“That vile, sensual self-indulgence puts back the hands of the clock,” he said, “and should not be forgiven.”

For the life of me I could never forgive Meredith; never afterwards was he of any importance to me.  He had always been to me a standard bearer in the eternal conflict, a leader in the Liberation War of Humanity, and here I found him pitiless to another who had been wounded on the same side in the great struggle:  it seemed to me appalling.  True, Wilde had not been wounded in fighting for us; true, he had fallen out and come to grief, as a drunkard might.  But after all he had been fighting on the right side:  had been a quickening intellectual influence:  it was dreadful to pass him on the wayside and allow him callously to bleed to death.  It was revoltingly cruel!  The foremost Englishman of his time unable even to understand Christ’s example, much less reach his height!

This refusal of Meredith’s not only hurt me, but almost destroyed my hope, though it did not alter my purpose.  I wanted a figurehead for my petition, and the figurehead I had chosen I could not get.  I began to wonder and doubt.  I next approached a very different man, the late Professor Churton Collins, a great friend of mine, who, in spite of an almost pedantic rigour of mind and character, had in him at bottom a curious spring of sympathy—­a little pool of pure love for the poets and writers whom he admired.  I got him to dinner and asked him to sign the petition; he refused, but on grounds other than those taken by Meredith.

“Of course Wilde ought to get out,” he said, “the sentence was a savage one and showed bitter prejudice; but I have children, and my own way to make in the world, and if I did this I should be tarred with the Wilde brush.  I cannot afford to do it.  If he were really a great man I hope I should do it, but I don’t agree with your estimate of him.  I cannot think I am called upon to bell the British cat in his defence:  it has many claws and all sharp.”

As soon as he saw the position was unworthy of him, he shifted to new ground.

“If you were justified in coming to me, I should do it; but I am no one; why don’t you go to Meredith, Swinburne or Hardy?”

I had to give up the Professor, as well as the poet.  I knocked in turn at a great many doors, but all in vain.  No one wished to take the odium on himself.  One man, since become celebrated, said he had no position, his name was not good enough for the purpose.  Others left my letters unanswered.  Yet another sent a bare acknowledgment saying how sorry he was, but that public opinion was against Mr. Wilde; with one accord they all made excuses....