The Trial of Oscar Wilde

The Trial of Oscar Wilde.

by Anonymous.

PREFACE

"_It is wrong for us during the greater part of the time to handle these questions with timidity and false shame, and to surround them with reticence and mystery. Matters relating to s.e.xual life ought to be studied without the introduction of moral prepossessions or of preconceived ideas.

False shame is as hateful as frivolity. It is a matter of pressing concern to rid ourself of the old prejudice that we "sully our pens" by touching upon facts of this cla.s.s. It is necessary at all costs to put aside our moral, esthetic, or religious personality, to regard facts of this nature merely as natural phenomena, with impartiality and a certain elevation of mind._"

PREFACE

_I blame equally as much those who take it upon themselves to praise man, as those who make it their business to blame him, together with others who think that he should be perpetually amused; and only those can I approve who seek for truth with tear-filled eyes._

PASCAL.

In "_De Profundis_," that harmonious and last expression of the perfect artist, Wilde seems, in a single page to have concentrated in guise of supreme confession, all the pain and pa.s.sion that stirred and sobbed in his soul.

"_This New Life, as through my love of Dante I like sometimes to call it, is of course no new life at all, but simply the continuance, by means of development, and evolution, of my former life. I remember when I was at Oxford saying to one of my friends as we were strolling round Magdalen"s narrow bird-haunted walks one morning in the year before I took my degree, that I wanted to eat of the fruit of all the trees in the garden of the world, and that I was going out into the world with that pa.s.sion in my soul. And so, indeed, I went out, and so I lived. My only mistake was that I confined myself so exclusively to the trees of what seemed to me the sun-lit side of the garden, and shunned the other side for its shadow and its gloom. Failure, disgrace, poverty, sorrow, despair, suffering, tears even, the broken words that come from lips in pain, remorse that makes one walk on thorns, conscience that condemns, self-abas.e.m.e.nt that punishes, the misery that puts ashes on its head, the anguish that chooses sack-cloth for its raiment and into its own drink puts gall:--all these were things of which I was afraid. And as I had determined to know nothing of them, I was forced to taste each of them in turn, to feed on them, to have for a season, indeed no other food at all._"

Further on, he tells us that his dominant desire was to seek refuge in the deepest shade of the garden, for his mouth was full of the bitterness of the dead-sea fruit that he had tasted, adding that this tomb-like aroma was the befitting and necessary outcome of his preceding life of error.

We are inclined to think he deceived himself.

The day wherein he was at last compelled to face the horror of his tragical destiny his soul was tried beyond endurance. He strode deliberately, as he himself a.s.sures us, towards the gloomiest nook of the garden, inwardly trembling perhaps, but proud notwithstanding ... hoping against hope that the sun"s rays would seek him out even there ... or in other words, that he would not cease to live that _Bios theoretikos_, which he held to be the greatest ideal.

"_From the high tower of Thought we can look out at the world. Calm, and self-centred, and complete, the aesthetic critic contemplates life, and no arrow drawn at a venture can pierce between the joints of his harness._"

We all know what arrows struck him, arrows that he himself had sharpened, and that Society had not forgotten to tip with poison.

"Neither his own heedlessness nor the envious and hypocritical anger of his enemies, nor the sn.o.bbish cruelty of social reprobation were the true cause of his misfortunes. It was he himself who, after a time of horrible anguish, consented to his punishment, with a sort of supercilious disdain for the weakness of human will, and out of a certain regard and unhealthy curiosity for the sportfulness of fate. Here was a voluptuary seeking for torture and desiring pain after having wallowed in every sensual pleasure.... Could such conduct have been due to aught else but sheer madness?"

The true debauchee has no such object. He seeks only for pleasure and discounts beforehand the conditions that Life dictates for the same; the conditions laid down containing no guarantee that the pleasure will be actually grasped except only in promise and antic.i.p.ation. Later, too proud to acknowledge his cruel disappointment, he will gravely a.s.sure us that the bitterness left in the bottom of the goblet whose wine he has quaffed, has indeed the sweet taste that he sought after. Certain minds are satisfied with the fantasmagoria of their intelligence, whereas the voluptuary finds happiness only in the pleasure of realisation. In his heart he concocts for himself a prodigious mixture of sorrow and of joy, of suffering and of ecstacy, but the great world, wotting naught of this secret alchemy and judging only according to the facts which lie upon the surface, slices down to the same level, with the same stupid knife, the strange, beautiful flower, as well as the evil weed that grew apace.

Remy de Gourmont said of the famous author, Paul Adam, that he was "a magnificent spectacle." Wilde may be p.r.o.nounced a painful problem. He seems to escape literary criticism in order to fall under the keen scalping knife of the a.n.a.lytical moralist, by the paradoxical fact of his apparently imperious purpose to hew out and fashion forth his life as a work of art.

"Save here and there, in _Intentions_ and in his poems, the _Poem of Reading Gaol_, nothing of his soul has he thrown into his books; he seemed to desire, one can almost postulate as a certainty, the stupendous tragedy that blasted his life. From the abyss where his flesh groaned in misery, his conscience hovered above him contemplating his woeful state whilst he thus became the spectator of his own death-throes."[1]

That is the reason why he stirs us so deeply.

Those who might be tempted to search in his work for an echo however feeble, of a new message to mankind, will be grievously disappointed. The technical cleverness of Wilde is undeniable, but the magnificent dress in which he has clothed it appears to us to have been borrowed. He has brought us neither remedy nor poison; he leads us nowhere, but at the same time we are conscious that he has been everywhere. No companion of ours is he, but all the companions we hold dear he has known. True he sat at the feet of the wise men of Greece in the Gardens of Academus, but the eurythmy of their gests fascinated him more than the soberness of their doctrines. Dante he followed in all his subterranean travels and peregrinations, but all that he has to relate to us after his frightful journeyings is merely an ecstatic description of the highly-wrought scenery that he had witnessed.

"I packed all my genius, said he, into my life, I have put only my talent into my works." Unfaithful to the principle which he learnedly deduced in _Intentions_, viz: that the undivided soul of a writer should incorporate itself in his work, even as Shakespeare pushing aside the "_impulses that stirred so strongly within him that he had, as it were perforce, to suffer them to realize their energy, not on the lower plane of actual life, where they would have been trammelled and constrained and so made imperfect, but on that of the imaginative plane of art_," ... he came to confound the intensity of feeling with the calmness of beauty. Possessed of a mind of rare culture, he nevertheless only evoked, when he touched Art, harmonious vibrations perhaps, but vibrations which others, after all said and done, had already created before him. He succeeded in producing nothing more than a splendid and incomparable echo. The most that can be said is that the music he had in his soul he kept there, living all the time a crowded, ostentatious life, and distinguishing himself as a superlative conversationalist. Be this as it may, posterity cannot judge us according to those possibilities of our nature which were never developed. However numerous may be the testimonies in our favour, she cannot p.r.o.nounce excepting on the works, or at least, the materials left by the workman. It is this which renders so precarious the actor"s fleeting glory, as it likewise dissipates the golden halo that hovers over the brilliant Society _causeur_. Nothing remains of Mallarme excepting a few cunningly wrought verses, inferior to the clearer and more profound poems of his great master, Baudelaire. Of Wilde nothing will remain beyond his written works which are vastly inferior to his brilliant epigrammatic conversation.

In our days, the master of repartee and the after-dinner speaker is fore-doomed to forgetfulness, for he always stands alone, and to gain applause has to talk down to and flatter lower-cla.s.s audiences. No writer of blood-curdling melodramas, no weaver of newspaper novels is obliged to lower his talent so much as the professional wit. If the genius of Mallarme was obscured by the flatterers that surrounded him, how much more was Wilde"s talent overclouded by the would-be witty, shoddy-elegant, and cheaply-poetical society hangers-on, who covered him with incense? One of his devoted literary courtezans, who has written a life of Wilde, which is nothing more than a rhapsodidal panegyric of his intimacy with the poet, tells us that the first attempts of the sparkling conversationalist were not at all successful in Paris drawing-rooms. In the house of Victor Hugo seeing he had to let the veteran sleep out his nap whilst others among the guests slumbered also, he made up his mind to astonish them. He succeeded, but at what a cost! Although he was a verse writer, most sincerely devoted to poetry and art, and one of the most emotional and sensitive and tender-hearted amongst modern wielders of the pen he succeeded only in gaining a reputation for artificiality.

We all know his studied paradoxes, his five or six continually repeated tales, but we are tempted to forget the charming dreamer who was full of tenderness for everything in nature.

"It is true that Mallarme has not written much, but all he has done is valuable. Some of his verses are most beautiful whilst Wilde seemed never to finish anything. The works of the English aesthete are very interesting, because they characterize his epoch; his pages are useful from a doc.u.mentary point of view, but are not extraordinary from a literary standpoint. In the _d.u.c.h.ess of Padua_, he imitates Hugo and Sardou; the _Picture of Dorian Grey_ was inspired by Huysmans; _Intentions_ is a _vade-mec.u.m_ of symbolism, and all the ideas contained therein are to be found in Mallarme and Villiers de l"Isle-Adam. As for Wilde"s poetry, it closely follows the lines laid down by Swinburne. His most original composition is _Poems in Prose_. They give a correct idea of his home-chat, but not when he was at his best; that no doubt, is because the art of talking must always be inferior to any form of literary composition. Thoughts properly set forth in print after due correction must always be more charming than a finely sketched idea hurriedly enunciated when conversing with a few disciples. In ordinary table-talk we meet nothing more than ghosts of new-born ideas fore-doomed to perish. The jokes of a wit seldom survive the speaker. When we quote the epigrams of Wilde, it is as if we were exhibiting in a gla.s.s case, a collection of beautiful b.u.t.terflies, whose wings have lost the brilliancy of their once gaudy colours. Lively talk pleases, because of the man who utters it, and we are impressed also by the gestures which accompany his frothy discourse. What remains of the sprightly quips and anecdotes of such celebrated _hommes d"esprit_, as Scholl, Becque, Barbey d"Aurevilly! Some stories of the XVIIIth. century have been transmitted to us by Chamfort, but only because he carefully remodelled them by the aid of his clever pen."[2]

These opinions of Rebell questionable though they may be, show us plainly something of the charm and the weakness of Wilde.

A perfect artist desiring to leave his mark on the temple-columns of Fame must not live among his fellow men ambitious to taste the bitterness and the sweetness alike of every caress of existence, but submit himself pitilessly to the thraldom of the writing desk. Some authors may produce masterpieces amidst the busy throng; but there are others who lose all power of creation unless they shut themselves up for a time and live severely by rote. When Wilde was dragging out a wretched life in the sordid room of a cheap, furnished hotel, where he eventually died, did he ever remember while reading Balzac by the flickering light of his one candle that the great master of French literature often sought solitude and wrestled for eighteen hours at a stretch with the demon of severe toil? Did he ever repeat the doleful wail of the Author of _La Comedie Humaine_ who was sometimes heard to exclaim in sad tones: "_I ought not to have done that.... I ought to have put black on white, black on white...._"

Few experiments are really necessary for the literary creator who seeks to a.n.a.lyse the stuff of which Life is composed in order to dissolve for us all its elements and demonstrate its ever-present underlying essence. The romance writer must stand away from the crowd, if only for a time, and reflect deeply upon what he has seen and heard. The power of thought, to be free and fruitful, cannot flourish without the strength of ascetism. We must yield to that law which decrees that action may not be the twin-sister of dreams. Those who live a life of pleasure can only give us colourless falsehoods when they try to depict sincerity of feeling. The confessions of sensualists resemble volcanic ashes.

Wilde himself gives us the key to his errors and his weakness:

"_Human life is the one thing worth investigating. Compared to it there is nothing else of any value. It is true that as one watches life in its curious crucible of pain and pleasure, one cannot wear over one"s face a mask of gla.s.s nor keep the sulphurous fumes from troubling the brain and making the imagination turbid with monstrous fancies and misshappen dreams. There are poisons so subtle that to know their properties one has to sicken of them. There are maladies so strange that one has to pa.s.s through them if one seeks to understand their nature. And yet what a great reward one receives! How wonderful the whole world becomes to one! To note the curious, hard logic of pa.s.sion and the emotional, coloured life of the intellect--to observe where they meet, and where they separate, at what point they are in unison and at what point they are in discord--there is a delight in that! What matter what the cost is? One can never pay too high a price for any sensation._"[3]

The brain becomes dulled at this sport, which it would be illusory to call a study. He who uses his intellect to serve only his sensuality can produce nothing elaborate but what is artificial. Such is the dilemma of Wilde, whose collections of writings is like a painted stage-scene, mere garish canvas, behind which there is never anything substantial.

"When I first saw Wilde, he had not yet been seared by the brand of general reprobation. Often I changed my opinion of him, but at first I felt the enthusiasm which young literary aspirants always feel for those who have made their mark; then the law-suit took place, followed by the dramatic thunderclap of a criminal prosecution; and my soul revolted as if some great iniquity had been consummated. Later on, it seemed to me that the man of fashion had swallowed up the literary G.o.d, his baggage seemed light, and his brilliant b.u.t.terfly-life had perhaps been of more importance to him than the small pile of volumes bearing his name.

"To-day, I seem clearly to understand what sort of a man he was--extraordinary beyond a doubt; but never has artificial sentiment been so cunningly mingled with seemingly natural simplicity and pulsating pleasure in one and the same man."[4]

"_I must say to myself that I ruined myself and that n.o.body great or small can be ruined except by his own hand. I am quite ready to say so. I am trying to say so, though they may not think it at the present moment. This pitiless indictment I bring without pity against myself. Terrible as was what the world did to me, what I did to myself was far more terrible still._

_I was a man who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age. I had realised this for myself at the very dawn of my manhood, and had forced my age to realise it afterwards. Few men hold such a position in their own lifetime, and have it so acknowledged. It is usually discerned, if discerned at all, by the historian, or the critic, long after both the man and his age have pa.s.sed away. With me it was different.

I felt it myself, and made others feel it. Byron was a symbolic figure, but his relations were the pa.s.sion of his age and its weariness of pa.s.sion. Mine were to something more n.o.ble, more permanent, of more vital issue, of larger scope._

_The G.o.ds had given me almost everything. But I let myself be lured into long spells of senseless and sensual ease. I amused myself with being a_ flaneur, _a dandy, a man of fashion. I surrounded myself with the smaller natures and the meaner minds. I became the spendthrift of my own genius, and to waste an eternal youth gave me a curious joy. Tired of being on the heights, I deliberately went to the depths in the search for new sensation. What the paradox was to me in the sphere of thought, perversity became to me in the sphere of pa.s.sion. Desire, at the end, was a malady, or a madness, or both. I grew careless of the lives of others. I took pleasure where it pleased me, and pa.s.sed on. I forgot that every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character, and that therefore what one has done in the secret chamber one has some day to cry aloud on the housetop. I ceased to be lord over myself. I was no longer the captain of my soul, and did not know it. I allowed pleasure to dominate me. I ended in horrible disgrace. There is only one thing for me now, absolute humility._"[5]

This confession of irreparable defeat while being exceedingly dolorous, is unfortunately, rendered still further painful by other pages which contradict it, and almost tempt us to doubt its sincerity, in spite of the fact that Wilde was always sincere for those who knew how to read between the lines and enter into his spirit.

"There is no doubt that he was truly a most extraordinary man, endowed with striking originality, but a man who at the same time took more than uncommon care to hide his gifts under a cloak bought in some conventional bazaar which made a point of keeping abreast with the fashions of the day."[6]

What brought about his downfall was the mad idea that possessed him of the possibility of employing in the service of n.o.ble aspirations all, without exception, all the pa.s.sions that moved and agitated his human soul.

Everyone of us is, no doubt, peopled at times with mysterious spirits, ephemeral apparitions, which like the wild beasts that Christ long ago cast out of the Gadarene swine, tear themselves to pieces in internecine warfare. It is with such soldiers as these, who very seldom obey the superior orders of the higher intellect, or desert and rebel against us at the opportune moment, that we are called upon to withstand the onslaught of a thousand enemies. Wilde made the grand mistake of trying to understand them all. He believed that they were capable of adapting themselves to that powerful instinct which animated him, and which directed him, wherever he wandered or wherever he went, towards the spirit of Beauty. This error lasted long enough perhaps to convince him of the power that was born in him, but unfortunately, the revelation of his error came too late.

My object in this preface is not to write the life of Wilde.

I have only to do with the Writer, for the Man is yet too much alive and his wounds have scarcely ceased bleeding! In the presence of still living sorrow, crimson-tinged, respect commands us to stand bareheaded; before the scarred face of woe the voice is dumb; we should, above all, endeavour rather to ignore the accidents that thrust themselves into a life and try to discover the great, calm soul, beautiful in its melancholy, which though pained and suffering, has never ceased to be n.o.bly inspired. To prove that this was true in the case of Wilde, we may have recourse to some of those who knew him well and who form a great "cloud of witnesses,"

testifying to the veracity of the things we have laid down.

Mr. Arthur Symons, a keen and large-minded critic, a friend of Wilde"s, and an elegant and forcible writer to boot, in his recent volume: "_Studies in Prose and Verse_," characterizes Wilde as a "poet of att.i.tudes," and we cannot do better than quote a few lines from the fine article which he consecrated to our author:

"_When the "Ballad of Reading Gaol" was published, he said, it seemed to some people that such a return to, or so startling a first acquaintance with, real things, was precisely what was most required to bring into relation, both with life and art an extraordinary talent so little in relation with matters of common experience, so fantastically alone in a region of intellectual abstractions. In this poem, where a style formed on other lines seems startled at finding itself used for such new purposes, we see a great spectacular intellect, to which, at last, pity and terror have come in their own person, and no longer as puppets in a play. In its sight, human life has always been something acted on the stage; a comedy in which it is the wise man"s part to sit aside and laugh, but in which he may also disdainfully take part, as in a carnival, under any mask. The unbia.s.sed, scornful intellect, to which humanity has never been a burden, comes now to be unable to sit aside and laugh, and it has worn and looked behind so many masks that there is nothing left desirable in illusion.

Having seen, as the artist sees, further than morality, but with so partial an eyesight as to have overlooked it on the way, it has come at length to discover morality in the only way left possible, for itself.

And, like most of those who, having "thought themselves weary," have made the adventure of putting thought into action, it has had to discover it sorrowfully, at its own incalculable expense. And now, having become so newly acquainted with what is pitiful, and what seems most unjust, in the arrangement of human affairs, it has gone, not unnaturally, to an extreme, and taken, on the one hand, humanitarianism, on the other realism, at more than their just valuation, in matters of art. It is that odd instinct of the intellect, the necessity of carrying things to their furthest point of development, to be more logical than either life or art, two very wayward and illogical things, in which conclusions do not always follow from premises._

_His intellect was dramatic, and the whole man was not so much a personality as an att.i.tude...._

_And it was precisely in his att.i.tudes that he was most sincere. They represented his intentions; they stood for the better, unrealised part of himself. Thus his att.i.tude, towards life and towards art, was untouched by his conduct; his perfectly just and essentially dignified a.s.sertion of the artist"s place in the world of thought and the place of beauty in the material world being in nowise invalidated by his own failure to create pure beauty or to become a quite honest artist. A talent so vividly at work as to be almost genius was incessantly urging him into action, mental action._