Oscar Wilde was released from prison in May, 1897. He records in his letters the joy of the thought that at that time “both the lilac and the laburnum will be blooming in the gardens.” The closing sentences of the book may be recalled: “Society, as we have constituted it, will have no place for me, has none to offer; but Nature, whose sweet rains fall on unjust and just alike, will have clefts in the rocks where I may hide, and secret valleys in whose silence I may weep undisturbed. She will hang the night with stars so that I may walk abroad in the darkness without stumbling, and send the wind over my footprints so that none may track me to my hurt: she will cleanse me in great waters, and with bitter herbs make me whole.”
He died in November, 1900, three years and a half after his release from Reading Gaol.
Monsieur Joseph Renaud, whose translation of Oscar Wilde’s “Intentions” has just appeared in Paris, has given a good example of how history is made in his preface to that work. He recounts an obviously imaginary meeting between himself and Oscar Wilde in a bar on the Boulevard des Italiens. He concludes the episode, such as it is, with these words: “Nothing remained of him but his musical voice and his large blue childlike eyes.” Oscar Wilde’s eyes were curious—long, narrow, and green. Anything less childlike it would be hard to imagine. To the physiognomist they were his most remarkable feature, and redeemed his face from the heaviness that in other respects characterised it. So much for M. Joseph Renaud’s powers of observation.
The complacent unanimity with which the chroniclers of Oscar Wilde’s last years in Paris have accepted and spread the “legend” of his life in that city is remarkable, and would be exasperating considering its utter falsity to anyone who was not aware of their incompetence to deal with the subject. Scarcely one of his self-constituted biographers had more than the very slightest acquaintance with him, and their records and impressions of him are chiefly made up of stale gossip and secondhand anecdotes. The stories of his supposed privations, his frequent inability to obtain a square meal, his lonely and tragic death in a sordid lodging, and his cheap funeral are all grotesquely false.
True, Oscar Wilde, who for several years before his conviction had been making at least £5,000 a year, found it very hard to live on his rather precarious income after he came out of prison; he was often very “hard up,” and often did not know where to turn for a coin, but I will undertake to prove to anyone whom it may concern that from the day he left prison till the day of his death his income averaged at least £400 a year. He had, moreover, far too many devoted friends in Paris ever to be in need of a meal provided he would take the trouble to walk a few hundred yards or take a cab to one of half a dozen houses. His death certainly was tragic—deaths are apt to be tragic—but he was surrounded by friends when he died, and his funeral was not cheap; I happen to have paid for it in conjunction with another friend of his, so I ought to know.
He did not become a Roman Catholic before he died. He was, at the instance of a great friend of his, himself a devout Catholic, “received into the Church” a few hours before he died; but he had then been unconscious for many hours, and he died without ever having any idea of the liberty that had been taken with his unconscious body. Whether he would have approved or not of the step taken by his friend is a matter on which I should not like to express a too positive opinion, but it is certain that it would not do him any harm, and, apart from all questions of religion and sentiment, it facilitated the arrangements which had to be made for his interment in a Catholic country, in view of the fact that no member of his family took any steps to claim his body or arrange for his funeral.
Having disposed of certain false impressions in regard to various facts of his life and death in Paris, I may turn to what are less easily controlled and examined theories as to that life. Without wishing to be paradoxical, or harshly destructive of the carefully cherished sentiment of poetic justice so dear to the British mind (and the French mind, too, for that matter), I give it as my firm opinion that Oscar Wilde was, on the whole, fairly happy during the last years of his life. He had an extraordinarily buoyant and happy temperament, a splendid sense of humour, and an unrivalled faculty for enjoyment of the present. Of course, he had his bad moments, moments of depression and sense of loss and defeat, but they were not of long duration. It was part of his pose to luxuriate a little in the details of his tragic circumstances. He harrowed the feelings of many of those whom he came across; words of woe poured from his lips; he painted an image of himself, destitute, abandoned, starving even (I have heard him use the word after a very good dinner at Paillard’s); as he proceeded he was caught by the pathos of his own words, his beautiful voice trembled with emotion, his eyes swam with tears; and then, suddenly, by a swift, indescribably brilliant, whimsical touch, a swallow-wing flash on the waters of eloquence, the tone changed and rippled with laughter, bringing with it his audience, relieved, delighted, and bubbling into uncontrollable merriment.
He never lost his marvellous gift of talking; after he came out of prison he talked better than before. Everyone who knew him really before and after his imprisonment is agreed about that. His conversation was richer, more human, and generally on a higher intellectual level. In French he talked as well as in English; to my own English ear his French used to seem rather laboured and his accent too marked, but I am assured by Frenchmen who heard him talk that such was not the effect produced on them.
He explained to me his inability to write, by saying that when he sat down to write he always inevitably began to think of his past life, and that this made him miserable and upset his spirits. As long as he talked and sat in cafés and “watched life,” as his phrase was, he was happy, and he had the luck to be a good sleeper, so that only the silence and self-communing necessary to literary work brought him visions of his terrible sufferings in the past and made his old wounds bleed again. My own theory as to his literary sterility at this period is that he was essentially an interpreter of life, and that his existence in Paris was too narrow and too limited to stir him to creation. At his best he reflected life in a magic mirror, but the little corner of life he saw in Paris was not worth reflecting. If he could have been provided with a brilliant “entourage” of sympathetic listeners as of old and taken through a gay season in London, he would have begun to write again. Curiously enough, society was the breath of life to him, and what he felt more than anything else in his “St. Helena” in Paris, as he often told me, was the absence of the smart and pretty women who in the old days sat at his feet!