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While returning to Prague Von Weber stopped for a while at the castle Grafen-Tonna, where he composed some of Korner's poems, among them "Lutzow's wilde Jagd" and the "Schwertlied." These songs were soon in everybody's mouth and acted like sparks flung into the powder-magazine of national feeling.
Trauaile like the trauaile wherein smithes put wilde horses when they shoo them, is good for nothing but to tame and bring men vnder. God had no greater curse to lay vppon the Israelites, than by leading them out of their owne countrey to liue as slaues in a strange land.
That is the frame of mind which the author should try to beget in his audience; and Oscar Wilde, then almost a novice, had, in this one little passage between Lady Windermere and the butler, shown himself a master of the art of dramatic story-telling. The dramatist has higher functions than mere story-telling; but this is fundamental, and the true artist is the last to despise it.
'One soon finds that he is a scholar and a gentleman. And when I dined with Wilde a few days afterwards he began at once, 'I had to strain every nerve to equal that man at all; and I was too loyal to speak my thought: 'You & not he' said all the brilliant things. He like the rest of us had felt the strain of an intensity that seemed to hold life at the point of drama.
He laid stress on the fact that Mr. Wilde had himself brought the charge against Lord Queensberry which had provoked the whole investigation: "on March 30th, Mr. Wilde," he said, "knew the catalogue of accusations"; and he asked: did the jury believe that, if he had been guilty, he would have stayed in England and brought about the first trial?
You love me, Bernardine. You can not, you dare not deny it. I repeat, if I were to sue you on my bended knees, could you, would you refuse to be my wife?" "I must marry Jasper Wilde," she whispered, wretchedly. Without another word, stung by pride and pain, Jay Gardiner turned from the girl he had learned to love so madly, and hurried down the dark, winding stairs, and out into the street.
An hour ago he had been absolutely indifferent, almost forgetful of her existence, but his vanity if not his heart was stung now into an emotion which had in it something of the primitive barbarian ardour of pursuit. He cared nothing less than nothing for Laura Wilde herself, yet it was not in his nature that he should suffer in silence before a sudden and unreasonable affront.
Wilde clambered out of his chair and dragged the chest away from the door. "Yes," he said, "it is time that you saw your cousin Louis." He unlocked the door and I picked up my hat and stick and stepped into the corridor. The stairs were dark.
I have spoken again and again in the course of this narrative of Oscar's enemies, asserting that the English middle-class as puritans detested his attitude and way of life, and if some fanatic or representative of the nonconformist conscience had hunted up evidence against Wilde and brought him to ruin there would have been nothing extraordinary in a vengeance which might have been regarded as a duty.
Young Whitbread took no apparent notice of this, and soon afterward the secretary of the Union proposed a conference. Bolt got wind of this, and was there when the orators came. The deputation arrived, and, after a very short preamble, offered to take the six-pence. "Why," said Bolt, "you must be joking. Those are the terms poor Wilde came back on, and you have hashed him for it."
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