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

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

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"It was no use. Wilde was in a curious double temper. He made no
pretence either of innocence or of questioning the folly of his
proceedings against Queensberry. But he had an infatuate haughtiness
as to the impossibility of his retreating, and as to his right to
dictate your course. Douglas sat in silence, a haughty indignant
silence, copying Wilde's attitude as all Wilde's admirers did, but
quite probably influencing Wilde as you suggest, by the copy. Oscar
finally rose with a mixture of impatience and his grand air, and
walked out with the remark that he had now found out who were his real
friends; and Douglas followed him, absurdly smaller, and imitating his
walk, like a curate following an archbishop.[7] You remember it the
other way about; but just consider this. Douglas was in the wretched
position of having ruined Wilde merely to annoy his father, and of
having attempted it so idiotically that he had actually prepared a
triumph for him. He was, besides, much the youngest man present, and
looked younger than he was. You did not make him welcome: as far as I
recollect you did not greet him by a word or nod. If he had given the
smallest provocation or attempted to take the lead in any way, I
should not have given twopence for the chance of your keeping your
temper. And Wilde, even in his ruin--which, however, he did not yet
fully realize--kept his air of authority on questions of taste and
conduct. It was practically impossible under such circumstances that
Douglas should have taken the stage in any way. Everyone thought him a
horrid little brat; but I, not having met him before to my knowledge,
and having some sort of flair for his literary talent, was curious to
hear what he had to say for himself. But, except to echo Wilde once or
twice, he said nothing.[8] You are right in effect, because it was
evident that Wilde was in his hands, and was really echoing him. But
Wilde automatically kept the prompter off the stage and himself in the
middle of it.

[Footnote 7: This is an inimitable picture, but Shaw's fine sense of
comedy has misled him. The scene took place absolutely as I recorded
it. Douglas went out first saying--"Your telling him to run away shows
that you are no friend of Oscar's." Then Oscar got up to follow him.
He said good-bye to Shaw, adding a courteous word or two. As he turned
to the door I got up and said:--"I hope you do not doubt my
friendship; you have no reason to."

"I do not think this is friendly of you, Frank," he said, and went on
out.]

[Footnote 8: I am sure Douglas took the initiative and walked out
first.

_I have no doubt you are right, and that my vision of the exit is
really a reminiscence of the entrance. In fact, now that you prompt my
memory, I recall quite distinctly that Douglas, who came in as the
follower, went out as the leader, and that the last word was spoken by
Wilde after he had gone.--G.B.S._]

"What your book needs to complete it is a portrait of yourself as good
as your portrait of Wilde. Oscar was not combative, though he was
supercilious in his early pose. When his snobbery was not in action,
he liked to make people devoted to him and to flatter them exquisitely
with that end. Mrs. Calvert, whose great final period as a stage old
woman began with her appearance in my _Arms and the Man_, told me one
day, when apologizing for being, as she thought, a bad rehearser, that
no author had ever been so nice to her except Mr. Wilde.

"Pugnacious people, if they did not actually terrify Oscar, were at
least the sort of people he could not control, and whom he feared as
possibly able to coerce him. You suggest that the Queensberry
pugnacity was something that Oscar could not deal with successfully.
But how in that case could Oscar have felt quite safe with you? You
were more pugnacious than six Queensberrys rolled into one. When
people asked, 'What has Frank Harris been?' the usual reply was,
'Obviously a pirate from the Spanish Main.'

"Oscar, from the moment he gained your attachment, could never have
been afraid of what you might do to him, as he was sufficient of a
connoisseur in Blut Bruderschaft to appreciate yours; but he must
always have been mortally afraid of what you might do or say to his
friends.[9]

[Footnote 9: This insight on Shaw's part makes me smile because it is
absolutely true. Oscar commended Bosie Douglas to me again and again
and again, begged me to be nice to him if we ever met by chance; but I
refused to meet him for months and months.]

"You had quite an infernal scorn for nineteen out of twenty of the men
and women you met in the circles he most wished to propitiate; and
nothing could induce you to keep your knife in its sheath when they
jarred on you. The Spanish Main itself would have blushed rosy red at
your language when classical invective did not suffice to express your
feelings.

"It may be that if, say, Edmund Gosse had come to Oscar when he was
out on bail, with a couple of first class tickets in his pocket, and
gently suggested a mild trip to Folkestone, or the Channel Islands,
Oscar might have let himself be coaxed away. But to be called on to
gallop _ventre a terre_ to Erith--it might have been Deal--and hoist
the Jolly Roger on board your lugger, was like casting a light
comedian and first lover for _Richard III_. Oscar could not see
himself in the part.

"I must not press the point too far; but it illustrates, I think, what
does not come out at all in your book: that you were a very different
person from the submissive and sympathetic disciples to whom he was
accustomed. There are things more terrifying to a soul like Oscar's
than an as yet unrealized possibility of a sentence of hard labor. A
voyage with Captain Kidd may have been one of them. Wilde was a
conventional man: his unconventionality was the very pedantry of
convention: never was there a man less an outlaw than he. You were a
born outlaw, and will never be anything else.

"That is why, in his relations with you, he appears as a man always
shirking action--more of a coward (all men are cowards more or less)
than so proud a man can have been. Still this does not affect the
truth and power of your portrait. Wilde's memory will have to stand or
fall by it.

"You will be blamed, I imagine, because you have not written a lying
epitaph instead of a faithful chronicle and study of him; but you will
not lose your sleep over that. As a matter of fact, you could not have
carried kindness further without sentimental folly. I should have made
a far sterner summing up. I am sure Oscar has not found the gates of
heaven shut against him: he is too good company to be excluded; but he
can hardly have been greeted as, 'Thou good and faithful servant.' The
first thing we ask a servant for is a testimonial to honesty, sobriety
and industry; for we soon find out that these are the scarce things,
and that geniuses[10] and clever people are as common as rats. Well,
Oscar was not sober, not honest, not industrious. Society praised him
for being idle, and persecuted him savagely for an aberration which it
had better have left unadvertized, thereby making a hero of him; for
it is in the nature of people to worship those who have been made to
suffer horribly: indeed I have often said that if the crucifixion
could be proved a myth, and Jesus convicted of dying of old age in
comfortable circumstances, Christianity would lose ninety-nine per
cent. of its devotees.

[Footnote 10: The English paste in Shaw; genius is about the rarest
thing on earth whereas the necessary quantum of "honesty, sobriety and
industry," is beaten by life into nine humans out of ten.--ED.

_If so, it is the tenth who comes my way.--G.B.S._]

"We must try to imagine what judgment we should have passed on Oscar
if he had been a normal man, and had dug his grave with his teeth in
the ordinary respectable fashion, as his brother Willie did. This
brother, by the way, gives us some cue; for Willie, who had exactly
the same education and the same chances, must be ruthlessly set aside
by literary history as a vulgar journalist of no account. Well,
suppose Oscar and Willie had both died the day before Queensberry left
that card at the Club! Oscar would still have been remembered as a wit
and a dandy, and would have had a niche beside Congreve in the drama.
A volume of his aphorisms would have stood creditably on the library
shelf with La Rochefoucauld's Maxims. We should have missed the
'Ballad of Reading Gaol' and 'De Profundis'; but he would still have
cut a considerable figure in the Dictionary of National Biography, and
been read and quoted outside the British Museum reading room.

"As to the 'Ballad' and 'De Profundis,' I think it is greatly to
Oscar's credit that, whilst he was sincere and deeply moved when he
was protesting against the cruelty of our present system to children
and to prisoners generally, he could not write about his own
individual share in that suffering with any conviction or
sympathy.[11] Except for the passage where he describes his exposure
at Clapham Junction, there is hardly a line in 'De Profundis' that he
might not have written as a literary feat five years earlier. But in
the 'Ballad,' even in borrowing form and melody from Coleridge, he
shews that he could pity others when he could not seriously pity
himself. And this, I think, may be pleaded against the reproach that
he was selfish. Externally, in the ordinary action of life as
distinguished from the literary action proper to his genius, he was no
doubt sluggish and weak because of his giantism. He ended as an
unproductive drunkard and swindler; for the repeated sales of the
Daventry plot, in so far as they imposed on the buyers and were not
transparent excuses for begging, were undeniably swindles. For all
that, he does not appear in his writings a selfish or base-minded man.
He is at his worst and weakest in the suppressed[12] part of 'De
Profundis'; but in my opinion it had better be published, for several
reasons. It explains some of his personal weakness by the stifling
narrowness of his daily round, ruinous to a man whose proper place was
in a large public life. And its concealment is mischievous because,
first, it leads people to imagine all sorts of horrors in a document
which contains nothing worse than any record of the squabbles of two
touchy idlers; and, second, it is clearly a monstrous thing that
Douglas should have a torpedo launched at him and timed to explode
after his death. The torpedo is a very harmless squib; for there is
nothing in it that cannot be guessed from Douglas's own book; but the
public does not know that. By the way, it is rather a humorous stroke
of Fate's irony that the son of the Marquis of Queensberry should be
forced to expiate his sins by suffering a succession of blows beneath
the belt.

[Footnote 11: Superb criticism.]

[Footnote 12: I have said this in my way.]

"Now that you have written the best life of Oscar Wilde, let us have
the best life of Frank Harris. Otherwise the man behind your works
will go down to posterity[13] as the hero of my very inadequate
preface to 'The Dark Lady of the Sonnets.'"

G. BERNARD SHAW.

[Footnote 13: A characteristic flirt of Shaw's humor. He is a great
caricaturist and not a portrait-painter.

When he thinks of my Celtic face and aggressive American frankness he
talks of me as pugnacious and a pirate: "a Captain Kidd": in his
preface to "The Fair Lady of the Sonnets" he praises my "idiosyncratic
gift of pity"; says that I am "wise through pity"; then he extols me
as a prophet, not seeing that a pitying sage, prophet and pirate
constitute an inhuman superman.

I shall do more for Shaw than he has been able to do for me; he is the
first figure in my new volume of "Contemporary Portraits." I have
portrayed him there at his best, as I love to think of him, and
henceforth he'll have to try to live up to my conception and that will
keep him, I'm afraid, on strain.

_God help me!--G.B.S._]

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