“When he was sentenced I spent a railway journey on a Socialist lecturing excursion to the North drafting a petition for his release.  After that I met Willie Wilde at a theatre which I think must have been the Duke of York’s, because I connect it vaguely with St. Martin’s Lane.  I spoke to him about the petition, asking him whether anything of the sort was being done, and warning him that though I and Stewart Headlam would sign it, that would be no use, as we were two notorious cranks, and our names would by themselves reduce the petition to absurdity and do Oscar more harm than good.  Willie cordially agreed, and added, with maudlin pathos and an inconceivable want of tact:  ’Oscar was NOT a man of bad character:  you could have trusted him with a woman anywhere.’  He convinced me, as you discovered later, that signatures would not be obtainable; so the petition project dropped; and I don’t know what became of my draft.

“When Wilde was in Paris during his last phase I made a point of sending him inscribed copies of all my books as they came out; and he did the same to me.

“In writing about Wilde and Whistler, in the days when they were treated as witty triflers, and called Oscar and Jimmy in print, I always made a point of taking them seriously and with scrupulous good manners.  Wilde on his part also made a point of recognizing me as a man of distinction by his manner, and repudiating the current estimate of me as a mere jester.  This was not the usual reciprocal-admiration trick:  I believe he was sincere, and felt indignant at what he thought was a vulgar underestimate of me; and I had the same feeling about him.  My impulse to rally to him in his misfortune, and my disgust at ‘the man Wilde’ scurrilities of the newspapers, was irresistible:  I don’t quite know why; for my charity to his perversion, and my recognition of the fact that it does not imply any general depravity or coarseness of character, came to me through reading and observation, not through sympathy.

“I have all the normal violent repugnance to homosexuality—­if it is really normal, which nowadays one is sometimes provoked to doubt.

“Also, I was in no way predisposed to like him:  he was my fellow-townsman, and a very prime specimen of the sort of fellow-townsman I most loathed:  to wit, the Dublin snob.  His Irish charm, potent with Englishmen, did not exist for me; and on the whole it may be claimed for him that he got no regard from me that he did not earn.

“What first established a friendly feeling in me was, unexpectedly enough, the affair of the Chicago anarchists, whose Homer you constituted yourself by ‘The Bomb.’  I tried to get some literary men in London, all heroic rebels and skeptics on paper, to sign a memorial asking for the reprieve of these unfortunate men.  The only signature I got was Oscar’s.  It was a completely disinterested act on his part; and it secured my distinguished consideration for him for the rest of his life.