“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.