Part 14

“I can understand your dislike of professionalism--in advertisement, Mr. Wilde,” he said bluntly. “And, since you have condescended to stoop to quote Dickens, I may add that, in the matter of advertisement, Barkis as represented by Wilde is not only willing but more than Mr. Willing the advertising agent himself. Good morning.”

One other story of Wilde and Le Gallienne occurs to me. Wilde held Le Gallienne, as I do, in warm liking as a friend and in genuine admiration as a poet; but, meeting him one day at a theatre, bowed gravely and coldly and made as if to pass on. Le Gallienne stopped to say something, and, noticing the aloofness of Wilde’s manner, inquired:

“What is the matter, Oscar? Have I offended you in anything?”

“Not offended so much as very greatly pained me, Richard,” was the stern reply.

“I pained you! In what way?”

“You have brought out a new book since I saw you last.”

“Yes, what of it?”

“You have treated me very badly in your book, Richard.”

“I treated you badly in my book!” protested Le Gallienne in amazement. “You must be confusing my book with somebody else’s. My last book was _The Religion of a Literary Man_. I’m sure you can’t have read it, or you wouldn’t say I had treated you badly.”

“That’s the very book; I have read every word of it,” persisted Wilde, “and your treatment of me in that book is infamous and brutal. I couldn’t have believed it of you, Richard--such friends as we have been too!”

“I treated you badly in my _Religion of a Literary Man_?” said Le Gallienne impatiently. “You must be dreaming, man. Why, I never so much as mentioned you in it.”

“That’s just it, Richard,” said Wilde, smilingly.

Here is a recollection of another sort. About the time when Wilde’s star was culminating, he boarded a Rhine steamer on the deck of which I was sitting. The passengers included a number of Americans, one of whom instantly recognised Wilde, and seating himself beside the new-comer, inquired:

“Guess, sir, you are the great Mr. Oscar Wilde about whom every one is talking?”

Smilingly, but not without an assumption of the bland boredom which he occasionally adopted toward strangers of whom he was uncertain, Wilde assented. The other, an elderly man wearing a white cravat, may or may not at some time have been connected with a church. Possibly he was then editing some publication, religious or otherwise, and in his time may have done some interviewing, for he plied Wilde with many curious and even over-curious questions concerning his movements, views, and projects. The latter, amused at first, soon tired. His eyes wandered from his interviewer to scan the faces of the passengers, and catching sight of me made as if to rise and join me.

The interviewer, who had not yet done with him, and was something of a strategist, cut off Wilde’s retreat by a forward movement of himself and the deck-chair, in which he was sitting, so as to block the way. It was apparently merely the unconscious hitching of one’s seat a little nearer to an interesting companion, the better to carry on the conversation, but it was adroitly followed by a very flattering remark in the form of a question, and Wilde relapsed lumpily into his seat to answer. For the next few minutes I could have imagined myself watching a game of “living chess.” Wilde, evidently wearying, wished to move his king, as represented by himself, across the board and into the square adjacent to myself, but for every “move” he made his adversary pushed forward another conversational “piece” to call a check. At last, shaking his head in laughing remonstrance, Wilde rose, and the other, seeing the game was up, did the same.

“It has been a real pleasure and honour to meet you, sir,” he said. “Guess when I get home and tell my wife I’ve talked to the great Oscar Wilde she won’t believe me. If you would just write your autograph there, I’d take it as a kindness.” He had been searching his pockets while speaking for a sheet of paper, but finding none opened his Baedeker where there was a blank sheet and thrust it into Wilde’s hand.

The latter, with a suggestion in his manner of the condescension which is so becoming to greatness, scrawled his name--a big terminal Greek “e” tailing off into space at the end--in the book, and bowing a polite, in response to the other’s effusive, farewell, made straight for a deck-chair next to me, and plumping himself heavily in it began to talk animatedly.

Meanwhile, the interviewer was excitedly going the round of his party to exhibit his trophy.

“Oscar Wilde’s on board, the great æsthete!” he said. “I’ve had a long talk with him. See, here’s his own autograph in my Baedeker. There he is, the big man talking to the one in a grey suit.”

The excitement spread, and soon we had the entire party standing in a ring, or perhaps I should say a halo, around the object of their worship, who though still talking animatedly missed nothing of it all, and by his beaming face seemed to enjoy his lionising. I suspect him, in fact, of amusing himself by playing up to it, for, seeing that some of his admirers were not only looking, but while doing their best to appear not to be doing so were also listening intently, his talk struck me as meant for them as much as for me. He worked off a witty saying or two which I had heard before, and just as I had seen him glance sideways at a big plate-glass Bond Street shop window to admire his figure or the cut of his coat, so he stole sideway glances at the faces around as if to see whether admiration of his wit was mirrored there.

Then he told stories of celebrities, literary or otherwise, of whom he spoke intimately, called some of them, as in the case of Besant and Whistler, by their Christian names, and so tensely was his audience holding its breath to listen, that when at Bingen he rose and said, “I’m getting off here,” one could almost hear the held breath “ough” out like a deflating tyre.

No sooner was he gone than the interviewer seated himself in the deck-chair vacated by Wilde, and inquired politely:

“Are you a lit-er-ary man, sir?”

“Why, yes,” I said, “I suppose so, in a way. That’s how I earn my living.”

“May I ask your name?”

“Certainly,” I said (meaning thereby “you may ask, but it does not follow that I shall tell you”). “I am afraid ‘Brown’ is not a very striking name, but don’t tell me you have never heard it, for there is nothing so annoys an author as that.”

He was a kindly man, and made haste to reassure me.

“I know it well,” he protested. “Yours is not an uncommon name, I believe, in England. It is less common in the States. Your Christian name is--is--is--?”

“John,” I submitted modestly.

His brow cleared. “Exactly,” he nodded. “I know it well.”

Then he seemed uncertain again, and looked thoughtfully but absently at a castle-crowned hill. I imagine he was running through and ticking off as the names occurred to him the list of all the illustrious John Browns. Possibly he thought of the author of _Rab and His Friends_, and decided that I was too young. Possibly of Queen Victoria’s favourite gillie, who was generally pictured in kilts, whereas I wore knickerbockers.

“You have published books?” he asked.

I nodded.

“Only in England perhaps?”

“No, they have been issued in America too.”

“Sold?”

“The people who bought them were,” I said.

“Tell me the name of one of your books, please.”

I shook my head.

“Can’t. Not allowed.”

“Not allowed? Why not?”

“Because,” I answered, rattling off the first nonsense which came to my head, “I’m a member of the famous ‘Silence Club,’ the members of which are known as the W.N.T.S.’s. You have heard of the club of course, even if you haven’t heard of me?”

“Yes,” he said. “I feel sure I have; but I was never quite sure what it meant. What does W.N.T.S. stand for?”

“It means ‘We Never Talk Shop.’ An author who so much as mentions the title of his book except to his publisher, his bookseller, or an agent is unconditionally expelled.”

Then I delivered my counter-attack. He had mentioned to Wilde that he hailed from Boston. It so happens that at my friend Louise Chandler Moulton’s receptions I had met nearly every eminent Boston or even American author, so I put a few questions to my interviewer which showed an inner knowledge of Boston and American literary life and celebrities that seemed positively to startle him. He was now convinced that I was a celebrity of world-wide fame, and that such a comet should come within his own orbit, without his getting to know as much as the comet’s name, was not to be endured by a self-respecting journalist. He literally agonised, as well as perspired, in his unavailing efforts to trick, wheedle or implore my obscure name from me. For one moment I was minded to tell him my name if only to enjoy the shock of its unknownness, but I resisted the temptation and, tiring in my turn as Wilde had tired, I rose and said that as I was getting off at the next stopping place I would wish him “Good day.” He did not even ask for John Brown’s autograph. He even seemed suddenly in a hurry to get rid of me, the reason for which I afterwards discovered. He had, I suppose, heard me tell Wilde that my luggage was on board; and the last I saw of him was in the boat’s hold, where he was stooping, pince-nez on nose, over the up-piled bags, boxes, dressing-cases and trunks, painfully raking them over, and every moment hoping to be rewarded by finding mine labelled “Robert Louis Stevenson,” “Rudyard Kipling,” “Algernon C. Swinburne” or “Thomas Hardy.” I trust he found it.

When we were back in town I told Wilde my own adventure with the interviewer after the former had left the boat. His comment was:

“It sounds like a terrible serial story that I once saw in a magazine, each chapter of which was written by a different hand. ‘The Adventures of Oscar Wilde, by himself, continued by Coulson Kernahan.’ How positively dreadful!”

I wonder what Wilde will have to say to me, if hereafter we should discuss together the brief and fragmentary continuation of his own story which in these Recollections I have endeavoured to carry on?

III

Once when Wilde, a novelist and I were lunching together, and when Wilde, after declaring that the wine was so “heavenly” that it should be drunk kneeling, was discoursing learnedly on the pleasures of the table--how the flesh of this or that bird, fish or beast should be cooked and eaten, with what wine and with what sauce, the novelist put in:

“If I were to adapt Bunyan, I should say that you ought to have been christened Os-carnalwise Wilde instead of plain Oscar.”

“How ridiculous of you to suppose that anyone, least of all my dear mother, would christen me ‘plain Oscar,’” was the reply. “My name has two O’s, two F’s and two W’s. A name which is destined to be in everybody’s mouth must not be too long. It comes so expensive in the advertisements. When one is unknown, a number of Christian names are useful, perhaps needful. As one becomes famous, one sheds some of them, just as a balloonist, when rising higher, sheds unnecessary ballast, or as you will shed your Christian name when raised to the peerage. I started as Oscar Finghal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde. All but two of the five names have already been thrown overboard. Soon I shall discard another and be known simply as ‘The Wilde’ or ‘The Oscar.’ Which it is to be depends upon one of my imitators--that horrid Hall Caine, who used to be known very properly as Thomas Henry; quite appropriate names for a man who writes and dresses as he does. I can’t say which he does worse as I have never read him, but I have often been made ill by the way he wears his clothes.

“And, by the by, never say you have ‘adapted’ anything from anyone. Appropriate what is already yours--for to publish anything is to make it public property--but never adapt, or, if you do, suppress the fact. It is hardly fair to Bunyan, if you improve on him, to point out, some hundreds of years after, how much cleverer you are than he; and it is even more unfair, if you spoil what he has said, and then ‘hold him accountable.’”

“That, I suppose,” said the novelist drily, “is why when you said the other day that ‘Whenever a great man dies, William Sharp and the undertaker come in together,’ you suppressed the fact that the same thing had already been said in other words by W. S. Gilbert.”

“Precisely,” said Wilde. “It is not for me publicly to point out Gilbert’s inferiority. That would be ungenerous. But no one can blame me, if the fact is patent to all.”

Mention of Sir W. S. Gilbert prompted the other to say that a friend of his had occasion to take a cab at Harrow where the author of _The Bab Ballads_ had built a house. Driving from the station to his destination, his friend noticed this house, and asked the cabman who lived there. “I don’t know ’is name, sir,” said the cabman. “But I do know (I have driven ’im once or twice) that ’e is sometimes haffable and sometimes harbitrary. They do say in the town, sir, that ’e’s wot’s called a retired ’umorist, whatever that may be.”

From Harrow the conversation shifted to the neighbouring city of St. Albans, where I was then living.

“That reminds me,” said Wilde, turning to me, “that I want to run down to St. Albans once again to bathe my fingers in the mediæval twilight of the grey old Abbey. We two will come to you to-morrow. You shall meet us at the station, give us lunch at your rooms--a cutlet, a flask of red chianti and a cigarette is all we ask--and then you shall take us over the Abbey.”

“I shall be delighted,” I said, “but do you remember my meeting you the other day when you were coming away from the Royal Academy? I asked you how you were, and you replied, ‘Ill, my dear fellow, ill and wounded to the soul at the thought of the hideousness of what in this degenerate country, and these degenerate days, dares to call itself Art. Get me some wine quickly, or I’m sure I shall faint.’ Well, I’m living in bachelor diggings where it would be highly inconvenient to have dead or dying artists on hand or lying about. The pictures on show in my bachelor rooms, like the furniture, are not of my selection. If you were wounded by what you saw in the Academy, you would die at sight of one work of art on my walls. It is a hideous and vulgar representation of ‘Daniel in the Lions’ Den,’ done in crude chromo, four colours.”

Wilde affected to shudder.

“How awful!” he said. “But I can think of something more awful even than that.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“A poor lion in a den of Daniels,” was his reply.

IV

A factor in Wilde’s downfall was, I am sometimes told, evil association, but if so it was a factor on which I can throw no light, as if evil associates he had I saw nothing of them.

Louise Chandler Moulton sings of

This brief delusion that we call our life, Where all we can accomplish is to die,

and of the many figures in the literary, artistic, and social world of the day whom I met in Wilde’s company, some have achieved death, some, knighthood (Mr. Stephen Phillips once said in my hearing, he was not sure which was the better--or the worse), and some, distinction. Of the remainder, the worst that could be said against them is that they have since come a crash financially, as Wilde himself did. It was only in money matters that I ever had cause to think Wilde immoral.

In setting down these recollections and impressions I do not write as one of his intimates. We were friends, we corresponded, I dined with him and Mrs. Wilde at 16 Tite Street, and he with me, and we forgathered now and then at clubs, theatrical first nights, and literary at homes; but the occasions on which we met were not very many, all told; nor did I desire more closely to cultivate him, and for two reasons. One was that the expensive rate at which he lived made him impossible as other than a very occasional companion, and the other was that “straightness” in money matters is to me one of the first essentials in the man of whom one makes a friend. On this point Wilde and I did not see alike. He laughed at me when I said that, while counting it no dishonour to be poor, I did count it something of a dishonour deliberately and self-indulgently to incur liabilities one might not be able to meet. In his vocabulary there were few more contemptuous words than that of “tradesman,” as the following incident, which I may perhaps be pardoned for interpolating, will show.

When _The Picture of Dorian Grey_ was in the press, Wilde came in to see me one morning.

“My nerves are all to pieces,” he said, “and I’m going to Paris for a change. Here are the proofs of my novel. I have read them very carefully, and I think all is correct with one exception. Like most Irishmen, I sometimes write ‘I will be there,’ when it should be ‘I shall be there,’ and so on. Would you, like a dear good fellow, mind going through the proofs, and if you see any ‘wills’ or ‘shalls’ used wrongly, put them right and then pass for press? Of course, if you should spot anything else that strikes you as wrong, I’d be infinitely obliged if you would make the correction.”

I agreed, went through proofs, made the necessary alterations, and passed for press. Two or three days after I had a telegram from Paris. “Terrible blunder in book, coming back specially. Stop all proofs. Wilde.” I did so, and awaited events. Wilde arrived in a hansom.

“It is not too late? For heaven’s sake tell me it is not too late?” he affected to gasp.

“Oh, make yourself easy. It was not too late. I stopped the proofs,” I answered.

“Thank God!” he exclaimed theatrically, throwing himself into a chair and making a great show of wiping away the perspiration from a perfectly dry brow. “I should never have forgiven myself, or you, had my book gone out disfigured by such a blunder--by such a crime as I count it against art.”

Then in a faint undertone, as if the thing were too unholy to speak of above one’s breath, he said:

“There’s a picture framer--a mere tradesman--in my story, isn’t there?”

“Yes,” I said.

“What have I called him?”

“Ashton, I think. Yes, Ashton,” I answered.

He simulated a shudder and seemed to wince at the words.

“Don’t repeat it! Don’t repeat it! It is more than my shattered nerves can stand. Ashton is a gentleman’s name,” he spoke brokenly, and wrung his hands as if in anguish. “And I’ve given it--God forgive me--to a tradesman! It must be changed to Hubbard. Hubbard positively smells of the tradesman!”

And having successfully worked off this wheeze on me, Oscar became himself again, and sat up with a happy smile to enjoy his own and my congratulations on the exquisiteness of his art.

Wilde’s contempt for tradesmen, as instanced in this anecdote, I did not share. Once, when he had spoken thus contemptuously because a shopkeeper was suing a certain impecunious but extravagant artist acquaintance of his and mine for a debt incurred, I told Wilde that even if I despised “tradesmen” as he and the artist did, I should despise myself much more were I to defraud a despised tradesman by ordering goods for which I had neither the means nor the intention to pay. He was not in the least offended, perhaps because the remark suggested an aphorism--the exact wording I forget, but it was to the effect that only mediocrity concerned itself with tradesmen’s bills, that a writer of genius, whether a playwright or a novelist, ran into debt as surely as his play or his book ran into royalties. I remember the occasion well, though I do not remember the phrasing of his aphorism, for on that particular morning he had, for the first time within my experience, shown less than his usual nice consideration for others which--whether due merely to love of approbation or to finer feelings--made him so agreeable and delightful a companion.

When he came in I offered him my cigarette case. They were of a brand he had often himself smoked in the past--in fact it was he who had first recommended them to me--quite good tobacco and well made, but moderate in price, and with no pretence to be of the very best. He took one, lit it, drew a few puffs, and then tossing it practically unsmoked on the fire, drew out his own bejewelled case and lit up one of his own. That was very unlike Wilde as I had known him in his less prosperous days. Then he would have said, “I have accustomed myself to smoke another brand lately and am something of a creature of habit. Do you mind if I smoke one of my own?”

Perhaps the omission was due only to preoccupation and forgetfulness. Perhaps the incident will be accounted too trivial, thus seriously to put on record. Possibly, but it is often by the cumulative effect of small and seemingly trivial details--not always by the bold broad strokes--that the truest portrait is drawn. Into the tragedy of human life we are not often permitted to look, but just as, since all fish swim against the stream, a minnow will serve to show the run of the current, no less than a pike, so trivial incidents serve sometimes to point the trend of life or of character as truly as great happenings.

Nor in Wilde’s case were other signs of change in him wanting. His first play had just then been produced and with success. He struck me on that particular morning as unpleasantly flushed, as already coarsened, almost bloated by success. There was a suspicion of insolence in his manner that was new to me, and from that time onward he and I--perhaps the fault was mine--seemed to lose touch of each other, and to drift entirely apart. Wilde died in the late autumn of 1900. I never saw or heard from him again after the spring of 1892.

V

Was it not Mr. Stead who defined paradox as a truth standing on its head? Wilde’s aim in paradox was so to manipulate truth and falsehood as to make the result startle one by appearing to reverse the existing standard. A paradox by him was sometimes a lie and a truth trotting side by side together in double harness like a pair of horses, but each so cleverly disguised that one was not quite sure which horse was which.

More often a paradox by Wilde was a lie (or a seeming lie) and a truth (or a seeming truth) driven the one in front of the other tandem-wise; but whichever Wilde had placed last was tolerably sure to take one by surprise by lashing out with its heels when one came to look at it. When Wilde had carefully arranged a paradox with a kick in it and wished to see one jump, he spoke the first half smilingly to put one off one’s guard. Then he would pause, suddenly become grave and thoughtful as if searching his words. But the pause was not for loss of a word. It was no pause of momentary inaction. It was, on the contrary, if I may vary the simile, like the backward swing of a rifle, and was meant only to give fuller play and power to the forward thrust that bayonets an enemy. No sooner was one off one’s guard by the smile and the momentary silence, than swift and sure came the sting of the stab.

Let me give an illustration. Wilde once asked me some question concerning my religious belief which I did my best to answer frankly and, as he was good enough afterwards to say, without the cant which he so loathed. When I had made an end of it, he said gravely:

“You are so evidently, so unmistakably sincere and most of all so truthful” (all this running smoothly and smilingly) “that” (then came the grave look and the pause as if at a loss for a word, followed by the swift stab) “I can’t believe a single word you say.”