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.”