Oscar Wilde, a study

II.

Here tragic reminiscences begin.

A persistent rumour, growing louder and louder with the fame of his successes (in London his plays were being acted in no less than three different theatres at the same time[1]), attributed to Wilde strange habits, on hearing of which, some people tempered their indignation with a smile, while others were not in the least indignant. It was claimed, moreover, as regards these alleged habits, that he concealed them little, and often on the other hand paraded them—some said courageously, others out of cynicism, and others for a pose. I was filled with astonishment when I heard these rumours. In no way, all the time that I had been intimate with him, had he given me the slightest ground for suspicion. But already out of prudence numbers of his old friends were deserting him. They did not yet actually cut him, but they no longer made a point of saying they had met him.

An extraordinary coincidence brought us together again. It was in January, 1895. I was travelling. A peevish disposition urged me on, and I sought solitude rather than novelty of scene. The weather was frightful. I had fled from Algiers to Blidah, and I was about to quit Blidah for Biskra. Just as I was leaving my hotel, I glanced, through idle curiosity, at the slate on which visitors' names were inscribed. What did I see there? By the side of my own name, actually touching it, was Wilde's. I have said that I was thirsting to be alone, so I took the sponge and rubbed my name out. Before reaching the railway station, however, I was not quite sure that a little cowardice did not underlie that act, so at once retracing my steps I had my bag taken upstairs and wrote my name on the slate again.

In the three years since I had seen him—for I can hardly count a short meeting in Florence the year before—Wilde had certainly changed. One felt that there was less tenderness in his look, that there was something harsh in his laughter and a madness in his joy. He seemed, at the same time, to be more sure of pleasing and less ambitious to succeed therein. He had grown reckless, hardened, and conceited. Strangely enough, he no longer spoke in fables, and during several days that I tarried there I was not once able to draw the shortest tale from him. My first impression was one of astonishment at finding him in Algeria.

'Oh,' he said to me, 'just now I am fleeing from art. I want only to adore the sun. Have you ever noticed how the sun detests thought? The sun always causes thought to withdraw itself and take refuge in the shade. Thought dwelt in Egypt originally, but the sun conquered Egypt; then it lived for a long time in Greece, and the sun conquered Greece, then in Italy, and then in France. Nowadays all thought is driven back as far as Norway and Russia, places where the sun never goes. The sun is jealous of art.'

To adore the sun, ah! that was—for him—to adore life. Wilde's lyrical adoration was fast becoming a frenzied madness. A fatality led him on; he could not and would not withdraw himself from it. He seemed to devote all his zeal and all his worth to over-rating his destiny, and over-reaching himself. 'My special duty,' he used to say, 'is to plunge madly into amusement.' He used to make a point of searching for pleasure as one faces an appointed duty. Nietzsche surprised me less, on a later occasion, because I had heard Wilde say, 'No, not happiness! Certainly not happiness! Pleasure. One must always set one's heart upon the most tragic.'

He would walk about the streets of Algiers preceded, escorted, and followed by an extraordinary mob of young ruffians. He talked to them all, regarded them all with equal delight, and threw them money recklessly. 'I hope to have thoroughly demoralized this town,' he told me. I thought of Flaubert's saying when he was asked what kind of reputation he most desired—'that of being a demoralizer,' he replied. In the face of all this I was filled with astonishment, admiration, and alarm. I knew of his shaky position, the enmities he had created, and the attacks which were being made upon him, and I knew what dark unrest lay hidden beneath his outward pretence of pleasure.

On one of those last evenings in Algiers, Wilde seemed to have made up his mind not to say a single serious word. At last I became somewhat annoyed at the exaggerated wit of his paradoxes, and I said to him, 'You have got something better to talk about than this nonsense; you are talking to me as if I were the public. You ought rather to talk to the public as you know so well how to talk to your friends. Why is it your plays are not better? The best that is in you, you talk; why do you not write it?' 'Oh, well,' he cried immediately, 'my plays are not good, I know, and I don't trouble about that, but if you only knew how much amusement they afford! They are nearly all the results of a bet. So was Dorian Gray—I wrote that in a few days because a friend of mine declared that I could not write a novel. Writing bores me so.'

It was only too true. The best of his writing is but a poor reflection of his brilliant conversation. Those who have heard him talk find him disappointing to read. Dorian Gray in its conception was a wonderful story, far superior to La Peau de Chagrin, and far more significant! Alas! when written, what a masterpiece spoiled. In his most delightful tales literary influence makes itself too much felt. However graceful they may be, one notices too much literary effort; affectation and delicacy of phrase[2] conceal the beauty of the first conception of them. One feels in them, and one cannot help feeling in them, the three periods of their generation. The first idea contained in them is very beautiful, simple, profound, and certain to make itself heard; a kind of latent necessity holds the parts firmly together, but from that point the gift stops. The development of the parts is done in an artificial manner; there is a lack of arrangement about them, and when Wilde elaborates his sentences and endeavours to give them their full value, he does so by overloading them prodigiously with tiny conceits and quaint and trifling fancies. The result is that one's emotion is held at bay, and the dazzling of the surface so blinds one's eyes and mind, that the deep central emotion is lost.

He spoke of returning to London, as a well-known peer was insulting him, challenging him, and taunting him with running away.

'But if you go back what will happen? 'I asked him. 'Do you know the risk you are running?'

'It is best never to know,' he answered. 'My friends are extraordinary—they beg me to be careful. Careful? but can I be careful? That would be a backward step. I must go on as far as possible. I cannot go much further. Something is bound to happen ... something else.'

Here he broke off, and the next day he left for England.

The rest of the story is well-known. That 'something else' was hard labour.

[I have invented nothing, nor altered anything, in the last few sentences I have quoted. Wilde's words are fixed in my mind, and, I might almost say, in my ears. I do not say that Wilde clearly saw the prison opening to receive him, but I do assert that the great and unexpected event which astonished and upset London, suddenly changing Oscar Wilde from accuser into accused, did not cause him any surprise.

The newspapers, which chose to see in him only a buffoon, misrepresented, as far as they could, the position taken up for his defence, even to the extent of wresting all meaning from it. Perhaps some day in the far future it will be seemly to lift this dreadful trial out of the mire—but not yet.]

III.

As soon as he came out of prison, Oscar Wilde went back to France. At Berneval, a quiet little village near Dieppe, a certain 'Sebastian Melmoth' took up his abode. It was he. As I had been the last of his French friends to see him, I wanted to be the first to greet him on his return to liberty, and as soon as I could find out his address I hastened to him.

I arrived about midday without having previously announced my proposed visit. M. Melmoth, whom T——[1] with warm cordiality invited to Dieppe fairly frequently, was not expected back till the evening. He did not return till midnight.

It was as cold as winter. The weather was atrocious. The whole day I wandered about the deserted beach in low spirits and bored to death. How could Wilde have chosen Berneval to live in, I wondered. It was positively mournful. Night came, and I went back to the hotel to engage a room, the same hotel where Melmoth was living—indeed it was the only one in the place. The hotel, which was clean and pleasantly situated, catered only for second-class boarders, inoffensive folk enough, with whom I had to dine. Rather poor company for Melmoth, I thought.

Fortunately I had a book to read, but it was a gloomy evening, and at eleven o'clock I was just going to abandon my intention of waiting up for him when I heard the rumbling of carriage wheels. M. Melmoth had arrived, benumbed with cold. He had lost his overcoat on the way. And, now that he came to think of it, he remembered that a peacock's feather which his servant had brought him the previous evening was a bad omen, and had clearly foretold some misfortune about to befall him; luckily it was no worse. But as he was shivering with cold, the hotel was set busy to warm some whiskey for him. He hardly said 'How do you do?' to me. In the presence of others, at least, he did not wish to appear to be at all moved. And my own emotion was almost immediately stilled on finding Sebastian Melmoth so plainly like the Oscar Wilde of old—no longer the frenzied poet of Algeria, but the sweet Wilde of the days before the crisis; and I found myself taken back not two years, but four or five. There was the same dreamy look, the same amused smile, the same voice.

He occupied two rooms, the best in the hotel, and he had arranged them with great taste. Several books lay on the table, and among them he showed me my own Nourritures Terrestres, which had been published lately. A pretty Gothic Virgin stood on a high pedestal in a dark corner.

Presently we sat down near the lamp, Wilde drinking his grog in little sips. I noticed, now that the light was better, that the skin of his face had become red and common looking, and his hands even more so, though they still bore the same rings—one to which he was especially attached had in a reversible bezel an Egyptian scarabæus in lapis lazuli. His teeth were dreadfully decayed.

We began chatting, and I reminded him of our last meeting in Algiers, and asked him if he remembered that I had almost foretold the approaching catastrophe.

'Did you not know,' I said, 'almost for certain what was awaiting you in England? You saw the danger and rushed headlong into it, did you not?'

Here I think I cannot do better than copy out the pages on which I wrote shortly afterwards as much as I could remember of what he said.

'Oh, naturally,' he replied, 'of course I knew that there would be a catastrophe, either that or something else; I was expecting it. There was but one end possible. Just imagine—to go any further was impossible, and that state of things could not last. That is why there had to be some end to it, you see. Prison has completely changed me[2]. I was relying on it for that. —-is terrible. He cannot understand that—he cannot understand that I am not taking up the same existence again. He accuses the others of having changed me—but one must never take up the same existence again. My life is like a work of art. An artist never begins the same work twice, or else it shows that he has not succeeded. My life before prison was as successful as possible. Now all that is finished and done with.'

He lighted a cigarette and went on: 'The public is so dreadful that it knows a man only by the last thing he has done. If I were to go back to Paris now, people would see in me only the convict. I do not want to show myself again before I have written a play. Till then I must be left alone and undisturbed.' And he added abruptly, 'Did I not do well to come here? My friends wanted me to go to the South to recruit, because at first I was quite worn out. But I asked them to find me, in the North of France, a very small place at the seaside, where I should see no one, where it was very cold and there was hardly ever any sun. Did I not do well to come and live at Berneval? [Outside the weather was frightful.] Here every one is most good to me—the Curé especially. I am so fond of the little church, and, would you believe it, it is called Notre Dame de Liesse[3]! Now, is not that charming? And now I know that I can never leave Berneval, because only this morning the Curé offered me a perpetual seat in the choir-stalls.

And the Custom-house men, poor fellows, are so bored here with nothing to do, that I asked them if they had not anything to read, and now I am giving them all the elder Dumas' novels. So I must stay here, you see. And the children, oh, the children they adore me. On the day of the Queen's Jubilee I gave a grand fête and a big dinner, when I had forty children from the school, all of them, and the schoolmaster, to celebrate it. Is not that absolutely charming? You know that I admire the Queen very much. I always have her portrait with me.'

And he showed me her portrait by Nicholson, pinned on the wall. I got up to look at it. A small bookshelf was close to it, and I began glancing at the books. I wanted to lead Wilde on to talk to me in a more serious vein. I sat down again, and rather timidly asked him if he had read Souvenirs de la Maison des Morts.

He gave me no direct answer, but began:—'Russian writers are extraordinary. What makes their books so great is the pity they put into them. You know how fond I used to be of Madame Bovary, but Flaubert would not admit pity into his work, and that is why it has a petty and restrained character about it. It is sense of pity by means of which a work gains in expanse, and by which it opens up a boundless horizon. Do you know, my dear fellow, it was pity that prevented me from killing myself? During the first six months I was dreadfully unhappy, so utterly miserable that I wanted to kill myself, but what kept me from doing so was looking at the others, and seeing that they were as unhappy as I was, and feeling sorry for them. Oh, dear! what a wonderful thing pity is, and I never knew it.'

He was speaking in a low voice without any excitement.

'Have you ever learned how wonderful a thing pity is? For my part I thank God every night, yes, on my knees I thank God for having taught it to me. I went into prison with a heart of stone, thinking only of my own pleasure, but now my heart is utterly broken—pity has entered into my heart. I have learned now that pity is the greatest and most beautiful thing in the world. And that is why I cannot bear ill-will towards those who caused my suffering and those who condemned me; no, nor to any one, because without them I should not have known all that. —— writes me terrible letters. He says he does not understand me, that he does not understand that I do not wish every one ill, and that every one has been horrid to me. No, he does not understand me. He cannot understand me any more. But I keep on telling him that in every letter: we cannot follow the same road. He has his, and it is beautiful—I have mine. His is that of Alcibiades; mine is now that of St. Francis of Assisi. Do you know St. Francis of Assisi? A wonderful man! Would you like to give me a great pleasure? Send me the best life of St. Francis you can find.'

I promised it to him. He went on:

'Yes, afterwards we had a charming prison Governor, oh, quite a charming man, but for the first six months I was dreadfully unhappy. There was a Governor of the prison, a Jew, who was very harsh, because he was entirely lacking in imagination.'

This last expression, spoken very quickly, was irresistibly funny; and, as I laughed heartily, he laughed too, repeated it, and then said:

'He did not know what to imagine in order to make us suffer. Now, you shall see what a lack of imagination he showed. You must know that in prison we are allowed to go out only one hour a day; then, we walk in a courtyard, round and round, one behind the other, and we are absolutely forbidden to say a word. Warders watch us, and there are terrible punishments for any one caught talking. Those who are in prison for the first time are spotted at once, because they do not know how to speak without moving their lips. I had already been in prison six weeks and I had not spoken a word to anyone—not to a soul[4].

'One evening we were walking as usual, one behind the other, during the hour's exercise, when suddenly behind me I heard my name called. It was the prisoner who followed me, and he said, "Oscar Wilde, I pity you, because you must suffer more than we do." Then I made a great effort not to be noticed (I thought I was going to faint), and I said without turning round, "No, my friend, we all suffer alike." And from that day I no longer had a desire to kill myself. We talked in that way for several days. I knew his name and what he had done. His name was P——; he was such a good fellow; oh! so good. But I had not yet learned to speak without moving my lips, and one evening,—"C.3.3." (C.3.3. was myself), "C.3.3. and A.4.8. step out of the ranks."

'Then we stood out, and the warder said, "You will both have to go before the Governor." And as pity had already entered into my heart, my only fear was for him; in fact I was even glad that I might suffer for his sake. But the Governor was quite terrible. He had P—— in first; he was going to question us separately, because you must know that the punishment is not the same for the one who speaks first, and for the one who answers; the punishment of the one who speaks first is double that of the other. As a rule the first has fifteen days' solitary confinement, and the second has eight days only. Then the Governor wanted to know which of us had spoken first, and naturally P——, good fellow that he was, said it was he. And afterwards when the Governor had me in to question me, I, of course, said it was I. Then the Governor got very red because he could not understand it. "But P—— also says that it was he who began it. I cannot understand it. I cannot understand it."

'Think of it, my dear fellow, he could not understand it. He became very much embarrassed and said, "But I have already given him fifteen days," and then he added, "Anyhow, if that is the case, I shall give you both fifteen days." Is not that extraordinary? That man had not a spark of imagination[5].'

Wilde was vastly amused at what he was saying, and laughed—he was happy telling stories. 'And, of course,' he continued, 'after the fifteen days we were much more anxious to speak to one another than before. You do not know how sweet that is, to feel that one is suffering for another. Gradually, as we did not go in the same order each day, I was able to talk to each of the others, to all of them, every one of them. I knew each one's name and each one's history, and when each was due to be released. And to each one I said, "When you get out of prison, the first thing you must do is to go to the Post Office, and there you will find a letter for you with some money." And so in that way I still know them, because I keep up my friendship with them. And there is something quite delightful in them. Would you believe it, already three of them have been to see me here? Is not that quite wonderful?'

'The successor of the harsh Governor was a very charming man—oh! remarkably so—and most considerate to me. You cannot imagine how much good it did me in prison that Salomé[6] was being played in Paris just at that time. In prison, it had been entirely forgotten that I was a literary person, but when they saw that my play was a success in Paris, they said to one another, "Well, but that is strange; he has talent, then." And from that moment they let me have all the books I wanted to read[7]. I thought, at first, that what would please me most would be Greek literature, so I asked for Sophocles, but I could not get a relish for it. Then I thought of the Fathers of the Church, but I found them equally uninteresting. And suddenly I thought of Dante. Oh! Dante. I read Dante every day, in Italian, and all through, but neither the Purgatorio nor the Paradiso seemed written for me. It was his Inferno above all that I read; how could I help liking it? Cannot you guess? Hell, we were in it—Hell, that was prison!'[8]

That same evening he told me a clever story about Judas, and of his proposed drama on Pharaoh. Next day he took me to a charming little house[9], about two hundred yards from the hotel, which he had rented and was beginning to furnish. It was there that he wanted to write his plays—his Pharoah first, and then one called Ahab and Jezebel (he pronounced it 'Isabelle'), which he related to me admirably.

The carriage which was to take me away was waiting, and Wilde got into it to accompany me part of the way. He began talking to me again about my book, and praised it, though with some slight reserve, I thought. At last the carriage stopped; he bade me good-bye, and was just going to get out, when he suddenly said, 'Listen, my dear friend, you must promise me one thing. Your Nourritures Terrestres is good, very good, but promise me you will never write a capital "I" again.' And as I seemed scarcely to understand what he meant, he finished up by saying, 'In Art, you see, there is no first person.'

IV.

On returning to Paris I went to give news of him to ——.

---- said to me: 'But all that is quite absurd. He is quite incapable of bearing the ennui. I know him so well. He writes to me every day. I also am of opinion that he ought to finish his play first, but after that he will come back here. He has never done anything good in solitude; he needs to be constantly drawn out of himself. It is by my side that he has written all his best work. Besides, just look at his last letter.'

He thereupon read it to me. In it Wilde begged —— to let him finish his Pharaoh in peace, but, in effect, the letter implied that as soon as his play was written he would come back, he would find him again; and it ended with these boastful words, 'and then I shall be once more the King of Life.'

V.

And a short time afterwards, Wilde went back to Paris.[1]

His play was not written—it will never be written now. Society well knows what steps to take when it wants to crush a man, and it has means more subtle than death. Wilde had suffered too grievously for the last two years, and in too submissive a manner, and his will had been broken. For the first few months he might still have entertained illusions, but he soon gave them up. It was as though he had signed his abdication. Nothing remained in his shattered life but a mouldy ruin, 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.

I met him again on two occasions only. One evening on the Boulevards, where I was walking with G——, I heard my name called. I turned round and saw Wilde. Ah! how changed he was. 'If I appear again before writing my play, the world will refuse to see in me anything except the felon,' he had once said to me. He had appeared again, without his play, and as he found certain doors closed in his face, he no longer sought admission anywhere. He prowled.

Friends, at different times, tried to save him[2]. They did all they could think of, and were for taking him to Italy, but he eluded their efforts, and began to drift back. Among those who had remained faithful for the longest time, some had often told me that Wilde was no longer to be seen, and I was somewhat uneasy, I admit, at seeing him again, and what is more, in a place where so many people might pass. Wilde was sitting at a table outside a café. He ordered two cock-tails for G—— and myself. I was going to sit opposite to him in such a way as to turn my back to the passers-by, but Wilde, noticed this movement, which he took as an impulse of absurd shame, (he was not entirely mistaken, I must admit), and said, 'Oh, sit here, near me,' pointing to a chair at his side, 'I am so much alone just now.'

Wilde was still well-dressed, but his hat was not so glossy; his collar was of the same shape, but it was not so clean, and the sleeves of his coat were slightly frayed at the edges.

'When I used to meet Verlaine in days gone by,' he continued with an outburst of pride, 'I was never ashamed of being seen with him. I was rich, light-hearted, and covered with glory, but I felt that to be seen with him was an honour, even when Verlaine was drunk.' Then fearing to bore G——, I think, he suddenly changed his mood, tried to be witty and to make jokes. In the effort he became gloomy. My recollections here are dreadfully sad. At last my friend and I got up. Wilde insisted on paying for the drinks, and I was about to say good-bye, when he took me aside, and, with an air of great embarrassment, said in a low voice, 'I say, I must tell you, I am absolutely without a penny[3].

Some days afterwards I saw him again, and for the last time. I do not want to repeat more than one word of our conversation. He told me of his troubles, of the impossibility of carrying out, or even of beginning, a piece of work[4]. Sadly I reminded him of the promise he had made not to show himself in Paris without having finished one book. 'Ah!' I began, 'why did you leave Berneval so soon, when you ought to have stayed there so long? I cannot say that I am angry with you, but—'

He interrupted me, laid his hand on mine, looked at me with his most sorrowful look, and said, 'You must not be angry with one who has been crushed[5].'

Oscar Wilde died in a shabby little hotel in the Rue des Beaux Arts. Seven persons followed the hearse, and even they did not all accompany the funeral procession to the end. On the coffin were some flowers and some artificial wreaths, only one of which, I am told, bore any inscription. It was from the proprietor of the hotel, and on it were these words: 'A Mon Locataire.'