Oscar Wilde

by Richard Ellmann

  The character of Douglas cast his actions into responses molded by others’ actions. In his emotional life he was constantly importunate, and, when thwarted, infinitely resentful. As Wilde would tell him, ‘By the terrible alchemy of egotism you converted your remorse into rage.’10 His correspondence to others at this time shows only self-justification.§

  Wilde was well aware, after three years and more of subjection to Bosie’s moods, that he would be impenetrable to moral persuasion, but for the sake of his own sanity and self-respect he felt he must make the effort. Like Hamlet to his mother, he would say to Douglas, ‘Look on that portrait, and on this.’ He was embittered by Douglas’s behavior before the prison sentence, and after it too, since no letter had come from him, though letters passed easily now in and out of the prison. Wilde could see a ‘purple pageant’ in which he was the noble stag hounded by the Marquess of Queensberry and his son, Douglas after his time and money, and Queensberry his reputation and liberty.

  Vicarious Confession

  Prison-life makes one see people and things as they really are. That is why it turns one to stone.

  De Profundis is a kind of dramatic monologue, which constantly questions and takes into account the silent recipient’s supposed responses. Given the place where it was written, Wilde might have been expected to confess his guilt. Instead he refuses to admit that his past conduct with young men was guilty, and declares that the laws by which he was condemned were unjust.‖ The closest he comes to the subject of homosexuality is to say, impenitently, that what the paradox was for him in the realm of thought, sexual deviation was in the realm of conduct. More than half of De Profundis is taken up by his confession, not of his own sins, but of Bosie’s. He evokes two striking images for that young man. One is his favorite passage from Agamemnon, about bringing up a lion’s whelp inside one’s house only to have it run amok. Aeschylus compared it to Helen, Wilde to Douglas. The other is Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who have no realization of Hamlet’s tragedy, being ‘the little cups that can hold so much and no more.’

  The main theme of self-recrimination is that he did not break with Bosie. But his letter is an attempt to restore relations. And while he admits to ‘weakness,’ he explains the weakness as due to his affection, good nature, aversion to scenes, incapacity to bear resentment, and desire to keep life comely by ignoring what he considered trifles. His weakness was strength. The gods, he has discovered, make instruments to plague us out of our virtues as well as our vices.

  Wilde acknowledges that along with good qualities, he was ‘the spendthrift of my own genius.’ But he passes quickly over this defect, and those that attend it. Much of De Profundis is an elegy for lost greatness. As he whips his own image, he cannot withhold his admiration for what that image was. Elegy generates eulogy. He heightens the pinnacle from which he has fallen:

  I was a man who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age. I had realised this for myself at the very dawn of my manhood, and had forced my age to realise it afterwards.… Byron was a symbolic figure, but his relations were to the passion of his age and its weariness of passion. Mine were to something more noble, more permanent, of more vital issue, of larger scope.

  The gods had given me almost everything. I had genius, a distinguished name, high social position, brilliancy, intellectual daring: I made art a philosophy, and philosophy an art: I altered the minds of men and the colours of things: there was nothing I said or did that did not make people wonder: I took the drama, the most objective form known to art, and made it as personal a mode of expression as the lyric or the sonnet, at the same time that I widened its range and enriched its characterisation: drama, novel, poem in rhyme, poem in prose, subtle or fantastic dialogue, whatever I touched I made beautiful in a new mode of beauty: to truth itself I gave what is false no less than what is true as its rightful province, and showed that the false and the true are merely forms of intellectual existence. I treated Art as the supreme reality, and life as a mere mode of fiction: I awoke the imagination of my century so that it created myth and legend around me: I summed up all systems in a phrase, and all existence in an epigram.

  In prison, he says, he has at least learned humility. Humility is a slippery term in De Profundis. Wilde’s only definition of it there is ‘the frank acceptance of all experience.’ The pursuit of pleasure must take into account the advent of sorrow. But in a way he has always known this. Still, much of the folderol of personality has receded in importance: as a young man he had often praised poses and masks; now he says, ‘Those who want a mask have to wear it.’ In America he announced that ‘the secret of life is art.’ Now he had found that ‘the secret of life is suffering.’13

  De Profundis moves from the discovery of pain to the discovery of consolation. Its climax, doubtless premeditated from the start, was a section dealing with Wilde’s discovery in prison of Christ. This too is less humble than it seems, since Wilde not only describes Christ without recognizing his divinity, but blends Christianity with aestheticism, as long before he told André Gide he would do. Christ appears here as the supreme individualist, uniting personality and perfection, saying beautiful things, making of his life the most wonderful of poems by creating himself out of his own imagination. He sympathizes with sinners as Wilde in ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism’ sympathizes with criminals, and recognizes no morality but that of sympathy. Christ is a precursor of the romantic movement, a supreme artist, a master of paradox, a type of Wilde in the ancient world. In this section of De Profundis Douglas is almost forgotten, but Wilde makes all he has learned about Christ into something he must impart to his friend. He cannot resist more particularization of the Queensberrys’ misdeeds, but he reaches at last a Christlike conclusion: ‘And the end of it all is that I have got to forgive you. I must do so. I don’t write this letter to put bitterness into your heart, but to pluck it out of mine. For my own sake I must forgive you.’14

  The most important thing about De Profundis is that it is a love letter. Wilde complains of neglect and arranges a reunion. He reminds Douglas, even at this late stage, that Douglas’s family had promised to pay his court costs, but financial matters are forgotten as he evokes the thought of their meeting ‘in some quiet foreign town like Bruges,’ where Bosie, who had come to him once to learn the Pleasure of Life and of Art, may be offered tutelage in ‘the meaning of Sorrow, and its beauty.’ For no matter how badly Douglas behaved, he always loved Wilde in his fashion. As an apologia De Profundis suffers from the adulteration of simplicity by eloquence, by an arrogance lurking in its humility, and by its disjointed structure. But as a love letter it has all the consistency it needs, and must rank—with its love and hate, solicitude, vanity, and philosophic musings—as one of the greatest, and the longest, ever written. Wilde on 3 April 1897 asked permission to send the letter out, but cannily recognized that to send it to Douglas would be to anticipate its destruction. In that case there would be no record of what had brought him to prison. So he asked permission to send it to Ross, who was instructed to have it copied and send Douglas the original. The Home Office refused permission to send it to anybody, but said he could take it with him on his release.

  The writing of De Profundis was regenerative. Wilde’s repudiation of Douglas was complete enough for him to feel drawn towards him once more—a characteristic turnabout. His wife’s behavior had turned about too. For a time Constance rediscovered her love for her husband, but after their pathetic meeting in February of 1896, following his mother’s death, she had not visited him again. Her letters, at first so sympathetic, became indignant. The bone of contention between them was not the divorce, which she gave up, but the life interest in her dowry. Wilde was entitled to half of it by the terms of the marriage settlement, and this half was offered for sale by the Official Receiver of his estate. It was rumored that Queensberry would bid for it, so as to make Wilde totally dependent upon him, but he did not. Constance Wilde’s solicitor seems to have bid £25, but Ross and
Adey bought it away from her for £75. Their object was to give Wilde something in case his wife should predecease him. They did not trust Constance’s advisers. There were many complications, but Constance Wilde was convinced that her husband’s friends were working against her. She had originally offered Wilde £200 a year as an allowance after his release, and, in case of her death, one-third the life interest, the rest to go to their sons. Now the offer was reduced to £150 and a third of the life interest. Wilde seems to have blamed Ross and Adey for interfering between himself and his wife and making her write unpleasant letters, but eventually he recognized that they had protected his interest, such as it was, and that Constance had misinterpreted their actions. He agreed to her terms early in 1897, and her solicitor, Hargrove, came to the prison in February 1897 to have Wilde sign papers turning over the custody of his children to his wife and Adrian Hope. Unknown to him, Constance Wilde had come with Hargrove, but remained outside the room as Wilde sat at the desk with Hargrove beside him. ‘Let me have one last glimpse of my husband,’ she asked the warder, and he moved away from the glass in the door so that she could look at the man she had loved. She left, in great emotion, in Hargrove’s company.15 The papers Wilde had signed contained a clause saying that his allowance would be cut off if he should visit her or the children without permission, or should live notoriously on the Continent. To return to Bosie Douglas would therefore mean financial disaster. And Adey’s solicitor said that Queensberry had threatened to kill one or both of them if they reunited.

  Reading’s Rounds

  Everything he [Ricketts] said, including his remark that he supposed time went very fast in prison … annoyed me extremely.

  The final months of Wilde’s prison life are recorded in part by a friendly warder. This was Thomas Martin, who knew him during his last months at Reading, which proved to be Martin’s last months there as well. Because of his impending release, Wilde had the great privilege of being allowed to let his hair grow for five months. He felt more like himself, and soon had won Martin’s heart. One day he remarked to him how keenly he felt the lack of a newspaper. ‘When I come out,’ he said, ‘I shall be just like Rip Van Winkle.’ Martin took the hint, and began to bring him the Daily Chronicle each morning. This produced a note which the warder treasured and kept:

  My dear friend, What have I to write about except that if you had been an officer in Reading Prison a year ago my life would have been much happier. Everyone tells me I am looking better—and happier.

  That is because I have a good friend who gives me the Chronicle, and promises me ginger biscuits!

  At the bottom of this note Martin penciled a reply, ‘Your ungrateful I done more than promise.’ Wilde said to him once, ‘I know nothing about figures, except that two and two make five.’ ‘They don’t,’ said Martin, ‘they only make four.’ ‘You see, I don’t even know that,’ said Wilde with a smile.16

  One day in March, Martin entered Wilde’s cell to find him still in bed. ‘I have had a bad night,’ he explained, ‘pains in my inside, and my head seems splitting.’ He declined a visit from the doctor, but declared he would be all right once he had something warm to drink. Since his breakfast would not be brought for an hour, Martin decided to get him something. He heated some beef tea, poured it into a bottle, and put the bottle inside his jacket so it would not be observed. But on his way to Wilde’s cell he was accosted by the chief warder about some administrative detail, and was held in conversation so long that the hot bottle began to burn his chest. When he finally made his way to Wilde and told him what had happened, Wilde laughed. Martin was angry, and banged the cell door as he left. But by the time he brought his breakfast Wilde had become contrite, and said he would not touch it until Martin forgave him. ‘Not even the cocoa?’ asked Martin. ‘Not even the cocoa,’ said Wilde, looking at it poignantly. ‘Well, rather than starve you, I’ll forgive you.’ ‘And supposing I laugh again?’ ‘I shan’t forgive you,’ said Martin. The following morning Wilde gave him a formal ‘Apology’ written in his most high-spirited vein. When Martin praised it, his prisoner said he had resolved never to laugh again, and never to write in that manner again. ‘Then I thought it fitting when I had broken one vow to break the other also.’ But he became grave: ‘I am no longer the Sirius of Comedy. I have sworn solemnly to dedicate my life to Tragedy. If I write any more books, it will be to form a library of lamentation.… I shall be an enigma to the world of Pleasure, but a mouthpiece for the world of Pain.’17

  Wilde’s fame spread among the warders, and they began to bring literary questions to him. As Wilde told Will Rothenstein, one man asked him, ‘Excuse me, sir, but Charles Dickens, sir, would he be considered a great writer now, sir?’ Wilde replied, ‘Oh yes, a great writer, indeed; you see he is no longer alive.’ ‘Yes, I understand, sir, being dead he would be a great writer, sir.’ And on another visit the same questioner asked: ‘Excuse me, sir, but Marie Corelli, would she be considered a great writer, sir?’ ‘This was more than I could bear,’ Wilde said to Rothenstein, ‘and putting my hand on his shoulder I said: “Now don’t think I’ve anything against her moral character, but from the way she writes she ought to be here.” ’ ‘You say so, sir, you say so,’ said the warder, surprised but respectful.a18

  Evidence of stranger behavior has been preserved. One day Wilde was walking in the yard during the exercise period, which he would dub ‘The Fools’ Parade.’ Suddenly he saw one of the other prisoners stare at him meaningfully, and then join his arms over his forehead with the hands clasped together in a peculiar way. Wilde recognized the sign of the widow’s son, which obliged any Mason who saw it to try to minister to the distress of the man making the sign. The problem bothered him to the extent that he asked for an interview with Major Nelson, to whom he explained his difficulty. Nelson was equal to the problem, and procured a pair of dark-blue glasses for Wilde to wear during the exercise period, so that he would be unable to see the sign of the widow’s son.19

  Another day Wilde was walking the round when he heard somebody mutter, ‘What are you doing in this place, Dorian Gray?’ ‘Not Dorian Gray, but Lord Henry Wotton,’ said Wilde. The man whispered, ‘I was at all your first nights, and at all your trials,’ as if they were comparable dramatic performances. Wilde found out the man’s name and address, as he did of several other prisoners, so that he could send some gifts of money to them after his release. One of his letters to warder Thomas Martin indicates how he secured the information:

  You must get me his address some day—he is such a good fellow. Of course I would not for worlds get such a friend as you are into any danger. I quite understand your feelings.

  The Chronicle is capital today. You must get A S/2 to come out and clean on Saturday morning and I will give him my note then myself.

  To Martin he spoke more frankly, when attendance at the prison chapel came up: ‘I long to rise in my place and cry out, and tell the poor disinherited wretches around me that it is not so; to tell them they are society’s victims, and that society has nothing to offer them but starvation in the streets, or starvation and cruelty in prison!’20

  But all the same his irrepressible imagination played on Biblical stories. It was during these last months that he conceived new versions of the texts he had pored over during his first months in prison, when not much besides the Bible had been available. He reconstructed the story of Moses and the Pharaoh, in accordance with his own recent experiences:

  When the Pharaoh died, his daughter, who had rescued Moses in his ark of bulrushes from the river, was married to her own brother—the new ruler—in accordance with the law of Egypt. After a time Moses, bearing the words of Jehovah, came with his brother Aaron before the new Pharaoh. The great magician of the god of Israel transformed his rod into a serpent and covered with leprosy the hand with which he had sent out plagues over Egypt. Then the Queen entered, lamenting because her firstborn and heir to the throne had by command of the Eternal just died with all the firstborn of the men and
beasts of Egypt. And Moses wept with her, for she had been like a mother to him, but she rebuffed him, saying, ‘When you were a little child I saved you from the river waters filled with crocodiles, and yet my child has been taken from me by your word. So I myself, in saving you, killed my firstborn. I have given my child life and I have taken it away, for each of us ends by killing what we love. May I be accursed forever! Put upon me this leprosy which appears and disappears at your pleasure. Have the serpent which you rouse from the dead wood bite me.’ And Moses answered her: ‘O thou who wert to me like a mother, thou who saved me from the waters filled with crocodiles, no creature that suffers is out of harmony with the deepest secret of life, for the secret of life is suffering. Yes, it is hidden in all things. Because of thy son’s death Pharaoh has recognized the might of the people of Israel and will permit them to go whither their destiny leads them. Because of thy son’s death a predestined son can be born. In the scales of life and death, only the Eternal knows the weight of souls. Bear in mind this truth among all truths: ‘Worlds are built up out of suffering: there is suffering at the birth of a child as at the birth of a star.’

  He told a different and livelier version of this story to Ricketts, perhaps when that artist visited him in prison in April 1897. Ricketts remembered a terrible moment when the new Pharaoh cried out to Moses, ‘Praise be to thy God, O prophet, for he has slain my only enemy, my son!’21 Wilde was well aware, through the Queensberry family, that the impulse to kill the father could dovetail with an impulse to kill the son. Both illustrated the propensity to kill the thing we love.

  Two other stories, about betrayal, date from this period. The figure of Judas had always interested Wilde, from the time when he said, ‘It is always Judas who writes the biography.’ In one story, Judas was the most beloved of the disciples until Jesus recruited John and James. John, because of his sweetness, became the favorite. Judas was madly jealous. ‘And, because he loved Jesus and believed in him, Judas wished, even while he wrought his revenge, to allow him to fulfil the prophecies and to manifest his divinity. So it was that Judas betrayed because he had believed and because he had loved, for we always end by killing what we love.’ The other story, which Wilde recounted to André Gide soon after his release from prison, ran somewhat like this: