I wish I could remember one-hundredth part of the good things he said. He was extraordinarily quick in answer and repartee, and anyone who says that his wit was the result of preparation and midnight oil can never have heard him speak. I remember once at dinner a friend of his who had formerly been in the “Blues,” pointing out that in the opening stanza of “The Ballad of Reading Jail” he had made a mistake in speaking of the “scarlet coat” of the man who was hanged; he was, as the dedication of the poem says, a private in the “Blues,” and his coat would therefore naturally not be scarlet. The lines go—
He did not wear his scarlet coat,
For blood and wine are red.
“Well, what could I do,” said Oscar Wilde plaintively, “I couldn’t very well say
He did not wear his azure coat,
For blood and wine are blue—
could I?”
The last time I saw him was about three months before he died. I took him to dinner at the Grand Café. He was then perfectly well and in the highest spirits. All through dinner he kept me delighted and amused. Only afterwards, just before I left him, he became rather depressed. He actually told me that he didn’t think he was going to live long; he had a presentiment, he said. I tried to turn it off into a joke, but he was quite serious. “Somehow,” he said, “I don’t think I shall live to see the new century.” Then a long pause. “If another century began, and I was still alive, it would be really more than the English could stand.” And so I left him, never to see him alive again.
Just before he died he came to, after a long period of unconsciousness and said to a faithful friend who sat by his bedside, “I have had a dreadful dream; I dreamt that I dined with the dead.” “My dear Oscar,” replied his friend, “I am sure you were the life and soul of the party.” “Really, you are sometimes very witty,” replied Oscar Wilde, and I believe those are his last recorded words. The jest was admirable and in his own genre; it was prompted by ready wit and kindness, and because of it Oscar Wilde went off into his last unconscious phase, which lasted for twelve hours, with a smile on his lips. I cherish a hope that it is also prophetic, Death would have no terrors for me if only I were sure of “dining with the dead.”[14]
