Wilde – Each Man Kills The Thing He Loves

Please let us hear no more of the tragedy of Oscar Wilde … Oscar was no tragedian. He was the superb comedian of the century, one to whom misfortune, disgrace and imprisonment were external yet traumatic.

His gaiety of soul was invulnerable; it shines through the blackest pages of De Profundis as clearly as in his wittiest epigraph. Even on his deathbed he found himself in no pity, ‘playing for a laugh with his last breath, and getting it with as sure a stroke as in his balmiest days’, according to George Bernard Shaw. He belongs to our world. Now beyond the reach of scandal, he comes before us still, a towering figure, laughing and weeping with parables and paradoxes, ‘so generous, so amusing and so right’ – the last lines of Richard Ellmann’s essential biography.

Wilde was born in October 1854, in Dublin, to Sir William Wilde, a noted eye surgeon and prolific writer (not only of articles for scientific journals, but also of literary criticism), and Jane Francesca Elgee, who believed she could trace her family back to Dante. She was a published poet, and expert on Celtic myths, a passionate republican, a kind of maternal Maud Gonne who penned such inflammatory political satire under the magnificent pseudonym of Speranza that she twice came close to being tried for sedition. It must not be forgotten, wrote Shaw, that though by culture Wilde was a citizen of all civilised capitals, he was a very Irish Irishman and, as such, a foreigner everywhere but in Ireland.

Well, the Irish foreigner would write the greatest English drawing-room comedy, an indisputable masterpiece, aged forty-one. The Importance of Being Earnest, written in three weeks, opened in triumph on Valentine’s Day in 1895.

A highly celebrated playwright, Wilde was one of the greatest of the Victorian era. Lady Windermere’s Fan in 1892, A Woman of No Importance in 1893, An Ideal Husband in 1895, the first night attended by the Prince of Wales. As Wilde said himself on that glorious first night of An Ideal Husband, he was ‘The King of Life’.

A recognised scholar, winner at Trinity College Dublin of the Berkeley Gold Medal for Greek, he won a scholarship to Oxford. The Irish scholar John Mahaffy was meant to have said: ‘Off you go, off to Oxford, Oscar – you’re not clever enough for us here.’ He was clever enough to get a double first.

In 1878, he won the Newdigate Prize for poetry at Oxford for his long poem ‘Ravenna’. Leader of the aesthetic movement, lampooned in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience, one must remember the dandy in velvet breeches was well over six foot and very strong …

He was editor, for a time, of The Woman’s World, published by Cassell’s. When asked by a fellow editor, ‘How often do you go to the office?’ he replied, ‘Three times a week for an hour a day. But I have since struck off one of those days – and I never answer the letters. I have known men come to London with bright prospects and seen them complete wrecks in a few months through a habit of answering letters.’
Wilde was an essayist. ‘The Decay of Lying’, ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism’. A novelist, whose Picture of Dorian Gray, though attacked by the critics as ‘vile’ and ‘leprous’, was surreptitiously read and admired all of Europe. A short-story writer: ‘The Happy Prince’, ‘Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime’. ‘The greatest conversationalist I have ever heard’, according to Max Beerbohm. ‘The best of his writing is only a pale reflection of his conversation’, said André Gide.

This genius became clear on his hugely successful lecture tour of America, where at one stage he lectured the miners in Leadville in the Rocky Mountains on Florentine art. They were, he said, the best-dressed men in America. When asked later had his audience not been rather rough, he said: ‘Ready, but not rough. The revolver is their book of etiquette – it teaches lessons that are not forgotten.’ A Man respectably married, to Constance Lloyd, lovely daughter of a Dublin solicitor. They had two sons, Cyril and Vyvyan.

On 18 February 1895 the Marquess of Queensberry, whose eldest son Viscount Drumlanrig had four months earlier been killed by the discharge of his gun at a shooting party (which many believed was due to the threatening emergence of a previously repressed homosexual scandal), left at the Albemarle Club a card bearing the words: ‘For Oscar Wilde, posing as a Sodomite’. In fact, he’d misspelt the word. Queensberry was enraged that his youngest son Lord Alfred Douglas, known as Bosie, twenty-four, incredibly handsome, talented and vicious, was undoubtedly the subject of gossip about his relationship with Oscar Wilde. The hall porter put the card in an envelope. Ten days later it was found by Wilde.

Why did Wilde not throw the card away?

‘The question,’ he once wrote, ‘arises a long time after the answer.’

Wilde immediately sent to his great friend Robbie Ross, possibly the greatest friend in literary history, a note which ended with the words: ‘The tower of ivory is assailed by the foul thing. On the sands is my life split.’ No it wasn’t. Not then …

These are the words of a man who not only seems to sense ruin but has already accepted it. Later he wrote, in an insight of the artist into his own work: ‘It was foreshadowed in my plays.’ In each play someone has a secret, the truth of which may destroy them or someone close to them. In each play catastrophe is averted, but as we know, not in life.

Though advised not to, Wilde sued for libel. And while the Marquess of Queensberry and his legal team worked feverishly with private detectives to investigate more fully the dangerous double life of Oscar Wilde, he, in an act of arrogant folly, went with Bosie to Monte Carlo, spending money with reckless abandon. It was madness bordering on self-destructive. It is as wrong to canonise him as it was to demonise him.

On a visit to André Gide, who advised him not to return to England, Wilde protested: ‘I must go on. Something must happen, something else, and I have no interest in happiness, pleasure. One must always seek the most tragic.’ Gide would write later: ‘Nietzsche was no shock to me. After all, I’d listened to Oscar Wilde.’

On 3 April Oscar Wilde appeared before Mr Justice Henn-Collins – ‘Despite the stunning brilliance with which Wilde gave vent to his polished paradoxes with careless nonchalance,’ reported one newspaper, he lost the libel case. He was arrested the same day and held at Holloway.

The trial opened on 26 April, he was found not guilty on some counts, and was then recharged. He took refuge for a time in his mother’s house, where she and his brother Willie urged him to behave like an Irish hero and face the music. This had proved an effective tactic in their family history – his father had survived a court case concerning the alleged seduction under chloroform of a female patient. ‘Wildes don’t run’ seemed to be the message.

Though begged by friends to leave, it was Bosie who urged Wilde to fight it and Bosie’s hated father the Marquess, all the way. This he did. ‘I have never doubted he was right to do so,’ said Yeats. In Irish Peacock & Scarlet Marquess, based on the transcript of the trial which, with many other fascinating items, are in the British Library archive, Merlin Holland, Wilde’s grandson, makes clear that Oscar now saw himself as defender of the freedom of the artists and eloquent defender of the affection the artist can feel for a wonderful and beautiful person – or mind. Wilde was emphatic at his trial that accusations of homosexuality against him were false.

He lied. ‘The love that dare not speak its name’ – not Wilde’s line, but that of Bosie, from his very good ‘Two Loves’ – came at a high price.

Oscar Wilde was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment, with hard labour. He almost collapsed when the sentence was handed down. His life was now indeed split upon the ground; it had taken precisely twelve weeks to destroy him.

After a short time in Wandsworth Prison Wilde was taken to Reading Gaol – where he did not write The Ballad, but where, day after day, sheet by sheet (he was allowed one page per day), he wrote De Profundis, an essential precursor to The Ballad. It is mostly – though there are some passages of self-pity – a ferocious examination of conscience.

He found himself guilty of having become ‘the spendthrift of my own genius … What the paradox was to me in the sphere of thought, perversity became to me in the sphere of passion. Desire at the end, was a malady, or a madness, or both. I grew careless of the lives of others. I took pleasure where it pleased me and passed on.’

He knowingly feasted with panthers. ‘The danger,’ he said, ‘was half the excitement.’ De Profundis ends with the lines to Bosie: ‘Perhaps I am chosen to teach you something much more wonderful, the meaning of Sorrow and its beauty.’

Sorrow courses through The Ballad of Reading Gaol. That, and pity. It is Pity to a Purpose – it was written over a period of ten days when Wilde was living in France under the name of Sebastian Melmoth, the satanic hero of Charles Maturin’s hugely influential Melmoth the Wanderer. Maturin was related to him on his mother’s side.

Wilde, the man who believed in ‘Art for Art’s sake’, and wished to burn as Walter Pater admonished, ‘with a hard, gem-like flame’, had now written a poem of humility and compassion. It is ‘a nearly great poem’ said Yeats … for Yeats believed Wilde had identified too much with his subject. Of the line ‘Yet each man kills the thing he loves’, Wilde once said ‘treachery is inseparable from faith. I often betray myself with a kiss.’ And when editing The Oxford Book of Modern Poetry, Yeats excised those famous lines. Now Yeats, in fact, is right that The Ballad is finally amongst the great, and Oscar the artist was of course aware of the artistic price of this identification. Seamus Heaney in his brilliant, provocatively titled ‘Speranza in Reading Gaol’ believed that in this poem Wilde became the kind of propagandist poet Speranza had been, and Wilde had always admired her nobility of purpose. Indeed, Heaney’s essay opens with the famous aphorism ‘All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That is his.’

The reason the poem will last, and the reason for its power, is because, as Heaney argues: ‘In the gathering force of its lamentation there lies a plea which is uniquely disturbing.’ It is poetry as a means of redress, and Oscar Wilde was well aware, as Ellmann points out, of the elements of propaganda. As to the prison conditions of the time, there was much to redress. Oscar Wilde spent six hours a day on the treadmill. His hands were torn to shreds by the picking of oakum. The sanitary conditions were so appalling that prisoners continually suffered the humiliation of diarrhoea. Books were forbidden. The one-hour walk per day had to be undertaken in silence – the punishment for breaking this rule was solitary confinement; double for the man who spoke first – a Kafkaesque note. However, the poem is not about Wilde’s suffering; it is about the terror, love and pity he and every other inmate felt for the man who’s got to swing. His name was Charles Thomas Wooldridge. ‘The man’s face,’ he said ‘will haunt me till I die.’ And in that horror lies the moral force of the poem – against capital punishment.

The poem, whose title was suggested by Robbie Ross, was published on 9 February 1898 by ‘the most learned erotomaniac in Europe’, Leonard Smithers, who published it when no one would touch anything by Wilde. Indeed no one would touch Wilde. Period.

So savage had been the reaction of society, that his wife Constance (poor kind Constance who’d travelled to Reading Gaol from Italy to tell Oscar personally of Speranza’s death) had been forced to change her name and that of the children to Holland, an old family name. From the day of his arrest Oscar Wilde never saw his children again.

The poem was published as written by C 3.3, Wilde’s cell number, Cell 3 on the third landing. The print run of four thousand was sold out in days – so at last a little good news for Oscar. It was reprinted, and sold brilliantly. The last edition in his lifetime bore his name – his publisher Smithers saying to him, ‘I think the time has now come when you should own “The Ballad”, Oscar.’

It was about all he did own. He had little money. He’d of course been declared bankrupt. His house was ransacked after the trial. Constance offered a small allowance, conditional on his not seeing Bosie. This, Wilde refused to do. It was, as Ellmann says, ‘a beserk passion’.

Within a short period of time his family was decimated. His brother, Willie, died. Constance died. When he visited her grave in Genoa, he said: ‘Life is a very terrible thing.’

The Marquess of Queensberry had died the same year, and in The Times his obituary was longer than that of Oscar Wilde’s – though much, much shorter than Bosie’s, ‘a Poet of Distinction’ – who amazingly went to prison for libel. While in prison, he wrote a poem – his answer to De ProfundisIn Excelsis. Wilde whose ‘gaiety of soul’, as Shaw noted, was ‘invulnerable’, would have smiled.

Few men have ever known such dizzying heights; few have fallen so far, so fast.

None in the depths of humiliation and grief have found such sweetness, such generosity and pity for the human condition as are found in this poem. That is why, perhaps, there are always fresh flowers on Wilde’s grave in the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris, where his body lies under Jacob Epstein’s beautiful monument bearing the words:
And alien tears will fill for him
Pity’s long-broken urn.

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