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involves such important principles. Schwob's version stands before a background of the history of 
literature. It would be easy to write a long and interesting essay on the factors of the problem. 
Occasionally he came to see Kelly in his studio. His conversation was full of the most intensely 
interesting, because impersonally intimate, details about men of letters. He told us at first hand the 
tragedy of Meredith's life, the mystery of his birth, and his father's attempts to establish a marriage 
with would have entitled him to a place in the peerage; the romance of Vittoria; and the intrigue of 
Diana of the Crossways. He traced the influence of the master's locomotor ataxia upon his life, his 
character and his creatures. He explained how the long years of suffering had deformed Meredith's 
disposition and led him to disgrace himself by refusing to head the petition for Oscar Wilde's 
release. 
He told us the true story of Salome. The character of Wilde was simple. He was a perfectly normal 
man; but, like so many Irish, suffered from being a snob. In Dublin, Sir William Wilde was somebody 
in society; but when Oscar reached Oxford, he discovered that a medical knighthood, so far from 
being a distinction, was little better than a badge of servility. A family even of commoners could 
afford to sneer at his acceptance of a trumpery honour at the hands of a Hanoverian hausfrau. 
Wilde could not bear to be despised by brainless dukes, so he had sought hegemony in the hierarchy 
by the only means available, as a socially sensitive swineherd might aspire to the papacy. He 
determined to become the high priest of the cult which already conferred a kind of aristocracy upon 
the undergraduate, though it had not yet been organized and boosted. That was the result of his 
"martyrdom", which accounts for most of the loathsome creatures that jostle one too frequently in 
1929. "The Law is a Hass"! 
Wilde had denied his nature in the interests of social ambition, and the success of his scheme drove 
him to adopt every affectation as a sign of superiority. Outside the English system of caste, he 
might have been a contented cornchandler. Within it, he found himself obliged to affect to be 
sexually stirred by Maeterlinck, Flaubert, Gustave Moreau, and even the most sacred character of 
Scripture. He degraded the Sphinx by representing her as a sexual monster. He interpreted the 
relations between Christ and John, between Paul and Timothy, in the light of his own perverse 
imagination. 
When I say perverse, I do not mean to use the word in the psychopathic sense. Wilde's only 
perversity was that he was not true to himself. Without 
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knowing it, he had adopted the standards of the English middle class, and thought to become 
distinguished by the simple process of outraging them. As one is said to be able to invoke the devil 
by reciting the Lord's Prayer backwards, so Wilde thought to set up a new morality by reciting 
George R. Sims backwards. He naively accepted the cockney idea that Paris is a very wicked place, 
and proposed to petrify the puritans by writing a play in French. His difficulty was that his French 
was that of a schoolboy turned tourist; so he struggled to write Salome on the pretence that he was 
sexually excited by The Temptation of St. Anthony, Moreau's pictures in the Luxembourg and the 
style of Pelléas and Mélisande. But the performance was pitiful; and it was Marcel Schwob who re-
wrote his puerile dialogue in French. 
At one of Marcel Schwob's afternoons I met Arnold Bennett, very ill at ease to find himself in Paris in 
polite society. He must have had a perfectly lovely time; everything was alike a source of innocent 
wonder. He was very much pleased by the generous measure of respect which he received on all 
hands simply for being a novelist. His speech and his appearance attracted no insult from literary 
circles in Paris. 
At the time I had only read one of his books --- The Grand Babylon Hotel; Which I thought, and still 
think, somewhere near his high-water mark. I told him how much I admired it and was surprised to 
find that I had apparently said the wrong thing. But Kelly explained that he took himself seriously as 
a serious novelist, on the strength of having complied some books of reference on life in Shropshire 
or Straffordshire or some such place. I don't know which is which, thank God; I do not understand