“That, I suppose,” said the novelist drily, “is why when you said the other day that ‘Whenever a great man dies, William Sharp and the undertaker come in together,’ you suppressed the fact that the same thing had already been said in other words by W. S. Gilbert.”
“Precisely,” said Wilde. “It is not for me publicly to point out Gilbert’s inferiority. That would be ungenerous. But no one can blame me, if the fact is patent to all.”
Mention of Sir W. S. Gilbert prompted the other to say that a friend of his had occasion to take a cab at Harrow where the author of _The Bab Ballads_ had built a house. Driving from the station to his destination, his friend noticed this house, and asked the cabman who lived there. “I don’t know ’is name, sir,” said the cabman. “But I do know (I have driven ’im once or twice) that ’e is sometimes haffable and sometimes harbitrary. They do say in the town, sir, that ’e’s wot’s called a retired ’umorist, whatever that may be.”
From Harrow the conversation shifted to the neighbouring city of St. Albans, where I was then living.
“That reminds me,” said Wilde, turning to me, “that I want to run down to St. Albans once again to bathe my fingers in the mediæval twilight of the grey old Abbey. We two will come to you to-morrow. You shall meet us at the station, give us lunch at your rooms--a cutlet, a flask of red chianti and a cigarette is all we ask--and then you shall take us over the Abbey.”
“I shall be delighted,” I said, “but do you remember my meeting you the other day when you were coming away from the Royal Academy? I asked you how you were, and you replied, ‘Ill, my dear fellow, ill and wounded to the soul at the thought of the hideousness of what in this degenerate country, and these degenerate days, dares to call itself Art. Get me some wine quickly, or I’m sure I shall faint.’ Well, I’m living in bachelor diggings where it would be highly inconvenient to have dead or dying artists on hand or lying about. The pictures on show in my bachelor rooms, like the furniture, are not of my selection. If you were wounded by what you saw in the Academy, you would die at sight of one work of art on my walls. It is a hideous and vulgar representation of ‘Daniel in the Lions’ Den,’ done in crude chromo, four colours.”