"If you have Meredith," he replied, "you don"t need many others. A dozen would do, or fewer if you find a dozen too many."
"I don"t think I shall meet with any difficulty," I replied, "but I will let you know."
"You will find it harder than you think," he concluded, "but if you get one or two great names the rest may follow. In any case one or two good names will make it easier for you."
Naturally I thanked him for his kindness and went away absolutely content. I had never set myself a task which seemed simpler. Meredith could not be more merciless than a Royal Commission. I returned to my office in _The Sat.u.r.day Review_ and got the Royal Commission report on this sentence of two years" imprisonment with hard labour. The Commission recommended that it should be wiped off the Statute Book as too severe. I drafted a little pet.i.tion as colourless as possible:
"In view of the fact that the punishment of two years" imprisonment with hard labour has been condemned by a Royal Commission as too severe, and inasmuch as Mr. Wilde has been distinguished by his work in letters and is now, we hear, suffering in health, we, your pet.i.tioners, pray--and so forth and so on."
I got this printed, and then sat down to write to Meredith asking when I could see him on the matter. I wanted his signature first to be printed underneath the pet.i.tion, and then issue it. To my astonishment Meredith did not answer at once, and when I pressed him and set forth the facts he wrote to me that he could not do what I wished. I wrote again, begging him to let me see him on the matter. For the first time in my life he refused to see me: he wrote to me to say that nothing I could urge would move him, and it would therefore only be painful to both of us to find ourselves in conflict.
Nothing ever surprised me more than this att.i.tude of Meredith"s. I knew his poetry pretty well, and knew how severe he was on every sensual weakness perhaps because it was his own pitfall. I knew too what a fighter he was at heart and how he loved the virile virtues; but I thought I knew the man, knew his tender kindliness of heart, the founts of pity in him, and I felt certain I could count on him for any office of human charity or generosity. But no, he was impenetrable, hard. He told me long afterwards that he had rather a low opinion of Wilde"s capacities, instinctive, deep-rooted contempt, too, for the showman in him, and an absolute abhorrence of his vice.
"That vile, sensual self-indulgence puts back the hands of the clock,"
he said, "and should not be forgiven."
For the life of me I could never forgive Meredith; never afterwards was he of any importance to me. He had always been to me a standard bearer in the eternal conflict, a leader in the Liberation War of Humanity, and here I found him pitiless to another who had been wounded on the same side in the great struggle: it seemed to me appalling. True, Wilde had not been wounded in fighting for us; true, he had fallen out and come to grief, as a drunkard might. But after all he had been fighting on the right side: had been a quickening intellectual influence: it was dreadful to pa.s.s him on the wayside and allow him callously to bleed to death. It was revoltingly cruel! The foremost Englishman of his time unable even to understand Christ"s example, much less reach his height!
This refusal of Meredith"s not only hurt me, but almost destroyed my hope, though it did not alter my purpose. I wanted a figurehead for my pet.i.tion, and the figurehead I had chosen I could not get. I began to wonder and doubt. I next approached a very different man, the late Professor Churton Collins, a great friend of mine, who, in spite of an almost pedantic rigour of mind and character, had in him at bottom a curious spring of sympathy--a little pool of pure love for the poets and writers whom he admired. I got him to dinner and asked him to sign the pet.i.tion; he refused, but on grounds other than those taken by Meredith.
"Of course Wilde ought to get out," he said, "the sentence was a savage one and showed bitter prejudice; but I have children, and my own way to make in the world, and if I did this I should be tarred with the Wilde brush. I cannot afford to do it. If he were really a great man I hope I should do it, but I don"t agree with your estimate of him. I cannot think I am called upon to bell the British cat in his defence: it has many claws and all sharp."
As soon as he saw the position was unworthy of him, he shifted to new ground.
"If you were justified in coming to me, I should do it; but I am no one; why don"t you go to Meredith, Swinburne or Hardy?"
I had to give up the Professor, as well as the poet. I knocked in turn at a great many doors, but all in vain. No one wished to take the odium on himself. One man, since become celebrated, said he had no position, his name was not good enough for the purpose. Others left my letters unanswered. Yet another sent a bare acknowledgment saying how sorry he was, but that public opinion was against Mr. Wilde; with one accord they all made excuses....
One day Professor Tyrrell of Trinity College, Dublin, happened to be in my office, while I was setting forth the difference between men of letters in France and England as exemplified by this conduct. In France among authors there is a recognised "_esprit de corps_," which constrains them to hold together. For instance when Zola was threatened with prosecution for "Nana," a dozen men like Cherbuliez, Feuillet, Dumas _fils_, who hated his work and regarded it as sensational, tawdry, immoral even, took up the cudgels for him at once; declared that the police were not judges of art, and should not interfere with a serious workman. All these Frenchmen, though they disliked Zola"s work, and believed that his popularity was won by a low appeal, still admitted that he was a force in letters, and stood by him resolutely in spite of their own prepossessions and prejudices. But in England the feeling is altogether more selfish. Everyone consults his own sordid self-interest and is rather glad to see a social favourite come to grief: not a hand is stretched out to help him. Suddenly, Tyrrell broke in upon my exposition:
"I don"t know whether my name is of any good to you," he said, "but I agree with all you have said, and my name might be cla.s.sed with that of Churton Collins, though, of course, I"ve no right to speak for literature," and without more ado he signed the pet.i.tion, adding, "Regius Professor of Greek at Trinity College, Dublin."
"When you next see Oscar," he continued, "please tell him that my wife and I asked after him. We both hold him in grateful memory as a most brilliant talker and writer, and a charming fellow to boot. Confusion take all their English Puritanism."
Merely living in Ireland tends to make an Englishman more humane; but one name was not enough, and Tyrrell"s was the only one I could get. In despair, and knowing that George Wyndham had had a great liking for Oscar, and admiration for his high talent, I asked him to lunch at the Savoy; laid the matter before him, and begged him to give me his name.
He refused, and in face of my astonishment he excused himself by saying that, as soon as the rumour had reached him of Oscar"s intimacy with Bosie Douglas, he had asked Oscar whether there was any truth in the scandalous report.
"You see," he went on, "Bosie is by way of being a relation of mine, and so I had the right to ask. Oscar gave me his word of honour that there was nothing but friendship between them. He lied to me, and that I can never forgive."
A politician unable to forgive a lie--surely one can hear the mocking laughter of the G.o.ds! I could say nothing to such paltry affected nonsense. Politician-like Wyndham showed me how the wind of popular feeling blew, and I recognised that my efforts were in vain.
There is no fellow-feeling among English men of letters; in fact they hold together less than any other cla.s.s and, by himself, none of them wished to help a wounded member of the flock. I had to tell Sir Ruggles Brise that I had failed.
I have been informed since that if I had begun by asking Thomas Hardy, I might have succeeded. I knew Hardy; but never cared greatly for his talent. I daresay if I had had nothing else to do I might have succeeded in some half degree. But all these two years I was extremely busy and anxious; the storm clouds in South Africa were growing steadily darker and my att.i.tude to South African affairs was exceedingly unpopular in London. It seemed to me vitally important to prevent England from making war on the Boers. I had to abandon the attempt to get Oscar"s sentence shortened, and comfort myself with Sir Ruggles Brise"s a.s.surance that he would be treated with the greatest possible consideration.
Still, my advocacy had had a good effect.
Oscar himself has told us what the kindness shown to him in the last six months of his prison life really did for him. He writes in _De Profundis_ that for the first part of his sentence he could only wring his hands in impotent despair and cry, "What an ending, what an appalling ending!" But when the new spirit of kindness came to him, he could say with sincerity: "What a beginning, what a wonderful beginning!" He sums it all up in these words:
"Had I been released after eighteen months, as I hoped to be, I would have left my prison loathing it and every official in it with a bitterness of hatred that would have poisoned my life. I have had six months more of imprisonment, but humanity has been in the prison with us all the time, and now when I go out I shall always remember great kindnesses that I have received here from almost everybody, and on the day of my release I shall give many thanks to many people, and ask to be remembered by them in turn."
This is the man whom Mr. Justice Wills addressed as insensible to any high appeal.
Some time pa.s.sed before I visited Oscar again. The change in him was extraordinary. He was light-hearted, gay, and looked better than I had ever seen him: clearly the austerity of prison life suited him. He met me with a jest:
"It is you, Frank!" he cried as if astonished, "always original! You come back to prison of your own free-will!"
He declared that the new governor--Major Nelson[3] was his name--had been as kind as possible to him. He had not had a punishment for months, and "Oh, Frank, the joy of reading when you like and writing as you please--the delight of living again!" He was so infinitely improved that his talk delighted me.
"What books have you?" I asked.
"I thought I should like the "Oedipus Rex,"" he replied gravely; "but I could not read it. It all seemed unreal to me. Then I thought of St.
Augustine, but he was worse still. The fathers of the Church were still further away from me; they all found it so easy to repent and change their lives: it does not seem to me easy. At last I got hold of Dante.
Dante was what I wanted. I read the "Purgatorio" all through, forced myself to read it in Italian to get the full savour and significance of it. Dante, too, had been in the depths and drunk the bitter lees of despair. I shall want a little library when I come out, a library of a score of books. I wonder if you will help me to get it. I want Flaubert, Stevenson, Baudelaire, Maeterlinck, Dumas _pere_, Keats, Marlowe, Chatterton, Anatole France, Theophile Gautier, Dante, Goethe, Meredith"s poems, and his "Egoist," the Song of Solomon, too, Job, and, of course, the Gospels."
"I shall be delighted to get them for you," I said, "if you will send me the list. By the by, I hear that you have been reconciled to your wife; is that true? I should be glad to know it"s true."
"I hope it will be all right," he said gravely, "she is very good and kind. I suppose you have heard," he went on, "that my mother died since I came here, and that leaves a great gap in my life.... I always had the greatest admiration and love for my mother. She was a great woman, Frank, a perfect idealist. My father got into trouble once in Dublin, perhaps you have heard about it?"
"Oh, yes," I said, "I have read the case." (It is narrated in the first chapter of this book.)
"Well, Frank, she stood up in court and bore witness for him with perfect serenity, with perfect trust and without a shadow of common womanly jealousy. She could not believe that the man she loved could be unworthy, and her conviction was so complete that it communicated itself to the jury: her trust was so n.o.ble that they became infected by it, and brought him in guiltless.[4] Extraordinary, was it not? She was quite sure too of the verdict. It is only n.o.ble souls who have that a.s.surance and serenity....
[Ill.u.s.tration: "Speranza": Lady Wilde as a Young Woman]
"When my father was dying it was the same thing. I always see her sitting there by his bedside with a sort of dark veil over her head: quite silent, quite calm. Nothing ever troubled her optimism. She believed that only good can happen to us. When death came to the man she loved, she accepted it with the same serenity and when my sister died she bore it in the same high way. My sister was a wonderful creature, so gay and high-spirited, "embodied sunshine," I used to call her.
"When we lost her, my mother simply took it that it was best for the child. Women have infinitely more courage than men, don"t you think? I have never known anyone with such perfect faith as my mother. She was one of the great figures of the world. What she must have suffered over my sentence I don"t dare to think: I"m sure she endured agonies. She had great hopes of me. When she was told that she was going to die, and that she could not see me, for I was not allowed to go to her,[5] she said, "May the prison help him," and turned her face to the wall.
"She felt about the prison as you do, Frank, and really I think you are both right; it has helped me. There are things I see now that I never saw before. I see what pity means. I thought a work of art should be beautiful and joyous. But now I see that that ideal is insufficient, even shallow; a work of art must be founded on pity; a book or poem which has no pity in it, had better not be written....
"I shall be very lonely when I come out, and I can"t stand loneliness and solitude; it is intolerable to me, hateful, I have had too much of it....
"You see, Frank, I am breaking with the past altogether. I am going to write the history of it. I am going to tell how I was tempted and fell, how I was pushed by the man I loved into that dreadful quarrel of his, driven forward to the fight with his father and then left to suffer alone....
"That is the story I am now going to tell. That is the book[6] of pity and of love which I am writing now--a terrible book....
"I wonder would you publish it, Frank? I should like it to appear in _The Sat.u.r.day_."
"I"d be delighted to publish anything of yours," I replied, "and happier still to publish something to show that you have at length chosen the better part and are beginning a new life. I"d pay you, too, whatever the work turns out to be worth to me; in any case much more than I pay Bernard Shaw or anyone else." I said this to encourage him.
"I"m sure of that," he answered. "I"ll send you the book as soon as I"ve finished it. I think you"ll like it"--and there for the moment the matter ended.
At length I felt sure that all would be well with him. How could I help feeling sure? His mind was richer and stronger than it had ever been; and he had broken with all the dark past. I was overjoyed to believe that he would yet do greater things than he had ever done, and this belief and determination were in him too, as anyone can see on reading what he wrote at this time in prison:
"There is before me so much to do that I would regard it as a terrible tragedy if I died before I was allowed to complete at any rate a little of it. I see new developments in art and life, each one of which is a fresh mode of perfection. I long to live so that I can explore what is no less than a new world to me. Do you want to know what this new world is? I think you can guess what it is. It is the world in which I have been living. Sorrow, then, and all that it teaches one, is my new world....
"I used to live entirely for pleasure. I shunned suffering and sorrow of every kind. I hated both...."