Oscar sat at his feet and imbibed as much as he could of the new aesthetic gospel.  He even ventured to annex some of the master’s most telling stories and thus came into conflict with his teacher.

One incident may find a place here.

The art critic of The Times, Mr. Humphry Ward, had come to see an exhibition of Whistler’s pictures.  Filled with an undue sense of his own importance, he buttonholed the master and pointing to one picture said: 

“That’s good, first-rate, a lovely bit of colour; but that, you know,” he went on, jerking his finger over his shoulder at another picture, “that’s bad, drawing all wrong ... bad!”

“My dear fellow,” cried Whistler, “you must never say that this painting’s good or that bad, never!  Good and bad are not terms to be used by you; but say, I like this, and I dislike that, and you’ll be within your right.  And now come and have a whiskey for you’re sure to like that.”

Carried away by the witty fling, Oscar cried: 

“I wish I had said that.”

“You will, Oscar, you will,” came Whistler’s lightning thrust.

Of all the personal influences which went to the moulding of Oscar Wilde’s talent, that of Whistler, in my opinion, was the most important; Whistler taught him that men of genius stand apart and are laws unto themselves; showed him, too, that all qualities—­singularity of appearance, wit, rudeness even, count doubly in a democracy.  But neither his own talent nor the bold self-assertion learned from Whistler helped him to earn money; the conquest of London seemed further off and more improbable than ever.  Where Whistler had missed the laurel how could he or indeed anyone be sure of winning?

A weaker professor of AEsthetics would have been discouraged by the monetary and other difficulties of his position and would have lost heart at the outset in front of the impenetrable blank wall of English philistinism and contempt.  But Oscar Wilde was conscious of great ability and was driven by an inordinate vanity.  Instead of diminishing his pretensions in the face of opposition he increased them.  He began to go abroad in the evening in knee breeches and silk stockings wearing strange flowers in his coat—­green cornflowers and gilded lilies—­while talking about Baudelaire, whose name even was unfamiliar, as a world poet, and proclaiming the strange creed that “nothing succeeds like excess.”  Very soon his name came into everyone’s mouth; London talked of him and discussed him at a thousand tea-tables.  For one invitation he had received before, a dozen now poured in; he became a celebrity.

Of course he was still sneered at by many as a mere poseur; it still seemed to be all Lombard Street to a china orange that he would be beaten down under the myriad trampling feet of middle-class indifference and disdain.