Thank you for your charming letter. I have been very ill and
unable to correct my proofs, but have sent them off now. _I have
changed my mind about the passage about temptation._ One can’t
pull a work of art about without spoiling it, and after all it
is merely Luther’s “Pecca Fortiter” put dramatically into the
lips of a character.
Do you think I should add to preface the definition of “morbid”
and “unhealthy” art I gave in the _Fortnightly_ for February? The
one on morbidity is really good.
Will you also look after my “wills” and “shalls” in proof! I am
Celtic in my use of these words, not English.
You are excellent on Rossetti. I read you with delight.
Your sincere friend,
OSCAR WILDE.
When next I met Wilde I recurred to the matter, but it was then too
late, for the book, he said, was in great part printed. Moreover, he
had now another excuse to put forward.
“After I had left you,” he said, “I remembered that a friend of mine,
a well-known critic, had read the book in manuscript when it was
first written. He said something to the same effect as you did, but
less strongly. Honestly it was that, more than anything else, which
finally decided me to leave the passage in. Had I taken it out, he
would have claimed that I did so in deference to his strictures, and
haul down my flag to a professional critic I never have and never
will.”
This incident (though Wilde has been dead sixteen years I have
neither written of it nor spoken of it before) shows Wilde as weak,
it shows him as yielding--as we all, alas, too often yield--to evil
influences, and to inclination as opposed to conscience, and as a
man who was determined to shine at all costs. His vanity would not
allow him to withhold the word that he was pleased to think daring,
original, and above all brilliant, though he knew that word to be
only brilliantly bad. Even in his sinning, it seems to me, he fed
and flattered his insatiable vanity, by electing, even in sin, to
be unlike others; and how far vanity, even more than viciousness,
was accountable for Wilde’s downfall, only the God who made him and
the devil who fostered and fed that vanity, till it less resembled a
pardonable human weakness than a hideous excrescence and disease, can
ever truly say.
The setting of Wilde’s sun (which had risen on so fair a prospect,
and with such promise of splendour) in foul quagmires of sin and
shame, was the greatest tragedy I have known. I met his friend and
mine, Mr. Hall Caine, immediately after the verdict and sentence.
I have seen Caine ill, and I have seen him deeply moved, even
distressed, but I remember always to his honour (for Wilde not seldom
made Caine’s writing the butt of his wit) the anguish in his face as
he said:
“God pity him in this hour when human pity there seems none! To think
of it! that man, that genius as he is, whom you and I have seen
fêted and flattered! whose hand we have grasped in friendship! a
felon, and come to infamy unspeakable! It haunts me, it is like some
foul and horrible stain on our craft and on us all, which nothing
can wash out. It is the most awful tragedy in the whole history of
literature.”