The First Meeting with Lord Alfred Douglas

Thou hast led me like an heathen sacrifice,

With music and with fatal pomp of flowers,

To my eternal ruin.

Webster’s The White Devil.

“Lady Windermere’s Fan” was a success in every sense of the word, and during its run London was at Oscar’s feet. There were always a few doors closed to him; but he could afford now to treat his critics with laughter, call them fogies and old-fashioned and explain that they had not a decalogue but a millelogue of sins forbidden and persons tabooed because it was easier to condemn² than to understand.

I remember a lunch once when he talked most brilliantly and finished up by telling the story now published in his works as “A Florentine Tragedy.” He told it superbly, making it appear far more effective than in its written form. A well-known actor, piqued³ at being compelled to play listener, made himself ridiculous by half turning his back on the narrator. But after lunch Willie Grenfell (now Lord Desborough), a model English athlete gifted with peculiar⁴ intellectual fairness, came round to me:

“Oscar Wilde is most surprising, most charming, a wonderful talker.”

At the same moment Mr. K. H—— came over to us. He was a man who went everywhere and knew everyone. He had quiet, ingratiating manners, always spoke⁵ in a gentle smiling way and had a good word to say for everyone, especially for women; he was a bachelor, too, and wholly unattached. He surprised me by taking up Grenfell’s praise and breaking into a lyric⁶:

“The best talker who ever lived,” he said; “most extraordinary. I am so infinitely⁷ obliged to you for asking me to meet him — a new delight. He brings a supernal⁸ air into life. I am in truth indebted to you”— all this in an

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