stance. She lived near her son
in level Chelsea, but I have heard her say, "I want to live on some high
place, Primrose Hill or Highgate, because I was an eagle in my youth." I
think her son lived with no self-mockery at all an imaginary life;
perpetually performed a play which was in all things the opposite of all
that he had known in childhood and early youth; never put off completely
his wonder at opening his eyes every morning on his own beautiful house,
and in remembering that he had dined yesterday with a duchess, and that he
delighted in Flaubert and Pater, read Homer in the original and not as a
schoolmaster reads him for the grammar. I think, too, that because of all
that half-civilized blood in his veins he could not endure the sedentary
toil of creative art and so remained a man of action, exaggerating, for
the sake of immediate effect, every trick learned from his masters,
turning their easel painting into painted scenes. He was a parvenu, but a
parvenu whose whole bearing proved that if he did dedicate every story in
_The House of Pomegranates_ to a lady of title, it was but to show that he
was Jack and the social ladder his pantomime beanstalk. "Did you ever
hear him say 'Marquess of Dimmesdale'?" a friend of his once asked me. "He
does not say 'the Duke of York' with any pleasure."

He told me once that he had been offered a safe seat in Parliament and,
had he accepted, he might have had a career like that of Beaconsfield,
whose early style resembles his, being meant for crowds, for excitement,
for hurried decisions, for immediate triumphs. Such men get their
sincerity, if at all, from the contact of events; the dinner table was
Wilde's event and made him the greatest talker of his time, and his plays
and dialogues have what merit they possess from being now an imitation,
now a record, of his talk. Even in those days I would often defend him by
saying that his very admiration for his predecessors in poetry, for
Browning, for Swinburne and Rossetti, in their first vogue while he was a
very young man, made any success seem impossible that could satisfy his
immense ambition: never but once before had the artist seemed so great,
never had the work of art seemed so difficult. I would then compare him
with Benvenuto Cellini who, coming after Michael Angelo, found nothing
left to do so satisfactory as to turn bravo and quarrel with the man who
broke Michael Angelo's nose.

XII

I cannot remember who first br