car
wanted to smoke. Suddenly the hostess drew his attention to a lamp the
shade of which was smouldering.

"Please put it out, Mr. Wilde," she said, "it's smoking."

Oscar turned to do as he was told with the remark:

"Happy lamp!"

The delightful impertinence had an extraordinary success.

Early in our friendship I was fain to see that the love of the
uncommon, his paradoxes and epigrams were natural to him, sprang
immediately from his taste and temperament. Perhaps it would be well
to define once for all his attitude towards life with more scope and
particularity than I have hitherto done.

It is often assumed that he had no clear and coherent view of life, no
belief, no faith to guide his vagrant footsteps; but such an opinion
does him injustice. He had his own philosophy, and held to it for long
years with astonishing tenacity. His attitude towards life can best be
seen if he is held up against Goethe. He took the artist's view of
life which Goethe was the first to state and indeed in youth had
overstated with an astonishing persuasiveness: "the beautiful is more
than the good," said Goethe; "for it includes the good."

It seemed to Oscar, as it had seemed to young Goethe, that "the
extraordinary alone survives"; the extraordinary whether good or bad;
he therefore sought after the extraordinary, and naturally enough
often fell into the extravagant. But how stimulating it was in London,
where sordid platitudes drip and drizzle all day long, to hear someone
talking brilliant paradoxes.

Goethe did not linger long in the halfway house of unbelief; the
murderer may win notoriety as easily as the martyr, but his memory
will not remain. "_The fashion of this world passeth away_," said
Goethe, "I would fain occupy myself with that which endures." Midway
in life Goethe accepted Kant's moral imperative and restated his
creed: "A man must resolve to live," he said, "for the Good, and
Beautiful, and for the Common Weal."

Oscar did not push his thought so far: the transcendental was not his
field.

It was a pity, I sometimes felt, that he had not studied German as
thoroughly as French; Goethe might have done more for him than
Baudelaire or Balzac, for in spite of all his stodgy German faults,
Goethe is the best guide through the mysteries of life whom the modern
world has yet produced. Oscar Wilde stopped where the religion of
Goethe began; he was far more of a pagan and individualist than the
great German; he l