e-Raphaelism was accurst, and to my mind, that had
to pick its symbols where its ignorance permitted, Velasquez seemed the
first bored celebrant of boredom. I was convinced from some obscure
meditation that Stevenson's conversational method had joined him to my
elders and to the indifferent world, as though it were right for old men,
and unambitious men and all women, to be content with charm and humour. It
was the prerogative of youth to take sides and when Wilde said: "Mr
Bernard Shaw has no enemies but is intensely disliked by all his friends,"
I knew it to be a phrase I should never forget, and felt revenged upon a
notorious hater of romance, whose generosity and courage I could not
fathom.

X

I saw a good deal of Wilde at that time--was it 1887 or 1888?--I have no
way of fixing the date except that I had published my first book _The
Wanderings of Usheen_ and that Wilde had not yet published his _Decay of
Lying_. He had, before our first meeting, reviewed my book and despite its
vagueness of intention, and the inexactness of its speech, praised without
qualification; and what was worth more than any review he had talked about
it and now he asked me to eat my Christmas dinner with him believing, I
imagine, that I was alone in London. He had just renounced his velveteen,
and even those cuffs turned backward over the sleeves, and had begun to
dress very carefully in the fashion of the moment. He lived in a little
house at Chelsea that the architect Godwin had decorated with an elegance
that owed something to Whistler. There was nothing mediaeval, nor
Pre-Raphaelite, no cupboard door with figures upon flat gold, no peacock
blue, no dark background. I remember vaguely a white drawing room with
Whistler etchings, "let in" to white panels, and a dining room all white,
chairs, walls, mantelpiece, carpet, except for a diamond-shaped piece of
red cloth in the middle of the table under a terra-cotta statuette, and I
think a red shaded lamp hanging from the ceiling to a little above the
statuette. It was perhaps too perfect in its unity, his past of a few
years before had gone too completely, and I remember thinking that the
perfect harmony of his life there, with his beautiful wife and his two
young children, suggested some deliberate artistic composition.

He commended and dispraised himself during dinner by attributing
characteristics like his own to his country: "We Irish are too poetical to
be poets; we are a nation o