self mockery at all an imaginary life; perpetually performed a
play which was in all things the opposite of all that he had known
in childhood and early youth; never put off completely his wonder
at opening his eyes every morning on his own beautiful house, and
in remembering that he had dined yesterday with a duchess and that
he delighted in Flaubert and Pater, read Homer in the original and
not as a school-master reads him for the grammar. I think, too,
that because of all that half-civilized blood in his veins, he
could not endure the sedentary toil of creative art and so
remained a man of action, exaggerating, for the sake of immediate
effect, every trick learned from his masters, turning their easel
painting into painted scenes. He was a parvenu, but a parvenu
whose whole bearing proved that if he did dedicate every story in
'The House of Pomegranates' to a lady of title, it was but to show
that he was Jack and the social ladder his pantomime beanstalk.
"Did you ever hear him say 'Marquess of Dimmesdale'?" a friend of
his once asked me. "He does not say 'the Duke of York' with any
pleasure."

He told me once that he had been offered a safe seat in Parliament
and, had he accepted, he might have had a career like that of
Beaconsfield, whose early style resembles his, being meant for
crowds, for excitement, for hurried decisions, for immediate
triumphs. Such men get their sincerity, if at all, from the
contact of events; the dinner table was Wilde's event and made him
the greatest talker of his time, and his plays and dialogues have
what merit they possess from being now an imitation, now a record,
of his talk. Even in those days I would often defend him by saying
that his very admiration for his predecessors in poetry, for
Browning, for Swinburne and Rossetti, in their first vogue while