book that you would rather have Wilde
back than any friend you have ever talked to, even though he was
incapable of friendship, though not of the most touching kindness[1]
on occasion.

[Footnote 1: Excellent analysis. [Ed.]]

"Our sixth meeting, the only other one I can remember, was the one at
the Cafe Royal. On that occasion he was not too preoccupied with his
danger to be disgusted with me because I, who had praised his first
plays handsomely, had turned traitor over 'The Importance of Being
Earnest.' Clever as it was, it was his first really heartless play. In
the others the chivalry of the eighteenth century Irishman and the
romance of the disciple of Theophile Gautier (Oscar was really
old-fashioned in the Irish way, except as a critic of morals) not only
gave a certain kindness and gallantry to the serious passages and to
the handling of the women, but provided that proximity of emotion
without which laughter, however irresistible, is destructive and
sinister. In 'The Importance of Being Earnest' this had vanished; and
the play, though extremely funny, was essentially hateful. I had no
idea that Oscar was going to the dogs, and that this represented a
real degeneracy produced by his debaucheries. I thought he was still
developing; and I hazarded the unhappy guess that 'The Importance of
Being Earnest' was in idea a young work written or projected long
before under the influence of Gilbert and furbished up for Alexander
as a potboiler. At the Cafe Royal that day I calmly asked him whether
I was not right. He indignantly repudiated my guess, and said loftily
(the only time he ever tried on me the attitude he took to John Gray
and his more abject disciples) that he was disappointed in me. I
suppose I said, 'Then what on earth has happened to you?' but I
recollect nothing more on that subject except that we did not quarrel
over it.

"When he was sentenced I spent a railway journey on a Socialist
lecturing excursion to the North drafting a petition for his release.
After that I met Willie Wilde at a theatre which I think must have
been the Duke of York's, because I connect it vaguely with St.
Martin's Lane. I spoke to him about the petition, asking him whether
anything of the sort was being done, and warning him that though I and
Stewart Headlam would sign it, that would be no use, as we were two
notorious cranks, and our names would by themselves reduce the
petition to absurdity and do Oscar more harm than good.