All this utterly unconscious of the fact that most tall men have no ever present-sense of their height as an advantage.  Yet on the whole one agrees with Montaigne that height is the chief beauty of a man:  it gives presence.

Oscar never learned anything from criticism; he had a good deal of personal dignity in spite of his amiability, and when one found fault with his work, he would smile vaguely or change the subject as if it didn’t interest him.

Again and again I played on his self-esteem to get him to write; but always met the same answer.

“Oh, Frank, it’s impossible, impossible for me to work under these disgraceful conditions.”

“But you can have better conditions now and lots of money if you’ll begin to work.”

He shook his head despairingly.  Again and again I tried, but failed to move him, even when I dangled money before him.  I didn’t then know that he was receiving regularly more than L300 a year.  I thought he was completely destitute, dependent on such casual help as friends could give him.  I have a letter from him about this time asking me for even L5[25] as if he were in extremest need.

On one of my visits to Paris after discussing his position, I could not help saying to him: 

“The only thing that will make you write, Oscar, is absolute, blank poverty.  That’s the sharpest spur after all—­necessity.”

“You don’t know me,” he replied sharply.  “I would kill myself.  I can endure to the end; but to be absolutely destitute would show me suicide as the open door.”

Suddenly his depressed manner changed and his whole face lighted up.

“Isn’t it comic, Frank, the way the English talk of the ‘open door,’ while their doors are always locked, and barred, and bolted, even their church doors?  Yet it is not hypocrisy in them; they simply cannot see themselves as they are; they have no imagination.”

A long pause, and he went on gravely: 

“Suicide, Frank, is always the temptation of the unfortunate, a great temptation.”

“Suicide is the natural end of the world-weary,” I replied; “but you enjoy life intensely.  For you to talk of suicide is ridiculous.”

“Do you know that my wife is dead, Frank?"[26]

“I had heard it,” I said.

“My way back to hope and a new life ends in her grave,” he went on.  “Everything I do, Frank, is irrevocable.”

He spoke with a certain grave sincerity.

“The great tragedies of the world are all final and complete; Socrates would not escape death, though Crito opened the prison door for him.  I could not avoid prison, though you showed me the way to safety.  We are fated to suffer, don’t you think? as an example to humanity—­’an echo and a light unto eternity.’”

“I think it would be finer, instead of taking the punishment lying down, to trample it under your feet, and make it a rung of the ladder.”