g that Oscar could not deal with successfully.
But how in that case could Oscar have felt quite safe with you? You
were more pugnacious than six Queensberrys rolled into one. When
people asked, 'What has Frank Harris been?' the usual reply was,
'Obviously a pirate from the Spanish Main.'

"Oscar, from the moment he gained your attachment, could never have
been afraid of what you might do to him, as he was sufficient of a
connoisseur in Blut Bruderschaft to appreciate yours; but he must
always have been mortally afraid of what you might do or say to his
friends.[9]

[Footnote 9: This insight on Shaw's part makes me smile because it is
absolutely true. Oscar commended Bosie Douglas to me again and again
and again, begged me to be nice to him if we ever met by chance; but I
refused to meet him for months and months.]

"You had quite an infernal scorn for nineteen out of twenty of the men
and women you met in the circles he most wished to propitiate; and
nothing could induce you to keep your knife in its sheath when they
jarred on you. The Spanish Main itself would have blushed rosy red at
your language when classical invective did not suffice to express your
feelings.

"It may be that if, say, Edmund Gosse had come to Oscar when he was
out on bail, with a couple of first class tickets in his pocket, and
gently suggested a mild trip to Folkestone, or the Channel Islands,
Oscar might have let himself be coaxed away. But to be called on to
gallop _ventre a terre_ to Erith--it might have been Deal--and hoist
the Jolly Roger on board your lugger, was like casting a light
comedian and first lover for _Richard III_. Oscar could not see
himself in the part.

"I must not press the point too far; but it illustrates, I think, what
does not come out at all in your book: that you were a very different
person from the submissive and sympathetic disciples to whom he was
accustomed. There are things more terrifying to a soul like Oscar's
than an as yet unrealized possibility of a sentence of hard labor. A
voyage with Captain Kidd may have been one of them. Wilde was a
conventional man: his unconventionality was the very pedantry of
convention: never was there a man less an outlaw than he. You were a
born outlaw, and will never be anything else.

"That is why, in his relations with you, he appears as a man always
shirking action--more of a coward (all men are cowards more or less)
than so proud a man can have been. Still this does