My first meeting with Oscar Wilde was an astonishment. I never before heard a man talking with perfect sentences, as if he had written them all ht with labour a all spontaneous. There resent that night at Henleys, by right of propinquity or of act, a man full of the secret spite of dullness, who interrupted from time to time and always to check or disorder thought; and I noticed with what mastery he was foiled and thrown. I noticed, too, that the impression of artificiality that I think all Wildes listeners have recorded, came from the perfect rounding of the sentences and from the deliberation that made it possible.
That very impression helped him as the effeetre, or of the antithetical prose of the seveh tury, which is itself a true metre, helps a writer, for he could pass without ingruity from some unforeseen swift stroke of wit to elaborate reverie. I heard him say a few nights later: Give me "The Wiale," "Daffodils that e before the swallow dare" but not "King Lear." What is "King Lear" but poor life staggering in the fog? and the slow ce, modulated with so great precision, sounded natural to my ears. That first night he praised Walter Paters Essays on the Renaissa is my golden book; I ravel anywhere without it; but it is the very flower of dece. The last trumpet should have souhe moment it was written. But,
said the dull man, would you not have given us time to read it? Oh no, was the retort, there would have beey of time afterwards??iher world. I think he seemed to us, baffled as we were by youth, or by infirmity, a triumphant figure, and to some of us a figure from ane, an audacious Italian fifteenth tury figure. A few weeks before I had heard one of my fathers friends, an official in a publishing firm that had employed both Wilde and Henley as editors, blaming Henley who was no use except under trol and praising Wilde, so i but such a genius; and now the firm became the topic of our talk. How often do you go to the office? said Henley. I used to go three times a week, said Wilde, for an hour a day but I have siruck off one of the days. My God, said Henley, I went five times a week for five hours a day and when I wao strike off a day they had a special ittee meeting. Furthermore, was Wildes answer, I never answered their letters. I have known men e to London full ht prospects ahem plete wrecks in a few months through a habit of answeriers. He too knew how to keep our elders in their place, and his method lainly the more successful for Henley had been dismissed. No he is not ahete, Henley ented later, being somewhat embarrassed by Wildes Pre?Raphaelite enta.
One soon finds that he is a scholar and a gentleman. And when I dined with Wilde a few days afterwards he began at once, I had to strain every o equal that man at all; and I was too loyal to speak my thought: You & not he said all the brilliant things. He like the rest of us had felt the strain of an iy that seemed to hold life at the point of drama. He had said, on that first meeting, The basis of literary friendship is mixing the poisoned bowl; and for a few weeks Henley and he became close friends till, the astonishment of their meeting over, diversity of character and ambition pushed them apart, and, with half the cavern helping, Henley began mixing the poisoned bowl for Wilde. Yet Henley never wholly lost that first admiration, for after Wildes downfall he said to me: Why did he do it? I told my lads to attack him a we might havefought under hi