One day at lunch I questioned him: 

“You told me once that you always imagined yourself in the place of every historic personage.  Suppose you had been Jesus, what religion would you have preached?”

“What a wonderful question!” he cried.  “What religion is mine?  What belief have I?

“I believe most of all in personal liberty for every human soul.  Each man ought to do what he likes, to develop as he will.  England, or rather London, for I know little of England outside London, was an ideal place to me, till they punished me because I did not share their tastes.  What an absurdity it all was, Frank:  how dared they punish me for what is good in my eyes?  How dared they?” and he fell into moody thought....  The idea of a new gospel did not really interest him.

It was about this time he first told me of a new play he had in mind.

“It has a great scene, Frank,” he said.  “Imagine a roue of forty-five who is married; incorrigible, of course, Frank, a great noble who gets the person he is in love with to come and stay with him in the country.  One evening his wife, who has gone upstairs to lie down with a headache, is behind a screen in a room half asleep; she is awakened by her husband’s courting.  She cannot move, she is bound breathless to her couch; she hears everything.  Then, Frank, the husband comes to the door and finds it locked, and knowing that his wife is inside with the host, beats upon the door and will have entrance, and while the guilty ones whisper together—­the woman blaming the man, the man trying to think of some excuse, some way out of the net—­the wife gets up very quietly and turns on the lights while the two cowards stare at her with wild surmise.  She passes to the door and opens it and the husband rushes in to find his hostess as well as the host and his wife.  I think it is a great scene, Frank, a great stage picture.”

“It is,” I said, “a great scene; why don’t you write it?”

“Perhaps I shall, Frank, one of these days, but now I am thinking of some poetry, a ‘Ballad of a Fisher Boy,’ a sort of companion to ’The Ballad of Reading Gaol,’ in which I sing of liberty instead of prison, joy instead of sorrow, a kiss instead of an execution.  I shall do this joy-song much better than I did the song of sorrow and despair.”

“Like Davidson’s ‘Ballad of a Nun,’” I said, for the sake of saying something.

“Naturally Davidson would write the ‘Ballad of a Nun,’ Frank; his talent is Scotch and severe; but I should like to write ’The Ballad of a Fisher Boy,’” and he fell to dreaming.

The thought of his punishment was oft with him.  It seemed to him hideously wrong and unjust.  But he never questioned the right of society to punish.  He did not see that, if you once grant that, the wrong done to him could be defended.

“I used to think myself a lord of life,” he said.  “How dared those little wretches condemn me and punish me?  Everyone of them tainted with a sensuality which I loathe.”