“Because he is a madman.”

“Oh, Frank, I can’t,” he cried.  “Bosie wouldn’t let me.”

“‘Wouldn’t let you’?  I repeated angrily.  “How absurd!  That Queensberry man will go to violence, to any extremity.  Don’t you fight other people’s quarrels:  you may have enough of your own some day.”

“You’re not sympathetic, Frank,” he chided weakly.  “I know you mean it kindly, but it’s impossible for me to do as you advise.  I cannot give up my friend.  I really cannot let Lord Queensberry choose my friends for me.  It’s too absurd.”

“But it’s wise,” I replied.  “There’s a very bad verse in one of Hugo’s plays.  It always amused me—­he likens poverty to a low door and declares that when we have to pass through it the man who stoops lowest is the wisest.  So when you meet a madman, the wisest thing to do is to avoid him and not quarrel with him.”

“It’s very hard, Frank; of course I’ll think over what you say.  But really Queensberry ought to be in a madhouse.  He’s too absurd,” and in that spirit he left me, outwardly self-confident.  He might have remembered Chaucer’s words: 

    Beware also to spurne again a nall;
    Strive not as doeth a crocke with a wall;
    Deme thy selfe that demest others dede,
    And trouth thee shall deliver, it is no drede.

FOOTNOTES: 

[11] “The Promise of May” was produced in November, 1882.

CHAPTER XII

These two years 1893-4 saw Oscar Wilde at the very zenith of success.  Thackeray, who always felt himself a monetary failure in comparison with Dickens, calls success “one of the greatest of a great man’s qualities,” and Oscar was not successful merely, he was triumphant.  Not Sheridan the day after his marriage, not Byron when he awoke to find himself famous, ever reached such a pinnacle.  His plays were bringing in so much that he could spend money like water; he had won every sort of popularity; the gross applause of the many, and the finer incense of the few who constitute the jury of Fame; his personal popularity too was extraordinary; thousands admired him, many liked him; he seemed to have everything that heart could desire and perfect health to boot.  Even his home life was without a cloud.  Two stories which he told at this time paint him.  One was about his two boys, Vyvyan and Cyril.

“Children are sometimes interesting,” he began.  “The other night I was reading when my wife came and asked me to go upstairs and reprove the elder boy:  Cyril, it appeared, would not say his prayers.  He had quarrelled with Vyvyan, and beaten him, and when he was shaken and told he must say his prayers, he would not kneel down, or ask God to make him a good boy.  Of course I had to go upstairs and see to it.  I took the chubby little fellow on my knee, and told him in a grave way that he had been very naughty; naughty to hit his younger brother, and naughty because he had given his mother pain.  He must kneel down at once, and ask God to forgive him and make him a good boy.