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1. Page 126 the word "worldings" was changed to "worldlings" in the phrase: "... guests are all mere worldlings...."

2. Page 262 the quoted phrase: "Fait vour quelle sera votre votre maturité" was changed to: "Fait voir quelle sera votre maturité" which is the correct wording from the poem "À Théodore de Banville" by Charles Baudelaire.

3. Page 317 the name "Bazil" was changed to "Basil" in the phrase: "Basil Hallward's studio" to correspond with the author's other spellings of the name Basil Hallward.

Two items in the index, which were out of alphabetical order ("De Profundis—Biblical influence" and "Shaw, G. B.") were placed in correct alphabetical order in this version.

OSCAR WILDE

THIRD EDITION

THE LIFE OF

OSCAR WILDE

WITH A CHAPTER CONTRIBUTED BY

THE PRISON WARDER WHO HELD

THIS UNHAPPY MAN IN GAOL

Very fully Illustrated and with Photogravure
Frontispiece, and a Biography

By

Robert Harborough Sherard

Demy 8vo, Cloth gilt

Also a limited edition de luxe

OSCAR WILDE,

From a Crayon Portrait by S. Wray.

OSCAR WILDE

BY

LEONARD CRESSWELL INGLEBY

LONDON

T. WERNER LAURIE

NEW YORK

MITCHELL KENNERLEY

MCMVII

CONTENTS

PART I

OSCAR WILDE: THE MAN

OSCAR WILDE

THE MAN

The συνετοι, the connoisseurs, always recognised the genius of Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde from the very first moment when he began to write. For many years ordinary people to whom literature and literary affairs were not of, at anyrate, absorbing interest only knew of Oscar Wilde by his extravagances and poses.

Then it happened that Wilde turned his powers in the direction of the stage and achieved a swift and brilliant success. The English public then began to realise that here was an unusually brilliant man, and the extraordinary genius of the subject of this work would have certainly been universally recognised in a few more years, when the shocking scandals associated with his name occurred and Oscar Wilde disappeared into oblivion.

A great change gradually took place in public opinion. Little by little the feeling of prejudice against the work of Oscar Wilde began to die away. The man himself was dead. He had expiated his crimes by a prolonged agony of the most hideous suffering and disgrace, and people began to wonder if his writings were in any way associated with the dark side of his life and character, or whether they might not, after all, be beautiful, pure, and treasures of the literature of our time. The four comedies of Manners, "Lady Windermere's Fan," "The Ideal Husband," "A Woman Of No Importance," "The Importance Of Being Earnest," everyone had seen and laughed at. They were certainly absolutely without offence. It was gradually seen that because a house was built by an architect of an immoral private life that did not necessarily invalidate it as a residence, that if Stephenson had ended his life upon the gallows people would still find railways convenient and necessary. The truth gradually dawned that Wilde had never in his life written a line that was immoral or impure, and that, in short, the criminal side of him was only a part of his complex nature, horribly disastrous for himself and his personal life, but absolutely without influence upon his work.

Art and his aberration never mingled or overlapped. Everybody began to realise the fact.

Opinion was also being quietly moulded from within by a band of literary and artistic people, some of them friends of the late author, others knowing him simply through his work.

The public began to ask for Wilde's books and found it almost impossible to obtain them, for the "Ballad of Reading Gaol," published while its author was still alive, had not stimulated any general demand for other works.

It was after Oscar Wilde's death that his friends and admirers were able to set to work at their endeavours to rehabilitate him as artist in the mind of general prejudice. Books and monographs were written about Wilde in English, French, and German. He was quoted in the leading Continental reviews. His play "Salomé" met with sudden and stupendous success all over Europe, a famous musician turned it into an opera. A well-known English man of letters, Mr Robert Harborough Sherard, published a final official "Life" of the dead author, and Wilde's own "De Profundis" appeared to startle, sadden, and thrill the whole reading world.

His plays are being revived, and an authoritative and exhaustive edition of his writings is being issued by a leading publishing house.

There is no doubt about it, the most prejudiced and hostile critics must admit it—in a literary sense, as a man of letters with extraordinary genius, Oscar Wilde has come into his own. The time is, therefore, ripe for a work of the present character which endeavours to "appreciate" one of the strangest, saddest, most artistic and powerful brains of modern times. Five years ago such a book as this would probably have been out of place. When Balzac died Sainte-Beuve prefaced a short critical article of fourteen pages, as follows:—

"A careful study of the famous novelist who has just been taken from us, and whose sudden loss has excited universal interest, would require a whole work, and the time for that, I think, has not yet come. Those sort of moral autopsies cannot be made over a freshly dug grave, especially when he who has been laid in it was full of strength and fertility, and seemed still full of future works and days. All that is possible and fitting in respect of a great contemporary renown at the moment death lays it low is to point out, by means of a few clear-cut lines, the merits, the varied skill, by which it charmed its epoch and acquired influence over it."

When Oscar Wilde died, and before the publication of "De Profundis," various short essays did, as I have stated, make an appearance. A longer work seems called for, and it is that want which the present volume does its best to supply.

"Oscar Wilde: The Man" is the title of the first part of this Appreciation. In Mr Sherard's "The Story of an Unhappy Friendship," as also in his careful and scholarly "Life," the many-sided nature of Oscar Wilde was set forth with all the ability of a brilliant pen. But there is yet room for another, and possibly more detached point of view, and also a summary of the views of others which will assist the general reader to gain a mental picture of a writer whose works, in a very short time, are certain to have a general, as well as a particular appeal.

The scheme of a work of this nature, which is critical rather than biographical, would nevertheless be incomplete without a personal study.

The study of Wilde's writings cannot fail to be enormously assisted by some knowledge of synetoithe man himself, and how he was regarded by others both before and after his personal disgrace.

Ever since his name was known to the world at all the public view of him has constantly been shifting and changing. There are, however, four principal periods during each of which Wilde was regarded in a totally different way. I have made a careful analysis of each of these periods and collected documentary and other evidence which defines and explains them.

The first period of all—Oscar Wilde himself always spoke of the different phases of his extraordinary career as "periods"—was that of the "Æsthetic movement" as it is generally called, or the æsthetic "craze" as many people prefer to name it still. New movements, whether good or bad in their conception and ultimate result, always excite enmity, hostility, and ridicule. In affairs, in religion, in art, this is an invariable rule. No pioneer has ever escaped it. England laughed at the first railway, jeered at the volunteer movement and laughed at John Keats in precisely the same fashion as it ridiculed Oscar Wilde and the æsthetic movement.

It is as well to define that movement carefully, for, though marred by innumerable extravagances and still suffering from the inanities of its first disciples, it has nevertheless had a real and permanent influence upon English life. Oscar Wilde was, of course, not the originator of the æsthetic movement. He took upon himself to become its hierophant, and to infuse much that was peculiarly his own into it. The movement was begun by Ruskin, Rossetti, William Morris, Burne-Jones, and a host of others, while it was continued in the delicate and beautiful writings of Walter Pater. But it had always been an eclectic movement, not for the public eye or ear, neither known of nor popular with ordinary people.

Oscar Wilde then began to interest and excite England and America in the true aims and methods of art of all kinds. It shows an absolute ignorance of the late Victorian era to say that the movement was a passing craze. To Oscar Wilde we owe it that people of refined tastes but moderate means can obtain beautiful papers for the walls of their houses at a moderate cost. The cheap and lovely fabrics that we can buy in Regent Street are spun as a direct consequence of the movement; harmony and delicacy of colour, beauty of curve and line, the whole renaissance of art in our household furniture are mainly due to the writings and lectures of Oscar Wilde.

It is not a crime to love beautiful things, it is not effeminate to care for them. It is to the subject of this appreciation we owe our national change of feeling on such matters.

This, briefly, is what the æsthetic movement was, such are its indubitable results. Let us see, in some instances, how Wilde was regarded in the period when, before his real literary successes, he preached the gospel of Beauty in everyday life.

Let us take a Continental view of Wilde in his first period, the view of a really eminent man, a distinguished scientist and man of letters.

The name of Dr Max Nordau will be familiar to many readers of this book. But, if the book fulfils the purpose for which it was designed, then possibly there will be many readers who will know little or nothing of the distinguished foreign writer. Hard, one-sided, and bitter as his remarks upon Wilde during the æsthetic movement will seem to most of us—seem to me—yet they have the merit of absolute detachment and sincerity. It is as well to insist on this fact in order that my readers may realise exactly such value as the words may have, no less and no more. The following short account of Dr Max Nordau's position and achievements is taken from that useful dictionary of celebrities, "Who's Who?" for 1907:—

"Nordau, Max Simon, M.D. Paris, Budapesth; Officier d'Académie, France; Commander of the Royal Hellenic Order of the St Saviour; author and physician; President Congress of Zionists; Hon. Mem. of the Greek Acad. of the Parnassos; b. Budapesth, 29th July 1849; y. s. of Gabriel Südfield, Rabbi, Krotoschin, Prussia, and his 2nd wife, b. Nelkin, Riga, Russia. Educ. Royal Gymnasium and Protestant Gymnasium, Budapesth; Royal University, Budapesth; Faculty of Medicine, Paris. Wrote very early for newspapers; travelled for several years all over Europe; practised as a physician for a year and a half, 1878-80, at Budapesth; settled then at Paris, residing there ever since; m. Anna-Elizabeth, 2nd d. of State-councillor Captain Julius Dons, Copenhagen, Denmark; one d. Publications: Paris, Studien und Bilder aus dem wahren Milliardenlande, 1878; Seifenblasen, 1879; Vom Kreml zur Alhambra, 1880; Aus der Zeitungswelt (together with Ferdinand Gross), 1880; Paris under der dritten Republik, 1881; der Krieg der Millionen, 1882; Die conventionellen Lügen der Culturmenschheit, 1883; Ausgewählte Pariser Briefe, 1884; Paradoxe, 1885; Die Krankheit des Jahrhunderts, 1887; Seelenanalysen, 1891; Gefühlskomödie, 1892; Entartung, 1893; Das Recht zu lieben, 1894; Die Kugel, 1895; Drohnenschlacht, 1896; La funzione sociale dell arte, 1897; Doctor Kohn, 1898; The Drones must Die, 1899: Zeitgenössische Franzosen, 1901; Morganatic, 1904; Mahâ-Rôg, 1905. Recreations: foil-fencing, swimming. Address: 8, Rue Léonie, Paris."

Nearly all the modern manifestations of Art, implies Dr Max Nordau, in "Degeneration," are manifestations of madness. Such a sweeping statement is incredible and has not—nor will it have—many advocates, despite the brilliant special pleading of its originator. In Oscar Wilde's case the aphorism seems particularly misleading for the reason that there may appear to be a considerable amount of truth in it.

That Wilde's social downfall was due to a certain kind of elliptiform insanity is without doubt. Mr Sherard has insisted on this over and over again. He has spent enormous labour in researches into Wilde's ancestry. His view is really a scientific view because it is written by an artist who sees both sides of the question, has a judicial mind, and while capable of appreciating the truths that science teaches us, is further capable of welding them to the psychological truths which the intuition of the artist alone evolves.

A certain definite and partial insanity alone can explain Wilde's life in certain of its aspects. But when once his pen was in his hand, in his real bright life of literature and art, this hidden thing entirely disappears. Therefore, Dr Max Nordau's study seems to me fundamentally wrong, though extremely interesting and not to be disregarded. To know Oscar Wilde we must know what all sorts of people, whose opinion has weight enough to secure a wide hearing, really thought about him.

The German scientist said:

"The ego-mania of decadentism, its love of the artificial, its aversion to nature, and to all forms of activity and movement, its megalomaniacal contempt for men and its exaggeration of the importance of art, have found their English representative among the 'Æsthetes,' the chief of whom is Oscar Wilde.

"Wilde has done more by his personal eccentricities than by his works. Like Barbey d'Aurevilly, whose rose-coloured silk hats and gold lace cravats are well known, and like his disciple Joséphin Péladan, who walks about in lace frills and satin doublet, Wilde dresses in queer costumes which recall partly the fashions of the Middle Ages, partly the rococo modes. He pretends to have abandoned the dress of the present time because it offends his sense of the beautiful; but this is only a pretext in which probably he himself does not believe. What really determines his actions is the hysterical craving to be noticed, to occupy the attention of the world with himself, to get talked about. It is asserted that he has walked down Pall Mall in the afternoon dressed in doublet and breeches, with a picturesque biretta on his head, and a sunflower in his hand, the quasi-heraldic symbol of the Æsthetes. This anecdote has been reproduced in all the biographies of Wilde, and I have nowhere seen it denied. But it is a promenade with a sunflower in the hand also inspired by a craving for the beautiful.

"Phrasemakers are perpetually repeating the twaddle, that it is a proof of honourable independence to follow one's own taste without being bound down to the regulation costume of the Philistine cattle, and to choose for clothes the colours, materials and cut which appear beautiful to oneself, no matter how much they may differ from the fashion of the day. The answer to this cackle should be that it is above all a sign of anti-social ego-mania to irritate the majority unnecessarily, only to gratify vanity, or an æsthetical instinct of small importance and easy to control—such as is always done when, either by word or deed, a man places himself in opposition to this majority. He is obliged to repress many manifestations of opinions and desires out of regard for his fellow-creatures; to make him understand this is the aim of education, and he who has not learnt to impose some restraint upon himself in order not to shock others is called by malicious Philistines, not an Æsthete, but a blackguard.

"It may become a duty to combat the vulgar herd in the cause of truth and knowledge; but to a serious man this duty will always be felt as a painful one. He will never fulfil it with a light heart, and he will examine strictly and cautiously if it be really a high and imperative law which forces him to be disagreeable to the majority of his fellow-creatures. Such an action is, in the eyes of a moral and sane man, a kind of martyrdom for a conviction, to carry out which constitutes a vital necessity; it is a form, and not an easy form, of self-sacrifice, for it means the renunciation of the joy which the consciousness of sympathy with one's fellow-creatures gives, and it exacts the painful overthrow of social instincts, which, in truth, do not exist in deranged ego-maniacs, but are very strong in the normal man.

"The predilection for strange costume is a pathological aberration of a racial instinct. The adornment of the exterior has its origin in the strong desire to be admired by others—primarily by the opposite sex—to be recognised by them as especially well shaped, handsome, youthful, or rich and powerful, or as pre-eminent through rank or merit. It is practised, then, with the object of producing a favourable impression on others, and is a result of thought about others, of preoccupation with the race. If, now, this adornment be, not through misjudgment but purposely, of a character to cause irritation to others, or lend itself to ridicule—in other words, if it excites disapproval instead of approbation—it then runs exactly counter to the object of the art of dress, and evinces a perversion of the instinct of vanity.

"The pretence of a sense of beauty is the excuse of consciousness for a crank of the conscious. The fool who masquerades in Pall Mall does not see himself, and, therefore, does not enjoy the beautiful appearance which is supposed to be an æsthetic necessity for him. There would be some sense in his conduct if it had for its object an endeavour to cause others to dress in accordance with his taste; for them he sees and they can scandalise him by the ugliness, and charm by the beauty, of their costume. But to take the initiative in a new artistic style in dress brings the innovator not one hair's breadth nearer his assumed goal of æsthetic satisfaction.

"When, therefore, an Oscar Wilde goes about in 'æsthetic costume' among gazing Philistines, exciting either their ridicule or their wrath, it is no indication of independence of character, but rather from a purely anti-socialistic, ego-maniacal recklessness and hysterical longing to make a sensation, justified by no exalted aim; nor is it from a strong desire of beauty, but from a malevolent mania for contradiction."

It is impossible to read the extracts quoted above—and only a few paragraphs sufficient to show the trend of a much longer article have been used—without realising its injustice and yet at the same time its perfect sincerity. During the "first period," with which we are dealing now, Wilde undoubtedly excited the enmity and ridicule of a vast number of people. He knew that he had something to say which was worth listening to. He knew also—as the genius always has known—that he was superior in intellect to those by whom he was surrounded. His temperament was impatient. He wanted to take the place to which he felt he was entitled in a sudden moment. His quick Celtic imagination ran riot with fact, his immeasurable ambition, his serene consciousness of worth, which to usual minds and temperaments suggested nothing but conceit, all urged him to display and extravagance in order to more speedily mount the rostrum from which he would be heard.

Therefore, in this first period of this so astonishing a career, he went far to spoil and obscure his message by the very means he hoped would enable him to publish it widely. He invented a pose which he intended should become a megaphone, whereas, in the effect, it did but retard the hearing of his voice until the practical wisdom of what he wished to say proved itself in concrete form.

Nor must we ever forget the man's constant sense of humour, a mocking sprite which doubtless led him to this or that public foolishness while he chuckled within at his own attitude and the dance he was leading his imitators and fools. For Oscar Wilde had a supreme sense of humour. Many people would like to deny him humour, while admitting his marvellous and scintillating wit. That they are wrong I unhesitatingly assert, and I believe that this will be proved over and over again in the following pages.

Let us take another view of Wilde at this period. It was written after his disappearance from public life, or rather when it was imminent and certain. The words are those of Mr Labouchere, the flaneur with an intellect, the somewhat acid critic of how many changing aspects and phases of English social life.

"I have known Oscar Wilde off and on for years," writes Mr Labouchere in Truth. "Clever and witty he unquestionably is, but I have always regarded him as somewhat wrong in the head, for his craving after notoriety seemed to me a positive craze. There was nothing that he would not do to attract attention. When he went over to New York he went about dressed in a bottle-green coat with a waist up to his shoulders. When he entered a restaurant people threw things at him. When he drove in the evening to deliver his lectures the windows of his carriage were broken, until a policeman rode on each side of it. Far from objecting to all this, it filled him with delighted complacency. 'Insult me, throw mud at me, but only look at me,' seemed to be his creed; and such a creed was never acted upon by anyone whose mind was not out of balance. So strange and wondrous is his mind, when in an abnormal condition, that it would not surprise me if he were deriving a keen enjoyment from a position which most people, whether really innocent or guilty, would prefer to die rather than occupy. He must have known in what a glass house he lived when he challenged investigation in a court of justice. After he had done this he went abroad. Why did he not stay abroad? The possibilities of a prison may not be pleasing to him, but I believe that the notoriety that has overtaken him has such a charm for him that it outweighs everything else. I remember, in the early days of the cult of æstheticism, hearing someone ask him how a man of his undoubted capacity could make such a fool of himself. He gave this explanation. He had written, he said, a book of poems, and he believed in their excellence. In vain he went from publisher to publisher asking them to bring them out: no one would even read them, for he was unknown. In order to find a publisher he felt that he must do something to become a personality. So he hit upon æstheticism. It succeeded. People talked about him; they invited him to their houses as a sort of lion. He then took his poems to a publisher, who—still without reading them—gladly accepted them."

This is thoroughly unsympathetic, but no doubt it represents a mood with some faithfulness. In criticising the work of critics one must be a psychologist. Religion, the Christian religion at anyrate, teaches tolerance. Its teachings are seldom obeyed. The four Hags of the litany—let us personify them!—Envy, Hatred, Malice, and Uncharitableness unfortunately intrude into religious life too often and too powerfully. But the real psychologist, not the scientist (vide Nordau) is able to understand better than anyone else the motives which have animated criticism at any given date. The psychologist more than any other type of man or woman has learnt the lesson Charles Reade tried to inculcate in "Put Yourself In His Place."

With a little effort, we can realise what Truth thought when these lines were written. We cannot blame the writer, we can only record his words as a part of the general statement dealing with Oscar Wilde's life and attitude during the "Æsthetic Period."

At this point the reader may possibly ask himself if the title given to the book—"Oscar Wilde: an Appreciation"—is entirely justified. "The writer of it," he may say to himself, "is giving us examples of hostile criticism of Wilde's first period, and though he endeavours to explain them, yet, in an appreciation, it rather seems that such quotations are out of place."

I do not think that if the point of view is considered for a moment, the stricture will be persisted in.

Eulogy, indiscriminating eulogy, is simply an ex parte statement which can have no weight at all. I shall endeavour to show, before this first part of the book is completed, not only how those who attacked Wilde were mistaken, not only how those who bestowed indiscriminate praise upon him made an over-statement, but finally and definitely what Wilde was as seen through the temperament of the writer, corrected by the statements of other writers both for and against him.

I am convinced that this is the only scientific method of arriving at a just estimation of the character of this brilliant and extraordinary man. No summing up of the æsthetic period could be complete without copious references to the great chronicler of our modern life—the pages of Mr Punch.

Punch has never been bitter. It has often been severe, but Mr Punch has always, from the very first moment of his arrival among us, successfully held the balance between this or that faction, and, moreover, has faithfully reflected the consensus of public opinion upon any given matter.

The extraordinary skill with which some of the brightest and merriest wits have made our national comic paper the true diary of events cannot be controverted or disputed. Follies and fashions have been criticised with satire, but never with spleen. Addison said that the "appearance of a man of genius in the world may always be known by the virulence of dunces." Punch has proved for generations that its kindly appreciation or depreciation has never been virulent, but nearly always an accurate statement of the opinion and point of view of the ordinary more or less cultured and well-bred person.

It has always been a sign of eminence in this or that department of life to be mentioned in Punch at all. The conductors of that journal during its whole career have always exercised the wisest discrimination, and have always kept shrewd fingers upon the pulses of English thought. When a politician, for example, is caricatured in Punch that politician knows that he has arrived at a certain place and point in public estimation. When a writer is caricatured, either in line or words, he also knows that he has, at anyrate, obtained a hold of this or that sort upon the country.

Now those who would try to minimise the place of Oscar Wilde in the public eye during the æsthetic period have only to look at the pages of Punch to realise how greatly that movement influenced English life during its continuance.

Let it be thoroughly understood—and very few people will attempt to deny it—that Punch has always been a perfectly adjusted barometer of celebrity.

It is, therefore, not out of place, herein, to publish a bibliography of the references to Oscar Wilde which, from first to last of that cometlike career, appeared in the pages of Mr Punch. Such a list proves immediately the one-sidedness of Dr Max Nordau's and Mr Labouchere's views. From extracts I have given from the remarks of these two eminent people the ordinary man might well be inclined to think that the æsthetic movement and the doings of Oscar Wilde in his first period were small and local things. This is not so, and the following carefully compiled list will show that it is not so.

The list has been properly indexed and is now given below. Afterwards I shall give a small selection from the witticisms of the famous journal to support the bibliography.

Those students of the work of Oscar Wilde and his position in modern life will find the references below of great interest. They date from 1881 to 1906, and those collectors of "Oscariana" and students of Wilde's work will doubtless be able to obtain the numbers in which the following articles, poems, and paragraphs have appeared.

1881

Almanack for 1882 (Dec. 6, 1881) (p. 5). More Impressions. (By Oscuro Wildegoose.) Des Sornettes.

1882

1883

1884

1885

1887

1889

1890

1891

1892

1893

1894

1895

1906

This list at least spells, and spelt, celebrity and a recognition of the importance of the Æsthetic movement.

Especially did the American lecturing tour of Oscar Wilde excite the comment and ridicule of Punch.

I quote some paragraphs from a pretended despatch from an "American correspondent."

A POET'S DAY

(From an American Correspondent)

Oscar at Breakfast!	Oscar at Luncheon!!
Oscar at Dinner!!!	Oscar at Supper!!!!

"You see I am, after all, but mortal," remarked the Poet, with an ineffable affable smile, as he looked up from an elegant but substantial dish of ham and eggs. Passing a long, willowy hand through his waving hair, he swept away a stray curl-paper with the nonchalance of a D'orsay.

After this effort, Mr Wilde expressed himself as feeling somewhat faint; and, with a half-apologetic smile, ordered another portion of

HAM AND EGGS

in the evident enjoyment of which, after a brief interchange of international courtesies, I left the Poet.

The irresponsible but not ungenial and quite legitimate fun of this is a fairly representative indication of the way in which the young "Apostle of Beauty" was thought of in England during his American visit.

The writer goes on to tell how, later in the day, he once more encountered the "young patron of Culture." It is astonishing to us now to realise how even the word "culture" was distorted from its real meaning and made into the badge of a certain set. At anyrate, Mr Punch's contributor goes on to say that "Oscar" was found at the business premises of the

CO-OPERATIVE DRESS ASSOCIATION.

On this occasion the Poet, by special request, appeared in the uniform of an English Officer of the Dragoon Guards, the dress, I understand, being supplied for the occasion from the elegant wardrobe of Mr D'oyley Carte's "Patience" Company.

Several ladies expressed their disappointment at the "insufficient leanness" of the Poet's figure, whereupon his Business Manager explained that he belonged to the fleshy school.

To accommodate Mr Wilde, the ordinary lay-figures were removed from the showroom, and, after a sumptuous luncheon, to which the élite of Miss ——'s customers were invited, the distinguished guest posed with his fair hostess in an allegorical tableau, representing English Poetry extending the right hand to American Commerce.

"This is indeed Fair Trade," remarked Mr Wilde lightly, and immediately improvised a testimonial advertisement (in verse) in praise of Miss ——'s patent dress-improver.

At a dinner given by "Jemmy" Crowder (as we familiarly call him), the Apologist of Art had discarded his military garb for the ordinary dress of an

ENGLISH GENTLEMAN

in which his now world-famed knee-breeches form a conspicuous item, suggesting indeed the Admiral's uniform in Mr D'Oyley Carte's "Pinafore" combination.

"I think," said the Poet, in a pause between courses, "one cannot dine too well"—placing everyone at his ease by his admirable tact in partaking of the thirty-six items of the menu.

The skit continues wittily enough, but it is not necessary to quote more of it. The paragraphs sufficiently explain the attitude of Mr Punch, which was the general attitude at the time.

It was hammered in persistently. "Oscar Interviewed" appeared under the date of January 1882, and again, in the following extracts the reader will recognise the same note.

"Determined to anticipate the rabble of penny-a-liners ready to pounce upon any distinguished foreigner who approaches our shores, and eager to assist a sensitive Poet in avoiding the impertinent curiosity and ill-bred insolence of the Professional Reporter, I took the fastest pilot-boat on the station, and boarded the splendid Cunard steamer, the Boshnia, in the shucking of a peanut."

HIS ÆSTHETIC APPEARANCE

He stood, with his large hand passed through his long hair, against a high chimney-piece—which had been painted pea-green, with panels of peacock-blue pottery let in at uneven intervals—one elbow on the high ledge, the other hand on his hip. He was dressed in a long, snuff-coloured, single-breasted coat, which reached to his heels, and was relieved with a sealskin collar and cuffs rather the worse for wear. Frayed linen, and an orange silk handkerchief, gave a note to the generally artistic colouring of the ensemble, while one small daisy drooped despondently in his buttonhole.... We may state that the chimney-piece, as well as the sealskin collar, is the property of Oscar, and will appear in his Lectures "on the Growth of Artistic Taste in England."

HE SPEAKS FOR HIMSELF

"Yes; I should have been astonished had I not been interviewed! Indeed, I have not been well on board this Cunard Argosy. I have wrestled with the glaukous-haired Poseidon, and feared his ravishment. Quite: I have been too ill, too utterly ill. Exactly—seasick in fact, if I must descend to so trivial an expression. I fear the clean beauty of my strong limbs is somewhat waned. I am scarcely myself—my nerves are thrilling like throbbing violins—in exquisite pulsation.

"You are right. I believe I was the first to devote my subtle brain-chords to the worship of the Sunflower, and the apotheosis of the delicate Tea-pot. I have ever been jasmine-cradled from my youth. Eons ago, I might say centuries, in '78, when a student at Oxford, I had trampled the vintage of my babyhood, and trod the thorn-spread heights of Poesy. I had stood in the Arena and torn the bays from the expiring athletes, my competitors."

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LECTURE PROSPECTS

"Yes; I expect my Lecture will be a success. So does Dollar Carte—I mean D'Oyley Carte. Too-Toothless Senility may jeer, and poor, positive Propriety may shake her rusty curls; but I am here in my creamy lustihood, to pipe of Passion's venturous Poesy, and reap the scorching harvest of Self-Love! I am not quite sure what I mean. The true Poet never is. In fact, true Poetry is nothing if it is intelligible. She is only to be compared to Salmacis, who is not a boy or girl, but yet is both."

And so forth, and so forth.

About the conversation and superficial manner of Oscar Wilde there must have been something strangely according to formula. Among intimate friends, friends who were sympathetic to his real ideals, his talk was wonderful. That fact is vouched for in a hundred quarters, it is not to be denied.

As I write I have dozens of undeniable testimonies to the fact, I myself can bear witness to it on at least one occasion. But when Wilde was not with people for whose opinion of him he cared much—really cared—his odd perversity of phrase, his persistent wish to astonish the fools, his extraordinary carelessness of average opinion often compelled him to talk the most frantic nonsense which was only redeemed from mere childish inversion of phrase by the air and manner with which it was said, and the merest tinsel pretence of wit. The wittiest talker of his generation, certainly the wittiest writer, gave the very worst of his wit to the pressmen who pestered him but who, and this was the thing he was unable to appreciate at its true value, represented him to the world during this "first period."

The mock interviews in Punch which have been quoted from are really no very wide departures from the real thing. A year or two after the Æsthetic movement was not so prominent in the public eye as was the success of Wilde as a writer of plays, an actual interview with him appeared in a well-known weekly paper in which he talked not much less extravagantly than he was caricatured as talking in Punch. A play of his had been produced and, while it was a complete and satisfying success, it had been assailed in that unfortunately hostile way by the critics to which he was accustomed.

He was asked what he thought about the attitude of the critics towards his play.

"For a man to be a dramatic critic," he is said to have replied, "is as foolish and inartistic as it would be for a man to be a critic of epics, or a pastoral critic, or a critic of lyrics. All modes of art are one, and the modes of the art that employs words as its medium are quite indivisible. The result of the vulgar specialisation of criticism is an elaborate scientific knowledge of the stage—almost as elaborate as that of the stage-carpenter, and quite on a par with that of the call-boy—combined with an entire incapacity to realise that a play is a work of art, or to receive any artistic impressions at all."

He was told that he was rather severe upon the dramatic critics.

"English dramatic criticism of our own day has never had a single success, in spite of the fact that it goes to all the first nights," was his reply.

Thereupon the interviewer suggested that dramatic criticism was at least influential.

"Certainly; that is why it is so bad," he replied, and went on to say:

"The moment criticism exercises any influence it ceases to be criticism. The aim of the true critic is to try and chronicle his own moods, not to try and correct the masterpieces of others."

"Real critics would be charming in your eyes, then?"

"Real critics? Ah, how perfectly charming they would be! I am always waiting for their arrival. An inaudible school would be nice. Why do you not found it?"

Oscar Wilde was asked if there were, then, absolutely no critics in London.

"There are just two," he answered, but refused to give their names. The interviewer goes on to recount his exact words:

"Mr Wilde, with the elaborate courtesy for which he has always been famous, replied, 'I think I had better not mention their names; it might make the others so jealous.'

"'What do the literary cliques think of your plays?'

"'I don't write to please cliques; I write to please myself. Besides, I have always had grave suspicions that the basis of all literary cliques is a morbid love of meat-teas. That makes them sadly uncivilised.'

"'Still, if your critics offend you, why don't you reply to them?'

"'I have far too much time. But I think some day I will give a general answer, in the form of a lecture, in a public hall, which I shall call "Straight Talks to Old Men."'

"'What is your feeling towards your audiences—towards the public?'

"'Which public? There are as many publics as there are personalities.'

"'Are you nervous on the night that you are producing a new play?'

"'Oh no, I am exquisitely indifferent. My nervousness ends at the last dress rehearsal; I know then what effect my play, as presented upon the stage, has produced upon me. My interest in the play ends there, and I feel curiously envious of the public—they have such wonderful fresh emotions in store for them.'

"I laughed, but Mr Wilde rebuked me with a look of surprise.

"'It is the public, not the play, that I desire to make a success,' he said.

"'But I'm afraid I don't quite understand——'

"'The public makes a success when it realises that a play is a work of art. On the three first nights I have had in London the public has been most successful, and had the dimensions of the stage admitted of it, I would have called them before the curtain. Most managers, I believe, call them behind.'"

There are pages more of this sort of thing, and the earlier and pretended interview in Punch differs a little in period but very little in manner from this real interview.

Punch continued its gibes during the whole time of the first period. Really witty parodies of Oscar Wilde's poems and plays appeared from time to time. Pictures of him were drawn in caricature by well-known artists. It was the same in almost every society. The band of enthusiasts listened to the message, but gave more prominence to the poses and extravagances which accompanied it. The message was obscured and it was the fault of Oscar Wilde's eccentricity.

We are reaping the benefit of it all now, at present I am merely the chronicler of opinion when the movement was in what the unobservant thought was its heyday, but which has proved to be its infancy.

The chorus of dislike and mistrust was almost universal. At Oxford itself, popularly supposed to be a stronghold of æstheticism at the time, a debate on the question took place at the Union. A very prominent undergraduate of the day, Mr J. A. Simon, of Wadham College, reflected the bulk of Oxford opinion when he spoke as follows:—

"Mr J. A. Simon (Wadham) said he felt nervous, for it was an extraordinary occasion for him to be on the side that would gain a majority. He did not consider that the motion had at all the meaning the mover gave it. He quite agreed with him as to the advances made in the illustrated press, and other things, and that many of these selected changes were good. The motion, however, evidently referred to the movement headed by Oscar Wilde, and represented by such things as the 'Yellow Book,' etc. He always thought that the mover was most natural when he was on the stage (applause) and they had all been given pleasure by his impersonations (applause). He believed, though, that he had been acting that night, and the speaker quoted from the speeches of Bassanio passages which he considered described the way the mover had led them off the scent. He intended to discuss the matter seriously. As a book entitled 'Degeneracy' pointed out, the new movement was the outcome of a craving for novelty, and the absurdities in connection with it would do credit to a madhouse. People were eccentric in the hope that they would be taken to be original (applause). It was not a development at all; it was but a jerk or twitching, the work of a moment. Oscar Wilde had actually signed his name to a most awful pun, as those who had seen 'The Importance Of Being Earnest' would understand. The writer's many epigrams were doubtless clever, for next to pretending to be drunk, pretending to be mad was the most difficult (applause). The process was to turn a proverb upside down, and there was the epigram. Then Aubrey Beardsley's figures, if they showed anything, showed extraordinary development; they certainly were not delicate; in fact, he should call them distinctly indelicate. For one thing, such creatures never existed, and it was a species of art that was absolutely imbecile. Oscar Wilde, though, had said that until we see things as they are not we never really live. But all he could say was that he hoped he should never live (applause). It was really not art at all, for art was nearly allied to nature, although Oscar Wilde said that the only connecting link was a really well-made buttonhole. That sort of thing was the art of being brilliantly absurd (applause). It was insignificant to lay claim to manners on the ground of personal appearance; such were not manners but mannerisms. Aubrey Beardsley's figures were but a mannerism of this sort (applause). A development must be new and permanent, and the pictures referred to were not new, for similar ones could be found on the old Egyptian monuments (applause). This cult were not even original individually, for where one led all the rest followed. Oscar Wilde talked about a purple sin: the others did the same. By-the-by, that remark was not original, for scarlet sins had been mentioned in very early days; it was indeed all of it but a resuscitation of what was old and had been long left behind by the rest of the world (applause). The movement was not permanent, as might be seen by the æsthetic craze of fifteen years ago. Velvet coats and peacock feathers were dying out, and soon it would not be correct to wear the hair long (laughter). It was but a phase; if everyone were to talk in epigrams it would be distinguished to talk sense. He was in a difficulty, for if he got a large majority against the motion, to be in a minority was just what would please the æsthetes most. Therefore, let as few vote against as possible (laughter). To be serious, he considered that true art should give pleasure and comfort to people who were in trouble or down in the world, and who, he asked, would be helped by the art of either Aubrey Beardsley or Oscar Wilde? (applause). In conclusion, he would ask the House to give the movers the satisfaction of having as few as possible voting for them (applause)."

"Ars longa est! All know what once that meant;
But cranks corrupt so sickeningly have shindied
About their Art of late, 'tis evident
The rendering now must be, 'Art is long-winded!'
For Vita brevis,—all true men must hope,
Brief life for such base Art—and a short rope!"

said a popular rhyme of the time. It sums up average opinion and may fittingly close this summary of it during the "Æsthetic" period.

We are forced to admit that the general misunderstanding was partially due to the fashion in which the new doctrines were presented. The thing was well worth saying, but it was not said seriously enough. It was a lamentable mistake, but it helps us to understand a certain aspect of Oscar Wilde: the man.

THE SECOND PERIOD

At the time in which what I have called the "second period" may be said to have begun, Wilde was emerging from the somewhat obscuring influences of the Æsthetic movement and was in a state of transition.

He was then editing a magazine known as The Woman's World, and doing his work with a conscientiousness and sense of responsibility which shows us another side of him and one which, to the sane, if limited, English temperament is a singularly pleasant one. He had moaned, money must be earned, and he earned it faithfully under a discipline. It is a speculation not without interest when we wonder to what heights such a man might not have risen if a discipline such as this had been more continuous.

"Lord of himself, that heritage of woe," sang Lord Byron, well aware from personal experience of the constant dangers, the almost certain shipwreck that the life of perfect freedom has for such as he was, and for such a temperament as Wilde's also.

Oscar was living in a beautiful house at Chelsea, and it is a remarkable instance of how surely the first period had merged into the second when we find that the decorations of his home were beautiful indeed, but not much like those he had preached about and insisted on in his æsthetic lectures and writings.

There was an utter lack of so-called æsthetic colouring in the house where Mr and Mrs Wilde had made their home. The scheme consisted, indeed, of faded and delicate brocades, against a background of white or cream painting, and was French rather than English.

Rare engravings and etchings formed a deep frieze along two sides of the drawing-room, and stood out on a dull-gold background, while the only touches of bright colour in the apartment were lent by two splendid Japanese feathers let into the ceiling, while, above the white, carved mantelpiece, a gilt-copper bas-relief, by Donaghue, made living Oscar Wilde's fine verses, "Requiescat."

Not the least interesting work of art in this characteristic sitting-room was a quaint harmony in greys and browns, purporting to be a portrait of the master of the house as a youth; a painting which was a wedding present from Mr Harper Pennington, the American artist.

The house could boast of an exceptionally choice gallery of contemporary art. Close to a number of studies of Venice, presented by Mr Whistler himself, hung an exquisite pen-and-ink illustration by Walter Crane. An etching of Bastien Le Page's portrait of Sarah Bernhardt contained in the margin a few kindly words written in English by the great tragedienne.

Mrs Oscar Wilde herself had strong ideas upon house decoration. She once told an inquirer that "no one who has not tried them knows the value of uniform tints and a quiet scheme of colouring. One of the most effective effects in house decoration can be obtained by having, say, the sitting-room pure cream or white, with, perhaps, a dado of six or seven feet from the ground. In an apartment of this kind, ample colouring and variety will be introduced by the furniture, engravings, and carpet; in fact, but for the trouble of keeping white walls in London clean, I do not think there can be anything prettier and more practical than this mode of decoration, for it is both uncommon and easy to carry out. I am not one of those," continued Mrs Wilde, "who believe that beauty can only be achieved at considerable cost. A cottage parlour may be, and often is, more beautiful, with its unconsciously achieved harmonies and soft colouring, than a great reception-room, arranged more with a view to producing a magnificent effect. But I repeat, of late, people, in their wish to decorate their homes, have blended various periods, colourings and designs, each perhaps beautiful in itself, but producing an unfortunate effect when placed in juxtaposition. I object also to historic schemes of decoration, which nearly always make one think of the upholsterer, and not of the owner of the house."

In conjunction with her husband, Mrs Wilde had also thought out the right place of flowers in the decoration of a house. She would say: "It is impossible to have too many flowers in a room, and I think that scattering cut blossoms on a tablecloth is both a foolish and a cruel custom, for long before dinner is over the poor things begin to look painfully parched and thirsty for want of water. A few delicate flowers in plain glass vases produce a prettier effect than a great number of nosegays, and yet, even though people may see that something is wrong, many do not realise how easily a charming effect might be produced with the same materials somewhat differently disposed.

"A Japanese native room, for example, is furnished with dainty simplicity, and one flower and one pot supply the Jap's æsthetic longing for decoration. When he gets tired of his flower and his pot, he puts them away, and seeks for some other scheme of colour produced by equally simple means."

Oscar Wilde now began to take a definite place in the English social world. His wit, his brilliance of conversation, his singular charm of manner all combined to render him a welcome guest, and in many cases a valued friend, in circles where distinction of intellect and charm of personality are the only passports. He began to make money and to indulge a natural taste for profusion and splendour. Yet, let it be said here, and said with emphasis, that greatly as he desired, and acquired, the elegances of life, increasing fortune found him as kind and generous as before. It is a known fact that he gave away large sums of money to those less fortunate in the effort to make an income by artistic pursuits. His purse was always open to the struggling and the unhappy and his influence constantly exerted on their behalf.

Suddenly all London was captured by the brilliant modern comedies he began to write. Success of the completest kind had arrived, the poet's name was in everyone's mouth. Curiously enough it is the French students of Wilde's career who have paid the most attention to Wilde in this second period. The man of society, the witty talker, the maker of epigrams—Wilde at his apogee just before his fall—this is the picture on which the Latin psychologists have liked to dwell.

"In our days, the master of repartee and the after-dinner speaker is foredoomed to forgetfulness, for he always stands alone, and to gain applause has to talk down to and flatter lower-class audiences. No writer of blood-curdling melodramas, no weaver of newspaper novels is obliged to lower his talent so much as the professional wit. If the genius of Mallarmé was obscured by the flatterers that surrounded him, how much more was Wilde's talent overclouded by the would-be-witty, shoddy-elegant, and cheaply-poetical society hangers-on, who covered him with incense. We are told that the first attempts of the sparkling talker were by no means successful in the Parisian salons.

"In the house of Victor Hugo, seeing he must wait to let the veteran sleep out his nap whilst others among the guests slumbered also, he made up his mind to astonish them. He succeeded, but at what a cost! Although he was a verse writer, most sincerely devoted to poetry and art, and one of the most emotional and sensitive and tender-hearted amongst modern wielders of the pen, he succeeded in gaining only a reputation for artificiality.

"We all know his studied paradoxes, his five or six continually repeated tales, but we are tempted to forget the charming dreamer who was full of tenderness for everything in nature."

Thus M. Charles Grolleau, and there is much in his point of view. The writer of "The Happy Prince" and "The House of Pomegranates" is a different person from the paradoxical causeur who went cometlike through a few London and Paris seasons before disappearing into the darkness of space.

And it was the encouragement and applause bestowed upon Oscar Wilde during the second period that not only confirmed him in his determination to live as the complete flaneur, but which prevented even sympathetic critics from appreciating his work at its true worth.

The late M. Hugues Rebell, who knew him fairly intimately, said of him:

"It is true that Mallarmé has not written much, but all he has done is valuable. Some of his verses are most beautiful, whilst Wilde seemed never to finish anything. The works of the English æsthete are very interesting, because they characterise his epoch; his pages are useful from a documentary point of view, but are not extraordinary from a literary standpoint. In the 'Duchess of Padua,' he imitates Hugo and Sardou; the 'Picture of Dorian Gray' was inspired by Huysmans; 'Intentions' is a vade mecum of symbolism, and all the ideas contained therein are to be found in Mallarmé and Villiers de l'Isle-Adam. As for Wilde's poetry, it closely follows the lines laid down by Swinburne. His most original composition is 'Poems in Prose.' They give a correct idea of his home-chat, but not when he was at his best; that, no doubt, is because the art of talking must always be inferior to any form of literary composition. Thoughts properly set forth in print after due correction must always be more charming than a finely sketched idea hurriedly enunciated when conversing with a few disciples. In ordinary table-talk we meet nothing more than ghosts of new-born ideas foredoomed to perish. The jokes of a wit seldom survive the speaker. When we quote the epigrams of Wilde, it is as if we were exhibiting in a glass case a collection of beautiful butterflies, whose wings have lost the brilliancy of their once gaudy colours. Lively talk pleases, because of the man who utters it, and we are impressed also by the gestures which accompany his frothy discourse. What remains of the sprightly quips and anecdotes of such celebrated hommes d'esprit as Scholl, Becque, Barbey d'Aurevilly! Some stories of the eighteenth century have been transmitted to us by Chamfort, but only because he carefully remodelled them by the aid of his clever pen."

Yet during all the time of his success, when he was receiving flattery enough, celebrity enough, money enough to turn the head of a far stronger-willed man than he was, there is abundant evidence of a frequent aspiration after better things. Serene and lofty moods came to him now and again and found utterance in his words or writings.

From the very beginning of his career he had been in the public eye. Now he had, it seemed, come into his own. The years of ridicule and misrepresentation, the years of the first period, were over and done with. A real and solid popularity seemed to be his. Yet, just as he had spoilt and obscured his æsthetic message by those eccentricities which the Anglo-Saxon mind will not permit in anyone who comes professing to teach it, so now Oscar Wilde was to spoil the triumphs of the second period by a mental intoxication that led him step by step to ultimate ruin and disgrace.

At this moment let us sum up the results at which we have arrived in the study of this complex character. We are all of us complex, but Wilde was more strangely compounded than the ordinary man in exact proportion as his intelligence was greater and his power beyond the general measure. This much and no more.

We have seen that the great fault of Wilde's career up to this period was that of an unconquerable egoism. He was complex only because such mighty gifts as those with which he was dowered were united to a temperament naturally gracious, kindly, and that of a gentleman in the best sense of the word, while both were obscured by a self-appreciation and confidence which reached not only the heights of absurdity but surely impinged upon the borders of mental failure. As he himself said over and over again after his downfall, he had nobody but himself to blame for it. Generous-hearted, free with all material things, kind to the unfortunate, gentle to the weak—Oscar Wilde was all these things. Yet, at the same time, he committed the most dreadful crimes against the social well-being; without a thought of those his influence led into terrible paths, without a thought of those nearest and dearest to him, he deliberately imposed upon them a horror and a shame with an extraordinary and almost unparalleled callousness and hardness of heart.

Bound up in the one man were the twin natures of an angel of light and an angel of dark. It is the same with all men, but never perhaps in the history of the world, certainly never in the history of literature, is there to be found a contrast so astonishing. It is not for the writer of this study to hold the balance and to say which part of his nature predominated. Opinion about him is still divided into two camps, and this book is a statement from which everyone can draw his own conclusion, and does not attempt to do more than provide the materials for doing so. Yet, the explanation of it all, if explanation there is, seems simple enough. There was an extraordinary and abnormal divorce between will-power and intelligence. Heavy indulgence grew and grew and gradually obscured the finer nature until he imagined his will was supreme and his wishes the only law. The royal intellect dominated the soul and grew by what it fed on, until it unseated the reason, and Wilde fell never to rise again, except only in his work.

At the end of the second period came the frightful exposure and scandals which sent the author into prison. It is no part of this book to touch upon these scandals or to do more than breathe the kindly hope that Wilde was unconscious of what he did, and was totally incapable of realising its enormity.

The third period, in this attempt at chronicling the various phases of his life and temperament, might be said to have begun on the day of his arrest, when his long agony and punishment were to begin. Greatly as he deserved a heavy punishment, not so much as for what he did to himself but because of the corrupting influence his life and association with others had upon a large section of society, it is yet a moot point whether he did not suffer for others and was made their scapegoat. The true history of this terrible period cannot be written and never will be written. Yet, those who know it in its entirety will say that Wilde bore the penalty for the transgressions of many other people in addition to the just punishment he received for his own.

Few nobler things can be said of any man than this. Let it be eternally placed to his credit that he made no endeavour to lighten his own punishment by implicating others. In more than one instance the betrayal of a friend would undoubtedly have lessened the cumulative burden of the indictment brought against him. He betrayed none of his friends.

THE THIRD PERIOD

This beautiful thread of brightness in the dark warp and woof of Wilde's life at this moment must not be forgotten by those who would estimate his character. It is one of the few relieving lights in the blackness with which the third period opens. And yet, there is still something that can be said for Wilde at this time which certainly provides the student with another aspect of him. It is the way in which he met his fate and was prepared to endure his punishment, although it would have been simple for him to have avoided it. To avoid the consequences of what he had done, inasmuch as the ruin of his career is concerned, was, of course, impossible. That, indeed, was to be the heaviest part of his penalty. Yet, had he so chosen, imprisonment and the frightful agony of the two years need never have been his portion. A French critic writing of him in the Mercure de France takes an analytical view of this fact, which I do not think is the true one, though, nevertheless, it is interesting. He says: "Neither his own heedlessness nor the envious and hypocritical anger of his enemies, nor the snobbish cruelty of social reprobation were the true cause of his misfortunes. It was he himself who, after a time of horrible anguish, consented to his punishment, with a sort of supercilious disdain for the weakness of human will, and out of a certain regard and unhealthy curiosity for the sportfulness of fate. Here was a voluptuary seeking for torture and desiring pain after having wallowed in every sensual pleasure. Can such conduct have been due to aught else but sheer madness?"

That is all very well, but it does not bear the stamp of truth. It is an interesting point of view and nothing more. The conduct of Wilde when he at last came athwart the horror of his destiny, when he realised what all the world realised, that he must answer for his sins before the public justice of England, was not unheroic, nor without a fine and splendid dignity. At this time I would much prefer to say, and all the experiences of those around him confirm it, that Wilde knew that it was his duty to himself to endure what society was about to mete out to him. To say that he was a mere gloomy and jaded voluptuary who wished to taste the pleasures of the most horrible and sordid pain, is surely to talk something perilously like nonsense, though full of one of those minute psychological presumptions so dear to a certain type of Latin mind.

Let it be remembered that Oscar Wilde refused to betray his friends, and in the light of that fact, let us see whether his motive for remaining in England to "face the music," as his brother, William Wilde, expressed it, was not something high and worthy in the midst of this hideous wreck and bankruptcy of his fortune. A friend who was with him then, his biographer, and a man of position in English letters, said that when the subject of flight was discussed, he declared to Wilde that, in his opinion, it was the best thing he could do, not only in his own interests but in those of the public too. This self-sacrificing friend offered to take all the responsibility of the flight upon his own shoulders and to make all the arrangements for it being carried out.

It must be remembered that, at the time Wilde was out on bail, and it has since been proved, with as much certainty as anything of the sort can be proved, that he was not watched by the police, and that even between the periods of his first and second trials, if he had secretly left the country and sought a safe asylum on the Continent, everybody would have felt relieved and the public would have been spared a repetition of the horrors which had already filled the pages of the newspapers to repletion. After the collapse of the action Oscar Wilde brought against Lord Queensberry, he was allowed several hours before the warrant for his arrest was executed in order that he might leave the country. "But imitative of great men in their whims and fancies, he refused to imitate the base in acts which he deemed cowardly. I do not think he ever seriously considered the question of leaving the country, and this, in spite of the fact that the gentleman who was responsible for almost the whole of the bail, had said, 'it will practically ruin me if I lose all that money at the present moment, but if there is a chance, even after conviction, in God's name let him go.'"

Whatever Wilde's motive was for staying to "face the music," we cannot deny that it was fine. Either he felt that he must endure the punishment society was to give him because he had outraged the law of society, or else he was unwilling to ruin the disinterested and noble-minded man—a gentleman who had only the slightest acquaintance with him—who had furnished the amount of his bail.

Let these facts be written to his credit and considered when the readers of this memoir pass their judgment upon his character.

At the beginning of this third period public opinion which, but a short time ago, had simply meant a chorus of public adulation, except for a minority of people who either envied his successes or honestly reprobated his attitude towards art and life, was now terribly bitter, venomous, and full of spleen and hatred.

Society, however much society was disposed to deny the fact, had set up an idol in their midst. It was partly owing to the senseless and indiscriminate adulation of its idol that its foundations were undermined and that it fell with so resonant a crash. When it was down society assailed it with every ingenuity of reprobation and hatred that it knew how to voice and use.

Nothing was too bad to be said about the erstwhile favourite who, let it be remembered, was not yet adjudged guilty but who, if ever a man was, was denied the application of the prime principle of English criminal law, which says that every man accused is to be deemed innocent until guilt has been proved against him. People gloated over the downfall.

When Wilde was first arrested and placed in Holloway, and before he was admitted to bail, the more scurrilous portion of the press was full of sickening pictures, both in line and words, of the fallen creature's agony.

Contrasts were drawn by little pens dipped in venom, and the writer of this memoir has in his possession a curious and saddening collection of the screeds of those days, a collection which shows how innate the principle of cruelty is still in the human mind despite centuries of civilisation and the influence of the Cross, which forbids gladiators to slay each other in the arena but allows a more subtle and terrible form of savage sport than anything that Nero or Caligula ever saw or promulgated.

It is unnecessary to quote largely from the productions which disgraced the English press at this time. One single article will serve to prove the point. Let those who read it learn tolerance from this mock sympathy and cruel dwelling upon the tortures of one so recently high in public popularity and esteem, still presumably innocent by English law, and yet placed under the vulgar microscope of the morbid-minded and the lovers of sensation at any cost.

"Figuratively speaking but yesterday Oscar Wilde was the man of the hour, and to him, and him alone, we looked for our wit, our epigrams, and our learned and interesting plays. But what a change! To-day, Oscar Wilde, the wit, the epicure, is gone from his world, and is languishing in a dreary cell in Holloway Prison. In short, Mr Wilde, in a moment of weak-headedness, walked over the side of the mountain of fame and fell headlong from its height to the morass below, to lie there forgotten, neglected and abused.

"Yes, although I have little or no sympathy with Oscar Wilde I cannot but help feeling for him in his altered circumstances. He is a man who from his very infancy has been nursed in the lap of luxury, and has systematically lived on the fat of the land. Mr Wilde's residence in Tite Street was elegantly and luxuriously furnished. His rooms at the Cadogan Hotel were all that comfort could desire. His room, or rather cell, in Holloway Prison is altogether undesirable, is badly furnished, ill-lighted, and uncomfortable. Picture to yourself this change—yes, a change effected within twenty-four hours—and then you can imagine what the mental and physical sufferings of a man of the Oscar Wilde temperament must be. It is in this sense alone that my sympathy goes out towards him, and I feel as a man for another man who has been suddenly snatched from the lap of indolent, free livelihood and suddenly pitched foremost into the icelike crevasse of a British prison cell.

"I will now describe in as few words as I possibly can, but with absolute accuracy and detail, the cell in which Mr Wilde spends his time and the manner in which he lives. The cell in which Oscar is incarcerated is not an ordinary one—that is, it is not one that is used by any condemned or ordinary prisoner under remand. The cell is known in prison parlance as a 'special cell,' for the use of which a fee is payable to the authorities, and is the same one as was occupied by a certain well-known Duchess some few months back when she was committed by the Queen's Bench Judges for contempt of court. The prison authorities only supply the 'cell,' the prisoner himself has to find his own furniture, which he usually hires, by the advice of one of the warders, from a local firm who have a suite they keep for the use of this 'special cell' in Holloway. When Mr Wilde arrived at the prison last Saturday week afternoon this 'cell' was vacant. He promptly gave orders for the furniture to be brought in, and in an incredibly short space of time the cell was furnished, and the distinguished prisoner took possession of his apartment. I will first describe the room, and then take one typical day in the prison routine, which will clearly show the kind of life that Mr Wilde is compelled to live.

"Now to the cell. The room is situated at the far end of the east wing of the prison, and is entered from the long passage which runs from the head warder's rooms past the convict cells, and terminates at the door which protects Oscar from the common herd, and helps to make him secure. The door is an ordinary prison cell door, possessing spyholes and flaptrap, and large iron bars and locks. The cell itself is about 10 ft. broad, 12 ft. long, and 11 ft. high. The walls are not papered but whitewashed, and the light by which the room is supplied is obtained through an iron-barred window in the wall placed high up and well out of the prisoner's reach. A small fireplace is also fixed securely at the end of the room, but it is seldom lit, as the room is well heated by hot-water pipes. Now to the furniture in the room. Just on the right-hand side of the window is placed a table made of hard, white wood. No cloth covers it, but at the back is placed a looking-glass, whilst on the table itself is a water jug and a Bible. Near the table and almost under the window is an arm-chair, in which Oscar spends most of his time. But more of this anon. In the corner near the fireplace is placed a small camp bedstead, which is so small that it seems almost an impossibility that so massive a form as that of Oscar could recline with any ease upon so small a space. No feather bed is upon the iron supports, and the sleeper is compelled to repose upon hard—probably too hard—mattresses. The bed is supplied with sheets, blankets, and a cover quilt, made up of patches of all colours of the rainbow. This quilt is not pretty, and most considerably upsets the artistic being of a man like Wilde. A small table on the other side of the room, another chair, and a small metal washing stand, go to make up all the furniture the room possesses. No carpet is on the floor, but the boards are kept scrupulously clean. This I think briefly comprises a description of Mr Wilde's residential and sleeping compartment. Now to his daily routine and the life he is compelled to lead. He is awakened by a warder at six o'clock, and whether he likes it or not, is compelled to get up. After washing himself in cold water—hot is not permitted—and using ordinary common soap, Mr Wilde dresses himself, and to do him justice, he turns himself out very neat and span considering he has no valet to wait upon him. At seven o'clock one of the convicted prisoners enters Mr Wilde's cell, cleans up the room, makes the bed, and generally tidies up the place. For this service the prisoner receives 1s. per week, and it usually takes him quite half-an-hour per day to get through his work. Truly a munificent remuneration, but then prison regulations, whenever reasonable, are on the side of liberality. At half-past seven o'clock Wilde's breakfast, usually consisting of tea, ham and eggs, or a chop, toast and bread and butter, arrives from a well-known restaurant in Holloway. Of course Mr Wilde pays for the food, and, within reason, can eat and drink what he pleases.

"At nine o'clock Mr Wilde is compelled to leave his cell, and proceed to the exercising yard of the prison, and for one hour he is compelled to walk at regulation pace round a kind of tower erected in the centre of the yard. After exercise the distinguished prisoner returns to his cell, and the daily newspapers are brought to him, for which he also pays. Mr Wilde sits during the time he is in his cell in the chair by the window, and then reads his papers. He, however, has moments of very low-spiritedness, and becomes almost despondent in the moods. The sketch in this issue represents him seated in his favourite chair, with a paper in his hand, and, after an interview with his solicitor, Mr Wilde is very fond, when his active brain is working too deeply, to push back his hair from off his forehead and then leave the hand on the head, and, as if staring into vacancy, sit for hours in this position thinking deeply. But, to continue, at twelve o'clock Mr Wilde's lunch arrives from the restaurant, for which he pays. It consists of a cut off the joint, vegetables, cheese, and biscuits and water, or one glass of wine. After lunch he is again taken to the exercise ground for an hour, and then sent back to his cell. Still seated in his chair, he still reads his papers, and thinks out improbable problems. Sometimes one of his friends comes to see him. On these occasions he brightens up, but after the visits of his solicitor he is visibly very low-spirited and morose. At six o'clock Mr Wilde's dinner—for which he pays—arrives. It consists usually of soup, fish, joint, or game, cheese, and half-a-pint of any wine he chooses to select. The dinner finished, Mr Wilde sits again in his chair, and the agony he endures at not being allowed even a whiff at his favourite cigarette must to him be agony indeed. At eight o'clock a warder enters his room and places a lamp on the table to light the room. At nine o'clock the same warder again enters the room and gives Oscar five minutes to undress himself and get into bed. He complies willingly but with a sigh. When he is safely in bed the warder removes the lamp, bolts and locks the door, and leaves Oscar to sleep or remain awake thinking, just as he pleases. Oscar, however, does not sleep much. He is out of bed most of the night, and in unstockinged feet paces the room in apparently not too good a mood. Yes, poor Oscar, I do pity you."

So much for popular kindness!

The trial, at which the accused man was admitted by everyone to have comported himself with a dignity and resignation that had nothing of that levity and occasional pose which must be allowed to have characterised his attitude during the two former ordeals, came to a close. Wilde was sentenced to prison for two years' hard labour.

During the trial, of course, no comment was permissible, though there were not wanting some papers who committed contempt of court. When, however, the sentence had been pronounced and Wilde as a man with a place in society—I am using the word society here not in its limited but its economic sense—had ceased to exist, then the thunders of the important and influential journals were let loose.

The Daily Telegraph which, to do it justice, had never been sympathetic to Wilde in his days of prosperity and fame, came out with a most weighty and severe condemnation. The article, from which I am about to quote an extract, certainly represented the opinion of the country at the time—as The Daily Telegraph has nearly always represented the mass of opinion of the country at any given moment. To the sympathisers with Wilde this article will seem unnecessarily cruel and severe. But to those who have taken into account the best that has been written herein about him during this terrible third period, and who have realised that the writer simply states facts and does not desire to comment on them, the article will seem only a natural and dignified expression of a truth which was hardly controvertible.

"No sterner rebuke could well have been inflicted on some of the artistic tendencies of the time than the condemnation on Saturday of Oscar Wilde at the Central Criminal Court. We have not the slightest intention of reviewing once more all the sordid incidents of a case which has done enough, and more than enough, to shock the conscience and outrage the moral instincts of the community. The man has now suffered the penalties of his career, and may well be allowed to pass from that platform of publicity which he loved into that limbo of disrepute and forgetfulness which is his due. The grave of contemptuous oblivion may rest on his foolish ostentation, his empty paradoxes, his insufferable posturing, his incurable vanity. Nevertheless, when we remember that he enjoyed a certain popularity among some sections of society, and, above all, when we reflect that what was smiled at as insolent braggadocio was the cover for, or at all events ended in, flagrant immorality, it is well, perhaps, that the lesson of his life should not be passed over without some insistence on the terrible warning of his fate. Young men at the universities, clever sixth-form boys at public schools, silly women who lend an ear to any chatter which is petulant and vivacious, novelists who have sought to imitate the style of paradox and unreality, poets who have lisped the language of nerveless and effeminate libertinage—these are the persons who should ponder with themselves the doctrines and the career of the man who has now to undergo the righteous sentence of the law. We speak sometimes of a school of Decadents and Æsthetes in England, although it may well be doubted whether at any time its prominent members could not have been counted on the fingers of one hand; but, quite apart from any fixed organisation or body such as may or may not exist in Paris, there has lately shown itself in London a contemporary bias of thought, an affected manner of expression and style, and a few loudly vaunted ideas which have had a limited but evil influence on all the better tendencies of art and literature. Of these the prisoner of Saturday constituted himself a representative. He set an example, so far as in him lay, to the weaker and the younger brethren; and, just because he possessed considerable intellectual powers and unbounded assurance, his fugitive success served to dazzle and bewilder those who had neither experience nor knowledge of the principles which he travestied, or of that true temple of art of which he was so unworthy an acolyte. Let us hope that his removal will serve to clear the poisoned air, and make it cleaner and purer for all healthy and unvitiated lungs."

It was the duty of a great journal to say what it said. Yet, nevertheless, a certain wave of sorrow seemed to pass over the press generally, and hostile comment on the débâcle was not unmingled with regret for the unhappy man himself. The doctrines he was supposed to have preached to the world at large were sternly denied and thundered against. His own fate was, in the majority of cases, treated with a sorrowful regret.

Yet, nobody realised at all that in condemning what was supposed to be the teaching and doctrine of Oscar Wilde, they were condemning merely supposititious deduction from his manner of life, which could not be in the least substantiated by any single line he had ever written.

All through this first part of the book I have insisted upon the fact that the man's life and the man's work should not be regarded as identical. To-day, as I write, that attitude has taken complete possession of the public mind. As was said in the first few pages of the memoir, the whole of Europe is taking a sympathetic and intelligent interest in the supreme art of the genius who produced so many beautiful things. The public seems to have learned its lesson at last, but at the beginning of what I have called the third period it was unable to differentiate between the criminal, part of whose life was shameful, and the artist, all of whose works were pure, stimulating, and splendid. I quote but a few words from the printed comments upon Wilde's downfall. They are taken from the well-known society paper Truth, and the writer seems to strike only a note of wonder and amazement. The horrible fact of Wilde's conviction had startled England, had startled the writer, and a writer by no means unsympathetic in effect, into the following paragraphs:—

"For myself, I turned into the Lyceum for half-an-hour, just to listen, when the performance was actually stopped by the great shout of congratulation that welcomed the first entrance of 'Sir Henry.' Yet, through all these cheers I seemed to hear the dull rumble of the prison van in which Oscar Wilde made his last exit—to Holloway. While the great actor-manager stood in the plenitude of position bowing and bowing again, to countless friends and admirers, again there rose before my eyes the last ghastly scene at the Old Bailey—I heard the voice of the foreman in its low but steady answer, 'Guilty,' 'Guilty,' 'Guilty,' as count after count was rehearsed by the clerk. I heard again that last awful admonition from the judge. I remembered how there had flitted through my mind the recollection of a night at St James's, the cigarette, and the green carnation, as the prisoner, broken, beaten, tottering, tried to steady himself against the dock rail and asked in a strange, dry, ghostlike voice if he might address the judge. Then came the volley of hisses, the prison warders, the rapid break-up of the Court, the hurry into the blinding sunshine outside, where some half-score garishly dressed, loose women of the town danced on the pavement a kind of carmagnole of rejoicing at the verdict. 'He'll 'ave 'is 'air cut regglar now,' says one of them; and the others laughed stridently. I came away. I did not laugh, for the matter is much too serious for laughter.

"The more I think about the case of Oscar Wilde, my dear Dick, the more astounding does the whole thing seem to me. So far as the man himself is concerned, it would be charitable to assume that he is not quite sane. Without considering—for the moment—the moral aspect of the matter, here was a man who must have known that the commission of certain acts constituted in the eye of the Law a criminal offence. But no thought of wife or children, no regard, to put it selfishly, for his own brilliant prospects, could induce him to curb a depraved appetite which led him—a gentleman and a scholar—to consort with the vilest and most depraved scum of the town."

Although, as I have said, printed comment was in one way reserved and not ungenerous, the public and spoken comment on the case was utterly and totally cruel. Those readers who remember the period of which I am writing will bear me witness as to the universal chorus of hatred which rose and bubbled all over the country.

This was natural enough.

One cannot expect mob law to be tolerant or to understand the myriad issues and influences which go to make up any given event. The public was right from its own point of view in all it said. To give instances from personal recollection or the personal recollection of others of this terrible shout of condemnation and hatred would be too painful for writer and reader alike.

While in prison Oscar Wilde wrote his marvellous book "De Profundis." The reader will find that work very fully dealt with in its due place in this work. It is not, therefore, necessary to say very much about it in this first part of the volume which I have headed "Oscar Wilde: the Man." It may not be out of place, however, to say that grave doubts were thrown upon the truth of the statement that the book was written in prison. Upon its publication rumours were circulated that the author wrote "De Profundis" at his ease in Paris or in Naples, and finally the rumours crystallised in a letter which was sent to The St James's Gazette, the gist of which was as follows:—

"I have very strong doubts that it was written in prison, and the gentleman who asserts that he received the MSS. before the expiration of the sentence in Reading Gaol ought to procure a confirmatory testimony to a proceeding which is contrary to all prison discipline. If there is one thing more strictly carried out than another it is that a prisoner shall not be allowed to handle pen, ink, and paper, except when he writes the letter to his friends, which, until the Prison Act, 1899, was once every three months. Each prisoner can amuse himself with a slate and pencil, but not pen and ink. It is now, and was, absolutely forbidden by the prison authorities.

"As was seen in Adolf Beck's case, where nine petitions appear in the Commissioner's Report (Blue Book), a prisoner's liberty, fortune, reputation, and life may be at stake, but he must tell his story on two and a half sheets of foolscap. Not a scrap of paper is allowed over the regulation sheets. In a local prison Oscar Wilde could apply for the privilege of a special visit or a letter, and probably would receive it, but as the official visitors of prisoners are simply parts of a solemn farce, and there is no such stereotyped method as giving a prisoner the slightest relief in matters affecting the intellect, I have grave doubts that such facilities were given as supplying pen, ink and paper to write 'De Profundis.'

"If it was otherwise the following process would have had to be gone through, either an application to the official prison visitor (possibly Major Arthur Griffiths) for leave to have pen, ink and paper in his cell, which would be refused. By the influence of friends, or the statement of his solicitors that they required special instructions in reference to some evidence, his case, or his property, leave might be granted, but not for journalistic or literary purposes. Had Oscar Wilde's sentence been that of a 'first-class misdemeanant' he could have had those privileges, but I never heard that his sentence was mitigated in this respect.

"Or, he might have applied to the visiting magistrates. In either case there would be a record of such facilities, and the Governor of Reading Gaol, the chaplain, and other officials can satisfy the public as well as the Prison Commissioners. If the book was written in prison then it is clear the officials made a distinction between Oscar Wilde and other prisoners.

"There is some glamour about books written in prisons. The 'Pilgrim's Progress' is a prison book, but Bedford Gaol was a pretty easy dungeon. Under the old régime such men as William Corbett, Orator Hunt, and Richard Carlile, conducted their polemic warfare in prison. The last Chartist leader (the late Mr Ernest Jones) used to tell how he wrote the 'Painter of Florence' and other poems in a London gaol while confined for sedition. It was a common subject of conversation with his young disciples how, as ink was denied in Coldbath Street Prison, he made incisions in his arm and wrote his poetry in his own blood. We believed it then, but as we grew older that feeling of doubt made us sceptical. Thomas Cooper's prison rhyme, the 'Purgatory of Suicides,' and his novel, the 'Baron's Yule Feast,' were written during his two years' imprisonment in Stafford Gaol for preaching a 'universal strike' as a means of establishing a British Republic.

"As 'De Profundis' is likely to be a classic, is it not as well to have this question thrashed out at the beginning and not leave it to the twenty-first century?"

The editor of "De Profundis" replied in a short letter saying, in effect, that he was not concerned to add anything to his definite statement in the preface of the book, a course with which everyone will be in agreement. To answer a busybody throwing doubts upon the statement of an honourable gentleman is a mistake. The matter, however, went a little further and was eventually set finally at rest.

In The Daily Mirror a facsimile of a page of the manuscript written on prison paper was reproduced, and Mr Hamilton Fyfe accompanied the letterpress by informing the public that he had seen the whole of the manuscript of "De Profundis." It was written on blue foolscap paper with the prison stamp on the top. There were about 60,000 words, of which altogether not more than one-third were published in the English edition. The explanation of the fact that the prisoner was allowed to write in his cell is perfectly simple.

Oscar Wilde handed this roll of paper to Mr Robert Ross on the day of his release, and gave him absolute discretion as to printing it. He had written most of it during the last three months of his two years' sentence. It was during the last half-year of his term that Wilde was allowed the special privilege of writing as much as he pleased. His friends represented to the Home Office that a man who had been accustomed to use his brain so continually was in danger of having his mind injured by being unable to write for so long a time as two years.

Dr Nicholson, of Broadmoor, who was consulted on the point, said he thought this danger was quite a real one. So the necessary permission was given, and Wilde could write whatever he liked.

Later on the prison regulations were relaxed again. As a rule, prisoners are not allowed to take away with them what they have written in their cells. Strictly, the MS. of "De Profundis" ought to have remained among the archives of Reading Gaol.

The authorities realised, however, that to enforce this rule in Wilde's case would have been harsh and unreasonable, so when (in order to defeat the intentions of the late Lord Queensberry and his hired bullies) he was removed from Reading to Wandsworth Prison, on the evening before his release he took the MS. with him; and he had it under his arm when he left the gloomy place next morning a free man.

This statement, and the facsimile printed above, should make it impossible henceforward for anyone to suggest, as many have been suggesting quite recently, that there is any doubt about the whole of the book having been written by Oscar Wilde during the time he was in prison.

The development of Oscar Wilde during his incarceration has, of course, been summed up and stated for all time by himself in the marvellous pages of "De Profundis." Yet, there are various accounts of that time of agony which do but go to show what a really purifying and salutary influence even the awful torture he underwent had upon the unhappy man. By those who knew him in prison he is described as living a life which, in its simple resignation, its kindly gentleness, its sweetness of demeanour, was the life of a saint. No bitterness or harsh word ever escaped him. When opportunity occurred of doing some tiny and furtive kindness that kindness was always forthcoming. Those who rejoiced at the fact of Wilde's imprisonment may well pause now when the true story of it has filtered through various channels and is generally known. He himself told Monsieur André Gide a strange and pathetic story of those silent, unhappy hours.

He speaks of one of the Governors under whose rule he lay in durance, and says that this gentleman imposed needless suffering upon his unhappy charges, not because of any inherent cruelty or contravention of the rules for prison discipline, but because he was entirely lacking in imagination.

On one occasion, during the hour allowed for exercise, a prisoner who walked behind Wilde upon the circular pathway of the yard addressed him by name, and told him that he pitied him even more than he pitied himself, because his sufferings must be greater than his. Such a sudden word of sympathy from an unknown fellow-convict gave the poor poet an exquisite moment of pleasure and pain. He answered him appropriately with a word of thanks. But one of the warders had been a witness of the occasion, and the matter was reported to the Governor. Two convicts had been guilty of the outrage of exchanging a few words. The unknown convict was taken first before the Governor. It is a prison regulation that the punishment is not the same for the man who speaks first and the man who answers him. The first offender has to pay a double penalty. The Convict X., when before the Governor, stated that he was the culprit and that he had spoken first. When afterwards Wilde was taken before the martinet, he very naturally told him that he himself was the principal offender. The Governor stated that he was unable to understand the matter at all. He grew red and uneasy, and told Wilde that he had already given X. fifteen days' solitary confinement. He then stated that as Wilde had also confessed to be the principal offender he should award him fifteen days' solitary confinement also!

This touching incident shows both Wilde and the unknown convict in a noble light, but the gentle way in which Oscar told of the incident to the French journalist is even a greater tribute to the innate dignity of his character, so long obscured by the exigencies of his life, so beautifully laid bare when he had paid his debt to society.

There are other anecdotes extant which confirm the above. All go to show that the third period brought out the finest traits in Wilde's character. We have in this period another and most touching side of the complex temperament of this great genius, this extraordinary and unhappy man. Much will have to be said on this point when the criticism of "De Profundis" is reached.

Meanwhile, I close the "third period" with a sense that here, at anyrate, there is nothing to be said which is not wholly fragrant and redolent of sincerity.

THE FOURTH PERIOD

It is with a sense of both reluctance and relief that I enter upon a short account of the fourth period, insomuch as this or that incident during it throws a light upon the character of him of whom we speak.

With a relief, because it is a far happier and more gracious task to endeavour to criticise and appreciate the literary works of a great genius than it is to chronicle facts in the life of a most unhappy man which may help to elucidate the puzzle of his personality.

With reluctance, because the fourth period is again one of almost unadulterated gloom and sadness. I shall be as brief as possible, and too much already has been written about the last days of Oscar Wilde after his release from prison.

A considerable amount of information has been placed at my disposal, but I design to use none of it. The facts that are already known to those who have taken an interest in Oscar Wilde may be briefly touched upon here, and that is all. An eloquent plea from a near relation of the poet should be respected here, and only such few facts as are really necessary to complete this incomplete study shall be given. "Nothing could have horrified him more than that men calling themselves his friends should publish concerning his latter days details so disgusting as those appearing in your issue of yesterday." Thus a paragraph from the appeal I have mentioned, an appeal which was prompted by the publication of many controversial articles as to the truth, or otherwise, of Mr Wilde's reception into the Roman Church, his debts, his manner of living towards the end. "I should be glad to think that this expression of my wish may put an end to this unpleasant correspondence. If it does not, I can only appeal to your correspondents to be very careful of what they write, and to reflect upon what Mr Oscar Wilde would think if he could read their letters. In life, he never said or countenanced a coarse or common thing. Personally, I write with too much reluctance to reply to them again, and I leave the matter to their sense of decency and chivalry."

Immediately upon his release from prison Oscar Wilde wrote his famous letters to The Daily Chronicle on "Children in Prison and Other Cruelties of Life in Gaol." He told a terrible story of a poor little child whose face was "like a white wedge of sheer terror," and in his eyes "the mute appeal of a hunted animal." Wilde had heard the poor little fellow at breakfast-time crying and calling to be let out. He was calling for his parents, and every now and then the elder prisoner could hear the harsh voice of the warder on duty telling the little boy to be quiet. The child had not been convicted of the offence with which he was charged, but was simply on remand. A kind-hearted warder, finding the little fellow crying with hunger and utterly unable to eat the bread and water given it for breakfast, brought it some sweet biscuits. This, Mr Wilde truthfully said, was a "beautiful action on the warder's part." The child, grateful for the man's kindness, told one of the senior warders about it. The result was that the warder who had brought the biscuits to the starving child was reported and dismissed from the service.

It is not too much to say that this story, told in the prose of a master of prose, written with a crushing and sledgehammer force all the more powerful because it was most marvellously simple, thrilled the whole of England. There followed an even more terrible story.

Three months or so before his release, Wilde had noticed, among the prisoners who took exercise with him, a young prisoner who was obviously either half-witted or trembling upon the verge of insanity. This poor creature used to gesticulate, laugh and talk to himself. "At chapel he used to sit right under the observation of two warders, who carefully watched him all the time. Sometimes he would bury his head in his hands, an offence against the chapel regulations, and his head would be immediately struck up by a warder.... He was on more than one occasion sent out of chapel to his cell, and of course he was continually punished.... I saw that he was becoming insane and was being treated as if he were shamming." There was a terrible denouement to this hideous story. Mr Wilde went on to say in words that do him eternal credit and which no one who has read them could ever forget:

"On Saturday week last, I was in my cell at about one o'clock occupied in cleaning and polishing the tins I had been using for dinner. Suddenly I was startled by the prison silence being broken by the most horrible and revolting shrieks, or rather howls, for at first I thought some animal like a bull or a cow was being unskilfully slaughtered outside the prison walls. I soon realised, however, that the howls proceeded from the basement of the prison, and I knew that some wretched man was being flogged. I need not say how hideous and terrible it was for me, and I began to wonder who it was being punished in this revolting manner. Suddenly it dawned upon me that they might be flogging this unfortunate lunatic. My feelings on the subject need not be chronicled; they have nothing to do with the question.

"The next day, Sunday, I saw the poor fellow at exercise, his weak, ugly, wretched face bloated by tears and hysteria almost beyond recognition. He walked in the centre ring along with the old men, the beggars and the lame people, so that I was able to observe him the whole time. It was my last Sunday in prison, a perfectly lovely day, the finest day we had had the whole year, and there, in the beautiful sunlight, walked this poor creature—made once in the image of God—grinning like an ape, and making with his hands the most fantastic gestures."

The story continued with even more terrible details than these. It is no part of my plan to harrow the feelings of my readers by a reprint of such horrors. I have said enough, I trust, to fulfil my purpose in quoting Oscar Wilde's letters to all—to show how powerfully he himself was moved with pity, and how he strove, even in his own terrible re-entrance to a world which would have none of him, to influence public opinion on the behalf of one who was being done to death, not perhaps by conscious cruelty, but by the awful stupidity of those who live by an inflexible rule which can make no allowance for special circumstances, which is as hard as the nether millstone and as cold as death itself.

So Oscar Wilde passed out of England with pity flowing from his pen and with pity in his heart. I wish that it was possible to end this memoir here. As I have set out to give all the facts which seem necessary to provide a complete picture for readers who know little or nothing of Oscar Wilde's nature, beyond the fact of his triumphs as a playwright and his subsequent disgrace, I must not shrink from proceeding to the end, as I have not shrunk from frankly recording facts in the first and second periods. It would be a fault, and insincere, to allow a deep and very natural sympathy to interfere with the performance, however inadequately it has been carried out, of the task I set out to complete.

Oscar Wilde crossed immediately to Dieppe, and shortly afterwards installed himself in a villa at a small seaside place some miles away from the gay Norman bathing place. His life at Berneval was simple and happy. His biographer, Mr Robert Harborough Sherard, who visited him there, has told of the quiet repose and healing days which Oscar Wilde enjoyed. He had a sufficient sum of money to live in comfort for a year or so, and all would doubtless have gone well with him had it not been for certain malign influences which had already been prominent factors in wrecking his life, and which now appeared again to menace his newly found salvation of mind and spirit. Such references are not within the province of the book, the story has been told elsewhere. The thing would not have been referred to at all, did it not illustrate the impatience and weakness of Wilde's character, even at this point in his history. The malign influences eventually had their way with the poet—that is to say, certain companions whom it was most unwise of him to see or recognise, once more entered into his life in a certain degree.

A letter which was written to a gentleman who has translated a French memoir dealing with the poet, says: "No more beautiful life has any man lived, no more beautiful life could any man live than Oscar Wilde lived during the short period I knew him in prison. He wore upon his face an eternal smile; sunshine was on his face, sunshine of some sort must have been in his heart. People say he was not sincere: he was the very soul of sincerity when I knew him. If he did not continue that life after he left prison, then the forces of evil must have been too strong for him. But he tried, he honestly tried, and in prison he succeeded." The forces of evil were too strong.

Oscar Wilde spent the last few years, and alas! miserable years, of his life in alternations of sordid poverty and sudden waves of temporary prosperity, in the city of Paris. There have been all sorts of stories about these last few years. The truth is simply this. Wilde's intellect was crushed and broken. The creative faculty flamed up for the last time in that brilliant and terrible poem, "The Ballad of Reading Gaol." Then it sank again and was never revived. When I say "creative faculty" I mean the faculty of producing a sustained artistic effort. As a talker the poet was never more brilliant. "Every now and again one or other of the very few faithful English friends left to him would turn up in Paris and take him to dinner at one of the best restaurants, and anyone who met him on these occasions would have found it difficult to believe that he had ever passed through such awful experiences. Whether he was expounding some theory, grave or fantastic, embroidering it the while with flashes of impromptu wit, or deepening it with extraordinary intimate learning, or whether he was keeping the table in a roar with his delightfully whimsical humour, a summer lightning that flashed and hurt no one, he was equally admirable. To have lived in his lifetime and not to have heard him talk is as though one had lived at Athens without going to look at the Parthenon."

I think we should be glad to know that in the wrecked life of this period the poet had some happy moments when he could reconstruct in bright and brilliant surroundings some slight renewal of other days that were gone for ever. There is no doubt at all that friends, both those who had had a good and those who had had a bad influence on his past life, were very kind to him.

He was supplied with enough money to have lived in considerable comfort had he not been incurably reckless and a spendthrift. It has been said that he died in wretched poverty and in debt. This is partly true, but it was entirely his own fault. There is indubitable proof of the fairly large sums he received from time to time. Some of his letters to a man in London, who occasionally employed his pen, have been sold to the curious, and such poignant passages as: "I rely on your sending me a little money to-morrow. I have only succeeded in getting twenty francs from the Concierge, and I am in a bad way," or, "I wish to goodness you could come over, also—send me, if you can, £4 or even £3. I am now trying to leave my hotel and get rooms where I can be at rest, and so stay in during the morning."

These letters seem to show that Oscar Wilde was nearly starving. I can assure my readers this was not the case. With the realisation that there would never be any more place for him in the world had come a carelessness and recklessness to all but immediate and petty sensual gratifications from day to day.

His landlord stated that towards the end it became very difficult for Wilde to write at all. "He used to whip himself up with cognac. A litre bottle would hardly see him through the night. And he ate little. And he took little exercise. He used to sleep till noon, and then breakfast, and then sleep again till five or six in the evening."

This is enough. I have said as little as can well be said. But let us remember the frightful and crushing disabilities under which Wilde suffered. Who is there who dare cast a stone? His death came as a happy release, and it was sordid and dreadful enough to complete the grim tragedy of his life without deviation from its completeness. True, an attached friend was by him at the end. True, the offices of the Holy Catholic Church lightened his passing. Yet, nevertheless, there was an abiding and sinister gloom about all his last hours. Details can be found in other places. "How Oscar Wilde died" was a journalistic sensation at the time.

I will simply quote the words of a French critic, who, after the end, went to pay his last sad duties to the shell which had held the poet's soul: "... The hotel in which he died was one of those horrible places which are called in the popular papers 'Houses of Crime.' A veritable Hercules of a porter led me through a long, evil-smelling corridor. At last the odour of some disinfectant struck my nostrils. An open door. A little square room. I stood before the corpse. His whitish, emaciated face, strangely altered through the growth of a beard after death, seemed to be lost in profound contemplation. A hand, cramped in agony, still clutched the dirty bed cloth. There was no one to watch by his body. Only much later they sent him some flowers. The noise of the street pierced the thin walls of the building. A stale odour filled the air. Ah, what loneliness, what an end!"

If I have quoted this ugly and vulgar picture of the poet's body in the sordid room I have done so with intention.

It is in the contemplation of such scenes as this that our minds and hearts are uplifted from the material to the supreme hope of all of us. The man who had suffered and sinned and done noble things in this world had gone away from it. Doubtless, when the Frenchman with his prying eyes and notebook was gloating over the material sensation of the scene, the soul of the poet was hearing harmonies too long unknown to it, and was beginning to undergo the Purification.

Requiescat.

Oscar Wilde was always a loving student of Dante. In that contempt for the world's opinion, which is sometimes the strength and also the ruin of great geniuses, Wilde bore a strong resemblance to the great Italian who said "Lascia dir le genti." The versatility of Oscar Wilde was supreme, and that is in itself the real solution of whatever is most astonishing in his power or startling in his madness, of all that most draws us towards him or repels us with an equal strength. "A variety of powers almost boundless, a pride not less vast in displaying them—a susceptibility of new impressions and impulses, even beyond the usual allotment of genius ... such were the two great and leading sources of all that varied spectacle which his life exhibited; and that succession of victories achieved by his genius, in almost every field of mind that genius ever trod, and of all those sallies of character in every shape and direction that unchecked feeling and dominant self-will can dictate."

It is not for the author of this memoir, whose attitude has been studiously impersonal throughout, to attempt any dictation to his readers as to the judgment they shall ultimately form upon the character of Oscar Wilde.

At the same time, he hopes that it may not be forbidden him to give his own, and doubtless very imperfect, view. He thinks that in regarding the whole field of the poet's life, as far as it can be known to others, one finds him to be a sweet and noble nature with much of the serenity of "highness" which accompanies a great genius, yet, obscured, soiled, overlapped, and periodically destroyed by a terrible and riotous madness, both of talk and of thought. It is a facile and dangerous thing to attribute all the good and noble actions of any man to his "real self," and to say that all the evil he wrought and did came from madness or irresponsibility. If such a doctrine were to be generally accepted and believed, laws would lose their raison d'être, punishment would become a mockery, and society would inevitably end.

Yet, possibly it may be that some few souls exist and have existed of whom such a statement may be true. If such exceptions do exist and have existed, then surely Oscar Wilde was one of them. There seems to be no other explanation of him but just this; and if we do not accept it I, at anyrate, cannot see any other.

Let each reader of this book appropriate his own, and I conclude the first part of it by repeating the old, old prayer—

Requiescat.

PART II

THE MODERN PLAYWRIGHT

THE DRAMATIST

When Mr George Alexander produced "Lady Windermere's Fan" at the St James's Theatre, in the spring of 1892, it created an unprecedented furore among all ranks of the playgoing public, and placed the author at once upon a pedestal in the Valhalla of the Drama; not on account of the plot, which was frankly somewhat vieux jeu, nor yet upon any striking originality in the types of the personages who were to unravel it, but upon the sparkle of the dialogue, the brilliancy of the epigrams, a condition of things to which the English stage had hitherto been entirely unaccustomed. The author was acclaimed as a playwright who had at last succeeded in clothing stagecraft with the vesture of literature, and with happy phrase and nimble paradox delighted the minds of his audience. What promise of a long succession of social comedies, illuminated by the intimate knowledge of his subject that he so entirely possessed, was held out to us! Here was a man who treated society as it really exists; who was himself living in it; portraying its folk as he knew them, with their virtues and vices coming to them as naturally as the facile flow of their conversation; conversation interlarded with no stilted sentences, no well- (or ill-) rounded periods, but such as that which falls without conscious effort from the lips of people who, in whatever surroundings they may be placed, are, before all things, and at all times, thoroughly at their ease. It may be objected that people in real life, even in the higher life of the Upper Ten, do not habitually scatter sprightly pleasantries abroad as they sit around the five-o'clock tea-table. That Oscar Wilde made every personage he depicted talk as he himself was wont to talk. Passe encore. The real fact remains that he knew the social atmosphere he represented, had breathed it, and was familiar with all its traditions and mannerisms. He gave us the tone of Society as it had never before been given. He was at home in it. He could exhibit a ball upon the stage where real ladies and gentlemen assembled together, quite distinct from the ancient "Adelphi guests" who had hitherto done yeoman's service in every form of entertainment imagined by the dramatist. The company who came to his great parties were at least vraisemblables, beings who conducted themselves as if they really might have been there. And so it was in every scene, in every situation. His types are drawn with the pen of knowledge, dipped in the ink of experience. That was his secret, the keynote of his success. And with what power he used it the world is now fully aware. It is not too much to say that Oscar Wilde revolutionised dramatic art. Henceforth it began to be understood that the playwright who would obtain the merit of a certain plausibility must endeavour to infuse something of the breath of life into his creations, and make them act and talk in a manner that was at least possible.

It has been a popular pose among certain superior persons, equally devoid of humour themselves as of the power of appreciating it in others, that Oscar Wilde sacrificed dramatic action to dialogue; that his plays were lacking in human interest, his plots of the very poorest; a fact that was skilfully concealed by the sallies of smart sayings and witty repartee, which carried the hearers away during the representation, so that in the charm of the style they forgot the absence of the substance. But such is by no means the case. The author recognised, with his fine artistic flair, that mere talk, however admirable, will not carry a play to a successful issue without a strong underlying stratum of histrionic interest to support it. There are situations in his comedies as powerful in their handling as could be desired by the most devout stickler for dramatic intention. There are scenes in which the humorist lays aside his motley, and becomes the moralist, unsparing in his methods to enforce, à l'outrance, the significance of his text. In each of his plays there are moments in which the action is followed by the spectator with absorbed attention; incidents of emotional value treated in no half-hearted fashion. Such are the hall mark of the true dramatist who can touch, with the unerring instinct of the poet, the finest feelings, the deepest sympathies of his audience, and which place Oscar Wilde by the side of Victorien Sardou. As has been well written by one of our most impartial critics: "No other among our playwrights equals this distinguished Frenchman, either in imagination or in poignancy of style."

Again, it has been contended, with a sneer, that the turning out of witty speeches is but a trick, easy of imitation by any theatrical scribe who sets himself to the task. But how many of Wilde's imitators—and there have been not a few—have accomplished such command of language, such literary charm, such "fineness" of wit? Who among them all has ever managed to hold an audience spellbound in the same way? How many have succeeded in drawing from a miscellaneous crowd of spectators such spontaneous expressions of delighted approval as "How brilliant! How true!" first muttered by each under the breath to himself, and then tossed loudly from one to the other in pure enjoyment, as the solid truth, underlying the varnish of the paradox, was borne home to them? Surely, not one can be indicated. Nor is the reason far to seek. For in all Oscar Wilde's seemingly irresponsible witticisms it is not only the device of the inverted epigram that is made a characteristic feature of the dialogue; there is real human nature behind the artificialities, there is poetry beneath the prose, the grip of the master's hand in seemingly toying with truth. And it is the possession of these innate qualities that differentiates the inventor from his imitators, and leaves them hopelessly behind in the race for dramatic distinction.

To invent anything is difficult, and in proportion to its merits praiseworthy. To cavil at that which has been devised, to point with the finger of scorn at its imperfections, to "run it down," is only too easy a pastime. Oscar Wilde was before all an inventor. Whatever he touched he endowed with the gracious gift of style that bore the stamp of his own individual genius. He originated a new treatment for ancient themes. For there is no such thing as an absolutely new "plot." Every play that has been written is founded on doings, dealings, incidents that have happened over and over again. Love, licit or illicit, the mainspring of all drama, is the same to-day as it was yesterday, and will be for ever and ever in this world. One man and one woman, or one woman and two men, or again, as a pleasant variant, two women and one man. Such are the eternal puppets that play the game of Love upon the Stage of Life; the unconscious victims of the sentiment which sometimes makes for tragedy. They are always with us, placed in the same situations, and extricating themselves (or otherwise) in the same old way. So that when a new playwright is condemned by the critics as a furbisher-up of well-known clichés he is hardly treated. He cannot help himself. He must tread the familiar paths, faute de mieux. And the public, with its big human heart and unquestioning traditions, knows this, and is satisfied therewith. Nothing really pleases people so much as to tell them something they already know. What an accomplished dramatist can do is to rehabilitate his characters by the power of his own personality, and by felicitous treatment invest his action with fresh interest. And this is what Oscar Wilde effected in stagecraft. He vitalised it.

It is well-nigh impossible, under the existing conditions of the theatre in England, to form any just appreciation of the dramatist's work at all. A novel may be read at any time, but a play depends on the caprice of a manager to "present" it or not, as suits his commercial convenience. Happily for us the comedies of Oscar Wilde are printed and published, and can be enjoyed equally in the study as in the stalls. We must go back to Congreve and Sheridan to find a parallel. It is the triumph of the littérateur over the histrionic hack, the man whose volumes are taken down from the shelves where they repose, again and again, and require no adventitious aid of scenery and costume to enhance the pleasure they afford. Albeit that the habit of reading plays is not particularly an English one. The old Puritan feeling that all things theatrical were tainted with more or less immorality still clings to many a mind. Emotion is yet looked upon with suspicion, and as the theatre is the hotbed of emotion it is even now regarded in some quarters as a dangerous, if exciting, pleasure-ground. Sober-minded folk prefer rather to take their doses of love tales in the form of the novel, however inexpert, than in that of the play, however masterly it may be. Let an author put to the vote his appeal to his public through their eyes or their ears, it will be found that the eyes have it. They prefer to stop at home and read, as they consider, seriously, than to go abroad and listen to what they hold to be, trivialities. Oscar Wilde has, in great measure, been instrumental in putting these illiberal views to flight. Men and women are now to be found in the theatre when his pieces are represented who not so long ago pooh-poohed the drama from an intelligent standpoint. He has turned attention to the fact that the dramatic method of telling a story may be made as intellectually interesting as in the best-written romances of the novelist. He brought to bear upon his work a singular power of observation, a fine imagination, a unique wit, and above all, and beneath all, an extensive knowledge of human life, and human character. Plays imbued with all these qualities were bound to make their mark. He knocked away the absurd conventions, the stereotyped phrases of the stage as he knew it. He placed on it living people in the place of mechanical puppets, and by his happy inspiration created a new order in the profession of dramaturgy.

It would be an interesting subject for speculation—were it not such a deeply sad one—how far Oscar Wilde, had he been permitted to live, would have gone in the new voie he had chosen for the expression of his artistic perceptions. Between "Lady Windermere's Fan" and "The Importance Of Being Earnest," the first and last of his comedies, there is evidence of very marked and rapid advancement in his art. In the former he shows us the invention of a hitherto unhandseled form of histrionic composition—the dialogue-drama. But he is feeling his way in this new departure of his, diffident of its success; while in the latter he has perfected what was more or less crude, incomplete, found wanting, and what was originally the natural hesitation of the novice has developed into the assured pronouncements of the adept. He was moving onwards. He was making theatrical history. He was becoming a power. And we who now read, mark, learn, be it on the stage or in the study, what he achieved in the production of but four modern comedies, can only premise that to-day he would have "arrived" at the meridian of his art. For, not in vain, was born the delicate wit that played around a philosophy of life, founded upon subtle observation, and one that has animated some of the most prominent literary and dramatic productions of our generation. Not in vain was struck that note of truth and sincerity in social ethics, unheard in the ad captandum strains of our professional novelists. Underlying those "phraseological inversions," so daintily cooed by the dove, was the wisdom of the serpent. It is the spirit of the poet speaking through the medium of prose. It is the utterance of the great artist that must compel attention even from the Philistines who sit in the seats of the scornful.

"LADY WINDERMERE'S FAN"

(Produced by Mr George Alexander at the St James's Theatre on 22nd February 1892)

I Have endeavoured to indicate, I trust more or less successfully, the manner in which an enthusiastic public received the first of Oscar Wilde's comedies. Let us now glance at the attitude affected by the critics. It is not too much to say that it was of undoubted hostility. Their verdict was decidedly an inimical one. They had received an unexpected shock, and were staggering under it in an angry, helpless way. The new dramatist was a surprise, and an unpleasing one. He had in one evening destroyed the comfortable conventions of the stage, hitherto so dear to the critic's heart. He had dared to break down the barriers of ancient prejudice, and attempt something new, something original. In a word, he had dared to be himself, the most heinous offence of all! They could not entirely ignore his undeniable talent. Public opinion was on his side. So they dragged in side issues to point their little moral, and adorn their little tale. This is how Mr Clement Scott writes after the first performance of "Lady Windermere's Fan":

"Supposing, after all, Mr Oscar Wilde is a cynic of deeper significance than we take him to be. Supposing he intends to reform and revolutionise Society at large by sublime self-sacrifice. There are two sides to every question, and Mr Oscar Wilde's piety in social reform has not as yet been urged by anybody. His attitude has been so extraordinary that I am inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. It is possible he may have said to himself, 'I will show you, and prove to you, to what an extent bad manners are not only recognised, but endorsed in this wholly free and unrestricted age. I will do on the stage of a public theatre what I should not dare to do at a mass meeting in the Park. I will uncover my head in the presence of refined women, but I refuse to put down my cigarette. The working man may put out his pipe when he spouts, but my cigarette is too 'precious' for destruction. I will show no humility, and I will stand unrebuked. I will take greater liberties with the public than any author who has ever preceded me in history. And I will retire scatheless. The society that allows boys to puff cigarette smoke in the faces of ladies in the theatre corridors will condone the originality of a smoking author on the stage.' This may be the form of Mr Oscar Wilde's curious cynicism. He may say, 'I will test this question of manners, and show that they are not nowadays recognised.'"

So far Mr Clement Scott, then the leader of the critic band who took his tone and cheerfully followed where he led—the old story of "Les brebis de Pannege." And to show how universal was this inordinate enmity, I will quote a paragraph from, at that time, the leading journal of historical criticism, written on the withdrawal of the play after a successful "run" of nine months. After endorsing the general opinion of the play as "A comedy of Society manners pure and simple which may fairly claim its place among the recognised names in that almost extinct class of drama," the writer goes on to say in the conclusion of his article—"Not the least amusing reminiscence will be the ferocious wrath which, on its first appearance, the play provoked among the regular stage-critics, almost to a man. Except that Mr Wilde smoked a cigarette when called on, it is difficult to see why—unless it was because the comedy ran off the beaten track which is just what they are always deprecating." In this last sentence lies the clou of the whole situation. The entire band had been clamouring for years for something fresh, "off the beaten track," and this is how they received it when they got it! Verily, the ways of criticism are indeed marvellous, and difficult of comprehension. But the author triumphed over them all and won his laurels despite the forces arrayed against him. His first comedy was a splendid success.

It must be conceded that there is nothing new in the plot of "Lady Windermere's Fan." It is an old tale of intrigue which has done duty on the stage over and over again. It has inspired many a play. But as I before observed, it is in its treatment by the accomplished hand that the novelty of drama lies. And here we have an interesting example of how old lamps may be made to look new at the touch of the magician's wand.

Lord and Lady Windermere have been married for a couple of years when the action of the play commences. It was a love-match, and the sky of happiness has hitherto been without a cloud. But the cloud at last appears in the guise of a certain Mrs Erlynne, a somewhat notorious divorcée, who has managed to gain admission into Society, in a half-acknowledged way, by means of her charms and her cash. The cash is supplied by Lord Windermere, and is in the nature of hush-money. For Mrs Erlynne turns out to be no other than Lady Windermere's mother, supposed to be long dead, and the "cloud" might prove an uncommonly inconvenient one if allowed suddenly to burst upon the unsuspicious ménage. So she is kept quiet by the cheques of her son-in-law. But her friends are not backward in enlightening Lady Windermere as to her husband's frequent visits to Mrs Erlynne, and one of them, the Duchess of Berwick, is more outspoken than the others, and succeeds in persuading poor innocent-minded Lady Windermere that the worst constructions should be placed upon his lordship's conduct. Mrs Erlynne has managed to induce Lord Windermere to send her a card for his wife's birthday ball, whereat, Lady Windermere, when she hears of this from her husband's lips, declares she will insult the guest openly if she arrives. But she does arrive and she is not insulted, although the celebrated fan is grasped ready to strike the blow! The ball passes off quietly enough, without any open scandal. But Lady Windermere, surprising, as she imagines, her husband in a compromising tête-à-tête with the fascinating intruder, determines in a moment of nervous tension to leave the house, and betake herself to the rooms of Lord Darlington, who earlier in the evening has offered her his sympathy, and his heart. Before she departs, however, she writes her husband a letter informing him of her intentions. This letter she leaves on a bureau where he is sure to find it. It is not he who finds it, however, but Mrs Erlynne. With the instinct born of a past and vast experience she scents danger, and opens and reads it. Then her better feelings and worse heart are suddenly awakened, and she determines, at all risks, to save her daughter. Whereupon she follows her to Lord Darlington's rooms, and, after a long scene between the two women, induces Lady Windermere to return to her husband before her flight is discovered. But it is too late. Lord Darlington, with a party of friends including Lord Windermere, is returning. Their voices are heard outside the door. Lady Windermere hides behind a curtain ready to escape on the first opportunity, while Mrs Erlynne—when Lord Windermere's suspicions are aroused at the sight of his wife's fan, and he insists on searching the room—comes forth from the place where she had concealed herself, and boldly takes upon herself the ownership of the fatal pièce á conviction. Lady Windermere is saved, and at the end of the play is reconciled to her husband without uncomfortable explanations, while Mrs Erlynne marries an elderly adorer, who is brother to the Duchess of Berwick.

Such, in brief, is the plot of "Lady Windermere's Fan." Every playgoer will at once recognise its situations, and hail its intrigue as an old and well-tried friend; the loving husband and wife, the fascinating adventuress who comes between them and cannot be explained; the tempter who offers substantial consolation to the outraged wife; the compromising fan, or scarf, or glove (selon les gôuts) found by the husband in the room of the other man; the convenient curtain closely drawn as if to invite concealment; the hairbreadth escape of the wife leaving the onus of the scandal to fall upon the shoulders of some self-sacrificing friend; the final reconciliation of husband and wife without any infelicitous catechism; are not these things written in the pages of all the plays that—as George Meredith so happily puts it—"deal with human nature in the drawing-rooms of civilised men and women." With certain variations they are the mainstay—the French word is l'armature—of every comedy of genteel passions and misunderstandings that ever existed. Now, how does Oscar Wilde contrive to clothe this dramatic skeleton with the flesh and blood of real life? How invest the familiar figures with the plausible presentment of new-born interest? Simply by the wonderful power of his personality, which dominates all he touches, and rejuvenates the venerable bones of his dramatis personæ, compelling them, after the fashion of the "Pied Piper," to dance to any tune he chooses to call. Or, perhaps, "sing" would be a better expression than "dance." For it is in what they say, rather than what they do, that our chief interest in them lies. We do not ask: "What are they going to do next?" That is more or less a forgone conclusion. But what we wait for with alert attention is what they are going to say next. And so we come back to that brilliant dialogue which is, as it should be, the chief feature of the play albeit that play is as well constructed as any could desire, straightforward and convincing. As a critic once wrote of it from the craftsman's point of view: "'Lady Windermere's Fan' as a specimen of true comedy is a head and shoulders above any of its contemporaries. It has nothing in common with farcical comedy, with didactic comedy, or the 'literary' comedy of which we have heard so much of late from disappointed authors, whose principal claim to literature appears to consist in being undramatic. It is a distinguishing note of Mr Wilde that he has condescended to learn his business, and has written a workmanlike play as well as a good comedy. Without that it would be worthless." In corroboration of this statement it is only necessary to note how skilfully, when it comes to the necessity of dramatic action, these scenes are handled. Take the one in the second act, where Mrs Erlynne, more or less, forces her way into Lady Windermere's ballroom. It is an episode of extreme importance, and how well led up to! Lord and Lady Windermere are on the stage together.

Lord Windermere. Margaret, I must speak to you.

Lady Windermere. Will you hold my fan for me, Lord Darlington? Thanks. (Comes down to him.)

Lord Windermere. (Crossing to her.) Margaret, what you said before dinner was, of course, impossible?

Lady Windermere. That woman is not coming here to-night!

Lord Windermere. (R.C.) Mrs Erlynne is coming here, and if you in any way annoy or wound her, you will bring shame and sorrow on us both. Remember that! Ah, Margaret! only trust me! A wife should trust her husband.

Lady Windermere. London is full of women who trust their husbands. One can always recognise them. They look so thoroughly unhappy. I am not going to be one of them. (Moves up.) Lord Darlington, will you give me back my fan, please? Thanks.... A useful thing a fan, isn't it?... I want a friend to-night, Lord Darlington. I didn't know I would want one soon.

Lord Darlington. Lady Windermere! I knew the time would come some day: but why to-night?

Lord Windermere. I will tell her. I must. It would be terrible if there were any scene. Margaret....

Parker (announcing). Mrs Erlynne.

(Lord Windermere starts. Mrs Erlynne enters, very beautifully dressed and very dignified. Lady Windermere clutches at her fan, then lets it drop on the floor. She bows coldly to Mrs Erlynne, who bows to her sweetly in turn, and sails into the room.)

If this is not effective stagecraft, I do not know what is. And the dramatist strikes a deeper, and more tragic, note in the scene later on (in the same act) where Mrs Erlynne discovers the letter of farewell that Lady Windermere had written to her husband.

(Parker enters, and crosses towards the ballroom, R. Enter Mrs Erlynne.)

Mrs Erlynne. Is Lady Windermere in the ballroom?

Parker. Her ladyship has just gone out.

Mrs Erlynne. Gone out? She's not on the terrace?

Parker. No, madam. Her Ladyship has just gone out of the house.

Mrs Erlynne (Starts and looks at the servant with a puzzled expression on her face). Out of the house?

Parker. Yes, madam—her Ladyship told me she had left a letter for his Lordship on the table.

Mrs Erlynne. A letter for Lord Windermere?

Parker. Yes, madam.

Mrs Erlynne. Thank you.

(Exit Parker. The music in the ballroom stops.)

Gone out of her house! A letter addressed to her husband!

(Goes over to bureau and looks at letter. Takes it up and lays it down again with a shudder of fear.)

No, no! it would be impossible! Life doesn't repeat its tragedies like that! Oh, why does this horrible fancy come across me? Why do I remember now the one moment of my life I most wish to forget? Does life repeat its tragedies?

(Tears letter open and reads it, then sinks down into a chair with a gesture of anguish.)

Oh, how terrible! the same words that twenty years ago I wrote to her father! And how bitterly I have been punished for it! No; my punishment, my real punishment is to-night, is now!

I have quoted these two episodes from the second act to demonstrate how equal was the playwright to the exigencies of his art. But it is in the third act, laid in Lord Darlington's rooms, that he reaches the level of high dramatic skill. First, in the scene between the mother and daughter, written with extraordinary power and pathos, and later on, when each of the women are hidden, the "man's scene" which ranks with the famous club scene in Lord Lytton's "Money." The blasé and genial tone of these men of the world is admirably caught. Their conversation sparkles with wit and wisdom—of the world bien entendu. But it is in Mrs Erlynne's appeal to her daughter, with all its tragic intent that the author surpasses himself. Just read it over. It is a masterpiece of restrained emotion.

Mrs Erlynne. (Starts with a gesture of pain. Then restrains herself, and comes over to where Lady Windermere is sitting. As she speaks, she stretches out her hands towards her, but does not dare to touch her.) Believe what you choose about me. I am not without a moment's sorrow. But don't spoil your beautiful young life on my account. You don't know what may be in store for you, unless you leave this house at once. You don't know what it is to fall into the pit, to be despised, mocked, abandoned, sneered at—to be an outcast! to find the door shut against one, to have to creep in by hideous byways, afraid every moment lest the mask should be stripped from one's face, and all the while to hear the laughter of the world, a thing more tragic than all the tears the world has ever shed. You don't know what it is. One pays for one's sin, and then one pays again, and all one's life one pays. You must never know that. As for me, if suffering be an expiation, then at this moment I have expiated all my faults, whatever they have been; for to-night you have made a heart in one who had it not, made it and broken it. But let that pass. I may have wrecked my own life, but I will not let you wreck yours. You—why you are a mere girl, you would be lost. You haven't got the kind of brains that enables a woman to get back. You have neither the wit nor the courage. You couldn't stand dishonour. No! go back, Lady Windermere, to the husband who loves you, whom you love. You have a child, Lady Windermere. Go back to that child who even now, in pain or in joy, may be calling to you. (Lady Windermere rises.) God gave you that child. He will require from you that you make his life fine, that you watch over him. What answer will you make to God, if his life is ruined through you? Back to your house, Lady Windermere—your husband loves you. He has never swerved for a moment from the love he bears you. But even if he had a thousand loves, you must stay with your child. If he was harsh to you, you must stay with your child. If he ill-treated you, you must stay with your child. If he abandoned you your place is with your child.

(Lady Windermere bursts into tears and buries her face in her hands.)

(Rushing to her). Lady Windermere!

Lady Windermere (holding out her hands to her, helplessly, as a child might do). Take me home. Take me home.

Few people who witnessed that situation could have done so without being deeply moved. It is Oscar Wilde the poet who speaks, not to the brain but to the heart.

Then turn from the shadow of that scene to the shimmer of the one that follows immediately, full of smartness and jeu d'esprit. The sprightly and irresponsible chatter of men of the world.

Dumby. Awfully commercial, women nowadays. Our grandmothers threw their caps over the mill, of course, but, by Jove, their granddaughters only throw their caps over mills that can raise the wind for them.

Lord Augustus. You want to make her out a wicked woman. She is not!

Cecil Graham. Oh! wicked women bother one. Good women bore one. That is the only difference between them.

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Dumby. In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it. The last is much the worst, the last is a real tragedy.

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Cecil Graham. What is a cynic?

Lord Darlington. A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

Cecil Graham. And a sentimentalist, my dear Darlington, is a man who sees an absurd value in everything, and doesn't know the market price of any single thing.

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Dumby. Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.

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Lord Windermere. What is the difference between scandal and gossip?

Cecil Graham. Oh! gossip is charming! History is merely gossip. But scandal is gossip made tedious by morality. Now I never moralise. A man who moralises is usually a hypocrite, and a woman who moralises is invariably plain. There is nothing in the whole world so unbecoming to a woman as a Nonconformist conscience. And most women know it, I'm glad to say.

And so we take our leave of "Lady Windermere's Fan."

"A WOMAN OF NO IMPORTANCE"