Before the success of the plays, Wilde had been an adventurer on thin ice, exhibiting a brave superiority to fortune, but painfully conscious that his income was far smaller than that on which it was possible to live with the happy extravagance that was natural to him. He had been born with the ghost of a silver spoon in his mouth, but had never been able to materialize it. It was his right to live luxuriously, since that task was one that he was peculiarly fitted to perform. Some carelessness in the inviting of his fairy godmothers, some inattention on the part of the presiding gods, had denied him that right. When the success of the plays suddenly raised his income to several thousands of pounds a year, he lost no time in living up to and above it. Some of his extravagances were of the simplest, most childish kind. He over-fed, like a schoolboy in a tuckshop with an unexpected sovereign in his hand. Flowers he had always worn, hansom-cabs he had always used, but now he bought the most expensive button-holes, and kept his cab waiting all day. His friendships became proportionately costly, for he denied nothing to those he liked, and some of them never forgot to ask. He hurriedly ruined himself with prosperity, like the poor man in the fairy tale, whose wish for all the gold in the world was granted by a mischievous destiny.
The success of the plays and the extravagance that it permitted placed him in so strong a light of public attention that he could do nothing in secret. He became one of those people whose celebrity lends a savour to gossip. Scandal borrowed wings from the knowledge that it had a beginning in truth. In 1889, before the maleficent flood of gold was poured upon him, he had become accustomed to indulge the vice that, openly alluded to in the days and verses of Catullus, is generally abhorred and hidden in our own. He had been in youth a runner after girls, but, as a man, he ceased to take any interest in women. In the moment of his success, when many were ready to throw themselves at his feet, one, perhaps, of the reasons of his power was his own indifference to his conquests. Many excuses have been made for him. It has been suggested, for example, that in his absorption in antiquity he allowed himself to forget that he was not living in it. But Wilde was not a scholar with a rampart of books between himself and the present. Our business here is scientific, not apologetic, and such evidence as we have shows that the vice needs none but a pathological explanation. It was a disease, a malady of the brain, not the necessary consequence of a delight in classical literature. Opulence permitted its utmost development, but did not create it. Opulence did, however, make it noticeable, and prepared the circumstances in which it was publicly punished.
Wilde had always been laughed at, and, even before the facts of his conduct were generally known, the laughter was coloured by dislike. A book that was written by a small, prehensile mind, gifted with a limber cleverness, enables us to see him through the eyes of the early nineties. This book, "The Green Carnation," is a limited but faithful caricature. Wilde was accused of having written it, but characteristically replied: "I invented that magnificent flower. But with the middle-class and mediocre book that usurps its strangely beautiful name, I have, I need hardly say, nothing whatsoever to do. The flower is a work of art. The book is not." Here, as in the matter of "Patience," he could not forgo the perversity of lending colour to other people's parodies of himself. "The Green Carnation" shows us Esmé Amarinth and a youthful patrician who models himself upon him expounding the art of being self-consciously foolish, wearing green carnations, and teaching choir-boys to sing a catch about "rose-white youth" in the presence of the widow of a strong and silent British soldier. Lady Locke thinks that England has changed, and though fascinated by Amarinth's under-study, does not marry him, for fear her "soldier's son," a stout Jehu of the governess-cart, should learn from him a soul-destroying and effeminate love of carnations pickled in arsenic. This book is like a clever statue, brightly painted, of Britannia refusing the advances of the æsthete. The æsthete is made to look rather a fool; and so is Britannia. Such sections of the public as took pleasure in it thought Wilde a peculiarly arrogant coxcomb, a disconcerting and polished reply to the Victorian tradition of muscular manhood in which they had long been secure. They were ready to rejoice in his discomfiture, and their hostility to Wilde spread swiftly and gave a quality of triumph to the delight of all classes as soon as he was arrested.
An elaborate account of the various trials would in no way serve the purpose of this book. It is sufficient to say that on May 25, 1895, he was sentenced to two years' imprisonment with hard labour.
IX
DE PROFUNDIS
The book called De Profundis, first published in 1905, five years after Wilde's death, is not printed as it was written, but is composed of passages from a long letter whose complete publication would be impossible in this generation. The passages were selected and put together by Mr. Robert Ross with a skill that it is impossible sufficiently to admire. The letter, a manuscript of "eighty close-written pages on twenty folio sheets," was not addressed to Mr. Ross but to a man to whom Wilde felt that he owed some, at least, of the circumstances of his public disgrace. It was begun as a rebuke of this friend, whose actions, even subsequent to the trials, had been such as to cause Wilde considerable pain. It was not delivered to him, but given to Mr. Ross by Wilde, who also gave instructions as to its partial publication.
It is not often possible to detect the original intention of rebuke in the published portions of De Profundis. I suppose that as Wilde pointed out his friend's share in his disaster, and set down on paper what that disaster was, he came to examine its ulterior effect on his own mind, for those pages that are open to us contain such an examination. He is in prison, and is at pains to realize exactly what this means to him: where he is unchanged, where he has lost, and where and how he has gained. He would draw up a profit and loss account, of the loaves that are sustenance for the body and the flowers of the white narcissus that are food for the soul, and in this way give himself courage to face the world with the knowledge that he had kept his soul alive. He will discover where he stands with regard to Christianity, and where with regard to Flaubert. A critic and artist, he will realize himself among masterpieces, and discover what is altered in the personality for whose notation he has been accustomed to use his criticism of works of art. "To the artist, expression is the only mode under which he can conceive life at all. To him what is dumb is dead."