Four Years | Page 7

the chapel door,
sprinkle her with holy water and say 'My friend Jones is dying for love
of you.' But when it was over, those quaint descriptions, so full of
laughter and sympathy, faded or remained in the memory as something
alien from one's own life like a dance I once saw in a great house,
where beautifully dressed children wound a long ribbon in and out as
they danced. I was not of Stevenson's party and mainly I think because
he had written a book in praise of Velasquez, praise at that time
universal wherever Pre-Raphaelitism was accurst, and to my mind, that
had to pick its symbols where its ignorance permitted, Velasquez
seemed the first bored celebrant of boredom. I was convinced, from
some obscure meditation, that Stevenson's conversational method had
joined him to my elders and to the indifferent world, as though it were
right for old men, and unambitious men and all women, to be content
with charm and humour. It was the prerogative of youth to take sides
and when Wilde said: 'Mr. Bernard Shaw has no enemies but is
intensely disliked by all his friends,' I knew it to be a phrase I should
never forget, and felt revenged upon a notorious hater of romance,
whose generosity and courage I could not fathom.

VIII
I saw a good deal of Wilde at that time--was it 1887 or 1888?--I have
no way of fixing the date except that I had published my first book 'The
Wanderings of Usheen' and that Wilde had not yet published his 'Decay
of Lying.' He had, before our first meeting, reviewed my book and
despite its vagueness of intention, and the inexactness of its speech,
praised without qualification; and what was worth more than any
review had talked about it, and now he asked me to eat my Xmas
dinner with him, believing, I imagine, that I was alone in London.
He had just renounced his velveteen, and even those cuffs turned
backward over the sleeves, and had begun to dress very carefully in the
fashion of the moment. He lived in a little house at Chelsea that the
architect Godwin had decorated with an elegance that owed something
to Whistler. There was nothing mediaeval, nor Pre-Raphaelite, no
cupboard door with figures upon flat gold, no peacock blue, no dark
background. I remember vaguely a white drawing room with Whistler
etchings, 'let in' to white panels, and a dining room all white: chairs,
walls, mantlepiece, carpet, except for a diamond-shaped piece of red
cloth in the middle of the table under a terra cotta statuette, and I think
a red shaded lamp hanging from the ceiling to a little above the
statuette. It was perhaps too perfect in its unity, his past of a few years
before had gone too completely, and I remember thinking that the
perfect harmony of his life there, with his beautiful wife and his two
young children, suggested some deliberate artistic composition.
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'