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?
III
Once when Wilde, a novelist and I were lunching together, and when Wilde, after declaring that the wine was so “heavenly” that it should be drunk kneeling, was discoursing learnedly on the pleasures of the table—how the flesh of this or that bird, fish or beast should be cooked and eaten, with what wine and with what sauce, the novelist put in:
“If I were to adapt Bunyan, I should say that you ought to have been christened Os-carnalwise Wilde instead of plain Oscar.”
“How ridiculous of you to suppose that anyone, least of all my dear mother, would christen me ‘plain Oscar,’” was the reply. “My name has two O’s, two F’s and two W’s. A name which is destined to be in everybody’s mouth must not be too long. It comes so expensive in the advertisements. When one is unknown, a number of Christian names are useful, perhaps needful. As one becomes famous, one sheds some of them, just as a balloonist, when rising higher, sheds unnecessary ballast, or as you will shed your Christian name when raised to the peerage. I started as Oscar Finghal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde. All but two of the five names have already been thrown overboard. Soon I shall discard another and be known simply as ‘The Wilde’ or ‘The Oscar.’ Which it is to be depends upon one of my imitators—that horrid Hall Caine, who used to be known very properly as Thomas Henry; quite appropriate names for a man who writes and dresses as he does. I can’t say which he does worse as I have never read him, but I have often been made ill by the way he wears his clothes.
“And, by the by, never say you have ‘adapted’ anything from anyone. Appropriate what is already yours—for to publish anything is to make it public property—but never adapt, or, if you do, suppress the fact. It is hardly fair to Bunyan, if you improve on him, to point out, some hundreds of years after, how much cleverer you are than he; and it is even more unfair, if you spoil what he has said, and then ‘hold him accountable.’”
“That, I suppose,” said the novelist drily, “is why when you said the other day that ‘Whenever a great man dies, William Sharp and the undertaker come in together,’ you suppressed the fact that the same thing had already been said in other words by W. S. Gilbert.”
“Precisely,” said Wilde. “It is not for me publicly to point out Gilbert’s inferiority. That would be ungenerous. But no one can blame me, if the fact is patent to all.”
Mention of Sir W. S. Gilbert prompted the other to say that a friend of his had occasion to take a cab at Harrow where the author of The Bab Ballads had built a house. Driving from the station to his destination, his friend noticed this house, and asked the cabman who lived there. “I don’t know ’is name, sir,” said the cabman. “But I do know (I have driven ’im once or twice) that ’e is sometimes haffable and sometimes harbitrary. They do say in the town, sir, that ’e’s wot’s called a retired ’umorist, whatever that may be.”