thoughts he had lived with, were not lost; his lips had been touched by the divine fire; his eyes had seen the world-wonder of sympathy, pity and love and, strangely enough, this higher vision helped, as we shall soon see, to shake his individuality from its centre, and thus destroyed his power of work and completed his soul-ruin.  Oscar’s second fall—­this time from a height—­was fatal and made writing impossible to him.  It is all clear enough now in retrospect though I did not understand it at the time.  When he went to live with Bosie Douglas he threw off the Christian attitude, but afterwards had to recognise that “De Profundis” and “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” were deeper and better work than any of his earlier writings.  He resumed the pagan position; outwardly and for the time being he was the old Oscar again, with his Greek love of beauty and hatred of disease, deformity and ugliness, and whenever he met a kindred spirit, he absolutely revelled in gay paradoxes and brilliant flashes of humour.  But he was at war with himself, like Milton’s Satan always conscious of his fall, always regretful of his lost estate and by reason of this division of spirit unable to write.  Perhaps because of this he threw himself more than ever into talk.

He was beyond all comparison the most interesting companion I have ever known:  the most brilliant talker, I cannot but think, that ever lived.  No one surely ever gave himself more entirely in speech.  Again and again he declared that he had only put his talent into his books and plays, but his genius into his life.  If he had said into his talk, it would have been the exact truth.

People have differed a great deal about his mental and physical condition after he came out of prison.  All who knew him really, Ross, Turner, More Adey, Lord Alfred Douglas and myself, are agreed that in spite of a slight deafness he was never better in health, never indeed so well.  But some French friends were determined to make him out a martyr.

In his picture of Wilde’s last years, Gide tells us that “he had suffered too grievously from his imprisonment....  His will had been broken ... nothing remained in his shattered life but a mouldy ruin,[23] painful to contemplate, of his former self.  At times he seemed to wish to show that his brain was still active.  Humour there was; but it was far-fetched, forced and threadbare.”

These touches may be necessary in order to complete a French picture of the social outcast.  They are not only untrue when applied to Oscar Wilde, but the reverse of the truth; he never talked so well, was never so charming a companion as in the last years of his life.

In the very last year his talk was more genial, more humorous, more vivid than ever, with a wider range of thought and intenser stimulus than before.  He was a born improvisatore.  At the moment he always dazzled one out of judgment.  A phonograph would have discovered the truth; a great part of his charm was physical; much of his talk mere topsy-turvy paradox, the very froth of thought carried off by gleaming, dancing eyes, smiling, happy lips, and a melodious voice.