“In five minutes,” Grimthorpe declares, “all the papers were put down and everyone had gathered round him to listen and laugh.”

At the end of the meal one Yorkshireman after the other begged the host to follow the lunch with a dinner and invite them to meet the wonder again.  When the party broke up in the small hours they all went away delighted with Oscar, vowing that no man ever talked more brilliantly.  Grimthorpe cannot remember a single word Oscar said:  “It was all delightful,” he declares, “a play of genial humour over every topic that came up, like sunshine dancing on waves.”

The extraordinary thing about Oscar’s talent was that he did not monopolise the conversation:  he took the ball of talk wherever it happened to be at the moment and played with it so humorously that everyone was soon smiling delightedly.  The famous talkers of the past, Coleridge, Macaulay, Carlyle and the others, were all lecturers:  talk to them was a discourse on a favourite theme, and in ordinary life they were generally regarded as bores.  But at his best Oscar Wilde never dropped the tone of good society:  he could afford to give place to others; he was equipped at all points:  no subject came amiss to him:  he saw everything from a humorous angle, and dazzled one now with word-wit, now with the very stuff of merriment.

Though he was the life and soul of every social gathering, and in constant demand, he still read omnivorously, and his mind naturally occupied itself with high themes.

For some years, the story of Jesus fascinated him and tinged all his thought.  We were talking about Renan’s “Life” one day:  a wonderful book he called it, one of the three great biographies of the world, Plato’s dialogues with Socrates as hero and Boswell’s “Life of Johnson” being the other two.  It was strange, he thought, that the greatest man had written the worst biography; Plato made of Socrates a mere phonograph, into which he talked his own theories:  Renan did better work, and Boswell, the humble loving friend, the least talented of the three, did better still, though being English, he had to keep to the surface of things and leave the depths to be divined.  Oscar evidently expected Plato and Renan to have surpassed comparison.

It seemed to me, however, that the illiterate Galilean fishermen had proved themselves still more consummate painters than Boswell, though they, too, left a great deal too much to the imagination.  Love is the best of artists; the puddle of rain in the road can reflect a piece of sky marvellously.

The Gospel story had a personal interest for Oscar; he was always weaving little fables about himself as the Master.

In spite of my ignorance of Hebrew the story of Jesus had always had the strongest attraction for me, and so we often talked about Him, though from opposite poles.

Renan I felt had missed Jesus at his highest.  He was far below the sincerity, the tenderness and sweet-thoughted wisdom of that divine spirit.  Frenchman-like, he stumbled over the miracles and came to grief.  Claus Sluter’s head of Jesus in the museum of Dijon is a finer portrait, and so is the imaginative picture of Fra Angelico.  It seemed to me possible to do a sketch from the Gospels themselves which should show the growth of the soul of Jesus and so impose itself as a true portrait.