We Argue About His “Pet Vice” and Punishment

A little later I was called to Monte Carlo and went for a few days, leaving Oscar, as he said, perfectly happy, with good food, excellent champagne, absinthe and coffee, and his simple fisher friends.

When I came back to La Napoule, I found everything altered and altered for the worse. There was an Englishman of a good class named M—— staying at the hotel. He was accompanied by a youth of seventeen or eighteen whom he called his servant. Oscar wanted to know if I minded meeting him.

“He is charming, Frank, and well read, and he admires me very much: you won’t mind his dining with us, will you?”

“Of course not,” I replied. But when I saw M—— I thought him an insignificant, foolish creature, who put to show a great admiration for Oscar, and drank in his words with parted lips; and well he might, for he had hardly any brains of his own. He had, however, a certain liking for the poetry and literature of passion.43

To my astonishment Oscar was charming to him, chiefly I think because he was well off, and was pressing Oscar to spend the summer with him at some place he had in Switzerland. This support made Oscar recalcitrant to any influence I might have had over him. When I asked him if he had written anything whilst I was away, he replied casually:

“No, Frank, I don’t think I shall be able to write any more. What is the good of it? I cannot force myself to write.”

“And your ‘Ballad of a Fisher Boy’?” I asked.

“I have composed three or four verses of it,” he said, smiling at me, “I have got them in my head,” and he recited two or three, one of which was quite good, but none of them startling.

Not having seen him for some days, I noticed that he was growing stout again: the good living and constant drinking seemed to ooze out of him; he began to look as he looked in the old days in London just before the catastrophe.

One morning I asked him to put the verses on paper which he had recited to me, but he would not; and when I pressed him, cried:

“Let me live, Frank; tasks remind me of prison. You do not know how I abhor even the memory of it: it was degrading, inhuman!”

“Prison was the making of you,” I could not help retorting, irritated by what seemed to me a mere excuse. “You came out of it better in health and stronger than I have ever known you. The hard living, regular hours and compulsory chastity did you all the good in the world. That is why you wrote those superb letters to the ‘Daily Chronicle,’ and the ‘Ballad of Reading Gaol’; the State ought really to put you in prison and keep you there.”

For the first time in my life I saw angry dislike in his eyes.

“You talk poisonous nonsense, Frank,” he retorted. “Bad food is bad for everyone, and abstinence from tobacco is mere torture to me. Chastity is just as unnatural and devilish as hunger; I hate both. Self-denial is the shining sore on the leprous body of Christianity.”

To all this M—— giggled applause, which naturally excited the combative instincts in me — always too alert.

“All great artists,” I replied, “have had to practise chastity; it is chastity alone which gives vigour and tone to mind and body, while building up a reserve of extraordinary strength. Your favourite Greeks never allowed an athlete to go into the pal?stra unless he had previously lived a life of complete chastity for a whole year. Balzac, too, practised it and extolled its virtues, and goodness knows he loved all the mud-honey of Paris.”

“You are hopelessly wrong, Frank, what madness will you preach next! You are always bothering one to write, and now forsooth you recommend chastity and ‘skilly,’ though I admit,” he added laughing, “that your ‘skilly’ includes all the indelicacies of the season, with champagne, Mocha coffee, and absinthe to boot. But surely you are getting too puritanical. It’s absurd of you; the other day you defended conventional love against my ideal passion.”

He provoked me: his tone was that of rather contemptuous superiority. I kept silent: I did not wish to retort as I might have done if M—— had not been present.

But Oscar was determined to assert his peculiar view. One or two days afterwards he came in very red and excited and more angry than I had ever seen him.

“What do you think has happened, Frank?”

“I do not know. Nothing serious, I hope.”

“I was sitting by the roadside on the way to Cannes. I had taken out a Vergil with me and had begun reading it. As I sat there reading, I happened to raise my eyes, and who should I see but George Alexander — George Alexander on a bicycle. I had known him intimately in the old days, and naturally I got up delighted to see him, and went towards him. But he turned his head aside and pedalled past me deliberately. He meant to cut me. Of course I know that just before my trial in London he took my name off the bill of my comedy, though he went on playing it. But I was not angry with him for that, though he might have behaved as well as Wyndham,44 who owed me nothing, don’t you think?

“Here there was nobody to see him, yet he cut me. What brutes men are! They not only punish me as a society, but now they are trying as individuals to punish me, and after all I have not done worse than they do. What difference is there between one form of sexual indulgence and another? I hate hypocrisy and hypocrites! Think of Alexander, who made all his money out of my works, cutting me, Alexander! It is too ignoble. Wouldn’t you be angry, Frank?”

“I daresay I should be,” I replied coolly, hoping the incident would be a spur to him.

“I’ve always wondered why you gave Alexander a play? Surely you didn’t think him an actor?”

“No, no!” he exclaimed, a sudden smile lighting up his face; “Alexander doesn’t act on the stage; he behaves. But wasn’t it mean of him?”

I couldn’t help smiling, the dart was so deserved.

“Begin another play,” I said, “and the Alexanders will immediately go on their knees to you again. On the other hand, if you do nothing you may expect worse than discourtesy. Men love to condemn their neighbours’ pet vice. You ought to know the world by this time.”

He did not even notice the hint to work, but broke out angrily:

“What you call vice, Frank, is not vice: it is as good to me as it was to C?sar, Alexander, Michelangelo and Shakespeare. It was first of all made a sin by monasticism, and it has been made a crime in recent times, by the Goths — the Germans and English — who have done little or nothing since to refine or exalt the ideals of humanity. They all damn the sins they have no mind to, and that’s their morality. A brutal race; they overeat and overdrink and condemn the lusts of the flesh, while revelling in all the vilest sins of the spirit. If they would read the 23rd chapter of St. Matthew and apply it to themselves, they would learn more than by condemning a pleasure they don’t understand. Why, even Bentham refused to put what you call a ‘vice’ in his penal code, and you yourself admitted that it should not be punished as a crime; for it carries no temptation with it. It may be a malady; but, if so, it appears only to attack the highest natures. It is disgraceful to punish it. The wit of man can find no argument which justifies its punishment.”

“Don’t be too sure of that,” I retorted.

“I have never heard a convincing argument which condemns it, Frank; I do not believe such a reason exists.”

“Don’t forget,” I said, “that this practice which you defend is condemned by a hundred generations of the most civilised races of mankind.”

“Mere prejudice of the unlettered, Frank.”

“And what is such a prejudice?” I asked. “It is the reason of a thousand generations of men, a reason so sanctified by secular experience that it has passed into flesh and blood and become an emotion and is no longer merely an argument. I would rather have one such prejudice held by men of a dozen different races than a myriad reasons. Such a prejudice is incarnate reason approved by immemorial experience.

“What argument have you against cannibalism; what reason is there why we should not fatten babies for the spit and eat their flesh? The flesh is sweeter, African travellers tell us, than any other meat, tenderer at once and more sustaining; all reasons are in favour of it. What hinders us from indulging in this appetite but prejudice, sacred prejudice, an instinctive loathing at the bare idea?

“Humanity, it seems to me, is toiling up a long slope leading from the brute to the god: again and again whole generations, sometimes whole races, have fallen back and disappeared in the abyss. Every slip fills the survivors with fear and horror which with ages have become instinctive, and now you appear and laugh at their fears and tell them that human flesh is excellent food, and that sterile kisses are the noblest form of passion. They shudder from you and hate and punish you, and if you persist they will kill you. Who shall say they are wrong? Who shall sneer at their instinctive repulsion hallowed by ages of successful endeavour?”

“Fine rhetoric, I concede,” he replied, “but mere rhetoric. I never heard such a defence of prejudice before. I should not have expected it from you. You admit you don’t share the prejudice; you don’t feel the horror, the instinctive loathing you describe. Why? Because you are educated, Frank, because you know that the passion Socrates felt was not a low passion, because you know that C?sar’s weakness, let us say, or the weakness of Michelangelo or of Shakespeare, is not despicable. If the desire is not a characteristic of the highest humanity, at least it is consistent with it.”45

“I cannot admit that,” I answered. “First of all, let us leave Shakespeare out of the question, or I should have to ask you for proofs of his guilt, and there are none. About the others there is this to be said, it is not by imitating the vices and weaknesses of great men that we shall get to their level. And suppose we are fated to climb above them, then their weaknesses are to be dreaded.

“I have not even tried to put the strongest reasons before you; I should have thought your own mind would have supplied them; but surely you see that the historical argument is against you. This vice of yours is dropping out of life, like cannibalism: it is no longer a practice of the highest races. It may have seemed natural enough to the Greeks, to us it is unnatural. Even the best Athenians condemned it; Socrates took pride in never having yielded to it; all moderns denounce it disdainfully. You must see that the whole progress of the world, the current of educated opinion, is against you, that you are now a ‘sport,’ a peculiarity, an abnormality, a man with six fingers: not a ‘sport’ that is, full of promise for the future, but a ‘sport’ of the dim backward and abysm of time, an arrested development.”

“You are bitter, Frank, almost rude.”

“Forgive me, Oscar, forgive me, please; it is because I want you at long last to open your eyes, and see things as they are.”

“But I thought you were with us, Frank, I thought at least you condemned the punishment, did not believe in the barbarous penalties.”

“I disbelieve in all punishment,” I said; “it is by love and not by hate that men must be redeemed. I believe, too, that the time is already come when the better law might be put in force, and above all, I condemn punishment which strikes a man, an artist like you, who has done beautiful and charming things as if he had done nothing. At least the good you have accomplished should be set against the evil. It has always seemed monstrous to me that you should have been punished like a Taylor. The French were right in their treatment of Verlaine: they condemned the sin, while forgiving the sinner because of his genius. The rigour in England is mere puritanic hypocrisy, shortsightedness and racial self-esteem.”

“All I can say, Frank, is, I would not limit individual desire in any way. What right has society to punish us unless it can prove we have hurt or injured someone else against his will? Besides, if you limit passion you impoverish life, you weaken the mainspring of art, and narrow the realm of beauty.”

“All societies,” I replied, “and most individuals, too, punish what they dislike, right or wrong. There are bad smells which do not injure anyone; yet the manufacturers of them would be indicted for committing a nuisance. Nor does your plea that by ............