ous attempts which you have just wiped out are bad? Just because
his stupendous laziness simplified his life almost as if he knew
instinctively that there must be no episodes to spoil the great
situation at the end of the last act but one. It was a well made life
in the Scribe sense. It was as simple as the life of Des Grieux, Manon
Lescaut's lover; and it beat that by omitting Manon and making Des
Grieux his own lover and his own hero.

"Des Grieux was a worthless rascal by all conventional standards; and
we forgive him everything. We think we forgive him because he was
unselfish and loved greatly. Oscar seems to have said: 'I will love
nobody: I will be utterly selfish; and I will be not merely a rascal
but a monster; and you shall forgive me everything. In other words, I
will reduce your standards to absurdity, not by writing them down,
though I could do that so well--in fact, _have_ done it--but by
actually living them down and dying them down.'

"However, I mustn't start writing a book to you about Wilde: I must
just tumble a few things together and tell you them. To take things in
the order of your book, I can remember only one occasion on which I
saw Sir William Wilde, who, by the way, operated on my father to
correct a squint, and overdid the correction so much that my father
squinted the other way all the rest of his life. To this day I never
notice a squint: it is as normal to me as a nose or a tall hat.

"I was a boy at a concert in the Antient Concert Rooms in Brunswick
Street in Dublin. Everybody was in evening dress; and--unless I am
mixing up this concert with another (in which case I doubt if the
Wildes would have been present)--the Lord Lieutenant was there with
his blue waistcoated courtiers. Wilde was dressed in snuffy brown; and
as he had the sort of skin that never looks clean, he produced a
dramatic effect beside Lady Wilde (in full fig) of being, like
Frederick the Great, Beyond Soap and Water, as his Nietzschean son was
beyond Good and Evil. He was currently reported to have a family in
every farmhouse; and the wonder was that Lady Wilde didn't
mind--evidently a tradition from the Travers case, which I did not
know about until I read your account, as I was only eight in 1864.

"Lady Wilde was nice to me in London during the desperate days between
my arrival in 1876 and my first earning of an income by my pen in
1885, or rather until, a few years earlier, I threw myself into
Socialism and cut