A Gay Spirit

Abstract

He came to Oxford in my third year to stay with my friend Douglas Ainslie¹ and I met him at supper, and next day he and Ainslie and a cultivated Bostonian friend of mine, Edward Warren, lunched with me at Balliol. Oscar Wilde was easily the best talker I have met, stimulating, pro-vocative, witty — it was before his paradoxes were so often inverted proverbs — and charming. His talk charmed because it was so plainly the utterance of a gay and engaging and keen spirit, and in those days he was an engaging spirit. He was then at the height of his early success, before his mouth and jaw had gotten the better of his eyes and forehead, and that success had not spoilt him, and I spent as delightful an evening as ever I have spent, listening to him. I met him a year or two later in the Oxford theatre, and he was already changing: his hair was no longer curled; it was waved. The impression of softness, that he had given me at our first meeting, was strengthened, and really softness is not a quality of the monochronos hedonist.

Memories of A Victorian, Vol. 1 (London: Victor Gollancz, 1933) p. 120. Editor’s title.