Frank Harris - Oscar Wilde, Volume 2 (of 2)

F >> Frank Harris >> Oscar Wilde, Volume 2 (of 2)

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This too I know--and wise it were
If each could know the same--
That every prison that men build
Is built with bricks of shame,
And bound with bars, lest Christ should see
How men their brothers maim.

Indeed, is it not clear that the man who, in his own wretchedness, wrote
that letter to the warder which I have reproduced, and was eager to
bring about the freeing of the little children at his own cost, is far
above the judge who condemned him or the society which sanctions such
punishments? "The Ballad of Reading Gaol," I repeat, and some pages of
"De Profundis," and, above all, the tragic fate of which these were the
outcome, render Oscar Wilde more interesting to men than any of his
peers.

He has been indeed well served by the malice and cruelty of his enemies;
in this sense his word in "De Profundis" that he stood in symbolic
relation to the art and life of his time is justified.

The English drove Byron and Shelley and Keats into exile and allowed
Chatterton, Davidson and Middleton to die of misery and destitution; but
they treated none of their artists and seers with the malevolent cruelty
they showed to Oscar Wilde. His fate in England is symbolic of the fate
of all artists; in some degree they will all be punished as he was
punished by a grossly materialised people who prefer to go in blinkers
and accept idiotic conventions because they distrust the intellect and
have no taste for mental virtues.

All English artists will be judged by their inferiors and condemned, as
Dante's master was condemned, for their good deeds (_per tuo ben far_):
for it must not be thought that Oscar Wilde was punished solely or even
chiefly for the evil he wrought: he was punished for his popularity and
his preeminence, for the superiority of his mind and wit; he was
punished by the envy of journalists, and by the malignant pedantry of
half-civilised judges. Envy in his case overleaped itself: the hate of
his justicers was so diabolic that they have given him to the pity of
mankind forever; they it is who have made him eternally interesting to
humanity, a tragic figure of imperishable renown.

THE END.

APPENDIX

Here are the two poems of Lord Alfred Douglas which were read out in
Court, on account of which the prosecution sought to incriminate Oscar
Wilde. My readers can judge for themselves the value of any inference to
be drawn from such work by another hand. To me, I must confess, the
poems themselves seem harmless and pretty--I had almost said, academic
and unimportant.

TWO LOVES

TO "THE SPHINX"

Two loves I have of comfort and despair
That like two spirits do suggest me still,
My better angel is a man right fair,
My worse a woman tempting me to ill.--_Shakespeare_.

I dreamed I stood upon a little hill,
And at my feet there lay a ground, that seemed
Like a waste garden, flowering at its will
With flowers and blossoms. There were pools that dreamed
Black and unruffled; there were white lilies
A few, and crocuses, and violets
Purple or pale, snake-like fritillaries
Scarce seen for the rank grass, and through green nets
Blue eyes of shy pervenche winked in the sun.
And there were curious flowers, before unknown,
Flowers that were stained with moonlight, or with shades
Of Nature's wilful moods; and here a one
That had drunk in the transitory tone
Of one brief moment in a sunset; blades
Of grass that in an hundred springs had been
Slowly but exquisitely nurtured by the stars,
And watered with the scented dew long cupped
In lilies, that for rays of sun had seen
Only God's glory, for never a sunrise mars
The luminous air of heaven. Beyond, abrupt,
A gray stone wall, o'ergrown with velvet moss
Uprose. And gazing I stood long, all mazed
To see a place so strange, so sweet, so fair.
And as I stood and marvelled, lo! across
The garden came a youth, one hand he raised
To shield him from the sun, his wind-tossed hair
Was twined with flowers, and in his hand he bore
A purple bunch of bursting grapes, his eyes
Were clear as crystal, naked all was he,
White as the snow on pathless mountains frore,
Red were his lips as red wine-spilth that dyes
A marble floor, his brow chalcedony.
And he came near me, with his lips uncurled
And kind, and caught my hand and kissed my mouth,
And gave me grapes to eat, and said, "Sweet friend,
Come, I will show thee shadows of the world
And images of life. See, from the south
Comes the pale pageant that hath never an end."
And lo! within the garden of my dream
I saw two walking on a shining plain
Of golden light. The one did joyous seem
And fair and blooming, and a sweet refrain
Came from his lips; he sang of pretty maids
And joyous love of comely girl and boy;
His eyes were bright, and 'mid the dancing blades
Of golden grass his feet did trip for joy.
And in his hands he held an ivory lute,
With strings of gold that were as maidens' hair,
And sang with voice as tuneful as a flute,
And round his neck three chains of roses were.
But he that was his comrade walked aside;
He was full sad and sweet, and his large eyes
Were strange with wondrous brightness, staring wide
With gazing; and he sighed with many sighs
That moved me, and his cheeks were wan and white
Like pallid lilies, and his lips were red
Like poppies, and his hands he clenched tight,
And yet again unclenched, and his head
Was wreathed with moon-flowers pale as lips of death.
A purple robe he wore, o'erwrought in gold
With the device of a great snake, whose breath
Was fiery flame: which when I did behold
I fell a-weeping and I cried, "Sweet youth
Tell me why, sad and sighing, thou dost rove
These pleasant realms? I pray thee speak me sooth
What is thy name?" He said, "My name is Love."
Then straight the first did turn himself to me
And cried, "He lieth, for his name is Shame,
But I am Love, and I was wont to be
Alone in this fair garden, till he came
Unasked by night; I am true Love, I fill
The hearts of boy and girl with mutual flame."
Then sighing said the other, "Have thy will,
I am the Love that dare not speak its name."

LORD ALFRED DOUGLAS.

September, 1892.

IN PRAISE OF SHAME

Unto my bed last night, methought there came
Our lady of strange dreams, and from an urn
She poured live fire, so that mine eyes did burn
At sight of it. Anon the floating flame
Took many shapes, and one cried, "I am Shame
That walks with Love, I am most wise to turn
Cold lips and limbs to fire; therefore discern
And see my loveliness, and praise my name."

And afterward, in radiant garments dressed,
With sound of flutes and laughing of glad lips,
A pomp of all the passions passed along,
All the night through; till the white phantom ships
Of dawn sailed in. Whereat I said this song,
"Of all sweet passions Shame is loveliest."

LORD ALFRED DOUGLAS.

THE UNPUBLISHED PORTION OF "DE PROFUNDIS"

This is not the whole of the unpublished portion of "De Profundis"; but
that part only which was read out in Court and used for the purpose of
discrediting Lord Alfred Douglas; still, it is more than half of the
whole in length and absolutely more than the whole in importance:
nothing of any moment is omitted, except the reiteration of accusations
and just this repetition weakens the effect of the argument and
strengthens the impression of querulous nagging instead of dispassionate
statement. If the whole were printed Oscar Wilde would stand worse;
somewhat more selfish and more vindictive.

I have commented the document as it stands mainly for the sake of
clearness and because it justifies in every particular and almost in
every epithet the shadows of the portrait which I have endeavoured to
paint in this book. Curiously enough Oscar Wilde depicts himself
unconsciously in this part of "De Profundis" in a more unfavourable
light than that accorded him in my memory. I believe mine is the more
faithful portrait of him, but that is for my readers to determine.

FRANK HARRIS.

NEW YORK, December, 1915.

H.M. Prison,
Reading.

DEAR BOSIE,

After long and fruitless waiting I have determined to write to you
myself, as much for your sake as for mine, as I would not like to think
that I had passed through two long years of imprisonment without ever
having received a single line from you, or any news or message even,
except such as gave me pain.

Our ill-fated and most lamentable friendship has ended in ruin and
public infamy for me, yet the memory of our ancient affection is often
with me, and the thought that loathing, bitterness and contempt should
for ever take the place in my heart once held by love is very sad to me;
and you yourself will, I think, feel in your heart that to write to me
as I lie in the loneliness of prison life is better than to publish my
letters without my permission, or to dedicate poems to me unasked,
though the world will know nothing of whatever words of grief or
passion, of remorse or indifference, you may choose to send as your
answer or your appeal.

I have no doubt that in this letter which I have to write of your life
and mine, of the past and of the future, of sweet things changed to
bitterness and of bitter things that may be turned to joy, there will be
much that will wound your vanity to the quick. If it prove so, read the
letter over and over again till it kills your vanity. If you find in it
something of which you feel that you are unjustly accused, remember that
one should be thankful that there is any fault of which one can be
unjustly accused. If there be in it one single passage that brings tears
to your eyes, weep as we weep in prison, where the day no less than the
night is set apart for tears. It is the only thing that can save you. If
you go complaining to your mother, as you did with reference to the
scorn of you I displayed in my letter to Robbie, so that she may flatter
and soothe you back into self-complacency or conceit, you will be
completely lost. If you find one false excuse for yourself you will soon
find a hundred, and be just what you were before. Do you still say, as
you said to Robbie in your answer, that I "attribute unworthy motives"
to you? Ah! you had no motives in life. You had appetites merely. A
motive is an intellectual aim. That you were "very young" when our
friendship began? Your defect was not that you knew so little about
life, but that you knew so much. The morning dawn of boyhood with its
delicate bloom, its clear pure light, its joy of innocence and
expectation, you had left far behind you. With very swift and running
feet you had passed from Romance to Realism. The gutter and the things
that live in it had begun to fascinate you. That was the origin of the
trouble[39] in which you sought my aid, and I, unwisely, according to
the wisdom of this world, out of pity and kindness, gave it to you. You
must read this letter right through, though each word may become to you
as the fire or knife of the surgeon that makes the delicate flesh burn
or bleed. Remember that the fool to the eyes of the gods and the fool to
the eyes of man are very different. One who is entirely ignorant[40] of
the modes of Art in its revelation or the moods of thought in its
progress, of the pomp of the Latin line or the richer music of the
vowelled Greek, of Tuscan sculpture or Elizabethan song, may yet be full
of the very sweetest wisdom. The real fool, such as the gods mock or
mar, is he who does not know himself. I was such a one too long. You
have been such a one too long. Be so no more. Do not be afraid. The
supreme vice is shallowness. Everything that is realised is right.
Remember also that whatever is misery to you to read, is still greater
misery to me to set down. They have permitted you to see the strange and
tragic shapes of life as one sees shadows in a crystal. The head of
Medusa that turns living men to stone, you have been allowed to look at
in a mirror merely. You yourself have walked free among the flowers.
From me the beautiful world of colour and motion has been taken away.

I will begin by telling you that I blame myself terribly. As I sit in
this dark cell in convict clothes, a disgraced and ruined man, I blame
myself. In the perturbed and fitful nights of anguish, in the long
monotonous days of pain, it is myself I blame. I blame myself for
allowing an intellectual friendship, a friendship whose primary aim was
not the creation and contemplation of beautiful things, entirely to
dominate my life. From the very first there was too wide a gap between
us. You had been idle at your school, worse than idle[41] at your
university. You did not realise that an artist, and especially such an
artist as I am, one, that is to say, the quality of whose work depends
on the intensification of personality, requires an intellectual
atmosphere, quiet, peace, and solitude. You admired my work when it was
finished: you enjoyed the brilliant successes of my first nights, and
the brilliant banquets that followed them: you were proud, and quite
naturally so, of being the intimate friend of an artist so
distinguished: but you could not understand the conditions requisite for
the production of artistic work. I am not speaking in phrases of
rhetorical exaggeration, but in terms of absolute truth to actual fact
when I remind you that during the whole time we were together I never
wrote one single line. Whether at Torquay, Goring, London, Florence, or
elsewhere, my life, as long as you were by my side, was entirely sterile
and uncreative. And with but few intervals, you were, I regret to say,
by my side always.

I remember, for instance, in September, '93, to select merely one
instance out of many, taking a set of chambers, purely in order to work
undisturbed, as I had broken my contract with John Hare, for whom I had
promised to write a play, and who was pressing me on the subject. During
the first week you kept away. We had, not unnaturally indeed, differed
on the question of the artistic value[42] of your translation of
_Salome_. So you contented yourself with sending me foolish letters on
the subject. In that week I wrote and completed in every detail, as it
was ultimately performed, the first act of an _An Ideal Husband_. The
second week you returned, and my work practically had to be given up. I
arrived at St. James's Place every morning at 11.30 in order to have the
opportunity of thinking and writing without the interruption inseparable
from my own household, quiet and peaceful as that household was. But the
attempt was vain. At 12 o'clock you drove up and stayed smoking
cigarettes and chattering till 1.30, when I had to take you out to
luncheon at the Cafe Royal or the Berkeley. Luncheon with its liqueurs
lasted usually till 3.30. For an hour you retired to White's. At tea
time you appeared again and stayed till it was time to dress for
dinner. You dined with me either at the Savoy or at Tite Street. We did
not separate as a rule till after midnight, as supper at Willis' had to
wind up the entrancing day. That was my life for those three months,
every single day, except during the four days when you went abroad. I
then, of course, had to go over to Calais to fetch you back. For one of
my nature and temperament it was a position at once grotesque and
tragic.

You surely must realise that now. You must see now that your incapacity
of being alone: your nature so exigent in its persistent claim on the
attention and time of others: your lack of any power of sustained
intellectual concentration: the unfortunate accident--for I like to
think it was no more--that you had not been able to acquire the "Oxford
temper" in intellectual matters, never, I mean, been one who could play
gracefully with ideas, but had arrived at violence of opinion
merely--that all these things, combined with the fact that your desires
and your interests were in Life, not in Art, were as destructive to your
own progress in culture as they were to my work as an artist. When I
compare my friendship with you to my friendship with still younger men,
as John Gray and Pierre Louys, I feel ashamed. My real life, my higher
life, was with them and such as they.

Of the appalling results of my friendship with you I don't speak at
present. I am thinking merely of its quality while it lasted. It was
intellectually degrading to me. You had the rudiments[43] of an artistic
temperament in its germ. But I met you either too late or too soon. I
don't know which. When you were away I was all right. The moment, in the
early December of the year to which I have been alluding, I had
succeeded in inducing your mother to send you out of England, I
collected again the torn and ravelled web of my imagination, got my life
back into my own hands, and not merely finished the three remaining acts
of the _Ideal Husband_, but conceived and had almost completed two other
plays of a completely different type, the _Florentine Tragedy_ and _La
Sainte Courtesane_, when suddenly, unbidden, unwelcome, and under
circumstances fatal to my happiness, you returned. The two works left
then imperfect I was unable to take up again. The mood that created them
I could never recover. You now, having yourself published a volume of
verse, will be able to recognise the truth of everything I have said
here. Whether you can or not it remains as a hideous truth in the very
heart of our friendship. While you were with me you were the absolute
ruin of my art, and in allowing you to stand persistently between Art
and myself, I give to myself shame and blame in the fullest degree. You
couldn't appreciate, you couldn't know, you couldn't understand. I had
no right to expect it of you at all. Your interests were merely in your
meals and moods. Your desires were simply for amusements, for ordinary
or less ordinary pleasures. They were what your temperament needed, or
thought it needed for the moment. I should have forbidden you my house
and my chambers except when I specially invited you. I blame myself
without reserve for my weakness. It was merely weakness. One half-hour
with Art was always more to me than a cycle with you. Nothing really at
any period of my life was ever of the smallest importance[44] to me
compared with Art. But in the case of an artist, weakness is nothing
less than a crime when it is a weakness that paralyses the imagination.

I blame myself for having allowed you to bring me to utter and
discreditable financial ruin. I remember one morning in the early
October of '92, sitting in the yellowing woods at Bracknell with your
mother. At that time I knew very little of your real nature. I had
stayed from a Saturday to Monday with you at Oxford. You had stayed with
me at Cromer for ten days and played golf. The conversation turned on
you, and your mother began to speak to me about your character. She told
me of your two chief faults, your vanity, and your being, as she termed
it, "all wrong about money." I have a distinct recollection of how I
laughed. I had no idea that the first would bring me to prison and the
second to bankruptcy. I thought vanity a sort of graceful flower for a
young man to wear, as for extravagance--the virtues of prudence and
thrift were not in my own nature or my own race. But before our
friendship was one month older I began to see what your mother really
meant. Your insistence on a life of reckless profusion: your incessant
demands for money: your claim that all your pleasures should be paid for
by me, whether I was with you or not, brought me, after some time, into
serious monetary difficulties, and what made the extravagance to me, at
any rate, so monotonously uninteresting, as your persistent grasp on my
life grew stronger and stronger, was that the money was spent on little
more than the pleasures of eating, drinking and the like. Now and then
it is a joy to have one's table red with wine and roses, but you
outstripped all taste and temperance. You demanded without grace and
received without thanks. You grew to think that you had a sort of right
to live at my expense, and in a profuse luxury to which you had never
been accustomed, and which, for that reason, made your appetites all the
more keen, and at the end, if you lost money gambling in some Algiers
Casino, you simply telegraphed next morning to me in London to lodge the
amount of your losses to your account at your bank, and gave the matter
no further thought of any kind.

When I tell you that between the autumn of 1892 and the date of my
imprisonment, I spent with you and on you, more than L5,000 in actual
money, irrespective of the bills I incurred, you will have some idea of
the sort of life on which you insisted. Do you think I exaggerate? My
ordinary expenses with you for an ordinary day in London--for luncheon,
dinner, supper, amusements, hansoms, and the rest of it--ranged from L12
to L20, and the week's expenses were naturally in proportion and ranged
from L80 to L130. For our three months at Goring my expenses (rent, of
course, included) were L1,340. Step by step with the Bankruptcy Receiver
I had to go over every item of my life. It was horrible. "Plain living
and high thinking," was, of course, an ideal you could not at that time
have appreciated, but such an extravagance was a disgrace to both of
us. One of the most delightful dinners I remember ever having had is one
Robbie and I had together in a little Soho Cafe, which cost about as
many shillings as my dinners to you used to cost pounds. Out of my
dinner with Robbie came the first and best of all my dialogues. Idea,
title, treatment, mode, everything was struck out at a 3 franc 50c.
table d'hote. Out of the reckless dinners with you nothing remains but
the memory that too much was eaten and too much was drunk. And my
yielding to your demands was bad for you. You know that now. It made you
grasping often: at times not a little unscrupulous: ungracious always.
There was, on far too many occasions, too little joy or privilege in
being your host. You forgot--I will not say the formal courtesy of
thanks, for formal courtesies will strain a close friendship--but simply
the grace of sweet companionship, the charm of pleasant conversation,
and all those gentle humanities that make life lovely, and are an
accompaniment to life as music might be, keeping things in tune and
filling with melody the harsh or silent places. And though it may seem
strange to you that one in the terrible position in which I am situated,
should find a difference between one disgrace and another, still I
frankly admit that the folly of throwing away all this money on you, and
letting you squander my fortune to your own hurt as well as to mine,
gives to me and in my eyes a note of common profligacy to my bankruptcy
that makes me doubly ashamed of it. I was made for other things.

But most of all I blame myself for the entire ethical degradation I
allowed you to bring on me. The basis of character is will power, and my
will power became absolutely subject[45] to yours. It sounds a grotesque
thing to say, but it is none the less true. Those incessant scenes that
seemed to be almost physically necessary to you, and in which your mind
and body grew distorted, and you became a thing as terrible to look at
as to listen to: that dreadful mania you inherit from your father, the
mania for writing revolting and loathsome letters: your entire lack of
any control over your emotions as displayed in your long resentful
moods of sullen silence, no less than in the sudden fits of almost
epileptic rage: all these things in reference to which one of my letters
to you, left by you lying about in the Savoy or some other hotel, and so
produced in court by your father's counsel, contained an entreaty not
devoid of pathos, had you at that time been able to recognise pathos
either in its elements or its expression--these, I say, were the origin
and causes of my fatal yielding to you in your daily increasing demands.
You wore me out. It was the triumph of the smaller over the bigger
nature. It was the case of that tyranny of the weak over the strong
which somewhere in one of my plays I describe as being "the only tyranny
that lasts." And it was inevitable. In every relation of life with
others one has to find some _moyen de vivre_.

I had always thought that my giving up to you in small things meant
nothing: that when a great moment arrived I could myself re-assert my
will power in its natural superiority. It was not so. At the great
moment my will power completely failed me. In life there is really no
great or small thing. All things are of equal value and of equal size.
My habit--due to indifference chiefly at first--of giving up to you in
everything had become insensibly a real part of my nature. Without my
knowing it, it had stereotyped my temperament to one permanent and fatal
mood. That is why, in the subtle epilogue to the first edition of his
essays, Pater says that "Failure is to form habits." When he said it the
dull Oxford people thought the phrase a mere wilful inversion of the
somewhat wearisome text of Aristotelian Ethics, but there is a
wonderful, a terrible truth hidden in it. I had allowed you to sap my
strength of character, and to me the formation of a habit had proved to
be not failure merely, but ruin. Ethically you had been even still more
destructive to me than you had been artistically.

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