Oscar Wilde

by Richard Ellmann

  The Libel Suit

  Blindly I staggered as an ox into the shambles.

  The proceedings were launched. Humphreys appeared for Wilde, and Sir George Lewis made his first and only appearance for Queensberry, saying that the Marquess would plead justification. Wilde was asked, ‘Are you a dramatist and an author?’ He replied airily, ‘I believe I am well known in that capacity.’ ‘Only answer the questions, please,’ the magistrate admonished him. It was an untoward beginning. Queensberry, questioned by the magistrate as to whether he had anything to say, replied, ‘I have simply, your worship, to say this. I wrote that card simply with the intention of bringing matters to a head, having been unable to meet Mr Wilde otherwise, and to save my son, and I abide by what I wrote.’ On this he was committed for trial.

  The case was adjourned for eight days. On 7 March, Wilde, accompanied by his wife and Douglas, attended The Importance of Being Earnest. Mrs Wilde had tears in her eyes.7* At the hearing on 9 March, Lewis having kept his word and withdrawn from the case out of friendship for Wilde, a barrister appeared instead. This was Edward Carson, a fellow student of Wilde’s from Trinity College, Dublin, and a man of great forensic power.† Carson had been admitted to the English bar only a year before, but was beginning to be known. When Wilde learned that it would be Carson against him, he said at first, according to Carson’s biographer, ‘I’m going to be cross-examined by old Ned Carson,’ as if he now had nothing to fear. But Travers Humphreys, who was C. O. Humphreys’s son, remembered Wilde’s saying to him, ‘No doubt he will perform his task with the added bitterness of an old friend.’10 It was like Isaac Butt with Jane Wilde in the Mary Travers case years before. There is nothing like the courtroom to obliterate fellow feeling.

  Carson, to give him his due, had not entered the case at once. Queensberry’s new solicitor, Charles Russell, invited him to accept the brief, but for a while Carson protested that Wilde was a fellow Irishman from the same university. He had, however, offered another reason when one was enough, the second being that the case against Wilde was too weak. Russell took the hint and set himself to strengthen the case, meanwhile not approaching any other barrister. Help came from an unexpected quarter. Charles Brookfield and Charles Hawtrey, both of whom had profited from Wilde’s career by acting in his plays and by writing their parody, The Poet and the Puppets, furnished information about his young friends. At the same time private detectives were looking about London, and one, a man named Littlejohn, happened to visit a shop in the West End which the police had under observation. A woman prostitute, asked how business was, said it was very bad because of competition for male clients from boys under the influence of Oscar Wilde. The detective asked eagerly for further information, and was told, ‘All you have to do is break into the top flat at 13 Little College Street, and you will find all the evidence you require.’ He went there, and pushed past the caretaker, an old woman, who tried to prevent his entry. He had come to the lodgings of Alfred Taylor. In the flat was a kind of postbox, containing the names and addresses of boys with whom Wilde consorted. On this information, he found William Allen and Robert Clibborn, who were hiding in Broadstairs, and soon Wood, Walter Grainger, Alfonso Harold Conway, and others. According to George Ives, these young men were sequestered in a house and terrified into giving evidence against Wilde.11

  With this new information, and some other leads as well, Russell returned to Carson to ask him to take the brief. Carson deliberated. The details were revolting and abundant enough, and he could see himself triumphant. College loyalty faded before Protestant morality. As a final step he consulted Lord Hailsbury, the previous Lord Chancellor, who urged him to take the case. Finally he agreed. Wilde and Douglas were fairly confident, having no inkling of the new evidence that had been turned up. Douglas was even able to persuade Wilde to take him to Monte Carlo, where, though he said Wilde had cured him of gambling, he gave himself up to the gaming tables, while Wilde sat alone and disquieted. They were away from 13 March for a week or more. An article in The Observer said that they were expelled from their hotel in Monte Carlo at the request of other guests.12 On their return they discussed the case with Humphreys, who advised them to find a reputable witness who would testify that Dorian Gray was not an immoral book. Wilde thereupon went, probably on Saturday, 23 March, to see Frank Harris. Harris proved himself a true friend: he would give the evidence Wilde wanted. But he asked Wilde about the case, and Wilde explained that Queensberry would not only bring up his formal literary works, but also had got hold of some letters from Wilde to Douglas, in spite of Wilde’s effort to pay blackmail and get them back. Harris needed to hear no more. He advised Wilde that the case was sure to go against him even if he were in the right. No jury would convict a father for protecting his son, and the letters would show that Douglas needed protecting. ‘You are sure to lose it,’ he warned, ‘you haven’t a dog’s chance, and the English despise the beaten—vae victis! Don’t commit suicide.’ His words frightened Wilde enough to make him agree to meet Harris for a further talk on Sunday night. During the day, Harris sampled the opinion of various people, including someone in the office of the Director of Public Prosecutions. The sentiment against Wilde was overwhelming: Queensberry’s charges were generally regarded as true. The letters to Douglas and the fact that Wilde had paid blackmail would count heavily. Harris urged that Wilde, as a leading man of letters, had not the right to set the clock back fifty years by rousing full enforcement of the law.

  It was agreed to meet again next day at the Café Royal, where Harris had already arranged to have lunch with contributors to The Saturday Review, including Bernard Shaw. Wilde asked if he might bring Douglas along, and Harris offered no objection. When he came, however, he was alone. Shaw and Harris were still sitting over their lunch. Shaw offered to leave, but Wilde told him to stay. Wilde asked Harris to testify to the high artistic character of Dorian Gray. Harris put the request aside as irrelevant. Instead of answering, he now gave an accurate prediction of what was to come. If Wilde would not drop the case, he would certainly lose it. If he dropped it, he could go at once to Paris, and he must take his wife with him. There could be no staying on in London, since Queensberry would not relent. From Paris he could write to the Times in his best style, saying he despaired of receiving justice because Queensberry was pretending to be the good father. After Harris had finished, Shaw registered agreement, and Wilde was swaying that way. Just then Douglas came up to their table. He listened with mounting impatience as Harris reiterated his arguments, and then, as Harris described it, ‘cried with his little white venomous, distorted face, “Such advice shows you are no friend of Oscar’s.” ’ ‘What do you mean?’ asked Harris, but Douglas had already turned on his heel to leave the restaurant. To Harris’s astonishment, this exit overcame Wilde. He too rose: ‘It is not friendly of you Frank, it really is not friendly,’ he said. ‘Don’t be absurd,’ cried Harris, but Wilde said, with forced anger, ‘No, it is not friendly.’ Leonine Wilde sheepishly followed Douglas out.13

  Wilde had prepared himself to defend his writings, including the letters to Douglas. There was, however, one more legal step. English law requires that the defendant in a libel action must enter his plea of justification, with particulars, before the trial begins. This was done by Queensberry on 30 March. Humphreys brought Wilde and Douglas to see it on 1 or 2 April, and they could only find it appalling. In fifteen separate counts, it accused Wilde of soliciting more than twelve boys, of whom ten were named, to commit sodomy:

  1. Edward Shelley, between February and May 1892.

  2. Sidney Mavor, in October 1892. (Mavor testified that Wilde had done nothing wrong.)

  3. Freddie Atkins, on 20 November 1892, in Paris. (His evidence was thrown out.)

  4. Maurice Schwabe, on 22 November 1892. (Did not testify.)

  5. Certain (unnamed) young men, between 25 January and 5 February 1892, in Paris.

  6. Alfred Wood, in January 1893.

  7. A certain young man, abou
t 7 March 1893, in the Savoy Hotel.

  8. Another young man, on or about 20 March 1893, in the Savoy Hotel.

  9. Charles Parker, in March and April 1893.

  10. Ernest Scarfe, between October 1893 and April 1894. (Did not testify.)

  11. Herbert Tankard, in March 1893 at Savoy Hotel. (Did not testify.)

  12. Walter Grainger, in June 1893 in Oxford and in June, July and August at Goring.

  13. Alfonso Harold Conway, in August–September 1894 at Worthing and about 27 September in Brighton.

  The last two counts spoke of the immorality of Dorian Gray and of the maxims Wilde had published in the Chameleon in December 1894. These two counts were the ones with which Carson chose to begin.

  Although Frank Harris and other friends urged Wilde to drop the case, Wilde was constantly being urged by Douglas not to play the coward. ‘I can’t, I can’t,’ he told Harris, ‘you only distress me by predicting disaster.’ Toulouse-Lautrec, in London at the time, found Wilde still outwardly confident and contemptuous of the British public. The strain showed, however, in his tirades and complaints.14 (He refused to sit for a drawing.) That he accepted the idea of being a martyr may be true, but must be reconciled with his obvious preference for not being one. He was rushed along, by solicitor, lover, barrister, into a situation from which there could be no retreat except voluntary exile, something he detested. Confronted by this choice, better to suffer in Athens than glory in Thebes. If nothing else, he would put on a good show.

  The trial opened on 3 April 1895 at the Old Bailey, before Mr Justice R. Henn Collins. There was the sense that a great legal battle was to be fought, and a crowd watched the arrival of the principals. Wilde drove to court in a brougham with two horses and liveried servants. He entered, without smiles. The Marquess of Queensberry, sporting a Cambridge-blue hunting stock instead of a collar and tie, was already in court. Collins arrived ten minutes late, and the trial began. Sir Edward Clarke made the opening speech for the prosecution. He had, as Harris noted, the bleak face and severe side whiskers that went with a nonconformist parson of some time back, but his manner was ‘quiet and conversational.’ It was not a good performance. Most of it had been composed before he saw the plea of justification, and he merely inserted a reference to that at the beginning of his speech. It was no longer simply a matter of injured reputation:

  By the plea which the defendant has brought before the Court a much graver issue has been raised. The defendant has said that the statement is true and that it is for the public benefit that the statement was made, and he has given particulars in the plea of matters which he has alleged show that the statement is true in regard to Mr Oscar Wilde. The plea has not been read to you, gentlemen. There is no allegation in the plea that Mr Oscar Wilde has been guilty of the offence of which I have spoken, but there is a series of accusations in it mentioning the names of persons, and it is said with regard to these persons that Mr Wilde solicited them to commit with him the grave offence, and that he has been guilty with each and all of them of indecent practices. It is for those who have taken the responsibility of putting into the plea those serious allegations to satisfy you, gentlemen, if they can, by credible witnesses, or evidence which they think worthy of consideration and entitled to belief, that these allegations are true. I can understand how it is that these statements have been put in the form in which they are found, for these people, who may be called upon to sustain these charges, are people who will necessarily have to admit in cross-examination that they themselves have been guilty of the gravest offences.

  The rest was a defense of Wilde’s letters to Douglas, which Clarke determined to quote before Carson had a chance to do so, and of his epigrams in the Chameleon and his novel Dorian Gray. (There was a certain naïveté on Clarke’s part in not realizing that he would be dealing with worse stains than those made by ink.) It was an attempt to show that Wilde was orotund but not vicious, that his verbal flowers were not weeds. But the main interest attached to Wilde’s testimony.

  When he took the stand, he said, ‘I am the prosecutor in this case,’ though it was already clear by this time that matters had been turned round. ‘I am thirty-nine years of age,’ he said. Carson, a forty-one-year-old Trinity classmate, took note of this computation. The account Wilde now gave of his blackmail by Wood, Allen, and Clibborn was as adroit as it could have been:

  WILDE: … From November 3rd, 1892, till March, 1894, I did not see the defendant, but in 1893 I heard that some letters which I had addressed to Lord Alfred Douglas had come into the hands of certain persons.

  CLARKE: Did anyone say that he had found letters of yours?

  WILDE: Yes. A man named Wood saw me at the rooms of Mr Alfred Taylor and told me that he had found some letters in a suit of clothes which Lord Alfred Douglas had been good enough to give him.…

  CLARKE: What happened?

  WILDE: When he entered the room, he said, ‘I suppose you will think very badly of me.’ I replied, ‘I hear that you have letters of mine to Lord Alfred Douglas which you certainly ought to have given back.’ He handed me three or four letters, and said they had been stolen from him ‘the day before yesterday’ by a man named Allen, and that he (Wood) had had to employ a detective to get them back. I read the letters, and said that I did not think them of any importance. He said, ‘I am very much afraid of staying in London, as this man and other men are threatening me. I want money to go to America.’ I asked what better opening as a clerk he could have in America than in England, and he replied that he was anxious to get out of London in order to escape from the man who had taken the letters from him. He made a very strong appeal to me. He said that he could find nothing to do in London. I paid him £15. The letters remained in my hand all the time.

  CLARKE: Did some man shortly afterwards come with another letter?

  WILDE: A man called and told me that the letter, a copy of which had been sent to Mr Beerbohm Tree, was not in his possession. His name was Allen.

  CLARKE: What happened at that interview?

  WILDE: I felt that this was the man who wanted money from me. I said, ‘I suppose you have come about my beautiful letter to Lord Alfred Douglas. If you had not been so foolish as to send a copy of it to Mr Beerbohm Tree, I would gladly have paid you a very large sum of money for the letter, as I consider it to be a work of art.’ He said, ‘A very curious construction can be put on that letter.’ I said in reply, ‘Art is rarely intelligible to the criminal classes.’ He said, ‘A man has offered me £60 for it.’ I said to him, ‘If you take my advice you will go to that man and sell my letter to him for £60. I myself have never received so large a sum for any prose work of that length; but I am glad to find that there is someone in England who considers a letter of mine worth £60.’ He was somewhat taken aback by my manner, perhaps, and said, ‘The man is out of town.’ I replied, ‘He is sure to come back,’ and I advised him to get the £60. He then changed his manner a little, saying that he had not a single penny, and that he had been on many occasions trying to find me. I said that I could not guarantee his cab expenses, but that I would gladly give him half a sovereign. He took the money and went away.

  CLARKE: Was anything said about a sonnet?

  WILDE: Yes, I said, ‘The letter, which is a prose poem, will shortly be published in sonnet form in a delightful magazine, and I will send you a copy of it.’

  CLARKE: As a matter of fact, the letter was the basis of a French poem that was published in the Spirit Lamp?

  WILDE: Yes.

  CLARKE: It is signed ‘Pierre Louÿs.’ Is that the nom de plume of a friend of yours?

  WILDE: Yes, a young French poet of great distinction, a friend of mine who has lived in England.

  CLARKE: Did Allen then go away?

  WILDE: Yes, and in about five minutes Clibborn came to the house. I went out to him and said, ‘I cannot bother any more about this matter.’ He produced the letter out of his pocket, saying, ‘Allen has asked me to give it back to you.’ I did not ta
ke it immediately, but asked: ‘Why does Allen give me back this letter?’ He said, ‘Well, he says that you were kind to him, and that there is no use trying to “rent” you as you only laugh at us.’ I took the letter and said, ‘I will accept it back, and you can thank Allen from me for all the anxiety he has shown about it.’ I looked at the letter, and saw that it was extremely soiled. I said to him, ‘I think it is quite unpardonable that better care was not taken of this original manuscript of mine.’ (Laughter) He said he was very sorry, but it had been in so many hands. I gave him half a sovereign for his trouble, and then said, ‘I am afraid you are leading a wonderfully wicked life.’ He said, ‘There is good and bad in every one of us.’ I told him he was a born philosopher, and he then left.