when one day, pointing to a sentence in the original, he asked, “What does that mean?” I thought, “Is Davray at last ’stumped’?” I examined the sentence with care, and then answered, “It doesn’t mean anything.”  “I thought so,” said M. Davray.  We looked at each other.  M. Davray was an old friend of Wilde’s, and was one of the dozen men who attended his desolating funeral.  And I was an enthusiastic admirer of Wilde’s style at its best.  We said no more.  But a day or two later a similar incident happened, and yet another.

* * * * *

Wilde’s letters to Mr. Ross from prison are extremely good.  They begin sombrely, but after a time the wit lightens, and towards the end it is playing continually.  The first gleam of it is this:  “I am going to take up the study of German.  Indeed prison seems to be the proper place for such a study.”  On the subject of the natural life, he says a thing which is exquisitely wise:  “Stevenson’s letters are most disappointing also.  I see that romantic surroundings are the worst surroundings for a romantic writer.  In Gower Street Stevenson would have written a new ’Trois Mousquetaires,’ in Samoa he writes letters to the Times about Germans.  I see also the traces of a terrible strain to lead a natural life.  To chop wood with any advantage to oneself or profit to others, one should not be able to describe the process.  In point of fact the natural life is the unconscious life.  Stevenson merely extended the sphere of the artificial by taking to digging.  The whole dreary book has given me a lesson.  If I spend my future life reading Baudelaire in a cafe I shall be leading a more natural life than if I take to hedger’s work or plant cacao in mud-swamps.”

HOLIDAY READING

[4 Aug. ’10]

I came away for a holiday without any books, except one, and I cut off the whole of my supply of newspapers, except one.  As a rule my baggage is most injurious to railway porters, and on the Continent very costly, because of the number of books and neckties it contains.  I wear the neckties, but I never read the books.  I am always meaning to read them, but something is always preventing me.  Before starting, the awful thought harasses me:  Supposing I wanted to read and I had naught!  This time I decided that it would be agreeably perilous to run the risk.  The unique book which I packed was the sixth volume of Montaigne in the Temple Classics edition.  We are all aware, from the writings of Mr. A.B.  Walkley, Sir William Robertson Nicoll, Mr. Hall Caine, and others, what a peerless companion is Montaigne; how in Montaigne there is a page to suit every mood; how the most diverse mentalities—­the pious, the refined, the libertine, the philosophic, the egoistic, the altruistic, the merely silly—­may find in him the food of sympathy.  I knew I should be all right with Montaigne.  I invariably read in bed of a night (unless paying in my temples the