CHAPTER XXVII

It was the inhumanity of the prison doctor and the English prison system

that killed Oscar Wilde. The sore place in his ear caused by the fall

when he fainted that Sunday morning in Wandsworth Prison chapel formed

into an abscess and was the final cause of his death. The "operation"

Ross speaks of in his letter was the excision of this tumour. The

imprisonment and starvation, and above all the cruelty of his gaolers,

had done their work.

The local malady was inflamed, as I have already said, by a more general

and more terrible disease. The doctors attributed the red flush Oscar

complained of on his chest and back, which he declared was due to eating

mussels, to another and graver cause. They warned him at once to stop

drinking and smoking and to live with the greatest abstemiousness, for

they recognised in him the tertiary symptoms of that dreadful disease

which the brainless prudery in England allows to decimate the flower of

English manhood unchecked.

Oscar took no heed of their advice. He had little to live for. The

pleasures of eating and drinking in good company were almost the only

pleasures left to him. Why should he deny himself the immediate

enjoyment for a very vague and questionable future benefit?

He never believed in any form of asceticism or self-denial, and towards

the end, feeling that life had nothing more to offer him, the pagan

spirit in him refused to prolong an existence that was no longer joyous.

"I have lived," he would have said with profound truth.

Much has been made of the fact that Oscar was buried in an

out-of-the-way cemetery at Bagneux under depressing circumstances. It

rained the day of the funeral, it appears, and a cold wind blew: the way

was muddy and long, and only a half-a-dozen friends accompanied the

coffin to its resting-place. But after all, such accidents, depressing

as they are at the moment, are unimportant. The dead clay knows nothing

of our feelings, and whether it is borne to the grave in pompous

procession and laid to rest in a great abbey amid the mourning of a

nation or tossed as dust to the wind, is a matter of utter indifference.

Heine's verse holds the supreme consolation:

Immerhin mich wird umgeben

Gotteshimmel dort wie hier

Und wie Todtenlampen schweben

Nachts die Sterne ueber mir.

Oscar Wilde's work was over, his gift to the world completed years

before. Even the friends who loved him and delighted in the charm of his

talk, in his light-hearted gaiety and humour, would scarcely have kept

him longer in the pillory, exposed to the loathing and contempt of this

all-hating world.

The good he did lives after him, and is immortal, the evil is buried in

his grave. Who would deny to-day that he was a quickening and liberating

influence? If his life was given overmuch to self-indulgence, it must be

remembered that his writings and conversation were singularly kindly,

singularly amiable, singularly pure. No harsh or coarse or bitter word

ever passed those eloquent laughing lips. If he served beauty in her

myriad forms, he only showed in his works the beauty that was amiable

and of good report. If only half-a-dozen men mourned for him, their

sorrow was unaffected and intense, and perhaps the greatest of men have

not found in their lifetime even half-a-dozen devoted admirers and

lovers. It is well with our friend, we say: at any rate, he was not

forced to drink the bitter lees of a suffering and dishonourable old

age: Death was merciful to him.

My task is finished. I don't think anyone will doubt that I have done

it in a reverent spirit, telling the truth as I see it, from the

beginning to the end, and hiding or omitting as little as might be of

what ought to be told. Yet when I come to the parting I am painfully

conscious that I have not done Oscar Wilde justice; that some fault or

other in me has led me to dwell too much on his faults and failings and

grudged praise to his soul-subduing charm and the incomparable sweetness

and gaiety of his nature.

Let me now make amends. When to the sessions of sad memory I summon up

the spirits of those whom I have met in the world and loved, men famous

and men of unfulfilled renown, I miss no one so much as I miss Oscar

Wilde. I would rather spend an evening with him than with Renan or

Carlyle, or Verlaine or Dick Burton or Davidson. I would rather have him

back now than almost anyone I have ever met. I have known more heroic

souls and some deeper souls; souls much more keenly alive to ideas of

duty and generosity; but I have known no more charming, no more

quickening, no more delightful spirit.

This may be my shortcoming; it may be that I prize humour and

good-humour and eloquent or poetic speech, the artist qualities, more

than goodness or loyalty or manliness, and so over-estimate things

amiable. But the lovable and joyous things are to me the priceless

things, and the most charming man I have ever met was assuredly Oscar

Wilde. I do not believe that in all the realms of death there is a more

fascinating or delightful companion.

One last word on Oscar Wilde's place in English literature. In the

course of this narrative I have indicated sufficiently, I think, the

value and importance of his work; he will live with Congreve and with

Sheridan as the wittiest and most humorous of all our playwrights. "The

Importance of Being Earnest" has its own place among the best of English

comedies. But Oscar Wilde has done better work than Congreve or

Sheridan: he is a master not only of the smiles, but of the tears of

men. "The Ballad of Reading Gaol" is the best ballad in English; it is

more, it is the noblest utterance that has yet reached us from a modern

prison, the only high utterance indeed that has ever come from that

underworld of man's hatred and man's inhumanity. In it, and by the

spirit of Jesus which breathes through it, Oscar Wilde has done much,

not only to reform English prisons, but to abolish them altogether, for

they are as degrading to the intelligence as they are harmful to the

soul. What gaoler and what gaol could do anything but evil to the

author of such a verse as this:

This too I know--and wise it were

If each could know the same--

That every prison that men build

Is built with bricks of shame,

And bound with bars, lest Christ should see

How men their brothers maim.

Indeed, is it not clear that the man who, in his own wretchedness, wrote

that letter to the warder which I have reproduced, and was eager to

bring about the freeing of the little children at his own cost, is far

above the judge who condemned him or the society which sanctions such

punishments? "The Ballad of Reading Gaol," I repeat, and some pages of

"De Profundis," and, above all, the tragic fate of which these were the

outcome, render Oscar Wilde more interesting to men than any of his

peers.

He has been indeed well served by the malice and cruelty of his enemies;

in this sense his word in "De Profundis" that he stood in symbolic

relation to the art and life of his time is justified.

The English drove Byron and Shelley and Keats into exile and allowed

Chatterton, Davidson and Middleton to die of misery and destitution; but

they treated none of their artists and seers with the malevolent cruelty

they showed to Oscar Wilde. His fate in England is symbolic of the fate

of all artists; in some degree they will all be punished as he was

punished by a grossly materialised people who prefer to go in blinkers

and accept idiotic conventions because they distrust the intellect and

have no taste for mental virtues.

All English artists will be judged by their inferiors and condemned, as

Dante's master was condemned, for their good deeds (_per tuo ben far_):

for it must not be thought that Oscar Wilde was punished solely or even

chiefly for the evil he wrought: he was punished for his popularity and

his preëminence, for the superiority of his mind and wit; he was

punished by the envy of journalists, and by the malignant pedantry of

half-civilised judges. Envy in his case overleaped itself: the hate of

his justicers was so diabolic that they have given him to the pity of

mankind forever; they it is who have made him eternally interesting to

humanity, a tragic figure of imperishable renown.

THE END.

APPENDIX

Here are the two poems of Lord Alfred Douglas which were read out in

Court, on account of which the prosecution sought to incriminate Oscar

Wilde. My readers can judge for themselves the value of any inference to

be drawn from such work by another hand. To me, I must confess, the

poems themselves seem harmless and pretty--I had almost said, academic

and unimportant.

TWO LOVES

TO "THE SPHINX"

Two loves I have of comfort and despair

That like two spirits do suggest me still,

My better angel is a man right fair,

My worse a woman tempting me to ill.--_Shakespeare_.

I dreamed I stood upon a little hill,

And at my feet there lay a ground, that seemed

Like a waste garden, flowering at its will

With flowers and blossoms. There were pools that dreamed

Black and unruffled; there were white lilies

A few, and crocuses, and violets

Purple or pale, snake-like fritillaries

Scarce seen for the rank grass, and through green nets

Blue eyes of shy pervenche winked in the sun.

And there were curious flowers, before unknown,

Flowers that were stained with moonlight, or with shades

Of Nature's wilful moods; and here a one

That had drunk in the transitory tone

Of one brief moment in a sunset; blades

Of grass that in an hundred springs had been

Slowly but exquisitely nurtured by the stars,

And watered with the scented dew long cupped

In lilies, that for rays of sun had seen

Only God's glory, for never a sunrise mars

The luminous air of heaven. Beyond, abrupt,

A gray stone wall, o'ergrown with velvet moss

Uprose. And gazing I stood long, all mazed

To see a place so strange, so sweet, so fair.

And as I stood and marvelled, lo! across

The garden came a youth, one hand he raised

To shield him from the sun, his wind-tossed hair

Was twined with flowers, and in his hand he bore

A purple bunch of bursting grapes, his eyes

Were clear as crystal, naked all was he,

White as the snow on pathless mountains frore,

Red were his lips as red wine-spilth that dyes

A marble floor, his brow chalcedony.

And he came near me, with his lips uncurled

And kind, and caught my hand and kissed my mouth,

And gave me grapes to eat, and said, "Sweet friend,

Come, I will show thee shadows of the world

And images of life. See, from the south

Comes the pale pageant that hath never an end."

And lo! within the garden of my dream

I saw two walking on a shining plain

Of golden light. The one did joyous seem

And fair and blooming, and a sweet refrain

Came from his lips; he sang of pretty maids

And joyous love of comely girl and boy;

His eyes were bright, and 'mid the dancing blades

Of golden grass his feet did trip for joy.

And in his hands he held an ivory lute,

With strings of gold that were as maidens' hair,

And sang with voice as tuneful as a flute,

And round his neck three chains of roses were.

But he that was his comrade walked aside;

He was full sad and sweet, and his large eyes

Were strange with wondrous brightness, staring wide

With gazing; and he sighed with many sighs

That moved me, and his cheeks were wan and white

Like pallid lilies, and his lips were red

Like poppies, and his hands he clenched tight,

And yet again unclenched, and his head

Was wreathed with moon-flowers pale as lips of death.

A purple robe he wore, o'erwrought in gold

With the device of a great snake, whose breath

Was fiery flame: which when I did behold

I fell a-weeping and I cried, "Sweet youth

Tell me why, sad and sighing, thou dost rove

These pleasant realms? I pray thee speak me sooth

What is thy name?" He said, "My name is Love."

Then straight the first did turn himself to me

And cried, "He lieth, for his name is Shame,

But I am Love, and I was wont to be

Alone in this fair garden, till he came

Unasked by night; I am true Love, I fill

The hearts of boy and girl with mutual flame."

Then sighing said the other, "Have thy will,

I am the Love that dare not speak its name."

LORD ALFRED DOUGLAS.

September, 1892.

IN PRAISE OF SHAME

Unto my bed last night, methought there came

Our lady of strange dreams, and from an urn

She poured live fire, so that mine eyes did burn

At sight of it. Anon the floating flame

Took many shapes, and one cried, "I am Shame

That walks with Love, I am most wise to turn

Cold lips and limbs to fire; therefore discern

And see my loveliness, and praise my name."

And afterward, in radiant garments dressed,

With sound of flutes and laughing of glad lips,

A pomp of all the passions passed along,

All the night through; till the white phantom ships

Of dawn sailed in. Whereat I said this song,

"Of all sweet passions Shame is loveliest."

LORD ALFRED DOUGLAS.

THE UNPUBLISHED PORTION OF "DE PROFUNDIS"

This is not the whole of the unpublished portion of "De Profundis"; but

that part only which was read out in Court and used for the purpose of

discrediting Lord Alfred Douglas; still, it is more than half of the

whole in length and absolutely more than the whole in importance:

nothing of any moment is omitted, except the reiteration of accusations

and just this repetition weakens the effect of the argument and

strengthens the impression of querulous nagging instead of dispassionate

statement. If the whole were printed Oscar Wilde would stand worse;

somewhat more selfish and more vindictive.

I have commented the document as it stands mainly for the sake of

clearness and because it justifies in every particular and almost in

every epithet the shadows of the portrait which I have endeavoured to

paint in this book. Curiously enough Oscar Wilde depicts himself

unconsciously in this part of "De Profundis" in a more unfavourable

light than that accorded him in my memory. I believe mine is the more

faithful portrait of him, but that is for my readers to determine.

FRANK HARRIS.

NEW YORK, December, 1915.

H.M. Prison,

Reading.

DEAR BOSIE,

After long and fruitless waiting I have determined to write to you

myself, as much for your sake as for mine, as I would not like to think

that I had passed through two long years of imprisonment without ever

having received a single line from you, or any news or message even,

except such as gave me pain.

Our ill-fated and most lamentable friendship has ended in ruin and

public infamy for me, yet the memory of our ancient affection is often

with me, and the thought that loathing, bitterness and contempt should

for ever take the place in my heart once held by love is very sad to me;

and you yourself will, I think, feel in your heart that to write to me

as I lie in the loneliness of prison life is better than to publish my

letters without my permission, or to dedicate poems to me unasked,

though the world will know nothing of whatever words of grief or

passion, of remorse or indifference, you may choose to send as your

answer or your appeal.

I have no doubt that in this letter which I have to write of your life

and mine, of the past and of the future, of sweet things changed to

bitterness and of bitter things that may be turned to joy, there will be

much that will wound your vanity to the quick. If it prove so, read the

letter over and over again till it kills your vanity. If you find in it

something of which you feel that you are unjustly accused, remember that

one should be thankful that there is any fault of which one can be

unjustly accused. If there be in it one single passage that brings tears

to your eyes, weep as we weep in prison, where the day no less than the

night is set apart for tears. It is the only thing that can save you. If

you go complaining to your mother, as you did with reference to the

scorn of you I displayed in my letter to Robbie, so that she may flatter

and soothe you back into self-complacency or conceit, you will be

completely lost. If you find one false excuse for yourself you will soon

find a hundred, and be just what you were before. Do you still say, as

you said to Robbie in your answer, that I "attribute unworthy motives"

to you? Ah! you had no motives in life. You had appetites merely. A

motive is an intellectual aim. That you were "very young" when our

friendship began? Your defect was not that you knew so little about

life, but that you knew so much. The morning dawn of boyhood with its

delicate bloom, its clear pure light, its joy of innocence and

expectation, you had left far behind you. With very swift and running

feet you had passed from Romance to Realism. The gutter and the things

that live in it had begun to fascinate you. That was the origin of the

trouble[39] in which you sought my aid, and I, unwisely, according to

the wisdom of this world, out of pity and kindness, gave it to you. You

must read this letter right through, though each word may become to you

as the fire or knife of the surgeon that makes the delicate flesh burn

or bleed. Remember that the fool to the eyes of the gods and the fool to

the eyes of man are very different. One who is entirely ignorant[40] of

the modes of Art in its revelation or the moods of thought in its

progress, of the pomp of the Latin line or the richer music of the

vowelled Greek, of Tuscan sculpture or Elizabethan song, may yet be full

of the very sweetest wisdom. The real fool, such as the gods mock or

mar, is he who does not know himself. I was such a one too long. You

have been such a one too long. Be so no more. Do not be afraid. The

supreme vice is shallowness. Everything that is realised is right.

Remember also that whatever is misery to you to read, is still greater

misery to me to set down. They have permitted you to see the strange and

tragic shapes of life as one sees shadows in a crystal. The head of

Medusa that turns living men to stone, you have been allowed to look at

in a mirror merely. You yourself have walked free among the flowers.

From me the beautiful world of colour and motion has been taken away.

I will begin by telling you that I blame myself terribly. As I sit in

this dark cell in convict clothes, a disgraced and ruined man, I blame

myself. In the perturbed and fitful nights of anguish, in the long

monotonous days of pain, it is myself I blame. I blame myself for

allowing an intellectual friendship, a friendship whose primary aim was

not the creation and contemplation of beautiful things, entirely to

dominate my life. From the very first there was too wide a gap between

us. You had been idle at your school, worse than idle[41] at your

university. You did not realise that an artist, and especially such an

artist as I am, one, that is to say, the quality of whose work depends

on the intensification of personality, requires an intellectual

atmosphere, quiet, peace, and solitude. You admired my work when it was

finished: you enjoyed the brilliant successes of my first nights, and

the brilliant banquets that followed them: you were proud, and quite

naturally so, of being the intimate friend of an artist so

distinguished: but you could not understand the conditions requisite for

the production of artistic work. I am not speaking in phrases of

rhetorical exaggeration, but in terms of absolute truth to actual fact

when I remind you that during the whole time we were together I never

wrote one single line. Whether at Torquay, Goring, London, Florence, or

elsewhere, my life, as long as you were by my side, was entirely sterile

and uncreative. And with but few intervals, you were, I regret to say,

by my side always.

I remember, for instance, in September, '93, to select merely one

instance out of many, taking a set of chambers, purely in order to work

undisturbed, as I had broken my contract with John Hare, for whom I had

promised to write a play, and who was pressing me on the subject. During

the first week you kept away. We had, not unnaturally indeed, differed

on the question of the artistic value[42] of your translation of

_Salomé_. So you contented yourself with sending me foolish letters on

the subject. In that week I wrote and completed in every detail, as it

was ultimately performed, the first act of an _An Ideal Husband_. The

second week you returned, and my work practically had to be given up. I

arrived at St. James's Place every morning at 11.30 in order to have the

opportunity of thinking and writing without the interruption inseparable

from my own household, quiet and peaceful as that household was. But the

attempt was vain. At 12 o'clock you drove up and stayed smoking

cigarettes and chattering till 1.30, when I had to take you out to

luncheon at the Café Royal or the Berkeley. Luncheon with its liqueurs

lasted usually till 3.30. For an hour you retired to White's. At tea

time you appeared again and stayed till it was time to dress for

dinner. You dined with me either at the Savoy or at Tite Street. We did

not separate as a rule till after midnight, as supper at Willis' had to

wind up the entrancing day. That was my life for those three months,

every single day, except during the four days when you went abroad. I

then, of course, had to go over to Calais to fetch you back. For one of

my nature and temperament it was a position at once grotesque and

tragic.

You surely must realise that now. You must see now that your incapacity

of being alone: your nature so exigent in its persistent claim on the

attention and time of others: your lack of any power of sustained

intellectual concentration: the unfortunate accident--for I like to

think it was no more--that you had not been able to acquire the "Oxford

temper" in intellectual matters, never, I mean, been one who could play

gracefully with ideas, but had arrived at violence of opinion

merely--that all these things, combined with the fact that your desires

and your interests were in Life, not in Art, were as destructive to your

own progress in culture as they were to my work as an artist. When I

compare my friendship with you to my friendship with still younger men,

as John Gray and Pierre Louys, I feel ashamed. My real life, my higher

life, was with them and such as they.

Of the appalling results of my friendship with you I don't speak at

present. I am thinking merely of its quality while it lasted. It was

intellectually degrading to me. You had the rudiments[43] of an artistic

temperament in its germ. But I met you either too late or too soon. I

don't know which. When you were away I was all right. The moment, in the

early December of the year to which I have been alluding, I had

succeeded in inducing your mother to send you out of England, I

collected again the torn and ravelled web of my imagination, got my life

back into my own hands, and not merely finished the three remaining acts

of the _Ideal Husband_, but conceived and had almost completed two other

plays of a completely different type, the _Florentine Tragedy_ and _La

Sainte Courtesane_, when suddenly, unbidden, unwelcome, and under

circumstances fatal to my happiness, you returned. The two works left

then imperfect I was unable to take up again. The mood that created them

I could never recover. You now, having yourself published a volume of

verse, will be able to recognise the truth of everything I have said

here. Whether you can or not it remains as a hideous truth in the very

heart of our friendship. While you were with me you were the absolute

ruin of my art, and in allowing you to stand persistently between Art

and myself, I give to myself shame and blame in the fullest degree. You

couldn't appreciate, you couldn't know, you couldn't understand. I had

no right to expect it of you at all. Your interests were merely in your

meals and moods. Your desires were simply for amusements, for ordinary

or less ordinary pleasures. They were what your temperament needed, or

thought it needed for the moment. I should have forbidden you my house

and my chambers except when I specially invited you. I blame myself

without reserve for my weakness. It was merely weakness. One half-hour

with Art was always more to me than a cycle with you. Nothing really at

any period of my life was ever of the smallest importance[44] to me

compared with Art. But in the case of an artist, weakness is nothing

less than a crime when it is a weakness that paralyses the imagination.

I blame myself for having allowed you to bring me to utter and

discreditable financial ruin. I remember one morning in the early

October of '92, sitting in the yellowing woods at Bracknell with your

mother. At that time I knew very little of your real nature. I had

stayed from a Saturday to Monday with you at Oxford. You had stayed with

me at Cromer for ten days and played golf. The conversation turned on

you, and your mother began to speak to me about your character. She told

me of your two chief faults, your vanity, and your being, as she termed

it, "all wrong about money." I have a distinct recollection of how I

laughed. I had no idea that the first would bring me to prison and the

second to bankruptcy. I thought vanity a sort of graceful flower for a

young man to wear, as for extravagance--the virtues of prudence and

thrift were not in my own nature or my own race. But before our

friendship was one month older I began to see what your mother really

meant. Your insistence on a life of reckless profusion: your incessant

demands for money: your claim that all your pleasures should be paid for

by me, whether I was with you or not, brought me, after some time, into

serious monetary difficulties, and what made the extravagance to me, at

any rate, so monotonously uninteresting, as your persistent grasp on my

life grew stronger and stronger, was that the money was spent on little

more than the pleasures of eating, drinking and the like. Now and then

it is a joy to have one's table red with wine and roses, but you

outstripped all taste and temperance. You demanded without grace and

received without thanks. You grew to think that you had a sort of right

to live at my expense, and in a profuse luxury to which you had never

been accustomed, and which, for that reason, made your appetites all the

more keen, and at the end, if you lost money gambling in some Algiers

Casino, you simply telegraphed next morning to me in London to lodge the

amount of your losses to your account at your bank, and gave the matter

no further thought of any kind.

When I tell you that between the autumn of 1892 and the date of my

imprisonment, I spent with you and on you, more than £5,000 in actual

money, irrespective of the bills I incurred, you will have some idea of

the sort of life on which you insisted. Do you think I exaggerate? My

ordinary expenses with you for an ordinary day in London--for luncheon,

dinner, supper, amusements, hansoms, and the rest of it--ranged from £12

to £20, and the week's expenses were naturally in proportion and ranged

from £80 to £130. For our three months at Goring my expenses (rent, of

course, included) were £1,340. Step by step with the Bankruptcy Receiver

I had to go over every item of my life. It was horrible. "Plain living

and high thinking," was, of course, an ideal you could not at that time

have appreciated, but such an extravagance was a disgrace to both of

us. One of the most delightful dinners I remember ever having had is one

Robbie and I had together in a little Soho Café, which cost about as

many shillings as my dinners to you used to cost pounds. Out of my

dinner with Robbie came the first and best of all my dialogues. Idea,

title, treatment, mode, everything was struck out at a 3 franc 50c.

table d'hôte. Out of the reckless dinners with you nothing remains but

the memory that too much was eaten and too much was drunk. And my

yielding to your demands was bad for you. You know that now. It made you

grasping often: at times not a little unscrupulous: ungracious always.

There was, on far too many occasions, too little joy or privilege in

being your host. You forgot--I will not say the formal courtesy of

thanks, for formal courtesies will strain a close friendship--but simply

the grace of sweet companionship, the charm of pleasant conversation,

and all those gentle humanities that make life lovely, and are an

accompaniment to life as music might be, keeping things in tune and

filling with melody the harsh or silent places. And though it may seem

strange to you that one in the terrible position in which I am situated,

should find a difference between one disgrace and another, still I

frankly admit that the folly of throwing away all this money on you, and

letting you squander my fortune to your own hurt as well as to mine,

gives to me and in my eyes a note of common profligacy to my bankruptcy

that makes me doubly ashamed of it. I was made for other things.

But most of all I blame myself for the entire ethical degradation I

allowed you to bring on me. The basis of character is will power, and my

will power became absolutely subject[45] to yours. It sounds a grotesque

thing to say, but it is none the less true. Those incessant scenes that

seemed to be almost physically necessary to you, and in which your mind

and body grew distorted, and you became a thing as terrible to look at

as to listen to: that dreadful mania you inherit from your father, the

mania for writing revolting and loathsome letters: your entire lack of

any control over your emotions as displayed in your long resentful

moods of sullen silence, no less than in the sudden fits of almost

epileptic rage: all these things in reference to which one of my letters

to you, left by you lying about in the Savoy or some other hotel, and so

produced in court by your father's counsel, contained an entreaty not

devoid of pathos, had you at that time been able to recognise pathos

either in its elements or its expression--these, I say, were the origin

and causes of my fatal yielding to you in your daily increasing demands.

You wore me out. It was the triumph of the smaller over the bigger

nature. It was the case of that tyranny of the weak over the strong

which somewhere in one of my plays I describe as being "the only tyranny

that lasts." And it was inevitable. In every relation of life with

others one has to find some _moyen de vivre_.

I had always thought that my giving up to you in small things meant

nothing: that when a great moment arrived I could myself re-assert my

will power in its natural superiority. It was not so. At the great

moment my will power completely failed me. In life there is really no

great or small thing. All things are of equal value and of equal size.

My habit--due to indifference chiefly at first--of giving up to you in

everything had become insensibly a real part of my nature. Without my

knowing it, it had stereotyped my temperament to one permanent and fatal

mood. That is why, in the subtle epilogue to the first edition of his

essays, Pater says that "Failure is to form habits." When he said it the

dull Oxford people thought the phrase a mere wilful inversion of the

somewhat wearisome text of Aristotelian Ethics, but there is a

wonderful, a terrible truth hidden in it. I had allowed you to sap my

strength of character, and to me the formation of a habit had proved to

be not failure merely, but ruin. Ethically you had been even still more

destructive to me than you had been artistically.

The warrant once granted, your will, of course, directed everything. At

a time when I should have been in London taking wise counsel and calmly

considering the hideous trap in which I had allowed myself to be

caught--the booby trap, as your father calls it to the present day--you

insisted on my taking you to Monte Carlo, of all revolting places on

God's earth, that all day and all night as well, you might gamble as

long as the casino remained open. As for me--baccarat[46] having no

charms for me--I was left alone outside by myself. You refused to

discuss even for five minutes the position to which you and your father

had brought me. My business was merely to pay your hotel expenses and

your losses. The slightest allusion to the ordeal awaiting me was

regarded as a bore. A new brand of champagne that was recommended to us

had more interest for you. On our return to London those of my friends

who really desired my welfare implored me to retire abroad, and not to

face an impossible trial. You imputed mean motives to them for giving

such advice and cowardice to me for listening to it. You forced me to

stay to brazen it out, if possible, in the box by absurd and silly

perjuries. At the end, of course, I was arrested, and your father became

the hero of the hour.

As far as I can make out, I ended my friendship with you every three

months regularly. And each time that I did so you managed by means of

entreaties, telegrams, letters, the interposition of your friends, the

interposition of mine, and the like to induce me to allow you back.

But the froth and folly of our life grew often very wearisome to me: it

was only in the mire that we met: and fascinating, terribly fascinating

though the one[47] topic round which your talk invariably centered was,

still at the end it became quite monotonous to me. I was often bored to

death by it, and accepted it as I accepted your passion for music halls,

or your mania for absurd extravagance in eating and drinking, or any

other of your to me less attractive characteristics, as a thing that is

to say, that one simply had to put up with, a part of the high price one

had to pay for knowing you.

When you came one Monday evening to my rooms, accompanied by two[48] of

your friends, I found myself actually flying abroad next morning to

escape from you, giving my family some absurd reason for my sudden

departure, and leaving a false address with my servant for fear you

might follow me by the next train....

Our friendship had always been a source of distress to my wife: not

merely because she had never liked you personally, but because she saw

how your continual companionship altered me, and not for the better.

You started without delay for Paris, sending me passionate telegrams on

the road to beg me to see you once, at any rate. I declined. You arrived

in Paris late on a Saturday night and found a brief letter from me

waiting for you at your hotel stating that I would not see you. Next

morning I received in Tite Street a telegram of some ten or eleven pages

in length from you. You stated in it that no matter what you had done to

me you could not believe that I would absolutely decline to see you; you

reminded me that for the sake of seeing me even for one hour you had

travelled six days and six nights across Europe without stopping once on

the way; you made what I must admit was a most pathetic appeal, and

ended with what seemed to me a threat of suicide and one not thinly

veiled. You had yourself often told me how many of your race there had

been who had stained their hands in their own blood: your uncle

certainly, your grandfather possibly; many others in the mad bad line

from which you come. Pity, my old affection for you, regard for your

mother, to whom your death under such dreadful circumstances would have

been a blow almost too great for her to bear, the horror of the idea

that so young a life, and one that amidst all its ugly faults had still

promise of beauty in it, should come to so revolting an end, mere

humanity itself--all these, if excuses be necessary, must serve as an

excuse for consenting to accord you one last interview. When I arrived

in Paris, your tears breaking out again and again all through the

evening, and falling over your cheeks like rain as we sat at dinner

first at Voisin's, at supper at Paillard's afterwards, the unfeigned joy

you evinced at seeing me, holding my hand whenever you could, as though

you were a gentle and penitent child; your contrition, so simple and

sincere at the moment made me consent to renew our friendship. Two days

after we had returned to London, your father saw you having luncheon

with me at the Café Royal, joined my table, drank of my wine, and that

afternoon, through a letter addressed to you, began his first attack on

me.... It may be strange, but I had once again, I will not say the

chance, but the duty, of separating from you forced on me. I need hardly

remind you that I refer to your conduct to me at Brighton from October

10th to 13th, 1894. Three years is a long time for you to go back. But

we who live in prison, and in whose lives there is no event but sorrow,

have to measure time by throbs of pain, and the record of bitter

moments. We have nothing else to think of. Suffering, curious as it may

sound to you, is the means by which we exist, because it is the only

means by which we become conscious of existing; and the remembrance of

suffering in the past is necessary to us as the warrant, the evidence,

of our continued identity. Between myself and the memory of joy lies a

gulf no less deep than that between myself and joy in its actuality. Had

our life together been as the world fancied it to be, one simply of

pleasure, profligacies and laughter, I would not be able to recall a

single passage in it. It is because it was full of moments and days

tragic, bitter, sinister in their warnings, dull or dreadful in their

monotonous scenes and unseemly violences, that I can see or hear each

separate incident in its detail, can indeed see or hear little else. So

much in this place do men live by pain that my friendship with you, in

the way through which I am forced to remember it, appears to me always

as a prelude consonant with those varying modes of anguish which each

day I have to realise, nay more, to necessitate them even; as though my

life, whatever it had seemed to myself and others, had all the while

been a real symphony of sorrow, passing through its rhythmically linked

movements to its certain resolution, with that inevitableness that in

Art characterises the treatment of every great theme.... I spoke of your

conduct to me on three successive days three years ago, did I not?

I entertained you, of course, I had no option in the matter; but

elsewhere, and not in my own home. The next day, Monday, your companion

returned to the duties[49] of his profession, and you stayed with me.

Bored with Worthing, and still more, I have no doubt, with my fruitless

efforts to concentrate my attention on my play, the only thing that

really interested me at the moment, you insist on being taken to the

Grand Hotel at Brighton.

The night we arrive you fall ill with that dreadful low fever that is

foolishly called the influenza, your second, if not your third, attack.

I need not remind you how I waited on you, and tended you, not merely

with every luxury of fruit, flowers, presents, books and the like that

money can procure, but with that affection, tenderness and love that,

whatever you may think, is not to be procured for money. Except for an

hour's walk in the morning, an hour's drive in the afternoon, I never

left the hotel. I got special grapes from London for you as you did not

care for those the hotel supplied; invented things to please you;

remained either with you or in the room next to yours; sat with you

every evening to quiet or amuse you.

After four or five days you recover, and I take lodgings in order to try

and finish my play. You, of course, accompany me. The morning after the

day on which we were installed I feel extremely ill.

The doctor finds I have caught the influenza from you.

There is no manservant to wait on me, not even any one to send out on a

message, or to get what the doctor orders. But you are there. I feel no

alarm. The next two days you leave me entirely alone without care,

without attendance, without anything. It was not a question of grapes,

flowers and charming gifts: it was a question of mere necessities.

And when I was left all day without anything to read, you calmly tell me

that you bought the book I wanted, and that they had promised to send it

down, a statement which I found by chance afterwards to have been

entirely untrue, from beginning to end. All the while you are, of

course, living at my expense, driving about, dining at the Grand Hotel,

and indeed only appearing in my room for money. On the Saturday night,

you having completely left me unattended and alone since the morning, I

asked you to come back after dinner, and sit with me for a little. With

irritable voice and ungracious manner you promise to do so. I wait till

11 o'clock, and you never appear.

At three in the morning, unable to sleep, and tortured with thirst, I

made my way in the dark and cold, down to the sitting-room in the hopes

of finding some water there. I found you. You fell on me with every

hideous word an intemperate mood, an undisciplined and untutored nature

could suggest. By the terrible alchemy of egotism you converted your

remorse into rage. You accused me of selfishness in expecting you to be

with me when I was ill; of standing between you and your amusements; of

trying to deprive you of your pleasures.

You told me, and I know it was quite true, that you had come back at

midnight simply in order to change your dress-clothes, and go out again.

I told you at length to leave the room; you pretended to do so, but when

I lifted up my head from the pillow in which I had buried it, you were

still there, and with brutality of laughter and hysteria of rage you

moved suddenly towards me. A sense of horror came over me, for what

exact reason I could not make out; but I got out of my bed at once, and

bare-footed and just as I was, made my way down the two nights of stairs

to the sitting-room.

You returned silently for money; took what you could find on the

dressing table, and mantelpiece, and left the house with your luggage.

Need I tell you what I thought of you during the two lonely wretched

days of illness that followed? Is it necessary for me to state, that I

saw clearly that it would be a dishonour to myself to continue even an

acquaintance with such a one as you had showed yourself to be? That I

recognised that the ultimate moment had come and recognised it as being

really a great relief? And that I knew that for the future my art and

life would be freer and better and more beautiful in every possible way?

Ill as I was, I felt at ease. The fact that the separation was

irrevocable gave me peace.

Wednesday was my birthday. Amongst the telegrams and communications on

my table was a letter in your handwriting. I opened it with a sense of

sadness on me. I knew that the time had gone by when a pretty phrase, an

expression of affection, a word of sorrow, would make me take you back.

But I was entirely deceived. I had underrated you.

You congratulated me on my prudence in leaving the sick bed, on my

sudden flight downstairs. "It was an ugly moment for you," you said,

"uglier than you imagine." Ah! I felt it but too well. What it had

really meant I do not know; whether you had with you the pistol you had

bought to try to frighten your father with, and that thinking it to be

unloaded, you had once fired off in a public restaurant in my company;

whether your hand was moving towards a common dinner knife that by

chance was lying on the table between us; whether forgetting in your

rage your low[50] stature and inferior strength, you had thought of some

special personal insult, or attack even, as I lay ill there; I could not

tell. I do not know to the present moment. All I know is that a feeling

of utter horror had come over me, and that I had felt that unless I left

the room at once and got away, you would have done or tried to do

something that would have been, even to you, a source of lifelong

shame....

On your return to town from the actual scene of the tragedy to which you

had been summoned, you came at once to me very sweetly and very simply,

in your suit of woe, and with your eyes dim with tears. You sought

consolation and help, as a child might seek it. I opened to you my

house, my home, my heart. I made your sorrow mine also, that you might

have help in bearing it. Never even by one word, did I allude to your

conduct towards me, to the revolting scenes, and the revolting letter.

The gods are strange. It is not our vices only they make instruments to

scourge us. They bring us to ruin through what in us is good, gentle,

humane, loving. But for my pity and affection for you and yours, I would

not now be weeping in this terrible place.

Of course, I discern in all our relations, not destiny merely, but

Doom--Doom that walks always swiftly, because she goes to the shedding

of blood. Through your father you come of a race, marriage with whom is

horrible, friendship fatal, and that lays violent hands either on its

own life, or on the lives of others.

In every little circumstance in which the ways of our lives met, in

every point of great or seemingly trivial import in which you came to me

for pleasure or help, in the small chances, the slight accidents that

look, in their relation to life, to be no more than the dust that dances

in a beam, or the leaf that flutters from a tree, ruin followed like the

echo of a bitter cry, or the shadow that hunts with the beast of prey.

Our friendship really begins with your begging me, in a most pathetic

and charming letter, to assist you in a position appalling to anyone,

doubly so to a young man at Oxford. I do so, and ultimately, through

your using my name as your friend with Sir George Lewis I begin to lose

his esteem and friendship, a friendship of fifteen years' standing. When

I was deprived of his advice and help and regard, I was deprived of the

one great safeguard of my life. You send me a very nice poem of the

undergraduate school of verse for my approval. I reply by a letter of

fantastic literary conceits; I compare you to Hylas, or Hyacinth,

Jonquil or Narcissus, or some one whom the Great God of Poetry favoured,

and honoured with his love. The letter is like a passage from one of

Shakespeare's sonnets transposed to a minor key.

It was, let me say frankly, the sort of letter I would, in a happy, if

wilful moment, have written to any graceful young man of either

university who had sent me a poem of his own making, certain that he

would have sufficient wit, or culture, to interpret rightly its

fantastic phrases. Look at the history of that letter! It passes from

you into the hands of a loathsome companion[51], from him to a gang of

blackmailers, copies of it are sent about London to my friends, and to

the manager[52] of the theatre where my work is being performed, every

construction but the right one is put on it, society is thrilled with

the absurd rumours that I have had to pay a high sum of money for having

written an infamous letter to you; this forms the basis of your father's

worst attack.

I produce the original letter myself in court to show what it really is;

it is denounced by your father's counsel as a revolting and insidious

attempt to corrupt innocence; ultimately it forms part of a criminal

charge; the crown takes it up; the judge sums up on it with little

learning and much morality; I go to prison for it at last. That is the

result of writing you a charming letter.

It makes me feel sometimes as if you yourself had been merely a puppet

worked by some secret and unseen hand to bring terrible events to a

terrible issue. But puppets themselves have passions. They will bring a

new plot into what they are presenting, and twist the ordered issue of

vicissitude to suit some whim or appetite of their own. To be entirely

free, and at the same time entirely dominated by law, is the eternal

paradox of human life that we realise at every moment; and this, I often

think, is the only explanation possible of your nature, if indeed for

the profound and terrible mystery of a human soul there is any

explanation at all, except one that makes the mystery all the more

marvellous still.

I thought life was going to be a brilliant comedy, and that you were to

be one of the graceful figures in it. I found it to be a revolting and

repellent tragedy, and that the sinister occasion of the great

catastrophe, sinister in its concentration of aim and intensity of

narrowed will power, was yourself stripped of the mask of joy and

pleasure by which you, no less than I, had been deceived and led astray.

The memory of our friendship is the shadow that walks with me here: that

seems never to leave me: that wakes me up at night to tell me the same

story over and over till its wearisome iteration makes all sleep abandon

me till dawn: at dawn it begins again: it follows me into the prison

yard and makes me talk to myself as I tramp round: each detail that

accompanied each dreadful moment I am forced to recall: there is nothing

that happened in those ill-starred years that I cannot recreate in that

chamber of the brain which is set apart for grief or for despair; every

strained note of your voice, every twitch and gesture of your nervous

hands, every bitter word, every poisonous phrase comes back to me: I

remember the street or river down which we passed: the wall or woodland

that surrounded us; at what figure on the dial stood the hands of the

clock; which way went the wings of the wind, the shape and colour of the

moon.

There is, I know, one answer to all that I have said to you, and that is

that you loved me: that all through those two and a half years during

which the fates were weaving into one scarlet pattern the threads of our

divided lives you really loved me.

Though I saw quite clearly that my position in the world of art, the

interest that my personality had always excited, my money, the luxury in

which I lived, the thousand and one things that went to make up a life

so charmingly and so wonderfully improbable as mine was, were, each and

all of them, elements that fascinated you and made you cling to me; yet

besides all this there was something more, some strange attraction for

you: you loved me far better than you loved anyone else. But you, like

myself, have had a terrible tragedy in your life, though one of an

entirely opposite character to mine. Do you want to learn what it was?

It was this. In you, hate was always stronger than love. Your hatred[53]

of your father was of such stature that it entirely outstripped,

overgrew, and overshadowed your love of me. There was no struggle

between them at all, or but little; of such dimensions was your hatred

and of such monstrous growth. You did not realise that there was no room

for both passions in the same soul: they cannot live together in that

fair carven house. Love is fed by the imagination, by which we become

wiser than we know, better than we feel, nobler than we are; by which we

can see life as a whole; by which and by which alone, we can understand

others in their real as in their ideal relations. Only what is fine, and

finely conceived, can feed love. But anything will feed hate. There was

not a glass of champagne that you drank, not a rich dish that you ate of

in all those years, that did not feed your hate and make it fat. So to

gratify it, you gambled with my life, as you gambled with my money,

carelessly, recklessly, indifferent to the consequences. If you lost,

the loss would not, you fancied, be yours. If you won, yours, you knew,

would be the exultation and the advantages of victory.

Hate blinds people. You were not aware of that. Love can read the

writing on the remotest star, but hate so blinded you that you could see

no further than the narrow, walled in, and already lust-withered garden

of your common desires. Your terrible lack of imagination, the one

really fatal defect in your character, was entirely the result of the

hate that lived in you. Subtly, silently, and in secret, hate gnawed at

your nature, as the lichen bites at the root of some sallow plant, till

you grew to see nothing but the most meagre interests and the most petty

aims. That faculty in you which love would have fostered, hate poisoned

and paralysed.

The idea of your being the object of a terrible quarrel between your

father and a man of my position seemed to delight you.

You scented the chance of a public scandal and flew to it. The prospect

of a battle in which you would be safe delighted you.

You know what my art was to me, the great primal note by which I had

revealed, first myself to myself, and then myself to the world, the

great passion of my life, the love to which all other loves were as

marsh water to red wine, or the glow worm of the marsh to the magic

mirror of the moon.... Don't you understand now that your lack of

imagination was the one really fatal defect of your character? What you

had to do was quite simple, and quite clear before you; but hate had

blinded you, and you could see nothing.

Life is quite lovely to you. And yet, if you are wise, and wish to find

life much lovelier still, and in a different manner you will let the

reading of this terrible letter--for such I know it is--prove to you as

important a crisis and turning point of your life as the writing of it

is to me. Your pale face used to flush easily with wine or pleasure. If,

as you read what is here written, it from time to time becomes scorched,

as though by a furnace blast, with shame, it will be all the better for

you. The supreme vice is shallowness. Whatever is realised is right.

How clearly I saw it then, as now, I need not tell you. But I said to

myself, "At all costs I must keep love in my heart. If I go into prison

without love, what will become of my soul?" The letters I wrote to you

at that time from Holloway were my efforts to keep love as the dominant

note of my own nature. I could, if I had chosen, have torn you to pieces

with bitter reproaches. I could have rent you with maledictions.

The sins of another were being placed to my account. Had I so chosen, I

could on either trial have saved myself at his expense, not from shame

indeed, but from imprisonment.[54] Had I cared to show that the crown

witnesses--the three most important--had been carefully coached by your

father and his solicitors, not in reticences merely, but in assertions,

in the absolute transference deliberate, plotted, and rehearsed, of the

actions and doings of someone else on to me, I could have had each one

of them dismissed from the box by the judge, more summarily than even

wretched perjured Atkins was. I could have walked out of court with my

tongue in my cheek, and my hands in my pockets, a free man. The

strongest pressure was put upon me to do so, I was earnestly advised,

begged, entreated to do so by people, whose sole interest was my

welfare, and the welfare of my house. But I refused. I did not choose to

do so. I have never regretted my decision for a single moment, even in

the most bitter periods of my imprisonment. Such a course of action

would have been beneath me. Sins of the flesh are nothing. They are

maladies for physicians to cure, if they should be cured. Sins of the

soul alone are shameful. To have secured my acquittal by such means

would have been a life-long torture to me. But do you really think that

you were worthy of the love I was showing you then, or that for a single

moment I thought you were? Do you really think that any period of our

friendship you were worthy of the love I showed you, or that for a

single moment I thought you were? I knew you were not. But love does not

traffic in a market place, nor use a huckster's scales. Its joy, like

the joy of the intellect, is to feel itself alive. The aim of love is to

love; no more, and no less. You were my enemy; such an enemy as no man

ever had. I had given you my life; and to gratify the lowest and most

contemptible of all human passions, hatred and vanity and greed, you had

thrown it away. In less than three years you had entirely ruined me from

every point of view.

After my terrible sentence, when the prison dress was on me, and the

prison house closed, I sat amidst the ruins of my wonderful life,

crushed by anguish, bewildered with terror, dazed through pain. But I

would not hate you. Every day I said to myself, "I must keep love in my

heart to-day, else how shall I live through the day?" I reminded myself

that you meant no evil to me at any rate....

It all flashed across me, and I remember that for the first and last

time in my entire prison life, I laughed. In that laugh was all the

scorn of all the world. Prince Fleur de lys! I saw that nothing that had

happened had made you realise a single thing. You were, in your own

eyes, still the graceful prince of a trivial comedy, not the sombre

figure of a tragic show.

Had there been nothing in your heart to cry out against so vulgar a

sacrilege, you might at least have remembered the sonnet he wrote who

saw with such sorrow and scorn the letters of John Keats sold by public

auction in London, and have understood at last the real meaning of my

lines:

"... I think they love not art

Who break the crystal of a poet's heart

That small and sickly eyes may glare or gloat."

One cannot always keep an adder in one's breast to feed on one, nor rise

up every night to sow thorns in the garden of one's soul.

I cannot allow you to go through life bearing in your heart the burden

of having ruined a man like me.

Does it ever occur to you what an awful position I would have been in

if, for the last two years, during my appalling sentence, I had been

dependent on you as a friend? Do you ever think of that? Do you ever

feel any gratitude to those who by kindness without stint, devotion

without limit, cheerfulness and joy in giving, have lightened my black

burden for me, have arranged my future life for me, have visited me

again and again, have written to me beautiful and sympathetic letters,

have managed my affairs for me, have stood by me in the teeth of

obloquy, taunt, open sneer or insult even? I thank God every day that he

gave me friends other than you. I owe everything to them. The very books

in my cell are paid for by Robbie out of his pocket money. From the same

source[55] are to come clothes for me when I am released. I am not

ashamed of taking a thing that is given by love and affection. I am

proud of it. But do you ever think of what friends such as More Adey,

Robbie, Robert Sherard, Frank Harris, and Arthur Clifton have been to me

in giving me comfort, help, affection, sympathy and the like?...

I know that your mother, Lady Queensberry, puts the blame on me. I hear

of it, not from people who know you, but from people who do not know

you, and do not desire to know you. I hear of it often. She talks of the

influence of an elder over a younger man, for instance. It is one of her

favourite attitudes towards the question, as it is always a successful

appeal to popular prejudice and ignorance. I need not ask you what

influence I had over you. You know I had none.

It was one of your frequent boasts that I had none, the only one indeed,

that was well founded. What was there, as a mere matter of fact, in you

that I could influence? Your brain? It was undeveloped. Your

imagination? It was dead. Your heart? It was not yet born. Of all the

people who have ever crossed my life, you were the one, and the only

one, I was unable in any way to influence in any direction.

I waited month after month to hear from you. Even if I had not been

waiting but had shut the doors against you, you should have remembered

that no one can possibly shut the doors against love forever. The unjust

judge in the gospels rises up at length to give a just decision because

justice comes daily knocking at his door: and at night time the friend,

in whose heart there is no real friendship, yields at length to his

friend "because of his importunity." There is no prison in any world

into which love cannot force an entrance. If you did not understand

that, you did not understand anything about love at all....

Write to me with full frankness, about yourself: about your life: your

friends: your occupations: your books. Whatever you have to say for

yourself, say it without fear. Don't write what you don't mean: that is

all. If anything in your letter is false or counterfeit I shall detect

it by the ring at once. It is not for nothing, or to no purpose that in

my lifelong cult of literature, I have made myself,

"Miser of sound and syllable, no less

Than Midas of his coinage."

Remember also that I have yet to know you. Perhaps we have yet to know

each other. For myself, I have but this last thing to say. Do not be

afraid of the past. If people tell you that it is irrevocable, do not

believe them. The past, the present and the future are but one moment in

the sight of God, in whose sight we should try to live. Time and space,

succession and extension, are merely accidental conditions of a thought.

The imagination can transcend them and more, in a free sphere of ideal

existences. Things, also, are in their essence what we choose to make

them. A thing is, according to the mode in which one looks at it. "Where

others," says Blake, "see but the dawn coming over the hill, I see the

sons of God shouting for joy." What seemed to the world and to myself my

future I lost irretrievably when I let myself be taunted into taking the

action against your father, had, I daresay, lost in reality long before

that. What lies before me is the past. I have got to make myself look on

that with different eyes, to make the world look on it with different

eyes, to make God look on it with different eyes. This I cannot do by

ignoring it, or slighting it, or praising it, or denying it. It is only

to be done fully by accepting it as an inevitable part of the evolution

of my life and character: by bowing my head to everything that I have

suffered.

How far I am away from the true temper of soul, this letter in its

changing, uncertain moods, its scorn and bitterness, its aspirations and

its failures to realise those aspirations shows you quite clearly. But

do not forget in what a terrible school I am setting at my task. And

incomplete, imperfect, as I am, yet from me you may have still much to

gain. You came to me to learn the pleasure of life and the pleasure of

art. Perhaps I am chosen to teach you something much more wonderful, the

meaning of sorrow and its beauty.

Your affectionate friend,

OSCAR WILDE.

This letter of Oscar Wilde to Lord Alfred Douglas is curiously

self-revealing and characteristic. While reading it one should recall

Oscar's provocation. Lord Alfred Douglas had driven him to the

prosecution, and then deserted him and left him in prison without using

his influence to mitigate his friend's suffering or his pen to console

and encourage him. The abandonment was heartless and complete. The

letter, however, is vindictive: in spite of its intimate revelations

Oscar took care that his indictment should be made public. The flagrant

self-deceptions of the plea show its sincerity: Oscar even accuses young

Alfred Douglas of having induced him to eat and drink too much.

The tap-root of the letter is a colossal vanity; the bitterness of it,

wounded egotism; the falseness of it, a self-righteous pose of ineffable

superiority as of a superman. Oscar denies to Alfred Douglas

imagination, scholarship, or even a knowledge of poetry: he tells him in

so many words:--he is without brain or heart. Then why did he allow

himself to be hag-ridden to his ruin by such a creature?

Yet how human the letter is, how pathetic!

OSCAR WILDE'S KINDNESS OF HEART

Here is a note which Oscar Wilde wrote to Warder Martin towards the end

of his imprisonment in Reading Gaol. Warder Martin, it will be

remembered, was dismissed from his post for having given some sweet

biscuits, bought with his own money, to some hungry little children

confined in the prison.

Wilde happened to see the children and immediately wrote this note on a

scrap of paper and slipped it under his door so that it should catch

Warder Martin's eye as he patrolled the corridor.

Please find out for me the name of A.2.11. Also, the names of

the children who are in for the rabbits, and the amount of the

fine.

Can I pay this and get them out? If so I will get them out

tomorrow. Please, dear friend, do this for me. I must get them

out.

Think what a thing for me it would be to be able to help three

little children. I would be delighted beyond words: if I can

do this by paying the fine tell the children that they are to

be released tomorrow by a friend, and ask them to be happy and

not to tell anyone.

Here is a second note which shows Oscar's peculiar sensitiveness; what

is ugly and terrible cannot, he thinks, furnish even the subject of art;

he shrinks from whatever gives pain.

I hope to write about prison-life and to try and change it for

others, but it is too terrible and ugly to make a work of art

of. I have suffered too much in it to write plays about it.

A third note simply thanks Warder Martin for all his kindness. It ends

with the words:

... Everyone tells me I am looking better and happier.

This is because I have a good friend who gives me _The

Chronicle_ and PROMISES me ginger biscuits. O.W.

MY COLDNESS TOWARDS OSCAR IN 1897

(See page 408)

When I talked with Oscar in Reading Gaol, he told me that the only

reason he didn't write was that no one would accept his work. I assured

him that I would publish it in _The Saturday Review_ and would pay for

it not only at the rate I paid Bernard Shaw but also if it increased the

sale of the journal I'd try to compute its value to the paper and give

him that besides. He told me that was too liberal; he would be quite

content with what I paid Shaw: he feared that no one else in England

would ever publish his work again.

He promised to send me the book "De Profundis" as soon as it was

finished. Just before his release his friend, Mr. More Adey, called upon

me and wanted to know whether I would publish Oscar's work. I said I

would. He then asked me what I would give for it. I told him I didn't

want to make anything out of Oscar and would give him as much as I

could, rehearsing the proposal I had made to Oscar. Thereupon he told me

Oscar would prefer a fixed price. I thought the answer extraordinary and

the gentle, urbane manner of Mr. More Adey, whom I hardly knew at that

time and misunderstood, got on my nerves. I replied curtly that before I

could state a price, I'd have to see the work, adding at the same time

that I had wished to do Oscar a good turn, but, if he could find another

publisher, I'd be delighted. Mr. More Adey assured me that there was

nothing in the book to which any prude even could object, no _arrière

pensée_ of any kind, and so forth and so on. I answered with a jest, a

wretched play on his French phrase.

That night I happened to dine with Whistler and telling him of what had

occurred called forth a most stinging gibe at Oscar's expense.

Whistler's _mot_ cannot be published.

A week or two later Oscar asked me to get him some clothes, which I did

and on his release sent them to him, and received in reply a letter

thanking me which I reproduce on page 583.

In that same talk with Oscar in Reading Gaol, I was so desirous of

helping him that I proposed a driving tour through France. I told him of

one I had made a couple of years before which was full of delightful

episodes--an entrancing holiday. He jumped at the idea, said nothing

would please him better, he would feel safe with me, and so forth. In

order to carry out the idea in the best way I ordered an American mail

phaeton so that a pair of horses would find the load, even with luggage,

ridiculously light. I asked Mr. More Adey whether Oscar had spoken to

him of this proposed trip: he told me he had heard nothing of it.

In one letter to me Oscar asked me to postpone the tour; afterwards he

never mentioned it. I thought I had been treated rather cavalierly. As I

had gone to some expense in getting everything ready and making myself

free, I, no doubt, expressed some amazement at Oscar's silence on the

matter. At any rate the idea got about that I was angry with him, and

Oscar believed it. Nothing could have been further from the truth. What

I had done and proposed was simply in his interest: I expected no

benefit of any kind and therefore could not be cross; but the belief

that I was angry drew this sincere and touching letter from Oscar, which

I think shows him almost as perfectly as that still more beautiful

letter to Robert Ross which I have inserted in Chapter XIX.

From

M. Sebastian Melmoth,

Hotel de la Plage,

Bernavol-sur-Mer,

Dieppe.

June 13, '97

MY DEAR FRANK:

I know you do not like writing letters, but still I think you might have

written me a line in answer, or acknowledgment of my letter[56] to you

from Dieppe. I am thinking of a story to be called "The Silence of Frank

Harris."

I have, however, heard during the last few days that you do not speak of

me in the friendly manner I would like. This distresses me very much.

I am told that you are hurt with me because my letter of thanks to you

was not sufficiently elaborated in expression. This I can hardly credit.

It seems so unworthy of a big strong nature like yours, that knows the

realities of life. I told you I was grateful to you for your kindness to

me. Words, _now_, to me signify things, actualities, real emotions,

realised thoughts. I learnt in prison to be grateful. I used to think

gratitude a burden. Now I know that it is something that makes life

lighter as well as lovelier for one. I am grateful for a thousand

things, from my good friends down to the sun and the sea. But I cannot

say more than that I am grateful. I cannot make phrases about it. For

_me_ to use such a word shows an enormous development in my nature. Two

years ago I did not know the feeling the word denotes. Now I know it,

and I am thankful that I have learnt that much, at any rate, by having

been in prison. But I must say again that I no longer make _roulades_ of

phrases about the deep things I feel. When I write directly to you, I

speak directly: violin variations don't interest me. I am grateful to

you. If that does not content you, then you do not understand, what you

of all men should understand, how sincerity of feeling expresses itself.

But I dare say the story told of you is untrue. It comes from so many

quarters that it probably is.

I am told also that you are hurt[57] because I did not go on the

driving-tour with you. You should understand, that in telling you that

it was impossible for me to do so, I was thinking as much of _you_ as of

myself. To think of the feelings and happiness of others is not an

entirely new emotion in my nature. I would be unjust to myself and my

friends, if I said it was. But I think of those things far more than I

used to do. If I had gone with you, you would not have been happy, nor

enjoyed yourself. Nor would I. You must try to realise what two years

cellular confinement is, and what two years of absolute silence means

to a man of my intellectual power. To have survived at all--to have come

out sane in mind and sound of body--is a thing so marvellous to me, that

it seems to me sometimes, not that the age of miracles is over, but that

it is just beginning; that there are powers in God, and powers in man,

of which the world has up to the present known little. But while I am

cheerful, happy, and have sustained to the full that passionate interest

in life and art that was the dominant chord of my nature, and made all

modes of existence and all forms of expression utterly fascinating to me

always--still I need rest, quiet, and often complete solitude. Friends

have come to see me here for a day, and have been delighted to find me

like my old self, in all intellectual energy and sensitiveness to the

play of life, but it has always proved afterwards to have been a strain

upon a nervous force, much of which has been destroyed. I have now no

_storage_[58] of nervous force. When I expend what I have, in an

afternoon, nothing remains. I look to quiet, to a simple mode of

existence, to nature in all the infinite meanings of an infinite word,

to charge the cells for me. Every day, if I meet a friend, or write a

letter longer than a few lines, or even read a book that makes, as all

fine books do, a direct claim on me, a direct appeal, an intellectual

challenge of any kind, I am utterly exhausted in the evening, and often

sleep badly. And yet it is three whole weeks since I was released.

Had I gone with you on the driving tour, where we would have of

necessity been in immediate contact with each other from dawn to sunset,

I would have certainly broken off the tour the third day, probably

broken down the second. You would have then found yourself in a pitiable

position: your tour would have been arrested at its outset: your

companion would have been ill without doubt: perhaps might have needed

care and attendance, in some little remote French village. You would

have given it to me, I know. But I felt it would have been wrong,

stupid, and thoughtless of me to have started an expedition doomed to

swift failure, and perhaps fraught with disaster and distress. You are a

man of dominant personality: your intellect is exigent, more so than

that of any man I ever knew: your demands on life are enormous: you

require response, or you annihilate: the pleasure of being with you is

in the clash of personality, the intellectual battle, the war of ideas.

To survive you, one must have a strong brain, an assertive ego, a

dynamic character. In your luncheon parties, in the old days, the

remains of the guests were taken away with the _débris_ of the feast. I

have often lunched with you in Park Lane and found myself the only

survivor. I might have driven on the white roads, or through the leafy

lanes, of France, with a fool, or with the wisest of all things, a

child: with you, it would have been impossible. You should thank me

sincerely for having saved you from an experience that each of us would

have always regretted.

Will you ask me why then, when I was in prison, I accepted with grateful

thanks your offer? My dear Frank, I don't think you will ask so

thoughtless a question. The prisoner looks to liberty as an immediate

return to all his ancient energy, quickened into more vital forces by

long disuse. When he goes out, he finds he has still to suffer: his

punishment, as far as its effects go, lasts intellectually and

physically just as it lasts socially: he has still to pay: one gets no

receipt for the past when one walks out into the beautiful air....

I have now spent the whole of my Sunday afternoon--the first real day of

summer we have had--in writing to you this long letter of explanation.

I have written directly and simply: I need not tell the author of "Elder

Conklin" that sweetness and simplicity of expression take more out of

one than fiddling harmonics on one string. I felt it my duty to write,

but it has been a distressing one. It would have been _better_ for me to

have lain in the brown grass on the cliff, or to have walked slowly by

the sea. It would have been kinder of you to have written to me directly

about whatever harsh or hurt feelings you may have about me. It would

have saved me an afternoon of strain, and tension.

But I have something more to say. It is pleasanter to me, now, to write

about others, than about myself.

The enclosed is from a brother prisoner of mine: released June 4th: pray

read it: you will see his age, offence, and aim in life.

If you can give him a trial, do so. If you see your way to this kind

action, and write to him to come and see you, kindly state in your

letter that it is about a situation. He may think otherwise that it is

about the flogging of A.2.11., a thing that does not interest _you_,

and about which _he_ is a little afraid to talk.

If the result of this long letter will be that you will help this fellow

prisoner of mine to a place in your service, I shall consider my

afternoon better spent than any afternoon for the last two years, and

three weeks.

In any case I have now written to you fully on all things as reported to

me.

I again assure you of my gratitude for your kindness to me during my

imprisonment, and on my release.

And am always

Your sincere friend and admirer

OSCAR WILDE.

_With regard to Lawley_

All soldiers are neat, and smart, and make capital servants. He would be

a good _groom_: he is, I believe, a 3rd Hussars man--he was a quiet,

well-conducted chap in Reading always.

Naturally I replied to this letter at once, saying that he had been

misinformed, that I was not angry and if I could do anything for him I

should be delighted: I did my best, too, for Lawley.

Here is his letter of thanks to me for helping him when he came out of

prison.

Sandwich Hotel,

Dieppe.

MY DEAR FRANK:

Just a line to thank you for your great kindness to me--for the lovely

clothes, and for the generous cheque.

You have been a real good friend to me--and I shall never forget your

kindness: to remember such a debt as mine to you--a debt of kind

fellowship--is a pleasure.

About our tour--later on let us think about it. My friends have been so

kind to me here that I am feeling happy already.

Yours,

OSCAR WILDE.

If you write to me please do so under cover to R.B. Ross, who is here

with me.

In the next letter of his which I have kept Oscar is perfectly friendly

again; he tells me that he is "entirely without money, having received

nothing from his Trustees for months," and asks me for even £5, adding,

"I drift in ridiculous impecuniosity without a sou."

THE MYSTERY OF PERSONALITY

I transcribe here another letter of Oscar to me from the second year

after his release to show his interest in all intellectual things and

for a flash of characteristic humour at the expense of the Paris police.

The envelope is dated October 13, 1898:--

From

M. Sebastian Melmoth,

Hotel d'Alsace,

Rue des Beaux-arts,

Paris.

MY DEAR FRANK:

How are you? I read your appreciation of Rodin's "Balzac" with intensest

pleasure, and I am looking forward to more Shakespeare--you will of

course put all your Shakespearean essays into a book, and, equally of

course, I must have a copy. It is a great era in Shakespearean

criticism--the first time that one has looked in the plays not for

philosophy, for there is none, but for the wonder of a great

personality--something far better, and far more mysterious than any

philosophy--it is a great thing that you have done. I remember writing

once in "Intentions" that the more objective a work of art is in form,

the more subjective it really is in matter--and that it is only when you

give the poet a mask that he can tell you the truth. But you have shown

it fully in the case of the one artist whose personality was supposed to

be a mystery of deep seas, a secret as impenetrable as the secret of the

moon.

Paris is terrible in its heat. I walk in streets of brass, and there is

no one here. Even the criminal classes have gone to the seaside, and the

gendarmes yawn and regret their enforced idleness. Giving wrong

directions to the English tourists is the only thing that consoles them.

You were most kind and generous last month in letting me have a

cheque--it gives me just the margin to live on and to live by. May I

have it again this month? or has gold flown away from you?

Ever yours,

OSCAR.

THE DEDICATION OF "AN IDEAL HUSBAND"

I received the following letter from Oscar early in 1899 I imagine. It

was written in the spring after the winter we spent in La Napoule.

From M. Sebastian Melmoth,

Gland,

Canton Vaud,

Switzerland.

MY DEAR FRANK:

I am, as you see from above, in Switzerland with M----: a rather

dreadful combination: the villa is pretty, and on the borders of the

lake with pretty pines about: on the other side are the mountains of

Savoy and Mont Blanc: we are an hour, by a slow train, from Geneva. But

M----is tedious, and lacks conversation: also he gives me Swiss wine to

drink: it is horrible: he occupies himself with small economies, and

mean domestic interests, so I suffer very much. _Ennui_ is the enemy.

I want to know if you will allow me to dedicate to you my next play,

"The Ideal Husband"--which Smithers is bringing out for me in the same

form as the others, of which I hope you received your copy. I should so

much like to write your name and a few words on the dedicatory page.

I look back with joy and regret to the lovely sunlight of the Riviera,

and the charming winter you so generously and kindly gave me: it was

most good of you: how can it ever be forgotten by me.

Next week a petroleum launch is to arrive here, so that will console me

a little, as I love to be on the water: and the Savoy side is starred

with pretty villages and green valleys.

Of course we won our bet--the phrase on Shelley is in Arnold's preface

to Byron: but M---- won't pay me! He suffers agony over a franc. It is

very annoying as I have had no money since my arrival here. However I

regard the place as a Swiss Pension--where there is no weekly bill....

Ever yours,

OSCAR.

I believe I answered; but am not sure. I was naturally delighted to have

just "An Ideal Husband" dedicated to me, because I had suggested the

plot of it to Oscar--not that the plot was in any true sense mine. An

interesting and clever American in Cairo, a Mr. Cope Whitehouse, had

given it to me as I tell in this book. The story Whitehouse told may not

be true; but my mind jumped at once to the thought of a story where an

English Minister would be confronted with some early sin of that sort. I

had hardly bettered the story given to me when I related it to Oscar who

used it almost immediately with great effect. Dedicatory words are

usually as flattering as epitaphs; those of "An Ideal Husband" run:

TO

FRANK HARRIS

A SLIGHT TRIBUTE TO

HIS POWER AND DISTINCTION

AS AN ARTIST

HIS CHIVALRY AND NOBILITY

AS A FRIEND

MRS. WILDE'S EPITAPH

(See page 447)

An evil fate seems to have pursued even Oscar's wife. She died in Genoa

and was buried in the corner of the Campo Santo set apart for

Protestants. This is what one reads on her tombstone:

CONSTANCE

DAUGHTER OF THE LATE

HORATIO LLOYD, Q.C.

BORN ---- DIED ----

No reference to her marriage or to the famous man who was the father of

her two sons.

The irony of chance wills it that the late Horatio Lloyd, Q.C., had been

more than suspected of sexual viciousness: cfr. "Criticisms by Robert

Ross" at end of Appendix.

SONNET

(See page 517)

TO OSCAR WILDE

I dreamed of you last night, I saw your face

All radiant and unshadowed of distress,

And as of old, in measured tunefulness,

I heard your golden voice and marked you trace

Under the common thing the hidden grace,

And conjure wonder out of emptiness,

Till mean things put on Beauty like a dress,

And all the world was an enchanted place.

And so I knew that it was well with you,

And that unprisoned, gloriously free,

Across the dark you stretched me out your hand.

And all the spite of this besotted crew,

(Scrabbling on pillars of Eternity)

How small it seems! Love made me understand.

ALFRED DOUGLAS.

December 10, 1900.

Whoever chooses to compare this first sketch of the sonnet of 1900 with

the sonnet as it was published in 1910 will remark three notable

differences.

The first sketch was entitled "To Oscar Wilde," the revision to "The

Dead Poet."

In the early draft, the first line:

"I dreamed of you last night, I saw your face," has become less

intimate, having been changed into:

"I dreamed of him last night, I saw his face."

Finally the sextet which in the first sketch was very inferior to the

rest has now been discarded in favour of six lines which are worthy of

the octave. The published sonnet is assuredly superior to the first

sketch, superb though that was.