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

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"I got a letter almost every day, Frank, begging me to come to
Posilippo, to the villa which Lord Alfred Douglas had rented. Every day
I heard his voice calling, 'Come, come, to sunshine and to me. Come to
Naples with its wonderful museum of bronzes and Pompeii and Paestum, the
city of Poseidon: I am waiting to welcome you. Come.'

"Who could resist it, Frank? love calling, calling with outstretched
arms; who could stay in bleak Berneval and watch the sheets of rain
falling, falling--and the grey mist shrouding the grey sea, and think of
Naples and love and sunshine; who could resist it all? I could not,
Frank, I was so lonely and I hated solitude. I resisted as long as I
could, but when chill October came and Bosie came to Rouen for me, I
gave up the struggle and yielded."

Could Oscar Wilde have won and made for himself a new and greater life?
The majority of men are content to think that such a victory was
impossible to him. Everyone knows that he lost; but I at least believe
that he might have won. His wife was on the point of yielding, I have
since been told; on the point of complete reconciliation when she heard
that he had gone to Naples and returned to his old habit of living; a
few days made all the difference.

It was at the instigation of Lord Alfred Douglas that Oscar began the
insane action against Lord Queensberry, in which he put to hazard his
success, his position, his good name and liberty, and lost them all. Two
years later at the same tempting, he committed soul-suicide.

He was not only better in health than he had ever been; but he was
talking and writing better than ever before and full of literary
projects which would certainly have given him money and position and a
measure of happiness besides increasing his reputation. From the moment
he went to Naples he was lost, and he knew it himself; he never
afterwards wrote anything: as he used to say, he could never afterwards
face his own soul.

He could never have won up again, the world says, and shrugs careless
shoulders. It is a cheap, unworthy conclusion. Some of us still persist
in believing that Oscar Wilde might easily have won and never again been
caught in that dreadful wind which whips the victims of sensual desire
about unceasingly, driving them hither and thither without rest in that
awful place where: "Nulla speranza gli conforta mai." (No hope ever
comforts!)

FOOTNOTES:

[7] Reproduced in the Appendix.

[8] Fac-simile copies of some of the notes Oscar wrote to Warder Martin
about these children are reproduced in the Appendix. The notes were
written on scraps of paper and pushed under his cell-door; they are
among the most convincing evidences of Oscar's essential humanity and
kindness of heart.

[9] The Home Secretary, Sir Matthew White Ridley, when questioned by Mr.
Michael Davitt in the House of Commons, May 25, 1897, declared that this
dismissal of a warder for feeding a little hungry child at his own
expense was "fully justified" and a "proper step." This same Home
Secretary appointed his utterly incompetent brother to be a judge of the
High Court.

[10] The correspondent to whom Wilde writes and the other friend
referred to are Roman Catholics.

[11] This refers to a story which Wilde was much interested in at the
time.

[12] The proprietor of the hotel.

[13] The Sphinx is a nickname for Mrs. Leverson, author of "The Eleventh
Hour," and other witty novels.

[14] Ernest was her husband.

[15] The silver spoon is a proposed line for a play given by Ross to
Turner (Reggie).

[16] Wilde's solicitor in Regina v. Wilde.

[17] A reference to the "Vailima Letters" of Stevenson which Wilde read
when he was in prison.

[18] An architect who sent Wilde books on his release from prison.

[19] His letter to _The Daily Chronicle_ about Warder Martin and the
little children.

[20] The Ballad was finished in Naples and Alfred Douglas has since
declared that he helped Oscar Wilde to write it. I have no wish to
dispute this: Alfred Douglas' poetic gift was extraordinary, far greater
than Oscar Wilde's. The poem was conceived in prison and a good deal of
it was printed before Oscar went near Alfred Douglas and some of the
best stanzas in it are to be found in this earlier portion: no part of
the credit of it, in my opinion, belongs to Alfred Douglas. See Appendix
for Ross's opinion.

[21] Hanging in chains was called keeping sheep by moonlight.

CHAPTER XX

"Non dispetto, ma doglia."--_Dante._

Oscar Wilde did not stay long in Naples, a few brief months; the
forbidden fruit quickly turned to ashes in his mouth.

I give the following extracts from a letter he wrote to Robert Ross in
December, 1897, shortly after leaving Naples, because it describes the
second great crisis in his life and is besides the bitterest thing he
ever wrote and therefore of peculiar value:

"The facts of Naples are very bald. Bosie for four months, by
endless lies, offered me a home. He offered me love,
affection, and care, and promised that I should never want for
anything. After four months I accepted his offer, but when we
met on our way to Naples, I found he had no money, no plans,
and had forgotten all his promises. His one idea was that I
should raise the money for us both; I did so to the extent of
L120. On this Bosie lived quite happy. When it came to his
having to pay his own share he became terribly unkind and
penurious, except where his own pleasures were concerned, and
when my allowance ceased, he left.

"With regard to the L500[22] which he said was a debt of
honour, he has written to me to say that he admits the debt of
honour, but as lots of gentlemen don't pay their debts of
honour, it is quite a common thing and no one thinks any the
worse of them.

"I don't know what you said to Constance, but the bald fact is
that I accepted the offer of the home, and found that I was
expected to provide the money, and when I could no longer do
so I was left to my own devices. It is the most bitter
experience of a bitter life. It is a blow quite awful. It had
to come, but I know it is better I should never see him again,
I don't want to, it fills me with horror."

A word of explanation will explain his reference to his wife, Constance,
in this letter: by a deed of separation made at the end of his
imprisonment, Mrs. Wilde undertook to allow Oscar L150 a year for life,
under the condition that the allowance was to be forfeited if Oscar ever
lived under the same roof with Lord Alfred Douglas. Having forfeited the
allowance Oscar got Robert Ross to ask his wife to continue it and in
spite of the forfeiture Mrs. Wilde continually sent Oscar money through
Robert Ross, merely stipulating that her husband should not be told
whence the money came. Ross, too, who had also sent him L150 a year,
resumed his monthly payments as soon as he left Douglas.

My friendship with Oscar Wilde, which had been interrupted after he left
prison by a silly gibe directed rather against the go-between he had
sent to me than against him, was renewed in Paris early in 1898. I have
related the little misunderstanding in the Appendix. I had never felt
anything but the most cordial affection for Oscar and as soon as I went
to Paris and met him I explained what had seemed to him unkind. When I
asked him about his life since his release he told me simply that he had
quarrelled with Bosie Douglas.

I did not attribute much importance to this; but I could not help
noticing the extraordinary change that had taken place in him since he
had been in Naples. His health was almost as good as ever; in fact, the
prison discipline with its two years of hard living had done him so
much good that his health continued excellent almost to the end.

But his whole manner and attitude to life had again changed: he now
resembled the successful Oscar of the early nineties: I caught echoes,
too, in his speech of a harder, smaller nature; "that talk about
reformation, Frank, is all nonsense; no one ever really reforms or
changes. I am what I always was."

He was mistaken: he took up again the old pagan standpoint; but he was
not the same; he was reckless now, not thoughtless, and, as soon as one
probed a little beneath the surface, depressed almost to despairing. He
had learnt the meaning of suffering and pity, had sensed their value; he
had turned his back upon them all, it is true, but he could not return
to pagan carelessness, and the light-hearted enjoyment of pleasure. He
did his best and almost succeeded; but the effort was there. His creed
now was what it used to be about 1892: "Let us get what pleasure we may
in the fleeting days; for the night cometh, and the silence that can
never be broken."

The old doctrine of original sin, we now call reversion to type; the
most lovely garden rose, if allowed to go without discipline and
tendance, will in a few generations become again the common scentless
dog-rose of our hedges. Such a reversion to type had taken place in
Oscar Wilde. It must be inferred perhaps that the old pagan Greek in him
was stronger than the Christian virtues which had been called into being
by the discipline and suffering of prison. Little by little, as he began
to live his old life again, the lessons learned in prison seemed to drop
from him and be forgotten. But in reality the high thoughts he had lived
with, were not lost; his lips had been touched by the divine fire; his
eyes had seen the world-wonder of sympathy, pity and love and, strangely
enough, this higher vision helped, as we shall soon see, to shake his
individuality from its centre, and thus destroyed his power of work and
completed his soul-ruin. Oscar's second fall--this time from a
height--was fatal and made writing impossible to him. It is all clear
enough now in retrospect though I did not understand it at the time.
When he went to live with Bosie Douglas he threw off the Christian
attitude, but afterwards had to recognise that "De Profundis" and "The
Ballad of Reading Gaol" were deeper and better work than any of his
earlier writings. He resumed the pagan position; outwardly and for the
time being he was the old Oscar again, with his Greek love of beauty and
hatred of disease, deformity and ugliness, and whenever he met a
kindred spirit, he absolutely revelled in gay paradoxes and brilliant
flashes of humour. But he was at war with himself, like Milton's Satan
always conscious of his fall, always regretful of his lost estate and by
reason of this division of spirit unable to write. Perhaps because of
this he threw himself more than ever into talk.

He was beyond all comparison the most interesting companion I have ever
known: the most brilliant talker, I cannot but think, that ever lived.
No one surely ever gave himself more entirely in speech. Again and again
he declared that he had only put his talent into his books and plays,
but his genius into his life. If he had said into his talk, it would
have been the exact truth.

People have differed a great deal about his mental and physical
condition after he came out of prison. All who knew him really, Ross,
Turner, More Adey, Lord Alfred Douglas and myself, are agreed that in
spite of a slight deafness he was never better in health, never indeed
so well. But some French friends were determined to make him out a
martyr.

In his picture of Wilde's last years, Gide tells us that "he had
suffered too grievously from his imprisonment.... His will had been
broken ... nothing remained in his shattered life but a mouldy
ruin,[23] painful to contemplate, of his former self. At times he seemed
to wish to show that his brain was still active. Humour there was; but
it was far-fetched, forced and threadbare."

These touches may be necessary in order to complete a French picture of
the social outcast. They are not only untrue when applied to Oscar
Wilde, but the reverse of the truth; he never talked so well, was never
so charming a companion as in the last years of his life.

In the very last year his talk was more genial, more humorous, more
vivid than ever, with a wider range of thought and intenser stimulus
than before. He was a born _improvisatore_. At the moment he always
dazzled one out of judgment. A phonograph would have discovered the
truth; a great part of his charm was physical; much of his talk mere
topsy-turvy paradox, the very froth of thought carried off by gleaming,
dancing eyes, smiling, happy lips, and a melodious voice.

The entertainment usually started with some humorous play on words. One
of the company would say something obvious or trivial, repeat a proverb
or commonplace tag such as, "Genius is born, not made," and Oscar would
flash in smiling, "not 'paid,' my dear fellow, not 'paid.'"

An interesting comment would follow on some doing of the day, a skit on
some accepted belief or a parody of some pretentious solemnity, a winged
word on a new book or a new author, and when everyone was smiling with
amused enjoyment, the fine eyes would become introspective, the
beautiful voice would take on a grave music and Oscar would begin a
story, a story with symbolic second meaning or a glimpse of new thought,
and when all were listening enthralled, of a sudden the eyes would
dance, the smile break forth again like sunshine and some sparkling
witticism would set everyone laughing.

The spell was broken, but only for a moment. A new clue would soon be
given and at once Oscar was off again with renewed brio to finer
effects.

The talking itself warmed and quickened him extraordinarily: he loved to
show off and astonish his audience, and usually talked better after an
hour or two than at the beginning. His verve was inexhaustible. But
always a great part of the fascination lay in the quick changes from
grave to gay, from pathos to mockery, from philosophy to fun.

There was but little of the actor in him. When telling a story he never
mimicked his personages; his drama seldom lay in clash of character, but
in thought; it was the sheer beauty of the words, the melody of the
cadenced voice, the glowing eyes which fascinated you and always and
above all the scintillating, coruscating humour that lifted his
monologues into works of art.

Curiously enough he seldom talked of himself or of the incidents of his
past life. After the prison he always regarded himself as a sort of
Prometheus and his life as symbolic; but his earlier experiences never
suggested themselves to him as specially significant; the happenings of
his life after his fall seemed predestined and fateful to him; yet of
those he spoke but seldom. Even when carried away by his own eloquence,
he kept the tone of good society.

When you came afterwards to think over one of those wonderful evenings
when he had talked for hours, almost without interruption, you hardly
found more than an epigram, a fugitive flash of critical insight, an
apologue or pretty story charmingly told. Over all this he had cast the
glittering, sparkling robe of his Celtic gaiety, verbal humour, and
sensual enjoyment of living. It was all like champagne; meant to be
drunk quickly; if you let it stand, you soon realised that some still
wines had rarer virtues. But there was always about him the magic of a
rich and _puissant_ personality; like some great actor he could take a
poor part and fill it with the passion and vivacity of his own nature,
till it became a living and memorable creation.

He gave the impression of wide intellectual range, yet in reality he was
not broad; life was not his study nor the world-drama his field. His
talk was all of literature and art and the vanities; the light
drawing-room comedy on the edge of farce was his kingdom; there he ruled
as a sovereign.

Anyone who has read Oscar Wilde's plays at all carefully, especially
"The Importance of Being Earnest," must, I think, see that in kindly,
happy humour he is without a peer in literature. Who can ever forget the
scene between the town and country girl in that delightful farce-comedy.
As soon as the London girl realises that the country girl has hardly any
opportunity of making new friends or meeting new men, she exclaims:

"Ah! now I know what they mean when they talk of agricultural
depression."

This sunny humour is Wilde's especial contribution to literature: he
calls forth a smile whereas others try to provoke laughter. Yet he was
as witty as anyone of whom we have record, and some of the best epigrams
in English are his. "The cynic knows the price of everything and the
value of nothing" is better than the best of La Rochefoucauld, as good
as the best of Vauvenargues or Joubert. He was as wittily urbane as
Congreve. But all the witty things that one man can say may be numbered
on one's fingers. It was through his humour that Wilde reigned supreme.
It was his humour that lent his talk its singular attraction. He was the
only man I have ever met or heard of who could keep one smiling with
amusement hour after hour. True, much of the humour was merely verbal,
but it was always gay and genial: summer-lightning humour, I used to
call it, unexpected, dazzling, full of colour yet harmless.

Let me try and catch here some of the fleeting iridescence of that
radiant spirit. Some years before I had been introduced to Mdlle. Marie
Anne de Bovet by Sir Charles Dilke. Mdlle. de Bovet was a writer of
talent and knew English uncommonly well; but in spite of masses of fair
hair and vivacious eyes she was certainly very plain. As soon as she
heard I was in Paris, she asked me to present Oscar Wilde to her. He had
no objection, and so I made a meeting between them. When he caught sight
of her, he stopped short: seeing his astonishment, she cried to him in
her quick, abrupt way:

"N'est-ce pas, M. Wilde, que je suis la femme la plus laide de France?"
(Come, confess, Mr. Wilde, that I am the ugliest woman in France.)

Bowing low, Oscar replied with smiling courtesy:

"Du monde, Madame, du monde." (In the world, madame, in the world.)

No one could help laughing; the retort was irresistible. He should have
said: "Au monde, madame, au monde," but the meaning was clear.

Sometimes this thought-quickness and happy dexterity had to be used in
self-defence. Jean Lorrain was the wittiest talker I have ever heard in
France, and a most brilliant journalist. His life was as abandoned as it
could well be; in fact, he made a parade of strange vices. In the days
of Oscar's supremacy he always pretended to be a friend and admirer.
About this time Oscar wanted me to know Stephane Mallarme. He took me to
his rooms one afternoon when there was a reception. There were a great
many people present. Mallarme was standing at the other end of the room
leaning against the chimney piece. Near the door was Lorrain, and we
both went towards him, Oscar with outstretched hands:

"Delighted to see you, Jean."

For some reason or other, most probably out of tawdry vanity, Lorrain
folded his arms theatrically and replied:

"I regret I cannot say as much: I can no longer be one of your friends,
M. Wilde."

The insult was stupid, brutal; yet everyone was on tiptoe to see how
Oscar would answer it.

"How true that is," he said quietly, as quickly as if he had expected
the traitor-thrust, "how true and how sad! At a certain time in life all
of us who have done anything like you and me, Lorrain, must realise that
we no longer have any friends in this world; but only lovers." (Plus
d'amis, seulement des amants.)

A smile of approval lighted up every face.

"Well said, well said," was the general exclamation. His humour was
almost invariably generous, kind.

One day in a Paris studio the conversation turned on the character of
Marat: one Frenchman would have it that he was a fiend, another saw in
him the incarnation of the revolution, a third insisted that he was
merely the gamin of the Paris streets grown up. Suddenly one turned to
Oscar, who was sitting silent, and asked his opinion: he took the ball
at once, gravely.

"_Ce malheureux! Il n'avait pas de veine--pour une fois qu'il a pris un
bain_...." (Poor devil, he was unlucky! To come to such grief for once
taking a bath.)

For a little while Oscar was interested in the Dreyfus case, and
especially in the Commandant Esterhazy, who played such a prominent
part in it with the infamous _bordereau_ which brought about the
conviction of Dreyfus. Most Frenchmen now know that the _bordereau_ was
a forgery and without any real value.

I was curious to see Esterhazy, and Oscar brought him to lunch one day
at Durand's. He was a little below middle height, extremely thin and as
dark as any Italian, with an enormous hook nose and heavy jaw. He looked
to me like some foul bird of prey: greed and cunning in the restless
brown eyes set close together, quick resolution in the out-thrust, bony
jaws and hard chin; but manifestly he had no capacity, no mind: he was
meagre in all ways. For a long time he bored us by insisting that
Dreyfus was a traitor, a Jew, and a German; to him a trinity of faults,
whereas he, Esterhazy, was perfectly innocent and had been very badly
treated. At length Oscar leant across the table and said to him in
French with, strange to say, a slight Irish accent, not noticeable when
he spoke English:

"The innocent," he said, "always suffer, M. le Commandant; it is their
_metier_. Besides, we are all innocent till we are found out; it is a
poor, common part to play and within the compass of the meanest. The
interesting thing surely is to be guilty and so wear as a halo the
seduction of sin."

Esterhazy appeared put out for a moment, and then he caught the genial
gaiety of the reproof and the hint contained in it. His vanity would not
allow him to remain long in a secondary _role_, and so, to our
amazement, he suddenly broke out:

"Why should I not make my confession to you? I will. It is I, Esterhazy,
who alone am guilty. I wrote the _bordereau_. I put Dreyfus in prison,
and all France can not liberate him. I am the maker of the plot, and the
chief part in it is mine."

To his surprise we both roared with laughter. The influence of the
larger nature on the smaller to such an extraordinary issue was
irresistibly comic. At the time no one even suspected Esterhazy in
connection with the _bordereau_.

Another example, this time of Oscar's wit, may find a place here. Sir
Lewis Morris was a voluminous poetaster with a common mind. He once
bored Oscar by complaining that his books were boycotted by the press;
after giving several instances of unfair treatment he burst out:
"There's a conspiracy against me, a conspiracy of silence; but what can
one do? What should I do?"

"Join it," replied Oscar smiling.

Oscar's humour was for the most part intellectual, and something like
it can be found in others, though the happy fecundity and lightsome
gaiety of it belonged to the individual temperament and perished with
him. I remember once trying to give an idea of the different sides of
his humour, just to see how far it could be imitated.

I made believe to have met him at Paddington, after his release from
Reading, though he was brought to Pentonville in private clothes by a
warder on May 18th, and was released early the next morning, two years
to the hour from the commencement of the Sessions at which he was
convicted on May 25th. The Act says that you must be released from the
prison in which you are first confined. I pretended, however, that I had
met him. The train, I said, ran into Paddington Station early in the
morning. I went across to him as he got out of the carriage: grey dawn
filled the vast echoing space; a few porters could be seen scattered
about; it was all chill and depressing.

"Welcome, welcome, Oscar!" I cried holding out my hands. "I am sorry I'm
alone. You ought to have been met by troops of boys and girls
flower-crowned, but alas! you will have to content yourself with one
middle-aged admirer."

"Yes, it's really terrible, Frank," he replied gravely. "If England
persists in treating her criminals like this, she does not deserve to
have any...."

"Ah," said an old lady to him one day at lunch, "I know you people who
pretend to be a great deal worse than you are, I know you. I shouldn't
be afraid of you."

"Naturally we pretend to be bad, dear lady," he replied; "it is the only
way to make ourselves interesting to you. Everyone believes a man who
pretends to be good, he is such a bore; but no one believes a man who
says he is evil. That makes him interesting."

"Oh, you are too clever for me," replied the old lady nodding her head.
"You see in my day none of us went to Girton and Newnham. There were no
schools then for the higher education of women."

"How absurd such schools are, are they not?" cried Oscar. "Were I a
despot, I should immediately establish schools for the lower education
of women. That's what they need. It usually takes ten years living with
a man to complete a woman's education."

"Then what would you do," asked someone, "about the lower education of
man?"

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