by Oscar Wilde
—Impressions of America”
The Bostonians take their learning too sadly; culture with them is an accomplishment rather than an atmosphere; their “Hub,” as they call it, is the paradise of prigs.
—“The American Invasion”
… though one can dine in New York, one could not dwell there.
—“The American Invasion”
“It is an odd thing, but everyone who disappears is said to be seen at San Francisco. It must be a delightful city, and possess all the attractions of the next world.”
—Lord Henry, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Ch. 19
Chapter 13
MARRIAGE
For an artist to marry his model is as fatal as for a gourmet to marry his cook: the one gets no sittings, and the other gets no dinners.
—“London Models”
I really don’t see anything romantic in proposing. It is very romantic to be in love. But there is nothing romantic about a definite proposal. Why, one may be accepted. One usually is, I believe. Then the excitement is all over. The very essence of romance is uncertainty. If I ever get married, I’ll certainly try to forget the fact.
—Algernon, The Importance of Being Earnest, Act 1
It is not customary in England, Miss Worsley, for a young lady to speak with such enthusiasm of any person of the opposite sex. Englishwomen conceal their feelings till after they are married. They show them then.
—Lady Caroline, A Woman of No Importance, Act 1
Men always want to be a woman’s first love. That is their clumsy vanity. We women have a more subtle instinct about things. What we like is to be a man’s last romance.
—Mrs. Allonby, A Woman of No Importance, Act 2
LORD GORING: Mabel, do be serious. Please be serious.
MABEL CHILTERN: Ah! that is the sort of thing a man always says to a girl before he has been married to her. He never says it afterwards.
—An Ideal Husband, Act 4
I have always been of opinion that a man who desires to get married should know either everything or nothing.
—Lady Bracknell, The Importance of Being Earnest, Act 1
One should always be in love. That is the reason one should never marry.
—Lord Illingworth, A Woman of No Importance, Act 3
Damme, sir, it is your duty to get married. You can’t be always living for pleasure.
—Lord Caversham, An Ideal Husband, Act 3
… if we men married the women we deserved, we should have a very bad time of it.
—Lord Goring, An Ideal Husband, Act 4
“My wife has a cold” but in about a month will be over it. I hope it is a boy cold, but will love whatever the gods send.
—Letter [May 20, 1885]; Wilde’s first son, Cyril, was born two weeks later
Our husbands never appreciate anything in us. We have to go to others for that!
—Mrs. Marchmont, An Ideal Husband, Act 1
“… the one charm of marriage is that it makes a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties. I never know where my wife is, and my wife never knows what I am doing. When we meet—we do meet occasionally, when we dine out together, or go down to the Duke’s—we tell each other the most absurd stories with the most serious faces.”
—Lord Henry, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Ch. 1
Well, there’s nothing in the world like the devotion of a married woman. It’s a thing no married man knows anything about.
—Cecil Graham, Lady Windermere’s Fan, Act 3
“What nonsense people talk about happy marriages. … A man can be happy with any woman, as long as he does not love her.”
—Lord Henry, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Ch. 15
The amount of women in London who flirt with their own husbands is perfectly scandalous. It looks so bad. It is simply washing one’s clean linen in public.
—Algernon, The Importance of Being Earnest, Act 1
It’s most dangerous nowadays for a husband to pay any attention to his wife in public. It always makes people think that he beats her when they’re alone. The world has grown so suspicious of anything that looks like a happy married life.
—Lady Plymdale, Lady Windermere’s Fan, Act 2
More marriages are ruined nowadays by the common sense of the husband than by anything else. How can a woman be expected to be happy with a man who insists on treating her as if she were a perfectly rational being?
—Mrs. Allonby, A Woman of No Importance, Act 2
Twenty years of romance make a woman look like a ruin; but twenty years of marriage make her something like a public building.
—Lord Illingworth, A Woman of No Importance, Act 1
Men marry because they are tired; women because they are curious. Both are disappointed.
—Lord Illingworth, A Woman of No Importance, Act 3
… the happiness of a married man … depends on the people he has not married.
—Lord Illingworth, A Woman of No Importance, Act 3
London is full of women who trust their husbands. One can always recognize them. They look so thoroughly unhappy.
—Lady Windermere, Lady Windermere’s Fan, Act 2
“Of course married life is merely a habit, a bad habit. But then one regrets the loss even of one’s worst habits. Perhaps one regrets them the most. They are such an essential part of one’s personality.”
—Lord Henry, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Ch. 19
Oh, there is only one real tragedy in a woman’s life. The fact that her past is always her lover, and her future invariably her husband.
—Mrs. Cheveley, An Ideal Husband, Act 3
“When a woman marries again it is because she detested her first husband. When a man marries again, it is because he adored his first wife. Women try their luck; men risk theirs.”
—Lord Henry, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Ch. 15
I suppose that when a man has once loved a woman, he will do anything for her, except continue to love her?
—Mrs. Cheveley, An Ideal Husband, Act 3
“Her capacity for family affection is extraordinary. When her third husband died, her hair turned quite gold from grief.”
—Lord Henry, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Ch. 15
… marriage is the one subject on which all women agree and all men disagree.
—“A Handbook to Marriage”
Chapter 14
SUFFERING AND IMPRISONMENT
Suffering—curious as it may sound to you—is the means by which we exist, because it is the only means by which we become conscious of existing …
—De Profundis
Misfortunes one can endure—they come from outside, they are accidents. But to suffer for one’s own faults—ah!—there is the sting of life.
—Lord Windermere, Lady Windermere’s Fan, Act 1
When I am in trouble, eating is the only thing that consoles me. Indeed, when I am in really great trouble, as anyone who knows me intimately will tell you, I refuse everything except food and drink. At the present moment I am eating muffins because I am unhappy. Besides, I am particularly fond of muffins.
—Algernon, The Importance of Being Earnest, Act 2
… I have come, not from obscurity into the momentary notoriety of crime, but from a sort of eternity of fame to a sort of eternity of infamy, and sometimes seem to myself to have shown, if indeed it required showing, that between the famous and infamous there is but one step, if as much as one.
—De Profundis
Society takes upon itself the right to inflict appalling punishment on the individual, but it also has the supreme vice of shallowness, and fails to realize what it has done.
—De Profundis
… where there is sorrow there is holy ground.
—Letter from prison [May 12, 1897]
I am not really ashamed of having been in prison: I often was in more shameful places: but I am really ashamed of having led a life unworthy of an artist.
—Letter [June 9,
1897]
… the secret of life is suffering. It is what is hidden behind everything. When we begin to live, what is sweet is so sweet to us, and what is bitter is so bitter, that we inevitably direct all our desires towards pleasures, and seek not merely for a “month or twain to feed on honeycomb,” but for all our years to taste no other food, ignorant all the while that we may really be starving the soul.
—De Profundis
As one reads history … one is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed, but by the punishments that the good have inflicted; and a community is infinitely more brutalised by the habitual employment of punishment, than it is by the occasional occurrence of crime.
—“The Soul of Man under Socialism”
The intense energy of creation has been kicked out of me.
—Letter [August 24, 1897]
There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves we feel that no one else has a right to blame us. It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution.
—The Picture of Dorian Gray, Ch. 8
The vilest deeds like poison weeds,
Bloom well in prison-air;
It is only what is good in Man
That wastes and withers there …
—“The Ballad of Reading Gaol,” Part 5
“Never attempt to reform a man. Men never repent. To punish a man for wrong-doing, with a view to his reformation, is the most lamentable mistake it is possible to commit. If he has any soul at all, such procedure is calculated to make him ten times worse than before. It is a sign of a noble nature to refuse to be broken by force.”
—Wilde, as quoted in conversation [OW]
There is the same world for all of us, and good and evil, sin and innocence, go through it hand in hand. To shut one’s eyes to half of life that one may live securely is as though one blinded oneself that one might walk with more safety in a land of pit and precipice.
—Lady Windermere, Lady Windermere’s Fan, Act 4
Actions are the first tragedy in life, words are the second. Words are perhaps the worst. Words are merciless.
—Lady Windermere, Lady Windermere’s Fan, Act 4
Do you really think … that it is weakness that yields to temptation? I tell you that there are terrible temptations that it requires strength, strength and courage, to yield to. To stake all one’s life on a single moment, to risk everything on one throw, whether the stake be power or pleasure, I care not—there is no weakness in that. There is a horrible, a terrible courage.
—Sir Robert Chiltern, An Ideal Husband, Act 2
All I know is that life cannot be understood without much charity, cannot be lived without much charity. It is love, and not German philosophy, that is the true explanation of this world, whatever may be the explanation of the next.
—Lord Goring, An Ideal Husband, Act 2
Suffering is one very long moment. We cannot divide it by seasons. We can only record its moods, and chronicle their return. With us time itself does not progress. It revolves. It seems to circle round one centre of pain.
—De Profundis
A patriot put in prison for loving his country loves his country, and a poet in prison for loving boys loves boys. To have altered my life would have been to have admitted that Uranian love is ignoble. I hold it to be noble—more noble than other forms.
—Letter [February 18, 1898]
That a Court of Law should decide that I am unfit to be with my own children is so terrible that to expunge it from the scroll of History and of Life I would gladly remain in this lonely cell for two more years—oh! for ten years if needs be. I don’t care to live if I am so degraded that I am unfit to be with my own child.
—Letter from prison [May 13, 1897]
… the many prisons of life—prisons of stone, prisons of passion, prisons of intellect, prisons of morality, and the rest. All limitations, external or internal, are prison-walls, and life is a limitation.
—Letter [c. February 20, 1898]
I envy the other men who tread the yard along with me. I am sure that their children wait for them, look for their coming, will be sweet to them.
—De Profundis
The poor are wiser, more charitable, more kind, more sensitive than we are. In their eyes prison is a tragedy in a man’s life, a misfortune, a casualty, something that calls for sympathy in others. They speak of one who is in prison as of one who is “in trouble” simply. It is the phrase they always use, and the expression has the perfect wisdom of love in it. With people of our own rank it is different. With us, prison makes a man a pariah.
—De Profundis
Here I have the horror of death with the still greater horror of living …
—Letter from prison [March 10, 1896]
There are many good nice fellows here. … I go out with an adder in my heart, and an asp in my tongue, and every night I sow thorns in the garden of my soul.
—Letter from prison [May 17, 1897]
… horrible as all the physical privations of modern prison life are, they are as nothing compared to the entire privation of literature to one to whom Literature was once the first thing of life, the mode by which perfection could be realised, by which, and by which alone, the intellect could feel itself alive.
—Letter from prison [July 2, 1896]
The mind is forced to think, and when it is deprived of the conditions necessary for healthy intellectual activity, such as books, writing materials, companionship, contact with the living world, and the like, it becomes, in case of those who are suffering from sensual monomanias, the sure prey of morbid passions, and obscene fancies, and thoughts that defile, desecrate and destroy.
—Letter from prison [July 2, 1896]
Suffering is a terrible fire; it either purifies or destroys: perhaps I may be a better fellow after it all.
—Letter [c. May 22, 1897]
Crimes may be forgotten or forgiven, but vices live on: they make their dwelling house in him who by horrible mischance or fate has become their victim: they are embedded in his flesh: they spread over him like a leprosy: they feed on him like a strange disease: at the end they become an essential part of the man … and prison life, by its horrible isolation from all that could save a wretched soul, hands the victim over, like one bound hand and foot, to be possessed and polluted by the thoughts he most loathes and so cannot escape them.
—Letter from prison [July 2, 1896]
Dreadful as are the results of the prison system—a system so terrible that it hardens their hearts whose hearts it does not break, and brutalises those who have to carry it out no less than those who have to submit to it—yet at least amongst its aims is not the desire to wreck the human reason.
—Letter from prison [July 2, 1896]
… when a wretched man is in prison, the people who are outside either treat him as if he was dead, and dispose of his effects, or treat him as if he was a lunatic, and pretend to carry out his wishes and don’t, or regard him as an idiot, to be humoured, and tell him silly and unnecessary lies, or look on him as a thing so low, so degraded, as to have no feelings at all …
—Letter from prison [May 13, 1897]
Kind words are much in prison, and a pleasant “Good-morning” or “Good-evening” will make one as happy as one can be in prison.
—Letter [May 27, 1897]
… one should never accept any sort of kindness. People regret their good actions. That is the point to which the moral sense ultimately arrives.
—Letter [July 1898]
In point of fact, describing a prison is as difficult artistically as describing a water-closet would be. If one had to describe the latter in literature, prose or verse, one could merely say it was well, or badly, papered: or clean or the reverse: the horror of prison is that everything is so simple and commonplace in itself, and so degrading, and hideous, and revolting in its effect.
—Letter [October 8, 1897]
My writing has gone to bits—like m
y character. I am simply a self-conscious nerve in pain.
—Letter [March 17, 1898]
… while to propose to be a better man is a piece of unscientific cant, to have become a deeper man is the privilege of those who have suffered. And such I think I have become.
—De Profundis
I often wonder what would have happened to those in pain if, instead of Christ, there had been a Christian.
—Letter [July 1898]
What astonishes and interests me about my present position is that the moment the world’s forces begin to persecute anyone they never leave off. This seems to me a historical fact, as well as an interesting psychological problem. To leave off a persecution is to admit that one has been wrong, and the world will never do that. Also, the world is angry because their punishment has had no effect. They wished to be able to say “We have done a capital thing for Oscar Wilde: by putting him in prison we have put a stop to his friendship with Alfred Douglas and all that that implies.” But now they find that they have not had that effect, that they merely treated me barbarously, but did not influence me, they simply ruined me, so they are furious.