besides notorious for his gallantries. Oscar's small portion, a little
money and a small house with some land, came to him in the nick of
time: he used the cash partly to pay some debts at Oxford, partly to
defray the expenses of a trip to Greece. It was natural that Oscar
Wilde, with his eager sponge-like receptivity, should receive the best
academic education of his time, and should better that by travel. We
all get something like the education we desire, and Oscar Wilde, it
always seemed to me, was over-educated, had learned, that is, too much
from books and not enough from life and had thought too little for
himself; but my readers will be able to judge of this for themselves.
In 1877 he accompanied Professor Mahaffy on a long tour through
Greece. The pleasure and profit Oscar got from the trip were so great
that he failed to return to Oxford on the date fixed. The Dons fined
him forty-five pounds for the breach of discipline; but they returned
the money to him in the following year when he won First Honours in
"Greats" and the Newdigate prize.
This visit to Greece when he was twenty-three confirmed the view of
life which he had already formed and I have indicated sufficiently
perhaps in that talk with Pater already recorded. But no one will
understand Oscar Wilde who for a moment loses sight of the fact that
he was a pagan born: as Gautier says, "One for whom the visible world
alone exists," endowed with all the Greek sensuousness and love of
plastic beauty; a pagan, like Nietzsche and Gautier, wholly out of
sympathy with Christianity, one of "the Confraternity of the faithless
who _cannot_ believe,"[5] to whom a sense of sin and repentance are
symptoms of weakness and disease.
Oscar used often to say that the chief pleasure he had in visiting
Rome was to find the Greek gods and the heroes and heroines of Greek
story throned in the Vatican. He preferred Niobe to the Mater Dolorosa
and Helen to both; the worship of sorrow must give place, he declared,
to the worship of the beautiful.
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