Oscar Wilde

by Richard Ellmann

  … I stretch out my hands towards you. Oh! may I live to touch your hair and your hands.

  Wilde’s First Trial

  The form of government that is most suitable to the artist is no government at all.

  The trial, which opened on 26 April 1895, went over the same ground as the Queensberry trial and the three hearings at Bow Street, and perhaps never in the nineties was so much unsavory evidence given so much publicity. The prosecutor insisted upon a speedy trial in which the cases of Taylor and Wilde would be joined, because Taylor had procured young men to commit acts of indecency with Wilde. So some charges related to conspiracy. Mr Justice Sir Arthur Charles agreed, over Clarke’s protest, but eventually the conspiracy charges were dropped voluntarily by the prosecution, and the judge then said he had never felt that they were properly joined to the other charges. Taylor, a bad witness (as Beerbohm says), and badly represented by J. T. Grein, was simply an additional weight on Wilde’s head. In other respects the case was conducted by the Treasury with considerable hypocrisy. Not only was homosexuality common in the English public schools which most of the legal personages present had attended. Also there had evidently been an agreement between Gill and Charles Russell, Queensberry’s solicitor, that Douglas’s name would be kept out of the case as far as possible, in return for Queensberry’s detailed evidence against Wilde. Who it was who introduced Atkins and Mavor to Wilde remained a mystery, though clearly a soluble one. As to why none of the important people whom George Wyndham approached saw fit to prevent the trial, there was a reluctance to interfere with the course of justice, and a lack of appetite to take on Queensberry as an adversary. There was also the old difficulty that Rosebery’s name had been mentioned in one of Queensberry’s letters. George Ives heard, nonetheless, that Rosebery had considered doing something to help Wilde until Balfour told him, ‘If you do, you will lose the election.’ (In the event, the Liberals lost the election anyway.)11 Everyone seemed to have a reason for leaning over backward to avoid any suggestion of going easy on Wilde. As for Lockwood, the Solicitor General, Carson is said to have suggested that he leave Wilde alone, as having suffered enough, but Lockwood said he had no alternative but to continue what Carson had initiated.

  Wilde looked thin; his hair had been cut shorter than usual. He was, said The New York Times, ‘careworn and anxious.’12 His cross-examination had few surprises to offer. He admitted that he knew the boys who had testified, but not that he had had indecent relations with them. The serious addition to the charges had to do with one young man who was not a prostitute, Edward Shelley. His testimony, given with extreme discomfort, was somewhat vitiated by his admission that he had at times been out of his mind, and also by the fact that he had pursued Wilde’s friendship and asked his help long after he had supposedly been corrupted by him.

  In cross-examining Wilde, Gill tried to follow Carson’s lead and besmirch him by association with the Chameleon, not so much with ‘The Priest and the Acolyte’ as with two homosexual poems by Douglas in it. ‘What is the “Love that dare not speak its name”?’ he asked. After all his lies, denials, and shifts, Wilde suddenly found a voice:

  The ‘Love that dare not speak its name’ in this century is such a great affection of an elder for a younger man as there was between David and Jonathan, such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy, and such as you find in the sonnets of Michaelangelo and Shakespeare. It is that deep, spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect. It dictates and pervades great works of art like those of Shakespeare and Michaelangelo, and those two letters of mine, such as they are. It is in this century misunderstood, so much misunderstood that it may be described as the ‘Love that dare not speak its name,’ and on account of it I am placed where I am now. It is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest form of affection. There is nothing unnatural about it. It is intellectual, and it repeatedly exists between an elder and a younger man, when the elder man has intellect, and the younger man has all the joy, hope and glamour of life before him. That it should be so the world does not understand. The world mocks at it and sometimes puts one in the pillory for it.

  This cri de coeur had its effect, though it could not, as the prosecutor noted, apply to the male prostitutes in the case, and Wilde himself said it could only happen once in a lifetime. For once Wilde spoke not wittily but well. As Max Beerbohm wrote to Reggie Turner after attending the trial, ‘Oscar has been quite superb. His speech about the Love that dares not tell his name was simply wonderful and carried the whole court right away, quite a tremendous burst of applause. Here was this man, who had been for a month in prison and loaded with insults and crushed and buffeted, perfectly self-possessed, dominating the Old Bailey with his fine presence and musical voice. He has never had so great a triumph, I am sure, as when the gallery burst into applause—I am sure it affected the jury.’13

  The rest of the cross-examination went less favorably. Wilde had again to defend his letters to Douglas. As for the evidence of the hotel servants, Wilde said, ‘It is entirely untrue. Can I answer for what hotel servants say years after I have left the hotel?’ He denied all Shelley’s evidence of impropriety, as well as the Parkers’, Atkins’s, and Wood’s.

  Why did you take up with these youths?—I am a lover of youth. (Laughter)

  You exalt youth as a sort of god?—I like to study the young in everything. There is something fascinating in youthfulness.

  So you would prefer puppies to dogs and kittens to cats?—I think so. I should enjoy, for instance, the society of a beardless, briefless barrister quite as much as that of the most accomplished Q.C. (Laughter)

  This time Sir Edward Clarke was better prepared. He persuasively denied that Dorian Gray or ‘Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young’ was in any sense corrupting or corrupted. He pointed out that Wilde, instead of shrinking like a guilty man from public exposure, had sought publicity by prosecuting Lord Queensberry. As to the hotel evidence against Wilde, it was extraordinary that the prosecution had been able to find such a paucity of it, when Wilde had stayed in hotel after hotel for years. The evidence of the Parkers, of Wood, and of Atkins obviously superimposed on what was true much that was false, as the best lies do. Wilde was undoubtedly taken in by them, which was evidence of imprudence, not crime. They were blackmailers whose evidence could not be trusted. Atkins had been proved on the stand to have perjured himself. ‘I ask the jury,’ Clarke said, ‘to clear from this frightful imputation one of our most renowned and accomplished men of letters of today, and in clearing him, to clear society from a stain.’ Grein then made a weak defense of Taylor. Gill, for the prosecution, insisted that the letters to Douglas ‘breathe an unholy passion,’ and that Wilde’s admitted presents to these many boys were proof of his gratitude. As Ives commented in his journal, Wilde suffered because of his generosity, which was not confined to young men. Granted that some of the boys were not of the highest type, there was still the case of Shelley, whose testimony was not tainted by blackmail charges. Finally, Gill gave up the charges of conspiracy. The case now went to the judge.

  Mr Justice Charles agreed to omit the conspiracy charges, and to direct a verdict of acquittal upon them. On the literary question he proved enlightened. He was inclined to agree with Clarke that Wilde was not culpable for having written Dorian Gray or for the Chameleon pieces, which he had not written. As for the letters to Douglas, he was not inclined to accept Gill’s statement that these proved anything. He acknowledged that Shelley was unstable. He found the stories of the maids and other functionaries at the Savoy Hotel difficult to credit. As to the fecal stains, he pointed out that these might have an innocent explanation. The judge did not, however, reject the testimony of the witnesses about Wilde’s and Taylor’s behavior. He put four questions to the jury:

  1) Do you think that Wilde committed indecent acts with Edward Shelley and Alfred Wood and with a person or persons unknown at the Savoy Hotel or with Charles Parker?

  2) Did Taylor procure or att
empt to procure the commission of these acts or of any of them?

  3) Did Wilde and Taylor or either of them attempt to get Atkins to commit indecencies?

  4) Did Taylor commit indecent acts with Charles Parker or with William Parker?

  The jury was out from 1:35 to 5:15 p.m. They then reported that they could agree only on the question about Atkins, where their verdict was not guilty. One newspaper, L’Echo de Paris of 4 May, said that the vote to convict Wilde had been ten to two, as revealed by an indiscreet juror in a Pall Mall club; Max Beerbohm heard that it was eleven to one, and Alfred Douglas agreed that only one juror voted for acquittal. Beerbohm reported to More Adey, ‘Hoscar stood very upright when he was brought up to hear the verdict and looked most leonine and sphinx-like. I pitied poor little Alfred Taylor—nobody remembered his existence.… Hoscar is thinner and in consequence finer to look at. Willie [Wilde] has been extracting fivers from Humphreys. It was horrible leaving the court day after day and having to pass through a knot of renters (the younger Parker wearing Her Majesty’s uniform, another form of female attire) who were allowed to hang around after giving their evidence and to wink at likely persons.’14

  Owing to the jury’s failure to reach a verdict, a new trial was ordered. The judge again refused bail, but Clarke announced he would seek it from another judge in chambers. Clarke proposed that the next trial be postponed, but Gill said it would be the usual course to hold it in the next sessions, and the judge agreed. Many people urged that harm ‘would be done to the public morals’ if the case were renewed. T. M. Healy begged Lockwood not to put Wilde on trial again. Lockwood said, ‘I would not but for the abominable rumours against Rosebery.’15 So the long-drawn-out farce went into its third and last act.

  Between Trials

  What are called criminals nowadays are not criminals at all.

  Bereft of the company of his lover Douglas, and his friends Ross and Turner—all three fugitive in the Hôtel de la Poste in Rouen—and unsought by most of his other friends,‡ Wilde could feel the shades of the prison house drawing round him figuratively as well as literally. He had twenty-five days to go before his second trial ended. The first five were spent in Holloway Prison. There was now no reason to deny him bail, but Mr Justice Charles perhaps wished to indicate that he had no sympathy for pederasts, even those who might be innocent. Yet only a misdemeanor, not a felony, was involved, so bail could not long be refused. Two days later, on 3 May, Charles Matthews applied again on Wilde’s behalf, this time to Mr Baron Pollock in chambers, for bail until the new trial should begin. He proposed two sureties of £1000 each.

  On 4 May Pollock set bail at £5000, of which £2500 would be allowed to Wilde on his own recognizance. It took two days to round up sureties for the remaining £2500. Frank Harris says he volunteered, but was ruled ineligible because not a householder. Bosie’s brother Percy had no money in hand, but out of loyalty to Bosie scraped together half of what was required in defiance of his father. The other half was harder. It may have been Ernest Leverson who, being himself debarred by the terms of his business partnership from going bail for anyone, approached first Selwyn Image, who did not have the money, and then the Reverend Stewart Headlam, who did. Headlam—whom Wilde had privately dubbed ‘the heresiarch’—was scarcely acquainted with him, having met him only twice, but he was a man of conviction, and strongly supported the view that Wilde was entitled not to be prejudged. Being a socialist and an unorthodox Christian, he knew that he would suffer notoriety for his kind of action and, worse, be thought to have sought it. His maid left his service, some of his friends defected, and an enemy accused him of wading in Gomorrah on his way to building Jerusalem. At least there would be no financial loss if Wilde jumped bail; so Leverson had promised, and Wilde gave his word not to flee. With Headlam’s £1225 and Percy Douglas’s in hand, all impediments to bail were removed. The bail hearing at Bow Street Police Station on 7 May concluded with Wilde’s release.

  Where to go was not so easily decided. Two rooms had been engaged for him at the Midland Hotel at St Pancras, far from his usual haunts, but just as he was sitting down to a late dinner, the manager entered. ‘You are Oscar Wilde, I believe.’ Wilde did not disavow it. ‘You must leave the hotel at once.’ Some of Queensberry’s pugilistic roughnecks, egged on by the Marquess himself, had threatened the manager with reprisals for receiving Wilde, and they followed him as he drove across town to another hotel. There too, after a few minutes, the manager apologized but said that some men had threatened to sack the hotel and raise the street against Wilde if he did not leave at once. By now it was near midnight. In the end Wilde had no alternative but to go to the house where his brother Willie was living with his second wife, Lily Lees, and Lady Wilde, 146 Oakley Street. It was not pleasant to have to plead with his brother, to whom he had not spoken for a year and a half, ‘Willie, give me shelter or I shall die in the streets.’ As Willie described the scene later, ‘He came tapping with his beak against the window-pane, and fell down on my threshold like a wounded stag.’16 For the moment magnanimity was in order.

  Willie gave his brother a room with a small camp bed in a corner between the fireplace and the wall, and here for some days Oscar was physically ill. His friends in France heard about it and asked Robert Sherard to go over and see him. Sherard did so. He found Wilde’s face ‘flushed and swollen.’ ‘Oh, why have you brought me no poison from Paris?’ he asked alliteratively in a broken voice. Sherard offered to take him to the country to recover his health, but he did not want to move. Sherard managed to rouse him by proposing they read some Wordsworth; in one sonnet Wordsworth was caught out rhyming ‘love’ with ‘shove,’ and Wilde feigned outrage and said severely to the hapless descendant, ‘Robert, what does this mean?’17

  It soon became apparent that the family setting in Oakley Street would prove anything but easy. Willie was setting up as a moralist: ‘At least my vices were decent,’ he muttered in his cups. He told Oscar that he was defending him all over London, at which Oscar commented to a friend, ‘My poor, dear brother, he would compromise a steam engine.’ ‘Willie makes such a merit of giving me shelter,’ he told Harris, and confided that, as Beerbohm had said, his brother had sold old letters to Humphreys in what amounted to blackmail. For his part, Willie had his own rhythmical explanations of his brother’s fall: ‘It is his vanity that has brought all this disgrace upon him; they swung incense before him, they swung it before his heart.’ Both Willie and Lady Wilde were determined that Oscar should stay and stand trial; Willie would assure visitors, ‘Oscar is an Irish gentleman, and he will face the music.’ As for Lady Wilde, she declaimed to Oscar in her grand manner, ‘If you stay, even if you go to prison, you will always be my son. It will make no difference to my affection. But if you go, I will never speak to you again.’ Wilde promised her that he would stay.18

  But as he approached martyrdom his friends wished to deny him it. Percy, though one of his guarantors, declared, ‘It will practically ruin me if I lose all that money at the present moment, but if there is a chance even of conviction, in God’s name let him go.’19 Sherard urged Wilde to leave, and Frank Harris brought matters to a head. Harris insisted upon taking Wilde out to lunch, against Willie’s wishes, and proposed the Café Royal, scene of so many meals in the past. Oscar did not feel it would be seemly, so Harris brought him instead to a restaurant in Great Portland Street, where they had a private room. Harris wanted to stiffen Wilde’s resistance. He proposed that Wilde should say he liked the company of young men because he liked writing about them. Wilde did not respond, and never adopted this tactic. Harris described the testimony as a pack of lies, and Wilde said that the testimony of the chambermaids at the Savoy Hotel was based on their mixing up his room with Douglas’s. Harris offered to make a plan of the rooms and get the maids to admit their error, but Wilde did not want Douglas to be implicated. At any rate, he said, Shelley’s testimony remained, and the judge had said that this was unimpugnable. Harris declared that Shelley was
an accomplice, and therefore could not be believed without corroboration, of which there was none. At this Wilde broke out and said, ‘You talk with passion and conviction, as if I were innocent.’ ‘But you are innocent,’ said Harris, ‘aren’t you?’ ‘No,’ said Wilde. ‘I thought you knew that all along.’ Harris said, ‘I did not believe it for a moment.’ ‘This will make a great difference to you?’ asked Wilde, but Harris assured him it would not.20

  He now developed his fallback plan, that Wilde should escape. A Jewish businessman of his acquaintance happened to mention owning a yacht, and Harris asked him if he would rent it for a month. The man was willing, and asked what Harris planned to do. On impulse Harris told him exactly what he wanted it for, and the yachtsman then said, ‘In that case you can have it for nothing.’ He too wanted Wilde to escape. Harris now made his proposal to Wilde. The yacht was at Erith, he said, and they could leave at once. Much skepticism has been shown about this yacht, yet both Yeats and Ada Leverson knew of the plan, and it seems to have been available even if it was not waiting at Erith with steam up, as Harris dramatically pictured it. Wilde, however, refused to go.21