I remember, for instance, in September, ’93, to select merely one instance out of many, taking a set of chambers, purely in order to work undisturbed, as I had broken my contract with John Hare, for whom I had promised to write a play, and who was pressing me on the subject.  During the first week you kept away.  We had, not unnaturally indeed, differed on the question of the artistic value[42] of your translation of Salome.  So you contented yourself with sending me foolish letters on the subject.  In that week I wrote and completed in every detail, as it was ultimately performed, the first act of an An Ideal Husband.  The second week you returned, and my work practically had to be given up.  I arrived at St. James’s Place every morning at 11.30 in order to have the opportunity of thinking and writing without the interruption inseparable from my own household, quiet and peaceful as that household was.  But the attempt was vain.  At 12 o’clock you drove up and stayed smoking cigarettes and chattering till 1.30, when I had to take you out to luncheon at the Cafe Royal or the Berkeley.  Luncheon with its liqueurs lasted usually till 3.30.  For an hour you retired to White’s.  At tea time you appeared again and stayed till it was time to dress for dinner.  You dined with me either at the Savoy or at Tite Street.  We did not separate as a rule till after midnight, as supper at Willis’ had to wind up the entrancing day.  That was my life for those three months, every single day, except during the four days when you went abroad.  I then, of course, had to go over to Calais to fetch you back.  For one of my nature and temperament it was a position at once grotesque and tragic.

You surely must realise that now.  You must see now that your incapacity of being alone:  your nature so exigent in its persistent claim on the attention and time of others:  your lack of any power of sustained intellectual concentration:  the unfortunate accident—­for I like to think it was no more—­that you had not been able to acquire the “Oxford temper” in intellectual matters, never, I mean, been one who could play gracefully with ideas, but had arrived at violence of opinion merely—­that all these things, combined with the fact that your desires and your interests were in Life, not in Art, were as destructive to your own progress in culture as they were to my work as an artist.  When I compare my friendship with you to my friendship with still younger men, as John Gray and Pierre Louys, I feel ashamed.  My real life, my higher life, was with them and such as they.

Of the appalling results of my friendship with you I don’t speak at present.  I am thinking merely of its quality while it lasted.  It was intellectually degrading to me.  You had the rudiments[43] of an artistic temperament in its germ.  But I met you either too late or too soon.  I don’t know which.  When you were away I was all right.  The moment, in the early December of the year to which