"Non dispetto, ma doglia."--_Dante._
Oscar Wilde did not stay long in Naples, a few brief months; the
forbidden fruit quickly turned to ashes in his mouth.
I give the following extracts from a letter he wrote to Robert Ross in
December, 1897, shortly after leaving Naples, because it describes the
second great crisis in his life and is besides the bitterest thing he
ever wrote and therefore of peculiar value:
"The facts of Naples are very bald. Bosie for four months, by
endless lies, offered me a home. He offered me love,
affection, and care, and promised that I should never want for
anything. After four months I accepted his offer, but when we
met on our way to Naples, I found he had no money, no plans,
and had forgotten all his promises. His one idea was that I
should raise the money for us both; I did so to the extent of
£120. On this Bosie lived quite happy. When it came to his
having to pay his own share he became terribly unkind and
penurious, except where his own pleasures were concerned, and
when my allowance ceased, he left.
"With regard to the £500[22] which he said was a debt of
honour, he has written to me to say that he admits the debt of
honour, but as lots of gentlemen don't pay their debts of
honour, it is quite a common thing and no one thinks any the
worse of them.
"I don't know what you said to Constance, but the bald fact is
that I accepted the offer of the home, and found that I was
expected to provide the money, and when I could no longer do
so I was left to my own devices. It is the most bitter
experience of a bitter life. It is a blow quite awful. It had
to come, but I know it is better I should never see him again,
I don't want to, it fills me with horror."
A word of explanation will explain his reference to his wife, Constance,
in this letter: by a deed of separation made at the end of his
imprisonment, Mrs. Wilde undertook to allow Oscar £150 a year for life,
under the condition that the allowance was to be forfeited if Oscar ever
lived under the same roof with Lord Alfred Douglas. Having forfeited the
allowance Oscar got Robert Ross to ask his wife to continue it and in
spite of the forfeiture Mrs. Wilde continually sent Oscar money through
Robert Ross, merely stipulating that her husband should not be told
whence the money came. Ross, too, who had also sent him £150 a year,
resumed his monthly payments as soon as he left Douglas.
My friendship with Oscar Wilde, which had been interrupted after he left
prison by a silly gibe directed rather against the go-between he had
sent to me than against him, was renewed in Paris early in 1898. I have
related the little misunderstanding in the Appendix. I had never felt
anything but the most cordial affection for Oscar and as soon as I went
to Paris and met him I explained what had seemed to him unkind. When I
asked him about his life since his release he told me simply that he had
quarrelled with Bosie Douglas.
I did not attribute much importance to this; but I could not help
noticing the extraordinary change that had taken place in him since he
had been in Naples. His health was almost as good as ever; in fact, the
prison discipline with its two years of hard living had done him so
much good that his health continued excellent almost to the end.
But his whole manner and attitude to life had again changed: he now
resembled the successful Oscar of the early nineties: I caught echoes,
too, in his speech of a harder, smaller nature; "that talk about
reformation, Frank, is all nonsense; no one ever really reforms or
changes. I am what I always was."
He was mistaken: he took up again the old pagan standpoint; but he was
not the same; he was reckless now, not thoughtless, and, as soon as one
probed a little beneath the surface, depressed almost to despairing. He
had learnt the meaning of suffering and pity, had sensed their value; he
had turned his back upon them all, it is true, but he could not return
to pagan carelessness, and the light-hearted enjoyment of pleasure. He
did his best and almost succeeded; but the effort was there. His creed
now was what it used to be about 1892: "Let us get what pleasure we may
in the fleeting days; for the night cometh, and the silence that can
never be broken."
The old doctrine of original sin, we now call reversion to type; the
most lovely garden rose, if allowed to go without discipline and
tendance, will in a few generations become again the common scentless
dog-rose of our hedges. Such a reversion to type had taken place in
Oscar Wilde. It must be inferred perhaps that the old pagan Greek in him
was stronger than the Christian virtues which had been called into being
by the discipline and suffering of prison. Little by little, as he began
to live his old life again, the lessons learned in prison seemed to drop
from him and be forgotten. But in reality the high thoughts he had lived
with, were not lost; his lips had been touched by the divine fire; his
eyes had seen the world-wonder of sympathy, pity and love and, strangely
enough, this higher vision helped, as we shall soon see, to shake his
individuality from its centre, and thus destroyed his power of work and
completed his soul-ruin. Oscar's second fall--this time from a
height--was fatal and made writing impossible to him. It is all clear
enough now in retrospect though I did not understand it at the time.
When he went to live with Bosie Douglas he threw off the Christian
attitude, but afterwards had to recognise that "De Profundis" and "The
Ballad of Reading Gaol" were deeper and better work than any of his
earlier writings. He resumed the pagan position; outwardly and for the
time being he was the old Oscar again, with his Greek love of beauty and
hatred of disease, deformity and ugliness, and whenever he met a
kindred spirit, he absolutely revelled in gay paradoxes and brilliant
flashes of humour. But he was at war with himself, like Milton's Satan
always conscious of his fall, always regretful of his lost estate and by
reason of this division of spirit unable to write. Perhaps because of
this he threw himself more than ever into talk.
He was beyond all comparison the most interesting companion I have ever
known: the most brilliant talker, I cannot but think, that ever lived.
No one surely ever gave himself more entirely in speech. Again and again
he declared that he had only put his talent into his books and plays,
but his genius into his life. If he had said into his talk, it would
have been the exact truth.
People have differed a great deal about his mental and physical
condition after he came out of prison. All who knew him really, Ross,
Turner, More Adey, Lord Alfred Douglas and myself, are agreed that in
spite of a slight deafness he was never better in health, never indeed
so well. But some French friends were determined to make him out a
martyr.
In his picture of Wilde's last years, Gide tells us that "he had
suffered too grievously from his imprisonment.... His will had been
broken ... nothing remained in his shattered life but a mouldy
ruin,[23] painful to contemplate, of his former self. At times he seemed
to wish to show that his brain was still active. Humour there was; but
it was far-fetched, forced and threadbare."
These touches may be necessary in order to complete a French picture of
the social outcast. They are not only untrue when applied to Oscar
Wilde, but the reverse of the truth; he never talked so well, was never
so charming a companion as in the last years of his life.
In the very last year his talk was more genial, more humorous, more
vivid than ever, with a wider range of thought and intenser stimulus
than before. He was a born _improvisatore_. At the moment he always
dazzled one out of judgment. A phonograph would have discovered the
truth; a great part of his charm was physical; much of his talk mere
topsy-turvy paradox, the very froth of thought carried off by gleaming,
dancing eyes, smiling, happy lips, and a melodious voice.
The entertainment usually started with some humorous play on words. One
of the company would say something obvious or trivial, repeat a proverb
or commonplace tag such as, "Genius is born, not made," and Oscar would
flash in smiling, "not 'paid,' my dear fellow, not 'paid.'"
An interesting comment would follow on some doing of the day, a skit on
some accepted belief or a parody of some pretentious solemnity, a winged
word on a new book or a new author, and when everyone was smiling with
amused enjoyment, the fine eyes would become introspective, the
beautiful voice would take on a grave music and Oscar would begin a
story, a story with symbolic second meaning or a glimpse of new thought,
and when all were listening enthralled, of a sudden the eyes would
dance, the smile break forth again like sunshine and some sparkling
witticism would set everyone laughing.
The spell was broken, but only for a moment. A new clue would soon be
given and at once Oscar was off again with renewed brio to finer
effects.
The talking itself warmed and quickened him extraordinarily: he loved to
show off and astonish his audience, and usually talked better after an
hour or two than at the beginning. His verve was inexhaustible. But
always a great part of the fascination lay in the quick changes from
grave to gay, from pathos to mockery, from philosophy to fun.
There was but little of the actor in him. When telling a story he never
mimicked his personages; his drama seldom lay in clash of character, but
in thought; it was the sheer beauty of the words, the melody of the
cadenced voice, the glowing eyes which fascinated you and always and
above all the scintillating, coruscating humour that lifted his
monologues into works of art.
Curiously enough he seldom talked of himself or of the incidents of his
past life. After the prison he always regarded himself as a sort of
Prometheus and his life as symbolic; but his earlier experiences never
suggested themselves to him as specially significant; the happenings of
his life after his fall seemed predestined and fateful to him; yet of
those he spoke but seldom. Even when carried away by his own eloquence,
he kept the tone of good society.
When you came afterwards to think over one of those wonderful evenings
when he had talked for hours, almost without interruption, you hardly
found more than an epigram, a fugitive flash of critical insight, an
apologue or pretty story charmingly told. Over all this he had cast the
glittering, sparkling robe of his Celtic gaiety, verbal humour, and
sensual enjoyment of living. It was all like champagne; meant to be
drunk quickly; if you let it stand, you soon realised that some still
wines had rarer virtues. But there was always about him the magic of a
rich and _puissant_ personality; like some great actor he could take a
poor part and fill it with the passion and vivacity of his own nature,
till it became a living and memorable creation.
He gave the impression of wide intellectual range, yet in reality he was
not broad; life was not his study nor the world-drama his field. His
talk was all of literature and art and the vanities; the light
drawing-room comedy on the edge of farce was his kingdom; there he ruled
as a sovereign.
Anyone who has read Oscar Wilde's plays at all carefully, especially
"The Importance of Being Earnest," must, I think, see that in kindly,
happy humour he is without a peer in literature. Who can ever forget the
scene between the town and country girl in that delightful farce-comedy.
As soon as the London girl realises that the country girl has hardly any
opportunity of making new friends or meeting new men, she exclaims:
"Ah! now I know what they mean when they talk of agricultural
depression."
This sunny humour is Wilde's especial contribution to literature: he
calls forth a smile whereas others try to provoke laughter. Yet he was
as witty as anyone of whom we have record, and some of the best epigrams
in English are his. "The cynic knows the price of everything and the
value of nothing" is better than the best of La Rochefoucauld, as good
as the best of Vauvenargues or Joubert. He was as wittily urbane as
Congreve. But all the witty things that one man can say may be numbered
on one's fingers. It was through his humour that Wilde reigned supreme.
It was his humour that lent his talk its singular attraction. He was the
only man I have ever met or heard of who could keep one smiling with
amusement hour after hour. True, much of the humour was merely verbal,
but it was always gay and genial: summer-lightning humour, I used to
call it, unexpected, dazzling, full of colour yet harmless.
Let me try and catch here some of the fleeting iridescence of that
radiant spirit. Some years before I had been introduced to Mdlle. Marie
Anne de Bovet by Sir Charles Dilke. Mdlle. de Bovet was a writer of
talent and knew English uncommonly well; but in spite of masses of fair
hair and vivacious eyes she was certainly very plain. As soon as she
heard I was in Paris, she asked me to present Oscar Wilde to her. He had
no objection, and so I made a meeting between them. When he caught sight
of her, he stopped short: seeing his astonishment, she cried to him in
her quick, abrupt way:
"N'est-ce pas, M. Wilde, que je suis la femme la plus laide de France?"
(Come, confess, Mr. Wilde, that I am the ugliest woman in France.)
Bowing low, Oscar replied with smiling courtesy:
"Du monde, Madame, du monde." (In the world, madame, in the world.)
No one could help laughing; the retort was irresistible. He should have
said: "Au monde, madame, au monde," but the meaning was clear.
Sometimes this thought-quickness and happy dexterity had to be used in
self-defence. Jean Lorrain was the wittiest talker I have ever heard in
France, and a most brilliant journalist. His life was as abandoned as it
could well be; in fact, he made a parade of strange vices. In the days
of Oscar's supremacy he always pretended to be a friend and admirer.
About this time Oscar wanted me to know Stephane Mallarmé. He took me to
his rooms one afternoon when there was a reception. There were a great
many people present. Mallarmé was standing at the other end of the room
leaning against the chimney piece. Near the door was Lorrain, and we
both went towards him, Oscar with outstretched hands:
"Delighted to see you, Jean."
For some reason or other, most probably out of tawdry vanity, Lorrain
folded his arms theatrically and replied:
"I regret I cannot say as much: I can no longer be one of your friends,
M. Wilde."
The insult was stupid, brutal; yet everyone was on tiptoe to see how
Oscar would answer it.
"How true that is," he said quietly, as quickly as if he had expected
the traitor-thrust, "how true and how sad! At a certain time in life all
of us who have done anything like you and me, Lorrain, must realise that
we no longer have any friends in this world; but only lovers." (Plus
d'amis, seulement des amants.)
A smile of approval lighted up every face.
"Well said, well said," was the general exclamation. His humour was
almost invariably generous, kind.
One day in a Paris studio the conversation turned on the character of
Marat: one Frenchman would have it that he was a fiend, another saw in
him the incarnation of the revolution, a third insisted that he was
merely the gamin of the Paris streets grown up. Suddenly one turned to
Oscar, who was sitting silent, and asked his opinion: he took the ball
at once, gravely.
"_Ce malheureux! Il n'avait pas de veine--pour une fois qu'il a pris un
bain_...." (Poor devil, he was unlucky! To come to such grief for once
taking a bath.)
For a little while Oscar was interested in the Dreyfus case, and
especially in the Commandant Esterhazy, who played such a prominent
part in it with the infamous _bordereau_ which brought about the
conviction of Dreyfus. Most Frenchmen now know that the _bordereau_ was
a forgery and without any real value.
I was curious to see Esterhazy, and Oscar brought him to lunch one day
at Durand's. He was a little below middle height, extremely thin and as
dark as any Italian, with an enormous hook nose and heavy jaw. He looked
to me like some foul bird of prey: greed and cunning in the restless
brown eyes set close together, quick resolution in the out-thrust, bony
jaws and hard chin; but manifestly he had no capacity, no mind: he was
meagre in all ways. For a long time he bored us by insisting that
Dreyfus was a traitor, a Jew, and a German; to him a trinity of faults,
whereas he, Esterhazy, was perfectly innocent and had been very badly
treated. At length Oscar leant across the table and said to him in
French with, strange to say, a slight Irish accent, not noticeable when
he spoke English:
"The innocent," he said, "always suffer, M. le Commandant; it is their
_métier_. Besides, we are all innocent till we are found out; it is a
poor, common part to play and within the compass of the meanest. The
interesting thing surely is to be guilty and so wear as a halo the
seduction of sin."
Esterhazy appeared put out for a moment, and then he caught the genial
gaiety of the reproof and the hint contained in it. His vanity would not
allow him to remain long in a secondary _rôle_, and so, to our
amazement, he suddenly broke out:
"Why should I not make my confession to you? I will. It is I, Esterhazy,
who alone am guilty. I wrote the _bordereau_. I put Dreyfus in prison,
and all France can not liberate him. I am the maker of the plot, and the
chief part in it is mine."
To his surprise we both roared with laughter. The influence of the
larger nature on the smaller to such an extraordinary issue was
irresistibly comic. At the time no one even suspected Esterhazy in
connection with the _bordereau_.
Another example, this time of Oscar's wit, may find a place here. Sir
Lewis Morris was a voluminous poetaster with a common mind. He once
bored Oscar by complaining that his books were boycotted by the press;
after giving several instances of unfair treatment he burst out:
"There's a conspiracy against me, a conspiracy of silence; but what can
one do? What should I do?"
"Join it," replied Oscar smiling.
Oscar's humour was for the most part intellectual, and something like
it can be found in others, though the happy fecundity and lightsome
gaiety of it belonged to the individual temperament and perished with
him. I remember once trying to give an idea of the different sides of
his humour, just to see how far it could be imitated.
I made believe to have met him at Paddington, after his release from
Reading, though he was brought to Pentonville in private clothes by a
warder on May 18th, and was released early the next morning, two years
to the hour from the commencement of the Sessions at which he was
convicted on May 25th. The Act says that you must be released from the
prison in which you are first confined. I pretended, however, that I had
met him. The train, I said, ran into Paddington Station early in the
morning. I went across to him as he got out of the carriage: grey dawn
filled the vast echoing space; a few porters could be seen scattered
about; it was all chill and depressing.
"Welcome, welcome, Oscar!" I cried holding out my hands. "I am sorry I'm
alone. You ought to have been met by troops of boys and girls
flower-crowned, but alas! you will have to content yourself with one
middle-aged admirer."
"Yes, it's really terrible, Frank," he replied gravely. "If England
persists in treating her criminals like this, she does not deserve to
have any...."
"Ah," said an old lady to him one day at lunch, "I know you people who
pretend to be a great deal worse than you are, I know you. I shouldn't
be afraid of you."
"Naturally we pretend to be bad, dear lady," he replied; "it is the only
way to make ourselves interesting to you. Everyone believes a man who
pretends to be good, he is such a bore; but no one believes a man who
says he is evil. That makes him interesting."
"Oh, you are too clever for me," replied the old lady nodding her head.
"You see in my day none of us went to Girton and Newnham. There were no
schools then for the higher education of women."
"How absurd such schools are, are they not?" cried Oscar. "Were I a
despot, I should immediately establish schools for the lower education
of women. That's what they need. It usually takes ten years living with
a man to complete a woman's education."
"Then what would you do," asked someone, "about the lower education of
man?"
"That's already provided for, my dear fellow, amply provided for; we
have our public schools and universities to see to that. What we want
are schools for the higher education of men, and schools for the lower
education of women."
Genial persiflage of this sort was his particular _forte_ whether my
imitation of it is good or bad.
His kindliness was ingrained. I never heard him say a gross or even a
vulgar word, hardly even a sharp or unkind thing. Whether in company or
with one person, his mind was all dedicated to genial, kindly,
flattering thoughts. He hated rudeness or discussion or insistence as he
hated ugliness or deformity.
One evening of this summer a trivial incident showed me that he was
sinking deeper in the mud-honey of life.
A new play was about to be given at the Français and because he
expressed a wish to see it I bought a couple of tickets. We went in and
he made me change places with him in order to be able to talk to me; he
was growing nearly deaf in the bad ear. After the first act we went
outside to smoke a cigarette.
"It's stupid," Oscar began, "fancy us two going in there to listen to
what that foolish Frenchman says about love; he knows nothing about it;
either of us could write much better on the theme. Let's walk up and
down here under the columns and talk."
The people began to go into the theatre again and, as they were
disappearing, I said:
"It seems rather a pity to waste our tickets; so many wish to see the
play."
"We shall find someone to give them to," he said indifferently, stopping
by one of the pillars.
At that very moment as if under his hand appeared a boy of about fifteen
or sixteen, one of the gutter-snipe of Paris. To my amazement, he said:
"Bon soir, Monsieur Wilde."
Oscar turned to him smiling.
"Vous êtes Jules, n'est-ce pas?" (you are Jules, aren't you?) he
questioned.
"Oui, M. Wilde."
"Here is the very boy you want," Oscar cried; "let's give him the
tickets, and he'll sell them, and make something out of them," and Oscar
turned and began to explain to the boy how I had given two hundred
francs for the tickets, and how, even now, they should be worth a louis
or two.
"Des jaunets" (yellow boys), cried the youth, his sharp face lighting
up, and in a flash he had vanished with the tickets.
"You see he knows me, Frank," said Oscar, with the childish pleasure of
gratified vanity.
"Yes," I replied drily, "not an acquaintance to be proud of, I should
think."
"I don't agree with you, Frank," he said, resenting my tone, "did you
notice his eyes? He is one of the most beautiful boys I have ever seen;
an exact replica of Emilienne D'Alençon,[24] I call him Jules D'Alençon,
and I tell her he must be her brother. I had them both dining with me
once and the boy is finer than the girl, his skin far more beautiful.
"By the way," he went on, as we were walking up the Avenue de l'Opera,
"why should we not see Emilienne; why should she not sup with us, and
you could compare them? She is playing at Olympia, near the Grand Hotel.
Let's go and compare Aspasia and Agathon, and for once I shall be
Alcibiades, and you the moralist, Socrates."
"I would rather talk to you," I replied.
"We can talk afterwards, Frank, when all the stars come out to listen;
now is the time to live and enjoy."
"As you will," I said, and we went to the Music Hall and got a box, and
he wrote a little note to Emilienne D'Alençon, and she came afterwards
to supper with us. Though her face was pretty she was pre-eminently dull
and uninteresting without two ideas in her bird's head. She was all
greed and vanity, and could talk of nothing but the hope of getting an
engagement in London: could he help her, or would Monsieur, referring to
me, as a journalist get her some good puffs in advance? Oscar promised
everything gravely.
While we were supping inside, Oscar caught sight of the boy passing
along the Boulevard. At once he tapped on the window, loud enough to
attract his attention. Nothing loth, the boy came in, and the four of us
had supper together--a strange quartette.
"Now, Frank," said Oscar, "compare the two faces and you will see the
likeness," and indeed there was in both the same Greek beauty--the same
regularity of feature, the same low brow and large eyes, the same
perfect oval.
"I am telling my friend," said Oscar to Emilienne in French, "how alike
you two are, true brother and sister in beauty and in the finest of
arts, the art of living," and they both laughed.
"The boy is better looking," he went on to me in English. "Her mouth is
coarse and hard; her hands common, while the boy is quite perfect."
"Rather dirty, don't you think?" I could not help remarking.
"Dirty, of course, but that's nothing; nothing is so immaterial as
colouring; form is everything, and his form is perfect, as exquisite as
the David of Donatello. That's what he's like, Frank, the David of
Donatello," and he pulled his jowl, delighted to have found the painting
word.
As soon as Emilienne saw that we were talking of the boy, her interest
in the conversation vanished, even more quickly than her appetite. She
had to go, she said suddenly; she was so sorry, and the discontented
curiosity of her look gave place again to the smirk of affected
politeness.
"_Au revoir, n'est-ce pas? à Charing Cross, n'est-ce-pas, Monsieur? Vous
ne m'oublierez pas?..._"
As we turned to walk along the boulevard I noticed that the boy, too,
had disappeared. The moonlight was playing with the leaves and boughs of
the plane trees and throwing them in Japanese shadow-pictures on the
pavement: I was given over to thought; evidently Oscar imagined I was
offended, for he launched out into a panegyric on Paris.
"The most wonderful city in the world, the only civilised capital; the
only place on earth where you find absolute toleration for all human
frailties, with passionate admiration for all human virtues and
capacities.
"Do you remember Verlaine, Frank? His life was nameless and terrible, he
did everything to excess, was drunken, dirty and debauched, and yet
there he would sit in a café on the Boul' Mich', and everybody who came
in would bow to him, and call him _maître_ and be proud of any sign of
recognition from him because he was a great poet.
"In England they would have murdered Verlaine, and men who call
themselves gentlemen would have gone out of their way to insult him in
public. England is still only half-civilised; Englishmen touch life at
one or two points without suspecting its complexity. They are rude and
harsh."
All the while I could not help thinking of Dante and his condemnation of
Florence, and its "hard, malignant people," the people who still had
something in them of "the mountain and rock" of their birthplace:--"_E
tiene ancor del monte e del macigno._"
"You are not offended, Frank, are you, with me, for making you meet two
caryatides of the Parisian temple of pleasure?"
"No, no," I cried, "I was thinking how Dante condemned Florence and its
people, its ungrateful malignant people, and how when his teacher,
Brunetto Latini, and his companions came to him in the underworld, he
felt as if he, too, must throw himself into the pit with them. Nothing
prevented him from carrying out his good intention (_buona voglia_)
except the fear of being himself burned and baked as they were. I was
just thinking that it was his great love for Latini which gave him the
deathless words:
... "Non dispetto, ma doglia
La vostra condizion dentro mi fisse.
"Not contempt but sorrow...."
"Oh, Frank," cried Oscar, "what a beautiful incident! I remember it all.
I read it this last winter in Naples.... Of course Dante was full of
pity as are all great poets, for they know the weakness of human
nature."
But even "the sorrow" of which Dante spoke seemed to carry with it some
hint of condemnation; for after a pause he went on:
"You must not judge me, Frank: you don't know what I have suffered. No
wonder I snatch now at enjoyment with both hands. They did terrible
things to me. Did you know that when I was arrested the police let the
reporters come to the cell and stare at me. Think of it--the degradation
and the shame--as if I had been a monster on show. Oh! you knew! Then
you know, too, how I was really condemned before I was tried; and what a
farce my trial was. That terrible judge with his insults to those he was
sorry he could not send to the scaffold.
"I never told you the worst thing that befell me. When they took me from
Wandsworth to Reading, we had to stop at Clapham Junction. We were
nearly an hour waiting for the train. There we sat on the platform. I
was in the hideous prison clothes, handcuffed between two warders. You
know how the trains come in every minute. Almost at once I was
recognised, and there passed before me a continual stream of men and
boys, and one after the other offered some foul sneer or gibe or scoff.
They stood before me, Frank, calling me names and spitting on the
ground--an eternity of torture."
My heart bled for him.
"I wonder if any punishment will teach humanity to such people, or
understanding of their own baseness?"
After walking a few paces he turned to me:
"Don't reproach me, Frank, even in thought. You have no right to. You
don't know me yet. Some day you will know more and then you will be
sorry, so sorry that there will be no room for any reproach of me. If I
could tell you what I suffered this winter!"
"This winter!" I cried. "In Naples?"
"Yes, in gay, happy Naples. It was last autumn that I really fell to
ruin. I had come out of prison filled with good intentions, with all
good resolutions. My wife had promised to come back to me. I hoped she
would come very soon. If she had come at once, if she only had, it might
all have been different. But she did not come. I have no doubt she was
right from her point of view. She has always been right.
"But I was alone there in Berneval, and Bosie kept on calling me,
calling, and as you know I went to him. At first it was all wonderful.
The bruised leaves began to unfold in the light and warmth of
affection; the sore feeling began to die out of me.
"But at once my allowance from my wife was stopped. Yes, Frank," he
said, with a touch of the old humour, "they took it away when they
should have doubled it. I did not care. When I had money I gave it to
him without counting, so when I could not pay I thought Bosie would pay,
and I was content. But at once I discovered that he expected me to find
the money. I did what I could; but when my means were exhausted, the
evil days began. He expected me to write plays and get money for us both
as in the past; but I couldn't; I simply could not. When we were dunned
his temper went to pieces. He has never known what it is to want really.
You have no conception of the wretchedness of it all. He has a terrible,
imperious, irritable temper."
"He's the son of his father," I interjected.
"Yes," said Oscar, "I am afraid that's the truth, Frank; he is the son
of his father; violent, and irritable, with a tongue like a lash. As
soon as the means of life were straitened, he became sullen and began
reproaching me; why didn't I write? Why didn't I earn money? What was
the good of me? As if I could write under such conditions. No man,
Frank, has ever suffered worse shame and humiliation.
"At last there was a washing bill to be paid; Bosie was dunned for it,
and when I came in, he raged and whipped me with his tongue. It was
appalling; I had done everything for him, given him everything, lost
everything, and now I could only stand and see love turned to hate: the
strength of love's wine making the bitter more venomous. Then he left
me, Frank, and now there is no hope for me. I am lost, finished, a
derelict floating at the mercy of the stream, without plan or
purpose.... And the worst of it is, I know, if men have treated me
badly, I have treated myself worse; it is our sins against ourselves we
can never forgive.... Do you wonder that I snatch at any pleasure?"
He turned and looked at me all shaken; I saw the tears pouring down his
cheeks.
"I cannot talk any more, Frank," he said in a broken voice, "I must go."
I called a cab. My heart was so heavy within me, so sore, that I said
nothing to stop him. He lifted his hand to me in sign of farewell, and I
turned again to walk home alone, understanding, for the first time in my
life, the full significance of the marvellous line in which Shakespeare
summed up his impeachment of the world and his own justification: the
only justification of any of us mortals:
"A man more sinn'd against than sinning."
FOOTNOTES:
[22] This was the sum promised by the whole Queensberry family and by
Lord Alfred Douglas in particular to Oscar to defray the costs of that
first action for libel which they persuaded him to bring against Lord
Queensberry. Ross has since stated in court that it was never paid. The
history of the monies promised and supplied to Oscar at that time is so
extraordinary and so characteristic of the age that it might well
furnish a chapter to itself. Here it is enough just to say that those
who ought to have supplied him with money evaded the obligation, while
others upon whom he had no claim, helped him liberally; but even large
sums slipped through his careless fingers like water.
[23] Cfr. Appendix: "Criticisms by Robert Ross."
[24] One of the prettiest daughters of the game to be found in Paris at
the time.