 CHAPTER XXI. The sorrowful speculation indulged in above as to what would have been Oscar Wilde's attitude at the present crisis reminds me to refer to the story, believed in by many, that he did not die in 1900 in Paris, that he is still alive, that he is living under another name, but hardest of all to credit, is wearing a big beard. The compliment of refusing to believe the mortal has been paid by humanity to many of its great men. It is indeed hard to realise the death and extinction of men of great powers and radiant intelligence. For my own part, as I have said, it seems to me that Wilde must be living still, although I am too well aware that he is dead. This impression is strongest when one reads his books, or listens to one of his plays. He then seems to be sitting at one side, and one could almost bring oneself to address him. I remember that when I first met Robert Ross, long after the last scene in the Rue des Beaux-Arts, my first question to him was, is Oscar really dead? I can hardly realise it. The legend as to his survival, as far as I have been able to trace its source, seems to have originated in the mind of an American newspaper reporter, probably a man writing on space rates, who was anxious to get up a sensational article. It was just the kind of story which would appeal to the readers of the Sunday papers of the American Yellow Press. The authority quoted was a Mr Arthur Craven Lloyd, who claims to be Oscar Wilde's nephew by marriage, and who combines the profession of poet with the craft of the pugilist. He is reported to have declared that his Uncle Oscar called on him in Paris on 23rd March 1913, and had a drink with him. He added that Uncle Oscar had grown fat and was wearing a beard. Arthur seems to have told him nothing about himself, beyond that he was writing his memoirs. This story was much quoted at the time, and evoked a number of quite unnecessary refutations. Henri Dauvray thought it requisite to announce, Je touché son cadavre. Those who were at the death-bed said nothing, disdaining the discussion. These were Mr Robert Ross, Mr Reginald Turner, and Monsieur de Poirier. Apropos of whom, as none of these gentlemen has written any biography of Wilde, one wonders what Lord Alfred Douglas meant when he announced that he was the only one of Wilde's biographers in whose arms the author of Lady Windermere's fan did not die. Robert Ross was holding Wilde's hand when he passed, and has thus described the passing. About five-thirty in the morning, November thirty, a complete change came over him, the lines of the face altered, and I believe what is called the death-rattle began. But I had never heard anything like it before. It sounded like the horrible turning of a crank, and it never ceased until the end. His eyes did not respond to the light-test any longer. Foam and blood came continuously from his mouth. From one o'clock we did not leave the room. The painful noise from that throat became louder and louder. We destroyed letters to keep ourselves from breaking down. The two nurses were out, and the proprietor of the hotel had come up to take their place. At one-forty-five the time of his breathing altered. I went to the bedside and held his hand. His pulse began to flutter. He heaved a deep sigh, the only natural one I had heard since I arrived. The limbs seemed to stretch involuntarily. The breathing became fainter. He passed at ten minutes to two exactly. Authority was unfortunately given to the story by the Paris correspondent of the New York Times. This is not a yellow sheet. It is a paper which the French would call un journal très sérieux, and it has always striven to maintain its reputation for being accurate in its literary news. As I have worked for it, I know what is demanded of its staff. Well the Paris correspondent of the New York Times, in a special cable on 8th November 1913, declared that, after careful investigation, he now almost believed that we shall see Wilde back in Paris some day. He stated that he had been unable to find anyone who saw Wilde dead, and made the inaccurate statement that Priest, Doctor, and Innkeeper had disappeared. He interviewed Arthur Craven by proxy, and learned that Wilde had become almost bald, and that what hair was left was white. Quote, his complexion was very much bronzed, which was the effect of the sunny lands where he has resided since his disappearance. Quote, Craven is stated to have added that the coffin contained, among other things, a glass jar. Quote, in which were a tragedy and a comedy the last things he had written before his disappearance. Quote. The correspondent adds that Charles Sibley, a literary man living in Paris, said to him, Craven's story brought to my mind the last word spoken to me by Wilde in his most quiet and impressive manner a few weeks before I heard of his death. He said, Sibley, I am going to begin life all over again. There is nothing for me here in England or in America. According to this cable, the story was originally invented by a hyphenated American poet called George Sylvester Viereck, who may be now finding useful employment for his talents on the German Press Bureau. Craven was said to have offered, quote, a wager of one thousand pound if the state digs up the coffin supposed to contain Wilde's body in pear-le-chase and does not find an entirely different occupant, unquote. Robert Ross has said nothing to refute these stories. Though, of course, they are mere sensation-mongering, they may give some consolation to thousands of Wilde's humbler and more ignorant admirers, as, for instance, the Jews in Russia, who all treasure the Yiddish translation of his soul of man under socialism, and have his portrait pinned up in the Isba, and indirectly, doubtless, they help in the way of advertisement, and so are beneficial to the Wilde state. Nobody better than Ross could tell what that coffin in pear-le-chase contains, as into it, with his own pious hands, he laid the remains of Oscar Wilde, which he personally removed from the grave in Baneur Cemetery, where they had lain ten years. Yes, Robert Ross actually went down into the yawning pits of death and corruption, and with his own hands dug out and transferred to the new coffin, the still decaying remnants of his friend's body. This is the Mr. Ross whom people have persecuted and harassed and endeavored to ruin. I wonder if ever such a friend existed as the one of whom Oscar, in his lifetime, when Ross's service was only rarely beginning, described as the perfect mirror of friendship. One of the writers who discussed this story about Wilde being still alive wondered if Oscar had visited his monument in pear-le-chase, and what he thought about it. One wonders. For my part, I never considered Mr. Jacob Epstein's inspiration a happy one. I agreed with a writer in the Paris Journal, who, after the gesture of Alastair Crowley in unveiling the statue in defiance of the Paris Municipal Authorities, wrote, quote, People may think what they like about this monument. Object to the precise, systematic style of the kneeling angel which imitates the rigidity of Egyptian sculpture, and which, severe, cold, even ponderous, is but poorly adapted to commemorate a poet whose mind, quite on the contrary, was refined, subtle, full of nuances, but one must be singularly timid or have an imagination very prompt to puriancy to find anything obscene in it. And yet certain modifications were demanded of the sculptor on the grounds of decency, and, as usual, all that was arrived at was to underline in the most unpleasant manner the detail which it was desired to hide, and which so many sculptures exhibit in the public gardens of Paris. Unquote The whole trouble arose from the fact that there exists in France a law, passed in the first years of the French Republic, forbidding for use as funereal monuments any statues of nudities to which the fig leaf was wanting. The prefect of police had no personal feeling in the matter, he had to apply the law. Epstein's sphinx could have been erected in any public square of Paris, but was illegal in consecrated ground. A bronze fig leaf was therefore supplied, and to this, Epstein, according to letters which he wrote to the press, objected strongly. I should much have preferred, he wrote, the monument to remain veiled until such time as the alleged improvements made against my expressed desires have been removed. The law of year five of the one and indivisible republic was passed at a time of great public license, and was intended to protect the feelings of those who visit cemeteries on errands of piety. The legislator, of course, had not foreseen Mr. Jacob Epstein. The French are very sensitive about their dead and their resting places, and I do think that Mr. Epstein's nudities would have given much offence to the Parisian bourgeoisie, and in this way have reacted unfavorably on Wilde's memory in France. When the time comes for Wilde's bones to be removed to Dublin, where they belong, as more than one prominent Irishman has pointed out to me, I am quite sure that the bronze fig leaf will have to accompany Mr. Epstein's memorial. I think Wilde would have been flattered by the proportions of the monument, not unworthy of an Assyrian king or Persian conqueror. I do not know to what extent he would have found it emblematic of his genius. It suggests the author of The Sphinx, but seems alien to him who wrote the importance of being earnest. Oscar Wilde always professed a great admiration for good sculpture. We have heard of his long stations in front of the Venus of Mylos in the Louvre. His study there of Nero's bust may possibly have been prompted by another motive. He used to express real delight in a certain statue that stands in the garden of the Toulary, at the extreme end of the garden, just opposite the Louvre and on the river side. This was the statue of a dancing boy, and I have found him there seated in contemplation of it. I like to visit it every day, he said to me, and I really think that he did. Though he often talked about art with his tongue in his cheek, he was sincere enough here, and I don't think that he imagined I should disbelieve him. He was well aware how people doubt the art lover's sincerity and think his professions are only his stock in trade. He used to tell me, as a joke, how after his first lecture in New York on art, a number of young bloods came to take him downtown, saying that after talking soul-throb all the evening on art and beauty and virtue and the rest, naturally he would be wanting to go and see the girls. I am not aware that Oscar Wilde's bust was ever executed, and it is a pity. Footnote. A barrel-leaf of Oscar Wilde was executed in America in January 1882 by J. E. Kelly. A bust was evolved in Paris in 1914 by a Monsieur Pat-Lagian. End footnote. There was a Chicago sculptor called Donahue who did a medallion of him, which still exists, but it was not a very satisfactory piece of work. In the early days of my friendship with Wilde, Donahue was always butting in. He used to profess great affection for and gratitude towards him. Wilde told me that when he was lecturing in Chicago, he received one day a letter from this Donahue, telling him that he was a sculptor and announcing great artistic ambitions, which, he wrote, were being stifled by his poverty and the indifference of the Chicago public. Wilde at once went to visit his studio, and that same night introduced a long reference to the sculptor into his lecture, telling the audience that they were allowing a man of genius who was in their midst to perish of want. The result was that Donahue was visited by a number of clients next day, and soon received enough commissions to enable him to travel to Europe and continue his studies. I imagine that in the end he did rather well at his craft, but when Oscar's troubles came, Donahue was not one of those who stood by his former friend and benefactor. I understood that he perished miserably. I remember once that Oscar Wilde used to come to ploweden buildings in the temple to sit for his bust to a Dutch sculptor, whose acquaintance he had made through John Gray, a young poet who, in those days, lived in ploweden buildings. The Dutch sculptor was not at all successful with his modeling, and an appalling caricature of Oscar was the result of the temple settings. I declare that what he produced reminded one rather of peck-sniff than of the author of Charmedies, and I believe that Oscar was very angry with the poor sculptor and actually rude to him. There are, however, many antique busts which might pass for portraits of Wilde, at least as far as the upper part of the face is concerned. I have seen a Tiberius which reminded me of him. He was never successfully painted, though one would have thought that the portrait painters would have besieged him with demands for sittings. On the other hand, many excellent black-and-white sketches of him exist. The punched caricatures are, generally speaking, very good likenesses of him. Whatever Whistler may have said about Wilde's ignorance of art, the fact remains that it was he who discovered Badsley, the Badsley whom others, with singular impudence, claimed to have invented. Inventing Badsley. One even hesitates to use the word discovered, for a genius like Badsley discovers itself, and cannot be kept in obscurity. I perfectly well remember how Oscar Wilde, with real satisfaction, told me that he had discovered a youth who was the very man to illustrate Salome. It is a young man who has been working for the pal-mal budget. I had noticed his work for some time, and have now got into touch with him. He is perfectly wonderful. This was Aubrey Badsley, and it is certain that Oscar Wilde's commission to him for the Salome drawings gave him his first real chance. In this sense Wilde may be said to have discovered Badsley, and to be in some way his artistic sponsor. Wilde paid Badsley for his work, and it was at Wilde's expense that Salome was produced. John Lane was nominally the publisher of Salome, but he took no risk in the matter, receiving copies from Wilde to sell as the demand arose, and taking a commission on the sales. As to which there was being hawked round Germany a curious autograph letter from Oscar Wilde to this publisher, a portion of which, without my knowledge or consent, was published in fact similarly in the German edition of My Life of Oscar Wilde. It refers to some dispute between Wilde and John Lane, and establishes the fact that Salome was published at Wilde's expense, and that John Lane had nothing to do with that book beyond selling it on commission. It establishes the fact that it was Oscar Wilde who was Badsley's earliest patron. Badsley in those days was a very shy, nervous lad who said Sir to people and who reeked of genius. I am able to give in these pages a facsimile of the very first drawing that he made for Salome, a wash-drawing of which the original was lent me for this book by its owner, a great Badsley enthusiast. He pointed out to me that this drawing is a much better piece of work than the one which was eventually used for the book, and called special attention to the expression of the man's face in the moon, and to the modelling of the feet. This picture is all the more interesting because the face in the moon is Badsley's early idea of Oscar Wilde's face, and is therefore Wilde's portrait by Badsley. It was doubtless one of the great good fortunes of Oscar Wilde's artistic career that in Salome he was associated with Badsley, and the inverse also holds true. I take it that the tremendous vogue which, alas, after his death also, Badsley enjoyed in Germany, where his drawings realise fabulous prices, was initiated by his concurrence with Oscar Wilde. Another artist of genius, of whom one has heard nothing for many years, but whose coloured drawings for the harlot's house have been searched for all over the world, was Miss Althea Giles, who was commissioned by Smithers to illustrate the poem, which was issued in 1904, as from the Maturin Press. I have seen many letters from Miss Giles to Smithers, and from one of them it appears that a sum of seventy pounds was paid for the five coloured drawings, described by Smithers as weirdly powerful and beautiful. The poem was issued at two guineas, with the illustrations printed on plate paper and the text on handmade paper, enclosed in a portfolio fifteen inches by eleven inches in size. One does not know what a copy of the addition de gras luxe of this poem, on pure valum with three sets of the illustrations, published at twelve guineas, of which only twelve copies were printed, would fetch in the market today. End footnote A gentleman who is undoubtedly the best authority on wild bibliography writes us to this. Smithers' addition of the harlot's house was issued in much larger numbers than he stated, as in the case with all his piracies, and even the so-called addition de gras luxe, published at twelve pounds, twelve shillings, does not fetch more than two pounds. End footnote Some time ago the friend who has lent me the original antheogiles drawing to illustrate the line, the shadows raced across the blind, was talking in London with a big dealer. Who, referring to altheogiles, said, We are all wondering what has become of the originals that were used for the photo groveurs for the harlot's house. They were last heard of some years ago, before the great wild boom, as at Walter T. Spencers at New Oxford Street, who cataloged them at twenty-five pounds. Since then there has been a regular search for them, as there are many collectors who wish to purchase them. I myself have made inquiries in every direction. Well, said my friend, it may interest you to know that they are safely at home in my house in the Midlands, in a portfolio, behind the sofa in my study. It was from this portfolio that I borrowed the altheogiles drawing which I reproduce in these pages. It was Leonard Smithers who initiated his acquaintanceship with Wilde, which afterwards grew into a real friendship. He seems to have written to him from Leeds, where at that time he was practising as a solicitor to congratulate him on the happy prince. Wilde wrote back to him an amiable letter, which is extant. Smithers was afterwards of great use to Wilde, as he became his publisher when nobody else would touch the poet's works. But for him the ballad of Reading Jail might not, at least in Wilde's lifetime, have seen the light. Smithers made a great deal of money out of Wilde, but on the other hand Wilde did get something from Smithers. Smithers' real trade was that of vendor of erotic literature. He was an authority on eighteenth-century pornography. I remember his once showing me a large volume which he told me he was selling for six hundred pounds. There are collectors of books of this kind, as I knew. Smithers also published pornographic books himself, and had a genius for employing genuine artists to supply him with copy and illustrations. His meeting with Wilde was in a sense his redemption. He was immensely proud of the connection, and acted generously, according to his lights, towards the unhappy poet. CHAPTER XXII. My stay in Oscar Wilde's lodgings in Charles Street was not a long one. With the exception of two or three days at Bernival after his release from prison, this was the last time that I ever spent a night under the same roof with him. Indeed, after my return to Paris in 1883, I saw very little of my friend, except on his occasional visits to Paris and my stale, rarer journeys to London. Life is so ordered today that many very good friends rarely see each other. For years I used to look on Coquayine Cadet as one of my best friends, a sentiment which he kindly reciprocated. But though we were living in Paris for years and years together, I rarely have ever saw him, except when I went to the comedy, and then only on the stage. One has to mind one's own spinning, and it is a good thing, because I think friendship lasts longer when there is not too much intimacy. The awful failure of matrimony seems to result from the intolerable obligation it lays upon two people of being constantly in each other's company. Wild and I were excellent friends, but we saw very little of each other for years. He usually, but by no means always, let me know when he came to Paris. When I went to London, I usually wrote for an appointment, but not always. Indeed, I have recorded how he blamed me once for not going to see him, and the curious explanation he gave of it. Lord Alfred Douglas is inaccurate when he states, therefore, in his book, that I was constantly with Wild and Ross in the years which preceded his own acquaintanceship with the former. It is a fact that I never even heard of Robert Ross until 1895, after the Wild scandal had broken out, and the very first time I met him was, I think, when I went over to London after Wild's release on bail. We afterwards journeyed to Reading together on more than one occasion, and, off and on, I have seen something of him since, but by no means enough. I think him one of the finest fellows in the world, and would like Ibsen to have known him. He might have cured him of his pessimism about humanity. I know nothing about many of Wild's acquaintances, nor ever heard their names mentioned. All those weird people who were spoken about, or put in their appearances at the Wild trials, were folk of whose very existence I was ignorant. The first time I met Alfred Douglas was one day when I found him sitting with Oscar Wilde in an upstairs room in the Cafe Royal, but I do not remember the date. It was some time when he was not on friendly terms with his father, and almost the first thing he said to me was that he had been burning candles at the Brompton Oratory for a purpose which had better be left unrecorded. I saw nothing whatever wrong in their association. They seemed to admire each other very much. Oscar pontified and Douglas listened with a certain amount of humorous criticism to his remarks. The max beer-bone caricature of the couple, as they used to be seen together, is an excellent piece of observation. We have Lord Alfred Douglas's statement that during all the time that he knew Oscar Wilde he never saw anything wrong in his conduct, and this, I should say, is the very best evidence of Wilde's innocence, because, according to Ransom, Wilde had been experimenting in certain kinds of aberration for three years before he met Lord Alfred Douglas, and afterwards succumbed to the mania. I do not know on what evidence Mr. Ransom makes this statement. I certainly saw nothing of it, and though my testimony may count for little, as I saw very little of Wilde during all those years, the same cannot be said of Lord Alfred Douglas, who, for some years, was constantly in his company. At the same time Wilde does not appear to have concealed in any way whatever his curious associations with people so vastly his social inferiors. I do not think that anybody who knew him would have seen any reason for grave suspicion in that. Tolstoy had the strangest frequentations, and Christian socialism, such as used to be preached by the Abbe Garnier in this, would explain all that the love of eccentricity left undecided. The thirst of the modern writer for the documarch humane is the reason for the strangest frequentations. We see Lord Tennyson hanging with grooms on the bridge at Coventry, and one has heard of the virtuous bourgeois, Emile Zola, representing the society of Demi-Mondayne and Souteneurs, so as to document himself for Nanna. And do not think worse of either of them. The interpretation which the prosecution put upon Wilde's frequentations surprised me immensely, but must have surprised and shocked Lord Alfred Douglas even more. During all those years I never doubted that one day Oscar Wilde would come to his own. I had the most absolute faith in his star. People who did not like him, and there were a great many, especially amongst literary folk who could not forgive him the numerous additions of his poems and his successful lecturers, people who had been delighted by Laboucher's exit Oscar, were ever so pleased when they heard that he had taken up some hack-work in Label-Sovage, and Contemna of Journalists had become one himself. It certainly was sad to see Oscar trudging to his office, but it must be said that he made a gallant show. He was always faultlessly dressed, in a thoroughfare where men all de-partie-pris seemed to dress shockingly, and to show himself blithe and gay he always had a flower in his buttonhole, and he seemed to take a real interest in the work, and some little pride in the scanty patronage which his position as editor gave him. Yet there were times when the drudgery of the life weighed upon him. We have a record of him at his office in Label-Sovage from the mouth of Mr. Arthur Fish, who was his assistant in the particular Rabbit Hutch, I am quoting Ryder Haggard, which was assigned to the production of the Woman's World. At first the work was taken quite seriously, writes Mr. Fish. And eleven o'clock on his appointed morning saw the poet entering the dingy portals of the yard. But after a few months his arrival became later, and his departure earlier, until at times his visit was little more than a call. After a very short time in my association with him, I could tell by the sound of his approach along the resounding corridor whether the necessary work to be done would be met cheerfully or postponed to a more congenial period. In the latter case he would sink with a sigh into his chair, carelessly glance at his letters, give a perfunctory look at proofs or make-up, ask, is it necessary to settle anything today? And on his hat, and with a sad, good morning, depart again. On his cheerful days, however, everything was different. These were fairly constant in the spring days of the year. There would be a smiling entrance, letters would be answered with epigrammatic brightness, there would be a cheery interval of talk when the work was accomplished, and the dull room would brighten under the influence of his great personality. Mr. Fish saw wild, then, in moods in which I never found him. I mean as to his moods of depression. I do not think that I ever saw wild, sad, or depressed. Even on that awful night when I found him in bed, a nervous wreck, in his room in Oakley Street, with the lily drooping from a tumbler on the mantelpiece over his head, he was completely master of himself. He had by no means surrendered his personality. Indeed, he seemed to me to be enjoying the opportunity of playing a part, a very tragic part, before the poor, insignificant audience of myself. His histrionism was Hyaline. He kept repeating, Robert, Robert, why have you brought me no poison from Paris? I am convinced that the opportunity of creating a role of such tremendous tragedy delighted him so that he forgot for the time being all the hideous circumstances by which he was environed. Even in prison he was quite master of himself, and, though, naturally, not cheerful, seemed by no means overwhelmed. I cannot believe that he ever seriously contemplated suicide, though he frequently warns Smithers that he has it in view. I have before me a very curious letter of his to the publisher, which is, I think, worth reproducing in extensio, because, apart from the threat it contains, it throws light on his position at the time. It is dated from the Villa Gidecce, 16th November, 1897, and runs. My dear Smithers, do remember that what is comedy to you may be the reverse of comic to others. Since I received your letter in which you said, I expect that before the arrival of this letter you will have received the ten pounds, I have been down twice a day to Naples to Cook's office, and I have just returned from third visit now, 5.30. Of course there was nothing, and I am really ashamed of my endless inquiries about a sum of ten pounds to be telegraphed from London. Perhaps you only wrote what you did to give me hope. But my dear fellow, hope constantly disappointed makes one's bread bitter, especially as I have just heard from my own solicitor to say that as I am in Naples with, blank, he is going to give his decision that I am leading an infamous life, and so deprive me of my sole income, thirty-eight pounds a quarter. For one's own solicitor this seems a little strong. Unluckily he has it in his power to stop my wretched allowance, and is going to do so, and as I see my poem is a very unsailable affair, the ballad of Reading Jail, I simply have starvation or suicide before me, the latter, as I dislike pain, for choice. He concludes this letter, in which he expresses the thought that there is just a chance, of a big sale for the ballad, with the words, the weather is entrancing, but in my heart there is no sun. Three weeks later he again writes to Smithers and again threatens suicide. I await the revise, he writes, and promise not to make my quietess with a bare bodkin till I have returned them. After that I think of retiring, but first I would like to dine with you here. To leave life as one leaves a feast is not merely philosophy, but romance. If space allowed of it one would like to quote the whole of this letter. It appears that Miss Marbury had proposed that the ballad should be illustrated, and Oscar writes, her suggestion of illustrations is of course out of the question. Pray tell her from me that I feel that it would entirely spoil any beauty the poem has, and not add anything to its psychological revelations. The horror of prison life is the contrast between the grotesqueness of one's aspect and the tragedy of one's soul. Illustrations would emphasise the former and conceal the letter. Of course I refer to realistic illustration. In the same letter he humorously pays off an old score he seems to have had against Jerome K. Jerome. He writes, I have seen the academy with its list of immortals. It is very funny what sort of people are proposed. But it is sufficient, no doubt, to make out a list. Personally I cannot make up my mind as to whether the juke of our guile, or Jerome K. Jerome, has the better claims. I think the former. The unread is always better than the unreadable. I quote this passage, as it is the only instance that I can recall of Wilde stooping to bear a grudge against anybody. Jerome was in court on 11th April 1895, during the proceedings at Bow Street after Wilde's arrest. He had previously attacked the chameleon in his periodical today, and had demanded its withdrawal. But Wilde always declared that he objected to the chameleon and had nothing to do with it. It is possible, writes Mr. Stuart Mason, that Wilde had given offence to Mr. Jerome previously, as he is reported to have said that the author of Three Men in a Boat was, Vulgar without being funny. Wilde always used to speak against suicide. He once said to me that nobody should commit suicide, as that was the highest compliment that one could pay to society. Mr. Fish might have explained Wilde's restlessness and depression on his visits to the yard by the fact that all smoking is strictly prohibited on the premises of the Messer's Castle. I think one may not even smoke in the yard itself. I remember asking Wilde how he could manage to exist without his cigarette for so long a time, and referred to the French saying, as sad as a day without tobacco. He said, Oh, one makes up one's mind that one cannot and one does not. A confirmed smoker is both restless and miserable if he is kept from his pleasure, even worse than the drinker. Wilde told me the same about his deprivation in prison. One makes up one's mind that one cannot and one does not. As a matter of fact, at Reading, at least, he might have smoked, since there was a friend in office there who would have facilitated the indulgence, and was prepared to give the prisoner a supply of snout, not to chew, but actually to smoke. Wilde, however, had the strength of mind to refuse, not that he was not sorely tempted to accept, but because he feared he might get his friend into very serious trouble. The letters from which I quote above came on the market after poor smithers had gone bankrupt and was in sore straits to live. They were sold for mere trifles. It is stated that in 1906 eight hundred letters written by Oscar Wilde were offered for sale at the price of forty pounds, but no buyer could be found. Nowadays, either of the two letters from which I quote above would fetch the very least fifty pounds, and probably much more. People who do not read the catalogs of the autograph merchants can have little idea of the tremendous prices that Wilde holographs fetch. Not that these are scarce, but on account of the extraordinary interest that is taken in the man. A year or two ago a Wilde letter was offered for sale in a dealers' catalog at a price four times as large as that asked for a letter from Queen Victoria, and an interesting letter at that. The Who in 1906, which was the date, by the way, when my life of Wilde first appeared, had invested forty pounds in those letters, would have realized a considerable fortune. I do not know how many applications I have received from dealers in all parts of the world asking me if I have any Wilde items to sell. I suppose that very few people have had more, or more interesting, Wilde items, but almost everything that I possessed of this kind has been stolen. When one is always travelling about, items of every variety are liable to be dispersed. I have related how all the letters which Wilde wrote to me at the beginning of our friendship turned up in the hands of a Baroness. Others, and not letters from Wilde alone, but from his friends, which at various times were stolen, seem to have been used in black mailing-attempts. The other day I was supplied with a copy of a letter which had been addressed to me at the time that Wilde was in prison. It came from one of his friends who was abroad, and in its way was a compromising document which I ought to have destroyed. However, the man who wrote it is a person who is very well able to take care of himself, and I am sorry for anybody who, in possession of this letter, may attempt to blackmail him on the strength of it. Not that there was anything very bad in it, but certainly a curious construction might be put upon it. He bids me, on my next visit to Wilde in prison, tell him, quote, that I love him and I am only living in the hope of seeing him again when he comes out. Tell him that if he dies in prison, or if I lose his love, I shall kill myself. As it is, life is hard enough to bear." And so on. This particular person has satisfied everybody that his friendship for Wilde was quite a proper one, and the quotation, therefore, may serve to share with what extraordinary affection Wilde was able to inspire his friends. For my own part, I do not see much to gird against in the use of this word love as between male friends. The Latin word for friend derives from amor. A Roman loved his friend. When he wrote him a letter, he ended by saying, Farewell and love us. Apropos of which there is an anecdote about a Frenchman who considered the use of classical phrases a pose which wanted snubbing. He had a friend who always ended his letters with, Wale et nos armours. And one day he tore this passage off his friend's letter and returned it to him with the words, Voyager mon ami, voyager et oublier. Yet in France a man loves his friend, just as he loves the cheese of camembert or the footing of the five o'clock. People who have studied the classics and who have lived a good deal in France use the word love very readily and nobody sees anything doubtful in it. In the same way a Frenchman may call you Monchère, but if an Englishman who may be steeped in Galicisms were to address you as my dear, the frank lockwoods of this world would see all kinds of evil in it. I quite admit that most Englishmen have a repugnance for this kind of thing, and I remember how indignant I was when, visiting an old school fellow in Sorrento, he fell on my neck and kissed me twice on the face. One's insularity will assert itself. I saw very little of Oscar Wilde after 1892, and was content to know that he had arrived and was prospering. Being in Paris and very busy I rarely went to London. I occasionally met him in Paris and was glad to see the French papers begin to take him very seriously. His movements were chronicled. He had become a personage. But the French had little appreciation of his genius. They treated him rather as a fashionable man of the world. His appearances at mundane restaurants were recorded. A sensational article in the Echo de Paris, entitled Elle Lui, described him on tête à tête at luncheon chez Durand with a well-known actress. An article I wrote in the Galois to correct the impression that Oscar Wilde was a mere butterfly, and to point out his great literary value was a real surprise to Paris. Who then is Cymus Your Oscar Wilde? was a question on the boulevard, and before he published my monograph, the editor of the Galois asked me if I was bien sûr that my man was of any real importance. I dined with him very shortly before the debacle at his house in Tite Street. I found him very spoiled. Already before then he had indicated that he was beginning to attach an exaggerated importance to himself. The McClure's of McClure's magazine had asked me to give them an article about him. With as many Oscariana as possible. I had sent their letter to Wilde. In the old days he would have been glad of the publicity, and still more glad to give me the opportunity of doing some highly remunerated work which would have attracted great attention in America. He wrote back very curtly that he considered the letter of the McClure's an impertinence, and that he would certainly not supply any Oscariana unless he were paid to do so, mentioning the sum of twenty pounds as his fee for an interview. In my story of an unhappy friendship I find the following passage referring to this period. I fancy that in his splendor our friendship relaxed. Possibly it was because we so rarely met. There was a feeling on my side of having been cast off, although there was little to warrant it. I received no letters from him during this period. I saw very little of him in his purple days. The stories of his luxurious life, the villas at Goring, the fashionable hotels, the butlers and under-buttlers which one heard the trial were so many revelations to me. Que diable allez-y-il fait dans cette galère? was a question I asked myself. At this dinner at Christmas 1894 he was not himself at all. He exuded unctuous prosperity, and reminded me of a Roman Emperor of the Decadence, Vitellius indeed, rather than Helio Gabolus. CHAPTER XXIII. One of the very few interesting things that Oscar Wilde said to me during that Christmas dinner at Tite Street in 1894 was in reference to the work he was doing, his playwriting. He said, It is far too easy. And indeed what he wrote was written without labour. Quarente Calamo. The importance of being earnest, which George Moore spoke of as the wittiest comedy he had ever seen, was turned out in about a fortnight. He seemed to attach no importance at all to this part of his work, whereas as regards Salome and Dorian Gray, on both of which he worked hard, he indicated the satisfaction that an artist feels at the successful accomplishment of a task which has demanded great sacrifices. For easy work Wilde seems to have had as much contempt as Zola. He once disclaimed any desire to be a popular novelist. It is far too easy, he wrote. At the same time he was certainly anxious to see Dorian Gray a popular success, and there is extant a letter of his to Messer's Ward, Locke and Company, expressing this desire and suggesting means for booming the book. It distressed me to see that Wilde's success had not only not brought him any happiness, but seemed to have laden him with care and anxiety. There may have been hanging over him a sense of disaster, but the probability is that he was merely worried by his debts, for the large income that he was making by no means sufficed for his increased extravagances. He spoke with a certain amount of self-reproach, but to that one was accustomed. He seemed to think that a writer ought to be methodical and laborious, and earn his reputation with the sweat of his brow. Yet of the laborious and methodical he always used to speak with a certain contempt. He used to hold up trollop as an example of what the man of letters should not be, and as to Sir Walter Besant, that businessman amongst novelists, he used to criticise in him the fact that he goes up to the city every day with a little bag. There is no doubt, too, that at this time Oscar Wilde was doing himself far too well. It occurred to me, more than once during dinner, that he was en route for a stroke of apoplexy. The veins in his forehead were swollen and pigmented, his breathing was oppressed, and his adiposity had enormously increased. I think it's certain that his imprisonment prolonged his life, for it interposed two years of abstinence, and indeed when he came out of prison he was in greatly improved health. I never saw him looking better than one day when we were taking a country walk at Burnervale, and I certainly never saw him looking worse than in his prosperity on the occasion of that last dinner in Tite Street. I had no communications from him in the early part of 1895. I knew nothing of the Queensbury business until I saw the account in the papers, and until then I had no idea that there was any quarrel between Oscar Wilde and the Marquess. He had never said anything about it, indeed he had never mentioned Lord Queensbury's name. On reading the newspaper report of the proceedings at Bow Street I was dismayed. The whole business seemed so utterly unlike what the Oscar whom I had known would have engaged in. Some sinister influence had obviously been at work. For a man who was so versed in Parisianism to run to the police for protection against another gentleman, Sanicefépa, and this Oscar Wilde recognized and admitted when he had come to his senses in Wandsworth jail, nor was it difficult to foresee from the very first what was likely to be the outcome of a contest between a Queensbury and a Wilde, between a nobleman of the most tremendous family interest and with the command of enormous wealth in the resources of his friends and relations, and a writer who was in debt and had no resources beyond the production of his pen. Lord Alfred Douglas has described to me in a letter his family's influences huge, seeing that he was going to try and get Oscar out. The letter was written when Wilde was in jail. He added that if he, Alfred Douglas, were in, his family would very soon get him out, as no doubt they would have been able to do. I know that I was so distressed and alarmed at what I read in the papers that I broke a long silence and from Paris sent Oscar Wilde a telegram of encouragement. It was no use then to upgrade him. I had no answer from him and I heard nothing about him except what I read in the papers. He was evidently enjoying his role as a prosecutor and the huge publicity that attended it. The utter unconsciousness with which he was acting at the time became apparent when it was announced that Mr. Wilde had left England for a trip to Monte Carlo at the very time when he ought to have been in England preparing for a prosecution which he knew was to be nothing but his own defence against the most serious charges. From the very first one noticed that public opinion was against him. The magistrate at Bow Street Police Court who heard the case against Lord Queensborough, Mr. Newton, from the first showed that he had little sympathy with the prosecutor. On Mr. Newton's own initiative, Lord Queensborough was accommodated with a seat outside the dock and Oscar Wilde's answer to almost the first question that was put to him brought forth a rebuke from the bench. In answer to the question, are you a dramatist and an author? Wilde answered, I believe I am well known in that capacity. Only answer the questions please, came at once from Mr. Newton. In the meanwhile the magistrate had very properly ordered Lord Alfred Douglas, who had accompanied Wilde to Bow Street in the carriage and pair, to leave the court immediately. Before Wilde signed his depositions, he requested that a part of them should be read over again to him. If you would just attend, this would not have happened, came testily from the bench. I remember saying to a well known Londoner, who was with me in Paris, when I was reading over the account of the police court proceedings, I wonder why Newton seems so down on Oscar Wilde. Perhaps he knows a bit, was the ominous answer. It was reported in Paris that the Monte Carlo hotelkeeper to whose house Wilde and his friend first went had refused to receive them. I do not know whether this is true, but the fact that the story was current shows what public feeling was. He seemed to think, and said so, that Wilde had encompassed his own ruin. The Marquis, who till then had not been very popular, became a hero. It was a terrible time for Wilde's friends, even for those who, like myself, had not the slightest idea of what defence Lord Queensbury would put up, and were ignorant of the way in which Oscar Wilde had compromised himself. All the English journalists in Paris exalted when the Queensbury case broke down, though I do not think that one of them knew Oscar Wilde, or had any reason to wish him harm. The Parisians also showed little sympathy. Those were pre-Alliance days, and before the Entente Cordiale had been heard of, and the French were never sorry when some scandal broke out in England to show the world that our vaunted British virtue was not what we professed. Even Alphonse Daudet, most sympathetic and kindly of men, who had a great friendship for me, and knew of my affection for Wilde, did not hesitate to express the hope that severe justice might be done. The English colony, perhaps because they resented Wilde's conduct in giving the French an opportunity to ridicule British morality, was more than bloodthirsty. I want to see this man get twenty years," was a remark that I often heard, long before Wilde had been tried. When Wilde was sentenced, and I had told the result of the trial to Alphonse Daudet, who was then staying at Brown's Hotel in Dover Street, he expressed great approval. That shows the good sense of the English, he said. I have often wondered since whether the attitude of the trade and of the public towards the novel of his of which he was most proud, and which he considered a moral lesson, namely Saffo, a book which has been dramatised by Cain and Bernad, and set to music, as Libretto to an opera by Massonet, and which in England is considered an obscene book, even more objectionable than most of Zola's works, would have modified this view of his of our national good sense. Only a very short while ago a bookseller in Queensland was prosecuted and heavily fined for selling an English version of this book, which Daudet considered so much a moral lesson that he dedicated it, Améphile L'Oquille au rang vingt-un, a dedication which it is true Paris immediately paraphrased into Améphile l'Oquille à rang vingt-franks. Oscar Wilde was much surprised and distressed to see how unpopular was his cause, and what detestation of himself seemed prevalent. I referred him, for an explanation, to one of the sayings of Dela Rochefoucault, who very aptly annunciates the instinctive maliciousness of men. If one is always more or less pleased at the downfall of a friend, how much more so will not one be at the disaster of a man who has outstripped everybody and who seems to be entering upon a career of unparalleled success? Not very long after Oscar Wilde had been released on bail, I received a telegram asking me to come over to London to take Wilde into the country. I imagined that this message had a veiled meaning and crossed over at once. But the telegram meant exactly what it said. It was thought that it would be a good thing for Wilde to go into the country, or up the river or somewhere, while awaiting his second trial, and I had been selected to accompany him. Wilde apparently was unaware of the proposed arrangement, and when I found him in bed in Oakley Street, a nervous wreck, he declared that he was far too ill to go anywhere. The question of flight was mooted, but it never had his sympathy. I can't see myself slinking about the continent, he said, a fugitive from justice. However, he left the matter in the hands of his friends, and one day there was a long consultation on the subject, to which I was not admitted, my own view as being too well known, and considered too anarchistic to be practical. As this meeting was held at the house of one of the men who had backed Stuart Headlam, when he bailed Wilde, and who had no desire whatever to lose the money he had at stake, the decision was a foregone conclusion, in spite of the fact that Lord Douglas of Howick, who was much more heavily involved, had given Wilde carte blanche to act as he thought best to his interests. I saw a great deal of Wilde during the period between 10th and 25th May, spending most of my time in his company at Oakley Street. He was in a terrible nervous condition, and seemed to me to be sickening of some kidney trouble, for his thirst was unquenchable, and he was drinking all the time, water, milk and soda, lemonade, and other innocuous fluids. Though greatly preoccupied, he kept himself in excellent control. I never heard a recrimination pass his lips. He was more than ever gentle and kindly to everybody who came into contact with him. His considerate good nature rose superior to the bitterness that his fate might have engendered. I think he showed finer than I had ever seen him, on the very last night of all, the night of 24th May, which preceded the last day of his trial. There was an extraordinary calm and dignity about him. His attitude, while I admired it, distressed me, for he seemed to me to anticipate what did happen, and what we all dreaded, and acted like a man who is taking a last farewell of life. His attitude in court during his last trial shows the enormous moral strength of the man. Before he went to the old Bailey to surrender he was a complete wreck. In court he showed himself as mentally active as ever. Sir T. Marchant Williams records his impression that, intellectually speaking, Wilde stood head and shoulders above the judges who tried him, and the council who prosecuted him. The impression that I received in court, I only attended there on the last day, was that a pack of mongrel terriers were worrying a wounded lion, and I felt heartily ashamed of myself for being there at all. We have, from a man who was in court all through the last trial, the following pen-pictures of the prisoner on the succeeding days. On May 22nd, we read, Mr. Wilde reached the court early, in company with his sureties, and took a seat at first on the Usher's bench below the jury-box, opposite his leading counsel Sir Edward Clark. Wilde looked haggard and ill, and his hair, which generally had a slight natural wave and was usually parted neatly down the middle, was in some disorder. Indeed, he looked so ill that a report was current in London on the Wednesday, a report which reached his friends at Oakley Street, that he had been taken ill in the dock. There was no truth in this, and, on the whole, when Wilde returned that night, he seemed more cheerful and in better spirits than when he had left in the morning. The next day he is described as, quote, obviously much enfeebled and upset by the experience he had been through. In the dock he sat with his head resting on his arms, a position which bespoke unutterable weariness, unquote. That was the day on which Justice Wilde's pitch-forked Shelley's evidence back to where it belonged, and withdrew the charge connected with him from the jury. This was a great score for the defence, and annoyed the prosecution so much that the Solicitor-General was heard to speak of Mr. Justice Wilde's inconsequence as, an old fool. It is recorded that, quote, excitement in court was intense when the judge intimated his intention of withdrawing from the jury the counts dealing with Shelley which had been universally regarded as the strongest against the accused. Wilde for the first time sat up erect, unquote. That night we were all more hopeful at Oakley Street. Wilde, though pleased that his innocence had been established on this count, was terribly nervous about the cross-examination which he was to undergo on the morrow at the hands of Sir Frank Lockwood. I am not fit to be cross-examined, he said to me. Sir Frank will do what he likes with me. He will turn me inside out. I told him that he had nothing to fear, and assured him that he would come through the ordeal as successfully and with as much credit to himself as he had done on the two previous occasions. It is certain that he was looking very ill in court next day, so much so that Sir Edward Clark was able to make a point by drawing attention to his condition. The defendant, he said in his opening speech for the defense, broken as he is now, as anyone who saw him at the first trial must see he is, by being kept in prison without bail, contrary to practice and, as I believe, contrary to law, will submit himself again to the indignity and pain of going into the witness box, even fit as he is after the ordeal he has gone through, he will repeat on oath his denial of the charges which have been made against him. Wilde looked so poorly that Sir Edward asked for permission for him to be seated while giving his evidence. Quote, his voice at the first trial so full and confident had become hollow and husky, he seemed glad to lean over the front of the witness box for support. When Sir Frank Lockwood rose to cross-examine him, Wilde stood up, he looked so ill that even Sir Frank took some pity on him. Don't rise, please, unless you wish, he said, but Wilde remained standing. I can hear better, he said. After a very short time, however, he sank back into his seat. The cross-examination, it is needless to say, was protracted and pitiless. The Treasury was out to kill, and poor Wilde was, as they say in Arizona, their meat. The whole of this last trial was not creditable to the English administration of justice. Sir Edward Clark had plenty of reason for his complaints about its unfairness. The device of trying Taylor first was obviously intended to prejudice the second jury against Wilde. Otherwise, why did the Treasury so strongly insist on the prisoners being taken in that order? Charges were brought against Wilde which even the judge stigmatized as unfair. Mr. Justice Wills, though it may be said that on the whole he impartially tried the case, certainly did not conceal which way his private opinion went. It was remarked, writes a man who was present during the trial, in more than one instance, that the judge, while placing two issues before the jury in fair enough language, yet imparted in his delivery, his tones and his manner, a significance which deprived his statements of that appearance of impartiality which is usually expected of the bench. Very possibly he felt his own intellectual inferiority to the prisoner at the bar and resented it. He certainly went out of the way to boast that he had not been at the university and that he could not see the extreme beauty of Wilde's language. He was very ferocious in manner when passing sentence and seemed to spit his words out at the prisoners. At the same time he was obviously in a very nervous condition. I heard that directly after the trial, so greatly had the details of it shocked him, he was taken seriously ill and had to go away for a rest and change. During that period he received from abroad a number of insulting postcards from one of Wilde's friends, who may have hoped to serve the prisoner by insulting the judge. I was in court on the last day of all. I arrived just after the summing up. I asked a barrister friend of mine how Wilde's had gone and he said, most deadly, dead against the prisoner. He added that all chance was lost. Still, as I wrote some years ago, the jury were a long time in discussion and each minute strengthened hope. After a long while, two hours, we heard a bell, an usher came bustling in and a great silence fell upon the buzzing court. It was the silence of a beast of prey, which, to seize its victim, opens a yawning mouth and, perforce, suspends its roar. But it was a false alarm. The jury had sent a question to the judge. It had been reported that the tenor of this question prompted Sir Frank Lockwood to remark to Sir Edward Clark, you'll dine your man in Paris tomorrow. I was sitting directly behind the Solicitor General and what he did say was, that means an acquittal. But Sir Edward shook his head mournfully. No, no, no, he said. Thus do they compliment each other. I whispered to my neighbour. The Treasury Council overheard my remark and turned round with a mighty face, suffused with joviality. He was amused, no doubt, to find that a layman appreciated at their just value the little compliments which advocates pay to each other. But I had heard that kind of prediction before. I travelled up to town with Montague Williams and the Attorney General on the last day but one of the LeFroy murder trial at Luz. Williams had made his speech for the defence. You've got that fellow off, said Mr. Attorney. And, no, no, said Williams. Wait for the judge. I thought that Lockwood seemed a very jolly fellow and I could not understand the animosity with which he had conducted the prosecution. I understood it still less when I heard afterwards that Sir Frank Lockwood was a personal friend of Oscar Wilde, a frequent visitor to his house, and that he had been there even after the libel proceedings had begun. I did not, of course, know that one of the men whose name was frequently mentioned as being an associate of the prisoner was a nephew of Sir Frank Lockwood. The jury deliberated for over two hours and finally brought in a verdict of guilty on every single count. A glance at their faces had been sufficient to tell me which way they'd gone. I noticed that while they were taking their seats, the judge's hand shook as in a palsy as he arranged his papers on the desk. Then he fumbled in one of his pockets. He's looking for the black cap, whispered some wag behind me. And, indeed, it was a death sentence, a sentence of cruel death, that he was about to pronounce. I looked at poor Oscar when the judge was passing sentence, and his face was what I shall never forget. Quote, It was flushed purple, the eyes protruded, and overall was an expression of extreme horror. When the judge had finished speaking, and whilst a whir of satisfaction buzzed through the court, Wilde, who had recovered himself, said, And I, may I say nothing, my lord? But the judge made no answer, only an impatient sign with his hand to the warders. These touched my poor friend on the back. He shuddered and gave one wild look round the court. Then he turned and lumbered forward to the head of the stairs, which led to the bottomless pit. He was swept down and disappeared. Quote, That same evening, at Wandsworth Jail, there was a struggle between a convicted prisoner and the warders, who wished to force him to take a bath in filthy water. That prisoner was Oscar Wilde. End of Chapter 23. Chapter 24 of The Real Oscar Wilde by Robert Chirard. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Oscar Wilde has given, in day profundis, some indication of his state of mind after his conviction and definite return to jail. He tells us that he had constantly in his mind the thought of suicide. I do not, however, believe that he ever had the serious intention of committing such an act. For one thing the means were wanting. For another he was very closely watched. And then again, whatever his hopes of a quittle may have been, he must have been prepared for what happened. Public prejudice was so strong against him that there was no possibility of an escape. This had been pointed out to him, and I believe that he expected to be convicted, though he did not anticipate receiving so severe a sentence. I had told him that it would be self-deception to expect anything but a conviction if he stayed on in England. And then he said, What do you think the sentence will be? Why, the maximum, of course, I answered, two years hard labour. Oh, not two years, Robert, he said pathetically, as though I had anything to do with it. Not two years. I could not stand two years. Again, before his trial he had spent a long time in prison, most unjustly, as Sir Edward Clark pointed out. Unjust no doubt it was, but, as things turned out, it was a good thing for him. It accustomed him to confinement, to the loss of liberty, to the absence of tobacco and extreme abstemiousness in the use of alcohol. The association with criminals would, to a man of his instinctive anarchism, be no terror at all. He was quite sincere when he said that he cared nothing about social distinctions. He would probably consider the men whom he met in the prison corridors and in the exercise ground very much more interesting and not less respectable than the majority of the people whom he used to meet outside. And as a writer he would find delight in the exercise of his powers of observation. As an Irishman he would see much less disgrace in imprisonment than Anglo-Saxon. He would enjoy the interest shown in him, and the deference paid towards him as a criminal demarc, by warders and prisoners, and as a man of wide reading he would remember that many men, his intellectual peers, had suffered far worse duress than this. He would think of Tolstoy and sense his indifference to the discomforts of the life and his utter contempt for what disgrace the world might see in imprisonment under a bourgeois regime. He would remember Dostoyevsky and his naut-scarred back. Dostoyevsky and his House of the Dead, compared with which Wandsworth jail was a comfortable abode. And possibly he might remember a passage in crime and punishment where the examining magistrate bids Raskolnikov not to dread prison, for prison calms the culprit. For the rest, for his calm, the prison doctors would provide. He slept a deep sleep that first night in Wandsworth jail and on subsequent nights. During the day time he wandered at the dullness of his sensations. The anticipated mental agony had none of the acuteness he had dreaded. The whole thing seemed like an evil dream, but objective rather than subjective. I fancied that this would be so, and on my first visit to the prison, as I was coming away from the par-loire, I said to the warder, bromides, I suppose, and buckets of it, said the warder. It is a curious circumstance and testifies to his inherent histrionism that his principal suffering, a moral one, seems to have been caused by having to wear the hideous and grotesque costume that English prisoners are dressed in. It will be remembered how he wrote to Smithers, The horror of prison life is the contrast between the grotesqueness of one's aspect and the tragedy of one's soul. He refers to the same thing both in Daprofundis and the Ballad of Reading Jail. One has always tried to console oneself about his prison life with the reflection that, as he undoubtedly improved in health while he was confined, and that as he always attached far more importance to the physical than to the mental, both as regards comfort and suffering, he may very likely have endured less than one supposed. When a man feels himself getting better and better, he cannot be altogether unhappy, and as against the hideousness of his zany attire, he could set for consolation the fact that his stoutness decreased gradually. He would derive real satisfaction from this, for he dreaded more than anything a fullness of habit. When he went to prison he was indeed getting fatter and fatter. When he came out his figure was an excellent one. The fat had disappeared and his muscle had developed. With regard to his far greater dread for physical than for mental suffering, I have often heard him express himself to that effect. It was physical pain, so much worse than anything mental, he often said. He took the greatest care of himself. During all the years that I knew him, I never once saw him ill or in pain of any kind. In one of his letters he speaks of having suffered from a severe attack of asthma, but I never heard of it, and I fancy it must have been invented as an excuse for not doing something that his correspondent wanted. Ransom attributed to him a certain disease, and added that it was the final cause of his death. I see that in his new edition Mr. Ransom omits this in discretion. I can only say that during the seventeen years I never saw in while the slightest sign of a melody which has a very distinct way of announcing its existence, a disease which certainly does not hide its fatal light under any bushel whatsoever. The fact is, the man had a wonderful constitution, just as he had a wonderful brain. My first visit to him at Wandsworth was on 25th August, when, in the hideous prison parlance, he was due for his first quarterly visit. The ticket entitled Two Friends to Visit the Prisoner, but not being in touch with Ross at the time, I could find nobody to go with me. I must have said something about this, because I find amongst my letters one of Rebuke from Alfred Douglas, who says that it is absurd of me to say that I could find nobody to come with the prison with me, when there were hundreds of wild friends who would have only been too glad of the opportunity. No doubt, only they did not come forward. Wild seemed very much broken, but what he complained of most was that he was allowed only one book a week to read. Later on, under a more humane Governor elsewhere, he was allowed a sufficiency of literature, and his friends were permitted to send books to the prison for him, the only stipulation being that these should remain the property of the prison library. He told me that he was reading Newman and Peter, but he spoke without enthusiasm. We looked at each other and simultaneously burst into a painful laugh. At that time, he was picking oakum for his task, and his nails were broken and bleeding. This oakum picking is a cruel task. A hard labour prisoner is bound under penalties to pick four pounds of the tarred rope in his dog. It is impossible for anybody but the most skilled, the very old prison lag. That this is so I tested one day. There was a magistrate friend of mine who used to hand out sentences of hard labour without realizing to what he was condemning the prisoners. One day after visiting the local workhouse, where oakum picking is one of the tasks imposed on the casuals, who, more fortunate in this respect than the convicts, do get some satisfaction out of the nasty stuff by smoking it. Fought demure in their pipes. I brought home a handful of the raw material and asked my friend to see what he could make of it. He lent himself to the experiment and picked away diligently for half an hour. He was a man very quick with his fingers. At the end of half an hour, his nails beginning to break and the tips of his fingers becoming sore, he declared that he had had more than enough of the task. But look, he added, pointing to a large pile of the fluffy fibre. What a heap I've managed to pick. I asked him to come with me into the kitchen, where I commandeered the domestic scales. The big heap of picked oakum on which the worthy J.P. had been working his very hardest for thirty minutes weighed very much less than two ounces. I recorded that I found Oscar Wilde in a terrible state of suffering and this announcement, on my part, brought me the approval of Alfred Douglas, who wrote me to say that it was the right thing to tell the truth, that he was sick of hearing people say that Oscar was bearing up wonderfully and things of that sort. Of course I know, he wrote, that he is in hell, and it is well that people should know it also. I visited Wilde again a few weeks later and had a long interview with him in a private room and not the vault-like crypt, where I had first seen him. Nor were there any double rows of bars between us. He seemed then much better in health and spirits, and, as he was quite, oh Courant, with the news of the day, I gathered that he had at last been able to learn of the resources of the prison and to make use of them. In the meanwhile, his friends were agitating for his release. The Parisian press, which had shown him scant mercy at the time of his trial, saw in his prison sufferings an opportunity. I repeat that this was before the days of the Entente Cordial, to attack la Perfide Albion, and did not spare its criticisms of the barbarity of Le Ha Le Bour, as they pronounced it. The Parisian literature, headed by Mr. Stuart Merrill, sent in petitions. The American special correspondent sent over sensational accounts of how Wilde was being tortured to death. The authorities at the home office seemed to have realized what the outcry would be if Wilde died in jail. And, though they steadfastly refused to consider any question of reducing his sentence, they recommended C-33 to the special attention of the prison doctor and governor. I think that Wilde would have had a better chance of some alleviation of his sentence, if it had not been for the misguided championship, not only of some of his friends, but of certain people who, believing him guilty, started an insane campaign to prove that what they called the Greek movement had no essence of criminality in it, that it was pure Philistinism to object to it, and that, if guilty, Wilde should be considered a martyr to pure italical prejudice. For my part, I considered with the gravest apprehension any attempts to palliate his guilt, if indeed he were guilty, which I did not and could not believe. When I heard that Lord Alfred Douglas was projecting an article in La Revue Blanche, which, as I understood, was to defend Wilde on aesthetic grounds, I was so seriously alarmed as to what the consequences might be to the prisoner that I telegraphed to the editor, whom I happen to know, following up my telegram with a long letter in which I pointed out how ill Wilde's interest would be served by the publication of any such article. This brought me a long abusive letter from Alfred Douglas, to which, in his book, he refers as my proper answer. He then told me that he had withdrawn the article. Eventually an article did appear very much more mischievous to my thinking than the one originally projected. As to this article, Alfred Douglas has since disclaimed all responsibility, attributing it to the imagination of some journalist who interviewed him, and faked his answers. I may dismiss the subject by mentioning that I have a manuscript document referring to this article, but in views of the laws of copyright I prefer not to reproduce it. The prison doctor put Wilde in the infirmary, and reported in such a way to the home office that a further examination of the prisoner was deemed expedient. The report was that there was some danger lest the man's mind might be affected by the strain upon him. In consequence, two experts were sent down from the home office to observe Wilde. Now, on the afternoon when these two pathologists came to the prison, Oscar Wilde happened to be in one of his cheerful moods, delighting, as always in an appreciative audience, he was entertaining his fellow patients in the infirmary ward with his jokes and anecdotes, and a jolly time was in progress, while the two experts were watching the prisoner through the observation spyhole. Some doctors might have found in this spectacle some cause for alarm, a man of high social standing, and the most brilliant intellect, taking obvious pleasure in amusing a collection of petty criminals, just as judges and juries had seen criminality in the same man for delighting in similar audiences when at large. But men are always more prone to condemn than to absolve, and the result was that the experts, without any further inquiry, returned to Whitehall to announce that Wilde was perfectly sane, and seemed quite happy. No doubt the fresh proof that he had afforded of his taste for low and criminal company was duly noted against him. When eventually a petition was prepared by, quote, some eminent persons in high positions in the church and the learned professions, whose calling and character placed them beyond the suspicion of having any prejudice in favour of the prisoner, or of any laxity of view with regard to offences of the kind for which Wilde was convicted, unquote, in which special stress was laid upon the danger to the man's mentality, an intimation was received from the home secretary that it would be useless to present it as, quote, the case of this prisoner has been the subject of careful inquiry and consideration, and that, as a result, the home secretary has come to the conclusion that no grounds, medical or other, exist which would justify him in advising any mitigation of the sentence. unquote. One good result, and Oscar Wilde would have been delighted to know of it, that came from the universal outcry against the barbarities of lehard labour, was that the attention of the authorities was at last drawn to the report of the departmental committee on prisons, which recommended that, quote, the power to earn remission of sentence should be extended from convict to local prisons, unquote. This has now been done, and there is no doubt that poor Wilde's sufferings helped to bring this about. I think that one of the few serious purposes he had in life when he left prison was to try to do something to reform the English prison system. His letters to the Daily Chronicle, his ballad of running jail, much in-day profundness, are evidence of this, and, to some extent, affected his purpose. He may have been projecting some book exclusively on this subject, for some time after his death, his landlord showed me the books he left behind him, and amongst these was a copy of John Howard's work, and various magazines in which there are articles on present life in England. That nothing came of this purpose, as nothing came of all his other purposes of work, has been malevolently attributed to the life he was constrained to lead after he left prison. It is said that he did not work because he was drinking. The terrible fact is that he was drinking because he could not work. He was seeking in the palpable hell of being unable to produce, because, his brain was exhausted, the artificial paradise that alcohol affords. He was in need of money, how badly is shown by Lord Alfred Douglas's narrative, how he supplied him with food and cash during the last year of his life. He could have earned a good income, for theatre managers offered him commissions. Indeed, one very well-known man came specially over to Bernival to try to induce him to write a play for his theatre, but the poor fellow simply could not produce. He had outlived his mental powers, as many men of the greatest intellect do. I think that it was because this had been observed already then that the ancients declared that those whom the gods love die young. Napoleon wore himself out in exactly the same way, and at about the same age, and Napoleon has never been accused of intemperance. This must have been Wilde's greatest suffering, to realise that he was finished. A long period of anxiety, during which the hapless brain diverted from its ordinary functions, never rests, produces this effect. For Napoleon there had been the French campaign, and the broodings at Elba. During two years in prison, Wilde's brain had been driven beyond powers of recuperation. It may be noted that Willie Wilde suffered in the same way towards the end of his life. Once the most brilliant and most fertile writer, to whom production was as delightful as it was easy, in the last years he simply was unable to produce, and writhed in despair as this fact forced itself upon him. I often think, when meditating on the mental collapse of the Wilde Brothers, of that story of Alphonse Daudet's, the man with the brain of gold. It tells of a man whose head was full of gold, who, when he wanted to spend money, had but to dig his fingers into his brain, and who, for some time, led a life of splendor and opulence. As time went on the supply became less abundant. In the end the scrapings which he could with difficulty obtain were tinged with blood. There was a great change for the better in Wilde's appearance and manner after Major Nelson took over the direction of Reading Jail. I considered the governor to whom he succeeded very, very, well, unsuitable for a prison governor. I remember once meeting him in the yard after, with a friend, I had left the visiting room. My friend suggested that I should speak to him, and ask him how Wilde was getting on. I told him that I surely could not muster up the courage to address him. He looked so very bristly. Then my friend went up to him, and a sarcastic counter-interrogation was all the answer he got to his question. On another occasion, when I was with the same friend in the visiting room, which was divided into a double row of hutches, one row being for the prisoners and the other for their friends, Wilde asked me if I would mind retiring, as he wished to speak in private with my companion. I fancy now it must have been about day profundus, but my companion never mentioned what it was, and I, of course, never asked him. I refer to this because, in my book, The Story of an Unhappy Friendship, I allude to this incident as follows. On this occasion, he asked me to absent myself for a few moments, while he talked to the gentleman who would come with me, and in the grey gloom of the prison corridor, where I waited till this conference, from which I was excluded, was over, it dawned upon me that my long friendship, fruitful as it had been in sorrow, might reserve for the future another sorrow, and the disappointment of a wasted effort. At the time that I wrote that, I knew nothing about day profundus, and could not imagine what Wilde might want to speak about in private, unless to ask for news of unworthy associates. I am glad of the opportunity of correcting the false impression that my words may have produced. The visits to Reading were painful in the extreme, but I loved going there, and Wilde knew this. One day, shortly before he was due for another visit, I received a letter from him in which he said, It is important that two friends should visit me at Reading on the occasion of my next at home, and so, as I know how disappointed you will be, I have obtained permission from the Governor to write you this special letter, and hope you will take it as a compensation. I was not only glad to go there, but I did not mind people knowing that I went there, with the result, of course, that many unpleasant things were said about me in the papers. I did not have the privilege of meeting him when he came out of prison, but met him again, not very long afterwards, at Dieppe in France. End of Chapter 24 Chapter 25 of The Real Oscar Wilde by Robert Charade This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. It is a curious psychological fact that Oscar Wilde's downfall and, disgrace, did not alter in the slightest degree the feelings of his friends towards him. The mere circumstance that a man has been in prison usually creates around him whatever one's own opinion of his guilt or responsibility may be, an aura to whose repelling power one involuntarily succumbs. I have known several men and women who have gotten to trouble, and whom I have visited in jail, whom, when I afterwards met them, I could not regard with the same respect as before they were imprisoned. I had this absurd feeling about Madame Clovis Hugue, the wife of the Poet Deputy, who went to Saint-Lazar for shooting a private inquiry agent of a particularly contemptible species named Morin, and, even more curiously, the gallant Marquis de Morin, for whom I had great personal affection and a strong admiration, always seemed to me in some way besmirched and tainted after I had seen him in the Santé prison, where I frequently visited him. And neither of these people were ever under charges which the French call infamante, while, as to the charges against Wilde, society knows none more full of disgrace. In spite of this, the fact that he had done two years made absolutely no difference, not only in our conduct, but in our innermost feelings towards him. As far as I am concerned, I might explain this mental attitude of mine, by my appreciation of the French Poet line, that it is the crime and not the scaffold which makes for disgrace. But that would not afford a sufficient explanation, for neither in the case of Madame Hugue, nor of de Morin, did I admit any criminality, and yet I felt differently towards them. And though I saw both these prisoners in jail, I had not seen them under degrading circumstances. Morin received me in the Governor's Office, and was dressed like any gentleman in the morning. Madame Hugue received me in the Palois of Saint-Lazare, and was in her usual clothes. Wilde I had seen behind bars, on several occasions in a kind of rabbit-hutch, with trellis-wire over the front of it, dressed in a hideous and repulsive costume, and disfigured as to his face by not being shaved, and as to his hands by the condition of disfigurement and maculation to which they had been brought by the barbarous tasks to which he had been forced. So that, while there was nothing degrading to remember about either Madame Hugue or de Morin, one could not but recall in Wilde's presence the conditions under which one had seen him, in prison. Well, yet one never felt that these degrading conditions had in any way degraded him. One remembered him only as figuring in a grotesque role in the tragedy of life, and with no more feeling of detraction or compassion than if one had remembered him in some realistic costume at a fancy dress-ball. When, shortly after his release from prison, I received from him from Bernival an invitation to go over and see him, his letter gave me as much pleasure, and seemed as much an honour as if those two years had never been. I naturally went over at once, and it was outside a cafe by the old harbour in Dieppe that I met him again as a free man. I confess that my first impression was one of disappointment. He was carelessly dressed, and he wore a tamashanta cap which did not suit him at all. His face was flushed, and over the men by whom he was surrounded at that terraced table hovered an atmosphere of absentine hilarity. As a matter of fact, during the period between his arrival at Dieppe and my meeting with him there, he had not been living very wisely. There had been banquets to minor French poets, invited en bloc from Paris, and other revelries, and the people who were with him, such as Condor and Smithers, were counsellors neither of discretion nor of prudence. But that impression was only momentary, and when he had got away from Dieppe, that provincial metropolis of La Haute Nos, he showed himself quite a different man, and it was there that I last realised how much prison had done for him, both physically and morally. He was genial and kindly and alert, and the man who told Carson that he never walked had become fond of long pedestrian excursions in the neighbourhood, and of other exercise also. I remember watching him swim with great vigor. His reacquired taste for riding, and later on in Italy, he went out often on horseback, is another sign that prison had galvanised into life his torpid muscular system. Lord Alfred Douglas talks about the breezy, brotherly, beautiful Bernofaldes, and implies that all of Wilde's friends lived there with him, as long as his funds lasted, having a good time. There is as little truth in this statement as there is in most of his amazing book. Already, a very short time after his release from prison, Wilde was financially embarrassed. Robert Ross gives two delightful letters from him, written one from Dieppe on 1st June 1897, about 10 days after his release from prison, and the other from Rome, three years later. Letters which give us the real Oscar Wilde, with all his wit and courage and bon amie and erudition. These letters appear at the end of the selected prose volume, which was published by Matthewon at one Schilling in 1914. The Rome letter, by the way, opens with a sentence which illustrates that brain paralysis of which I spoke higher up. I simply cannot write, he says. It is too horrid. Not of me, but to me. It is a mode of paralysis, a cacoeathese tecendi, the one form that Malady takes in me. It is, however, to the Dieppe letter that I wish to refer. It is here that he announces his intention of living at Bernival, and he adds, lower down. As regards people living on me, and the extra bedrooms, dear boy, there is no one who would stay with me but you, and you will pay your bill at the hotel for meals, and as for your room, the charge will be nominally two francs fifty centimes a night. But there will be lots of extras, such as bougie, bas, and hot water, and all cigarettes smoked in the bedrooms, a charged extra. And if any one does not take the extras, of course he is charged more. Bath, twenty-five centimes, no bath, fifty centimes, cigarette in the bedroom, ten centimes a cigarette, no cigarette in the bedroom, twenty centimes for each cigarette. This is the system in all good hotels. People who went over to Bernival to visit him took their meals at the hotel. These were rather dear, dear even for Dieppe in the season. But M. Melmouth had been very lavish during his first days there, and the landlord had been spoiled. If I had only three guests like M. Melmouth, he told me, I should have a good season. I was not well off at the time, and so perforce my visit to my friend was of the briefest. I did not sleep more than three nights under the roof of Wilde's villa, and I have not the faintest notion what Douglas intends to suggest about Wilde's friends there. We were annoyed by the presence in the village of an obvious detective, supposed to be in the pay of Lord Queensbury. This detective was the only disturbing element there. Wilde never spoke of any literary projects. I do not think that any illusion was made to the ballad of Reading Jail, and there was only a general idea that, in response to a verbal invitation extended to him by a theatrical manager who would come over from London, he would, as soon as he could settle down, begin work on a play. He was in high spirits, and only very occasionally showed that some bitterness had infiltrated into the benignity of his sweet disposition. He showed no resentment whatever about the detective, but seemed rather to pity him. Chacune sans métier, he said, and he certainly never showed that he suffered from his position, as was revealed in that letter which he wrote to Smithers from Naples some months later, where, after complaining that certain people to whom he had written had left his letter unanswered, he adds, The fact is that when a man has had two years hard labour, people quite naturally treat him as a pariah dog. This is a social truth that I realise every day. I don't complain about it. There is no use complaining about facts. Je constate la fait. C'est tout. It comes from the decay of the imagination in the race, caused by the pressure of an artificial society, and, after all, when my own wife leaves me to die of starvation in Naples, without taking the smallest interest in the matter, I don't see why I should expect old friends to take the trouble to even answer or acknowledge my letters. But letters return to the poem. There's life in art, take refuge there, says Goethe, slightly misquoted. The bitterness did not seem to be provoked by any recollection of what he had suffered, of his wasted years in the injustice of it all, but by the feeling of conviction that many people, for whose opinion he did care, might refuse any further association with him, consider him, in fact, to use his own words, as a pariah dog. I remember how pleased he was when I related to him how I had been with Meredith and Henry James shortly after he was sent to prison, and with what sympathy he had been spoken about, sympathy devoid of all dissertation. I confess that I did not see any signs, then, of the cacoeathe's tachendi of which he speaks, but I imagine that, though he could make all the money he chose by writing, it would be difficult for him to write under his own name, or even under any pseudonym that might connect the work with him. I was mistaken, as was shown by the way in which the public rushed for the ballad. Meanwhile, there had been published in London an anonymous novel, or rather a prolonged short story, which was skillfully advertised in a roundabout way, as being the work of Oscar Wilde, and which jumped into immediate success. It is true that the book was, of its kind, a very clever one, a literary gem indeed, but it is certain that, but for the story about its authorship, its chances of attracting attention, the publishers being only in a very small way of business, without influence on the reviewers, would have been very slight indeed. Wilde never spoke to me about his financial position. I understood that he had an income settled on him. It was not until I heard Douglas's counsel in the ransom-trial ridiculing the amount, the £2.17 odd a week, that I knew how little it was. But, even had I known it, I should have felt no anxiety, for I knew how easily he could work, and the kind of work he could do, and the prices that he ought to be able to command. There was nothing to show the paralysis of which he speaks, the brain exhaustion, and certainly his letters written at the time, as for instance the one of 1st June to Robert Ross, from which I have quoted a passage, show him as witty, as alert, as amusing as ever. There is little more pathetic in his afterlife than his efforts to discipline himself. He has lost the taste of work, as the French say, and he wants to school himself back into productivity. He thinks, as many unhappy writers have thought before him, that if he can get some regular hack-work to perform, he may be able to serve over again an apprenticeship to the pen. The hack-work never came his way. It would have been useless if it had done so, but advantage was taken by dishonest publishers of the fact that this wish of his had become known, to pretend that they had afforded him the opportunity that he desired, and that certain hack-work, such as translations from the classics, and from certain French authors suspected of pornographic tendencies, was from his pen. Alfred Douglas paints a sorry picture of the poor man in the last year of his life. We are to imagine him living on his lordship's charity, and spending the Douglas arms in drinking in the cafes. We have in his book an account of Oscar Wilde's day in Paris. He begins his libations at the Grand Café, and continues them at the Café Julien. As a matter of fact, during that last year, Oscar was making a frantic effort to earn money. He was working when, physically, no less than mentally, he was unfit to do so. I have on this matter the direct evidence of excellent Monsieur de Poirier, the landlord of the Hotel d'Alsace, whose veracity I absolutely believe. He did not know what work it was, but that it was not hack-work in the ordinary sense of the word is shown by the price paid for it. He used to work at night, said Monsieur de Poirier, 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, and he seemed pleased and proud to think that he had earned one hundred francs in one night. But the man who employed him was very irregular about sending him his money, and this used to vex-miss your wild very much. He was always, anchier, until the payment came, and used to rail against his employer. Towards the end it became very difficult for him to write, and he used to whip himself up with cognac. A litre bottle would hardly see him through the night, and he ate little, and took but little exercise. He used to sleep till noon, and then breakfast, and then sleep again till five or six in the evening. This picture is sad enough, but how different from that painted by his former friend. In another respect we see him trying to discipline himself also, I mean in his expenditure. He tried to school himself to economy, just like Ernest Dawson, he writes to Smithers, who owes him twenty pounds, and asks to be paid at the rate of five pounds a week. This will keep me all right, he says. He does not ask for the total amount, he hopes to force himself to live on five pounds a week, just as Dawson hoped to manage on a smaller sum. We thus see him struggling to the last. He has the envie de bien faire, without which a man, as the French saying goes, is indeed lost. He has not degenerated into the alcoholic waste-rule as which has been painted. It is recorded of him that in that last year his conversation was more brilliant than ever. He refuses to perish altogether. We have the testimony of Ernest Lajounès, how, towards the end, quote, he tells all his stories in one breath. It is the bitter yet dazzling final piece of a display of superhuman fireworks. Those who, at the end of his life, heard him unravel the skein of gold and jeweled threads, the strong subtleties, the psychic and fantastic inventions with which he proposed to sow and embroider the tapestry of the plays and poems, which he was going to write, will keep the remembrance of a sight at once tragic and lofty. I think that he was perfectly sincere in the resolutions made in prison, and formulated in de profundis. During the short period in which I saw him after his release from prison, he was the man that, in that book, he announced that he was going to be. I knew nothing then of those resolutions, but obviously some strong moral influence had been at work. This influence was that of the long cogitation and final resolve which his prison book exacted. It is a pity that those parts of that book which we now know, leaving aside the peevish futilities about Alfred Douglas, were not published in his lifetime, for they would have delivered a bond to the world. It is difficult to keep resolutions which have never been enunciated. The public signing of the Pledge often saves a man because his amour propre is involved in his mastery of himself. The friar keeps his three vows because everybody who sees him knows that he has taken those three vows. Klanderstein resolutions, when everything is warring against their observance, are but poor restraining forces. But not only was de profundis not made public, nobody knew anything about it except Robert Ross. The very warder who befriended him, and saw him write this work, was ignorant as to what he was writing. As he told me, quote, whilst he was in prison he wrote and wrote, and what he wrote about I never knew, for I always neglected to ask him, unquote. I do not say that in the main wild broke the secret promises which he had made to himself. He was kindly, compassionate, and Christian till the end. But the observance of his vow of humility and poverty, which he had frankly accepted, was neglected when he found himself unable to break his newfound habits of extravagance. One has, however, to recall that in Leonard Smith's most profuse and prodigal of men, he had an almost irresistible tempter ever at his side. Nor would the society of his noble friend from Chantilly, with his good things, his liqueur varié, and his Alemo signary thousand franc notes, help him towards the peace which those know who limit their desires.