Oscar Wilde

by Richard Ellmann

  It was while he was still in Oakley Street that the Leversons invited Wilde to dinner and discovered how unhappy he was, living with his brother. They bravely invited him to stay with them, and he accepted. Before he arrived with his belongings, they called the servants together and offered them a month’s wages if they wished to leave rather than be in the house with this notorious man. All chose to stay with ‘poor Mr Wilde,’ as one called him, and Mrs Leverson drove over to Oakley Street to bring him back, on about 18 May. The address was kept secret to ward Queensberry off. The Leversons’ son was in the country, so Wilde was shown up to the nursery, which consisted of two large rooms and a bathroom. ‘Shall I remove the toys?’ she asked, but he replied, ‘Please leave them.’ So among the rocking horses and dollhouses he received his solicitors and friends, gathering the threads of destitution and disgrace. To avoid embarrassing his hosts, he took his meals upstairs and did not come down until six o’clock. Then he appeared in dinner clothes, flower in buttonhole, and made a point of talking to Mrs Leverson about everything but his main concerns. His old hairdresser came to shave him and wave his hair every day.

  Later Mrs Leverson would remember some of his conversation. He had romantic ideas about absinthe, and described its effect to her: ‘After the first glass, you see things as you wish they were. After the second, you see things as they are not. Finally you see things as they really are, and that is the most horrible thing in the world.’ ‘How do you mean?’ ‘I mean disassociated. Take a top-hat! You think you see it as it reallv is. But you don’t, because you associate it with other things and ideas. If you had never heard of one before, and suddenly saw it alone, you’d be frightened, or laugh. That is the effect absinthe has, and that is why it drives men mad.’ He went on, ‘Three nights I sat up all night drinking absinthe, and thinking that I was singularly clearheaded and sane. The waiter came in and began watering the sawdust. The most wonderful flowers, tulips, lilies, and roses sprang up and made a garden of the café. “Don’t you see them?” I said to him. “Mais non, monsieur, il n’y a rien.” ’ There was no drug to make the world flower now. He turned to other subjects, especially books. Dickens was an old phobia, and it was to amuse her that he made his classic remark ‘One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing.’ Or he made up un-Christian parables in the manner of Lives of the Saints. He liked one or another of these well enough to ask for something on which to write it down, but Mrs Leverson could not put her hand on anything. ‘You have all the equipment of a writer, my dear Sphinx,’ he said to her, ‘except pens, ink and paper.’22

  While Oscar Wilde was with the Leversons, Yeats came on 19 May to Oakley Street in search of him. Yeats’s father had told him he owed it to Wilde to offer to testify for him, or do some service, and Yeats brought along a packet of letters he had collected from Irish men of letters, including George Russell, to encourage his friend. (Only Professor Edward Dowden refused.) He was met, however, by Willie, who said, ‘Before I give him this, you must tell me what is in it. Are you telling him to run away? All his friends are telling him that, and we have made up our minds that he must go to prison if necessary.’ Yeats replied, ‘No, I certainly would not advise him to run away.’ Which was true: to Yeats it seemed a great moment for Wilde to show his mettle.§ He wrote to Dowden about his visit:

  I went to try and see Wilde today and to tell him how much I sympathised with him in his trouble. He has left Oakley Street but they told me this much about his movements. A yacht and a very large sum of money was placed at his disposal and all settled for his flight but he refused to go. He says he will stand it out and face the worst and no matter how it turns out work on. He will not go down, they said, or drink, or take poison. I mentioned how I had found some of our Dublin literary men sympathetic to him and my words were received with most pathetic gentleness and I promised to tell them about his plans. I write to suggest that you either write direct to him, some sympathetic words, Morris has already written, or write some answer to this which I can get shown to him.24

  Others were keener than Yeats and Willie to save him from prison, however it might spoil the drama. Constance Wilde came to see her husband at the Leversons’ and spent two hours with him. She brought an earnest message from her lawyer, imploring him to go away before his next trial, which would undoubtedly be calamitous. She left in tears, and Ada Leverson saw on his face ‘a look of immovable obstinacy.’ Mrs Leverson herself had the temerity to send up a note asking him to do what his wife urged. There was no reply until he came down to dinner, when he handed her back her note, only remarking, ‘That is not like you, Sphinx,’ before he changed the subject.25

  Wilde had made a decision, and intended to stick to it. Mrs Leverson thought him too involved in a fantasy of success to believe that anything bad could happen to him, but Wilde’s life had offered no such cycle of triumphs as she supposed. There had been his broken engagement to Florence Balcombe, his removal from Frank Miles’s house, the failure of his early plays, his troubled American lecture tour, years of not having enough money, and the chaotic affair with Douglas. As he was to declare later, his works had always had a telltale undercurrent of sorrow. And he knew what running away would be like, whether he did it in the boisterous company of Frank Harris or by himself. There would be no dignity in that. He might well be stopped, or, if not stopped, he would have to slink about the Continent as a fugitive from British justice. As his trip to Florence had shown, slinking was not Wilde’s style. Ostracism (a subject about which he had quarreled with Jebb years before) was not for him. What he wrote to Douglas just before the trial ended was what he felt all along: ‘I decided that it was nobler and more beautiful to stay.… I did not want to be called a coward or a deserter. A false name, a disguise, a hunted life, all that is not for me.’ He chose to be convicted, knowing that people would wrongly say that he chose out of weakness or megalomania—yet neither obliged his choice. Could he really have preferred picking oakum to ruling a dinner table? He recognized that of the ignominious alternatives available to him, this was the least unheroic. (It was also the most modest.) Yeats was delighted when an old enemy of Wilde, perhaps Henley, met him in the street, and said with admiration of Wilde, ‘He has made of infamy a new Thermopylae.’ As for Yeats himself, he wrote later, ‘I have never doubted, even for an instant, that he made the right decision, and that he owes to that decision half of his renown.’26 He submitted to the society he had criticized, and so earned the right to criticize it further.

  Heroics were not the daily fare at the Leversons’ house. Wilde did not claim heroism, nor do any more than resist pleas that he run away, without giving any grounds in particular, least of all grandiloquent ones. As the day of the trial approached, he showed something like resignation. He told Sherard that he thought he could bear a year’s imprisonment, but Sherard warned him that he might well get the maximum sentence of two years. Wilde fell back for comfort on his love of Douglas, and wrote him letters of the most fervent kind: ‘Now, in anguish and pain, in grief and humiliation, I feel that my love for you, your love for me, are the two signs of my life, the divine sentiments which make all bitterness bearable.’ Douglas had admitted his own blame (he would deny it later), but Wilde said, ‘Let destiny, Nemesis, or the unjust gods alone receive the blame for everything that has happened.’ And again, ‘My sweet rose, my delicate flower, my lily of lilies, it is perhaps in prison that I am going to test the power of love. I am going to see if I cannot make the bitter waters sweet by the intensity of the love I bear you.’ These letters were of a different kind from those produced in court, which had been very nearly the formal literary productions that Wilde claimed. He was still prodigal of phrases: ‘None of God’s created beings, and you are the Morning Star to me, have been so wildly worshipped, so madly adored.’ Beneath the purple alliteration was real feeling. Douglas wryly commented long afterwards in his Autobiography: ‘The emotion of the great crisis fanned the waning fires of our devotion t
o each other.’ He replied to Wilde with less eloquence, though with comparable emotion. He also wrote to his brother, begging him to make Wilde leave England while it was still possible. Percy replied that he hoped he would. In Paris Bosie took heart and wrote to Wilde, ‘It seems too dreadful to be here without you, but I hope you will join me next week. Do keep up your spirits, my dearest darling. I continue to think of you day and night, and send you all my love. I am always your own loving and devoted boy BOSIE.’27 Douglas’s state of mind in this period was exceedingly disturbed. A series of letters he sent to the press were of varying degrees of indiscretion. On 19 April, writing to the Star to complain of Wilde’s being prejudged, and of Sir John Bridge’s obvious bias against him, he went on to say:

  I feel, therefore, that I am taking my life in my hands in daring to raise my voice against the chorus of the pack of those who are now hounding Mr Oscar Wilde to his ruin; the more so as I feel assured that the public has made up its mind to accept them as it has accepted everybody and everything connected with this case, at Mr Carson’s valuation. I, of course, am the undutiful son who, in his arrogance and folly, has kicked against his kind and affectionate father, and who has further aggravated his offence by not running away and hiding his face after the discomfiture of his friend.

  Wilde understandably felt even at the time, though he did not tell Douglas till later, that this was a commonplace production; it was worse, indeed, because Douglas saw himself as the center of interest. He followed this up five days later with a letter saying he had received thousands of letters in support of his stand for Wilde. By 25 May the French press had caught up with him, and Georges Docquois published an interview with him on that date. Douglas had claimed that he left England (on the second day of Wilde’s trial, according to Raffalovich) because of the illness of his mother in Italy, but the press had found out she was in fact well. He now admitted that he had left because Wilde’s lawyers had warned him he might be called as a witness, which he did not want. He had arrived in Paris on 15 May, but dodged the press for eight days. Asked about his letter to Le Temps, he explained, ‘You do not know what an absolutely abominable man the Marquess of Queensberry is.… Until I was twelve, I saw him at most twenty times, and I didn’t feel at all sure from the way he treated me that I was his son.’ The reporter inquired delicately about his relationship with Wilde, but Douglas insisted it was extraterrestrial, a communion together in the symbol rather than something seedy (‘louche’). He knew no joy greater than to dine with Wilde when the latter was in ‘good form.’ They had once been joined by a dilettantish pleasure; now they were joined by persecution. To another French journalist he wrote on 30 May that he knew a hundred overt homosexuals in the best English society.‖

  Lady Queensberry had some inkling of how Bosie was behaving, and she encouraged her son Percy to go to Rouen to see him at the end of May. She also consulted an old friend, the Reverend Sebastian Bowden, and asked him to find some trustworthy person to stay with Bosie and prevent his behaving foolishly out of loyalty to the fallen Wilde. Bowden asked More Adey to do this; Adey replied that his first duty was to Robert Ross, but that he would deal with Douglas as soon as he had calmed Ross down. Ross’s family, meanwhile, forbade his remaining with Douglas, and Douglas, as Adey informed Bowden, planned a trip to Florence to see Lord Henry Somerset, almost as scandalous a character as Wilde.

  A New Thermopylae

  How steep the stairs within kings’ houses are.

  Meanwhile, Wilde was faced with the reality of his last trial. On its eve, 21 May, he serenely bade his friends farewell, and informed each of a little present from the few possessions left to him which would be a souvenir in case he did not return.29 When he was going to his room he asked Ada Leverson to leave a sleeping draught for him on the mantelpiece—not that he would take it, but that its presence would have a magical effect. Next day, before leaving with More Adey to join Stewart Headlam, he said to her, ‘If the worst comes to the worst, Sphinx, you’ll write to me?’ During the next six days he was met in the morning and escorted back at night by Headlam, sometimes by Percy Douglas as well. At the Old Bailey all the seats were taken, so Queensberry, wearing a white cravat and a flower, had to stand, listening attentively, small and ferocious. Sir Edward Clarke was determined to try to secure some advantage for Wilde, and moved that Wilde and Taylor should be tried separately. Sir Frank Lockwood as Solicitor General opposed the motion, on the grounds that the cases were intertwined. But Mr Justice Sir Alfred Willsa ruled in Clarke’s favor. Lockwood then proposed to take Taylor’s case first, and Clarke again protested, for Taylor really had no defense at all, was well known to the police, and certain to be convicted. Over Clarke’s protest, the judge agreed. He said that Taylor had been in prison for seven weeks already, without bail, and that his trial should be delayed no longer.

  This decision, which seemed minor, was very much to Wilde’s detriment. The testimony in the Taylor case would involve him as well, and if Taylor were convicted, Wilde could scarcely be acquitted by the same jury without evident injustice. The Taylor case was quickly heard and quickly decided. The prosecutor had resolved to reduce the charge from sodomy to indecency, as being easier to prove, and to secure a conviction. Taylor was found guilty on two counts of indecency with the Parker brothers, but not guilty of procuring Wood for Wilde, since, as the judge pointed out, he had not introduced the two men to each other. One of the Parker brothers had been promised immunity by ex-Inspector Littlefield if he would turn state’s evidence against Wilde, but he nobly refused. Mr Justice Wills deferred sentence. Queensberry sent a telegram to his son Percy’s wife: ‘To Lady Douglas—must congratulate on verdict. Cannot on Percy appearance. Looked like a dug-up corpse. Fear too much madness in kissing. Taylor guilty. Wilde’s turn to-morrow. Queensberry.’ He also, on the mistaken notion that Wilde was staying with Percy and her, went to their house that night, knocked on the door, and made a disturbance. To Percy’s wife he sent an illustration from a popular weekly of an iguanodon, with a childish note, ‘Perhaps an ancestor of Oscar Wilde.’30 The following morning in Bond Street, in front of Scott’s the hatters, Percy caught sight of his father and asked him if he were going to continue to annoy his wife with his communications. A street fight broke out, with Lord Douglas getting a black eye. They were both arrested and bound over next day on their own sureties of £500 to keep the peace for six months.b

  In this atmosphere of near-hysteria, the second trial of Oscar Wilde was to take place. The press had been discussing Wilde for weeks, with condemnation general except for Reynolds’s News, which had private information about the extraordinary zeal with which Wilde was being prosecuted. Most of the newspapers considered that Queensberry had rightly brought down the ‘High Priest of the Decadents,’ as the National Observer saw fit to label Wilde.

  The trial had few surprises. It became clear that two of the most important witnesses, the brothers Parker, were being maintained at Chiswick under the care of a Crown detective. It did not become clear, though it was apparently true, that all the witnesses had been receiving £5 a week from the beginning of Wilde’s prosecution of Queensberry until his conviction.31 The star witness, Charles Parker, had received a new suit of clothes at Crown expense, ostensibly because he could not appear in court in a soldier’s uniform. (He was to be cashiered.) This time the prosecution began not with him, however, but with Shelley, who made his usual blubbering denunciation of Wilde’s sexual advances. This was again countered by the now familiar letters which he had addressed to Wilde after the alleged offenses, asking for financial help. For a moment or two the case veered in Wilde’s favor as the judge ruled that Shelley was, as Harris had claimed, an accomplice, and therefore not credible unless corroborated. This eliminated the prosecution’s trump card, since Shelley alone of the important witnesses was neither male prostitute nor blackmailer. The next day Sir Frank Lockwood, once Wilde’s friend, tried to persuade the judge to change his view, but the judge stood firm. Lockwo
od was heard to murmur outside, ‘The old fool!’ Testimony disclosed that the person who had introduced Taylor to Wilde was Lockwood’s nephew by marriage, Maurice Schwabe, a point upon which Lockwood was careful not to dilate.

  Clarke did his best. He pointed out that, as anyone could see who had been at the other trials, Wilde was a broken man. It was inconceivable that he would have subjected himself to possible prosecution, by charging Queensberry with libel, if he had himself been so vulnerable. ‘This trial seems to be operating as an act of indemnity for all the blackmailers in London,’ he said, and it was obvious that the witnesses could have been the accused rather than the accusers. They had nothing on Wilde, for otherwise they would have blackmailed him relentlessly. Charles Parker was an uncorroborated witness, and a peculiarly unstable one. The testimony of the chambermaids did not prove that Wilde had committed any improper acts. ‘If on an examination of the evidence you, therefore, feel it your duty to say that the charges against the prisoner have not been proved, then I am sure that you will be glad that the brilliant promise which has been clouded by these accusations, and the bright reputation which was so nearly quenched in the torrent of prejudice which a few weeks ago was sweeping through the press, have been saved by your verdict from absolute ruin; and that it leaves him, a distinguished man of letters and a brilliant Irishman, to live among us a life of honour and repute, and to give in the maturity of his genius gifts to our literature, of which he has given only the promise in his early youth.’

  The last day of the trial, 25 May, was the Queen’s birthday. In the midst of patriotic fervor, Lockwood made his final speech for the prosecution. He raked Wilde over; he dealt with the suspect letters to Douglas, the payment of blackmail to Wood, the relations with Taylor, Wood, Parker, Conway, which he insisted corroborated one another. If the evidence of the chambermaids was false, why had not Lord Alfred Douglas been called to deny it? As Wilde listened to ‘Lockwood’s appalling denunciation,’ which sounded, he said later, ‘like a thing out of Tacitus, like a passage in Dante, like one of Savonarola’s indictments of the Popes at Rome,’ he felt ‘sickened with horror at what I heard. Suddenly it occurred to me, “How splendid it would be, if I was saying all this about myself!” I saw then at once that what is said of a man is nothing. The point is, who says it.’ As he wrote to Ross later, ‘the idea of “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” came to me while I was in the dock.’32 He was not cowed; his imagination was secretly triumphing over the proceedings.