^.r> 
 
 
 .ORD ALFRED DOUGLAS 
 
 Hiim)Hmi}tniiitiiii!UifiutJif!!i!!iiSiiiii;n'!i{:'nn 
 
\ IN- 
 
OSCAR WILDE AND MYSELF 
 

OSCAR WILDE 
 AND MYSELF 
 
 BY 
 
 LORD ALFRED DOUGLAS 
 
 WITH PORTRAIT OP THE AUTHOR 
 
 AND THIRTEEN OTHER PORTRAITS AND ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 ALSO FAC-SIMILE LETTERS 
 
 New York 
 
 Duffield & Company 
 1914 
 
Copyright, 1914, by 
 DuFTiBW) & Company 
 
Preface 
 
 THE manuscript of this book was completed 
 by me and handed over to the publishers 
 as long ago as last July. Certain persons 
 thereupon deemed it advisable to apply to the Court 
 for an injunction restraining me from including 
 in my book any of the letters from Oscar Wilde 
 which were in my possession, and they further 
 applied for an injunction restraining me from quot- 
 ing from the unpublished portion of the **De 
 Profundis" manuscript which is now sealed up at 
 the British Museum and which was used against 
 me in open Court as part of the justification in the 
 defence to a libel action brought by me jn ApriL 
 191 3. The application for these injunctions was 
 made in the Vacation Court before Mr. Justice 
 Astbury, the most recent recruit to the Judicial 
 Bench. It was immediately granted, and though 
 I was advised by counsel to appeal against the 
 
vi Preface 
 
 decision, I thought it better to accept it, at any rate 
 for the moment. Consequently, ail the copious 
 extracts I was intending to publish from the " De 
 Profundis," which extracts had already been repro- 
 duced in all the newspapers at the hearing of the 
 action of Douglas v, Ransome and The Times 
 Book Club have been entirely removed. The same 
 applies to those letters of Wilde's which I had 
 originally included in my book. As far as the let- 
 ters are concerned, the omission does not very 
 much aifect the book. The letters were included 
 not to make points against my opponents, but 
 merely as interesting curiosities. The enforced 
 omission of the extracts from the unpublished **De 
 Profundis" has, on the other hand, been an un- 
 doubted handicap to me. A considerable portion 
 of this book is devoted to a reply to the violently 
 mendacious attacks made upon me and upon my 
 family by Wilde in that unpublished portion of the 
 ** De Profundis" which has been accepted by the 
 authorities of the British Museum from the literary 
 executor of the late author. Obviously it is very 
 difficult to reply to an attack which one is unable 
 to quote, and I can only say that I have met the 
 
Preface vii 
 
 difficulty as best 1 could, and that at a future date 
 I look forward to being able to deal with the whole 
 matter even more completely and finally. In this 
 connection I refer my readers to the chapter in this 
 book entitled *' A Challenge to Mr. Ross." 
 
 ALFRED BRUCE DOUGLAS 
 
 Boulogne-sur-Mer 
 April, 1 9 14 
 
To my Mother 
 Sibyl, Marchioness of Queensberry 
 
Contents 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 Introductory 3 
 
 I. Oxford . 11 
 
 II. Lost Illusions 25 
 
 III. Wilde in Society 33 
 
 IV. The Lord of Language 42 
 
 V. Our Mutual Friends 53 
 
 VI. Lord Queensberry Intervenes ... 68 
 
 VII. The Wilde Trials 90 
 
 VIII. Hard Labour and After 106 
 
 IX. Naples and Paris 122 
 
 X. The "Ballad of Reading Gaol" . . . 140 
 
 XI. The Truth about "De Profundis" . . 146 
 
 XII. My Letters to Wilde 166 
 
 XIII. My Letters to Labouchere . . . . 179 
 
 XIV. The Article in THE "Revue Blanche" . 184 
 XV. Fifteen Years of Persecution . . .189 
 
 XVI. Wilde's Poetry 197 
 
 XVII. The Plays and Prose Works .... 213 
 
 XVIII. For Posterity ........ 226 
 
 XIX. The British Museum and "De Profun- 
 dis" 232 
 
 xi 
 
xii Contents 
 
 CHAPTER PAGB 
 
 XX. Ransome's "Critical Study" .... 240 
 
 XXI. My Actions for Libel 247 
 
 XXII. "The Picture of Dorian Gray" . . .255 
 
 XXIII. Literature and Vice 266 
 
 XXIV. Crosland and "The First Stone" . . 272 
 XXV. A Challenge to Mr. Ross 278 
 
 XXVI. Wilde in Russia, France and Germany 283 
 
 XXVII. The Smaller Fry 289 
 
 XXVIII. To Be Done with It All 294 
 
 Index 299 
 
List of Illustrations 
 
 Lord Alfred Douglas Frontispiece 
 
 TO FACE PAGE 
 
 Oscar Wilde 20 
 
 Lord Alfred Douglas, at the age of twenty-one, at 
 Oxford 30 
 
 Caricature by Max Beerbohm of Oscar Wilde and 
 Lord Alfred Douglas 56 
 
 Oscar Wilde's House, 16 Tite Street, Chelsea . . 68 
 
 The Late Marquis of Queensberry 86 
 
 Drawing of Lord Alfred Douglas, at the age of 
 Twenty-four 104 
 
 Cafe de la Paix, Paris 126 
 
 Grand Cafe, Paris 132 
 
 Hotel d'Alsace, Paris 138 
 
 Raymond Wilfrid Sholto Douglas, only child of 
 Lord Alfred Douglas 160 
 
 Lady Alfred Douglas 194 
 
 KiNMouNT House, Annan, the Seat of the Late 
 Marquis of Queensberry, where Lord Alfred 
 Douglas's childhood was passed .... 228 
 
 Monument erected over Oscar Wilde's Grave, Pere 
 
 la Chaise, Paris 246 
 
 xiii 
 
OSCAR WILDE AND MYSELF 
 
Introductory 
 
 OUT of little things there may come a peck 
 of troubles. I suppose that my first 
 meeting with Oscar Wilde was to me, 
 at that time, a little thing. By this I do not mean 
 that I was other than glad to meet a man of Wilde's 
 culture and attainments, but I was not particularly 
 impressed by him at first, and, if I had never set 
 eyes on him, I should certainly have lost nothing. 
 As Fate arranges matters, our acquaintance has 
 brought the gravest disasters, not only upon myself, 
 but upon those nearest and dearest to me. The 
 purpose of the present book is not to complain of 
 what had happened or to rail against Oscar Wilde, 
 who, for years, was my close friend and who, at one 
 time in our friendship, held me fascinated by what 
 I conceived to be his genius. That he had what 
 passed for genius nobody will, I think, nowadays 
 dispute, though it used to be the fashion to pooh- 
 pooh him for a mere poseur and decadent. If our 
 friendship had remained a private friendship — 
 
 3 
 
4 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 like many other of Wilde's friendships — instead of 
 being bruited abroad from every housetop, this 
 book would never have been written. From the 
 moment Wilde's name became notorious, however, 
 people have been careful to link our names to- 
 gether, and even more careful to link them together 
 in scandalous ways. There are many persons now 
 alive who were friends with Wilde in the days of 
 his greatness and prosperity; and, without a single 
 exception, so far as I am aware, their friendship 
 is reckoned to their credit, and, in some instances, 
 has proved highly advantageous to them from 
 many points of view. Yet what was a virtue in 
 these persons would seem to have been a crime in 
 me. I have never boasted of my relations with 
 Wilde and, though I have had many proposals from 
 editors and publishers to say my say about my 
 friend for handsome remuneration, I have never 
 previously taken a penny piece from any of them. 
 I have always known that there was nothing in our 
 friendship of which I need be ashamed and, 
 although the tongue of malice and slander has been 
 busy with my name almost without ceasing since 
 the day of Wilde's downfall, I looked to time and 
 the facts to set me right. 
 
 Since Wilde's downfall, my life has been lived 
 tender conditions of which it is to be hoped few 
 
Introductory 5 
 
 persons have had experience. Always I have had 
 to fight the cunningly contrived innuendo which, 
 while it could not be nailed to the counter and re- 
 butted in the Courts of Law, nevertheless did its 
 deadly work and threw its bitter odium over my 
 name and fame. On occasions out of number I 
 have had to take expensive legal proceedings in 
 sheer self-defence. Generally, the parties con- 
 cerned have been people of straw, who apologised 
 abjectly or disappeared or got out by asserting that 
 they did not mean what they had tried to say, imme- 
 diately the writs were issued. My own determina- 
 tion has always been to refrain from litigation 
 on the subject, unless it were absolutely forced upon 
 me. How far I was wise in this determination 
 is another affair. 
 
 It may seem a simple and easy thing to wipe out 
 slander. How difficult it is, only the few persons 
 who have had a really foul and abominable slander 
 put up against them can know. In addition to the 
 multitudinous gentlemen with ready pens who have 
 not scrupled to decry and defame me, I have for 
 years had to contend with the class of persons who 
 had letters to sell or letters to print, and who have 
 ever been handy with their documents and '^inside 
 information" when opportunity might arise 
 whereby they hoped to turn an honest penny. For 
 
6 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 these gentry I have encouraged a proper contempt, 
 and not one of them has had from me a single six- 
 pence or a breath of appeal for the mercy which 
 they believed themselves capable of extending. 
 Later, a Mr. Arthur Ransome — whom I had not 
 known as an acquaintance of Wilde and who had 
 no acquaintance with myself — went out of his way 
 to assert in a book, which purported to be an inti- 
 mate study of Wilde, that the latter had attributed 
 some measure of his public obloquy to my influence 
 over him ; and, further, that I had lived upon Wilde 
 after his imprisonment and left him stranded at 
 Naples when his financial resources were exhausted. 
 I took an action for libel against Ransome and his 
 publishers and The Times Book Club, with the re- 
 sult that the publishers withdrew Ransome's book 
 from circulation, leaving him and The Times Book 
 Club to make what defence they could. The jury 
 found for the defendants on the first libel, and that 
 the second libel was not a libel at all. It will interest 
 all parties concerned to know that this is exactly 
 the finding which I anticipated, and it is note- 
 worthy that the libels of which I complained have 
 been expunged from the new edition of the book. 
 Mr. Justice Darling and the defendants' counsel 
 repeatedly observed during the course of the trial 
 that they could not understand what motive had 
 
Introductory 7 
 
 prompted me to come into court. A letter which 
 Wilde addressed to me previous to his imprison- 
 ment, and other letters which I had written to him, 
 were read by defendants' counsel. Judge, counsel 
 and jury alike appear to have imagined that, if I 
 had known of the existence of these letters, I should 
 not have brought my action. In point of fact, I 
 was well aware of their existence and I was told, 
 while the action was still pending, that they were 
 to be raked up and that I should be ''simply evis- 
 cerated" in the witness-box. Well, I went like a 
 lamb to the evisceration, and Mr. Justice Darling 
 marvelled at my lack of worldly wisdom. 
 
 In the following pages I shall set out the whole 
 details of my relationship with Oscar Wilde, and 
 I do so, not by way of defence or apology — ^because 
 I need neither — but simply with a view to making 
 clear in the public interest, and for the benefit of 
 posterity, the true inwardness of Wilde's writing 
 and character. I take this step as much for Wilde's 
 sake as for my own. 
 
 During his imprisonment at Reading, Oscar 
 Wilde was permitted the use of pen and ink, and 
 he appears to have relieved the tedium of his in- 
 carceration by writing eighty thousand words, or 
 thereabouts, addressed to myself. A copy of the 
 manuscript is alleged to have been sent to me by 
 
8 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 post, shortly after its completion. Half of it has 
 been published under the aegis of Mr. Robert Ross, 
 and is known to the world as "De Profundis." The 
 nature and drift of the published portion of the 
 MSS. needs no comment from me at this juncture. 
 The unpublished parts, however, may reasonably 
 be described as a frantic attack upon me. Till a 
 copy of this attack came into my hands during the 
 time the Ransome action was pending, I had no 
 knowledge of its existence. At the trial, it trans- 
 pired that this farrago of hysterical abuse had been 
 handed by Mr. Ross to the authorities at the British 
 Museum as a present to the nation, and that it was 
 not to be made public till 1960, when it is to be 
 hoped we shall all be dead. I could have wished, 
 for the sake of my old friend, that Mr. Ross had 
 seen the wisdom of destroying a piece of writing 
 which even Mr. Justice Darling conceives to be 
 evil and discreditable to its author. Whether or 
 not it is my property is a legal problem. I have 
 applied to the British Museum for its return, but 
 so far without success. Mr. Ross's "present to 
 the nation" may possibly abide on the British 
 Museum's shelves, unperused by the curious, till 
 1960. My own present to Mr. Ross and to the 
 weeping worshippers . of Wilde is delivered here- 
 with, and can be opened and read by him who runs 
 
Introductory 9 
 
 while we have still a little breath. The result of 
 Mr. Ross's action would seem to be that, if the Brit- 
 ish Museum do, in fact, disclose the contents of the 
 manuscript after my death Wilde will be disgraced 
 and confounded on his own evidence. 
 
Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 OXFORD 
 
 AFTER leaving Winchester, where I won the 
 school steeplechase and edited a paper 
 - called the Pentagram — the only literary 
 or journalistic venture, by the way, out of which 
 I ever made a profit — I went up to Oxford in the 
 ordinary course. I was entered at Magdalen Col- 
 lege, and I remained an undergraduate of the 
 University for four years. Magdalen, as it always 
 has been in recent times, and still continues to be, 
 was considered a more or less fashionable college. 
 It was the never-ending boast of Oscar Wilde that 
 he had been there. The continuous ''when I was 
 at Oxford" which crops up in his writings was 
 complemented by continuous ''when I was at Mag- 
 dalen" in his conversation. I do not know that 
 there was anything extraordinary about Magdalen 
 in my time. I look back upon my life there as 
 fairly pleasant, and chiefly so because I had the 
 companionship of my friend, the late Viscount En- 
 
 II 
 
12 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 combe, whose death at the early age of twenty- 
 eight was a great blow to me. Of course, I met at 
 Oxford all the people who were supposed to be 
 worth meeting. There was Mr. Warren, then, as 
 now. President of Magdalen, whom I remember on 
 account of his black beard and his very obsequious 
 treatment of myself. He was a profound admirer 
 of Matthew Arnold, whose poetry he urged me to 
 study and imitate. He also, rather incongruously, 
 professed great admiration for the writings of his 
 personal friend, John Addington Symonds. I say 
 ''incongruously;'' for an admiration for Matthew 
 Arnold ought surely to preclude an admiration for 
 Symonds, at any rate, as far as poetry is concerned. 
 For Oscar Wilde he also admitted a great par- 
 tiality. They had been contemporaries at the Uni- 
 versity in their undergraduate days and, to a certain 
 extent, friends. When Wilde came up to see me 
 at Oxford, he always made a point of calling on 
 Mr. Warren, and on these occasions I invariably 
 accompanied him, and I thus had the advantage 
 of profiting by their conversation, which, needless 
 to say, generally turned on literary matters; but I 
 cannot honestly say that I was greatly edified or 
 that any gems of purest ray serene from these duo- 
 logues have remained shining in my memory. When 
 I first became an intimate friend of Oscar Wilde, 
 
Oxford 13 
 
 my mother, who had an instinctive disHke of Wilde, 
 wrote to Mr. Warren and asked him if he consid- 
 ered Wilde was the sort of man who would be a 
 good friend for me. The President, in reply, sent 
 her a long letter in which he gave Wilde a very 
 high character, praised his great gifts and achieve- 
 ments of scholarship and literature, and assured her 
 that I might consider myself lucky to have obtained 
 the favourable notice of such an eminent man. I 
 mention this, not as anything to Mr. Warren's 
 detriment, but simply to show the sort of reputation 
 Wilde at that time enjoyed among the big-wigs of 
 the University. 
 
 Then there was Walter Pater, to whom I was 
 introduced by Wilde on the first occasion when the 
 latter visited me at Oxford. Wilde had an im- 
 mense opinion of Pater and spoke of him always 
 with reverence as the greatest living writer of prose. 
 I tried hard to appreciate Pater and he personally 
 was kind to me, but quite apart from the fact that 
 he had practically no conversation and would sit 
 for hours without saying more than an occasional 
 word, I never could bring myself to have more 
 than a very limited admiration for his far-famed 
 prose, which has always seemed to me artificial, 
 finnicking and over-elaborated to an exasperating 
 degree. I have altogether livelier recollections of 
 
14 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 Mr., now the Reverend Dr. Bussell, Pater's most 
 intimate friend at Brazenose, for he was a fine 
 musician and had a devotion to Handel and Bach 
 which endears his memory to me to this day. 
 
 Next to Encombe, probably my best friend among 
 the undergraduates of my day was the poet Lionel 
 Johnson, a frail, tiny man, with probably the finest 
 head and the kindest heart in the University. We 
 talked and wrote a considerable amount of poetry 
 together, and it was Johnson who introduced me 
 to Oscar Wilde. At this period Wilde had just 
 begun to be considered a person of some promise 
 m letters. He had outgrown "sesthetics" and had 
 written "The Picture of Dorian Gray" and "Inten- 
 tions," and was rehearsing his first play: Lady 
 Windermere's Fan, 
 
 One vacation I went with Johnson to Wilde's 
 house in Tite Street, and over dinner commenced 
 a friendship which was to be none too fortunate for 
 either of us. For some reason or other Wilde in- 
 sisted on being considerably more brilliant that 
 evening than ever he was afterwards. Indeed, he 
 fired oflf witticisms so persistently and with such an 
 evident anxiety not to miss even the slenderest of 
 opportunities that, while I had come to the meeting 
 in the spirit of the youthful admirer, or literary 
 hero-worshipper, I went away with a sort of feeling 
 
Oxford 15 
 
 that I had been at a show and that I had not seen 
 a really great man after all. However, as our ac- 
 quaintance ripened, I began to understand, or im- 
 agine that I understood, Wilde's moods. I soon 
 perceived that he said quite half of everything he 
 had to say with his tongue in his cheek and that one 
 should not really take him seriously, because his 
 only aim in conversation was not to say what he 
 believed, but to say what he supposed to be witty, 
 profound, whimsical or brilliant at the moment. 
 Further, I soon discovered that Wilde was one of 
 those conversationalists who were conscious of the 
 value, not only of their own mots, but of those of 
 other people, and that his or my joke or epigram 
 let loose over lunch on Monday was bound to figure 
 in the bit of dialogue or portion of an essay which 
 he would indite, with the help of stifif whiskies-and- 
 sodas and illimitable cigarettes, on a Tuesday morn- 
 ing. At the same time, I cheerfully admit that I 
 found him an agreeable, entertaining and even 
 lovable acquaintance. He had, of course, an eye 
 for humour and beauty, he was a great deal of a 
 scholar, he spoke good English and excellent 
 French, and he had a pleasant voice and a charming 
 delivery. Compared with the average man-about- 
 town he shone, and compared with the average 
 *'man of genius" he scintillated. 
 
16 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 During my second year at Oxford I contributed 
 to the Oxford Magazine, the official journal of the 
 University, a poem which pleased everybody but its 
 author and provoked the excellent Mr. Warren to 
 write me a lengthy letter of praise and congratula- 
 tion. Unfortunately, I have not got this epistle at 
 hand, otherwise I might be tempted to print it with 
 a view of convincing the University Oxford that I 
 am indeed somewhat of a poet. This was the first 
 serious poem I ever wrote or, at any rate, preserved, 
 and it is now included in the ''City of the Soul." I 
 also contributed on several occasions to an under- 
 graduate paper called The Spirit Lamp^ which was 
 owned by a man whose name I forget, but he called 
 on me one day and explained that he was going- 
 down and very munificently offered to make me a 
 present of his journalistic property if, as he diffi- 
 dently put it, I cared to take it on and would prom- 
 ise to continue its high traditions to the best of 
 my ability. I gave this gentleman the necessary 
 assurances, and The Spirit Lamp became mine. Six 
 or seven subsequent numbers appeared under my 
 editorship, and copies of these numbers are, I under- 
 stand, worth considerably more than their published 
 price in what is known as the market. Of my own 
 contributions I have a poor opinion, though they 
 were warmly appreciated at the time of their ap- 
 
Oxford 17 
 
 pearance by that class of person who makes warm 
 appreciations a sort of hobby. I am proud of the 
 fact, however, that I printed some of Lionel John- 
 son's best verses and several contributions from 
 the late John Addington Symonds, and I also had 
 the advantage of various contributions from Wilde, 
 including his prose poems "The Disciple" and "The 
 House of Judgment," and what I consider to be 
 the best sonnet he ever wrote. Wilde frequently 
 came to Oxford in those days, and on several occa- 
 sions stayed as my guest in the rooms in High 
 Street which I shared with my friend. Lord En- 
 combe. 
 
 Although throughout my career as an under- 
 graduate I was keenly interested in poetry and 
 letters generally, I did not profess to belong to any 
 literary set and I had no notion of taking to writing 
 as a profession. My name and family traditions 
 marked me out for the sporting and convivial side 
 of University life rather than for serious literary 
 endeavour. I read for the Honours school in a 
 desultory kind of way, but relieved the tedium of 
 my prescribed studies by a good deal of riding and 
 boating and fairly regular attendance at such race- 
 meetings as were within reasonable distance of 
 what Mr. Ruskin doubtless called his Alma Mater. 
 At the same time, my interest in poetry was well 
 
18 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 known in the University, and I was considered a 
 poet of promise and parts. 
 
 Of course, every undergraduate who can write 
 poetry at all is expected to compete for the Newdi- 
 gate prize. I was frequently urged by my friends 
 to enter for this prize, but none of the subjects set 
 during my first three years at Oxford appealed to 
 me. Tennyson, if I remember rightly, won the 
 Newdigate with a poem about Timbuctoo. Such 
 a subject while, perhaps, entertaining enough in 
 its way, is, obviously, not very inspiring and cer- 
 tainly not calculated to induce the production of 
 high poetry. As I have said, the subjects set in 
 my first three years did not excite in me any great 
 poetical emotion. In my fourth year, however, the 
 subject was St. Francis of Assisi, and I felt at once 
 that here was my opportunity. I told my friends 
 that I should enter, and began to plan the poem. I 
 was talking of the matter at dinner one night, with 
 Encombe and the late Lord Warkworth — after- 
 wards Earl Percy, who was at that time at Christ- 
 church — and I told the latter that I was going in 
 for the prize. He said that he, too, was having 
 a shot at it, and pointed out that it was impossible 
 for me to enter as I was in my fourth year. He 
 offered to show me the rule in the Statutes, but, 
 unfortunately, we had not a copy handy and I took 
 
Oxford 19 
 
 it that Warkworth knew what he was talking about 
 and let the thing drop. Lord Warkworth won the 
 Newdigate that year himself, and it was only after 
 the announcement of his success that I discovered 
 that there was no such rule as the one he had told 
 me of. Of course, I make no aspersion on Wark- 
 worth's good intentions in the matter; yet, in a 
 sense, it is a pity that I did not look more closely 
 into the rules, because, though I say it myself, I 
 could have beaten him with a good many lengths 
 to spare, and though to have won the Newdigate 
 means, perhaps, very little from a literary point 
 of view, it appears to be a good backing for a man 
 who goes in seriously for poetry. 
 
 I have noticed with some astonishment that 
 whenever opportunity has arisen persons who do 
 not love me have been at pains to suggest that there 
 was something discreditable about my Oxford 
 career. It has been hinted that I was "sent down" 
 in disgrace, and great capital has been made of the 
 circumstance that I left Oxford without a degree. In 
 point of fact, I was ''sent down'' in my second year 
 for a term because I was ''ploughed" in my exam- 
 ination for "smalls," and I soon set this right by 
 spending three weeks with a crammer and getting 
 myself well posted up in Euclid and such-like sub- 
 jects, which, though doubtless very important in 
 
20 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 their way, had never specially attracted me. When 
 the time came for my examination in the Honours 
 school I happened to be ill and was unable to attend, 
 so that I left the University degreeless. Without 
 any suggestion from me, the authorities offered to 
 confer an honorary degree upon me if I cared to 
 return in the vacation and pass two papers. I con- 
 sulted my father, the late Marquis of Queensberry, 
 on the subject, and he told me that he had never 
 known a degree to be worth twopence to anybody, 
 and, accordingly, I never took the trouble to avail 
 myself of the Oxford's kind offer. If going dow^n 
 without a degree is a crime, I belong to an excellent 
 company of criminals, for Swinburne left Oxford 
 minus a degree and so did Lord Rosebery and, if it 
 comes to genius, so did the poet Shelley. 
 
 I need hardly say that Oscar Wilde expressed 
 himself as entirely delighted with my remissness in 
 failing to become an M.A. Oxon. He said, in his 
 usual airy way, that it was "wonderful" of me and 
 a ''distinction," and he pointed out that I should be 
 like Swinburne, who determined to remain an 
 undergraduate all his life. I am free to confess 
 that personally I did not take much interest in the 
 matter either way, though, had I understood the 
 world then as I understand it now, I might have 
 been a trifle less careless. 
 
OSCAR WILDE 
 
Oxford 21 
 
 Generally, I do not wish it to be supposed that 
 my life at Oxford was any more immaculate than 
 that of other young men in my own position in 
 life. I came into collision with the authorities on 
 various small sins of omission and commission. I 
 was gated once for going to the Derby — wicked 
 youth that I was! — and I dare say I worried the 
 authorities by my persistent refusal to take either 
 themselves or the University for the most serious 
 thing in nature. But I lived with them gloriously 
 and delicately for the full undergraduate span of 
 four years, save one term over ''smalls," and, as 
 I have shown, they were quite willing to take me 
 to their bosom as a full member of the University 
 if I had cared to fall into their embrace. 
 
 The idea that Oxford is a place entirely given 
 over to the laborious and the assiduous pursuit of 
 knowledge is a mistake. It can be proved quite 
 easily that, while the assiduous and the laborious 
 who choose to make Oxford a sort of career may 
 do very well out of it in the way of Fellowships, 
 scholastic appointments, and so forth, the best men 
 Oxford turns out are, in the main, men who have 
 been considered to have missed their opportunities. 
 Everybody who was anybody at Oxford in my time 
 had a disposition to be very modest about learning 
 and a trifle shy about recommending it as the be-all 
 
22 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 and end-all of life. There is a tale attributed to a 
 certain worthy Don — indeed, it is said to have been 
 his stock story — which relates to two excellent youths 
 of good family who went up to Oxford together. 
 One of them was slack and fond of his ease; he 
 read nothing and did nothing and, after years of 
 dissipation, was fain to get a living by driving a 
 hansom-cab. The other youth, the pride of his 
 family and college, read everything and won every- 
 thing and did everything that was proper. Years 
 after, somebody found him in London doing his 
 best to keep the wolf from the door by driving a 
 four-wheeler. This is an old story, but it is a very 
 good one, and anybody who knows Oxford in the 
 intimate personal sense knows how true it may well 
 be. For myself, I think if it had come to cab-driving 
 the hansom would unquestionably have been my 
 vehicle. 
 
 I was careless and desultory in the widest sense 
 of the terms ; so careless and desultory, in fact, that, 
 with a view to saving time and trouble in my inter- 
 course with the authorities, I had a form printed as 
 follows : — 
 
 Lord Alfred Bruce Douglas presents his 
 
 compliments to 
 
 and regrets that he will be unable to 
 in consequence of 
 
Oxford 23 
 
 Filled up, this ingenious document would read 
 as follows: — 
 
 Lord Alfred Bruce Douglas presents his 
 compliments to Professor Smith and re- 
 grets that he will be unable to show up 
 an essay on the Evolution of the Moral , 
 Idea in consequence of not having pre- 
 pared one. 
 
 I found these missives extremely useful and used 
 a great quantity. They were famed throughout the 
 University and, though they angered some of the 
 Dons to the verge of madness, nothing could be 
 done about them, because they were obviously 
 polite, and an undergraduate who is polite to his 
 pastors and masters has done his duty. It may be 
 on the strength of this form and on my being ''sent 
 down" for a failure to pass ''smalls" that the legend 
 and fiction of my alleged ignominious career at 
 Oxford depends. I know of nothing more serious, 
 otherwise I should be pleased to unburden myself. 
 Both before and after I terminated my undergrad- 
 uateship by removing my name from the books of 
 Magdalen College, I was a frequent visitor to the 
 scene of my old triumphs and kept up many friend- 
 ships among the men of my time and among the 
 University authorities. I removed my name from 
 the books of my own free will and as a matter of 
 
24 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 personal convenience. What I did may have been a 
 trifle unusual, though I am acquainted with at least 
 one distinguished Oxford man who did precisely 
 the same thing, and that my actions should have 
 been twisted into a sort of horrible wickedness must 
 have startled a good many other people besides 
 myself. 
 
 So much for the gay Lord Alfred Douglas, under- 
 graduate of Magdalen College, Oxford. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 LOST ILLUSIONS 
 
 IT is very hard, indeed, wellnigh impossible, for 
 me to recapture and set forth for the benefit 
 of my readers the secret of the fascination that 
 Oscar Wilde had for me in those f ar-ofif days. The 
 revelation of his perfidy and vileness which came 
 to me when, about a year ago, I first got knowledge 
 of the existence of the unpublished portion of ''De 
 Profundis," the shock of horror, indignation and 
 disgust which the reading of that abominable docu- 
 ment produced in my mind, and the ever-recurring 
 reflection that during the last few years of his life 
 and after his release from prison, when he was pro- 
 fessing the greatest friendship and afifection for me 
 and living — for a time in part, and ultimately alto- 
 gether — on my bounty, he was all the while the 
 secret author of a foul and lying attack on me and 
 on my family which he had arranged to make pub- 
 lic after my death, combine to make the task of 
 reconstructing a semblance of my old feeling for 
 him almost a hopeless one. Long however before 
 
 25 
 
26 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 I had cognisance of the unpublished ''De Pro- 
 fundis," my view of his character and my estimate 
 of his value as a man of letters had undergone a 
 profound change. With the passing of the years and 
 a more serious and mature outlook on the facts of 
 life and on the responsibilities of those who seek 
 the suffrages or merely the ears of the general 
 reader, I had arrived at the conclusion that Oscar 
 Wilde's writings were ridiculously overrated, that 
 he was never either a great poet or a great writer 
 of prose, and that the harm he had caused to the 
 whole body of English literature and the pernicious 
 effect he had exercised on the literary movements 
 and the journalism of the period immediately suc- 
 ceeding his own, very much more than counter- 
 balanced the credit of any legitimate success he may 
 have achieved. Still, up till the period when the 
 discovery of the unpublished part of "De Profun- 
 dis'' was forced upon my notice, I carefully re- 
 frained from giving voice to these sentiments. The 
 man had been my friend, I had been very fond of 
 him, and I had formerly had an exaggerated view 
 as to the value of his work. I did not therefore 
 consider that I was in any way called upon to inter- 
 fere with his literary reputation, even though, in 
 my opinion, it was a specious reputation and the 
 result, moreover, of a cleverly-engineered campaign 
 
Lost Illusions 27 
 
 on his behalf, made by friends who were more care- 
 ful of Wilde's fame than of the general good of 
 letters. 
 
 Still less did I conceive it to be any part of my 
 duty to attack what was left of his character. On 
 the contrary, I steadily persisted in taking the best 
 view possible of the man, and until I read the un- 
 published ^'De Profundis'' I kept a great measure 
 of my affection for his memory and, in common 
 with many other people, cherished fond illusions 
 about his moral character. That my affection for 
 him was real and sincere and continued to be so 
 right up to the time when I read the unpublished 
 part of "De Prof undis'' is fairly proved by the facts 
 that I persistently defended him — even at the cost 
 of some violence to my own literary conscience — in 
 the columns of the Academy, when I was its editor, 
 and that I wrote to his memory one of my best 
 sonnets, which I herje reproduce: — 
 
 The Dead Poet 
 
 I dreamed of him last night, I saw his face 
 All radiant and unshadowed of distress, 
 And as of old, in music measureless, 
 I heard his golden voice and marked him trace 
 Under the common thing the hidden grace, 
 And conjure wonder out of emptiness. 
 Till mean things put on beauty like a dress 
 And all the world was an enchanted place. 
 
28 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 And then methought outside a fast locked gate 
 I mourned the loss of unrecorded words, 
 Forgotten tales and mysteries half said, 
 Wonders that might have been articulate. 
 And voiceless thoughts like murdered singing birds. 
 And so I woke and knew that he was dead. 
 
 Now I wrote that sonnet as long ago as 1901, within 
 a few months of Wilde's death, but I included it in 
 my 1909 volume of sonnets and, in face of it, I could 
 not possibly pretend, even if I wished to do so, that 
 I was not at one time deeply attached to him and 
 that I continued to cherish his memory after his 
 death. But when it comes to explaining that attach- 
 ment and reproducing the atmosphere which gen- 
 erated it, I find that I am met at the outset by this 
 deplorable set-back — namely and to wit: that the 
 very qualities in him which then excited my admira- 
 tion, now evoke my contempt. It must be remem- 
 bered that when I met Wilde I was very young in 
 years, and still younger in temperament and in 
 experience. I was, in fact, a mere child. I repro- 
 duce on the opposite page a photograph of myself, 
 taken in my second year at Oxford, just about the 
 time I first met Wilde. It is obviously the photo- 
 graph of a boy — and a fairly unsophisticated boy, 
 at that. There are numbers of my friends and con- 
 temporaries at Oxford, now living, and they could 
 all bear witness to the fact that even at the age of 
 
Lost Illusions 29 
 
 twenty-three I had the appearance of a youth of 
 sixteen ; and though, of course, I should have been 
 woefully offended if any one had told me so at the 
 time, there was much in my character that corre- 
 sponded with my appearance. I don't think there 
 was ever any one so easily deceived, such an obvious 
 mark for the designing, as I was in those days. I 
 was never allowed to forget that I was Lord Alfred 
 Douglas, the son of a marquis and a person of con- 
 sequence. The mere fact that I thought myself 
 very knowing and a complete man of the world only 
 served to make me an easier victim to any accom- 
 plished teller of the literary tale. Wilde made a 
 dead set at me. He was attracted by my youth, my 
 guilelessness, and — to be perfectly frank — by what 
 he considered my social importance, and he laid 
 himself out to captivate me and to fascinate me. 
 
 He was then about forty years of age ; he was a 
 brilliant talker — every one admits that: I have 
 never heard it denied, even by his greatest enemy; 
 he was utterly unlike any one or anything that 
 I had ever come across before, and he had that sort 
 of assumption of certainty about all the problems 
 of life which is one of the compensations — ex- 
 changed for many other better things — that comes 
 at that age to an accomplished man of the world. 
 He had a habit of enunciating the most entirely 
 
30 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 unmoral and subversive sentiments in a manner 
 and with an air of final authority which could not 
 fail to appeal to a high-spirited youth, already in- 
 clined — as is the manner of high-spirited youth — 
 to kick over the traces. According to him, it didn't 
 matter in the least what one did as long as one 
 happened to be "a charming and graceful young 
 man, related to every one in the peerage," and did 
 whatever one wanted to do in "s, charming and 
 graceful manner." This "simple and beautiful" 
 theory appealed irresistibly to me, as it very well 
 might to any thoughtless youth; and, coming as 
 it did from one who was actually looked up to and 
 admired by the President of my College, and who 
 had been commended to my mother as a most de- 
 sirable acquaintance for me, it naturally seemed the 
 last word of wisdom. But how can I be expected 
 now to have anything but contempt for such arts, 
 practised by a clever man of the world on an unre- 
 flecting boy ? Or how can I be blamed because the 
 recollection of the fact that I was, for the time, 
 attracted by such preposterous and poisonous spe- 
 ciousness is anything else but repugnant to me now 
 when I look back on it ? 
 
 In my desperate anxiety to do justice to the mem- 
 ory of one who was formerly my friend, I might 
 
LORD ALFRED DOUGLAS, AT THE AGE OF TWENIY-ONE, 
 AT OXFORD 
 
Lost Illusions 31 
 
 be tempted to give more instances of his method of 
 dealing with young men whose good will he was 
 anxious to obtain; but by so doing I should add 
 nothing to his reputation, even for cleverness. It 
 is the easiest thing in the world to turn the head 
 of a young fellow at Oxford or Cambridge. Any 
 man of the world could do so, if he cared to take 
 the trouble and was sufficiently unscrupulous. It 
 does not require great wit or great brains or any- 
 thing but impudence and a blunted sense of honour. 
 These two ''qualities" Wilde undoubtedly possessed. 
 It is easy for any one who has not forgotten the 
 time of his own youth to see how Wilde contrived 
 to attract me. He flattered me incessantly, he pro- 
 fessed extreme admiration for the few poetical 
 efforts which I had then produced — efforts, by the 
 way, which, in his Reading Gaol days, became poor 
 ^'undergraduate verses" — and whatever I did or 
 whatever I said was "wonderful" in his eyes. He 
 displayed all the outward signs and symbols of 
 friendship and affection. He has himself set them 
 all out faithfully, so that I am spared the necessity 
 of reproducing them here. I will merely put it on 
 record — to give him the whole of the credit that 
 can possibly be due to him — that, in the matter of 
 sending expensive bunches of muscat grapes and 
 copies of the illustrated papers to my bedside when 
 
32 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 I happened to be ill, promptly replying to requests 
 for an immediate despatch of cigarettes when I had 
 gone away to the country and forgotten to take 
 them with me, and remembering my favourite 
 dishes when I happened to dine with him, he was 
 ''all that a loving heart could wish." I accepted 
 these husks for the real bread of friendship, and 
 because it has been all through my life my fatal 
 habit to idealise my friends and to endow them with 
 all sorts of qualities which they never dreamed of 
 possessing, I conceived a great and lasting affection 
 for this man ; and, when he was in trouble, I fought 
 for him and defended him through thick and thin 
 and without any regard to rhyme or reason or my 
 own interest. Hence these tears! And I am not 
 in the least disposed to dispute that I have only 
 myself to blame and that it served me very well 
 right. ''But this is got by casting pearl to hogs.'' 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 WILDE IN SOCIETY 
 
 IN view of the curious anxiety of those who 
 support and uphold the Wilde legend, to paint 
 him for us as a man of fashion and social 
 position, it may be interesting if I try to recall Oscar 
 Wilde in his figure as a buck or, as we nowadays 
 say, man about town. There can be no doubt what- 
 ever that he did really consider himself a person 
 of fashion and social standing, outside of his claims 
 to literary notoriety. 
 
 In his writings he is very fond of using such 
 phrases as ''men of our rank," ''people of our social 
 class," and so forth. "Rank" is a good word, and 
 Wilde knew perfectly well how to use it in a manner 
 which would lead people really to believe that he 
 was nobly born. He was able to talk of his mother as 
 Lady Wilde, and I have heard him refer to her in 
 certain company as "her ladyship" with great efifect. 
 You would imagine from his manner that she was 
 a grande dame of the first water, with two or three 
 large places to her name, and retinues of servants. 
 
 33 
 
34 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 Of Papa Wilde we did not hear quite so frequently, 
 probably for the reason that he was not "his lord- 
 ship/' At the same time, Wilde could not have put 
 on greater airs than he was sometimes wont to don 
 if his father had been a duke. 
 
 Now, with this feeling of "family" about him, 
 it is not extraordinary that he should have tried 
 to live up to it to the best of his lights. He opined 
 that if "a gentleman of rank'' is to be taken for 
 a gentleman of rank, he must not only keep his 
 rank duly prominent in his conversation, but he 
 must also look, dress and, as far as possible, live 
 the part. In the matter of looks, Wilde believed 
 in his heart that he had the "bulge" of all the 
 literary people of his time. Tennyson might wear 
 prophetic robes and wideawake hats, Swinburne 
 might look the decent little ginger gentleman he was. 
 Pater might pass for the profound and beetle- 
 browed thinker on the high arts, Bernard Shaw 
 might pass for the bewhiskered fire-eater, Arthur 
 Symons for the blonde angel, Beardsley for the 
 delicate spider-legged artist; but when it came to 
 nobility and beauty of features, Wilde was con- 
 vinced that he had them all "beaten to a frazzle." 
 He was very fond of likening himself to the Roman 
 Emperors. He had a big face, which was, as he 
 himself put it, "delicately chiselled" ; and if anybody 
 
Wilde in Society 35 
 
 had asked him to sit for a bust of Nero, he would 
 have considered that person most discerning. I 
 remember him saying to me that, while it was con- 
 sidered among ''the dull English'' to be almost crim- 
 inal for a man to speak of good looks, either in him- 
 self or in another man, good looks were half the 
 battle in society. Of course, I laughed and told him 
 not to be a fool ; but he meant it, all the same ; and 
 nothing would make him angrier than the hint that 
 his mouth was too large or that his face was spoiled 
 by too great an expanse of jowl. He took great 
 care of his complexion, and I never knew a man 
 who brushed his hair more frequently in the day 
 than he did. 
 
 He had a defect which was the sorrow of his life 
 — the arts of the dentist not being so well under- 
 stood then as they are to-day — but on this I do not 
 propose to dwell. 
 
 I have been astonished that the published part 
 of ''De Profundis'' contains no touching and beauti- 
 ful passages relating to clothes ; and this is all the 
 more surprising because, in point of fact, Wilde 
 was, to a large extent, a tailor's man. I sometimes 
 think that if he had lived in the present era of 
 Homburg hats and tweed suits he would never have 
 been famous at all. He began his notoriety by fan- 
 tastic dressing, but as he ascended on the rungs 
 
36 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 of art to the heaven of rank, his great aim was for 
 what he termed "elegant correctness." Hence, the 
 Wilde of my time consisted, to a great extent, of 
 silk hat, frock coat, striped trousers and patent 
 leather boots. Add to these a very tall clouded cane 
 with a heavy gold knob and a pair of grey suede 
 gloves, and you have the outward man. On the 
 whole, I believe that he loathed the get-up, espe- 
 cially in the hot weather, but he stuck to it like a 
 Trojan, and nobody ever saw Oscar Wilde in Lon- 
 don outside of the regulation harness from eleven 
 o'clock till seven, or outside of the hard white shirt 
 and swallow-tails from seven-thirty till any time 
 you like in the morning. 
 
 Being a Roman, he must do as persons of rank 
 did in Rome, and he always struck me as being 
 garbed in perpetual readiness to walk out or dine 
 out with the duke or prince of the blood who would 
 one day surely be calling round for him. He had 
 a large turquoise set in diamonds, which I had 
 purchased for him in an expansive moment when 
 we happened to be together in a jeweller's shop. 
 The occasion was his birthday and I took him to 
 choose his own present. His eye fell on this sea- 
 blue bauble in its ring of brilliants, and all question 
 of trouble to the shopman was sunk. He wore this 
 ornament in his shirt-front of evenings with a truly 
 
Wilde in Society 37 
 
 regal dignity. For myself, I used to call it ''the 
 blue light" or the "Hope-Not" — the Hope diamond 
 being at that time very much to the fore in polite 
 conversation. 
 
 In the country he naturally subsided into easier 
 habiliments; but even here he must follow the 
 fashion or be a little bit ahead of it. His suits and 
 caps must be all of one piece, his boots as worn by 
 ''the nobility and gentry" and his general accoutre- 
 ments designed subtly to convey the impression that 
 he owned at least ten thousand acres somewhere 
 or other. 
 
 This bucolic perfection was entirely a social 
 affair with him, for he was most coy of being photo- 
 graphed otherwise than en grande tenue. In all 
 his official photographs, the frock coat, braided for 
 preference, or the fur coat, with a suggestion of a 
 silk hat on a side table, "bear the gree." 
 
 The very suggestion of "literalism" in the matter 
 of appearance horrified him. He desired to pass 
 for a gentleman, a "gentleman of rank," and noth- 
 ing more. And this he undoubtedly succeeded in 
 doing to his own satisfaction. In his intercourse 
 with the "highest in the land" — which was, to put 
 it plainly, of a very occasional nature — he always 
 seemed to me to be a trifle strained and uneasy. He 
 longed to smack certain personages on the back, 
 
38 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 but he never dared to do it. With women he suc- 
 ceeded a great deal better than with men. Some- 
 how, the men made him either very stiff or very 
 Hmp. His bow was wasted upon them and his diffi- 
 dent attempts at epigram missed fire. I think that 
 women loved him because he would insist that 
 everything was ''charming'' or "exquisite/' and be- 
 cause, although he was expected to talk brilliantly, 
 he really did a great deal of listening. Late in the 
 proceedings, when the buffet had done its harmless, 
 necessary work, he would open fire and talk amaz- 
 ingly, and fifteen to twenty women would hang on 
 his words, doubtless because their hostess had told 
 them that Mr. Wilde was ''so amusing." But the 
 men hung aloof. When he came away Wilde was 
 always as eager to know how he had "gone down," 
 as a debutante is eager to be informed as to the 
 figure she cut at her first ball. If one said: "You 
 were great, Oscar," he would glow with honest 
 pride; if one hummed a little, he would be in the 
 depths for a week. There were women who didn't 
 admire him in the least, and some of them were at 
 no pains to disguise the fact. Long before the 
 tongue of scandal took definite hold of his name, 
 there were whispers that there was something 
 wrong about him; and when Lady Blank referred 
 
Wilde in Society 39 
 
 to him in his hearing as '^that fellow," he became 
 white with passion and was with difficulty re- 
 strained from making a demonstration. 
 
 On the whole, however, his social evenings were 
 a source of joy and delight to him, and he would 
 talk of this or that party for months after it had 
 taken place, with continual notes of gratification 
 in his voice. And when, as sometimes happened, 
 he went to the houses of persons who were not 
 friends of mine, I could make sure of brilliantly 
 jewelled accounts of the high jinks and proceed- 
 ings, and of the honour which had been rendered 
 to him by brave and fair alike. ''Dear Lady 
 So-and-So,'' he would say; ''Ah! a charming 
 woman, if you like: came down the staircase to 
 receive me, for all the world like CEnone coming 
 down Ida. And the Prime Minister was there, and 
 I don't mind telling you that he glowered at me. 
 They hate genius, my boy. And poor old Lord 
 
 1 have never seen him before — looked to me 
 
 like a waiter. Extraordinary that a man of his 
 position should look so rusty. However, I need 
 not tell you that he was very civil to me.'' And 
 when I asked him what he meant by "rusty," he 
 said: "Well, he wore such extraordinary clothes." 
 The real facts of the case doubtless were that his 
 hostess was not beautiful at all, that the Prime 
 
40 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 Minister had not happened to look his way, and 
 
 that, despite his rusty suit, old Lord had gone 
 
 out of his way to meet rather profuse deference 
 with graciousness. 
 
 I don't say that Wilde had no social success, 
 but what he had was of that curious kind which 
 is here to-day and forgotten to-morrow, and his 
 reports of it were always slightly exaggerated. It 
 was on such a slender basis that he built up the 
 fabric of wonder and splendour with regard to 
 "rank" which he afterwards spread out for us in 
 Reading gaol. Throughout, he draws a great line 
 between "the poor thieves and outcasts with whom 
 I now associate" and "people of our rank'' — never 
 "people of our intellect," never "people of our cul- 
 ture." He tells us that in prison he became a great 
 individualist, and apparently it was in prison that 
 he became a great aristocrat. 
 
 In one passage in the published "De Profundis" 
 he actually uses the words "I had inherited a noble 
 name." One need not grudge him these tender illu- 
 sions, and, in a way, there is something rather 
 pathetic about them. But their encouragement was 
 so entirely characteristic of the man that it is 
 impossible to avoid a reference to them in a truthful 
 portrait. That Wilde did not happen to be nobly 
 born is certainly nothing to his discredit; that he 
 
Wilde in Society 41 
 
 should have persistently pretended to noble birth 
 is, on the other hand, fairly contemptible, especially 
 as in his efforts to live up to the part he had allotted 
 to himself he invariably succeeded in behaving in 
 an eminently unaristocratic manner. He lacked a 
 kind heart just as surely as he lacked a coronet, and 
 Norman blood was as alien to him as simple faith. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE LORD OF LANGUAGE 
 
 I AM not sure that this chapter is headed in 
 quite the way that Oscar Wilde's adherents 
 would like it to be. When he wished to seem 
 particularly important, Wilde was wont to describe 
 himself, not only as a Lord of Language, but as the 
 King of Life. His claims to these magniloquent 
 titles have been suffered to pass unquestioned by his 
 critics, and unassailed even by his enemies. The 
 coterie of long-haired persons who weep at the men- 
 tion of "dear Oscar's'' name and hold him up for a 
 saint and a martyr, naturally take pride in his own 
 description of himself, and will no doubt consider 
 it remiss of me to leave out one of them from this 
 chapter heading. The King of Life business has 
 always appeared to me to have been settled at the 
 Old Bailey, and since such a title as the Lord of 
 Language is plainly literary in its bearings, I sup- 
 pose I am free to discuss it from the literary point 
 of view. And I must state at the outset that I am 
 not concerned to deal with Wilde in other than a 
 reasonable, critical spirit. If his fame and writings 
 
 42 
 
The Lord of Language 43 
 
 had been left to themselves instead of becoming 
 the subject of attentions on the part of over-zealous 
 log-rollers on the one hand and catch-penny scandal- 
 mongers on the other, Wilde would, in the nature 
 of things, have attained to his proper position in 
 literary history and to his proper status as an 
 author. As it is, I maintain that the current views 
 about his character and his writings are exag- 
 gerated and even preposterous — views very far 
 ahead of the true facts and, in a large measure, 
 opposed to what Wilde himself would have wished. 
 Practically everybody nowadays who writes for 
 pleasure or for profit about Oscar Fingall OTlaher- 
 tie Wills Wilde has taken him for granted as a sort 
 of literary and artistic aristocrat who had a natural 
 right to the best of life and for whom all beauty 
 and delicacy were created. One of the most recent 
 of his biographers says: "Wilde provides us with 
 the rare spectacle of a man most of whose powers 
 are those of a spectator, a connoisseur, a man for 
 whom pictures are painted and books written, the 
 perfect elaborator for whom the artist hopes in his 
 heart." I have never seen a fault of taste, a fault 
 of judgment or a fault of intellect attributed to 
 him. Even his vices are held up to us as having 
 been necessary to the development of his chartered 
 and immaculate soul, and as having contributed 
 
44 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 and been necessary to the perfection of his work. 
 Greater bunkum was never propagated. Wilde was 
 far from being in any sense a perfervid worshipper 
 of the beautiful. To suggest that beauty was all in 
 all for him is to suggest what is not true. He was 
 never content that other people should write fine 
 poetry or fine prose for him to admire, his sole 
 ambition being to write fine things himself — ^not 
 especially for the fine thing's sake, but for the sake 
 of being able to pose as the one great and superior 
 person in all the world. It is not to Wilde's dis- 
 credit, perhaps, that he praised but little or, as one 
 might say, frugally. There was nobody of his time 
 who greatly required to be praised. He professed 
 the stock admiration for Tennyson, Swinburne, 
 Meredith and Pater; but when he expressed it — 
 which was seldom — it was always with the reserva- 
 tion that of the five he himself was the greatest. 
 There were occasions, of course, when he could be 
 adulatory, and even obsequious ; but this was either 
 to dead men or to those of his contemporaries who 
 were engaged in arts with which he was not con- 
 cerned as a practitioner. His sonnets to Miss Ellen 
 Terry and the late Henry Irving may stand for his 
 monument in this special line. As to artists paint- 
 ing pictures for him, and so forth, the great quarrel 
 of his life was with Whistler, from whom he de- 
 
The Lord of Language 45 
 
 rived practically everything that he affected to 
 know about art and whose work he believed to be 
 'Vastly overrated/' Of pictures in their relation 
 to beauty he had little or no appreciation. Just as 
 the far-famed blue china at Oxford was valuable 
 to him because he could make mots over it and get 
 himself talked about, so all his views and his ex- 
 pressions of opinion with respect to art were not 
 the views and opinions of the person who loves and 
 knows art, but were designed to illustrate his own 
 singularity or superiority, or to support a pose. In 
 spite of all he wrote and said on the subject, and in 
 spite of all that has been said and written by his 
 admirers, there is nothing of Wilde that persists 
 in criticism on the art side which is not to be found 
 in Whistler's 'Ten o'clock," or which he had not 
 gleaned either from his contemporaries or from 
 the older writers on the literary side. In order 
 to show more clearly what I mean, let us take the 
 preface to ''Dorian Gray," which, as is well known, 
 consists of a number of aphorisms concerning art 
 and criticism as Wilde is supposed to have believed 
 in them. I quote some of them: — 
 
 The artist is the creator of beautiful things. 
 
 To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's 
 aim. 
 
46 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 The critic is he who can translate into another 
 manner or a new material his impression of 
 beautiful things. 
 The highest, as the lowest, form of criticism 
 is a mode of autobiography. 
 
 Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things 
 are corrupt without being charming. This 
 is a fault. 
 Those who find beautiful meanings in beauti- 
 ful things are the cultivated. For these 
 there is hope. 
 
 They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean 
 only beauty. 
 There is no such thing as a moral or an im- 
 moral book. Books are well written or badly 
 written. That is all. 
 
 The nineteenth-century dislike of realism is the 
 rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a 
 glass. 
 The nineteenth-century dislike of romanticism 
 is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own 
 face in a glass. 
 
 The moral life of man forms part of the subject- 
 matter of the artist, but the morality of 
 art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect 
 medium. 
 
The Lord of Language 47 
 
 No artist desires to prove anything. Even things 
 that are true can be proved. 
 
 Thought and language are to the artist instru- 
 ments of an art. 
 Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for 
 an art. 
 
 From the point of view of form, the type of all 
 the arts is the art of the musician. From 
 the point of view of feeling, the actor's craft 
 is the type. 
 
 It is the spectator and not life that art really 
 mirrors. 
 Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows 
 
 that the work is new, complex and vital. 
 When critics disagree the artist is in accord 
 with himself. 
 
 We can forgive a man for making a useful thing 
 as long as he does not admire it. The only 
 excuse for making a useless thing is that 
 one admires it intensely. 
 All art is quite useless. 
 
 These remarks have been held up to us as Wilde's 
 credo, and slight and few though they be, it is the 
 fact that they do really epitomise what some people 
 call his ''teaching." One has only to glance at 
 them, however, to perceive that without exception 
 
48 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 they are either obvious or perverted truisms or the 
 merest glosses on quite hoary critical adages. For 
 example, "The artist is the creator of beautiful 
 things" must have been said at least a thousand 
 times before Wilde suddenly rushed upon the world 
 with it as a new and marvellous discovery. "To 
 reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim" is a 
 very cheap variant of the saying that language was 
 invented to conceal one's thoughts, or Horace's old 
 tag: ''Ars est celare artem," "The highest and 
 lowest form of criticism is a form of autobiog- 
 raphy" is merely to say what was said by Rousseau 
 — namely: that all writing is in essence autobio- 
 graphical; while "It is the spectator and not life, 
 that art really mirrors" is merely Shakespeare's 
 "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder," clumsily 
 rendered. All the talk about there being no such 
 thing as a moral or an immoral book, and about 
 art being quite useless, is the merest perversion and 
 fiddle-de-dee, as anybody who is not in the last stage 
 of idiocy will perceive for himself. 
 
 I maintain that this statement of Wilde — which, 
 by the way, did not originally appear as a preface 
 to "Dorian Gray," but was painfully and carefully 
 compiled when its author was at the height of his 
 achievement and wished to pontificate — shows us 
 clearly the nature of the man's mind, which was a 
 
The Lord of Language 49 
 
 shallow and comparatively feeble mind, incapable 
 of grappling unaided with even moderately pro- 
 found things, and disposed to fribble and antic with 
 old thoughts for lack of power to evolve new ones. 
 It was a mind which was continually discovering 
 with a glow that two and two make four, or pre- 
 tending to discover with a much warmer glow that 
 two and two make five. In every scrap that he 
 wrote, leaving out, of course, the poems, you will 
 find this feeble, mediocre, but, withal, vain-glorious 
 instrument hard at work on the fearful business of 
 saying nothing in such a way that foolish people 
 will shout about it. 
 
 Wilde knew himself for a shallow and oblique 
 thinker. The fact that he never did anything really 
 great has been set down to his indolence. It was 
 due really to shallowness rather than indolence. 
 When he found that nobody would read his poetry, 
 he became most indolent about the writing of 
 verses and complained that there was nothing for 
 a poet of his eminence to write about. When he 
 found that people would listen to lectures written on 
 a basis of Whistler and William Morris, he wrote 
 and delivered such lectures with an industry worthy 
 of the best of causes. And when he found actor- 
 managers who would produce money "on account'' 
 for such drama as ''Lady Windermere's Fan" and 
 
50 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 such comedy as ^The Importance of being Ear- 
 nest," he wrote plays till the sweat fairly rolled off 
 him. But he was conscious, as every unbiassed con- 
 temporary critic was conscious, that he ran very 
 far short of the achievement of which he was wont 
 to plume himself, and he knew that when it came 
 to serious things he was always considered more 
 or less of a dabbler. 
 
 Like most Irishmen, he was troubled all his life 
 with attacks of regret which he was accustomed 
 to call remorse. He believed that he had supreme 
 gifts and that he had squandered them; he never 
 could see that it was impossible that a man who 
 pretended, as he pretended, could ever have had 
 supreme gifts. His remorse over the squandering 
 of these alleged gifts was at times ludicrous to 
 behold. He would bemoan his wasted life and come 
 very nigh shedding tears about his shallowness at 
 two o'clock in the morning ; while at one o'clock the 
 same day he would be swallowing ortolans as if 
 they were oysters and swearing over some silly 
 liqueur that he was the greatest genius that ever 
 lived. 
 
 In time, this notion of shallowness became an 
 obsession with him. He makes constant use of the 
 word "shallow" in his writings, and right through 
 '*De Profundis" you find him crying "the supreme 
 
The Lord of Language 51 
 
 vice is shallowness," in and out of season, and with- 
 out the remotest reference to the context. Of 
 course, if we endeavour to look into the psychology 
 of the situation, we perceive clearly that it was im- 
 possible for a man of Wilde's type to do any really 
 big work, and he certainly never did do it. His 
 claims to be considered as a "Lord of Language'' 
 will not bear looking into. He wrote passable verse 
 and competent prose, but he wrote no better verse 
 and no better prose than several other men of his 
 time whose writings are more or less forgotten. 
 We have it on the statement of Mr. Justice Darling 
 that Wilde could ''conjure with words." I should 
 like chapter and verse for any verbal conjuring 
 which can be considered worth remembering, or 
 which, for that matter, is remembered. I think 
 that all Wilde did for the English language was to 
 degrade, abuse or make ridiculous such words as 
 "exquisite," "wonderful," "charming," "delight- 
 ful," "delicate," and so forth. He bored me to 
 death at times with his "How perfectly wonderful 
 of you!" while his "charming fellows" and "charm- 
 ing ladies," "delicious dishes," "exquisite liqueurs" 
 and general ecstatics were like sands on the sea 
 where the blue wave rolls nightly. He was plagued 
 with the Irishman's propensity to muddle his 
 "shalls" and "wills," and I found hi him an utter 
 
52 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 incapacity to understand or appreciate, in the lit- 
 erary sense, certain plain English idioms with 
 which any man possessed of a feeling for language 
 would never have had the slightest trouble. I re- 
 member having a lengthy and fearful argument 
 with him over Shakespeare's use of the word ''your" 
 in such phrases as "your tanner will last you eleven 
 years." He.could understand neither the force nor 
 the sense of such usages and, though he "tumbled" 
 in the end, he was a fearful time about it. One does 
 not expect such dullness in a Lord of Language. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 OUR MUTUAL FRIENDS 
 
 ACCORDING to the Ransome book— the 
 biographical details in which, its author 
 - admits, have been checked by Mr. Robert 
 Ross — Oscar Wilde was the son of William Wilde, 
 ''knighted in 1864, a celebrated oculist and aurist, 
 a man of great intellectuality and uncertain temper, 
 a runner after girls, with a lusty enjoyment of life, 
 and a delight in falling stars and thunderstorms/' 
 This is an ingenious way of presenting a de- 
 cidedly dubious and unpleasing character to an awe- 
 stricken world. Wilde's father was certainly a 
 knight; but heaven alone knows who his grand- 
 father was. It is also to be noted that while Sir 
 William Wilde may have died "a celebrated oculist 
 and aurist," he began life as an apothecary, and for 
 years kept a chemist's shop in an obscure part of 
 Dublin. The ''runner after girls" admission on 
 the part of Messrs. Ransome and Ross is also very 
 touching, seeing that William Wilde had once been 
 prosecuted for insulting a lady patient and that 
 
 53 
 
54 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 everybody knows the story of Wilde's father and 
 the witty veterinary surgeon who ralHed him on the 
 subject with one of the sharpest bits of sarcasm 
 that ever fell from a man's mouth. 
 
 It is perhaps necessary for me to say here that 
 I have never in my life laid any great stress upon 
 the advantages of birth. If a man's manners and 
 disposition are all right, I am not greatly concerned 
 to know that his father drove pigs or got locked 
 up for stealing spoons. At the same time, I have 
 never been able to repress feelings of amused con- 
 tempt for that numerous body of persons who, hav- 
 ing no ancestry or forbears to speak of, make a 
 point of proclaiming themselves to be persons of 
 family, and invent all manner of legends to support 
 their supposed exalted birth. 
 
 In the case of Wilde, it is due to him to say that 
 he kept his parentage and extraction fairly in the 
 background so far as I was concerned. He ad- 
 mitted that he belonged to the Irish middle classes 
 and prided himself on having risen to academic 
 honour, not with the help of money, but by sheer 
 force of intellect. This was in the early days of 
 our acquaintance. Ultimately, when he had man- 
 aged to get out of the rut of bohemianism and to 
 find his way into respectable society, he began to 
 conceive himself in the light of a very great social 
 
Our Mutual Friends 55 
 
 figure, and it was easy for him to suppose that he 
 was a born member of the aristocracy and that all 
 his people belonged to what Burke, I believe, calls 
 'The titled landed and official classes." I used to 
 smile at these pretensions and joke with him about 
 them ; and he would admit that he was foolish. But 
 the fact remains that to the end of his life he kept 
 up the legend of his high birth and connections, and 
 was eager always to pass himself off as a great 
 gentleman. 
 
 His biographers have taken up the wondrous tale 
 and, without saying so in as many words, they lead 
 the polite world of Wilde worshippers to believe 
 that their saint was what the young lady called "a 
 gentleman in his own right." The Wildes ''were 
 people of consideration in Dublin," says the zealous 
 Mr. Ransome: "his school- fellows did not have to 
 ask Wilde who his father was." Well, possibly they 
 didn't — for very different reasons than those Mr. 
 Ransome would have us conjure up. Down to the 
 time of my first meeting Wilde, he had never had 
 any real footing in society and, though he fought 
 for it desperately during the period of our friend- 
 ship, I doubt if he ever really got it. He was too 
 obviously the tuft-hunter and the snob ever to be 
 liked by the people for whose acquaintance he 
 sighed. I never could see why a man of his talents 
 
56 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 and mode of life should have been so desperately 
 anxious to be "hail fellow well met" with some of 
 the dullest and silliest people in the world ; but there 
 can be no doubt that he dearly loved a lord and 
 would put up with a great deal of pain and incon- 
 venience on the mere chance of a casual word or 
 two with a duchess. When our acquaintance began 
 he knew nobody, and, though his name was in the 
 papers and his picture turned up from time to time 
 in Punch, you never saw him at the places where he 
 would have given his soul to be. He told me that 
 at Magdalen he had managed to get on terms with 
 an unmarried duke, but before this beam of sun- 
 shine had shone upon him for a year or two, the 
 duke incontinently married and the duchess inter- 
 vened and put an end to the intimacy. 
 
 Wilde's own set of friends and acquaintances 
 struck one as being a peculiar assemblage; but he 
 assured me that they were great and charming 
 people and that they were all on the high road to 
 eminence and fame ; and, being young and unversed 
 in the world's ways, I took him at his word and set 
 down my incapacity to appreciate his immediate 
 entourage to my own dullness and lack of pers- 
 picacity. The first stars in the firmament of charm- 
 ing fellows and world-compelling geniuses brought 
 to me by Wilde were Mr. Robert Ross and Mr. 
 
33 
 o 
 
 g 2 
 
 m 
 
 H 
 -*! 
 O 
 
Our Mutual Friends 57 
 
 Reggie Turner. According to the allegations 
 brought against me at the Ransome trial, when 
 Wilde entertained these gentlemen at dinner he did 
 it in Soho and with the help of a shilling bottle of 
 Medoc ; whereas when I, Lord Alfred Douglas, was 
 his guest, it was always at Willis's rooms and to 
 the accompaniment of specially imported pates 
 from Strasbourg and priceless champagnes. In 
 point of fact, all four of us drank a good many 
 humble whiskies and sodas at the Cafe Royal and 
 dined and lunched at the same place without any 
 great effusions of money on anybody's part. Wilde 
 was a doughty and assiduous trencherman. I would 
 have backed him to eat the head off a brewer's dray- 
 man three times a day, and his capacity for whisky 
 and soda knew no bounds. The marvel of it was 
 that he never became really drunk, though from 
 four o'clock in the afternoon till three in the morn- 
 ing he was never really sober. The more he drank 
 the more he talked, and without whisky he could 
 neither talk nor write. 
 
 After Messrs. Ross and Turner, Wilde brought 
 along the late Ernest Dowson, who, for some reason 
 or other, seemed scared out of his wits; Mr. Max 
 Beerbohm, who giggled prettily at everything either 
 Wilde or I said; and Mr. Frank Harris, who wore 
 the same costly furs and roared in the same sucking- 
 
58 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 dove way as still continues to delight his troops of 
 friends. They were a merry and, I am afraid, a 
 rather careless company. They talked art, poetry 
 and politics ; none of them seemed to have much to 
 do, though I believe all of them were fairly busy 
 men and, on the whole, they were pleasant enough 
 people to meet. 
 
 Gradually, however, the acquaintance between 
 myself and Wilde began to strengthen and become 
 more intimate. I took him to my mother's place 
 near Ascot and introduced him to a good many 
 people whom he considered to be important. He 
 met my cousin, George Wyndham, who, I believe, 
 asked him down afterwards to Clouds, and, at his 
 very special request, I introduced him to my 
 brother. Viscount Drumlanrig, at that time a Lord- 
 in- Waiting to Queen Victoria. No two men could 
 have less in common than Drumlanrig and Wilde. 
 On one hand you had a soldier and a sportsman, 
 with perhaps a bit of the courtier thrown in; on 
 the other hand you had the overdressed Bohemian, 
 with his hair nicely parted and very anxious to be 
 friendly and charming. My brother was amused 
 and, though they did not meet more than three 
 times, it was years before Wilde ceased to talk 
 pompously of "my friend. Lord Drumlanrig, Lord- 
 in-Waiting to Her Majesty." I also introduced 
 
Our Mutual Friends 59 
 
 him to my grandfather, Mr. Alfred Montgomery, 
 who took a violent and invincible dislike to him 
 and declined to meet him again. 
 
 In addition to the people I have mentioned, Wilde 
 always had on hand a sort of job line of weird and 
 wonderful acquaintances whose names were for 
 ever on his lips and whose possessions — intellectual 
 and otherwise — were supposed to be fabulous. He 
 would come a few minutes late for lunch and beg 
 to be excused for unpunctuality. "The fact of the 
 matter is," he would say, "I have spent a most de- 
 lightful morning with my dear friend, Mr. Balsam 
 Bassy — a charming fellow with a face like a Michel 
 Angelo drawing and a mind like Benvenuto Cellini. 
 I would have brought him in to lunch — he is dying 
 to make your acquaintance — but he has to go down 
 to his uncle's place in Devonshire and couldn't miss 
 the two-fifty on any account." There would fol- 
 low a long and highly elaborate statement of Mr. 
 Balsam Bassy's many gifts, graces and accomplish- 
 ments, his wonderful powers of conversation, the 
 exquisite mots he perpetrated, and the charming 
 poetry that he could write if he would only take 
 the trouble to live his own life instead of frivolling 
 it away in the highest circles. Wilde had, to my 
 knowledge, at least half a dozen ''Balsam Bassys" 
 going at one time and, though I only saw one of 
 
60 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 them in the flesh, I believe they were real persons, 
 and that Wilde believed all he had invented about 
 them. The solitary ''Balsam Bassy" he produced 
 on an occasion when he could not help himself, 
 as the man sailed right into us at supper, turned 
 out to be a very mild and inoffensive gentleman 
 who possessed an allowance of two hundred and 
 fifty pounds a year from his uncle, a brewer, but 
 with no more talent — let alone genius — than a box 
 of matches. When I observed to Wilde that this 
 particular Mr. Balsam Bassy did not seem quite 
 to come up to expectations, he became very angry 
 and said that the fact that Mr. Balsam Bassy was 
 his friend was a sufficient passport for him to any 
 society. I said that I thought it was, and there 
 the matter dropped. 
 
 The large number of persons of eminence whom 
 Wilde knew in a casual way would, of course, make 
 a long list, but of his friends and intimates — the 
 people who, so to say, gyrated immediately around 
 him — I have given a full account. It should be 
 added that Wilde knew Beardsley, whom he was 
 disposed to patronise, and Mr. George Bernard 
 Shaw, who was then a writer on the Star. Of Shaw 
 he had a high opinion and prophesied for him a 
 future in a walk of life far other than the one in 
 which he has succeeded. Probably if he had never 
 
Our Mutual Friends 61 
 
 known Shaw he would never have written the ''Soul 
 of Man." While Shaw's socialism was a very much 
 redder and more blatant affair in those days than 
 it is now, it attracted Wilde because it was odd and 
 Shaw was Irish. Though a mild Liberal by pre- 
 tension, Wilde was always a rebel in his heart. 
 ''Down with everything that's up and up with 
 everything that's down" was his intellectual motto. 
 If he had not met Shaw he would probably have 
 kept his views about the social order of things to 
 himself. Shaw helped him to a species of socialism 
 which looks very revolutionary but which is really 
 designed to benefit the rich rather than the poor. 
 Like pretty well everything else that Wilde wrote, 
 "The Soul of Man under Socialism" fails entirely 
 when you come to look into it. It is neither fish, 
 flesh, fowl nor good red herring, and its main argu- 
 ment — namely, that human beings will never be 
 happy tiir they have got rid of altruism — is, of 
 course, the obvious reverse of the truth. 
 
 It may be that the account I have given of Wilde's 
 circle will come with a shock of disappointment to 
 those who have been accustomed to the Ross- 
 Ransome-Sherard versions as to his mode of life. 
 The absence of distinguished names is certainly 
 conspicuous. But as I am writing the truth and 
 not a fairy story, I am compelled to stick to the 
 
62 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 actual facts, which are that Wilde, during all the 
 time I knew him, was not on terms of anything like 
 intimacy with any of the distinguished people of 
 his day. He was continually talking of his various 
 eminent contemporaries as if he were on terms of 
 friendship with them; he constantly referred to 
 Edward Burne- Jones, to William Morris, to Ruskin, 
 to Meredith, to Tennyson, Swinburne, Browning 
 and the rest; and he referred to them always as if 
 he had at one time been most friendly with them. 
 Whether this were or were not the case I have no 
 means of settling authoritatively : I can only speak 
 of the period of his life during which I knew him 
 and was continually in his society — namely, from 
 the year 1892 to the time of his death — and I say 
 positively that during the whole of that time he 
 never had the slightest intercourse with any of the 
 persons mentioned. I believe Wilde had at one time 
 a slight acquaintance with Burne- Jones ; but on two 
 occasions when I myself met the latter at Clouds, 
 the country house of my uncle, the late Mr. Percy 
 Wyndham, I never heard him mention Wilde's 
 name. I believe he knew Ruskin at Oxford, but 
 only in the way in which any undergraduate could 
 know him if he wished to do so. Browning he had 
 met once or twice, and the same applies to Meredith. 
 I do not believe that he ever saw or, at any rate. 
 
Our Mutual Friends 63 
 
 spoke either to Tennyson or Swinburne. Yet to 
 hear him talk of all these people one would have 
 supposed that he was a regular member of their 
 circle. When I was with Wilde, before his down- 
 fall and imprisonment I accepted all he told me 
 as to his friendship with the intellectual giants of 
 his time as gospel truth, and it was not till long 
 afterwards that it struck me as curious that we 
 never came across any of these celebrities; that 
 Wilde was never able to get one of them to come 
 to his house, and never by any chance went to see 
 them at theirs. 
 
 A good example of Wilde's pushfulness in this 
 line of pretended intimacy with celebrated people 
 is furnished by the terms of his dedication of one 
 of his plays : 'To the dear memory of Robert, Earl 
 of Lytton.'' I have it on the authority of Mr. 
 Neville Lytton, the younger son of the late Lord 
 Lytton, that his father scarcely knew Wilde, and 
 had only met him on one or two occasions, and that 
 he might or might not have been flattered by 
 Wilde's dedication. The same applies to his sup- 
 posed French acquaintance. According to Wilde's 
 own account, he knew everybody in France who was 
 worth knowing, but, as a fact, he had only the 
 very slightest knowledge of a few of them, derived 
 from meeting them once or twice at luncheon or 
 
64 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 dinner-parties at the time he wrote his play 
 ^'Salome." This question is settled by the articles 
 which have appeared on the subject in France by 
 M. Henri de Regnier and the Vicomte d'Humieres. 
 After he left prison, of course nobody knew him, 
 but at the very height of his fame and success the 
 facts were as I have stated. The same applies to 
 social as opposed to literary and artistic lights. 
 When I was twenty-three years of age I was elected 
 to an institution called the Crabbet Club, which had 
 been founded by my cousin, Mr. Wilfrid Blunt. 
 The club met once a year at Mr. Wilfrid Blunt's 
 country house, Crabbet Park, for the purpose of 
 playing lawn-tennis and reading poems composed 
 by the members of the club for a prize. Among the 
 members of the club were George Curzon — now 
 Lord Curzon of Kedlestone — George Wyndham, 
 George Leveson-Gower — then Comptroller of the 
 Queen's Household: the 'Trinity of Georges," as 
 some one called them in a prize poem ; Lord Hough- 
 ton, now Lord Crewe, Mr. Harry Cust, Mr. God- 
 frey Webb, Mr. Mark Napier, the late Lord Cairns, 
 Mr. ''Lulu" Harcourt and a lot more. Mr. Blunt 
 had made Oscar Wilde a member of this club, and 
 Wilde attended one meeting. It was the custom 
 that any new member should be proposed in a 
 speech at dinner on the first night of the meeting 
 
Our Mutual Friends 65 
 
 and opposed by some one else. Wilde was opposed 
 by George Curzon, who attacked him in a brilliant, 
 humorous, witty but deadly speech in such a very 
 scathing way that he never could be induced to go to 
 another meeting of the Club. As an undoubted mem- 
 ber of this club he certainly could claim to know the 
 other members, and he actually passed one Satur- 
 day to Monday at Crabbet in their company. He 
 never forgot it, and never forgot to refer to them 
 by their Christian names ever afterwards ; but none 
 of them ever came to Wilde's house or asked him 
 to his, with the solitary exception of George Wynd- 
 ham, under circumstances which I have already de- 
 tailed. On the only occasion on which I attended 
 a meeting of the Crabbet Club I was proposed by 
 George Wyndham and opposed in a friendly way 
 by Hubert Howard, who was afterwards killed at 
 the battle of Omdurman. The Crabbet Club was 
 only a club in name. There was no subscription and 
 no entrance fee, and admittance to it was simply by 
 invitation of Mr. Blunt, who used the annual occa- 
 sion of the meeting of the club as a pretext for a 
 charming and most lavish hospitality. I was ac- 
 tually the last member to join it, and the year I 
 joined was the last year of its existence. One of 
 the rules of the club was that Prime Ministers, 
 Bishops, and Viceroys were not eligible for mem- 
 
66 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 bership, and that any member found guilty of 
 attaining such positions should be at once expelled. 
 Nothing was said about convicts, but when two 
 of the members (Lord Curzon and Lord Hough- 
 ton) became Viceroys, and one (Oscar Wilde) was 
 sent to prison, Mr. Blunt came to the conclusion 
 that the Crabbet Club had better be wound up; 
 and it lives now only as a glorious memory and by 
 virtue of a privately printed volume of prize and 
 other poems, mostly of a satirical nature, which 
 would make the fortune of a dealer in rare books 
 if he could get hold of a copy. I may be excused 
 for mentioning with pride that I won the lawn- 
 tennis tournament of my year, and divided the 
 honours of the Prize Poem with the late Mr. God- 
 frey Webb, known as "Webber'' to his numerous 
 friends. To be strictly accurate, Mr. Godfrey 
 Webb was declared the laureate of the year, and 
 invested with the laurel wreath, while a special 
 prize was awarded to me for my poem. It was a 
 beautifully bound edition of Surrey's and Wyatt's 
 sonnets, and I regret to say that I left it behind me 
 at Naples, along with a great many other valuable 
 and interesting books, in the charge of Oscar Wilde 
 when I handed over my villa to him. All these 
 books Wilde sold or lost soon after I left Naples. 
 
Our Mutual Friends 67 
 
 The prize for the Lawn Tennis Tournament I still 
 have in my possession. It is a handsome silver cup 
 of the Georgian period, and is inscribed as follows : 
 
 'Tn Youth and Crabbed Age." 
 
 Crabbet Club, 
 
 1894. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 LORD QUEENSBERRY INTERVENES 
 
 IN 1895 my friendship with Oscar Wilde had 
 ripened into an intimacy which was an 
 affair for the gossips. We were inseparable : 
 wherever Wilde went I went, and wherever I went 
 Wilde went. I was living at my mother's house 
 in Cadogan Place, and Wilde at his house in Tite 
 Street. We lunched and dined usually at the Cafe 
 Royal or at the Savoy ; we visited the theatres and 
 music-halls of an evening, and we often wound 
 up the day with supper at Willis's rooms. I had 
 left Oxford and my time was my own. Money did 
 not trouble me much in those days. My father 
 allowed me three hundred and fifty pounds a year 
 for pocket money; the necessaries and luxuries of 
 life were always at my disposal at home and in 
 the houses of my numerous friends and relatives; 
 and whenever I wanted money I had merely to 
 ask my mother or my indulgent Grandfather Mont- 
 gomery for it. One way or another, I dare say I 
 was living at the rate of at least fifteen hundred a 
 
 68 
 
OSCAR WILDE'S HOUSE, 16 TITE STREET, CHELSEA 
 
Lord Queensberry Intervenes 69 
 
 year. Wilde was an expensive sort of friend, par- 
 ticularly after he began to consider himself a 
 gourmet and a man of the great world. He gave 
 fairly expensive entertainments, and although a 
 chop and a pint of bitter beer at some respectable 
 inn would always have done for me, I never pro- 
 fessed to be insensible to the charms of good cook- 
 ing, and when it came to ordering and paying for 
 a dinner for my friends I was certainly not to be 
 outdone by Wilde. At the Ransome trial, among 
 the charges brought against me on the strength 
 of the precious document which Mr. Ross has 
 handed to the British Museum, was that of extrava- 
 gance, in respect of which I had to meet Wilde's 
 stories of the long-departed menus of some of our 
 Lucullian feasts. It was suggested that we lived 
 on nothing but "delicious ortolans" — by the way, 
 are there any ortolans that are not delicious ? — and 
 foie gras from Strasbourg, which we made a point 
 of washing down with Perrier Jouet and topped 
 off with fifty-year-old brandy. Of course, I do not 
 profess to remember what I had for dinner twenty 
 years ago ; but any man about town knows that one 
 can dine very comfortably for a sovereign, and I 
 happen to remember that Wilde always considered 
 a sovereign quite a good deal of money. It was 
 further suggested that between the autumn of 1892 
 
70 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 and the date of his imprisonment — that is to say, in 
 less than three years — Wilde spent with me and on 
 me more than five thousand pounds in actual money, 
 irrespective of the bills he incurred. But in plain 
 terms this means that he spent at least forty pounds 
 a week in entertaining me. So that for three years 
 I must have been eating three meals a day and 
 twenty-one meals a week, at a cost and charge of 
 two pounds a meal, with Oscar Wilde. I cannot 
 have disbursed a penny on myself or on him and, at 
 the end of the three years, I ought to have had a 
 thousand or two in the bank and a stone or two of 
 flesh to spare. In point of fact, even in those early 
 days I spent a great deal more money on Wilde than 
 he spent on me, and my weight has stood at less 
 than ten stone five ever since I can remember, which, 
 for a man of my height, does not point to much 
 gourmandising. It is a pretty thing that any 
 gentleman should be compelled to go into such mat- 
 ters, but as the world has already been told and 
 is to be told again in 1960 that I got through five 
 thousand pounds' worth of Wilde's ortolans and 
 Perrier Jouet in three years, I here and now venture 
 to tell the world that I did nothing of the kind. In 
 the three years in question, it is exceedingly doubt- 
 ful whether Wilde ever had five thousand pounds 
 at his disposal. He had developed expensive tastes 
 
Lord Queensberry Intervenes 71 
 
 in many other directions besides food and drink: 
 he dressed expensively, he wore expensive jewel- 
 lery, he made presents of jewellery and money to 
 all sorts of ridiculous people; the upkeep of his 
 house in Tite Street must have run him into at 
 least a thousand a year; he travelled a good deal 
 and made expensive stays in Paris, at Homburg 
 and in Italy; and, not to put too fine a point on it, 
 he was continually short of money. On several 
 occasions I borrowed money from moneylenders 
 at his suggestion and instigation, and he invariably 
 helped himself liberally, not only to these sums but 
 to sums of money which I obtained from my mother 
 and from my other relatives. Indeed, so far as my 
 money was concerned, we had a common purse. It 
 never occurred to me to refuse him anything. 
 Nothing was too good for him, and I always re- 
 garded him as a man who, although he might have 
 spurts of money, was without proper income and 
 resources, and was consequently to be helped out 
 whenever occasion demanded. To take an instance 
 in point: just before "The Woman of no Impor- 
 tance" was put on at the Haymarket I went to a 
 moneylender and borrowed two hundred and fifty 
 pounds. At lunch I showed Wilde the money in ten- 
 pound notes, and he took them into his hand and said : 
 *'How beautiful they are and how wonderful it is of 
 
72 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 you to be able to get them." Then, with a laugh, he 
 put five or six of them into his own pocket and 
 handed me the balance. I thought no more about 
 it at the moment than I should have thought of 
 sharing a bottle of wine with him. Indeed, I got 
 the money with the intention of giving him some 
 of it because he had been groaning for over a week 
 about his hard-upness. This is only one instance of 
 many. All my life I have been free-handed and 
 careless about money. I was well over thirty years 
 of age before it dawned upon me that money did 
 not grow on the trees on the family estate. There 
 are plenty of people who are now living who know 
 me well, and I should like to hear one of them who 
 would tell me that I am ''thrifty" or that I permit 
 my friends to pay out of their turn. It is true that 
 Wilde and I were for a long period on terms of 
 friendship which were quite outside and beyond the 
 "you-ask-me-to-dinner-and - 1 - ask-you-back- again" 
 principle; but it is grotesquely untrue to suggest 
 that he wasted any appreciable part of his sub- 
 stance upon me. Wilde had a great way of making 
 everything appear important. He was very fond 
 of sending for the managers of restaurants to 
 consult them over the merits of wine or to bid 
 them summon the chef to receive instruction or 
 compliment, as the case might be. These were not 
 
Lord Queensberry Intervenes 73 
 
 practices of mine, and never have been. Up to the 
 time of my meeting Oscar Wilde, I had been accus- 
 tomed to live at great houses, and the best food and 
 the best drink were the only sort I knew about. It 
 never occurred to me that Wilde's "exquisite'' 
 spreads were anything out of the ordinary. I sup- 
 pose the cooking at the Cafe Royal or at the Savoy 
 Hotel is good, but it is certainly, to say the least, 
 no better than what one gets in a good house or at 
 a good club. Wilde made fusses and went through 
 elaborate rituals over the ordering of his meals. 
 I, for my part, ordered, ate and paid for them, and 
 thought nothing further about it. 
 
 As I have said, our constant appearances to- 
 gether at cafes, restaurants, theatres and public 
 places set the gossips wagging their tongues. I 
 heard all sorts of rumours which were silly on the 
 face of them and which were a good deal sillier 
 when one thought about them. Naturally, I 
 ignored them utterly. I am convinced that some 
 of the whispers and hints that went around were 
 set going by persons who deemed that I had sup- 
 planted them in Wilde's good graces and who were 
 annoyed because, while he still continued to know 
 them, he ceased, in a great measure, to frequent 
 their company. In any case, I was made to feel 
 that certain people were very sore about my 
 
74 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 ''monopolising Wilde/' Egged on doubtless by 
 what she heard, even Mrs. Wilde — with whom I 
 always had been on the most friendly terms — 
 began to say that I took up a great deal too much 
 of Oscar's time, and Wilde once told me that she 
 had made difficulties about our being so much to- 
 gether. I told him that we certainly did seem to 
 be always together, and I offered to go away and 
 leave him to his own devices; but he said that 
 this would be unbearable to him and that he had 
 made Mrs. Wilde understand and that he had men- 
 tioned the matter to me in the idlest way and with- 
 out any notion that I should be so foolish as to take 
 him seriously. So our lives drifted along as usual. 
 I may here mention that for the first three years 
 of my close intimacy with Oscar Wilde I never 
 heard a coarse or indelicate allusion come out of 
 his mouth. I knew him for a somewhat cynical and 
 insincere kind of humourist; I was not blind to his 
 faults of vanity and his occasional lapses into vul- 
 gar manners ; I knew he was no saint, even as men 
 of the world go; but I considered that he was a 
 man of decent life, and I never heard from him a 
 word or a sign which made me think otherwise. 
 He treated me always with the greatest and, I may 
 even say, the most elaborate courtesy, and I noticed 
 particularly that when we were in the society of 
 
Lord Queensberry Intervenes 75 
 
 men who were apt to kick somewhat over the traces 
 and indulge in Rabelaisian conversation Wilde was 
 eagerly careful to turn or suppress the talk. He 
 therefore seemed to be all that a man should be; 
 and when I heard on one or two occasions certain 
 other hints of tendencies of his, I repudiated them 
 with indignation, believing that, as I was his close 
 friend, I knew him through and through, and feel- 
 ing that there could not possibly be any truth in 
 what was suggested. 
 
 Some years before I met Wilde my mother had 
 found it desirable to divorce my father, and at the 
 time to which I am now referring the family rela- 
 tionships were not exactly running smooth. To 
 be quite frank, I had conceived feelings of resent- 
 ment against my father on account of his treatment 
 of my mother which I am afraid were far from 
 filial. You may judge, then, of my anger when 
 Wilde one day told me that Lord Queensberry had 
 sent him a letter in which he requested Wilde to 
 terminate his friendship with me at once, inasmuch 
 as he did not think it would be beneficial to me. 
 Wilde asked me what he should do, and I told him 
 to take no notice of the letter. Later, my father 
 sent me a letter in which he told me what he had 
 said to Wilde, and threatened to cut ofif my allow- 
 ance if I did not at once terminate the acquaintance. 
 
76 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 I was not aware of any grounds upon which Lord 
 Queensberry could make such a request, and con- 
 cluded that he had written to me for the mere pur- 
 pose of annoyance and because he knew that I had 
 taken sides with my mother since the divorce pro- 
 ceedings. Consequently, I sent him a fairly sting- 
 ing reply, and a heated correspondence followed. 
 Portions of that correspondence have been pre- 
 served in glass cases by careful lawyers, and these 
 relics of an unpleasant feud have been brought up 
 against me in various cross-examinations with a 
 view to proving that I was an unfilial brute and that 
 I treated my own father very badly. 
 
 In the light of what has happened since, I know 
 that I was hasty and mistaken, but one cannot be 
 the son of the eighth Marquis of Queensberry nor 
 a member of the family of Douglas without having 
 the defects of one's qualities. I did not sit down 
 to the abuse of my father in the manner of a person 
 without spirit for the very simple reason that I am 
 not devoid of spirit and never shall be. However, 
 before he died my father sent for me and there was 
 a complete reconciliation between us, and he left 
 me every shilling that could possibly be arranged 
 for me out of his very considerable estate. 
 
 Failing to make disruption between myself and 
 Wilde, Lord Queensberry adopted a different line 
 
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 CLOUDS. 
 
 »<»*" 
 
 EASTKNOYLe. 
 
 'y* 
 
 SALISBURY, 
 
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 v^ Aa.^>^ ^^---^^ 
 
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 luJ^M^ ,uJ^^cJ< ^i-^^cM c^ yv^ 
 
Lord Queensberry Intervenes 81 
 
 of tactics; and, I believe, with the sincere view of 
 saving me from what he knew was an undesirable 
 entanglement, he went ahead to disgrace Wilde 
 publicly. At a theatre where one of Wilde's plays 
 was running he caused a bouquet of carrots to be 
 handed up to Wilde over the footlights, and he left 
 his card on him at his club with certain odious 
 remarks written on the back of it. I need scarcely 
 say that Wilde was very much distressed. He came 
 to me in a great state about it and said that it was 
 most wicked and cruel of my father to treat him 
 in this way and that, unless an immediate apology 
 was forthcoming, he would have no alternative but 
 to prosecute Lord Queensberry for criminal libel. 
 I was a little bit nettled at the tone he took, as he 
 seemed to imply by his air that I was in some 
 way to blame for what had happened; and I said 
 at once: ''You are not in the least likely to get 
 apologies from my father and, so far as I am con- 
 cerned, you can prosecute and be blowed!" 
 
 It has been widely asserted that I went out of 
 my way to instigate these proceedings against my 
 father. It is quite certain that I did not go on 
 my bended knees to ask Wilde not to take pro- 
 ceedings. He assured me that the suggestions and 
 accusation against him were quite false and without 
 foundation. I had not the smallest reason to sup- 
 
82 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 pose that he was lying to me, and I undoubtedly 
 allowed matters to take their course. I will go 
 further, and say that in a sense I was not sorry 
 that Lord Queensberry should be brought to book 
 for what I considered to be his very bad treatment 
 of both myself and Wilde. I went with Wilde, at 
 his request, to see a lawyer on the subject. This 
 lawyer had been recommended to him by Robert 
 Ross, who also accompanied us on this occasion. 
 He advised proceedings, and we went to Bow Street 
 and procured a warrant for my father's arrest. On 
 the morning the warrant was executed Wilde came 
 to me in a condition bordering on hysteria, told 
 me that he had no money and that at least three 
 hundred pounds were required in order that the 
 case might go on. At his urgent solicitation, I 
 gave him three hundred and sixty pounds to give 
 to his solicitor. (The figures appear in my bank- 
 book and were proved at the Ransome trial. ) This, 
 I am told, was most unnatural conduct. Wilde, for 
 his part, pointed out that it was entirely through his 
 friendship for me that he had to sufifer Lord 
 Queensberry's insults, and that unless he went on 
 with the prosecution he would be branded through- 
 out Europe for a person of vicious and abominable 
 life; and that, as I had been the means of getting 
 him into the trouble, it would be a poor thing if 
 
Lord Queensberry Intervenes 83 
 
 I would not find a few hundreds to get him out 
 again. What was I to do — and what would any 
 man so placed have done? I should have liked 
 to have quoted verbatim Wilde's version of this 
 episode as it was put to me at the Ransome trial; 
 but since the manuscript of this book was completed 
 Mr. Robert Ross has obtained an injunction against 
 me, by which I am precluded from quoting any part 
 of the unpublished ''De Profundis'' manuscript. 
 This unpublished part has been used against me in 
 the most frightful manner. Venomous passages 
 have been read in open court and reproduced in 
 hundreds of newspapers, and yet I understand I 
 am debarred from quoting from it for the purpose 
 of replying to it and pointing out its obvious falsity. 
 It is unnecessary for me to enlarge on the absolute 
 negation of every principle of justice and common 
 sense which is involved in such a decision : it is too 
 obvious for that. I do not say that such decision 
 may not be a correct interpretation of the law as it 
 exists, though it is hard to believe it. What I do 
 say is that the existence of such a law is a disgrace 
 and a danger to the community, for it is obvious 
 that under its provisions any man can foully slander 
 another and so arrange his slander that reply to it 
 becomes impossible during the lifetime of the slan- 
 dered. For example, there is nothing to prevent 
 
84 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 me from writing a long letter, say, to Mr. Justice 
 Astbury — the judge who granted Mr. Ross the 
 interim injunction restraining me from quoting 
 passages from the unpublished "De Profundis." I 
 can, if I please, accuse him in this letter of every 
 sort of crime and impute to him every kind of base- 
 ness ; I can attack his parents and his relations and 
 I can ascribe to him imaginary words alleged to 
 have been spoken by him, and I can invent imag- 
 inary scenes in which I allege that he has taken 
 part. All I have to do is to hand this letter to a 
 friend and give him instructions that after my 
 death it is to be placed in the British Museum and 
 kept there till such time as the friend may think 
 fitting to bring it out and publish it. If Mr. Justice 
 Astbury should happen to outlive me, and if he 
 should thereupon by some chance get knowledge of 
 the fact that a long epistle addressed to him and 
 containing a violent attack on his character is lying 
 in the British Museum and is to be published in fifty 
 years' time, he will be powerless to take the smallest 
 step to prevent the publication of this posthumous 
 libel, and he will not even be able to defend himself 
 against the accusations it contains. The copyright 
 in the manuscript will be the property of my heirs 
 and executors, and should Mr. Justice Astbury 
 propose to quote any part of it with a view to show- 
 
Lord Queensberry Intervenes 85 
 
 ing its scandalous and ridiculous falsity he will im- 
 mediately be pulled up by the law of copyright. My 
 slanderous and shameful letter will be a valuable 
 literary property; for Mr. Justice Astbury to quote 
 passages from it would be injurious to its market 
 value. In vain he would protest that he was surely 
 entitled to defend himself against an attack made 
 on him by a dead man and designed to be made 
 public to the world after his own death. He would 
 simply be told that ''the law is quite clear/' and 
 he would have to grin and bear it as well as he 
 could, just as I have to do under precisely similar 
 circumstances. What I can, at any rate, legiti- 
 mately do — even within the narrow compass which 
 Mr. Justice Astbury's interpretation of the law 
 allows me — is to set out the true facts connected 
 with this period of Wilde's career and my own con- 
 nection with it. 
 
 I desire firstly to state emphatically that I did 
 not force Wilde into taking proceedings against 
 my father. The matter can be summed up in a 
 few sentences. My father had accused Wilde of 
 certain abominations. These accusations it seems 
 were true. Wilde denied the truth of them to me 
 and proceeded to take up what, in view of the facts 
 known to himself and not to me, was a ridiculous 
 prosecution against my father. He was, of course, 
 
86 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 beaten, and the authorities turned upon him and 
 convicted him of crimes which he had denied. Then 
 I became a convenient scapegoat. 
 
 I did not drag Wilde down to Bow Street to 
 procure a warrant. I went with him, but at his 
 own request. The suggestion of coercion — either 
 moral or physical — is ridiculous. Here was the 
 ''King of Life" — a great big, fat, strong fellow, 
 full of brains and forty-one years of age — "in the 
 prime of his splendid manhood," as one of his 
 admirers puts it; and I was sixteen years his junior 
 — that is to say, twenty-four years of age. The 
 real fact is that he had something inside him that 
 I knew nothing about — namely and to wit, a guilty 
 conscience. He was too much of a coward to tell 
 me that he was guilty of the charges the Marquis 
 of Queensberry had levelled at him, and he was 
 too much of a coward, even, to go to Bow Street 
 for a warrant alone : so he came whimpering to me 
 to go with him. 
 
 I did not coerce or cajole Wilde into going to 
 Monte Carlo at this time, nor did Wilde pay my 
 expenses or my gambling losses. Wilde said his 
 nerves were all broken up. He had never been 
 to Monte Carlo, and we went there in order that 
 he might be distracted from the question of the 
 trial, upon which he seemed to brood a great deal. 
 
THE LATE MARQUIS OF QUEENSBERRY 
 
Lord Queensberry Intervenes 87 
 
 Believing him to be an innocent man, I told him 
 that he was a fool to worry and that it was the other 
 side who ought to do the worrying, and we went to 
 ]\Ionte Carlo. I have frequently been to Monte 
 Carlo, and I have never in my life spent more than 
 two hours at a stretch in the rooms. On this par- 
 ticular occasion I was less frequently in the rooms 
 and for less periods of time than I have ever been 
 before or since, largely because Wilde was with me. 
 More often than not he was with me in the rooms, 
 and I gave him more than one handful of louis out 
 of my winnings. He never had the pluck to put a 
 louis on the table because, as I have said, he always 
 felt that a gold piece was a good deal of money. In 
 any case, does it stand to reason that a man who 
 had no money wherewith to pay his solicitor's fees 
 was the kind of man one would take to Monte Carlo 
 to pay one's hotel expenses and Casino losses ? No 
 one but a fool would pretend to believe such a 
 farrago of rubbish. 
 
 Wilde's friends, including the never-to-be-for- 
 gotten Robert Sherard, with the "face like a Roman 
 Emperor," whom Wilde thought "perfectly wonder- 
 ful," have echoed the cry that I was the author of 
 his disaster and downfall. Even Mrs. Wilde writes 
 to tell Sherard that I had "marred a fine life." Mr. 
 Ransome, who tells his readers that he derives his 
 
88 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 biographical facts from Ross, says it in print. All 
 these people should surely have been aware that the 
 person who ruined Oscar Wilde and brought about 
 his disaster and marred his life was Oscar Wilde 
 himself. He was not charged at the Old Bailey 
 for having taken proceedings against the Marquis 
 of Queensberry, but for having made a low, squalid 
 and abominable brute of himself. They prefer to 
 assume that he was convicted on false evidence 
 and to speak always of me as the author of his 
 debacle. Their great point seems to be that if he 
 had not known me he would probably never have 
 been found out and might have passed down to 
 posterity for one of those highly respectable per- 
 sons of whom he professes to be so contemptuous; 
 and if this be their point, I will cheerfully concede 
 it to them. 
 
 It was also a charge against me — again on 
 Wilde's word only — that I was, at the time of his 
 trouble, attacking him with loathsome letters. Now, 
 what does this mean, and what is the suggestion? 
 Where are those letters, and how could I be ac- 
 cusing him in letters on the one hand, and putting 
 up money to defend him from these very accusa- 
 tions on the other ? I had written him no loathsome 
 letters : all I had written after our conversation on 
 the subject was a letter in which I confirmed my 
 
Lord Queensberry Intervenes 89 
 
 opinion that, as he was innocent of these charges, 
 he had no alternative but to proceed against my 
 father. Yet this was brought against me as being 
 as 'loathsome'' as the cards on which my father 
 had been charging him with a terrible offence. The 
 truth was that Wilde, having once decided to take 
 proceedings against my father, made up his mind 
 that, if they failed, I was to be responsible for 
 everything. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 THE WILDE TRIALS 
 
 A LL the world knows that the proceedings 
 /\ against my father broke down, as it was 
 jL, JL, only natural that they should. Wilde had 
 a guilty mind, which he was careful to hide from 
 me, and he attributed his defeat to "a foul and hide- 
 ous conspiracy'' and not to the fact that my father 
 had merely spoken the truth. One of his biog- 
 raphers has given a highly melodramatic account of 
 what happened after the collapse of the prosecution. 
 Says the writer in question: "At that moment, my 
 friend, with some companions, was sitting in a 
 private room in the Cadogan Arms (sic), smoking 
 cigarettes, drinking whisky-and-soda, and waiting. 
 What for waiting (sic), not one of them could have 
 said. They had set fire to a mine and were trying to 
 stupefy themselves into the belief and hope that it 
 would not explode beneath them. It was reported to 
 me that when, after an intentional delay of many 
 hours, unable to wait any longer, the police at last 
 moved and a knock came at the door of that sitting- 
 
 90 
 
The Wilde Trials 91 
 
 room in the Cadogan Arms, they all blanched as if 
 under the shock of a sudden surprise. Not one of his 
 friends had the sense to explain to Wilde what was 
 the true meaning of the warning his counsel had 
 given at the close of his cross-examination, or to 
 force him to realise that, if only as a matter of 
 public policy, he should leave the country at once. 
 As a matter of fact, the warrant for his arrest was 
 not signed until after the last day train for Dover, 
 carefully watched, had been seen to leave without 
 him, and it was impossible to delay action any 
 longer." 
 
 The inexactitudes herein set forward are as 
 beautiful as they are numerous. In the first place, 
 this wonderful biographer's friend never sat with 
 some companions in a private room in the Cadogan 
 Arms smoking cigarettes and drinking whiskies and 
 soda. Wilde's companions, for reasons best known 
 to themselves, disappeared like snowflakes on a 
 river the moment it was known that Sir Edward 
 Clarke had withdrawn from the proceedings against 
 my father. The only person left with him at this 
 precise juncture happens to have been myself. We 
 were both well aware that Wilde's arrest might fol- 
 low on what had happened ; and Wilde was not only 
 sure that he was about to be arrested, but he told 
 me that in all likelihood they would arrest me also. 
 
92 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 I did my best to cheer him up, and I pointed out to 
 him that they were welcome to indulge in any 
 amount of arresting, since he said himself that he 
 had done nothing and I knew that I had done noth- 
 ing. I had a suite of rooms at the Cadogan Hotel — 
 not ''Arms," Mr. Sherard, if you please ! — in Sloane 
 Street, and I drove Wilde there from the Old Bailey 
 after we had lunched at the Holborn Hotel. I 
 never saw a man more broken up or more nervously 
 anxious about himself. He kept on tearfully pro- 
 testing that it was a vile and hideous conspiracy 
 against him, and that the suspense would kill him. 
 I managed to bring him to reason, somewhat, by 
 talking to him pretty plainly; and, in order to help 
 him with the suspense difficulty, I went down to the 
 House of Commons to see my cousin, George 
 Wyndham, and asked him if he could find out what 
 the authorities intended to do. Wyndham saw me 
 in the lobby and, after making enquiries in the 
 House, came out and told me that Sir Robert Reid 
 had told him that there was to be a prosecution. I 
 went back to the Cadogan Hotel and found there, 
 not Oscar Wilde, but a letter in which he told me 
 he had been arrested and would have to pass 
 the night at Bow Street, and asking me to see vari- 
 ous people on the question of bail, and also to come 
 to Bow Street and try to see him. This letter I 
 
The Wilde Trials 93 
 
 had intended to produce in facsimile, but the amiable 
 Mr. Ross has obtained an injunction which prevents 
 me from doing so. There was never any question 
 of his leaving the country until the time when he 
 was out on bail. According to his own showing, he 
 had no reason for leaving the country other than 
 to avoid the inconvenience of a criminal trial. In 
 any case, he could not have left, because he was 
 shadowed by detectives from the moment he had left 
 the Old Bailey that morning. So far from sitting 
 in private rooms and endeavouring to stupefy our- 
 selves with cigarettes and whisky, we had spent the 
 hour after lunch in going round to George Lewis, 
 the solicitor, to see if he could do anything. He 
 said it was too late for anything to be done, and 
 that if the matter had been taken to him in the first 
 instance, he would simply have destroyed my 
 father's card and told Wilde not to be a fool. In 
 view of Mr. Ross's attempt to attribute Wilde's 
 downfall to my bad advice, it is singular that I had 
 recommended him to go to Mr. Lewis. If he had 
 done so, there would have been no prosecution. As 
 it was, he went to Mr. Ross's own solicitor, Mr. 
 Humphreys, who advised the prosecution which 
 proved so disastrous. 
 
 I do not think that the grounds upon which Sir 
 Edward Clarke withdrew from the proceedings 
 
94 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 against my father have ever been stated, and con- 
 sequently I set them out herewith. Sir Edward 
 Clarke, like myself, believed in Wilde's innocence. 
 He looked upon him as more or less of a madman, 
 who did everything that was foolish and unwise 
 for the mere sake of appearing eccentric or 
 superior; but he nevertheless believed that he was 
 innocent of any actual viciousness. After Sir Ed- 
 ward Carson's cross-examination of Wilde, there 
 was a conference, and Sir Edward Clarke pointed 
 out that it would be impossible to get over the preju- 
 dice created in the minds of the jury by Wilde's 
 admissions in the witness-box. Sir Edward Carson 
 had made great use of 'The Picture of Dorian 
 Gray" in the course of the cross-examination, and 
 passages had been read which obviously pointed to 
 a most objectionable attitude of mind on the part 
 of the author towards certain vices. Sir Edward 
 Clarke advised that when the proceedings opened 
 next day, no further evidence should be offered 
 against the Marquis of Queensberry, and that the 
 case against him should be abandoned on the 
 ground that what Wilde had written and published 
 in ''Dorian Gray" would be sufficient to justify a 
 reasonable person in supposing that Wilde sympa- 
 thised with the vices in question. It should be 
 pointed out that my father had not accused Wilde 
 
The Wilde Trials 95 
 
 of the actual practice of these vices; on the card 
 which he left at Wilde's club he had written an 
 accusation against Wilde as "posing" as a vicious 
 person. Sir Edward Clarke was of opinion that, 
 if the course indicated were taken, the defence 
 would be more or less appeased and that Wilde 
 would, to some extent, save his face and lessen the 
 risks of a subsequent prosecution. "If you with- 
 draw from the case now," said Sir Edward, "it will 
 be a nine days' talk, but you will probably hear no 
 more about it so far as the authorities are con- 
 cerned. If you continue, and Lord Queensberry is 
 found 'not guilty,' they will, in all probability, arrest 
 you in court." Mr. — now Sir Charles — Matthews, 
 who was also counsel for Wilde, agreed with Sir 
 Edward, and it was decided to withdraw. Every- 
 body who writes about this part of the proceedings 
 contrives to suggest that Sir Edward Clarke threw 
 up the sponge in disgust and without Wilde's con- 
 sent or knowledge. In point of fact, Wilde con- 
 sented to the withdrawal and, so far from throwing 
 him over as a client, both Sir Edward Clarke and 
 Sir Charles Matthews defended him in the two sub- 
 sequent trials, and, what is more, defended him 
 for nothing. 
 
 On returning to the Cadogan Hotel and finding 
 that Wilde had been arrested, I went straight to 
 
96 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 Bow Street and offered bail for his temporary 
 release. I was told that bail could not be accepted 
 that night and that, if bail were accepted at all, 
 other securities besides myself would be required. 
 I went off at once to see Mr. — now Sir George — 
 Alexander and Mr. Lewis Waller, at whose theatres 
 Wilde's plays were running, and asked them to offer 
 bail. In the letter Wilde left for me at the Cadogan 
 he requested me to see these gentlemen for that 
 purpose. They both refused. Between the time 
 of his arrest and of his trial at the Old Bailey, Wilde 
 was kept at Holloway Prison, and either there or at 
 Bow Street I visited him daily for a period of three 
 or four weeks. There was nobody else to come 
 near him. His companions had left the country, 
 his wife would have nothing to do with him, and 
 his general acquaintance was going about London 
 protesting that it had never known him. It is the 
 fashion to say that I deserted him. At the Ran- 
 some trial Mr. Campbell, k.c, had the face to put 
 it to me that I fled the country. If a daily pilgrim- 
 age to Holloway and daily interviews with a pris- 
 oner are desertion and fleeing the country, then 
 my gentle detractors are right. Without the slight- 
 est intention of benefit to me, a certain person has 
 made public a letter which states that my daily visits 
 were the only things which quickened Wilde into 
 
The Wilde Trials 97 
 
 life. And here is a portion of a letter which I 
 myself had occasion to write to this same person : "I 
 saw Oscar yesterday in a private room at the police 
 court, and he gave me your three letters and asked 
 me to write and tell you how deeply touched he was 
 by your kindness and sympathy and loyalty to him 
 in his terrible and undeserved trouble. He himself 
 is so ill and unhappy that he has not sufficient 
 strength and energy to write, and all his time has 
 to be devoted to preparing his defence against a 
 diabolical conspiracy, which seems almost unlimited 
 in its size and strength. I will not add to your 
 sorrow by telling you of the privations and suffer- 
 ings he has to endure. I have seen him three times 
 since his arrest: once through a horrible kind of 
 barred cage, separated from him by a space of one 
 yard and in almost complete darkness, with twenty 
 other people talking at the same time. This is the 
 ordinary way, and one visit a day of a quarter of 
 an hour is all he is allowed. After that, I managed 
 to get an order from the Home Secretary to see him 
 in a private room for three-quarters of an hour. And 
 yesterday I contrived to have a fairly long interview 
 with him at the police court. In spite of all the 
 brutal and cowardly clamour of our disgusting 
 newspapers, I think the sympathy of all decent men 
 is with him, and that he will ultimately triumph ; but 
 
98 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 he has much to go through first. I have determined 
 to remain here and do what I possibly can, though 
 I am warned on all hands that my own risk is not 
 inconsiderable and my family implore me to go 
 away." It is plain, on the whole, therefore, that 
 desertion and fleeing the country are rather out of 
 the picture. 
 
 During the time that Wilde lay in Holloway 
 Prison I began to have a certain amount of doubt 
 as to his innocence. In our repeated conversations 
 he clung to the conspiracy fiction with considerable 
 persistence. As the time for the trial drew near, 
 however, he began to weaken, and eventually he 
 admitted that there were "things in his life which 
 could be made to look pretty awkward;'' but this 
 was as far as he would go. His one anxiety seemed 
 to be that I should not give him up, and I always 
 told him that I never would. One day he said to 
 me: "Even if these horrible tales were true, you 
 would stick to me, wouldn't you?" And I said, "Of 
 course I would." It was not until the day before 
 the trial that he made anything like a proper attempt 
 to unburden himself. It had been arranged that I 
 should see him in a private room on this day and 
 that we should have a longer interview than was 
 permitted by the regulations. We talked on gen- 
 eral matters for some time, but ultimately Wilde 
 
The Wilde Trials 99 
 
 became very serious and said that he did not see 
 how it was possible for him to hope for a verdict 
 of ''not guilty." He then went on to tell me that, 
 ''in a way," the charges set forward in the indict- 
 ment were true and that he must have been mad 
 to live as he had been living and that his only hope 
 was that the skill of Clarke and Matthews might 
 save him from the severest punishment. He re- 
 minded me of my promise not to forsake him and, 
 though I was shocked at what he told me, I am free 
 to confess that it never entered into my head that 
 it was my duty forthwith to give up his acquaint- 
 ance. I told him that what he had said should not 
 make any difference and that I would stick to him 
 through thick and thin. 
 
 In the meanwhile great pressure was being 
 brought to bear on me by my family to leave the 
 country. My father's advisers put up the very 
 worst reason they could have chosen to get me to 
 do this. They pretended that, as my name had been 
 so continually linked with Wilde's, and as a silly 
 letter he had addressed to me had been read in 
 court, I was under some danger of being arrested 
 and charged with him. Such threats did not move 
 me in the least — rather, they confirmed me in my 
 determination to stop where I was. During those 
 unpleasant days I seemed almost to live at Bow 
 
100 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 Street or Holloway, so that if the police had wanted 
 me they knew where to find me. Then Sir Edward 
 Clarke took a hand, quite independently, I believe, 
 of any suggestion from my family. He pointed out 
 that my continued association with Wilde after the 
 collapse of the case against my father was creating 
 all sorts of comment and prejudice, and that it 
 would be much better for Wilde if I went abroad. 
 When I put it to Wilde he said that he quite agreed 
 with Sir Edward Clarke and that I should be oblig- 
 ing him and putting him in a better position in the 
 eyes of the world if I remained away during the 
 trial. Even with this assurance I was not satisfied, 
 and I asked Wilde to think it over and put it into 
 writing, which he did. I thereupon left England 
 for Paris. The result of the trial was that the 
 jury disagreed. There had been six counts in the 
 indictment, and the prosecution had brought up all 
 sorts of extraordinary evidence, but the jury could 
 not come to a unanimous verdict. It had been said, 
 and, I believe, with truth, that only one juror stood 
 out in Wilde's favour. In any case, there was the 
 fact of no verdict, and the authorities had to con- 
 sider their position. They decided to have a new 
 trial, and Wilde was taken back to Holloway. It 
 was arranged that he should be admitted to bail 
 until the new trial took place if sureties to the 
 
The Wilde Trials 101 
 
 amount of two thousand five hundred pounds were 
 forthcoming. My brother Percy, then Lord Doug- 
 las of Hawick and now Marquis of Queensberry, 
 and the Rev. Stuart Headlam became bail for the 
 amount. 
 
 I have often thought that the supremely tragical 
 period of Wilde's life was not the moment of his 
 taking action against my father, as he suggested, 
 but the period during which he was out on bail with 
 the second trial looming ahead of him. I have 
 reason for knowing that Wilde looked upon the dis- 
 agreement of the jury as a sort of verdict in his 
 favour, and was under the impression that he stood 
 a very good sporting chance of being found not 
 guilty at the second trial. It is notorious that per- 
 sons afflicted with Wilde's particular type of 
 viciousness are for ever believing that the world 
 will one day condone and even approve of them. 
 Wilde looked upon the one juryman who refused 
 to find him guilty not as an honest Englishman who 
 was determined to satisfy himself on the evidence, 
 but as a friend or approver of unnameable wicked- 
 ness. He argued: ''If there was one man of this 
 jury who was with me there is sure to be one on the" 
 next," and, as it was evident that people were be- 
 coming tired of the scandal, and the press, which 
 in the beginning had pursued him with relentless 
 
102 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 and bloodthirsty fierceness, had calmed down a 
 good deal, he began to think that he would get oflf. 
 For my own part, I do not profess to have had 
 great wisdom, but it happens that I did not think 
 that he would get of? and, rightly or wrongly, I 
 advised him to leave the country. I wrote to my 
 brother Percy and asked him if he would mind if 
 Wilde made a bolt of it. The matter was put to 
 Wilde and he refused to budge. His brother is 
 reputed to have said : ''Oscar is an Irish gentleman 
 and will face the music.'' It has been held up to 
 him for nobility that he did remain, and I have 
 frequently seen it stated that he remained because 
 he did not wish to be dishonourable with respect 
 to his bail. His bail, however, would not have com- 
 plained if he had gone. Yet he stopped. Here 
 again the tragedy was entirely of his own making. 
 Even if we are to believe that Wilde abandoned 
 his will-power entirely to me when he went to Bow 
 Street for his warrant, how comes it to pass that 
 when he was at Oakley Street without a shilling or 
 a friend and a public exposure behind him of the 
 like no man ever had in all history, his will-power 
 suddenly reasserts itself? I have been blamed for 
 suggesting that he should go away. On the other 
 hand, the very people who blamed me for advising 
 his retreat when I knew that he was guilty, have 
 
The Wilde Trials 103 
 
 blamed me for not advising him to get away when 
 I supposed him to be innocent. I take no shame 
 whatever for having advised him as I did. His 
 withdrawal to France would have cost my brother 
 two thousand five hundred pounds, and heaven 
 alone knows what it would have cost me in hard 
 money; but it would have saved Wilde two years 
 of imprisonment and it would have saved literature 
 from the ultimate degradation at his hands. For it 
 is obvious that, if he had remained a free man, he 
 would not have degraded himself and the English 
 language by writing ''De Profundis." 
 
 I have already produced the statement of one 
 of Wilde's biographers as to the manner in which 
 Wilde and his companions are alleged to have spent 
 the hours between the collapse of the case against 
 Lord Queensberry and Wilde's arrest; but I should 
 like once more to call attention to the sentence about 
 the police knocking at the door of the sitting-room 
 at the Cadogan Arms and the ''blanched faces" and 
 ''sudden surprise" of Wilde and his companions. 
 Here is another account of what happened: "Oscar 
 Wilde had spent that afternoon in a private sitting- 
 room at a hotel, smoking cigarettes, drinking 
 whisky and soda and reading now the Yellow Book 
 and now evening papers. He evinced neither dis- 
 may nor trepidation when the officers entered the 
 
104 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 room^ and, on alighting from the cab at Scotland 
 Yard, he had a courteous discussion with one of 
 the detectives about the payment of the cab." It 
 will interest the reader to know that both these 
 accounts, though they are diametrically opposed one 
 to the other, are the work of the same person — 
 namely, Robert Harborough Sherard. 
 
 It is the same Mr. Sherard who tells the follow- 
 ing fearful and wonderful anecdote: ''Late in the 
 afternoon of the following day, Saturday, 25th 
 May, 1895, Oscar Wilde was found guilty and sen- 
 tenced to two years' hard labour. There had been 
 six counts against him. He was asked after his 
 release by a very old friend as to the justice of the 
 finding, and he said: Tive of the counts referred 
 to matters with which I had absolutely nothing to 
 do. There was some foundation for one of the 
 counts.' 'But then, why,' asked his friend, 'did you 
 not instruct your defenders?' 'That would have 
 meant betraying a friend,' said Oscar. Circum- 
 stances which have since transpired have estab- 
 lished — what for the rest was never in doubt in the 
 minds of those who heard it made — the absolute 
 truth of this statement." 
 
 Presuming that Wilde said this, he must have 
 taken for granted that "those who heard him" had 
 suddenly become idiots. The six counts of the in- 
 
DRAWING OF LORD ALFRED DOUGLAS, AT THE 
 AGE OF TWENTY-FOUR 
 
The Wilde Trials 105 
 
 dictment bore reference to his improper relations 
 with different persons, all of whom were produced 
 in the witness-box and gave their evidence in 
 Wilde's presence. If a friend had been involved in 
 the slightest way, that friend's name would most 
 assuredly have leaked out in the course of the pro- 
 ceedings, and if twenty friends had been involved 
 and their names had been kept secret, Wilde's posi- 
 tion would not have been bettered in the slightest 
 degree or his guilt any the less plainly established. 
 Wilde was not of the stuff that goes to hard labour 
 with the name of a friend in his bosom when, by 
 mentioning that name, he could have cleared him- 
 self. His whole principle of life was subversive 
 to any such high altruism ; he would not have gone 
 without his dinner to save a friend — much less have 
 faced ruin and imprisonment. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 HARD LABOUR AND AFTER 
 
 TO say that I was distressed by the sentence 
 of two years' imprisonment with hard 
 labour, imposed upon Wilde by a Judge 
 who seemed to be absolutely without mercy, is to 
 put a mild term upon my condition of anguish. 
 Wilde and his supporters never ceased to suggest 
 that the whole thing was my fault. They never 
 blamed him for what he had done, but went about 
 calling my father opprobrious names and asserting 
 that I had been Wilde's ruin. It pleased them to 
 have a scapegoat upon whom to shift the moral 
 responsibilities of this big fat man and, with the 
 help of a foolish letter or two which I had written 
 at moments of great stress, they shifted them to 
 some purpose. I have no desire to be mealy- 
 mouthed about the suggestions which have been 
 made, and I will say right out what impression 
 it is that these people have tried to create from the 
 time that Wilde went to prison. They have sug- 
 
 io6 
 
Hard Labour and After 107 
 
 gested that I, Alfred Bruce Douglas, was a partner 
 in the vices of which Wilde was charged and con- 
 victed. There has been more or less established the 
 legend that it was I who took him from the path of 
 rectitude and introduced him to the kennels of foul- 
 ness; and the impression has been created that I 
 led a debauched life with him prior to his imprison- 
 ment and that, when he came out and was willing 
 to mend his ways and be reconciled to his wife, it 
 was I who seduced him and dragged him back to 
 his old villainies. I observe that Mr. Ransome has 
 the following note to the edition of his critical study 
 which has lately been published at a shilling: "The 
 publication of this book in 1912 was the subject of 
 a libel action which was brought against me in the 
 King's Bench Division of the High Court of Jus- 
 tice, and was heard before Mr. Justice Darling and 
 a Special Jury on four days in April, 1913. In that 
 action a verdict was given in my favour. In bring- 
 ing out this new edition I have considered the ques- 
 tion of reprinting the book in its original form, as I 
 have a perfect right to do; but as I do not consider 
 that the passages complained of are essential to 
 the critical purpose of my book, I have decided, in 
 order to spare the feelings of those who might be 
 pained by the further publication of those passages, 
 to omit them from this edition." 
 
108 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 Mr. Ransome's desire to spare people's feelings 
 by omitting from his book what is not true is won- 
 derfully creditable to him ; but the fact remains that 
 he asserted in his first edition that Wilde owed 
 some, at least, of the circumstances of his public 
 disgrace to me, while the exquisite Mr. Sherard 
 goes further and embellishes his "authoritative'' 
 life with the following passage : "He was then living 
 in Naples. The circumstances under which he had 
 been obliged to leave Berneval and return to the 
 least desirable companionship that the zvorld of men 
 offered to his choice are summed up in the follow- 
 ing sentence by the author of Twenty Years in 
 Paris' : The time came, however, when, being with- 
 out money, repulsed, desolate, he could no longer 
 resist entreaties which offered to him companion- 
 ship in the place of utter loneliness, friendship in 
 the place of hostility, homage in the place of insult 
 and, in the place of impending destitution, a luxuri- 
 ous and elegant hospitality.' " 
 
 It is well known that it was I who offered him a 
 sanctuary at Naples when his money had run out 
 and he was reduced to a paltry allowance of two 
 pounds nineteen and sixpence a week; and I sub- 
 mit that the sentence italicised in the above-quoted 
 passage is intended to mean — and can only mean — 
 one thing; while Ransome's assertion is capable of 
 
Hard Labour and After 109 
 
 the worst interpretation. And now we come to the 
 inner secret of the whole of the abominable busi- 
 ness. When Wilde went to prison I was in France, 
 by his own request. I wrote to him the moment 
 I heard of the sentence, and there can be no doubt 
 whatever that, up to this point, we were good 
 friends and that he counted me his chiefest and 
 dearest friend. I set to work immediately to do 
 what I could for him in the way of trying to get 
 his sentence reduced, and trying to obtain for him 
 special privileges in prison. In pursuance of my 
 promise and my natural desire to stick to him 
 through thick and thin, I even went the length of 
 writing to certain newspapers with a view to show- 
 ing that what he had done would not have been 
 considered so very terrible by many eminent people ; 
 that his offence was no offence at all in France, and 
 that his sentence was altogether out of proportion 
 to his crime when one came to consider the amount 
 of suffering a sentence of two years' hard labour 
 would entail upon a man of his nature and tem- 
 perament. 
 
 In addition to engaging myself in these efforts 
 on Wilde's behalf, I was kept continually busy re- 
 pelling all sorts of stupid attacks on myself. 
 Wilde's conviction and the curiosity and scandal 
 aroused by what transpired at the trial seems to 
 
110 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 have driven the whole of Paris into a state of mad- 
 ness for the time being. Statements of the most 
 ridiculous kind about Wilde and myself were pub- 
 lished broadcast — articles were printed which pur- 
 ported to be written by me and were signed in my 
 name, though I had never so much as seen them; 
 and one paper went the length of printing a number 
 of gallant letters which I was alleged to have ad- 
 dressed to a certain well-known demi-mondaine — 
 a lady, by the way, to whom I had never written 
 or spoken in my life. I spent a great deal of time 
 and temper in endeavouring to cope with these 
 matters : I challenged various people to duels and I 
 took actions at law against various newspapers. 
 But I soon found that it was next door to impossible 
 to keep track of my traducers and that I might 
 easily have spent the rest of my life in litigation 
 without obtaining redress. 
 
 About this time I wrote for the Mercure de 
 France an article about Wilde which might have 
 done him a certain amount of good in the literary 
 sense. Sherard heard in some way that this article 
 had been written ; he mentioned it to Wilde in prison 
 and, on the strength of what Wilde said, Sherard 
 wrote me a letter stating that Wilde desired that 
 the article should not appear. I gave Sherard his 
 immediate and proper answer and, as it was noth- 
 
Hard Labour and After 111 
 
 ing to me whether the article appeared or not, unless 
 Wilde wished it to appear, I arranged with the 
 Mercure de France that it should not be printed. 
 In the meantime, I decided to go to England and 
 to visit Wilde in prison, in order that we might 
 talk generally of his affairs. I wrote informing 
 Robert Ross of my intention and, in reply, he told 
 me that he had just come from Wilde and that, as 
 his correspondence and visitors were strictly lim- 
 ited, he desired that I should neither write to him 
 nor visit him. I said that I thought such a request 
 ought to have come to me directly from Wilde — 
 either by word of mouth or by letter — but Ross told 
 me that prisoners were allowed to write only a lim- 
 ited number of letters in the year, and to see only a 
 limited number of visitors and that he had already 
 written as many letters as he was entitled to write 
 and would be unable either to receive letters or 
 visitors for some time to come. I was very much 
 upset on receiving this news, and I had some 
 thought of trying to obtain an interview with Wilde 
 through influence which I possessed ; but I was told 
 that it would be bad for Wilde if I did so, and I 
 accordingly determined to follow out his wishes and 
 to wait until he could write or send to me. I sub- 
 sequently went to Naples and occupied myself with 
 literary pursuits, getting together a volume of 
 
112 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 poetry which I proposed to pubHsh and dedicate to 
 Wilde. 
 
 Now it is quite clear that during the latter part 
 of his imprisonment Wilde laboured under the im- 
 pression that my silence and my failure to visit 
 him were due to carelessness, indifference and 
 apathy on my part. Either he did not know, or 
 pretended not to know, of the precise intimations 
 given to me not to visit or write to him. As he did 
 not hear from me, he concluded that I had forsaken 
 him. This filled him with a violent anger, and he 
 set to work and wrote ''De Profundis." His rage 
 and hate apparently knew no limits, and Sherard 
 published a letter of Mrs. Wilde's, in which she 
 states that she had seen her husband in prison and 
 
 that he had said that if he could get hold of , 
 
 meaning myself, he would kill him. 
 
 And all this time I was thinking hourly of the 
 man who had been my friend and counting the days 
 to the time of his release. I had steady reports of 
 him from Ross, but never a word or a hint that he 
 was angry with me or that I had done anything 
 to offend him, until he had nearly completed his sen- 
 tence. The only indication of the sort that came 
 my way was in the matter of the dedication of my 
 first volume of poems. Ross wrote to say that 
 Wilde felt that it would be better if I did not dedi- 
 
Hard Labour and After 113 
 
 cate the book to him; and, as he wished it, I re- 
 frained and issued the book without any dedication 
 at all. 
 
 Of Wilde in prison we have had many touching 
 and woeful pictures. Sherard has a passage about 
 it which, in the circumstances, is worth quoting: 
 "In Wandsworth Prison first and then in Reading 
 Gaol, Oscar Wilde's mental development reached 
 a point of transcendency to which never in the 
 world of men he could have hoped to attain. There 
 had been forced upon him the recluse life which 
 had raised many men in the world's history towards 
 the stars, but which, perhaps, never before demon- 
 strated its reforming and enhancing powers in a 
 manner more magnificent, more orbicular, more tri- 
 umphant. In the old days he had tried to imitate 
 Balzac in his mode of life ; but Society and Pleasure 
 had ever knocked at the door of his cell, nor had 
 he the strength of will great enough to resist their 
 allurements. Now there were iron bars between 
 him and the wasteful pleasures of the world: a 
 claustration as strict, if less severe, than that which 
 Balzac imposed upon himself, held him fast, and he 
 had the time to think. He had the time to think, 
 and with a brain which at last had recovered its 
 splendid normal power. The prison regime, the 
 enforced temperance in food, the enforced abstin- 
 
114 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 ence from all narcotic drugs and drink, the regular 
 hours, the periodical exercise — the simple life, in 
 one word — had restored him the splendid heritage 
 that he had received from nature. What the real 
 Oscar Wilde was, and of what he was capable, was 
 now to be made patent. In 'De Profundis' he laid 
 his soul bare, and the impartial are to judge from 
 that book of the man's new powers as a thinker 
 and as a literary artist. His friends will ask no 
 more than that, reserving to themselves the high 
 delight of taking a holy joy in the lofty virtues 
 which that book reveals, the kindness, the patience, 
 the resignation, the forgiveness of sins so splendid 
 that one may almost believe that in his ardent medi- 
 tations on Christ he was able to bring the bodily 
 presence of the God who taught these things into 
 his cell, and to learn from the divine lips themselves 
 what is the true secret of human happiness. Critics 
 abroad have said : There is too much about Christ 
 in "De Profundis," ' overlooking the fact that the 
 book is, from the first page to the last, inspired by 
 Christ — that no man who had not found Christ 
 could have written that book, nor lived as the man 
 who wrote it did live. In England, one heard it 
 said that it is absurd to believe that an agnostic, a 
 sensualist would turn to religion, and the blas- 
 phemous statement has been made that this book 
 
Hard Labour and After 115 
 
 is, in its way, no more sincere than the dying con- 
 fessions of many prison cells, the greasy cant that 
 officious chaplains win from fawning prisoners. 
 One has heard the word HYPOCRISY pro- 
 nounced." This is very precious writing and quite 
 typical of the ecstatic frame of mind of the average 
 Wilde enthusiast. Unlike Mr. Ransome, however, 
 Mr. Sherard does not appear to have had the ad- 
 vantage of knowing that the published "De Pro- 
 fundis," which aroused him to such a pitch of 
 pietistic fervour, is merely a collection of elegant 
 extracts. A perusal of the extracts from the com- 
 plete "De Profundis'' published in reports of the 
 Ransome trial would have convinced him that this 
 saint-like inhabitant of Wandsworth and Reading 
 gaols was indeed a hypocrite of the most hypo- 
 critical dye, and that the "De Profundis'' was in- 
 deed "no more sincere than the dying confessions 
 of many prison cells, the greasy cant that officious 
 chaplains wring from fawning prisoners." Nay, it 
 was worse than this, for the design of the canting 
 deceiver of prison chaplains is not usually to hurt 
 other people, whereas Wilde's design was utterly 
 to destroy the reputation and good name of a man 
 who had befriended him ; and to do this in such a 
 way that he might still continue to obtain kindness 
 and money from the object of his hatred and leave 
 
116 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 him absolutely without a word of defence in his 
 lifetime. I say that Oscar Wilde conceived this 
 horrible and unheard-of plot in his unreasoning 
 rage at what he conceived to be my attitude towards 
 him, and I say that Mr. Robert Ross, who professed 
 great friendship for me both then and until long 
 after Wilde's death, did nothing to make Wilde's 
 plot ineffective, or even to warn me of it. On the 
 contrary, he presented the unpublished parts of 
 '*De Profundis" to the authorities at the British 
 Museum on the understanding that it was to re- 
 main sealed up only until the year 1960. However, 
 I shall deal with the whole question of ''De Pro- 
 fundis" in a separate chapter. My main point here 
 is to show plainly what has been brought to my 
 charge, and to show how the people who bring these 
 charges stultify themselves. Nobody who reads 
 Mr. Ransome's book before (out of the kindness 
 of his heart) he removed his aspersions on me, could 
 doubt for a moment that he wished to convey the 
 impression that I had a bad influence upon Wilde 
 and that it was this bad influence that brought 
 Wilde to grief and prevented him from rehabili- 
 tating himself after his release. Yet it is this same 
 Mr. Ransome — who tells his readers in his preface 
 that he is indebted to Mr. Ross for verifications of 
 his biographical facts — who gives us the following 
 
Hard Labour and After 117 
 
 precise details as to ''the intensification of Wilde's 
 personality" when he became a habitual devotee of 
 the vice for which he was imprisoned : ''He had first 
 experimented in that vice,'' says Ransome, 'Hn 
 1886; his experiments became a habit in 1889." 
 Well, in 1886 I was a boy, fifteen years of age, at 
 Winchester School, and I had never so much as 
 heard of Oscar Wilde; whereas in 1889 I was 
 eighteen years of age and in the south of France 
 with a tutor, and was not to meet Wilde — whose 
 name was still unknown to me — till nearly three 
 years later. So that by the time we did meet he 
 had already found his way to the lowest moral 
 depths without my juvenile assistance. It is to be 
 noted further that both Ross and Sherard knew 
 Wilde long before I did; and, according to their 
 own showing, were his constant and faithful com- 
 panions until I arrived on the scene. Both of them 
 swear that they never heard him use an objection- 
 able phrase or an obscene remark, and that they 
 had no inkling of his aberration. Whereas I, a cal- 
 low undergraduate from Oxford, with so simple 
 an outlook upon life that, in spite of my classical 
 training, I never clearly understood the nature of 
 Wilde's viciousness till the time of the trials, am 
 alleged to have known everything and to have been 
 
118 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 the prime mover in events v^hich had occurred 
 years before I was on the scene at all. 
 
 Then again, let us take the accounts of v^hat hap- 
 pened immediately after Wilde came out of prison. 
 During the time of his incarceration some sympa- 
 thiser or other — a lady, by the way — put up a thou- 
 sand pounds for the use of Wilde, so that he might 
 have money by him while he was in prison and a 
 sufficient sum to face the world with when he came 
 out. There can be no doubt whatever that Wilde 
 had at least eight hundred pounds at his command 
 on the day he left prison. Ransome tells us that 
 he "immediately crossed the Channel for Dieppe, 
 where he stayed for some days and drove about with 
 Mr. Robert Ross and Mr. Reginald Turner, exam- 
 ining the surrounding villages, most of which 
 seemed uninhabitable.'' At the end of a week he 
 took rooms in the inn at the little hamlet of Berne- 
 val. Then he took a chalet for the season and 
 talked about building a house. "He asked for his 
 pictures and Japanese gold-paper that should pro- 
 vide a fitting background for lithographs by 
 Rothenstein and Shannon." Sherard tells us that 
 at Berneval his resources melted away in his hands. 
 "He spent money with the recklessness of sailors 
 on shore and prisoners free of gaol. ... In inviting 
 friends to visit him at Berneval, he used to ask those 
 
Hard Labour and After 119 
 
 who were married to bring their wives with them. 
 . . . He showed himself, to those who had the 
 privilege of seeing him during the weeks he spent in 
 Berneval, a gentleman, a hero, and a Christian T 
 Doubtless! The italics are mine and I make no 
 comment. I was in Paris and, later, in Aix-les- 
 Bains with my mother during the brief, bright, 
 brotherly Berneval weeks, when Oscar Wilde was 
 getting rid of the last of his substance and throwing 
 out of the window, as it were, the money which 
 should have been used reasonably to maintain him 
 until he could cast about for work. I heard from 
 Wilde that he was all right and going well and 
 strong, and that he had ''dear so-and-so" and ''dear 
 so-and-so'' to visit him. Several letters passed be- 
 tween us, and he kept on saying that he would come 
 to see me. Ultimately, when I had decided to take 
 a villa at Naples, it was arranged that Wilde should 
 visit me there. Just before I started for Naples, I 
 got a long letter, in which he explained that he had 
 spent his last shilling, that all his friends were gone, 
 and that he hadn't even sufficient money to pay his 
 fare to Naples. I telegraphed a sufficient sum to 
 cover his expenses and he joined me there at the 
 Royal Hotel. Soon after I moved into the Villa 
 Giudice at Posilippo, taking Wilde with me. In less 
 than three months at Berneval he had got through 
 
120 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 eight hundred pounds, and he came to me penniless, 
 excepting for what I had myself given him. It is 
 suggested that his coming to Naples was the result 
 of frantic appeals and persuasions on my part. In 
 point of fact, he came because he had nowhere else 
 to go and because nobody else would have him. He 
 required neither ''luring" nor "tempting" — which 
 he certainly would not have had from me, in any 
 case — and he was very glad to find a refuge in my 
 establishment. 
 
 There is just one other point, and I shall have 
 done with this very unpleasant part of my subject. 
 The people who suggest that in some unexplained 
 manner I was the means of separating Wilde from 
 his wife forget that Wilde left prison in May, J 897, 
 and did not join me at Naples until the end of 
 August of the same year. We have seen that im- 
 mediately on his release from prison he went to 
 Dieppe and was driving about with Ross and 
 Turner. Why did they not take him to his wife? 
 They were with him for weeks at Berneval, and so 
 was Sherard. Why was the reconciliation — which 
 Sherard professes to have laboured like Hercules 
 to arrange — never brought about? Of course, the 
 answer is Alfred Douglas stood between them. The 
 fact is, that Alfred Douglas did nothing of the sort. 
 What actually happened was this: Wilde never 
 
Hard Labour and After 121 
 
 dreamed of rejoining Mrs. Wilde or becoming 
 reconciled to her while his money lasted. When his 
 money was spent he wrote to Ross and asked if 
 more could not be raised. Ross replied that nothing 
 more could be done. Wilde then wrote to his wife 
 to enquire if she would receive him as her husband. 
 Wilde asserted that she sent him a reply full of 
 hums and haws and imposed a number of what he 
 described as absurd conditions. The letter drove 
 him into a fury and, I believe, he never wrote again 
 to her in his life, or she to him. The plain fact is — 
 as the unpublished part of ''De Profundis" shows — 
 that Wilde had never forgiven me for what he be- 
 lieved to be my neglect of him while he was in 
 prison ; and that if the supplies of money had held 
 out, he would never have come near me. But when 
 he found that his admirers and supporters in Lon- 
 don were not disposed to keep him in the lap of 
 luxury at Berneval, and that they considered his 
 miserable pittance of under three pounds a week 
 sufficient for him to live upon, his thoughts turned 
 towards Naples, where he knew no such views of 
 economy were likely to prevail. He came to me on 
 false pretences, because he knew that ''De Pro- 
 fundis'' had not been destroyed and, from that time 
 forward to the day of his death, I had the honour 
 and pleasure of supporting him. 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 NAPLES AND PARIS 
 
 WHEN Wilde came to the Villa Giudice 
 he was in fair health and reasonable 
 spirits. That he had eaten and drunk 
 too much at Berneval he freely admitted, but on 
 the whole he was in good physical condition. From 
 the end of August to the middle of November he 
 had the run of my villa as my guest, and I paid 
 the whole of the housekeeping expenses, including 
 the tradesmen's bills for food and wine, the ser- 
 vants' wages, and so forth, to which expenses Wilde 
 never so much as contributed a farthing piece. So 
 far as I am aware, the life he lived here was per- 
 fectly proper and without reproach. He had 
 brought with him from Berneval a rough draft 
 of part of the "Ballad of Reading Gaol," which he 
 read to me. It has been stated on supposed author- 
 ity that Wilde composed none of the ''Ballad of 
 Reading Gaol" during the time of his imprison- 
 ment. He told me that he had composed certain 
 of the stanzas in prison and he added to them at 
 
 122 
 
Naples and Paris 123 
 
 Berneval. But there can be no question that the 
 poem was completed at Naples. He laboured over 
 it in a manner which I had never known him to 
 labour before. Every word had to be considered; 
 every rhyme and every cadence carefully pondered. 
 I had "Ballad of Reading GaoF' for breakfast, din- 
 ner and tea, and for many weeks it was almost our 
 sole topic of conversation. For my own part, I, too, 
 was busy with literary work, and I wrote at Naples 
 during this period some of my best sonnets, and 
 occupied myself with various translations. We had 
 not an idle week during the whole time we were 
 together. It was one of the charges against me in 
 the Ransome case that I hindered Wilde in his lit- 
 erary production, and that he never did anything 
 worth doing when he was with me. How maliciously 
 false these statements were may be gathered from 
 the fact that he planned and wrote the whole of 
 ''A Woman of No Importance" while we were to- 
 gether at Lady Mount-Temple's house at Babba- 
 combe; that he wrote the whole of 'The Impor- 
 tance of Being Earnest" at Worthing, where we 
 shared a house; and ''The Ideal Husband" partly at 
 Goring, where we shared a house, and partly in 
 London, while we were continually together; while 
 he composed and completed the final version 
 of the "Ballad of Reading Gaol" whilst staying in 
 
124 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 my villa at Naples. I have no desire to take credit 
 to myself for another man's work, but many collab- 
 orations between authors have been acknowledged 
 on much less slender grounds than it would be pos- 
 sible for me to set up in the matter of the aforesaid 
 plays and of the aforesaid ''Ballad of Reading 
 Gaol" if I were disposed to do so. In the ordinary 
 course of events I would never have said a single 
 word on the subject. It seemed to me perfectly 
 natural that, as we were together, Wilde should 
 show me what he was doing and read me what 
 he was writing. And as he thereby invited 
 advice and criticism, it seemed to be per- 
 fectly natural that I should give it, and that he 
 should adopt it. The truth is that Wilde con- 
 sistently made free use of such gifts as I possessed, 
 that I assisted him to many a piece of dialogue and 
 many a gibe which has helped to make him famous, 
 and that I gave him very material aid and counsel 
 in the matter of the ''Ballad of Reading Gaol.'' 
 There are passages in this latter poem which he 
 lifted holus-bolus from a poem of my own, and it 
 must be remembered that, while up to the time that 
 he left Reading Gaol, he had affected some scorn of 
 the ballad form and knew next to nothing of its 
 possibilities, I had given a great amount of atten- 
 tion to the study of that form and had produced 
 
Naples and Paris 125 
 
 the '^Ballad of Perkin Warbeck^' and the ''Ballad of 
 St. Vitus" — which latter Wilde read for the first 
 time at Naples, and with which he was mightily 
 impressed. It would be preposterous for me to 
 claim more than my due as regards the literary side 
 of our friendship, and I had perhaps better put the 
 position this way : I have never denied that I learned 
 things from Wilde and that, up to a certain point, 
 I owe a good deal to him in the literary sense. On 
 the other hand, in view of what he said, it is neces- 
 sary for me to point out that Wilde owes just as 
 much to me as I owe to him and, for that matter, a 
 great deal more. I have written neither plays nor 
 poems which embody a single word or phrase of his, 
 and I never took a literary hint from him in my life. 
 He has done me the honour to use a great deal of 
 Alfred Douglas, and he is perfectly welcome. All 
 I ask is, that I may not be maligned in consequence. 
 Although our life at the Villa Giudice was per- 
 fectly harmless and consisted mainly of fairly 
 strenuous literary toil, the fact that we were to- 
 gether did not please certain of Wilde's friends, and 
 the scandal-mongers were set busy again. How 
 easy it is to make scandal was prettily illustrated 
 by no less a personage than Mr. Justice Darling 
 during the course of the Ransome trial. "Are you 
 aware, Mr. Campbell," said his lordship to the de- 
 
126 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 fending counsel, ''are you aware of the reputation 
 of Naples?" Of course, Mr. Campbell shook his 
 head in the most deprecatory manner, and the jury 
 made a mental note that a villa at Naples meant the 
 very lowest depths of wickedness and profligacy. 
 
 Anybody who knows Europe at all, knows per- 
 fectly well that Naples was then, and is now, a 
 resort of the most exclusive set of the Italian aris- 
 tocracy, and that there is a large and highly re- 
 spectable English colony there. My grandmother, 
 the late Hon. Mrs. Alfred Montgomery, lived there 
 for twenty years, and there was not a person of 
 position in the place by whom I was not known or 
 with whom I was not on calling terms if I cared to 
 follow up my social duties. There is nothing at all 
 about the reputation of Naples to differentiate it 
 from Rome or Genoa or Florence or Venice or any 
 other Italian city. Many people of distinction 
 whom Mr. Justice Darling might not be sorry to 
 know continue to make a point of going there every 
 season. Well, just as there were brave men before 
 Agamemnon, so there were people who could ferret 
 out scandal even from the most harmless method 
 of life before Mr. Justice Darling. Wilde and I 
 were together at Naples, and malice and leering 
 gossip were abroad with their abominable insinua- 
 tions before one had time to say "jackknife." The 
 
Naples and Paris 127 
 
 reports naturally came to the ears of my people, 
 who were much distressed and upset by them ; and 
 it was pointed out to me that I was doing myself 
 great damage by befriending this man and that I 
 ought to send him about his business. One of the 
 attaches from the British Embassy at Rome, in 
 which city I had spent the winter of 1896 with my 
 mother, came to Naples, at the instigation of the 
 Ambassador, expressly to see me, and to urge on 
 me the advisability of dissociating myself from 
 Wilde. He told me that the fact that I had Wilde 
 as a guest in my house was causing all sorts of un- 
 pleasant gossip, and he even went so far as to say 
 that it was not fair to them at the Embassy that I 
 should persist in giving cause for such gossip, as 
 they had all made a point of being civil and friendly 
 to me when I was in Rome. I told him that I cared 
 nothing for gossip and scandal, that I had asked 
 Wilde to stay with me because he had nowhere else 
 to go and was practically without means, and that 
 it was unthinkable that in these circumstances I 
 should turn him out of my house simply because 
 evil-minded people chose to concern themselves 
 with what was no affair of theirs. He was very 
 insistent, and when he found that I was not to be 
 moved he got annoyed with me, told me I was a 
 "quixotic fool" and that I should live to be very 
 
128 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 sorry for having befriended a ''beast like Wilde/' 
 who would get everything he could out of me and 
 then probably turn round and abuse me. I was 
 very indignant at this prophetic pronouncement, 
 and we parted in anger. I believed then — and I 
 believe now — that my attitude was the right one, 
 and the gentlemanly one, in the right sense of the 
 word. I knew that Oscar Wilde was hard at work 
 on his poem. I believed that his life was clean 
 and that he had determined to keep from his old 
 evil courses; and I knew that my life was just as 
 proper as it always had been, and I consequently 
 saw no reason for turning upon my friend. The 
 world was welcome to shrug its shoulders if it 
 cared to, and I proposed to leave it to its shrugging. 
 But the feeling amongst my friends in England, 
 largely got up and fomented by my enemies, ulti- 
 mately became so strong that it was proposed to 
 stop my financial supplies unless I consented to a 
 separation from Wilde. I was thus forced to 
 capitulate; but I did not do so without a struggle 
 and without making provision for the man who 
 was dependent upon me. I arranged to leave him at 
 the Villa Giudice, the rent of which had been paid 
 in advance, and I arranged that my mother should 
 send him two hundred pounds, which would enable 
 him to live in comfort for a month or two; and I 
 
Naples and Paris 129 
 
 further arranged to let him have additional money 
 as he wanted it. I make special reference to the 
 sum of two hundred pounds because it is a pay- 
 ment which can be authenticated, and, in fact, was 
 authenticated at the Ransome trial. It is true that 
 at the very moment when he was writing to me in 
 acknowledgment of these sums and to express his 
 gratitude for my kindness, he was complaining to 
 Ross in a letter produced at the Ransome trial that 
 I had deserted him because his money was done. 
 But every one with the slightest knowledge of 
 Wilde's affairs knows perfectly well that all the 
 money Wilde had was the allowance of two pounds 
 nineteen and odd which came to him weekly through 
 his friends. 
 
 The general untrustworthiness of Wilde's accu- 
 sation is obvious on the face of it. Any one ac- 
 quainted with him would, moreover, have laughed 
 at his impudence in saying that I expected him to 
 raise money. I knew Wilde too well to expect him 
 to raise money, even in his alleged palmy days; 
 and that I should have been ass enough to suppose 
 that when he came to me at Naples, an ex-convict, 
 an undischarged bankrupt, and on a railway ticket 
 that I had paid for, he could be financially useful 
 to me is too ridiculous for words. Yet Ransome 
 gets into "the Critical Study" the following choice 
 
130 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 sentences: "Soon after Wilde left Berneval for 
 Naples, those who controlled the allowance that 
 enabled him to live with his friend, purposely 
 stopped it. His friend, as soon as there was no 
 money, left him. 'It was,' said Wilde, 'a most bitter 
 experience in a bitter life.' He went to Paris." The 
 last sentence should have had an addendum: it 
 should have read: "He went to Paris with two hun- 
 dred pounds of Lord Alfred Douglas's money in his 
 pocket, which had been sent to him per Mr. More 
 Adey and the Marchioness of Queensberry." But 
 it doesn't. Of course Wilde went to Paris — and he 
 went the moment he heard I was proposing to live 
 there. It was in December of 1897 that he came 
 and took an apartment at a hotel in the Rue Mar- 
 sollier. A few weeks later I came to Paris and 
 became the tenant of a flat in the Avenue Kleber. 
 He might just as well have lived at my flat for the 
 use he made of his hotel except to sleep in. For a 
 whole year — that is to say, down to the end of 1898 
 — he used my flat as though it were his own, in- 
 variably turning up at meal-times when he had 
 nowhere else to lunch or dine, and never failing 
 to extract from me a good deal more than I could, 
 at that period, afford to give him in the way of 
 money to tide him over his constant and ever- 
 recurring "difficulties." I believe that from time 
 
Naples and Paris 131 
 
 to time he picked up various sums of money on 
 his own. In January or February of 1898 he pub- 
 lished the '^Ballad of Reading GaoF' through 
 Leonard Smithers; and later I believe he obtained 
 some small advances of money from theatrical man- 
 agers for plays which he was always going to write 
 but of which he never produced a line. The rights 
 of one of these he seems to have sold for sums 
 varying from twenty to a hundred pounds to at 
 least half a dozen different persons; and he also 
 sold for small sums the plots of two plays and sev- 
 eral short stories which have since been given to 
 the public by another hand. But whatever money 
 he got did him no good. A couple of hundred 
 francs would take him away from his dinner at the 
 Avenue Kleber to do himself well with a roaring 
 company of boidevardiers; but the next day he was 
 back at lunch, full of complaints of the hardness 
 of the world and full of groans over his difficulties. 
 I speedily came to consider him in the light of a 
 permanent pensioner, and my servants had instruc- 
 tions to give him food, and not infrequently lent 
 him money in my absence. 
 
 During 1899 and 1900 his condition went from 
 bad to worse. At the end of 1899 I took a shooting- 
 box in Scotland, jointly with my brother Douglas 
 of Hawick, and I was in Scotland until the death 
 
132 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 of my father in January, 1900. I came into a 
 considerable amount of money under my father's 
 will, and the very first payment I made out of my 
 inheritance was one hundred pounds, which I sent 
 to Oscar Wilde in Paris. Out of this money he took 
 a trip to Switzerland. By the time he came back 
 I was at the Hotel Conde in Chantilly, where I had 
 acquired a racing stable. Of course, I was often in 
 Paris, and whenever I was there I made a point 
 of asking Wilde to lunch or dine, and I never left 
 him without handing him sums of money. My pass- 
 books show that in a single year after the death 
 of my father I gave Wilde nearly four hundred 
 pounds in cheques alone: the figures appear in my 
 bank-book and were proved at the Ransome trial: 
 and I must have given him twice as much in hard 
 cash or notes. At the very least penny, he had from 
 me that year quite a thousand pounds over and 
 above more or less constant entertainment. It was 
 almost impossible for me to take a meal with him 
 and keep money in my pocket. He would come to 
 the restaurant or hotel where we were to meet with 
 a dejected and depressed look on him, as who should 
 say: "Behold, how we are harassed and reduced, 
 and in what pain of mind we exist." I would give 
 him of the best to cheer and comfort him, but his 
 spirits insisted on remaining damp, and it was only 
 

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Naples and Paris 133 
 
 with difficulty that one could get a smile out of him. 
 When the time came for parting, if I put my hand 
 in my pocket and handed him five or six hundred 
 francs, well and good; if not, he would order an- 
 other old brandy and open up a dreadful tale as to 
 the condition of his bill at the hotel, the attitude 
 of his landlord about it, and his own desperation 
 and despair. In the end I got more or less into the 
 habit of handing him what I proposed to give him 
 before we proceeded to refresh ourselves. I found 
 that by this means the old Oscar Wilde was brought 
 to the front, and we could talk pleasantly together, 
 as gentlemen should. 
 
 I remember a certain occasion on which one of 
 our sittings had been prolonged until a very late 
 hour. I had taken the precaution to hand him a 
 note for a thousand francs before we sat down to 
 dine. He took his usual abundant share of the good 
 things, and we talked and laughed over our string 
 of liqueurs and let dull care go his own way. When 
 I called for the bill, Wilde suddenly pulled a long 
 and piteous face. "My dear boy," he said, ''money 
 — ah ! — money. I hate to distress you, but I really 
 must have a thousand francs now. I cannot return 
 to my hotel unless I have with me money to pay at 
 least a part of the bill. I don't mind telling you 
 that I am without a penny in the world, and if I 
 
134 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 do not go to the hotel to-night I shall be homeless." 
 ''But, my dear Oscar/' I said, '1 have just given 
 you a thousand francs, which you put in your 
 pocket." He looked at me as one amazed and then 
 burst into a fit of coughing laughter. I laughed too. 
 Though he could have lived quite comfortably 
 on what I gave him, and though he had, as we have 
 seen, a weekly allowance which should at least have 
 kept him from starvation, there can be no doubt 
 that towards the end of his life Wilde underwent a 
 certain amount of privation. He resorted to all 
 sorts of desperate shifts to get money, and com- 
 posed many very plausible begging letters; but, just 
 as pretty well every decent door was shut to him, 
 so people had begun to steel their hearts against 
 him, especially as he was now drinking in a most 
 reckless way and made no secret of the fact that 
 he had once more given himself over to his old 
 habits. He became a sort of show for the bohemi- 
 ans of Paris ; the sport and mock of the Boulevard 
 and the reproach of English letters in the City of 
 Light. He got his dinners on credit, and borrowed 
 money from waiters. His health was on the down 
 grade in consequence of the intensification by alco- 
 hol of a terrible disease he had contracted. He took 
 to weeping and cursing at the slightest provocation, 
 and, though his wit would flame out and his learn- 
 
Naples and Paris 135 
 
 ing remained with him to the last, it was a poor 
 wreck and shadow of himself which I saw from 
 time to time when I went to Paris on various occa- 
 sions in the year 1900. All through my acquaint- 
 ance with him after his release from prison it had 
 required a good deal of pluck to be seen about with 
 him. He was known and notorious wherever we 
 went, and I have seen men leave cafes because he 
 had entered, and heard lulls in conversation and un- 
 pleasant gibes when we have visited restaurants 
 together. At some of the places which we fre- 
 quented they would have turned him out had it not 
 been for the fact that apparently they could not 
 afford to turn me out. In his later period the feel- 
 ing against him grew more and more pronounced. 
 His companionships and resorts were of the vilest 
 and his self-respect was almost entirely gone. 
 
 Of Wilde's life in Paris before he began to break 
 up, the following is a good sample daily itinerary : 
 He would rise late, say at half-past eleven or twelve 
 o'clock, and walk from his hotel in the Latin Quar- 
 ter, through the Louvre to the Cafe de la Paix, 
 where he would sit and drink aperitifs before going 
 to lunch. In the afternoon he would go on to the 
 Grand Cafe, where he would drink till dinner-time. 
 The evening he generally spent where his friends 
 might lead him, and some of them led him to pretty 
 
136 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 dreadful places. When I came to Paris from Chan- 
 tilly, if I had not made an appointment with him 
 beforehand I could always find him at the Grand 
 Cafe or the Cafe de la Paix of a morning, or at 
 the Cafe Jidien or the Calisaya Bar of an afternoon. 
 So long as I remained in Paris he lunched and dined 
 with me as a matter of course — Paillard's, Maire's, 
 and the Cafe de la Paix being our chief resorts. At 
 his meals he behaved always like a pleased child, 
 provided, that is to say, you had put him into a 
 decent humour with a present of money before- 
 hand. He was the biggest eater I ever knew, and 
 the only man I ever met in my life who could drink 
 quantities of champagne at each meal and keep on 
 doing it. He had a fine head for drink, and it was 
 not until eighteen months or so before his death 
 that he began to lose it. Intoxication would come 
 over him suddenly and without apparent warning. 
 He would rise from his seat and say: ''My dear 
 fellow, I am sorry, but I perceive that I am drunk.'' 
 Then he would call loudly for a cab and stumble 
 forth. He made a great joke about these drunken 
 fits, and one day said to me: /'I have made a won- 
 derful discovery: I find that alcohol taken per- 
 sistently and in sufficiently large quantities pro- 
 duces all the efifects of intoxication," and so it 
 certainly did. At Maire*s there was a real 1800 
 
Naples and Paris 137 
 
 brandy, which had originally been laid down at the 
 Tuileries. Wilde had some of it after a dinner 
 there, and immediately began to make Maire's his 
 home. The stuff cost five or six francs a glass, but 
 this was nothing to Wilde if he happened to have 
 money or was the guest of somebody else. He 
 used to compliment the maitre d'hotel on this "ex- 
 cellent brandy,'' and there was no getting him away 
 from it. Wilde had few friends other than myself 
 who could be of use to him financially. Frank 
 Harris used to come over occasionally and take him 
 to dine at Durmid's, and I know that Harris also 
 obliged him with money. From time to time, too, 
 he picked up odd acquaintances who had means and 
 were disposed to show him kindness; but for the 
 most part they were Americans, and their capacity 
 for befriending the man whom one of them de- 
 scribed as ''England's premier poet-dramatist" ex- 
 hibited a great want of staying power. 
 
 I was in Scotland shooting when I had a letter 
 from Ross to say that Wilde was ill but that it was 
 nothing serious. On the next day I got a telegram 
 announcing that he was dead and asking what 
 should be done in regard to his affairs. I went 
 straight to Paris and to the Hotel d' Alsace, where 
 Wilde lay dead. I there saw Ross and Turner. 
 They told me that Wilde had no money. I promptly 
 
138 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 provided funds for the expenses of the moment 
 and I paid for the funeral, at which Ross, Turner 
 and myself were the only English mourners. After 
 the funeral Ross handed me a list of small debts 
 of Wilde's, consisting of unpaid dinner-bills and 
 sums he had borrowed from waiters and such-like, 
 the amount being between twenty and thirty pounds. 
 These obligations I paid. 
 
 When Wilde had been dead three years I re- 
 ceived from a M. Du Bouche, dentist of Paris, a letter 
 in which he pointed out that Wilde had owed him 
 six hundred francs for professional services, and 
 that the account had never been paid. I wrote to 
 M. Du Bouche, advising him to apply to Mr. Adrian 
 Hope, who, I understood, was Wilde's trustee. 
 Later Du Bouche wrote to tell me that he had ap- 
 plied to Mr. Adrian Hope, but that Mr. Hope pro- 
 fessed to know nothing of Wilde's affairs or to be 
 in any way responsible. In the face of this letter 
 I paid M. Du Bouche six hundred francs in settle- 
 ment of the account and got his receipt for it. There 
 was no question at that time of Ross being Wilde's 
 legal representative. Wilde made no will, but over 
 and over again before he died he said to me: ''Of 
 course, if I die first, you will look after my literary 
 affairs." Ross was made literary executor of 
 Wilde's estate in 1906 — six years after Wilde's 
 
HdTEL D' ALSACE, PARIS 
 
Naples and Paris 139 
 
 death. After the funeral he came to me and said : 
 ''Wilde has left nothing but a tumble of old papers. 
 I suppose yoii don't mind if I go through them?'' 
 I told him to do what he thought best, and there the 
 matter ended. Ross was a person whom Wilde and 
 I found useful because he was always willing to 
 attend to occasional matters of business for us 
 which we were too indolent to attend to ourselves, 
 and this was the light in which I regarded him when 
 I acquiesced in the suggestion which he then made. 
 One would think from the continual references to 
 Wilde's allowance being paid to him ''through Mr. 
 Ross" that Wilde was in some way in a condition 
 of tutelage to Ross. As a matter of fact, Wilde 
 arranged for the payment through Ross simply to 
 save himself the trouble and annoyance of corre- 
 sponding with his wife's solicitors. 
 
CHAPTER X 
 
 THE '^BALLAD OF READING GAOL" 
 
 IF Wilde is to last as a poet it will be on the 
 strength of the ''Ballad of Reading Gaol/' 
 The "Sphinx" may also endure, though its 
 chances — for reasons which I shall explain in the 
 chapter on Wilde's poetry, are not comparable with 
 those of the "Ballad/' Criticism of the work itself 
 is not entirely my present purpose. It is a work 
 which stands out head and shoulders above any 
 other of Wilde's performances by virtue of its 
 human appeal and its relative freedom from defects 
 which render the bulk of Wilde's poetry practically 
 unreadable. It is singular, too, as being the only 
 work of importance which Wilde completed after 
 his imprisonment. There is a story, and I believe a 
 true one, to the effect that before Wilde left prison 
 a certain American journalist offered him a thou- 
 sand pounds for a two hours' interview on the sub- 
 ject of his prison experience. The offer is said to 
 have been communicated to Wilde, and Wilde is 
 understood to have replied, with some hauteur, that 
 
 140 
 
The ^^Ballad of Reading Gaol" 141 
 
 he was astonished that such a proposal "should be 
 placed before a gentleman/' This was very fine 
 talk, and it has been widely applauded by Wilde's 
 admirers. I happen to know, however, that within 
 three months of his release Wilde regretted bitterly 
 that he had not closed with the American gentle- 
 man's proposition. At the time the offer was made 
 Wilde knew that he had eight hundred pounds be- 
 hind him, and he had been given to understand that 
 large sums of money would be subscribed for him 
 by his troop of admiring friends outside. The eight 
 hundred pounds were there, right enough, but the 
 mammoth subscription, or whip round, resulted in 
 the collection of little more than a hundred pounds, 
 the major portion of which was contributed by 
 Frank Harris. 
 
 Wilde believed, also, that on his release he would 
 find plenty of editors and publishers waiting for 
 him, with hope in their eyes and fat cheques in their 
 hands, and that he would be able to pick and choose 
 among them in the matter of placing anything he 
 might choose to say or write. Here again, how- 
 ever, he was mistaken; nobody deemed it worth 
 while to make a bid for a Wilde book or a Wilde 
 play, and he went to France commissionless. 
 
 As the beautiful Berneval weeks slipped away 
 with the beautiful Berneval money, he began to 
 
142 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 have twinges of anxiety. He knew his world well 
 and he knew that his world could do nothing for 
 him. He had discovered, likewise, to his amaze- 
 ment, that Oscar Wilde, even with two years' hard 
 labour to his credit, was not in any large sense 
 marketable whether from a journalistic or a liter- 
 ary point of view. It was the general feeling of 
 being ''out of it" which spurred him on to build up 
 the "Ballad of Reading Gaol." I know for a fact 
 that he made offers to be interviewed for much less 
 than a thousand pounds to the editors of various 
 newspapers in England and America, but no one 
 came near him. All he could manage to do for him- 
 self was to get certain letters printed in the Daily 
 Chronicle, and for these, of course, he received 
 nothing in the way of remuneration; so that the 
 "Ballad of Reading Gaol" became important to him 
 in a double sense. 
 
 He had taken the line that he was still an artist 
 and too securely placed in his art to condescend 
 to "low interviewing." He also felt that his one 
 chance of getting back into something approximat- 
 ing to public favour was to produce some sort of 
 a work of sustained and supreme power. This is 
 why the "Ballad of Reading Gaol" is so long and 
 so good. Wilde put all he knew and all he could 
 into it. He even went to what was for him the fear- 
 
The ^'Ballad of Reading Gaol" 143 
 
 ful and unthinkable length of truckling somewhat 
 to the more ordinary human sentiments in the tone 
 of the poem, and avoided, as far as he could, those 
 idiosyncrasies of Wilde the verse-maker which had 
 always provoked the expostulation of the critics 
 and the contempt or laughter of the general public. 
 As we have seen, the ''Ballad of Reading Gaol" was 
 completed at Naples. I believe that Wilde was 
 satisfied with every word of it. He had written to 
 certain of his friends in England pooh-poohing it 
 and pretending that it was in the manner of Sims ; 
 but he knew perfectly well that fifty Sims rolled into 
 one would not have produced such a poem, and his 
 self-deprecations were intended to soften his aban- 
 donment of the superior point of view rather than 
 to express what he really felt. Having finished the 
 poem, the next thing was to sell it. His thoughts 
 turned to America, the land of hope and glory, and 
 the land which had evolved that never-to-be-for- 
 gotten live journalist with his thousand pounds for 
 an interview. Wilde solemnly forwarded the "Bal- 
 lad of Reading GaoF' to a New York paper, the 
 name of which wild horses shall not drag out of 
 me, and proffered it for dollars, and the New York 
 paper proceeded solemnly to erect an everlasting 
 monument to its own stupidity by promptly return- 
 ing the MS. So that for the two or three months 
 
144 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 the ''Ballad of Reading Gaol'' was kicking about 
 in the world, with nobody to publish it. In the 
 meantime Wilde had gone to Paris, and he was 
 there sought out by the late Leonard Smithers, a 
 publisher who had done a great deal for Beardsley, 
 Dowson, and a number of quaint "geniuses" whose 
 names are now forgotten, and who had also pub- 
 lished an unexpurgated edition of "Burton's Ara- 
 bian Nights." Smithers took Wilde out to dinner, 
 produced an immediate handful of louis, and told 
 him that he was prepared to publish anything that 
 he cared to write. The "Ballad of Reading Gaol" 
 was raked out of a drawer and handed to Smithers, 
 and Smithers published it in England in February, 
 1898. The first edition consisted of eight hundred 
 copies at two-and-sixpence, with thirty copies on 
 Japanese vellum. Six further editions were called 
 for in twelve or fourteen months, and Smithers sent 
 from time to time various useful cheques for royal- 
 ties. I believe that he also purchased the book 
 rights of Wilde's plays, but that was the end of his 
 great publishing schemes for Oscar Wilde, for 
 Wilde produced nothing out of which a book could 
 be made after the "Ballad." I may note that two 
 or three years after Wilde's death Smithers, who 
 by this time had fallen upon somewhat evil days, 
 called on me and told me that he had drawings and. 
 
The "Ballad of Reading Gaol" 145 
 
 if I remember rightly, plates for producing the 
 '^Harlot's House" in a very sumptuous and dec- 
 orative form. The drawings were by Miss Althea 
 Giles, and seemed to me to be very fine. With a 
 view of giving both Miss Giles and Smithers a lift, 
 I and a friend of mine put up the money Smithers 
 required to go on with the publication. The ''Har- 
 lot's House" had never been published in a book, 
 though it had appeared in some obscure periodical. 
 It did not occur to me that there could be any 
 objection to Smithers publishing the book, which 
 is a trifle in itself, and no more than thirty-six lines 
 long. However, the next I heard about it was that 
 Ross had stepped in, in his capacity of 'literary 
 executor," and stopped the publication. Ross did 
 this without so much as referring to me in the 
 matter, though, as far as I knew, we were on terms 
 of friendship at the time. I suppose this is an in- 
 stance of what Mr. Sherard calls "keeping a level 
 commercial head in looking after Wilde's estate!" 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 
 THE TRUTH ABOUT "dE PROFUNDIS" 
 
 IN 1905 there was given to the world with a 
 great flourish of trumpets a book entitled "De 
 Profundis," which purported to be a work by 
 Oscar Wilde. To this book Robert Ross supplied 
 the preface. It will be necessary for us to examine 
 this preface very thoroughly. Ross commences by 
 explaining that for a long time curiosity had been 
 expressed about the manuscript of "De Profundis/' 
 "which was known to be in my possession, the 
 author having mentioned the existence to many 
 other friends." 
 
 Presuming that Wilde mentioned the existence 
 of this MS. to any of his other friends, I very much 
 doubt whether he ever explained to them the nature 
 of its contents. He no more dared do this than 
 he dared have attempted to publish it, for he knew 
 perfectly well that if he had told many other friends, 
 whispers of his vileness and duplicity would have 
 been sure to get round to me, and there might have 
 been an end of my friendship and an end of my 
 gifts. 
 
 146 
 
About ''De Profundis" 147 
 
 At our first meeting after his release Wilde told 
 me that he had ''a hideous confession to make/' 
 He said that while he was in prison he had been 
 told that I was no longer loyal to him and that 
 I had expressed contempt for his sufiferings. He 
 said that he knew now that this was not true, but 
 that it had preyed on his mind, and he had allowed 
 it to anger him to such an extent that he had writ- 
 ten me a very fierce and abominable letter and had 
 it forwarded by Ross. I told him that I had a 
 recollection of having received a copy of some such 
 letter (not the letter itself) from Ross and with it 
 a covering letter from Ross in which he said how 
 sorry he was to have to send Wilde's letter, but that 
 Wilde was apparently more or less out of his mind 
 in consequence of the treatment he had received in 
 prison, and was disposed to quarrel with every- 
 body, and that he (Ross) hoped that I should take 
 no notice of what he was sending. I threw the copy 
 of Wilde's letter into the fire and I wrote to Ross 
 to tell him to mind his own business, and to point 
 out that if Wilde had anything to say to me he 
 could say it in his own handwriting. So that when 
 Wilde opened up his "hideous confession" I nat- 
 urally thought that he was referring to the letter 
 Ross had sent me, and I said: ''My dear Oscar, I 
 never read more than three or four lines of the 
 
148 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 wretched thing. I gathered that it was an ill- 
 tempered letter and threw it into the fire. Don^t 
 let us talk any more about it. I quite understand 
 how you must have felt, but it is all over now and 
 there is nothing more to be said." It struck me, at 
 the moment, as curious that Wilde should be want- 
 ing to make confessions as to having written a 
 letter which he knew I had received, but I had no 
 wish to pursue unpleasant matters, and the con- 
 versation dropped. From that day forward, though 
 he was continually in my company and continually 
 accepting kindnesses at my hand, he never breathed 
 a single word about unpleasant letters or secret 
 manuscripts or anything of the kind. It has been 
 suggested by people who wish to make out that I 
 had a copy of "De Profundis'' sent to me in Wilde's 
 lifetime that the letter which I received through 
 Ross and burned was, in fact, ''De Profundis," but 
 this cannot be so, for the very simple reason that 
 "De Profundis" is a fifty-thousand-word manu- 
 script, whereas the letter I burned covered only sev- 
 eral sides of ordinary letter paper in Ross's hand- 
 writing. I fail to see how Wilde's position is in 
 the least degree improved even if it were granted 
 that I had received a copy of the "De Profundis" 
 manuscript; but, as a fact, I did not receive it. 
 Ross goes on to tell us that Wilde had instructed 
 
About '*De Profundis'' 149 
 
 him to publish ''De Profundis/' Those instruc- 
 tions, Mr. Ross tells us, were contained in a letter 
 from Wilde written to him, obviously from prison. 
 Part of this letter Mr. Ross has published in ''De 
 Profundis,'' but he omitted the passages which gave 
 him the actual instructions. I should have much 
 liked to have seen these, for they might have thrown 
 some light on Wilde's action in leaving behind him 
 in the hands of others a posthumous libel on a man 
 who had been his friend up to and during his prison 
 period, and to whom he afterwards turned for 
 assistance and refuge. 
 
 It was not till ''De Profundis" was announced 
 to be forthcoming by the press that I ever knew 
 that Wilde had left behind him an unpublished 
 manuscript of any sort or kind. When I learnt 
 that there was a manuscript and that it was to 
 be published under the editorship of Ross I was 
 very much astonished. Wilde had never spoken 
 to me of any manuscript which would be long 
 enough to make a book; neither had Ross, and 
 neither had anybody else. I was so astonished 
 that I went round to see Ross, who at that time 
 kept a picture shop in Ryder Street. I said to 
 him : "What is all this about an unpublished manu- 
 script by Wilde? There is no such manuscript/' 
 He said: ''Oh, yes, there is." I said: 'Then why 
 
150 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 have you not told me of it before? and why did 
 Wilde not tell me of it?'' Ross said: '1 wanted 
 to keep it as a surprise." This struck me as being 
 rather strange, and I said : ''Wilde was hard up and 
 keen on selling anything that he could get rid of. 
 Why should he not have published it himself?" 
 Ro^s replied: "He didn't do that because the MS. 
 consists of a long letter. It contains a lot of dis- 
 agreeable writing about you and other people, but I 
 have cut this out, and what is left makes a nice little 
 book." I said that it seemed a very extraordinary 
 thing that nobody should have heard of this before, 
 but Ross assured me that he would publish nothing 
 that would hurt Wilde's reputation and that the 
 book would do him good, and there the matter 
 ended. When "De Profundis" was published there 
 was not a word to indicate that it had been ad- 
 dressed to me and not to Ross at all, and the oppo- 
 site deduction is one which the reader of the preface 
 may fairly draw. For example, Ross quotes Wilde 
 as saying that the privilege of writing to Ross at 
 great length was one for which he was grateful to 
 the Governor of the prison. Moreover, this im- 
 pression still remains. Holbrooke Jackson, in his 
 book "The Eighteen-Nineties" (published 1913), 
 writes of Wilde: "During his imprisonment he 
 wrote 'De Profundis' in the form of a long letter 
 
About ''De Profundis" 151 
 
 to his friend Robert Ross." ''De Profundis'' was 
 published in 1895, and I never knew till 1912 — 
 seventeen years later, when the Ransome case was 
 toward — that it was really addressed to me and that 
 the unpublished parts were still in existence and 
 amounted to more than half of the whole manu- 
 script. Still less did I dream that the unpublished 
 moiety — as any reader of the reports of the Ran- 
 some trial can see for himself — contained gross 
 libels on myself or that the British Museum authori- 
 ties had kindly consented to accept it as a present 
 to the nation without so much as consulting any of 
 us. I leave the facts as I have set them forth to the 
 judgment of the public. 
 
 The existence of the ''De Profundis" manuscript 
 forces us to one of two alternatives : Wilde, accord- 
 ing to Ross, wished it to be published and gave it 
 to Ross with a view to publication, never afterwards 
 changing his mind on the subject or desiring that 
 the manuscript should be destroyed. In that case 
 he has exhibited a perfidy which is without parallel 
 in history, inasmuch as for three years after, leav- 
 ing prison and right up till the time of his death 
 he professed to be my devoted and attached friend 
 and accepted in friendship what I was very pleased 
 to give in friendship. 
 
 The other alternative is that, on leaving prison 
 
152 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 and finding that he had been misinformed as to my 
 attitude toward him, he repented the writing of 
 this manuscript and intended it to be destroyed, but 
 failed to cancel his instructions. 
 
 While the Ransome case was pending I wrote 
 Ross a letter setting out the facts stated above, 
 namely, that I had never any idea that "De Pro- 
 fundis'' was a letter addressed to me or that it had 
 any connection with the letter which Ross had sent 
 me in 1897. I also informed him of Wilde's soli- 
 tary reference to the letter, which I have previously 
 referred to. I expected Ross to give me some reply 
 by way of explanation, but received none. I con- 
 sider that, in view of the circumstances, he might 
 have taken the opportunity of ridding the memory 
 of his friend of what, in the absence of such an 
 explanation, must be regarded by all fair-minded 
 persons as an act of cowardly and abominable 
 treachery. As it is, seeing how zealous an adherent 
 of Wilde Ross is, I am forced to the conclusion that 
 Wilde was playing the Judas with me all the time 
 we were together at Naples and all the time that he 
 was lunching and dining and "meeting his diffi- 
 culties" at my expense in Paris. 
 
 Before proceeding to refute charges brought 
 against me at the Ransome trial, based on Wilde's 
 posthumous libel, I should like to enquire whether 
 
About "De Profundis" 153 
 
 it can be considered proper, either on literary 
 grounds or on grounds of public policy, that a book 
 like ''De Profundis" should be given to the world 
 at all. Mr. Ransome tells us that the book is com- 
 posed of passages from a long letter the complete 
 publication of which would be impossible in this 
 generation. "The passages were selected and put 
 together,'' he adds, ''by Mr. Robert Ross, with a 
 skill that it is impossible sufficiently to admire.'' 
 Quite so. But it can be demonstrated out of the 
 text that Mr. Ross's selectings and puttings- 
 together have, in the net result, entirely deceived 
 the public, not only with regard to the nature and 
 intentions of "De Profundis" as a book, but also 
 with regard to Wilde's own character and his atti- 
 tude towards his own misfortune. What right has 
 Mr. Ross or any other person, no matter how skilled, 
 to indulge in this kind of literary liberty? Despite 
 what Wilde himself said to the contrary, it is always 
 important that we should know as much as is pos- 
 sible to be known about any man who sets up to 
 teach us, and especially is this so in the case of an 
 author like Wilde, whose whole writings amount 
 really to a sort of personal statement. Mr. Ross 
 recognises this much, because in his version of "De 
 Profundis" he offers no samples of Wilde the 
 vituperative spitter-out of venom or of Wilde the 
 
154 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 braggart and vain boaster, such as appear in the 
 reports of the Ransome trial, but shows us simply 
 the Wilde who weeps profusely and swears that he 
 has turned saint. ''And I do this,'' says Ross, in 
 his preface, "hoping that my efforts will give many 
 readers a different impression of the witty and de- 
 lightful writer." The ''different impression" has 
 obviously resulted. Wilde emerges from the mire 
 a gracious, suffering, forgiving, magnanimous fig- 
 ure. The extracts from Wilde's own manuscript, 
 read and relied on by the counsel for the defendant 
 in the Ransome trial, prove him to have been noth- 
 ing of the kind, and, for that matter, the direct 
 opposite. On literary grounds alone we are surely 
 entitled to protest against such a dangerous viola- 
 tion of the normal editorial function. If we are to 
 take "De Profundis" for an approved precedent, a 
 literary executor is justified in treating a dead 
 man's inedited manuscripts in such a way that he 
 is made to say only half of what he really did say, 
 and so made to appear the direct opposite of what 
 he really was. On public grounds one is entitled 
 to protest even more strongly. We have, in Wilde, 
 a person of careless and vicious life, whose talents 
 were always carelessly and at times viciously em- 
 ployed. Such a man was almost, in the nature of 
 things, bound to come to a miserable and degraded 
 
About "De Profundis" 155 
 
 end. Wilde ended up in prison for his offences, 
 and if he had really repented and had really written 
 "De Profundis," as published without the sup- 
 pressed portion, and lived out the rest of his life in 
 a decent way, it would have been possible and proper 
 for us to forgive and forget a great deal ; but, unless 
 he has maligned himself most madly, he never did 
 repent, and it is certain that ''De Profundis,'' as 
 published, does not represent his sentiments or his 
 nature. The result has been that a false and 
 specious glamour has been put upon the aim and 
 trend of Wilde's life and writings, and very gen- 
 erally the apologia contained in the bowdlerised "De 
 Profundis" is regarded as a sufficient ''Apologia pro 
 Vita sua," 
 
 Commenting on the reading of the unpublished 
 parts of "De Profundis" at the Ransome trial, the 
 Outlook said: 
 
 'Those who heard its unpublished portions . . . 
 fall from the lips of the learned junior counsel for 
 the defence, or even those who had to be content 
 with such portions their newspapers gave them, had 
 the unusual experience of sharing the privileges 
 reserved for posterity. They have added to their 
 knowledge of the last prose work of Oscar Wilde ; 
 indeed, they have gained their first true knowledge 
 of the form in which it left his pen. They know 
 
156 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 that it begins 'Dear Bosie,' and ends 'Your affec- 
 tionate friend, Oscar Wilde/ but it is not always 
 either friendly or affectionate. They know that 
 there are parts — about meals and the influenza and 
 the respect that is due to a great artist — 'and espe- 
 cially such an artist as I am' — that are not an ex- 
 pression of the mood which gave to the world the 
 well-known parts about Christ. They have learned, 
 for the first time, that some parts have been taken 
 and that other parts have been left — to the nation. 
 In the parts that have been taken, and strung, like 
 beads, on a new string, to form the book the world 
 knows, they have learned that the 'you' addressed 
 is not general and impersonal, but the friend who, 
 whatever the rights and wrongs of last week, has 
 at least written poetry that is better than Wilde's 
 own, in spite of the mood of scolding superiority in 
 which the letter seems to have begun." 
 
 It has been suggested that the article from which 
 this passage is an extract was written by my friend 
 T. W. H. Crosland and inserted in The Outlook 
 through the influence of George Wyndham. Any- 
 body who is acquainted with London journalism 
 knows that Mr. Crosland has had nothing to do 
 with The Outlook since he resigned the Literary 
 Editorship of that journal in 1902; and Mr. Wynd- 
 ham ceased to have any interest in the paper some 
 
About '*De Profundis" 157 
 
 months later. The author of the article is, so far 
 as I am aware, entirely unknown to me, and, in any 
 case, it was not written by my desire or inspiration. 
 I have already referred to certain charges against 
 me, in support of which passages from the unpub- 
 lished parts of "De Profundis'' were put to me at 
 the Ransome trial, and shown how preposterous 
 they are. I had an opportunity, at the time of the 
 Ransome trial, of reading a copy of the manuscript 
 with great care ; and I say advisedly that, in so far 
 as it concerns me, I had great difficulty in finding a 
 single statement which could not be demonstrated 
 to be utterly, deliberately and ridiculously false. If 
 Mr. Robert Ross will remove his embargo I am 
 open to print the whole of such portions of ''De Pro- 
 fundis,'' word for word and line for line, with plain 
 demonstrations of the absolute malice and contempt 
 for the truth that Wilde has exhibited right through 
 the piece. As it is, at present I am prevented from 
 quoting or even from paraphrasing any portions 
 owing to the legal steps taken by Mr. Ross. But, in 
 order that it may never be suggested that I fear or 
 admit the charges brought against me in the Ran- 
 some trial, and to clear myself from them, I propose 
 to deal with the more serious of them (not already 
 dealt with in Chapter VIII) as assertions of fact 
 and not even by way of paraphrase of the precious 
 
158 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 MS. I should have preferred to put these charges 
 into Wilde's own words, and so have given my 
 posthumous libeller every opportunity of couching 
 his attack in his own way and with all the master's 
 skill. But Mr. Ross has prevented this by obtain- 
 ing an injunction against me. I do not think, how- 
 ever, that either he or the law can prevent me from 
 dealing with allegations of fact made against me 
 in cross-examination qua allegations of fact. 
 
 I have already referred to the falseness of 
 Wilde's charge that I hampered his work, and that 
 when I was by he was sterile. I had to meet the 
 charge, in particular, that when he was pressed to 
 deliver "The Ideal Husband" he had to wait till 
 I was away and then got on famously. When I 
 returned, ''all work had to be abandoned." This 
 assertion is wantonly wrong. When Wilde was in 
 working mood he worked and I never attempted 
 to take him away from it. The play was read to 
 me scene by scene and line by line, and so far from 
 my having delayed its completion I materially 
 assisted it. If one were disposed to be flippant and 
 to admit that Wilde gives a correct description of 
 our daily programme at St. James' Place, one might 
 enquire why — if he found it impossible to work in 
 the atmosphere of his own quiet and peaceful house- 
 hold and found it equally impossible to work at St. 
 
About "De Profundis" 159 
 
 James' Place because of my interruptions — he never 
 locked the door of St. James' Place, never contrived 
 to be out, and never omitted to send me telegrams 
 of enquiry and letters of pleasant rebuke if I hap- 
 pened to miss calling upon him. Wilde was too 
 keen an artist to allow anything or anybody to come 
 between him and what he would call a realisable 
 mood. The truth is that he would begin a work 
 with great zeal and fury and apply himself to it and 
 to the contemporaneous consumption of cigarettes 
 and whiskies till he became utterly exhausted. As 
 a rule, he completed what he had begun in a series 
 of spurts and with periods of easy donothingness 
 between whiles. On the other hand, there were 
 occasions when he got stuck, and he got stuck over 
 more than one of his plays. This is merely to say 
 that he was like any other artist ; to blame me for 
 it is childish or lunatic — whichever you will. Wilde 
 began 'The Sphinx'' — a work of which he was in- 
 ordinately proud — when he was little more than 
 twenty years of age : he was thirty-eight before he 
 finished it, and then, apparently, he had to call in 
 no less a poet than Robert Harborough Sherard, 
 author of "Whispers," to help him out with rhymes 
 ending with "ar." Sherard tells us with great pomp 
 and pride that he suggested ''nenuphar" — a sub- 
 stantive of Greek origin, which had been worn to 
 
160 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 death by precious poets before either Wilde or 
 Sherard was born, but the sudden and glorious dis- 
 covery of which by Sherard appears to have trans- 
 ported them both into the seventh heaven. 
 
 It is absolutely untrue that my mother, the 
 Dowager Marchioness of Queensberry, ever in- 
 formed Wilde at Bracknell that I was 'Vain," or 
 ''wrong about money/' My mother has never been 
 in the habit of discussing the characters of those 
 near and dear to her with anybody, much less with 
 comparative strangers. On his own showing, 
 Wilde scarcely knew me at this period, and on the 
 only occasion he was at my mother's house near 
 Bracknell there were a dozen other guests staying 
 in the house, and his conversations with my mother 
 would be of the very slightest, and amount, so far 
 as she was concerned, to the merest civilities when 
 they met at lunch or dinner. My mother is still 
 alive and, whether at Bracknell or anywhere else, 
 she did not say to Wilde what he professes she said. 
 It is the same with the charge that our residence 
 at Goring, where I was well known, cost him a fab- 
 ulous sum. If this is so, seeing that we shared 
 expenses of the Goring establishment, Wilde ap- 
 pears to have let me off exceedingly cheaply for 
 my half-share; for I do not recollect that it cost me 
 more than twenty or thirty pounds a month, exclud- 
 
RAYMOND WILFRID SHOLTO DOUGLAS, ONLY CHILD OF LORD 
 
 ALFRED DOUGLAS, BORN 17TH NOVEMBER, 1902 
 
 (AGED NINE IN THE PHOTOGRAPH) 
 
About ''De Profundis" 161 
 
 ing the rent, of which I never heard, inasmuch as 
 Wilde professed that the house had been lent to him 
 by a well-known member of the Peerage. If thir- 
 teen hundred pounds were spent by Wilde at Goring 
 during those three months, all I can say is that at 
 least twelve hundred must have gone in rent; for 
 we lived very simply there, and there were no res- 
 taurants into which one could be lured to a meal 
 which would cost ''a whole sovereign." So Goring 
 won't do, any more than the five thousand pounds 
 worth of ortolans and Perrier Jouet. One other 
 small matter and I shall have done with this part 
 of the subject. 
 
 I deny emphatically that I gambled and lost at 
 Algiers and expected him to pay my losses. At 
 the time Wilde and I went to Algiers together I 
 had just come into some money, and I took a suite 
 of rooms at the best hotel in the place. Wilde 
 stayed there with me, and I paid the hotel bill my- 
 self. There was not, so far as I am aware, a tripot 
 or other gambling place — much less a Casino — in 
 Algiers at that period, so that neither of us could 
 gamble even if we had wished to. Wilde returned 
 to London before me for business reasons ; but the 
 business was entirely his own and had nothing to 
 do with me, and I lent him fifteen pounds to pay 
 his fare home. By some aberration or other he 
 
162 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 actually returned me this money, paying a cheque 
 for the amount into my account in London. In all 
 the literature of the subject, that is to say, in all the 
 pass-books, banking accounts, business and private 
 letters, and so forth, that are in existence or ever 
 did exist, this is the sole and only instance of Wilde 
 ever paying a sum of money to me; whereas it could 
 be demonstrated out of the same documents that I 
 paid a very great many sums to Wilde. In the safe 
 seclusion of Reading Gaol he sits, tearfully peni- 
 tent, and remembers that fifteen pounds, which, no 
 doubt, loomed up in his memory like a shot-tower. 
 He catches at it, gleefully, and uses it as a peg 
 on which to hang a false, preposterous, lying story 
 about meeting my gambling debts in a place where 
 there is no gambling. At the back of his mind he 
 knew that nothing of the kind ever occurred, yet the 
 fifteen pound payment might have lent colour to 
 the statement if it came to be investigated after my 
 death. And that was all the colour he had for his 
 pretty statement. 
 
 I have no wish to be uncharitable to this man 
 who, doubtless, suffered, and suffered severely. 
 Nobody could read the complete "De Profundis" 
 without perceiving that imprisonment destroyed 
 Wilde's moral fibre and crushed his spirit to such 
 an extent that he became a sort of Mrs. Gummidge 
 
About "De Profundis'' 163 
 
 who felt everything ''more than you do." I am 
 forced to think — and, to be quite frank, I try to 
 think — that Wilde cannot have been mentally re- 
 sponsible when he wrote this stupid and abominable 
 manuscript. That I am not alone in my opinion 
 of what confinement and bitter discipline were do- 
 ing for him will be evident from the following letter 
 which I received from a close friend of Ross's at 
 the time when Wilde was supposed to be angry with 
 me. The letter is dated from a house which was at 
 that time occupied by Ross and the writer of the 
 letter. 
 
 "My Dear Bosie, 
 
 ''Your letter distresses me, for I can say 
 so little to comfort you and I would do all I can. 
 You will know by this time that I had seen Oscar 
 before I received your letter. I saw him on Sat- 
 urday, 30th November, the very day you wrote, 
 and I only got your letter to-day, Tuesday. You 
 must not think that I do not know what Oscar's 
 change towards you must be to you, but Robbie 
 will tell you that from the very first I never be- 
 lieved that it was more than a passing delirium 
 of gaol moral fever. I naturally minimised to you 
 and Robbie, when I wrote, the horrors of the gen- 
 eral prison surroundings, but I have seen them, 
 
164 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 and am confirmed in my belief that no man like 
 Oscar who is subject to them can be considered 
 capable of exercising his ordinary mental or moral 
 faculties. What he says now no more expresses 
 his proper natural feelings than do the ravings of 
 a man in delirium. I am certain that his mind has 
 very much suflfered, but I think from what I have 
 heard of him before, and what I have seen of him, 
 that he is better ; and I think that he is conscious 
 that he must make efforts to prevent his mind 
 suffering more, because he was so very anxious to 
 get some rather drudging mental work to do, in 
 order to occupy and, in a sort of way, discipline 
 his mind. In former interviews he spoke of you 
 just as a lunatic or a man in delirium does of the 
 people they love best, but the other day he did not 
 do so; he merely complained of some letter which 
 you had written to him or to the Governor (I sup- 
 pose of Wandsworth) which he had heard of but 
 was not allowed to see. I told him that I was cer- 
 tain that you would write no more. He has to be 
 talked to as a person very slowly recovering from 
 delirium. I could not have said anything to dis- 
 tress him. Just think, he has only one half-hour in 
 the awful weeks of hideous prison life. You must 
 try to show the love which I know you have for 
 him, by the most difficult of all ways — waiting," 
 
About "De Profundis" 165 
 
 There may be- — and probably is — a good deal to 
 be said for the view herein set forward, and it 
 would be inhuman not to make all necessary allow- 
 ances. But we are still left face to face with the 
 unchallengeable fact that Wilde was sane enough 
 when he came out of prison; that his health was 
 on the whole improved by his sojourn there; and 
 that for three years he kept up his friendship with 
 me, and lived to a great extent on my bounty ; and 
 that he never said a single word about the disgrace- 
 ful document which Mr. Ross has so generously be- 
 stowed upon the nation. 
 
CHAPTER XII 
 
 MY LETTERS TO WILDE 
 
 THE law as to property in letters appears 
 to be in a very confused and amazing con- 
 dition. Letters, though lightly penned by 
 most people and considered to be of trifling impor- 
 tance, are nearly always far more important than 
 they look. If I had been cautious and worldly- 
 wise I suppose that the letters which I wrote to 
 Oscar Wilde or, at any rate, those which were 
 produced by favour of Ross at the Ransome trial, 
 would never have been written. The fact that they 
 were written, however, cannot be denied, and, for 
 many reasons, I am not sorry that they were 
 brought up against me. I knew that some such 
 letters existed, and I was told before the trial came 
 on that they would be produced and that they would 
 ruin me. Well, to the great consternation and 
 amazement of the parties immediately concerned 
 I went into the witness-box and ''faced the music," 
 and I was not ruined. By a coincidence, it hap- 
 pened that I had various difficulties of litigation 
 
 i66 
 
My Letters to Wilde 167 
 
 round about the time of the Ransome trial, and 
 rumour had it that those troubles were in some way 
 bound up with the Wilde affair. As a fact, they 
 had nothing to do with it, and were quite indepen- 
 dent of it, and even the endeavour to create a public 
 impression that my wife had left me because of the 
 Ransome trial proved utterly futile. The unfortu- 
 nate differences between myself and Lady Alfred 
 Douglas arose out of matters of settlements and 
 the education of our child, and, lest my enemies 
 should lay the flattering unction to their souls that 
 they have succeeded in separating us, I may men- 
 tion here and now that my wife and I are no longer 
 at variance and that our reconciliation was brought 
 about by our two selves after the trial and not 
 before it. In the witness-box I made no bones about 
 condemning the two letters of mine which were 
 raked up to show that I had a bad influence over 
 Wilde's mind. I shall not attempt to justify them 
 here, and I shall not abate my opinion of them one 
 jot or tittle. They are letters which I am ashamed 
 to have written and which I ought to have a good 
 deal too much sense to write. They have not been 
 printed in the press and I shall not reproduce them 
 here, any more than I would think of reproducing 
 similar letters written by Wilde and his friends. I 
 do not think, however, that any man of the world 
 
168 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 who perused them could fail to recognise that they 
 were letters written more or less in a jocular spirit, 
 and that they were plainly not the letters of the 
 kind of person some people have been gracious 
 enough to wish to make me out. At school, the 
 universities, and even in clubs, men who are not 
 considered by any means wicked men make jokes, 
 exchange jokes, and tell stories which, one takes it, 
 would very much shock Mr. Justice Darling if they 
 happened to come to his polite ears. There are per- 
 sons of the highest positions in all walks of life — 
 not even forgetting the immaculate and stainless 
 profession of the law — who in their day and gen- 
 eration could swap coarse jokes with any stable-boy, 
 and who, over their wine, are not above indulging in 
 a trifle of witty obscenity, even yet. Everybody 
 knows this, and nobody pretends that it is other- 
 wise, or that it is ever likely to be otherwise. The 
 only place where you get such a pretence is in the 
 law courts, when Counsel wishes to "eviscerate" 
 somebody. The pretence was well kept up at the 
 Ransome trial by all parties concerned and as I 
 have said before, I do not in the least complain but 
 am rather glad than otherwise. For the improper 
 is obviously the improper wherever you encounter 
 it, and there is no reason why my impropriety should 
 be extenuated while the next man's is punished. I 
 
My Letters to Wilde 169 
 
 punished myself for my offences against decency 
 and good taste by standing up and having them read 
 out to me twenty years after they were written. I 
 could have run away from them if I had wished to, 
 but I stood my ground and took my gruel with a 
 short spoon. The result has been exactly what one 
 was entitled to expect that it would be. I have not 
 lost a single friend or come across a single cold 
 shoulder as the result of Mr. Ross's letter-preserv- 
 ing charitableness. My cousin, the late Right Hon- 
 ourable George Wyndham, m.p., than whom no 
 more honourably-minded man existed, wrote to me 
 immediately after the trial and told me that he 
 had followed it closely, and that nothing had hap- 
 pened which was to make any difference between 
 himself and myself, and he added that, not only 
 in his opinion but in the opinion of many persons 
 with whom he had talked, I had been abominably 
 treated. Of course, it is preposterous to say that 
 my influence over Wilde was a bad influence. If 
 the letters produced to prove it prove anything at 
 all, they prove, rather, that Wilde's influence over 
 me was a bad one, and a very bad one at that. Any 
 one who knows me must be well aware that, when it 
 came to the question of his ultimate vices, such influ- 
 ence as I had over him was on the side of goodness 
 and decency rather than otherwise. In all his cun- 
 
170 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 ning, overweening and merciless desire to damage 
 and destroy me, Wilde could never find it in his heart 
 to set down the last unthinkable lie. He knew that 
 if he did that he would be blankly sinning against 
 the Holy Ghost, and, hate me as he would, and rage 
 and rage as he would, he could not bring himself 
 to take the terrible risks. Nowhere in all this out- 
 pouring of hate does he dare to come out with the 
 accusation which would put me outside the pale 
 of social possibility. That he was quite willing to 
 have shouted that accusation out at the top of his 
 voice if there had been the slightest ground for it 
 is only too evident from the general drift of what 
 he has to say. If by a deft ambiguity he can get 
 in the hint that will hurt me without going the 
 length of the rankest perjury he gets it in. It is 
 plain on every showing that our friendship was a 
 harmless and proper friendship and that our life 
 together was harmlessly, if, perhaps, somewhat ex- 
 travagantly, lived; and two things have always to 
 be remembered: first, that during our friendship, 
 whether despite me or otherwise, Wilde did un- 
 doubtedly produce the best of his plays and the finest 
 of his poems, indeed, the only poem which is likely 
 to live; while, during the same friendship, I, for 
 my part, produced the bulk of the poetry con- 
 tained in the "City of the Soul.'* There is nothing 
 
My Letters to Wilde 171 
 
 in any of the work produced by Wilde during the 
 time that we were together of which he need be 
 ashamed, and there is nothing in the "City of the 
 Soul" of which I need be ashamed. On the con- 
 trary, Wilde's reputation, in so far as it is a pure 
 literary reputation, has been largely built up on the 
 work to which I refer, whereas it is largely by my 
 own work during that period that I shall stand or 
 fall so far as posterity is concerned. How dare 
 people assail and defame an association of this 
 kind ? I print below two letters which were sent to 
 me by Mr. George Wyndham immediately after the 
 Ransome trial. 
 
 I leave the parties concerned to make the best 
 they can of an outside opinion, and to meditate with 
 what gratification they may on their ''base thing.*' 
 
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CHAPTER XIII 
 
 MY LETTERS TO LABOUCHERE 
 
 THAT the late Henry Labouchere was a good 
 deal of a blackguard is well known, but he 
 was one of those blackguards who man- 
 aged to get into the House of Commons and, as 
 impudence was a gift with him, he made some repu- 
 tation there. When Gladstone proposed to give 
 him a Cabinet appointment, however. Queen Vic- 
 toria calmly drew her pen through his name. Glad- 
 stone gasped, but Labouchere did not become a 
 Minister of the Crown. Labby's strength lay in 
 his money. A poorer rogue would not have been 
 tolerated, even in the House of Commons. And 
 Labby's weakness was Truth — the paper, not the 
 abstraction. Labouchere always made a great point 
 of running Truth in the interests of public morality. 
 For quack doctors, begging-letter writers, and cer- 
 tain classes of bookmakers and money-lenders he 
 had, invariably, abundant stripes; but for the very 
 big fish Henry Labouchere had a confirmed respect 
 
 179 
 
180 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 and was most careful to say nothing about them 
 and do nothing to them — unless they happened to 
 fall, when he would rush in and deliver a few kicks. 
 It is not astonishing that as soon as Oscar Wilde 
 came to grief Henry Labouchere should have 
 hastened to put in his bit of kicking. While Wilde 
 was flaunting himself about town and "going 
 strong/' Labby found it convenient to let him alone, 
 even though "there were rumours" — and Truth was 
 nothing if not an investigator of rumours. In his 
 hey-dey, therefore, Labby would say no word that 
 was evil of Wilde, though he poked fun at him. But 
 the moment Mr. Justice Wills hands out two years' 
 hard labour and Wilde is down and past mortal 
 chance of getting up again, forth comes Labby, 
 with his silly little patent-leather boots and his 
 dirty little dagger, and Wilde is kicked and stabbed 
 without mercy. Incidentally, too, Labby took the 
 opportunity to refer to me as a "young scoundrel" 
 and to accuse me of deserting my friend in his 
 trouble. I wrote and pointed out that, so far from 
 deserting Wilde, I was the one and only friend of 
 his who remained faithful to him after his arrest, 
 and visited him daily in prison, and when he was up 
 at Bow Street Police Station ; and I went on to ex- 
 press my opinion of the mean and unnecessary 
 venom of Labby's attacks on a man who was down 
 
My Letters to Labouchere 181 
 
 and unable to defend himself. It is characteristic 
 of Labouchere that, while he was too much of a 
 coward to print my letters in full, and was content 
 to publish only that part of one of them in which 
 I defended myself against his charge of deserting 
 my friend, he was careful to preserve them. 
 Eighteen years after they were written Truth 
 turned up in court with them to be used against 
 me in a matter with which Truth was not in any 
 way concerned. I presume that they were produced 
 under subpoena, though how their existence became 
 known to Mr. Ransome remains a mystery. With 
 that fine sense of what is fitting which distinguishes 
 him, Mr. Justice Darling explained that the people 
 who have kept and produced my letters are not to be 
 blamed, "inasmuch," said his lordship, "as they are 
 only doing what they are paid to do," which is 
 somewhat cryptic, but is possibly meant to be funny. 
 However, I really do not care "tuppence" who 
 treasures these letters of mine. The only point is 
 that somehow it seems un-English and unsports- 
 manlike. As for the letters themselves, they failed 
 entirely in the object to which they were put by 
 Ransome's lawyers. I cannot find that it was 
 thought wise to print extracts from them in the 
 newspapers at the time of the trial. And, as I 
 have not got possession of them and am apparently 
 
182 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 not entitled to possession of them, I cannot print 
 them here, even if I were disposed to do so. I know 
 what is in them, however, and there is no reason 
 why I should not summarise them. The letters 
 contain the stock arguments of those apologists 
 for the perversion to which Wilde was addicted 
 which were current at the time. They point out 
 that vice of this character was rampant in the West 
 End of London and at certain public schools and 
 universities, and that Labby had not said a word 
 about it in his wonderful paper — Truth, The letters 
 also quote or epitomise sundry medical and scien- 
 tific views on the subject. That is all. What I 
 had to say I said plainly and without beating about 
 the bush, and, while I should not write such letters 
 to-day, there is nothing about them which is greatly 
 to my discredit. During the whole time of the trial 
 there sat in court the author of the following state- 
 ment : '^It is a matter of common observation among 
 physiologists that where a child is born to a couple 
 in which the woman has the much stronger nature 
 and a great mental superiority over the father, the 
 chances are that the child will develop at certain 
 critical periods in his career an extraordinary at- 
 traction towards persons of its own sex. This fact 
 is one of Nature's mysteries. Those who believe 
 in a Divine Creation of the world should reverently 
 
My Letters to Labouchere 183 
 
 bow their heads before what they cannot under- 
 stand and ought to take to be a divine dispensation. 
 At any rate, the wisdom of Nature may be pre- 
 sumed greater than that of the Ecclesiastical 
 Courts." 
 
 There is nothing in my letters to Labouchere 
 which can in the least compare with the foregoing 
 passage, which I take from 'The Life of Oscar 
 Wilde," by Robert Harborough Sherard. Sherard's 
 ''Life," like Ransome's "Critical Study," is pub- 
 lished broadcast and under everybody's nose, and 
 both of them, as we have seen, contain their indi- 
 vidual views of Wilde's vices. 
 
CHAPTER XIV 
 
 THE ARTICLE IN THE ''rEVUE BLANCHE" 
 
 IN pursuance of what I conceived to be my duty 
 towards Wilde at the time he was in prison, 
 I wrote the Labouchere letters and a good deal 
 of similar matter which was not printed. My argu- 
 ment was not that Wilde had wrongfully been con- 
 victed, and not that what he did was to be counted 
 to his credit, or even to be approved, but merely 
 that there were scientific and medical grounds for 
 supposing that he was not responsible for his 
 actions in this regard, and that, in any case, the 
 punishment meted out to him seemed unnecessarily 
 and brutally severe. I do not know that I have 
 changed my opinion to this day. It is unthinkable 
 that a sane person could flounder into the loathsome 
 depths in which Wilde was taken red-handed; par- 
 ticularly is it unthinkable in respect of a man of 
 Wilde's culture and social surroundings. 
 
 That he was sane enough in other regards cannot 
 be doubted, but I do not think there can be any 
 question as to his insanity on this particular point. 
 
 184 
 
Article in the "Revue Blanche'' 185 
 
 But this is as far as I go, and this is as far as any 
 decently-minded person can go. I never went an 
 inch further, and never intended to. I have already 
 stated that after sentence was passed upon Wilde 
 all Paris appeared to go off its head with regard 
 to the scandal. Many absurd and unfounded pieces 
 of gossip were published in the French newspapers, 
 and some of these I took it upon myself to endeavour 
 to refute. When it became known that I was in 
 Paris, the interviewers flocked round me and 
 wanted me to talk to them on all manner of silly 
 matters. I declined to have anything to do with 
 them in a general way, especially as I found that 
 they were disposed to garble and exaggerate every- 
 thing one might tell them. One fine morning, how- 
 ever, there called upon me a journalist with whom 
 I had some acquaintance, who told me that he had 
 been commissioned by the Editor of the Revue 
 Blanche to get me to write an article on the Wilde 
 affair in which my views should be set out definitely 
 and finally, and thus put an end to the extraordinary 
 stories which were being circulated in my name. I 
 knew the Revue Blanche as a weekly literary jour- 
 nal of somewhat advanced opinions, and I thought 
 that here was an excellent opportunity to say some- 
 thing that might be of use to Wilde. My difficulty 
 was that, while I spoke French fluently, I did not 
 
186 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 feel that I had a sufficient command of style and 
 so forth to write the article in French. My friend 
 the journalist was very accommodating, however, 
 and it was arranged between us that, with the 
 knowledge of the Editor of the Revvie Blanche, I 
 was to write an article in English which would be 
 translated into French and inserted in the paper 
 over my name. I wrote the article and handed it 
 to the representative of the Revue, for translation 
 and publication. I stipulated for a proof in French, 
 but the next I heard about the matter was that the 
 article had appeared. The translator, whoever he 
 was, simply took my article as a sort of peg, and 
 hung on it a farrago of extremely vicious opinions, 
 and even more vicious comparisons which I had 
 never put forward, and which my own article cer- 
 tainly did not suggest. I complained to the Editor 
 of the Revue at the time, but found myself unable 
 to obtain any redress, and there was nothing more 
 to be done. The French article passed almost un- 
 noticed, inasmuch as the Revue Blanche had a very 
 limited circulation, and I never heard another word 
 about it until years after, when I was editing The 
 Academy, In that paper I had occasion to write a 
 paragraph about a journal called The Freethinker, 
 which was edited by a Mr. Foote, and which made a 
 
Article in the **Revue Blanche'' 187 
 
 sort of business of blasphemy. Mr. Foote was not 
 pleased at what I said about him and, by way of 
 retort, he translated a particularly nauseous pas- 
 sage from the Revue Blanche article, inserted it in 
 his journal and accused me of being the author. I 
 immediately issued a writ for libel against the pro- 
 prietors of the Freethinker J and, after receiving the 
 writ, Mr. Foote discovered that he had made a 
 serious mistake and promptly apologised in the next 
 issue of his paper. He did not even enter an ap- 
 pearance. I was content with my apology and 
 allowed the action to lapse. 
 
 This is the whole truth about the Revue Blanche 
 article. Though the Revue is now dead, the pro- 
 prietor and editor are, I believe, still alive. If, as 
 was contended in the Ransome trial, I wrote the 
 article I am said to have written, or furnished the 
 material for it, these gentlemen could easily have 
 been produced to say so. But they were not brought 
 forward as witnesses and were not even approached 
 on the subject. Yet the article was put in at the 
 trial and, though I said on oath in court what I now 
 say here in print — and my assertion was not in the 
 slightest degree shaken by cross-examination — Mr. 
 Justice Darling persisted in reading aloud, and for 
 the benefit of the jury, words which I had not writ- 
 
188 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 ten, and this in spite of my explanations and protest. 
 There is no use in complaining, nor do I complain. 
 I merely put it on record once for all, that the Revue 
 Blanche article is not my article, and I am in no 
 way responsible for it. 
 
CHAPTER XV 
 
 FIFTEEN YEARS OF PERSECUTION 
 
 I Dp not think it is an exaggeration to say 
 that from the day of Oscar Wilde's sentence 
 in 1887 down to the Ransome trial in 1913 
 not a single week had passed over my head without 
 some unpleasantness or other arising in conse- 
 quence of my friendship with Oscar Wilde. Even 
 before Wilde was sent to prison the trouble began. 
 There was talk and gossip almost from the com- 
 mencement of our acquaintanceship. This was 
 largely set afoot by envious people. Wilde's friends 
 could not brook that we should be so constantly to- 
 gether, and that I should — to use their own phrase 
 — ''monopolise" him. 
 
 In point of fact, I had no desire to monopolise 
 him. It was simply impossible to shake him off. 
 If I left him for a day he would seek me out and 
 want to know where I had been and why I had 
 not asked him to accompany me. If I went abroad 
 he would follow me and either entreat me to return 
 or sit down solemnly and wait my time. So con- 
 
 189 
 
190 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 tinually were we together that our friendship be- 
 came matter for public comment and was referred 
 to in the newspapers. I do not say that I disliked 
 all this, though it was certainly embarrassing and 
 even annoying at times. In a sense, perhaps, I was 
 rather flattered. I have always been fond of com- 
 panionship, and Wilde was undoubtedly an enter- 
 taining companion when he liked. Besides which 
 he was famous in a way, and it is not always un- 
 pleasant to go about with famous people, partic- 
 ularly when they happen to be very civil to one. It 
 is a fact that Wilde could not bear me out of his 
 sight. If we happened to be staying together and 
 I went away for ten minutes without telling him 
 where I was going, he would work himself up into 
 a state of nervous apprehension and rouse a whole 
 hotel with his enquiries. 
 
 I remember that when we were at a hotel in 
 Algiers, I went out to make a purchase without 
 mentioning to Wilde that I was going. On my 
 return, half an hour later, I was met in the hall 
 by a scared-looking concierge, who said: ''Mon- 
 sieur, you are back ! Voire papa has been demand- 
 ing to know where you were, with great noise, for 
 the last hour !" Wilde happened to be descending 
 the staircase at this precise moment and overheard 
 what the man had said. The expression ''voire 
 
Fifteen Years of Persecution 191 
 
 papa'' simply drove him to fury. He was always 
 vain of his "youthful appearance" (though, as a 
 matter of fact, he looked much older than his age), 
 and he jumped to the conclusion that he was be- 
 ginning to look old. He could not see that his 
 anxious queries as to my whereabouts had set the 
 hotel people thinking that he must stand in a paren- 
 tal relationship to the object of his solicitude. For 
 myself, I was vastly amused and, for months after, 
 if I wished to make Wilde fearfully angry, I had 
 only to say ''voire papa'' 
 
 I may, perhaps, explain here that from the very 
 beginning I always treated Wilde in the way I 
 would treat any other friend of mine, that is to 
 say, though I believed him to be a great man, I 
 never had any awe of him, and I never flattered 
 him. Not only so, but at times I made a great 
 deal of fun of him, and there were occasions when 
 he didn't relish it. For example, he had been talk- 
 ing to me and to other people at great length about 
 Milton. Somebody in a paper had pointed out that 
 certain of his sonnets had a Miltonic echo about 
 them. He admitted that this was so, but said that 
 what the critic called an echo was really an achieve- 
 ment, and that he had wilfully set himself to write 
 sonnets like Milton's, which should be as good as 
 Milton's. For several days his conversation turned 
 
192 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 in the same direction, and in the end I began to 
 grow a little weary of the Milton- Wilde amalgama- 
 tion, and told him that it was quite easy to write 
 Miltonic sonnets, and that lots of people could do it 
 besides Oscar Wilde. On leaving him that evening 
 I wrote and posted to him the following sonnet, 
 which, I need hardly say, was ''writ sarcastic" : 
 
 Oscar ! what though no brazen trumpet-call 
 Of Fame hath called thee to the foremost van 
 Of life's array, though not from man to man 
 Thy name is bandied, though thy life seem small, 
 Ignoble in men's eyes; the Lord of all. 
 Who reads the heart and with his fearful fan 
 Purges his floor, knows thy true talisman — 
 A humble soul too near the ground to fall. 
 
 Therefore, repine not if thy lot obscure 
 Seeks quiet ways and walks not with the crowd : 
 A kindly heart is more than laurel crown ; 
 A virtuous life builds thrones that will endure 
 More surely than the Kingdoms of the proud 
 And Thrift shall stand when Luxury falls down. 
 
 Wilde professed to take this ''undergraduate 
 effusion" seriously, and pronounced it to be "not 
 bad, for an amateur.'' But we heard no more about 
 Miltonic sonnets. 
 
 I mention these things, which are typical, so that 
 the reader may be spared the conclusion that my 
 friendship with Wilde was a smooth and treacly 
 affair ; for it was nothing of the kind. Indeed, we 
 
Fifteen Years of Persecution 193 
 
 had many a tiff and many a disagreement, and I 
 wrote no end of skits and letters to him, some of 
 them not over civil ; and that he remembered them 
 and that they hurt him much more keenly than I 
 had intended is shown by his references to "loath- 
 some" and "brutal" letters received from me. Any- 
 thing that displeased Wilde was loathsome, brutal, 
 callous, coarse, and so forth. If I wrote and said : — 
 
 "My dear Oscar, 
 
 "I am afraid that I shall not be able to come 
 round to lunch to-day as I am feeling a bit off 
 colour," 
 
 I could count on getting a reply in some such terms 
 as: — 
 
 "I have received your callous note. If you 
 are ill, surely you can say so without using coarse 
 and vulgar expressions." 
 
 I took precious little notice of these missives and, 
 when we met the next day, neither of us would re- 
 fer to them. 
 
 As I have said, people gossipped about our friend- 
 ship and exhibited a certain amount of jealousy of 
 me; but I was not then, and never have been, dis- 
 posed to allow third parties to interfere in my 
 friendships. I have shown what happened when 
 my own father attempted to make differences be- 
 
194 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 tween us. The moment Wilde was sentenced things 
 were made intolerable for me. Lying tales as to 
 my indifference to his fate reached Wilde, and he 
 was told that I was about to publish letters of his 
 to his damage and my own monetary profit. The 
 only letters of Wilde's I ever proposed to publish, in 
 my life, were letters which contained sentiments 
 that were to his credit, and even these I withdrew 
 the moment I heard that he was supposed not to 
 wish them printed. Not only was every effort made 
 to embitter and estrange Wilde against me while 
 he was in prison, but I was being continually 
 assailed by impudent rogues who professed to have 
 information and documents which it would be worth 
 my while to buy. To these people I paid neither 
 the smallest heed nor the smallest of monies. They 
 never had a farthing from me, nor will they ever 
 get one. I was threatened with "exposure'' by 
 pretty well all the crawling vermin of London and 
 Paris for months after the trial. I knew there was 
 nothing to expose, so that I was not particularly 
 anxious; but seeing, as I had seen, what venom 
 and villainy were capable of doing when they got 
 fairly to work, I do not profess that these threats 
 were pleasant reading of a morning at breakfast. 
 Furthermore, my family were assailed in much the 
 same way and, though they never allowed them- 
 
LADY ALFRED DOUGLAS 
 
Fifteen Years of Persecution 195 
 
 selves to be victimised, they were not entirely de- 
 lighted with the constant current of menace which 
 came their way. 
 
 In 1902 I married. It was a runaway match, 
 which neither myself nor my wife have ever re- 
 pented. At once, however, the dastardly attentions 
 of the blackmailers, letter-sellers and information 
 mongers were directed to Lady Alfred. We lived 
 abroad for a considerable time and, though the 
 threats had been bad enough while we were away, 
 they assumed a double fury when we came to Eng- 
 land. They have continued with greater or less 
 frequency ever since. The people who wanted 
 money to keep quiet have fallen off unappeased long 
 ago. But the kind and gentle souls who imagined 
 that Lady Alfred Douglas would be pleased to hear 
 ''something dreadful" about her husband on an 
 anonymous postcard are still with us and crop up 
 from time to time as the spirit moves them. When 
 I took over the editorship of The Academy, in 1907, 
 the fun became fast and furious. We could not 
 review a book adversely in the paper without being 
 made the object of anonymous threats and abuse 
 with reference to Wilde, and what was going to be 
 done to us if we didn't look out. Persons on papers 
 at Oxford and Cambridge wrote paragraphs about 
 the Editor of The Academy containing veiled sug- 
 
196 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 gestions as to the discreditable character of his for- 
 mer relations with Wilde, till we were compelled to 
 take legal proceedings ; then they fell on their knees 
 and wept bitterly and spoke of their dying fathers 
 and apologised humbly and paid our costs. I sent 
 my friend Crosland down to see the Dons of one 
 of our Universities who were responsible for a 
 certain publication, and he sat solemnly with these 
 learned and reverend signors, in the cloistered se- 
 clusion of College, while they solemnly settled 
 
 the terms of an apology and tried to make the costs 
 pounds instead of guineas by promising to dismiss 
 their editor. From time to time, too, outsiders took 
 a hand at the game. It was through the tender 
 offices of these people that I had steady reminders 
 of the existence of mysterious letters which were 
 being held by one of them, and which were to be 
 produced for my destruction when this gentleman 
 might deem the occasion to have arisen. 
 
CHAPTER XVI 
 wilde's poetry 
 
 WILDE once said to me when we were 
 discussing poetry that there were two 
 ways of disHking poetry — one being to 
 disHke it, and the other to Hke Pope. This remark 
 was brought forth really by Aubrey Beardsley, who 
 was present, and who said that for him, at any rate, 
 there was only one English poet, namely. Pope. It 
 is highly characteristic of Wilde, who, although 
 he insisted on his own eminence as a poet and a 
 critic of poetry, never committed himself to what 
 might be considered a serious theory on the subject. 
 Piecing together the views he expressed from time 
 to time in a casual and general way, I am convinced, 
 indeed, that he had no theory which was in the least 
 stable or cogent and which was not liable to be 
 altered by the moment's whim or mood. It is cer- 
 tain that, while he hankered after poetic distinction 
 and in his early manhood strove after it, his aim 
 was not so much to produce great poetry as to turn 
 
 out stuff which would provoke the critics to write 
 
 197 
 
198 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 about him and the witlings to talk about him. He 
 published a volume of poems when he was twenty- 
 six years of age, but after that he produced next to 
 nothing poetical till he wrote the ''Ballad of Read- 
 ing Gaol." "The Sphinx/' it is true, was published 
 in 1894, but it had been written many years before. 
 In his preface to "Wilde's Selected Poems," Mr. 
 Ross tells us that Wilde's early work was never 
 ''until recently" well received by the critics. He 
 adds, however, that "they have survived the test 
 of nine editions," with the "nine" in capital letters. 
 For myself, I do not admit that the poems have been 
 well received by criticism, even recently, for the very 
 simple reason that there is very little in them to re- 
 ceive. Of course, it is unfair to apply the test of "re- 
 ception" to any poetry that is worth talking about, 
 just as it is unfair to rely on the test of editions. To 
 take an instance in point : there is Miss Ella Wheeler 
 Wilcox, who has been received with all manner of 
 plaudits by all manner of reviewers and whose 
 works have stood the test of probably ninety edi- 
 tions. But who in his senses is going to tell us 
 that this estimable lady is a great poetess and to 
 be mentioned in the same breath as — say — Mrs. 
 Browning or Mrs. Meynell, the latter of whom, at 
 any rate, has not achieved even so many editions 
 as Wilde? It is plain that the only real test of 
 
Wilde's Poetry 199 
 
 poetry is its quality, and neither its reception nor its 
 saleability can affect that quality. If we apply such 
 a test to Wilde's early poetical work, which repre- 
 sents the bulk of what he accomplished, we shall not 
 find that he shines with anything like the effulgence 
 that his adherents have imagined for him. Wilde 
 himself knew that he was not a great poet. His 
 cry is, continually: '*I am an artist — the supreme 
 artist, in fact,'' and never : '1 am a poet," or "I am 
 the supreme poet." He knew perfectly well that 
 that cock wouldn't fight. He was not even anxious 
 to be known as a poet in the way that some of his 
 contemporaries were anxious to be known. He told 
 me that to be dubbed "poet" was to raise up visions 
 of untidy hair, dirty linen, and no dinner to speak 
 of, and such a view of himself he abhorred. ''Never 
 be a poet, my dear Bosie: be a gentleman, a con- 
 noisseur, an artist — what you will; but not a poet- 
 Let us leave being a poet to Dowson and Arthur 
 Symons and, if you like, Dick Le Gallienne." All 
 Wilde's biographers have striven manfully and — 
 one might say — pitifully to make a great poet out 
 of Oscar Wilde, and they have failed. Even Mr. 
 Ransome, the most zealous of the bunch, cannot 
 bring himself to any more flattering conclusion than 
 that Wilde was a sort of inspired plagiarist or imi- 
 tator who, in Mr. Ransome's view, improved upon 
 
200 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 what he appropriated. Nobody who has read any 
 poetry other than Wilde's can fail to perceive that, 
 leaving out the ''Ballad of Reading Gaol" and, up to 
 a point, 'The Sphinx,'' Wilde's poetical work con- 
 sists of clever, and occasionally, perhaps, brilliant 
 imitations. Wherever one turns in the three hun- 
 dred pages of his published poems one finds echoes 
 — and little else but echoes. His sonnets are, for 
 the most part, Miltonic in their eflfects; the metre 
 and method of "In Memoriam" are used in the 
 greater number of his lyrics ; and he uses the metre 
 which Tennyson sealed to himself for all time even 
 in "The Sphinx," which is his great set work; while 
 in such pieces as "Charmides," "Panthea," "Hu- 
 manitad" and "The Burden of Itys" he borrows the 
 grave pipe of Matthew Arnold and what he himself 
 called the silver-keyed flute of Keats. Haphazard, 
 I take up the Ross-edited volume "Poems by Oscar 
 Wilde," and I open, on page two hundred and 
 twenty-two — "La Mer": — 
 
 A white mist drifts across the shrouds, 
 A wild moon in this wintry sky 
 Gleams, like an angry lion's eye. 
 Out of a mane of tawny clouds. 
 
 The muffled steersman at the wheel 
 
 Is but a shadow in the gloom: • 
 
 And in the throbbing engine-room 
 
 Leap the long rods of polished steel. 
 
Wilde's Poetry 201 
 
 The shattered storm has left its trace 
 Upon this huge and heaving dome. 
 For the thin threads of yellow foam 
 Float on the waves, like ravelled lace. 
 
 The bird is Wilde, the plumage and call are Tenny- 
 son's to a fault. 
 
 Then again, on page one hundred and thirty- 
 six: — 
 
 To outer senses there is peace, 
 A dreamy peace on either hand ; 
 Deep silence in the shadowy land, 
 Deep silence where the shadows cease; 
 
 Save for a cry that echoes shrill 
 From some lone bird disconsolate: 
 A corn-crake calling to its mate. 
 The answer from the misty hill. 
 
 \ 
 And suddenly the moon withdraws 
 Her sickle from the lightening skies, 
 And to her sombre cavern flies, 
 Wrapped in a veil of yellow gauze. 
 
 More Tennyson, with the "In Memoriam'* verse 
 lines arbitrarily and wrongfully disposed for the 
 deception of the innocent. I might go on quoting 
 from Wilde in the metre ad nauseam and never 
 strike so much as four lines which can be pro- 
 nounced to be pure Wilde. With "The Sphinx/' 
 as a whole, I shall deal later; but I may point out 
 
202 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 here that while Wilde arranges the stanzas as 
 though they consisted of two lines, they really con- 
 sist of Tennyson's four and, for correctness' sake, 
 should have been printed thus : — 
 
 In a dim corner of my room 
 
 For longer than my fancy thinks, 
 A beautiful and silent Sphinx 
 
 Has watched me through the shifting gloom. 
 
 Inviolate and immobile, 
 
 She does not rise, she does not stir; 
 
 For silver moons are naught to her. 
 And naught to her the suns that reel. 
 
 Tennyson's suns as well as Tennyson's stanza! I 
 am not suggesting that all this is otherwise than 
 neat and deft and skilful and pleasing, but a poet 
 of parts, leaving out the "true poet" so beloved of 
 Mr. Ross, should surely have a note or tone or 
 cadence of his own, and not warble so distressingly 
 like the "true poet" in the next street. As the Wilde 
 faction appear to be acquainted with no poetry but 
 "poor dear Oscar's," I will take a few passages 
 from "In Memoriam," which, while they will be 
 familiar to the more intelligent reader, will doubt- 
 less come in the way of an eye-opener to people 
 like Mr. Ross. Let us repeat, to begin with, the 
 second verse of "La Mer" : — 
 
Wilde's Poetry 203 
 
 The muffled steersman at the wheel 
 Is but a shadow in the gloom: 
 And in the throbbing engine-room 
 Leaps the long rods of polished steel. 
 
 This is, as we have seen, Wilde. Against it let us 
 put Tennyson's 
 
 I hear the noise about the keel, 
 I hear the bell struck in the night ; 
 I see the cabin-window bright ; 
 
 I see the sailor at the wheel. 
 
 If ever there was an impudent and unblushing 
 *'crib/' surely we have it here ! I wonder what the 
 Ransomes, Sherards, Harrises and Inglebys of this 
 little world would say if they caught anybody else 
 but Wilde at pretty little tricks of this kind. In 
 Wilde such childish conveyance must be excused 
 and even held up to admiration; in another it would 
 be sheer theft. Then, again, take the second set of 
 stanzas I have quoted from Wilde, about peace and 
 silence, and compare them with the following from 
 "In Memoriam": — 
 
 Calm is the morn, without a sound, 
 Calm as to suit a calmer grief, 
 And only through the faded leaf 
 
 The chestnut pattering to the ground: 
 
 Calm and deep peace on this high wold, 
 And on these dews that drench the furze. 
 And all the silvery gossamers 
 
 That twinkle into green and gold : 
 
204 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 Calm and still light on yon great plain 
 That sweeps with all its autumn bowers. 
 And crowded farms and lessening towers, 
 
 To mingle with the bounding main: 
 
 Calm and deep peace in this wide air. 
 These leaves that redden to the fall; 
 And in my heart, if calm at all, 
 
 If any calm, a calm despair: 
 
 Wilde's verses are plainly a paraphrase — and a bad 
 one to boot. It will be urged that he wrote these in 
 his youth, and that all poets, more or less, echo one 
 another when they are young. But when one comes 
 to consider that out of the forty or so lyrical pieces 
 which Wilde wrote no fewer than eighteen are in 
 the metre of "In Memoriam,'' and not one of them 
 is free from images, phrases or cadences which can 
 easily be paralleled out of Tennyson, while the whole 
 of "The Sphinx" is open to criticism on the same 
 grounds, one cannot doubt that Oscar Wilde is a 
 poet who has rather overdone the youthful imitation 
 business ; and one can scarcely be expected to break 
 the alabaster box of critical adulation at his feet. 
 I have not space to enter into great detail with 
 regard to those lyrics of Wilde which are not flatly 
 Tennysonian. There are about twenty of them, 
 and they include a cheap imitation of "La Belle 
 Dame sans Merci,'' a flagrant copy of Hood's lines 
 
Wilde's Poetry 205 
 
 beginning 'Take her up tenderly," and sundry 
 pieces which are childishly reminiscent of Mrs. 
 Browning, William Morris and even Jean Ingelow. 
 Of his own initiative, Mr. Ross heads up this col- 
 lection of poetical brummagem with such taking 
 titles as ''Eleutheria,'' ''Windflowers," 'Tlowers of 
 Gold,'' "The Fourth Movement'' and "Flowers of 
 Love." But the fact that they are wood-pulp or 
 ceraceous replicas of other people's nosegays is of 
 no account to the faithful and the blind. 
 
 As regards the sonnets, which may, perhaps, be 
 said to constitute that part of Wilde's poetical work 
 which is best worth consideration, I have only to say 
 that while it would be tedious to compare them 
 side by side with the sonnets of Milton and other 
 writers, such a comparison cannot fail to convince 
 any reasonable being that in this department again 
 Wilde was an over-sedulous ape — so over-sedulous, 
 in fact, that he is careful to emphasise and exag- 
 gerate the very faults and defects of his masters. 
 On the point of technique, the importance of which 
 cannot be too gravely insisted upon where the son- 
 net form is concerned, he is continuously and hope- 
 lessly at fault. His rhyme-sounds are, for the most 
 part, of the cheapest and the most hackneyed. Of 
 the twenty-eight sonnets which he produced, seven 
 have rhymes to ''play," "say," ''day," and so forth; 
 
206 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 rhymes to *'see," "be" and ''me" are common, and 
 in even greater number; and on no fewer than 
 twenty-one distinct occasions are we proffered such 
 rhymes as ''liberty/' "anarchy," "memory," "de- 
 mocracy," "already," "victory," "luxury," and the 
 like, or an average of three times in every four 
 sonnets. And this, if you please, is the work of 
 "the supreme artivSt!" 
 
 It follows without saying that while Wilde be- 
 lieved himself to be writing in the Italian sonnet 
 form, he persistently finds himself unable to ad- 
 here to the difficult rules of that form. He has 
 octaves with four rhymes in them instead of two, 
 and he will wind up a sextet with a couplet like 
 the veriest tyro of them all. The contents of the 
 sonnets represent the best of Wilde's thought, 
 being, for the most part, free from fleshliness, cyni- 
 cism and perversity. Yet, when one has said this 
 for it, one has said all. There is nowhere anything 
 very great or very noble or very beautiful, and one 
 never catches even a suggestion of the large accent 
 which makes a poet. Sententiousness, grandiose- 
 ness, and a laboured classicism set forward with the 
 help of an artificial rhetoric which at times is almost 
 comic are the upshot of Wilde's sonnets taken gen- 
 erally and in the lump. 
 
 There now remain the set pieces such as "A Gar- 
 
Wilde's Poetry 207 
 
 den of Eros/' a la Matthew Arnold; "The New 
 Helen," a la Keats; "The Burden of Itys," a la 
 Matthew Arnold again; "Panthea," a blend of 
 Matthew Arnold and Keats; and "Humanitad," 
 more Arnold; also "The Sphinx'' and the "Ballad of 
 Reading Gaol." No lover of poetry in a high sense 
 is likely to waste much time in the perusal of the 
 five pieces first mentioned. It is not claimed for 
 them by anybody that they are other than cold and 
 super-painted failures, produced in the spirit of 
 "Now, let me show you what I, the scholar and a 
 connoisseur, can do," rather than by any spiritual or 
 poetical impulsion. Only the meagrest portions of 
 them can be admired, even by the elect; and these 
 portions are not edifying. 
 
 As for "The Sphinx," even if we concede that 
 the uneasy effect of its metre be dismissed from the 
 question, we have left what is — on the face of it — 
 a work of not always too successful virtuosity on a 
 theme which is frankly bestial. There is an un- 
 doubted pomp and swing about some of the stanzas ; 
 there are pictures well visualised and put on the 
 canvas with a fine eye for colour; and the element 
 of curiousness or weirdness is well sustained; but 
 right through the piece one is made to feel that it is 
 not the poet but the mechanician who has come be- 
 fore us, and continually he creaks and whirrs, as it 
 
208 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 were, for want of oil and control. Wilde, doubt- 
 less, set out to build a jewelled palace for his dubious 
 and, if you come to look at it closely, loathsome 
 fancy. He has succeeded only in establishing a 
 sort of Wardour Street receptacle for old, tarnished 
 and too-vividly-coloured lots. His efforts to do 
 things in the most dazzling and wizardly manner 
 are at times ludicrous, and his endeavours to get up 
 unthinkable passions provoke one to laughter rather 
 than awe. In a despairing determination to tie to 
 the end of the poem something on which a reason- 
 able being might ponder, he becomes utterly in- 
 consequential. 
 
 False Sphinx! False Sphinx! By reedy Styx old Charon 
 
 leaning on his oar, 
 Waits for my coin. Go thou before, and leave me to my 
 
 crucifix. 
 Whose pallid burden, sick with pain, watches the world with 
 
 wearied eyes. 
 And weeps for every soul that dies, and weeps for every soul 
 
 in vain. 
 
 The dragging in of this bit of specious religiosity 
 as a bonne bouche after an orgy of flamboyant 
 passion-slaking is, doubtless, very cunning and 
 clever, but it has nothing to do with either great 
 art on the one hand or common sense on the other. 
 'The Sphinx'' is a poem which may well have 
 stirred certain resorts in the neighbourhood of 
 
Wilde's Poetry 209 
 
 Piccadilly Circus to their foundations. It is a poem 
 for the perverse and the "curious," but its value as 
 art or poetry is next door to negligible. 
 
 I have already said that in my view the ''Ballad 
 of Reading Gaol" is the only poem of Wilde's which 
 is likely to endure. It is as different from his pre- 
 vious work as chalk is different from cheese, and 
 to read it after perusal of 'The Sphinx" or the 
 sonnets, it might almost be the work of another 
 hand. In point of fact, it was indeed written by 
 a Wilde who had very little in common, whether 
 intellectually or artistically, with the Wilde of the 
 bulk of the poems. Up to the time of his imprison- 
 ment Oscar Wilde, poet, had encouraged, or pre- 
 tended to encourage, certain very grave fallacies 
 with regard to poetry. He asserted — largely, I 
 think, because he knew himself to be incapable of 
 sincerity — that poetry was, in its essence, a matter 
 of pretence and artifice. He held that style was 
 everything, and feeling nothing; that poetry should 
 be removed as well from material actuality as from 
 the actuality of the spirit, and that no great poet 
 had ever in his greatest moments been other than 
 insincere. He professed other odd views and used 
 roundly to assert that he would rather have written 
 Swinburne's "Poems and Ballads" than anything 
 else in literature; and that Shakespeare was not, 
 
210 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 after all, a very great poet. I remember that when 
 some idiot talked of starting an "Anti-Shake- 
 speare Society," on the ground that "Shakespeare 
 never wrote a line of poetry in his life," Wilde was 
 vastly tickled by the idea, and said that Shakespeare 
 had been much overrated. He would have it that 
 Webster's "Duchess of Malfi" was a much better 
 play and much better poetry than any of Shake- 
 speare's, and, as he admired little that he did not 
 sooner or later try to imitate, it is possible that we 
 owe his "Duchess of Padua" to this view. In any 
 case, up to the time of his going to prison, there can 
 be no question that Wilde was peculiar and in a great 
 measure heretical in his notions about what poetry 
 should be. His opinions may or may not have 
 altered while he was in prison. I never heard him 
 renounce them, but after he came out he did arrive 
 at a perception of the fact that a poet who wishes 
 to be heard must make his appeal to the human 
 heart as well as to the intellect, and that perversity 
 is never by any chance poetry. And so he set about 
 the "Ballad of Reading Gaol." Even here, how- 
 ever, he could not walk alone. He must have 
 models, and his actual model was "The Dream of 
 Eugene Aram," with "The Ancient Mariner" 
 thrown in on technical grounds. The result, of 
 course, far outdistances "Eugene Aram," just as 
 
Wilde's Poetry 211 
 
 in certain ultimate qualities it falls far short of 
 "The Ancient Mariner/' It is sufficient for us that 
 in the ''Ballad of Reading GaoF' we have a sus- 
 tained poem of sublimated actuality and of a 
 breadth and sweep and poignancy such as had never 
 before been attained in this line. The emotional 
 appeal is, on the whole, quite legitimate and, if we 
 except a very few passages in which the old Adam 
 Wilde crops out, the established tradition as to 
 what is fitting and comely in a poem of this nature 
 is not outraged or transgressed. Because of this 
 and the general skill and deftness of its workman- 
 ship, the poem will last, and, though I cannot agree 
 with those critics who desire to place Wilde among 
 the Immortals, I am certainly of opinion that it is 
 on the ''Ballad of Reading GaoF' and on the "Bal- 
 lad of Reading GsloV alone that his reputation 
 among posterity will stand. 
 
 The placing of poets and poetry in their proper 
 relation to the mass of literature is no fool's job, 
 and I am aware that the opinion of one age is fre- 
 quently stultified by the opinion of the next. But 
 this is not true of great work. I think it can be 
 established that all great work has been admired 
 and treasured from the beginning. From time to 
 time, too, the vast quantities of mediocre and insig- 
 nificant work is also admired, but in the nature of 
 
212 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 things there is no vitality about it and, despite the 
 p3ean of fools, it perishes. Much that Wilde has 
 strung into verse will so perish. The "Ballad" may 
 persist and save him from the oblivion which he 
 seems to me assiduously to have courted. 
 
CHAPTER XVII 
 
 THE PLAYS AND PROSE WORKS 
 
 I HAVE demonstrated in the foregoing chapter 
 the absolute folly of Wilde's claim to suprem- 
 acy as an artist. It is a claim which would 
 never have been put forward for him if he had not 
 put it forward for himself, but it is a claim which 
 his adherents have constantly reiterated since his 
 death, with nobody to gainsay them ; and so vocif- 
 erous and persistent have these people been that 
 the idea of Wilde's supreme artistry has come to be 
 accepted without question by a gaping public and 
 to pass current as good, sound, critical coin even 
 among the cultivated. Wilde the supreme artist 
 in the capacity of poet does not exist and never has 
 existed. We have now to turn to Wilde the 
 supreme proseman. The Ross-Ransome faction are 
 nothing if not wonderful in this regard. Their one 
 cry, which they repeat with parrot-like iteration and 
 to which they cling as a drowning critic might cling 
 to critical straws, is this — Wilde's own saying: 
 "The fact of a man being a poisoner is nothing 
 
 213 
 
214 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 against his prose/' Now, this is such a truism 
 that, of itself, it is not worth talking about, but 
 it has been put up for the defence and glorification 
 of Wilde, in and out of season. Even our great 
 literary judge, Mr. Justice Darling, takes his cue 
 from this remark and tells twelve English jurymen 
 that because a man was a bad man, that is not 
 to say that we are to refrain from reading his books, 
 and so on. But all these people miss the real point, 
 which is that, though the fact of a man being a 
 poisoner is nothing against his prose, it is equally, 
 and just as clearly, nothing for it. Without going 
 further into the question at the moment, I shall 
 venture to deal with Wilde's prose writings on the 
 assumption that if they are no worse they are 
 certainly no better through the fact of the shame- 
 fulness of his life. Wilde himself never made any 
 great fuss about his prose writings other than the 
 plays. He regarded — and very properly regarded — 
 the essays in 'Intentions," together with the fairy 
 tales and his other stories (excepting, of course, 
 'The Picture of Dorian Gray"), as so much donkey 
 work, and pretty well on the level with his lectures, 
 which were written for the pure purpose of getting 
 money and with no eye to ''supreme artistry." "In- 
 tentions" was first published in 1891. Three years 
 went by before the book passed into its second edi- 
 
The Plays and Prose Works 215 
 
 tion. The first edition was published at 7s. 6d., and 
 I believe I am right in saying that the second edi- 
 tion, published at 3s. 6d., was simply a "remainder'' 
 of the first in a cheaper binding. It was not till 
 after Wilde's imprisonment and death and after the 
 ''boosters" had been at work on him for some years 
 that we began to hear of the marvellous artistry 
 and genius which this volume is alleged to exhibit. 
 Wilde himself would have laughed in his sleeve if 
 he could have been told that such preposterous 
 claims would ever be made for his pot-boiling fleers 
 and ironies. He knew that the ''Decay of Lying/' 
 the "Critic as Artist" and the "Truth of Masks" 
 were, in a large measure, cribbed from Whistler, 
 and he knew that "Pen, Pencil and Poison" was the 
 merest review article, and neither better nor worse 
 than the average stodginess which the public of his 
 day accepted from their somnolent monthlies. The 
 doctrine in these papers will not bear examination. 
 When it is good it is not Wilde's, and when it is 
 bad it is horrid, and not necessarily Wilde's at that. 
 It is studded with such clap-trap statements as "All 
 art is immoral" ; "Society often forgives the crim- 
 inal: it never forgives the dreamer"; "There is no 
 sin except stupidity"; "The Greeks had no art 
 critics" ; "It is difficult not to be unjust to what one 
 loves" ; "His crimes gave strong personality to his 
 
216 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 style''; ''I am prepared to prove anything''; "The 
 more we study art the less we care for nature"; 
 ''Shakespeare is too fond of going directly to life 
 and borrowing life's natural utterance" ; "Meredith 
 is a prose Browning — and so is Browning" ; "I live 
 in terror of not being misunderstood" ; "To have a 
 capacity for a passion and not to realise it is to 
 make oneself incomplete and limited." And so 
 we might continue, to the complete exasperation of 
 reason and decency. Pernicious and scurrilous 
 stuff was always in Wilde's bosom, and if he could 
 get it off in a sly way while pretending to discuss 
 serious matters in a serious sense he was delighted. 
 His doctrine was nothing more or less than a doc- 
 trine of smart negation. That he had literary skill 
 enough and wit and scholarship enough to be enter- 
 taining nobody wishes to deny, but the cultivated 
 people whom he entertains place no value upon his 
 opinions. It is the middling-minded who are not 
 entertained, and yet take him for gospel and allow 
 such intellectuality as they may possess to be dam- 
 aged and warped by his insincerities. On the whole, 
 therefore, I say that "Intentions" will not do if we 
 are to consider Wilde in the light of a serious and 
 illuminating thinker. 
 
 On the ground of artistry, style and so forth 
 the book is not by any means flawless. That Wilde 
 
The Plays and Prose Works 217 
 
 had a good, easy prose style and did, at times, write 
 accomplished prose I admit; but in this regard he 
 stands on no better level than Mr. Frank Harris or 
 Mr. Gilbert Chesterton. All three of them — Wilde, 
 Harris and Chesterton — are killed by the exuber- 
 ance of their own facility. They have the pen of the 
 ready writer and they fall accordingly. Moreover, 
 Wilde is prone to the over-sugared and over-gilded 
 passage ; even though he can be as bald as the bald- 
 est and as limping as the lamest. Of his minor 
 defects I will say nothing, except that his split 
 infinitives are a standing disgrace to him. 
 
 We may now pass to his stories. I have always 
 held that if Wilde was anything at all he was an 
 inventor of stories. Such social success as he ever 
 attained was almost entirely due to this gift coupled 
 with a remarkable delivery and a good voice. "I 
 have thought of a story" was an announcement for 
 ever on his lips, and his intimates knew that five 
 times out of six the story would be worth listening 
 to. When I first knew him his pet stories were of 
 the order of the inverted fable; somewhat in the 
 manner of the fables of Ambrose Bierce. Two ex- 
 amples which have never been published I may set 
 down here. One of them is what Wilde called 'The 
 True Story of Androcles and the Lion.'' He said 
 that though Androcles may have been an early 
 
218 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 Christian slave, he was also a dentist. A certain 
 lion found himself suffering from severe toothache 
 and consulted Androcles on the subject. The 
 dentist advised gold filling for the back teeth and 
 an entirely new set of teeth for the upper jaw or 
 mandible. Later, Androcles, because he was a good 
 Christian, was thrown to the lions or, rather, to a 
 lion, and perceiving when the beast was let loose 
 upon him that here was an old friend, approached 
 him with joy, feeling sure that the lion would not 
 hurt him inasmuch as he had made no charge for 
 the gold filling and the upper set of teeth. But the 
 King of Beasts had other views and promptly tore 
 Androcles to pieces, and chewed him up with the 
 very teeth which had been so kindly and generously 
 supplied to him. 
 
 And the other story was called 'Tresence of 
 Mind." *'In a theatre in America," said Wilde, 
 ''there was a young flute-player who was gifted 
 with an extraordinary presence of mind. One 
 evening some of the scenery caught fire and, as the 
 smoke and flames began to rush into the building, 
 the audience prepared to flee. Whereupon, with 
 singular presence of mind, the young flute-player 
 jumped out of his seat and, holding up a lily-white 
 hand, cried in stentorian tones: There is no 
 danger!' In consequence of these words the audi- 
 
The Plays and Prose Works 219 
 
 ence kept their seats and every single soul of them 
 was burnt to death. Thus we may see," added 
 Wilde, ''how useful a thing presence of mind 
 really is." 
 
 Of course, he had other stories in different veins, 
 and I believe that all the tales in 'The Happy 
 Prince" and "The House of Pomegranates," as well 
 as in the volume which contains "Lord Arthur 
 Saville's Crime," were told by Wilde over and over 
 again before they were written ; just as he told the 
 tale of "La Sainte Courtisane" and the plots of his 
 plays before they were written. "The Happy 
 Prince" and "The House of Pomegranates" are not 
 without their merits as fairy tales in the manner 
 of Hans Andersen, but Wilde could not be content 
 with the simplicities of his model, and some of the 
 stories are marred by the obliquities of the cynic 
 and the perverse mind. 
 
 "Lord Arthur Saville's Crime" and the stories 
 printed with it may be said to represent Wilde's 
 attempt to come up with Robert Louis Stevenson 
 on the plane of the New Arabian Nights. For 
 my own part, I do not think that any of them quite 
 "comes off." Wilde's friends have been at great 
 pains to dilate on their "exquisite charm," their 
 "mordant humour," and so forth; but they have 
 always seemed to me to be fairly feeble. "Lord 
 
220 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 Arthur Saville's Crime'' itself is so over- fantastical 
 that it becomes farcical. "The Canterville Ghost/' 
 which Wilde describes as a hylo-idealistic romance, 
 is a feeble but unblushing imitation of a now for- 
 gotten story called "Cecilia de Noel," by Lane Fal- 
 coner. "The Sphinx, Without a Secret," is a very 
 stale and flat disappointment; and "The Model 
 Millionaire" is exactly the kind of story for which 
 Tit-Bits or Answers gives a guinea prize every 
 week. I should not like the reader to imagine that 
 I am dismissing these things airily or pooh-poohing 
 them for the mere sake of doing it. I have lately 
 read them with care, and I marvel that anybody can 
 pretend that there is a great or dazzling merit 
 about them. 
 
 I believe that at the bottom of his heart Wilde 
 felt that his true genius had found expression in 
 his plays. Being the man he was, he could not 
 refrain from praising his own poetry, his own 
 essays and stories, and professing that they were 
 very fine things indeed; but when he talked of 
 himself as a supreme artist, it was the plays that 
 he always had looming in his mind. For his poetry 
 he had never received any of the critical rewards 
 which would have so delighted him. He was never 
 hailed poet by the poets contemporary with him; 
 never admitted to that higher hierarchy to which 
 
The Plays and Prose Works 221 
 
 Tennyson, Swinburne, Arnold, Browning and, if 
 you like, even Rossetti, felt and knew themselves to 
 belong. But his general prose and some of his 
 ■essays (paid for lavishly by Frank Harris when he 
 was editing The Fortnightly) made a nine days' 
 sensation, but they brought him no real credit or 
 reputation ; neither did the story books. It was with 
 Lady Windermere's Fan that he first got home, as 
 it were; with results which, in the way of finance 
 and applause, were entirely beyond his wildest 
 dreams or expectation. Lady Windermere's Fan 
 was a success, as successes went in those days, and 
 it was followed by other successes, culminating in 
 The Importance of being Earnest, which brought 
 Wilde more money and more appreciation than any 
 of them. Because the plays were a success and 
 London went to see them, Wilde allowed himself 
 to think that they must be important as literature 
 and that he was a great dramatist. 
 
 Sir Arthur Pinero will probably not consider 
 himself too flattered when I mention that Wilde 
 bad the greatest possible admiration for his work, 
 and told me that from Pinero and Dumas Fils 
 lie had learnt all he knew of stagecraft and that 
 lie considered The Magistrate to be the best of all 
 modern comedies. It is certain that for the plays, 
 as for everything else he did, Wilde had to model 
 
222 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 himself on somebody, and Sir Arthur is fortunate 
 or unfortunate in having been the man. One has 
 only to compare the constructive methods of the 
 two to recognise this. The only difference between 
 them is that Sir Arthur Pinero maintains an illusion 
 of strict sanity among his characters, whereas 
 Wilde is not always to be depended upon in this 
 regard. Besides which, there is the further differ- 
 ence that, while Pinero conforms to the established 
 code of morals and makes his good people good and 
 his bad people bad, Wilde has a tendency to hold up 
 bad people for good people, and drops out really 
 good people altogether. I am going to say this 
 much and no more about the plays as a body: 
 namely, that they put Wilde into a secondary posi- 
 tion with regard to Pinero and Mr. Sydney Grundy. 
 His plays are not literary or intellectual plays, but 
 just the conventional things which were stirring 
 in London during Wilde's period, with the Wilde 
 paradox, irony, flippancy and insincerity thrown 
 in. I am no frantic believer in the supreme gifts 
 of Mr. George Bernard Shaw, and I have never 
 been able to get up any great enthusiasm for the 
 sentimentalities of Sir J. M. Barrie; but it is quite 
 certain that both these gentlemen have beaten 
 Wilde as exponents of a drama which is supposed 
 
The Plays and Prose Works 223 
 
 to be concerned with art and literature rather than 
 with the stage and the box-office. 
 
 Wilde will not last as a dramatist, whether behind 
 the footlights or in the closet. His plays have been 
 revived occasionally, and the glitter has been found 
 in a great measure to have died out of them ; while 
 as plays for reading they w^ould not be read at all 
 if they bore any other name but Wilde's. I will ask 
 any unbiassed person to peruse Lady Windermere's 
 Fan or, if you like, An Ideal Husband and The Im- 
 portance of being Earnest ^ and tell me if here is 
 great work. I do not wish to load these pages with 
 quotations from books which are readily obtainable ; 
 but if I were so disposed I could set forth twaddling 
 and mock-heroic dialogue and feeble humour from 
 Wilde's plays by the yard. There are passages in 
 all the plays which might have been written by 
 a sentimental schoolgirl rather than by an artist, 
 or by a giggling actor rather than a wit. I shall not 
 say that the plays failed of their purpose, which, 
 however, could have been at best only a temporary 
 purpose. A man who boasted of the intellectual 
 superiorities of which Wilde boasted, demeaned 
 himself when he wrote them, and still more hope- 
 lessly demeaned himself when he pretended to take 
 the popular applause which followed for honest 
 
224 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 fame. I was constantly with him, as I have shown^ 
 when he wrote the most successful of them. In a 
 careless way I aided and abetted him in their pro- 
 duction, but it never entered my mind that they 
 were either fine drama or fine literature. And 
 whatever Wilde himself might have thought about 
 them, he certainly would not have contended that 
 they were wonderful works or genius before me. I 
 do not wish to suggest that a man of genius is not 
 entitled to condescend to the demands of the popular 
 stage in certain circumstances, such as need of 
 money or a desire to show that genius can do com- 
 mon things quite as capably as common people ; and 
 it is therefore that I do not blame Wilde for writing 
 the prose plays. But it is obviously illogical and 
 idiotic of him to turn round and profess that be- 
 cause he could tickle the popular fancy of his period^ 
 the work with which he did it is as fine and as 
 worthy as anything in dramatic literature. Nobody 
 knew better than he how false and foolish and how 
 subversive of reason such an assumption must be^ 
 Wilde's ''boomsters" have gone further in this 
 stupid business than even Wilde himself would have 
 gone. If we are to believe what they write, Wilde 
 is the greatest dramatist since Shakespeare, and 
 beats Goldsmith, Congreve, Sheridan and all the 
 rest of them into a cocked hat. The cold truth is; 
 
The Plays and Prose Works 225 
 
 that he never succeeded in rivalling Sir Arthur 
 Pinero or Mr. Jones, and that he has been out- 
 distanced by his own pupil, Mr. George Bernard 
 Shaw. 
 
CHAPTER XVIII 
 
 FOR POSTERITY 
 
 THERE is a critical shibboleth to the effect 
 that no man can rightly judge his contem- 
 poraries. The true inwardness of this very 
 comforting idea lies in its extreme utility where 
 persons of mediocre intellect are concerned. Per- 
 sons who write feeble poetry and silly plays, not to 
 mention offensive fiction, always pretend to put 
 their hopes in posterity. My contention is that 
 posterity is not likely to be much more imbecile than 
 the contemporary world, and that the foolish hopes 
 of vain and incompetent people are consequently 
 ill-founded. A feeble poem is not to be strength- 
 ened by the mere process of time any more than a 
 piece of strong work is likely to be weakened or 
 degraded. It is singular to note, too, that people 
 seldom appeal to posterity when they are being ap- 
 plauded. For a man with bouquets in his hand and 
 the laurel on his brow posterity does not exist. On 
 the other hand, for all of us, whoever we may be, 
 
 posterity has its use, and, though I do not think that 
 
 226 
 
For Posterity 227 
 
 these uses are important to us, they nevertheless 
 exist. By way, therefore, of a sporting offer, as it 
 were, I shall reach a hand through time and ask 
 posterity to do me a favour, which is this : when I 
 have been dead fifty years let some critic of parts 
 put on one side Wilde's published work, the present 
 work and my own poems and verses; and let him 
 put on the other side all the biographies of Wilde 
 he can lay his hand on, together with the parts 
 of "De Profundis" which are now lying in the 
 British Museum; and when he has examined care- 
 fully and critically these two bundles of material, 
 let him say without fear or favour who has drawn 
 the true picture — Lord Alfred Douglas or Messrs. 
 Ross, Ransome, Sherard and Harris. 
 
 I shall sink or swim on some such decision, and 
 I am content. At the present moment it is to the 
 interest of everybody directly concerned that the 
 Wilde myth should continue to exist. It is excellent 
 for Wilde's publishers, excellent for the printing, 
 paper and bookbinding trades, and excellent for 
 those critics and editors who are best known by 
 their labours in connection with Wilde. For them 
 it is merely a matter of trade, and innocent enough. 
 It is also excellent for those depraved persons who 
 take Wilde as their moral guide and who profess 
 to believe — and, possibly, do believe— that the 
 
228 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 viciousness for which Wilde suffered imprisonment 
 is a species of superior virtue; and it is also excel- 
 lent for that vast multitude of persons who, while 
 they may have no particular sympathy with Wilde's 
 depravities, are, nevertheless, of oblique mind and 
 cynically immoral intellect. In the aggregate these 
 people are very strong, much stronger than the easy- 
 going, uncorrupted masses of humanity imagine. 
 They are so strong in England and so numerous 
 that it is profitable to flood the country with Wilde's 
 works at a shilling. They are so strong in the 
 press that it is next door to impossible to find a 
 critical review or newspaper wherein Wilde's name 
 is not mentioned, from time to time, with bated 
 breath and whispered humbleness. They are so 
 strong socially that the Wilde evangelists are wel- 
 comed in the highest political and social circles. 
 And they are so insidious that they have succeeded 
 in upsetting the usually calm judgment of the Bench 
 and the Bar. We have seen Mr. F. E. Smith, k.c, 
 weeping crocodile tears over Wilde's memory and 
 expressing the hope that his sins were forgotten and 
 that his genius might be left to blaze brilliantly in 
 all men's sight without so much as a rude air to 
 disturb it. 
 
 There are two interests, however, which these 
 bands of champions habitually ignore. One is the 
 
m 
 
 O PM 
 
 H 
 
For Posterity 229 
 
 interest of letters and the other is the interest of 
 the pubHc morals. It is not in the interest of letters 
 that any writer, however capable, should be given 
 honour and adulation beyond his merits. When 
 Wilde is set up for the supreme artist all other 
 artists in all time are degraded thereby; when 
 Wilde is set up for a poet of the first order, all other 
 poets suffer damage by comparison; and when 
 Wilde is set up for a moralist, there is just a lunatic, 
 anarchist end of morals. The question of the pub- 
 lic interest is largely bound up in these things. But 
 outside of them there are ever graver matters. I 
 maintain that even if we dismiss Wilde's private 
 shamefulness from the account, he is still to be con- 
 demned by reason of the nature and intention of his 
 
 writmgs. 
 
 As I shall show in the chapter on "Dorian Gray," 
 Wilde himself admitted that ''Dorian Gray'' was a 
 poisonous book. In its own way 'The Sphinx" is 
 just as poisonous, and so are many passages in the 
 essays which go to make up "Intentions." In the 
 plays we find him continually flying in the face of 
 the rules of conduct which make life possible and 
 keep it sweet. He preaches always (flatly or by 
 innuendo) that vice is at least more interesting than 
 virtue; that insincerity is better and more to be de- 
 sired than truth; that cynical carelessness and in- 
 
230 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 difference are more comely than kind feeling and 
 altruism; and that the whole end and aim of life 
 is to eat delicately, sleep softly and be as wicked 
 and depraved as you like, provided that you are 
 wicked and depraved in a graceful manner. I find 
 myself utterly incapable of acquiescing in such a 
 scandalous view of the reasons and purposes of 
 human existence, and I say my say accordingly. 
 It would have been easier and more profitable for 
 me to have made a book about Wilde which would 
 not have appeared harsh or severe or in any way 
 offensive to the factions which ring him round. 
 The breaking up of other people's gods, even though 
 they happen to be gods of clay, is not a job for a 
 man of a pacific turn of mind. Wilde knew that 
 some day a true biographical and critical account 
 of himself would have to be written and, doubtless, 
 on the principle of getting one's blow in first, he put 
 it on record that it is always Judas who is the biog- 
 rapher. The late lamented Charles Peace was of 
 the same opinion, and so, doubtless, were many 
 other unpleasant and somewhat exploded persons, 
 accounts of whose lives have still to be written. It 
 is conceivable that there are circumstances in which 
 honest biography is of slight consequence. In point 
 of fact, all biography that matters is largely a sort 
 of exegesis and commentary on the life work of its 
 
For Posterity 231 
 
 subject. The biographies of persons who have done 
 nothing are, in the nature of things, unprofitable. 
 Wilde made a stir in the world, and his drum- 
 beaters and fuglemen have made an even greater 
 stir on his behalf. It is right and proper that while 
 the noise is still in the air we should endeavour to 
 discover its real meaning and to get sight of the in- 
 struments by which it is produced. 
 
CHAPTER XIX 
 
 THE BRITISH MUSEUM AND "dE PROFUNDIS" 
 
 I HAVE already shown that it was not until 
 the Ransome trial was well on the way that 
 I had any idea of the existence of the unpub- 
 lished parts of ''De Profundis'' or that the whole 
 manuscript had originally been couched in the form 
 of a letter to me. As soon as I heard rumours of 
 these facts I communicated with Mr. Robert Ross, 
 and was informed definitely of them by Messrs. 
 Lewis and Lewis, who, in their letter to me, asserted 
 that "I must have known'' of the existence of the 
 manuscript and that my name was omitted from the 
 published parts out of ''consideration for my feel- 
 ings." It is perfectly obvious that there is nothing 
 in the published parts of ''De Profundis" to which 
 I could take exception, nor should I have been in the 
 least degree injured if Mr. Ross had let it be known 
 that the published parts were addressed to me in- 
 stead of leaving it to be inferred that they had been 
 addressed to him. It is true that when I had a con- 
 versation with him prior to the publication of the 
 
 232 
 
British Museum and'*De Profundis" 233 
 
 book, Ross told me that there were certain refer- 
 ences in it which I might not have Hked, but he also 
 told me that these had been expunged, and I under- 
 stood that the book was really a letter addressed to 
 himself. This is as far as my information went up 
 to the time of the action. 
 
 Before the trial I obtained, by order of the Court, 
 discovery of the unpublished part of "De Pro- 
 fundis." I handed the document to Mr. T. W. H. 
 Crosland, who, after perusing it, insisted on reading 
 it to me from the first word to the last. I gave him 
 answers then and there on every point he chose to 
 raise, and I don't mind admitting that his examina- 
 tion of me was a good deal closer and a good deal 
 keener than that of Mr. Campbell, k.c, who cross- 
 examined me on behalf of Ransome. 
 
 It was not until we got into Court that we knew 
 that Mr. Ross had been so kind as to hand over 
 the unpublished parts of the ''De Profundis" MS. 
 to the authorities of the British Museum as a pres- 
 ent to the nation with the condition that they were 
 to remain under seal till 1960, and that the British 
 Museum authorities had been gracious enough to 
 accept the gift. It is not for me to profess to know 
 upon what principle the British Museum accepts 
 gifts of secret documents. One takes it that some- 
 body at the British Museum must have taken the 
 
234 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 trouble to read the MS. before it was accepted and 
 sealed up, and that unless the person who perused 
 it was a sheer idiot he must have perceived that it 
 contained much scurrilous and libellous matter not 
 only concerning myself, but concerning the Dow- 
 ager Marchioness of Queensberry and other mem- 
 bers of my family. Yet the MS. was accepted and 
 is now in possession and control of the officials at 
 the British Museum. With these facts before us 
 we are brought face to face with an entirely new 
 and unprecedented range of possibilities. I flatter 
 myself that when I die any lengthy MS. of mine 
 which I might care to write would have some slight 
 value for persons concerned in the collection of 
 holographs and similar material for museums. It 
 is open to me, therefore, to sit down and write a 
 villainous attack upon any eminent person with 
 whom I may chance to be acquainted and to arrange 
 that my executor shall present it to the British 
 Museum to be treasured for the nation and put to 
 such uses as the British Museum may at any time 
 deem to be fitting. How many manuscripts of this 
 nature may already be lurking on the British 
 Museum's shelves the wise authorities alone know. 
 Fifty years hence we may wake up to a due knowl- 
 edge of the "real" characters of most of our most 
 noted public men, written by other eminent public 
 
British Museum and "De Profundis" 235 
 
 men who have had real or imaginary grievances 
 against them. It may well be that we shall have 
 the pleasure of reading Mr. Lloyd George's inside 
 opinions of Lord Reading and his brethren, written 
 in Mr. Lloyd George's own hand at the National 
 Liberal Club in moments of irritation or depression 
 after the Marconi affair. Possibly Mr. Keir Hardie 
 may have consigned to the same safe and honour- 
 able keeping some of his extraordinary opinions 
 about certain dukes and certain judges ; and to come 
 into other fields, Mr. Clement K. Shorter may have 
 lodged his private and innermost view of the char- 
 acter and habits of Sir William Robertson NicoU, 
 Mr. Thomas Hardy, Miss Marie Corelli, and heaven 
 and the British Museum alone know whom else be- 
 sides. And what a chance is herein opened up for 
 Mr. Frank Harris ! He has known and apparently 
 loved Carlyle, Huxley, Meredith, Matthew Arnold 
 and Oscar Wilde, not to mention Lord Randolph 
 Churchill, Mr. Asquith, Mr. Ben Tillet and other 
 notabilities. He has nothing to do but to write what 
 he likes about them and present the result to the 
 British Museum, for opening and publication in 
 that annus mirahilis 1960. 
 
 Of course, it is ridiculous to suppose that any 
 of the persons I have mentioned possess spleen and 
 impudence enough to degrade themselves by doing 
 
236 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 anything of the kind. But the fact remains that 
 the British Museum authorities are sitting at the 
 receipt of custom, with open and itching palms, and 
 that in Wilde's case they have received, and, not 
 only so, but have refused to disgorge when they 
 were caught at it. 
 
 I quite admit that, having once accepted on be- 
 half of the nation a relic of any kind, the British 
 Museum is bound to be cautious about parting with 
 It again. This, doubtless, is the refuge behind 
 which the authorities take their stand; but the real 
 point is whether they were ever justified in accept- 
 ing it at all, and whether, in any case, it was in the 
 public interest that such a manuscript should be 
 accepted. In law, the paper on which any letter is 
 written belongs to the person to whom it is ad- 
 dressed. The "De Profundis'' manuscript is ad- 
 dressed to me, on the face of it, and I hold that I have 
 a moral if not a legal right to its possession. But 
 leaving this aspect of the question on one side, the 
 British Museum authorities will surely not contend 
 that it is to the interest of anybody in the world, 
 other than those persons who delight in scandal, 
 backbiting and malice, that such a manuscript 
 should be preserved. What possible motive that 
 is worthy can be offered as an excuse by these 
 people? Argue as they will, they must perceive 
 
British Museum and ''De Profundis" 237 
 
 that the manuscript is one which in no conceivable 
 circumstances can be considered to reflect anything 
 but discredit on its author. When it is published — 
 and it will be out of copyright one day — Oscar 
 Wilde is finished. No reputation, however securely 
 founded, can hope to survive the moral debacle 
 which this manuscript demonstrates to have taken 
 place in the mind of Oscar Wilde. It is said that 
 there must be honour even among thieves. A man 
 may do despicable things and still retain a share of 
 the respect of his fellow-men. Murderers have 
 gone to their doom and have yet compelled some 
 sort of respect from the world in the manner of 
 their doing it. As the published reports of the 
 Ransome trial show, Wilde has whined and shuffled 
 and protested and wept and tried to shift his re- 
 sponsibilities to innocent shoulders ; and the British 
 Museum is to make a public treasure of the record 
 of his infamy and keep it for him until such time 
 as it may be published without unpleasant legal con- 
 sequences. 
 
 For myself I do not care tuppence about the 
 contents of this manuscript. I was anxious that 
 It should be read out word for word in Court at 
 the Ransome trial. If this had been done, and 
 the counsel for the defence had dared to cross- 
 examine me on it in detail, I should have won my 
 
238 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 case. On the insistence of my counsel a pretence 
 was made of reading it, but not twenty pages had 
 been got through before Mr. Justice DarHng inter- 
 vened, and the reading of the MS. as a whole was 
 discontinued. Thereafter only such portions were 
 read as were supposed to be greatly to my detri- 
 ment. Although these passages were read, I was 
 never so much as asked, either by judge or counsel, 
 to say if there was any truth in them. Wilde had 
 written them in mad rage when he was caged up in 
 a squalid gaol, a disgraced and whimpering convict, 
 and, of course, they must be true! The judge him- 
 self pointed out that prisoners are apt to slander 
 and unreason, but he did not tell the jury that they 
 must take no notice of what had been read. Oscar 
 Wilde had written it, Oscar Wilde was a man of 
 genius, and they must form their own conclusions. 
 The veriest tyro in law will tell you that such a docu- 
 ment as this is no evidence at all and ought not to 
 have been admitted. Yet it was admitted and parts 
 selected by the defence were allowed to go to the 
 jury. I think that common sense and common jus- 
 tice demanded that we should have had all or none. 
 If the British Museum authorities did not fully 
 appreciate the nature of the manuscript at the time 
 of its acceptance they have had every opportunity 
 of making themselves conversant with its meaning 
 
British Museum and "De Profundis" 239 
 
 and intention through what took place at the trial. 
 They must surely have recognised that it is capable 
 of being put — and, indeed, has been put — to the 
 basest and most cowardly uses, and that it is, in 
 essence, of absolutely no other use. For all that, it 
 is still preserved, as though it were a literary gem 
 of the first water instead of something which man- 
 kind at large would be quite willing to let die. I am 
 in no position to fight the British Museum for the 
 possession of this abominable curiosity. If it had 
 come into my hands at any time prior to the Ran- 
 some trial it would have been simply thrown on 
 the fire, not because I am afraid of it or because any 
 of my family are afraid of it, but because, when all 
 is said, I should have had too much respect for 
 Wilde's memory and too much regard for letters 
 ever t6 consent to its publication. But it has never 
 been in my hands, and it is now no longer possible 
 for it to be kept secretly. Responsible persons at 
 the British Museum may well be left to their own 
 reflections upon the wisdoms of preserving this 
 mummified libel. 
 
CHAPTER XX 
 
 ransome's "critical study" 
 
 I AM not going to trouble the reader with an 
 account of the "Life and Works" of Mr. 
 Arthur Ransome, one of whose claims to fame 
 lies in the fact that he was a defendant in the 
 Ransome trial. His critical study of Oscar Wilde 
 is a lumbering, apologetic performance dedicated 
 to Robert Ross and with an evident regard for the 
 opinions of Ross even where criticism is concerned. 
 The passages in it which I held to be libellous upon 
 myself have been expunged, and, according to Ran- 
 some, this was done with a view to sparing my feel- 
 ings. The edition current among the public, how- 
 ever, is not published by the original publishing 
 house, but by another firm, and both this firm and 
 Mr. Ransome will, doubtless, be startled to hear that 
 if they had ventured to insert the passages of which 
 I complained in the edition for which they are re- 
 sponsible I should have immediately served writs 
 for libel upon them and taken my chances of another 
 "evisceration" in the witness-box. Possibly Mr. 
 
 240 
 
Ransome's '^Critical Study" 241 
 
 Ransome had no inkling of this when he put his 
 wonderfully magnanimous note to the new edition, 
 but his publishers are wise people. 
 
 Ransome's "Critical Study/' at a shilling, has 
 been planted on Smith's stalls and at all the shilling 
 bookselling booths throughout the country, ever 
 since the trial, with the name "Oscar Wilde" printed 
 large on the dust cover, and the name of "Ransome" 
 not quite so large. I am going to take the edition 
 as it stands, because the original edition was with- 
 drawn by the publishers and can only have had a 
 very limited circulation. It deals with the facts of 
 Wilde's life in the briefest way, and is devoted 
 mainly to a pretentious discussion of Wilde's writ- 
 ings. I may best sum up its critical announcements 
 by saying that they are all of them what Ross would 
 have liked them to be. Beginning with the poems, 
 Ransome assures us that "Ravenna" is an admirable 
 prize poem. He tells us that Wilde's early poems 
 are "rich in imitations" and full of "variations of 
 other men's music," adding that they are vari- 
 ations to which the personality of the virtuoso has 
 given "a certain uniformity." "Certain" is good, in 
 view of the fact that these poems are most distinctly 
 not uniform in any single quality which appertains 
 to poetry. Of Wilde's apings of Milton he says: 
 "Some of those exercises, which are among the most 
 
242 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 interesting he wrote, suggest the new view of the 
 morale of imitation" ; and he goes on to tell us that 
 ''Wilde made himself, as it were, the representative 
 poet of his period. People who had heard of Rossetti 
 and Swinburne, but never read them, were able to 
 recover their self-respect by purchasing Wilde/' 
 Was ever such arrant nonsense put before a con- 
 fiding public, even at a shilling ? Mr. Ransome was 
 in swaddling clothes when Wilde's early volume 
 was going through its five editions, otherwise he 
 would know that for one person who ''recovered 
 his self-respect" by purchasing Wilde there were 
 fifty persons who were purchasing and reading 
 Swinburne and Rossetti without worrying about 
 their self-respect at all. 
 
 Mr. Ransome is full of admiration for the early 
 poems as a body. He cannot deny that "the young 
 man's verse was grossly derivative," or that Milton, 
 Dante, Marlowe, Keats, Browning and others "make 
 up a goodly list of sufferers by this light-hearted 
 corsair's piracies," but he asks the reader to believe 
 that Wilde's plagiarism was a really pretty gift and 
 all to the advantage of letters, and that the poems 
 are to be valued as the early work of a great man 
 and, for that matter, a great poet. I should have 
 wished that Mr. Ransome might have given us a 
 more explicit condemnation of the moral aspect of 
 
Ransome's ''Critical Study" 243 
 
 'The Sphinx." His final remark is that "it is as 
 if a man were finding solace for his feverish hands 
 in the touch of cool, hard stones, and at the same 
 time stimulating his fever by the sexual excitement 
 of contrast between the over-sensitive and the 
 utterly insensible" — whatever this may mean. 
 
 On the prose Mr. Ransome spreads his butter 
 very thick and, by way of apology and blessing 
 for ''Dorian Gray," he has the following specious 
 paragraphs: "Perhaps the reason why it was so 
 loudly accused of immorality was that in the pop- 
 ular mind luxury and sin are closely allied, and the 
 unpardonable mannerism that made him preach in 
 a parable against the one, did not hide his whole- 
 hearted delight in describing the other." . . . 
 " 'Dorian Gray,' for all its faults, is such a book. It 
 is unbalanced; and that is a fault. It is a mosaic, 
 hurriedly made by a man who reached out in all 
 directions and took and used in his work whatever 
 scrap of jasper or porphyry or broken flint was put 
 into his hand; and that is not a virtue. But in it 
 there is an individual essence, a private perfume, a 
 colour whose secret has been lost. There are moods 
 whose consciousness that essence, perfume, colour 
 is needed to intensify." 
 
 And all this — mind you — of a book which Wilde 
 himself called "poisonous," and which Mr. Ran- 
 
244 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 some's own publishers, Messrs. Methuen, declined 
 to include at any price in their various editions of 
 Wilde's works. There is a great deal to pretty 
 much the same effect about "Intentions" and the 
 plays. Everything that Wilde has done is wonder- 
 ful from the Ransome point of view, and his liter- 
 ary faults and failings are beautifully explained 
 away or made the occasion for the handing up of 
 bouquets, until we come right down to the appended 
 somewhat mild reproof : "In 1889, before the malefi- 
 cent flood of gold was poured upon him, he had 
 become accustomed to indulge the vice that, openly 
 alluded to in the days and verses of 'Catullus/ is 
 generally abhorred and hidden in our own." 
 
 I have previously shown that Ransome goes out 
 of his way in another place to indicate that Wilde's 
 best work was done during the period when he was 
 "an habitual devotee" to the vice in question, and 
 he is not content even with this subtle hint, but 
 goes on to suggest that Wilde's knowledge of his 
 own infamy may have induced in him "a height- 
 ened ardour of production." I am aware that the 
 impropriety of this sort of criticism can be readily 
 explained away on the ground that it is honest or 
 scientific; but the fact remains that such criticism 
 must convey some vague suggestion that the literary 
 result — in Wilde's case, at least — was an excuse for 
 
Ransome's "Critical Study'' 245 
 
 the vice. Such an impression should not be de- 
 rivable from what professes to be a ''critical study" 
 of literary work. 
 
 It is the custom of all persons who wish to defend 
 dubious or immoral publications, such as I judge 
 some of Wilde's works to be, to assert that the same 
 thing is done in France — which country they assert 
 to be the Mother of all the Arts — and that nobody 
 complains and no harm has accrued. If this were 
 true of the French or any other people I do not know 
 that it would be good argument; but, as a matter 
 of fact, it is not true. Frenchmen have undoubt- 
 edly been the greatest sinners in the composition 
 of undesirable books, and that they are beginning 
 to reap what they have sown is quite evident from 
 the condition of French public morals to-day. 
 France admits that the greatest of her social prob- 
 lems at the moment lies in the utterly vicious and 
 decadent tendencies of French youth, particularly 
 of the lower and middle classes. But Frenchmen 
 are beginning to perceive that just as the apache 
 and the adolescent criminal are the direct outcome 
 of the neglect of religious and moral teaching in 
 the French national schools, so the unsavoury in- 
 tellectual art-mongers and Wilde-worshippers Vv^ho 
 are so thick upon the ground in middle-class French 
 society owe themselves, in the m.ain, to the per- 
 
246 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 nicious literature upon which the French law places 
 no check. It may be useful to remember here that 
 even in that great and glorious centre of artistic 
 freedom — Paris — the authorities declined to allow 
 the proposed monument to be erected over Wilde's 
 grave in Pere la Chaise until certain modifications 
 had been made in the work. It was a bitter blow 
 to some of the Wilde faction, but the authorities of 
 Paris were inexorable, and those responsible for the 
 monument learned a lesson that they could not 
 do as they liked, even in France. I do not say 
 that Mr. Ransome has anything to do with this, 
 but I do say that anybody who, by so much as a 
 word or a phrase, minimises Wilde's vices or vicious 
 writing in the name of Art is not sufficiently alive 
 to the danger of one of the most scandalous move- 
 ments that has ever excited and betrayed mankind. 
 
MONUMENT ERECTED OVER OSCAR WILDES GRAVE, 
 PERE LA CHAISE, PARIS 
 
I CHAPTER XXI ] 
 
 MY ACTIONS FOR LIBEL 
 
 THE number of writs which I have had from 
 time to time to issue over the Wilde affair 
 is past my count. If I had invoked the law 
 on every occasion upon which I have been Hbelled 
 over it, I suppose that the fees for writs alone would 
 have run into hundreds of pounds. For some years 
 I allowed people to say whatever they might choose 
 to say about me without lifting a finger against them. 
 I believed in Wilde, who was my friend : I believed 
 in his genius and I had an exaggerated opinion 
 about the value of some of his writings. It seemed 
 to me that time would set me right; and it seemed 
 to me important, both for Wilde's sake and the sake 
 of letters, that I should avoid, so far as was pos- 
 sible, stirring up the mud which I knew lay at the 
 bottom of his life. By the time Wilde came out of 
 prison I formed a sort of habit of taking no notice 
 whatever of either his or my detractors. After his 
 death I let everybody who had known him rush into 
 print about him without offering the slightest con- 
 
 247 
 
248 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 tribution to the discussion. Sherard produced two 
 books purporting to be biographies of Wilde. Other 
 books on Wilde have been written by various hands ; 
 Mr. Ingleby has written a life, and I believe biog- 
 raphies have been published in America. I can 
 honestly say, however, that I have not troubled 
 even to read any of these works. Though I have 
 quoted from Sherard in the present volume, I have 
 not read either of his books through. Ingleby's 
 book I have glanced at and Ransome's ''Critical 
 Study" I read through for the first time in July of 
 last year. My opinions as to the importance of 
 Wilde's writings began to change as my reading 
 extended and my mind took hold of serious things. 
 A man's critical judgment is not at its best at 
 twenty-eight, especially in regard to the artistic 
 productions of his intimates. Even when we were 
 together I had told Wilde over and over again that 
 he overrated himself and that he was not by any 
 means the great man he believed himself to be. To 
 give him his due, he agreed with me. Nevertheless, 
 after his death I held his memory as a friend and, 
 if you like, even as a literary figure, in such regard 
 that I never so much as dreamed of saying or writ- 
 ing anything which would be likely to injure him. 
 We had had our differences. I knew that he had 
 written me one angry letter in prison and I knew that 
 
My Actions for Libel 249 
 
 for reasons of their own his intimates hated me; but 
 he had apologised to me for his anger and admitted 
 that it was unrighteous and ill-founded. I did 
 everything that a man could do to succour and help 
 him and make life possible for him after he left 
 prison; and I was unremitting in kindness to him 
 right down to the time of his death. He, for his 
 part, seemed to be most kindly and affectionately 
 disposed towards me and, for aught I knew to the 
 contrary, would gladly have done for me what I 
 gladly did for him if our positions had been re- 
 versed. 
 
 This thing is certain: that, during the whole of 
 our close intimacy in Naples and Paris, subsequent 
 to his downfall, he never once said or even hinted 
 to me that he had anything to blame me for, or that, 
 whether as regards finance or any other matters, 
 I had treated him otherwise than generously and 
 as one friend should treat another. He was a clever 
 man and, in his way, a singularly astute man, but I 
 never imagined that he was either clever or astute 
 enough to keep up a show of affectionate friendship 
 for a man whom he hated during the years that 
 elapsed between his leaving Berneval and his death. 
 At the last he drank a great deal more than was 
 good for him, and when alcohol began to have a 
 power over him and make him drunk, the wine was 
 
250 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 in and the wit was out in Oscar Wilde's case just 
 as in any other man's. If he had cherished resent- 
 ments against me and had succeeded in hiding them 
 when he was sober, I should have thought he would 
 have given me an inkling of them when he was 
 drunk, but he never did. Yet all the time the manu- 
 script of "De Profundis'' was in existence, and Mr. 
 Ross held his instructions to publish it. 
 
 Now, when I found in a book — which was ob- 
 viously intended to be the apotheosis of Wilde, but 
 was dedicated to Ross, and which claimed to put 
 forth the major facts of Wilde's life on the author- 
 ity of Ross as to biographical details — statements 
 to the effect that I had been in some way responsible 
 for his public obloquy, and that I basely deserted 
 him when his money was spent, I cannot see that 
 there was any possible course open to me but to have 
 the matter threshed out in a court of law. I ac- 
 cordingly issued writs upon the whole of the parties 
 who were legally concerned: that is to say, on the 
 author, the publisher, the printers, and a represen- 
 tative firm of distributors. The printers apologised 
 and the publisher withdrew the book from circula- 
 tion, and they were allowed to drop out of the action. 
 The 'Times Book Club" put in a defence on tech- 
 nical grounds, and Ransome, for his part, put in a 
 plea of justification. That plea could never have 
 
My Actions for Libel 251 
 
 been framed without the assistance and co-opera- 
 tion of Ross. I knew perfectly well what it would, 
 in all probability, contain before ever I saw it. It 
 was never really put to the jury. Recourse was had 
 to other measures. Ross was in possession of a few 
 old letters of mine; the British Museum had the 
 unpublished parts of "De Profundis"; Truth had 
 the letters which I had addressed to Labouchere, 
 and Messrs. Russell — a firm of solicitors of which 
 the Honourable Charles Russell is the principal — 
 produced — I presume under subpoena — the idiot 
 letter from Wilde to myself which my father pro- 
 duced at Wilde's trial at the Old Bailey. Of my 
 letters to Wilde, Ross and Labouchere there is, 
 since they were not in the defendants' possession, 
 no mention whatever in the defendants' affidavit of 
 documents, and consequently I had no warning of 
 them. 
 
 Of the "De Profundis" manuscript I was given 
 due notice and, of course, I knew that Wilde's 
 own letter — which is a letter which reflects discredit 
 on Wilde rather than on anybody else — would be 
 sure to turn up. So that my letters to Wilde and 
 Ross and the letters to Truth — the former sixteen 
 years old and the latter eighteen or twenty years 
 old — were sprung on me as I stood in the witness- 
 box. They proved absolutely nothing, but it was 
 
252 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 natural that they should make prejudice; and I com- 
 plain, not that they were produced, but that they 
 were produced without my being given an oppor- 
 tunity of perusing them and calling to mind the 
 circumstances in which they were written. I said 
 in the witness-box what I sincerely felt and feel — 
 namely : that I am ashamed of having written them ; 
 but I will say here and now what I tried to say then, 
 which is that the other side ought to be much more 
 ashamed of having produced them. What the de- 
 fence really did in effect was to say: "If you didn't 
 ruin Wilde and desert him because he had no more 
 money to spend on you, you did something else 
 which justifies us in saying anything we like about 
 you." In point of fact, this is always what happens 
 where actions for libel are concerned. You libel a 
 man in a most cruel and vicious way, and if he takes 
 an action against you you go to court and libel him 
 still further. Mr. Ransome got his verdict and, 
 though I would have appealed against it if I had 
 possessed the means, he is fully entitled to it in law. 
 He is entitled to go on saying that I ruined Wilde, 
 or that I lived on Wilde, till he is black in the face 
 if he can get anybody to print and stand the racket 
 of it. But who will believe him? Even with the 
 jury's verdict to give it sanction, the thing is too 
 preposterous for words. The Ransome affair had 
 
My Actions for Libel 253 
 
 made no particular difference to me ; but what has it 
 done for Wilde ? Here were these people with two 
 short paragraphs which had nothing to do with 
 and could not possibly help their book in the least. 
 When I started my action against them I did not 
 ask for damages and should have been content with 
 a withdrawal of the paragraphs, and, in the long run, 
 they have had to be withdrawn. If this had been 
 done before the trial I should never have known of 
 the existence of the unpublished parts of "De Pro- 
 fundis'' and the public would never have known of 
 them till 1960. The present book would not have 
 been written and the Wilde myth would have gone 
 merrily on its way rejoicing, until it was exploded 
 by process of time. So that clearly Wilde profits 
 nothing, but, on the whole, loses disastrously and 
 perhaps prematurely, and his tumble has been 
 brought about by the very persons who profess to 
 be his most devoted and zealous friends. Knowing 
 what they must have known, and particularly know- 
 ing that I had not asked for damages, they would 
 have taken good care that no action took place if 
 they had sufficiently valued Wilde. They are fifteen 
 hundred pounds out of pocket, and the radiant 
 picture of Oscar Wilde, which they had been at 
 pains to limn, can be radiant no more. Even Mr. 
 Justice Darling and Mr. F. E. Smith cannot save 
 
254 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 it in its pristine beauty. The former was kind 
 enough to explain to a crowded court that Lord 
 Alfred Douglas *'might" have achieved some suc- 
 cess in letters if he had put his talents to assiduous 
 use, while the latter said that Lord Alfred Douglas 
 had, in some way which was not explained, outraged 
 every tradition of his class. Mr. Justice Darling 
 forgot that I am still the possessor of a pen far 
 more able than his own, and Mr. F. E. Smith forgot 
 that, unlike himself, I belong to a class which takes 
 no stock in cant and is not to be put down by windy 
 rhetoric; a class, too, which does not look to Mr. 
 Horatio Bottomley for a push into prominence. 
 
CHAPTER XXII 
 "the picture of dorian gray'* 
 
 WILDE had written and published "The 
 Picture of Dorian Gray" two years be- 
 fore I knew him. At the time of its 
 appearance in Lippincott's Magazine I was an 
 undergraduate at Oxford and, so far as I know, 
 neither Wilde nor myself had ever set eyes on one 
 another. I mention this because it has been pre- 
 tended that Wilde took me for the model for one 
 of his beastly characters. Dates are pretty stubborn 
 things, however, and there can be no doubt what- 
 ever that "The Picture of Dorian Gray" was pub- 
 lished in 1890. Not only so, but, by the time I came 
 to know Wilde, the hubbub which the story had 
 first created had altogether died away ; and as I did 
 not read the book with any sort of care or critical 
 intention till years afterwards, it never entered into 
 my mind that it expressed the peculiar views of life 
 which it is said to illustrate. Wilde talked about 
 the book sometimes as a highly moral work which 
 had been hopelessly misunderstood by the critics, 
 
 255 
 
256 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 and he gave me a copy of it in which, as was his 
 custom, he inscribed his name; and I did not read 
 the book again until the time of my father's action 
 against Wilde. Even then I did not read it closely 
 or with any grave attention. I took it for granted 
 for what Wilde says it was — namely: a work of 
 art with an excellent moral; and I do not wish to 
 say now that it is not a work of art or that it does 
 not point a very splendid moral for morally disposed 
 people. It has been reviewed as such in more than 
 one important religious paper. At the time when 
 I was editing The Academy I blamed Messrs. Meth- 
 uen for not having the pluck to include the book in 
 their editions of Wilde's works. It seems to me 
 preposterous that if a book can be sold openly at 
 any English bookshop it should be refused inclusion 
 among the author's works by his own publishers. 
 Since I made my protest on this matter, however, 
 the whole question of Wilde and his books has 
 undergone a marked and, to my mind, a most dan- 
 gerous change. I quite anticipated that the day 
 would arrive when Wilde's disgrace might, in a 
 sense, be dissociated from his writings. I looked 
 to time and common sense to winnow out what was 
 good in those writings and reject what was noxious 
 or deleterious. It never occurred to me that I 
 should live to see Wilde used in the way in which 
 
n 
 
 The Picture of Dorian Gray" 257 
 
 he has been used, and is being used, to the en- 
 dangerment of letters and morals. We are now 
 face to face with this fact — namely: that there 
 exists in England as well as in France, Germany 
 and Russia, a distinct and recognisable Wilde cult, 
 which has as its creed that Wilde was one of the 
 greatest geniuses that ever lived. To this large 
 following, which accepts Wilde's vices as a sign 
 of genius, 'The Picture of Dorian Gray" has proved 
 to be a powerful weapon. It is a book after their 
 own heart, and its wit and the moral which it points 
 — or does not point, according as one may take it — 
 enable these people to employ it in subtle and de- 
 vious ways. I cannot help believing that Wilde 
 must have intended ''Dorian Gray'' as a fleer at 
 morality. In effect he may be said to have laid 
 himself out to write a sermon the interest of which 
 should really depend on obscenities. He puts be- 
 fore us one of the vilest of human creatures, and, 
 without particularising as to the nature of his vile- 
 ness, brings him to an infamous and therefore 
 poetically just end ; but the danger of the thing lies 
 in that, while nine people out of ten could not have 
 told you at the time of the publication of the book 
 wherein the peculiar sin of "Dorian Gray" lay, quite 
 ninety people out of a hundred can now tell you. 
 What was laughed at for affectation in 1891 as- 
 
258 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 sumed a sinister and altogether an abominable 
 aspect as the years went on and the true effect and 
 intention of Wilde's work began to make itself ap- 
 parent. I am not going into details, but everybody 
 knows what I mean. 
 
 It may be interesting if I print in this place por- 
 tions of a review of the story which appeared in 
 the St James' Gazette for June 24th, 1890. 'Time 
 was (it was in the 70's) when we talked about 
 Mr. Oscar Wilde; time came (it was in the '80's) 
 when he tried to write poetry and, more adventurous, 
 we tried to read it ; time is when we had forgotten 
 him — or only remembered him as the late editor of 
 the Woman's World — a part for which he was sin- 
 gularly unfitted if we are to judge him by the work 
 which he has been allowed to publish in Lippincotfs 
 Magazine, and which Messrs. Ward, Lock and Co. 
 have not been ashamed to circulate in Great Britain. 
 Not being curious in ordure, and not wishing to 
 offend the nostrils of decent persons, we do not pro- 
 pose to analyse The Picture of Dorian Gray' — 
 that would be to advertise the developments of an 
 esoteric prurience. The puzzle is that a young man 
 of decent parts who enjoyed, when he was at Ox- 
 ford, the opportunity of associating with gentlemen, 
 should put his name — such as it is — to so stupid 
 and vulgar a piece of work. Let nobody read it 
 
*The Picture of Dorian Gray'' 259 
 
 in the hope of finding witty paradox or racy wicked- 
 ness. The writer airs his cheap research among 
 the garbage of the French decadents like any drivel- 
 Hng pedant, and he bores you unmercifully with his 
 prosy rigmaroles about the beauty of the body and 
 the corruption of the soul. The grammar is better 
 than Ouida's — the erudition equal; but in every 
 other respect we prefer the talented lady who broke 
 off with pious aposiopesis when she touched upon 
 the horrors which are described in the pages of 
 Suetonius and Livy — not to mention the yet worse 
 infamies believed by many scholars to be accurately 
 portrayed in the lost works of Plutarch, Venus and 
 Nicodemus — especially Nicodemus. 
 
 "Let us take one peep at the young men in Mr. 
 Oscar Wilde's story. Puppy No. 1 is the painter 
 of a picture of 'Dorian Gray' ; Puppy No. 2 is the 
 critic (a courtesy lord, skilled in all the knowledge 
 of the Egyptians and weary of all the sins and 
 pleasures of London) ; Puppy No. 3 is the original, 
 cultivated by Puppy No. 1 with a romantic friend- 
 ship. The Puppies are all talking: Puppy No. 1 
 about his heart, Puppy No. 2 about his sins and 
 pleasures and the pleasures of sin, and Puppy No. 3 
 about himself — always about himself and generally 
 about his face, which is brainless and beautiful. 
 The Puppies appear to fill up the intervals of talk 
 
260 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 by plucking daisies and playing with them, and 
 sometimes by drinking something with strawberries 
 in it. The youngest Puppy is told he is 'charming' ; 
 but he mustn't sit in the sun for fear of spoiling his 
 complexion. When he is rebuked for being a 
 naughty, wilful boy he makes a pretty moue — 
 this man of twenty! This is how he is addressed 
 by the blase Puppy at their first meeting : 'Yes, Mr. 
 Gray, the gods have been good to you. But what 
 the gods give they quickly take away. When your 
 mouth goes your beauty will go with it, and then 
 you will suddenly discover that there are no tri- 
 umphs left for you. . . . Time is jealous of you 
 and wars against your lilies and roses. You will 
 become sallow and hollow-cheeked and dull-eyed. 
 You will suflfer horribly.' 
 
 "Why, bless our souls! haven't we read some- 
 thing of this kind somewhere in the classics ? Yes, 
 of course we have ! But in what recondite author ? 
 Ah, yes! — no! — yes! it was in Horace! What an 
 advantage it is to have received a classical educa- 
 tion, and how it will astonish the Yankees. But we 
 must not forget our Puppies, who have probably 
 occupied their time in lapping 'something with 
 strawberries in it.' Puppy No. 1 (the art puppy) 
 has been telling Puppy No. 3 (the dull puppy) how 
 much he admired him. What is the answer? 'I 
 
''The Picture of Dorian Gray'' 261 
 
 am less to you than your ivory Hermes or your 
 silver Fawn. You will like them always. How 
 long will you like me? — till I have my first wrinkle, 
 I suppose. I know now that when one loses one's 
 good looks, whatever they may be, one loses every- 
 thing. ... I am jealous of the portrait you have 
 painted of me. Why should it keep what I must 
 lose? Oh, if it was only the other way! If the 
 picture could only change and I could be always 
 what I am now!' 
 
 ''No sooner said than done. The picture does 
 change; the original doesn't. Here is a situation 
 for you! Theophile Gautier could have made it 
 romantic — entrancingly beautiful. Mr. Stevenson 
 could have made it convincing, humorous, pathetic. 
 Mr. Anstey could have made it screamingly funny. 
 It has been reserved for Mr. Oscar Wilde to make 
 it dull and nasty. The promising youth plunges 
 into every kind of mean depravity, and ends in being 
 cut by fast women and vicious men ; he finishes with 
 murder. . . . And every wickedness or filthiness 
 committed by Dorian Gray is faithfully registered 
 upon his face in the picture ; but his living features 
 are undisturbed and unmarred by his inward 
 vileness. This is the story which Mr. Oscar Wilde 
 has tried to tell. A very lame story it is and very 
 lamely it is told. 
 
262 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 "Why has he told it? There are two explana- 
 tions ; and, so far as we can see, not more than two. 
 Not to give pleasure to his readers; the thing is 
 too clumsy, too tedious and — alas that we should 
 say it — too stupid! Perhaps it was to shock his 
 readers in order that they might cry fie upon him 
 and talk about him. Are we then to suppose that 
 Mr. Oscar Wilde has yielded to the craving for a 
 notoriety which he once earned by talking fiddle- 
 faddle about other men's art, and seize his only 
 chance of recalling it by making himself obvious at 
 the cost of being obnoxious and by attracting the 
 notice which the olfactory sense cannot refuse to 
 the presence of certain self-asserting organisms? 
 That is an uncharitable hypothesis, and we would 
 gladly abandon it. It may be suggested — but is it 
 more charitable? — that he derives pleasure from 
 treating a subject merely because it is disgusting. 
 The phenomenon is not unknown in recent liter- 
 ature, and it takes two forms, in appearance widely 
 separate — in fact, two branches from the same root 
 — a root which draws its life from malodorous 
 putrefaction. One development is found in the 
 Puritan prurience which produced Tolstoy's 'Kreut- 
 zer Sonata' and Mr. Stead's famous outbursts. 
 That is odious enough and mischievous enough, and 
 it is rightly execrated because it is tainted with a 
 
'•The Picture of Dorian Gray" 263 
 
 hypocrisy not the less culpable because charitable 
 people may believe it to be unconscious. But is it 
 more odious or more mischievous than the frank 
 paganism which delights in dirtiness and confesses 
 its delight? Still, they are both chips from the 
 same block — 'The Maiden Tribute of Modern 
 Babylon' and 'The Picture of Dorian Gray' — and 
 both of them ought to be chucked into the fire — 
 not so much because they are dangerous and cor- 
 rupt as because they are incurably silly, written by 
 simple poseurs (whether they call themselves puritan 
 or pagan) who know nothing about the life which 
 they affect to have explored and because they are 
 mere catchpenny revelations of the non-existent 
 which, if they reveal anything at all, are revelations 
 only of the singularly unpleasant minds from which 
 they emerge." 
 
 The last paragraph is significant as bearing out 
 what I have said with regard to the difiference be- 
 tween the public morals of the time when 'The 
 Picture of Dorian Gray" was first published and 
 the public morals of to-day. The review as a whole 
 did not please Wilde, and he wrote to the editor of 
 the St, James' Gazette to say that he was "quite 
 incapable of understanding how any work of art 
 can be criticised from a moral standpoint." This, 
 plainly, was no answer to the review, nor can it 
 
264 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 be answered with reasonable argument. A sim- 
 ilarly cutting article which appeared in the Daily 
 Chronicle described ''Dorian Gray'' as ''a mixture 
 of dullness and dirt" — ''a tale spawned from the 
 leprous literature of the French decadents'' — ''a 
 poisonous book, the atmosphere of which is heavy 
 with the mephitic odours of moral and spiritual 
 putrefaction" — ''a gloating study of the mental and 
 physical corruption of a fresh, fair and golden 
 youth." 'There is not a single good and holy im- 
 pulse of human nature, scarcely a fine feeling or 
 instinct that civilisation, art and religion have de- 
 veloped throughout the ages as part of the barriers 
 between Humanity and Animalism that is not held 
 up to ridicule and contempt in 'Dorian Gray,' " con- 
 tinued the Chronicle, To which, and a great deal 
 more of similarly scathing comment, Wilde could 
 muster up no better reply than to say : "My story is 
 an essay on decorative art. It reacts against the 
 crude brutality of plain realism. It is poisonous, 
 if you like, but you cannot deny that it is also per- 
 fect, and perfection is what we artists aim at." 
 
 Neither the St, James' Gazette nor the Daily 
 Chronicle could foresee that a book which they took 
 to be the outcome of prowlings and garbage-hunt- 
 ing among the French decadents would come to be 
 the gospel and literary stand-by of a world-wide 
 
"The Picture of Dorian Gray" 265 
 
 cult of moral and physical leprosy; but the thing has 
 come to pass, and "Dorian Gray" goes on accom- 
 plishing its mission, unquestioned by criticism, un- 
 checked by authority, and belauded by every half- 
 baked youth who can earn a precarious shilling by 
 dabbling in ink. 
 
CHAPTER XXIII 
 
 LITERATURE AND VICE 
 
 WITH much more wisdom than appears 
 on the surface of the remark, Mr. Ran- 
 some tells us in the "Critical Study" 
 that it is ''scarcely twenty years since Wilde wrote 
 his books, and in poetry as well as in prose their 
 influence is already becoming so common as not to 
 be recognised." This is true, and true in the worst 
 sense. Every objectionable book that is published 
 at a reasonable price increases the trend — consid- 
 ered impossible at one time in this country, but now 
 obviously marked — towards a want of decency in 
 our national literature. By a singular irony, the 
 criticism of the day is largely in the hands of Rad- 
 icals and Nonconformists, many of whom, by an 
 irony still more singular, are engaged in the propa- 
 gation of loose and pernicious doctrine. I would 
 like to wager that the present book will be attacked 
 with the greatest fury in precisely the quarters 
 where, twenty years ago, it would have been ap- 
 plauded. If I wish to see Wilde and his work 
 
 266 
 
Literature and Vice 267 
 
 spoken of with the greatest respect and the greatest 
 admiration, I have nothing to do but turn to certain 
 Radical or Nonconformist sheets, and I shall be at 
 once obliged. I am of opinion that certain novels, 
 and even certain magazines and reviews, now pub- 
 lished in England would never have existed at all 
 but for Oscar Wilde. One of the monthly reviews 
 is a particular offender; and the infection is not 
 limited to one paper only. Nobody seems to be 
 shocked or distressed by the fact and nobody lifts 
 a voice or a pen by way of complaint. The journals 
 I have in my mind are, in the main, respectable and 
 reasonably cultivated publications. They are above 
 purchase or corruption in regard to their general 
 conduct, being owned by rich men or syndicates and 
 run in some instances at a loss or, at any rate, no 
 particular profit, and for the good of the political 
 interests they represent. They take a high tone 
 with regard to political and social morality. They 
 contain general articles, stories, sketches and so 
 forth which are beyond reproach both as regards 
 their tone and literary qualities. Yet when it comes 
 to dealing with literature itself they may be found 
 only too frequently on the side of the palpably du- 
 bious and undesirable. 
 
 , I have had several years of editorial experience 
 of my own, and out of that experience I think I can 
 
268 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 explain the phenomenon. It simply amounts to 
 this: Editors are too busy — or too careless — to 
 select their reviewers judiciously and, when a book 
 has been reviewed, they are too busy or too careless 
 to examine the reviewer's work with a view to 
 making sure that it is free from the current taints. 
 It is a fact that the younger school of critics, and 
 many of the old ones, now base themselves on 
 Wilde's dictum that a work of art cannot be criti- 
 cised from a moral standpoint, and that the sphere 
 of art and the sphere of ethics are absolutely dis- 
 tinct and separate. If the result were that the 
 reviewer contented himself with the consideration 
 of literary work qua art, and in no other relation, 
 there would perhaps be no great harm done; but 
 in point of fact this is seldom or never done, and 
 it is next door to impossible that it should be done. 
 Opinions and moral reflections insist on finding 
 their way even into works of art, and literary works 
 of art are, by their very nature, almost entirely 
 made up of them. In spite of his own denial of the 
 inter-relation between art and morals, Wilde always 
 asserted that "Dorian Gray" had a moral — that is 
 to say, when it suited him to make the assertion. 
 It is obvious that any four lines of serious verse 
 must have some sort of a moral bearing, and so 
 every poem has a moral and every story has a moral 
 
Literature and Vice 269 
 
 and every piece of writing has a moral — implied, 
 even if it be not specifically stated. Now the new 
 reviewer and all of the old ones know this as well 
 as I do. They cannot divide art from morality, 
 and when they pretend to do so it will usually be 
 found that they are really condoning, defending, 
 upholding or propagating obvious immorality. I 
 do not wish it to be supposed that the review col- 
 umns of English journals bristle with this sort of 
 thing; but there can be no doubt that it crops up 
 from time to time and with a sufficient frequency 
 to make it quite plain that the press is far more 
 easy and tolerant on the matter than it has any 
 right to be. Obviously, letters is a vehicle which 
 is handier than any other vehicle for the spread 
 of evil thinking. An improper picture is improper 
 on the face of it, and calls immediate attention to 
 itself and immediate reproof from decent people. 
 Such pictures cannot really exist publicly. An im- 
 proper play has to get past the censor, and it has 
 also to overcome the repugnance of persons who do 
 not like openly to be assisting in wickedness. Both 
 picture and play, too, have to be, in the nature of 
 things, either decent, or frankly and palpably in- 
 decent. But in a book you can have dubiety, and 
 you can have patches of impropriety and indecency 
 tucked away amid a mass of inoffensive and, it may 
 
270 Oscar Wilde and My elf 
 
 be, even excellent writing. This is particularly the 
 case with regard to novels and poetry, and nobody 
 with any care for either literature or the public well- 
 being can help but regret it. The only censorship 
 which can do anything to stem the increasing tide 
 of looseness and license in these regards is, obvi- 
 ously, criticism. I maintain that the criticism of 
 the day is — in a preponderating measure, con- 
 sciously or unconsciously — in agreement with Wilde 
 on these subjects, and the result is plain for all of 
 us to see. I used to believe that art is more im- 
 portant than conduct. This is a mistake which most 
 of us are prone to make when we are young and 
 dazzled with the beauty and colour of life. The 
 vast mass of mankind, however, are not concerned 
 with art as art at all, but merely with art in its 
 relation to its personal effect upon themselves. The 
 average reader, whether of prose or verse, has little 
 or no conscious interest in the art of either. If he 
 had, many of the moderns with enormous circula- 
 tions would feel a very considerable draught, inas- 
 much as they are not artists and do not pretend to 
 be. In view of the general ability to read and the 
 extraordinary cheapness of books, it has become 
 more than ever important that literature should be 
 kept free from viciousness, prurience and improper 
 suggestion. If criticism fails in its duty in this 
 
Literature and Vice 271 
 
 respect, the national intellect and the national 
 morals will inevitably be debased, and the proper 
 purposes of art utterly destroyed. It is the fashion 
 to say that great authors do not write merely for 
 youth and young misses at school, but it is neverthe- 
 less a fact that it is upon the adolescent of both 
 sexes that these authors have to depend, in the 
 main, for a hearing and for reputation and income. 
 In the case of Wilde, it is to youth particularly that 
 he very largely appeals. Most persons of middle 
 life know a great deal more about the facts of 
 existence than would admit them to take Wilde for 
 anything but a flippant and unbalanced writer. The 
 wise perceive that there is no gingerbread beneath 
 his gilt, and they know that even the gilt is not 
 honest metal. His influence upon youth is un- 
 doubted and obvious, but it is equally undoubted and 
 obvious that his influence is a bad one, and the 
 sooner we acknowledge the fact the better it will 
 be for Art and Letters. 
 
CHAPTER XXIV 
 
 CROSLAND AND "tHE FIRST STONE" 
 
 TO be properly understood in this world is 
 beyond human expectation. That my rela- 
 tions with Wilde have been misunderstood 
 this narrative bears witness. Pretty well every- 
 thing I have done or said with respect to him has 
 been misconstrued or misrepresented; and, of 
 course, it was not a matter of surprise to me to find 
 that when Crosland published "The First Stone'' 
 some devotees took it for granted that I had sub- 
 orned him to do it. Their rage knew no bounds. 
 On the appearance of the book, half the editors in 
 London were besieged with letters from adherents 
 of Wilde — whose identity was and is entirely un- 
 known to me — abusing Crosland and explaining 
 that it was well known that I had instigated him to 
 write the work, and paid for the publication. So 
 far as I am aware, none of these letters was printed 
 and, when the writers of them found that they could 
 not get the publicity they required, they took to 
 sending copies of them to Crosland and myself. 
 
Crosland and 'The First Stone'' 273 
 
 Ultimately somebody went to the length of print- 
 ing a pamphlet in which both of us were accused 
 of all sorts of vileness. This pamphlet appeared 
 without the name of its author and without the 
 name or address of the printer and publisher. 
 Those responsible for it lacked the courage of their 
 opinions, but they had pluck enough to post it out 
 under cover and to say that copies of it could be 
 obtained at some address in Chelsea. I had en- 
 quiries made at the address given and found that 
 it consisted of a block of flats, but that there was 
 nobody there who would admit any knowledge of 
 the matter. The pamphlet was called "The Writ- 
 ing on the Floor," but nobody who lived on any of 
 the floors of these flats from the basement up- 
 wards, would own to the slightest connection with 
 it. I mention these facts not because I attach any 
 importance to the pamphlet, but because they show 
 to what extraordinary courses my enemies will have 
 resort when their malice gets the better of them. 
 They indicate, too, that there is no limit to the 
 resources of these people. The difficulties of ob- 
 taining a printer, whether in London or the prov- 
 inces, for such statements as were contained in 'The 
 Writing on the Floor'' must have been well-nigh 
 insuperable. No printer who can read could, in 
 ordinary circumstances, have been procured to pro- 
 
274 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 duce such a pamphlet, even without his imprimatur, 
 on any terms whatever. He would know full well 
 that the risks were too great. More crass and abom- 
 inable criminal libels were never put into type. The 
 thing could only have been printed either abroad 
 or at a private press; and, from the character of 
 the type and paper, I should say that the chances 
 are that the printing was done at a private press in 
 England. The type was new and the paper such 
 as is readily obtainable in London. All this meant 
 considerable cost, upon which the authors of the 
 pamphlet could not hope to recoup themselves, in- 
 asmuch as they gave it away and did not set a price 
 upon it; besides which there was a cost of postage 
 and clerical work. So that we had here not only 
 malice and wicked propaganda, but malice and 
 wicked propaganda which were willing to go to great 
 expense and to run great risks for the expression of 
 themselves. This business, and other similar busi- 
 nesses which have come to my notice, tend to con- 
 vince me that there are plenty of minor enthusiasts 
 engaged in the canonisation of Wilde, and that they 
 lack neither means nor energy, I use the phrase 
 "minor enthusiast'' advisedly because I wish to 
 make it clear that I do not suggest that any person 
 named in this book was a party to these letters or 
 anonymous scurrilities. 
 
Crosland and ''The First Stone" 275 
 
 With regard to 'The First Stone" itself, I have 
 no wish to apologise for it, and should not have the 
 slightest objection to accepting the responsibility 
 for it — if it were mine to accept. But it is not mine, 
 nor did I suggest or advise it, or have hand or part 
 in its production. What happened was this : When 
 I obtained through my solicitors a copy of the un- 
 published parts of ''De Profundis," duly authenti- 
 cated by Messrs. Lewis & Lewis, I took it, without 
 reading it, to Mr. Crosland. I did this of my own 
 initiative and for my own reasons. Crosland began 
 to read it in my presence. He had not read more 
 than a page or two before he said : "I am going to 
 read this manuscript to you, word for word, and 
 I am going to put absolutely flat and straight ques- 
 tions to you, even though they hurt or anger you." 
 I said : ''You can read away, my dear chap, and ask 
 me any questions you like." I sat there for four 
 solid hours, face to face with the man who probably 
 knows more about me and my life and my manner 
 of living it than anybody else in the world, and I 
 am free to say that he did not spare me. But it is 
 necessary to remember that, up to this time, Cros- 
 land had never had any other version of the history 
 and my connection with Wilde than my own. When 
 he first met me in 1903, over the publication of some 
 of my sonnets, we had not talked together three 
 
276 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 minutes before he plumped me with some sharp 
 questions in regard to myself and Wilde. I was 
 able at once to give him straightforward and con- 
 vincing answers and, in good times and bad, from 
 that day to this, he has believed me, as, indeed, he 
 could not help but believe me, and he has always 
 and rightly acted on the assumption that he knew 
 the truth. But I remembered those questions of 
 his, and it was partly for this reason, namely, that 
 I courted all the questions he could devise, that I 
 went round to him with the unpublished ''De Pro- 
 fundis." Here was new material of which neither 
 he nor I had ever had the smallest inkling. I knew 
 that it could not be friendly material, otherwise it 
 would not have been put up by Ransome's solicitors, 
 yet I placed it unreservedly in the hands of my closest 
 friend, a critically minded person of whom it may be 
 said, at least, that neither friendship nor any other 
 consideration will hold or restrain him where mat- 
 ters of principle are concerned. After reading the 
 manuscript Crosland went to work of his own ac- 
 cord and, within a very few days, "The First Stone" 
 was written and printed. Whatever may be its 
 merits or faults as a piece of writing, it is certainly 
 of interest as exhibiting the effect on an honest mind 
 of Wilde's stupid and ludicrous outburst. I am not 
 concerned either to praise or blame the poem, but 
 
Crosland and *'The First Stone" 277 
 
 it will last Wilde probably a good deal longer than 
 the unpublished parts of ''De Profundis" will last 
 me. I had intended to republish the whole poem 
 in this book, but as it contains quotations taken 
 direct from the Ujipublished portion of "De Pro- 
 fundis," I have been reluctantly compelled to aban- 
 don my intention. 
 
CHAPTER XXV 
 
 A CHALLENGE TO MR. ROSS 
 
 I DO not know what Mr. Robert Ross's legal 
 rights as Wilde's literary executor were until 
 the year 1906, when his position was officially 
 confirmed. During the last years of his life Wilde 
 certainly looked to me to do all that might be neces- 
 sary to be done in regard to his literary affairs after 
 his death. Ross knew this, and other people knew 
 it. Both Wilde and I, however, had been accus- 
 tomed to look upon him as a business man, and I 
 quite admit that when he came to me after the 
 funeral and asked me what should be done with 
 Wilde's papers, I told him to act as he thought fit. 
 The first occasion upon which Ross used the title 
 of literary executor was in Paris after the funeral. 
 Somebody in an English paper had suggested that 
 Wilde had been buried without ceremony and that 
 none of his friends had thought it worth while to 
 attend the funeral. I considered that this was an 
 improper statement, and a long telegram was writ- 
 ten and sent to the paper in question, the Daily 
 
 278 
 
A Challenge to Mr. Ross 279 
 
 Express, with a view to its correction. The ques- 
 tion arose as to whether I should sign it or whether 
 somebody else should sign it, and in the end we 
 decided that the signature should be Ross's. After 
 Ross had put his name to the telegram he said to me : 
 "It will carry more weight if I were to put 'Literary 
 executor to Oscar Wilde' under my name." I saw 
 no objection to this at the time, and Ross added 
 the words, and the telegram was despatched so 
 signed. So far as I am aware, that is the only man- 
 date Ross ever had from anybody. I do not doubt 
 that his position has been confirmed and made legal 
 since by the Receiver of Wilde's estate and by 
 Wilde's sons. Neither do I doubt that Ross has 
 rendered valuable services to the estate and admin- 
 istered it justly and well. I think that he has done 
 many things which are scarcely in Wilde's interest, 
 however, and of which Wilde would have disap- 
 proved ; such, for example, as his publication of the 
 version of the "Ballad of Reading Gaol," curtailed 
 "for the benefit of reciters and their audiences," 
 and his dedication of "Intentions" to a woman 
 whom Wilde scarcely knew, in his own name rather 
 than Wilde's. But these are minor matters, and 
 there is no need to labour them. The challenge I 
 have to issue to Mr. Ross has to do with the ques- 
 tion of "De Profundis." 
 
280 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 It is admitted by all parties concerned that this 
 manuscript was addressed to me. A portion of 
 the work has already been published, under Mr. 
 Ross's sanction. The other half he has presented 
 to the nation through the British Museum. So that 
 it is evident that Mr. Ross feels that the whole man- 
 uscript should be preserved. Sufficient of the con- 
 tents of the second or unpublished part has been 
 made public in the Law Courts and in the press to 
 make it quite obvious that the manuscript relates 
 chiefly to me, and relates to me in a very bitter, 
 malicious and libellous way. It is consequently a 
 document in which at least two living persons are 
 very seriously concerned. Neither Mr. Ross nor 
 any other person dare print or publish the thing 
 as it stands, because of its libellous character, and 
 they know quite well that, apart from any action 
 I might take, the Dowager Marchioness of Queens- 
 berry would be absolutely sure to take action against 
 them if the manuscript were published. Mr. Ross 
 therefore stores this libel at the British Museum 
 till 1960, when, in the course of human events, my 
 mother will have passed away and I, too, shall be 
 dead. At this happy juncture the discretion of the 
 British Museum authorities is to come into play. 
 As a matter of fact, however, the manuscript will 
 be out of copyright by 1960 and, unless the British 
 
A Challenge to Mr. Ross 281 
 
 Museum destroy it meanwhile — which, by the way, 
 they would not be within their legal rights in doing 
 — there is nothing to hinder publication, inasmuch 
 as it is open knowledge that copies exist and are in 
 other hands than those of the British Museum. 
 Now I think it will be commonly admitted that a 
 person who is attacked possesses de facto the right 
 to reply ; furthermore, it is the duty of a person who 
 knows that he has been accused, as I have been ac- 
 cused, to defend and clear himself, if he can. There- 
 fore it is that I conceive it to be my duty thoroughly 
 to sift and examine the charges which Oscar Wilde 
 has brought against me, and to rebut them and give 
 proof that they are false and unsubstantial. It is 
 impossible that this can be done completely and 
 satisfactorily unless I have from Mr. Ross, who, 
 rightly or wrongly, considers himself the legal 
 owner of the copyright, permission to print very 
 lengthy portions of the manuscript now in the hands 
 of the British Museum. In view of the subtle way 
 in which the manuscript is written, it would not be 
 sufficient for my purpose to make extracts here and 
 there and deal with them singly. The only proper 
 method, in the circumstances, would be to print the 
 unpublished ''De Profundis'' in extenso, with my 
 running comment, either beneath it or on the oppo- 
 site pages. Mr. Ross is acquainted with the whole 
 
282 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 contents of this manuscript, and he contends that 
 he is the owner of the copyright. I challenge him 
 to give his permission for the manuscript to be used 
 in the manner I have indicated. My proposition is 
 a perfectly fair and square one. I will publish the 
 whole manuscript, word for word and line for line, 
 without omitting or curtailing anything, and over it 
 I will publish my reply, and the public at large shall 
 be left to judge between Oscar Wilde and Lord 
 Alfred Douglas. Mr. Ross's acquiescence in this 
 proposal cannot hurt him in the least. Nobody has 
 anything to gain out of the manuscript, inasmuch as 
 Mr. Ross dare not publish it himself, or get any- 
 body else to publish it, in my lifetime or the life- 
 time of my mother. He knows that it is a libel on 
 both of us, and the least he can do if he is a fair- 
 minded man is to give me an opportunity of dealing 
 openly and fully with the accusations involved. If 
 he refuses to do this, I take it that the public will 
 draw their own conclusions as to the truth or falsity 
 of these accusations. 
 
[^   CHAPTER XXVI 
 
 WILDE IN RUSSIA, FRANCE AND GERMANY 
 
 A STOCK argument of Wilde's critical friends 
 /\ has always been that, even if it can be 
 JL. jL demonstrated that Wilde has been grossly 
 overrated in England, the fact of his popularity in 
 foreign parts proves that there is in him the literary 
 stuff which goes to the making of immortals. This, 
 of course, is not philosophically true, being, in fact, 
 the merest fudge. Wilde's books, it is true, have 
 been translated into various languages — but which 
 books? Well, "Dorian Gray" and "Salome," for 
 the most part, with "De Profundis" for a bad third, 
 and the rest nowhere. What Wilde abroad really 
 means is very prettily indicated by the following 
 letter which was addressed to the editor of Every- 
 man by one of Wilde's translators : — 
 
 "Sir, 
 
 "Please let me produce some figures to up- 
 hold your correspondent's statement in your issue 
 of June 6th as to Oscar Wilde's popularity in Russia. 
 
 "I have had the honour of translating Wilde's 
 
 283 
 
284 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 works into Russian and can state that his books 
 were among the best-selling fiction in this country. 
 Some of Oscar Wilde's masterpieces, such as The 
 Picture of Dorian Gray/ 'De Profundis/ 'Salome/ 
 published in popular editions at 10 kopecks (2>4d.) 
 each have had a circulation (in the last four to five 
 years) from eighty to one hundred thousand each, 
 and are still selling briskly. Wilde's comedies are 
 constantly on the repertory of the Moscow and St. 
 Petersburg Imperial State Theatres, not counting 
 the innumerable provincial stages. 
 
 ''I can assure you that you will not find one edu- 
 cated person in Russia who has not read Wilde's 
 works. I have received in the last seven to eight 
 years hundreds of letters from quite unknown 
 people all over Russia, with the expression of the 
 strongest and sincerest admiration for one of 'the 
 greatest writers of the world.' 
 
 ''I must frankly acknowledge that nearly all the 
 letters of my correspondents, ranking from all 
 classes of Russian life, contain many bitter com- 
 ments on the treatment Wilde received in the hands 
 of his countrymen. 
 
 "I am, Sir, etc., 
 "Michael Lykiardopulos, 
 "Secretary of the 
 
 "Moscow." " 'Moscow Art Theatre.' 
 
In Russia, France, and Germany 285 
 
 This letter gives a curious insight into the whole 
 business. Of course, ''Dorian Gray" and ''Salome'' 
 at twopence-halfpenny in England would sell like 
 wildfire, just as a pirated '"De Profundis'' was sold 
 a little while ago at a penny on the street corners. 
 Nobody professed that this pirated "De Profundis'' 
 was being sold because of its literary value : it was 
 sold and offered for sale in the gutter as "the con- 
 fession of Oscar Wilde," and it was bought in just 
 the same way that the alleged confession of any 
 other criminal would be bought. So that these 
 books at ten kopecks in Russia point their own 
 moral. 
 
 I do not know how cheaply or how dearly Wilde 
 is sold in Paris and Berlin. But I do know that the 
 vogue he has in both cities is largely based on his 
 iniquities, and that this fact is equally deplored by 
 right-thinking Frenchmen and right-thinking Ger- 
 mans. In the scandals which of late years have 
 disgraced Berlin, the Wilde factor has been only too 
 evident. The scandals to which I refer have oc- 
 curred in so-called literary and artistic circles ; and 
 wherever you have such scandals in such circles 
 there you are bound always to find that Oscar Wilde 
 sits enthroned. It is a deplorable thing, doubtless, 
 but what is one to expect in the face of "Dorian 
 Gray" ? The bad influence of Wilde in both France 
 
286 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 and Germany has been noted and deprecated by 
 more than one eminent writer, and the main force 
 of criticism in both countries is in arms against it. 
 In Russia his admirers belong chiefly to the anar- 
 chistic and revolutionary sections of the community, 
 who, being in a large measure decadents and crim- 
 inals themselves, have a natural sympathy with the 
 work of a decadent criminal. In Russia they say 
 Wilde must be a great man because he went to 
 prison and is universally loved and admired by the 
 English. In England we are told that Wilde's 
 greatness cannot be disputed, inasmuch as he is 
 loved and admired in Russia — at 10 kopecks a time. 
 Mr. Ransome is very amusing on Wilde's foreign 
 successes. He says that we ''cannot afford to 
 neglect the opinion of critical Germany,'' which, in 
 point of fact, is just the opinion we can afford to 
 neglect; and he quotes Mr. Ross as follows: "In 
 1901, within a year of the author's death, it 
 ("Salome") was produced in Berlin; from that 
 moment it has held the European stage. It has 
 run for a longer consecutive period in Germany 
 than any play by any Englishman, not excepting 
 Shakespeare. Its popularity has extended to all 
 countries where it is not prohibited. It is per- 
 formed throughout Europe, Asia and America. It 
 is played even in Yiddish." One would imagine 
 
In Russia, France, and Germany 287 
 
 that all Europe, Asia and America had rushed in 
 a body to see this compelling drama. The facts 
 are that, while it may have been staged at theatres 
 of standing in Berlin and other cities, and may 
 have had a long run in Berlin, its vogue elsewhere 
 is not associated with either distinguished theatres 
 or the best actors, having been, in fact, a rather 
 hole-and-corner affair, and, whatever may have hap- 
 pened years ago, one may travel the globe now- 
 adays without finding that Wilde comes anywhere 
 near holding the stage in a substantial or perennial 
 way. Wilde, of course, has been pushed and 
 boomed for all he is worth and for a good deal more 
 than he is worth. The result is that he has come 
 into a sort of artificial kingdom of his own, on the 
 Continent and in America just as in England. But 
 I maintain that it is a kingdom based on rottenness ; 
 that it is an utterly insignificant kingdom in so far 
 as it is taken to mean merit or worthiness in Wilde, 
 and that, by its very nature, it is bound to fall and 
 be forgotten. Wilde's supporters would appear to 
 be very conscious of this fact, and that is perhaps 
 why some of them fall into such fits of rage if any- 
 body ventures to suggest that their idol is not en- 
 tirely gold. There are no plays of Wilde's and no 
 books of Wilde's which can last on their literary 
 merits. His only chance is that he suffered im- 
 
288 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 prisonment and he wrote certain improprieties. 
 These have been put on a different basis for an en- 
 during literary reputation, even in Asia or among 
 the Jews. 
 
CHAPTER XXVII 
 
 THE SMALLER FRY 
 
 I SUPPOSE that the number of little poets, 
 little fictionists, and, above all, little critics, 
 who imagine that they owe themselves to Wilde 
 is infinite. His peculiar form of humour, which 
 seemed to have genius behind it and so dazzled 
 everybody in Wilde's own time, was soon discovered 
 to be wonderfully easy of imitation, and really to 
 require very little brains in its production. The 
 consequence has been that everybody who consid- 
 ered himself anybody took up with it, as it were; 
 and it has become so common that it is no longer 
 taken for humour at all. All our dullest young men 
 who happen to be engaged or interested in a branch 
 of the arts have talked, thought and written Wilde 
 for years past. Some middle-aged and elderly gen- 
 tlemen who began when Wilde was at his zenith are 
 still at it, and apparently nothing will stop them ; 
 which means, of course, that humour in England 
 has altogether lost both its point and its usefulness. 
 The humour of the day has a dull cruelty about 
 
 289 
 
290 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 it which it formerly lacked. Its object might almost 
 be, not to make people laugh, but to make them cry. 
 The fiercer and more heartless it is, the better it is 
 supposed to be appreciated. Furthermore, instead 
 of being kept in its proper place in the scheme of 
 things, it has been allowed to run riot whenever 
 its authors choose to let it loose. To be comic in 
 a bitter and insincere way seems to be the ambition 
 of most of the eminent people one can nowadays 
 come across. We have comic judges and comic 
 counsel who manage to keep the King's Courts in 
 ripples of merriment. We have even a comic magis- 
 trate or two. In Parliament the mordant humour- 
 ist and the man who can say sharp things are the 
 only ones to be listened to; sarcastic bishops and 
 witty clerics abound. And as for the gentlemen of 
 the press, they are all bent on the leer, at whatever 
 cost. If you look closely into these professed or un- 
 professed fun-makers, you are bound to perceive 
 that the majority of them are little Oscar Wildes 
 to a man. They look on life with a confirmed squint 
 and they cannot see that there is anything human 
 about which it is not desirable that they should 
 make jokes. Only a little while back we had the 
 spectacle of an English judge indulging his fancy 
 in Wildeisms in the course of a trial for murder. 
 In itself, his Lordship's epigram or paradox, or 
 
The Smaller Fry 291 
 
 whatever you like to call it, would help or hurt no- 
 body ; but the fact that it was forthcoming in such 
 circumstances indicates pretty plainly the pass to 
 which we have come. 
 
 Wilde's answer to everything was by quip or fleer, 
 or a plain perversion of the truth. He had no 
 serious views or intentions about anything, and he 
 considered that the art of life lay in flippancy. 
 People who read him and make a gospel of him can 
 scarcely be expected not to imitate him, and imitate 
 him they certainly do; so that nowadays we have 
 hundreds of little Wildes where formerly there was 
 only one Wilde — and a not over big one at that. 
 They swarm and spread themselves over everything 
 that is decent, and they parrot Wilde at everybody 
 who comes near them. They have seen it in 'Tn- 
 tentions" that there is no sin save stupidity, and 
 tha\: all art is immoral, and they imagine that the 
 world can be run on these two remarkably shallow 
 and unreliable axioms. 
 
 I am quite free to admit that in a literary sense 
 the world does present the appearance of being so 
 run. The preponderating weight of contemporary 
 authorship and criticism would indeed seem to be 
 on the Wilde side. This, of course, is unthinkably 
 pitiable, but we cannot get beyond the fact. The 
 reason is not far to seek, and it will be found to 
 
292 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 lie in the shallowness which always characterises 
 the popular view of large questions. Wilde began 
 by asserting that the only sin was stupidity, yet 
 he ended with the assertion that the supreme vice 
 is shallowness. I do not say that shallowness is by 
 any means the supreme vice ; there can be no doubt, 
 however, that it is the very commonest vice among 
 people who imagine themselves to be thinkers. It 
 is, in consequence of this very circumstance, that 
 to attack Wilde nowadays is to be howled down, just 
 as to have praised him eighteen years ago was to be 
 execrated. The shallowness of 1895 could not see 
 an inch below the surface of Wilde's glaring vicious- 
 ness. It went the length of taking his name off his 
 own plays and relegating him to the position of a 
 man who was well-nigh without literary existence. 
 The shallowness of 1914 is unable to look beneath 
 the success, enormous sales, enormous popularity, 
 and what not, which have resulted from the Wilde 
 boom, and it is quite incapable of recognising or 
 appreciating the dangers which lie beneath it. We 
 are asked by tearful counsel and writers of pathetic 
 nonsense for the penny weeklies to forget Wilde's 
 vices. For my own part, I certainly do not wish 
 to revive them or insist upon them. But I am not 
 prepared to forget them unless his apologists cease 
 to discuss them. 
 
The Smaller Fry 293 
 
 Nobody will question that what has been termed 
 the revulsion of feeling in Wilde's favour was 
 largely brought about by the publication of *'De 
 Profundis." This book, which, as I have shown, 
 does not in the least accurately represent Wilde's 
 feelings, owes its success in no small measure to the 
 wide publicity which w^s given to the statements 
 that it had been written in prison, and that it is a 
 sort of repentant confession and authentic dying 
 speech of its author. As we have seen, and as will 
 become still more apparent when the unpublished 
 ''De Profundis" sees the light, nothing can be fur- 
 ther from the truth. The small fry may go on ad- 
 miring Wilde, and they may go on pointing to "De 
 Profundis" as a work of a sainted martyr — the 
 swan-song of a contrite, broken and bleeding heart, 
 and so on, as long as they please. But they will 
 never get away from the hard facts of the case, 
 which are quite the reverse of what has been gen- 
 erally assumed and supposed. 
 
CHAPTER XXVIII 
 
 TO BE DONE WITH IT ALL 
 
 WHEN Wilde had completed the "De Pro- 
 fundis" manuscript, he is understood to 
 have written to Ross to say that he had 
 rid his bosom of much perilous stuflf. I will do him 
 the justice to agree that he got into the "De Pro- 
 fundis" manuscript as a whole, more real Wilde 
 than ever he put into any other piece of work. 
 Before, he had given us, as far as in him lay, Wilde 
 the artist with frequent glimpses of Wilde the 
 shameful liver and vicious thinker. But in the com- 
 plete ''De Profundis" he gives us Wilde the man. 
 The bottom of his vicious and halting soul is laid 
 bare for us in this extraordinary work. That he 
 had it in him to give himself utterly and entirely 
 away as he did is incomprehensible, and can only 
 be set down to the fact that the reticence which 
 had previously been his safeguard and saviour was 
 entirely destroyed by his rage on perceiving that the 
 life he had succeeded in living would never again 
 be possible to him. 
 
 294 
 
To Be Done with It All 295 
 
 My own task is finished here and now. I have 
 taken what is practically Wilde's own picture of 
 himself and unveiled it. Before he went to prison 
 he had exposed to the public gaze a picture of him- 
 self which was all lights and rose and purple. To 
 this picture his friends have been most faithful. 
 Of their own initiative they decked it out with 
 supererogatory daubs of pretty and bewitching 
 colour ; and they set it round with a beautiful gold 
 frame, surmounted with a crown of gilded bays and 
 something which is intended for a halo. Of the 
 shadows and dubious blacks and browns which 
 Wilde himself prepared by his life and by his lucu- 
 brations in gaol they have been anxious to take no 
 notice. They were only brought out of their 
 seclusion as weapons wherewith I might be de- 
 feated. The pot of blackness was brought into a 
 Court of Justice and there emptied before the gaze 
 of all beholders, as was supposed, for my upsetting. 
 Then the mess was all scraped up, as best it could 
 be, and hurried back to the British Museum; and, 
 honour being now satisfied and all being over, every- 
 body, it was hoped, would speedily forget the little 
 black pot. But not so: it will never be forgotten 
 and must always be remembered by anybody who 
 wishes to look honestly at the features of Wilde. 
 
 So far as I am concerned, I have drawn my own 
 
296 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 picture from the man as I knew him, and from his 
 writings, which are readily accessible and can be 
 pursued by all who care to take the trouble. If I 
 had been disposed to write the present book in the 
 vein of ''De Profundis," published or unpublished, 
 it would not have been difficult, from a literary point 
 of view, for me to do so. I could have embellished 
 my pages with tears and regrets and moral reflec- 
 tions, not to say with quotations from the classics 
 and Holy Scripture, just as readily and at just as 
 great length as Wilde has done. Surely if any man 
 has had cause for tears and bitter regrets, I have 
 had cause. All my life, from twenty years of age 
 up, has been overshadowed and filled with scandal 
 and grief through my association with this man, 
 Oscar Wilde. I am not going to shed public or 
 private tears about it, and I am not going to waste 
 my breath in vain regrets. I have absolutely an 
 easy conscience as regards my treatment of Wilde, 
 both before and since his death. If I have hurt 
 anybody at all it has been myself and my family, 
 and I have done this only through misplaced loyalty 
 to my friend and a too high regard for chivalry. 
 I now say all that I have had to say about Wilde, 
 whether with respect to my personal relationship 
 to him or my mature view of his complete writings. 
 It will be noted that, just as I have refrained from 
 
To Be Done with It All 297 
 
 weeping and moralising, I have equally refrained 
 from details of petty quarrels and misunderstand- 
 ings. I have not accused him of gobbling my food 
 and spilling my wine and devouring my substance ; 
 I have not charged him, as I easily might, with 
 corrupting my intellect and assisting me in the care- 
 less waste of some of the best years of my life. I 
 have never said, as he says of me, that I became a 
 child in his hands and that we never met "except in 
 the gutter,'' and never conversed except about 
 ''loathsome things.'' I hold that a man's acts are 
 his own affairs, even if they lead to his ruin 
 and disgrace. The shifting of responsibility is no 
 work for me or any other person of sense. I accept 
 full responsibility for everything I have done or 
 said in regard to this affair. For my own indis- 
 cretions and carelessness I could not honestly blame 
 anybody. I have been punished for them and shall 
 doubtless go on being punished for them ; but there 
 they are, and all the water in the sea will not wash 
 them out. This book is not an apology for me, 
 neither is it a work undertaken on the tu quoque or 
 tit-for-tat principle against Wilde. I am of opinion 
 that, in the circumstances, there is no man living 
 who can put Oscar Wilde into his true relation to 
 the life and literature of his time more accurately 
 than myself. I have always known this — though, at 
 
298 Oscar Wilde and Myself 
 
 the same time, I have hitherto refrained from put- 
 ting my pen to paper. My enemies have compelled 
 me to defend myself, and if, in the course of that 
 defence, I have had to tear away some of the un- 
 deserved laurels which have been heaped upon his 
 brow and dissipated some of the undeserved incense 
 which has been offered up at his shrine, I have done 
 him no wrong, and I feel that I may conceivably 
 have made a slight contribution to the literary and 
 general good. 
 
 It seems to me a great deal more than probable 
 that the present volume will rouse a considerable 
 deal of what is called controversy. The right of 
 criticism is everybody's right, and I shall not hope 
 to be spared criticism or, for that matter, even con- 
 tradiction. I shall only beg that those reviewers 
 whose duty and business it will be to deal with this 
 book may remember that I am entitled to exactly 
 as much justice in this world as Wilde and Wilde's 
 friends. The forces against me are undoubtedly 
 numerous and powerful. On the other hand, it is 
 very certain that I shall not run away from them. 
 
Index 
 
 Adey, Mr. More, 130 
 
 Alexander, Sir G., 96 
 
 "Androcles and the Lion, True 
 Story of," 217 
 
 Arnold, Matthew, 12; imitations 
 of, 200 
 
 Art and Morality — Wilde's dic- 
 tum, 277, 282, 305 
 
 Astbury, Mr. Justice, 84, 85 
 
 B 
 
 "Ballad of Perkin Warbeck," 
 
 125 
 
 "Ballad of Reading Gaol," 122, 
 124, 198, 200, 207 
 Accepted opinions, deference 
 
 to, 143, 210, 212 
 Model, 210 
 Publication, 131, 144 
 Refused by a New York 
 
 paper, 143 
 Ross's, Mr., curtailed ver- 
 sion, 293 
 Wilde's best work, 140, 142, 
 209, 212 
 "Ballad of St. Vitus," 125 
 Barrie, Sir J. M., 222 
 Beardsley, Aubrey, 34, 60, 197 
 Beerbohm, Mr. Max, 57 
 Berneval, Wilde at, 108, 118, 119, 
 121, 123 
 Correspondence with Author, 
 
 119 
 Money resources, 108, 118, 
 120, 129, 134, 140 
 Bierce, Ambrose, 217 
 Blunt, Mr. Wilfrid, 64 
 Bouche, M. du, dentist, 138 
 
 British Museum authorities and 
 the unpublished portions of 
 "De Profundis," 8, 84, 151, 
 233-234, 280 
 
 Browning, 62, 216, 242 
 
 Browning, Mrs., 198 
 
 "Burden of Itys," 200, 207 
 
 Burne-Jones, 62 
 
 Bussell, Dr., 14 
 
 Cab-driving story, 22 
 Cairns, late Lord, 64 
 Campbell, Mr., k.c, 126, 233 
 "Canterville Ghost," 220 
 Carson, Sir Edward, 94 
 "Charmides," 200 
 Chesterton, Mr. G., 217 
 "City of the Soul," 16, 171 
 Clarke, Sir Edward — 
 
 Queensberry proceedings, 
 
 withdrawal from, 91, 94 
 Subsequent trials, defence of 
 Wilde, 95, 99 
 Crabbet Club, 64-67 
 Crewe, Lord, 64 
 Crosland, Mr. T. W. H., 186 
 Cross-examination of Author 
 on unpublished part of 
 "De Profundis," 234, 275 
 "First Stone," 272 
 Outlook article on Ransome 
 trial, 156 
 Curzon, Lord, 64 
 Cust, Mr. Harry, 64 
 
 Daily ^ Chronicle, review of 
 
 "Dorian Gray," 264 
 Dante, 242 
 
 299 
 
300 
 
 Index 
 
 Darling, Mr. Justice, 7, 8, 9, 51, 
 107, 181, 214, 238 
 Naples, reputation of, 126 
 Tribute to Author's literary 
 
 talent, 274 
 "De Profundis," 8, 25, 83 
 
 Copy alleged to have been in 
 
 Author's possession, 7, 148 
 Foreign reputation, 283 
 Letter addressed to Author- 
 no indication in published 
 
 portion, 150, 232 
 Origin of — Anger at Author's 
 
 apparent desertion, 112, 
 
 1 1 5-1 16, 121 
 Preface, 146 
 Property in, 8, 236 
 Publication — 
 
 Propriety question, 153 
 
 Wilde's instructions to Mr. 
 Ross, 148-149 
 
 Wilde's intentions, alterna- 
 tive possibilities, 151-152 
 Revulsion of feehng in 
 
 Wilde's favour resulting, 
 
 293 
 Sherard, Mr., on, 114-115 
 Unpublished portions — At- 
 tacks on Author, 8, 25, 83^ 
 British Museum authori- 
 ties, MS. given to, not to 
 be published till i960, 8, 
 151, 233, 280 
 
 Injustice to Author, 
 Challenge to Mr. Ross, 
 157, 281-282, 295 
 Charges at Ransome trial, 
 
 158 et seq. 
 Copies in existence, 281 
 Cross-examination of Au- 
 thor by Mr. Crosland, 
 
 233, 275 
 
 Injunction precluding Au- 
 thor from quoting, 83, 
 158 
 
 Secrecy and treachery, 25, 
 115, 146, 149. 165. 249 
 
 Sole attempt at confession, 
 
 Wilde's picture of himself, 
 
 294-295 
 Wilde's reputation, probable 
 effect on, 237, 239 
 
 ''Dead Poet," sonnet, 27 
 "Disciple," 17 
 "Dorian Gray," 14, 45 
 
 Character modelled on Au- 
 thor, allegation, 254 
 Daily Chronicle article, 264 
 Foreign reputation, 283 
 Poisonous nature, 257, 265 
 
 Wilde's admission, 229, 264 
 Preface, 45 
 Queensberry proceedings, use 
 
 in, 94 
 Ransome, Mr., on, 243 
 St. James's Gazette review, 
 258 
 Douglas, Lady Alfred, 167, 195 
 Douglas, Lord Alfred — 
 Exploits at Winchester, 11 
 Intimacy with Wilde — Scan- 
 dal resulting, etc., 28, 
 72-73, 189, 193, et seq. 
 Persecution of Author re- 
 sulting. See sub-heading 
 Scapegoat 
 Vicious tendencies in 
 Wilde, no evidence of, 74 
 Letters to Wilde, use at Ran- 
 some trial, etc., 76, 99, 106, 
 166, 167, 251, 252 
 Literary work— ^ 
 Academy editorship, 26, 
 
 186, 19s, 256 
 Ballad form, study of, 
 
 124-125 
 DarHng's, Mr. Justice, trib- 
 ute, 254 
 Oxford, 18 
 Wilde's debt to Author, 
 
 124-125 
 For particular poems, etc., 
 see their names 
 Loyalty, defence of Wilde 
 after his conviction, etc., 
 26, 27, 32, 296 
 Labouchere, letters to, 181- 
 
 182 
 Letters to newspapers, etc., 
 
 123, 124, 199-201 
 Scientific and medical 
 grounds of defence, 182 
 Refer also to titles Naples, 
 Paris, Trials, etc. 
 Marriage, 167, 195 
 
Ind 
 
 ex 
 
 301 
 
 Douglas, Lord Alfred (cont.) 
 Money relations with Wilde, 
 allegations of expense 
 caused to Wilde, etc., 69, 
 70, 82 
 Algiers, 161-165 
 Goring, 160-161 
 Loans from Author, 71 
 Solitary instance of re- 
 payment, 162 
 Monte Carlo, 87 
 Refer also to titles Naples, 
 Paris, and Trials 
 Oxford career, 11 
 Collisions with authorities, 
 
 etc., 20-23 
 Warkworth, Lord, and the 
 Newdigate, 18-19 
 Partnership in vice, corrupt- 
 ing Wilde, charges of, 106, 
 116, 169 
 Scapegoat— Persecution in 
 connection with Wilde af- 
 fair, 4-5, 87, 88, 93, 106, 107, 
 194, 295-296 
 Blackmailing attempts, 5, 
 
 194, 195 
 Legal proceedings, collapse 
 
 of calumniators, 5, 196 
 Letters to Lady Alfred 
 
 Douglas, 195 
 Loyalty impugned, slanders 
 reaching Wilde, etc., 88, 
 194 
 Pamphlet, "The Writing on 
 
 the Floor," 273 
 Paris. 109-110 
 Policy in regard to, 5, 247 
 Posterity, appeal to, 226-227 
 Douglas, Lord, of Hawick, loi 
 Dowson, late Ernest, 57, 199 
 Drumlanrig, Viscount, 58 
 "Duchess of Padua," 210 
 
 Encombe, late Viscount, 11, 14 
 
 "First Stone," 274 
 
 Foote, Mr., and the Revue 
 
 Blanche article, 187 
 Fortnightly, Wilde's essays in, 
 
 221 
 
 France — 
 
 Vice in — A comparison and 
 
 an excuse, 245 
 Wilde faction in, 246, 285, 286 
 Freethinker and the Revue 
 Blanche article, 187 
 
 "Garden of Eros," 207^ 
 Germany, Wilde cult in — Ber- 
 lin scandals, etc., 285, 286 
 Giles, Miss Althea — Drawings 
 for "The Harlot's House," 
 145 
 
 H 
 
 "Happy Prince," 219 
 Harcourt, Mr. "Lulu," 64 
 "Harlot's House," 145 
 Harris, Mr. Frank, 57, 137, 141, 
 
 217, 221 
 Headlam, Rev. Stewart, loi 
 Hood, imitations of, 205 
 Hope, Mr. Adrian, 138 
 Houghton, Lord, 64 
 "House of Judgment," 17 
 "House of Pomegranates," 219 
 Howard, Hubert, 65 
 "Humanitad," 200, 207 
 Humieres, Vicomte d', 64 
 Humor of To-day— Wilde's in- 
 fluence, 289-290 
 Humphreys, Mr., 93 
 
 "Ideal Husband," 124, 158, 223 
 "Importance of being Earnest," 
 
 50, 124, 221, 22s 
 Imprisonment. See Prison 
 
 Period 
 Ingleby, Mr. — Biography of 
 
 Wilde, 248 
 "Intentions," 14, 214-215 
 
 Dedication by Mr. Ross, 279 
 Poisonous nature, 229 
 Irving, Henry, Wilde's sonnets 
 
 to, 44 
 
 Jackson, Holbrooke, 150 
 Johnson, Lionel, 14, 17 
 
302 
 
 Index 
 
 Keats, imitations of, 200, 204, 
 207, 242 
 
 L 
 
 "La Mer," 200, 202 
 
 "La Sainte Courtisane," 2ig 
 
 Labouchere, Henry, Author's 
 letters to, etc., 180-183 
 
 "Lady Windermere's Fan," 14, 
 49, 221, 223 
 
 Le Gallienne, 199 
 
 Leveson-Gower, George, 64 
 
 Lewis and Lewis, Messrs., 232 
 
 Lewis, George, on the Queens- 
 berry proceedings, 93 
 
 Lippincott's Magazine — Publica- 
 tion of "Dorian Gray," 254, 
 258 
 
 Literature — EflFect of Wilde's 
 works and the Wilde cult, 153, 
 229, 266 et seq., 271, 292 
 
 "Lord Arthur Saville's Crime," 
 219, 220 
 
 Lykiardopulos, Michael — Wilde 
 in Russia, 283-284 
 
 Lytton, Robert, Earl of, 63 
 
 M 
 
 Magdalen College, Oxford, 23 
 
 Marlowe — Wilde's piracies, 242 
 
 Matthews, Sir Charles — With- 
 drawal from Queensberry pro- 
 ceedings, defence of Wilde in 
 subsequent trials, 95, 99 
 
 Meredith, 44, 62, 216 
 
 Methuen, Messrs., and "Dorian 
 Gray," 244, 256 
 
 Meynell, Mrs., 198 
 
 Milton-Wilde amalgamation, 
 191 -192, 200, 205, 242 
 
 "Model Millionaire," 220 
 
 Montgomery, Hon. Mrs. Alfred, 
 126 
 
 Montgomery, Mr. Alfred, 59, 68 
 
 Morris, William, 49 
 
 N 
 
 Napier, Mr. Mark, 64 
 Naples period, 6y 
 
 Allegations by Sherard. 107, 
 108 
 
 Naples period (continued) 
 
 Author's books sold or lost 
 
 by Wilde, 66 
 Irreproachable and industri- 
 ous life, 122, 125 
 Money question — 
 All expenses borne by 
 
 Author, 119, 121, 124 
 Desertion on mercenary 
 grounds alleged, 129-130 
 Provision made for Wilde 
 after Author's departure, 
 128-129 
 Reputation of the city, social 
 standing of Author, etc., 
 126 
 Scandal arising — Efforts of 
 relatives, etc., to effect a 
 separation, 127 — Success, 
 128 
 "New Helen," 207 
 Newdigate Prize and Lord 
 Warkworth, 18 
 
 Outlook article on unpublished 
 portions of "De Profundis," 
 155-156 
 
 Oxford Magazine, Author's 
 poem in, 16 
 
 "Panthea,'' 200, 207 
 Paris Period — 
 
 Drink, vicious habits and dis- 
 ease, 134-137 
 
 Earnings, 131 
 
 Help accepted from Author, 
 loans of money, etc., 130, 
 131, 132 
 
 Last days, privations — Beg- 
 ging letters, etc., 134, 137 
 
 News of illness, 137 — Death, 
 
 Funeral expenses, etc., paid 
 by Author, 138 
 Pater, Walter, 13, 44 
 "Pentagram," 11 
 Percy, Lord, and the Newdigate, 
 
 18 
 "Picture of Dorian Gray." See 
 "Dorian Gray'* 
 
Index 
 
 303 
 
 Pinero, Sir A., Wilde's admira- 
 tion of, 221 
 Pope, Wilde's view of, 199 
 "Presence of mind," fable, 218 
 Prison Period, 7 
 
 Author's visits, correspon- 
 dence, etc., refused through 
 Ross, III, 112 
 Desertion by Author, appear- 
 ance of, due to Ross- 
 Wilde's anger resulting in 
 "De Profundis," 112, 115- 
 116, 121 
 Effect on spirit and moral 
 
 fibre, 162 et seq. 
 Interview on, American jour- 
 nalist's offer, 140, 143 
 Sherard's account, 113-115 
 Public morals — Effect of Wilde's 
 works and Wilde cult, 227-229, 
 263, 292 
 
 Q 
 
 Queensberry, Dowager Mar- 
 chioness of, 130 
 *'De Profundis" libels, 160, 
 
 234, 280 
 Dislike of Wilde, 13 
 Queensberry, late Marquis of — 
 Libel action against — 
 Action leading to Wilde pro- 
 ceedings, 75, 81, 85 
 Collapse — Reception of news 
 by Wilde, varying accounts, 
 103-104 
 Instigation by Author, al- 
 leged — Funds supplied, etc., 
 75-76, 85, 86, 102 
 Nature of Lord Queens- 
 berry's accusation, 95 
 Ross's, Mr., responsibility, 93 
 Reconciliation with Author, 
 
 .76 
 Wife, divorce from, 75 
 Queensberry, present Marquis 
 of, lOI 
 
 R 
 Ransome, Mr. Arthur — 
 "Critical Study" — Aspersions 
 on Author and resulting 
 libel action, 6, 8, 53, 57, 69, 
 82, 87, 116, 129, 130, 132, 
 240, 250 
 
 Ransome, Mr. Arthur, "Critical 
 Study," etc. (continued) 
 
 Author's letters to Wilde, use 
 of, 166, 167 et seq., 251 
 
 Author's litigation difficulties 
 at time of trial, 167 
 
 "De Profundis," unpublished 
 portions, use of, 83, 237- 
 239, 251 
 Outlook comments, 155-156 
 
 Labouchere letters produced, 
 181, 251 
 
 Passages complained of with- 
 drawn, 107-108, 240, 253 
 
 Revue Blanche article, 187 
 
 Verdict, reasons for not ap- 
 pealing, 252 
 
 Wilde's reputation, effect on, 
 
 253 
 "De Profundis," 153 
 Wilde's poetry, views on, 199- 
 
 200 
 Wilde's vices, views on, 197 
 "Ravenna," 241 
 Reading, imprisonment at. See 
 
 Prison Period 
 Regnier, M. Henri de, 64 
 Reid, Sir Robert, 92 
 Revue Blanche article, 185-187 
 Ross, Mr. Robert, 56, 6g 
 
 "De Profundis," editing of, 
 etc., 8, 69, 98, 116, 118, 119, 
 138 
 Author's letter, failure to re- 
 ply to, 152 
 Preface, 146 
 
 Unpublished parts presented 
 to British Museum and_ in- 
 junction obtained against 
 Author, 8, 83 
 "Harlot's House," publication 
 
 stopped, 145 
 Imprisonment Period, treach- 
 erous action during, iii ^ 
 Legal representative and ^ lit- 
 erary executor of Wilde, 
 139, 278, 279 
 Ransome's book, biographical 
 
 details supplied for, 53 
 Ransome trial, co-operation 
 in, 251 
 Ruskin, 62 
 Russell, Messrs., 251 
 
304 
 
 Index 
 
 Russia, Wilde's reputation in, 
 283-285, 286 
 
 S 
 St. James's Ga:;ette — Review of 
 ^^ "Dorian Gray," 258 
 "Salome," 64 — Foreign reputa- 
 tion, 283, 286 
 Shakespeare, Wilde on, 210, 216 
 Shaw, Mr. G. B., 34, 60, 224, 225 
 Sherard, Mr. Robert Harbor- 
 ough, 87, 112, IIS, 120 
 Arrest of Wilde, contradic- 
 tory accounts, 103-104 
 Biographies of Wilde, 248 
 Mercure de France article, no 
 Naples Period, allegations 
 
 against Author, 107 
 Prison life of Wilde, 113-115 
 "Sphinx" rhymes, assistance 
 
 with, 159 
 Wilde's vices, views on, 182- 
 183 
 Smith, Mr. F. E., 228, 254 
 Smithers, Leonard, 131, 144 
 "Soul of Man under Socialism," 
 
 61 
 "Sphinx," 140, 198, 200, 207 
 Poisonous nature, 229 
 Ransome, Mr., on, 243 
 Rhymes supplied by Mr. 
 
 Sherard, 159 
 Tennysonian metre, 201, 202, 
 
 204 
 Time taken to complete, 159 
 "Sphinx without a Secret," 220 
 "Spirit Lamp," 16-17 
 Swinburne, 17, 20, 34, 44, 62 
 
 Wilde on, 209 
 Symonds, J. A., 12, 17 
 Symons, Arthur, 34, 199 
 
 T 
 
 Tennyson, 18, 44, 6^ 
 
 Wilde's imitations of, 200, 
 201, 202, 203, 204 
 Terry, Miss Ellen, Wilde's Son- 
 nets to, 44 
 Trials of Wilde- 
 First trial — 
 Arrest of Wilde, 92— Letter 
 to Author, reproduction 
 precluded by injunction, 
 93 
 
 Trials of Wilde— First trial 
 
 {continued) 
 
 Bail, efforts to arrange, 96 
 
 Desertion by Author alleged 
 
 — Facts in contradiction, 
 
 96-99, 180— Reasons for 
 
 leaving England, 100, 109 
 
 Desertion by friends and 
 
 wife, 91, 96 
 Result, 100 
 
 Truth of charges admitted, 
 99 
 Second trial decided on, 100 
 Bail, admission to — Sureties, 
 
 lOI 
 
 Reasons for remaining to 
 face trial— Misconception 
 of position, 101-103 
 Verdict and sentence, 104 — 
 Justice of, Wilde's state- 
 ment according to Sher- 
 ard, 104 
 Truth, 179 
 Turner, Mr. Reggie, 57, 118, 120 
 
 W 
 
 Waller, Sir Lewis, 96 
 
 Ward, Lock & Co., Messrs., 258 
 
 Warkworth, Lord, and the New- 
 
 digate, 18 
 Warren, Mr., President of Mag- 
 dalen, 12 
 Author's poetry, opinion of, 
 
 16 
 Opinion of Wilde, 13, 30 
 Webb, Mr. Godfrey, 64, 66 
 Webster's "Duchess of Malfi," 
 
 Wilde on, 210 
 "Whispers," 159 
 Whistler- 
 Cribs from, 44, 49 
 Quarrel with Wilde, 45 
 Wilcox, Miss Ella Wheeler, 198 
 Wilde, Lady, Z3 
 Wilde, Mrs., 74, 112 
 
 Abandonment of Wilde at 
 
 time of trial, 96 
 Objections to intimacy with 
 
 Author, 74, 87 
 Separation from Wilde after 
 his release — Charge against 
 Author, 120 
 
Index 
 
 305 
 
 Wilde, Oscar Fingall O'Flaher- 
 tie Wills- 
 Author, intimacy with, money 
 relations, etc. See Douglas, 
 Lord Alfred, also Naples, 
 Paris, etc. 
 Conversation, 14-15, 20, 29 
 Crabbet Club, reception as 
 
 member, 64-65 
 Death, 137-138 
 Drink as inspiration, etc., 38, 
 
 136 
 Expensive tastes, 71 
 Gourmet and trencherman, 
 
 57, 69, 72-73, 136 
 Humor, 289 
 Imprisonment at Reading. 
 
 See Prison Period 
 ''King of Life" and "Lord of 
 
 Language," 42 
 Life after imprisonment. See 
 titles Berneval, Naples and 
 Paris 
 Literary work — 
 
 Contemporary art, attitude 
 
 towards, 44-45 
 Credo from preface to 
 "Dorian Gray," 46 et seq. 
 Current opinion, exaggera- 
 tion of Wilde's import- 
 ance, 26, 42, 51, 213, 215, 
 226-228, 231 
 Debt to Author, 124, 224 
 Degradation of language, 
 
 51 
 Evil intention and influ- 
 ence — Effect of Wilde's 
 "teaching" and the 
 Wilde myth, 26, 44, 229, 
 246, 257 ^ 
 Intensification of person- 
 ality, etc., due to vice — 
 Mr. Ransome's state- 
 ment, 116-117, 244 — 
 Excuse for vice, 245 
 Foreign reputation, 283,287 
 Genius, question of, 3, 247 
 Hindrance by Author al- 
 leged, 124, 158, 176 
 Indifference of editors and 
 publishers after Wilde's 
 release, 141, 142 
 
 Wilde, Oscar, Literary work 
 (continued) 
 
 Literary remains, 139 
 Methods of work, 159 
 Paris period, sums earned 
 
 in, 131 
 Plagiarisms and imitations, 
 191, 200 et seq. — Mr. Ran- 
 some's admissions, 241- 
 242 
 Spirit Lamp, contributions 
 
 to, 17 
 Wilde's self-knowledge, 50, 
 
 248 
 See also sub-headings 
 Plays, Poems, Prose, and 
 Stories, and for particu- 
 lar works see their names 
 Oxford and Magdalen, 11, 12 
 Plays- 
 Exaggerated current esti- 
 mate, 222-223 
 Pinero, Sir A., as model, 
 
 222 
 Wilde's opinion of, 220 
 Poems — 
 
 Biographers, claims of, 
 
 199-200 
 Reception, 198, 220 
 Ross, Mr. — Preface to 
 selected poems, 198 — 
 Titles bestowed by, 205 
 Self-knowledge, 199, 220 
 Sonnets, 205, 206 
 Technical defects, 205, 
 
 209 
 Theory of poetry, 197, 209 
 Prose works — Wilde as su- 
 preme artist, 213 
 Ransome, Mr., on, 243 
 Reception of, 221 
 Style, 217 
 
 Wilde's own opinion, 214 
 
 Queensberry Proceedings. 
 
 See Queensberry, late 
 
 Marquis of 
 
 Scholarshfp, 15 
 
 Shallowness and indolence, 
 
 49-50, 292 
 Social standing and fash- 
 ion, claims to, 34 et seq., 
 56 et seq. 
 
306 
 
 Index 
 
 Wilde, Oscar (continued) 
 Socialism, 6i 
 
 Stories — Fables, etc., 217, 219 
 Models and Imitations, 220 
 Unpublished examples, 218 
 Trials. See that title 
 Vanity in regard to looks, 
 clothes, etc., 33 et seq., 58 
 —Voire Papa story, 188- 
 189 
 Wilde, William, 53 
 Wills, Mr. Justice, 180 
 
 "Woman of No Importance," 71, 
 
 123 
 Woman's World,Wi\At's editor- 
 ship of, 258 
 "Writing on the Floor," pamph- 
 let, 273 
 Wyndham, George, 58, 92 
 
 Letters to Author after Ran- 
 some trial, 169, 171, 173, 177 
 Outlook article on Ransome 
 trial, 156 
 Wyndham, Mr. Percy, 62 
 

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