Frank Harris - Oscar Wilde, Volume 2 (of 2)
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Frank Harris >> Oscar Wilde, Volume 2 (of 2)
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Dear Robbie, I wish you would be a little more considerate, and not keep
me up so late talking to you. It is very flattering to me and all that,
but you should remember that I need rest. Good-night. You will find some
cigarettes and some flowers by your bedside. Coffee is served below at 8
o'clock. Do you mind? If it is too early for you I don't at all mind
lying in bed an extra hour. I hope you will sleep well. You should as
Lloyd is not on the Verandah.[17]
TUESDAY MORNING, 9.30.
The sea and sky are opal--no horrid drawing master's line between
them--just one fishing boat, going slowly, and drawing the wind after
it. I am going to bathe.
6 O'CLOCK.
Bathed and have seen a Chalet here which I wish to take for the
season--quite charming--a splendid view: a large writing room, a dining
room, and three lovely bedrooms--besides servants' rooms and also a huge
balcony.
[In this blank space he had I don't know the scale
roughly drawn a ground plan of the drawing, but the
of the imagined Chalet.] rooms are larger than
the plan is.
1. Salle-a-manger. All on ground floor
2. Salon. with steps from balcony
3. Balcony. to ground.
The rent for the season or year is, what do you think?--L32.
Of course I must have it: I will take my meals here--separate and
reserved table: it is within two minutes walk. Do tell me to take it.
When you come again your room will be waiting for you. All I need is a
domestique. The people here are most kind.
I made my pilgrimage--the interior of the Chapel is of course a modern
horror--but there is a black image of Notre Dame de Liesse--the chapel
is as tiny as an undergraduate's room at Oxford. I hope to get the Cure
to celebrate Mass in it soon; as a rule the service is only held there
in July and August; but I want to see a Mass quite close.
There is also another thing I must write to you about.
I adore this place. The whole country is lovely, and full of forest and
deep meadow. It is simple and healthy. If I live in Paris I may be
doomed to things I don't desire. I am afraid of big towns. Here I get up
at 7.30. I am happy all day. I go to bed at 10. I am frightened of
Paris. I want to live here.
I have seen the "terrain." It is the best here, and the only one left. I
must build a house. If I could build a chalet for 12,000
francs--L500--and live in a home of my own, how happy I would be. I must
raise the money somehow. It would give me a home, quiet, retired,
healthy, and near England. If I live in Egypt I know what my life would
be. If I live in the south of Italy I know I should be idle and worse. I
want to live here. Do think over this and send me over the
architect.[18] M. Bonnet is excellent and is ready to carry out any
idea. I want a little chalet of wood and plaster walls, the wooden beams
showing and the white square of plaster diapering the framework--like, I
regret to say--Shakespeare's house--like old English sixteenth-century
farmers' houses. So your architect has me waiting for him, as he is
waiting for me.
Do you think the idea absurd?
I got the _Chronicle_, many thanks. I see the writer on
Prince--A.2.11.--does not mention my name--foolish of her--it is a
woman.
I, as you, the poem of my days, are away, am forced to write. I have
begun something that I think will be very good.
I breakfast to-morrow with the Stannards: what a great passionate,
splendid writer John Strange Winter is! How little people understand her
work! _Bootle's Baby_ is an "oeuvre symboliste"--it is really only the
style and the subject that are wrong. Pray never speak lightly of
_Bootle's Baby_--Indeed pray never speak of it at all--I never do.
Yours,
OSCAR.
Please send a _Chronicle_ to my wife.
MRS. C.M. HOLLAND,
Maison Benguerel,
Bevaix,
Pres de Neuchatel,
just marking it--and if my second letter appears, mark that.
Also cut out the letter[19] and enclose it in an envelope to:
MR. ARTHUR CRUTHENDEN,
Poste Restante, G.P.O., Reading,
with just these lines:
Dear friend,
The enclosed will interest you. There is also another letter
waiting in the post office for you from me with a little money.
Ask for it if you have not got it.
Yours sincerely,
C.3.3.
I have no one but you, dear Robbie, to do anything. Of course the letter
to Reading must go at once, as my friends come out on Wednesday morning
early.
This letter displays almost every quality of Oscar Wilde's genius in
perfect efflorescence--his gaiety, joyous merriment and exquisite
sensibility. Who can read of the little Chapel to Notre Dame de Liesse
without emotion quickly to be changed to mirth by the sunny humour of
those delicious specimens of self-advertisement: "Mr. Beerbohm Tree also
writes: 'Since I have tried it, I am a different actor, my friends
hardly recognise me.'"
This letter is the most characteristic thing Oscar Wilde ever wrote, a
thing produced in perfect health at the topmost height of happy hours,
more characteristic even than "The Importance of Being Earnest," for it
has not only the humour of that delightful farce-comedy, but also more
than a hint of the deeper feeling which was even then forming itself
into a master-work that will form part of the inheritance of men
forever.
"The Ballad of Reading Gaol" belongs to this summer of 1897. A fortunate
conjuncture of circumstances--the prison discipline excluding all
sense-indulgence, the kindness shown him towards the end of his
imprisonment and of course the delight of freedom--gave him perfect
physical health and hope and joy in work, and so Oscar was enabled for a
few brief months to do better than his best. He assured me and I believe
that the conception of "The Ballad" came to him in prison and was due to
the alleviation of his punishment and the permission accorded to him to
write and read freely--a divine fruit born directly of his pity for
others and the pity others felt for him.
"The Ballad of Reading Gaol"[20] was published in January, 1898, over
the signature of C.3.3., Oscar's number in prison. In a few weeks it ran
through dozens of editions in England and America and translations
appeared in almost every European language, which is proof not so much
of the excellence of the poem as the great place the author held in the
curiosity of men. The enthusiasm with which it was accepted in England
was astounding. One reviewer compared it with the best of Sophocles;
another said that "nothing like it has appeared in our time." No word of
criticism was heard: the most cautious called it a "simple poignant
ballad, ... one of the greatest in the English language." This praise is
assuredly not too generous. Yet even this was due to a revulsion of
feeling in regard to Oscar himself rather than to any understanding of
the greatness of his work. The best public felt that he had been
dreadfully over-punished, and made a scapegoat for worse offenders and
was glad to have the opportunity of repairing its own fault by
over-emphasising Oscar's repentance and over-praising, as it imagined,
the first fruits of the converted sinner.
"The Ballad of Reading Gaol" is far and away the best poem Oscar Wilde
ever wrote; we should try to appreciate it as the future will appreciate
it. We need not be afraid to trace it to its source and note what is
borrowed in it and what is original. After all necessary qualifications
are made, it will stand as a great and splendid achievement.
Shortly before "The Ballad" was written, a little book of poetry called
"A Shropshire Lad" was published by A.E. Housman, now I believe
professor of Latin at Cambridge. There are only a hundred odd pages in
the booklet; but it is full of high poetry--sincere and passionate
feeling set to varied music. His friend, Reginald Turner, sent Oscar a
copy of the book and one poem in particular made a deep impression on
him. It is said that "his actual model for 'The Ballad of Reading Gaol'
was 'The Dream of Eugene Aram' with 'The Ancient Mariner' thrown in on
technical grounds"; but I believe that Wilde owed most of his
inspiration to "A Shropshire Lad."
Here are some verses from Housman's poem and some verses from "The
Ballad":
On moonlit heath and lonesome bank
The sheep beside me graze;
And yon the gallows used to clank
Fast by the four cross ways.
A careless shepherd once would keep
The flocks by moonlight there,[21]
And high amongst the glimmering sheep
The dead men stood on air.
They hang us now in Shrewsbury jail:
The whistles blow forlorn,
And trains all night groan on the rail
To men that die at morn.
There sleeps in Shrewsbury jail to-night,
Or wakes, as may betide,
A better lad, if things went right,
Than most that sleep outside.
And naked to the hangman's noose
The morning clocks will ring
A neck God made for other use
Than strangling in a string.
And sharp the link of life will snap,
And dead on air will stand
Heels that held up as straight a chap
As treads upon the land.
So here I'll watch the night and wait
To see the morning shine
When he will hear the stroke of eight
And not the stroke of nine;
And wish my friend as sound a sleep
As lads I did not know,
That shepherded the moonlit sheep
A hundred years ago.
THE BALLAD OF READING GAOL
It is sweet to dance to violins
When Love and Life are fair:
To dance to flutes, to dance to lutes,
Is delicate and rare:
But it is not sweet with nimble feet
To dance upon the air!
And as one sees most fearful things
In the crystal of a dream,
We saw the greasy hempen rope
Hooked to the blackened beam
And heard the prayer the hangman's snare
Strangled into a scream.
And all the woe that moved him so
That he gave that bitter cry,
And the wild regrets, and the bloody sweats,
None knew so well as I:
For he who lives more lives than one
More deaths than one must die.
There are better things in "The Ballad of Reading Gaol" than those
inspired by Housman. In the last of the three verses I quote there is a
distinction of thought which Housman hardly reached.
"For he who lives more lives than one
More deaths than one must die."
There are verses, too, wrung from the heart which have a diviner
influence than any product of the intellect:
The Chaplain would not kneel to pray
By his dishonoured grave:
Nor mark it with that blessed Cross
That Christ for sinners gave,
Because the man was one of those
Whom Christ came down to save.
* * * * *
This too I know--and wise were it
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.
With bars they blur the gracious moon,
And blind the goodly sun:
And they do well to hide their Hell,
For in it things are done
That Son of God nor son of man
Ever should look upon!
The vilest deeds like poison weeds
Bloom well in prison-air:
It is only what is good in Man
That wastes and withers there:
Pale Anguish keeps the heavy gate,
And the Warder is Despair.
* * * * *
And he of the swollen purple throat,
And the stark and staring eyes,
Waits for the holy hands that took
The Thief to Paradise;
And a broken and a contrite heart
The Lord will not despise.
"The Ballad of Reading Gaol" is beyond all comparison the greatest
ballad in English: one of the noblest poems in the language. This is
what prison did for Oscar Wilde.
When speaking to him later about this poem I remember assuming that his
prison experiences must have helped him to realise the suffering of the
condemned soldier and certainly lent passion to his verse. But he would
not hear of it.
"Oh, no, Frank," he cried, "never; my experiences in prison were too
horrible, too painful to be used. I simply blotted them out altogether
and refused to recall them."
"What about the verse?" I asked:
"We sewed the sacks, we broke the stones,
We turned the dusty drill:
We banged the tins, and bawled the hymns,
And sweated on the mill:
And in the heart of every man
Terror was lying still."
"Characteristic details, Frank, merely the _decor_ of prison life, not
its reality; that no one could paint, not even Dante, who had to turn
away his eyes from lesser suffering."
It may be worth while to notice here, as an example of the hatred with
which Oscar Wilde's name and work were regarded, that even after he had
paid the penalty for his crime the publisher and editor, alike in
England and America, put anything but a high price on his best work.
They would have bought a play readily enough because they would have
known that it would make them money, but a ballad from his pen nobody
seemed to want. The highest price offered in America for "The Ballad of
Reading Gaol" was one hundred dollars. Oscar found difficulty in getting
even L20 for the English rights from the friend who published it; yet it
has sold since by hundreds of thousands and is certain always to sell.
I must insert here part of another letter from Oscar Wilde which
appeared in _The Daily Chronicle_, 24th March, 1898, on the cruelties of
the English prison system; it was headed, "Don't read this if you want
to be happy to-day," and was signed by "The Author of 'The Ballad of
Reading Gaol.'" It was manifestly a direct outcome of his prison
experiences. The letter was simple and affecting; but it had little or
no influence on the English conscience. The Home Secretary was about to
reform (!) the prison system by appointing more inspectors. Oscar Wilde
pointed out that inspectors could do nothing but see that the
regulations were carried out. He took up the position that it was the
regulations which needed reform. His plea was irrefutable in its
moderation and simplicity: but it was beyond the comprehension of an
English Home Secretary apparently, for all the abuses pointed out by
Oscar Wilde still flourish. I can't help giving some extracts from this
memorable indictment: memorable for its reserve and sanity and complete
absence of any bitterness:
"... The prisoner who has been allowed the smallest privilege dreads the
arrival of the inspectors. And on the day of any prison inspection the
prison officials are more than usually brutal to the prisoners. Their
object is, of course, to show the splendid discipline they maintain.
"The necessary reforms are very simple. They concern the needs of the
body and the needs of the mind of each unfortunate prisoner.
"With regard to the first, there are three permanent punishments
authorised by law in English prisons:
"1. Hunger.
"2. Insomnia.
"3. Disease.
"The food supplied to prisoners is entirely inadequate. Most of it is
revolting in character. All of it is insufficient. Every prisoner
suffers day and night from hunger....
"The result of the food--which in most cases consists of weak gruel,
badly baked bread, suet and water--is disease in the form of incessant
diarrhoea. This malady, which ultimately with most prisoners becomes a
permanent disease, is a recognised institution in every prison. At
Wandsworth Prison, for instance--where I was confined for two months,
till I had to be carried into hospital, where I remained for another
two months--the warders go round twice or three times a day with
astringent medicine, which they serve out to the prisoners as a matter
of course. After about a week of such treatment it is unnecessary to say
that the medicine produces no effect at all.
"The wretched prisoner is thus left a prey to the most weakening,
depressing and humiliating malady that can be conceived, and if, as
often happens, he fails from physical weakness to complete his required
evolutions at the crank, or the mill, he is reported for idleness and
punished with the greatest severity and brutality. Nor is this all.
"Nothing can be worse than the sanitary arrangements of English
prisons.... The foul air of the prison cells, increased by a system of
ventilation that is utterly ineffective, is so sickening and unwholesome
that it is not uncommon for warders, when they come into the room out of
the fresh air, and open and inspect each cell, to be violently sick....
"With regard to the punishment of insomnia, it only exists in Chinese
and English prisons. In China it is inflicted by placing the prisoner in
a small bamboo cage; in England by means of the plank bed. The object of
the plank bed is to produce insomnia. There is no other object in it,
and it invariably succeeds. And even when one is subsequently allowed a
hard mattress, as happens in the course of imprisonment, one still
suffers from insomnia. It is a revolting and ignorant punishment.
"With regard to the needs of the mind, I beg that you will allow me to
say something.
"The present prison system seems almost to have for its aim the wrecking
and the destruction of the mental faculties. The production of insanity
is, if not its object, certainly its result. That is a well-ascertained
fact. Its causes are obvious. Deprived of books, of all human
intercourse, isolated from every humane and humanising influence,
condemned to eternal silence, robbed of all intercourse with the
external world, treated like an unintelligent animal, brutalised below
the level of any of the brute-creation, the wretched man who is confined
in an English prison can hardly escape becoming insane."
This letter ended by saying that if all the reforms suggested were
carried out much would still remain to be done. It would still be
advisable to "humanise the governors of prisons, to civilise the
warders, and to Christianise the Chaplains."
This letter was the last effort of the new Oscar, the Oscar who had
manfully tried to put the prison under his feet and to learn the
significance of sorrow and the lesson of love which Christ brought into
the world.
In the beautiful pages about Jesus which form the greater part of _De
Profundis_, also written in those last hopeful months in Reading Gaol,
Oscar shows, I think, that he might have done much higher work than
Tolstoi or Renan had he set himself resolutely to transmute his new
insight into some form of art. Now and then he divined the very secret
of Jesus:
"When he says 'Forgive your enemies' it is not for the sake of the
enemy, but for one's own sake that he says so, and because love is more
beautiful than hate. In his own entreaty to the young man, 'Sell all
that thou hast and give to the poor,' it is not of the state of the poor
that he is thinking but of the soul of the young man, the soul that
wealth was marring."
In many of these pages Oscar Wilde really came close to the divine
Master; "the image of the Man of Sorrows," he says, "has fascinated and
dominated art as no Greek god succeeded in doing."... And again:
"Out of the carpenter's shop at Nazareth had come a personality
infinitely greater than any made by myth and legend, and one, strangely
enough, destined to reveal to the world the mystical meaning of wine and
the real beauties of the lilies of the field as none, either on
Cithaeron or Enna, has ever done. The song of Isaiah, 'He is despised
and rejected of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief: and we
hid as it were our faces from him,' had seemed to him to prefigure
himself, and in him the prophecy was fulfilled."
In this spirit Oscar made up his mind that he would write about "Christ
as the precursor of the romantic movement in life" and about "The
artistic life considered in its relation to conduct."
By bitter suffering he had been brought to see that the moment of
repentance is the moment of absolution and self-realisation, that tears
can wash out even blood. In "The Ballad of Reading Gaol" he wrote:
And with tears of blood he cleansed the hand,
The hand that held the steel:
For only blood can wipe out blood,
And only tears can heal:
And the crimson stain that was of Cain
Became Christ's snow-white seal.
This is the highest height Oscar Wilde ever reached, and alas! he only
trod the summit for a moment. But as he says himself: "One has perhaps
to go to prison to understand that. And, if so, it may be worth while
going to prison." He was by nature a pagan who for a few months became a
Christian, but to live as a lover of Jesus was impossible to this
"Greek born out of due time," and he never even dreamed of a reconciling
synthesis....
The arrest of his development makes him a better representative of his
time: he was an artistic expression of the best English mind: a Pagan
and Epicurean, his rule of conduct was a selfish Individualism:--"Am I
my brother's keeper?" This attitude must entail a dreadful Nemesis, for
it condemns one Briton in every four to a pauper's grave. The result
will convince the most hardened that such selfishness is not a creed by
which human beings can live in society.
* * * * *
This summer of 1897 was the harvest time in Oscar Wilde's Life; and his
golden Indian summer. We owe it "De Profundis," the best pages of prose
he ever wrote, and "The Ballad of Reading Gaol," his only original poem;
yet one that will live as long as the language: we owe it also that
sweet and charming letter to Bobbie Ross which shows him in his habit as
he lived. I must still say a word or two about him in this summer in
order to show the ordinary working of his mind.
On his release, and, indeed, for a year or two later, he called himself
Sebastian Melmoth. But one had hardly spoken a half a dozen words to
him, when he used to beg to be called Oscar Wilde. I remember how he
pulled up someone who had just been introduced to him, who persisted in
addressing him as Mr. Melmoth.
"Call me Oscar Wilde," he pleaded, "Mr. Melmoth is unknown, you see."
"I thought you preferred it," said the stranger excusing himself.
"Oh, dear, no," interrupted Oscar smiling, "I only use the name Melmoth
to spare the blushes of the postman, to preserve his modesty," and he
laughed in the old delightful way.
It was always significant to me the eager delight with which he shuffled
off the new name and took up the old one which he had made famous.
An anecdote from his life in the Chalet at this time showed that the old
witty pagan in Oscar was not yet extinct.
An English lady who had written a great many novels and happened to be
staying in Dieppe heard of him, and out of kindness or curiosity, or
perhaps a mixture of both motives, wrote and invited him to luncheon. He
accepted the invitation. The good lady did not know how to talk to Mr.
Sebastian Melmoth, and time went heavily. At length she began to
expatiate on the cheapness of things in France; did Mr. Melmoth know how
wonderfully cheap and good the living was?
"Only fancy," she went on, "you would not believe what that claret you
are drinking costs."
"Really?" questioned Oscar, with a polite smile.
"Of course I get it wholesale," she explained, "but it only costs me
sixpence a quart."
"Oh, my dear lady, I'm afraid you have been cheated," he exclaimed,
"ladies should never buy wine. I'm afraid you have been sadly
overcharged."
The humour may excuse the discourtesy, but Oscar was so uniformly polite
to everyone that the incident simply shows how ineffably he had been
bored.
This summer of 1897 was the decisive period and final turning-point in
Oscar Wilde's career. So long as the sunny weather lasted and friends
came to visit him from time to time Oscar was content to live in the
Chalet Bourgeat; but when the days began to draw in and the weather
became unsettled, the dreariness of a life passed in solitude, indoors,
and without a library became insupportable. He was being drawn in two
opposite directions. I did not know it at the time; indeed he only told
me about it months later when the matter had been decided irrevocably;
but this was the moment when his soul was at stake between good and
evil. The question was whether his wife would come to him again or
whether he would yield to the solicitations of Lord Alfred Douglas and
go to live with him.
Mr. Sherard has told in his book how he brought about the first
reconciliation between Oscar and his wife; and how immediately
afterwards he received a letter from Lord Alfred Douglas threatening to
shoot him like a dog, if, by any words of his, Wilde's friendship was
lost to him, Douglas.
Unluckily Mrs. Wilde's family were against her going back to her
husband; they begged her not to go; talked to her of her duty to her
children and herself, and the poor woman hesitated. Finally her advisers
decided for her, and Mrs. Wilde wrote this decision to Oscar's
solicitors shortly before his release: Oscar's probation was to last at
least a year. I do not know enough about Mrs. Wilde and her relations
with her family and with her husband even to discuss her inaction: I
dare not criticise her: but she did not go to her husband when if she
had gone boldly she might have saved him. She knew Lord Alfred Douglas'
influence over him; knew that it had already brought him to grief. Gide
says, and Oscar himself told me afterwards, that he had come out of
prison determined not to go back to Alfred Douglas and the old life. It
seems a pity that his wife did not act promptly; she allowed herself to
believe that a time of probation was necessary. The delay wounded
Oscar, and all the while, as he told me a little later, he was resisting
an influence which had dominated his life in the past.
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