As one who knew Wilde personally, I am sometimes asked whether I was
not instinctively aware that the man was bad. Frankly I was not.
Possibly because scandal does not interest me, and other things do,
I had not heard the rumours which I now understand were even then
prevalent, and so I took him as I found him, an agreeable companion,
a brilliant conversationalist, a versatile and accomplished man of
letters. On the crime of which he has since been committed, I make no
comment, if only for the reason that I did not follow the evidence at
his trial, just as I abstained from reading Mr. W. T. Stead’s _Maiden
Tribute to Modern Babylon_--not because of any innate niceness on my
part, but for the same reason which causes me to turn aside if, in
my morning’s walk, I come across offal which it is not my business
to remove. The Wilde of the days of which I am writing was foppish
in dress and affected in manner. He talked and wrote much nonsense,
as I held it to be, about there being no such thing as a moral or an
immoral book or picture; that the book or picture was either a work
of art, or was not a work of art, and there the matter ended; but
much of this talk I attributed to pose, and I had even then learned
that some of the men who are most anxious to have us believe them
moralists--and stern moralists at that--are often less moral in their
life than some of those who make no pretence of any morals at all.
To the folk who objected that Wilde has boasted of being a “pagan”
I replied that he probably used the word--just then very much in
vogue--in the same sense in which Mr. Kenneth Grahame used it when he
entitled a volume, bubbling over with the joy of life, with animal
spirits, keen observation, and exquisite humour, _Pagan Papers_.
Wilde’s “paganism” I took as meaning no more than that he claimed
for himself freedom from formula, most of all freedom from cant in
his attitude towards the accepted conventions, whether literary,
artistic, social, or even religious.
That he was not an irreligious man, I had reason to know. One day
when we were chatting together, Wilde mentioned a little book
of mine of which I will say no more here than that it made no
uncertain confession of the writer’s faith in Christianity. This
led Wilde--uninvited by me, for I make it a rule never to obtrude
my religious views upon others--to express himself upon the subject
of religion, especially of Christianity, and with such intense
reverence, such manifest earnestness, that I perhaps looked something
of the surprise I felt.
“You are surprised,” he said, “to hear Oscar Wilde, the _poseur_,
as people call him, the man who is supposed to hold nothing too
sacred, talking seriously and on serious things. _No_, I am _not_
making believe to be earnest, as I do make believe about so much
else. I am speaking as I feel, and you will perhaps hardly realise
what an intense relief it is to meet some one to whom one can talk
about such matters without cant. It is cant and officialdom” (he
spoke bitterly) “which is keeping the men and women who think out
of the churches to-day. It is cant which more than anything else
stands between them and Christ. Shall I tell you what is my greatest
ambition--more even than an ambition--the dream of my life? Not to
be remembered hereafter as an artist, poet, thinker, or playwright,
but as the man who reclothed the sublimest conception which the world
has ever known--the Salvation of Humanity, the Sacrifice of Himself
upon the Cross by Christ--with new and burning words, with new and
illuminating symbols, with new and divine vision, free from the
accretions of cant which the centuries have gathered around it. I
should thereby be giving the world back again the greatest gift ever
given to mankind since Christ Himself gave it, peerless and pure two
thousand years ago--the pure gift of Christianity as taught by Christ.
“Yes,” he went on, “I hope before I die to write the Epic of the
Cross, the Iliad of Christianity, which shall live for all time.”
On another occasion Wilde unfolded to me the opening scene in a
sort of religious drama which he intended one day to write--the
finding to-day of the body of the Christ in the very rock-sepulchre
where Joseph of Arimathea had laid it, and a great and consequent
eclipse of faith in Him and in His resurrection. Thereafter, by a
new revelation of the Christ, Wilde was, in his drama, newly to
recreate Christianity and faith in Christianity, but of this Second
Act of his World-Drama I heard no more, as our talk was at this point
interrupted, and he never renewed it.
I speak of this proposed religious drama here for the singular reason
that I, too, had long been turning over in my mind some such work and
some such opening scene as in Wilde’s drama--I mean the finding of
the body of Christ.
Wilde went no further with his project, but in a book of mine,
written some years after, I carried my own project into effect. To
this day I am uncertain how much of my opening scene was Wilde’s,
and how much mine. The idea appears to have occurred to both, but
whereas, in Wilde’s mind, it was clear and defined, in mine it was
then no more than an idea. I sometimes wonder whether his words did
not make vivid to me what before was vague. Of one thing at least I
am sure, that he was the first to speak of such an opening scene,
which fact in itself constitutes some sort of previous claim. The
rest of the book was entirely mine, and probably the whole, but the
facts seem to me not uninteresting, and having made confession of
the possibility at least of some debt incurred, I must leave it to
the reader to say whether I ought or ought not to be condemned in
“conscience money.”
I have already said that I have reason to know that Wilde was not
irreligious, and I propose now to give my reasons for refusing to
believe him to be irreclaimably bad. One has some hesitation in
quoting oneself, but, in a dream-parable booklet of mine, there is
a passage which I may perhaps be forgiven for printing here, when I
say that I had Wilde in my mind when I wrote it. In my dream-parable,
Satan, even as once of old he had presented himself to speak with God
concerning Job, appears to-day before the Most High, urging that men
and women have become godless and faithless. He craves permission
to prove this by putting them to certain tests. The permission is
accorded on condition that Satan himself becomes mortal, even as
they. In the following passage Satan is supposed to be speaking,
after the failure and defeat of his projects.
Master and Maker, hear me ere I die. For until Thou didst in Thy
wisdom decree that ere I might work my will on mortals, myself
must become mortal even as they--until then, the thoughts of
these mortals were as foreign to my understanding as are the
thoughts in the brain of a bird, to the fowler who spreads his
net to catch the little creature. Like the fowler, I knew that
I must change my bait, according to the creature that I set out
to snare, that this one could be taken by avarice, that one by
vanity, a third by spiritual pride, a fourth by bodily lust. When
they came to my lure, and I caught them; when I saw the poor
fools struggling in my net, I laughed and hugged myself to think
of their misery and of the impotent anguish of God. And so I
grew wise in the ways and the weaknesses of men and women, while
knowing nothing of the hearts which beat in their breasts.
But now that I have become mortal, even as they,--now at last,
to the wonder and the mystery of mortal life, are my eyes opened.
Now perceive I that, in the least and most shameful of these
lives, is to be seen, even in uttermost wreckage, something so
sacred, so august, so beautiful, so divine, that the very angels
of light might stand amazed in envious wonder and awe.
For if men and women have failed greatly, at least they have
striven greatly--how greatly, how valiantly, how desperately,
only the God Who sees all, may know.
It may be that by Him, that very striving itself, even the
unsuccessful striving, shall mercifully be taken into account.
The sin and the shame are human: the wish and the effort to
overcome them are divine. For that which in a man’s truer, nobler
moments, he has longed unutterably to be, _that in some sense he
is, and shall be accounted_, in the eyes of the God, Who taketh
not pleasure in remembering sin, but in rewarding righteousness.
That even in sin, a man should think such thoughts, should carry
unsullied in his heart some white flower of his childhood, and,
in spite of what is ugly and impure in himself, should project
so pure and perfect a vision of hoped-for, longed-for Loveliness
and Purity, sets that man, even in his sins, a world removed
above the angels. When I who was once an angel fell, I fell from
uttermost light to uttermost dark. Ceasing to be an angel, I
became a devil. Man falls, but even in his fall retains something
that is divine.
Yonder man into whose great brain I entered, working strange
madness within! Him first I taught to love Beauty, because it is
of Thee. Him I haunted of beauty, haunted with visions of forms
more fair than earthly eyes may know, luring him at last to look
upon Beauty as of greater worth than all else, and as a law unto
itself.
And because the love of beauty is not far removed from the love
of pleasure, it was not difficult for me to lead on such as he
to love pleasure for itself. With innocent pleasures at first I
plied him, and when they staled, I enticed him with grosser joys,
till the pleasure-seeker became the voluptuary, and, in the veins
of the voluptuary, desire soon quickened into lust.
Next, because wine, like water to drooping flowers, lent
fictitious strength to his flagging pulse, made the live
thoughts to quicken in his tired brain, and set the tongue of
his wit a-wagging; because he loved to stand well with his
comrades, among whom to chink glasses together was the sign of
fellowship--because of all these I enticed him to drink and yet
again to drink, until Alcohol, the Arch Destroyer, had stolen
away his will power, silenced his conscience, perverted his moral
sense, inflamed with foul passion his degenerate brain, and made
the wreck and the ruin of him that he now is.
Yet even now, as I steal gloatingly through the dark chambers of
that House of Shame which was once the fair temple of the living
God, even now there still smoulders under the ashes of a fouled
hearthstone some spark of the fire which was kindled of God, a
fire which I strive in vain to trample out, since, because it is
of God, it is inextinguishable and eternal.
If therefore when I seem most to have conquered, there never yet
was God wholly defeated--of what use is it further to wage the
unequal conflict? For God never entirely lets go His hold on a
human soul; and that to which God holds fast, Satan shall never
finally wrest from Him. Say the world, think the world, what it
will, in the warfare for souls God wins, and has won all along
the line.
It was, as I say, Wilde who was in my mind when I penned that passage
commencing “Yonder man into whose great brain I entered, working
strange madness within.” To me he seems to have been less hopelessly
bad than partly mad.
We are told that it is possible, by locating and destroying certain
cells or nerve-centres in the brain, so to affect the mind of the
subject as to destroy his sense of colour, his sense of touch, or
even, it is believed, to destroy his sense of right and wrong.
Wilde died of meningitis, which is a brain affection, and I think
that the fact should be considered retrospectively. A post-mortem
examination would possibly have revealed some disease or degeneration
of certain brain-cells which may account for much that is painful
in his career and character. This degeneration of brain-cells may
have been inherited and congenital, in which case, condemnation
on our part is silenced; or it may have been due to excesses of
his own choosing and committing. Even if this be so, the price he
paid was surely so terrible, and so tragic, as in a sense to be
accounted an atonement, and even to entitle him to our pity. In the
passage quoted from my dream-parable, I have hinted at some form of
demoniacal possession which may or may not be a positive, as opposed
to a negative form of madness. There is a brain derangement by which
the power to reason aright and to co-ordinate ideas is lost; a brain
derangement which results mainly in vacancy of mind. But there is
yet another and more terrible form of derangement in which, so it
seems to me, that unseen evil powers, outside himself, seize upon
and possess the brain chambers, thus vacated, and direct and rule
the unhappy victim, not according to his own will, which indeed has
passed out of his control, but according to the wish or will of the
power by which he is possessed.
On such a question we dare not dogmatise; but I am humbly of opinion
that in the great re-awakening to the realities (not to the outward
forms) of religion, which some of us think will follow the war,
there will be a return to simplicity of belief, and that the too
often disregarded New Testament explanation of certain mysterious
happenings will be proved to be more in accordance with the later
discoveries of Science than some advocates of the Higher Criticism
now think. For my own part I have never doubted the accuracy of the
Gospel records in regard to demoniacal possession. We have Christ’s
own words: “For this saying go thy way; the devil is gone out of
thy daughter,” “Howbeit this kind goeth not out but by prayer and
fasting,” and “I charge thee come out of him and enter no more into
him.”
That some men and women whose wills are weakened--possibly by
habitual disregard of conscience or by continued wrongdoing for which
they cannot be held irresponsible--_do_ commit, under the urging and
direction of evil spirits by which they are possessed, crimes and
cruelties for which they are not in the fullest sense responsible,
I think more than possible. My friend, the late Benjamin Waugh,
Founder of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children,
on more than one occasion placed before me the full facts and the
indisputable proofs of acts so fiendish as to be difficult to ascribe
to human motive or passions.
In the most terrible sonnet ever penned, Shakespeare says:
The expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action, and till action, lust
Is perjured, murderous, bloody, full of blame,
Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust,
and, to lust, some particularly bestial outrages which came before
the Society were clearly attributable. Others were as clearly the
outcome of avarice, greed, hatred, jealousy and blind fury of anger.
But some crimes there were, such as the torturing of her own children
by a mother, and, in another case, the deliberate jabbing out of the
eyes of an unoffending pony by a woman, not under the influence of
drink, and in whom the medical experts declared they otherwise found
no symptoms of insanity, which, if only for the sake of our common
humanity, one would be relieved to think were due to demoniacal
possession, for which the victim was, in this last stage at least,
irresponsible.
In the near future it is possible that Science will by closer
inquiry and by completer records be found once more in harmony with
Scripture. Hypnotism, a science which as yet is not a science, but
merely a haphazard accumulation of unorganised data, pointing to the
possession of unexplained powers and possibilities by the individual,
has established the fact that the living can thus be influenced
and obsessed by the living. If so, why not by the dead, who, when
emancipated from the body, may possibly be able to concentrate
even greater spiritual force upon the living than when they were
themselves alive?
I am not likely to live to see it, but my belief is that all these
so-called occult matters, Hypnotism, Thought-reading, Obsession,
Clairvoyance, Spiritualism, and the like will one day fall into line
with Science, and be proved to be not supernatural, but merely the
manifestation of natural laws--of certain psychical powers and forces
which may be easily explainable and demonstrable with further and
exacter knowledge, but concerning the working of which we are at
present very much in the dark.
I have written at greater length than I intended, in hinting and in
hoping that Wilde was at times under the subjection of powers and
forces of darkness outside himself. I say “at times” intentionally,
and for the following reason. It would be gratifying to one’s
_amour propre_ (I use a French term for once, as it expresses my
meaning more nearly than any English equivalent) could I take high
ground, and aver that I was vaguely conscious--warned, as it were,
by some fine instinct--of evil in the presence of Wilde, but so to
aver would be untrue. I have not lived to nearly threescore years
without meeting men from whom one does thus instinctively shrink,
and concerning whom one found it impossible to breathe the same air.
I experienced nothing of the sort in Wilde’s company, and, since
his guilt seems uncontrovertible, I ask myself whether it is not
possible that Wilde lived a sort of Jekyll and Hyde life, of the
latter of which I saw nothing, inasmuch as just as some wounded or
plague-stricken creature withdraws itself from the herd, so, during
the Hyde period of madness or of obsession, some instinct moved him
to withdraw from his home, his haunts and the companions of his
everyday life, only to return when the obsession or madness had
passed, and once again he was his sane and normal self.
This “periodicity” is not infrequent in madness, whether the madness
be due to a brain derangement, explainable by pathology, or to
some such demoniacal possession as that of which I have spoken. A
memorable instance is that of Mary Lamb, who was herself aware of the
return of homicidal mania, and at such times of her own accord placed
herself under restraint. Recalling the fact that I saw in Wilde no
sign either of the presence of evil or of insanity, I ask myself
whether in picturing Dorian Grey as at one season living normally
and reputably, and at another disappearing into some oblivion of
iniquity, he was not consciously or unconsciously picturing for us
his own tortured self. I write “tortured” advisedly, for whether
he were wholly, or only partly, or not at all, responsible, I
refuse to believe that the man, as in his saner moments I knew him,
_could_ sink thus low, without fighting desperately, if vainly--how
desperately only the God who made him knows--before allowing himself
in the hopelessness of despair to forget his failures in filth, as
other unhappy geniuses have before now drowned their souls in drink.
One talk with him I particularly remember. I had been reading the
proofs of _Dorian Grey_, and, on our next meeting, I said that he had
put damnable words into the mouth of one of his characters.
“Such poisonous stuff is not likely to affect grown men and women,” I
said, “but for a writer of your power and persuasiveness to set up a
puppet like Lord Henry to provide ready-made excuses for indulgence,
and to make evil seem necessary, unavoidable, and easy, by whispering
into the ears of readers, of impressionable age and inflammable
passion, that ‘the only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to
it’--when you do that, you are helping to circulate devils’ doctrines
in God’s world.”
Wilde was visibly perturbed.
“You are quite right,” he said. “It _is_ damnable; it _is_ devils’
doctrine. I will take it out.”
But, alas, other influences, whether within himself in the shape of
the whisperings of some evil spirit, by which he was, as I believe,
at times possessed, or in the form of so-called friends, whose
influence over him was of the worst, I cannot say, but some days
after the conversation recorded above I received the following letter:
GRAND HÔTEL DE L’ATHENÉE,
15 RUE SCRIBE, PARIS.