Oscar Wilde

by Richard Ellmann

  There were still a few more rehearsals for The Importance of Being Earnest: A Trivial Comedy for Serious People. By this time Alexander had persuaded Wilde to drop one of the four acts, in which Algernon is almost arrested for debt. Wilde came to a rehearsal and said, ‘Yes, it is quite a good play. I remember I wrote one very like it myself, but it was even more brilliant than this.’35 As the opening drew closer, Wilde heard by chance from a mutual acquaintance that Queensberry was planning a demonstration on the first night, and alerted Alexander, who canceled Queensberry’s ticket and arranged for policemen to be present. The night of St Valentine’s Day happened to be freezing cold. Wilde arrived, dressed, as Ada Leverson said, with ‘florid sobriety,’ green carnation and all. Everyone was there except the Marquess of Queensberry and Douglas, still in Algiers. Everyone liked the play except Shaw, who thought it all froth and no pith. Thank God for froth.d The New York Times, not given to praising Wilde, an nounced next day, ‘Oscar Wilde may be said to have at last, and by a single stroke, put his enemies under his feet.’

  All his enemies except one. In concealed desperation and panic, Wilde set the stage for the next act, in which evil would masquerade as fatherly feeling and social orderliness, and good make do with the humiliating guise of the criminal. Wilde had always held that the true ‘beasts’ were not those who expressed their desires, but those who tried to suppress other people’s. The society whose hypocrisies he had anatomized now turned them against him. Victorianism was ready to pounce.

  * It may have been in his mind as he told the ‘Early Church’ story of Pope John XXII to Grant and others at Oxford in 1893.

  † The amendment reads, ‘Any male person who, in public or private, commits, or is a party to the commission of, or procures or attempts to procure the commission by any male person of, any act of gross indecency with another male person, shall be guilty of a misdemeanour, and, being convicted thereof, shall be liable, at the discretion of the Court, to be imprisoned for any term not exceeding two years with or without hard labour.’ When it was pointed out to Queen Victoria that women were not mentioned, she is reported to have said, ‘No woman would do that.’

  ‡ Wilde’s only comment on the diminutive Johnson was, according to George Santayana, ‘Every morning at 11 o’clock you can see him come out very drunk from the Café Royal and hail the first passing perambulator.’9

  § At the end of the century Turner began to write novels, feeble in their kind, about people of uncertain parentage who marry surprisingly well. Though Beerbohm loyally praised each book as he received it, they were dismally amateurish and gave only the most faded sense of Turner’s pungent wit. He lived on, as Wilde had once predicted, to become the most entertaining member of the English set in Florence, and Beerbohm would celebrate him in an essay as Comus, ugly and talented.

  ‖ Wilde seems to have gone alone, at the invitation of Mary Smith Costelloe, to visit the brother of the novelist Vernon Lee on 19 May: ‘It was a great success. Oscar talked like an angel, and they all fell in love with him, even Vernon Lee, who had hated him almost as much as he had hated her. He, for his part, was charmed with her.’16

  a Many of the play’s details had a real origin. In the original version, the solicitor who comes to take Algernon to Holloway Prison is from the firm Parker and Grigsby. Parker’s name came from the Parker brothers, two of Wilde’s young men, while Grigsby harked back to a character in du Maurier’s aesthetic caricatures in Punch. Another such element was the naming of the two butlers: one was to be Lane and the other Mathews, to immortalize Wilde’s displeasure with those publishers. (He expressed it also when asked what Beardsley’s drawing for the cover of the Yellow Book was like: ‘Oh, you can imagine the sort of thing. A terrible naked harlot smiling through a mask—and with ELKIN MATHEWS written on one breast and JOHN LANE on the other.’23) But he magnanimously changed ‘Mathews’ to ‘Merriman.’

  b A contract was signed on 14 August by Humphreys and Wilde, with Douglas as witness. The book, Oscariana, was privately printed in January 1895, but not published until 1910.

  c In January 1895 Alexander was in difficulties with James’s Guy Domville, and Wilde asked Charles Wyndham, with whom he had contracted for the production, to let Alexander have The Importance so he could realize on it at once. Wyndham had a success on at the time, so consented, but as soon as he did, his own play failed.32

  d A list of names in the military directory at the end of the play includes one Maxbohm, a private joke with Beerbohm. Max proclaimed the play a masterpiece. In his copy, inscribed to him by Wilde, he had a note next to the beginning of Act I: ‘What an admirable opening! You are instantly held—and prepared. Cf. Hamlet!—and plays by born men of the theatre.’ The Prism scene in the last act he thought ‘one of the funniest scenes ever written.’ His copy contained two restorations based upon his memory of the first performance, which Wilde had forgotten: at the end of Act I, Jack says, ‘Oh, that’s nonsense, Algy, you never talk anything but nonsense,’ to which Algernon replies, ‘Nobody ever does.’ Beerbohm says the speech should go on, ‘And besides, I love nonsense.’ He also corrected Miss Prism’s words to Cecily in Act II: ‘The chapter on the Fall of the Rupee you may omit. It is somewhat too sensational. Even these metallic problems have their melodramatic side.’ Beerbohm preferred to this last sentence what he remembered from the original, ‘It is somewhat too unconventional for a young girl.’36

  Disgrace

  CHAPTER XVII

  ‘I Am the Prosecutor in This Case’

  It often happens that the real tragedies of life occur in such an inarticulate manner that they hurt one by their crude violence, their absolute incoherence, their absurd want of meaning, their entire lack of style.

  Mounting Pressure

  All trials are trials for one’s life,’ Wilde would declare after his trials were over and his destruction by them was complete.1 Still, it was a paradox after his own manner that the first trial should be not his own but the one he forced upon Queensberry, whose life was in no such jeopardy. John Sholto Douglas, the ninth Marquess, was a very rich man. He could have lost a dozen libel cases without flinching, and no doubt would have persisted in hounding Wilde whatever happened in court. This was so plain that Wilde’s litigiousness gave proof of a distraught mind rather than an indignant one. The trial ended the two years of provocation. From Queensberry’s point of view, of course, he was the victim, not the aggressor. Wilde and Douglas had tauntingly continued to appear with each other in spite of his repeated threats to go to Scotland Yard. From Wilde’s point of view, it was intolerable that a boor and bully should dictate his conduct. Moreover, his life with Douglas, including the publicity of their romantic passion, reflected his intention to oblige a hypocritical age to take him as he was.

  Verbal abuse was something to which Wilde was accustomed, and few of the attacks he had suffered during his forty years had drawn blood. He had weathered the mockery of the American and British press over his aesthetic renaissance. Once Whistler had accused him of the purely literary crime of plagiarism, but he had outlived the charge and vindicated himself as an original genius. Much of the gossip about his homosexual tendencies had disappeared with his marriage, but, courting disfavor as he was prone to do, he had roused more gossip with The Picture of Dorian Gray and ‘The Portrait of Mr W.H.’ Even Lillie Langtry talked against him at this time. There had been literary attacks upon him in 1881, from The Colonel and Patience; 1892, from The Poet and the Puppets; and 1894, from The Green Carnation. If he was accused of being precious, plumed, and effeminate, he had checked his accusers with intellect and grace. After all, even Queensberry had submitted for an hour or two to his charm.

  Wilde seems to have overlooked his vulnerability. He was confident of the devotion of his many friends in the political and literary world. With some of them he did not trouble to be circumspect. So he said to the actress Aimée Lowther, ‘Aimée, if you were only a boy I could adore you.’ Ellen Terry said innocently, ‘Osca
r, you really didn’t mean it?’ An embarrassed silence fell, and Henry Irving had to explain to her later.2 His attitude towards sexual transactions was the conventional one of his class. He did not think of his behavior with boys as of any consequence. Except for Shelley, they were prostitutes, to be bought or sold. The boys knew Wilde had treated them well, but tried to make him treat them better still. As for Douglas, Wilde had a right to feel virtuous rather than not. Having long since given up sexual relations with him, he might think of their attachment as an approximation of the Greek ideal. Wilde had made some effort to check Douglas’s excesses, and had rescued him from a number of scrapes. If anyone had ruined Bosie, in Wilde’s view, it was his parents. Queensberry had treated Bosie even in infancy with contempt for his physical weakness, and Lady Queensberry, in reaction to the paternal bullying, had spoiled him. Queensberry was unruly, though he loved rules.

  That Wilde anticipated the result of his actions is unlikely, though his sense of doom had been present since childhood. He believed in his unlucky star as much as in his lucky one. The exfoliation of his nature licensed recklessness and promoted foreboding. His first success, ‘Ravenna,’ had described a city fallen from greatness. That he might lose ‘a soul’s inheritance’ is foreshadowed in his prefatory poem, ‘Hélas!’ Tragic themes had come to him earlier than comic ones. For a man who condemned sacrifice, he wrote plays that were full of it. Vera dies to save the Czar, Guido attempts to die to save the Duchess only to have her die as well. Mrs Erlynne sacrifices herself for her daughter as Mrs Arbuthnot has sacrificed herself for her son. The Happy Prince sacrifices himself to help the poor: sacrifice is close to suicide. In Dorian Gray both the hero and Sibyl Vane kill themselves, though Dorian does it with more ambiguity. Wilde needed less Greek than he had to know that overreaching would attract Nemesis.

  His prosecution of Queensberry for criminal libel was the end, not the beginning, of a long series of legal maneuvers. He had consulted Humphreys about a prosecution in May 1894 and again in July. Queensberry had also taken advice. In the summer of 1894 some passionate letters of Wilde to his son fell into his hands, in particular the Hyacinth letter (either the original or a copy), and a letter of March 1893 which said, ‘You are the divine thing I want, the thing of grace and beauty.’ Wilde had bought back others, but not these. Queensberry’s solicitor advised that the letters alone would not sustain a charge of sodomy against Wilde, so he had adopted the allegation that Wilde was a posing sodomite, which did not necessarily entail commission of the offense. His plea of privilege as a father could be invoked. If Queensberry was not a father in feeling, he was one in fact, and fully exploited this role. His blood was up and he was determined to make Wilde pay for what he appeared to be doing. He would protect his son from similar charges through his influence with the authorities. Queensberry’s memories of the death of his son and heir, and of the nullification of his marriage, were still fresh. By bringing down an established reputation like Wilde’s he could remake his own, as Prince Hal said he would do by conquering Hotspur.

  Wilde and Douglas talked over the situation during the weeks that followed their separate returns from Algiers. Up to now they had told the other members of the family, including Bosie’s brother Percy (Lord Douglas of Hawick), now the eldest son, that Queensberry was a victim of delusions. Wilde urged Douglas to tell his brother the truth, but Douglas, though reckless, was not brave, and refused. He proposed to go on just as in the past. By now Wilde was living entirely away from home. On 28 January, Constance had to approach Ross to ask Wilde for some money for her when he came home from Algiers, since she was going to Torquay for a month. On 12 March she still did not know her husband’s address. Three days later she thanked Ross for sending it. The reason for her ignorance of his whereabouts was that he was avoiding her.

  During this time he took rooms at the Avondale Hotel in Piccadilly. Douglas came to stay with him, and ran up a lavish bill at once. Wilde was distinctly uneasy. Queensberry had been denied entrance to the opening night of The Importance of Being Earnest, and forced to content himself with leaving a bouquet of vegetables at the stage door instead of making the public denunciation which he had planned. Humphreys, consulted again, wrote on 28 February that he could do nothing, because neither Alexander nor his staff would give evidence. When Douglas proposed to keep a young man in the hotel at Wilde’s expense, Wilde refused. Douglas left the Avondale in a pet, and moved to another hotel with the friend. There followed a series of letters accusing Wilde of cowardice.

  The Booby Trap

  In your war of hate with your father I was at once shield and weapon to each of you.

  The first of the letters came on Thursday morning, 28 February 1895, before Wilde set out for the Albemarle Club, not far from his hotel. The club was to prove no refuge from the father any more than the hotel had proved a refuge from the son. The hall porter, Sidney Wright, immediately handed him the card left by the Marquess of Queensberry ten days before. Wright had not deciphered the words—no one was to do so accurately—but he understood that an insult was intended, and had written on the back the details of its receipt, four-thirty on 18 February. Wilde probably made out the words as ‘To Oscar Wilde, ponce and Somdomite.’ He did not smile at Queensberry’s aristocratic misspelling, but took it as a written and public repetition of the charge Queensberry had made in Tite Street. What Queensberry actually wrote was ‘To Oscar Wilde posing Somdomite,’ but in court he said that the words were ‘posing as a Somdomite,’ an easier accusation to defend.3 What he had wanted from leaving the card was an interview. Wilde was goaded beyond that.

  For Wilde the significance of the card was that Queensberry, having failed to invade his theatre, was invading his club. There was no hope of confining the matter to private correspondence, or to the knowledge of a small circle. Understandably Wilde felt sorry for himself, on receiving from the father a message as vitriolic as that he had received an hour earlier from the son. ‘I felt I stood between Caliban and Sporus,’ he wrote Alfred Douglas later.4 He went back to the hotel with the idea of bolting to Paris, as he had once before. But the manager, hearing of his intention, said that he must first pay his bill, and that until he did his luggage would be impounded. Wilde did not have the money, and felt trapped.

  He was more vexed than despairing. Queensberry must be stopped from making these wanton attacks. He wrote to Douglas asking him to call early on Friday morning, but to Robert Ross he wrote more fully:

  Dearest 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

  OSCAR5

  He wrote to George Lewis to ask his advice, but Lewis reminded him that he had already been engaged by Queensberry. Afterwards Lewis was to say that, if he had been free to advise Wilde, he would have told him to tear up Queensberry’s card and forget about it.

  When Ross came round that night he urged Wilde to take no action, but when Wilde persisted suggested he consult Humphreys again. Wilde agreed, and in the morning took Douglas with him to the solicitor’s chambers. Douglas was triumphant: his father had put down his charge in writing, and could now be prosecuted. Before his friend’s eagerness Wilde began to have doubts, but there was no resisting Douglas’s fierceness. ‘It is what we fear that happens to us,’ he said. Humphreys displayed a combination of opportunism and naïveté. He scented a spectacular case, saw a celebrity eager to take on another celebrity in court, and urged prosecution. He cannot easily be absolved of blame, since he must have known that Ross, who had sent Wilde to him, was homosexual, and he had the evidence of great intimacy between Douglas and Wilde before him. He chose to suspect nothing
, though he asked the routine questions and received decorous answers. As Wilde afterwards remarked, ‘What is loathsome to me is the memory of interminable visits paid by me to the solicitor Humphreys in your company, when in the ghastly glare of a bleak room you and I would sit with serious faces telling serious lies to a bald man, till I really groaned and yawned with ennui.’ Later he would dismiss Humphreys as one ‘who would bluster, and threaten, and lie,’ but the lying was not all on Humphreys’s side. Ross offered to tell the truth to Humphreys and Lord Douglas of Hawick, who was sympathetic: Wilde and Douglas absolutely refused.6 On the assumption of his client’s innocence, Humphreys announced that a prosecution of Queensberry was bound to succeed. He was a hopeful man. By this time Wilde had lost his initial impetus, and played a last card, which he expected to be decisive: he had no money. Bosie, determined to keep him up to the mark, announced that his brother Lord Douglas and Lady Queensberry would be delighted to pay costs. Goaded by the whole Queensberry clan, Wilde had no opportunity to withdraw. Humphreys and Douglas escorted him, a white flower in his buttonhole, to a four-wheeler, which took them to Marlborough Street police station on 1 March. He swore out a warrant for the arrest of Queensberry, which took place shortly afterwards. The Marquess was brought to Marlborough Police Court on the charge of publishing a libel against Wilde.

  To some extent Wilde was the prey of his own consciousness as well as of Queensberry father and son. His inclination to betray himself, such as he attributed to mankind in general in ‘Humanitad,’ was not thoroughgoing. He thought of self-betrayal as proceeding in surges, after which there would be recoveries. The role of victim—Sebastian or Marsyas—was only one among several, including the dandy and the apostle of joy, through which he could see himself passing. In his flirtation with Catholicism, he spoke of going to see Newman ‘to burn my fingers a little more.’ He half invited obloquy, half lost his nerve in the process, meaning or almost meaning to pull back at the last. But the age in which he lived was unexpectedly eager (like most ages), and the right to choose left him before he had time to exercise it. So he emulated his father’s disgrace—also over the implications of a libel suit—exceeded it even, and fulfilled his own half-wish to kill the success he loved. It would be wrong to assume that this urge to destroy the beloved object, himself or another, came to him after his fall. In The Ballad of Reading Gaol the act of killing what we love is made largely deliberate, as it is also in Salome, but in other works Wilde, like Lord Arthur Savile, blamed fate, not will. We are by nature our own enemies, ‘the lips betraying and the lips betrayed.’ We seek the events that unconsciously befit us, which consciously we fear. Flaunting and fleeing, Wilde could not embrace a single course of action.