in order to avoid seeing or being introduced to the notorious writer. Oscar
shook hands with his host as if he had noticed nothing, and began to talk.
"In five minutes," Grimthorpe declares, "all the papers were put down and
everyone had gathered round him to listen and laugh."
At the end of the meal one Yorkshireman after the other begged the host to
follow the lunch with a dinner and invite them to meet the wonder again. When
the party broke up in the small hours they all went away delighted with Oscar,
vowing that no man ever talked more brilliantly. Grimthorpe cannot remember a
single word Oscar said: "It was all delightful," he declares, "a play of genial
humour over every topic that came up, like sunshine dancing on waves."
The extraordinary thing about Oscar's talent was that he did not monopolise the
conversation: he took the ball of talk wherever it happened to be at the moment
and played with it so humorously that everyone was soon smiling delightedly.
The famous talkers of the past, Coleridge, Macaulay, Carlyle and the others,
were all lecturers: talk to them was a discourse on a favourite theme, and in
ordinary life they were generally regarded as bores. But at his best Oscar
Wilde never dropped the tone of good society: he could afford to give place to
others; he was equipped at all points: no subject came amiss to him: he saw
everything from a humorous angle, and dazzled one now with word-wit, now with
the very stuff of merriment.
Though he was the life and soul of every social gathering, and in constant
demand, he still read omnivorously, and his mind naturally occupied itself
with high themes.
For some years, the story of Jesus fascinated him and tinged all his thought.
We were talking about Renan's "Life" one day: a wonderful book he called it, one
of the three great biographies of the world, Plato's dialogues with Socrates as
hero and Boswell's "Life of Johnson" being the other two. It was strange, he
thought, that the greatest man had written the worst biography; Plato made of
Socrates a mere phonograph, into which he talked his own theories: Renan did
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