Four Years | Page 9

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 he was a very young man, made any success seem impossible
that could satisfy his immense ambition: never but once before had the
artist seemed so great, never had the work of art seemed so difficult. I
would then compare him with Benvenuto Cellini who, coming after
Michael Angelo, found nothing left to do so satisfactory as to turn
bravo and assassinate the man who broke Michael Angelo's nose.

IX
I cannot remember who first brought me to the old stable beside
Kelmscott House, William Morris' house at Hammersmith, & to the

debates held there upon Sunday evenings by the socialist League. I was
soon of the little group who had supper with Morris afterwards. I met at
these suppers very constantly Walter Crane, Emery Walker presently,
in association with Cobden Sanderson, the printer of many fine books,
and less constantly Bernard Shaw and Cockerell, now of the museum
of Cambridge, and perhaps but once or twice Hyndman the socialist
and the anarchist Prince Krapotkin. There too one always met certain
more or less educated workmen, rough of speech and manner, with a
conviction to meet every turn. I was told by one of them, on a night
when I had done perhaps more than my share of the talking, that I had
talked more nonsense in one evening than he had heard in the whole
course of his past life. I had merely preferred Parnell, then at the height
of his career, to Michael Davitt who had wrecked his Irish influence by
international politics. We sat round a long unpolished and unpainted
trestle table of new wood in a room where hung Rossetti's
'Pomegranate,' a portrait of Mrs. Morris, and where one wall and part of
the ceiling were covered by a great Persian carpet. Morris had said
somewhere or other that carpets were meant for people who took their
shoes off when they entered a house, and were most in place upon a
tent floor. I was a little disappointed in the house, for Morris was an old
man content at last to gather beautiful things rather than to arrange a
beautiful house. I saw the drawing-room once or twice and there alone
all my sense of decoration, founded upon the background of Rossetti's
pictures, was satisfied by a big cupboard painted with a scene from
Chaucer by Burne Jones, but even there were objects, perhaps a chair
or a little table, that seemed accidental, bought hurriedly perhaps, and
with little thought, to make wife or daughter comfortable. I had read as
a boy in books belonging to my father, the third volume of 'The Earthly
Paradise' and 'The Defence of Guinevere,' which pleased me less, but
had not opened either for a long time. 'The man who never laughed
again' had seemed the most wonderful of tales till my father had
accused me of preferring Morris to Keats, got angry about it and put me
altogether out of countenance. He had spoiled my pleasure, for now I
questioned while I read and at last ceased to read; nor had Morris
written as yet those prose romances that became, after his death, so
great a joy that they were the only books I was ever to read slowly that
I might not come too quickly to the end. It was now Morris himself that

stirred my interest, and I took to him first because of some little tricks
of speech and body that reminded me of my old grandfather in Sligo,
but soon discovered his spontaneity and joy and made him my chief of
men. To-day I do not set his poetry very high, but for an odd altogether
wonderful line, or thought; and yet, if some angel offered me the choice,
I would