It must be said for Wilde that the risk was impossible to estimate. Society put up with a great deal that was illegal, and sometimes did so knowingly. Countenancing illegality did not amount to sanctioning it, however, and the atmosphere could change at any time. Wilde was dimly aware from the beginning that his genius gave him only a limited immunity. But the way of life which Alfred Douglas had opened up was necessarily reckless. There was something fascinating in being the rival, the accomplice, and the object of each other’s love. Shared indiscretion cemented them romantically together. Prudence would have been a form of betrayal.
Events had taken him beyond erotic fantasy and indulgence. After Queensberry’s exoneration, Wilde was indecisive when others were decisive. Clarke’s concession that Wilde’s being called a sodomite was in the public interest made prosecution almost certain. To be quite sure, Charles Russell, within minutes of Queensberry’s acquittal, addressed a letter to Hamilton Cuffe, Director of Prosecutions:
Dear Sir,
In order that there may be no miscarriage of justice I think it my duty at once to send you a copy of all our witnesses’ statements together with a copy of the shorthand notes of the trial.
Queensberry, for his part, informed Wilde, ‘I will not prevent your flight, but if you take my son with you, I will shoot you like a dog.’ He added, to the French press, ‘But I don’t think he’ll be allowed to go. This case has cost me 30,000 francs, but I don’t regret anything, since I know all I have done is for the good of my sons, the honor of my family, and the public benefit.’3 He said later he had been misquoted; he had said that he would shoot Wilde like a dog, if he had a mind to do so and if it seemed worthwhile. It was probably Queensberry’s detectives, rather than Scotland Yard’s, who were instructed to stay on Wilde’s trail.
That trail led Wilde first to his solicitor Humphreys, then to Sir George Lewis, who threw up his hands and said, ‘What is the good of coming to me now?’ Then to the Holborn Viaduct Hotel. Douglas, his brother Percy, and Robert Ross accompanied Wilde, and on 5 April, in the hotel, he wrote a letter to the editor of the Evening News:
It would have been impossible for me to have proved my case without putting Lord Alfred Douglas in the witness-box against his father.
Lord Alfred Douglas was extremely anxious to go into the box, but I would not let him do so.
Rather than put him in so painful a position I determined to retire from the case, and to bear on my own shoulders whatever ignominy and shame might result from my prosecuting Lord Queensberry.
OSCAR WILDE4
The letter reads as if Wilde thought the matter might end there. After lunch he gave Ross a check to cash for £200 and went on to the Cadogan Hotel, where he was joined by Reggie Turner. Douglas had been staying there for five weeks. Ross and Turner urged Wilde to take a train for Dover and a boat for France, but he seemed incapable of decision. He said, ‘The train is gone. It is too late.’ In fact he still had a chance, but seemed disinclined to take it. Douglas was off trying to see his cousin, the M.P. George Wyndham, and stir up influential friends. Wilde asked Ross to see Constance Wilde and inform her what had happened. She wept and said, ‘I hope Oscar is going away abroad.’ George Wyndham arrived at four o’clock and asked to see Wilde, but Wilde, fearing recriminations, had Ross talk with him. Wyndham began to scold Ross for allowing Wilde and Douglas to be together, but Ross disarmed him by saying that he and all Wilde’s friends had been trying to separate them for years. Wyndham changed his tack and asked Ross to persuade Wilde to leave the country at once. They were still talking when Douglas rushed in, and took Wyndham off to see someone who might help.
At five o’clock a sympathetic reporter from the Star arrived and told Ross that the warrant for Wilde’s arrest had been issued. In fact, Charles Russell had busily gone round to see Sir John Bridge at Bow Street in the early afternoon and persuaded him that Wilde should be arrested. Ross told Wilde, who ‘went very grey in the face.’ Up to now he had not let Ross give him the money from the bank, but he now asked for it, and Ross thought he must have decided upon flight. Instead Wilde settled down in his chair and said, ‘I shall stay and do my sentence whatever it is.’
A half-packed suitcase lay on the bed, emblem of contradictory impulses. He was tired of action. Like Hamlet, as he understood that hero, he wished to distance himself from his plight, to be the spectator of his own tragedy. His stubbornness, his courage, and his gallantry also kept him there. He had always met adversity head on, to face hostile journalists, moralistic reviewers, and canting, ranting fathers. A man so concerned with his image disdained to think of himself as a fugitive, skulking in dark corners instead of lording it in the limelight. He preferred to be a great figure, doomed by fate and the unjust laws of a foreign country. Suffering was more becoming than embarrassment. Writers, after all, had been prisoners before him. Cunninghame Graham and Blunt came to mind. His mind would survive, superior to any indignities his inferiors could heap upon him. If he was to be immolated, so must be his age. Reveal him as pederast, reveal his society as hypocrite. So he waited, defiant. At ten past six came the expected knock at the door. A waiter entered, followed by two detectives. They said, ‘We have a warrant here, Mr Wilde, for your arrest on a charge of committing indecent acts.’ Wilde asked if he would be given bail and the detectives were doubtful. As he rose and groped unsteadily for his overcoat and for a book with a yellow cover, it was suddenly evident that he had been drinking heavily. He asked Ross to get him a change of clothes and bring it to him. ‘Where shall I be taken?’ he asked. ‘To Bow Street,’ was the reply. The cab drove off, and the Wilde epoch came to an end.
Despair and Its Anodynes
Every great love has its tragedy, and now ours has too.
Ross went as directed to Tite Street. Mrs Wilde had locked the bedroom door and library and gone out. Wilde’s servant, Arthur, was there, and helped Ross to break into the bedroom and pack a bag. At Bow Street he was refused admission, either to see Wilde or to leave the clothing. He realized that Wilde’s papers were in danger from Queensberry’s men or the police, and hurried back to Tite Street. Again with Arthur’s help, he broke open the library door, and removed some of Wilde’s letters and manuscripts. He noted grimly that the two most recent writings, A Florentine Tragedy and an enlarged version of ‘The Portrait of Mr W.H.,’ which had been returned to Wilde a few days before, were not to be found. (Both survived.) After all this, Ross drove to his mother’s house and collapsed.
Ross was named in the newspapers as having been with Wilde at the time of the arrest and had to resign from some of his clubs. Mrs Ross was understandably alarmed for her son and insisted that he go abroad. He demurred on the grounds that he would be abandoning his friend, and she offered £500 to help in Wilde’s defense if he would leave at once. He allowed himself to be persuaded, and took himself off to the Terminus hotel at Calais and a week later to Rouen. Reggie Turner and Maurice Schwabe also decamped. Henry Harland wrote to Edmund Gosse that six hundred gentlemen had crossed from Dover to Calais on a night when normally only sixty would have done so.5 Douglas, however, elected to stay on, though he appeared to be in greater danger than the others. In fact, his father had evidently resolved to protect him, probably by having Russell arrange matters with the Director of Prosecutions. Robert Sherard and Ada and Ernest Leverson were the other friends of Wilde who remained conspicuously loyal and helpful. But dozens fell away.
Wilde left a message for Douglas that he would be at Bow Street Police Station that night, and asked him to try to get his brother Percy, and George Alexander and Lewis Waller (from the theatres where Wilde’s plays were running), to attend next morning to give bail. Only Percy was willing. Wilde also asked Douglas to secure Humphreys’s services for the hearings. Douglas went round to Bow Street in the evening in the hope of seeing Wilde, but like Ross was refused. He resolved, however, to see him every day. For his part, Wilde ate a bit of cold chicken, drank some coffee, was refused permission to smoke, an
d spent a wretched night.
‘With what a crash this fell!’ Wilde wrote to the Leversons on 9 April. It was like the history of Timon of Athens, or of Wilde’s old admiration, Agamemnon, yet meaner. Wilde’s name was removed from the hoardings of the two theatres where An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest were playing to large audiences, and soon, with public feeling running high, the plays were taken off. The same thing happened in New York, and the actress Rose Coghlan, who was about to take A Woman of No Importance on tour in the United States, canceled it. Not only did Wilde’s friends in England drop away; so did most of his friends in France. On 13 April 1895 Jules Huret, in his ‘Petite Chronique des lettres’ in Le Figaro littéraire, named three French writers as Wilde’s intimates: Catulle Mendès, Marcel Schwob, and Jean Lorrain. A furore resulted. Schwob sent his seconds to meet Huret’s seconds, and was angry when they accepted Huret’s explanation. Lorrain had Huret publish a letter from him denying intimacy, and forgot having dedicated his story ‘Lanterne magique’ to Wilde in L’Echo de Paris of 14 December 1891. Catulle Mendès was not so easily fobbed off. He and Huret had a duel with épées in the ‘premières feuilles’ of the forest of Saint-Germain, on 17 April at 3:00 p.m. Blood was shed, but, as a commentator remarked, in droplets only.6 Colette’s husband, Willy, registered his amusement in L’Echo de Paris for 17 April at Wilde’s behavior and England’s embarrassment over it; but on 20 April, Henri Bauër mocked Willy for pretending that homosexuality was only an English vice. ‘I will not disavow now having known and visited him,’ he said. Wilde’s heteroclite tastes were not his affair. Nor had Wilde done any harm: ‘Young Douglas was old enough to go out without his governess, and without his father’s permission.’ Octave Mirbeau also wrote sympathetically of Wilde in an article, ‘A Propos du “Hard Labour.” ’7 As for Sarah Bernhardt, when Sherard asked her to buy the rights to Salome for $1500 to $2000 to cover court costs, she expressed sympathy, dithered, and did nothing.
If Wilde hoped that the hearings that began on 6 April would soon be over, he was mistaken. They dragged on and on, with intervals of several days between each. Meanwhile, he was in Bow Street, in physical pain, never saying a word to the other prisoners, making subdued groans as he changed his standing position from time to time.8 He was then transferred to Holloway Prison except when recalled for another hearing. He hoped for bail, and the magistrate had it in his power to grant it. But Sir John Bridge was revolted by the crime of sodomy. As the French newspapers commented with some bewilderment, in England sodomy ranked only one step below murder. Though Humphreys pointed out that Wilde could have run away if he had wanted to, Bridge insisted that the gravity of the charge made bail unthinkable.*
Wilde’s second hearing took place on 11 April, the third on 18 April. The Grand Jury found true bills against Wilde and Alfred Taylor—whose case was linked with Wilde’s, very much against Wilde’s interest—on 23 April. The charges were indecency and sodomy. Meanwhile, various incidents added to the tensions. On 11 April a stationer tried to sell photographs of Wilde; the resulting fracas made the police intervene and stop the sale. On 24 April a bankruptcy sale of Wilde’s effects was forced by Queensberry, who demanded payment of his £600 costs, and by other creditors who followed his lead. Douglas had promised that his family would pay the costs of the trial; they did not. Wilde was rendered miserable by the sale not only of his manuscripts and his own books, but of presentation volumes from Hugo, Whitman, Swinburne, Mallarmé, Morris, and Verlaine, his Burne-Jones and Whistler drawings, paintings by Monticelli and Simeon Solomon, expensive china, Thomas Carlyle’s writing desk, and a hundred other things. A few were bought by friends. There was still not enough money to pay off the debts, so the estate remained in receivership until Ross eventually rescued it, long after Wilde’s death.
At the dismal proceedings, Wilde was represented by young Travers Humphreys and later by Sir Edward Clarke, who offered to represent him without fee. The prosecutor was Charles Gill, like Carson a Trinity College, Dublin, man, and equally prejudiced against Wilde. There was some effort by the prosecution to persuade Taylor to turn state’s evidence and so get off, but, perhaps because Wilde had talked to him before the trial, Taylor refused to betray his friend in any way. A long array of witnesses was produced, headed by the infamous Parker brothers, who claimed they had been recruited by Taylor to minister to Wilde’s wishes.† At first Charles Parker pretended to be nineteen; under cross-examination he proved to be twenty-one. In fact, none of the young men was under the statutory age of seventeen. There was testimony from Taylor’s fellow tenants and landladies about his peculiarly curtained and perfumed rooms, and the young men who came to tea there. Alfred Wood the blackmailer was there to testify about receiving £35 from Wilde in exchange for the letters Wilde had sent to Douglas, who had failed to remove them from his clothes before giving them to Wood. Sidney (better known as Jenny) Mavor had been threatened into testifying, but Douglas managed to collar him before his appearance and to remind him that he was a public-school boy with a sense of honor, counseling him to deny having anything to do with Wilde. So this young man, asked what had happened the time he spent a night in Wilde’s bed, replied, ‘Nothing.’
The Savoy Hotel was represented by its ‘professor of massage,’ Antonio Migge, who testified to having seen a young man sleeping in Wilde’s bed while Wilde was dressing. The chambermaid Jane Cotter also claimed to have seen a boy there. A former housekeeper at the hotel, Mrs Perkins, testified that there had been fecal stains on the bedsheets. As for Taylor, there was testimony that he had gone through a form of marriage, dressed as a woman. The more Sir John Bridge heard of this testimony, the more he bristled, and when asked again for bail he said that ‘no worse crime than this’ existed, and bail could not be allowed. After the Grand Jury presented its charge, Wilde’s lawyers asked that the case be postponed until the May Sessions, to give the defense time to prepare and to allow public opinion to die down. The prosecutor, Gill, objected, and Mr Justice Charles, who was to hear the case, agreed to an immediate trial, beginning on 26 April, promising it would be a fair one.
Douglas sent a letter to the Star on 19 April, complaining that Wilde was being judged before his trial, not at it. What was only too clear about this and subsequent letters from him to the press was that he was thinking more about himself than about his friend, and Wilde in De Profundis was severe on the subject: ‘they [the letters] were simply to say that you hated your father. Nobody cared if you did or not.’9
No doubt such thoughts glanced off his mind at the time. Mostly he was conscious only of Douglas’s love for him, and his for Douglas. The almost daily visits meant a great deal. They were limited to about fifteen minutes, and there was so much noise that Wilde, who was rather deaf in one ear, could hardly hear. Wilde informed the Leversons on 9 April, ‘I write to you from prison, where your kind words have reached me and given me comfort, though they have made me cry, in my loneliness. Not that I am really alone. A slim thing, gold-haired like an angel, stands always at my side. His presence overshadows me. He moves in the gloom like a white flower.… I thought but to defend him from his father: I thought of nothing else, and now—’ To Ross and his close friend More Adey (translator of Ibsen’s Brand and an art expert), both at Calais, he wrote on 9 April, ‘Bosie is so wonderful. I think of nothing else. I saw him yesterday.’ To Ada Leverson he wrote on 17 April, ‘As for me, the wings of great love encompass me: holy ground.’ As his trial approached, he wrote to her, ‘I care less when I think that he is thinking of me. I think of nothing else.’ In the meantime, he sent Douglas a number of passionate letters.
But Sir Edward Clarke felt that Douglas’s presence at the trial would be prejudicial to Wilde’s interests, as stirring up recollections of the supposed corruption of the young man by him. Douglas would not go without Wilde’s express request, and insisted upon having it in writing. At the last meeting, Douglas recalled, Wilde ‘kissed the end of my finger through an iron grating at Newg
ate, and he begged me to let nothing in the world alter my attitude and my conduct towards him.’ The young man joined Ross and Turner at the Hôtel Terminus in Calais, then went on to Rouen and Paris. He told the press that he had gone because of his mother’s illness in Italy, but this pretext was quickly exploded. To a reporter for Le Journal, on 25 May 1895, he said that there had been danger of his being called as a witness, presumably by the prosecution, which he did not want. But in his Autobiography, Douglas said that on the third day of the trial he telegraphed certain information to Sir Edward Clarke, though it was prejudicial to himself, and again offered to give evidence. Presumably he took responsibility for the incidents of buggery, since Wilde did not practice this.10 The solicitors replied that his telegram was very improper, and that he should not make Clarke’s task more difficult than it was already. Wilde wrote to him on the last day of the trial, 29 April:
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.
… 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 remember 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.
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