English literature is much the poorer by John Davidson having taken his own life, in despair at the scantiness of the rewards which his genius could earn. Davidson was a man I liked very much. His robust personality was reflected in his brilliant eyes and colouring. His heartiness and sincerity were transparent and he was a very vital poet. He came often. Davidson was inspired; there are lines of white fire in “The Ballad of the Nun.” His cheery, courageous face and blithe smile did not in the least suggest a man who would commit suicide; they were much more suggestive of the bloods who lived in the piping times of King George III. He was another Lane discovery, I think, and I suspect that Lane brought him to our house, as he brought Beardsley and many another man destined to be celebrated, W. J. Locke among them.
Le Gallienne I knew better than any of them. He and his brother-in-law, James Welch, were conspicuous features at our parties, Welch because he was irresistibly funny, and in the habit of exercising his wonderful gift of mimicry at odd moments—we all believed in his future eminence.
Le Gallienne was even more conspicuous for his personal appearance and frank posing. He had a face like Shelley, and the true hyacinthine curls, if hyacinthine curls mean the rich, waving black hair which one associates with the Greeks of mythology. He was really a rather vigorous and athletic man, and he used to say in the most captivating way, “You mustn’t mind me letting my hair grow, and living up to it—it is part of my stock-in-trade. People wouldn’t come to hear me lecture without it.”
Undoubtedly his picturesque appearance made him one of the most striking figures in any literary assemblage, but he also had splendid gifts as a poet. I have always thought that his version of Omar Khayyam is one of the most beautiful, and has never received justice in comparison with other versions. Like Fitzgerald, he was unable to translate from the original, but that did not signify, because hardly any one in England, in or out of the Omar Khayyam Club, can understand the original, and the most popular version of the Rubaiyat is valued, not for what Omar put into it, but for what Fitzgerald put into it. Huntly McCarthy, who was only in our house once or twice, did, of course, actually make a translation of the Rubaiyat, but he is a literary marvel who has not yet come into his own, author of exquisite poems, and of some of the most brilliant and delightful historical novels by any living writer. His father, the genial leader of the Home Rule Party, who loved Ireland without hating England, and wrote history blindfolded to prejudice, that grand old man, Justin McCarthy, was a much more frequent visitor. I can see him now, with his long beard, and eloquent Irish eyes behind very conspicuous glasses, leaning on his daughter Charlotte, and I can hear his rich brogue. It was a great honour to be admitted to the intimate friendship of Justin McCarthy, and when he grew more infirm, and went to die at Westgate, where he lived on for a surprising time, he never failed to remember me with a line at Christmas.
I ought to mention Oscar Wilde here, who had a wonderful gift of poetical expression, and whom I met when we were both undergraduates at Oxford, where he used to call himself O. O’F. Wills Wilde—Oscar O’Flaherty Wills Wilde. He was always known as Wills Wilde.
But our parties were too crowded for him; he prefered to come to see me on a chance afternoon, like Lewis Morris. He hated having people introduced to him, until he had expressed the desire that they should have the honour, and in meetings so Bohemian he could not have escaped it. He took a scholarship at Oxford, and won the University prize for the English poem, and I rather think he got a First Class, but one did not think of him dans cette galère. He had, even in those days, a desire to be conspicuous, and in those days æstheticism pranced through the land. Garments of funny-coloured green baize, with a Greek absence of any pretence at dressmaking, were the badge of the æsthetic female, who to take first prize was required to have red hair and green eyes, and a mouth like a magenta foxglove. And the idea was that men should wear black velvet knickerbocker suits, with silk stockings and black velvet caps like pancakes. I never saw them doing it, except in an æsthetic pottery shop in the Queen’s Road, Bayswater, where they sold Aspinall’s enamels, and on the stage, where Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience took the place now occupied by works of genius like Bernard Shaw’s Chocolate Soldier. Wilde never wore the dress at Oxford, but he was quite courageous in adjuncts. At one time he banished all the decorations from his rooms, except a single blue vase of the true æsthetic type which contained a “Patience” lily. He was discovered by the other undergraduates of Magdalen prostrated with grief before it because he never could live up to it. They did what they could to revive him by putting him under the college pump.
But they applauded his wit, at the coining of a famous example of which I was privileged to be present. We were both in for a Divinity exam. at the same time. There was no Honour school in Divinity; it was simply a qualifying exam. to show that we had sufficient knowledge of the rudiments of the religion of the Church of England to be graduates of a religious university; we used to call the exam. “Rudiments” for short.
I went to the exam., like a good young man, at the advertised hour, nine o’clock; Wilde did not arrive till half-an-hour later, and when Spooner, the Head of New College, who was one of our examiners, asked him what he meant by being so late, he said, “You must excuse me; I have no experience of these pass examinations.”
It was the morning of the viva voce examinations, and his being late did not really signify because W is one of the last letters in the alphabet. But the examiners were so annoyed at his impertinence that they gave him a Bible, and told him to copy out the long twenty-seventh chapter of the Acts. He copied it out so industriously in his exquisite handwriting that their hearts relented, and they told him that he need not write out any more. Half-an-hour afterwards they noticed that he was copying it out as hard as ever, and they called him up to say, “Didn’t you hear us tell you, Mr. Wilde, that you needn’t copy out any more?”
“Oh yes,” he said, “I heard you, but I was so interested in what I was copying, that I could not leave off. It was all about a man named Paul, who went on a voyage, and was caught in a terrible storm, and I was afraid that he would be drowned, but, do you know, Mr. Spooner, he was saved, and when I found that he was saved, I thought of coming to tell you.”