he had all the heedless confidence of the artist who has won
world-wide popularity and has the halo of fame on his brow. With high
heart and smiling eyes he went to his fate unsuspecting.
It was in the autumn of 1891 that he first met Lord Alfred Douglas. He
was thirty-six and Lord Alfred Douglas a handsome, slim youth of
twenty-one, with large blue eyes and golden-fair hair. His mother,
the Dowager Lady Queensberry, preserves a photograph of him taken a
few years before, when he was still at Winchester, a boy of sixteen
with an expression which might well be called angelic.
When I met him, he was still girlishly pretty, with the beauty of
youth, coloring and fair skin; though his features were merely
ordinary. It was Lionel Johnson, the writer, a friend and intimate of
Douglas at Winchester, who brought him to tea at Oscar's house in Tite
Street. Their mutual attraction had countless hooks. Oscar was drawn
by the lad's personal beauty, and enormously affected besides by Lord
Alfred Douglas' name and position: he was a snob as only an English
artist can be a snob; he loved titular distinctions, and Douglas is
one of the few great names in British history with the gilding of
romance about it. No doubt Oscar talked better than his best because
he was talking to Lord Alfred Douglas. To the last the mere name
rolled on his tongue gave him extraordinary pleasure. Besides, the boy
admired him, hung upon his lips with his soul in his eyes; showed,
too, rare intelligence in his appreciation, confessed that he himself
wrote verses and loved letters passionately. Could more be desired
than perfection perfected?
And Alfred Douglas on his side was almost as powerfully attracted; he
had inherited from his mother all her literary tastes--and more: he
was already a master-poet with a singing faculty worthy to be compared
with the greatest. What wonder if he took this magical talker, with
the luminous eyes and charming voice, and a range and play of thought
beyond his imagining, for a world's miracle, one of the Immortals.
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