Oxford. I had been watching the students bathing in the river: the
beautiful white figures all grace and ease and virile strength. I had
been pointing out how Christianity had flowered into romance, and how
the crude Hebraic materialism and all the later formalities of an
established creed had fallen away from the tree of life and left us
the exquisite ideals of the new paganism....
"The pale Christ had been outlived: his renunciations and his
sympathies were mere weaknesses: we were moving to a synthesis of art
where the enchanting perfume of romance should be wedded to the severe
beauty of classic form. I really talked as if inspired, and when I
paused, Pater--the stiff, quiet, silent Pater--suddenly slipped from
his seat and knelt down by me and kissed my hand. I cried:
"'You must not, you really must not. What would people think if they
saw you?'
"He got up with a white strained face.
"'I had to,' he muttered, glancing about him fearfully, 'I had
to--once....'"
I must warn my readers that this whole incident is ripened and set in
a higher key of thought by the fact that Oscar told it more than ten
years after it happened.
FOOTNOTES:
[3] Oscar was always fond of loosely quoting or paraphrasing in
conversation the purple passages from contemporary writers. He said
them exquisitely and sometimes his own embroidery was as good as the
original. This discipleship, however, always suggested to me a lack of
originality. In especial Matthew Arnold had an extraordinary influence
upon him, almost as great indeed as Pater.
[4] "Stain," not "pain," in the original.
CHAPTER IV
The most important event in Oscar's early life happened while he was
still an undergraduate at Oxford: his father, Sir William Wilde, died
in 1876, leaving to his wife, Lady Wilde, nearly all he possessed,
some L7,000, the interest of which was barely enough to keep her in
genteel poverty. The sum is so small that one is constrained to
believe the report that Sir William Wilde in his later years kept
practically open house--"lashins of whisky and a good larder," and was
|