“Oscar, from the moment he gained your attachment, could never have been afraid of what you might do to him, as he was sufficient of a connoisseur in Blut Bruderschaft to appreciate yours; but he must always have been mortally afraid of what you might do or say to his friends.[9]

[Footnote 9:  This insight on Shaw’s part makes me smile because it is absolutely true.  Oscar commended Bosie Douglas to me again and again and again, begged me to be nice to him if we ever met by chance; but I refused to meet him for months and months.]

“You had quite an infernal scorn for nineteen out of twenty of the men and women you met in the circles he most wished to propitiate; and nothing could induce you to keep your knife in its sheath when they jarred on you.  The Spanish Main itself would have blushed rosy red at your language when classical invective did not suffice to express your feelings.

“It may be that if, say, Edmund Gosse had come to Oscar when he was out on bail, with a couple of first class tickets in his pocket, and gently suggested a mild trip to Folkestone, or the Channel Islands, Oscar might have let himself be coaxed away.  But to be called on to gallop ventre a terre to Erith—­it might have been Deal—­and hoist the Jolly Roger on board your lugger, was like casting a light comedian and first lover for Richard III.  Oscar could not see himself in the part.

“I must not press the point too far; but it illustrates, I think, what does not come out at all in your book:  that you were a very different person from the submissive and sympathetic disciples to whom he was accustomed.  There are things more terrifying to a soul like Oscar’s than an as yet unrealized possibility of a sentence of hard labor.  A voyage with Captain Kidd may have been one of them.  Wilde was a conventional man:  his unconventionality was the very pedantry of convention:  never was there a man less an outlaw than he.  You were a born outlaw, and will never be anything else.

“That is why, in his relations with you, he appears as a man always shirking action—­more of a coward (all men are cowards more or less) than so proud a man can have been.  Still this does not affect the truth and power of your portrait.  Wilde’s memory will have to stand or fall by it.

“You will be blamed, I imagine, because you have not written a lying epitaph instead of a faithful chronicle and study of him; but you will not lose your sleep over that.  As a matter of fact, you could not have carried kindness further without sentimental folly.  I should have made a far sterner summing up.  I am sure Oscar has not found the gates of heaven shut against him:  he is too good company to be excluded; but he can hardly have been greeted as, ‘Thou good and faithful servant.’  The first thing we ask a servant for is a testimonial to honesty, sobriety and industry; for we soon find out that these are the scarce things, and that geniuses[10]