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

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

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It was only famous actresses such as Ellen Terry and Sarah Bernhardt and
great ladies that Oscar ever praised. He was a snob by nature; indeed
this was the chief link between him and English society. Besides, he had
a rooted contempt for women and especially for their brains. He said
once, of some one: "he is like a woman, sure to remember the trivial and
forget the important."

It was this disdain of the sex which led him, later, to take up our
whole dispute again.

"I have been thinking over our argument in the train," he began; "really
it was preposterous of me to let you off with a drawn battle; you should
have been beaten and forced to haul down your flag. We talked of love
and I let you place the girl against the boy: it is all nonsense. A girl
is not made for love; she is not even a good instrument of love."

"Some of us care more for the person than the pleasure," I replied, "and
others--. You remember Browning:

Nearer we hold of God
Who gives, than of His tribes that take, I must believe."

"Yes, yes," he replied impatiently, "but that's not the point. I mean
that a woman is not made for passion and love; but to be a mother.

"When I married, my wife was a beautiful girl, white and slim as a lily,
with dancing eyes and gay rippling laughter like music. In a year or so
the flower-like grace had all vanished; she became heavy, shapeless,
deformed: she dragged herself about the house in uncouth misery with
drawn blotched face and hideous body, sick at heart because of our love.
It was dreadful. I tried to be kind to her; forced myself to touch and
kiss her; but she was sick always, and--oh! I cannot recall it, it is
all loathsome.... I used to wash my mouth and open the window to cleanse
my lips in the pure air. Oh, nature is disgusting; it takes beauty and
defiles it: it defaces the ivory-white body we have adored, with the
vile cicatrices of maternity: it befouls the altar of the soul.

"How can you talk of such intimacy as love? How can you idealise it?
Love is not possible to the artist unless it is sterile."

"All her suffering did not endear her to you?" I asked in amazement;
"did not call forth that pity in you which you used to speak of as
divine?"

"Pity, Frank," he exclaimed impatiently; "pity has nothing to do with
love. How can one desire what is shapeless, deformed, ugly? Desire is
killed by maternity; passion buried in conception," and he flung away
from the table.

At length I understood his dominant motive: _trahit sua quemque
voluptas_, his Greek love of form, his intolerant cult of physical
beauty, could take no heed of the happiness or well-being of the
beloved.

"I will not talk to you about it, Frank; I am like a Persian, who lives
by warmth and worships the sun, talking to some Esquimau, who answers me
with praise of blubber and nights spent in ice houses and baths of foul
vapour. Let's talk of something else."

FOOTNOTES:

[27] He lived till November, 1910.

CHAPTER XXIV

A little later I was called to Monte Carlo and went for a few days,
leaving Oscar, as he said, perfectly happy, with good food, excellent
champagne, absinthe and coffee, and his simple fisher friends.

When I came back to La Napoule, I found everything altered and altered
for the worse. There was an Englishman of a good class named M----
staying at the hotel. He was accompanied by a youth of seventeen or
eighteen whom he called his servant. Oscar wanted to know if I minded
meeting him.

"He is charming, Frank, and well read, and he admires me very much: you
won't mind his dining with us, will you?"

"Of course not," I replied. But when I saw M---- I thought him an
insignificant, foolish creature, who put to show a great admiration for
Oscar, and drank in his words with parted lips; and well he might, for
he had hardly any brains of his own. He had, however, a certain liking
for the poetry and literature of passion.[28]

To my astonishment Oscar was charming to him, chiefly I think because
he was well off, and was pressing Oscar to spend the summer with him at
some place he had in Switzerland. This support made Oscar recalcitrant
to any influence I might have had over him. When I asked him if he had
written anything whilst I was away, he replied casually:

"No, Frank, I don't think I shall be able to write any more. What is the
good of it? I cannot force myself to write."

"And your 'Ballad of a Fisher Boy'?" I asked.

"I have composed three or four verses of it," he said, smiling at me, "I
have got them in my head," and he recited two or three, one of which was
quite good, but none of them startling.

Not having seen him for some days, I noticed that he was growing stout
again: the good living and constant drinking seemed to ooze out of him;
he began to look as he looked in the old days in London just before the
catastrophe.

One morning I asked him to put the verses on paper which he had recited
to me, but he would not; and when I pressed him, cried:

"Let me live, Frank; tasks remind me of prison. You do not know how I
abhor even the memory of it: it was degrading, inhuman!"

"Prison was the making of you," I could not help retorting, irritated by
what seemed to me a mere excuse. "You came out of it better in health
and stronger than I have ever known you. The hard living, regular hours
and compulsory chastity did you all the good in the world. That is why
you wrote those superb letters to the 'Daily Chronicle,' and the 'Ballad
of Reading Gaol'; the State ought really to put you in prison and keep
you there."

For the first time in my life I saw angry dislike in his eyes.

"You talk poisonous nonsense, Frank," he retorted. "Bad food is bad for
everyone, and abstinence from tobacco is mere torture to me. Chastity is
just as unnatural and devilish as hunger; I hate both. Self-denial is
the shining sore on the leprous body of Christianity."

To all this M---- giggled applause, which naturally excited the
combative instincts in me--always too alert.

"All great artists," I replied, "have had to practise chastity; it is
chastity alone which gives vigour and tone to mind and body, while
building up a reserve of extraordinary strength. Your favourite Greeks
never allowed an athlete to go into the palaestra unless he had
previously lived a life of complete chastity for a whole year. Balzac,
too, practised it and extolled its virtues, and goodness knows he loved
all the mud-honey of Paris."

"You are hopelessly wrong, Frank, what madness will you preach next! You
are always bothering one to write, and now forsooth you recommend
chastity and 'skilly,' though I admit," he added laughing, "that your
'skilly' includes all the indelicacies of the season, with champagne,
Mocha coffee, and absinthe to boot. But surely you are getting too
puritanical. It's absurd of you; the other day you defended conventional
love against my ideal passion."

He provoked me: his tone was that of rather contemptuous superiority. I
kept silent: I did not wish to retort as I might have done if M---- had
not been present.

But Oscar was determined to assert his peculiar view. One or two days
afterwards he came in very red and excited and more angry than I had
ever seen him.

"What do you think has happened, Frank?"

"I do not know. Nothing serious, I hope."

"I was sitting by the roadside on the way to Cannes. I had taken out a
Vergil with me and had begun reading it. As I sat there reading, I
happened to raise my eyes, and who should I see but George
Alexander--George Alexander on a bicycle. I had known him intimately in
the old days, and naturally I got up delighted to see him, and went
towards him. But he turned his head aside and pedalled past me
deliberately. He meant to cut me. Of course I know that just before my
trial in London he took my name off the bill of my comedy, though he
went on playing it. But I was not angry with him for that, though he
might have behaved as well as Wyndham,[29] who owed me nothing, don't
you think?

"Here there was nobody to see him, yet he cut me. What brutes men are!
They not only punish me as a society, but now they are trying as
individuals to punish me, and after all I have not done worse than they
do. What difference is there between one form of sexual indulgence and
another? I hate hypocrisy and hypocrites! Think of Alexander, who made
all his money out of my works, cutting me, Alexander! It is too ignoble.
Wouldn't you be angry, Frank?"

"I daresay I should be," I replied coolly, hoping the incident would be
a spur to him.

"I've always wondered why you gave Alexander a play? Surely you didn't
think him an actor?"

"No, no!" he exclaimed, a sudden smile lighting up his face; "Alexander
doesn't act on the stage; he behaves. But wasn't it mean of him?"

I couldn't help smiling, the dart was so deserved.

"Begin another play," I said, "and the Alexanders will immediately go on
their knees to you again. On the other hand, if you do nothing you may
expect worse than discourtesy. Men love to condemn their neighbours' pet
vice. You ought to know the world by this time."

He did not even notice the hint to work, but broke out angrily:

"What you call vice, Frank, is not vice: it is as good to me as it was
to Caesar, Alexander, Michelangelo and Shakespeare. It was first of all
made a sin by monasticism, and it has been made a crime in recent times,
by the Goths--the Germans and English--who have done little or nothing
since to refine or exalt the ideals of humanity. They all damn the sins
they have no mind to, and that's their morality. A brutal race; they
overeat and overdrink and condemn the lusts of the flesh, while
revelling in all the vilest sins of the spirit. If they would read the
23rd chapter of St. Matthew and apply it to themselves, they would learn
more than by condemning a pleasure they don't understand. Why, even
Bentham refused to put what you call a 'vice' in his penal code, and you
yourself admitted that it should not be punished as a crime; for it
carries no temptation with it. It may be a malady; but, if so, it
appears only to attack the highest natures. It is disgraceful to punish
it. The wit of man can find no argument which justifies its punishment."

"Don't be too sure of that," I retorted.

"I have never heard a convincing argument which condemns it, Frank; I do
not believe such a reason exists."

"Don't forget," I said, "that this practice which you defend is
condemned by a hundred generations of the most civilised races of
mankind."

"Mere prejudice of the unlettered, Frank."

"And what is such a prejudice?" I asked. "It is the reason of a thousand
generations of men, a reason so sanctified by secular experience that it
has passed into flesh and blood and become an emotion and is no longer
merely an argument. I would rather have one such prejudice held by men
of a dozen different races than a myriad reasons. Such a prejudice is
incarnate reason approved by immemorial experience.

"What argument have you against cannibalism; what reason is there why we
should not fatten babies for the spit and eat their flesh? The flesh is
sweeter, African travellers tell us, than any other meat, tenderer at
once and more sustaining; all reasons are in favour of it. What hinders
us from indulging in this appetite but prejudice, sacred prejudice, an
instinctive loathing at the bare idea?

"Humanity, it seems to me, is toiling up a long slope leading from the
brute to the god: again and again whole generations, sometimes whole
races, have fallen back and disappeared in the abyss. Every slip fills
the survivors with fear and horror which with ages have become
instinctive, and now you appear and laugh at their fears and tell them
that human flesh is excellent food, and that sterile kisses are the
noblest form of passion. They shudder from you and hate and punish you,
and if you persist they will kill you. Who shall say they are wrong? Who
shall sneer at their instinctive repulsion hallowed by ages of
successful endeavour?"

"Fine rhetoric, I concede," he replied, "but mere rhetoric. I never
heard such a defence of prejudice before. I should not have expected it
from you. You admit you don't share the prejudice; you don't feel the
horror, the instinctive loathing you describe. Why? Because you are
educated, Frank, because you know that the passion Socrates felt was not
a low passion, because you know that Caesar's weakness, let us say, or
the weakness of Michelangelo or of Shakespeare, is not despicable. If
the desire is not a characteristic of the highest humanity, at least it
is consistent with it."[30]

"I cannot admit that," I answered. "First of all, let us leave
Shakespeare out of the question, or I should have to ask you for proofs
of his guilt, and there are none. About the others there is this to be
said, it is not by imitating the vices and weaknesses of great men that
we shall get to their level. And suppose we are fated to climb above
them, then their weaknesses are to be dreaded.

"I have not even tried to put the strongest reasons before you; I should
have thought your own mind would have supplied them; but surely you see
that the historical argument is against you. This vice of yours is
dropping out of life, like cannibalism: it is no longer a practice of
the highest races. It may have seemed natural enough to the Greeks, to
us it is unnatural. Even the best Athenians condemned it; Socrates took
pride in never having yielded to it; all moderns denounce it
disdainfully. You must see that the whole progress of the world, the
current of educated opinion, is against you, that you are now a 'sport,'
a peculiarity, an abnormality, a man with six fingers: not a 'sport'
that is, full of promise for the future, but a 'sport' of the dim
backward and abysm of time, an arrested development."

"You are bitter, Frank, almost rude."

"Forgive me, Oscar, forgive me, please; it is because I want you at long
last to open your eyes, and see things as they are."

"But I thought you were with us, Frank, I thought at least you condemned
the punishment, did not believe in the barbarous penalties."

"I disbelieve in all punishment," I said; "it is by love and not by hate
that men must be redeemed. I believe, too, that the time is already come
when the better law might be put in force, and above all, I condemn
punishment which strikes a man, an artist like you, who has done
beautiful and charming things as if he had done nothing. At least the
good you have accomplished should be set against the evil. It has always
seemed monstrous to me that you should have been punished like a Taylor.
The French were right in their treatment of Verlaine: they condemned the
sin, while forgiving the sinner because of his genius. The rigour in
England is mere puritanic hypocrisy, shortsightedness and racial
self-esteem."

"All I can say, Frank, is, I would not limit individual desire in any
way. What right has society to punish us unless it can prove we have
hurt or injured someone else against his will? Besides, if you limit
passion you impoverish life, you weaken the mainspring of art, and
narrow the realm of beauty."

"All societies," I replied, "and most individuals, too, punish what they
dislike, right or wrong. There are bad smells which do not injure
anyone; yet the manufacturers of them would be indicted for committing a
nuisance. Nor does your plea that by limiting the choice of passion you
impoverish life, appeal to me. On the contrary, I think I could prove
that passion, the desire of the man for the woman and the woman for the
man, has been enormously strengthened in modern times. Christianity has
created, or at least cultivated, modesty, and modesty has sharpened
desire. Christianity has helped to lift woman to an equality with man,
and this modern intellectual development has again intensified passion
out of all knowledge. The woman who is not a slave but an equal, who
gives herself according to her own feeling, is infinitely more desirable
to a man than any submissive serf who is always waiting on his will. And
this movement intensifying passion is every day gaining force.

"We have a far higher love in us than the Greeks, infinitely higher and
more intense than the Romans knew; our sensuality is like a river
banked in with stone parapets, the current flows higher and more
vehemently in the narrower bed."

"You may talk as you please, Frank, but you will never get me to believe
that what I know is good to me, is evil. Suppose I like a food that is
poison to other people, and yet quickens me; how dare they punish me for
eating of it?"

"They would say," I replied, "that they only punish you for inducing
others to eat it."

He broke in: "It is all ignorant prejudice, Frank; the world is slowly
growing more tolerant and one day men will be ashamed of their barbarous
treatment of me, as they are now ashamed of the torturings of the Middle
Ages. The current of opinion is making in our favour and not against
us."

"You don't believe what you say," I cried; "if you really thought
humanity was going your way, you would have been delighted to play
Galileo. Instead of writing a book in prison condemning your companion
who pushed you to discovery and disgrace, you would have written a book
vindicating your actions. 'I am a martyr,' you would have cried, 'and
not a criminal, and everyone who holds the contrary is wrong.'

"You would have said to the jury:

"'In spite of your beliefs, and your cherished dogmas; in spite of your
religion and prejudice and fanatical hatred of me, you are wrong and I
am right: the world does move.'

"But you didn't say that, and you don't think it. If you did you would
be glad you went into the Queensberry trial, glad you were accused, glad
you were imprisoned and punished because all these things must bring
your vindication more quickly; you are sorry for them all, because in
your heart you know you were wrong. This old world in the main is right:
it's you who are wrong."

"Of course everything can be argued, Frank; but I hold to my conviction:
the best minds even now don't condemn us, and the world is becoming more
tolerant.[31] I didn't justify myself in court because I was told I
should be punished lightly if I respected the common prejudices, and
when I tried to speak afterwards the judge would not let me."

"And I believe," I retorted, "that you were hopelessly beaten and could
never have made a fight of it, because you felt the Time-spirit was
against you. How else was a silly, narrow judge able to wave you to
silence? Do you think he could have silenced me? Not all the judges in
Christendom. Let me give you an example. I believe with Voltaire that
when modesty goes out of life it goes into the language as prudery. I am
quite certain that our present habit of not discussing sexual questions
in our books is bound to disappear, and that free and dignified speech
will take the place of our present prurient mealy-mouthedness. I have
long thought it possible, probable even, in the present state of society
in England, where we are still more or less under the heel of the
illiterate and prudish Philistinism of our middle class, that I might be
had up to answer some charge of publishing an indecent book. The current
of the time appears to be against me. In the spacious days of Elizabeth,
in the modish time of the Georges, a freedom of speech was habitual
which to-day is tabooed. Our cases, therefore, are somewhat alike. Do
you think I should dread the issue or allow myself to be silenced by a
judge? I would set forth my defence before the judge and before the jury
with the assurance of victory in me! I should not minimise what I had
written; I should not try to explain it away; I should seek to make it
stronger. I should justify every word, and finally I'd warn both judge
and jury that if they condemned and punished me they would only make my
ultimate triumph more conspicuous. 'All the great men of the past are
with me,' I would cry; 'all the great minds of to-day in other
countries, and some of the best in England; condemn me at your peril:
you will only condemn yourselves. You are spitting against the wind and
the shame will be on your own faces.'

"Do you believe I should be left to suffer? I doubt it even in England
to-day. If I'm right, and I'm sure I'm right, then about me there would
be an invisible cloud of witnesses. You would see a strange movement of
opinion in my favour. The judge would probably lecture me and bind me
over to come up for judgment; but if he sentenced me vindictively then
the Home Secretary[32] would be petitioned and the movement in my favour
would grow, till it swept away opposition. This is the very soul of my
faith. If I did not believe with every fibre in me that this poor stupid
world is honestly groping its way up the altar stairs to God, and not
down, I would not live in it an hour."

"Why do you argue against me, Frank? It is brutal of you."

"To induce you even now to turn and pull yourself out of the mud. You
are forty odd years of age, and the keenest sensations of life are over
for you. Turn back whilst there's time, get to work, write your ballad
and your plays, and not the Alexanders alone, but all the people who
really count, the best of all countries--the salt of the earth--will
give you another chance. Begin to work and you'll be borne up on all
hands: No one sinks to the dregs but by his own weight. If you don't
bear fruit why should men care for you?"

He shrugged his shoulders and turned from me with disdainful
indifference.

"I've done enough for their respect, Frank, and received nothing but
hatred. Every man must dree his own weird. Thank Heaven, life's not
without compensations. I'm sorry I cannot please you," and he added
carelessly, "M----has asked me to go and spend the summer with him at
Gland in Switzerland. _He_ does not mind whether I write or not."

"I assure you," I cried, "it is not my pleasure I am thinking about.
What can it matter to me whether you write or not? It is your own good I
am thinking of."

"Oh, bother good! One's friends like one as one is; the outside public
hate one or scoff at one as they please."

"Well, I hope I shall always be your friend," I replied, "but you will
yet be forced to see, Oscar, that everyone grows tired of holding up an
empty sack."

"Frank, you insult me."

"I don't mean to; I'm sorry; I shall never be so brutally frank again;
but you had to hear the truth for once."

"Then, Frank, you only cared for me in so far as I agreed with you?"

"Oh, that's not fair," I replied. "I have tried with all my strength to
prevent you committing soul-suicide, but if you are resolved on it, I
can't prevent you. I must draw away. I can do no good."

"Then you won't help me for the rest of the winter?"

"Of course I will," I replied, "I shall do all I promised and more; but
there's a limit now, and till now the only limit was my power, not my
will."

It was at Napoule a few days later that an incident occurred which gave
me to a certain extent a new sidelight on Oscar's nature by showing just
what he thought of me. I make no scruple of setting forth his opinion
here in its entirety, though the confession took place after a futile
evening when he had talked to M---- of great houses in England and the
great people he had met there. The talk had evidently impressed M----
as much as it had bored me. I must first say that Oscar's bedroom was
separated from mine by a large sitting-room we had in common. As a rule
I worked in my bedroom in the mornings and he spent a great deal of time
out of doors. On this especial morning, however, I had gone into the
sitting-room early to write some letters. I heard him get up and splash
about in his bath: shortly afterwards he must have gone into the next
room, which was M----'s, for suddenly he began talking to him in a loud
voice from one room to the other, as if he were carrying on a
conversation already begun, through the open door.

"Of course it's absurd of Frank talking of social position or the great
people of English society at all. He never had any social position to be
compared with mine!" (The petulant tone made me smile; but what Oscar
said was true: nor did I ever pretend to have such a position.)

"He had a house in Park Lane and owned _The Saturday Review_ and had a
certain power; but I was the centre of every party, the most honoured
guest everywhere, at Clieveden and Taplow Court and Clumber. The
difference was Frank was proud of meeting Balfour while Balfour was
proud of meeting me: d'ye see?" (I was so interested I was unconscious
of any indiscretion in listening: it made me smile to hear that I was
proud of meeting Arthur Balfour: it would never have occurred to me that
I should be proud of that: still no doubt Oscar was right in a general
way).

"When Frank talks of literature, he amuses me: he pretends to bring new
standards into it; he does: he brings America to judge Oxford and
London, much like bringing Macedon or Boeotia to judge Athens--quite
ridiculous! What can Americans know about English literature?...

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