The First Meeting with Lord Alfred Douglas

Thou hast led me like an heathen sacrifice,

With music and with fatal pomp of flowers,

To my eternal ruin.

Webster’s The White Devil.

“Lady Windermere’s Fan” was a success in every sense of the word, and during its run London was at Oscar’s feet. There were always a few doors closed to him; but he could afford now to treat his critics with laughter, call them fogies and old-fashioned and explain that they had not a decalogue but a millelogue of sins forbidden and persons tabooed because it was easier to condemn than to understand.

I remember a lunch once when he talked most brilliantly and finished up by telling the story now published in his works as “A Florentine Tragedy.” He told it superbly, making it appear far more effective than in its written form. A well-known actor, piqued at being compelled to play listener, made himself ridiculous by half turning his back on the narrator. But after lunch Willie Grenfell (now Lord Desborough), a model English athlete gifted with peculiar intellectual fairness, came round to me:

“Oscar Wilde is most surprising, most charming, a wonderful talker.”

At the same moment Mr. K. H—— came over to us. He was a man who went everywhere and knew everyone. He had quiet, ingratiating manners, always spoke in a gentle smiling way and had a good word to say for everyone, especially for women; he was a bachelor, too, and wholly unattached. He surprised me by taking up Grenfell’s praise and breaking into a lyric:

“The best talker who ever lived,” he said; “most extraordinary. I am so infinitely obliged to you for asking me to meet him — a new delight. He brings a supernal air into life. I am in truth indebted to you”— all this in an affected purring tone. I noticed for the first time that there was a touch of rouge on his face; Grenfell turned away from us rather abruptly I thought.

At this first roseate dawn of complete success and universal applause, new qualities came to view in Oscar. Praise gave him the fillip needed in order to make him surpass himself. His talk took on a sort of autumnal richness of colour, and assumed a new width of range; he now used pathos as well as humour and generally brought in a story or apologue to lend variety to the entertainment. His little weaknesses, too, began to show themselves and they grew rankly in the sunshine. He always wanted to do himself well, as the phrase goes, but now he began to eat and drink more freely than before. His vanity became defiant. I noticed one day that he had signed himself, Oscar O’Flahertie Wilde, I think under some verses which he had contributed years before to his College magazine. I asked him jokingly what the O’Flahertie stood for. To my astonishment he answered me gravely:

“The O’Flaherties were kings in Ireland, and I have a right to the name; I am descended from them.”

I could not help it; I burst out laughing.

“What are you laughing at, Frank?” he asked with a touch of annoyance.

“It seems humorous to me,” I explained, “that Oscar Wilde should want to be an O’Flahertie,” and as I spoke a picture of the greatest of the O’Flaherties, with bushy head and dirty rags, warming enormous hairy legs before a smoking peat-fire, flashed before me. I think something of the sort must have occurred to Oscar, too, for, in spite of his attempt to be grave, he could not help laughing.

“It’s unkind of you, Frank,” he said. “The Irish were civilised and Christians when the English kept themselves warm with tattooings.”

He could not help telling one in familiar talk of Clumber or some other great house where he had been visiting; he was intoxicated with his own popularity, a little surprised, perhaps, to find that he had won fame so easily and on the primrose path, but one could forgive him everything, for he talked more delightfully than ever.

It is almost inexplicable, but nevertheless true that life tries all of us, tests every weak point to breaking, and sets off and exaggerates our powers. Burns saw this when he wrote:

“Wha does the utmost that he can

Will whyles do mair.”

And the obverse is true: whoever yields to a weakness habitually, some day goes further than he ever intended, and comes to worse grief than he deserved. The old prayer: Lead us not into temptation, is perhaps a half-conscious recognition of this fact. But we moderns are inclined to walk heedlessly, no longer believing in pitfalls or in the danger of gratified desires. And Oscar Wilde was not only an unbeliever; but he had all the heedless confidence of the artist who has won world-wide popularity and has the halo of fame on his brow. With high heart and smiling eyes he went to his fate unsuspecting.

It was in the autumn of 1891 that he first met Lord Alfred Douglas. He was thirty-six and Lord Alfred Douglas a handsome, slim youth of twenty-one, with large blue eyes and golden-fair hair. His mother, the Dowager Lady Queensberry, preserves a photograph of him taken a few years before, when he was still at Winchester, a boy of sixteen with an expression which might well be called angelic.

When I met him, he was still girlishly pretty, with the beauty of youth, coloring and fair skin; though his features were merely ordinary. It was Lionel Johnson, the writer, a friend and intimate of Douglas at Winchester, who brought him to tea at Oscar’s house in Tite Street. Their mutual attraction had countless hooks. Oscar was drawn by the lad’s personal beauty, and enormously affected besides by Lord Alfred Douglas’ name and position: he was a snob as only an English artist can be a snob; he loved titular distinctions, and Douglas is one of the few great names in British history with the gilding of romance about it. No doubt Oscar talked better than his best because he was talking to Lord Alfred Douglas. To the last the mere name rolled on his tongue gave him extraordinary pleasure. Besides, the boy admired him, hung upon his lips with his soul in his eyes; showed, too, rare intelligence in his appreciation, confessed that he himself wrote verses and loved letters passionately. Could more be desired than perfection perfected?

And Alfred Douglas on his side was almost as powerfully attracted; he had inherited from his mother all her literary tastes — and more: he was already a master-poet with a singing faculty worthy to be compared with the greatest. What wonder if he took this magical talker, with the luminous eyes and charming voice, and a range and play of thought beyond his imagining, for a world’s miracle, one of the Immortals. Before he had listened long, I have been told, the youth declared his admiration passionately. They were an extraordinary pair and were complementary in a hundred ways, not only in mind, but in character. Oscar had reached originality of thought and possessed the culture of scholarship, while Alfred Douglas had youth and rank and beauty, besides being as articulate as a woman with an unsurpassable gift of expression. Curiously enough, Oscar was as yielding and amiable in character as the boy was self-willed, reckless, obstinate and imperious.

Years later Oscar told me that from the first he dreaded Alfred Douglas’ aristocratic, insolent boldness:

“He frightened me, Frank, as much as he attracted me, and I held away from him. But he ............