So, of Wilde himself, I cannot but hope and believe that though he told many stories of exceeding beauty, none of which were true, yet hidden away in his heart was much that was gracious, true, noble and beautiful, the story of which will now never be known, for like the poet lad of his fantasy he told it to no one. Of what was evil and what was good in his life, only a merciful God can strike the balance, and only a merciful God shall judge.
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.”