II
My friendship with Wilde was literary in its beginnings. Flattered vanity on my part possibly contributed not a little to it, for when I was a young and—if that be possible—a more obscure man even than I am now, Wilde, already famous, was one of the very first to speak an encouraging word. Here is the first letter I received from him:
16 Tite Street, Chelsea.
Dear Mr. Kernahan,
If you have nothing to do on Wednesday, will you come and dine at the Hotel de Florence, Rupert Street, at 7.45—morning dress, and chianti yellow or red!
I am charmed to see your book is having so great a success. It is strong and fine and true. Your next book will be a great book.
Truly yours,
Oscar Wilde.
This letter, it will be observed, is undated. Apparently Wilde never dated his letters, for of all the letters of his which I have preserved not a solitary one bears a date, other perhaps than the name of the day of the week on which it was written, and that only rarely. He had the impudence once at a dinner-party, when taken to task by a great lady for not having answered a letter, to reply:
“But, my dear lady, I never answer or write letters. Ask my friend there, whose faithful correspondent I am.” Then turning to me, he said, “Tell Lady —— when you heard from me last.”
As I had heard from him that morning, I dissembled by saying:
“How can I answer that, Wilde, for among my other discoveries of the eccentricities of genius I have discovered that genius, at least as represented by you, never dates its letters. I never had one from you that was dated.”
Not long after the receipt of this first letter, I proposed to write what I may call a “grown-up fairy story,” and asked Wilde whether I might borrow as sub-title a phrase I had once heard him use of a fairy tale of his own making—“A Story for Children from Eight to Eighty.” He replied as follows, then, as always, with a capital D for “dear”:
16 Tite Street,
Chelsea, S.W.My Dear Kernahan,
I am only too pleased that any little phrase of mine will find a place in any title you may give to any story. Use it, of course. I am sure your story will be delightful. Hoping to see you soon.
Your friend,
Oscar Wilde.
My story written and published, I despatched it cap in hand to carry my acknowledgments to the teller of supremely lovely fairy stories—imagined, not invented—from whom my own drab and homespun-clad little tale had impudently “lifted” a beautiful sub-title to wear, a borrowed plume, in its otherwise undecorated hat.
Here is Wilde’s very characteristic reply. It needs no signature to indicate the writer. No other author of the day would have written thus graciously and thus generously:
16 Tite Street,
Chelsea, S.W.My Dear Kernahan,
I should have thanked you long ago for sending me your charming Fairy Tale, but the season with its red roses of pleasure has absorbed me quite and I have almost forgotten how to write a letter. However, I know you will forgive me, and I must tell you how graceful and artistic I think your story is—full of delicate imagination, and a symbolism suggestive of many meanings, not narrowed down to one moral, but many-sided, as I think symbolism should be.
But your strength lies not in such graceful winsome work. You must deal directly with Life—modern terrible Life—wrestle with it, and force it to yield you its secret. You have the power and the pen. You know what passion is, what passions are. You can give them their red raiment and make them move before us. You can fashion puppets with bodies of flesh and souls of turmoil, and so you must sit down and do a great thing.
It is all in you.
Your sincere friend,
Oscar Wilde.
That Wilde was an artist in flattery as well as an egotist, is not to be denied, but when quite early in our friendship I was shown by a certain woman poet a presentation copy of Wilde’s book of poems inscribed “To a poet and a poem,” and within the next few weeks saw upon a table in the drawing-room of a very beautiful and singularly accomplished woman, the late Rosamund Marriott-Watson (“Graham Tomson”), who was a friend of Wilde’s and mine, a fine portrait of himself also inscribed “To a poet and a poem,” I was not so foolish as to take too seriously the flattering things he said.
Egotist as Wilde was, his was not the expansive egotism which, in spreading its wings to invite admiration, seeks to eclipse and to shut out its fellow egotists from their own little place in the sun. Most egotists are eager only for flattery and applause. Wilde was equally eager, but he was ready for the time being to forget himself and his eagerness in applauding and flattering others. Not many egotists of my acquaintance, especially literary egotists, write letters like that I have quoted, in which there is no word of himself, or of his own work, but only of his friend.
The last letter I ever received from Wilde is in the same vein. It is as usual undated, but as the play to which it refers was his first, Lady Windermere’s Fan, I am, by the assistance of Mr. Stuart Mason’s admirably compiled Oscar Wilde Calendar, enabled to fix the date as the middle of February, 1892.
Hotel Albemarle,
Piccadilly, London.My Dear Kernahan,
Will you come and see my play Thursday night. I want it to be liked by an artist like you.
Yours ever,
O. W.
Wilde came to see me, I think, the morning after the production of the play, or at all events within a morning or two after, and hugged himself with delight when, in reply to his question, “Do tell me what you admired most in the play,” I said:
“Your impudence! To dare to come before the footlights in response to enthusiastic calls—smoking a cigarette too—and compliment a British audience on having the unexpected good taste—for your manner said as plainly as it could, ‘Really, my dear people, I didn’t think you had it in you!’—to appreciate a work of art on its merits! You are a genius, Wilde, in impudence at least if in nothing else.”
“And you are a plagiarist as well as a flatterer,” he replied. “You stole that last remark from a story you have heard me tell about Richard Le Gallienne. I’m going to punish you by telling you the story, for, though you stole part of it, I am sure you have never heard it. No one ever has heard the story he steals and calls his own; no one ever has read—the odds are that he will swear he has never heard of—the book from which he has plagiarised. Our friend Richard is very beautiful, isn’t he? Wasn’t it you who told me that Swinburne described him to you as ‘Shelley with a chin’? I don’t agree. Swinburne might just as well have described himself as ‘Shelley without a chin.’ No, it is the Angel Gabriel in Rossetti’s National Gallery painting of the Annunciation of which Richard reminds me. The hair, worn long and fanning out into a wonderful halo around the head, always reminds me of Rossetti’s angel. However, my story is that an American woman, in that terribly crude way that Americans have, asked Richard, ‘Why do you wear your hair so long, Mr. Le Gallienne?’ Richard is sometimes brilliant as well as always beautiful, but on this occasion he could think of nothing less banal and foolish to say than ‘Perhaps, dear lady, for advertisement.’ ‘But you, Mr. Le Gallienne! You who have such genius!’ Richard blushed and bowed and smiled until the lady added cruelly—‘for advertisement!’”
Wilde was quite right in saying I had heard the story before. It had been told me as happening to himself in America in the days when he wore his own hair very long, and I am of opinion that it was much more likely to have happened to Wilde, who was both a notoriety hunter and an advertiser, than to Le Gallienne, who is neither.
A propos of Wilde’s love of advertising, I once heard the fact commented upon—perhaps rudely and crudely—to Wilde himself. Just as I was about to enter the Savage Club in company with a Brother Savage, who was well known as an admirer of Dickens, we encountered Wilde, and I invited him to join us at lunch.
“In the usual way,” he answered, “I should say that I was charmed, but out of compliment to our friend here, I will for once condescend to quote that dreadful and tedious person Dickens and answer, ‘Barkis is willin’.’ Where are you lunching—Romano’s?”
“No,” I said, “the Savage Club.”
“Oh, the Savage Club,” said Wilde. “I never enter the Savage Club. It tires me so. It used to be gentlemanly Bohemian, but ever since the Prince of Wales became a member and sometimes dines there, it is nothing but savagely snobbish. Besides, the members are all supposed to be professionally connected with Literature, Science, and Art, and I abhor professionalism of every sort.”
My Dickens friend, who shares every Savage’s love for the old club (he told me afterwards, whether correctly or not I do not know, that Wilde’s aversion was due to the fact that his brother Willie Wilde had unsuccessfully put up for membership), was annoyed by what Wilde had said both about the club and about Charles Dickens.
“I can understand your dislike of professionalism—in advertisement, Mr. Wilde,” he said bluntly. “And, since you have condescended to stoop to quote Dickens, I may add that, in the matter of advertisement, Barkis as represented by Wilde is not only willing but more than Mr. Willing the advertising agent himself. Good morning.”
One other story of Wilde and Le Gallienne occurs to me. Wilde held Le Gallienne, as I do, in warm liking as a friend and in genuine admiration as a poet; but, meeting him one day at a theatre, bowed gravely and coldly and made as if to pass on. Le Gallienne stopped to say something, and, noticing the aloofness of Wilde’s manner, inquired:
“What is the matter, Oscar? Have I offended you in anything?”
“Not offended so much as very greatly pained me, Richard,” was the stern reply.
“I pained you! In what way?”
“You have brought out a new book since I saw you last.”
“Yes, what of it?”
“You have treated me very badly in your book, Richard.”
“I treated you badly in my book!” protested Le Gallienne in amazement. “You must be confusing my book with somebody else’s. My last book was The Religion of a Literary Man. I’m sure you can’t have read it, or you wouldn’t say I had treated you badly.”
“That’s the very book; I have read every word of it,” persisted Wilde, “and your treatment of me in that book is infamous and brutal. I couldn’t have believed it of you, Richard—such friends as we have been too!”
“I treated you badly in my Religion of a Literary Man?” said Le Gallienne impatiently. “You must be dreaming, man. Why, I never so much as mentioned you in it.”
“That’s just it, Richard,” said Wilde, smilingly.
Here is a recollection of another sort. About the time when Wilde’s star was culminating, he boarded a Rhine steamer on the deck of which I was sitting. The passengers included a number of Americans, one of whom instantly recognised Wilde, and seating himself beside the new-comer, inquired:
“Guess, sir, you are the great Mr. Oscar Wilde about whom every one is talking?”
Smilingly, but not without an assumption of the bland boredom which he occasionally adopted toward strangers of whom he was uncertain, Wilde assented. The other, an elderly man wearing a white cravat, may or may not at some time have been connected with a church. Possibly he was then editing some publication, religious or otherwise, and in his time may have done some interviewing, for he plied Wilde with many curious and even over-curious questions concerning his movements, views, and projects. The latter, amused at first, soon tired. His eyes wandered from his interviewer to scan the faces of the passengers, and catching sight of me made as if to rise and join me.
The interviewer, who had not yet done with him, and was something of a strategist, cut off Wilde’s retreat by a forward movement of himself and the deck-chair, in which he was sitting, so as to block the way. It was apparently merely the unconscious hitching of one’s seat a little nearer to an interesting companion, the better to carry on the conversation, but it was adroitly followed by a very flattering remark in the form of a question, and Wilde relapsed lumpily into his seat to answer. For the next few minutes I could have imagined myself watching a game of “living chess.” Wilde, evidently wearying, wished to move his king, as represented by himself, across the board and into the square adjacent to myself, but for every “move” he made his adversary pushed forward another conversational “piece” to call a check. At last, shaking his head in laughing remonstrance, Wilde rose, and the other, seeing the game was up, did the same.
“It has been a real pleasure and honour to meet you, sir,” he said. “Guess when I get home and tell my wife I’ve talked to the great Oscar Wilde she won’t believe me. If you would just write your autograph there, I’d take it as a kindness.” He had been searching his pockets while speaking for a sheet of paper, but finding none opened his Baedeker where there was a blank sheet and thrust it into Wilde’s hand.
The latter, with a suggestion in his manner of the condescension which is so becoming to greatness, scrawled his name—a big terminal Greek “e” tailing off into space at the end—in the book, and bowing a polite, in response to the other’s effusive, farewell, made straight for a deck-chair next to me, and plumping himself heavily in it began to talk animatedly.
Meanwhile, the interviewer was excitedly going the round of his party to exhibit his trophy.
“Oscar Wilde’s on board, the great æsthete!” he said. “I’ve had a long talk with him. See, here’s his own autograph in my Baedeker. There he is, the big man talking to the one in a grey suit.”
The excitement spread, and soon we had the entire party standing in a ring, or perhaps I should say a halo, around the object of their worship, who though still talking animatedly missed nothing of it all, and by his beaming face seemed to enjoy his lionising. I suspect him, in fact, of amusing himself by playing up to it, for, seeing that some of his admirers were not only looking, but while doing their best to appear not to be doing so were also listening intently, his talk struck me as meant for them as much as for me. He worked off a witty saying or two which I had heard before, and just as I had seen him glance sideways at a big plate-glass Bond Street shop window to admire his figure or the cut of his coat, so he stole sideway glances at the faces around as if to see whether admiration of his wit was mirrored there.
Then he told stories of celebrities, literary or otherwise, of whom he spoke intimately, called some of them, as in the case of Besant and Whistler, by their Christian names, and so tensely was his audience holding its breath to listen, that when at Bingen he rose and said, “I’m getting off here,” one could almost hear the held breath “ough” out like a deflating tyre.
No sooner was he gone than the interviewer seated himself in the deck-chair vacated by Wilde, and inquired politely:
“Are you a lit-er-ary man, sir?”
“Why, yes,” I said, “I suppose so, in a way. That’s how I earn my living.”
“May I ask your name?”
“Certainly,” I said (meaning thereby “you may ask, but it does not follow that I shall tell you”). “I am afraid ‘Brown’ is not a very striking name, but don’t tell me you have never heard it, for there is nothing so annoys an author as that.”
He was a kindly man, and made haste to reassure me.
“I know it well,” he protested. “Yours is not an uncommon name, I believe, in England. It is less common in the States. Your Christian name is—is—is—?”
“John,” I submitted modestly.
His brow cleared. “Exactly,” he nodded. “I know it well.”
Then he seemed uncertain again, and looked thoughtfully but absently at a castle-crowned hill. I imagine he was running through and ticking off as the names occurred to him the list of all the illustrious John Browns. Possibly he thought of the author of Rab and His Friends, and decided that I was too young. Possibly of Queen Victoria’s favourite gillie, who was generally pictured in kilts, whereas I wore knickerbockers.
“You have published books?” he asked.
I nodded.
“Only in England perhaps?”
“No, they have been issued in America too.”
“Sold?”
“The people who bought them were,” I said.
“Tell me the name of one of your books, please.”
I shook my head.
“Can’t. Not allowed.”
“Not allowed? Why not?”
“Because,” I answered, rattling off the first nonsense which came to my head, “I’m a member of the famous ‘Silence Club,’ the members of which are known as the W.N.T.S.’s. You have heard of the club of course, even if you haven’t heard of me?”
“Yes,” he said. “I feel sure I have; but I was never quite sure what it meant. What does W.N.T.S. stand for?”
“It means ‘We Never Talk Shop.’ An author who so much as mentions the title of his book except to his publisher, his bookseller, or an agent is unconditionally expelled.”
Then I delivered my counter-attack. He had mentioned to Wilde that he hailed from Boston. It so happens that at my friend Louise Chandler Moulton’s receptions I had met nearly every eminent Boston or even American author, so I put a few questions to my interviewer which showed an inner knowledge of Boston and American literary life and celebrities that seemed positively to startle him. He was now convinced that I was a celebrity of world-wide fame, and that such a comet should come within his own orbit, without his getting to know as much as the comet’s name, was not to be endured by a self-respecting journalist. He literally agonised, as well as perspired, in his unavailing efforts to trick, wheedle or implore my obscure name from me. For one moment I was minded to tell him my name if only to enjoy the shock of its unknownness, but I resisted the temptation and, tiring in my turn as Wilde had tired, I rose and said that as I was getting off at the next stopping place I would wish him “Good day.” He did not even ask for John Brown’s autograph. He even seemed suddenly in a hurry to get rid of me, the reason for which I afterwards discovered. He had, I suppose, heard me tell Wilde that my luggage was on board; and the last I saw of him was in the boat’s hold, where he was stooping, pince-nez on nose, over the up-piled bags, boxes, dressing-cases and trunks, painfully raking them over, and every moment hoping to be rewarded by finding mine labelled “Robert Louis Stevenson,” “Rudyard Kipling,” “Algernon C. Swinburne” or “Thomas Hardy.” I trust he found it.
When we were back in town I told Wilde my own adventure with the interviewer after the former had left the boat. His comment was:
“It sounds like a terrible serial story that I once saw in a magazine, each chapter of which was written by a different hand. ‘The Adventures of Oscar Wilde, by himself, continued by Coulson Kernahan.’ How positively dreadful!”
I wonder what Wilde will have to say to me, if hereafter we should discuss together the brief and fragmentary continuation of his own story which in these Recollections I have endeavoured to carry on?