OSCAR WILDE
An Idler's Impression
BY
Edgar Saltus
CHICAGO
BROTHERS OF THE BOOK
1917
Copyright 1917
by
Edgar Saltus
f this first edition of Oscar Wilde: An Idler's Impression, by EdgarSaltus, there have been printed four hundred and seventy-four copies,and the type distributed. No second edition will be made. Theautographed copies were all subscribed for before publication.
The edition consists of
49 copies on Inomachi vellum, in full binding, each copyautographed by the author. Numbered from 1 to 49 inclusive.
100 copies on Inomachi vellum, in three-quarters binding.Numbered from 50 to 149 inclusive.
325 copies on Fabriano hand-made paper, in boards. Numberedfrom 150 to 474 inclusive.
This Copy is Number
Oscar Wilde: An Idler's Impression
OSCAR WILDE
ears ago, in a Paris club, one man said to another: "Well, what'sup?" The other shook a paper: "There is only one genius in England andthey have put him in jail."
One may wonder though whether it were their doing, or even Wilde's,that put him there. One may wonder whether it were not the high fateswho so gratified him in order that, from his purgatory, he might riseto a life more evolved. But that view is perhaps obvious. Wildehimself, who was the least mystic of men, accepted it. In the "DeProfundis," after weighing his disasters, he said: "Of these things Iam not yet worthy."
The genuflexion has been called a pose. It may have been. Even so, itis perhaps better to kneel, though it be in the gallery, than to stoopat nothing, and Wilde, who had stood very high, bent very low. He sawthat there is one thing greater than greatness and that is humility.
Yet though he saw it, it is presumable that he forgot it. It ispresumable that the grace which was his in prison departed in Paris.On the other hand it may not have. There are no human scales for anysoul.
It was at Delmonico's, shortly after he told our local Customs that hehad nothing to declare but genius, that I first met him. He wasdressed like a mountebank. Without, at the entrance, a crowd hadcollected. In the restaurant people stood up and stared. Wilde wasbeautifully unmoved. He was talking, at first about nothing whatever,which is always an interesting topic, then about "Vera," a play of hisfor which a local manager had offered him an advance, five thousanddollars I think, "mere starvation wages," as he put it, and he went onto say that the manager wanted him to make certain changes in it. Hepaused and added: "But who am I to tamper with a masterpiece?"—ajest which afterward he was too generous to hoard.
Later, in London, I saw him again. In appearance and mode of life hehad become entirely conventional. The long hair, the knee-breeches,the lilies, the velvet, all the mountebank trappings had gone. He wasmarried, he was a father, and in his house in Tite street he seemed abit bourgeois. Of that he may have been conscious. I remember one ofhis children running and calling