Although Wilde had obviously paid at least £15 blackmail, the episode was too funny to take seriously. In his more heroic mode, Wilde then described the meeting with Lord Queensberry:
WILDE: … At the end of June, 1894, there was an interview between Lord Queensberry and myself in my house. He called upon me, not by appointment, about four o’clock in the afternoon, accompanied by a gentleman with whom I was not acquainted. The interview took place in my library. Lord Queensberry was standing by the window. I walked over to the fireplace, and he said to me, ‘Sit down.’ I said to him, ‘I do not allow anyone to talk like that to me in my house or anywhere else. I suppose you have come to apologise for the statements you made about my wife and myself in letters you wrote to your son. I should have the right any day I chose to prosecute you for writing such a letter.’ He said, ‘The letter was privileged, as it was written to my son.’ I said, ‘How dare you say such things to me about your son and me?’ He said, ‘You were both kicked out of the Savoy Hotel at a moment’s notice for your disgusting conduct.’ I said, ‘That is a lie.’ He said, ‘You have taken furnished rooms for him in Piccadilly.’ I said, ‘Somebody has been telling you an absurd set of lies about your son and me. I have not done anything of the kind.’ He said, ‘I hear you were thoroughly well blackmailed for a disgusting letter you wrote to my son.’ I said, ‘The letter was a beautiful letter, and I never write except for publication.’ Then I asked: ‘Lord Queensberry, do you seriously accuse your son and me of improper conduct?’ He said, ‘I do not say that you are it, but you look it.’ (Laughter).
MR JUSTICE COLLINS: I shall have the court cleared if I hear the slightest disturbance again.
WILDE: (continuing Lord Queensberry’s remarks) ‘But you look it, and you pose at it, which is just as bad. If I catch you and my son together again in any public restaurant I will thrash you.’ I said, ‘I do not know what Queensberry rules are, but the Oscar Wilde rule is to shoot at sight.’ I then told Lord Queensberry to leave my house. He said he would not do so. I told him that I would have him put out by the police. He said, ‘It is a disgusting scandal.’ I said, ‘If it be so, you are the author of the scandal, and no one else.’ I then went into the hall and pointed him out to my servant. I said, ‘This is the Marquess of Queensberry, the most infamous brute in London. You are never to allow him to enter my house again.’
The Cross-Examination
The sins of another were being placed to my account.
Carson rose to cross-examine. His performance has been very much praised. Professionals are impressed by proficiency, and unperturbed by disloyalty. Carson had so much evidence, and of such a kind, that he only needed to be persistent, not clever. Even if he failed to worst Wilde on literary matters, he would impugn the witness’s reliability and prepare for unliterary accusations. He began well by forcing Wilde to admit that he was neither thirty-eight years of age, as Sir Edward Clarke had said, nor thirty-nine, as he had said himself, but forty. The purpose of this was not just to catch Wilde out, but also to emphasize the disparity in age between him and Alfred Douglas, who was twenty-four. Carson took up the subject of the Chameleon, his questions being intended to suggest that the magazine was a homosexual one. It contained Douglas’s poem ‘Two Loves,’ one heterosexual and one homosexual. ‘Did you think that made any improper suggestion?’ ‘None whatever,’ Wilde replied, and called it a beautiful poem. Carson went on to the story ‘The Priest and the Acolyte,’ and presumed that Wilde had sanctioned the story and approved of its contents. Wilde denied both allegations.
As the cross-examination proceeded, it became clear that Wilde was retorting cavalierly to Carson’s questions. Instead of expounding his theory of art as an enhancement and expansion of life, he presented himself as amoral artist and scorned the moral mob. Early in the prosecution case, as Ralph Hodgson recalled, Carson read a passage from Dorian Gray and demanded, ‘Did you write that?’ Wilde said he had the honor to be the author. Carson laid down the book with a sneer and turned over some papers. Wilde was lost in thought. Presently Carson read aloud a piece of verse from one of Wilde’s articles. ‘And I suppose you wrote that also, Mr Wilde?’ Wilde waited till you could hear a pin drop and then said, very quietly, ‘Ah no, Mr Carson, Shakespeare wrote that.’ Carson went scarlet. He turned pages again and read another piece of verse and said, ‘And I suppose Shakespeare wrote that also, Mr Wilde?’ ‘Not as you read it, Mr Carson,’ Oscar said. The judge said he would clear the court if there was more noise. Wilde deliberately turned his back, folded his arms, and looked far away through the ceiling in rapt concentration. It was effectively done. Carson thundered at him to conduct himself properly, and appealed to the judge: ‘M’lud, M’lud.’ Wilde stared deeper into the void for a full minute. Suddenly he swung round as if he heard Carson for the first time and said, assuming a most apologetic tone, ‘I beg your pardon, Mr Carson; I do beg your pardon.’15 When Carson suggested that Dorian Gray was perverted, Wilde replied, ‘That could only be to brutes and illiterates. The views of Philistines on art are incalculably stupid.’ This elitism could scarcely have favored his cause, and Carson drove it home:
CARSON: The affection and love of the artist of Dorian Gray might lead an ordinary individual to believe that it might have a certain tendency?
WILDE: I have no knowledge of the views of ordinary individuals.
CARSON: Have you ever adored a young man madly?
WILDE: No, not madly. I prefer love—that is a higher form.
CARSON: Never mind about that. Let us keep down to the level we are at now.
WILDE: I have never given adoration to anybody except myself. (Loud laughter)
CARSON: I suppose you think that a very smart thing?
WILDE: Not at all.
CARSON: Then you have never had that feeling?
WILDE: No. The whole idea was borrowed from Shakespeare, I regret to say—yes, from Shakespeare’s sonnets.
CARSON: I believe you have written an article to show that Shakespeare’s sonnets were suggestive of unnatural vice.
WILDE: On the contrary I have written an article to show that they are not. I objected to such a perversion being put upon Shakespeare.
Carson was not capable of cornering Wilde through literary criticism.
At last he began on the young men. Wilde had said in direct examination that he denied all the charges in the plea of justification which had to do with sodomy. But the mustering of a considerable list by Carson, the multifarious details, the constant (as it wrongly seemed) association with homeless and shiftless boys, as Carson persisted in calling them, had its effect. The defense had done its work well, and Carson had instance after instance to adduce. There were Wood, Allen, and Clibborn to begin with, whose association with Wilde had not been limited to blackmailing him. Wilde liked to talk of the pleasure of feasting with panthers, but these panthers had all been defanged by Queensberry’s men, and were ready to say anything to stay free. If they often mixed up what they had done with Wilde with what they had done with Douglas, so much the better.
As Carson began to sink his teeth into Wilde, Clarke realized he must do something. Up to now he had withheld Queensberry’s letters to his son and ex-wife, but he now read them out as evidence. They proved that Queensberry was beside himself, but they also reasserted the wholesome fatherliness of his motives. On 1 April 1894 Queensberry had admonished his son for doing nothing, and for being intimate with Wilde. In the second letter, in answer to Douglas’s telegram ‘WHAT A FUNNY LITTLE MAN YOU ARE,’ Queensberry threatened to thrash Douglas, and to create a public scandal if he caught him again with Wilde. On 6 July he wrote his father-in-law, Alfred Montgomery, complaining of his ex-wife’s support of Alfred Douglas. ‘Your daughter must be mad by the way she is behaving … I am now fully convinced that the Rosebery-Gladstone-Royal insult that came to me through my other son, that she worked that.…’ On 21 August 1894, in reply to a vicious postcard from his son, he said in part, ‘You reptile. You are no s
on of mine and I never thought you were.’ And on 28 August he wrote to ‘You miserable creature … If you are my son, it is only confirming proof to me, if I needed any, how right I was to face every horror and misery I have done rather than run the risk of bringing more creatures into the world like yourself, and that was the entire and only reason of my breaking with your mother as a wife, so intensely was I dissatisfied with her as the mother of you children, and particularly yourself, whom, when quite a baby I cried over you the bitterest tears a man ever shed, that I had brought such a creature into the world, and unwittingly committed such a crime. If you are not my son, and in the Christian country with these hypocrites ’tis a wise father who knows his own child, and no wonder on the principles they intermarry on … You must be demented; there is madness on your mother’s side.’
The effect of these letters was not what Clarke intended. According to Marjoribanks, who must have got it from Carson, the introduction of the names of Rosebery and Gladstone, which at once appeared in the continental press, made it inevitable that Wilde should be tried when the Queensberry case was over, in case it looked as if these men had favored him out of a need to protect themselves.16
In any case, the letters did not stop the merciless march of Carson through Wilde’s liaisons. There were Charley Parker and his brother, one a valet, the other a groom, whom Wilde had met through Taylor. Asked if he knew their occupations, Wilde replied, ‘I did not know it, but if I had I should not have cared. I didn’t care twopence what they were. I liked them. I have a passion to civilise the community.’ This was the opposite of his condemnation of the general reading public, and Carson was quick to fasten upon ‘the valet and the groom’ as strange companions for an artist. Then there was Fred Atkins, whom Wilde had taken with him to Paris. There was Ernest Scarfe, whom he had met through Taylor. There was Sidney Mavor, who stayed at the Albemarle Hotel with Wilde one night. Carson came at last to Walter Grainger, a servant at a house in the High Street, Oxford, where Douglas had rooms. ‘Did you ever kiss him?’ ‘Oh, dear no. He was a peculiarly plain boy. He was, unfortunately, extremely ugly. I pitied him for it.’
CARSON: Was that the reason why you did not kiss him?
WILDE: Oh, Mr Carson, you are pertinently insolent.‡
CARSON: Why, sir, did you mention that this boy was extremely ugly?
WILDE: For this reason. If I were asked why I did not kiss a door-mat, I should say because I do not like to kiss door-mats. I do not know why I mentioned that he was ugly, except that I was stung by the insolent question you put to me and the way you have insulted me through this hearing. Am I to be cross-examined because I do not like it?
Carson persisted, and at last Wilde answered, ‘You sting me and insult me and try to unnerve me; and at times one says things flippantly when one ought to speak more seriously. I admit it.’ Carson went on to the Savoy, and asked whether an incident involving buggery had occurred. Wilde denied it absolutely. Carson returned to Atkins and Charley Parker, and took up various presents made to them and other boys. He then turned to Edward Shelley. Wilde denied any wrongdoing, and in rebuttal Clarke read letters written by Shelley asking Wilde for help and expressing admiration for his writings. Carson then ended with some questions about Conway and Wood. The exchange of letters between Humphreys and Queensberry in 1894 was read, and Carson also made clear that the ‘exalted personages’—that is, Rosebery, Gladstone, and the Queen—were not mentioned in relation to the question of Wilde’s sodomy. It was then time for Carson’s opening speech. He said that Queensberry had been animated from the beginning to end ‘by one hope alone—that of saving his son.’ Wilde, on the other hand, was consorting with ‘some of the most immoral characters in London,’ such as Taylor, ‘a most notorious character—as the police will tell the court.’ He vividly contrasted Wilde’s artistic elitism with his democratic taste for common boys. On the literary works of Wilde alone, Queensberry’s charge would have been justified. But there was also his payment of blackmail to Wood, who was no longer out of the country, but was here and would testify. Carson did not allege any misconduct between Wilde and Douglas. ‘God forbid! But everything shows that the young man was in a dangerous position in that he acquiesced in the domination of Mr Wilde, a man of great ability and attainments.’ (Queensberry had succeeded in protecting his son.) He was now going to bring forward the young men, who would testify to ‘shocking acts’ with Wilde. Conway, for example, would testify to Wilde’s having dressed him up in good clothes, so as to make him appear a fit companion.17
At this point Sir Edward Clarke plucked Carson by the gown and, with the judge’s permission, went aside to confer with him. There had been a discussion that morning with Wilde, who was not in court. His solicitor Matthews said that he and Clarke would keep the trial going if Wilde wished so he would have time to get to France. The defense would be allowed to call its witnesses, as a delaying tactic. Otherwise Clarke would have to abandon the prosecution at once. ‘I’ll stay,’ said Wilde. Clarke hoped that Carson would accept a verdict of not guilty—’ “not guilty” having reference to the word “posing,” ’ and to Dorian Gray and the epigrams in the Chameleon. Nothing would then be conceded about Wilde’s acts of sodomy as itemized in the plea of justification. Wilde agreed, but in the event, Carson insisted and Clarke had to consent that the whole plea be allowed; that is, Queensberry was justified in calling Wilde a sodomite in the public interest. The judge instructed the jury so to rule. Queensberry was applauded, and Mr Justice Collins, as Frank Harris noted, made no attempt to stop the cheering, but simply folded up his papers and left. He sent a message to Carson:
Dear Carson
I never heard a more powerful speech nor a more searching crossXam.
I congratulate you on having escaped the rest of the filth.
Yrs ever
R. HENN COLLINS
What made Carson unmade Wilde.
* A letter from Constance Wilde to Marie Belloc Lowndes was written during this period: ‘We should both be so pleased to come and meet your friend—Oscar sends his love—but as you may have seen in the papers we are very worried just now, and I do not find we can go out at present.’8
† Reggie Turner, himself a young barrister, advised Wilde to get Clarke and Carson to represent him as leaders, and Gill and Matthews as juniors. Carson and Gill being already retained by Queensberry, Wilde got Matthews, Clarke, and Travers Humphreys.9
‡ Probably a court reporter’s error for ‘You are impertinent and insolent.’
CHAPTER XVIII
Doom Deferred
GUIDO: Guilty?—Let those
Who know not what a thing temptation is,
Let those who have not walked as we have done,
In the red fire of passion, those whose lives
Are dull and colourless, in a word let those,
If any such there be, who have not loved,
Cast stones against you.
On Fortune’s Wheel
The quarry was about to fall. If Queensberry had not brought Wilde down, someone else might well have done so. The easy and half-acknowledged indulgence which he practiced with Alfred Douglas’s ardent complicity involved a succession of young men, many of them Douglas’s castoffs, any one of whom might have toppled Wilde. It was, as Henri de Régnier said, ‘a chronological error.’ If he had lived in the days of the Greeks, no one would have minded. That summer of 1893, when Douglas, having gone down from Oxford without a degree, joined Wilde at Goring, may stand for many instances of their common imprudence.
In De Profundis Wilde brings up the subject of Goring, so as to upbraid Douglas for making him spend the staggering sum of £1340 in less than a summer. But he says nothing of their riskier joint enterprise, the Philip Danney case. Of it Oscar Browning commented, disingenuously, ‘This was the first time I ever heard Oscar was given to those proceedings.’1
Wilde had to pick his way among blackmailing boys and furious fathers. He ran a risk with the father of Edward Sh
elley, John Lane’s office employee, who was as indignant as Queensberry, and with the father of a public-school boy, Sidney Mavor, just as earlier he had roused the indignation of Frank Miles’s father. He was circling nearer to some kind of legal confrontation. Only self-assurance, and the thoughtless flurry of his activities, made him trust to his luck.
Still, the furious fathers mostly stayed in the background, while the blackmailing boys were always about, ready to sell themselves or Wilde. The £35 (probably not £15) he had given to Wood in 1893, in the hope that the young man would go to America and stay there, was not likely to be enough. From America Wood had ominously written, ‘Tell Oscar he can send me a draft for an Easter egg.’ The gang—for Wood, Allen, Clibborn, and others constituted a gang—had obviously marked Wilde for prolonged milking. It was as tricky a game for them as for him, since there were heavier penalties for blackmail than for indecency. Their running such risks fascinated Wilde. Clibborn and Allen, in particular, he admired for waging ‘an infamous war against life.’ Clibborn liked to tell Wilde of his adventures, and one, with Lord Euston—prominent in the Cleveland Street scandal—required such avaricious tenacity on Clibborn’s part as to entitle him, Wilde said, to the Victoria Cross.
Clibborn continued to confide in Wilde as the trial drew near. One day he was telling him, as George Ives recounts, ‘the plots that were being planned by threats and money and all kind of means, to bring about his [Wilde’s] ruin.’ Wilde paid little heed, but suddenly looked up and asked a question that had evidently been long in his mind: ‘Bob, what I want to know is, did you ever love any boy for his own sake?’ Clibborn replied, ‘No, Oscar, I can’t say I ever did!’2 For Ives this was an instance of Wilde’s mystical search for the truth of things even on the verge of his own collapse. His curiosity was less mystical when he suggested bringing together ‘the panther,’ as he often called Clibborn, with Ives, who prided himself on being a ‘cold disciplined Hellenist,’ to see what would happen. But that meeting never took place.
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