“To return for a moment to Lady Wilde.  You know that there is a disease called giantism, caused by ’a certain morbid process in the sphenoid bone of the skull—­viz., an excessive development of the anterior lobe of the pituitary body’ (this is from the nearest encyclopedia).  ’When this condition does not become active until after the age of twenty-five, by which time the long bones are consolidated, the result is acromegaly, which chiefly manifests itself in an enlargement of the hands and feet.’  I never saw Lady Wilde’s feet; but her hands were enormous, and never went straight to their aim when they grasped anything, but minced about, feeling for it.  And the gigantic splaying of her palm was reproduced in her lumbar region.

“Now Oscar was an overgrown man, with something not quite normal about his bigness—­something that made Lady Colin Campbell, who hated him, describe him as ‘that great white caterpillar.’  You yourself describe the disagreeable impression he made on you physically, in spite of his fine eyes and style.  Well, I have always maintained that Oscar was a giant in the pathological sense, and that this explains a good deal of his weakness.

“I think you have affectionately underrated his snobbery, mentioning only the pardonable and indeed justifiable side of it; the love of fine names and distinguished associations and luxury and good manners.[2] You say repeatedly, and on certain planes, truly, that he was not bitter and did not use his tongue to wound people.  But this is not true on the snobbish plane.  On one occasion he wrote about T.P.  O’Connor with deliberate, studied, wounding insolence, with his Merrion Square Protestant pretentiousness in full cry against the Catholic.  He repeatedly declaimed against the vulgarity of the British journalist, not as you or I might, but as an expression of the odious class feeling that is itself the vilest vulgarity.  He made the mistake of not knowing his place.  He objected to be addressed as Wilde, declaring that he was Oscar to his intimates and Mr. Wilde to others, quite unconscious of the fact that he was imposing on the men with whom, as a critic and journalist, he had to live and work, the alternative of granting him an intimacy he had no right to ask or a deference to which he had no claim.  The vulgar hated him for snubbing them; and the valiant men damned his impudence and cut him.  Thus he was left with a band of devoted satellites on the one hand, and a dining-out connection on the other, with here and there a man of talent and personality enough to command his respect, but utterly without that fortifying body of acquaintance among plain men in which a man must move as himself a plain man, and be Smith and Jones and Wilde and Shaw and Harris instead of Bosie and Robbie and Oscar and Mister.  This is the sort of folly that does not last forever in a man of Wilde’s ability; but it lasted long enough to prevent Oscar laying any solid social foundations.[3]