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.”
S. J. STONE, THE HYMN-WRITER
I
The Rev. S. J. Stone, M.A., was the author of two hymns that are known wherever the English tongue is spoken, one the beautiful Lenten litany of love, trust and repentance, “Weary of earth and laden with my sin”; the other that soul-stirring triumph-song, “The Church’s One Foundation,” which—set as it is to majestic battle-march music that fires the imagination—has become, as it were, the Marseillaise of the Church militant and victorious.