He was active, practical and eminently successful. His wife recalls Florence Nightingale, in face, figure and conduct (people who are built alike as regards their internal secretions are those whom we recognize as similar physically and psychically). She, too, was a pituito-adrenal, and in so far resembled her husband. But as in a woman ante-pituitary and adrenal superiority make for masculinity, she must be classed as a masculinoid type of woman. She was socially aggressive, and took part in the revolutionary movement of her time in Ireland. Thus we find that Oscar Wilde was the result of a mating of internal secretions acting in the same direction. The process might be compared to parthenogenesis.
It is on record that when enceinte his mother often expressed the wish that her child be a girl. When a boy was born, she was immensely disappointed. To compensate for her disappointment, she brought him up a good deal like a little girl. She had him dressed in girls' clothes at an age when most boys are violent destroyers of clothing. She would hang massive jewelry upon him, for the delight of playing with the resultant stage picture as a satisfaction for her discontented desires. In the light of modern psychology, and our formulization of her endocrine status, we must put down her conduct to a suppressed homosexual craving. Had her son been built along the lines of strong emphatic masculinity, her influence, though vicious, would probably have found no congenial soil, and would have died out altogether after his contacts with the outer world, beginning with school. No matter how she would have conditioned his vegetative system temporarily, his internal secretions, released then from compression, would have asserted themselves and determined his fate differently. However, it is quite possible that if such had been the case Oscar Wilde, the aesthete, the paradoxer, the disciple of Walter Pater and Baudelaire, would have stayed in the land of the to be born. I mean that then we would not have had Oscar Wilde, but another person, genius or commonplace, who also might have borne the name of Oscar Wilde.
That was not to be. The singular assortment of endocrines that mingled their activities to make Oscar Wilde shaped a personality which we must classify as the thymocentric (thymus-centered). Why this should be so is an interesting question. Pituito-adrenal plus pituito-adrenal of his heredity should make two pituito-adrenals according to elementary arithmetic and the rule of three. A cancellation of the two factors of the equation rather than addition seems to have occurred. The result was a persistent thymus superiority, with an instability of the other two main glands involved.
How do we know that Oscar Wilde was a thymocentric? Because in his fullest development he exhibited all the earmarks of the thymus pattern. We possess a number of good pictures and descriptions of him, as he was really a contemporary, and would probably be alive today if he had been put in a hospital for proper treatment instead of in prison. An excellent description is that of Henri de Regnier's: "This foreigner (Wilde) was tall, and of great corpulence. A high complexion seemed to give still greater width to his clean shaven face. It was the unbearded (glabre) face that one sees on coins. The hands … were rather fleshy and plump." The points of immediate interest are the height, the complexion and the beardlessness. One classic variety of the thymocentric is tall, has a baby's skin, and has little or no hair on the face. A passage from a narrative written by one of his warders confirms the last condition decidedly. "Before leaving his cell to see a visitor, he was alway careful to conceal, as far as possible, his unshaven chin by means of his red handkerchief." Bristles on the chin, with little or none on the cheeks, is the inference. It is important to stress the thymocentric significance of this glabrosity of the face. Another sign to be put in italics was the quality of his voice. It has been described as a beautiful tenor, when he had it under perfect control, and high pitched and strident when under the influence of passion or temper. Such a voice would be the product of a larynx remaining partly or completely in the infantile state, as in a woman's. That, and the large breasts he is said to have had, point again to the thymus-centered constitution. All in all, there can be no doubt that Oscar Wilde was a case of status lymphaticus, the technical name for the thymus-centered personality.
As happens in a number of thymocentrics, his pituitary must have attempted to compensate for the endocrine deficiencies always present in them. The exceptional size of his head was a pituitary trait. Finding, possibly making, plenty of room for itself to grow, for some unknown reason, in an extraordinary fashion, it reinforced the love of the beautiful that is part of the feminine post-pituitary nature, with an intellectual ability and maturity that was at first all-conquering. In the face of a society organized for pure masculine and pure feminine types, disgrace and disaster at last overtook him with almost the ruthlessness of natural selection wiping out an unadapted sport suddenly cropping up in an environment. In prison he suffered from severe splitting headaches, which were probably due to changes in his pituitary. Described as being directly over the eyes, they haunted him until his death, and may have had a good deal to do with the absinthe addiction he acquired.
THE TREATMENT OF GENIUS
The problem of Oscar Wilde raises an ethical question that still remains to be finally answered. Granting that all of society should one day see him and his kind as a peculiar and specific constitutional product of an odd intermixture of internal secretions, what should be done with him and them? It is easy to play with words like "degenerates." But still, we do not condemn imbeciles, idiots or defectives, or other substandard, subnormal creatures to the prisons. For the sake of the good opinion society would maintain of itself, it sends the latter nowadays to hospitals, sanitaria, or their equivalents, where protection for itself without punishment for them may be practised. But is confinement, or even treatment the solution? For we have to consider what society would lose by cutting such abnormals off from itself, and them from its stimulations. A number of artists have been built like Oscar Wilde, musicians in particular. Without them, would there not be a great gap, a yawning absence, in the world's culture?
Modern diagnosis and modern therapy might have done a great deal for Napoleon, Nietzsche, Julius Caesar, Florence Nightingale, Oscar Wilde. Were they alive today, and willing to submit themselves to scientific scrutiny, the X-ray would tell us of the state of the pituitary and thymus in them, chemical examinations of the blood the condition of the thyroid and adrenals, detailed investigation of the body and mind a flood of light upon their maladies as well as their personalities. Therapy might have relieved Napoleon of his attacks, and so, halting the creeping degeneration of his pituitary, made Waterloo impossible. But then, would we have had the Emperor at all? Would there have been enough of that instability that drives on the genius to his goal? Nietzsche might have been relieved of his headaches, and Caesar of his epilepsy—but then, would not—with correction of the underlying streams of activity on the part of the other glands of the internal secretion to compensate—their peculiar superiority and distinction, and the fruits of their lives as by-products, have been destroyed. Florence Nightingale, too, might have been a softer and more human person. But then would she have revolutionized the practice of nursing? Oscar Wilde possibly might have been made over into a heterosexual. But then would not the world be the poorer without "De Profundis," let us ask? To state the problem in the most general terms: how much abnormality are we to tolerate (I speak, of course, of malignant abnormality, and disregard benign abnormality altogether) for the sake of the valuable that is concomitant? How much are we to stand of that which degrades the germ-plasm while it raises the mind-plasm of the race? The Flowers of Evil. Destroy or modify the roots, change the seed, and the buds will bloom, if at all, not orchids, but dull brown commonplaces.
What means may be licensed for the attainment of a worthy end is perhaps the broadest aspect of the problem. The instruments of Man's ascent to divinity may arouse his instinctive repulsions, dislikes, and destructive passions. The study of the internal secretions is putting and will put the most powerful apparatus for the control of the abnormal into our hands. What are we going to do with them?
It does not follow that because we are beginning to understand the normal that we are to establish one fixed absolute standard of the normal. In view of all the possible mixtures, permutations and combinations of the endocrine glands, that may construct an individual, it is possible to conceive a million types of normals. For normality means harmony, the harmonious equilibrium between the hormones, which tends to continue itself, because it does no harm to itself. So there are all sorts and conditions of men and women who are classed as normals. We need create no inquiry into the value of raising the subnormal to the normal level. It is when we come to consider the possibility of lowering the supernormal (in certain respects) to the normal, that we pause and hesitate. Traditional morality assists not, but hinders us here.