THE GREEN CARNATION
Eight years ago Frank Harris published his two volumes entitled “Oscar
Wilde: His Life and Confessions.” I wrote him that it was one of the
half dozen greatest biographies in the English language, and he replied,
characteristically: “Name the other five.” That story never fails to
raise a laugh; but in fairness to Frank Harris I ought to add that when
I sat down and thought it over seriously I could not name the other
five. Here is the story of a terrific human tragedy, told plainly and
completely, with profound insight and deep pity. How can the man who
wrote it not know that it is great?
The subject of this sermon in action was born in Dublin in 1854. His
father was a wealthy baronet, a physician who was accustomed to seduce
his women-patients; his mother was an excessively vain society poetess.
The son was burdened with the label Oscar Fingal O’Flahartie Wills
Wilde, and received the usual public school and Oxford education. In
these so-called “public” schools, which are ruling class
boarding-schools, the boys live semi-monastic lives, entirely withdrawn
from woman’s influence; they are fed upon Greek literature and art,
which glorifies homosexuality, and therefore English upper-class life is
rotten with this odious vice. Frank Harris narrates that at the time of
Wilde’s trial, when general exposures on this subject were threatened,
great numbers of London’s prominent club members suddenly discovered
that they had important business on the Continent.
Oscar Wilde had extraordinary gifts; a vivid imagination, a flow of
eloquence, and charming wit. He was the perfect fine flower of
leisure-class art, a gentleman about town, a literary dandy who learned
the lesson that it pays to advertise, and made himself the most talked
about man in London by dressing in knee breeches and silk hose, carrying
a large sunflower in his hand, and greeting men and women with sweet
impertinences. There is a satiric portrait of this elegant “esthete” in
Robert Hichens’ novel, “The Green Carnation.”
Oscar wrote comedies dealing with the London world of fashion in which
he lived. These plays delighted that world, and still delight audiences
of the fashionable. Frank Harris regards them as imperishable classics;
and all I can do is to record the fact that they put me to sleep. Nearly
twenty years ago I saw “The Importance of Being Earnest” in New York,
and cannot recall that I was ever more bored in a theater. The interest
of the play is supposed to lie in its “smart” dialogue, and the formula
for that smartness is one which anyone can learn in two minutes. Take
any statement involving the simple common sense of mankind, the moral
heritage of the race for countless ages; and then make an epigram
proclaiming the opposite, and you have a “line” for a society play.
“Charity creates a multitude of sins.... It is better to be good-looking
than to be good.... All charming people are spoiled.... A man can be
happy with any woman as long as he does not love her.... It is a
dangerous thing to reform anyone.... The real drawback to marriage is
that it makes one unselfish.... Democracy means simply the bludgeoning
of the people by the people for the people.... There is no such thing as
a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written....
The sphere of art and the sphere of ethics are absolutely distinct and
separate.”
A man who is absorbed in useful work, and therefore has few impulses to
depravity, can encounter such Wildeness with indifference; but the
average man, who is never sure of his own self-control, and who has sons
and daughters to train in as much decency as he can, is made frantic by
such perversity, the deliberate bedeviling of the wits of our blindly
struggling humanity. These “epigrams” of Oscar Wilde are like the
snapping of a whip-lash in the face of men’s everyday moral sensibility.
So naturally this too-clever young esthete was cordially loathed, and
his enemies whetted their knives for him.
Oscar came over to America to exhibit his whimsicalities to the wives
and daughters of our steel kings and pork packers. To the custom’s
officer he remarked: “I have nothing to declare but my genius”; and so
his success was assured. He went back to London and wrote more plays,
one of them, “Salome,” assuredly the most cruel, cold, and disgusting
piece of lewdness in the English language. Its heroine is the young
daughter of King Herod, who attempts to seduce John the Baptist to her
sensual desires, and when he repels her, has him executed, and has his
head brought in upon a platter, and strips herself as nearly naked as
stage-customs allow, and dances before this bloody object and fondles
and kisses it. The climax of modern art depravity was reached when
Richard Strauss set this drama to elaborate and costly music. When I saw
audiences of bedizened and bejewelled fat beasts, male and female,
having their sick nerves thrilled by this “grand” opera, I knew that
European capitalism was ready for the slaughterman’s ax.
Out of these plays Oscar reaped much money, and spent it in eating too
much, drinking too much, and pursuing his cultured vices. Among his
favorites was a young heir of the nobility, who has since become Lord
Alfred Douglas, assuredly the most disagreeable little wretch that ever
displayed himself in the British world of letters. Lord Alfred’s father,
the Marquis of Queensbury, made an effort to separate his son from
Wilde, and in so doing he wrote letters concerning Wilde which brought
about a great literary scandal.
It is the privilege of elegant British gentlemen to pursue their vices
without interference; but they must display discretion, and not step
upon the toes of marquises. Oscar Wilde brought suit for slander against
Queensbury; and his lordship rallied his aristocratic friends, defended
himself successfully, and then had the audacious playwright arrested and
prosecuted for sodomy.
The ordinary British citizen had, of course, no knowledge of the inside
circumstances of this case; all he saw was that a writer of nasty plays
tripped jauntily into the limelight and brought a libel suit against a
father for trying to save his son. Of the fact that the father was a bad
one, and the son worse, and that the courts were being used to maintain
a corrupt ruling class--those things the average Englishman did not
know. He will never know them until there is a Socialist daily press in
England, with the right to tell the truth about the ruling class,
something which at present the libel laws prevent.
Here is material for a drama, far greater than any that Wilde wrote; and
Frank Harris gives us the whole story. In the early part of it he sees
Oscar clearly as the pitiful victim of his own will-less nature; but
when the tragedy of this nature reaches its climax, Harris lets himself
be tempted into offering Wilde to us in a new rôle, that of a persecuted
hero and martyred genius. Much as Harris may abhor Oscar’s sin, he
abhors the leading British virtues still more; so he is in the position
of Milton dealing with Satan--he cannot keep from sympathizing with his
character, in spite of logic. To be sure, he gives us the facts, so that
we can judge for ourselves, if we have the brains; and we must try to be
worthy of that trust!
It seems evident enough that Oscar was sent to prison, not because of
his genius, nor yet because of his vices, but simply because he attacked
in a conspicuous and aggravating way a member of the hallowed ruling
caste of Britain. You may call that turning the tragedy into a Socialist
tract; but a man cannot interpret any case of social persecution unless
he sees its economic implications--unless, in other words, he
understands the class struggle. If Frank Harris had been a conscious
social revolutionist, his book would have been more powerful and
convincing, because he would have been less tempted to blame individuals
for evils which are social in their origin. He would have given us an
economic interpretation of Oscar, the spoiled darling of a putrescent
leisure class, thrown overboard, like Jonah, as a sacrifice in a
middle-class hurricane of virtue.
Oscar Wilde was convicted and sent to prison; and of course Frank Harris
does not like prisons--he, too, has been sent there by the British
ruling caste. It is only natural that he should overlook in his book the
significance of the fact which he himself records, that this
imprisonment was the best thing that ever happened to Oscar. Harris
interceded for him, and was able to get him good food and the right to
have his books; he tells us that he noticed during his visits a
“spiritual deepening” in Oscar, due to the rigid disciplining of his
selfish nature. He was never so well or so much in possession of his
mental faculties as when he came out; but immediately he went back to
his vomit, and ate and drank and loafed himself to death, according to
the customs prevailing in that putrescent leisure class.
It seems to me that the true conclusion to be drawn from Frank Harris’
book is that decadent poets should be sent to prison and kept there
permanently. Anything to save them from smart society! While Oscar was
at large, the pet of the cultured rich, he idled and wrote futile plays;
but when he was locked up, he took life seriously, and wrote great
literature: “De Profundis,” a study of his spiritual reactions to his
disgrace; and “The Ballad of Reading Gaol,” a supremely eloquent and
noble poem, the poet’s excuse for having lived.
Reading these two works we say, by all means let us have prisons for
will-less men; places where such unhappy beings may have as much
self-government as they can use, together with plain wholesome food,
moderate work outdoors, and enforced abstinence from alcohol and tobacco
and drugs. Having set up such prisons, let us keep in them, not merely
all thieves and highwaymen and esthetes, but men of fashion, princes,
lords and dukes, bishops, stock-brokers and fat persons.
Says Mrs. Ogi: “You said you were going to label all your jokes.”
Her husband, after meditating, remarks: “What Oscar needed was the right
sort of a wife.”
She answers: “Almost any wife would have told him that a guilty man
cannot bring a slander suit.”