In good company

by Coulson Kernahan

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.