 CHAPTER XI of THE REAL OSCAR WILD by Robert Chirard. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. This habit of saying more than things about people was one of Wilde's most unfortunate characteristics. I fancy that even Willie, proud as he was of his brother, and truly affectionate as he was by nature, was not without some feeling of resentment against him for the unkind things that Oscar had said to and about him, a resentment which may possibly have diminished for him at least the appalling grief that all Oscar Wilde's friends felt at his terrible downfall. I remember that during those dreadful days at Oakley Street, when Oscar Wilde was out on bail at his brother's house, Willie did not seem to realize the terrible danger in which his brother stood. It is quite possible that he never anticipated his conviction. At any rate, he violently opposed any suggestion that Oscar should take to his heels, as more than one of his friends was urging him to do. He was particularly anxious lest my influence with Oscar might bring him to flee, for I had very definitely stated that I considered that that was, in view of the Wilde prejudice that existed against the accused man, the only sensible thing to do. Oscar is an Irish gentleman, he used to say to me, and will stay and face the music. One morning he came down to breakfast, and made the announcement that he had decided that I must be induced to return to Paris, and, he added, if he hasn't the means to travel, I must sell my library to get him his ticket. In this attitude I saw that he preferred to his brother's safety the family honour. I am not blaming him for that, but would have welcomed a little more solicitude for Oscar and a little less of the Spartan lack of altruism. His singularly high spirit during the whole of that mournful period struck me as peculiar. He was joking and laughing all the time. He greatly enjoyed the mixture of metaphors into which he had fallen, when, first describing poor Oscar's arrival at Oakley Street on the night of his release from prison, after he had been hounded from one hotel to another by Lord Queensborough's gang, he had informed me that, quote, Oscar came tapping with his beak at my window and fell down on my threshold like a wounded stag, unquote. He repeated it frequently to Oscar's intense ennervement. He did not seem to care to spare his brother's feelings. He was constantly referring to some letters which he had found addressed to Oscar by one of his friends from Italy, in which a curious medley of attractions was set out. There was moonlight on the orange groves, and there were other inducements which need not be particularised. It is, I have always held, very unfortunate that those letters were not preserved. They would have established that the alleged corruptor was a man who had refused to be corrupted. I can remember also how, one day at lunch, he made Oscar wince, as though with a branding iron, by relating how he had had a discussion that morning with a cabman, and had challenged him to fight, quote, on Queensborough's rules. I thought it a fine thing in my friend that he showed no resentment whatever at these examples of tacklessness. He seemed profoundly grateful to his brother for his hospitality and protection, and, in his heart of hearts, I do not doubt that he was glad to have Willie between him and friends like myself, who wanted him to yield to his accusers, to seek safety in flight, and, in the eyes of his enemies, forfeit his honour. On more than one occasion at Oakley Street he said things that showed that he felt sorry to have hurt unwittingly his brother's feelings in the past. I, as often, told him that I did not think that he had ever willfully hurt anybody's feelings, but that he was so fond of epigram, and so skilled in language, repartee, and retort, that, if a smart thing was to be said, say it, he would, no matter how it might sting the person it was aimed at. How many people had harboured grievances against him for having been made victims of his fondness for smart sayings was shown by the extraordinary number of enemies who emerged from the obscurity of their lives when he fell. Men seemed to be able to forgive everything except injuries to their vanity. Hell knows no fury here, also. One of Oscar's most mischievous enemies in active aggressiveness was an actor whom he had criticised for appearing in a New York drawing room wearing his gloves during an afternoon call. Another actor, Charles Brookfield, who in January 1895 had thankfully accepted a part in Oscar Wilde's play An Ideal Husband, was, as Mr. Stuart Mason informs us, quote, largely responsible for collecting the evidence which brought about Wilde's downfall some weeks later. Stuart Mason adds, quote, after Wilde's conviction, Brookfield and some friends entertained the Marquess of Queensbury at a banquet in celebration of the event. In revenge for this, some of Wilde's admirers entered a protest at the Prince of Wales Theatre on the night of Charles Hortree's revival of Charles Brookfield's play Dear Old Charlie, on 20th February 1912, shortly after the latter's appointment as joint reader of plays, unquote. Brookfield's incentive may have been a real friendship for Lord Queensbury, but there was broadened aid in it also, and doubtless resentment for one or two remarks which Oscar Wilde had made about his representation of himself in The Poet and the Puppets. Oscar had had this unfortunate habit of medicines all his life. It is the characteristic of his which his school fellows at Portora first recall. He was the inventor of nicknames for the school, non-flattering. At Portora also, he displayed that aloofness which distinguished him in afterlife and which raised up so many enemies to him. The ordinary individual, the elderly individual, the ugly, those suffering from physical illness or disfigurement, were very soon made to feel that Oscar Wilde did not desire their acquaintance or their company. On several occasions I have seen him act toward such in a manner that might, in a person of less importance, have been considered as downright discurtecy and rudeness. I can't help it, he used to say. I can't stand those sort of people. How can you know such a dreadfully ugly man? He once asked me, after he had cold-shouldered a friend of mine whom I had introduced to him at Charles Street. He would certainly have been rude to Socrates, and indeed after spending some time in the company of a poet who was the physical reincarnation of Socrates, I mean Paul Verlaine, combined with the habits and laissez-à-les of deogenes, he complained bitterly of the discomfort he had felt at having to sit at the same cafe table with a person so unattractive. And this was the great Verlaine, sweetest of poets, most winsome of those men-children who have never grown up. He was perfectly truthful in his answers to Mr. Carson about the kind of people he liked and disliked. After his hour in Verlaine's company at the Café François-Première, we were walking down the Boulevard Saint-Michel, when we were accosted by a young acrobat, an exceedingly graceful and handsome young fellow. He was carrying a red carpet, and he asked us to patronise him, for, he said, Je travaille très bien. I like that," said Wilde, I like his I do find things. That is what every artist ought to say about himself. This lad quite takes the taste of Verlaine, with his hideous squalor and his bannieu humility and self-delegation, out of my mouth. I will patronise this lad. So he sat down on the terrace of a café on the Place Saint-Michel, and bade the acrobat perform, bestowed largesse on him, and afterwards made him sit at our table, where he let him order what he liked, and carried on an animated conversation with him for a very much longer time than I thought necessary or wise. And this, in spite of the fact that the spectacle of this elegantly dressed and remarkable looking man, sitting in front of a café at the same table, with a tumbler, in spangled trunks, attracted the attention of all the passes by. He did not seem to mind being noticed under such circumstances any more than later on, he had no hesitation in showing himself at public places of entertainment with the extra-ordinary companions who afterwards testified against him. Yet, on the previous evening, he had precipitately fled from a box at the skating music hall, because he noticed that none of the other boxes were occupied, and that he was attracting attention on this account. I referred to this after we had left the acrobat and were walking home, and he said that he had hated to be stared at when sitting in the box, because there curiosity was aroused in him on account of his supposed wealth, being the only occupant of the high-priced loger. But that he did not at all mind being noticed because he was in the company of a social outcast, was rather proud of it, in fact. While he often went out of his way to illustrate his theories, and to force them on public attention, he avoided anything resembling ostentation. For his Lucullian rapasts at a restaurant, he preferred a private room. He did not want to be noticed as a man who could spend money freely. But he did not mind sitting with an acrobat at the aperitif in the view of all Paris. So also, when he went with ordinary people to a theatre, he would prefer to sit at the back of the box. But when he was in company of curious folk, he liked everybody in the theatre to notice it. Towards the end of his career in London, I heard some extra ordinary accounts of public appearances he had made in the London places of entertainment. It has often occurred to me, in thinking over those times, that Constance Wilde was quite justified in telling me that her husband, at the time of his arrest, had for some years previously been out of his mind. Certainly just before his arrest, he was acting in a manner entirely alien to the Oscar Wilde whom I had known for so many years. The laying on of an information against Lord Queensborough, and all the noise and display that surrounded that miserable act, was sure signs that the man was not himself. I remember the dismay with which I read that Oscar Wilde, in his role of prosecutor, had driven up to the Bow Street police-court to give evidence against the Marquess in a carriage and pair, a voiture de grand remise, which was to figure subsequently on more than one occasion, as in the precipitate withdrawal from the Old Bailey, and the drive to the Cadogan Hotel, from which he was to return in a four-wheeled cab between two detective inspectors, and that much advertised excursion in Bozie's company to Monte Carlo before the Queensbury trial, when effacement and discreteness seemed indispensable. But the man seemed altogether transformed and spoiled. One heard of his engaging an under-butler, and wondered why no groom of the chambers. In which connection it is curious to note that Oscar Wilde never employed a valet, even in his days of opulence. One would have fancied a valet likely to be of far more service to him than an under-butler, or even than a butler pure and simple, especially as he rarely dined at home, and certainly never owned a cellar. But I never knew him to have a man to attend to him, and it now occurs to me that I never asked him why he dispensed with a servant so essential to a man of fashion, who likes to turn out faultlessly groomed. Amongst the fellows who were brought to give evidence against him there were two gentlemen's servants, and it seems to me that if he had desired their company for the purposes alleged, his evil designs might have been very much more easily affected, without risk of detection or even comment, by engaging one or the other of them to act as his valet. That is, doubtless, what had his intentions in seeking their company being such as were described by the prosecution, he would have done. Oscar Wilde rarely, if ever, spoke to me of his school days. I understood that his reminiscences of school life were that it was essentially tedious, and that, like most of us, he longed to grow up and be out in that world where, as a matter of fact, one first begins to realise what tediousness means. I never heard of his having any fights. I imagine that his bulk, to say nothing of his manner, secured him immunity from assault, in spite of the fact that his justifiable assumption of superiority, his distaste for games, and the fact that he insisted on always wearing a top hat, must have marked him for the vengeance of the school bullies. I fancy that Willie may have stood between him and these. Willie was intensely proud and very fond of his bookish and clever brother, and Willie was very handy with his fists. It is recorded, by the way, that he was very, quote, superior in his manner towards Willie. His conduct was uniformly good, and only one occasion is remembered on which he violently misbehaved himself by an open defiance of the headmaster, old steel, whom it appears he, quote, cheeked something awful. This must have been one of the very rare occasions in his life when he let temper get beyond control. I never once saw him in a temper during the seventeen years that I knew him. He did not particularly distinguish himself at school, but it was noticed that he could master the contents of a book with extraordinary rapidity, and that what he had once read he never forgot. He does not seem to have attempted any writing as a boy, the kind of writings I mean that pure isle pens indulge in, poetry, and so forth, but his mother used to speak with the light of the beautiful letters which he sent her from Portora school, which, she said, were wonderful and often real literature. One such letter at least is extant, and has been referred to in these pages. As a schoolboy, so he told me, he had no spirit of adventure, no wish to run away, to join the pirates, to hunt red Indians, to form secret societies, to go to sea, to be wrecked on desert islands, or to do any of the things which most boys are so very anxious to do. He once told me that he had never climbed a tree, that he never collected anything, not even postage stamps, and had always regarded collecting things as the essence of tediousness. Besides which he had no sense of ownership, no desire for property. He satisfied himself with reading of the adventures of others, and devoured the English classical novels. He was all along too bulky to be a boy of action. He, quote, used to flop about ponderously, is what was said of him. No doubt he had at heart a very solid contempt for his school-fellows, one can imagine the genus, and it may be noted that, apart from the two wilds, none of the poor Torah boys of those days has ever distinguished himself. He seems to have liked to look nice, and better dressed than his associates, from whom he further differentiated himself by allowing his hair to grow long. I think the best friend of his school days was his mother at home, to whom he wrote his wonderful letters. He would be thinking of her most of the time, and no doubt the fact that she took him on continental travel in his holidays, satisfied the wanderlust that is innate in every boy, and kept him quiet and apparently apathetic in term time. One does not hear much of his being greedy at school, as boys are, but the letter referred to shows that he appreciated a hamper from home. He took such a delight in later life in the pleasures of the table, and was a gourmet so pronounced, that the wild of Portora School might have shown some penchant that way, but I have not been able to get any proof of his having done so. When one has talked with former pupils of the school, with former masters and people about the place who may have been living there in the sixties, even those who were ready to speak about Oscar Wilde seem to remember very little about him. He was so reserved and stood so much aloof that he seems to have passed through the school without attracting any particular attention. Possibly some might be able to tell one things, but prefer not to speak about him. I have noticed in Ireland a greater reluctance to speak about Oscar Wilde, and this is not from any condemnation of the man, of whom all Irishmen I think are proud, but from a want of confidence in the motives which prompt the questions. When I was writing My Life of Wilde, I found many people in Ireland who could have been most useful to me, but these refused to say a word about him, thinking that any Englishman could only write about Wilde to attack his memory. Indeed, one New York editor, a certain Laughin, did actually in a long editorial in the New York Sun, charge me with having committed a move his action in writing the book at all. A certain Sullivan, MP, one of them, who had been a great friend of the Wilde family, wrote me a most indignant letter when he heard that I was wishful of writing A Life of Wilde. He seemed convinced that I, as an Englishman, could have no other object than to condemn the brilliant Irishman of whom his countrymen were so proud. It was of no avail that I pointed out to him that, on the contrary, my object was to show that Oscar Wilde was not the monster that many English people wished him to be remembered as, and that I thought a useful and patriotic purpose would be served, by showing foreigners that we do not have men of genius in Great Britain who do not necessarily belong to the territorial logical domain, an impression which, with regard to our men of genius, we English have sedulously fostered abroad. But it was in vain, none of the people who knew Oscar Wilde as a lad and a schoolboy would consent to speak about him. Let him rest in peace, was their answer. In other words, let his friends remain silent while his innumerable enemies keep alive the horrible legend which they invented. CHAPTER XII. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. In day profundus Oscar Wilde states that one of the two turning points of his life was when his father sent him to Oxford. If that book had been published during his lifetime I should have asked him to enlarge on this statement. My own opinion was that the phrase was written because it was an effective one, and facilitated an antithesis of which Victor Hugo would have been proud. Oscar Wilde has declared that when he wrote a book he was concerned entirely with literature, that is, with art. He rarely thought that anything that he wrote was true. Indeed, he might say, never. Not true in the actual sense of the word. I think that this applies to much in day profundus, this antithesis amongst other things. I have known hundreds of Oxford men, and I never saw one on whom Oxford had left less of its unmistakable mark than Oscar Wilde. If I had had to guess at which university he had received his final education I should have said Cambridge. Oxford bestows a certain manner, the Oxford manner, not to agreeable, which was entirely absent from Wilde's demeanour. The average honours man is pedagogic, not to say pedantic, and was there ever a man of such universal knowledge as Oscar Wilde who less obtruded his superior sapience? Cambridge men are at least more modest, perhaps because of the lower rank that their university holds in the public estimation. I don't see that Oxford gave him anything, had anything to give him. He went there, after sweeping all before him at Trinity, Dublin, as a business proposition. He preferred to go to Oxford where better things are to be won, is what is recorded on College Green of the reasons why he left Trinity. He had little to learn at Oxford, and he certainly did not read there much more than he read at Trinity. Quote, he was not a reading man and was rarely seen at his books. The more I think of it, the more I wonder what he did mean in the statement I have quoted. It certainly was not Oxford that made a poet of him. His aestheticism must have developed there in spite of every antagonistic influence. In those days, at any rate, Oxford was the high metropolis of British Philistinism. It was the same university which had expelled Shelley and had bestowed high honours and plump pre-bends on Dr Warren. It has been a lethal chamber for the poets, with such few exceptions as, for instance, Matthew Arnold, William Wordsworth, Jr., George Nathaniel Curson, Sir Renal Rod, and Ernest Dawson. It is true that Revenna, the protoplasm of most of Wilde's verse, was written there, but it was conceived elsewhere, and the only credit that Oxford can claim from that fine poem is that it was probably evoked by the strong contrast between the mouldiness of his life and the damp mist of its meadows and the glorious subsisting vitality of the sun-bathed Italian city, which Dante Alighieri elected for his eternal repose, one thousand years after the Empress Gala Plakidia had been laid to rest there. Contrast is the active stimulus to literary production. Walter Raleigh describes the pulsing activity of the world's history in some little ease of the Tower of London. Bonnion, surrounded by thieves and outcasts in Bedford Jail, evolves as saintly progress. Oscar Wilde writes de profundis in Reading Jail. We give in these pages a portrait of Oscar Wilde taken when he was an undergraduate, and it may fairly be asked if there is anything in the man's appearance, as shown in that picture, to warrant the stories that have been told of his posturing eccentricities there. Here is the typical undergraduate in the typical Oxford lounge suit, with nothing except his fine head to distinguish him from the other undergraduates in the group. I think that all the stories we have since heard about his conduct there, and the unpopularity which it aroused, have been invented for the needs of a very sorry cause. It is not denied that in his beautiful rooms in Maudlin he had some blue china, but it is improbable. Indeed, he denied it to me, that he ever said that he was trying to live up to it. And no doubt there were many other young men of taste who had such porcelain ornaments in their rooms. I was up at Oxford not many years after Oscar Wilde had gone down. There was certainly no talk about him. He had left behind him no legend. I never heard his name mentioned one single time. As regards any evil rumour connected with his name, there was none. There was a good deal of talk, far too much to my liking, about what has since been described as the Greek movement, but other names than his were associated with it. And then we have Alfred Douglas's invaluable testimony as to the position which Oscar Wilde held in the estimation of the president of his college. This silence seems to me all the more remarkable today, since Revenna has taken its right place in undergraduate verse. This poem had been recited at the Sheldonian theatre just two years before I went up. And as amongst the non-sporting friends whom I had at the university were several poets. John Barlas, amongst others, who were postulant Newdegate prize-men, one would have fancied that Wilde's name, at least as a poet, would have come up in our interminable discussions. But I never heard it mentioned, and indeed the first time that I did hear of him as a poet, or at all, was in a letter which I received in Naples from another Newdegate poet, whom has since come to very high honours in the diplomatic service. No Wilde was not a centre of corruption at Maudlin or in Oxford. He seems to have passed through the university without attracting much attention to himself, except in the schools, and can have exercised no influence on his contemporaries. He was not well off. His father could not largely supplement his scholarship. And in Oxford, in those days at least, the amount of a man's income went a long way towards deciding his popularity. What's he got? would be asked in Maudlin, as readily as in Mayfair, and Wilde had got very little. This kind of snobbishness was certainly noticed at the time when I was at Oxford. I remember, for instance, that an offensive name used to be given to the young men who, having passed the Indian Civil Service Examination, were sent to Oxford at the government expense, and that simply because they were being financially assisted. I understand that some similar feeling exists towards the Rhodes Scholars nowadays, and for the same unworthy reason. Wilde seems to have gone through Oxford much as he went through Trinity, that is to say, without drawing any particular attention to himself, or leading anybody to suppose that here was a man of genius. In my life of Wilde, I record some remarks made to me by one of his contemporaries at the University of Dublin. He left this college with the very highest character. As regards scholarship, he was considered an average sort of man. As regards aesthetic tendencies, nothing was remembered of him, except that he was always fond of fine editions of books. This taste he afterwards lost. He cared little about books when I knew him, and what money he had to spend, certainly did not go to the bookseller. I can only recall one occasion on which he bought a valuable first edition, and that was the copy of the Life of Gerard de Nerval, of which I have spoken, and which he bought to give to me. I remember giving him once a very rare copy of the maxims of the Duke de la Rocheforteau, a writer for whom, in those Charles Street days, he expressed some admiration. He never looked at the book and attached no value to it. Beyond the fact that I noticed that, as usual, a piece had been torn out of the back page, to be rolled into a pellet and put into his mouth, I might have fancied that it had never been in his hands at all. When I last saw it, it was lying open amongst a lot of rubbish at the bottom of a cupboard in the Charles Street sitting room. When he was in America he gave his imprimatur to a most extraordinary specimen of publishing bad taste. This was a volume of poems, produced in England by a former friend of his, for which he had been asked to find an American publisher. The poems were very beautiful ones, but the American edition was the most hideous production that has ever left the printing press. The poems were printed on transparent paper, with coloured sheets behind each page, and an extraordinary collection of blocks had been used to decorate the pages. Under a beautiful poem, in which occurred the words about a swallow that, quote, she took the sunset on her wings and flew, unquote, there was the picture of a flat candlestick from a block borrowed from some iron monger's catalogue. In the picture of Dorian Gray there are several pages of Biblia Fili, which would seem to indicate a knowledge of the subject, but these pages degrade an odour, if not of the lamp, at least of the British Museum. As a matter of fact, for these pages, as for his descriptions of jewels, laces, garments, and other collectania, which Dorian studied, Wilde availed himself of book sellers and antiquarians' catalogs, in doing which he was merely following the example of Victor Hugo, who made a habit of collecting every trade circular that came his way, even accepting the leaflets offered to him in the streets, and systematically filing these for future reference and use, where it was necessary to display technical knowledge. In this way he also acquired a reputation for omniscience. In one way, indeed, his life at Oxford may be said to have influenced his character, it raised to acuteness his interest in Greece and Italy, and sent him wandering there during his vacations. Here and there he seems to have steeped himself in the life of bygone days, and so was induced into that chronological era of which Henri Doranier speaks, where he says, quote, Mr. Wilde thought himself living in Italy at the time of the Renaissance, or in Greece in the days of Socrates. He was punished for a chronological era, and severely. It is recorded of him that he rode a good deal while at Oxford, but that he never hunted. With regard to hunting, for which there are splendid facilities at Oxford, it will be remembered with what contempt he speaks somewhere in his plays of the sport, the unspeakable in chase of the un-eatable. He never rode during the time I knew him, and never spoke of horses, except to insist on the fact that under no conditions would he be driven in a cab with a white horse, because he considered that most unlucky. I have often wondered what was the colour of the horse that took him in the company of Inspector Richards and Sergeant Allen from the Cadogan Hotel to Scotland Yard on the day of his arrest, 5 April 1895. I did ask him later on, but he said that he had been too much interested to notice. He seems to have spent his time jarring that drive, chatting with the two detectives on all manner of topics, and left them the impression that he was a very amiable gentleman, and, quote, as clever as they make them. Wild also got on well with the minor mere medons of the law, and had a very high opinion of them. After he had bailed poor Barlus out of Westminster Police Court, after his revolver practice, quote, to show his contempt for the Houses of Parliament, unquote, on Westminster Bridge, he could not speak too highly of the way the policemen and the warders spoke to and acted towards the prisoners under their charge. They show them nothing of the contempt which the honest man is supposed to feel for the criminal. The feeling is that most people are liable at one time or another to get into trouble, and that these just happen to be in that position. And with the instinctive anarchy which lies at the bottom of the hearts of most men, I rather suspect some sympathy with the law-breakers as against the administrators of the law. And if, for the prison officials under whom he served his sentence, he had little respect, it will be remembered how he speaks of chaplains and doctors in the ballad of Reading Jail, he seems to have liked and to have been liked by the warders. I remember that whenever I went to see him, either at Wandsworth or at Reading, every warder I came into contact with seemed to take a special interest in me when they knew who it was I had come to visit, were courteous and amiable, and made things as easy for me as possible. Possibly in some ways this may have been because Wilde was considered a show prisoner, a prisoner of Mark, a criminal of universal reputation, but generally speaking there was a decided manifestation of sympathy towards him. I remember one warder at Wandsworth who refused a tip from me, for some special trouble he had taken on my behalf, with the words that he had done nothing to earn it, and was very sorry that he could do nothing for my friend, who was, quote, the finest gentleman we have ever had inside these walls, unquote. This incident occurred very shortly after I had received a letter from one of his friends, who reproached me with not conveying messages from him to the prisoner. I had written to tell him that I considered it imprudent to mention his name in any conversations with Wilde, for such conversations, if not listened to by the prison authorities, were certainly heard by the warder in attendance, and that any reference to him might get round to the home office and further jeopardize Oscar's position. He wrote back to say that, quote, the warder was not everybody, unquote, that no doubt a sovereign from me would make matters all right, and that such had been his experience at Holloway. There is further to be noted in this connection that the special offences which were charged against Wilde seem not to arouse amongst the classes to which warders and policemen belong, the horror with which they are considered by the higher ranks of British society. Ever since, owing to the Wilde scandals and the subsequent litigation in which Lord Alfred Douglas has been involved, my attention has been to my extreme distaste, drawn to these wretched matters. I have found amongst the people a tendency to discover a source of humour, Aristophanaean, of course, in these aberrations which their votaries endeavour to poetise. I have been in the Old Bailey and in the law courts when these subjects have been under discussion, and have always noticed, on the part of the plebs, neither disgust nor dismay nor indignation, but hilarity and amusement, mingled, perhaps, with contemptuous pity. And my own opinion is that the crasser minnower of the people rightly inspires them in this matter. One feels very sorry for the folk, many of them very delightful persons, who suffer from these aberrations. But one cannot withhold a certain amount of contempt, because every man, who is not a proclaimed lunatic, ought to be able to control himself. But one's main impulse is to laugh, perhaps, as Beaumarchais said, so as not to be forced to weep. Oscar Wilde left Oxford with the very highest character, just as he had left Portora and Trinity. If there had been the slightest suspicion of anything wrong against him, one may be sure that we should have heard of it at the Queensbury trial, but nothing was heard, because there was nothing, and the stories of his effeminacy at Oxford and the indignation provoked thereby, amongst the undergraduates, which one has since heard, were invented, Paul le Beswande la cause. I remember that when I went up, there was a story told of how some man at Maudlin, who went in for aesthetic posturings, had been ragged by his fellow students. But this man was not a friend of Wilde, and had made himself objectionable in other ways besides wearing his hair long and sporting sage-green ties. Men are always being ragged at Oxford, but that does not imply that they are offenders against morality. It is quite possible that a willful confusion has been created between the man I am referring to and Oscar Wilde, who had nothing whatever in common with him. Wilde seems to have had a happy time at the Varsity. He always maintained a great affection for his alma mater, and the fact of having been at Oxford was ever a man's best passport to his respect and friendship. And anarchist as he was in his heart, he appreciated the social advantages which are derived in England from having been educated at a public school and at the university. He told me, shortly before his disaster, that it was his intention to send both his sons to Eaton and to the House, and added that he considered that indispensable for their future welfare. That was always my intention, he said, though before my plays succeeded, I used to wonder how I should manage it. Now, gra cedure, it will be an easy matter. Of course, Eaton would have been impossible for them after the debacle. In England, more than anywhere else, the sins of the Fathers must be paid for by the after-comers. It is recorded that, at the time of Wiles' downfall, his two boys were at a private school kept, of course, by a reverend gentleman, Professor of Christianity. This gentleman felt that injustice to his school, which was a pep-in-year for Eaton and other public schools, for their own sakes, of course, he thought it better for the two boys to be removed. It would be so very unpleasant for them to remain there after what had happened. Of these lads, Cyril, the elder, whom I only saw once as a baby in arms, has joined our band of heroes in immortality. He fell, footnote. 9th May, 1915, aged 29, end footnote, fighting for the country which had martyred his father in the field of Flanders. The other brother, Vivian Holland, is, as I write, at the front in the RFA. He was educated at Stonyhurst, and went thence to Trinity Hall, Cambridge. In coming down he was called to the bar, but when the war broke out he applied for a commission in the RFA. I only saw him during the trials in which Robert Ross was involved, and I remember the touching tribute in the witness-box at the old Bailey, he paid to his father's friend, who, he said, had been a second father to him, and his brother. CHAPTER XIII My first introduction to Oscar Wilde took place in Paris in 1883 at the house of a Greek lady, an artist who had been intimately associated with the pre-Raphaelites in London, for whose art she had such enthusiasm that, although a woman of very considerable wealth, she readily placed at the disposal of her friends, the painters, as a model, her own beauties and graces, and figured in more than one famous picture by Byrne Jones, Rosetti, and the rest. She is the female figure in the picture entitled The Beguiling of Merlin, for instance. By the way, I never see a picture by Byrne Jones, or hear his name mentioned, without thinking of the very shabby way in which he rounded on his former friend, and fugulman, Oscar Wilde, after the debacle. Shortly after Wilde's arrest, a demand came from the artist that all letters which he had written to the man who was then in prison should be immediately returned. This was done, no doubt by Mr. Ross, who sent with the parcel a request that a like courtesy might be extended to the prisoner, and that all letters which Oscar Wilde had written to Byrne Jones should be sent back. A curt message came in answer to this request, to the effect that, quote, those letters were all destroyed long ago, unquote. Oscar Wilde had been in Paris some time before I met him. I cannot say that his presence there had attracted much attention, and I was then in a position to know very closely what was, and was not, interesting Paris. Yet, with his usual skill in advertising himself, he had carefully prepared his Parisian campaign. He had brought over from London several copies of his poems, and, on settling down in the hotel on the K. Voltaire, which, by the way, is barely three minutes' walk from the wretched inn in the Rue de Beaux-Arts, where he came to perish, he dispatched these copies, each accompanied by a complimentary letter to the literary and artistic celebrities of Paris. At the time of his arrest, these letters, now having become documents of topical interest, were laid out for inspection in more than one salon, and pathetic it was too for his friends to see these proofs of his young ambitions, and to remember to what ambition had brought him. And I may say right here that nowhere in Paris, amongst literary and artistic people, did I hear any sympathy with him expressed. Dorday said that I, being without children of my own, had no voir au chapitre, no right to say anything, and as for Zola, his indignation was so violent against Wilde that one might have fancied him the editor of a religious magazine, or the writer of moral textbooks, ad usum delfini. As a matter of fact, the first time that I heard that Oscar Wilde was in Paris, that spring of 1883, was at the studio of a friend of mine, and I remember saying something uncomplementary about the man to whom I was afterwards to become so much attached. I told Oscar about this hostility very shortly after we had made friends, and he said, Robert, that was very wrong of you. Why should you be hostile towards me? I said that while it certainly did not arise from any feeling of jealousy, it was probably prompted by my objection to his methods of furthering his literary standing, his methods of advertising, and so on. I said that that sort of thing had never been practised by true men of letters, but by charlatans only, who enter upon literary pursuits, not for a love of art, but in a purely commercial spirit, relying upon their skill in self-puffery and advertisement, to make the arduous profession of letters not one to be carried on on weak porridge, but as his friends in the country from which he had just come would say, a paying proposition. How very tedious you are, my dear Robert, he said. For the rest you are quite in the right, and it is now months since I discarded my eccentricities of costume, and had my hair cut. All that belonged to the Oscar of the first period. We are now concerned with the Oscar-wild of the second period, who has nothing whatever in common with the gentleman who wore long hair and carried a sunflower down Piccadilly. Here he broke off and muttered something about the survival of personality, which I did not pay much attention to, but a version of which I afterwards discovered in one of his essays, Pen, Pencil, and Poison. I often much regret that things that were going on on the key interested me more that spring morning than what my friend in the white, munkish cowl was saying in a kind of monologue addressed to himself. They were words, I am sure, that were well worth listening to, and one of the very rare occasions on which Oscar-wild in my presence revealed, under the frivolous, often flippant humorist and sayer of epigrams, the luminous philosopher that he was. It was as though an Aristophanes had for the briefest space lifted a mask and revealed Aristotle. The gist of what he said was that time so completely transforms the individuality of man that he of today is an entirely different person from the same man seven years previously, and should not be held responsible for opinions then expressed or acts at that time done. This in regard to civil matters is a principle which the law of England, of course, recognises as established by the statute of limitations. In France it has a far wider extension and is equally applicable to criminal matters. The murderer of ten years ago, if he fortunately escapes the mere medans of the law, today walks the boulevard as free as you or I, may indeed come to honours, post-sidle honours, if I may coin a word, for I myself have seen the murderer of two women who had made good his flight, had awaited abroad the expiration of the term of prescription, had then returned to Paris, where an exhibition of his manufactured products, not corpses, but some kind of goods, attracted to him the favourable attention of the minister of commerce who bestowed upon him the ribbon of the Legion of Honor, thus putting a gout of red into the buttonhole of a man whose hands, ten years previously, had dripped gouts and gouts of red. I think that Oscar Wilde was so imbued with the idea that one is not rightfully to be held responsible for what one did some time ago, and do not know what term of prescription he had fixed in his mind, that his revolt against the severity of his sentence, indeed against any conviction, was enhanced by the feeling that it was unjust and illogical to try him, and far more so to punish him, for alleged offences supposed to have been committed when he was not the Oscar Wilde who stood in the dock. It is very certain, be it remarked en passant, that William Shakespeare of the Buen Retiro at Stratford-on-Avon was not will of the Globe Theatre, that Samuel Johnson embodied about a dozen different Samuel Johnsons, that William Wordsworth, the friend of Briso and the Rue de Sevre, would readily have sent to widow Guillotine the William Wordsworth of Rydall Mount, stamp distributor and poet Lariatus, or, to come closer, that the Aubrey Beardsley, who on his deathbed on the Riviera, pitifully, and with gaunt and trembling fingers, traced that disregarded request, footnote, written in my death-agony, Aubrey Beardsley, and footnote, that the Lysistrata drawings of his might be destroyed was never at all the Aubrey Beardsley of the Smythersean Orgies at the Hotel Foyaux. Well, such was my feeling about Oscar Wilde that when, a few days after I had first heard of his presence in Paris, I received an invitation to dine at the house in the Avenue de Segoire, where the Greek Lady Artist lived, with the information that I should meet him there, my first strong impulse was not to go. In those days my cultus of literature was a very devotional one, and I had thought that in Oscar's masquerades an offence against the dignity of letters had been committed. Then curiosity overcame the objection, and I went. When I reached the house, I found John Sargent, the portrait painter there. One did not quite realise at that time what a very great man this was. At that time Sargent's portraits did not enchant, but horrified, the public. The desideratum of most artists, to get themselves talked about, and their pictures discussed, was equally attained. In those days, if at the salon you saw a crowd of people surrounding some twal, making gestures of dismay or ridicule, and heard cries of, mais c'est impossible, quel horreur! You might safely wager that the exciting cause was the newest Sargent portrait. Sargent was good enough to take an artistic interest in me, and some time later he asked me to come to his studio. He wanted to paint my portrait, and also to model my head. I was foolish enough not to take advantage of an offer which would have resulted in securing for me a permanent and most efficacious advertisement. However, in those days I did not believe that in the profession of letters the publicity department above all others should be attended to. In England the most successful amongst my confrère are those upon whom this commercial axiom has most firmly impressed itself. However, I did come to be limbed by Sargent, and in company no less distinguished than that of Oscar Wilde and Paul Bourget. We were all sitting together at the Café Lavigneux, near the Guerre Montparnasse, when Sargent proposed that he should make a sketch of the three Almes de Lettre. The drawing was duly executed in an album which belonged to the proprietor of the Café, and which contained a number of most interesting contributions, in prose, in verse, as well as drawings, caricatures, and sketches by many artists, who, students at the time, have since become famous, though none perhaps in the same degree as our limne. This album was taken with him by the landlord after he had sold his business, and all my efforts to trace him and it have failed. I was anxious to secure the wild come Bourget picture by Sargent for this book, but who shall say in what provincial grannier it lies mouldering? Oscar Wilde was very late that evening for dinner. I noticed that he had a habit of unpunctuality. On one occasion he kept me waiting on the Place Vendôme, where he had given me rendezvous for over an hour, during which time I walked round and round that square, studying the Napoleon statue from every angle, and fuming against my tardy friend. When at last he did arrive he had not one word of excuse or apology, and when I, resenting this indifference, made some allusion to my peripatetics, we came as nigh to a quarrel as ever I was with him during the eighteen years that I was his friend. Those who disliked him, and Ilyon Ave, used to say that he practised being late so as to draw a special attention to himself, to enhance his entrée, to get himself disgust, awaited, desired. It is recorded that one day he came very late, indeed, to a luncheon-party to which he had been bidden, and that when a reproachful hostess asked him to look at the clock, he answered airily, Oh, madam, what can that little clock know of what the great golden sun is doing? It was suggested that it was for the sole purpose of asking that question, that he had kept everybody waiting, and had filled with chagran the bosom of a Mayfair cordon bleu. He was such a strange apparition when he did come, in his Count Dorsay costume, with his turned-back cuffs, his coloured handkerchief, his boutonnière, his noticeable rings, and his mass of banked-up and artificially curled hair, that I could not restrain a burst of almost hysterical laughter, and had to hurry across the drawing-room to bury my head in an album of drawings, to conceal the effect produced upon me. Sergeant was standing by the table, and I remember that he noticed the condition I was in, and said something to me which I did not catch, but which may have been a rebuke, or perhaps a counsel. Whatever wild's appearance was, the first time that I saw him, it is certain that I was impressed also by the absolute ease of his manner, by that superiority of his, and there were several persons of distinction there that night, which made him at once, and thenceforward all through the evening, play the leading role in our gathering. He seized at once on the conversation, and held it. Few of us had a word to say, and after the first few moments we resigned ourselves willingly to the part of listeners. I felt some irritation at certain of his remarks on matters artistic. I held that he was posturing, and that under his leadership we were all playing, round that table, the roles of some new comedy, to be called le presieur ridicule. And so, during a momentary pause, after Wilde had remarked that he was in the habit of spending long hours in front of the statue of the Venus of Mylos, I bluntly remarked that I knew nothing of the Louvre Museum, but that I often went to the big Louvre shop, where I found the best value for money in ties of any shop in Paris. This flippancy attracted Oscar Wilde's attention and approbation. He may have gauged the motive which had prompted the remark, and when two augers meet they smile, do they not? He said, oh, I like that. And thereupon opened for me a little wicket gate into the discussion, which was proceeding and from which, with most of the other guests, I had until then been excluded. And after dinner he continued to talk to me, and when we parted he begged me to call upon him on the following day, which I readily agreed to do, for he had thrown over me the spell of his undeniable fascination, a spell which still holds me fifteen years after the earth has closed over him, who on that Paris night seemed to me less immortal than a demigod, with his extraordinary vitality, a brazier filled with the unquenchable fire of genius. Now I know that some people who may do me the honour of reading this book will bridle at this remark of mine, and find it absurd with the absurdity of extravagance. I can only say that it is an absolute description, as exact as I can make it, of the effect produced upon me by Oscar Wilde on the first occasion on which I met him, and I may add that this was not only because I was a mere land at the time, the same feeling that the man was a superman has never left me, and even today, as I have said, that extraordinary fascination lingers. His friends can hardly believe him dead. Men like these explain the creed of survival after death. Somebody the other day said to me, oh, Oscar is sixty today. Contemporary memoirs abound in accounts of the impression produced upon their writers by Oscar Wilde on their first meeting with him. Dour old Walt Whitman even succumbed to the great charm of the young Irish poet who visited him in his dust laden cabin. Verlaine, gone though he was in Absanthe, admitted that the poet, quote, although he never offered me un cibiche, unquote, was most decidedly un type épétante. While here, from the recently published memoirs of Dr. Fairburn, head of Mansfield College Oxford, and Willem Chairman of the Congregational Union, is a description of his first meeting with Oscar Wilde. Quote, In the evening went to Wemmys Reid's dinner, thirty present. Company included Lord Acton, Oscar Wilde, Bryce, Augustine Biddle, William Black, and quite a host of others. Biddle was full of talk, great on eighteenth-century men, a man of letters not ashamed of his non-conformist descent, at least to me, yet thinking and speaking of non-conformists as something outside him, with which he was largely over and done. Wish it were possible to get over this attitude. Oscar Wilde sat opposite to me, very handsome fellow, hair parted in the middle, flower in the buttonhole, with the air about him that he ought to be looked at, and would improve anybody who would be wise enough to do so. Thus Dr. Fairburn, many years after Oscar Wilde's disgrace and downfall. It is to be remarked, by the way, that whereas men of letters were particularly severe towards their fallen confrayer, the dons and the academical, in whom a great odium against an alleged corruptor of youth might have been supposed to prevail, showed tolerance and a disposition towards pardon and forgetfulness. Zola, as I have pointed out, was the severest critic of Wilde in France, and as for the gentle and pious Francois Carpe, when approached by the Stuart Merrill Committee to sign the petition which was being circulated amongst French men of letters, to secure for the prisoner some abatement of his sentence, replied that he was prepared to sign, but only in his capacity as a member of the society for the prevention of cruelty to animals. On the other hand, the dons at Trinity Dublin express admiration and affection for their brilliant alumnus. Dr. Mahaffey has retained his good opinion of the scholarly and scintillating youth who accompanied him on one of his rambles in Greece, and there are dons at Oxford who will not listen to any aspersion on the unhappy Irishman, who, having stripped his native university of all the laurels it had to offer, carried all before him at Oxford. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. It is indeed a curious and noteworthy circumstance, the tolerance shown by the professorial class towards Oscar Wilde, even amongst those, both in England and abroad, who may hold that he was justly convicted, a tolerance which almost equals that of the medical people who consider moral aberrations of that kind, as amongst the diseases for which, as yet, they have discovered no remedies beyond the palliative promidium. The university folk, of course, read widely, recall the past history of the world, and understand what the ordinary individual is incomprehensible and therefore terrifying, hence this tolerance. A notable exception is, of course, Sir Herbert Warren, President of Maudlin. Mr. Warren's professions of esteem for Oscar Wilde, when the latter was his contemporary at Maudlin, were multiple and great. Lord Alfred Douglas relates in his book that Lady Queensbury, having written to the President of Maudlin to ask him if he considered Wilde a suitable friend for her son. Quote, The President in reply sent her a long letter, in which he gave Wilde a very high character, praised his great gifts and achievements of scholarship and literature, and assured her that I might consider myself lucky to have obtained the favourable notice of such an eminent man. Since then, like many others of Wilde's former friends, Sir Herbert Warren has seen reason to modify his appreciation of this eminent man. There might be said things, but does not Bossouette extol les Grands à des nez pas tout dire. And so with a shrug of the shoulders forward. I often wonder what in the yonderland poor Oscar Wilde thinks about it all, about us all, about the courtiers of his first and of his latest hours, and his revival and rebirth, and the way the Philistine has been whistled back, and how today, from behind the ambushing hedges of repudiation, mercantile faces now peer up ecstatically at his apogee. There died not very long ago in Capri, quote, that island of beauty all burned up by the sun, unquote, an Italian poet, whose name was Giuseppe Vanicola, and who, as a gentle lady who was his neighbour, writes me, was, only about 35 years old, with long, snow-white hair, but had a young and beautiful face, and such young eyes. Well, Giuseppe Vanicola tells us in an article which appeared in the Naples Matino, after his death, Articolo Postimo, that in 1905 he had a conversation, Dutré Tombe, with Oscar Wilde, and he records this conversation, but, unfortunately, did not ask him questions on the subjects indicated above, on which my wonder lasts. It was at the house of André Gide, people had dined. A poco a poco, only four were left. Gide, Vanicola, the Belgian painter Theo van Roissenberg, and an, quote, intellectual lady who acted as writing medium, unquote. Wilde's Wraith was evoked from the Yonderland, and the first thing he communicated was, Doriano Miha Traddito. Dorian has betrayed me. Gide asked him his opinion about his trial, and Wilde said, It was typically English, Purginus Hippocrates Puritans. Vanicola said, Thou knowest the cultus I have for thy works, I beg thee to express an opinion on me. Wilde answered, Thanks, Vanicola, for the harmonies thou hast thought out and written about me. Roissenberg said, We would like to know your opinion on life beyond the grave. Wilde answered, A chaotic confusion of fluid nebulosities, a cleric of souls, and the essences of organic life. Gide then said, And to the existence of God. Wilde answered, That is still for us the great mystery. I cannot, en passant, refrain from expressing the wonder whether the author of From Mordelin to Magdalen, happily pacing his maternal cloisters, ever hears, whispering, the wonderful voice of the man whom he admired greatly many years ago, whispering in some such words as these. O well for him who lives at ease with garnered gold in wide domain, nor heeds the plashing of the rain, the crashing down of forest trees. O well for him who near hath known the travail of the hungry years, a father grey with grief and tears, a mother weeping all alone. But well for him whose feet hath trod the weary road of toil and strife, yet from the sorrow of his life builds ladders to be nearer God. These lines, which were written by Oscar Wilde at Mordelin in 1876, and were originally published in the Dublin University magazine for September of that year, seemed to have been composed in that spirit of prophecy, or foresight, which to true poets is given. He indeed was to know the travail of the hungry years, he too was to have a mother weeping all alone, and he too, from the sorrows of his life, was to build ladders to be nearer God. William Blake had this intuition, this foresight, this power of prophecy in a preeminent degree, and it occurs to me that the above lines of Oscar Wilde may, in some measure, have been suggested to him by some reminiscence of something that William Blake wrote. I remember that when they were first read to me, I, being ignorant of their author's name, pronounced them the work of Blake. So if here Oscar Wilde borrowed the style and the philosophy of William Blake, he seems, with them, to have acquired also that power of Maudmont, which enabled the boy Blake, as he and his father were leaving the studio of the magnificent Rylund, engraver to his majesty, to say, quote, I do not like the look of that man, I think that he will come to be hanged. Unquote. Writing these lines in a room on the walls of which there are many specimens of the art of Rylund, who it will be remembered did come to be hanged, I am constantly reminded of this anecdote, and as often I reflect how entirely in me was lacking that power which was possessed both by William Blake and Oscar Wilde, for never once until the avalanche descended and overwhelmed my friend in 1895, had I any inkling of what the future held in store for him. His ultimate fate was the very last denouement to his life that I could have predicted. Of course, had his aberrations been revealed to me, it would have been easy to foretell disaster. But these were concealed with the discretion that almost amounted to the cunning with which maniacs are able to shroud from their friends the demon hags that ride them. On that first night in Paris he appeared to me one of the most wonderful beings that I had ever met, and it seemed to me that there was no prize which the world offers to endeavor and genius, which is another word for endeavor, to which he might not aspire. This opinion was more than confirmed when, next morning, having made the long journey from Pomp Street, Passy, down to his hotel on the Cay Voltaire, I spent several hours in his company. I knew him brilliant beyond description, and be it remembered that I was then living in a circle of the most brilliant conversationalists in Europe, for I was a obituary of Victor Hugo's house, where one met everybody who counted. I had yet to discover that he had constrained himself to that constant labour and industry which, as Bolzac says, is the law of art as it is the law of creation. Any misgivings that I may have had, that here was a foppish dillatant of letters, spending his life, like those semi-artists of whom Bolzac writes, in talking himself, were immediately dispelled when I came into his sitting-room, a fine apartment, commanding a view of the Seine and the Louvre, on the first floor of the Hotel de Cay Voltaire. He was dressed, as I have described, in his Balzacian gabardine, but here affectation began and ended. His table was overlaid with papers, he was then working on his Duchess of Padua, and a glance at these sheets showed that many of the lines had been written over and over again. Laboriousness and the function of the wet stone were apparent. Like Count Dorsey's ties, I said, these, I suppose, are your failures. The only accessory on that writing table which suggested the dillatant was a huge box of cigarettes, and, for an astray, a large blue china bowl, half full already of stumps and ashes. Some words of Zola then occurred to me, where the author of La Assomois speaks with contempt of those men of letters who turn out their prose while, quote, smoking cigarettes and tickling their beards, unquote. These words occur in a passage where he also speaks of, quote, the intolerable weight of a pen. unquote, I have been working all the morning, he said, so now we will go out to lunch. I was disappointed with this invitation, for I had hoped to be with him, chez louis, and for lunch the hotel could have supplied us quite adequately. But Oscar Wilde had still, at that time, a balance at a Parisian bank, the remainder of what he had brought over from his American lecturing tour, and nothing would satisfy him then except the most expensive restaurants. He never took any meals at his hotel, beyond the first Petit des Jeunets, except when his funds had run out. The impression he produced upon me that first day was that he was a man of considerable fortune. He lived en France, and was so reckoned by the hotel servants and restaurant waiters. The fact was that beyond his balance at the Paris bank, and his expectations from Mary Anderson, on account of the Duchess of Padua, which was being written to her order, he had apparently no means whatever. In those days, the Café de Paris in the Avenue de la Opera, which was owned by one of the pignons, the overlords of fashionable Parisian catering, was a house which was reputed to be exclusively patronized by millionaires, and it was to this house that Oscar Wilde took his guest, a poor clerk, no wise, great or fair, who would have been amply satisfied with a luncheon chez Duval, which would not have cost one-tenth of what he paid for our desuné at the Café de Paris. I remember mildly remonstrating when I saw whether he was taking me, but he said that it beloved the artist and literature to show the bourgeois that he must abandon his idea that the man of letters is invariably a needy bohemian dwelling in a garret, and for the most part, starving. It's a duty we owe to the dignity of letters, he said, with his inimitable, boyish, and gleeful laugh. Many years later a similar remark was made to me in the palatial restaurant of the Plaza Hotel in New York, where I was dining with an American author, reputed to turn out nothing but best-sellers. I drew his attention to the fact that there were millionaires on every side of our table. Indeed, for jewels corresponding all around us, we might have been dining in Aladdin's Cave. And that's just the reason, he said, quote, why I like coming here, just to show these people that, though nothing but a writer, I can put up as good a dinner to any friend of mine as the richest amongst them. It's a sort of education for them, and that being laid down, let's have another martini, unquote. I take it that Zola's extravagant expenditure on furnishing and decorating his houses, an extravagance which provoked the irony of Mr. George Moore, was prompted largely for, personally, Zola was a man inclined to frugality, by the same wish to epater les bourgeois. In the case of Oscar Wilde, however, the love of extravagance appears to have been instinctive. He might endeavour to explain and palliate his folly in the way suggested above. It remains certain that the mania of prodigality held him and drove him powerless to resist. There are, in J. Stuart Hayes' masterly life of the amazing Emperor Helio Gabalus, many passages which, Mutatis Mutandis, seem strangely applicable to this case also. Indeed, I will go so far as to say that for a comprehension of the real Oscar Wilde, this book, or Lampridius' life, or other classical works which deal with the amazing Elegabalus, might be studied with advantage. The psychology of extravagance, writes Mr. Stuart Haye, quote, has not yet been examined, so we are still free to condemn what we do not understand. Negalomania we all know something about, and can all condemn as experts, unquote. Oscar Wilde's extravagance and eccentricity in dress find their parallel, Mutatis Mutandis, in that other marvellous boy who perished in pride, and in this connection there may be quoted from Mr. Stuart Haye a passage not exempt from irony. Of course, he writes, quote, it is not a pleasant taste this overlaying of the body with an inordinate display of wealth, even when done merely for the honour of one's God, as Elegabalus protested. Unfortunately, it is still known both in the plutocratic and saccadotal worlds. Certain minds still revolt, still see its snobbery, vanity, and degeneracy, are even foolish enough to imagine that the personal vanity of such functionaries will one day renounce what is their main means of attraction, unquote. It is quite possible that Oscar Wilde, who was steeped in the paganism of Rome and Greece, and to whom, no doubt, the career and character of the amazing Emperor were as familiar as to us or the personalities and performances of the more sedulously puffed of our contemporaries, may instinctively have set out to imitate, in his small way, a personage who must have aroused in his mind, if all that is said is true, an extraordinary interest. I may say, however, that I never once heard him refer to Marcus Aurelius and to Ninus, though many were his remarks on Nero, whom Elegabalus so much surpassed in all that was undesirable. He modelled the dressing of his hair, after he had shorn the long locks of the aesthetic period, on the coiffure of Nero in the bust in the Louvre, and in one of his earlier letters to me, speaks of how he is amazing London with it. He dressed as who lived, as though a man of very large means. He had abundant jewellery, though not offensively displayed. His segrat case was of silver or of gold. I do not remember that he ever carried a watch, or, happily, it had joined the Barkley gold medal, shame at aunt. He had a silver matchbox with a huge opal in the lid, and on his fingers were noticeable rings, including a green scarab, the loss of which, in Paris, in those early days, was the great grief of my life. It may sound absurd to compare Oscar Wilde to Helio Gabalus or Nero, though, of course, intellectually he towered above both those gentlemen. But in extravagance both of dress and expenditure, he appears to have imitated them as far as his means are allowed of. But, of course, while Marcus Aurelius Antoninus had one hundred million pounds to spend every year of the four years of his reign, I cannot leave Mr. J. Stuart Hayes' book without quoting two more passages, which refer to a side of my subject's character with which, knowing nothing about it in connection with him, I am incompetent to deal. I am in entire agreement with their author. Since the world began, writes Mr. Haye, no one has been wholly wicked, no one wholly good. The truth about Helio Gabalus must lie between the two extremes, admitting, however, a congenital twist towards the evil tendencies of his age. He had habits which are regarded by scientists less as vices than as perversions, but which at that time were accepted as a matter of course. Men were then regarded as virtuous when they were brave, when they were honest, when they were just. And this boy did, despite his hereditary taint, show more than flashes of these virtues. The idea of using virtuous in its later sense occurred, if at all, in jest merely as a synonym for a eunuch. It was the matron and the vestal who were supposed to be virtuous, and their virtue was often supposed to titious. In the Roman sense of the word then, Oscar Wilde, who certainly was brave, honest and just, was virtuous in a preeminent degree. Quite a cursory study of authorities on psychology, such as craft ebbing, bloc, forel, mal, etc., will show us that characters like Elagabalus have occasionally appeared and are still known in history. They are almost curiosities of nature, and are rarely, if ever, responsible for their own instincts. Neither are they cruel nor evil by nature. Today we are inclined to regard the romantic friendships exhibited in the stories of David and Jonathan, Heracles and Hylus, Apollo and Hyacinth, to mention no others, as the outcome of somewhat similar natures, and we decry some of the noblest patriots, tyrannocides, lawgivers and heroes in the early days of Greece, because they regarded the bond of male friendship as higher and nobler than what they called the sensual love for women, or because they received friends and comrades with peculiar honor on account of their staunchness in friendship. Nevertheless, psychologists have noted that this tendency towards the more elevated forms of homosexual feeling is still to be found, more or less developed, amongst religious leaders and other persons with strong ethical instincts. It is only therefore, when this tendency occurs in slightly abnormal minds, that we excite our passions against men for whom the only fitting reward is an application of the stake and faggot without further inquiry. To the vulgar-minded, all persons who present deformities, whether physical or mental, are subjects of derision and hatred. To those who realize something of the disabilities under which these unfortunates are laboring, they are objects of either active or passive sympathy. In the abstract, of course, should the insane, the leprous, or even the man of genius get in our way, we, as normal persons, feel ourselves justified in ridding the world of its nuisance. Now here may be the proper place to quote that memorable answer made by Oscar Wilde in the course of the first trial before Mr. Justice Charles, to the question put to him by Mr. Gill. What is the love that dare not speak its name? The love that dare not speak its name, in this century, is such a great affection of an elder for a younger man, as there was between David and Jonathan, such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy, and such as you find in the sonnets of Michelangelo and Shakespeare. It is that deep spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect. It dictates and pervades great works of art like those of Shakespeare and Michelangelo, and those two letters of mine, such as they are. It is in this century misunderstood, so much misunderstood, that it may be described as the love that dare not speak its name, and on account of it I am placed where I am now. It is beautiful. It is fine. It is the noblest form of affection. That is nothing unnatural about it. It is intellectual, and it repeatedly exists between an elder and a younger man, where the elder man has intellect, and the younger man has all the joy, hope, and glamour of life before him. That it should be so, the world does not understand. The world mocks at it, and sometimes putts one in the pillory for it. These words, it may here be recorded, created a sensation in court. As the author of Oscar Wilde Three Times Tried relates, As he stopped speaking there was loud applause, mingled with some hisses in the public gallery of the court. Mr. Justice Charles at once said, If there is the slightest manifestation of feeling, I shall have the court cleared. There must be complete silence preserved. The speech of Wilde was declared by some to be the finest speech of an accused man, since that of Paul before a gripper. It thrilled everyone in the court. Mr. Robert Buchanan considered it marvellous. End of Chapter 14 Chapter 15 of The Real Oscar Wilde by Robert Chirard This Libravox recording is in the public domain. Wilde was a dowty and assiduous trencherman. I would have backed him to eat the head off a brewer's dremen three times a day, and his capacity for whisky and soda knew no bounds. Thus Lord Alfred Douglas If this were true we might find it in another resemblance to the amazing Emperor. To food and drink the Emperor was as much addicted as the traditional city Olderman, though his imagination certainly surpassed that of the retired tradesman, at least in quality and design. Lampridius states that no feast cost Elagabalus less than 100,000 cesterces, and often reached the stupendous figure of 300,000 cesterces, to compree. I cannot say, however, that I ever noticed any such defect as Gormandis in Oscar Wilde, nor, as I have said, any inclination either to alcoholic excess. It is, however, certain that after he left prison and was seeking, in a real and palpable hell, any artificial paradise that he could find, he did indulge unconscionably in alcohol, and Douglas's statement that during the last years in Paris he was often seen on the verge of intoxication is confirmed by other witnesses. At the time, however, when I first made his acquaintance, and right down till a year or two before he died, he appeared to me abstemious rather than self-indulgent, and one reason for this was that he was exceedingly sensitive about his tendency towards corpulence, and did all he could to keep his figure the figure of youth. I remember that once I offended him quite innocently by asking him if he could explain the use or derivation of the word habit, in such an expression as a man of a full habit. He flared up. What do you mean by that question, Robert? He cried, as though suspecting that I was making an allusion to his embonpois, when nothing had been further from my mind. I remember also possessing a little note of his, written on blue prison paper, which began, yes, it is perfectly true, and continued by begging the person to whom the note was addressed, one of the warders in Reading Jail, to convey in writing some message to a fellow prisoner by shoving the note under the door of his cell. This, yes, it is perfectly true, was in answer to a question which the warder had addressed to him in writing, as to the authenticity of an anecdote about him, which had appeared in one of the papers, and related how Oscar Wilde, being at a reception, was talking to some grondam, when a noble quidnunk came up behind him, slapped him on the back, and exclaimed, Why Oscar, you are getting fatter and fatter. Without turning around, Oscar Wilde said, Yes, and you are getting ruder and ruder, and quietly continued his conversation with the lady. This note was among various papers which were stolen from me, and though that collection contained some very extraordinary items, it was perhaps the document whose last sign most regret. For amongst other things, in Oscar's use of that word shoving, I saw the one and only sign that prison environment had weakened his good taste, and soiled his nicety. In the old days he would never have used such a word, he who, considering himself a lord of language, had an extreme fastidiousness of vocabulary. I remember that we were once looking over some of Wordsworth's sonnets, and that Oscar came upon a line whose terminal was made to rhyme with love, for which the poet had employed the word shove. Robert, Robert! said Oscar, What is the meaning of this? When I first knew him, being careful of his figure, he was inclined rather to the practices of Mr William Banting than to habits of gluttony. I have often seen him refuse a dish urged upon him by a persuasive maître de hôtel, with the remark, Il faut souffrir pour être beau. But if he was never, to my knowledge, a gourmand, I always knew him as a gourmet de primo cartello. He had a very extensive knowledge of the art of cookery. And as an art, the haute cuisine is considered in Paris, where many most distinguished men of letters have not disdained to employ their pens in its glorification. In England it is not so, and during one of Wilde's trials, one of the bewigged gentlemen, who may be supposed to have been as familiar with Mrs Beaton as he was ignorant of the gentle Brille Savarine, who cross-examined him, endeavoured to make a point against him with a sarcastically ejaculated, what, another art, when cookery was under discussion. He was a master at ordering a delicate repast, and surprised me with his maestria, who knew him to be of Irish descent, and hold the Irish amongst the very Philistines of gastronomy. I remember the interest which he took in a series of stories which I was writing for a paper which devoted itself to the pleasures of the table. These stories were called Romances of the Table, and the point of each was that, in the guise of a tale, some recipe should be introduced. He was good enough to describe them as ingenious, as well as literary, and did me the honour of using, as a subject of conversation, one of the stories, which was called The Lady of the Red Roses, and which narrated how a fair Greek lady encouraged her young admirer to bring her roses and roses, not indeed to carp it with their crimson petals the floor of her withdrawing room, but simply because she was very fond of that Greek preserve, known as Rhodosacary, which is a compote of roses much appreciated in the Moray and Peninsula. I remember nothing about that Desgenus Chebignon, at which I first partook of Oscar's bread and salt, beyond that it was luxurious and expensive, though certainly not gargantuan. As the wine was served, I remarked to Oscar that I did not know why people spoke of white wine, when the word yellow, which designated its colour correctly, was a much more pictorial word. He immediately adopted the suggestion, and from thence forward never spoke of white wine, but of yellow wine. The expression occurs in an unfortunate letter that he wrote to one of his friends, a letter which was used against him with damning effect at his trial, where he tells this friend that he is to him as red and yellow wine. The luxuriousness of the repast, and the indifference with which he discharged the formidable bill that was presented whilst our coffee was making itself on the table between us, confirmed me in my conclusion that he was a man of wealth. As a matter of fact, he was living on his expectations from the Duchess of Padua. It will be remembered that he was writing this under contract with a certain Mr. Hamilton Griffin, acting on behalf of Mary Anderson. By this contract he had agreed to write for Miss Mary Anderson a first-class five-act tragedy to be completed on or before March 1st, 1883. The first-class five-act tragedy was to become Mary Anderson's absolute property, the consideration being a payment to him of five thousand dollars, of which one thousand dollars was paid down on signing the contract, and the balance of which, namely four thousand dollars, was to be paid on Mary Anderson's acceptance and approval of the said tragedy. So that in those February days when I first met Oscar Wilde he was in the expectation of receiving, sometime in March, the sum of eight hundred pounds. He was therefore naturally full of the Duchess and spoke much about her. We dine with the Duchess tonight, he would sometimes say. At the time I did not understand what he meant. I well understood the expression to dine with the duke for which the French equivalent is, to dance before the buffet, an expression familiar to most young men who have practiced the art and craft of letters in Paris. I do not know on what grounds Mary Anderson rejected the manuscript. She may possibly have regretted her bargain and have taken advantage of the fact that the manuscript, which was not finished till 15th March, did not reach her until more than a month after the date stipulated in the agreement. It cannot have been on the ground that the work was not a first-class tragedy, for such it has now been universally recognized to be. I happened to be with Oscar Wilde in his sitting-room at the Hôtel de Caye Voltaire when her cable decision reached him. It was some time towards the end of April. Not having heard from her and his funds running low, he had that morning cable to her in California, begging her for an answer. We were sitting smoking when the waiter brought in une dépêche pour messieurs. Wilde opened it and read the disappointing news without giving the slightest sign of chagrin or annoyance. He tore a tiny strip off the blue form, rolled it up into a pellet, and put it into his mouth. Then he passed the cable over to me and said, Robert, this is very tedious. After that he never referred again to his disappointment. I admired his son foie greatly at the time, though I did not know then that this refusal of his work meant the loss to him of a large sum of money on which he had absolutely counted, a tremendous setback in his career as a dramatist, and, worse still, the obligation to give up his elegant existence in Paris and to return to London and the drudgery of the provincial lecture-platform. But, as I say, he showed no disappointment at all, and a minute or two later was chatting gaily on something as remote from the Duchess of Padua as California is from their cave altare. We were to dine together that night, and when the time came for us to go out, he said, We shan't be able to dine with the Duchess tonight. It is rather a case of Duke Humphrey. But what do you say to a sucrutagani at Zimmer's? I insisted, however, that sauerkraut and sausages were not proper food for a poet, and begged him to come with me as my guest for once in a while to a little place on the other side of the water, where they don't do you at all badly. To which, he, having consented, I led him by devious routes and down a side street and by a side entrance into that very café de Paris where we had first lunched together. It was not until we had got into the cell that opened on to the avenue de l'opera that he recognized the place, and then he kept up my little pleasantry. Quite a nice little place, he said, and all through the meal we continued the joke and pretended that we were dining at some Marchandivin, patronized by the cab drivers. Than which, in those days, an eating-house of that order could have no better recommendation. After dinner we went to the folie-bejaire for that night's performance, at which a journalist friend had sent me a box. But after we had occupied the loge a few minutes he suggested that we should leave. There are occasions, he said, on which a loge is a pillory, and the fact was that he had been a great deal stared at while he was sitting there. Since I have realized what Mary Anderson's refusal meant to him, and remember how he took what too many would have been a knock-down blow, my admiration for his self-control and his dignity has become great. Most men would have grumbled, men who might have consoled themselves for the loss of eight hundred pounds at a time when they were well nigh penniless, but who would have suffered in their vanity at the rejection of their work. And I know that Oscar Wilde felt that in the Duchess of Padua he had achieved a masterpiece. He never said so, of course, for contrary to what has been alleged against him, he rarely spoke of his work at all, and never in boastful terms. Indeed, self-glorification he described as vulgar in the extreme, and I have heard him lecture on this subject of youth who was given to boasting. But a glance at the title-page of the first printed edition of this play, privately printed as manuscript, of which only four copies are known to exist, will show the importance he attached to this tragedy as a work of art. In the top left-hand corner of the title-page stand the words Opus II. It was the custom of the great musical composers of such masters as Beethoven, Bach and Wagner, thus to number their works. It is Grand Deliquent, my second Opus. It classifies the book as a work, as an Opus, by which masterpiece is suggested. It implies that the reader will be pleased to know the standing numerically of this particular masterpiece in the cycle of the author's productions. It need not be remembered as a first-class tragedy named the Duchess of Padua. It will be sufficient for the public to recall it as Oscar Wilde's second Opus. While this second Opus had been curtly rejected, and was threatened with the oblivion which very nearly enshrouded it, for it was not until 1891 that it was produced in New York by Lawrence Barrett, and that anonymously, not as Opus the second, nor indeed as the Duchess of Padua, but under the title of Guido Ferrante. It enjoyed a succé d'estime, and was well received by the critics. The New York Tribune found that it was the work of a practised writer and a good one, and the critic mentioned that he had had the pleasure of reading it several years previously in manuscript, when it was called the Duchess of Padua, and knew it to be the work of Oscar Wilde. The piece only ran from Monday 26th January till 14th February, and was performed 21 times in all. It seems to have brought evil fortune upon Lawrence Barrett, who died a few weeks later. When, in 1906, it was performed in Hamburg, the text being the authorised German translation of Dr. Max Mayerfeld, the man who played the principal part, went raving mad upon the stage. She was not a lucky hostess, that Duchess of Padua. Sheiky Oscar Wilde and I dined in those early days in Paris. Many authors would have grumbled, would have voiced their disappointment, might have questioned the actress' judgment or taste, or possibly her bona fides. Oscar Wilde never said a word. Indeed, to me, never spoke of the Duchess again. The fact is he had a tremendous confidence in himself. His motto was Quo non ascendam, and he believed in its promise. He used to speak of his measureless ambition. To have a second opus set aside was as nothing to a man whose teeming brain projected a cycle of masterpieces. Still, self-confidence or prepotency, his conduct on that occasion, as on similar occasions subsequently, calls for admiration, and shows him a strong man. End of Chapter 15