him say a
few nights later: "Give me _The Winter's Tale_, 'Daffodils that come
before the swallow dare' but not _King Lear_. What is _King Lear_ but poor
life staggering in the fog?" and the slow, carefully modulated cadence
sounded natural to my ears. That first night he praised Walter Pater's
_Studies in the History of the Renaissance_: "It is my golden book; I
never travel anywhere without it; but it is the very flower of decadence:
the last trumpet should have sounded the 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 been plenty of time afterwards--in
either 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 another
age, an audacious Italian fifteenth century figure. A few weeks before I
had heard one of my father's friends, an official in a publishing firm
that had employed both Wilde and Henley as editors, blaming Henley who was
"no use except under control" and praising Wilde, "so indolent 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 since struck off one of the days."
"My God," said Henley, "I went five times a week for five hours a day and
when I wanted to strike off a day they had a special committee meeting."
"Furthermore," was Wilde's answer, "I never answered their letters. I have
known men come to London full of bright prospects and seen them complete
wrecks in a few months through a habit of answering letters." He too knew
how to keep our elders in their place, and his method was plainly the more
successful, for Henley had been dismissed. "No he is not an aesthete,"
Henley commented later, being somewhat embarrassed by Wilde's
Pre-Raphaelite entanglement; "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 nerve to equal that man at all"; and I was
too loyal to speak my thought: "You and not he said all the brilliant
things." He like the rest of us had felt the strain of an intensity 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
astoni