Class _ 
 
 Book 
 
 CopyrigM'N . 
 
 COPYRIGHT DKPOSm 
 
IN MEMORIAM: O. W. 
 
THE EDITION OF THIS BOOK 
 IS LIMITED TO 975 COPIES 
 
 PRINTED AT 
 
 THE LITERARY COLLECTOR PRESS 
 
 GREENWICH, CONNECTICUT 
 
IN MEMORIAM 
 OSCAR WILDE 
 
 BY 
 
 ERNEST LA JEUNESSE 
 ANDRfe GIDE AND FRANZ BLEI 
 
 Translation and Introduction 
 
 by 
 
 PERCIYAL POLLARD 
 
 GREENWICH, CONN. 
 
 THE LITERARY COLLECTOR PRESS 
 
 1905 
 
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 T 13 1905 . \ r \ 
 
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 Copyright, 1905 
 By The Literary Collector Press 
 
 05-330*/*/ 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 Introduction 
 
 By Percival Pollard - - 9 
 In Memoriam : O. W. 
 
 By Andre Gide - - - 29 
 In Memoriam : O. W. 
 
 Ernest La Jeunesse - - 75 
 
 In Memoriam : O. W. 
 
 By Franz Blei .... 97 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 BY 
 
 PERCIVAL POLLARD 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 STROLLING in the rare sunshine 
 that visited Berlin this May of 
 1905, a whim took me into a quaint 
 little bookshop that faces the work- 
 shop of venerable Joseph Joachim. 
 There, among that litter of old and 
 new, in all tongues, I found crystal- 
 lised what much other observation 
 had already hinted. Namely, that 
 upon the continental literature con- 
 cerning itself primarily with formal 
 
 9 2 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 art no exotic influence was more 
 noticeable, at that moment, than that 
 of the late Oscar Wilde. Exotic influ- 
 ence upon the German theatre was 
 discernible enough; here were farces 
 from the French: there dismal stuff 
 from Scandinavia, Strindberg and 
 Bjoernson to the fore: even Bernard 
 Shaw and J. M. Barrie were repre- 
 sented in translation. But, to name 
 the piece that was being played often- 
 est, on both sides of the Rhine, we 
 had to hark back to a play by Wilde, 
 "Salome." When you went bey ond the 
 theatre, eying the windows of the 
 booksellers, you saw Wilde's name 
 everywhere, — his ' ' De Profundis ' ' was 
 the most famous book of the season 
 in Berlin, as in France and England ; 
 or, at any rate, the booksellers seemed 
 10 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 to intimate that; they positively 
 plastered their show-cases and win- 
 dows with Wilde literature. 
 
 Much of this Wilde literature was 
 but repetition of what, despite our 
 whilom Puritanic aversion from this 
 writer's work, is already fairly fa- 
 miliar to us. One curious little book 
 I came upon, however, of such inti- 
 mate, melancholy interest, that I took 
 it away with me. Its title was "In 
 Memoriam: 0. W.," and as I sipped 
 my cup of Berliner Kafke at the Aus- 
 tria, I determined some day to turn 
 it into English. This I have now 
 done. 
 
 To persons whose notions of Ger- 
 man art have been formed upon the 
 sculpture of Rheinhold Begas, or the 
 literature of the Gartenlaube type, 
 11 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 it may seem curious that such a talent 
 as Wilde's should find anything like an 
 echo of sympathy in the land of Sud- 
 ermann and Hauptmann. But those 
 persons are unaware of the tremen- 
 dous modernisation that has come 
 over German art and letters. I can 
 here only hint at the facts. The 
 movement typified in England by the 
 Yellow Book, in America by The 
 Lark, the Chap-book, and similar 
 attempts away from the academic, 
 had a few years later its German 
 echo. In art a whole school of suc- 
 cessful men now testifies to this influ- 
 ence ; in illustration there are Jugend 
 and Simplicissimus, conveying to the 
 public the work of the younger 
 Munich men ; and in letters there are 
 such men as Ernst Yon Wolzogen, 
 12 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 Frank Wedekind, Otto Bierbaum, 
 Richard Dehmel, and many others. 
 Just as through Beardsley, Wilde's 
 influence upon our illustrative and 
 decorative arts— in houses as well as 
 in print — may still distinctly be felt, 
 so upon a number of German writers, 
 for print and playhouse, the Irish- 
 man's influence is undoubted. Aside 
 from the obvious proofs that met the 
 hastiest eye ; the fact that the show- 
 windows of Berlin were plastered 
 with Wilde literature; it was rather 
 in the thought-mode of a number of 
 successful writers of the lighter sort, 
 some of whom I named just now, that 
 I found myself marking the flowing of 
 an impetus that had sprung from the 
 author of " Salome." I could even 
 trace to him the mainspring of the 
 13 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 curious movement of some years ago 
 that sought to give to the German 
 music-hall the dignity of actual art ; 
 this movement, in its dissolution, 
 evaporated into what is now the 
 "cabaret" of Berlin. 
 
 To me the tremendous popular in- 
 terest in everything connected with 
 Wilde was peculiarly of moment. In 
 January of 1901 , a month after Wilde's 
 death, I had written here in America 
 an essay seeking to rehabilitate the 
 man's position as an artist. If I be- 
 lieved my friends, it was foolhardy 
 thus to fly into the face of Puritania, 
 where his name still spelt anathema. 
 In the course of my considerable ap- 
 preciation of the man's artistic ac- 
 complishments I made some forecasts. 
 Time has more than borne me out. 
 14 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 Plays by Wilde have been performed 
 in London, in Australia, in California, 
 as well as in Continental Europe; and 
 at the moment the revival of Wilde 
 interest everywhere, spurred by the 
 publication of his letters from prison, 
 is inescapable. In introducing the 
 work of the three contributors to "In 
 Memoriam: 0. W.", perhaps I may, in 
 passing, recall some few phrases from 
 my essay of January, 1901, inasmuch 
 as they match adequately the general 
 color of this little book : 
 
 Whatever the man's faults and fla- 
 grancies, I wrote, the man's works will 
 none the less keep the name of Oscar 
 Wilde from oblivion. No matter how 
 much of nausea his decline and fall 
 may fill one with, the children of his 
 brain deserve consideration sheerly on 
 15 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 their own merits. In no just scale is 
 the man allowed to weigh against 
 the creatures of his mind. The poem 
 and the play, the story and the essay, 
 have a life, a worth, that has nothing 
 whatever to do with the life and 
 worth of their creator. . . We have 
 only to recall Poe, Byron, Shelley and 
 Verlaine to remember that great tal- 
 ent is not infrequently companion to 
 great vices. Some of Wilde's work, it 
 is true, may seem to be sicklied over 
 with the taint of his baser self. " Sa- 
 lome," "The Picture of Dorian Grey" 
 and "The Sphinx" suffer from being 
 construed too much in the shadow of 
 his personal scandal. What, on the 
 other hand, could be more exquisite 
 than "The Happy Prince and other 
 Tales," "The House of Pomegran- 
 16 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 ates," the "Poems," or more witty 
 than the critical essays in " Inten- 
 tions"? To deny the power of this 
 man's writings, now when he is dust, 
 and when his baser part may well 
 have oblivion as its share, is to com- 
 mit the folly committed by the British 
 Museum when it withdrew from cir- 
 culation the books it once, for their 
 intrinsic merits, had housed, and to 
 surpass in injustice the act of the 
 theatre managers who stopped the 
 successful runs of plays written by 
 Wilde on account of the then obloquy 
 of his name. 
 
 Aside from the final succession of 
 tragedies that closed the public career 
 of Oscar Wilde, the impress made by 
 the man was certainly as much a part 
 of the history of the manners of the 
 17 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 nineteenth century in its decadence 
 as his writings were a part of its lit- 
 erature. . . . One may conceive that 
 in Wilde a perverse sense of loyalty to 
 art kept him from ever displaying the 
 real depth below his obvious insincer- 
 ities ; he had begun by being a public 
 fool ; he had succeeded in establishing 
 folly as a reputation for himself; and 
 the rumor of his paradoxic brilliance 
 was too secure and too amusing for 
 him to risk shattering it with glimpses 
 of more serious depths. Yet who that 
 reads his sonnet "De Profundis" but 
 must feel that, under the glitter and 
 the pose, there was something else, 
 something the gay world of London 
 knew nothing of. Expressive of his 
 career, his disgrace, his heights and 
 his depths, this poem is necessary to 
 18 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 the attempt at understanding its 
 author. This was the cry of his soul : 
 
 To drift with every passion till my soul 
 
 Is a stringed lute whereon all winds may play — 
 
 Is it for this that I have given away 
 
 Mine ancient wisdom, and austere control ? 
 
 Methinks my life is a twice- written scroll 
 Scrawled over in some boyish holiday, 
 With idle songs for pipe and virelay, 
 That do but mar the beauty of the whole. 
 
 Surely there was a time I might have trod 
 The sunlit heights, and from life's dissonance 
 Struck one clear chord to reach the ears of God ! 
 Is that time lost ? Lo, with a little rod 
 I did but touch the honey of romance, 
 And must 1 lose a soul's inheritance? 
 
 That holds a quality that leads one 
 to think of Yerlaine and his curious 
 commingling of the mystic and the 
 animal. Indeed, in life as in works, 
 the similarity between these two, the 
 19 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 Frenchman and the Irishman, is 
 strong. It is in the verses I have just 
 quoted that the man's superiority 
 over such a man, say, as Catulle 
 Mendes, shows. Mendes was once 
 "the wickedest man in Paris," and 
 he remains the most striking instance 
 of the brilliant man of letters who 
 has done almost everything nearly as 
 well as the master of that particular 
 craft. But of soul he has only the 
 ghost. Wilde posed as a Soul only in 
 the spirit in which that word was then, 
 in the 'Eighties, used in English soci- 
 ety, as opposed to the Smart ; he pre- 
 tended nothing about him was genu- 
 ine; he passed for a symbol of his 
 own clever defence of liars; yet in 
 " De Profundis " the soul gave its cry. 
 Nothing of the black shadow that 
 20 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 ousted him from the world, that 
 made him as one dead even before 
 death, should creep over his writings 
 and his earlier achievements for art 
 and culture. We read De Maupassant, 
 and his scarlet sins and black butter- 
 flies no longer concern us ; a verse or 
 so of Verlaine's will outlive that of 
 the most stainless curate who ever 
 was horrified at the thought of ab- 
 sinthe; D'Annunzio and Mendes sin 
 quite as fluently, according to the 
 Puritans, as they write. Millions 
 have lived righteously without leav- 
 ing for posterity anything so fine as 
 u The Ballad of Reading Gaol." . . . 
 No death in all history seems more 
 horrid than this one. Beau Brummell 
 in Calais, Yerlaine in Paris do not ap- 
 proach this, nor yet Heine on his pal- 
 21 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 let. One may fancy the beautiful, 
 cruel, yet pitiful wanton, Paris, whis- 
 pering by the bed of this once brilliant 
 Irishman : 
 
 " For none can tell to what red Hell 
 His sightless soul may stray." 
 
 Those, then, were some of the things 
 I had printed within a month of 
 Wilde's death. Meanwhile, what he 
 had hinted in his sonnet "De Profun- 
 dis" he had elaborated in his letters 
 from prison to Mr. Ross, eventually 
 issued as a book under the same title. 
 Just as Pierre Loti once wrote a book 
 of Pity and of Death, so might "De 
 Profundis" be called Wilde's book of 
 Pity and of Life. Just as that book 
 hinted at the tragedy of Wilde's pris- 
 on life, a tragedy more of soul than 
 of body, so does this present little 
 22 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 volume disclose some few facts touch- 
 ing upon the man's life after leaving 
 prison. The few had perforce to read 
 "De Profundis" in the light of their 
 knowledge that Wilde, after all his 
 beautiful resolutions and conclusions 
 in that document, reverted to the 
 baser self, and died with his life fallen 
 far below the altitude marked in the 
 prison letters. That knowledge of 
 the few is set forth in concrete, inti- 
 mate, personal manner in the follow- 
 ing pages. It is true that on some 
 points even these documents are in 
 conflict ; as in the matter of the num- 
 ber following Wilde's body to his 
 grave. But the glimpses of the man 
 just before death, as Ernest La Jeun- 
 esse and Andre Gide give them to us 
 in these pages, remain incontestably 
 23 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 valuable. He died and was buried. 
 Whether seven followed the coffin, or 
 thirteen ; whether he lies in this ceme- 
 tery or that; what matter? His 
 work lives on. Mr. Robert Ross has 
 lately retold, circumstantially, the de- 
 tails of Wilde's burial, of the difficul- 
 ties encountered in the fact of Wilde's 
 dying under an assumed name in 
 Paris, and of the purely temporary 
 nature of his present resting place ; it 
 being the intention, some time in 
 1906, to obtain a permanent plot in 
 Pere La Chaise. 
 
 A word or two about the authors 
 with whose pages I am taking the 
 liberty of very free translation. M. 
 La Jeunesse is one of the most witty 
 of the younger Parisians. Much of 
 his work has been on the impudent 
 24 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 and amusing plane of a Max Beer- 
 bohm. His volume The Nights, The 
 Ennuis and the Souls of our Most 
 Notorious Contemporaries, criticised, 
 chiefly by way of parody, all the big- 
 gest toads in the puddle of French 
 letters; Zola, Bourget, Maeterlinck 
 and Anatole France all suffered his 
 scalpel. About M. Gide I regret that 
 I can tell you nothing ; I prefer to in- 
 vent nothing. Herr Franz Blei is one 
 of the several talented men connected 
 with the German monthly, Die In- 
 sel } published in Leipzig two or three 
 years ago, under the direction of Otto 
 Julius Bierbaum. Bierbaum and Blei 
 occasionally wrote for the stage to- 
 gether, and Blei has constantly been 
 to the fore in translating for German 
 readers the works of such men as 
 25 3 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 Walter Pater, Arthur Symons, and 
 Ernest Dowson. 
 
 The D— referred to in M. Gide's 
 pages is, of course, Lord Alfred 
 Douglas. 
 
 The hotel-keeper, mentioned on page 
 71, guards to this day, the rooms in 
 which Wilde died, as a shrine, not with- 
 out pecuniary profit. Indeed, visitors 
 have had amusing proof of the inex- 
 haustible store of relics he commands. 
 Percival Pollard. 
 
 26 
 
IN MEMORIAM : 0. W. 
 ANDRE GIDE 
 
IN MEMORIAM : 0. W. 
 
 THOSE who came to know Wilde 
 only in the latter years of his life 
 can scarcely, in view of that feeble and 
 infirm existence, have had any concep- 
 tion of this wonderful personality. It 
 was in 1891 that first I saw him. 
 Wilde had at that time what Thacke- 
 ray termed the most important of 
 talents, success. His gestures, his 
 look, were triumphant. So complete 
 was his success that it seemed as if it 
 29 
 
IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 
 
 had preceded him, and Wilde had 
 nothing to do but follow it tip. His 
 books were talked about. Plays of 
 his were on at several London thea- 
 tres. He was rich; he was famous; 
 he was beautiful. Happiness and 
 honors were his. One likened him to 
 an Asiatic Bacchus; or to a Roman 
 Emperor, or even to Apollo himself — 
 what is certain is that he was radiant. 
 When he came to Paris, his name 
 traveled from lip to lip ; one told the 
 most absurd anecdotes about him: 
 Wilde was pictured as everlastingly 
 smoking gold-tipped cigarettes and 
 strolling about with a sunflower in 
 his hand. For Wilde had always the 
 gift of playing up to those who now- 
 adays fashion fame, and he made for 
 himself an amusing mask that 
 30 
 
IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 
 
 covered his actual countenance. 
 
 I heard him spoken of at Mallarme's 
 as of a brilliant causeur. A friend 
 invited Wilde to dinner. There were 
 four of us, but Wilde was the only one 
 who talked. 
 
 Wilde was not a causeur; he nar- 
 rated. During the entire meal he 
 hardly once ceased his narrating. He 
 spoke slowly, gently ; in a soft voice. 
 He spoke admirable French, but as if 
 he tapped a little for the words he was 
 using. Hardly any accent at all, or 
 just the faintest that he chose to 
 adopt, giving the words often a quite 
 
 novel and foreign air The 
 
 stories he told us that evening were 
 confused and not of his best. Wilde 
 was not sure of us, and was testing 
 us. Of his wisdom or his folly he 
 31 
 
IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 
 
 gave only what he thought his lis- 
 teners might like ; to each he served a 
 dish to suit the taste; those who 
 expected nothing of him received 
 nothing or the merest froth; and, 
 since all this was just amusement for 
 him, many, who think they know 
 him, know him only as an entertainer. 
 
 As we left the restaurant on that 
 occasion my friends went ahead, I 
 followed with Wilde. 
 
 "You listen with your eyes/' he 
 said to me rather abruptly, "that is 
 why I tell you this story : 
 
 "When Narcissus died the pool of his 
 pleasure changed from a cup of sweet 
 waters into a cup of salt tears, and 
 the Oreads came weeping through the 
 woodland that they might sing to 
 the pool and give it comfort. 
 32 
 
IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 
 
 "And when they saw that the pool 
 had changed from a cup of sweet 
 waters into a cup of salt tears, they 
 loosened the green tresses of their 
 hair, and cried to the pool, and said : 
 1 We do not wonder that you should 
 mourn in this manner for Narcissus, 
 so beautiful was he.' 
 
 "'But was Narcissus beautiful?' 
 said the pool. 
 
 "'Who should know that better 
 than you?' answered the Oreads. 
 * Us did he ever pass by, but you he 
 sought for, and would lie on your 
 banks and look down at you, and in 
 the mirror of your waters he would 
 mirror his own beauty.' 
 
 "And the pool answered: "But I 
 loved Narcissus because, as he lay on 
 my banks and looked down at me, in 
 33 
 
IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 
 
 the mirror of his eyes I saw my own 
 beauty mirrored.' " 
 
 As I said : before others Wilde wore 
 a mask, to deceive, to amuse, some- 
 times to anger. He never listened, 
 and bothered little about any thought 
 that was not his own. If he could 
 not shine quite alone, he withdrew 
 into the shadow. One found him 
 there only when one was alone with 
 him. 
 
 But so, alone, he began : 
 
 " What have you done since yester- 
 day?" 
 
 And as my life had then a very 
 ordinary routine, what I told about 
 it could hardly interest him at all. I 
 rehearsed this very ordinary matter, 
 and Wilde's frown showed. 
 
 "Really only that?" 
 34 
 
IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 
 
 " Really nothing new." 
 
 "Then why tell it? Yon must see 
 yourself that all that is very uninter- 
 esting. There are just two worlds: 
 the one exists without one ever speak- 
 ing of it ; that is called the real world, 
 for one does not need to speak of it to 
 perceive its existence. The other is 
 the world of art: one must talk of 
 that, for without such talk it would 
 not exist. 
 
 "There was once a man who was 
 beloved in his village for the tales he 
 told. Every morning he left the vil- 
 lage, and when he returned, at even- 
 ing, the villagers, who had tired 
 themselves in labor all day long, 
 assembled before him and said, — Tell 
 us, now, what you saw to-day ! He 
 told them : I saw a faun in the wood 
 35 
 
IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 
 
 piping a dance to little woodgods. — 
 What else ? Tell us ! said the people. 
 — As I came to the sea I saw on the 
 waves three sirens combing their green 
 locks with a golden comb. — And the 
 people loved him because he told them 
 stories. 
 
 "One morning he left the village as 
 usual — but as he reached the sea he 
 saw three sirens, three sirens on the 
 waves, combing with golden combs 
 their green tresses. And as he fared 
 on, he saw in the wood a faun, pip- 
 ing before dancing woodnymphs. . 
 . . When he reached his village that 
 evening and one asked him as of old : 
 Tell us! What have you seen? he 
 answered : I have seen nothing." 
 
 Wilde paused a little ; let the story 
 work into me ; then : 
 36 
 
IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 
 
 "I do not like your lips; they are 
 the lips of one who has never lied. I 
 shall teach you to lie, that your lips 
 may grow beautiful and curved as 
 those of an antique mask. 
 
 "Do you know what is art and 
 what is nature? And the difference 
 between them ? For after all a flower 
 is as beautiful as any work of art, so 
 the difference between them is not 
 merely beauty. Do you know the 
 difference ? The work of art is always 
 unique. Nature, that creates nothing 
 permanent, forever repeats herself, so 
 that nothing of what she has created 
 may be lost. There are many nar- 
 cisse, so each can live but one day. 
 And every time that Nature invents a 
 new form, she repeats it. A sea- 
 monster in one sea knows that its 
 37 
 
IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 
 
 image exists in some other sea. When 
 God made a Nero, a Borgia, a Napo- 
 leon, he was only replacing their likes ; 
 we do not know those others, but 
 what matter ? What is important is 
 that one succeeded ! For God achieves 
 man, and man achieves the work of 
 art." 
 
 That Wilde was convinced of his aes- 
 thetic mission was made clear to me 
 more than once. 
 
 The Gospel disquieted the pagan 
 Wilde. He did not forgive its mira- 
 cles. Pagan miracles, those were 
 works of art; Christianity robbed 
 him of those. 
 
 ' i When Jesus returned to Nazareth, ' ' 
 
 he said, "Nazareth was so changed 
 
 that he did not know the place. The 
 
 Nazareth of his day had been full of 
 
 38 
 
IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 
 
 misery and tears ; this town laughed 
 and sang. And as the Lord descended 
 into the town he saw flower-laden 
 slaves hastening up the white steps of 
 a marble house. He went into the 
 house and saw in a jasper hall reclin- 
 ing upon a marble couch one in whose 
 hair were twined red roses and whose 
 lips were red with wine. And the 
 Lord stepped behind him, touched his 
 shoulder and spoke to him : ' Why do 
 you spend your life like this?' The 
 man turned around, knew him, and 
 said: 'I was a leper once, and you 
 healed me — how else should I live ? ' 
 
 "And the Lord left the house and 
 returned upon the street. And after a 
 little while he saw one whose face and 
 garments were painted, and whose 
 feet were shod with pearls. And after 
 39 
 
IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 
 
 her followed a youth, softly, slowly, 
 like a hunter, and his coat was of two 
 colors, and lust was in his eyes. But 
 the face of the woman was as the 
 lovely face of a goddess. And the 
 Lord touched the youth's hand, and 
 said: 'Why look you so upon this 
 woman?' And the youth turned 
 around, knew him, and said : ' I was 
 blind, and you restored my sight. 
 Upon what else shall I look ? ' 
 
 "And the Lord approached the 
 woman : ' The way you go is the way 
 of sin ; why do you go that way ? ' 
 And the woman knew him, and said : 
 'The way I go is a joyful way, and 
 you forgave me my sins.' 
 
 "Then the Lord's heart filled with 
 sorrow, and he wished to depart from 
 the town. And as he came to the 
 40 
 
IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 
 
 gates, a youth was sitting by the 
 roadside, weeping. The Lord ap- 
 proached him, touched his hair, and 
 said to him : ' Why do you weep ? ' 
 
 4 'And the youth looked up, knew 
 him, and said : ' I was dead, and you 
 waked me from the dead. What else 
 should I do but weep ? ' " 
 
 ' ' Shall I tell you a secret?" Wilde 
 began, another time — it was at 
 Heredia's; he had taken me aside in 
 the middle of the crowded salon, and 
 was confiding this to me: "Do you 
 know why Christ did not love his 
 mother?" — He spoke quite softly 
 into my ear, as if in shame. Then he 
 made a slight pause, took me by the 
 arm, and, suddenly breaking into loud 
 laughter: "Because she was a vir- 
 gin!" 
 
 41 4 
 
IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 
 
 One morning Wilde bade me read a 
 review in which a somewhat unskilful 
 critic had congratulated him upon the 
 fact that he "gave form and vesture 
 to his ideas by way of daintily 
 invented stories." 
 
 "They imagine," Wilde began, "that 
 all ideas come naked into the world. 
 They do not understand that I 
 can think in no other way save in 
 stories. The sculptor does not trans- 
 late his thought into marble; he 
 thinks in marble." 
 
 Wilde believed in a sort of fate in 
 art, and that ideas were stronger 
 than men. "There are," he said, 
 "two sorts of artists: these offer us 
 answers; those offer questions. One 
 must know to which of these sorts 
 one belongs ; for he who asks is never 
 42 
 
IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 
 
 he who answers. There are works of 
 art that stand waiting, that one does 
 not understand for a long time, for 
 the reason that they offer answers to 
 questions that one has not yet put; 
 for often the question conies dread- 
 fully long after the answer." 
 
 And he said, also : 
 
 " The soul conies old into the body, 
 which must age to give her youth. 
 Plato was the youth of Socrates." 
 
 Then I did not see Wilde again for 
 three years. 
 
 A stubborn rumor that grew with 
 his success as playwright ascribed 
 extraordinary habits to Wilde, about 
 which some people voiced their irri- 
 tation smilingly, others not at all ; it 
 was added that Wilde made no secret 
 of it, and spoke of it without embar- 
 43 
 
IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 
 
 rassment — some said he spoke with 
 bravado, some with cynicism, some 
 with affectation. I was very much 
 astonished ; nothing in the time I had 
 known Wilde had led me to suspect 
 this. But already his old friends were 
 cautiously leaving him. Not yet did 
 one quite disown him. But one no 
 longer spoke of having known him. 
 
 An unusual accident brought us 
 together again. It was in January, 
 1895. A fit of the blues had driven 
 me to travel, seeking solitude rather 
 than change. I hurried through 
 Algiers to Blidah; left Blidah for 
 Biskra. Leaving the hotel, my eyes 
 fall, in weary curiosity, upon the black 
 tablet that bears the names of the 
 hotel-guests. And next to my own I 
 see Wilde's name. I was hungry for 
 44 
 
IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 
 
 solitude, and I took the sponge and 
 wiped my name out. 
 
 Even before I reached the station I 
 was in doubt as to whether I had not 
 acted as a coward, and I had my trunk 
 brought back, and re- wrote my name 
 on the tablet. 
 
 In the three years since last I had 
 seen him — I do not count a very has- 
 ty encounter in Florence — Wilde had 
 changed visibly. One felt less softness 
 in his look, and there was something 
 coarse in his laughter, something 
 forced in his gaiety. At the same 
 time he seemed more certain of pleas- 
 ing, and less anxious to succeed; he 
 was bolder, greater, more sure of him- 
 self. And curiously enough he spoke no 
 longer in parables; not one single story 
 did I hear from him the whole time. 
 45 
 
IN MEM0R1AM OSCAR WILDE 
 
 At first I voiced my wonder at 
 finding him in Algiers. "I am run- 
 ning away from art," he replied, "I 
 want to worship only the sun. . . 
 Have you never noticed how the sun 
 despises all thought ? He always dis- 
 courages thought; it flies to the 
 shadows. Thought once dwelt in 
 Egypt; the sun conquered Egypt. 
 Long it lived in Greece ; the sun con- 
 quered Greece, then Italy, then 
 France. To-day all thought is 
 crowded out, driven into Norway, 
 and Russia, where the sun never 
 comes. The sun is jealous of art." 
 
 To worship the sun, that was to 
 worship life. Wilde's lyric worship 
 grew fierce and dreadful. A destiny 
 determined him; he could not and 
 would not escape it. He seemed to 
 46 
 
12V MEM0R1AM OSCAR WILDE 
 
 apply all his care, all his courage to 
 the task of exaggerating his fate, and 
 making it worse for himself. He went 
 about his pleasure as one goes about 
 one's duty. "It is my duty," he 
 said, "to amuse myself frightfully." 
 
 Nietzsche did not surprise me so 
 much, later, because I had heard 
 Wilde say: — "Not happiness! Any- 
 thing but happiness! But pleasure, 
 yes ; pleasure, joy ! One must always 
 want what is most tragic." 
 
 As he walked through the streets of 
 Algiers, he was the centre of a most 
 strange crew ; he chatted with each of 
 these fellows ; they delighted him, and 
 he threw his money at their heads. 
 
 "I hope," he said, "that I have 
 thoroughly demoralised this town." 
 I thought of Flaubert's reply, when 
 47 
 
IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 
 
 he had been asked what glory he held 
 most worthy — "La gloire de demor- 
 atisateur." 
 
 All this filled me with astonishment, 
 wonder, and dread. I was aware of 
 his shattered condition, of the attacks 
 and enmities aimed at him, and what 
 dark disquiet he concealed under his 
 abandonment of gaiety. One evening 
 he appeared to have made up his mind 
 to say absolutely nothing serious or 
 sincere. His paradoxes irritated me, 
 and I told him his plays, his books, 
 were far from being as good as his 
 talk. Why did he not write as well as 
 he talked? "Yes," said Wilde, "the 
 plays are not great ; I think nothing 
 of them ; . . . but if you only knew 
 how amusing they are ! . . . . Inci- 
 dentally, most of them are the results 
 48 
 
IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 
 
 of bets. So is 'Dorian Grey.' I wrote 
 that in a few days, because one of my 
 friends asserted I would never write a 
 novel." He leaned towards me and 
 added: "Do you wish to know the 
 great drama of my life ? I have given 
 my genius to my life, to my work only 
 my talent." 
 
 Wilde spoke of returning to London; 
 
 the Marquis of Q was abusing 
 
 him, and accusing him of flight. 
 "But," I asked, "if you go to Lon- 
 don, do you know what you are 
 risking?" 
 
 "That is something one should 
 never know. My friends are funny; 
 they advise caution. Caution! How 
 can I have that? That would 
 mean my immediate return. I must 
 go as far away as possible. And 
 49 
 
IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 
 
 now I can go no farther. Something 
 must happen — something different." 
 
 The next morning Wilde was on his 
 way to London. 
 
 The rest is well known. That 
 1 ' something different ' ' was hard labor 
 in prison. 
 
 From prison Wilde came to France. 
 
 In B , a remote little village near 
 
 Dieppe, there settled a Sebastian Mel- 
 moth; that was he. Of his French 
 friends I had been the last to see him ; 
 I wished to be the first to see him 
 again. I arrived about midday, with- 
 out having announced myself in ad- 
 vance. Melmoth, whom friendship 
 
 with T brought often to Dieppe, 
 
 was not expected back that evening. 
 He did not arrive until midnight. 
 50 
 
IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 
 
 It was still nearly winter, cold and 
 bitter. All day long I mooned about 
 the deserted strand, bored and 
 moody. How could Wilde have 
 
 chosen this B to live in? This 
 
 boded no good. 
 
 Night came, and I went into the 
 hotel, the only one in the place, where 
 Melmoth, too, lodged. It was eleven, 
 and I had begun to despair of my 
 waiting, when I heard wheels. M. 
 Melmoth had returned. 
 
 He was numb with cold. On the 
 way home he had lost his overcoat. 
 A peacock's feather that his servant 
 had brought him the day before may 
 have given him a foreboding of ill 
 luck ; he expresses himself as fortunate 
 to have got off with only the loss of 
 his overcoat. He shakes with the 
 51 
 
IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 
 
 cold, and the whole hotel is astir to 
 make him a hot grog. He scarcely 
 has a greeting for me. He does not 
 wish to show his emotion before the 
 others. And my own excited expecta- 
 tion quiets down as I find in Sebastian 
 Melmoth so completely the Oscar 
 Wilde, — not the hard, strained, force- 
 ful Wilde of Algiers, but the soft, pli- 
 able Wilde of before the crisis ; I feel 
 myself set back not two years, but 
 four or five ; the same arresting look, 
 the same winning smile, the same voice. 
 He lodged in two rooms, the best in 
 the house, and had furnished them 
 tastefully. Many books on the table, 
 among which he showed me my 
 "Nourritures Terrestres," then but 
 just out. On a high pedestal, in the 
 shadow, a Gothic Madonna. 
 52 
 
IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 
 
 We sat at table by lamplight, and 
 Wilde sipped his grog. Now, in the 
 better light, I note how the skin of his 
 face has roughened and coarsened, 
 and his hands still more, those hands 
 with their fingers still covered by the 
 same rings, even the lapis lazuli in its 
 pendant setting, to which he was so 
 much attached. His teeth are horri- 
 bly decayed. 
 
 We chat. I speak of our last meet- 
 ing in Algiers, and if he recalls my 
 then foretelling his catastrophe. "You 
 must have foreseen the danger into 
 which you were plunging ? " 
 
 " Of course ! I knew a catastrophe 
 would come — this one or that one. I 
 expected it. It had to end like that. 
 Think! Going on was impossible. 
 An end had to be. Prison has utterly 
 53 
 
IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 
 
 changed me. And I have counted on 
 
 that. D is terrible; he will not 
 
 understand my not taking up my old 
 life; he accuses the others of hav- 
 ing changed me. . . But one can 
 never take up the same life. . . My 
 life is like a work of art: an artist 
 never begins the same thing twice. 
 My life, before I was in prison was a 
 success. Now it is quite ended." 
 
 Wilde lit a cigarette. 
 
 "The public is dreadful; it judges 
 only by what one has done last. If I 
 returned to Paris it would see only 
 the condemned man. I shall not 
 appear again until I have written a 
 play." — And then, abruptly : "Was I 
 not quite right to come here? My 
 friends wanted to order me South, for 
 rest, for at first I was quite unstrung. 
 54 
 
IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 
 
 But I begged them to find me a quiet 
 little village somewhere in Northern 
 France, where I would see nobody, 
 where there is some cold and hardly 
 any sunshine. I have all that, here. 
 
 "Everyone is very nice to me here, 
 especially the clergyman. His little 
 church is a great pleasure to me. 
 Think : it is called the Church of Our 
 Lady of Joy — Isn't that delightful ? — 
 And now I am quite sure I shall never 
 
 be able to leave B , for this very 
 
 morning the clergyman has offered me 
 a pew! 
 
 "And the customs officers! How 
 bored such people are ! I asked them 
 if they had nothing to read, and now 
 I am getting for them all the novels 
 of the elder Dumas. I must stay 
 here, eh ? 
 
 55 
 
IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 
 
 "And the children here worship me. 
 On the Queen's birthday I gave a 
 feast to forty school-children — the 
 whole school was there, with the 
 teacher ! For the Queen's Day ! Isn't 
 that delightful ? . . . You know, I 
 am very fond of the Queen. I always 
 have her picture by me." And he 
 showed me Nicholson's portrait of the 
 Queen pinned to the wall. I arise to 
 examine it; a small bookcase is under- 
 neath it; I look at the books. I 
 wished to induce Wilde to talk more 
 seriously. I sit down again, and ask 
 him, somewhat timidly, if he has 
 read the "Recollections in a Morgue." 
 He does not reply directly. 
 
 "These Russian writers are extraor- 
 dinary; what makes their books so 
 great is the pity they put into them. 
 56 
 
IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 
 
 Formerly I adored 'Madame Bo varie' ; 
 but Flaubert would have no pity in 
 his books, and the air in them is close ; 
 pity is the open door through which a 
 book can shine eternally. . . Do you 
 know, it was pity that kept me from 
 suicide. For the first six months I 
 was so dreadfully unhappy that I 
 longed to kill myself— but I saw the 
 others. I saw their unhappiness; it 
 was my pity for them that saved me. 
 Oh, the wonder of pity ! And once I 
 did not know pity." He said this 
 quite softly and without any exalta- 
 tion. " Do you know how wonderful 
 pity is ? I thanked God every night, 
 yes, on my knees I thanked Him, that 
 He had made me acquainted with 
 pity. For I entered prison with a 
 heart of stone, and thought only of 
 57 5 
 
IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 
 
 my own pleasure ; but now my heart 
 is quite broken ; pity has entered in ; I 
 know now that pity is the greatest 
 and loveliest thing in the world. . . 
 And that is why I can have nothing 
 against those who condemned me, for 
 without them I would not have experi- 
 enced all this. D writes me hor- 
 rible letters; he writes that he does 
 not understand me, does not under- 
 stand my not taking arms against the 
 whole world; since all have been 
 abominable to me. . . No; he does 
 not understand, cannot understand 
 me. In every letter I tell him that our 
 ways lie apart; his is the way of 
 pleasure — mine is not. His is that of 
 Alcibiades; mine that of St. Francis 
 of Assisi. . . Do you know St. 
 Francis ? Will you do me a very great 
 58 
 
IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 
 
 pleasure ? Send me the best life of our 
 Saviour! " 
 I promised ; and he went on : 
 " Yes — towards the last we had a 
 splendid warden, a charming man! 
 But for the first six months, I was 
 utterly, completely unhappy. The 
 warden, then, was a horrible crea- 
 ture, a cruel Jew, without any ima- 
 gination." I had to laugh at the 
 absurdity of this rapidly uttered 
 comment, and Wilde laughed too. 
 
 "Yes, he did not know what to 
 invent for our torturing. . . You 
 shall see how void of imagination the 
 man was. You must know that in 
 prison one has but an hour in the 
 sunshine, that is, one marches around 
 the yard in a circle, one after the 
 other, and is forbidden to say a 
 59 
 
IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 
 
 word. One is watched, and there are 
 dreadful punishments if one is caught 
 talking. The novices, who are in 
 prison for the first time, can be distin- 
 guished by their inability to speak 
 without moving their lips. For ten 
 weeks I had been there, and had 
 not spoken a word to a soul. One 
 evening, just as we are making our 
 round, one behind the other, I sud- 
 denly hear my name spoken behind 
 me. It was the prisoner behind me, 
 who was saying : ' Oscar Wilde, I pit} r 
 you, for you are suffering more than 
 we.' I made the greatest efforts not 
 to be observed, and said, without 
 turning around: 'No, my friend; we 
 all suffer alike.' And on that day I 
 did not think of suicide. 
 "In this way we often talked 
 60 
 
IN MBMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 
 
 together. I knew his name and what 
 
 he was in for. He was called P , 
 
 and was a fine fellow! But I had 
 not yet the trick of speaking with 
 motionless lips, and one evening *C. 
 33!' (—that was I—) 'C.33andC48 
 fall out ! ' We left the rank, and the 
 turnkey said: 'You are to go before 
 the warden ! ' And as pity was 
 already in my heart I had fear only 
 for him; I was even happy that 
 I must suffer on his account. — Well, 
 the warden was simply a monster. 
 
 He called P first; he wished to 
 
 hear us separately — since the punish- 
 ment for the one who has spoken first 
 is twice as heavy as for the other; 
 usually the former gets a fortnight in 
 the dark cell, the latter only a week ; 
 so the warden wanted to know which 
 61 
 
IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 
 
 of us two had been the first. And of 
 
 course P said he was. And when 
 
 the warden interrogated me presently, 
 of course I, too, said it had been I. 
 That enraged the man so that his face 
 went scarlet, for he could not under- 
 stand such a thing. 'But P 
 
 declares also that he began ! I don't 
 understand. . .' 
 
 "What do you say to that, mon 
 cher? He could not understand ! He 
 was very much embarrassed. 'But I 
 have already given him fourteen 
 days. . .' and then: 'Very well! If 
 this is the case, you simply both get 
 fourteen days.' Splendid, that, eh? 
 The man simply had not an atom of 
 imagination." Wilde was greatly 
 amused; he laughed, and went on 
 talking gaily: 
 
 62 
 
IN MBMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 
 
 " Naturally, after the fourteen days, 
 our desire to talk was all the keener. 
 You know how sweet is the sensation 
 of suffering for others. Gradually — 
 one did not always parade in just the 
 same sequence — gradually I managed 
 to talk with all of them! I knew 
 the name of every single one, his 
 story, and when he would be leaving 
 prison. And to each I said : The first 
 thing you are to do when you come 
 out is to go to the post-office; there 
 will be a letter there for you with 
 money. . . There were some splen- 
 did fellows among them. Will you 
 believe me if I tell you that already 
 some three of my fellow prisoners 
 have visited me here? Is that not 
 wonderful ? 
 
 "The unimaginative warden was 
 63 
 
IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 
 
 succeeded by a very nice one. Now I 
 could ask to read whatever I wished. 
 I thought of the Greeks, and that they 
 would please me. I asked for Sopho- 
 cles, but he was not to my taste. 
 Then I thought of the writers on reli- 
 gion; those, too, failed to hold me. 
 And suddenly I thought of Dante. . . 
 oh, Dante ! I read Dante every day in 
 the Italian, every page of him; but 
 neither the Purgatory nor the Para- 
 dise was intended for me. But the 
 Inferno! What else was I to do but 
 adore it? Hell — were we not dwell- 
 ing in it ? Hell, that was the prison." 
 
 The same night he spoke to me of 
 his dramatic scheme of a Pharaoh, 
 and of a spirited story on Judas. 
 
 The following morning Wilde took 
 me to a charming little house, not far 
 64 
 
IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 
 
 from the hotel, that he had rented, 
 and was beginning to furnish. Here 
 he meant to write his plays : first, the 
 Pharaoh, than an "Achab and Isa- 
 bella," the story of which he told 
 marvellously. 
 
 The carriage that is to drive me off 
 is ready. Wilde gets in with me to 
 accompany me a little distance. He 
 speaks of my book, praises it cau- 
 tiously. The carriage stops. Wilde 
 gets out and says goodbye; then 
 abruptly : " Look here, mon cher, you 
 must promise me something. The 
 1 Nourritures Terrestres ' is good . . . 
 very good. But, mon cher, promise 
 me never again to write ' I ' again. In 
 art there is no first person." 
 
 Back in Paris again, I told D my 
 
 news. He declared : 
 65 
 
IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 
 
 "All that is quite ridiculous. Wilde 
 is incapable of suffering boredom. I 
 know him very well ; he writes to me 
 every day. I dare say he may finish 
 his play first, but then he will come 
 back to me. He never did anything 
 great in solitude, he needs distrac- 
 tions. He wrote his best while with 
 me. — Look at his last letter. . ." 
 
 D read it out to me. In it Wilde 
 
 implored D to let him finish his 
 
 Pharaoh in peace ; that then he would 
 return, return to him. The letter 
 closed with this glorious sentenc — 
 " And then I shall be King of Life once 
 more!" 
 
 Soon afterward Wilde returned to 
 
 Paris. The play was, and remained, 
 
 unwritten. When Society wishes to 
 
 destroy a man, she knows what is 
 
 66 
 
IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 
 
 needed, and she has methods more 
 subtle than death. . . Wilde had for 
 two years suffered too much and too 
 passively; his will was broken. For 
 the first few months he was still able 
 to set up 'illusions for himself; but 
 soon he gave up even those. It was 
 an abdication. Nothing was left of 
 his crushed life but the sorrowful 
 memory of what he had once been; 
 some wit still was there ; occasionally 
 he tested it, as if to try whether he 
 still was capable of thought ; but it 
 was a crackling, unnatural, tortured 
 wit. I only saw Wilde twice again. 
 One evening on the Boulevards, as I 
 
 was walking with G , I heard 
 
 myself called by name. I turn round, 
 
 it was Wilde ! How changed he was ! 
 
 "If I should reappear before I have 
 
 67 
 
IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 
 
 written my play, the world will see in 
 me only the convict," he had said. 
 He had returned without his play, 
 and when some doors closed against 
 him he sought entry nowhere else ; he 
 turned vagabond. Friends often tried 
 to save him ; one tried to think what 
 was to be done for him; one took 
 him to Italy. Wilde soon escaped, 
 slipped back. Of those who had re- 
 mained longest faithful to him, some 
 had several times told me that Wilde 
 had disappeared. Hence I was, I 
 admit, a trifle embarrassed to see 
 him again like that, in that place. 
 Wilde was sitting on the terrace of a 
 cafe\ He ordered two cocktails for 
 
 myself and G . I sat down facing 
 
 him, so that my back was to those 
 
 passing. Wilde noticed that and 
 
 68 
 
IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 
 
 ascribed it to an absurd shame on my 
 part, and not altogether, I regret to 
 say, with injustice. 
 
 " Oh," he said, " sit down here, next 
 to me," and pointed to a chair by his 
 side, "I am so utterly alone now!" 
 
 Wilde was still quite well dressed ; 
 but his hat no longer was brilliant, 
 his collar was still of the old cut but 
 not quite so immaculate, and the 
 sleeves of his coat showed faint fringes. 
 
 ' 'When once I met Verlaine," he 
 began, with a touch of pride, "I did 
 not blush at him. I was rich, joyous, 
 famous, but I felt that it was an 
 honour for me to be seen with Ver- 
 laine, even though he was drunk." 
 Perhaps because he feared to bore 
 
 G , he suddenly changed his tone, 
 
 attempted to be witty, to jest; his talk 
 69 
 
IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 
 
 became mere stumbling. As we arose 
 Wilde insisted upon paying. When I 
 was bidding him farewell he took me 
 aside and said, in a low and confused 
 tone, " Listen: you must pay . . . 
 I am quite without means. . . ." 
 
 A few days later I saw him again 
 for the last time. Let me mention but 
 one thing of those we talked of: he 
 bewailed his inability to undertake 
 his art once more. I reminded him of 
 his promise, that he had made to 
 himself, not to return to Paris with- 
 out a completed play. 
 
 He interrupted me, laid his hand on 
 mine, and looked at me quite sadly : 
 
 " One must ask nothing of one who 
 has failed." 
 
 Oscar Wilde died in a miserable little 
 hotel in the Rue des Beaux-Arts. 
 70 
 
IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 
 
 Seven persons followed to his funeral, 
 and not all of these accompanied him 
 to his last resting-place. Flowers and 
 wreaths lay on the coffin. Only one 
 piece bore an inscription ; it was from 
 his landlord ; and on it one read these 
 words : " A mon locataire. ' ' 
 
 71 
 
IN MEMORIAM : 0. W. 
 
 BY 
 
 ERNEST LA JEUNESSE 
 
IN MEMORIAM : 0. W. 
 
 TF, WITHOUT looking more closely, 
 -*- one happened to notice this slowly 
 moving and very solemn gentleman as 
 he strolled our boulevards in his ex- 
 pansive corpulence, one jumped at 
 once to the conclusion that to himself 
 and in himself he appeared as a 
 mourning processional. 
 
 Never was there a more utter victim 
 of the misunderstanding between the 
 mob and the poet. The public longs 
 75 
 
IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 
 
 to be fooled. It has a right to decep- 
 tion, as it has a right to bread, or to 
 its dreams — and the real dreams of 
 the night-time are so rare and so dif- 
 ficult! It wants to dream, of an 
 evening, in the theatre, so that in the 
 daytime it may have matter for aston- 
 ishment and for wonder ; it wants to 
 be excited, at break of day, before 
 work comes, by the murders and 
 crimes in the newspapers. 
 
 When once a thaumaturg — and I 
 choose the word purposely, one that 
 Wilde respected highly — undertakes 
 to fool the public, he has the right to 
 choose his material where he finds it ; 
 one does not expect of him moral and 
 social lessons, but inventions, tricks, 
 words, a touch of heaven and a touch 
 of hell, and what not else ; he must be 
 76 
 
IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 
 
 Proteus and Prometheus, must be 
 able to transform all things, and him- 
 self; he must reveal the secret of this 
 or that life for the readers of his paper 
 or the patrons of his theatre ; he must 
 be confessor, prophet and magician; 
 he must dissect the world with the 
 exactness of a doctrinarian and re- 
 create it anew the moment after, by 
 the light of his poetic fancy ; he must 
 produce formulas and paradoxes, and 
 even barbaric puns with nothing save 
 their antiquity to save them. 
 
 For this price — a well paid one — he 
 can find distraction after the manner 
 of the gods or the fallen angels, and 
 seek for himself excitements and de- 
 ceptions, since he has advanced, and 
 eventually crossed the borders of ordi- 
 nary human emotions and sensations. 
 77 
 
IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 
 
 Wilde had paid the price. Now, with 
 the coin of his artistic triumphs, he 
 longed among a thousand nobler and 
 more interesting things, to play the 
 young man. 
 
 He played badly. 
 
 Now it was the public that was 
 duped in duping him. For the only 
 fortune, good or bad, permitted to 
 the poet is of the sort that an octo- 
 genarian biographer delights to pre- 
 sent after the poet's death. 
 
 Wilde in exile remained always 
 English: I mean to say that he had 
 pity with all victims without hatred 
 for the judges. He approved com- 
 pletely of the sentence and execution 
 of that Louise Masset who was 
 hanged for the killing of her child. He 
 followed closely the course of events 
 78 
 
IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 
 
 in the Transvaal, and was all enthu- 
 siasm for Kitchener and Roberts, a 
 touching trait in an exile. Irishman 
 by birth, an Italian in his inclinations, 
 Greek in culture and Parisian in his 
 passion for paradox and blague, he 
 never could forget London — London, 
 in whose fogs he had found all his 
 triumphs ; London, into which he had 
 brought all exotic civilisations ; Lon- 
 don, that in his vanity he had trans- 
 formed into a monstrous garden of 
 flowers and palaces, of subtlest sug- 
 gestion and discreetest charm. His 
 impertinences toward the English had 
 been those of a benevolent monarch. 
 When he came late into a salon, with- 
 out greeting to anyone, accosted the 
 hostess and asked, quite audibly : "Do 
 I know anybody here?" that was 
 79 
 
IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 
 
 nothing but his singular gallantry; 
 he had by no means the intention of 
 slighting this one or that one, but 
 wished merely to avoid the appear- 
 ance of knowing all the world, inas- 
 much as the hostess herself probably 
 knew only a small number of her 
 guests. He has been accused of a 
 green carnation and a cigarette; it 
 was for that, perhaps, that for 
 twenty -four months he was deprived 
 of all tobacco and all flowers. He 
 has been reproached of having spent 
 twice the 150,000 francs his plays 
 brought him in; he was declared 
 bankrupt. His name was erased from 
 the hoardings and from the memories 
 of men ; his children were taken away 
 from him ; all this because the public 
 wished to amaze him with its cruelty. 
 80 
 
IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 
 
 Still this was not the end. From 
 the moment that he set foot on our 
 soil we were witnesses to a terrible 
 tragedy: his effort to pick up the 
 thread of his life. This giant, whom 
 lack of sleep, of nourishment, of peace 
 and of books, had been unable to 
 destroy and scarcely to weaken, asked 
 of the sea, of Paris and of Naples, 
 that they harbor the dawn of a new 
 era in his art. 
 
 He failed. 
 
 At forty, confident in the future, he 
 failed. He could but reach out with 
 impotent arms into the past, lose him- 
 self in bitter memories. American 
 managers clamored for a new play of 
 his ; all he could do was to give Leon- 
 ard Smithers "An Ideal Husband" 
 to print, a play several years old. 
 81 
 
IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 
 
 His heavy lids drooped upon cher- 
 ished dreams : his successes ; he walked 
 slowly, in short paces, so as not to 
 disturb his memories; he loved the 
 solitude one gave him, since it left him 
 alone with what he had once been. 
 Yet still the evil habit was on him of 
 haunting, with some companion, the 
 obscurest streets, dreaming of similar 
 adventures in London. . . always 
 London ! 
 
 He had to have that oblivion which 
 alcohol denied him. For even in the 
 bars it was London he sought. There 
 was left for him nothing but the 
 American bars, which were not to his 
 liking. One evening at Chatham's he 
 had been told his presence was unwel- 
 come. There on the terrace he had 
 tried to distract his incurious eyes, 
 82 
 
IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 
 
 but the passers-by gazed at him too 
 curiously ; he gave up even that. 
 
 All his face was furrowed by tears. 
 His eyes seemed caverns hollowed out 
 by pale tears; his heavy lips seemed 
 compact of sobs and oozing blood; 
 and everywhere was that horrible 
 bloating of the skin that signals 
 human fear and heart-ache corroding 
 the body. An unwieldy ghost, an 
 enormous caricature, he cowered over 
 a cocktail, always improvising for the 
 curious, for the known, and for the 
 unknown— for anyone— his tired and 
 tainted paradoxes. But mostly it 
 was for himself he improvised; he 
 must assure himself he still could, still 
 would, still knew. 
 
 He knew everything. 
 
 Everything. The commentaries on 
 83 
 
IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 
 
 Dante; the sources of Dante Gabriel 
 Rossetti; the events and the battles 
 of history — of all he could talk as a 
 stripling talks, smiling sometimes his 
 smile that was of purgatory, and 
 laughing — laughing at nothing, shak- 
 ing his paunch, his jowls, and the 
 gold in his poor teeth. 
 
 Slowly, word for word, he would in- 
 vent in his feverish, stumbling agony 
 of art, curious, fleeting parables: 
 the story of the man who, having 
 received a worthless coin, voyages 
 forth to meet in combat the ruler 
 whose doubly counterfeit presentment 
 he has found. . . But he lacked, 
 for the setting down of these tales, 
 the golden tablet of Seneca. 
 
 He wasted himself in words; per- 
 haps he tried to lose himself in them. 
 84 
 
IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 
 
 He sought scholars that he might find 
 in them an excuse for finding himselt 
 again, for living anew, for being born 
 again, and to keep him from overmuch 
 thinking about ungrateful plagiarists. 
 
 Wilde once told a tale of a king and 
 a beggar, and said at close: "I have 
 been king; now I will be a beggar." 
 Yet he remained to the very last day 
 the perfect, well-groomed Englishman 
 — and did not beg. 
 
 That would indeed have been a new- 
 life, this life that fate denied him. 
 
 Words fail to paint properly the 
 chaos of hope, of words and laughter, 
 the mad sequence of half-concluded 
 sentences, into which this poet 
 plunged, proving to himself his still 
 inextinguished fancy, his battling 
 against surrender, his smiling at fate ; 
 85 
 
IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 
 
 or to suggest the grim dark into 
 which he always must turn, daily 
 fearing death, in the narrow chamber 
 of a sordid inn. 
 
 He had been in the country, in Italy, 
 and he longed for Spain, for the Med- 
 iterranean; there was nothing for him 
 save Paris — a Paris gradually closing 
 against him, a deaf Paris, bloodless, 
 heartless, a city without eternity and 
 without legend. 
 
 Each day brought him sorrows ; he 
 had neither followers nor friends ; the 
 direst neurasthenia tortured him. 
 Want clutched at him ; the pittance of 
 ten francs a day allowed him by his 
 family was no longer increased by any 
 advances from his publishers ; he must 
 needs work, write plays that he had 
 already contracted to undertake, — 
 86 
 
7,Y MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 
 
 and he was physically unable to arise 
 from his bed before three in the after- 
 noon! 
 
 He did not sour under all this; he 
 simply let himself run down. One day 
 he takes to his bed, and pretends that 
 he has been poisoned by a dish of 
 mussels in a restaurant ; he gets up 
 again, but wearily, and with thoughts 
 of death. 
 
 He attempts his stories all over 
 again. It is like nothing save the bitter, 
 blinding brilliance of a super-human 
 firework. All who saw him at the 
 close of his career, still spraying forth 
 the splendor of his wit and his inven- 
 tion, whittling out the golden, jeweled 
 fragments of his genius, with which 
 he was to fashion and embroider the 
 plays and poems he still meant to do 
 87 
 
IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 
 
 — who saw him proudly lifting his 
 face to the stars the while he coughed 
 his last words, his last laughter,— 
 will never forget the tremendous, trag- 
 ic spectacle as of one calmly damned 
 yet proudly refusing utterly to bend 
 the neck. 
 
 Nature, at last kind to him who had 
 denied her, gathered all her glories 
 together for him in the Exposition. 
 He died of its passing, as he died of 
 everything. He had loved it, had 
 drunk it in large measures, greedily, 
 as one drinks blood on the battlefield. 
 In every palace of it he built again his 
 own palace of fame, riches and im- 
 mortality. 
 
 For this dying man it was a long 
 and lovely dream. One day he passed 
 out through the Porte de l'Alma to 
 88 
 
IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 
 
 look at Rodin's work. He was almost 
 the only wayfarer thither. That, too, 
 is tragedy; and the master showed 
 him, quite near by, the Porte de 
 l'Enfer. 
 
 But enough of details: on to the 
 end. 
 
 Thirteen persons, in a bedroom out 
 by the city limits, remove their hats 
 before a coffin marked with a No. 13 ; 
 a shaky hearse with shabby metal 
 ornaments ; two landaus instead of a 
 funeral coach; a wreath of laurel; 
 faded flowers; a church that is not 
 draped for death, that tolls no death- 
 note, and opens only a narrow side- 
 entrance for the procession; a dumb 
 and empty mass without music; an 
 absolution intoned in English, the 
 liturgic Latin turned to a non-con- 
 89 
 
IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 
 
 formist jumble; the glittering salute 
 of a captain of the guard on the Place 
 Saint Germain-des-Pres ; three report- 
 ers counting the participants with 
 cold-blooded precision — that is the 
 farewell that the world takes from one 
 of its children, from one who had 
 wished to illuminate and spread far 
 the splendor of its dream; — that is 
 the knell of a life of phantasms and of 
 dreams of impossible beauty; — that 
 is the forgiveness and the recompense; 
 — that, on a false dawn, is the first 
 rosy light of immortality. 
 
 Wilde, who was a Catholic, received 
 but two sacraments: the first while in 
 a coma, the last in his last sleep. The 
 priest who looked after him was 
 bearded and English ; seemed himself 
 a convert. In all justice I would as- 
 90 
 
IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 
 
 sert here that Wilde was sincerely 
 enough a Catholic not to have need of 
 the last rites ; that he devoutly loved 
 all the Romish pomp and ceremony, 
 even to the color-effects of the stained 
 windows and the notes of the organ ; 
 and that some of all this might rightly 
 have been his due, rather than this 
 stolid farce, this hasty burying, this 
 oppressive absolution, in which the 
 vicar seemed to be washing his hands 
 clean of this taint of unrighteousness. 
 
 It was in our hearts, in us, that the 
 true religion was. 
 
 I cannot judge, cannot praise, 
 Oscar Wilde here. Properly to seize 
 and set forth his curious genius were 
 a greater task. One will not find that 
 genius in his writings. Witty and 
 sublime it is, there; but, for him, too 
 91 
 
IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 
 
 piecemeal. His work is the shadow of 
 his thoughts, the shadow of his illumi- 
 nating speech. 
 
 One must conceive him as one who 
 knew everything and said every- 
 thing in the best way. A Brummell, 
 who was a Brummell even in his 
 genial moments. And one who would 
 have fulfilled that part while tasting 
 of shame and of unhappiness. 
 
 None believed in Art more than 
 Wilde. 
 
 I will close this oration by an allu- 
 sion to his simplicity. Wilde, who 
 suffered so much, suffered under his 
 reputation of being affected. One 
 evening Wilde, who was not usually 
 fond of publicly deploring his lost 
 treasures, lamented his paternity. 
 After he had told me of his son 
 92 
 
IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 
 
 Vivian's conversion to the Catholic 
 faith, the boy having quite simply 
 declared to his guardian "I am a 
 Catholic," Wilde said with a smile, 
 "And Vivian, twelve years old, lies 
 down on a couch, and when they wish 
 him to get up, says: 'Leave me — I 
 am thinking ! ' with a gesture, mind 
 you, of my own — a gesture that peo- 
 ple have jeered at and of which they 
 have always declared it was affected!" 
 That was the beginning of a rehabili- 
 tation among the mob. 
 
 And now the grandson of this 
 Mathurin, who admired Balzac, from 
 whom this unfortunate borrowed 
 his fatal pseudonym of Sebastian 
 Melmoth, sleeps; he sleeps, this son 
 of a noble and learned father and 
 mother, at whose christening stood a 
 93 
 
IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 
 
 King of Sweden; sleeps, and sleeps 
 badly, in a churchyard that is far 
 enough away to choke the courage 
 and the prayers of whoso might wish 
 to venture there. Hardly will the 
 echo of borrowed fables wake or lull 
 him. Hardly will the occasional 
 utterance of his name in scandal reach 
 him, bringing its burden of insult. 
 
 He will, I hope, pardon me these 
 words, uttered only for history, for 
 sincerity and for justice, and to be 
 witnesses for one who was his friend 
 in evil days, who is neither aesthete 
 nor cynic, and who in all humility 
 sends greeting to him in his silence 
 and his peace. 
 
 94 
 
IN MEMORIAM : 0. W. 
 
 BY 
 
 FRANZ BLEI 
 
IN MEMORIAM : 0. W. 
 
 LIFE is frightfully devoid of form. 
 Its catastrophes occur in the 
 wrong places and to the wrong people. 
 Grotesque horror plays round about 
 its comedies, and its tragedies wind 
 up in farce. It wounds you when you 
 would approach it ; it lasts too long 
 or too briefly." 
 
 If one seek an example to these 
 sentiments, one would find none better 
 than the life of him who uttered them. 
 97 
 
IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 
 
 For every word of Oscar Wilde's came 
 true in his own case, up to that one 
 which declared that Art, and Art 
 alone, could safeguard us against the 
 soiling dangers of life. His passion for 
 discovering the ways that fare 
 between Truth and Beauty led him 
 into discredited paths that spelt 
 anathema to the conventional; he 
 believed he could tread those ways 
 safely, since he carried before him 
 the illumining torch of Beauty. But 
 Life always wounds those who ap- 
 proach it from dreams. And Wilde, 
 like his own Dorian, had moments in 
 which he saw evil only as a means 
 towards realising his conception of 
 the beautiful, and so one saw him con- 
 sorting with evil. He recognized sin 
 as the only thing that in our time has 
 98 
 
IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 
 
 kept color and life, and that we cannot 
 hark back to holiness and can learn 
 far more from the sinner. As Dorian 
 was, so was he a type that our time 
 desires strongly and yet fears, that we 
 picture to ourselves in secret fancies 
 and worshippings and yet crucify 
 when it comes to life. For not yet is 
 there one law over both thought and 
 deed, and we must be grateful to this 
 divorce for our scheme of life, without 
 which our world would be the richer 
 only for one animal without sin. 
 
 Wilde's literary residue would be 
 important enough to secure his name 
 to posterity. But his life encountered 
 a fate that took precedence, with its 
 grotesque tragedy, over his work, and 
 overshadowed it scurrilously with a 
 blackness that, in England, was as a 
 99 
 
IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 
 
 night of pestilence. One may almost 
 admire the stupid power for cruelty in 
 such a people that— peer and butcher- 
 boy acting as one man — dealt out to 
 its one-time darling a two years' tor- 
 ture, and, not satisfied with that, 
 wished to stamp out even the memory 
 of him as of one infamous. One must 
 needs explain this cruelty as a mob 
 outbreak of Saddism, not to be found 
 altogether extraordinary there, where 
 flagellation marks the highest plane of 
 erotic culture. 
 
 English society is always ruled by a 
 dandy, and not only since the days of 
 Brummel and Selwyn. The greater 
 the dandy, the more absolute his rule. 
 Wilde was the acknowledged master 
 and tyrant; he lashed that society 
 and spared not, and it cringed before 
 100 
 
IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 
 
 him, since he was dandy by the grace 
 of God. Magic words he had, that 
 paradoxically subjugated the truths 
 of to-morrow. Yet somewhere a lover 
 hides always in his scabbard of sense- 
 less love a dagger of hate that some 
 day is bared and kills the beloved. 
 Does one really measure the punish- 
 ment and martyrdom of Wilde by the 
 wrong represented in his little Socratic 
 diversions? Everyone knows that at 
 Eton and Cambridge Greek is not 
 merely a matter of learning, and no 
 understanding person thinks that 
 strange, or as anything that concerns 
 the law. The law's absurd clause was 
 only an excuse. The sentence was exe- 
 cuted simply because the monarch had 
 become unbearable. Wilde was both 
 a dandy and a genius; democracy 
 101 
 
IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 
 
 can suffer neither in the long run. 
 "Dandyism is simply a manner of 
 being, and is not to be made in any 
 way tangibly visible." One notes 
 from this sentence that Barbey 
 d'Aurevilly does not insist upon the 
 importance of the dandy's more speci- 
 fic arts — of body and vesture — as 
 compared to the beautifully shaded 
 art that may be achieved by mere liv- 
 ing. This is wrong. One may live 
 one's life in the most delicate shadings, 
 may dress and act as a dandy, and 
 yet remain, like Whistler, merely a 
 painter. It is the visible, material 
 elements that compose the importance 
 of the whole. The dandy is, before 
 all else, a decorative artist, whose 
 material is his own body. That 
 seems but a slight matter. But, if all 
 102 
 
IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 
 
 the world went naked, one would 
 have a higher and better valuation of 
 the one exception that went clothed. 
 The dandy is an artist. He is egoistic 
 as an artist, delights, like him, to deal 
 with the world, and feels, like the 
 artist, most in his element when con- 
 spicuously alone. Only one distinction 
 I would draw between them, and that 
 is upon a point of art: that of the 
 dandy is unselfish, since he offers it to 
 all who wish to see. One error should 
 be scouted : clerks and dignitaries who 
 happen to dress exaggeratedly, are by 
 no means dandies. Not all who 
 versify are poets. The clerks and the 
 dignitaries may compose their toil- 
 ettes as finely as they will; they are 
 still primarily clerks and dignitaries. 
 Dandyism, too, like every other art, 
 103 
 
IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 
 
 has its dilettanti. But here is the 
 case: the whole being of the dandy 
 must be full of his art; all that he 
 does, says, and thinks, must emanate 
 from his dandyism. And, unlike other 
 artists, he may never be less than his 
 work; on this or that point his per- 
 sonality must always loom as the 
 greater — greater than all the sum of 
 all his powers that only come singly 
 to utterance. A dandy will say that a 
 really well arranged bouquet for the 
 buttonhole is the only thing that joins 
 art and nature, for he has seen it as 
 life's first duty to be as artistic as pos- 
 sible, and knows that the second duty 
 has not yet been discovered. 
 
 No dandy has more conscientiously 
 fulfilled this duty than Wilde; later 
 days proved that in this fulfilment he 
 104 
 
IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 
 
 had spent his genius. He wrote occa- 
 sionally, when he had no audience; 
 for as a dandy he was of the type that 
 spends its life declaiming. No poet 
 ever set art above nature more nobly 
 than Wilde, for his ambition was not 
 to be a poet, but more than that : a 
 dandy. He dreamed of an abstract 
 beauty that might never run into the 
 danger of losing itself in life, since it 
 never arose out of life, — of a beauty 
 that would prove nothing, that would 
 not even have any intrinsic purpose. 
 For even this conscious purpose in 
 beauty seemed to him only, at best, a 
 moral pose in disguise. 
 
 It is not in his writings that one will 
 
 find this strange man's genius ; only a 
 
 shadow of it is there. One who, like 
 
 Wilde, does not center his artistic 
 
 105 
 
IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 
 
 temperament upon a single expres- 
 sion, upon the art and craft of a single 
 book or a single poem, but utters it 
 rather in his whole living and being, 
 will achieve in his books and poems 
 only the fragmentary that even to 
 himself must seem slight, and that 
 must always be subject for his own 
 irony. " All bad writing is the result 
 of sincere feeling" — Wilde asserted 
 that when he was at the height of 
 his fame, when he ranked the poet and 
 poetry far beneath dandyism, and 
 gladly deserted poetry in favor of suc- 
 cess as dandy. Only when he was 
 neglected and despised and ill and 
 miserable, sincere feeling bred in him 
 his one great poem: The Ballad of 
 Reading Gaol. He could assert his 
 paradox only as a dandy ; as poet he 
 106 
 
IN MEMORIAM OSCAR WILDE 
 
 went counter to it. Then he had 
 fashioned art into his life; now life 
 fashioned him to his art. 
 
 107 
 
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