VI
As one who knew Wilde personally, I am sometimes asked whether I was not instinctively aware that the man was bad. Frankly I was not. Possibly because scandal does not interest me, and other things do, I had not heard the rumours which I now understand were even then prevalent, and so I took him as I found him, an agreeable companion, a brilliant conversationalist, a versatile and accomplished man of letters. On the crime of which he has since been committed, I make no comment, if only for the reason that I did not follow the evidence at his trial, just as I abstained from reading Mr. W. T. Stead’s Maiden Tribute to Modern Babylon—not because of any innate niceness on my part, but for the same reason which causes me to turn aside if, in my morning’s walk, I come across offal which it is not my business to remove. The Wilde of the days of which I am writing was foppish in dress and affected in manner. He talked and wrote much nonsense, as I held it to be, about there being no such thing as a moral or an immoral book or picture; that the book or picture was either a work of art, or was not a work of art, and there the matter ended; but much of this talk I attributed to pose, and I had even then learned that some of the men who are most anxious to have us believe them moralists—and stern moralists at that—are often less moral in their life than some of those who make no pretence of any morals at all.
To the folk who objected that Wilde has boasted of being a “pagan” I replied that he probably used the word—just then very much in vogue—in the same sense in which Mr. Kenneth Grahame used it when he entitled a volume, bubbling over with the joy of life, with animal spirits, keen observation, and exquisite humour, Pagan Papers. Wilde’s “paganism” I took as meaning no more than that he claimed for himself freedom from formula, most of all freedom from cant in his attitude towards the accepted conventions, whether literary, artistic, social, or even religious.
That he was not an irreligious man, I had reason to know. One day when we were chatting together, Wilde mentioned a little book of mine of which I will say no more here than that it made no uncertain confession of the writer’s faith in Christianity. This led Wilde—uninvited by me, for I make it a rule never to obtrude my religious views upon others—to express himself upon the subject of religion, especially of Christianity, and with such intense reverence, such manifest earnestness, that I perhaps looked something of the surprise I felt.
“You are surprised,” he said, “to hear Oscar Wilde, the poseur, as people call him, the man who is supposed to hold nothing too sacred, talking seriously and on serious things. No, I am not making believe to be earnest, as I do make believe about so much else. I am speaking as I feel, and you will perhaps hardly realise what an intense relief it is to meet some one to whom one can talk about such matters without cant. It is cant and officialdom” (he spoke bitterly) “which is keeping the men and women who think out of the churches to-day. It is cant which more than anything else stands between them and Christ. Shall I tell you what is my greatest ambition—more even than an ambition—the dream of my life? Not to be remembered hereafter as an artist, poet, thinker, or playwright, but as the man who reclothed the sublimest conception which the world has ever known—the Salvation of Humanity, the Sacrifice of Himself upon the Cross by Christ—with new and burning words, with new and illuminating symbols, with new and divine vision, free from the accretions of cant which the centuries have gathered around it. I should thereby be giving the world back again the greatest gift ever given to mankind since Christ Himself gave it, peerless and pure two thousand years ago—the pure gift of Christianity as taught by Christ.
“Yes,” he went on, “I hope before I die to write the Epic of the Cross, the Iliad of Christianity, which shall live for all time.”
On another occasion Wilde unfolded to me the opening scene in a sort of religious drama which he intended one day to write—the finding to-day of the body of the Christ in the very rock-sepulchre where Joseph of Arimathea had laid it, and a great and consequent eclipse of faith in Him and in His resurrection. Thereafter, by a new revelation of the Christ, Wilde was, in his drama, newly to recreate Christianity and faith in Christianity, but of this Second Act of his World-Drama I heard no more, as our talk was at this point interrupted, and he never renewed it.
I speak of this proposed religious drama here for the singular reason that I, too, had long been turning over in my mind some such work and some such opening scene as in Wilde’s drama—I mean the finding of the body of Christ.
Wilde went no further with his project, but in a book of mine, written some years after, I carried my own project into effect. To this day I am uncertain how much of my opening scene was Wilde’s, and how much mine. The idea appears to have occurred to both, but whereas, in Wilde’s mind, it was clear and defined, in mine it was then no more than an idea. I sometimes wonder whether his words did not make vivid to me what before was vague. Of one thing at least I am sure, that he was the first to speak of such an opening scene, which fact in itself constitutes some sort of previous claim. The rest of the book was entirely mine, and probably the whole, but the facts seem to me not uninteresting, and having made confession of the possibility at least of some debt incurred, I must leave it to the reader to say whether I ought or ought not to be condemned in “conscience money.”
I have already said that I have reason to know that Wilde was not irreligious, and I propose now to give my reasons for refusing to believe him to be irreclaimably bad. One has some hesitation in quoting oneself, but, in a dream-parable booklet of mine, there is a passage which I may perhaps be forgiven for printing here, when I say that I had Wilde in my mind when I wrote it. In my dream-parable, Satan, even as once of old he had presented himself to speak with God concerning Job, appears to-day before the Most High, urging that men and women have become godless and faithless. He craves permission to prove this by putting them to certain tests. The permission is accorded on condition that Satan himself becomes mortal, even as they. In the following passage Satan is supposed to be speaking, after the failure and defeat of his projects.
Master and Maker, hear me ere I die. For until Thou didst in Thy wisdom decree that ere I might work my will on mortals, myself must become mortal even as they—until then, the thoughts of these mortals were as foreign to my understanding as are the thoughts in the brain of a bird, to the fowler who spreads his net to catch the little creature. Like the fowler, I knew that I must change my bait, according to the creature that I set out to snare, that this one could be taken by avarice, that one by vanity, a third by spiritual pride, a fourth by bodily lust. When they came to my lure, and I caught them; when I saw the poor fools struggling in my net, I laughed and hugged myself to think of their misery and of the impotent anguish of God. And so I grew wise in the ways and the weaknesses of men and women, while knowing nothing of the hearts which beat in their breasts.
But now that I have become mortal, even as they,—now at last, to the wonder and the mystery of mortal life, are my eyes opened. Now perceive I that, in the least and most shameful of these lives, is to be seen, even in uttermost wreckage, something so sacred, so august, so beautiful, so divine, that the very angels of light might stand amazed in envious wonder and awe.
For if men and women have failed greatly, at least they have striven greatly—how greatly, how valiantly, how desperately, only the God Who sees all, may know.
It may be that by Him, that very striving itself, even the unsuccessful striving, shall mercifully be taken into account. The sin and the shame are human: the wish and the effort to overcome them are divine. For that which in a man’s truer, nobler moments, he has longed unutterably to be, that in some sense he is, and shall be accounted, in the eyes of the God, Who taketh not pleasure in remembering sin, but in rewarding righteousness.
That even in sin, a man should think such thoughts, should carry unsullied in his heart some white flower of his childhood, and, in spite of what is ugly and impure in himself, should project so pure and perfect a vision of hoped-for, longed-for Loveliness and Purity, sets that man, even in his sins, a world removed above the angels. When I who was once an angel fell, I fell from uttermost light to uttermost dark. Ceasing to be an angel, I became a devil. Man falls, but even in his fall retains something that is divine.
Yonder man into whose great brain I entered, working strange madness within! Him first I taught to love Beauty, because it is of Thee. Him I haunted of beauty, haunted with visions of forms more fair than earthly eyes may know, luring him at last to look upon Beauty as of greater worth than all else, and as a law unto itself.
And because the love of beauty is not far removed from the love of pleasure, it was not difficult for me to lead on such as he to love pleasure for itself. With innocent pleasures at first I plied him, and when they staled, I enticed him with grosser joys, till the pleasure-seeker became the voluptuary, and, in the veins of the voluptuary, desire soon quickened into lust.
Next, because wine, like water to drooping flowers, lent fictitious strength to his flagging pulse, made the live thoughts to quicken in his tired brain, and set the tongue of his wit a-wagging; because he loved to stand well with his comrades, among whom to chink glasses together was the sign of fellowship—because of all these I enticed him to drink and yet again to drink, until Alcohol, the Arch Destroyer, had stolen away his will power, silenced his conscience, perverted his moral sense, inflamed with foul passion his degenerate brain, and made the wreck and the ruin of him that he now is.
Yet even now, as I steal gloatingly through the dark chambers of that House of Shame which was once the fair temple of the living God, even now there still smoulders under the ashes of a fouled hearthstone some spark of the fire which was kindled of God, a fire which I strive in vain to trample out, since, because it is of God, it is inextinguishable and eternal.
If therefore when I seem most to have conquered, there never yet was God wholly defeated—of what use is it further to wage the unequal conflict? For God never entirely lets go His hold on a human soul; and that to which God holds fast, Satan shall never finally wrest from Him. Say the world, think the world, what it will, in the warfare for souls God wins, and has won all along the line.
It was, as I say, Wilde who was in my mind when I penned that passage commencing “Yonder man into whose great brain I entered, working strange madness within.” To me he seems to have been less hopelessly bad than partly mad.
We are told that it is possible, by locating and destroying certain cells or nerve-centres in the brain, so to affect the mind of the subject as to destroy his sense of colour, his sense of touch, or even, it is believed, to destroy his sense of right and wrong.
Wilde died of meningitis, which is a brain affection, and I think that the fact should be considered retrospectively. A post-mortem examination would possibly have revealed some disease or degeneration of certain brain-cells which may account for much that is painful in his career and character. This degeneration of brain-cells may have been inherited and congenital, in which case, condemnation on our part is silenced; or it may have been due to excesses of his own choosing and committing. Even if this be so, the price he paid was surely so terrible, and so tragic, as in a sense to be accounted an atonement, and even to entitle him to our pity. In the passage quoted from my dream-parable, I have hinted at some form of demoniacal possession which may or may not be a positive, as opposed to a negative form of madness. There is a brain derangement by which the power to reason aright and to co-ordinate ideas is lost; a brain derangement which results mainly in vacancy of mind. But there is yet another and more terrible form of derangement in which, so it seems to me, that unseen evil powers, outside himself, seize upon and possess the brain chambers, thus vacated, and direct and rule the unhappy victim, not according to his own will, which indeed has passed out of his control, but according to the wish or will of the power by which he is possessed.
On such a question we dare not dogmatise; but I am humbly of opinion that in the great re-awakening to the realities (not to the outward forms) of religion, which some of us think will follow the war, there will be a return to simplicity of belief, and that the too often disregarded New Testament explanation of certain mysterious happenings will be proved to be more in accordance with the later discoveries of Science than some advocates of the Higher Criticism now think. For my own part I have never doubted the accuracy of the Gospel records in regard to demoniacal possession. We have Christ’s own words: “For this saying go thy way; the devil is gone out of thy daughter,” “Howbeit this kind goeth not out but by prayer and fasting,” and “I charge thee come out of him and enter no more into him.”
That some men and women whose wills are weakened—possibly by habitual disregard of conscience or by continued wrongdoing for which they cannot be held irresponsible—do commit, under the urging and direction of evil spirits by which they are possessed, crimes and cruelties for which they are not in the fullest sense responsible, I think more than possible. My friend, the late Benjamin Waugh, Founder of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, on more than one occasion placed before me the full facts and the indisputable proofs of acts so fiendish as to be difficult to ascribe to human motive or passions.
In the most terrible sonnet ever penned, Shakespeare says:
The expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action, and till action, lust
Is perjured, murderous, bloody, full of blame,
Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust,
and, to lust, some particularly bestial outrages which came before the Society were clearly attributable. Others were as clearly the outcome of avarice, greed, hatred, jealousy and blind fury of anger. But some crimes there were, such as the torturing of her own children by a mother, and, in another case, the deliberate jabbing out of the eyes of an unoffending pony by a woman, not under the influence of drink, and in whom the medical experts declared they otherwise found no symptoms of insanity, which, if only for the sake of our common humanity, one would be relieved to think were due to demoniacal possession, for which the victim was, in this last stage at least, irresponsible.
In the near future it is possible that Science will by closer inquiry and by completer records be found once more in harmony with Scripture. Hypnotism, a science which as yet is not a science, but merely a haphazard accumulation of unorganised data, pointing to the possession of unexplained powers and possibilities by the individual, has established the fact that the living can thus be influenced and obsessed by the living. If so, why not by the dead, who, when emancipated from the body, may possibly be able to concentrate even greater spiritual force upon the living than when they were themselves alive?
I am not likely to live to see it, but my belief is that all these so-called occult matters, Hypnotism, Thought-reading, Obsession, Clairvoyance, Spiritualism, and the like will one day fall into line with Science, and be proved to be not supernatural, but merely the manifestation of natural laws—of certain psychical powers and forces which may be easily explainable and demonstrable with further and exacter knowledge, but concerning the working of which we are at present very much in the dark.
I have written at greater length than I intended, in hinting and in hoping that Wilde was at times under the subjection of powers and forces of darkness outside himself. I say “at times” intentionally, and for the following reason. It would be gratifying to one’s amour propre (I use a French term for once, as it expresses my meaning more nearly than any English equivalent) could I take high ground, and aver that I was vaguely conscious—warned, as it were, by some fine instinct—of evil in the presence of Wilde, but so to aver would be untrue. I have not lived to nearly threescore years without meeting men from whom one does thus instinctively shrink, and concerning whom one found it impossible to breathe the same air. I experienced nothing of the sort in Wilde’s company, and, since his guilt seems uncontrovertible, I ask myself whether it is not possible that Wilde lived a sort of Jekyll and Hyde life, of the latter of which I saw nothing, inasmuch as just as some wounded or plague-stricken creature withdraws itself from the herd, so, during the Hyde period of madness or of obsession, some instinct moved him to withdraw from his home, his haunts and the companions of his everyday life, only to return when the obsession or madness had passed, and once again he was his sane and normal self.
This “periodicity” is not infrequent in madness, whether the madness be due to a brain derangement, explainable by pathology, or to some such demoniacal possession as that of which I have spoken. A memorable instance is that of Mary Lamb, who was herself aware of the return of homicidal mania, and at such times of her own accord placed herself under restraint. Recalling the fact that I saw in Wilde no sign either of the presence of evil or of insanity, I ask myself whether in picturing Dorian Grey as at one season living normally and reputably, and at another disappearing into some oblivion of iniquity, he was not consciously or unconsciously picturing for us his own tortured self. I write “tortured” advisedly, for whether he were wholly, or only partly, or not at all, responsible, I refuse to believe that the man, as in his saner moments I knew him, could sink thus low, without fighting desperately, if vainly—how desperately only the God who made him knows—before allowing himself in the hopelessness of despair to forget his failures in filth, as other unhappy geniuses have before now drowned their souls in drink.
One talk with him I particularly remember. I had been reading the proofs of Dorian Grey, and, on our next meeting, I said that he had put damnable words into the mouth of one of his characters.
“Such poisonous stuff is not likely to affect grown men and women,” I said, “but for a writer of your power and persuasiveness to set up a puppet like Lord Henry to provide ready-made excuses for indulgence, and to make evil seem necessary, unavoidable, and easy, by whispering into the ears of readers, of impressionable age and inflammable passion, that ‘the only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it’—when you do that, you are helping to circulate devils’ doctrines in God’s world.”
Wilde was visibly perturbed.
“You are quite right,” he said. “It is damnable; it is devils’ doctrine. I will take it out.”
But, alas, other influences, whether within himself in the shape of the whisperings of some evil spirit, by which he was, as I believe, at times possessed, or in the form of so-called friends, whose influence over him was of the worst, I cannot say, but some days after the conversation recorded above I received the following letter:
Grand Hôtel de L’athenée,
15 Rue Scribe, Paris.My Dear Kernahan,
Thank you for your charming letter. I have been very ill and unable to correct my proofs, but have sent them off now. I have changed my mind about the passage about temptation. One can’t pull a work of art about without spoiling it, and after all it is merely Luther’s “Pecca Fortiter” put dramatically into the lips of a character.
Do you think I should add to preface the definition of “morbid” and “unhealthy” art I gave in the Fortnightly for February? The one on morbidity is really good.
Will you also look after my “wills” and “shalls” in proof! I am Celtic in my use of these words, not English.
You are excellent on Rossetti. I read you with delight.
Your sincere friend,
Oscar Wilde.
When next I met Wilde I recurred to the matter, but it was then too late, for the book, he said, was in great part printed. Moreover, he had now another excuse to put forward.
“After I had left you,” he said, “I remembered that a friend of mine, a well-known critic, had read the book in manuscript when it was first written. He said something to the same effect as you did, but less strongly. Honestly it was that, more than anything else, which finally decided me to leave the passage in. Had I taken it out, he would have claimed that I did so in deference to his strictures, and haul down my flag to a professional critic I never have and never will.”
This incident (though Wilde has been dead sixteen years I have neither written of it nor spoken of it before) shows Wilde as weak, it shows him as yielding—as we all, alas, too often yield—to evil influences, and to inclination as opposed to conscience, and as a man who was determined to shine at all costs. His vanity would not allow him to withhold the word that he was pleased to think daring, original, and above all brilliant, though he knew that word to be only brilliantly bad. Even in his sinning, it seems to me, he fed and flattered his insatiable vanity, by electing, even in sin, to be unlike others; and how far vanity, even more than viciousness, was accountable for Wilde’s downfall, only the God who made him and the devil who fostered and fed that vanity, till it less resembled a pardonable human weakness than a hideous excrescence and disease, can ever truly say.
The setting of Wilde’s sun (which had risen on so fair a prospect, and with such promise of splendour) in foul quagmires of sin and shame, was the greatest tragedy I have known. I met his friend and mine, Mr. Hall Caine, immediately after the verdict and sentence. I have seen Caine ill, and I have seen him deeply moved, even distressed, but I remember always to his honour (for Wilde not seldom made Caine’s writing the butt of his wit) the anguish in his face as he said:
“God pity him in this hour when human pity there seems none! To think of it! that man, that genius as he is, whom you and I have seen fêted and flattered! whose hand we have grasped in friendship! a felon, and come to infamy unspeakable! It haunts me, it is like some foul and horrible stain on our craft and on us all, which nothing can wash out. It is the most awful tragedy in the whole history of literature.”