Oscar Wilde

by André Gide

  To win one’s joy through struggle is better than to yield to melancholy.

  One completely overcomes only what one assimilates.

  What I dislike least in my former self are the moments of prayer.

  The want of logic annoys. Too much logic bores. Life eludes logic, and everything that logic alone constructs remains artificial and forced.

  So long as we live among men, let us cherish humanity.

  To what a degree the same past can leave different marks—and especially admit of different interpretations.

  IMAGE GALLERY

  André Gide, 1893

  Oscar Wilde, 1882

  Billy Rose Theater Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

  Image of the Marquis of Queensberry’s visiting card, left for Oscar Wilde at the Albermarle Club, London, in 1895, and which precipitated Wilde’s lawsuit against him for criminal libel. Note it is marked as “Exhibit A” in the trial.

  OSCAR WILDE QUOTES

  The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.

  Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.

  Genius is born—not paid.

  The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself.

  A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.

  When the gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers.

  Seriousness is the only refuge of the shallow.

  The aim of life is self-development. To realize one’s nature perfectly—that is what each of us is here for.

  A man can be happy with any woman as long as he does not love her.

  One should always play fairly when one has the winning cards.

  Arguments are to be avoided; they are always vulgar and often convincing.

  The advantage of the emotions is that they lead us astray, and the advantage of science is that it is not emotional.

  Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast.

  Biography lends to death a new terror.

  Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.

  Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.

  I think that God in creating Man somewhat overestimated his ability.

  What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

  I am not young enough to know everything.

  Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination.

  If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they’ll kill you.

  To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable.

  Illusion is the first of all pleasures.

  Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong.

  Most modern calendars mar the sweet simplicity of our lives by reminding us that each day that passes is the anniversary of some perfectly uninteresting event.

  We live in an age when unnecessary things are our only necessities.

  Morality, like art, means drawing a line someplace.

  Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.

  One can survive everything, nowadays, except death, and live down everything except a good reputation.

  We teach people how to remember, we never teach them how to grow.

  Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

  Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.

  The only thing to do with good advice is pass it on. It is never any use to oneself.

  It is always a silly thing to give advice, but to give good advice is fatal.

  The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.

  Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.

  There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating: people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing.

  Wisdom comes with winters.

  One should absorb the colour of life, but one should never remember its details. Details are always vulgar.

  Work is the curse of the drinking classes.

  One’s real life is often the life that one does not lead.

  My own business always bores me to death; I prefer other people’s.

  I can resist anything but temptation.

  Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.

  Scandal is gossip made tedious by morality.

  The truth is rarely pure and never simple.

  Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them.

  I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects. A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies.

  I like persons better than principles, and I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world.

  At twilight, nature is not without loveliness, though perhaps its chief use is to illustrate quotations from the poets.

  Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one’s mistakes.

  One can always be kind to people about whom one cares nothing.

  Women love us for our defects. If we have enough of them, they will forgive us everything, even our intellects.

  There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written.

  Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s original virtue. It is through disobedience and rebellion that progress has been made.

  We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.

  Only the shallow know themselves.

  Anybody can sympathise with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature to sympathise with a friend’s success.

  TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

  THE PRESENT TRANSLATION INTRODUCES A WORK OF Gide which dates from the first years of the century. The first of the two essays was written in 1901; the second, in 1905. They were published together in 1910 by Mercure de France.

  The essays require no introductory comment. However, the following two quotations from the Journal supplement the text and provide interesting perspectives. The first is dated January 1st, 1892, when Gide was twenty-two years old; the second, June 29th, 1913:

  “Wilde has done me, I think, nothing but harm. With him, I had forgotten how to think. I had more varied emotions, but I could no longer order them; I was particularly unable to follow the deductions of others. A few thoughts, occasionally; but my clumsiness in handling them made me abandon them. I am now resuming, with difficulty, though with great delight, my history of philosophy, where I am studying the problem of language (which I shall resume with Muller and Renan).”

  “Certainly, in my little book on Wilde, I appeared rather unfair toward his work and I pooh-poohed it too casually, I mean before having known it well enough. I admire, as I think back upon it, the good grace with which Wilde listened to me when, in Algiers, I passed judgment upon his plays (quite impertinently, as it seems to me now). No impatience in the tone of his reply, and not even a protest; it was then that he was led to say to me, “I have put all my genius into my life; I have put only my talent into my works.” I should be curious to know whether he ever uttered this remark to anyone else.

  I do hope later on to be able to come back to the matter and tell everything which I dared not say at first. I would also like to explain Wilde’s work in my own way, particularly his plays—whose chief interest lies between the lines.
”

  B.F.

  FOREWORD

  I WARN THE READER AT ONCE: THIS IS NEITHER A biography of Oscar Wilde nor a study of his works; it is the simple assembling of two sketches which have not even the merit of being new, but which the growing public of the great Irish poet has not known where to find, since one of them remains buried in a volume of various critical pieces,1 and the other has not yet been unearthed from a number of L’Ermitage where I published it in August 1905.

  Incapable of re-writing anything, I present both of them again without changing a word in their texts, though on at least one point my opinion has been deeply modified: It seems to me today that in my first essay I spoke of Oscar Wilde’s work, and in particular of his plays, with unjust severity. The English as well as the French led me to do this, and Wilde himself at times showed an amusing disdain for his comedies by which I allowed myself to be taken in. I admit that for a long time I therefore believed that An Ideal Husband and A Woman of No Importance were not to be regarded as anything but dramatic entertainment which was itself “of no importance.” To be sure, I have not come to consider these plays as perfect works; but they appear to me, today when I have learned to know them better, as among the most curious, the most significant and, whatever may have been said about them, the newest things in the contemporary theatre. If French criticism has already been surprised at the interest which it could take in the recent production of Lady Windermere’s Fan, what would it not have thought of the other two plays!

  In short, to him whose ears are sharp, An Ideal Husband and A Woman of No Importance reveal quite a bit about their author—as, for that matter, does each of his works. It might almost be said that the literary value of the latter is in direct proportion to their importance as confidences; and I still wonder that the climax should have held so little surprise in a life so strangely conscious, a life in which even the fortuitous seemed deliberate.

  A. G.

  1 Prétextes (Mercure de France).

  IN MEMORIAM

  IT WAS A YEAR AGO THIS TIME,1 IN BISKRA, THAT I learned through the newspapers of the lamentable end of Oscar Wilde. Distance did not permit me, alas! to join the meagre cortège which followed his remains to the cemetery of Bagneux; in vain did I grieve that my absence seemed further to reduce the small number of friends who had remained faithful; the present pages, at least, I wanted to write at once; but for a rather long time, Wilde’s name seemed again to become the property of the newspapers … At present, now that all gossip about this wretchedly famous name has quieted down, now that the throng has grown weary, after having praised, of being astonished and then of damning, perhaps a friend may express a sadness which persists, may bring, like a wreath to a forsaken grave, these pages of affection, admiration and respectful pity.

  When the scandalous trial, which excited English opinion, threatened to wreck his life, a few men of letters and a few artists attempted a kind of salvaging in the name of literature and art. It was hoped that by praising the writer, they might manage to exonerate the man. Alas! a misunderstanding arose; for we really must acknowledge that Wilde is not a great writer. Thus, all that was accomplished by the lead buoys which were thrown out to him was his ruin; his works, far from bearing him up, seemed to sink down with him. In vain did a few hands reach out to help. The wave of the world closed over him; all was over,

  At the time, one could not at all think of defending him differently. Instead of trying to hide the man behind his work, the first thing to do was to show that the man was admirable, as I shall try to do today—the work itself then taking on an illumination. “I have put all my genius into my life; I have put only my talent into my works,” said Wilde, A great writer, no, but a great viveur, if the word may be permitted to take on its full meaning. Like the philosophers of Greece, Wilde did not write but talked and lived his wisdom, imprudently entrusting it to the fluid memory of men, as if inscribing it on water. Let those who knew him longer tell the story of his life; one of those who listened to him most eagerly here simply sets down a few personal memories.

  A. G.

  1 Written in December 1901.

  OSCAR WILDE’S DE PROFUNDIS

  That religion and morals make such recommendations, well and good; but we are shocked to see them set down in a code … I shall say as much for the harsh measures taken to assure the rule of our morals and manners. The most serious abuses are less damaging than a system of inquisition which degrades character.

  —RENAN

  I

  THOSE WHO CAME INTO CONTACT WITH WILDE ONLY toward the end of his life have a poor notion, from the weakened and broken being whom the prison returned to us, of the prodigious being he was at first. It was in ’91 that I met him for the first time. Wilde had at the time what Thackeray calls “the chief gift of great men”: success. His gesture, his look triumphed. His success was so certain that it seemed that it preceded Wilde and that all he needed do was go forward to meet it. His books astonished, charmed. His plays were to be the talk of London. He was rich; he was tall; he was handsome; laden with good fortune and honors. Some compared him to an Asiatic Bacchus; others to some Roman emperor; others to Apollo himself—and the fact is that he was radiant.

  At Paris, no sooner did he arrive, than his name ran from mouth to mouth; a few absurd anecdotes were related about him: Wilde was still only the man who smoked gold-tipped cigarettes and who walked about in the streets with a sunflower in his hand. For, Wilde, clever at duping the makers of worldly celebrity, knew how to project, beyond his real character, an amusing phantom which he played most spiritedly.

  I heard him spoken of at the home of Mallarmé: he was portrayed as a brilliant talker, and I wished to know him, though I had no hope of managing to do so. A happy chance, or rather a friend, to whom I had told my desire, served me. Wilde was invited to dinner. It was at the restaurant. There were four of us, but Wilde was the only one who talked.

  Wilde did not converse: he narrated. Throughout almost the whole of the meal, he did not stop narrating. He narrated gently, slowly; his very voice was wonderful. He knew French admirably, but he pretended to hunt about a bit for the words which he wanted to keep waiting. He had almost no accent, or at least only such as it pleased him to retain and which might give the words a sometimes new and strange aspect. He was fond of pronouncing skepticisme for “scepticisme”…1 The tales which he kept telling us all through the evening were confused and not of his best; Wilde was uncertain of us and was testing us. Of his wisdom or indeed of his folly, he uttered only what he believed his hearer would relish; he served each, according to his appetite, his taste; those who expected nothing of him had nothing, or just a bit of light froth; and as his first concern was to amuse, many of those who thought they knew him knew only the jester in him.

  When the meal was over, we left. As my two friends were walking together, Wilde took me aside:

  “You listen with your eyes,” he said to me rather abruptly. “That’s why I’m going to tell you this story: When Narcissus died, the flowers of the field asked the river for some drops of water to weep for him. ‘Oh!’ answered the river, ‘if all my drops of water were tears, I should not have enough to weep for Narcissus myself. I loved him!’ ‘Oh!’ replied the flowers of the field, ‘how could you not have loved Narcissus? He was beautiful.’ ‘Was he beautiful?’ said the river. ‘And who could know better than you? Each day, leaning over your bank, he beheld his beauty in your water …’ ”

  Wilde paused for a moment …

  “‘If I loved him,’ replied the river, “it was because, when he leaned over my water, I saw the reflection of my waters in his eyes.’”

  Then Wilde, swelling up with a strange burst of laughter, added, “That’s called The Disciple.”

  We had arrived at his door and left him. He invited me to see him again. That year and the following year I saw him often and everywhere.

  Before others, as I have said, Wilde wore a showy mask, designed to astonish, amuse, or
, at times, exasperate. He never listened, and paid scant heed to ideas as soon as they were no longer his own. As soon as he ceased to shine all by himself, he effaced himself. After that, he was himself again only when one was once more alone with him.

  But no sooner alone he would begin:

  “What have you done since yesterday?”

  And as my life at that time flowed along rather smoothly, the account that I might give of it offered no interest. I would docilely repeat trivial facts, noting, as I spoke, that Wilde’s brow would darken.

  “Is that really what you’ve done?”

  “Yes,” I would answer.

  “And what you say is true!”

  “Yes, quite true.”

  “But then why repeat it? You do see that it’s not at all interesting. Understand that there are two worlds: the one that is without one’s speaking about it; it’s called the real world because there’s no need to talk about it in order to see it. And the other is the world of art; that’s the one which has to be talked about because it would not exist otherwise.”

  “There was once a man who was beloved in his village because he would tell stories. Every morning he left the village and in the evening when he returned, all the village workmen, after having drudged all day long, would gather about him and say, ‘Come! Tell us! What did you see today?’ He would tell: ‘I saw a faun in the forest playing a flute, to whose music a troop of woodland creatures were dancing around.’ ‘Tell us more; what did you see?’ said the men. ‘When I came to the seashore, I saw three mermaids, at the edge of the waves, combing their green hair with a golden comb.’ And the men loved him because he told them stories.

  “One morning, as every morning, he left his village—but when he came to the seashore, lo! he beheld three mermaids combing their green hair with a golden comb. And as he continued his walk, he saw, as he came near the woods, a faun playing the flute to a troop of woodland creatures. That evening, when he came back to his village and was asked, as on other evenings, ‘Come! Tell us! What did you see?’ he answered, ‘I saw nothing.’”