“Des Grieux was a worthless rascal by all conventional standards; and we forgive him everything.  We think we forgive him because he was unselfish and loved greatly.  Oscar seems to have said:  ’I will love nobody:  I will be utterly selfish; and I will be not merely a rascal but a monster; and you shall forgive me everything.  In other words, I will reduce your standards to absurdity, not by writing them down, though I could do that so well—­in fact, have done it—­but by actually living them down and dying them down.’

“However, I mustn’t start writing a book to you about Wilde:  I must just tumble a few things together and tell you them.  To take things in the order of your book, I can remember only one occasion on which I saw Sir William Wilde, who, by the way, operated on my father to correct a squint, and overdid the correction so much that my father squinted the other way all the rest of his life.  To this day I never notice a squint:  it is as normal to me as a nose or a tall hat.

“I was a boy at a concert in the Antient Concert Rooms in Brunswick Street in Dublin.  Everybody was in evening dress; and—­unless I am mixing up this concert with another (in which case I doubt if the Wildes would have been present)—­the Lord Lieutenant was there with his blue waistcoated courtiers.  Wilde was dressed in snuffy brown; and as he had the sort of skin that never looks clean, he produced a dramatic effect beside Lady Wilde (in full fig) of being, like Frederick the Great, Beyond Soap and Water, as his Nietzschean son was beyond Good and Evil.  He was currently reported to have a family in every farmhouse; and the wonder was that Lady Wilde didn’t mind—­evidently a tradition from the Travers case, which I did not know about until I read your account, as I was only eight in 1864.

“Lady Wilde was nice to me in London during the desperate days between my arrival in 1876 and my first earning of an income by my pen in 1885, or rather until, a few years earlier, I threw myself into Socialism and cut myself contemptuously loose from everything of which her at-homes—­themselves desperate affairs enough, as you saw for yourself—­were part.  I was at two or three of them; and I once dined with her in company with an ex-tragedy queen named Miss Glynn, who, having no visible external ears, reared a head like a turnip.  Lady Wilde talked about Schopenhauer; and Miss Glynn told me that Gladstone formed his oratorical style on Charles Kean.

“I ask myself where and how I came across Lady Wilde; for we had no social relations in the Dublin days.  The explanation must be that my sister, then a very attractive girl who sang beautifully, had met and made some sort of innocent conquest of both Oscar and Willie.  I met Oscar once at one of the at-homes; and he came and spoke to me with an evident intention of being specially kind to me.  We put each other out frightfully; and this odd difficulty persisted between us to the very last, even when we were no longer mere boyish novices and had become men of the world with plenty of skill in social intercourse.  I saw him very seldom, as I avoided literary and artistic society like the plague, and refused the few invitations I received to go into society with burlesque ferocity, so as to keep out of it without offending people past their willingness to indulge me as a privileged lunatic.