“True enough, Frank,” he replied with a certain contempt which was foreign to him.  “Hichens got to know Bosie Douglas in Egypt.  They went up the Nile together, I believe with ‘Dodo’ Benson.  Naturally Bosie talked a great deal about me and Hichens wanted to know me.  When they returned to town, I thought him rather pleasant, and saw a good deal of him.  I had no idea that he was going to play reporter; it seems to me a breach of confidence—­ignoble.”

“It is not a picture of you,” I said, “but there is a certain likeness.”

“A photograph is always like and unlike, Frank,” he replied; “the sun too, when used mechanically, is merely a reporter, and traduces instead of reproducing you.”

“The Green Carnation” ruined Oscar Wilde’s character with the general public.  On all sides the book was referred to as confirming the worst suspicions:  the cloud which hung over him grew continually darker.

During the summer of 1894 he wrote the “Ideal Husband,” which was the outcome of a story I had told him.  I had heard it from an American I had met in Cairo, a Mr. Cope Whitehouse.  He told me that Disraeli had made money by entrusting the Rothschilds with the purchase of the Suez Canal shares.  It seemed to me strange that this statement, if true, had never been set forth authoritatively; but the story was peculiarly modern, and had possibilities in it.  Oscar admitted afterwards that he had taken the idea and used it in “An Ideal Husband.”

It was in this summer also that he wrote “The Importance of Being Earnest,” his finest play.  He went to the seaside and completed it, he said, in three weeks, and, when I spoke of the delight he must feel at having two plays performed in London at the same time, he said: 

“Next year, Frank, I may have four or five; I could write one every two months with the greatest ease.  It all depends on money.  If I need money I shall write half a dozen plays next year.”

His words reminded me of what Goethe had said about himself:  in each of the ten years he spent on his “Theory of Light” he could have written a couple of plays as good as his best.  The land of Might-have-been is peopled with these gorgeous shadow-shapes.

Oscar had already found his public, a public capable of appreciating the very best he could do.  As soon as “The Importance of Being Earnest” was produced it had an extraordinary success, and success of the best sort.  Even journalist critics had begun to cease exhibiting their own limitations in foolish fault-finding, and now imitated their betters, parroting phrases of extravagant laudation.

Oscar took the praise as he had taken the scandal and slander, with complacent superiority.  He had changed greatly and for the worse:  he was growing coarser and harder every year.  All his friends noticed this.  Even M. Andre Gide, who was a great admirer and wrote, shortly after his death, the best account of him that appeared, was compelled to deplore his deterioration.  He says: