 CHAPTER VI. OF THE REAL OSCAR WILD by Robert Chirard. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. On the very last occasion when I saw Oscar Wilde alive—it was in Paris—it was Ernest Dowson's name that procured me admission to my friend. It was shortly after Dowson's death at my cottage in Catford, and on arriving in Paris I thought I would go and see Wilde and tell him about it. On arriving at the Hôtel d'Alsace, in the Rue des Beaux-Arts, and asking to see Monsieur Sebastian Melmoth, the garçon who had taken my name up to Oscar Wilde's rooms, returned and informed me that Monsieur Melmos was desolé not to be able to receive me, but that he was far too fatigué that morning to see anybody. Of course, if I had known what kind of habits Oscar Wilde had developed at that time—the poor fellow was seeking through drink to create for himself an artificial paradise in the real and palpable hell of his existence—I should never have called on him in the morning. But as I was leaving Paris that same afternoon, and could have no further opportunity of seeing him for some time, as it happened I might write, for ever. I wrote on a card. Sorry to hear you are so tired, Oscar. I have come to Paris from Ernest Dowson's deathbed. He died in my arms, and I thought you might like to hear about him and the messages he bade me take to you. The waiter took this card up to Monsieur Melmoth, and soon returned, asking me to follow him. The scene of my final parting from my old friend will be described in its proper place. The reason why it's referred to here is to show that Oscar Wilde's interest in Ernest Dowson was so great that, although in a dreadful state of nerves, he was willing to admit a visitor to the room in which he was shaking and groaning, because that visitor had news to give of the poet whom he admired. If he charged Dowson, whom he knew to be a man of the greatest delicacy in money-matters, with acting disgracefully and alleging falsely to have made a payment, it was not because he really believed him to have told an untruth. It was simply because he was in a pitiful state of nervous irritability. He was writing abusive letters to everybody, I got my due share, even to the devoted Robert Ross. Everybody who has been through the mill knows what it is when one is in financial difficulties to have a sum of money dangled in front of one's eyes, but just out of one's reach. I first met Dowson in London at some bohemian chambers in the temple. Even in those days his future might have caused anxiety to his friends, for already at that time his visits were not welcomed. The tenant of those chambers, endowed with that racial flair which scents dissolution and reveals to those who possess it, which men amongst their acquaintances are not going to be prosperous in life, was already treating him with coldness. Still, in those days his career was full of promise. He had written one novel, The Comedy of Masks, in collaboration, which was a commercial as well as an artistic success. He was welcomed as a contributor to the reviews which prided themselves on being guardians of the English language and the purity of style. He was known as the author of many beautiful poems. He was at that time living in the dock-house of a dock at Stapney, which is described in his first novel. It had come to him from his father. There was employment for him there, and an assured existence, amidst surroundings which might have appealed to his poetic nature. All the romance of the sea was brought to his very feet. The great ships which came into his dock for repair seemed like wounded sea-birds beating their wings upon his threshold. Animation, variety, colour, embellished a scene over which the hundred different types of sea-faring men from all parts of the world passed to and fro. But already in those days all things on this earth had lost their power of appealing to his heart or imagination. He hunted after suffering with the eagerness with which most men pursue pleasure. I saw a good deal of him in London, and later on he came to me in Paris, and asked to be allowed to sleep on the sofa in my workroom. His nerves were all gone. He told me he was afraid to enter the room in the hotel near the Gare Montparnasse, where he lived. Before that dread came upon him, he had told me that there was a statue on his mantelpiece which filled him with terror. I lie awake at night and watch it, he said. I know that one night it means to come down off its shelf and strangle me. He was so nervous that he could not enter a shop to ask for anything. He was ever haunted with the perpetual dread of falling down paralysed. His was the most complete case of neurostenia that I've ever witnessed. He could not even summon up the energy to open any letter that came for him. He delighted in self-abasement. In this way he flung ashes on his head. I remember once asking him, having met him after a long absence, what work he was doing, for I knew that he had been engaged on a novel. Hack work! he cried, with a laugh which had in it the exaltation of the damned. He neglected his clothes willfully, and always presented a dreadful appearance. That it had been willful I learned when he was dying. In those last days I could give him no greater pleasure than to bring back home to our cottage a new shirt or a clean collar for him and to put it on him. The story I had to tell Oscar Wilde of the last days of one of his friends for whom he had, I think, the most admiration and respect, next to Robbie Ross, of course, was a sad one. I have told the story before elsewhere, but the book has for years been out of print and so I repeat it here. It is interesting in itself, as the story of the end of one of Oscar Wilde's friends is of special interest and has its place here. It was some months after he had returned to England that I saw him again. I heard that he had been very ill, and that he was living in a garret in the Euston Road. I visited him there one Sunday morning as I was on my way to King's Cross Station, where I was to take the train for a country house in Hertfordshire. I found him living at the top of a house exactly opposite St Pancras Church. He was in bed, though it was past noon, and he told me that he had been lying there since the preceding Friday. I said that I hoped his once had been attended to, and he said that his landlady supplied him with nothing but a small breakfast. And I don't think that she will let me have that very long, he added. For I am in a rears with my rent and they are pressing me for it. Every morning now there is a note on my tray from the landlord asking me whether I consider myself a gent. I fetched him some provisions and a bottle of wine. On my return from Hertfordshire the next afternoon I went to see him again. I found him just as I had left him. He had not stirred from his bed. He was just too wretched and depressed to make any effort on behalf of himself. I induced him to get up and I took him out. He showed me a small confectioner's shop where he said, I get my meals when I get any. It was a place where he could buy buns and glasses of milk. He told me that he was working for smithers who paid him weekly when he sent in his work, but that for weeks he had been unable to do any writing. I returned to see him several times and each time found him lying in bed, often without having eaten anything for twenty-four hours. Then came a period of several days when I did not see him. I had my own spinning to mind, as they say in Yorkshire. One evening I went into the Bodega in Bedford Street to write some letters in the room downstairs. While I was writing, someone touched me on the shoulder. I turned round and started for it was as if a being from the grave was standing by my side. It was poor Ernest. He told me that, though he was very ill, he could be driven by the threats of his landlord, who was an Italian music-master, to leave his bed and go to the office of his publisher to appeal for help. Smithers had gone off on one of his holidays to Dieppe, with a glare in his eye and a bag full of sovereigns in his pocket, and had left a sarcastic note for Ernest Dowson. There was no chance of his getting any money, and he was trying to brace up his courage to return to the Euston Road and to face his landlord with empty hands. I asked him if half a sovereign would help him, and as I passed it to him I felt his hand. It was in an abominable state. Dowson! I said. You're very ill, and I'm not going to let you return to that place. You must come with me. I told him that just then I was living in a cottage in Catford, of which the lower part was let out to a bricklayer and his wife, but that I could give him a pleasant room to sit in, and that I would look after him until his affairs might take a turn. He said that he would be glad to come, for he had not the courage to wrangle for further grace at his lodgings. But, he said, you must take me down to Catford first class, for I cannot bear to be with people. I remember that he was so weak that I had to take him in a cab to Charing Cross, and again in a cab from Catford Station to my home. He lived with me there just six weeks, the last days of his short life. My first desire after getting him home was to send for a doctor, but he would not allow me to do so. He warned me that if I brought anyone to see him he would leave the house at once. We were not prosperous. Indeed, at that time I had been glad to take the task of writing a pamphlet on some new process of making white lead, and this pamphlet had to be produced in the intervals of attending to his wants. He often used to send me out to get medicines made up for him from prescriptions which he found in Health in the Home, and similar publications. But the seal had been set upon his destiny. There were no remedies which could have saved his life. He was dying, though we did not know it, of galloping consumption. There was nothing to show how near the end was. He made good meals. He was cheerful. We used to laugh together, as I read him passages from my work, on the path to which the Parnassians have come. Towards the end we used to sit together all day talking of literature, and les gennés de Paris. At times he put out his hand and touched mine and said that he was happy that he had met me. He read all the books that I had in the house, but Esmond was his favourite volume. He used to take it to bed with him, and it was by his side when he breathed his last. On the day before his death, towards evening, his condition began to cause me serious alarm. He had wished to dictate a letter to me, which was intended for his friend, the co-author of his novels, but he could not form the opening phrase. I feel too tired, he said. Still I could not induce him that night to go to bed. He sat up till five in the morning, and even after he had retired to his room, he kept shouting out to me not to go to sleep, but to talk with him. I remember that we discussed Oliver Twist, and to a remark I made that I did not think that for anything that Fagan could have told him Bill Sykes would have murdered Nancy, he answered, no, he would have gone for Fagan. He would not let me go to sleep. He wished to be convivial. At six in the morning, he asked me to drink some Gilby's Port, which was in his room. At eight he was coughing badly, and he sent me to the chemists to get him some Impeccar Kwanher wine, which he said relieved him. But after this, as he still continued to cough badly, I declared that the doctor must be fetched. The doctor arrived an hour after the poor fellow had died. I had gone downstairs to fetch something, and as I was coming up again, I called out, you had better get up, Ernest, and sit in the armchair. You'll breathe more easily. As I entered the room, a woman who was in attendance in the house pointed to the bed. I looked and saw that his forehead was bathed in perspiration. I went and raised him up, and while I was wiping his brow, his head fell back on my shoulder. He was dead. I remember that the woman then asked me for two coppers to put on his eyes, and, which shows how poor we were, it was she who had to advance the coins. Grubb Street has ever since repeated that I made a very good thing out of Ernest Dawson. Had I not known the address of one of his relations, an old gentleman at Lloyd's, to whom I wired and who came down and provided for everything, poor Ernest's wasted body would have had to have been buried by the parish. End footnote. I shall have something more to say about Ernest Dawson lower down. Wild letter containing the angry remark about Ernest Dawson was crossed by one from Smithers, accelerating the Jew course and forwarding the younger poet's money. Smithers, with characteristic duplicity, or shall I use the milder word porkiness instead, seems to have taken credit to himself for having induced Dawson to pay the ten pounds on account, whereas we have seen that the repayment was a voluntary act on his part, and was made as soon as ever any money came into his hands. Oscar Wilde writes on 27 October, Your letter with Ernest's ten pounds and the manuscript were delivered on Monday last. The post is disgraceful here. It was very kind of you to secure the ten pounds for me, and I am much obliged. It has, amongst other things, enabled me to buy some writing paper of the cheaper kind. Next week I hope to be able to buy a pen. In January 1888 Oscar Wilde had left the villa Giudice and was living at 31 Santa Lucia, where moderately priced lodgings were obtainable. He writes on the ninth to Smithers a letter from which I extract the following passage with its threats of suicide. I have had many misfortunes since I wrote to you, Influenza, the robbing during my absence in Sicily of all my clothes, etc., by a servant whom I left at the villa, ill health, loneliness, and general ennui, with a tragic comedy of an existence. But I want to see my poem out before I take steps. Footnote. The Ballad of Reading Jail. End footnote. When we come to deal with Oscar Wilde's life in Naples and Paris, during his last mournful years, we shall have to refer back to some of the passages quoted, because much that he says in his letters to Smithers has recently been contradicted by Lord Alfred Douglas in his book Oscar Wilde and Myself. But here and now, to use one of Alfred Douglas's favorite locutions, I would like to point out that while Alfred Douglas says that the villa Giudice was taken by him and kept up by him, and that there he entertained Oscar Wilde, whom he describes as penniless, and that when he left Naples he left Wilde in the villa as his guest, weighted on by his Douglas's servants, Wilde's letters describe a very different position. According to what he writes to Smithers, it was he who took the villa Giudice, which was without servants and not habitable, and these letters also show that in the month of October alone he received at least 35 pounds in addition to his allowance of 12 pounds ten a month. My own information at the time I wrote my story of an unhappy friendship, 1902, was that he was the guest of Alfred Douglas, but that after a very short time his host was starved into leaving Naples and Oscar Wilde by the stopping of his allowance. I then also wrote, On his side Oscar Wilde was quite penniless. By selling their jewels and even pawning their clothes, the two friends managed to prolong their resistance for a few weeks. I have heard accounts of this period, when every morning the excitable Italian chef used to clemer hysterically for the raw materials of his art, which would be humorous were not the whole story so sad. I did not know then that a sum of 200 pounds was afterwards sent to Oscar Wilde by the Queensbury family to enable him to pay his debts and those of Alfred Douglas in Naples, and thus to be in a position to separate. The digression apropos of Oscar Wilde's liberality to Lady Wilde, having led us far enough afield for the present, we may here return to his mother and quote two more descriptions of her. One pictures her as a very tall woman, she looked over six feet high, wearing a long crimson silk gown which swept the floor. The skirt was voluminous, underneath there must have been two crinolines. This is perhaps what gave rise to the story of her wearing three dresses, one over the other, for when she walked there was a peculiar swaying, swelling movement. The long, massive, handsome face was plastered with powder. Over her blue, black, glossy hair was a gilt crown of laurels. Her throat was bare, so were her arms, but they were covered with quaint jewellery. On her broad chest was fastened a series of large miniature brooches, evidently family portraits. These would be the cameos that I noticed during my call at Park Street. Another lady gives a picture of Lady Wilde at her receptions at Oakley Street, which may be compared with that of Madame de Bremon. This lady saw a tall woman slightly bent with rheumatism, fantastically dressed in a trained black-and-white-checkered silk gown. From her head floated long white tulle streamers mixed with ends of scarlet ribbon. What glorious dark eyes she had! Even then, and she was over sixty, she made a strikingly handsome woman. Her fine eyes were indeed Lady Wilde's most striking feature, a beauty which both her sons inherited. Willie's eyes were darker, but there was more expression in Oscars, which glowed with the light of genius. In his Oxford days a poet, like himself, winner of the Nudigate Prize for Poetry, wrote of him, You with your wondrous eyes. Madame de Bremon says that on his deathbed Oscar Wilde reminded her strongly of Lady Wilde, whom, as we have heard, she knew very well. Oscar Wilde seemed wrapped in slumber. The coarseness that of late years marred his features had been refined by the invisible hand of death. The beauty of his youth had returned, while his striking likeness to the face of his mother smote my heart with a pang of remembrance. I have pointed out elsewhere that Oscar Wilde probably inherited from his mother also his eccentricity in the matters of dress and personal adornment. He was fond of large and noticeable jewels. Lord Alfred Douglas describes a large turquoise and diamond solitaire, which he and Oscar Wilde used to speak of as the hope-not in illusion, on the Lucas and non-Lucendo principle. To the blue-hope diamond, which in those days was being much talked about, and relates that Oscar Wilde used to wear this in his shirt front when in evening dress. It sounds almost incredible, even in wild, with his taste for the outre, and all I can say is that I never once saw him wearing the hope-not. End of Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Of The Real Oscar Wilde by Robert Chirard This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. As I have related in my life of Oscar Wilde, it was the earnest hope of Speranza, before her unfortunate son was born, that the expected child should be a girl. I had this on unimpeachable authority in Dublin, and referred to it because it seemed to me to illustrate, and to some extent explain, one side of Oscar Wilde's physiological composition. Madame de Bremont, from whose interesting book I have already had occasion to quote, frankly speaks of his feminine soul, and in view of the authority which she may be held to possess, I wish here to cite the passage in which she sets forth her view, and endeavours to establish it. It is to the soul of Oscar Wilde, she writes, that we must look for the solution of his paradoxical personality and genius. When the union of brain and soul is abnormal, the result is the genius. The phenomenon is due to the hybrid state wherein the soul and brain are bound by sexual antithesis. The feminine soul in the masculine brain building creates the genius of man, while the masculine soul in the feminine brain building creates the genius of woman. Therefore to the soul in the wrong brain building is due all that is great in art and wonderful in the world's progress. Oscar Wilde possessed the feminine soul. This was the ghost that haunted his house of life, that sat beside him at the feast, and sustained him in the day of famine. The secret influence that waited down his manhood and enervated his hope, the knowledge that he possessed the feminine soul, that he was a slave to the capricious critical feminine temperament, the feminine vanity and feminine weakness to temptation, the feminine instinct of adaptability, the feminine impulse of the wanton's soul, gave him the lust for strange forbidden pleasures, and imparted to his final repentance the sublime abnegation of the Magdalene. And yet that same feminine soul endowed him with the supreme love and appreciation of beauty in every form, the music of words, the subtle harmonies of color, imagery in language, the cockatree of thought that veiled itself in paradoxes, and the fine and delicate vision that created in him the instinct of the poet, the keen sense of feminine intuition in the analysis of character that made him the wit and dramatist of his day, and the feminine quality of vanity and appetite for flattery and praise that made him the first dandy of his time. His secret antipathy to woman as woman, and his open admiration for man as man, was a further proof of his feminine soul. He has said, the woman that would hold a man must appeal to the worst in him. But there were two women that he did not include in this sweeping assertion. The one was his mother, and the other his wife, both women that he well knew appealed to the best in his protean nature. He himself would have been a good and noble woman had his feminine soul been in its right place, in feminine brain-building. He was doomed before his birth, hence the strange maternal spirit of divination that urged his mother to wish that the child she was about to bring into the world would be a girl. The mother instinct sensed the feminine soul that had taken form within her. Now, I quote this passage from Madame de Bremon, not because I agree with it, but because it expresses the views of many people. I cannot leave Madame de Bremon's book without quoting an anecdote, because everybody who knew Oscar Wilde will agree with what one of his most intimate friends and admirers said about it to me, one day when we were discussing the lady's monograph. She has met Oscar Wilde on a steamer on the Seine, the Baton Mouche to St. Cloud, and she reports an extraordinary conversation which she had with him. In answer to one of her questions, why do you not write now? He answers, because I have written all there was to write. I wrote when I did not know life. Now that I do know the meaning of life, I have no more to write. Life cannot be written. Life can only be lived. I have lived. Again he says, I have found my soul. I was happy in prison. I was happy there because I found my soul. What I wrote before I wrote without a soul. And what I have written under the guidance of my soul the world shall one day read. It shall be the message of my soul to the souls of men. I should say these are Oscar Wilde's Ipsissimer Werber. I was once asked in a long letter from a Swedish professor, to whom I shall have occasion to refer again, this question, amongst others. Did you ever hear Wilde pronounce himself as to which of his own works he considered the most successful, from the point of view of technical perfection or otherwise? I prefer to let someone else answer this question, the man most qualified to answer it, and this is what he wrote. Wilde constantly said that all his works were technically perfect and equally so. After his imprisonment he disliked all of them thoroughly, and said they were inadequate expressions of his genius. He used to prefer the young king, House of Pomegranates. I suppose that what he meant by what he had written under the guidance of his soul was the impersonal part of De Profundis, those parts pieced together with such consummate skill by Mr. Robert Ross. The poor man can hardly have known how truly prophetic were his words. The world shall one day read. No book published in this century has been more widely or more universally read than De Profundis. During the trial of Regina versus Crossland it was stated that of this book, leaving aside the large editions of translations, over half a million copies have been sold. Still, today it is as good a property as any far mimboce, for the annual income it produces in royalties varies between four and five hundred pounds a year. Again there was a pause. The revelation of that solemn moment was overpowering. I closed my eyes and pressed my hands to them to keep back the tears of real joy that filled my heart. God had been indeed merciful. God had rewarded that stricken genius beyond the power of man. Yes, God was good. God had given him back his soul. Come tesser, he said. Don't sorrow for me, but watch and pray. It will not be for long. Watch and pray. I can hardly fancy Oscar Wilde ever saying anything of the sort, and believe that Madame de Bremond's memory must have betrayed her. She continues. His voice sank into silence. There was a long pause broken only by the grating sound of the boat as it touched the pier. I strove to compose myself and waited for him to speak. Then I uncovered my face and turned to look at him. Italics. But he was gone. The Italics are my own. Can you imagine Oscar reading that story, asked my friend, and coming to the words, but he was gone, and can you not imagine the burst of his Olympian laughter? I raised my eyes, but he was gone. This was, I agreed, just the kind of story of writing which would have appealed most strongly to his sense of humour. It is as a specimen of the anticlimax, a gem, the rapid evanescence of the bulky poet from a sea of—well, let us say, pathos—his comedy of a rich complexion. It helps to the understanding of a man to be told by his intimates what were the things that amused him. Lord Alfred Douglas made some comments, intended to be caustic or worse, on certain deductions I drew from the facts that Wilde's mother was a much stronger character than his father, and that not only had she hoped before Oscar's birth that the child would be a girl, but had brought him up and dressed him as a girl as long as it was possible to do so. My deductions were in the main inspired by that unhappy young, Israelite man of genius, Otto Weininger, who committed suicide in Vienna at the age of 21, shortly after he had published his book Sex and Character. Doubtless because, as it is suggested in the preface to the eighth edition of the English version of that work, he could not bear to face his own ghastly revelations of psychophysiological truth. My deductions were not apologetic, they were explanatory. For my own part I never saw anything in Oscar Wilde to justify the charge of effeminacy against him. He always impressed me as a man, a man of masculine bent of mind. To begin with, I always considered him a genius and geniuses never associated with what is feminine. As to which Otto Weininger, pass him, may be consulted for demonstration, pitiless and irrefutable. He certainly was not an athlete and had no fondness for sports. I remember once asking him if he'd ever liked playing cricket, and he said, No, the attitude strike me as indecent. At school he never played any games, but used to flop about ponderously. As I record in the life, quote, he never rode on the lake, and he had for the musketry instructor and the drill sergeant contempt mingled with pity, end quote. Now none of these things ever suggested to me that my friend was unmanly. I have known so many men of talent and genius who were men in every sense of the word, who eschewed physical exercise and exercises. I knew Victor Hugo very well. He never exercised his body. Dorday, before he became a cripple, used to dance when he needed relaxation. Zola was essentially what the Germans call an Ofenhocker, a man who sits by the stove all day, and the French designates as une pantouflah. The same may be said of Ernest Renan, as to whom it may be recorded that he also, had for the musketry instructor and the drill sergeant, contempt mingled with pity. He once said to me in his wonderful library in the Ecole de France, It is exceedingly lucky for me that I escaped military service. I simply could not have performed it. I should have deserted at the first opportunity, or I should have committed suicide. And that was Ernest Renan who spoke, the author of The Life of Christ. General Boulanger, and surely he was a man, was not even able to fence, as was demonstrated in his jewel with floquet. Oscar Wilde, it will be remembered, once sincerely regretted having no knowledge of the use of arms, so that, more a galleco, he might be able to defend himself against insult. It was only skill and not courage that he lacked. As a matter of fact, he was essentially brave, both morally and physically. As to moral courage, the blackmailers of London, as we have seen, had reason to appreciate his quality in this respect. He was not to be rented, as are the pusillanimous. He only laughs at us, and the compromising documents are handed over, without payment save for a contemptuous dole. Where was finer moral courage displayed than by him, when, released on bail between the two criminal trials, he refused, in spite of the solicitations of at least one of his friends, to flee the country. Quote, Oscar is an Irish gentleman, and he will face the music. End quote. Nor was there any braggadocio here. It was serene, quiet, and virile courage. He was of good heart and played the man. I remember being with him one afternoon in Oakley Street, during that dreadful period of storm and rang, when Frank Harris came in and asked to take him out. Where do you think of going to? said Oscar Wilde. Out of the Café Royal, said Harris. You must show them that you are not afraid of them, that you have nothing to fear. But Oscar Wilde shook his head. It would be unseemly, he pointed out. I confess I had applauded Harris's suggestion, but I afterwards recognized that Oscar Wilde did right to refuse, and on that memorable occasion, when Lord Queensbury came to his house in Tite Street, to demand that he should cease his friendship with Lord Alfred Douglas, can it be denied that here he showed fine courage? I know that in a letter describing the interview, Lord Queensbury charged him with cowardice. I don't believe Wilde will now dare defy me, he wrote. The letter was read out at his trial. He plainly showed the white feather the other day when I tackled him. Oscar Wilde did nothing of the sort, and even had he shown some nervousness, it would have been very unfair to charge him with cowardice. He was alone, his hostile visitors were two, and one of them at least, the Marquess, was known to him not only as a violent and reckless man, but as a skilled pugilist. He seems to have comported himself with great dignity to judge from his account of the incident given in the witness-box at the Queensbury trial, an account on which he was not cross-examined and of which no refutation was attempted. At the end of June 1894, he said in answer to Sir Edward Clark, there was an interview between Lord Queensbury and myself in my house. He called upon me, not by appointment, about four o'clock in the afternoon, accompanied by a gentleman with whom I was not acquainted. The interview took place in my library. Lord Queensbury was standing by the window. I walked over to the fireplace, and he said to me, Sit down. I said, I do not allow anyone to talk like that to me in my house or anywhere else. I suppose you have come to apologize for the statement you made about my wife and myself in letters you wrote to your son. I should have the right any day I chose to prosecute you for writing such a letter. An acrimonious discussion ensued during which Lord Queensbury accused Wilde of having written a disgusting letter to his son. The witness continued, The letter was a beautiful letter, and I never write except for publication. Lord Queensbury eventually announced, If I catch you and my son together again in any public restaurant, I will thrash you. To which Wilde answered, I do not know what the Queensbury rules are, but the Oscar Wilde rule is to shoot at sight. Continuing his account, the witness added, I then told Lord Queensbury to leave my house. He said he would not do so. I told him I would have him put out by the police. I then went into the hall and pointed him out to my servant. I said, This is the Marquess of Queensbury. You are never to allow him to enter the house again. I remember an occasion in Paris when I was with Wilde and some other friends in a thieves' kitchen. We had been exploring the slums. Some of the apaches resented our presence, and hostile demonstrations were made against le salle anglais. Some of our parties showed distinct signs of trepidation, but Wilde seemed absolutely indifferent, and continued to joke and laugh. I imagined that the apaches were much more impressed by his calm, as well as by his costo appearance than by the Don Wiscarando's attitude which I assumed. Footnote. Costo. Parisian slang word, meaning strong, sturdy. End footnote. Referring to this afterwards Oscar Wilde said, Robert was splendid. He defended us at the risk of our lives. He was a strongly built man, and could have trained into athleticism if he had cared to do so. I remember watching him swimming in the sea at Bernaveal, like a Byron winning across the Hellespont, and saying to Robert Ross, Nothing very effeminate about that performance is there. I had always considered that the fact that he dragged out, after his downfall, which I date with his arrest, his miserable existence to the bitter end, without seeking s'cease of sorrow in a way which must have suggested itself to him every day, perhaps every hour of his life, and which the examples of great men, recorded in those classics in which his soul was steeped, would commend, condone, and consecrate, showed a rare courage in so true a pagan. That was before I had read de profundis. I refer to the passage, While I was in Wandsworth prison, I longed to die. It was my one desire. When, after two months in the infirmary, I was transferred here, and found myself growing gradually better in physical health, I was filled with rage. I determined to commit suicide on the very day on which I left prison. After a time that evil mood passed away, and I made up my mind to live, there is before me so much to do, that I would regard it as a terrible tragedy if I died before I was allowed to complete, at any rate, a little of it. I see new developments in art and life, each one of which is a fresh mode of perfection. I long to live, so that I can explore what is no less than a new world to me. In a recent and magnificent poem, Eve, Rudyard Kipling writes, If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew to serve your turn long after they have gone, and so hold on when there is nothing in you, except the will which says to them, hold on. And when I read these lines I could not but think back on de profundis, and draw the conclusion that the poet draws, and going from the general to the particular, confirm my view that Wilde was a man in the best sense of the word. End of Chapter 7 Chapter 8 of The Real Oscar Wilde by Robert Chirard This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. After he had left Oxford and was living in town, Oscar Wilde one afternoon visited a friend of his, an artist well known at the time, who had a studio somewhere in Chelsea. He found his friend in a state of great distress and alarm, making hasty preparations as if for flight. He asked him what had occurred, and his friend said, Oh, it's all up with me, Oscar! I'm a ruined man! He described an offence he had committed, and added, I am sure the parents have laid an information, and that I am liable to be arrested at any moment. I'm trying to get away before the police come. Then I'm afraid you're too late, said Oscar, and that they are here already, because as I came into the house I noticed two men hanging about the doorway, and I'm sure I recognise them as Scotland Yard men. On hearing this, said Oscar, in telling me the story, Blank became frantic with alarm, talked of suicide, of throwing himself out of the window of his disgrace, and dishonour, and so forth. In the meanwhile I secured the outer door to the studio. Is there no means of escape that way? I asked, pointing to the window. Yes, he answered with a horse-croak, I could clamber to the roof and away through Blank's studio three houses off. Then do it at once, I said. But they're coming, he whimpered. I can hear them on the stairs. Oh, get along with you. I'll keep the door against them long enough for you to manage your escape. And that is what the effeminate Oscar Wilde did for his unworthy friend. After some parlaying, one can imagine Oscar's part in the dialogue, the detectives began to force the door. In the end the lock gave way, and a moment later the police would have burst in. And then Wilde put his broad back against the door and held it fast against the invaders for a minute or two longer. Long enough, in any case, to give the fugitive time to make good his escape. They were furious, continued Oscar, and spoke of arresting me for resisting the police and the execution of their duty. But I pacified them by saying that as I knew my friend, the artist, had left London that morning in a great hoodie for the Continent, I had thought it was some studio practical joke that was being played on me. Your feet, I said, reminds me of the exploit of Catherine Douglas, who held the door against the man who had come to murder the king. By the way, do you know John Barlus, who was her direct descendant? You remember Catherine Douglas won the name of The Barlass? I forget when Oscar first met John Barlus, but I remember taking the Scottish poet to our rooms in Charles Street, Grovener Square, where a number of poets, John Davidson amongst others, used occasionally to meet. I had made Barlus' acquaintance at New College, Oxford, where his rooms were opposite mine on the ground floor of the extreme right-hand side of the first quadrangle. Already at Oxford he was known as eccentric, but was considered a genius, and was appreciated as a poet. Oscar Wilde always had a respect for varsity men, and I think that he had a good opinion of John Barlus, who had done well in the schools, and would have done better but for a love of romance and adventure, which interfered with his studies. He had a very excitable brain and was very quarrelsome. I used to think of him as the young Lockenvarr, and he dearly loved fighting. Wilde was very nice and complimentary to him during his afternoon at Charles Street, and had not shown any surprise at his having brought with him a weird young female, whom he introduced as his sister Soul and Muse. It appeared she lived in a room adjoining his in an awful slum in Lambeth, and that, like himself, she professed anarchy, and, as he confided to us, wore flannel under-things of a blood-red hue to show the colour of her convictions. She was hardly a person to bring to so respectable a house as the one in Charles Street, kept by a retired butler, who used to go out and resume his functions whenever the governors of the Bank of England gave a dinner party, and who would have swooned if he had caught a glimpse of the red desu of the sister Soul from Hercules' building's Lambeth. But there was nothing snobbish about Oscar Wilde, Pache Lord Alfred Douglas, and he received this weird young lady, because she was Barlas' friend, as courteously as though she had been Lady This or Lady That. Barlas, however, conceived a grouch. He thought that the sister Soul had not been treated with due reverence. We all left Charles Street together, Barlas and the Muse ahead, followed by Wilde, Davidson, and myself. Suddenly Barlas was seen to signal to a handsome. It came up, and the Lady was bundled into it, followed by the poet, who rebuked us all in general, and Oscar Wilde in particular, for our want of respect to the sister Soul. It appears he thought that Oscar Wilde should have offered his arm to the Lady, and so have escorted her across Grovener Square, which would have been a sight for the gods. Poor Barlas' heroic exit was spoiled, however, by the cabman, who, when he heard what address he was expected to drive to, said he didn't know about that. It was a roguish neighbourhood, and was he sure of getting his fare. And then Oscar Wilde, who hated a scene worse than any man, and who might justly have been peaked by Barlas' unreasonable behaviour, stepped forward and smilingly assured the cabman, who knew him by sight and addressed him as my lord, that it was all right, and thus saved the situation. Oscar Wilde, by the way, was always very popular with cab drivers, and was perhaps better known to them than any man in London. He was the best rider in Chelsea, was the description of him given to me at the time of his trial, by a sympathetic Jehu. He must have spent much money with the craft. This dialogue between him and Mr. Carson at the time of the Queensbury trial will be remembered. Is Park Walk about ten minutes walk from Tite Street? I don't know. I never walk. I suppose when you pay visits you always take a cab. Always. And if you visited you would leave the cab outside? If it were a good cab. Some little time after the Grovener Square incident, Barlas fell into the hands of the police. He had rushed out of Hercules' buildings early one morning, and had discharged a revolver against the houses of Parliament, to show his contempt for them, he explained to the police. Oscar Wilde, who traced his excitement to the influence of his Theroin de Mericor, immediately went bail for him, and afterwards became one of his sureties to be of good behaviour. Some of the papers blamed Mr. de Rootson for his leniency, and, of course, Wilde came in from a level and dispersion. I know that he did not care. He acted as he did, not only from kindness of heart, but also because he respected John Barlas, and admired him. Barlas heartily reciprocated his respect and admiration, as he showed in an article contributed to some forgotten magazine, whose name I do not recall. I give the following extracts from this article, Footnote. The printed version, it appeared in April 1892, differs considerably from the manuscript from which I quote. End Footnote. A manuscript copy of which I possess, because they illustrate the opinion on Wilde held by a man whom many contemporaries look upon as a poet of genius, who was a scholar and a man of lofty ideals and great courage, universally liked, and respected at Oxford and elsewhere. Hygienius is always symbolic, or typical. The subject of this sketch is a perfect type, in life, in style, in thought, he is the artist among us. From the first he was a critic in art, and he is now the artist of criticism. Concentration and universality are great gifts not often found together. The gift of the creative artist is not often united in one person, with the gift of the sterile critic. Oscar Wilde has both. He can make beautiful things of a distinct type. He can enjoy beautiful things of every type. But he has said himself that he holds the critic greater than the artist, holds him who dwells in the palace greater than him who built it. Creation is necessary and contemplation delightful to guard and man alike. We must all make something. Most of us have to build houses or bridges of brick or stone, or to till the earth. But if we build our houses religiously, we make them into temples, and the fruits of the earth we can offer to God, a cane's offering openly rejected, but dear to him in his sacred heart. Other few of us are privileged to weave rainbows out of colors, and dreams out of rainbows, to build with things of the spirit. These are artists. God alone can make the stars. UNQUOTE He then quotes some passages of Wilde's criticisms and proceeds. This is astral music, and if he who wrote it has not lived a four time in Egypt and Syria, in violet crowned Athens, and Dante's own city of flowers, I have misunderstood the music. He does not seem quite so inspired when he speaks of Italy and her painters. It may be that, after all, he never heard from Botticelli's lips of the strange heresies he painted upon the cold, rebellious faces of his Madonna's, nor left his art for a while to plunge into the mysteries of occult science with the pupil of Verrocchio, artist and lover of all beautiful things, nor listened to the silent, painted music of Giorgione. It was Walter Pater who did all that. But criticism pure and simple makes only the middle period of Oscar Wilde's development. He began as a critical poet in verse, and he ends as a symbolic poet in prose. He is the first poet novelist of England. Fielding, Dickens, Thackery were novelists, not poets. Shelley wrote some novels when he was very young, but left prose for poetry. The poetry of Scott is better seen in his poetry than in his novels. In France, it is otherwise. Hugo, Flaubert, and Gauthier were poets of prose. The creator of Giliat's heroic love and Jean Valjean's holy sufferings was a poet. He who saw the snake skin slippers of Salambeau in the marble bath tank of her scarlet room, and waded through the massacre of the Valley of the Battleaxe, and beheld Lyons Crucified, was a poet. He who loved a woman who had never seen and gave her the hands of Magdalene, the body of sleeping Antiope, the raiment of an earlier Queen, and who found her in the flesh in strange disguise, and made her his own but for a single night, was a poet. And he who was clothed the mystery of the Phoenix in the picture of Dorian Gray is a prince of poets. And this leads us to his earlier poetry in verse. The personality of the man we know is already there, the love of colors, of bright birds and beautiful gems. The love of curious gems came later. The deep, sensuous enjoyment of nature that recalls Keats and the Roman poets, especially Vergil and Ovid, the critical spirit of Greece strangely blended with the religious fervor of Catholic Christianity, the godlike calm, the titan-like defiance, the swift and gentle irony, vivid and lambent and harmless to spiritual life as sheet-lightning, but terrible to those who know what it means. But a man who is all this, and when faters cast him upon these latter days, cannot fail to be a revolutionist. And this voluptuous artist is a very Michael, or rather a Raphael, for he does not use physical means but spiritual. Nor are his spiritual weapons of the Corsa kind, noisy and explosive. He does not use dynamite, but a dagger whose hilt is crusted with flaming jewels, and whose point drips with the poison of the Borgias. That dagger is the paradox. No weapon could be more terrible. He has stabbed all our proverbs, and our proverbs rule us more than our kings. Perhaps it is better to say that he uses sheet-lightning. With a sudden flash of wit, he exposes to our startled eyes the sheer, cliff-like rift which he has opened out, as if by a silent earthquake between our moral belief and the belief of our fathers. That fissure is the intellectual revolution. A singular fatality has dogged the steps of Oscar Wilde's friends. Many have come to a sad end, and of some of those who survive it may be said that they are not the luckier ones. Consider the sudden and unlovely death of Lionel Johnson, who fell back inanimate from off the high stool of a bar counter, the lingering agony of consumption aggravated by want of Ernest Dawson, the dreadful suicide of John Davidson, and other illustrations which might be given. Poor John Barlis was to endure a fate even worse, to linger on for years, a physical wreck, with a mind diseased, in Godnaval Asylum. I heard from him thence in the present year, 1914. He was unable to write himself, but dictated the letter to his wife, who seems faithfully to have transcribed his words. It was a sad day to read such a letter after reading the essay from which I have quoted above. But there is one curious thing about it which strikes me now. He has told me quite luckily of the enormous output of plays and poems, which he has achieved since last we met, twenty years ago, but then trails off into a mysterious account of visions he has of, quote, trains full of corpses. The poet, Vartis, is a visionary and a poet, and to the innocent it is said, second sight is given. Can his disordered brain have foreseen the impending horrors of battle and massacre? Footnote. The following extract from a letter written by Barlis to his son in 1905, quoted from Mr David Lowe's brochure on the poet, will be read with interest, quote. You may have heard that I knew Oscar Wilde pretty well at one time, both in Paris and London, and we sometimes dined together with other friends and acquaintances in the latter mighty city. He was and remains my ideal of a man and genius in this generation. His words were as splendid as his writings, turned and spoken with exquisite grace, and half concealing under an appearance of sportive levity, unheard of profundity of perception and thought. He read the very innermost souls of men. We have had none like him for this power since Shakespeare. His misfortunes were an extraordinary example of the power of slander and of capital. So long as he left the pocket unassailed, he prevailed over all the lies and libels of the jealous. But his article in the Four Nightly Review on Socialism brought all the hornets upon him, unquote. End of footnote. Sufficient proof has, I think, been given that it is wrong to speak of Oscar Wilde as effeminate, by reason of a want of courage, physical and moral. And all the more credit should be given him for the quality which he displayed, that courage seems to diminish in a man in proportion to his intellect. The Napoleon of the Pont d'Arcole was, no doubt, a hero in the popular sense of the word. The mentally developed Napoleon of the retreat from Moscow was so little courageous that, in deadly fear of falling into the hands of the Cossacks, after narrowly escaping them in a raid, he ordered his physician to prepare him a sachet of poison, which he could wear around his neck, and which could be used as a last resource if he were to be captured. The contents of this sachet he did eventually swallow. It was on the night before the abdication of Fontainebleu. But the strength of the poison had evaporated, and he only succeeded in making himself very sick, and in giving great alarm to the faithful minival. The stronger the imagination, and consequently the greater the power to conceive the horrors of pain and death, the less will the courage be. Wise old age is timorous and shy of danger. Immature youth is heroic and reckless. I think of Oscar Wilde, that, in as much as he was undoubtedly a man of genius, his courage was quite remarkable. He was not a bully nor a swashbuckler. Unlike Alfred Douglas, who tells us that in Paris he challenged numerous people to jewels, he never issued a cartel, but bore his enemies down by the serene force of his courage. He heard that dignity and calm which suggest strength. One has heard his affectations of speech referred to as a proof of a feminacy. Now, I do not think that any of his friends ever heard him speak otherwise, than in a perfectly natural, albeit highly distinguished manner, when he was not on the stage. By being on the stage, I mean when he was playing to the gallery, amazing the public, posturing for the sake of notoriety for the sake of the ultimate benefits which, in a commercial age and country, notoriety is supposed to bring. I know that I never did, never once. It would have bored, or it would have irritated me, and while I never experienced one seconds ennui during all the hours I have spent in his company, I cannot conceive any man ever having been irritated by Oscar Wilde. His company was sheer delight. He had certain little catchphrases or expressions, who has not, such as perfectly charming and rather tedious, but they were so skillfully used and so amusingly applied that they never produced the annoyance of the gag. He had also certain philological dislikes. For instance, he used to say that to use or to hear any word ending in at, such as literat, flannelat, and so on, literally put his teeth on edge. Had he lived, he would have harboured a grievance against Mrs. Pankhurst because of the designation of her followers. Yet, curiously enough, it was a word ending in at, which expressed what played so vast a role in his physical life. A word which, had he been restricted to a vocabulary of only ten words, would certainly have been one of them, if not the first, namely, cigarette. It was doubtless his fondness for what it described, that made him accord to this word with the hated suffix, the high honour of admission, the grand entree, into his poems. It is found once, and is fitted with a jingle-partner in that wonderful poem, The Harlots House, which I saw and heard him compose in Paris. Here are the lines. Sometimes a horrible marionette came out and smoked a cigarette upon the steps like a live thing. With regard to the apparent extravagance of his language in public discourse, as well as in his writings, let me once again quote one of the questions put to me by the Swedish Professor, and the answer given to it. They contain, besides the explanation sought after, other information of interest. The Swedish Professor asks me, quote, Had wild any very genuine first-hand knowledge of Greek literature, beyond what readings in it were indispensable for him to have when he took his Oxford degree, did he read any Greek books in later years, or did he maintain his classical scholarship chiefly by studying the works of others, scientific productions, Mahafi, etc. You have, of course, noticed in many of Wilde's writings a frequent occurrence of words and groups of words like these. Honey-coloured, fiery-coloured, scarlet plume, scarlet thread, jasper cave, purple air, purple darkness, the purple dignity of tragedy, etc., as of various names of flowers, such as anemones, narcissus, crocus, hyacinth, iris, and so on. Now, I wonder, are these reminiscences of classical poetry? To these questions the following answer was given. Wilde won the Barclay Gold Medal for Greek at Dublin, at the age of 17, his essay being on the Greek comic poets. He obtained a Greek scholarship at Mordlin, and took a first in literary humaniores for his degree, which was classical. Any writer who has enjoyed these scholastic distinctions generally retains something of his classical education, Wilde is, therefore, hardly an exception. As he never worked at Oxford, and went to Greece for a couple of terms, when he should have been at the university, for which his scholarship was temporarily taken away, and still got a first in every examination, we may safely conclude that he retained the scholarship acquired at Dublin. His memory was always extraordinary, and perhaps too retentive. He often reproduced phrases of other writers unconsciously. No doubt the vocabulary referred to by the doctor had its origin from the same source. Theocritus and, of course, Plato were the only Greek authors he read carefully in later life. Although Oscar Wilde was a great talker, I myself have charged him that Balzac's definition of the dimmy artists who spend their lives in talking themselves, passant lieu via ces palais, might be applied to him, he never imposed his conversation on people. He talked nobody down, as there are some who do, and amongst the least obscure. If he seemed to pontify, it was because he was such a delightful talker, and had a voice so melodious that people simply stopped talking themselves, inviting him by their silence to continue. Do not the naturalists describe for us some bird, as to which they tell us that when it begins to sing, a hush falls upon the whole grove, vocal till then. One simply had to listen, and was led from delight to delight, from surprise to surprise. I have never anywhere in the world met anybody even faintly resembling him in this gift. His conversation was indescribable, it charmed, touched, amused, inspired. One felt an enthusiasm for the man as one listened to him, the kind of enthusiasm that one experiences for nature at the spectacle of some grand piece of scenery, some light on sea or land. One was lifted out of oneself. In regard to voice, Sarah Bernhardt, on whom Oscar somewhat modelled himself, has the same fascination, the same power to move. End of Chapter 8 Chapter 9 of The Real Oscar Wild by Robert Chirard This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. It's an accepted fact that an essentially feminine weakness is a want of discretion, an inability to keep a secret. I should say that these weaknesses were never less to be found in a man than they were in Oscar Wild. He was, as far as I observed him, the most discreet of men. I suppose, like every other young man, he had had his amorets. Indeed, one of them was at one time a matter of public notoriety, and few of us have forgotten the article El Elouie, which appeared in the Echo de Paris, and which very transparently described the Irish poet and his famous in Amorata, as minutely observed and pitilessly analysed by a celebrated Parisian chronicer, who had frequently seen them together. It was a liaison of which any man might have been vain, of which many men would have boasted. I never once heard Oscar Wild mention the lady's name, any more than I ever heard him refer to any of his adventures or bond fortune. Of course, Wild was a gentleman. Now, gentlemen are not supposed to do these things, but, unfortunately, many gentlemen do, if not by direct statement, at least by suggestion. But I am not defending Wild here on a charge frequently brought against him of being a phop, and an egotist steeped in vanity, the very kind of vanity which sets men's cackling about their triumphs in this field. I am trying to point out that the charge of effeminacy here also falls to the ground. Even under the sinister effects of alcohol, which was the fonds at Origo and alone of his downfall and ruin, every foolish thing that he ever did, having been conceived and executed when he was under its baleful influence, his reticence on subjects on which honour bound him to be silent, appears to have been absolute. I say appears, because for my part I never once, during all the years I knew him, saw Oscar Wild under the influence of drink. Lord Alfred Douglas states that towards the end, in Paris, Wild frequently got intoxicated after dining with him, and would say, Excuse me, my dear fellow, but I perceive I am drunk, and would lumber heavily from the room. I am afraid that there is no doubt that during his last miserable years in Paris, he did seek this artificial paradise out of a real and palpable hell, and I am afraid also that I do not see what else he could very well have done to fill the unforgiving minute. When I visited the Hotel d'Alsace after his death, his landlord, showing me his room, told me, quote, he used to work at nights, all night long, as a rule he would come in at one o'clock in the morning and sit down to his table, and in the morning he would show me what he had written, and I have earned a hundred francs to-night, he would say. Towards the end it became very difficult for him to write, and he used to whip himself up with cognac. A liter, seven-eighth of a quart, bottle, would hardly see him through the night, unquote. The landlord then pointed through the window to the little courtyard of the hotel, and said, quote, and there is the table where Mr. Melmuth used to sit and take his absence, unquote. I will add, though, that the landlord said he had never seen him drunk. Parfois entre deux vins ça se peut, he admitted, me sous ça jamais. A bit squiffy, perhaps, at times, but drunk, never. Well, during all the years I knew him, I never even once saw him entre deux vins. The only occasion I remember when there was merely a suggestion of anything of the kind, the suggestion came from him, was once when we'd been dining together at Mare's with another friend, and as we were walking back along the boulevards, Oscar said, I really think, Carlos, that we must have had too much wine at dinner. We are ballooning. In those days he seemed to consider excessive drinking as a want of manners. One remembers how indignant he was with the cross-examining council, who suggested that at a certain dinner-party he had deliberately caused too much wine to be served. In answer to Carson's question, did you give him plenty of wine at dinner? He angrily replied, as I have said before, any one who dines at my table is not stinted in wine. If you mean did I ply him with wine, I say no. It's monstrous and I won't have it. He had previously said that any guest of his was welcomed to as much wine as he liked, but that he considered it extremely vulgar for anyone to take too much. It was, by the way, apropos of wine that during this cross-examination he made one of his most effective hits of repartee. Do you drink champagne yourself? asked Mr. Carson. Yes, was the answer. Iced champagne is a favorite drink of mine, strongly against my doctor's orders. Never mind your doctor's orders, sir, retorted Mr. Carson. I never do, said Oscar Wilde. Beyond that it was vulgar to get drunk, I never heard him express an opinion on the subject. I will admit, though, that when everybody was talking about Ibsen's plays, Wilde was much attracted by the phrase, coming home with vine leaves in his hair, and it occurred to me that if he thought of a man as with vine leaves in his hair, he would think less badly about him and the vulgarity of his act than if the fact that the man was drunk presented itself to him. Let us think of him then in those mournful days and still more mournful nights in Paris, not ever as entre deux vins, but just with vine leaves in his hair. And though he did all the foolish and all the evil things that ruined his life when in this condition, as when he laid his information against Lord Queensborough, as when he sought out those inexplicable companionships which disgraced him, if he was reckless and sacrificed himself, no more then than when his hair was free of the pompre did he allow his tongue to involve or implicate others. As an instance of his absolute discretion, I will mention the fact that though I knew him from 1883 till the year of his death, I was never aware that he was a Freemason. It was only late in this year, 1914, that I heard for the first time that he was admitted to the Brotherhood at Oxford on 25th of May 1876. May the 25th, by the way, was, as may be observed, an important date in Oscar Wilde's life. I heard it for the first time from a mutual friend, not a Mason himself, who had discovered the fact one day when Oscar Wilde was turning out some papers in his library in Tide Street and disclosed two Masonic documents, his Certificate of Admission to the Order, and another referring to some promotion in degree. After that he sometimes referred to this status of his when speaking with this friend, and it was to him that he told an amusing story of how he met a Brother Mason in Reading Jail. It was towards the end of my time, and one day as I was walking round and round the ring in the prison-yard at exercise, I noticed a man, another prisoner, signalling to me. He was a perfect stranger to me. I could see from his clothes, he was not in prison dress, that he was a prisoner on remand. I took no notice of him at first, because at that time I was on the Governor's Good Books. Major Nelson had been very kind to me, and I did not want to get reported for communicating with another prisoner in the exercise-yard. It is a grave offence. I had been punished once before. He was here referring to an incident which he described in his own inimitable style to André Gide. Those who are in prison for the first time, he said, recognize one another by the fact that they are unable to converse without moving their lips. I had been locked up for six weeks, and drawing that time I had not spoken a single word to a single soul, to a single soul. One evening we were marching one behind the other, drawing the exercise-yard, and suddenly, behind me, I heard my name spoken. It was the prisoner who was behind me, who was saying, Oscar Wilde, I pity you, for you must suffer more than we do. I had to make an enormous effort not to be observed. I thought that I was going to faint, and I said, without turning round, no, my friend, we all suffer alike. And that day I had no longer the faintest desire to kill myself. We spoke thus together for several days running. I got to know his name and what his trade was. His name was P. Blank. He was an excellent fellow. But I had not yet learned how to talk without moving my lips. And one evening, C. III, it was I who was C. III, and A. 48, leave the ranks. We left the ranks, and the water said, you will have to go before the governor. And as pity had already entered into my heart, I was alarmed only for my companion, absolutely on his account alone. For myself, I was pleased to think that I should suffer on his account. But the governor was altogether terrible. He made P. Blank come in first. He wished to question us apart. For I must tell you that the punishment is not the same for the man who has spoken first, and thus began the conversation, as for him who answered. The punishment is double for the man who speaks first. Usually the former gets fourteen days' cells, and the latter only seven. So the governor wished to know which of us had spoken to the other first. And naturally P. Blank, who was a very good fellow, said that it was he. And when afterwards the governor had me brought in and questioned me, naturally I said that it was I who had spoken first. Then the governor turned very red, because he could not follow us in his understanding. But P. Blank says also that it was he who began to talk. I cannot make it out. I cannot make it out. Can you imagine that he could not understand? He was much perplexed. He said, but I have already given him a fortnight. Then he added, Well, if that's the way you have settled it, I shall give both of you a fortnight. Was it not extraordinary? The man had no imagination of any kind. G. remarked that Wilde was greatly amused with what he was saying. He laughed. He was happy to be telling this story. He concluded the story by saying, And naturally, after the fortnight, we had a greater wish than ever to talk to each other. You cannot think how sweet it was to feel that we were suffering one for the other. As time went on, as we did not always have the same places in the ranks, as time went on, I was able to converse with every one of the other prisoners, with every one, with every one. The recollection, however, of the fortnight spent in the cells had made him very prudent, and besides this he had no wish to appear ungrateful in the eyes of the new Governor, Major Nelson. The Governor, who was altogether terrible, was an official named Isaacson, the very man for a Garder-Shiom, who seems to have won rapid promotion in a service where, in those days at least, humanness was not encouraged by the system. Major Nelson, who was in charge of Reading Jail during the last few months of Oscar Wilde's detention there, seems better than his predecessor to have known how to reconcile with a strict execution of his irksome duties, that manseuertude, which should be looked for in Christian gentlemen, even when they're prison governors. I am giving in facsimile in these pages a letter addressed to Robert Ross by Mr. Isaacson. This person, it will be seen, answers Ross's application on the turned-back corner of his own letter. Well, Wilde was very anxious not to do anything to lose the Governor's good opinion of him, and so he was much upset when he saw the remand prisoner making signals to him. I took no notice at first and turned my eyes away, he continued, but when he had again attracted my attention, he made that Masonic sign to me, which is known as the Sign of the Widow's Son, which is an appeal from one brother Mason to another, when in direct distress, and cannot be disregarded under any circumstances, and must be responded to. How true this is, was shown in the Old Bailey a year or two ago, when a prisoner in the dock made the Sign of the Widow's Son to the Judge on the Bench, and the Judge laid down the Black Cap and made the Counter-Sign with the tears bursting from his eyes. The prisoner was the man Seddon, an insurance agent who had murdered an old lady who was boarding in his house after plundering her of a not inconsiderable competency, and the Judge was missed the Justice Bucknell. So I was obliged to respond to the man, and very fortunately escaped attracting the attention of the Warders, but I was determined not to run the risk again, especially as it was quite out of my power to help my brother Mason. And how did you manage that, Oscar? he was asked. Oh! I asked to see the Governor after I had got back to my cell, and I told him how I was placed between my desire not to break the prison regulations, and my pledged duty to my order. I did not, of course, indicate in any way who was the man who had signalled to me, and a ruse was decided upon. If my eyes were bad, and I couldn't see well, I could not be expected to respond to Masonic signals. So, next time I went out to exercise, I had been fitted by the prison doctor with a pair of dark blue goggles, and, after that, the man left me alone. I must say here that, although I visited Wilde several times in prison, both at Wandsworth and in Reading, and have much information about his life as a prisoner, I know nothing of it from his lips. He never spoke to me on the subject, and I never questioned him. On the only occasion on which I made any reference to his prison life, and may have seemed to want some information, all he said was, Now, Robert, don't be morbid. With regard to all those extraordinary companions of his, and the strange doings as to whom, and as to which, the trials brought out such revelations, I never heard him say a word about them. The only thing that might have given me to think that my friend was compromising himself with very undesirable people, and was acting with incomprehensible folly, was that he was fond of telling the story of how he had foiled the Blackmailers when they came to rent him over that letter of his to Lord Alfred Douglas. I heard this story more than once. He delighted in telling it, and he told it in picturesque utterance. The dramatic side of these squalid interviews appealed to me, and the personality of the reptilian youths, with their panther-like glide as they emerged from the murk of tight street into the brilliance of his hall. He really seemed impressed by them. The passage in day profundus will be remembered. Claiborne and Atkins, these were the two Blackmailers, were wonderful in their infamous war against life. To entertain them was an astounding adventure. Numapeer, Chalini, Goya, Edgar Allan Peer, or Baudelaire, would have done just the same. It is quite comprehensible that he should have been silent about these people and these topics in my company before the exposures at the trials, because he knew that I had neither interest in nor any kind of sympathy with people and doings of that sort. Indeed, that the only feeling they aroused in me was a wish to laugh, with the kind of cruel laugh that greets the gyrations of a drunkard or the grotesque obscenities of a monkey-house. But, when all the charges were out and registered against him, I might have expected him to say something to explain himself, to disculpate himself, to cast some of his intolerable burden onto the shoulders of others. But he only once referred to the past in my presence, and the only words he said, then, were these. Fortune had so turned my head that I fancied I could do whatever I chose. Then, once again, while the last trial was in progress, he said to me one evening in Oakley Street, when he returned home on bail, I saw all those witnesses outside the court today, Robert, and they jeered at me. They jeered at me. And I had always tried to be kind to them, nothing else, only tried to be kind to them. I never heard a single name mentioned, nor any reference made to any place or incident. I did not know that such a person as Alfred Taylor existed, and I had never heard of any such street as College Street, Westminster. These names, as well as all the others, were learned by me for the first time when I saw them in the papers at the time of the trial. I had never heard any suspicions expressed as to wild morality and normality, any more than the usual slanders which are current in England about everybody who is in any prominent position. The usual slander in England about a man is that he drinks, that he's a drunkard. And the next thing is that he's addicted to horrible sins, to unnatural vices. It was commonly reported, for instance, that when Wilde was arrested there were found on him, besides a quantity of other papers, rits and so forth, several letters from a distinguished conservative statesman who is also a great student of the classics. I was at pains to inquire into this report, and found that there was not a word of truth in it. The thing suggested, of course, was that the right honourable gentleman referred to was associated with Wilde in the pursuits alleged against the latter. I actually saw the docket or list of papers and articles taken from Wilde's pockets at Bow Street police station. I remember being surprised that several rits should have been found upon him, because at the time of his arrest he had three plays running in London, while his account at the St James Square branch of his bank was good enough to allow him to draw one hundred pounds a few hours before his arrest. End of Chapter 9 Chapter 10 of The Real Oscar Wilde by Robert Chirard This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. But Oscar Wilde was ever improvident and reckless about money, as so many of his countrymen are. Reference has been made to his having won, at the age of 17, for an essay on the Greek comic poets, the Barclay Gold Medal. It would be interesting to know how many times during his lifetime this gold medal was pawned. I remember that it was in pawn when I was staying with Oscar Wilde at his homes in Charles Street, Grovener Square, because one day, when he found he had lost the pawn ticket relating to this pledge, he asked me to accompany him to Marlborough Police Court to make the necessary affidavit, entitling him to a fresh ticket. He must have greatly prized the actual medal, because it was one of the few things of his past possessions which he preserved to the day of his death. Though often desperately poor after his release from prison, he seems always to have managed to pay the interest on the bishop's medal, and after his death, Robert Ross found the ticket for it amongst his papers. I had always understood that the medal was, though to win it, was a high distinction, intrinsically of small value. I was told in Dublin what was the amount the bishop had left for supplying the medal, and it seemed so small to me that I wrote in my life. In a letter written by Lady Wilde to Mr O'Donoghue, she begs him not to admit to mention, in writing a biographical notice of her, that both her sons were gold medalists, a distinction, she said, of which they are both very proud. Oscar's medal was the Barkley Medal. This prize was founded by the famous Bishop Barkley, who denied the existence of matter, and of whom Lord Byron wrote, that when he said that there was no matter, it really was no matter what he said. It was possibly from a desire to be consistent with his principles, that the bishop left so small a sum for the purpose of this prize, that the Barkley gold medal is not materially of much value. Well, when I asked Ross why, as he had found the ticket, he had not redeemed the medal which had been so much prized by Oscar Wilde, and would consequently have been something that his family would have wished to preserve, he said, it was at the time quite impossible. Why, there was sixty pounds worth of gold alone in it. I am glad of the opportunity of making this correction here and now, and can only suppose that Bishop Barkley's legacy developed amazingly by unearned increment. Another story which was persistent at the time of Oscar Wilde's arrest was that a certain very well-known nobleman was in such terror as to the consequences which any revelations on Wilde's part might bring upon him, that he took refuge on board his yacht, and remained there, ready at any moment, on a signal from land, to up anchor and steam away out of British jurisdiction, until Wilde had been tried for the last time, and had been sent to prison. From Wilde himself I never heard anything either before, pending, or after his trials, about the wretched business in which he was implicated, or the wretched people who seemed to have been associated with him. He was absolutely discreet and reticent, and not to me alone. As to this, may I quote what many years ago I wrote on the subject. I am referring to the period when he was out on bail, and I was seeing him every day at Oakley Street. Yet my admiration for the nobility of character which he displayed helped me to bear the tragedy long drawn out of those cruel days. Not one word of recrimination ever passed his lips. He attached blame to no one. He sought to involve no one. He had no thought of vengeance or even of resentment against those who had encompassed his so formidable ruin. He bent his broad shoulders and assayed with his sole strength to bear the crushing burden of infamy and fate. He never showed himself to me more fine than in the days when the whole world was shouting out that he was of man the vilest. The people who had been associated with him in his strange frequentations seemed to have feared he would speak, seemed to have feared his revelations. A scampering exodus took place from London. A wave of terror swept over the channel and the city of Calais witnessed a strange invasion. From the Arcana of London a thousand guilty consciences startled into action by the threat of imminent requitals came fleeing south. Every outgoing steamer numbered amongst its passengers such nightmare faces as in quiet times one cannot fancy to exist outside the regions of disordered dreams. My loyalty and friendship lent to misinterpretation. I saw those nightmare faces. I was in Paris at the time, gathering around me, watching with pale eyes for sympathy where I had nothing but revolt and horror to give. Lord Alfred Douglas, of whom I will say that he did not desert his friend when the crash came, until Wilde himself requested him to leave the country, guards against me in his book for pointing out that had Wilde chosen to speak he could have disculpated himself almost entirely by implicating others. In my book from which Lord Alfred quotes, but which, as he says, he has done me the honour not to read, occurs this passage. There had been six counts against him. He was asked after his release by a very old friend as to the justice of the finding, and he said, Five of the counts refer to matters with which I had absolutely nothing to do. There was some foundation for one of the counts. But then why, asked his friend, did you not instruct your defenders? That would have meant betraying a friend, said Oscar Wilde. Alfred Douglas indignantly espouses the cause of the unknown and unnamed friend and declares, what we have seen to be false, that Wilde was not made of the stuff which sacrifices itself for a friend, and that, far from going to disgrace and prison for a friend, he would not even have gone without his dinner. The same statement after his paying the penalty for another man's sins is made by Wilde in that long letter which he wrote to Lord Alfred Douglas from Reading Jail, and extracts from which have been published under the title Day Profundus, a book which has made some stir in the world. The passage is as follows. A great friend of mine, a friend of ten years standing, came to see me some time ago, and told me that he did not believe a single word of what was said against me, and wished me to know that he considered me quite innocent and the victim of a hideous plot. I burst into tears at what he said, and told him that while there was much amongst the definite charges that was quite untrue, and transferred to me by revolting malice, still my life had been full of perverse pleasures, and that unless he accepted that as a fact about me, and realized it to the full, I could not possibly be friends with him any more, or ever be in his company. I know the man he is referring to, a man of very considerable wealth and high culture, an Oxford man, by the way, with houses in Paris and in England, married to a beautiful woman, with a family of children, the very sort of man who, if he had ever had the faintest suspicion that there was anything wrong in Wilde's life and conduct, or if Wilde had ever hinted at the frequentations which were charged against him, would have put an immediate period to their friendship. But, as I know, he entirely believed what Wilde told him in prison, disregarded his penitential self-accusation as to perverse pleasures, remained his constant friend and admirer until his death, and has respected his memory ever since. He was one of the first people to write to me, after I had published my story of an unhappy friendship, to thank me for having written it. I saw him afterwards in Paris, and he said that never at any time had he had any suspicion as to Wilde's morality. Otherwise, he said, do you think I would have had him to my house to meet my wife and children? I told him that I was exactly in the same position, and that not only had I never seen or heard anything about Wilde to make me think him abnormal, but that also he seemed immune against those natural temptations which beset healthy young men. The only time, I said, that I ever saw him talking to a woman under a sexual impulse, was once at the Eden Palace in Paris, a sort of music hall which caquettes used to frequent. I left him talking to her, and I can't say whether he succumbed to her allurements or not, but next day when I called on him at the Hotel Voltaire, the first thing he said to me was, Robert, what animals we are. I remember the incident, trivial as it is, because a tragic end was the close of that woman's career. She was the Marie Agueton who was murdered in her flat by the sinister and mysterious assassin and thief who passed under the name of Prado. But Wilde was a young man then, and it was long before his marriage. In parentheses, it is a curious coincidence that the charming young lady who was married in January 1914 to Oscar's younger son, Vivian, is a niece of a Parisian grandam, who indirectly was the cause of Prado's final arrest. She was driving home one winter's evening to her beautiful house on the cause-la-ren, and was just passing a hotel which stands next to the house where Prince Rowland Bonaparte used to live, when a small, dark man dashed out in full flight, pursued by a waiter who was shouting, Au voler, au voler, arrêtez-le, arrêtez-le. The Countess's carriage just drove by as the man was balting across the road. He was nearly run over, and delayed long enough to enable to, so genderville, to run up. I saw him dash across the road behind my carriage, said the Countess, with whom I dined that evening, and disappeared down the steps, leading to the key, closely followed by the two police officers. Then, just as we were turning into my courtyard, I heard the sound of revolver shots. This was Prado, who was afterwards guillotined for the murder of Marie Aguitton, plus the attempted murder of the policeman. The friend alluded to above was, of my opinion, that any foolish thing that Oscar Wilde had ever done had been done when he was not himself, when he had got several stages beyond mere ballooning. He told me in prison, he said, what you say he told you also, that he was strongly under the influence of prolonged drinking when he laid that information against Lord Queensborough. As to this, Lord Alfred Douglas denies that Wilde was intoxicated at the time. Very probably not. It is not so much when a man is intoxicated that he does foolish and wicked things. It is when his brain is muddled, and his inside all wrong through a long bout. Just in the same way, it is very rare indeed for a man to be seized with delirium tremens when he is actually drunk. It is after he has apparently recovered his senses that the blow falls. Wilde always told me he was irresponsible, and no master of himself, when he committed what he described in de profundis as, the one disgraceful, unpardonable, and to all time contemptible action of my life. Namely, informing against Lord Queensborough. As to which action he further says, in the same letter, what seemed to the world and to myself my future, I lost when I allowed myself to be taunted into taking action against Lord Queensborough. With regard to de profundis, I would like to say here that until Dr. Mayerfeld first published in Germany the extracts from Wilde's prison letter to Alfred Douglas, which go under this name, I did not know of the existence of such a manuscript. Wilde never mentioned its entity, nor had Ross ever told me anything about it. Nor did I know then, or even when that infamous book The First Stone came out, that the letter had been addressed to Alfred Douglas, or that it contained any recriminations against him. I only knew that there were other parts, and that Dr. Mayerfeld, with the publicist's flair for what is likely to win notoriety and consequently likely to sell, was most anxious to publish the whole thing in Germany, where, by the way, de profundis first saw the light. Mayerfeld was most desirous to do this, and tried to enlist my cooperation to overcome Ross's invincible objection. It was not till the ransom trial that I had an opportunity of seeing a typewritten copy of the whole manuscript, as it was penned in Reading Jail, and I admit that I then felt that Ross had acted with great discretion, and excellent good sense, in refusing to make Wilde's recriminations against his former friend public. And this, in spite of the fact that there were certain passages, or at least a certain passage, in the suppressed portion concerning myself, which for my own sake, as well as that of my friends, I should have been pleased to see in print, explaining, as the words did, the nature of my friendship with Oscar Wilde, and further demolishing the evil construction which was put upon it by enemies. I also saw how wisely, merely from a business point of view, Ross had acted in suppressing all the matter addressed to Lord Alfred Douglas. I don't believe that if the whole manuscript, as it stood, had been published, it would have gained a tithe of the universal appreciation which it now enjoys. Its beauties would have been swamped in the unloveliness of the peevish recriminations it contains, which are of no interest to anybody. It occurred to me that the original day profundist might be said to resemble a work written in collaboration by Socrates and his good lady. Ross very wisely has given us the Socratician parts alone, leaving the Zantipay contributions for a remote posterity to deal with. How posterity, a generation and a half, hence, will deal with them who can have a shadow of a doubt. It will leave this bicromatic manuscript to the repose and silence of the strong room in the British Museum. Who, in 1960, will care whether Oscar Wilde sent grapes to a certain Lord Alfred Douglas, or whether the latter did or did not reciprocate the attention. It is too childish even to be considered. In forty-six years from now the world won't be troubling about how a poet squabbled in the last century with the second son of an eighth Marquis. It will have other tremendous problems to face. I think I may cite Wilde's absolute silence to me on the subject of day profundis, undoubtedly because of its personal and philipic character, as another instance of his unfeminine character. We have now seen the effeminate Oscar Wilde with a feminine soul, as a man of great physical and moral courage, as a complete master of his tongue, as a man with whom a secret was eternally safe. We can now return to him where we left him, dressed as a girl in his father's house in Marion Square Dublin. He rarely spoke of his childhood, beyond saying that he had been very, very happy. His parents seemed to have considered him a prodigy. When he was only nine years old his mother described him as wonderful, wonderful. Lady Wilde seems to have made a constant companion of her second son. He accompanied her and his father on their journeys of archaeological research. He was on the continent with his mother long before he was out of Nicarbacas. There seems to have been little of the nursery in Oscar Wilde's life. The boys used to dine with their parents, even when there was company in the house in Marion Square. Before Oscar was eight years old he had, as a biographer of his rights, learned the ways to the shores of old romance, had seen all the apples plucked from the tree of knowledge, and had gazed with wondering eyes into the younger day. As a lad he was very fond of his brother Willie. When I first met him in Paris he spoke of him with great affection and admiration. He told me of their games together, and how once when playing charges in the nursery, with Willie and the boy who is now Sir Edward Sullivan, Baronette, he got his arm broken. It was my first introduction to the horrors of pain, the lurking tragedies of life. He went on to say the detestation he had of physical pain a thousand times worse than any mental suffering, and could only attribute the heroism of martyrs to a kind of hysterical insanity. At the same time he declared that he had no sympathy with people suffering from physical pain. Illness and suffering always inspire me with repulsion, a man with the toothache, ought, I know, to have my sympathy, for it is a terrible pain. Well, he fails me with nothing but a version. He is tedious. He is a bore. I cannot stand him. I cannot look at him. I must get away from him. That was in 1883. Twelve years later he found the path of pity and compassion, as he describes in De Profundis, and as he proves in his two letters to the Daily Chronicle, the case of Warder Martin, and Prison Reform. I think that he was always deeply attached to his brother. The fact is, Oscar Wilde had a truly affectionate heart, and it was to him he fled for refuge on the night of his release on bail, when he had been haunted out of house after house by Lord Queensborough's mere middons. I remember the most very good friends together in the Charles Street days. I have heard Oscar giving Willie many a plot for a tale in The World, and the other papers to which he contributed. He was vastly proud of Willie's big success as reporter to the Daily Telegraph at the Parnell Inquiry. Such estrangement, as did exist later and for a short period between the brothers, was caused by the fact that Willie's bohemianisms might injure his, Oscar's, social progress. He was rather unkind to his brother about this time, spoke of him as seeking after the usual half-crown, and referred contemptuously to his brother's gutter friends.