Chapter 8

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 had talked about it, and now he
asked me to eat my Xmas 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, mantlepiece, 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, & 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 of brilliant failures, but
we are the greatest talkers since the Greeks.' When dinner was
over he read me from the proofs of 'The Decay of Lying' and when
he came to the sentence: 'Schopenhauer has analysed the pessimism
that characterises modern thought, but Hamlet invented it. The
world has become sad because a puppet was once melancholy,' I
said, 'Why do you change "sad" to "melancholy?"' He replied that
he wanted a full sound at the close of his sentence, and I thought
it no excuse and an example of the vague impressiveness that
spoilt his writing for me. Only when he spoke, or when his writing
was the mirror of his speech, or in some simple fairytale, had he
words exact enough to hold a subtle ear. He alarmed me, though not
as Henley did for I never left his house thinking myself fool or
dunce. He flattered the intellect of every man he liked; he made
me tell him long Irish stories and compared my art of story-telling
to Homer's; and once when he had