In the next year he was again amusing himself with fairy tales, writing this time a book alone in English literature; a book of tales not intended for the British child but for those grown-up people who shared Wilde's own enjoyment of brilliant-coloured fantasy. He had learnt to control his invention, although he did not choose to do without a tuning fork. Andersen still struck the note to which Wilde sang, but Flaubert had been his singing master, and the curious and beautiful tales collected in _A House of Pomegranates_ are like what I imagine "The Snow Queen" would have been, if it had been written by the author of "Saint Julien l'Hospitalier." In 'The Infanta's Birthday,' where one of Goya's grotesques dances before a painting by Velasquez, the flowers pass their opinions on the dwarf quite in the Danish manner. In 'The Star-child': "The Earth is going to be married, and this is her bridal dress," whispered the Turtle-doves to each other. "Their little pink feet were quite frost-bitten, but they felt that it was their duty to take a romantic view of the situation." That is surely written by the ghost of Andersen's English translator. But 'The Star-child' ends with the firm, aloof touch of Flaubert, who would not tolerate "quite": "Yet ruled he not long, so great had been his suffering, and so bitter the fire of his testing, for after the space of three years, he died. And he who came after him ruled evilly." I remember the end of "Herodias" on just such a distant note: "Et tous les trois, ayant pris la tete de Iaokanaan, s'en allerent du cote de la Galilee. Comme elle etait tres lourde, ils la portaient alternativement." And the picture of the leper in this story is almost a transcription of that in "Saint Julien l'Hospitalier": "Over his face hung a cowl of grey linen, and through the eyelets his eyes gleamed like red coals." And Flaubert: "Il etait enveloppe d'une toile en lambeaux, la figure pareille a un masque de platre et les deux yeux plus rouge que des charbons." I do not suggest that one is a copy of the other; but I think that Wilde remembered that clay mask with gleaming eyes, and mistook it for a creation of his own whose eyes shone through a grey linen cowl. It is hardly worth while so to carry the study of influence into detail. Wilde wrote, with the pen of Flaubert, stories that might have been imagined by Andersen, and sometimes one and sometimes the other touches his hand. It is not impossible that Baudelaire was also present. But all this does not much concern us, except that by subtraction we may come to what we seek, which is the personal, elusive, but unmistakable quality contributed by Wilde himself.