nt Meredith
did not answer at once, and when I pressed him and set forth the facts
he wrote to me that he could not do what I wished. I wrote again,
begging him to let me see him on the matter. For the first time in my
life he refused to see me: he wrote to me to say that nothing I could
urge would move him, and it would therefore only be painful to both of
us to find ourselves in conflict.

Nothing ever surprised me more than this attitude of Meredith's. I knew
his poetry pretty well, and knew how severe he was on every sensual
weakness perhaps because it was his own pitfall. I knew too what a
fighter he was at heart and how he loved the virile virtues; but I
thought I knew the man, knew his tender kindliness of heart, the founts
of pity in him, and I felt certain I could count on him for any office
of human charity or generosity. But no, he was impenetrable, hard. He
told me long afterwards that he had rather a low opinion of Wilde's
capacities, instinctive, deep-rooted contempt, too, for the showman in
him, and an absolute abhorrence of his vice.

"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