Once when Wilde, a novelist and I were lunching together, and when
Wilde, after declaring that the wine was so “heavenly” that it should
be drunk kneeling, was discoursing learnedly on the pleasures of the
table--how the flesh of this or that bird, fish or beast should be
cooked and eaten, with what wine and with what sauce, the novelist
put in:
“If I were to adapt Bunyan, I should say that you ought to have been
christened Os-carnalwise Wilde instead of plain Oscar.”
“How ridiculous of you to suppose that anyone, least of all my dear
mother, would christen me ‘plain Oscar,’” was the reply. “My name
has two O’s, two F’s and two W’s. A name which is destined to be in
everybody’s mouth must not be too long. It comes so expensive in the
advertisements. When one is unknown, a number of Christian names are
useful, perhaps needful. As one becomes famous, one sheds some of
them, just as a balloonist, when rising higher, sheds unnecessary
ballast, or as you will shed your Christian name when raised to the
peerage. I started as Oscar Finghal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde. All
but two of the five names have already been thrown overboard. Soon
I shall discard another and be known simply as ‘The Wilde’ or ‘The
Oscar.’ Which it is to be depends upon one of my imitators--that
horrid Hall Caine, who used to be known very properly as Thomas
Henry; quite appropriate names for a man who writes and dresses as he
does. I can’t say which he does worse as I have never read him, but
I have often been made ill by the way he wears his clothes.
“And, by the by, never say you have ‘adapted’ anything from anyone.
Appropriate what is already yours--for to publish anything is to make
it public property--but never adapt, or, if you do, suppress the
fact. It is hardly fair to Bunyan, if you improve on him, to point
out, some hundreds of years after, how much cleverer you are than he;
and it is even more unfair, if you spoil what he has said, and then
‘hold him accountable.’”
“That, I suppose,” said the novelist drily, “is why when you said
the other day that ‘Whenever a great man dies, William Sharp and the
undertaker come in together,’ you suppressed the fact that the same
thing had already been said in other words by W. S. Gilbert.”
“Precisely,” said Wilde. “It is not for me publicly to point out
Gilbert’s inferiority. That would be ungenerous. But no one can blame
me, if the fact is patent to all.”
Mention of Sir W. S. Gilbert prompted the other to say that a friend
of his had occasion to take a cab at Harrow where the author of _The
Bab Ballads_ had built a house. Driving from the station to his
destination, his friend noticed this house, and asked the cabman who
lived there. “I don’t know ’is name, sir,” said the cabman. “But I do
know (I have driven ’im once or twice) that ’e is sometimes haffable
and sometimes harbitrary. They do say in the town, sir, that ’e’s
wot’s called a retired ’umorist, whatever that may be.”
From Harrow the conversation shifted to the neighbouring city of St.
Albans, where I was then living.
“That reminds me,” said Wilde, turning to me, “that I want to run
down to St. Albans once again to bathe my fingers in the mediæval
twilight of the grey old Abbey. We two will come to you to-morrow.
You shall meet us at the station, give us lunch at your rooms--a
cutlet, a flask of red chianti and a cigarette is all we ask--and
then you shall take us over the Abbey.”
“I shall be delighted,” I said, “but do you remember my meeting you
the other day when you were coming away from the Royal Academy? I
asked you how you were, and you replied, ‘Ill, my dear fellow, ill
and wounded to the soul at the thought of the hideousness of what in
this degenerate country, and these degenerate days, dares to call
itself Art. Get me some wine quickly, or I’m sure I shall faint.’
Well, I’m living in bachelor diggings where it would be highly
inconvenient to have dead or dying artists on hand or lying about.
The pictures on show in my bachelor rooms, like the furniture, are
not of my selection. If you were wounded by what you saw in the
Academy, you would die at sight of one work of art on my walls. It is
a hideous and vulgar representation of ‘Daniel in the Lions’ Den,’
done in crude chromo, four colours.”
Wilde affected to shudder.
“How awful!” he said. “But I can think of something more awful even
than that.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“A poor lion in a den of Daniels,” was his reply.