“’You must not, you really must not.  What would people think if they saw you?’

“He got up with a white strained face.

“‘I had to,’ he muttered, glancing about him fearfully, ’I had to—­once....’”

I must warn my readers that this whole incident is ripened and set in a higher key of thought by the fact that Oscar told it more than ten years after it happened.

FOOTNOTES: 

[3] Oscar was always fond of loosely quoting or paraphrasing in conversation the purple passages from contemporary writers.  He said them exquisitely and sometimes his own embroidery was as good as the original.  This discipleship, however, always suggested to me a lack of originality.  In especial Matthew Arnold had an extraordinary influence upon him, almost as great indeed as Pater.

[4] “Stain,” not “pain,” in the original.

CHAPTER IV

The most important event in Oscar’s early life happened while he was still an undergraduate at Oxford:  his father, Sir William Wilde, died in 1876, leaving to his wife, Lady Wilde, nearly all he possessed, some L7,000, the interest of which was barely enough to keep her in genteel poverty.  The sum is so small that one is constrained to believe the report that Sir William Wilde in his later years kept practically open house—­“lashins of whisky and a good larder,” and was besides notorious for his gallantries.  Oscar’s small portion, a little money and a small house with some land, came to him in the nick of time:  he used the cash partly to pay some debts at Oxford, partly to defray the expenses of a trip to Greece.  It was natural that Oscar Wilde, with his eager sponge-like receptivity, should receive the best academic education of his time, and should better that by travel.  We all get something like the education we desire, and Oscar Wilde, it always seemed to me, was over-educated, had learned, that is, too much from books and not enough from life and had thought too little for himself; but my readers will be able to judge of this for themselves.

In 1877 he accompanied Professor Mahaffy on a long tour through Greece.  The pleasure and profit Oscar got from the trip were so great that he failed to return to Oxford on the date fixed.  The Dons fined him forty-five pounds for the breach of discipline; but they returned the money to him in the following year when he won First Honours in “Greats” and the Newdigate prize.

This visit to Greece when he was twenty-three confirmed the view of life which he had already formed and I have indicated sufficiently perhaps in that talk with Pater already recorded.  But no one will understand Oscar Wilde who for a moment loses sight of the fact that he was a pagan born:  as Gautier says, “One for whom the visible world alone exists,” endowed with all the Greek sensuousness and love of plastic beauty; a pagan, like Nietzsche and Gautier, wholly out of sympathy with Christianity, one of “the Confraternity of the faithless who cannot believe,"[5] to whom a sense of sin and repentance are symptoms of weakness and disease.