Wilde’s best work was unquestionably, I think, done for the stage, and here it may be conceded he struck out a path of his own. He had the sense of the theatre, a genuine instinct for those moments in the conflict of character to which the proper resources of the theatre can grant both added force and added refinement. It is not an uncommon assumption, especially among writers of fiction, that the drama by comparison is an art of coarse fibre, incapable, by reason of its limitations, of presenting the more intimate realities of character, or the more delicate shades of feeling. The truth is that each art has its own force, its own refinement, and cannot borrow them of another. What is perfectly achieved in one form remains incomparable, and for that very reason cannot in its completed form be appropriated by an art that has other triumphs and is subject to other laws and conditions. And it is here that the novelist so often breaks down in attempting to employ his own special methods in the service of the stage. Wilde made no such blunder. By constant study as well as by natural gift he knew well the arena in which he was working when he chose the vehicle of the drama. His wit has perhaps been over-praised; his epigrams so loudly acclaimed at the time bear the taint of modishness that seems to render them already old-fashioned. But his grip of the more serious situations in life, and his ability to exhibit and interpret them by means genuinely inherent in the resources at the disposal of the dramatist, are left beyond dispute. [Illustration: _Emery Walker_ ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON From the painting by Sir WILLIAM RICHMOND, K.C.B., R.A., in the National Portrait Gallery. _To face page 215._ ] CHAPTER XV A YOUNGER GENERATION During the ’seventies I got to know many of the younger men of letters whose fame had not yet completely asserted itself. My association with the _Saturday Review_ brought me into closer contact with my old friend, Walter Pollock, whom I had known from a boy, and it was as his guest that I constantly found myself at lunch-time at the Savile Club, a favourite haunt of Robert Louis Stevenson when he happened to be in London. Those lunches at the Savile, with discussions carried late into the afternoon and sometimes prolonged to the dinner-hour, remain as a vivid and delightful recollection. It was there that I met Henley, a notable individuality, at that time almost without recognition in the world of literature; and Charles Brookfield, who would look in now and then to lighten our graver discussions with his keen and incisive wit; and among others, Richard Duffield, a strange yet not unattractive individuality who won instant recognition by reason of a fortuitous resemblance to Michael Angelo, due to a broken nose; but whose literary claims, as far as I can remember, rested chiefly upon a presumably exclusive knowledge of the work of Cervantes.