and when He asked why he
wept, the old man answered, "Lord, I was dead and You raised me into life,
what else can I do but weep?"'"

Wilde published that story a little later, but spoiled it with the verbal
decoration of his epoch, and I have to repeat it to myself as I first
heard it, before I can see its terrible beauty. I no more doubt its
sincerity than I doubt that his parade of gloom, all that late rising, and
sleeping away his life, that elaborate playing with tragedy, was an
attempt to escape from an emotion by its exaggeration. He had three
successful plays running at once; he had been almost poor, and now, his
head full of Flaubert, found himself with ten thousand a year:--"Lord, I
was dead, and You raised me into life, what else can I do but weep." A
comedian, he was in the hands of those dramatists who understand nothing
but tragedy.

A few days after the first production of my _Land of Heart's Desire_, I
had my last conversation with him. He had come into the theatre as the
curtain fell upon my play, and I knew that it was to ask my pardon that he
overwhelmed me with compliments; and yet I wonder if he would have chosen
those precise compliments, or spoken so extravagantly, but for the turn
his thoughts had taken: "Your story in _The National Observer_, _The
Crucifixion of the Outcast_, is sublime, wonderful, wonderful."

Some business or other brought me to London once more and I asked various
Irish writers for letters of sympathy, and I was refused by none but
Edward Dowden, who gave me what I considered an irrelevant excuse--his
dislike for everything that Wilde had written. I heard that Wilde was at
his mother's house in Oakley Street, and I called there, but the Irish
servant told me, her face drawn and tragic as in the presence of death,
that he was not there, but that I could see his brother. Willie Wilde
received me with, "Who are you; what do you want?" but became all
friendship when I told him that I had brought letters of sympathy. He took
the bundle of letters in his hand, but said, "Do these letters urge him to
run away? Every friend he has is urging him to, but we have made up our
minds that he must stay and take his chance." "No," I said, "I certainly
do not think that he should run away, nor do those letters advise it."
"Letters from Ireland," he said. "Thank you, thank you. He will be glad to
get those letters, but I would keep them from him if they advised him to
run away." Then he threw