Oscar Wilde at the Lyric Club

Abstract

Lady Wilde lived opposite our lodgings in Park Street where we lived in those days. Meeting her at Mrs Dallas Glyn’s in Mount Street (where I first met Willie and Oscar, her sons), Lady Wilde told the assembled guests, not in a whisper either, that, in her intense desire for a daughter, she thought and willed incessantly. Further that, to compensate for her bitter disappointment when Oscar was born, she treated him for ten whole years as if he had been her daughter, carrying out this treatment in every detail of dress, habit, and companions. So it becomes evident that, in addition to the condition under which he saw the light, this unfortunate and self-sufficient genius was sent to school abnormally developed in mind, and instead of being a normal healthy man, he resembled a neurotic woman. It is a pathological fact, that the young in whom mental aberrations are discerned are usually more matured in mental receptivity and are not normal minded. Neurotic imagination is stimulated by reading Greek tragedies and the Latin poets. Parents unwittingly make their children familiar with the men and women of antiquity, and this is called reading the classics, but to translate these stories into modern English were unthinkable. Though I knew Oscar Wilde at the Lyric Club, I can add little lustre to his meteoric flash through London. His tourneys of repartee were tilted at Whistler and many other clever men at the Lyric in my hearing almost daily and for years. I regret now I never made a note at the time of many of his flashes of wit, his brilliant sayings, which went unrecorded.

Extracted from A Chronicle of Friendships (London: T. Werner Laurie, 1912) pp. 95–9. Editor’s title.