in good company 30

in good company 30

“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.