Oscar Wilde Read online

  What, at least, is this mean secret that Wilde, experienced as he nevertheless was, had to purchase at so monstrous a price?—From page to page, in his De Profundis, he repeats it: “That something hidden away in my nature, like a treasure in a field, is humility.” That was not perhaps what the essayist was seeking; but what is to be done about it? For the present, he must cling to it since that is all he has. “There is only one thing for me now, absolute humility.” And if at first he calls his state a horrible disgrace, shortly afterwards, regaining his self-possession, or pretending to regain his self-possession, he writes: “It is the last thing left in me, and the best: the ultimate discovery at which I have arrived, the starting-point for a fresh development …” When, in the case of an artist, for external or inner reasons, the creative spring runs dry, the artist settles down, renounces and makes of his weariness a wisdom which he calls: having found the Truth. For Tolstoi, as for Wilde, this “truth” is approximately the same—and how could it be otherwise?

  “The starting-point for a fresh development!”… My mind is made up: I shall mix my voice as little as possible with Wilde’s, that is, shall, as often as possible, content myself with quoting him; the sentences which I shall extract from the book will illuminate it better than anything I might say about it.

  “I hope to be able to recreate my creative faculty,” writes Wilde desperately. While waiting, he covers over the only retreat left to him with all the sophistries that he can muster: “I have got to make everything that has happened to me good for me. The plank bed, the loathsome food, the hard ropes shredded into oakum till one’s finger-tips grow dull with pain, the menial offices with which each day begins and finishes, the harsh orders that routine seems to necessitate, the dreadful dress that makes sorrow grotesque to look at, the silence, the solitude, the shame—each and all of these things I have to transform into a spiritual experience. There is not a single degradation of the body which I must not try and make into a spiritualising of the soul.” And again: “Whatever is realised is right.” And finally: “While for the first year of my imprisonment I did nothing else, and can remember nothing else, but wring my hands in impotent despair, and say, ‘What an ending, what an appalling ending!’ now I try to say to myself, and sometimes when I am not torturing myself do really and sincerely say, ‘What a beginning, what a wonderful beginning!’ It may really be so. It may become so” Then without quite realizing, or admitting to himself, that he is going cruelly counter to that “absolute humility” which he is extolling: “In the very fact that people will recognize me wherever I go and know all about my life, as far as its follies go, I can discern something good for me. It will force on me the necessity of again asserting myself as an artist, and as soon as I possibly can. If I can produce only one beautiful work of art I shall be able to rob malice of its venom, and cowardice of its sneer, and to pluck out the tongue of scorn by the roots.”

  “I feel,” he goes on to say, “that not to be ashamed of having been punished is one of the first points I must attain to, for the sake of my own imperfection, and because I am so imperfect.

  “Then I must learn to be happy. Once I knew it, or thought I knew it, by instinct … Now I am approaching life from a completely new standpoint, and even to conceive happiness is often extremely difficult for me.” Then elsewhere: “And if I am not ashamed of my punishment, as I hope not to be, I shall be able to think, and walk, and live with freedom.”

  For those who knew Wilde before and then after prison, such words remain doubtfully painful; for his artistic silence was not the pious silence of a Racine, and humility was only a pompous name that he gave to his impotence. “Many men on their release carry their prison about with them into the air, and hide it as a secret disgrace in their hearts, and at length, like poor poisoned things, creep into some hole and die.”—“Like a poisoned thing,” yes, that is quite how I here see the tremendous Wilde; no longer the brilliant conqueror whom society, about to sacrifice him, cajoled, alas, but mottled, deformed, tired; wandering like Peter Schlemihl in quest of his shadow, heavy and lamentable, and saying to me with an attempt at laughter which sounded like a sob: “They have taken away my soul; I don’t know what they’ve done with it.”

  From the depth of his “humility,” the bursts of his former pride are even more dismal: “I am not prepared,” he announces, “to sit in the grotesque pillory they put me into, for all time; for the simple reason that I inherited from my father and mother a name of high distinction in literature and art, and I can not for eternity allow that name to be degraded.”—“She and my father,” he announces again, “had bequeathed me a name they had made noble and honoured … I had disgraced that name eternally. I had made it a low byword among low people. I had dragged it through the very mire … What I suffered then, and still suffer, is not for pen to write.” Elsewhere, he is preoccupied with acting “as a gentleman by bowing my head and accepting everything.”

  Wilde, still strangely lucid, when, however, he did not attempt to give himself illusions about the failure of his pride, was not mistaken about the nature of his fault: it was out of a deficiency of individualism, not out of an excess of individualism, that he had succumbed. “People used to say of me that I was too individualistic … Indeed, my ruin came not from too great individualism of life, but from too little. The one disgraceful, unpardonable, and to all time contemptible action of my life was to allow myself to appeal to society for help and protection.” We all know the story: it was he who brought action against the most illustrious of his defamers and entered as accuser into “that chamber of men’s justice” … False boldness, ignorance, folly! I imagine a Byron thus appealing to the society which he was braving … “Of course,” he continues, “once I had put into motion the forces of society, society turned on me and said, ‘Have you been living all this time in defiance of my laws, and do you now appeal to these laws for protection? You should have those laws exercised to the full. You shall abide by what you have appealed to’ The result is that I am in gaol.”

  Yes, a deficiency of individualism, and that is why what he blushes at is not what society accuses him of, his “sins,” but at having allowed himself to be caught in such an unfavorable position; “I don’t regret for a single moment having lived for pleasure. I did it to the full, as one should do everything that one does” Yes, a deficiency of individualism, hence this exasperation. “Everything about my tragedy has been hideous, mean, repellant, lacking in style.” Or: “Certainly no man ever fell so ignobly, and by such ignoble instruments, as I did.” Or again: “Indeed my entire tragedy seems to me grotesque and nothing else.”—Certainly it was not for him, it is for us to perceive its grandeur. The prison, which yesterday was his shame, magnifies him and today gives his tragic figure an importance which could not have been loaned for long to this playboy of genius by the footlights of the London drawing-rooms and stages where he paraded.

  From the depth of his dungeon, he is astounded as he recalls that departed splendor, that glory which he hardly exaggerates; he is astounded as he now recounts it to himself. “The gods had given me almost everything.” he cries.

  Few men held such a position in their own lifetime, and have it so acknowledged” His tongue seems to play over the slight taste of honey that remains on his lips. “I used to live entirely for pleasurem,” he writes, and elsewhere: “I filled my life to the very brim with pleasure, as one might fill a cup to the very brim with wine.”

  But through the excess of pleasure, I admire the secret advance toward a more significant destiny. As he becomes less wilful, he becomes more representative. This fatality was leading him on as if there were something exemplary about it; he sometimes abandoned himself to it without making any further effort to misinterpret it: “To have continued the same life would have been wrong because it would have been limiting. I had to pass on.” This latent fatality, if I may say so, makes the beauty, the unity of his life, and intimately illuminates his work. Yes, the work of him for whom t
o “conceal the artist” was “art’s aim” becomes for us, as it were, confidential. “Of course all this is foreshadowed and prefigured in my books,” and he cites them one after the other in succession, and finally: “the prose poem of the man who from the bronze of the image of the ‘Pleasure that liveth for a moment’ has to make the image of the ‘Sorrow that abideth forever’ …” Alas! alas! poor Wilde, that was not what your story said; quite the contrary, the artist of whom you speak smashed the statue of Grief in order to make of it that of Joy; and your wilful error remains more eloquent than an avowal.

  That is why I can not help feeling a certain irritation, upon reading in the preface which M. Joseph Renaud joins to his translation of Intentions: “These facts, imperfectly established, be it noted, which cast into prison a writer who was glorious, rich, and esteemed by all, prove nothing against his work. Let us forget them … Do we not read, despite their private lives, Musset, Baudelaire, etc.? If someone were to reveal that Flaubert and Balzac had committed crimes, would we have to burn Salammbo and Cousine Bette? etc… The works belong to us, not the authors.”—Are we still worrying about that sort of thing! Doubtless these gracious words are said with the best intention in the world, but does not Wilde himself tell us in De Profundis: “A great friend of mine—a friend of ten years’ standing—came to see me some time ago, and told me that he did not believe a single word of what was said against me, and wished me to know that he considered me quite innocent, and the victim of a hideous plot. I burst into tears at what he said, and told him that while there was much amongst the definite charges that was quite untrue and transferred to me by revolting malice, still that my life had been full of perverse pleasures, and that unless he accepted that as a fact about me and realized it to the full I could not possibly be friends with him any more, or ever be in his company.” And elsewhere: “To regret one’s own experiences is to arrest one’s own development. To deny one’s own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one’s own life. It is no less than a denial of the soul”

  What is the use of claiming that “if Flaubert had committed crimes,” Salammbo would not interest us any the less; how much more interesting and right it is to understand that “if Flaubert had committed crimes” it is not Salammbo that he would have written, but … something else, or nothing at all; and that if Balzac had wanted to live his Comédie humaine, that might have prevented him from writing it.—Wilde was in the habit of saying that “everything that is gained for life is lost for art,” and that is the very reason why Wilde’s life is tragic. —“Must we go, then, to Art for everything?” he has one of the speakers say in the best dialogue in Intentions. “For everything”, replies the second. “Because Art does not hurt us”

  No, in order to read his work better, regardless of what M. Joseph Renaud says about it, let us not pretend to ignore the drama of the man who, though knowing that it wounds, wished, nevertheless, to address himself to life; who, after having taught in so masterly a way that “Art begins where imitation ends” that “Life is the solvent that breaks up Art, the enemy that lays waste the house,” and finally that “Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life,” offered himself as an example, and, with his own life gave, as it were, a proof ad absurdum of his words—quite like the hero of one of his most beautiful poems, like that man who was a clever story-teller, who every evening charmed the people of his village by relating the marvelous adventures which he pretended to have had during the day, but who, the day when some tragic adventure in reality befell him, could find nothing more to say.

  M. Davray prefixes to his translation of De Profundis four letters written from prison which the English edition does not contain;4 some pages of these letters are so pathetic and have so urgent a psychological interest that I can hardly refrain from copying them here.5 I would like to quote the whole book; better to refer the reader to it—and to consider myself satisfied if I have been able, be it ever so little, to be of service to a sad and glorious memory, for which it is time to cease having only contempt, insolent indulgence, or pity even more insulting than contempt.

  1 The representatives of his family assured Wilde that they would make things comfortable for him if he agreed to undertake certain engagements, among others that of never seeing B … again. He could not or would not undertake them.

  1 Oscar Wilde, Intentions, translated by J.-Joseph Renaud, 1 vol. in-18. (P.-V. Stock). There has since appeared a much better translation by M. Charles Grolleau with a preface by Hugues Rebell (Carrington).

  2 Oscar Wilde, De Profundis, preceded by letters written from prison, and followed by the Ballad of Reading Gaol, translated by Henry-D. Davray, 1 vol. in-18 (Mercure de France).

  3 Ermitage of April 15th, 1905.

  4 Translator’s note: These letters appear in later editions.

  5 I prefer to quote the passage from De Profundis which the English publisher had good reasons for not giving. (See Appendix.)

  APPENDIX

  “Other miserable men when they are thrown into prison, if they are robbed of the beauty of the world are at least safe in some measure from the world’s most deadly slings, most awful arrows. They can hide in the darkness of their cells and of their very disgrace make a mode of sanctuary. The world having had its will goes its way, and they are left to suffer undisturbed. With me it has been different. Sorrow after sorrow has come beating at the prison doors in search of me; they have opened the gates wide and let them in. Hardly if at all have my friends been suffered to see me. But my enemies have had full access to me always; twice in my public appearances in the Bankruptcy Court; twice again in my public transferences from one prison to another have I been shown under conditions of unspeakable humiliation to the gaze and mockery of men. The messenger of Death has brought me his tidings and gone his way; and in entire solitude and isolated from all that could give me comfort or suggest relief I have had to bear the intolerable burden of misery and remorse, which the memory of my mother placed upon me and places upon me still. Hardly has that wound been dulled, not healed, by time, when violent and bitter and harsh letters come to me from solicitors. I am at once taunted and threatened with poverty. That I can bear. I can school myself to worse than that; but my two children are taken from me by legal procedure. That is, and always will remain to me a source of infinite distress, of infinite pain, of grief without end or limit. That the law should decide and take upon itself to decide that I am one unfit to be with my own children is something quite horrible to me. The disgrace of prison is as nothing compared with it. I envy the other men who tread the yard along with me. I am sure that their children wait for them, look for their coming, will be sweet to them.

  The poor are wiser, more charitable, more kind, more sensitive than we are.”

  INDEX

  Ahab and Jezebel, 27

  Alcibiades, 23

  Apollo, 1

  Arnauld, Michel, 35

  Bacchus, 1

  Ballad of Reading Gaol, 34

  Balzac, 42, 43

  Baudelaire, 42

  Borgia, 6

  Byron, 40

  Church Fathers, 27

  Comédie humaine, 43

  Cousin Bette (Balzac), 42

  Dante, 27

  Davray, Henry-D., 34

  De Profundis, 34, 35, 43-45

  Disciple, The, 4

  Dorian Grey, 16

  Douglas, Lord Alfred, 33, 34

  Dumas, 22

  Flaubert, 15, 22, 42, 43

  Francis of Assisi, Saint, 23

  Grolleau, Charles, 34

  Heredia, 9

  House of the Dead, The, 22

  Ideal Husband, An, vii, viii

  Inferno (Dante), 27

  Intentions, 34, 35, 42, 44

  Jesus, 7, 8, 9

  Joseph of Arimathaea, 7

  Judas, 27

  Lady Windermere’s Fan, viii

  Madame Bovary (Flaubert), 22

  Mallarmé, 2

  Melmoth, Sebastian, 18

&nb
sp; Muller, v

  Musset, 42

  Napoleon, 6

  Narcissus, 3

  Nazareth, 7, 8

  Nero, 6

  Nicholson, 22

  Nietzsche, 15

  Nourritures Terrestres, 19

  Paradise (Dante), 27

  Peau de Chagrin, 16

  Pharaoh, 27, 29

  Plato, 12

  Purgatory (Dante), 27

  Racine, 37

  Rebell, Hugues, 34

  Renan, vi, xii

  Renaud, J.-Joseph, 34, 42, 44

  Ross, Robert, 33

  Salome, 27

  Salammbo (Flaubert), 42, 43

  Socrates, 12

  Sophocles, 27

  Thackeray, 1

  Thaulow, 18

  Tolstoi, 36

  Turner, Reginald, 33

  Verlaine, 31

  Woman of No Importance, A, vii, viii

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