Danger Signals: the Challenge

These two years 1893–4 saw Oscar Wilde at the very zenith of success. Thackeray, who always felt himself a monetary failure in comparison with Dickens, calls success “one of the greatest of a great man’s qualities,” and Oscar was not successful merely, he was triumphant. Not Sheridan the day after his marriage, not Byron when he awoke to find himself famous, ever reached such a pinnacle. His plays were bringing in so much that he could spend money like water; he had won every sort of popularity; the gross applause of the many, and the finer incense of the few who constitute the jury of Fame; his personal popularity too was extraordinary; thousands admired him, many liked him; he seemed to have everything that heart could desire and perfect health to boot. Even his home life was without a cloud. Two stories which he told at this time paint him. One was about his two boys, Vyvyan and Cyril.

“Children are sometimes interesting,” he began. “The other night I was reading when my wife came and asked me to go upstairs and reprove the elder boy: Cyril, it appeared, would not say his prayers. He had quarrelled with Vyvyan, and beaten him, and when he was shaken and told he must say his prayers, he would not kneel down, or ask God to make him a good boy. Of course I had to go upstairs and see to it. I took the chubby little fellow on my knee, and told him in a grave way that he had been very naughty; naughty to hit his younger brother, and naughty because he had given his mother pain. He must kneel down at once, and ask God to forgive him and make him a good boy.

“‘I was not naughty,’ he pouted, ‘it was Vyvyan; he was naughty.’

“I explained to him that his temper was naughty, and that he must do as he was told. With a little sigh he slipped off my knee, and knelt down and put his little hands together, as he had been taught, and began ‘Our Father.’ When he had finished the ‘Lord’s Prayer,’ he looked up at me and said gravely, ‘Now I’ll pray to myself.’

“He closed his eyes and his lips moved. When he had finished I took him in my arms again and kissed him. ‘That’s right,’ I said.

“‘You said you were sorry,’ questioned his mother, leaning over him, ‘and asked God to make you a good boy?’

“‘Yes, mother,’ he nodded, ‘I said I was sorry and asked God to make Vyvyan a good boy.’

“I had to leave the room, Frank, or he would have seen me smiling. Wasn’t it delightful of him! We are all willing to ask God to make others good.”

This story shows the lovable side of him. There was another side not so amiable. In April, 1893, “A Woman of No Importance” was produced by Herbert Beerbohm Tree at The Haymarket and ran till the end of the season, August 16th, surviving even the festival of St. Grouse. The astonishing success of this second play confirmed Oscar Wilde’s popularity, gave him money to spend and increased his self-confidence. In the summer he took a house up the river at Goring, and went there to live with Lord Alfred Douglas. Weird stories came to us in London about their life together. Some time in September, I think it was, I asked him what was the truth underlying these reports.

“Scandals and slanders, Frank, have no relation to truth,” he replied.

“I wonder if that’s true,” I said, “slander often has some substratum of truth; it resembles the truth like a gigantic shadow; there is a likeness at least in outline.”

“That would be true,” he retorted, “if the canvas, so to speak, on which the shadows fall were even and true; but it is not. Scandals and slander are related to the hatred of the people who invent them and are not in any shadowy sense even, effigies or images of the person attacked.”

“Much smoke, then,” I queried, “and no fire?”

“Only little fires,” he rejoined, “show much smoke. The foundation for what you heard is both small and harmless. The summer was very warm and beautiful, as you know, and I was up at Goring with Bosie. Often in the middle of the day we were too hot to go on the river. One afternoon it was sultry-close, and Bosie proposed that I should turn the hose pipe on him. He went in and threw his things off and so did I. A few minutes later I was seated in a chair with a bath towel round me and Bosie was lying on the grass about ten yards away, when the vicar came to pay us a call. The servant told him that we were in the garden, and he came and found us there. Frank, you have no idea the sort of face he pulled. What could I say?”

“‘I am the vicar of the parish,’ he bowed pompously.

“‘I’m delighted to see you,’ I said, getting up and draping myself carefully, ‘you have come just in time to enjoy a perfectly Greek scene. I regret that I am scarcely fit to receive you, and Bosie there’— and I pointed to Bosie lying on the grass. The vicar turned his head and saw Bosie’s white limbs; the sight was too much for him; he got very red, gave a gasp and fled from the place.

“I simply sat down in my chair and shrieked with laughter. How he may have described the scene, what explanation he gave of it, what vile gloss he may have invented, I don’t know and I don’t care. I have no doubt he wagged his head and pursed his lips and looked unutterable things. But really it takes a saint to suffer such fools gladly.”

I could not help smiling when I thought of the vicar’s face, but Oscar’s tone was not pleasant.

The change in him had gone further than I had feared. He was now utterly contemptuous of criticism and would listen to no counsel. He was gross, too, the rich food and wine seemed to ooze out of him and his manner was defiant, hard. He was like some great pagan determined to live his own life to the very fullest, careless of what others might say or think or do. Even the stories which he wrote about this time show the worst side of his paganism:

“When Jesus was minded to return to Nazareth, Nazareth was so changed that He no longer recognised His own city. The Nazareth where he had lived was full of lamentations and tears; this city was filled with outbursts of laughter and song. . . .

“Christ went out of the house and, behold, in the street he saw a woman whose face and raiment were painted and whose feet were shod with pearls, and behind her walked a man who wore a cloak of two colours, and whose eyes were bright with lust. And Christ went up to the man and laid His hand on his shoulder, and said to him, ‘Tell me, why art thou following this woman, and why dost thou look at her in such wise?’ The man turned round, recognised Him and said, ‘I was blind; Thou didst heal me; what else should I do with my sight?’”

The same note is played on in two or three more incidents, but the one I have given is the best, and should have been allowed to stand alone. It has been called blasphemous; it is not intentionally blasphemous; as I have said, Oscar always put himself quite na?vely in the place of any historical character.

The disdain of public opinion which Oscar now showed not only in his writings, but in his answers to criticism, quickly turned the public dislike into aggressive hatred. In 1894 a book appeared, “The Green Carnation,” which was a sort of photograph of Oscar as a talker and a caricature of his thought. The gossipy story had a surprising success, altogether beyond its merits, which simply testified to the intense interest the suspicion of extraordinary viciousness has for common minds. Oscar’s genius was not given in the book at all, but his humour was indicated and a malevolent doubt of his morality insisted upon again and again. Rumour had it that the book was true in every particular, that Mr. Hichens had taken down Oscar’s talks evening after evening and simply reproduced them. I asked Oscar if this was true.

“True enough, Frank,” he replied with a certain contempt which was foreign to him. “Hichens got to know Bosie Douglas in Egypt. They went up the Nile together, I believe with ‘Dodo’ Benson. Naturally Bosie talked a great deal about me and Hichens wanted to know me. When they returned to town, I thought him rather pleasant, and saw a good deal of him. I had no idea that he was going to play reporter; it seems to me a breach of confidence — ignoble.”

“It is not a picture of you,” I said, “but there is a certain likeness.”

“A photograph is always like and unlike, Frank,” he replied; “the sun too, when used mechanically, is merely a reporter, and traduces instead of reproducing you.”

“The Green Carnation” ruined Oscar Wilde’s character with the general public. On all sides the book was referred to as confirming the worst suspicions: the cloud which hung over him grew continually darker.

During the summer of 1894 he wrote the “Ideal Husband,” which was the outcome of a story I had told him. I had heard it from an American I had met in Cairo, a Mr. Cope Whitehouse. He told me that Disraeli had made money by entrusting the Rothschilds with the purchase of the Suez Canal shares. It seemed to me strange that this statement, if true, had never been set forth authoritatively; but the story was peculiarly modern, and had possibilities in it. Oscar admitted afterwards that he had taken the idea and used it in “An Ideal Husband.”

It was in this summer also that he wrote “The Importance of Being Earnest,” his finest play. He went to the seaside and completed it, he said, in three weeks, and, when I spoke of the delight he must feel at having two plays performed in London at the same time, he said:

“Next year, Frank, I may have four or five; I could write one every two months with the greatest ease. It all depends on money. If I need money I shall write half a dozen plays next year.”

His words reminded me of what Goethe had said about himself: in each of the ten years he spent on his “Theory of Light” he could have written a couple of plays as good as his best. The land of Might-have-been is peopled with these gorgeous shadow-shapes.

Oscar had already found his public, a public capable of appreciating the very best he could do. As soon as “The Importance of Being Earnest” was produced it had an extraordinary success, and success of the best sort. Even journalist critics had begun to cease exhibiting their own limitations in foolish fault-finding, and now imitated their betters, parroting phrases of extravagant laudation.

Oscar took the praise as he had taken the scandal and slander, with complacent superiority. He had changed greatly and for the worse: he was growing coarser and harder every year. All his friends noticed this. Even M. André Gide, who was a great admirer and wrote, shortly after his death, the best account of him that appeared, was compelled to deplore his deterioration. He says:

“One felt that there was less tenderness in his looks, that there was something harsh in his laughter, and a wild madness in his joy. He seemed at the same time to be sure of pleasing, and less ambitious to succeed therein. He had grown reckless, hardened and conceited. Strangely enough he no longer spoke in fables. . . . ”

His brother Willie made a similar complaint to Sir Edward Sullivan. Sir Edward writes:

“William Wilde told me, when Oscar was in prison, that the only trouble between him and his brother was caused by Oscar’s inordinate vanity in the period before his conviction. ‘He had surrounded himself,’ William said, ‘with a gang of parasites who praised him all day long, and to whom he used to give his cigarette-cases, breast pins, etc., in return for their sickening flattery. No one, not even I, his brother, dared offer any criticism on his works without offending him.’”

If proof were needed both of his reckless contempt for public opinion and the malignancy with which he was misjudged, it could be found in an incident which took place towards the end of 1894. A journal entitled The Chameleon was produced by some Oxford undergraduates. Oscar wrote for it a handful of sayings which he called “Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young.” His epigrams were harmless enough; but in the same number there appeared a story entitled “The Priest and the Acolyte” which could hardly be defended. The mere fact that his work was printed in the same journal called forth a storm of condemnation though he had never seen the story before it was published nor had he anything to do with its insertion.

Nemesis was following hard after him. Late in this year he spoke to me of his own accord about Lord Queensberry. He wanted my advice:

“Lord Queensberry is annoying me,” he said; “I did my best to reconcile him and Bosie. One day at the Café Royal, while Bosie and I were lunching there, Queensberry came in and I made Bosie go over and fetch his father and bring him to lunch with us. He was half friendly with me till quite recently; though he wrote a shameful letter to Bosie about us. What am I to do?”

I asked him what Lord Queensberry objected to.

“He objects to my friendship with Bosie.”

“Then why not cease to see Bosie?” I asked.

“It is impossible, Frank, and ridiculous; why should I give up my friends for Queensberry?”

“I should like to see Queensberry’s letter,” I said. “Is it possible?”

“I’ll bring it to you, Frank, but there’s nothing in it.” A day or two later he showed me the letter, and after I had read it he produced a copy of the telegram which Lord Alfred Douglas had sent to his father in reply. Here they both are; they speak for themselves loudly enough:

ALFRED —

It is extremely painful for me to have to write to you in the strain I must; but please understand that I decline to receive any answers from you in writing in return. After your recent hysterical impertinent ones I refuse to be annoyed with such, and I decline to read any more letters. If you have anything to say do come here and say it in person. Firstly, am I to understand that, having left Oxford as you did, with discredit to yourself, the reasons of which were fully explained to me by your tutor, you now intend to loaf and loll about and do nothing? All the time you were wasting at Oxford I was put off with an assurance that you were eventually to go into the Civil Service or to the Foreign Office, and then I was put off with an assurance that you were going to the Bar. It appears to me that you intend to do nothing. I utterly decline, however, to just supply you with sufficient funds to enable you to loaf about. You are preparing a wretched future for yourself, and it would be most cruel and wrong for me to encourage you in this. Secondly, I come to the more painful part of this letter — your intimacy with this man Wilde. It must either cease or I will disown you and stop all money supplies. I am not going to try and analyse this intimacy, and I make no charge; but to my mind to pose as a thing is as bad as to be it. With my own eyes I saw you both in the most loathsome and disgusting relationship as expressed by your manner and expression. Never in my experience have I ever seen such a sight as that in your horrible features. No wonder people are talking as they are. Also I now hear on good authority, but this may be false, that his wife is petitioning to divorce him for sodomy and other crimes. Is this true, or do you not know of it? If I thought the actual thing was true, and it became public property, I should be quite justified in shooting him at sight. These Christian English cowards and men, as they call themselves, want waking up.

Your disgusted so-called father,

QUEENSBERRY.

In reply to this letter Lord Alfred Douglas telegraphed:

“What a funny little man you are! ALFRED DOUGLAS.”

This telegram was excellently calculated to drive Queensberry frantic with rage. There was feminine cunning in its wound to vanity.

A little later Oscar told me that Queensberry accompanied by a friend had called on him.

“What happened?” I asked.

“I said to him, ‘I suppose, Lord Queensberry, you have come to apologise for the libellous letter you wrote about me?’

“‘No,’ he replied, ‘the letter was privileged; it was written to my son.’

“‘How dared you say such a thing about your son and me?’

“‘You were both kicked out of The Savoy Hotel for disgusting conduct,’ he replied.

“‘That’s untrue,’ I said, ‘absolutely untrue.’

“‘You were blackmailed too for a disgusting letter you wrote my son,’ he went on.

“‘I don’t know who has been telling you all these silly stories,’ I replied, ‘but they are untrue and quite ridiculous.’

“He ended up by saying that if he caught me and his son together again he would thrash me.

“‘I don’t know what the Queensberry rules are,’ I retorted, ‘but my rule is to shoot at sight in case of personal violence,’ and with that I told him to leave my house.”

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