Chapter 6 - Page 2

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 & 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 astonishment of their meeting over, diversity of
character and ambition pushed them apart, and, with half the
cavern helping, Henley began mixing the poisoned bowl for Wilde.
Yet Henley never wholly lost that first admiration, for after
Wilde's downfall he said to me: 'Why did he do it? I told my lads
to attack him and yet we might have fought under his banner.'