ABSTRACT
When I was lecturing in Boston a little before the War an Arab refugee told me that Oscar Wilde’s works had been translated into Arabian and that his Happy Prince and Other Tales had been the most popular: —‘They are our own literature,’ he said. I had already heard that ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism’ was much read in the Young China party; and for long after I found myself meditating upon the strange destiny of certain books. My mind went back to the late eighties when I was but just arrived in London with the manuscript of my first book of poems, and when nothing of Wilde’s had been published except his poems and The Happy Prince. I remember the reviews were generally very hostile to his work, for Wilde’s aesthetic movement was a recent event and London journalists were still in a rage with his knee breeches, his pose-and it may be with his bitter speeches about themselves; while men of letters saw nothing in his prose but imitations of Walter Pater or in his verse but imitations of Swinburne and Rossetti. Never did any man seem to write more deliberately for the smallest possible audience or in a style more artificial, and that audience contained nobody it seemed but a few women of fashion who invited guests to listen to his conversation and two or three young painters who continued the tradition of Rossetti. And then in the midst of my meditation it was as though I heard him saying with that slow precise, rhythmical elocution of his, ‘I have a vast public in Samarkand.’ Perhaps they do not speak Arabian in Samarkand, but whatever name he had chosen he would have chosen it for its sound and for its suggestion of romance. His vogue in China would have touched him even more nearly, and I can almost hear his voice speaking of jade and powdered lacquer. Indeed, when I remember him with pleasure it is always the talker Iremember, either as I have heard him at W.E.Henley’s or in his own house or in some passage in a play, where there is some stroke of wit which had first come to him in conversation or might so have come. He was certainly the greatest talker of his time. ‘We Irish’, he had said to me, ‘are too poetical to be poets, we are a nation of brilliant failures, but we are the greatest talkers since the Greeks.’ He talked as good Irish talkers always do-though with a manner and music that he had learnt from Pater or Flaubert-and as no good English talker has ever talked. He had no practical interest, no cause to defend, no information to give, nor was he the gay jester whose very practical purpose is our pleasure. Behind his words was the whole power of his intellect, but that intellect had given itself to pure contemplation. I know two or three such men in Ireland to-day, and one of them is an unknown man who lurched into my carriage in a Wicklow train two or three years ago:—‘First class carriage, third class ticket, do it on principle,’ he began, and then, speaking of a friend of his killed in the war, burst out with, ‘Why are so many dead that should be alive and so many alive that should be dead?’ For twenty minutes of drunken speech he talked as Shakespeare’s people talked, never turning away for a
moment from the fundamental and insoluble; and he told me one story that Wilde would have told with delight. Then too I think of a doctor and of a priest with whom I have talked in many places, but especially on a remote Connemara sea coast where, day after day, their minds, more learned in all the poetry of the world than mine, and vehement with phantasy, played with the fundamental and the insoluble.
