TO MRS GEORGE LEWIS
Since the character of the aesthetic poet Bunthorne in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience was widely but erroneously thought to be a satire based upon Wilde’s public persona, the young poet was offered a lecture tour by the publicity-shrewd American producers of the comic opera, which had opened in New York the previous September.Wilde made the most of the opportunity.
Betty Lewis was the wife of the famous solicitor. Harry Tyrwhitt had just become Equerry in Waiting to the Prince of Wales. The Grange was the London home of fashionable painter Sir Edward Burne-Jones.
New York
[ Circa 15 January 1882 ]
My dear Mrs Lewis,
I am sure you have been pleased at my success! The hall had an audience larger and more wonderful than even Dickens had. I was recalled and applauded and am now treated like the Royal Boy. I have several “Harry Tyrwhitts” as secretaries. One writes my autographs all day for my admirers, the other receives the flowers that are left really every ten minutes. A third whose hair resembles mine is obliged to send off locks of his own hair to the myriad maidens of the city, and so is rapidly becoming bald.
I stand at the top of the reception rooms when I go out, and for two hours they defile past for introduction. I bow graciously and sometimes honour them with a royal observation, which appears next day in all the newspapers. When I go to the theatre the manager bows me in with lighted candles and the audience rise. Yesterday I had to leave by a private door, the mob was so great. Loving virtuous obscurity as much as I do, you can judge how much I dislike the lionizing, which is worse than that given to Sarah Bernhardt I hear.
For this, and indeed for nearly all my successes, I have to thank your husband. Pray give Mr Lewis my most affectionate remembrances, also to the Grange, and believe me, very sincerely yours
Oscar Wilde
TO MRS BERNARD BEERE
Fanny Beere was an actress who had been scheduled to play the leading role in Wilde’s drama Vera in December 1881; however the opening had been cancelled. “The President” of the Mormons ws Brigham Young’s successor in Utah, John Taylor, who had seven wives and thirty-four children. “The Governor of the State” was Horace Tabor of Colorado. “Dot” was the actor Dionysius George Boucicault, son of the playwright.
Kansas City, Missouri
[ 17 April 1882 ]
My dear Bernie,
I have lectured to the Mormons. The Opera House at Salt Lake City is an enormous affair about the size of Covent Garden, and holds with ease fourteen families. They sit like this
and are very, very ugly. The President, a nice man, sat with five wives in the stage box. I visited him in the afternoon and saw a charming daughter of his.
I have also lectured at Leadville, the great mining city in the Rocky Mountains. We took a whole day to get up to it on a narrow-gauge railway 14,000 feet in height. My audience was entirely miners; their make-up excellent, red shirts and blonde beards, the whole of the first three rows being filled with McKee Rankins of every colour and dimension. I spoke to them of the early Florentines, and they slept as though no crime had ever stained the ravines of their mountain home. I described to them the pictures of Botticelli, and the name, which seemed to them like a new drink, roused them grom their dreams, but when I told them in my boyish eloquence of the “secret of Botticelli” the strong men wept like children. Their sympathy touched me and I approached modern art and had almost won them over to a real reverence for what is beautiful when unluckily I described one of Jimmy Whistler’s “nocturnes in blue and gold.” Then they leaped to their feet and in their grand simple way swore that such things should not be. Some of the younger ones pulled their revolvers out and left hurriedly to see if Jimmy was “prowling about the saloons” or “wrestling a hash” at any earing shop. Had he been there I fear he would have been killed, their feeling was so bitter. Their enthusiasm satisfied me and I ended my lecture there. Then I found the Governor of the State waiting in a bullock wagon to bring me down the great silvermine of the world, the Matchless. So off we drove, the miners carrying torchers before us till we came to the shaft and were shot down in buckets (I of course true to my principles being graceful even in a bucket) and down in the great gallery of the mine, the walls and ceilings glittering with metal ore, was spread a banquet for us.
The amazement of the miners when they saw that art and appetite could go hand in hand knew no bounds; when I lit a long cigar they cheered till the silver fell in dust from the roof of our plates; and when I quaffed a cocktail without flinching, they unanimously pronounced me in their grand simple way “a bully boy with no glass eye”—artless and spontaneous praise which touched me more than the pompous panegyrics of literary critics ever did or could. Then I had to open a new vein, or lode, which with a silver drill I brilliantly performed, amidst unanimous applause. The silver drill was presented to me and the lode named “The Oscar.” I had hoped that in their simple grand way they would have offered me shares in “The Oscar,” but in their artless untutored fashion they did not. Only the silver drill remains as a memory of my night at Leadville.
I have had a delightful time all through California and Colorado and am now returning home, twice as affected as ever, my dear Bernie. Please remember me to dear Dot, to Reggie and all our mutual friends including Monty Morris, who won’t write to me or even criticize me. Goodbye. Your sincere friend
Oscar Wilde
Письмо Оскара Уайльда миссис Бернард Бир:
Канзас-Сити, штат Миссури
[ 17 апреля 1882 г. ]
Дорогая Берни,
я читал лекцию мормонам. Оперный театр в Солт-Лейк представляет собой огромный зал величиной с Ковент-Гарден и легко вмещает четырнадцать семей. Главы семейств сидят в окружении многочисленных жен, очень, очень некрасивых. Президент, славный старик, сидел с пятью женами в ложе у самой сцены. Днем я нанес ему визит и видел его очаровательную дочь.
Я также читал лекции в Ледвилле, большом городе рудокопов в Скалистых горах. Мы целый день добирались до него по узкоколейной железной дороге, поднявшись на высоту 14 000 футов. Моя аудитория состояла целиком из рудокопов чрезвычайно сценичного вида, русобородых и в красных рубахах; первые же три ряда были сплошь заполнены Макки Рэнкинами всех цветов и размеров. Я говорил им о ранних флорентинцах, а они спали так невинно, как если бы ни одно преступление еще не осквернило ущелий их гористого края. Я описывал им картины Боттичелли, и звук этого имени, которое они приняли за название нового напитка, пробудил их ото сна, а когда я со своим мальчишеским красноречием поведал им о «тайне Боттичелли», эти крепкие мужчины разрыдались, как дети. Их сочувствие тронуло меня, и я, перейдя к современному искусству, совсем было уговорил их с благоговением относиться к прекрасному, но имел неосторожность описать один из «ноктюрнов в синем и золотом» Джимми Уистлера. Тут они дружно повскакали на ноги и со своим дивным простодушием поклялись, что такого быть не должно. Те, кто помоложе, выхватили револьверы и поспешно вышли посмотреть, «не шатается ли Джимми по салунам» и «не уплетает ли он тушеное рагу» в какой-нибудь харчевне. Окажись он там, его, боюсь, пристрелили бы, до того они распалились. Их энтузиазм меня удовлетворил, и на том свою лекцию я закончил. Потом я нашел губернатора штата, который ждал меня в фургоне, запряженном волами, чтобы отвезти на самый большой в мире серебряный рудник — Несравненный. Итак, мы тронулись — рудокопы с факелами шли впереди, освещая нам путь, пока, наконец вся эта процессия не достигла ствола шахты, по которому всех нас спустили вниз в клетях (разумеется, я, верный своему принципу, был элегантен даже в клети), а там, в огромной подземной галерее, стены и потолок которой сверкали от металлической руды, уже был накрыт для нас банкетный стол.
Когда рудокопы увидели, что искусство и аппетит могут прекрасно сочетаться, изумлению их не было предела; когда я закурил длинную сигару, от их одобрительных кликов к нам в тарелки посыпалась серебряная пыль с потолка, а когда я, не поморщившись, залпом выпил крепчайший коктейль, они в своей благородно-бесхитростной манере дружно объявили, что я «малый не промах» — эта простодушная и искренняя похвала растрогала меня, как не могли бы растрогать никакие высокопарные панегирики литературных критиков. Затем я должен был открыть разработку новой жилы, что блистательно совершил серебряным буром под гром аплодисментов. Серебряный бур был подарен мне, а жила названа «Оскар». Я надеялся, что в той же благородно-бесхитростной манере они предложат мне пай в «Оскаре», но они с присущим им неотесанным простодушием этого не сделали. Только серебряный бур останется памятью о вечере, проведенном мною в Ледвилле.
Я прекрасно провел время, объездив вдоль и поперек Калифорнию и Колорадо, и теперь возвращаюсь домой вдвое большим эстетом, чем прежде, дорогая Берни. Передайте, пожалуйста, привет дорогому Доту, а также Реджи и всем нашим общим друзьям, в том числе и Монти Моррису, который не желает ни писать мне, ни даже критиковать меня. До свидания. Ваш искренний друг
Оскар Уайльд
Комментарии
Рэнкин, Артур Макки (1842–1914) — американский актер-режиссер. Был известен, в частности, как исполнитель одной из ролей в мелодраме Хоакина Миллера из жизни мормонов.
Уистлер, Джеймс Эббот Мак Нейл (1843–1903) — американский художник, живший в Лондоне.
Дот — прозвище Диона Джорджа Бусико (1859–1929), ирландского актера и драматурга, сына крайне популярного в английском театре XIX века драматурга Диона (Дионисиуса Ларднера) Бусико (1822–1890), автора более чем 150 пьес и переработок, в том числе мелодрамы «Лондонский стряпчий» — одной из первых пьес на современную тему в английском театре.
Реджи — Тернер, Реджинальд (1869–1938) — английский журналист, известный своим острым пером, один из ближайших друзей Уайльда, особенно много сделавший для него в последние годы его жизни. Автор нескольких романов.
TO ROBERT H. SHERARD
Sherard, who would later be a biographer of Wilde, had dedicated Whispers, his first book of poetry, to Oscar.
8 Mount Street,
Grosvernor Square, London
[ Postmark 17 May 1883 ]
Dear Robert,
Your letter was as loveable as yourself, and this is my first moment after channel-crossings, train-catchings, and my natural rage at the charges for extra luggage from Paris, for sitting down to tell you what pleasure it gave me, and what memories of moonlit meanderings, and sunset strolls, the mere sight of your handwriting brought.
As for the dedication of your poems, I accept it: how could I refuse a gift so musical in its beauty, and fashioned by one whom I love so much as I love you?
To me the mirror of perfect friendship can never be dulled by any treachery, however mean, or disloyalty, however base. Individuals come and go like shadows but the ideal remains untarnished always: the ideal of lives linked together not by affection merely, or the pleasantness of companionship, but by the capacity of being stirred by the same noble things in art and song. For we might bow before the same marble goddess, and with hymns not dissimilar fill the reeds of her flutes: the gold of the night-time, and the silver of the dawn, should pass into perfection for us: and from each string that is touched by the fingers of the prayer, from each bird that is rapturous in brake or covert, from each hill-flower that blossoms on the hill, we might draw into our hearts the same sense of beauty, and in the House of Beauty meet and join hands.
That is what I think true friendship should be, like that men could make their lives: but friendship is a fire where what is not flawless shrinks into grey ashes, and where what is imperfect is not purified but consumed. There may be much about which we may differ, you and I, more perhaps than we fancy, but in our desire for beauty in all things we are one, and one in our search for that little city of gold where the flute-player never wearies, and the spring never fades, and the oracle is not silent, that little city which is the house of art, and where, with all the music of the spheres, and the laughter of the gods, Art waits for her worshippers. For we at least have not gone out into the desert to seek a reed shaken by the wind, or a dweller in kings’ houses, but to a land of sweet waters, and to the well of life; for the nightingale has sung to both of us, and the moon been glad of us, and not to Pallas, or to Hera, have we given the prize, but to her who from the marble of the quarry and the stone of the mine can give us pillared Parthenon and glyptic gem, to her who is the spirit of Beauty, and who has come forth from her hollow hill into the chill evening of this old world, and walks among us visible.
That is, I think, what we are seeking, and that you should seek it with me, you who are yourself so dear to me, gives me faith in our futures, confidence in our love.
Oscar
TO CONSTANCE LLOYD WILDE
Wilde had married Constance Lloyd the previous May. His major source of income at the time was lecturing on dress, home decoration, and “the value of art in modern life,” and he was then away to give such lectures in Scotland.
The Balmoral, Edinburgh
Tuesday
[ Postmark 16 December 1884 ]
Dear and Beloved,
Here am I, and you at the Antipodes. O execrable facts, that keep our lips from kissing, though our souls are one.
What can I tell you by letter? Alas! nothing that I would tell you. The messages of the gods to each other travel not by pen and ink and indeed your bodily presence here would not make you more real: for 1 feel your fingers in my hair, and your cheek brushing mine. The air is full of the music of your voice, my soul and body seem no longer mine, but mingled in some exquisite ecstasy with yours. I feel incomplete without you. Ever and ever yours
Here I stay till Sunday.
Oscar
TO THE EDITOR OF THE SCOTS OBSERVER
The feisty editor of the Scots Observer was the poet W. E. Henley. The review of Dorian Gray, which accused Wilde of “grubbing in muck-heaps” and writing for “outlawed noblemen and perverted telegraph-boys,” was written by Henley’s assistant Charles Whibley, a friend and future brother-in-law of Whistler.
16 Tite Street, Chelsea
9 July 1890
Sir,
You have published a review of my story, The Picture of Dorian Gray. As this review is grossly unjust to me as an artist, I ask you to allow me to exercise in your columns my right of reply.
Your reviewer, sir, while admitting that the story in question is “plainly the work of a man of letters,” the work of one who has “brains, and art, and style,” yet suggests, and apparently in all seriousness, that I have written the work in order that it should be read by the most depraved members of the criminal and illiterate classes. Now, sir, I do not suppose that the criminal and illiterate classes ever read anything except newspapers. They are certainly not likely to be able to understand anything of mine. So let them pass, and on the broad question of why a man of letters writes at all let me say this. The pleasure that one has in creating a work of art is a purely personal pleasure, and it is for the sake of this pleasure that one creates. The artist works with his eye on the object. Nothing else interests him. What people are likely to say does not even occur to him. He is fascinated by what he has in hand. He is indifferent to others. I write because it gives me the greatest possible artistic pleasure to write. If my work pleases the few, I am gratified. If it does not, it causes me no pain. As for the mob, I have no desire to be a popular novelist. It is far too easy.
Your critic then, sir, commits the absolutely unpardonable crime of trying to confuse the artist with his subject-matter. For this, sir, there is no excuse at all. Of one who is the greatest figure in the world’s literature since Greek days Keats remarked that he had as much pleasure in conceiving the evil as he had in conceiving the good. Let your reviewer, sir, consider the bearings of Keats’s fine criticism, for it is under these conditions that every artist works. One stands remote from one’s subject-matter. One creates it, and one contemplates it. The further away the subject-matter is, the more freely can the artist work. Your reviewer suggests that I do not make it sufficiently clear whether I prefer virtue to wickedness or wickedness to virtue. An artist, sir, has no ethical sympathies at all. Virtue and wickedness are to him simply what the colours on his palette are to the painter. They are no more, and they are no less. He sees that by their means a certain artistic effect can be produced, and he produces it. Iago may be morally horrible and Imogen stainlessly pure. Shakespeare, as Keats said, had as much delight in creating the one as he had in creating the other.
It was necessary, sir, for the dramatic development of this story to surround Dorian Gray with an atmosphere of moral corruption. Otherwise the story would have had no meaning and the plot no issue. To keep this atmosphere vague and indeterminate and wonderful was the aim of the artist who wrote the story. I claim, sir, that he has succeeded. Each man sees his own sin in Dorian Gray. What Dorian Gray’s sins are no one knows. He who finds them has brought them.
In conclusion, sir, let me say how really deeply I regret that you should have permitted such a notice as the one I feel constrained to write on to have appeared in tour paper. That the editor of the St James’s Gazette should have employed Caliban as his art-critic was possibly natural. The editor of the Scots Observer should not have allowed Thersites to make mows in his review. It is unworthy of so distinguished a man of letters. I am, etc.
Oscar Wilde
TO BERNARD SHAW
While praising Shaw’s Quintessence of Ibsenism (1891), Oscar was forwarding a copy of his just-published Salom é.
Babbacombe Cliff
[ Postmark 23 February 1893 ]
My dear Shaw,
You have written well and wisely and with sound wit on the ridiculous institution of a stage-censorship: your little book on Ibsenism and Ibsen is such a delight to me that I constantly take it up, and always find it stimulating and refreshing: England is the land of intellectual fogs but you have done much to clear the air: we are both Celtic, and I like to think that we are friends: for these and many other reasons Salome presents herself to you in purple raiment.
Pray accept her with my best wishes, and believe me, very truly yours
Oscar Wilde
TO THE EDITOR OF THE TIMES
The Times had condemned Salom é —which the Lord Chamberlain had refused to license for production in England—as “an arrangement in blood and ferocity, morbid, bizarre, repulsive, and very offensive in its adaptation of scriptural phraseology to situations the reverse of sacred.”
[ Circa 1 March 1893 ]
Sir,
My attention has been drawn to a review of Salome which was published in your columns last week. The opinions of English critics on a French work of mine have, of course, little, if any, interest for me. I write simply to ask you to allow me to correct a misstatement that appears in the review in question.
The fact that the greatest tragic actress of any stage now living saw in my play such beauty that she was anxious to produce it, to take herself the part of the heroine, to lend to the entire poem the glamour of her personality, and to my prose the music of her flute-like voice—this was naturally, and always will be, a source of pride and pleasure to me, and I look forward with delight to seeing Mme. Bernhardt present my play in Paris, that vivid centre of art, where religious dramas are often performed. But my play was in no sense of the words written for this great actress. I have never written a play for any actor or actress, nor shall I ever do so. Such work is for the artisan in literature—not for the artist.
I remain, Sir, your obedient servant,
Oscar Wilde
TO GRACE HAWTHORNE
Grace Hawthorne was an English actress eager to produce Wilde. Oscar was less eager for that opportunity.
5 Esplanade, Worthing
[ Postmark 4 October 1894 ]
Dear Miss Hawthorne,
My plays are difficult plays to produce well: they require artistic setting on the stage, a good company that knows something of the style essential to high comedy, beautiful dresses, a sense of the luxury of modern life, and unless you are going out with a management that is able to pay well for things that are worth paying for, and to spend money in suitable presentation, it would be much better for you not to think of producing my plays. The very nominal sum I said I would accept in advance of fees I would not, I need hardly say, have accepted from anyone else: but as you said you were in some difficulty I was ready to take a nominal sum in advance. A management that could not pay that could not, I fear, give anything better than a travesty of my work. Some day you must find a brilliant manager who can produce things well for you. I will be charmed then to have a talk with you over some play of mine.
Bon voyage, and best wishes for a most successful tour. Sincerely yours
Oscar Wilde
TO LORD ALFRED DOUGLAS
The Marquess of Queensberry, Douglas’s father, had attempted to disrupt the curtain calls of The Importance of Being Earnest by presenting Wilde with a “phallic bouquet” of appropriate vegetables. Percy was Lord Douglas of Hawick, elder brother of Lord Alfred.
Thos Cook & Son, 33 Piccadilly
[ Circa 17 February 1895 ]
Dearest Boy,
Yes: the Scarlet Marquis made a plot to address the audience on the first night of my play! Algy Bourke revealed it, and he was not allowed to enter.
He left a grotesque bouquet of vegetables for me! This of course makes his conduct idiotic, robs it of dignity.
He arrived with a prize-fighter!! I had all Scotland Yard-twenty police—to guard the theatre. He prowled about for three hours, then left chattering like a monstrous ape. Percy is on our side.
I feel now that, without your name being mentioned, all will go well.
I had not wished you to know. Percy wired without telling me. I am greatly touched by your rushing over Europe. For my own part I had determined you should know nothing.
I will wire to Calais and Dover, and you will of course stay with me till Saturday. I then return to Tite Street, I think.
Ever, with love, all love in the world, devotedly your
Oscar
TO ROBERT ROSS
Queensberry, furious at Wilde’s relationship with Lord Alfred, had left a calling card accusing Wilde of being a sodomite (and in the process misspelling the word). Rather than ignore it, Wilde would make the mistake if suing for libel. Ross, a young member of the Wilde circle, was, after Douglas, Oscar’s closest confidant.
Hotel Avondale, Piccadilly
[ 28 February 1895 ]
Dear Bobbie,
Since I saw you something has happened. Bosie’s father has left a card at my club with hideous words on it. I don’t see anything now but a criminal prosecution. My whole life seems ruined by this man. The tower of ivory is assailed by the foul thing. On the sand is my life spilt. I don’t know what to do. If you could come here at 11.30 please do so tonight. I mar your life by trespassing ever on your love and kindness.
I have asked Bosie to come tomorrow. Ever yours
Oscar
TO LORD ALFRED DOUGLAS
The name omitted in the second paragraph was excised by Douglas. Written in advance of the jury’s expected verdict, the letter was intended for dispatch after the decision was rendered.
H. M. Prison, Holloway
Monday Evening [ 29 April 1895 ]
My dearest boy,
This is to assure you of my immortal, my eternal love for you. Tomorrow all will be over. If prison and dishonour be my destiny, think that my love for you and this idea, this still more divine belief, that you love me in return will sustain me in my unhappiness and will make me capable, I hope, of bearing my grief most patiently. Since the hope, nay rather the certainty, of meeting you again in some world is the goal and the encouragement of my present life, ah! I must continue to live in this world because of that.
Dear __________ came to see me today. I gave him several messages for you. He told me one thing that reassured me: that my mother should never want for anything. I have always provided for her subsistence, and the thought that she might have to suffer privations was making me unhappy. As for you (graceful boy with a Christ-like heart), as for you, I beg you, as soon as you have done all that you can, leave for Italy and regain your calm, and write those lovely poems which you do with such a strange grace. Do not expose yourself to England for any reason whatsoever. If one day, at Corfu or in some enchanted isle, there were a little house where we could live together, oh! life would be sweeter than it has ever been. Your love has broad wings and is strong, your love comes to me through my prison bars and comforts me, your love is the light of all my hours. Those who know not what love is, will write, I know, if fate is against us, that I have had a bad influence upon your life. If they do that, you shall write, you shall say in your turn, that it is not so. Our love was always beautiful and noble, and if I have been the butt of a terrible tragedy, it is because the nature of that love has not been understood. In your letter this morning you say something which gives me courage. I must remeber it. You write that it is my duty to you and to myself to live in spite of everything. I think that is true. I shall try and I shall do it. I want you to keep Mr Humphreys informed of your movements so that when he comes he can tell me what you are doing. I believe solicitors are allowed to see the prisoners fairly often. Thus I could communicate with you.
I am so happy that you have gone away! I know what that must have cost you. It would have been agony for me to think that you were in England when your name was mentioned in court. I hope you have copies of all my books. All mine have been sold.I stretch out my hands towards you. Oh! may I live to touch your hair and your hands. I think that your love will watch over my life. If I should die, I want you to live a gentle, peaceful existence somewhere, with flowers, books and lots of work. Try to let me hear from you soon. I am writing you this letter in the midst of great suffering; this long day in court has exhausted me. Dearest boy, sweetest of all young men, most loved and most lovable. Oh! wait for me! wait for me! I am now, as ever since the day we met, yours devoutly and with an immortal love
Oscar
TO THE HOME SECRETARY
Wilde’s petition for commutation of his sentence on grounds of broken health was forwarded to the Home Secretary by the Governor of Reading Gaol with a medical report from the prison doctor declaring that Wilde’s health was good. Still, four Prison Visitors were sent to investigate. They confirmed the medical findings but recommended that Wilde be permitted writing materials and additional books in his cell. The Home Secretary at the time was Sir Matthew White Ridley.
H. M. Prison, Reading
2 July 1896
To the Right Honourable Her Majesty’s Principal Secretary of State for the Home Department.
The Petition of the above-mentioned prisoner humbly sheweth that he does not desire to attempt palliate in any way the terrible offences of which he was rightly found guilty, but to point out that such offences are forms of sexual madness and are recognised as such not merely by modern pathological science but by much modern legislation, notably in France, Austria, and Italy, where the laws affecting these misdemeanours have been repealed, on the ground that they are diseases to be cured by a physician, rather than crimes to be punished by a judge. In the works of eminent men of science such as Lombroso and Nordau, to take merely two instances out of many, this is specially insisted on with reference to the intimate connection between madness and the literary and artistic temperament Professor Nordau in his book on “Degenerescence” published in 1894 having devoted an entire chapter to the petitioner as a specially typical example of this fatal law.
The petitioner is now keenly conscious of the fact that while the three years preceding his arrest were from the intellectual point of view the most brilliant years of his life (four plays from his pen having been produced on the stage with immense success, and played not merely in England, America, and Australia, but in almost every European capital, and many books that excited much interest at home and abroad having been published), still that during the entire time he was suffering from the most horrible form of erotomania, which made him forget his wife and children, his high social position in London and Paris, his European distinction as an artist, the honour of his name and family, his very humanity itself, and left him the helpless prey of the most revolting passions, and of a gang of people who for their own profit ministered to them, and then drove him to his hideous ruin.
It is under the ceaseless apprehension lest this insanity, that displayed itself in monstrous sexual perversion before, may now extend to the entire nature and intellect, that the petitioner writes this appeal which he earnestly entreats may be at once considered. Horrible as all actual madness is, the terror of madness is no less appalling, and no less ruinous to the soul.
For more than thirteen dreadful months now, the petitioner has been subject to the fearful system of solitary cellular confinement: without human intercourse of any kind; without writing materials whose use might help to distract the mind: without suitable or sufficient books, so essential to any literary man, so vital for the preservation of mental balance: condemned to absolute silence: cut off from all knowledge of the external world and the movements of life: leading an existence composed of bitter degradations and terrible hardships, hideous in its recurring monotony of dreary task and sickening privation: the despair and misery of this lonely and wretched life having been intensified beyond words by the death of his mother, Lady Wilde, to whom he was deeply attached, as well as by the contemplation of the ruin he has brought on his young wife and his two children.
By special permission the petitioner is allowed two books a week to read: but the prison library is extremely small and poor: it hardly contains a score of books suitable for an educated man: the books kindly added at the prisoner’s request he has read and re-read till they have become almost meaningless to him: he is practically left without anything to read: the world of ideas, as the actual world, is closed to him: he is deprived of everything that could soothe, distract, or heal a wounded and shaken mind: and horrible as all the physical privations of modern prison life are, they are as nothing compared to the entire privation of literature to one to whom Literature was once the first thing of life, the mode by which perfection could be realised, by which, and by which alone, the intellect could feel itself alive.
It is but natural that living in this silence, this solitude, this isolation from all human and humane influences, this tomb for those who are not yet dead, the petitioner should, day and night in every waking hour, be tortured by the fear of absolute and entire insanity. He is conscious that his mind, shut out artificially from all rational and intellectual interests, does nothing, and can do nothing, but brood on those forms of sexual perversity, those loathsome modes of erotomania, that have brought him from high place and noble distinction to the convict’s cell and the common gaol. It is inevitable that it should do so. The mind is forced to think, and when it is deprived of the conditions necessary for healthy intellectual activity, such as books, writing materials, companionship, contact with the living world, and the like, it becomes, in the case of those who are suffering from sensual monomanias, the sure prey of morbid passions, and obscene fancies, and thoughts that defile, desecrate and destroy. Crimes may be forgotten or forgiven, but vices live on: they make their dwelling house in him who by horrible mischance or fate has become their victim: they are embedded in his flesh: they spread over him like a leprosy: they feed on him like a strange disease: at the end they become an essential part of the man: no remorse however poignant can drive them out: no tears however bitter can wash them away: and prison life, by its horrible isolation from all that could save a wretched soul, hands the victim over, like one bound hand and foot, to be possessed and polluted by the thoughts he most loathes and so cannot escape from.
For more than a year the petitioner’s mind has borne this. It can bear it no longer. He is quite conscious of the approach of an insanity that will not be confined to one portion of the nature merely, but will extend over all alike, and his desire, his prayer is that his sentence may be remitted now, so that he may be taken abroad by his friends and may put himself under medical care so that the sexual insanity from which he suffers may be cured. He knows only too well that his career as a dramatist and writer is ended, and his name blotted from the scroll of English Literature never to be replaced: that his children cannot bear that name again, and that an obscure life in some remote country is in store for him: he knows that, bankruptcy having come upon him, poverty of a most bitter kind awaits him, and that all the joy and beauty of existence is taken from him for ever: but at least in all his hopelessness he still clings to the hope that he will not have to pass directly from the common gaol to the common lunatic asylum.
Dreadful as are the results of the prison system—a system so terrible that it hardens their hearts whose hearts it does not break, and brutalises those who have to carry it out no less than those who have to submit to it—yet at least amongst its aims is not the desire to wreck the human reason. Though it may not seek to make men better, yet it does not desire to drive them mad, and so, earnestly does the petitioner beg that he may be allowed to go forth while he has still some sanity left: while words have still a meaning, and books a message: while there is still some possibility that, by medical science and humane treatment, balance may be restored to a shaken mind and health given back to a nature that once knew purity: while there is still time to rid the temperament of a revolting madness and to make the soul, even for a brief space, clean.
Most earnestly indeed does the petitioner beg the Home Secretary to take, if he so desires it, the opinion of any recognised medical authorities on what would be the inevitable result of solitary confinement in silence and isolation on one already suffering from sexual monomania of a terrible character.
The petitioner would also point out that while his bodily health is better in many respects here than it was at Wandsworth, where he was for two months in the hospital for absolute physical and mental collapse caused by hunger and insomnia, he has, since he has been in prison, almost entirely lost the hearing of his right ear through an abscess that has caused a perforation of the drum. The medical officer here has stated that he is unable to offer any assistance, and that the hearing must go entirely. The petitioner, however, feels sure that under the care of a specialist abroad his hearing might be preserved to him. He was assured by Sir William Dalby, the great aurist, that with proper care there was no reason at all why he should lose his hearing. But though the abscess has been running now for the entire time of his imprisonment, and the hearing getting worse every week, nothing has been done in the way even of an attempted cure. The ear has been syringed on three occasions with plain water for the purpose of examination, that is all. The petitioner is naturally apprehensive lest, as often happens, the other ear may be attacked in a similar way, and to the misery of a shattered and debilitated mind be added the horrors of complete deafness.
His eyesight, of which like most men of letters he had always been obliged to take great care, has also suffered very much from the enforced living in a white-washed cell with a flaring gas-jet at night: he is conscious of great weakness and pain in the nerves of the eyes, and objects even at a short distance become blurred. The bright day-light, when taking exercise in the prison-yard, often causes pain and distress to the optic nerve, and during the past four months the consciousness of failing eyesight has been a source of terrible anxiety, and should his imprisonment be continued, blindness and deafness may in all human probability be added to the certainty of increasing insanity and the wreck of the reason.
There are other apprehensions of danger that the limitation of space does not allow the petitioner to enter on: his chief danger is that of madness, his chief terror that of madness, and his prayer that his long imprisonment may be considered with its attendant ruin a sufficient punishment, that the imprisonment may be ended now, and not uselessly or vindictevily prolonged till insanity has claimed soul as well as body as its prey, and brought it to the same degradation and the same shame.
Oscar Wilde
TO CARLOS BLACKER
Carlos Blacker was a wealthy Englishman, slightly younger than Wilde, who lived with his wife in Paris. He may have helped to back financially the first production of Lady Windermere’s Fan. In exile Wilde had adopted, temporarily, a transparent new name, which echoed both St. Sebastian and the novel Melmoth the Wanderer.
[ Chalet Bourgeat ] Berneval-sur-Mer
12 July 1897
My dear old Friend,
I need not tell you with what feelings of affection and gratitude I read your letter. You were always my staunch friend and stood by my side for many years.
Often in prison I used to think of you: of your chivalry of nature, of your limitless generosity, of your quick intellectual sympathies, of your culture so receiptive, so refined. What marvelous evenings, dear Carlos, we used to have! What brilliant dinners! What days of laughter and delight! To you, as to me, conversation—that [ delightful wickedness ] as Euripides calls it— that sweet sin of phrases—was always among the supreme aims of life, and we tired many a moon with talk, and drank many a sun to rest with wine and words. You were always the truest of friends and the most sympathetic of companions. You will, I know, wish to hear about me, and what I am doing and thinking.
Well, I am in a little chalet, with a garden, over the sea. It is a nice chalet with two great balconies, where I pass much of my day and many of my nights. Berneval is a tiny place consisting of a hotel and about twenty chalets: the people who come here are des bons bourgeois as far as I can see. The sea has a lovely beach, to which one descends through a small ravine, and the land is full of trees and flowers, quite like a bit of Surrey: so green and shady. Dieppe is ten miles off. Many friends, such as Will Rothenstein, the artist, Conder, who is a sort of Corot of the sunlight, Ernest Dowson, the poet, and others have come to see me for a few days: and next month I hope to see Ricketts and Shannon, who decorated all my books for me, dear Robbie Ross, and perhaps some others. I learnt many things in prison that were terrible to learn, but I learnt some good lessons that I needed. I learnt gratitude: and though, in the eyes of the world, I am of course a disgraced and ruined man, still every day I am filled with wonder at all the beautiful things that are left to me: loyal and loving friends: good health: books, one of the greatest of the many worlds God has given to each man: the pageant of the seasons: the loveliness of leaf and flower: the nights hung with silver and the dawns dim with gold. I often find myself strangely happy. You must not think of me as being morbidly sad, or willfully living in sadness, that sin which Dante punishes so terribly. My desire to live is as intense as ever, and though my heart is broken, hearts are made to be broken: that is why God sends sorrow into the world. The hard heart is the evil thing of life and of art. I have also learnt sympathy with suffering. To me, suffering seems now a sacramental thing, that makes those whom it touches holy. I think I am in many respects a much better fellow than I was, and I now make no more exorbitant claims on life: I accept everything. I am sure it is all right. I was living a life unworthy of an artist, and though I do not hold with the British view of morals that sets Messalina above Sporus, I see that any materialism in life coarsens the soul, and that the hunger of the body and the appetites of the flesh desecrate always, and often destroy.
Of course I am troubled about money, because the life of a man of letters —and I hope to be one again—requires solitude, peace, books and the opportunity of retirement. I have, as I daresay you know, only £3 a week: but dear Robbie Ross and some other friends got up privately a little subscription for me to give me a start. But of course they are all quite poor themselves, and though they gave largely from their store, their store was small, and I have had to buy everything, so as to be able to live at all.
I hope to write a play soon, and then if I can get it produced I shall have money — far too much I dare say: but as yet I have not been able to work. The two long years of silence kept my soul in bonds. It will all come back, I feel sure, and then all will be well.
I long to see you, dear friend. Could you come here with your wife? Or to Dieppe? The hotel here is a charming little auberge with a capital cook: everything very wholesome and clean, and daintily served besides. I must talk over my future, for I believe that God still holds a future for me, only I must be wise, and must see my way.
Will you do this? It would help me very much to see you—more than I can say.
And now, dear friend, I must end my letter. I have only said a little in it, but writing is strangely difficult for me from long disuse.
Write to me as Monsieur Sebastian Melmoth. It is my new name. I enclose a card. Pray offer my homage to your wife, and believe me, ever gratefully and affectionaly yours
Oscar Wilde
TO REGINALD TURNER
Through his Oxford companion Max Beerbohm, Reggie Turner (see A. Weintraub, Reggie, 1965) had become acquainted with Wilde in Oscar’s grander and happier days. He would remain loyal to the end. Leonard Smithers, publisher of The Savoy, edited by Aubrey Beardsley and Arthur Symons, would chance the publication of the Ballad of Reading Gaol.
[ Dieppe ]
Tuesday 10 August [ 1897 ]
My dear Reggie,
Will you come over here on Saturday next, by the afternoon boat? Robbie is here, and we want you so much. It is quite quiet and the weather is charming. Also last night acrobats arrived. Smithers, the publisher and owner of Aubrey, comes over on Sunday and we all dine with him: then we go to Berneval.
I do not know if you know Smithers: he is usually in a large straw hat, has a blue tie delicately fastened with a diamond brooch of the impurest water—or perhaps wine, as he never touches water: it goes to his head at once. His face, clean-shaven as befits a priest who serves at the altar whose God is Literature, is wasted and pale—not with poetry, but with poets, who, he says, have wrecked his life by insisting on publishing with him. He loves first editions, especially of women: little girls are his passion. He is the most learned erotomaniac in Europe. He is also a delightful companion, and a dear fellow, very kind to me.
You will on arrival proceed without delay to the Café Suisse, where Robbie and I will be waiting for you.
If you don’t come I shall be quite wretched. I long to see you again. Ever yours
Oscar
TO LEONARD SMITHERS
Wilde was discussing the final text of the Ballad of Reading Gaol. His first quotation, however, is from Hamlet.
Posilippo
Sunday [? 28 November 1897 ]
Dear Smithers,
Do try and make the Chiswick Press less mad and less maddening. I now have “While some coarse-mouthed doctor straddles by, with a flattened bulldog noses, fingering the watch” etc. If they ask you is there no offence in it, say it is simply miching mallecho, but to say it with stule wear sables. However, if thery kick, I cannot sacrifice the lines about the watch, so I enclose a feeble substitute, but I shall be outraged and perhaps outrageous if it is used.
I wish you would start a Society for the Defence of Oppressed Personalities: at present there is a gross European concert headed by brutes and solicitors against us. It is really rificulous that after my entire life has been wrecked by Society, people should still propose to exercise social tyranny over me, and try to force me to live in solitude — the one thing I can’t stand. I lived in silence and solitude for two years in prison. I did not think that on my release my wife, my trustees, the guardians of my children, my neew friends, such as they are, and my myriad enemies would combine to force me by starvation to live in silence and s olitude again. After all in prison we had food of some kind: it was revolting, and made as loathsome as possible on purpose, and quite inadequate to sustain life in health. Still, there was food of some kind. The scheme now is that I am to live in silence and solitude and have no food at all. Really, the want of imagination in people is appalling. This scheme is put forward on moral grounds! It is proposed to leave me to die of starvation, or to blow my brains out in a Naples urinal. I never came across anyone in whom the moral sense was dominant who was not heartless, cruel, vindictive, log-stupid, and entirely lacking in the smallest sense of humanity. Moral people, as they are termed, are simple beasts. I would sooner have fifty unnatural vices than one unnatural virtue. It is unnatural virtue that makes the world, for those who suffer, such a premature Hell.
All this has, of course, direct reference to my poem: and indeed is the usual way in whicj poets write to publishers.
I have decided to put back the opening of Canto Three, because it is dramatically necessary for the telling of the story. The reader wants to know where the condemned man was, and what he was doing. I wish it were better, but it isn’t and can’t be. I think it aids the narrative immensely. So stick it in. For the rest I think I have corrected enough. The popularity of the poem will be largely increased by the author’s painful death by starvation. The public love poets to die in that way. It seems to them deamatically right. Ever yours
O. W.
TO ROBERT ROSS
Oscar had inscribed a copy of Earnest to Ross. Constance Wilde had died on 7 April 1898. Wilde had seen neither het nor their sons after his arrest in 1895. Horace Sedger was a theatrical manager to whom Wilde had sold his scenario of Mr and Mrs Daventry. Wilde sold it also to Ada Rehan, Louis Nethersole, Leonard Smithers, and Frank Harris, who actually wrote a play based on Ocscar’s idea and produced it in October 1900. The others all cried foul, and Harris had to buy them off.
Gland, Canton Vaud, Switzerland
[ Circa 1 March 1899 ]
My dear Robbie,
Thanks for your charming letter, which I found waiting for me here on my arrival from Genoa yesterday.
It was a great pleasure weiting your name on the page of dedication. I only wish it was a more wonderful work of art - of higher seriousness of intent - but it has some amusing things in it, and I think the tone and temper of the whole thing bright and happy.
I went to Genoa to see Constance’s grave. It is very pretty - a marble cross with dark ivy-leaves inlaid in a good pattern. The cemetery is a garden at the foot of the lovely hills that climb into the mountains that girdle Genoa. It was very tragic seeing her name carved on a tomb - her surname, my name, not mentioned of course - just “Constance Mary, daughter of Horace Lloyd, Q.C.” and a verse from Revelations. I brought some flowers. I was deeply affected - with a sense, also, of the uselessness of all regrets. Nothing could have been otherwise, and Life is a very terrible thing.
This is a pretty house on the Lake. We look over to the snows and hills of Savoy. Geneva is half an hour by rail. You are to come whenever you like. April is lovely here, I believe, and flaunts in flowers.
There is an Italian cook, also the lad Eolo, who waits at table. His father told Mellor at Spezia that he was christened Eolo because he was born on a night on which there was a dreadful wind! I think it is rather nice to have thought of such a name. An English peasant would probably have said “We called him John, sir, because we were getting in the hay at the time.”
There is no truth at all in Sedger’s advertisement, and I am very angry about it. It is quite monstrous. My only chance is a play produced anonymously. Otherwise the First Night would be a horror, and people would find meanings in every phrase.
I am going to try a bicycle. I have never forgotten the lesson you so kindly gave me: even my leg remembers it.
Do write again soon. Have I forgotten anyone to whom I should send a copy? Ever yours
Oscar
Wildean Wit from the Other Comedies:
I. From Lady Windermere’s Fan
Cecil Graham. Hopper is one of Nature’s gentlemen, the worst type of gentleman I know.
Lord Plymdale. Women of that kind are most useful. They form the basis of other people’s marriages.
Cecil Graham. Nothing looks so like innocence as an indiscretion.
Dumby. Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.
Cecil Graham. There’s nothing in the world like the devotion of a married woman. It’s a thing no married man knows anything about. … I never seem to meet any but good women. The world is perfectly packed with good women. To know them is a middle-class education.
Mrs Erlynne. I think he’s sure to be a wonderful success. He thinks like a Tory, and talks like a radical, and that’s so important now-a-days.
Lord Darlington. Do you know I am afraid that good people do a great deal of harm in this world. Certainly the greatest harm they do is that they make badness of such extraordinary importance. It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.
Lady Winder mere. Are all men bad?
Duchess of Berwick. Oh, all of them, my dear, all of them, without any exception. And they never grow any better. Men become old, nut they never become good.
Lady Windermere. Why do you talk so trivially about life, then?
Lord Darlington. Because I think that life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about it.
II. From A Woman of No Importance
Lord Illingworth. It is perfectly monstrous the way people go about, now-a-days, saying things against one behind one’s back that are absolutely and entirely true.
Lord Illingworth. The English country gentleman galloping after a fox—the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable.
Lady Stutfield. It must be terribly, terribly disinteresting to be in debt.
Lord Alfred. One must have some occupation now-a-days. If I hadn’t my debts I shouldn’t have anything to think about.
Lord Illingworth. Twenty years of romance make a woman look like a ruin; but twenty years of marriage make her something like a public building.
Lord Illingworth. You should study the Peerage, Gerald. It is the one book a young man about town should know thoroughly, and it is the best thing in fiction the English have ever done.
Mrs Allonby. Nothing is so aggravating as calmness. There is something positively brutal about the good temper of most modern men. I wonder we women stand it as well as we do.
Mrs Allonby. Men always want to be a woman’s first love. That is their clumsy vanity. We women have a more subtle instinct about things. What we like is to be a man’s last romance.
Lady Caroline. Women have become so highly educated, Jane, that nothing should surprise us now-a-days, except happy marriages.
Mrs Allonby. More marriages are ruined now-a-days by the common sense of the husband than by anything else. How can a woman be expected to be happy with a man who insists on treating her as if she were a perfectly rational being?
Lady Caroline. There are great many things you haven’t got in America, I am told, Miss Worsely. They say you have no ruins, and no curiosities.
Mrs Allonby. [ To Lady Stutfield ]. What nonsense! They have their mothers and their manners.
Lord Illingworth. All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy.
Mrs Allonby. No man does. That is his.
Lord Illingworth. Moderation is a fatal thing, Lady Hunstanton. Nothing succeeds like excess.
Lady Hunstanton. I hope I shall remember that. It sounds an admirable maxim. But I’m beginning to forget everything. It’s a great misfortune.
Lord Illingworth. It is one of your most fascinating qualities, Lady Hunstanton. No woman should have a memory. Memory in a woman is the beginning of dowdiness.
III. From An Ideal Husband
Mrs. Cheveley. Questions are never indiscreet. Answers sometimes are.
Lord Goring. Everything is dangerous, my dear fellow. If it wasn’t so, life wouldn’t be worth living.
Mrs Cheveley. Society has become dreadfully mixed. One sees the oldest people everywhere.
Lady Markby. That is quite true, dear. But one needn’t know them. I’m sure I don’t know half the people who come to my house. Indeed, from all I hear, I shouldn’t like to.
Mrs Cheveley. Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people whom we personally dislike.
Lord Goring. Doesn’t that sound rather like tempting Providence?
Mrs Cheveley. Oh, surely Providence can resist temptation by this time.
Mrs Cheveley. A woman’s first duty in life is to her dressmaker, isn’t it? What the second duty is, no one has as yet discovered.
Mrs Cheveley. I don’t think anyone at all is morally responsible for what he or she does at an English country home.
Mrs. Cheveley. Women are never disarmed by compliments. Men always are. That is the difference between the sexes.