The Solicitor General.—(Severely) “I ask you, Taylor, for an explanation, for it requires one, of the use of the words “come home soon, dear”, as between two men.”

Taylor.—(Laughing nervously) “I do not see anything in it.”

The Solicitor General.—“Nothing in it?”

Witness.—“Well, I am not responsible for the expressions of another.”

The Solicitor General.—“You allowed yourself to be addressed in this strain?”

Witness.—“It’s the way you read it.”

The summing-up followed and after a consultation of three-quarters of an hour, the jury returned a verdict against Taylor on the indecency counts, not agreeing, however, as to the charges of procuration. Sentence was postponed, pending the result of the trial of Oscar Wilde, which began next day.

Wilde had meanwhile been at large on bail. The one charge of “conspiring with Alfred Taylor to procure” had been dropped, and the indictment of misdemeanour alleged that the prisoner unlawfully committed various acts with Charles Parker, Alfred Wood, Edward Shelley, and certain persons unknown.

The plea of “Not Guilty” was recorded.

The case for the prosecution was opened by calling Edward Shelley, the young man who had been employed by the Vigo Street publishers. Shelley repeated the story of the beginning and the progress of his intimacy with Wilde. It began, he said, in 1891; in March 1893, they quarrelled. The witness had been subjected by the prisoner to attempts at improper conduct. Oscar had, to be plain, on several occasions, placed his hand on the private parts of the witness and sought to put his, witness’s, hand in the same indelicate position as regards Wilde’s own person. Witness resented these acts at the time; had told Wilde not to be ‘a beast’, and the latter expressed his sorrow. “But I am so fond of you, Edward,” he had said.

The Witness wrote Wilde that he would not see him again. He spoke in the letter of these and other acts of impropriety and made use of the expression, “I was entrapped.” Witness explained to the court, “He knew I admired him very much and he took advantage of me—of my admiration and—well, I won’t say innocence. I don’t know what to call it.”

These are some of the letters which Shelley wrote to Wilde:

Another letter ran:

Sir Edward Clarke.—“Now, Mr. Shelley, do you mean to tell the jury that having in your mind, that this man had behaved disgracefully towards you, you wrote that letter of October 27, 1892?”

Witness.—“Yes. Because after those few occurrences he treated me very well. He seemed really sorry for what he had done.”

Sir Edward.—“He introduced you to his home?”

Witness.—“Yes, to his wife. I dined with them and he seemed to take a real interest in me.”

Sir Edward.—“You have met Lord Alfred Douglas?”

Witness.—“Yes, at his rooms at the ‘Varsity’.”

Sir Edward.—“He was kind to you?”

Witness.—“Yes. He gave me a suit of clothes while I was there.”

Sir Edward.—“And you found two letters in one of the pockets?”

Witness.—“Yes.”

Sir Edward.—“Who from?”

Witness.—“From Mr. Wilde to Lord Alfred.”

Sir Edward.—“How did they begin?”

Witness.—“One was addressed, “Dear Alfred”, and the other to “Dear Bogie.”

Solicitor-General.—“When did you first meet Lord Alfred?”

Witness.—“At Taylor’s rooms in Little College Street.”

Solicitor-General.—“Then you visited him at the University?”

Witness.—“Yes.”

The Solicitor-General then proceeded to ask the witness as to the terms upon which Wilde and Lord Alfred appeared to be; but this has been a prohibited topic from first to last and was now successfully objected to.

Charles Parker was called and he repeated his evidence at great length, relating the most disgusting facts in a perfectly serene manner. He said that Wilde invariably began his “campaign”—before arriving at the final nameless act—with indecencies. He used to require the witness to do what is vulgarly known as “tossing him off”, explained Parker quite unabashed, “and he would often do the same to me. He suggested two or three times that I should permit him to insert “it” in my mouth, but I never allowed that.” He gave other details equally shocking.

A few other witnesses were examined, and the rest of the day having been spent in the reading over of the evidence, Sir Edward Clarke submitted that in respect of certain counts of the indictment there was no evidence to go to the jury.

The Solicitor-General submitted that there was ample evidence to go to the jury, who alone could decide as to whether or not it was worthy of belief.

The Judge said he thought the point in respect to the Savoy Hotel incident was just on the line, but he thought that the wiser and safer course was to allow the count in respect of this matter to go to the jury. At the same time, he felt justified, if the occasion should arise, in reserving the point for the Court of Appeal. He was inclined to think it was a matter, the responsibility of deciding which, rested with the jury.

Sir Edward Clarke submitted next that there was no corroboration of the evidence of this witness. The letters of Shelley pointed to the inference that the latter might have been the victim of delusions, and, judging from his conduct in the witness-box, he appeared to have a peculiar sort of exaltation in and for himself.

The Solicitor-General maintained that Shelley’s evidence was corroborated as far as it could possibly be. Of course, in a case of this kind there was an enormous difficulty in producing corroboration of eye-witnesses to the actual commission of the alleged act.

The judge held that Shelley must be treated on the footing of an accomplice. He adhered, after a most careful consideration of the point, to his former view, that there was no corroboration of the nature required by the Act to warrant conviction, and therefore he felt justified in withdrawing that count from the jury.

Sir Edward Clarke made the same submission in the case of Wood.

The Solicitor General protested against any decision being given on these questions other than by a verdict of the jury. In his opinion the case of the man Wood could not be withheld from the jury. He submitted that there was every element of strong corroboration of Wood’s story, having regard especially to the strange and suspicious circumstances under which Wilde and Wood became acquainted.

Sir Edward Clarke quoted from the summing-up of Mr. Justice Charles on the last trial relative to the directions which he gave the jury in the law respecting the corroboration of the evidence of an accomplice.

The judge was of opinion that the count affecting Wood ought to go to the jury, and he gave reasons why it ought not to be withheld.

Sir Edward Clarke after a private passage of arms with the Solicitor-General in respect to the need for corroborative evidence, then began a brief, but able appeal to the jury on behalf of his client, after which Wilde entered the witness-box. He formally denied the allegations against him. Sir Frank Lockwood, in cross-examination: “Now, Mr. Wilde, I should like you to tell me where Lord A. Douglas is now?”

Witness.—“He is in Paris, at the Hotel des Deux Mondes.”

Sir Frank.—“How long has he been there?”

Witness.—“Three weeks.”

Sir Frank.—“Have you been in communication with him?”

Witness.—“Certainly. These charges are founded on sand. Our friendship is founded on a rock. There has been no need to cancel our acquaintance.”

Sir Frank.—“Was Lord Alfred in London at the time of the trial of the Marquis of Queensberry?”

Witness.—“Yes, for about three weeks. He went abroad at my request before the first trial on these counts came on.”

Sir Frank.—“May we take it that the two letters from you to him were samples of the kind you wrote him?”

Witness.—“No. They were exceptional letters born of the two exceptional letters he sent to me. It is possible, I assure you, to express poetry in prose.”

Sir Frank.—“I will read one of these prose-poem letters. Do you think this line is decent, addressed to a young man? “Your rose-red lips which are made for the music of song and the madness of kissing.”

Witness.—“It was like a sonnet of Shakespeare. It was a fantastic, extravagant way of writing to a young man. It does not seem to be a question of whether it is proper or not.”

Sir Frank.—“I used the word decent.”

Witness.—“Decent, oh yes.”

Sir Frank.—“Do you think you understand the word, Sir?”

Witness.—“I do not see anything indecent in it, it was an attempt to address in beautiful phraseology a young man who had much culture and charm.”

Sir Frank.—“How many times have you been in the College Street ‘snuggery’ of the man Taylor?”

Witness.—“I do not think more than five or six times.”

Sir Frank.—“Who did you meet there?”

Witness.—“Sidney Mavor and Schwabe—I cannot remember any others. I have not been there since I met Wood there.”

Sir Frank.—“With regard to the Savoy Hotel Witnesses?”

Witness.—“Their evidence is quite untrue.”

Sir Frank.—“You deny that the bed-linen was marked in the way described?”

Witness.—“I do not examine bed-linen when I arise. I am not a housemaid.”

Sir Frank.—“Were the stains there, Sir?”

Witness.—“If they were there, they were not caused in the way the Prosecution most filthily suggests.”

Sir Edward Clarke, after a slight “breeze” with the Solicitor-General as to the right to the last word to the jury, then addressed that devoted band of men for the third time, and asked for the acquittal of his client on all the counts.

Sir Frank Lockwood also addressed the jury and the Court then adjoined.

Next day the Solicitor-General, resuming his speech on behalf of the Crown dealt in details with the arguments of Sir E. Clarke in defence of Wilde, and commented in strong terms on observations that he made respecting the lofty situation of Wilde, with his literary accomplishments, for the purpose of influencing the judgment of the young. He said that the jury ought to discard absolutely any such appeal, to apply simply their common-sense to the testimony; and to form a conclusion on the evidence, which he submitted fully established the charges.

He was commenting on another branch of the case, when Sir E. Clarke interposed on the ground that the learned Solicitor-General was alluding to incidents connected with another trial. The Solicitor-General maintained that he was strictly within his rights, and the Judge held that the latter was entitled to make the comments objected to. “My learned friend does not appear to have gained a great deal by his superfluity of interruption”, remarked the Solicitor-General suavely, and the Court laughed loudly. The Judge said that this sort of thing was most offensive to him. It was painful enough to have to try such a case and keep the scales of justice evenly balanced without the Court being pestered with meaningless laughter and applause. If such conduct were repeated he would have the Court cleared.

The Solicitor-General then criticised the answers given by Wilde to the charges, which explanations he submitted, were not worthy of belief. The jury could not fail to put the interpretation on the conduct of the accused that he was a guilty man and they ought to say so by their verdict.

The Judge, in summing-up, referred to the difficulties of the case in some of its features. He regretted, that if the conspiracy counts were unnecessary, or could not be established, they should have been placed in the indictment. The jury must not surrender their own independent judgment in dealing with the facts and ought to discard everything which was not relevant to the issue before them, or did not assist their judgment.

He did not desire to comment more than he could help about Lord Alfred Douglas or the Marquis of Queensberry, but the whole of this lamentable enquiry arose through the defendant’s association with Lord A. Douglas.

He did not think that the action of the Marquis of Queensberry in leaving the card at the defendant’s club, whatever motives he had, was that of a gentleman. The jury were entitled to consider that these alleged acts happened some years ago. They ought to be the best judges as to the testimony of the witnesses and whether it was worthy of belief.

The letters written by the accused to Lord A. Douglas were undoubtedly open to suspicion, and they had an important bearing on Wood’s evidence. There was no corroboration of Wood as to the visit to Tite Street, and if his story had been true, he thought that some corroboration might have been obtained. Wood belonged to the vilest class of person which Society was pestered with, and the jury ought not to believe his story unless satisfactorily corroborated.

Their decision must turn on the character of the first introduction of Wilde to Wood. Did they believe that Wilde was actuated by charitable motives or by improper motives?

The foreman of the jury, interposing at this stage, asked whether a warrant had been issued for the arrest of Lord Alfred Douglas and if not, whether it was intended to issue one.

The Judge said he could not tell, but he thought not. It was a matter they could not now discuss. The granting of a warrant depended not upon the inferences to be drawn from the letters referred to in the case, but on the production of evidence of specific acts. There was a disadvantage in speculating on this question. They must deal with the evidence before them and with that alone. The foreman said, “If we are to deduce from the letters it applies to Lord Alfred Douglas equally as to the defendant.”

The Judge.—“In regard to the question as to the absence of Lord A. Douglas, I warn you not to be influenced by any consideration of the kind. All that they knew was that Lord A. Douglas went to Paris shortly after the last trial and had remained there since. He felt sure that if the circumstances justified it, the necessary proceedings could be taken.”

His lordship dealt with each of the charges, and the evidence in support of them, and he then, after thanking the jury for the patient manner in which they had attended to the case, left the issues in their hands.

The jury retired to consider their verdict at half past three o’clock and at half past five they returned into Court.

THE VERDICT

Amidst breathless excitement, the Foreman, in answer to the usual formal questions, announced the verdict, “Guilty.”

Sir Edward Clarke.—“I apply, my lord, for a postponement of sentence.”

The Judge.—“I must certainly refuse that request. I can only characterise the offences as the worst that have ever come under my notice. I have, however, no wish to add to the pain that must be felt by the defendants. I sentence both Wilde and Taylor to two years imprisonment with hard labour.”

The sentence was met with some cries of “shame”, “a scandalous verdict”, “unjust,” by certain persons in Court. The two prisoners appeared dazed and Wilde especially seemed ready to faint as he was hurried out of sight to the cells.

Thus perished by his own act a man who might have made a lasting mark in British Literature and secured for himself no mean place in the annals of his time.

He forfeited, in the pursuit of forbidden pleasures, if pleasures they can be called, all and everything that made life dear.

He entered upon his incarceration bankrupt in reputation, in friends, in pocket, and had not even left to him the poor shreds of his own self-esteem.

He went into gaol, knowing that if he emerged alive, the darkness would swallow him up and that his world—the spheres which had delighted to honour him—would know him no more.

He had covered his name with infamy and sank his own celebrity in a slough of slime and filth.

He would die to leave behind him what?—the name of a man who was absolutely governed by his own vices and to whom no act of immorality was too foul or horrible.

Oscar Wilde emerged from prison in every way a broken man. The wonderful descriptive force of the Ballad of Reading Gaol; the perfect, torturing self-analysis of De Profundis speak eloquently of powers unimpaired; but they were the swan-songs of a once great mind. All his abilities had fled. He seemed unable to concentrate his mind upon anything. He took up certain subjects, played with them, and wearied of them in a day. French authors did not ostracise the erratic English genius when he hid himself amongst them and they honestly endeavoured to find him employment. But his faculties had been blunted by the horrors of prison life. His epigrams had lost their edge. His aphorisms were trite and aimless. He abandoned every subject he took up, in despair. His mind died before his body. He suffered from a complete mental atrophy. A nightingale cannot sing in a cage. A genius cannot flourish in a prison. He died in two years and is now—the merest memory! Let us remember this of him: if he sinned much, he suffered much.

Peace to his ashes!

HIS LAST BOOK
AND HIS LAST YEARS IN PARIS
By “A”
(LORD ALFRED DOUGLAS?)

OSCAR WILDE

His last Book and his last Years

The publication of Oscar Wilde’s last book, “De Profundis,” has revived interest in the closing scenes of his life, and we to-day print the first of two articles dealing with his last years in Paris from a source which puts their authenticity beyond question.

The one question which inevitably suggested itself to the reader of “De Profundis,” was, “What was the effect of his prison reflections on his subsequent life?” The book is full not only of frank admissions of the error of his ways, but of projects for his future activity. “I hope,” he wrote, in reply to some criticisms on the relations of art and morals, “to live long enough to produce work of such a character that I shall be able at the end of my days to say, “Yes, that is just where the artistic life leads a man!” He mentions in particular two subjects on which he proposed to write, “Christ as the Precursor of the Romantic Movement in Life” and “The Artistic Life Considered in its Relation to Conduct.” These resolutions were never carried out, for reasons some of which the writer of the following article indicates.

Oscar Wilde was released from prison in May, 1897. He records in his letters the joy of the thought that at that time “both the lilac and the laburnum will be blooming in the gardens.” The closing sentences of the book may be recalled: “Society, as we have constituted it, will have no place for me, has none to offer; but Nature, whose sweet rains fall on unjust and just alike, will have clefts in the rocks where I may hide, and secret valleys in whose silence I may weep undisturbed. She will hang the night with stars so that I may walk abroad in the darkness without stumbling, and send the wind over my footprints so that none may track me to my hurt: she will cleanse me in great waters, and with bitter herbs make me whole.”

He died in November, 1900, three years and a half after his release from Reading Gaol.

Monsieur Joseph Renaud, whose translation of Oscar Wilde’s “Intentions” has just appeared in Paris, has given a good example of how history is made in his preface to that work. He recounts an obviously imaginary meeting between himself and Oscar Wilde in a bar on the Boulevard des Italiens. He concludes the episode, such as it is, with these words: “Nothing remained of him but his musical voice and his large blue childlike eyes.” Oscar Wilde’s eyes were curious—long, narrow, and green. Anything less childlike it would be hard to imagine. To the physiognomist they were his most remarkable feature, and redeemed his face from the heaviness that in other respects characterised it. So much for M. Joseph Renaud’s powers of observation.

The complacent unanimity with which the chroniclers of Oscar Wilde’s last years in Paris have accepted and spread the “legend” of his life in that city is remarkable, and would be exasperating considering its utter falsity to anyone who was not aware of their incompetence to deal with the subject. Scarcely one of his self-constituted biographers had more than the very slightest acquaintance with him, and their records and impressions of him are chiefly made up of stale gossip and secondhand anecdotes. The stories of his supposed privations, his frequent inability to obtain a square meal, his lonely and tragic death in a sordid lodging, and his cheap funeral are all grotesquely false.

True, Oscar Wilde, who for several years before his conviction had been making at least £5,000 a year, found it very hard to live on his rather precarious income after he came out of prison; he was often very “hard up,” and often did not know where to turn for a coin, but I will undertake to prove to anyone whom it may concern that from the day he left prison till the day of his death his income averaged at least £400 a year. He had, moreover, far too many devoted friends in Paris ever to be in need of a meal provided he would take the trouble to walk a few hundred yards or take a cab to one of half a dozen houses. His death certainly was tragic—deaths are apt to be tragic—but he was surrounded by friends when he died, and his funeral was not cheap; I happen to have paid for it in conjunction with another friend of his, so I ought to know.

He did not become a Roman Catholic before he died. He was, at the instance of a great friend of his, himself a devout Catholic, “received into the Church” a few hours before he died; but he had then been unconscious for many hours, and he died without ever having any idea of the liberty that had been taken with his unconscious body. Whether he would have approved or not of the step taken by his friend is a matter on which I should not like to express a too positive opinion, but it is certain that it would not do him any harm, and, apart from all questions of religion and sentiment, it facilitated the arrangements which had to be made for his interment in a Catholic country, in view of the fact that no member of his family took any steps to claim his body or arrange for his funeral.

Having disposed of certain false impressions in regard to various facts of his life and death in Paris, I may turn to what are less easily controlled and examined theories as to that life. Without wishing to be paradoxical, or harshly destructive of the carefully cherished sentiment of poetic justice so dear to the British mind (and the French mind, too, for that matter), I give it as my firm opinion that Oscar Wilde was, on the whole, fairly happy during the last years of his life. He had an extraordinarily buoyant and happy temperament, a splendid sense of humour, and an unrivalled faculty for enjoyment of the present. Of course, he had his bad moments, moments of depression and sense of loss and defeat, but they were not of long duration. It was part of his pose to luxuriate a little in the details of his tragic circumstances. He harrowed the feelings of many of those whom he came across; words of woe poured from his lips; he painted an image of himself, destitute, abandoned, starving even (I have heard him use the word after a very good dinner at Paillard’s); as he proceeded he was caught by the pathos of his own words, his beautiful voice trembled with emotion, his eyes swam with tears; and then, suddenly, by a swift, indescribably brilliant, whimsical touch, a swallow-wing flash on the waters of eloquence, the tone changed and rippled with laughter, bringing with it his audience, relieved, delighted, and bubbling into uncontrollable merriment.

He never lost his marvellous gift of talking; after he came out of prison he talked better than before. Everyone who knew him really before and after his imprisonment is agreed about that. His conversation was richer, more human, and generally on a higher intellectual level. In French he talked as well as in English; to my own English ear his French used to seem rather laboured and his accent too marked, but I am assured by Frenchmen who heard him talk that such was not the effect produced on them.

He explained to me his inability to write, by saying that when he sat down to write he always inevitably began to think of his past life, and that this made him miserable and upset his spirits. As long as he talked and sat in cafés and “watched life,” as his phrase was, he was happy, and he had the luck to be a good sleeper, so that only the silence and self-communing necessary to literary work brought him visions of his terrible sufferings in the past and made his old wounds bleed again. My own theory as to his literary sterility at this period is that he was essentially an interpreter of life, and that his existence in Paris was too narrow and too limited to stir him to creation. At his best he reflected life in a magic mirror, but the little corner of life he saw in Paris was not worth reflecting. If he could have been provided with a brilliant “entourage” of sympathetic listeners as of old and taken through a gay season in London, he would have begun to write again. Curiously enough, society was the breath of life to him, and what he felt more than anything else in his “St. Helena” in Paris, as he often told me, was the absence of the smart and pretty women who in the old days sat at his feet!

A.

OSCAR WILDE’S
LAST YEARS IN PARIS.—II

The French possess the faculty, very rare in England, of differentiating between a man and his work. They are utterly incapable of judging literary work by the moral character of its author. I have never yet met a Frenchman who was able to comprehend the attitude of the English public towards Oscar Wilde after his release from prison. They were completely mystified by it. An eminent French man-of-letters said to me one day: “You have a man of genius, he commits crimes, you put him in prison, you destroy his whole life, you take away his fortune, you ruin his health, you kill his mother, his wife, and his brother (sic), you refuse to speak to him, you exile him from your country. That is very severe. In France we should never so treat a man of genius, but enfin ça peut se comprendre. But not content with that, you taboo his books and his plays, which before you enjoyed and admired, and pour comble de tout you are very angry if he goes into a restaurant and orders himself some dinner. Il faut pourtant qu’il mange ce pauvre homme!” If I had been representing the British public in an official capacity I should have probably given expression to its views and furnished a sufficient repartee to my voluble French friend by replying: “Je n’en vois pas la nécessité.”

Fortunately for Oscar Wilde, the French took another view of the attitude to adopt towards a man who has offended against society, and who has been punished for it. Never by a word or a hint did they show that they remembered that offence, which, in their view, had been atoned for and wiped out. Oscar Wilde remained for them always un grand homme, un maître, a distinguished man, to be treated with deference and respect and, because he had suffered much, with sympathy. It says a great deal for the innate courtesy and chivalry of the French character that a man in Oscar Wilde’s position, as well known by sight, as he once remarked to me, as the Eiffel Tower, should have been able to go freely about in theatres, restaurants, and cafés without encountering any kind of hostility or even impertinent curiosity.

It was this benevolent attitude of Paris towards him that enabled him to live and, in a fashion, to enjoy life. His audience was sadly reduced and precarious, and except on some few occasions it was of inferior intellectual calibre; but still he had an audience, and an audience to him was everything. Nor was he altogether deprived of the society of men of his own class and value. Many of the most brilliant young writers in France were proud to sit at his feet and enjoy his brilliant conversation, chief among whom I may mention that accomplished critic and essayist, Monsieur Ernest Lajeunesse, who is the author of what is perhaps the best posthumous notice of him that has been published in France in that excellent magazine, the “Revue blanche”; among older men who kept up their friendship with him, Octave Mirbeau, Moréas, Paul Fort, Henri Bauer, and Jean Lorrain may be mentioned.

In contrast to this attitude taken up towards him by so many distinguished and eminent men, I cannot refrain from recalling the attitude adopted by the general run of English-speaking residents in Paris. For the credit of my country I am glad to be able to put them down mostly as Americans, or at any rate so Americanised by the constant absorption of “American drinks” as to be indistinguishable from the genuine article. These gentlemen “guessed they didn’t want Oscar Wilde to be sitting around” in the bars where they were in the habit of shedding the light of their presence, and from one of these establishments Oscar Wilde was requested by the proprietor to withdraw at the instance of one of our “American cousins” who is now serving a term of two years penal servitude for holding up and robbing a bank!

Oscar Wilde, to do him justice, bore this sort of rebuff with astonishing good temper and sweetness. His sense of humour and his invincible self-esteem kept him from brooding over what to another man might have appeared intolerable, and he certainly possessed the philosophical temperament to a greater extent than any other man I have ever come across. Every now and then one or other of the very few faithful English friends left to him would turn up in Paris and take him to dinner at one of the best restaurants, and anyone who met him on one of these occasions would have found it difficult to believe that he had ever passed through such awful experiences. Whether he was expounding some theory, grave or fantastic, embroidering it the while with flashes of impromptu wit or deepening it with extraordinary and intimate learning (for, as Ernest Lajeunesse says, he knew everything), or whether he was “keeping the table in a roar” with his delightfully whimsical humour, summer-lightning that flashed and hurt no one, he was equally admirable. To have lived in his lifetime and not to have heard him talk is as though one had lived for years at Athens without going to look at the Parthenon.

I wish I could remember one-hundredth part of the good things he said. He was extraordinarily quick in answer and repartee, and anyone who says that his wit was the result of preparation and midnight oil can never have heard him speak. I remember once at dinner a friend of his who had formerly been in the “Blues,” pointing out that in the opening stanza of “The Ballad of Reading Jail” he had made a mistake in speaking of the “scarlet coat” of the man who was hanged; he was, as the dedication of the poem says, a private in the “Blues,” and his coat would therefore naturally not be scarlet. The lines go—

He did not wear his scarlet coat,
For blood and wine are red.

“Well, what could I do,” said Oscar Wilde plaintively, “I couldn’t very well say

He did not wear his azure coat,
For blood and wine are blue—

could I?”

The last time I saw him was about three months before he died. I took him to dinner at the Grand Café. He was then perfectly well and in the highest spirits. All through dinner he kept me delighted and amused. Only afterwards, just before I left him, he became rather depressed. He actually told me that he didn’t think he was going to live long; he had a presentiment, he said. I tried to turn it off into a joke, but he was quite serious. “Somehow,” he said, “I don’t think I shall live to see the new century.” Then a long pause. “If another century began, and I was still alive, it would be really more than the English could stand.” And so I left him, never to see him alive again.

Just before he died he came to, after a long period of unconsciousness and said to a faithful friend who sat by his bedside, “I have had a dreadful dream; I dreamt that I dined with the dead.” “My dear Oscar,” replied his friend, “I am sure you were the life and soul of the party.” “Really, you are sometimes very witty,” replied Oscar Wilde, and I believe those are his last recorded words. The jest was admirable and in his own genre; it was prompted by ready wit and kindness, and because of it Oscar Wilde went off into his last unconscious phase, which lasted for twelve hours, with a smile on his lips. I cherish a hope that it is also prophetic, Death would have no terrors for me if only I were sure of “dining with the dead.”[14]

“DE PROFUNDIS”

A Criticism by “A”

(LORD ALFRED DOUGLAS?)

“The English are very fond of a man who admits he has been wrong.”
(The Ideal Husband).

“DE PROFUNDIS”

A Criticism by

Lord Alfred Douglas

In a painful passage in this interesting posthumous book (it takes the form of a letter to an unnamed friend), Oscar Wilde relates how, on November the 13th, 1895, he stood for half an hour on the platform of Clapham Junction, handcuffed and in convict dress, surrounded by an amused and jeering mob. “For a year after that was done to me,” he writes, “I wept every day at the same hour and for the same space of time.” That was before he had discovered or thought he had discovered that his terrible experiences in prison, his degradation and shame were a part, and a necessary part, of his artistic life, a completion of his incomplete soul. After he had learnt humility in the bitterest school that “man’s inhumanity to man” provides for unwilling scholars, after he had drained the cup of sorrow to the dregs, after his spirit was broken—he wrote this book in which he tried to persuade himself and others that he had learnt by suffering and despair what life and pleasure had never taught him.

If Oscar Wilde’s spirit, returning to this world in a malicious mood, had wished to devise a pleasant and insinuating trap for some of his old enemies of the press, he could scarcely have hit on a better one than this book. I am convinced it was written in passionate sincerity at the time, and yet it represents a mere mood and an unimportant one of the man who wrote it, a mood too which does not even last through the 150 pages of the book. “The English are very fond of a man who admits he has been wrong,” he makes one of his characters in “The Ideal Husband” say, and elsewhere in this book he compares the advantages of pedestals and pillories in their relation to the public’s attitude towards himself. Well here he is in the pillory, and here also is Mr. Courtney in the “Daily Telegraph” getting quite fond of him for the very first time. Here is Oscar Wilde, “a genius,” “incontestably one of the greatest dramatists of modern times” as he is now graciously allowed to be, turning up unexpectedly with an admission that he was in the wrong, and telling us that his life and his art would have been incomplete without his imprisonment, that he has learnt humility and found a new mode of expression in suffering. He is “purged by grief,” “chastened by suffering,” and everything, in short, that he should be, and Mr. Courtney is touched and pleased. What Mr. Courtney and others have failed to realise, and what Wilde himself did realise very soon after he wrote this interesting but rather pathetically ineffective book, is that the mood which produced it was no other than the first symptom of that mental and physical disease generated by suffering and confinement which culminated in the death of its gifted and unfortunate author a few years later. As long as the spirit of revolt was left in Oscar Wilde, so long was left the fire of creative genius. When the spirit of revolt died, the flame began to subside, and continued to subside gradually with spasmodic flickers till its ultimate extinction. “I have got to make everything that has happened good for me.” He writes, “The plank bed, the loathsome food, the hard rope shredded into oakum till one’s finger tips grow dull with pain, the menial offices with which each day begins, the harsh orders that routine seems to necessitate, the dreadful dress that makes sorrow grotesque to look at, the silence, the solitude, the shame—each and all these things I have to transform into a spiritual experience. There is not a single degradation of the body which I must not try and make into a spiritualising of the soul.” But, alas! plank beds, loathsome food, menial offices, and oakum picking do not spiritualise the soul; at any rate, they did not spiritualise Oscar Wilde’s soul. The only effect they had was to destroy his magnificent intellect, and even, as some passages in this book show to temporarily cloud his superb sense of humour. The return of freedom gave him back the sense of humour, and the wreck of his magnificent intellect served him so well to the end of his life that, although he had hopelessly lost the power of concentration necessary to the production of literary work, he remained to the day of his death the most brilliant and the most intellectual talker in Europe.

It must not be supposed, however, that this book is not a remarkable book and one which is not worth careful reading. There are fine prose passages in it, and occasional felicities of phrase which recall the Oscar Wilde of “The House of Pomegranates” and the “Prose-Poems,” and here and there rather unexpectedly comes an epigram like this for example: “There were Christians before Christ. For that we should be grateful. The unfortunate thing is that there have been none since.” True, he spoils the epigram by adding, “I make one exception, St. Francis of Assisi.” A concession to the tyranny of facts and the relative importance of sincerity to style, which is most uncharacteristic of the “old Oscar.” Nevertheless, the trace of the master hand is still visible, and the book contains much that is profound and subtle on the philosophy of Christ as conceived by this modern evangelist of the gospel of Life and Literature. One does not travel further than the 33rd page of the book before finding glaring and startling inconsistencies in the mental attitude of the writer towards his fate, for whereas on page 18 in a rather rhetorical passage he speaks of the “eternal disgrace” he had brought on the “noble and honoured name” bequeathed him by his father and mother, on page 33 “Reason” tells him “that the laws under which he was convicted are wrong and unjust laws, and the system under which he has suffered a wrong and unjust system.” But this is the spirit of revolt not quite crushed. He says that if he had been released a year sooner, as in fact he very nearly was, he would have left his prison full of rage and bitterness, and without the treasure of his new-found “Humility.” I am unregenerate enough to wish that he had brought his rage and bitterness with him out of prison. True, he would never have written this book if he had come out of prison a year sooner, but he would almost certainly have written several more incomparable comedies, and we who reverenced him as a great artist in words, and mourned his downfall as an irreparable blow to English Literature would have been spared the rather painful experience of reading the posthumous praise now at last so lavishly given to what certainly cannot rank within measurable distance of his best work.

A.

From “The Motorist and Traveller” (March 1, 1905).