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

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Shaw says his judgment of Wilde is severer than mine--"far sterner,"
are his words; but I am not sure that this is an exact estimate.

While Shaw accentuates Wilde's snobbishness, he discounts his "Irish
charm," and though he praises highly his gifts as dramatist and
story-teller he lays little stress on his genuine kindness of nature
and the courteous smiling ways which made him so incomparable a
companion and intimate.

On the other hand he excuses Wilde's perversion as pathological, as
hereditary "giantism," and so lightens the darkest shadows just as he
has toned down the lights.

I never saw anything abnormal in Oscar Wilde either in body or soul
save an extravagant sensuality and an absolute adoration of beauty and
comeliness; and so, with his own confessions and practises before me,
I had to block him in, to use painters' jargon, with black shadows,
and was delighted to find high lights to balance them--lights of
courtesies, graces and unselfish kindness of heart.

On the whole I think our two pictures are very much alike and I am
sure a good many readers will be almost as grateful to Shaw for his
collaboration and corroboration as I am.

POSTSCRIPT

Since writing this foreword I have received the proof of his
contribution which I had sent to Shaw. He has made some slight
corrections in the text which, of course, have been carried out, and
some comments besides on my notes as Editor. These, too, I have
naturally wished to use and so, to avoid confusion, have inserted them
in italics and with his initials. I hope the sequence will be clear to
the reader.

MY MEMORIES OF OSCAR WILDE

BY BERNARD SHAW

MY DEAR HARRIS:--

"I have an interesting letter of yours to answer; but when you ask me
to exchange biographies, you take an unfair advantage of the changes
of scene and bustling movement of your own adventures. My
autobiography would be like my best plays, fearfully long, and not
divided into acts. Just consider this life of Wilde which you have
just sent me, and which I finished ten minutes ago after putting aside
everything else to read it at one stroke.

"Why was Wilde so good a subject for a biography that none of the
previous attempts which you have just wiped out are bad? Just because
his stupendous laziness simplified his life almost as if he knew
instinctively that there must be no episodes to spoil the great
situation at the end of the last act but one. It was a well made life
in the Scribe sense. It was as simple as the life of Des Grieux, Manon
Lescaut's lover; and it beat that by omitting Manon and making Des
Grieux his own lover and his own hero.

"Des Grieux was a worthless rascal by all conventional standards; and
we forgive him everything. We think we forgive him because he was
unselfish and loved greatly. Oscar seems to have said: 'I will love
nobody: I will be utterly selfish; and I will be not merely a rascal
but a monster; and you shall forgive me everything. In other words, I
will reduce your standards to absurdity, not by writing them down,
though I could do that so well--in fact, _have_ done it--but by
actually living them down and dying them down.'

"However, I mustn't start writing a book to you about Wilde: I must
just tumble a few things together and tell you them. To take things in
the order of your book, I can remember only one occasion on which I
saw Sir William Wilde, who, by the way, operated on my father to
correct a squint, and overdid the correction so much that my father
squinted the other way all the rest of his life. To this day I never
notice a squint: it is as normal to me as a nose or a tall hat.

"I was a boy at a concert in the Antient Concert Rooms in Brunswick
Street in Dublin. Everybody was in evening dress; and--unless I am
mixing up this concert with another (in which case I doubt if the
Wildes would have been present)--the Lord Lieutenant was there with
his blue waistcoated courtiers. Wilde was dressed in snuffy brown; and
as he had the sort of skin that never looks clean, he produced a
dramatic effect beside Lady Wilde (in full fig) of being, like
Frederick the Great, Beyond Soap and Water, as his Nietzschean son was
beyond Good and Evil. He was currently reported to have a family in
every farmhouse; and the wonder was that Lady Wilde didn't
mind--evidently a tradition from the Travers case, which I did not
know about until I read your account, as I was only eight in 1864.

"Lady Wilde was nice to me in London during the desperate days between
my arrival in 1876 and my first earning of an income by my pen in
1885, or rather until, a few years earlier, I threw myself into
Socialism and cut myself contemptuously loose from everything of which
her at-homes--themselves desperate affairs enough, as you saw for
yourself--were part. I was at two or three of them; and I once dined
with her in company with an ex-tragedy queen named Miss Glynn, who,
having no visible external ears, reared a head like a turnip. Lady
Wilde talked about Schopenhauer; and Miss Glynn told me that Gladstone
formed his oratorical style on Charles Kean.

"I ask myself where and how I came across Lady Wilde; for we had no
social relations in the Dublin days. The explanation must be that my
sister, then a very attractive girl who sang beautifully, had met and
made some sort of innocent conquest of both Oscar and Willie. I met
Oscar once at one of the at-homes; and he came and spoke to me with an
evident intention of being specially kind to me. We put each other out
frightfully; and this odd difficulty persisted between us to the very
last, even when we were no longer mere boyish novices and had become
men of the world with plenty of skill in social intercourse. I saw him
very seldom, as I avoided literary and artistic society like the
plague, and refused the few invitations I received to go into society
with burlesque ferocity, so as to keep out of it without offending
people past their willingness to indulge me as a privileged lunatic.

"The last time I saw him was at that tragic luncheon of yours at the
Cafe Royal; and I am quite sure our total of meetings from first to
last did not exceed twelve, and may not have exceeded six.

"I definitely recollect six: (1) At the at-home aforesaid. (2) At
Macmurdo's house in Fitzroy Street in the days of the Century Guild
and its paper '_The Hobby Horse_.' (3) At a meeting somewhere in
Westminster at which I delivered an address on Socialism, and at which
Oscar turned up and spoke. Robert Ross surprised me greatly by telling
me, long after Oscar's death, that it was this address of mine that
moved Oscar to try his hand at a similar feat by writing 'The Soul of
Man Under Socialism.' (4) A chance meeting near the stage door of the
Haymarket Theatre, at which our queer shyness of one another made our
resolutely cordial and appreciative conversation so difficult that our
final laugh and shake-hands was almost a reciprocal confession. (5) A
really pleasant afternoon we spent together on catching one another in
a place where our presence was an absurdity. It was some exhibition in
Chelsea: a naval commemoration, where there was a replica of Nelson's
Victory and a set of P. & O. cabins which made one seasick by mere
association of ideas. I don't know why I went or why Wilde went; but
we did; and the question what the devil we were doing in that galley
tickled us both. It was my sole experience of Oscar's wonderful gift
as a raconteur. I remember particularly an amazingly elaborate story
which you have no doubt heard from him: an example of the cumulation
of a single effect, as in Mark Twain's story of the man who was
persuaded to put lightning conductor after lightning conductor at
every possible point on his roof until a thunderstorm came and all the
lightning in the heavens went for his house and wiped it out.

"Oscar's much more carefully and elegantly worked out story was of a
young man who invented a theatre stall which economized space by
ingenious contrivances which were all described. A friend of his
invited twenty millionaires to meet him at dinner so that he might
interest them in the invention. The young man convinced them
completely by his demonstration of the saving in a theatre holding, in
ordinary seats, six hundred people, leaving them eager and ready to
make his fortune. Unfortunately he went on to calculate the annual
saving in all the theatres of the world; then in all the churches of
the world; then in all the legislatures; estimating finally the
incidental and moral and religious effects of the invention until at
the end of an hour he had estimated a profit of several thousand
millions: the climax of course being that the millionaires folded
their tents and silently stole away, leaving the ruined inventor a
marked man for life.

"Wilde and I got on extraordinarily well on this occasion. I had not
to talk myself, but to listen to a man telling me stories better than
I could have told them. We did not refer to Art, about which,
excluding literature from the definition, he knew only what could be
picked up by reading about it. He was in a tweed suit and low hat like
myself, and had been detected and had detected me in the act of
clandestinely spending a happy day at Rosherville Gardens instead of
pontificating in his frock coat and so forth. And he had an audience
on whom not one of his subtlest effects was lost. And so for once our
meeting was a success; and I understood why Morris, when he was dying
slowly, enjoyed a visit from Wilde more than from anybody else, as I
understand why you say in your book that you would rather have Wilde
back than any friend you have ever talked to, even though he was
incapable of friendship, though not of the most touching kindness[1]
on occasion.

[Footnote 1: Excellent analysis. [Ed.]]

"Our sixth meeting, the only other one I can remember, was the one at
the Cafe Royal. On that occasion he was not too preoccupied with his
danger to be disgusted with me because I, who had praised his first
plays handsomely, had turned traitor over 'The Importance of Being
Earnest.' Clever as it was, it was his first really heartless play. In
the others the chivalry of the eighteenth century Irishman and the
romance of the disciple of Theophile Gautier (Oscar was really
old-fashioned in the Irish way, except as a critic of morals) not only
gave a certain kindness and gallantry to the serious passages and to
the handling of the women, but provided that proximity of emotion
without which laughter, however irresistible, is destructive and
sinister. In 'The Importance of Being Earnest' this had vanished; and
the play, though extremely funny, was essentially hateful. I had no
idea that Oscar was going to the dogs, and that this represented a
real degeneracy produced by his debaucheries. I thought he was still
developing; and I hazarded the unhappy guess that 'The Importance of
Being Earnest' was in idea a young work written or projected long
before under the influence of Gilbert and furbished up for Alexander
as a potboiler. At the Cafe Royal that day I calmly asked him whether
I was not right. He indignantly repudiated my guess, and said loftily
(the only time he ever tried on me the attitude he took to John Gray
and his more abject disciples) that he was disappointed in me. I
suppose I said, 'Then what on earth has happened to you?' but I
recollect nothing more on that subject except that we did not quarrel
over it.

"When he was sentenced I spent a railway journey on a Socialist
lecturing excursion to the North drafting a petition for his release.
After that I met Willie Wilde at a theatre which I think must have
been the Duke of York's, because I connect it vaguely with St.
Martin's Lane. I spoke to him about the petition, asking him whether
anything of the sort was being done, and warning him that though I and
Stewart Headlam would sign it, that would be no use, as we were two
notorious cranks, and our names would by themselves reduce the
petition to absurdity and do Oscar more harm than good. Willie
cordially agreed, and added, with maudlin pathos and an inconceivable
want of tact: 'Oscar was NOT a man of bad character: you
could have trusted him with a woman anywhere.' He convinced me, as you
discovered later, that signatures would not be obtainable; so the
petition project dropped; and I don't know what became of my draft.

"When Wilde was in Paris during his last phase I made a point of
sending him inscribed copies of all my books as they came out; and he
did the same to me.

"In writing about Wilde and Whistler, in the days when they were
treated as witty triflers, and called Oscar and Jimmy in print, I
always made a point of taking them seriously and with scrupulous good
manners. Wilde on his part also made a point of recognizing me as a
man of distinction by his manner, and repudiating the current estimate
of me as a mere jester. This was not the usual reciprocal-admiration
trick: I believe he was sincere, and felt indignant at what he thought
was a vulgar underestimate of me; and I had the same feeling about
him. My impulse to rally to him in his misfortune, and my disgust at
'the man Wilde' scurrilities of the newspapers, was irresistible: I
don't quite know why; for my charity to his perversion, and my
recognition of the fact that it does not imply any general depravity
or coarseness of character, came to me through reading and
observation, not through sympathy.

"I have all the normal violent repugnance to homosexuality--if it is
really normal, which nowadays one is sometimes provoked to doubt.

"Also, I was in no way predisposed to like him: he was my
fellow-townsman, and a very prime specimen of the sort of
fellow-townsman I most loathed: to wit, the Dublin snob. His Irish
charm, potent with Englishmen, did not exist for me; and on the whole
it may be claimed for him that he got no regard from me that he did
not earn.

"What first established a friendly feeling in me was, unexpectedly
enough, the affair of the Chicago anarchists, whose Homer you
constituted yourself by '_The Bomb_.' I tried to get some literary men
in London, all heroic rebels and skeptics on paper, to sign a memorial
asking for the reprieve of these unfortunate men. The only signature I
got was Oscar's. It was a completely disinterested act on his part;
and it secured my distinguished consideration for him for the rest of
his life.

"To return for a moment to Lady Wilde. You know that there is a
disease called giantism, caused by 'a certain morbid process in the
sphenoid bone of the skull--viz., an excessive development of the
anterior lobe of the pituitary body' (this is from the nearest
encyclopedia). 'When this condition does not become active until after
the age of twenty-five, by which time the long bones are consolidated,
the result is acromegaly, which chiefly manifests itself in an
enlargement of the hands and feet.' I never saw Lady Wilde's feet; but
her hands were enormous, and never went straight to their aim when
they grasped anything, but minced about, feeling for it. And the
gigantic splaying of her palm was reproduced in her lumbar region.

"Now Oscar was an overgrown man, with something not quite normal about
his bigness--something that made Lady Colin Campbell, who hated him,
describe him as 'that great white caterpillar.' You yourself describe
the disagreeable impression he made on you physically, in spite of his
fine eyes and style. Well, I have always maintained that Oscar was a
giant in the pathological sense, and that this explains a good deal of
his weakness.

"I think you have affectionately underrated his snobbery, mentioning
only the pardonable and indeed justifiable side of it; the love of
fine names and distinguished associations and luxury and good
manners.[2] You say repeatedly, and _on certain planes_, truly, that
he was not bitter and did not use his tongue to wound people. But this
is not true on the snobbish plane. On one occasion he wrote about T.P.
O'Connor with deliberate, studied, wounding insolence, with his
Merrion Square Protestant pretentiousness in full cry against the
Catholic. He repeatedly declaimed against the vulgarity of the British
journalist, not as you or I might, but as an expression of the odious
class feeling that is itself the vilest vulgarity. He made the mistake
of not knowing his place. He objected to be addressed as Wilde,
declaring that he was Oscar to his intimates and Mr. Wilde to others,
quite unconscious of the fact that he was imposing on the men with
whom, as a critic and journalist, he had to live and work, the
alternative of granting him an intimacy he had no right to ask or a
deference to which he had no claim. The vulgar hated him for snubbing
them; and the valiant men damned his impudence and cut him. Thus he
was left with a band of devoted satellites on the one hand, and a
dining-out connection on the other, with here and there a man of
talent and personality enough to command his respect, but utterly
without that fortifying body of acquaintance among plain men in which
a man must move as himself a plain man, and be Smith and Jones and
Wilde and Shaw and Harris instead of Bosie and Robbie and Oscar and
Mister. This is the sort of folly that does not last forever in a man
of Wilde's ability; but it lasted long enough to prevent Oscar laying
any solid social foundations.[3]

[Footnote 2: I had touched on the evil side of his snobbery, I
thought, by saying that it was only famous actresses and great ladies
that he ever talked about, and in telling how he loved to speak of the
great houses such as Clumber to which he had been invited, and by half
a dozen other hints scattered through my book. I had attacked English
snobbery so strenuously in my book on "The Man Shakespeare," had
resented its influence on the finest English intelligence so bitterly,
that I thought if I again laid stress on it in Wilde, people would
think I was crazy on the subject. But he was a snob, both by nature
and training, and I understand by snob what Shaw evidently understands
by it here.]

[Footnote 3: The reason that Oscar, snobbish as he was, and admirer of
England and the English as he was, could not lay any solid social
foundations in England was, in my opinion, his intellectual interests
and his intellectual superiority to the men he met. No one with a fine
mind devoted to things of the spirit is capable of laying solid social
foundations in England. Shaw, too, has no solid social foundations in
that country.

_This passing shot at English society serves it right. Yet able men
have found niches in London. Where was Oscar's?--G.B.S._]

"Another difficulty I have already hinted at. Wilde started as an
apostle of Art; and in that capacity he was a humbug. The notion that
a Portora boy, passed on to T.C.D. and thence to Oxford and spending
his vacations in Dublin, could without special circumstances have any
genuine intimacy with music and painting, is to me ridiculous.[4]
When Wilde was at Portora, I was at home in a house where important
musical works, including several typical masterpieces, were being
rehearsed from the point of blank amateur ignorance up to fitness for
public performance. I could whistle them from the first bar to the
last as a butcher's boy whistles music hall songs, before I was
twelve. The toleration of popular music--Strauss's waltzes, for
instance--was to me positively a painful acquirement, a sort of
republican duty.

[Footnote 4: I had already marked it down to put in this popular
edition of my book that Wilde continually pretended to a knowledge of
music which he had not got. He could hardly tell one tune from
another, but he loved to talk of that "scarlet thing of Dvorak,"
hoping in this way to be accepted as a real critic of music, when he
knew nothing about it and cared even less. His eulogies of music and
painting betrayed him continually though he did not know it.]

"I was so fascinated by painting that I haunted the National Gallery,
which Doyle had made perhaps the finest collection of its size in the
world; and I longed for money to buy painting materials with. This
afterwards saved me from starving: it was as a critic of music and
painting in the _World_ that I won through my ten years of journalism
before I finished up with you on the _Saturday Review_. I could make
deaf stockbrokers read my two pages on music, the alleged joke being
that I knew nothing about it. The real joke was that I knew all about
it.

"Now it was quite evident to me, as it was to Whistler and Beardsley,
that Oscar knew no more about pictures[5] than anyone of his general
culture and with his opportunities can pick up as he goes along. He
could be witty about Art, as I could be witty about engineering; but
that is no use when you have to seize and hold the attention and
interest of people who really love music and painting. Therefore,
Oscar was handicapped by a false start, and got a reputation[6] for
shallowness and insincerity which he never retrieved until it was too
late.

[Footnote 5: I touched upon Oscar's ignorance of art sufficiently I
think, when I said in my book that he had learned all he knew of art
and of controversy from Whistler, and that his lectures on the
subject, even after sitting at the feet of the Master, were almost
worthless.]

[Footnote 6: Perfectly true, and a notable instance of Shaw's
insight.]

"Comedy: the criticism of morals and manners _viva voce_, was his real
forte. When he settled down to that he was great. But, as you found
when you approached Meredith about him, his initial mistake had
produced that 'rather low opinion of Wilde's capacities,' that
'deep-rooted contempt for the showman in him,' which persisted as a
first impression and will persist until the last man who remembers his
esthetic period has perished. The world has been in some ways so
unjust to him that one must be careful not to be unjust to the world.

"In the preface on education, called 'Parents and Children,' to my
volume of plays beginning with _Misalliance_, there is a section
headed 'Artist Idolatry,' which is really about Wilde. Dealing with
'the powers enjoyed by brilliant persons who are also connoisseurs in
art,' I say, 'the influence they can exercise on young people who have
been brought up in the darkness and wretchedness of a home without
art, and in whom a natural bent towards art has always been baffled
and snubbed, is incredible to those who have not witnessed and
understood it. He (or she) who reveals the world of art to them opens
heaven to them. They become satellites, disciples, worshippers of the
apostle. Now the apostle may be a voluptuary without much conscience.
Nature may have given him enough virtue to suffice in a reasonable
environment. But this allowance may not be enough to defend him
against the temptation and demoralization of finding himself a little
god on the strength of what ought to be a quite ordinary culture. He
may find adorers in all directions in our uncultivated society among
people of stronger character than himself, not one of whom, if they
had been artistically educated, would have had anything to learn from
him, or regarded him as in any way extraordinary apart from his actual
achievements as an artist. Tartufe is not always a priest. Indeed, he
is not always a rascal: he is often a weak man absurdly credited with
omniscience and perfection, and taking unfair advantages only because
they are offered to him and he is too weak to refuse. Give everyone
his culture, and no one will offer him more than his due.'

"That paragraph was the outcome of a walk and talk I had one afternoon
at Chartres with Robert Ross.

"You reveal Wilde as a weaker man than I thought him: I still believe
that his fierce Irish pride had something to do with his refusal to
run away from the trial. But in the main your evidence is conclusive.
It was part of his tragedy that people asked more moral strength from
him that he could bear the burden of, because they made the very
common mistake--of which actors get the benefit--of regarding style as
evidence of strength, just as in the case of women they are apt to
regard paint as evidence of beauty. Now Wilde was so in love with
style that he never realized the danger of biting off more than he
could chew: in other words, of putting up more style than his matter
would carry. Wise kings wear shabby clothes, and leave the gold lace
to the drum major.

"You do not, unless my memory is betraying me as usual, quite
recollect the order of events just before the trial. That day at the
Cafe Royal, Wilde said he had come to ask you to go into the witness
box next day and testify that _Dorian Gray_ was a highly moral work.
Your answer was something like this: 'For God's sake, man, put
everything on that plane out of your head. You don't realize what is
going to happen to you. It is not going to be a matter of clever talk
about your books. They are going to bring up a string of witnesses
that will put art and literature out of the question. Clarke will
throw up his brief. He will carry the case to a certain point; and
then, when he sees the avalanche coming, he will back out and leave
you in the dock. What you have to do is to cross to France to-night.
Leave a letter saying that you cannot face the squalor and horror of a
law case; that you are an artist and unfitted for such things. Don't
stay here clutching at straws like testimonials to _Dorian Gray_. _I
tell you I know._ I know what is going to happen. I know Clarke's
sort. I know what evidence they have got. You must go.'

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