He commended, & dispraised himself, during dinner by attributing
characteristics like his own to his country: 'We Irish are too
poetical to be poets; we are a nation of brilliant failures, but
we are the greatest talkers since the Greeks.' When dinner was
over he read me from the proofs of 'The Decay of Lying' and when
he came to the sentence: 'Schopenhauer has analysed the pessimism
that characterises modern thought, but Hamlet invented it. The
world has become sad because a puppet was once melancholy,' I
said, 'Why do you change "sad" to "melancholy?"' He replied that
he wanted a full sound at the close of his sentence, and I thought
it no excuse and an example of the vague impressiveness that
spoilt his writing for me. Only when he spoke, or when his writing
was the mirror of his speech, or in some simple fairytale, had he
words exact enough to hold a subtle ear. He alarmed me, though not
as Henley did for I never left his house thinking myself fool or
dunce. He flattered the intellect of every man he liked; he made
me tell him long Irish stories and compared my art of story-telling
to Homer's; and once when he had described himself as writing in
the census paper 'age 19, profession genius, infirmity talent,'
the other guest, a young journalist fresh from Oxford or Cambridge,
said 'What should I have written?' and was told that it should
have been 'profession talent, infirmity genius.' When, however,
I called, wearing shoes a little too yellow--unblackened leather
had just become fashionable--I understood their extravagence when
I saw his eyes fixed upon them; an another day Wilde asked me to
tell his little boy a fairy story, and I had but got as far as
'Once upon a time there was a giant' when the little boy screamed
and ran out of the room. Wilde looked grave and I was plunged into
the shame of clumsiness that afflicts the young. When I asked for