The Trial of Oscar Wilde Part 17

The following three articles, two of them from the "St. James's Gazette"

and one from the "Motorist", are marked with so much good sense and dissipate so many errors touching Oscar Wilde's last Years in Paris that the publisher deemed it a duty to reproduce them here as a permanent answer to the wild legends circulated about the subject of this book.

OSCAR WILDE

His last Book and his last Years

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

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

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

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

Monsieur Joseph Renaud, whose translation of Oscar Wilde's "Intentions"

has just appeared in Paris, has given a good example of how history is made in his preface to that work. He recounts an obviously imaginary meeting between himself and Oscar Wilde in a bar on the Boulevard des Italiens. He concludes the episode, such as it is, with these words: "Nothing remained of him but his musical voice and his large blue childlike eyes." Oscar Wilde's eyes were curious--long, narrow, and green.

Anything less childlike it would be hard to imagine. To the physiognomist they were his most remarkable feature, and redeemed his face from the heaviness that in other respects characterised it. So much for M. Joseph Renaud's powers of observation.

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

True, Oscar Wilde, who for several years before his conviction had been making at least 5,000 a year, found it very hard to live on his rather precarious income after he came out of prison; he was often very "hard up," and often did not know where to turn for a coin, but I will undertake to prove to anyone whom it may concern that from the day he left prison till the day of his death his income averaged at least 400 a year.

He had, moreover, far too many devoted friends in Paris ever to be in need of a meal provided he would take the trouble to walk a few hundred yards or take a cab to one of half a dozen houses. His death certainly was tragic--deaths are apt to be tragic--but he was surrounded by friends when he died, and his funeral was not cheap; I happen to have paid for it in conjunction with another friend of his, so I ought to know.

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

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

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

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

A.

OSCAR WILDE'S

LAST YEARS IN PARIS.--II

The French possess the faculty, very rare in England, of differentiating between a man and his work. They are utterly incapable of judging literary work by the moral character of its author. I have never yet met a Frenchman who was able to comprehend the att.i.tude of the English public towards Oscar Wilde after his release from prison. They were completely mystified by it. An eminent French man-of-letters said to me one day: "You have a man of genius, he commits crimes, you put him in prison, you destroy his whole life, you take away his fortune, you ruin his health, you kill his mother, his wife, and his brother (_sic_), you refuse to speak to him, you exile him from your country. That is very severe. In France we should never so treat a man of genius, but _enfin ca peut se comprendre_. But not content with that, you taboo his books and his plays, which before you enjoyed and admired, and _pour comble de tout_ you are very angry if he goes into a restaurant and orders himself some dinner.

_Il faut pourtant qu'il mange ce pauvre homme!_" If I had been representing the British public in an official capacity I should have probably given expression to its views and furnished a sufficient repartee to my voluble French friend by replying: "_Je n'en vois pas la necessite_."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Well, what could I do," said Oscar Wilde plaintively, "I couldn't very well say

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

could I?"

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

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

"DE PROFUNDIS"

_A Criticism by_ "_A_"

(LORD ALFRED DOUGLAS?)

"The English are very fond of a man who admits he has been wrong."

(_The Ideal Husband_).

"DE PROFUNDIS"

_A Criticism by_

Lord Alfred Douglas

In a painful pa.s.sage in this interesting posthumous book (it takes the form of a letter to an unnamed friend), Oscar Wilde relates how, on November the 13th, 1895, he stood for half an hour on the platform of Clapham Junction, handcuffed and in convict dress, surrounded by an amused and jeering mob. "For a year after that was done to me," he writes, "I wept every day at the same hour and for the same s.p.a.ce of time." That was before he had discovered or thought he had discovered that his terrible experiences in prison, his degradation and shame were a part, and a necessary part, of his artistic life, a completion of his incomplete soul.