Four Years | Page 8

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 some literary gossip for some provincial newspaper, that paid
me a few shillings a month, he explained very explicitly that writing
literary gossip was no job for a gentleman. Though to be compared to
Homer passed the time pleasantly, I had not been greatly perturbed had
he stopped me with 'Is it a long story?' as Henley would certainly have
done. I was abashed before him as wit and man of the world alone. I
remember that he deprecated the very general belief in his success or
his efficiency, and I think with sincerity. One form of success had gone:
he was no more the lion of the season, and he had not discovered his
gift for writing comedy, yet I think I knew him at the happiest moment
of his life. No scandal had darkened his fame, his fame as a talker was
growing among his equals, & he seemed to live in the enjoyment of his
own spontaneity. One day he began: 'I have been inventing a Christian
heresy,' and he told a detailed story, in the style of some early father, of
how Christ recovered after the Crucifixion and, escaping from the tomb,
lived on for many years, the one man upon earth who knew the
falsehood of Christianity. Once St. Paul visited his town and he alone
in the carpenters' quarter did not go to hear him preach. The other
carpenters noticed that henceforth, for some unknown reason, he kept

his hands covered. A few days afterwards I found Wilde, with smock
frocks in various colours spread out upon the floor in front of him,
while a missionary explained that he did not object to the heathen going
naked upon week days, but insisted upon clothes in church. He had
brought the smock frocks in a cab that the only art-critic whose fame
had reached Central Africa might select a colour; so Wilde sat there
weighing all with a conscious ecclesiastic solemnity.

VIII
Of late years I have often explained Wilde to myself by his family
history. His father, was a friend or acquaintance of my father's father
and among my family traditions there is an old Dublin riddle: 'Why are
Sir William Wilde's nails so black?' Answer, 'Because he has scratched
himself.' And there is an old story still current in Dublin of Lady Wilde
saying to a servant. 'Why do you put the plates on the coal-scuttle?
What are the chairs meant for?' They were famous people and there are
many like stories, and even a horrible folk story, the invention of some
Connaught peasant, that tells how Sir William Wilde took out the eyes
of some men, who had come to consult him as an oculist, and laid them
upon a plate, intending to replace them in a moment, and how the eyes
were eaten by a cat. As a certain friend of mine, who has made a
prolonged study of the nature of cats, said when he first heard the tale,
'Catslove eyes.' The Wilde family was clearly of the sort that fed the
imagination of Charles Lever, dirty, untidy, daring, and what Charles
Lever, who loved more normal activities, might not have valued so
highly, very imaginative and learned. Lady Wilde, who when I knew
her received her friends with blinds drawn and shutters closed that none
might see her withered face, longed always perhaps, though certainly
amid much self mockery, for some impossible splendour of character
and circumstance. She lived near her son in level Chelsea, but I have
heard her say, 'I want to live on some high place, Primrose Hill or
Highgate, because I was an eagle in my youth.' I think her son lived
with no 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