“To the memory of one who by some strange madness, beyond understanding, made shipwreck of his own life and of the life of others; one of whom the world speaks in whispers, but of whom I say openly that I never heard an objectionable word from his lips and saw in him at no time anything more vicious than vanity; to the memory of

Oscar Wilde,

actor (in a great life tragedy as in everything else), artist (in more crafts than one, including flattery), poet, critic, convict, genius, and, as I knew him, gentleman: I dedicate these pages in memory of many kindnesses.”

In these words I wished, soon after Wilde’s death, to dedicate a book, but the publisher of the book in question was obdurate. He would not, he said, have Wilde’s name on the dedication page of any work issued by him, and went so far as to urge me not to fulfil the intention I had even then formed of one day writing a chapter on Oscar Wilde as I knew him. Yet in Oscar Wilde as I knew him, as stated in the above dedication, except for his vanity there was no offence. The preface, since my relations with the publisher of whom I speak were pleasant and friendly, I withdrew. If I have let sixteen years elapse before writing the chapter, it was for no other reason than that I felt the thing could wait—would perhaps be the better for waiting—and that the pressure of other work kept me employed.

But one day a man, who to my knowledge has eaten Wilde’s salt and received many kindnesses from him in the season of Wilde’s prosperity, called to see me concerning some literary project. On my shelves are books given and inscribed to me by Wilde and signed “from his sincere friend,” and on my mantelshelf stands a portrait similarly inscribed and signed. Seeing this portrait, my caller observed:

“If I were you I should put that thing out of sight, and, if you happen at any time to hear his name mentioned, I should keep the fact that he had been a friend of yours to yourself.”

That decided me to write my long delayed chapter. I begin by a protest. In his very interesting Notes from a Painter’s Life, my friend Mr. C.E. HallÉ speaks of Wilde’s “repulsive appearance.” At the time of Wilde’s conviction some of the sketches of him, presumably made in court and published in certain prints, did so portray him, possibly because, as he was just then being held up to public execration, so to picture him fitted in with the popular conception. Mr. HallÉ wrote “after the event” of Wilde’s downfall, when it is easy not only to be wise, but also to see in the outer man some signs of the evil within. But from the statement that Wilde’s appearance was “repulsive” I entirely dissent. It is true there was a flabby fleshiness of face and neck, a bulkiness of body, an animality about the large and pursy lips—which did not close naturally, but in a hard, indrawn and archless line—that suggested self-indulgence, but did not to me suggest vice. Otherwise, except for this fleshiness and for the animality of the mouth, I saw no evil in Wilde’s face. The forehead, what was visible of it—for he disposed brown locks of his thick and carefully parted hair over either temple—was high and finely formed. The nose was well shaped, the nostrils close and narrow—not open and “breathing” as generally seen in highly sensitive men. The eyes were peculiar, the almond-shaped lids being minutely out of alignment. I mean by this that the lids were so cut and the eyes so set in the head that the outer corners of the lids drooped downwards very slightly and towards the ears, as seen sometimes in Orientals. Liquid, soft, large and smiling, Wilde’s eyes, if they seemed to see all things—life, death, other mortals and most of all himself—half banteringly, met one’s own eyes frankly. His smile seemed to me to come from his eyes, not from his lips, which he tightened rather than relaxed in laughter. His general expression—always excepting the mouth, which, its animality notwithstanding, had none of the cruelty which goes so often with sensuality—was kindly.

The best portrait I have seen of Wilde is one in my possession which has never been published. It was taken when he was the guest of the late Lady Palmer (then Mrs. Walter Palmer), with whom I had at the time some acquaintance. She was a close friend of Wilde (who christened her “Moonbeam”) and of George Meredith (whom she sometimes half-seriously, half-playfully spoke of as “The Master”). In the portrait, Lady Palmer is seated with Meredith, Mrs. Jopling Rowe being seated on her right and Mr. H.B. Irving on her left. Behind Meredith’s chair stands Wilde with Miss Meredith (afterwards Mrs. Julian Sturgis), Sir J. Forbes-Robertson, and I think Mr. David Bisham on his right. The portrait of Wilde, if grave, is frank, untroubled, and attractive, for, when he chose to be serious, the large lines of his face and features sobered into a repose and into a massiveness which were not without dignity. Too often, however, Dignity suddenly let fall her cloak, and Vanity, naked and unashamed, was revealed in her place.

Yet there is this to be said of Wilde’s vanity, that its very nakedness was its best excuse. A loin-cloth, a fig-leaf would have offended, but it was so artlessly naked that one merely smiled and passed on. Moreover, it was never a jealous or a malicious vanity. It was so occupied in admiring itself in the mirror that the smile on its face was never distorted into a scowl at sight of another’s success. Wilde’s vanity, I repeat, was as entirely free from venom as was his wit. No one’s comments on society, on the men and women he met, the authors he read, were more incisive or more caustic, but I remember none in which the thought was slanderous or the intention spiteful.

A propos of Wilde’s vanity, here is a story told me long ago by Lieutenant-Colonel Spencer, who then held a post of some sort in connection with the Masters in Lunacy. Visiting the Zoological Gardens one day—in his private capacity, I assume, not in connection with the Lunacy Commission—he entered the Monkey House. Within the big cement wire enclosure a certain liveliness—the war phrase seems to have come to stay—was evident. What it was all about Colonel Spencer did not know, but with one exception the occupants were very excited, leaping wildly from end to end of the cage, and from top to bottom, jabbering, groaning, snarling, emitting shrill shrieks of terror or hoarse howls of rage.

The one exception was an evil-looking and elderly monkey which sat humped and brooding in a corner, absolutely motionless except for the twitching of his nostrils and the angry way in which he switched his eyes first upon what he apparently thought to be the staring human idiots outside, and then at the capering and noisy monkey imbeciles within. “What’s the matter with that monkey?” Colonel Spencer inquired of a keeper. “Is he ill? He seems too bored even to scratch.” The keeper shook his head. “No, he isn’t ill, sir,” he answered. “Wot’s the matter with ’im, sir? Why, wanity.” Then stirring up the sulking monkey with his cane, he added, “’Ere, get up—Hoscar Wilde!”

One day it was Wilde’s caprice to amuse himself by talking the most blatantly insincere nonsense, directed against my own political views, and deliberately intended to “draw” me. He was in his most exasperating mood, exuding, or affecting to exude, egotism at every pore, and fondling, or making pretence to fondle, his vanity as some spinsters fondle a favourite cat. At last I could stand it no longer, and wickedly told him the story of Colonel Spencer’s visit to the Monkey House at the Zoo and the keeper’s comment about the sulky monkey. “Wot’s the matter with ’im, sir? Why, wanity. ’Ere, get up—Hoscar Wilde.”

So far from being annoyed, Wilde simply rocked, or affected to rock with delight.

“I hoped once,” he said, “to live to see a new shape in chrysanthemums or sunflowers, or possibly a new colour in roses, blue for choice, called after me. But that one’s name should percolate even to the Zoological Gardens, that it should come naturally to the lips of a keeper in the Monkey House, is fame indeed. Do remind me to tell George Alexander the story. It will make him so dreadfully jealous.”

And I answered grimly:

“Your game, Wilde!”

II

My friendship with Wilde was literary in its beginnings. Flattered vanity on my part possibly contributed not a little to it, for when I was a young and—if that be possible—a more obscure man even than I am now, Wilde, already famous, was one of the very first to speak an encouraging word. Here is the first letter I received from him:

16 Tite Street, Chelsea.

Dear Mr. Kernahan,

If you have nothing to do on Wednesday, will you come and dine at the Hotel de Florence, Rupert Street, at 7.45—morning dress, and chianti yellow or red! I am charmed to see your book is having so great a success. It is strong and fine and true. Your next book will be a great book.

Truly yours,
Oscar Wilde.

This letter, it will be observed, is undated. Apparently Wilde never dated his letters, for of all the letters of his which I have preserved not a solitary one bears a date, other perhaps than the name of the day of the week on which it was written, and that only rarely. He had the impudence once at a dinner-party, when taken to task by a great lady for not having answered a letter, to reply:

“But, my dear lady, I never answer or write letters. Ask my friend there, whose faithful correspondent I am.” Then turning to me, he said, “Tell Lady —— when you heard from me last.”

As I had heard from him that morning, I dissembled by saying:

“How can I answer that, Wilde, for among my other discoveries of the eccentricities of genius I have discovered that genius, at least as represented by you, never dates its letters. I never had one from you that was dated.”

Not long after the receipt of this first letter, I proposed to write what I may call a “grown-up fairy story,” and asked Wilde whether I might borrow as sub-title a phrase I had once heard him use of a fairy tale of his own making—“A Story for Children from Eight to Eighty.” He replied as follows, then, as always, with a capital D for “dear”:

16 Tite Street,
Chelsea, S.W.

My Dear Kernahan,

I am only too pleased that any little phrase of mine will find a place in any title you may give to any story. Use it, of course. I am sure your story will be delightful. Hoping to see you soon.

Your friend,
Oscar Wilde.

My story written and published, I despatched it cap in hand to carry my acknowledgments to the teller of supremely lovely fairy stories—imagined, not invented—from whom my own drab and homespun-clad little tale had impudently “lifted” a beautiful sub-title to wear, a borrowed plume, in its otherwise undecorated hat.

Here is Wilde’s very characteristic reply. It needs no signature to indicate the writer. No other author of the day would have written thus graciously and thus generously:

16 Tite Street,
Chelsea, S.W.

My Dear Kernahan,

I should have thanked you long ago for sending me your charming Fairy Tale, but the season with its red roses of pleasure has absorbed me quite and I have almost forgotten how to write a letter. However, I know you will forgive me, and I must tell you how graceful and artistic I think your story is—full of delicate imagination, and a symbolism suggestive of many meanings, not narrowed down to one moral, but many-sided, as I think symbolism should be.

But your strength lies not in such graceful winsome work. You must deal directly with Life—modern terrible Life—wrestle with it, and force it to yield you its secret. You have the power and the pen. You know what passion is, what passions are. You can give them their red raiment and make them move before us. You can fashion puppets with bodies of flesh and souls of turmoil, and so you must sit down and do a great thing.

It is all in you.

Your sincere friend,
Oscar Wilde.

That Wilde was an artist in flattery as well as an egotist, is not to be denied, but when quite early in our friendship I was shown by a certain woman poet a presentation copy of Wilde’s book of poems inscribed “To a poet and a poem,” and within the next few weeks saw upon a table in the drawing-room of a very beautiful and singularly accomplished woman, the late Rosamund Marriott-Watson (“Graham Tomson”), who was a friend of Wilde’s and mine, a fine portrait of himself also inscribed “To a poet and a poem,” I was not so foolish as to take too seriously the flattering things he said.

Egotist as Wilde was, his was not the expansive egotism which, in spreading its wings to invite admiration, seeks to eclipse and to shut out its fellow egotists from their own little place in the sun. Most egotists are eager only for flattery and applause. Wilde was equally eager, but he was ready for the time being to forget himself and his eagerness in applauding and flattering others. Not many egotists of my acquaintance, especially literary egotists, write letters like that I have quoted, in which there is no word of himself, or of his own work, but only of his friend.

The last letter I ever received from Wilde is in the same vein. It is as usual undated, but as the play to which it refers was his first, Lady Windermere’s Fan, I am, by the assistance of Mr. Stuart Mason’s admirably compiled Oscar Wilde Calendar, enabled to fix the date as the middle of February, 1892.

Hotel Albemarle,
Piccadilly, London.

My Dear Kernahan,

Will you come and see my play Thursday night. I want it to be liked by an artist like you.

Yours ever,
O. W.

Wilde came to see me, I think, the morning after the production of the play, or at all events within a morning or two after, and hugged himself with delight when, in reply to his question, “Do tell me what you admired most in the play,” I said:

“Your impudence! To dare to come before the footlights in response to enthusiastic calls—smoking a cigarette too—and compliment a British audience on having the unexpected good taste—for your manner said as plainly as it could, ‘Really, my dear people, I didn’t think you had it in you!’—to appreciate a work of art on its merits! You are a genius, Wilde, in impudence at least if in nothing else.”

“And you are a plagiarist as well as a flatterer,” he replied. “You stole that last remark from a story you have heard me tell about Richard Le Gallienne. I’m going to punish you by telling you the story, for, though you stole part of it, I am sure you have never heard it. No one ever has heard the story he steals and calls his own; no one ever has read—the odds are that he will swear he has never heard of—the book from which he has plagiarised. Our friend Richard is very beautiful, isn’t he? Wasn’t it you who told me that Swinburne described him to you as ‘Shelley with a chin’? I don’t agree. Swinburne might just as well have described himself as ‘Shelley without a chin.’ No, it is the Angel Gabriel in Rossetti’s National Gallery painting of the Annunciation of which Richard reminds me. The hair, worn long and fanning out into a wonderful halo around the head, always reminds me of Rossetti’s angel. However, my story is that an American woman, in that terribly crude way that Americans have, asked Richard, ‘Why do you wear your hair so long, Mr. Le Gallienne?’ Richard is sometimes brilliant as well as always beautiful, but on this occasion he could think of nothing less banal and foolish to say than ‘Perhaps, dear lady, for advertisement.’ ‘But you, Mr. Le Gallienne! You who have such genius!’ Richard blushed and bowed and smiled until the lady added cruelly—‘for advertisement!’”

Wilde was quite right in saying I had heard the story before. It had been told me as happening to himself in America in the days when he wore his own hair very long, and I am of opinion that it was much more likely to have happened to Wilde, who was both a notoriety hunter and an advertiser, than to Le Gallienne, who is neither.

A propos of Wilde’s love of advertising, I once heard the fact commented upon—perhaps rudely and crudely—to Wilde himself. Just as I was about to enter the Savage Club in company with a Brother Savage, who was well known as an admirer of Dickens, we encountered Wilde, and I invited him to join us at lunch.

“In the usual way,” he answered, “I should say that I was charmed, but out of compliment to our friend here, I will for once condescend to quote that dreadful and tedious person Dickens and answer, ‘Barkis is willin’.’ Where are you lunching—Romano’s?”

“No,” I said, “the Savage Club.”

“Oh, the Savage Club,” said Wilde. “I never enter the Savage Club. It tires me so. It used to be gentlemanly Bohemian, but ever since the Prince of Wales became a member and sometimes dines there, it is nothing but savagely snobbish. Besides, the members are all supposed to be professionally connected with Literature, Science, and Art, and I abhor professionalism of every sort.”

My Dickens friend, who shares every Savage’s love for the old club (he told me afterwards, whether correctly or not I do not know, that Wilde’s aversion was due to the fact that his brother Willie Wilde had unsuccessfully put up for membership), was annoyed by what Wilde had said both about the club and about Charles Dickens.

“I can understand your dislike of professionalism—in advertisement, Mr. Wilde,” he said bluntly. “And, since you have condescended to stoop to quote Dickens, I may add that, in the matter of advertisement, Barkis as represented by Wilde is not only willing but more than Mr. Willing the advertising agent himself. Good morning.”

One other story of Wilde and Le Gallienne occurs to me. Wilde held Le Gallienne, as I do, in warm liking as a friend and in genuine admiration as a poet; but, meeting him one day at a theatre, bowed gravely and coldly and made as if to pass on. Le Gallienne stopped to say something, and, noticing the aloofness of Wilde’s manner, inquired:

“What is the matter, Oscar? Have I offended you in anything?”

“Not offended so much as very greatly pained me, Richard,” was the stern reply.

“I pained you! In what way?”

“You have brought out a new book since I saw you last.”

“Yes, what of it?”

“You have treated me very badly in your book, Richard.”

“I treated you badly in my book!” protested Le Gallienne in amazement. “You must be confusing my book with somebody else’s. My last book was The Religion of a Literary Man. I’m sure you can’t have read it, or you wouldn’t say I had treated you badly.”

“That’s the very book; I have read every word of it,” persisted Wilde, “and your treatment of me in that book is infamous and brutal. I couldn’t have believed it of you, Richard—such friends as we have been too!”

“I treated you badly in my Religion of a Literary Man?” said Le Gallienne impatiently. “You must be dreaming, man. Why, I never so much as mentioned you in it.”

“That’s just it, Richard,” said Wilde, smilingly.

Here is a recollection of another sort. About the time when Wilde’s star was culminating, he boarded a Rhine steamer on the deck of which I was sitting. The passengers included a number of Americans, one of whom instantly recognised Wilde, and seating himself beside the new-comer, inquired:

“Guess, sir, you are the great Mr. Oscar Wilde about whom every one is talking?”

Smilingly, but not without an assumption of the bland boredom which he occasionally adopted toward strangers of whom he was uncertain, Wilde assented. The other, an elderly man wearing a white cravat, may or may not at some time have been connected with a church. Possibly he was then editing some publication, religious or otherwise, and in his time may have done some interviewing, for he plied Wilde with many curious and even over-curious questions concerning his movements, views, and projects. The latter, amused at first, soon tired. His eyes wandered from his interviewer to scan the faces of the passengers, and catching sight of me made as if to rise and join me.

The interviewer, who had not yet done with him, and was something of a strategist, cut off Wilde’s retreat by a forward movement of himself and the deck-chair, in which he was sitting, so as to block the way. It was apparently merely the unconscious hitching of one’s seat a little nearer to an interesting companion, the better to carry on the conversation, but it was adroitly followed by a very flattering remark in the form of a question, and Wilde relapsed lumpily into his seat to answer. For the next few minutes I could have imagined myself watching a game of “living chess.” Wilde, evidently wearying, wished to move his king, as represented by himself, across the board and into the square adjacent to myself, but for every “move” he made his adversary pushed forward another conversational “piece” to call a check. At last, shaking his head in laughing remonstrance, Wilde rose, and the other, seeing the game was up, did the same.

“It has been a real pleasure and honour to meet you, sir,” he said. “Guess when I get home and tell my wife I’ve talked to the great Oscar Wilde she won’t believe me. If you would just write your autograph there, I’d take it as a kindness.” He had been searching his pockets while speaking for a sheet of paper, but finding none opened his Baedeker where there was a blank sheet and thrust it into Wilde’s hand.

The latter, with a suggestion in his manner of the condescension which is so becoming to greatness, scrawled his name—a big terminal Greek “e” tailing off into space at the end—in the book, and bowing a polite, in response to the other’s effusive, farewell, made straight for a deck-chair next to me, and plumping himself heavily in it began to talk animatedly.

Meanwhile, the interviewer was excitedly going the round of his party to exhibit his trophy.

“Oscar Wilde’s on board, the great Æsthete!” he said. “I’ve had a long talk with him. See, here’s his own autograph in my Baedeker. There he is, the big man talking to the one in a grey suit.”

The excitement spread, and soon we had the entire party standing in a ring, or perhaps I should say a halo, around the object of their worship, who though still talking animatedly missed nothing of it all, and by his beaming face seemed to enjoy his lionising. I suspect him, in fact, of amusing himself by playing up to it, for, seeing that some of his admirers were not only looking, but while doing their best to appear not to be doing so were also listening intently, his talk struck me as meant for them as much as for me. He worked off a witty saying or two which I had heard before, and just as I had seen him glance sideways at a big plate-glass Bond Street shop window to admire his figure or the cut of his coat, so he stole sideway glances at the faces around as if to see whether admiration of his wit was mirrored there.

Then he told stories of celebrities, literary or otherwise, of whom he spoke intimately, called some of them, as in the case of Besant and Whistler, by their Christian names, and so tensely was his audience holding its breath to listen, that when at Bingen he rose and said, “I’m getting off here,” one could almost hear the held breath “ough” out like a deflating tyre. No sooner was he gone than the interviewer seated himself in the deck-chair vacated by Wilde, and inquired politely:

“Are you a lit-er-ary man, sir?”

“Why, yes,” I said, “I suppose so, in a way. That’s how I earn my living.”

“May I ask your name?”

“Certainly,” I said (meaning thereby “you may ask, but it does not follow that I shall tell you”). “I am afraid ‘Brown’ is not a very striking name, but don’t tell me you have never heard it, for there is nothing so annoys an author as that.”

He was a kindly man, and made haste to reassure me.

“I know it well,” he protested. “Yours is not an uncommon name, I believe, in England. It is less common in the States. Your Christian name is—is—is—?”

“John,” I submitted modestly.

His brow cleared. “Exactly,” he nodded. “I know it well.”

Then he seemed uncertain again, and looked thoughtfully but absently at a castle-crowned hill. I imagine he was running through and ticking off as the names occurred to him the list of all the illustrious John Browns. Possibly he thought of the author of Rab and His Friends, and decided that I was too young. Possibly of Queen Victoria’s favourite gillie, who was generally pictured in kilts, whereas I wore knickerbockers.

“You have published books?” he asked.

I nodded.

“Only in England perhaps?” “No, they have been issued in America too.”

“Sold?”

“The people who bought them were,” I said.

“Tell me the name of one of your books, please.”

I shook my head.

“Can’t. Not allowed.”

“Not allowed? Why not?”

“Because,” I answered, rattling off the first nonsense which came to my head, “I’m a member of the famous ‘Silence Club,’ the members of which are known as the W.N.T.S.’s. You have heard of the club of course, even if you haven’t heard of me?”

“Yes,” he said. “I feel sure I have; but I was never quite sure what it meant. What does W.N.T.S. stand for?”

“It means ‘We Never Talk Shop.’ An author who so much as mentions the title of his book except to his publisher, his bookseller, or an agent is unconditionally expelled.”

Then I delivered my counter-attack. He had mentioned to Wilde that he hailed from Boston. It so happens that at my friend Louise Chandler Moulton’s receptions I had met nearly every eminent Boston or even American author, so I put a few questions to my interviewer which showed an inner knowledge of Boston and American literary life and celebrities that seemed positively to startle him. He was now convinced that I was a celebrity of world-wide fame, and that such a comet should come within his own orbit, without his getting to know as much as the comet’s name, was not to be endured by a self-respecting journalist. He literally agonised, as well as perspired, in his unavailing efforts to trick, wheedle or implore my obscure name from me. For one moment I was minded to tell him my name if only to enjoy the shock of its unknownness, but I resisted the temptation and, tiring in my turn as Wilde had tired, I rose and said that as I was getting off at the next stopping place I would wish him “Good day.” He did not even ask for John Brown’s autograph. He even seemed suddenly in a hurry to get rid of me, the reason for which I afterwards discovered. He had, I suppose, heard me tell Wilde that my luggage was on board; and the last I saw of him was in the boat’s hold, where he was stooping, pince-nez on nose, over the up-piled bags, boxes, dressing-cases and trunks, painfully raking them over, and every moment hoping to be rewarded by finding mine labelled “Robert Louis Stevenson,” “Rudyard Kipling,” “Algernon C. Swinburne” or “Thomas Hardy.” I trust he found it.

When we were back in town I told Wilde my own adventure with the interviewer after the former had left the boat. His comment was:

“It sounds like a terrible serial story that I once saw in a magazine, each chapter of which was written by a different hand. ‘The Adventures of Oscar Wilde, by himself, continued by Coulson Kernahan.’ How positively dreadful!”

I wonder what Wilde will have to say to me, if hereafter we should discuss together the brief and fragmentary continuation of his own story which in these Recollections I have endeavoured to carry on?

III

Once when Wilde, a novelist and I were lunching together, and when Wilde, after declaring that the wine was so “heavenly” that it should be drunk kneeling, was discoursing learnedly on the pleasures of the table—how the flesh of this or that bird, fish or beast should be cooked and eaten, with what wine and with what sauce, the novelist put in:

“If I were to adapt Bunyan, I should say that you ought to have been christened Os-carnalwise Wilde instead of plain Oscar.”

“How ridiculous of you to suppose that anyone, least of all my dear mother, would christen me ‘plain Oscar,’” was the reply. “My name has two O’s, two F’s and two W’s. A name which is destined to be in everybody’s mouth must not be too long. It comes so expensive in the advertisements. When one is unknown, a number of Christian names are useful, perhaps needful. As one becomes famous, one sheds some of them, just as a balloonist, when rising higher, sheds unnecessary ballast, or as you will shed your Christian name when raised to the peerage. I started as Oscar Finghal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde. All but two of the five names have already been thrown overboard. Soon I shall discard another and be known simply as ‘The Wilde’ or ‘The Oscar.’ Which it is to be depends upon one of my imitators—that horrid Hall Caine, who used to be known very properly as Thomas Henry; quite appropriate names for a man who writes and dresses as he does. I can’t say which he does worse as I have never read him, but I have often been made ill by the way he wears his clothes.

“And, by the by, never say you have ‘adapted’ anything from anyone. Appropriate what is already yours—for to publish anything is to make it public property—but never adapt, or, if you do, suppress the fact. It is hardly fair to Bunyan, if you improve on him, to point out, some hundreds of years after, how much cleverer you are than he; and it is even more unfair, if you spoil what he has said, and then ‘hold him accountable.’”

“That, I suppose,” said the novelist drily, “is why when you said the other day that ‘Whenever a great man dies, William Sharp and the undertaker come in together,’ you suppressed the fact that the same thing had already been said in other words by W.S. Gilbert.”

“Precisely,” said Wilde. “It is not for me publicly to point out Gilbert’s inferiority. That would be ungenerous. But no one can blame me, if the fact is patent to all.”

Mention of Sir W.S. Gilbert prompted the other to say that a friend of his had occasion to take a cab at Harrow where the author of The Bab Ballads had built a house. Driving from the station to his destination, his friend noticed this house, and asked the cabman who lived there. “I don’t know ’is name, sir,” said the cabman. “But I do know (I have driven ’im once or twice) that ’e is sometimes haffable and sometimes harbitrary. They do say in the town, sir, that ’e’s wot’s called a retired ’umorist, whatever that may be.”

From Harrow the conversation shifted to the neighbouring city of St. Albans, where I was then living.

“That reminds me,” said Wilde, turning to me, “that I want to run down to St. Albans once again to bathe my fingers in the mediÆval twilight of the grey old Abbey. We two will come to you to-morrow. You shall meet us at the station, give us lunch at your rooms—a cutlet, a flask of red chianti and a cigarette is all we ask—and then you shall take us over the Abbey.”

“I shall be delighted,” I said, “but do you remember my meeting you the other day when you were coming away from the Royal Academy? I asked you how you were, and you replied, ‘Ill, my dear fellow, ill and wounded to the soul at the thought of the hideousness of what in this degenerate country, and these degenerate days, dares to call itself Art. Get me some wine quickly, or I’m sure I shall faint.’ Well, I’m living in bachelor diggings where it would be highly inconvenient to have dead or dying artists on hand or lying about. The pictures on show in my bachelor rooms, like the furniture, are not of my selection. If you were wounded by what you saw in the Academy, you would die at sight of one work of art on my walls. It is a hideous and vulgar representation of ‘Daniel in the Lions’ Den,’ done in crude chromo, four colours.”

Wilde affected to shudder.

“How awful!” he said. “But I can think of something more awful even than that.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“A poor lion in a den of Daniels,” was his reply.

IV

A factor in Wilde’s downfall was, I am sometimes told, evil association, but if so it was a factor on which I can throw no light, as if evil associates he had I saw nothing of them.

Louise Chandler Moulton sings of

and of the many figures in the literary, artistic, and social world of the day whom I met in Wilde’s company, some have achieved death, some, knighthood (Mr. Stephen Phillips once said in my hearing, he was not sure which was the better—or the worse), and some, distinction. Of the remainder, the worst that could be said against them is that they have since come a crash financially, as Wilde himself did. It was only in money matters that I ever had cause to think Wilde immoral.

In setting down these recollections and impressions I do not write as one of his intimates. We were friends, we corresponded, I dined with him and Mrs. Wilde at 16 Tite Street, and he with me, and we forgathered now and then at clubs, theatrical first nights, and literary at homes; but the occasions on which we met were not very many, all told; nor did I desire more closely to cultivate him, and for two reasons. One was that the expensive rate at which he lived made him impossible as other than a very occasional companion, and the other was that “straightness” in money matters is to me one of the first essentials in the man of whom one makes a friend. On this point Wilde and I did not see alike. He laughed at me when I said that, while counting it no dishonour to be poor, I did count it something of a dishonour deliberately and self-indulgently to incur liabilities one might not be able to meet. In his vocabulary there were few more contemptuous words than that of “tradesman,” as the following incident, which I may perhaps be pardoned for interpolating, will show.

When The Picture of Dorian Grey was in the press, Wilde came in to see me one morning.

“My nerves are all to pieces,” he said, “and I’m going to Paris for a change. Here are the proofs of my novel. I have read them very carefully, and I think all is correct with one exception. Like most Irishmen, I sometimes write ‘I will be there,’ when it should be ‘I shall be there,’ and so on. Would you, like a dear good fellow, mind going through the proofs, and if you see any ‘wills’ or ‘shalls’ used wrongly, put them right and then pass for press? Of course, if you should spot anything else that strikes you as wrong, I’d be infinitely obliged if you would make the correction.”

I agreed, went through proofs, made the necessary alterations, and passed for press. Two or three days after I had a telegram from Paris. “Terrible blunder in book, coming back specially. Stop all proofs. Wilde.” I did so, and awaited events. Wilde arrived in a hansom.

“It is not too late? For heaven’s sake tell me it is not too late?” he affected to gasp. “Oh, make yourself easy. It was not too late. I stopped the proofs,” I answered.

“Thank God!” he exclaimed theatrically, throwing himself into a chair and making a great show of wiping away the perspiration from a perfectly dry brow. “I should never have forgiven myself, or you, had my book gone out disfigured by such a blunder—by such a crime as I count it against art.”

Then in a faint undertone, as if the thing were too unholy to speak of above one’s breath, he said:

“There’s a picture framer—a mere tradesman—in my story, isn’t there?”

“Yes,” I said.

“What have I called him?”

“Ashton, I think. Yes, Ashton,” I answered.

He simulated a shudder and seemed to wince at the words.

“Don’t repeat it! Don’t repeat it! It is more than my shattered nerves can stand. Ashton is a gentleman’s name,” he spoke brokenly, and wrung his hands as if in anguish. “And I’ve given it—God forgive me—to a tradesman! It must be changed to Hubbard. Hubbard positively smells of the tradesman!”

And having successfully worked off this wheeze on me, Oscar became himself again, and sat up with a happy smile to enjoy his own and my congratulations on the exquisiteness of his art.

Wilde’s contempt for tradesmen, as instanced in this anecdote, I did not share. Once, when he had spoken thus contemptuously because a shopkeeper was suing a certain impecunious but extravagant artist acquaintance of his and mine for a debt incurred, I told Wilde that even if I despised “tradesmen” as he and the artist did, I should despise myself much more were I to defraud a despised tradesman by ordering goods for which I had neither the means nor the intention to pay. He was not in the least offended, perhaps because the remark suggested an aphorism—the exact wording I forget, but it was to the effect that only mediocrity concerned itself with tradesmen’s bills, that a writer of genius, whether a playwright or a novelist, ran into debt as surely as his play or his book ran into royalties. I remember the occasion well, though I do not remember the phrasing of his aphorism, for on that particular morning he had, for the first time within my experience, shown less than his usual nice consideration for others which—whether due merely to love of approbation or to finer feelings—made him so agreeable and delightful a companion.

When he came in I offered him my cigarette case. They were of a brand he had often himself smoked in the past—in fact it was he who had first recommended them to me—quite good tobacco and well made, but moderate in price, and with no pretence to be of the very best. He took one, lit it, drew a few puffs, and then tossing it practically unsmoked on the fire, drew out his own bejewelled case and lit up one of his own. That was very unlike Wilde as I had known him in his less prosperous days. Then he would have said, “I have accustomed myself to smoke another brand lately and am something of a creature of habit. Do you mind if I smoke one of my own?”

Perhaps the omission was due only to preoccupation and forgetfulness. Perhaps the incident will be accounted too trivial, thus seriously to put on record. Possibly, but it is often by the cumulative effect of small and seemingly trivial details—not always by the bold broad strokes—that the truest portrait is drawn. Into the tragedy of human life we are not often permitted to look, but just as, since all fish swim against the stream, a minnow will serve to show the run of the current, no less than a pike, so trivial incidents serve sometimes to point the trend of life or of character as truly as great happenings.

Nor in Wilde’s case were other signs of change in him wanting. His first play had just then been produced and with success. He struck me on that particular morning as unpleasantly flushed, as already coarsened, almost bloated by success. There was a suspicion of insolence in his manner that was new to me, and from that time onward he and I—perhaps the fault was mine—seemed to lose touch of each other, and to drift entirely apart. Wilde died in the late autumn of 1900. I never saw or heard from him again after the spring of 1892.

V

Was it not Mr. Stead who defined paradox as a truth standing on its head? Wilde’s aim in paradox was so to manipulate truth and falsehood as to make the result startle one by appearing to reverse the existing standard. A paradox by him was sometimes a lie and a truth trotting side by side together in double harness like a pair of horses, but each so cleverly disguised that one was not quite sure which horse was which.

More often a paradox by Wilde was a lie (or a seeming lie) and a truth (or a seeming truth) driven the one in front of the other tandem-wise; but whichever Wilde had placed last was tolerably sure to take one by surprise by lashing out with its heels when one came to look at it. When Wilde had carefully arranged a paradox with a kick in it and wished to see one jump, he spoke the first half smilingly to put one off one’s guard. Then he would pause, suddenly become grave and thoughtful as if searching his words. But the pause was not for loss of a word. It was no pause of momentary inaction. It was, on the contrary, if I may vary the simile, like the backward swing of a rifle, and was meant only to give fuller play and power to the forward thrust that bayonets an enemy. No sooner was one off one’s guard by the smile and the momentary silence, than swift and sure came the sting of the stab.

Let me give an illustration. Wilde once asked me some question concerning my religious belief which I did my best to answer frankly and, as he was good enough afterwards to say, without the cant which he so loathed. When I had made an end of it, he said gravely:

“You are so evidently, so unmistakably sincere and most of all so truthful” (all this running smoothly and smilingly) “that” (then came the grave look and the pause as if at a loss for a word, followed by the swift stab) “I can’t believe a single word you say.”

And so, having discharged his missile, Wilde, no longer lolling indolently forward in his seat, pulled himself backwards, and up like a gunner taking a pace to the rear, or to the side of his gun the better to see the crash of the shell upon the target, and then, if I may so word it, “smiled all over.” He was so openly, so provokingly pleased with himself and with this particular paradox that not to be a party to the gratification of such sinful vanity, instead of complimenting him, as he had expected, on its neatness, I ignored the palpable hit, and inquired:

“Where are you dining to-night, Wilde?”

“At the Duchess of So-and-so’s,” he answered.

“Precisely. Who is the guest you have marked down, upon whom—when everybody is listening—to work off that carefully prepared impromptu wheeze about ‘You are so truthful that I can’t believe a single word you say,’ which you have just fired off on me?”

Wilde sighed deeply and threw out his hands with a gesture of despair, but the ghost of a glint of a smile in the corner of his eye signalled a bull’s-eye to me.

“Compliments are thrown away on such coarse creatures as you,” he said. “This very morning I called into being a new and wonderful aphorism—‘A gentleman never goes east of Temple Bar’—notwithstanding which I have brought wit and fame and fashion to lighten your editorial room in the City. Why? To pay you the supremest compliment one artist can pay another one. To make you the only confidant of one of my most graceful and delicate fancies. I was about to tell you——” “Yes, I know,” I interpolated rudely, “you have coined a witty new aphorism, or thought out a lovely fancy. You do both and do them more than well. But you are going to the Duchess’s dinner party to-night, and you will contrive so to turn what is said that your aphorism or fancy seems to rise as naturally and spontaneously to the surface of the conversation as the bubbles rise to the surface of the glass of champagne at your side. But you are not, as actors say, sure of your ‘words.’ You think it would be as well to have something of the nature of a dress rehearsal. So you have dropped in here, on your way to your florist’s or to some one else, to try it upon me as somebody is said to try his jokes on his dog before publishing them. I don’t mind playing ‘dog’ in your rÔle in the least, but I object to being made a stalking-horse for the Duchess’s honoured guest.”

I have no intention in these Recollections to play the reporter to my own uninteresting share in the conversation, but one must do so sometimes for obvious reasons. In this case, I wish to illustrate the means by which I sometimes succeeded in inducing Wilde to drop attitudinising and to be his natural self.

There is a certain Professor of my acquaintance, a man of brilliant abilities and incomparable knowledge, whom I used to meet at a club—let us call him Clough. When Clough could be induced to talk upon the matters in which he was an expert, he was worth travelling many miles to hear. Unfortunately he had an aggressive, even offensive manner, and was troubled with self-complacent egotism. It was only after a systematic course of roughness and rudeness at the hands of his fellow clubmen that Clough was endurable, or could be got to talk of anything but himself.

One would sometimes hear a fellow clubman say, “Clough is in the other room, just down from the ‘Varsity; and more full of information than ever. Two or three capable members are administering the usual course of medicine—‘Cloughing’ we call it now—of flatly contradicting every word he says, ‘trailing’ him, snubbing him, and otherwise reducing his abnormally swollen head to moderate dimensions. Then he will be better worth listening to on his own subjects than any other man in England. Don’t miss it.”

Similarly, in my intercourse with Wilde, I found that a certain amount of “Cloughing,” such as, “Now then, Wilde! You know you are only showing off, as we used to say at home when I was one of a family of kids. Stow it, and talk sense,” had equally good result. He would protest at first when minded to let me off lightly, that such “engaging ingenuousness” alarmed and silenced him. At other times he would vow that my coarseness made him shudder and wince—that it was like crushing a beautiful butterfly, to bludgeon a sensitive creature of moods and impulses with unseemly jibes and blatant speech. Having, however, thus delivered himself and made his protest, he would often stultify that protest and provide me with an excuse to myself for my Philistinism, by throwing aside his stilts (assumed possibly because he imagined they advertised him to advantage above the heads of those who walk afoot in the Vanity Fair of Literature and Art), and by showing himself infinitely more interesting when seen naturally and near at hand than when stilting it affectedly in mid-air above one’s head.

At times, and when he had forgotten his grievance at being thus rudely pulled down, he would forget—egotist that he was—even himself, in speaking of his hopes, his ambitions and his dreams; and in his rare flashes of sincerity would show himself as greater and nobler of soul than many who met and talked to him only in the salon or in society perhaps realised.

There is a graceful fancy of Wilde’s—I do not know whether he ever told it in print—the hero of which was a poet lad who had dreamed so often and written such lovely songs about the mermaid, that at last—since the dream-world was more real to him than the waking world—he was convinced that mermaids there really are in the seas around our shores, and that if one watched long and patiently they might by mortal eye be seen. So day and night the poet watched and waited, but saw nothing. And when his friends asked him, “Have you seen the mermaids?” he answered, “Yes, by moonlight I saw them at play among the rollers,” telling thereafter what he had seen and with such vividness and beauty that almost he persuaded the listeners to believe the story. But one night by moonlight the poet did indeed have sight of the mermaids, and in silence he came away and thereafter told no one what he had seen.

So, of Wilde himself, I cannot but hope and believe that though he told many stories of exceeding beauty, none of which were true, yet hidden away in his heart was much that was gracious, true, noble and beautiful, the story of which will now never be known, for like the poet lad of his fantasy he told it to no one. Of what was evil and what was good in his life, only a merciful God can strike the balance, and only a merciful God shall judge.

VI

As one who knew Wilde personally, I am sometimes asked whether I was not instinctively aware that the man was bad. Frankly I was not. Possibly because scandal does not interest me, and other things do, I had not heard the rumours which I now understand were even then prevalent, and so I took him as I found him, an agreeable companion, a brilliant conversationalist, a versatile and accomplished man of letters. On the crime of which he has since been committed, I make no comment, if only for the reason that I did not follow the evidence at his trial, just as I abstained from reading Mr. W. T. Stead’s Maiden Tribute to Modern Babylon—not because of any innate niceness on my part, but for the same reason which causes me to turn aside if, in my morning’s walk, I come across offal which it is not my business to remove. The Wilde of the days of which I am writing was foppish in dress and affected in manner. He talked and wrote much nonsense, as I held it to be, about there being no such thing as a moral or an immoral book or picture; that the book or picture was either a work of art, or was not a work of art, and there the matter ended; but much of this talk I attributed to pose, and I had even then learned that some of the men who are most anxious to have us believe them moralists—and stern moralists at that—are often less moral in their life than some of those who make no pretence of any morals at all.

To the folk who objected that Wilde has boasted of being a “pagan” I replied that he probably used the word—just then very much in vogue—in the same sense in which Mr. Kenneth Grahame used it when he entitled a volume, bubbling over with the joy of life, with animal spirits, keen observation, and exquisite humour, Pagan Papers. Wilde’s “paganism” I took as meaning no more than that he claimed for himself freedom from formula, most of all freedom from cant in his attitude towards the accepted conventions, whether literary, artistic, social, or even religious.

That he was not an irreligious man, I had reason to know. One day when we were chatting together, Wilde mentioned a little book of mine of which I will say no more here than that it made no uncertain confession of the writer’s faith in Christianity. This led Wilde—uninvited by me, for I make it a rule never to obtrude my religious views upon others—to express himself upon the subject of religion, especially of Christianity, and with such intense reverence, such manifest earnestness, that I perhaps looked something of the surprise I felt.

“You are surprised,” he said, “to hear Oscar Wilde, the poseur, as people call him, the man who is supposed to hold nothing too sacred, talking seriously and on serious things. No, I am not making believe to be earnest, as I do make believe about so much else. I am speaking as I feel, and you will perhaps hardly realise what an intense relief it is to meet some one to whom one can talk about such matters without cant. It is cant and officialdom” (he spoke bitterly) “which is keeping the men and women who think out of the churches to-day. It is cant which more than anything else stands between them and Christ. Shall I tell you what is my greatest ambition—more even than an ambition—the dream of my life? Not to be remembered hereafter as an artist, poet, thinker, or playwright, but as the man who reclothed the sublimest conception which the world has ever known—the Salvation of Humanity, the Sacrifice of Himself upon the Cross by Christ—with new and burning words, with new and illuminating symbols, with new and divine vision, free from the accretions of cant which the centuries have gathered around it. I should thereby be giving the world back again the greatest gift ever given to mankind since Christ Himself gave it, peerless and pure two thousand years ago—the pure gift of Christianity as taught by Christ.

“Yes,” he went on, “I hope before I die to write the Epic of the Cross, the Iliad of Christianity, which shall live for all time.”

On another occasion Wilde unfolded to me the opening scene in a sort of religious drama which he intended one day to write—the finding to-day of the body of the Christ in the very rock-sepulchre where Joseph of Arimathea had laid it, and a great and consequent eclipse of faith in Him and in His resurrection. Thereafter, by a new revelation of the Christ, Wilde was, in his drama, newly to recreate Christianity and faith in Christianity, but of this Second Act of his World-Drama I heard no more, as our talk was at this point interrupted, and he never renewed it.

I speak of this proposed religious drama here for the singular reason that I, too, had long been turning over in my mind some such work and some such opening scene as in Wilde’s drama—I mean the finding of the body of Christ.

Wilde went no further with his project, but in a book of mine, written some years after, I carried my own project into effect. To this day I am uncertain how much of my opening scene was Wilde’s, and how much mine. The idea appears to have occurred to both, but whereas, in Wilde’s mind, it was clear and defined, in mine it was then no more than an idea. I sometimes wonder whether his words did not make vivid to me what before was vague. Of one thing at least I am sure, that he was the first to speak of such an opening scene, which fact in itself constitutes some sort of previous claim. The rest of the book was entirely mine, and probably the whole, but the facts seem to me not uninteresting, and having made confession of the possibility at least of some debt incurred, I must leave it to the reader to say whether I ought or ought not to be condemned in “conscience money.”

I have already said that I have reason to know that Wilde was not irreligious, and I propose now to give my reasons for refusing to believe him to be irreclaimably bad. One has some hesitation in quoting oneself, but, in a dream-parable booklet of mine, there is a passage which I may perhaps be forgiven for printing here, when I say that I had Wilde in my mind when I wrote it. In my dream-parable, Satan, even as once of old he had presented himself to speak with God concerning Job, appears to-day before the Most High, urging that men and women have become godless and faithless. He craves permission to prove this by putting them to certain tests. The permission is accorded on condition that Satan himself becomes mortal, even as they. In the following passage Satan is supposed to be speaking, after the failure and defeat of his projects.

Master and Maker, hear me ere I die. For until Thou didst in Thy wisdom decree that ere I might work my will on mortals, myself must become mortal even as they—until then, the thoughts of these mortals were as foreign to my understanding as are the thoughts in the brain of a bird, to the fowler who spreads his net to catch the little creature. Like the fowler, I knew that I must change my bait, according to the creature that I set out to snare, that this one could be taken by avarice, that one by vanity, a third by spiritual pride, a fourth by bodily lust. When they came to my lure, and I caught them; when I saw the poor fools struggling in my net, I laughed and hugged myself to think of their misery and of the impotent anguish of God. And so I grew wise in the ways and the weaknesses of men and women, while knowing nothing of the hearts which beat in their breasts.

But now that I have become mortal, even as they,—now at last, to the wonder and the mystery of mortal life, are my eyes opened. Now perceive I that, in the least and most shameful of these lives, is to be seen, even in uttermost wreckage, something so sacred, so august, so beautiful, so divine, that the very angels of light might stand amazed in envious wonder and awe.

For if men and women have failed greatly, at least they have striven greatly—how greatly, how valiantly, how desperately, only the God Who sees all, may know.

It may be that by Him, that very striving itself, even the unsuccessful striving, shall mercifully be taken into account. The sin and the shame are human: the wish and the effort to overcome them are divine. For that which in a man’s truer, nobler moments, he has longed unutterably to be, that in some sense he is, and shall be accounted, in the eyes of the God, Who taketh not pleasure in remembering sin, but in rewarding righteousness.

That even in sin, a man should think such thoughts, should carry unsullied in his heart some white flower of his childhood, and, in spite of what is ugly and impure in himself, should project so pure and perfect a vision of hoped-for, longed-for Loveliness and Purity, sets that man, even in his sins, a world removed above the angels. When I who was once an angel fell, I fell from uttermost light to uttermost dark. Ceasing to be an angel, I became a devil. Man falls, but even in his fall retains something that is divine.

Yonder man into whose great brain I entered, working strange madness within! Him first I taught to love Beauty, because it is of Thee. Him I haunted of beauty, haunted with visions of forms more fair than earthly eyes may know, luring him at last to look upon Beauty as of greater worth than all else, and as a law unto itself.

And because the love of beauty is not far removed from the love of pleasure, it was not difficult for me to lead on such as he to love pleasure for itself. With innocent pleasures at first I plied him, and when they staled, I enticed him with grosser joys, till the pleasure-seeker became the voluptuary, and, in the veins of the voluptuary, desire soon quickened into lust.

Next, because wine, like water to drooping flowers, lent fictitious strength to his flagging pulse, made the live thoughts to quicken in his tired brain, and set the tongue of his wit a-wagging; because he loved to stand well with his comrades, among whom to chink glasses together was the sign of fellowship—because of all these I enticed him to drink and yet again to drink, until Alcohol, the Arch Destroyer, had stolen away his will power, silenced his conscience, perverted his moral sense, inflamed with foul passion his degenerate brain, and made the wreck and the ruin of him that he now is.

Yet even now, as I steal gloatingly through the dark chambers of that House of Shame which was once the fair temple of the living God, even now there still smoulders under the ashes of a fouled hearthstone some spark of the fire which was kindled of God, a fire which I strive in vain to trample out, since, because it is of God, it is inextinguishable and eternal.

If therefore when I seem most to have conquered, there never yet was God wholly defeated—of what use is it further to wage the unequal conflict? For God never entirely lets go His hold on a human soul; and that to which God holds fast, Satan shall never finally wrest from Him. Say the world, think the world, what it will, in the warfare for souls God wins, and has won all along the line.

It was, as I say, Wilde who was in my mind when I penned that passage commencing “Yonder man into whose great brain I entered, working strange madness within.” To me he seems to have been less hopelessly bad than partly mad.

We are told that it is possible, by locating and destroying certain cells or nerve-centres in the brain, so to affect the mind of the subject as to destroy his sense of colour, his sense of touch, or even, it is believed, to destroy his sense of right and wrong.

Wilde died of meningitis, which is a brain affection, and I think that the fact should be considered retrospectively. A post-mortem examination would possibly have revealed some disease or degeneration of certain brain-cells which may account for much that is painful in his career and character. This degeneration of brain-cells may have been inherited and congenital, in which case, condemnation on our part is silenced; or it may have been due to excesses of his own choosing and committing. Even if this be so, the price he paid was surely so terrible, and so tragic, as in a sense to be accounted an atonement, and even to entitle him to our pity. In the passage quoted from my dream-parable, I have hinted at some form of demoniacal possession which may or may not be a positive, as opposed to a negative form of madness. There is a brain derangement by which the power to reason aright and to co-ordinate ideas is lost; a brain derangement which results mainly in vacancy of mind. But there is yet another and more terrible form of derangement in which, so it seems to me, that unseen evil powers, outside himself, seize upon and possess the brain chambers, thus vacated, and direct and rule the unhappy victim, not according to his own will, which indeed has passed out of his control, but according to the wish or will of the power by which he is possessed.

On such a question we dare not dogmatise; but I am humbly of opinion that in the great re-awakening to the realities (not to the outward forms) of religion, which some of us think will follow the war, there will be a return to simplicity of belief, and that the too often disregarded New Testament explanation of certain mysterious happenings will be proved to be more in accordance with the later discoveries of Science than some advocates of the Higher Criticism now think. For my own part I have never doubted the accuracy of the Gospel records in regard to demoniacal possession. We have Christ’s own words: “For this saying go thy way; the devil is gone out of thy daughter,” “Howbeit this kind goeth not out but by prayer and fasting,” and “I charge thee come out of him and enter no more into him.”

That some men and women whose wills are weakened—possibly by habitual disregard of conscience or by continued wrongdoing for which they cannot be held irresponsible—do commit, under the urging and direction of evil spirits by which they are possessed, crimes and cruelties for which they are not in the fullest sense responsible, I think more than possible. My friend, the late Benjamin Waugh, Founder of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, on more than one occasion placed before me the full facts and the indisputable proofs of acts so fiendish as to be difficult to ascribe to human motive or passions.

In the most terrible sonnet ever penned, Shakespeare says:

and, to lust, some particularly bestial outrages which came before the Society were clearly attributable. Others were as clearly the outcome of avarice, greed, hatred, jealousy and blind fury of anger. But some crimes there were, such as the torturing of her own children by a mother, and, in another case, the deliberate jabbing out of the eyes of an unoffending pony by a woman, not under the influence of drink, and in whom the medical experts declared they otherwise found no symptoms of insanity, which, if only for the sake of our common humanity, one would be relieved to think were due to demoniacal possession, for which the victim was, in this last stage at least, irresponsible.

In the near future it is possible that Science will by closer inquiry and by completer records be found once more in harmony with Scripture. Hypnotism, a science which as yet is not a science, but merely a haphazard accumulation of unorganised data, pointing to the possession of unexplained powers and possibilities by the individual, has established the fact that the living can thus be influenced and obsessed by the living. If so, why not by the dead, who, when emancipated from the body, may possibly be able to concentrate even greater spiritual force upon the living than when they were themselves alive?

I am not likely to live to see it, but my belief is that all these so-called occult matters, Hypnotism, Thought-reading, Obsession, Clairvoyance, Spiritualism, and the like will one day fall into line with Science, and be proved to be not supernatural, but merely the manifestation of natural laws—of certain psychical powers and forces which may be easily explainable and demonstrable with further and exacter knowledge, but concerning the working of which we are at present very much in the dark.

I have written at greater length than I intended, in hinting and in hoping that Wilde was at times under the subjection of powers and forces of darkness outside himself. I say “at times” intentionally, and for the following reason. It would be gratifying to one’s amour propre (I use a French term for once, as it expresses my meaning more nearly than any English equivalent) could I take high ground, and aver that I was vaguely conscious—warned, as it were, by some fine instinct—of evil in the presence of Wilde, but so to aver would be untrue. I have not lived to nearly threescore years without meeting men from whom one does thus instinctively shrink, and concerning whom one found it impossible to breathe the same air. I experienced nothing of the sort in Wilde’s company, and, since his guilt seems uncontrovertible, I ask myself whether it is not possible that Wilde lived a sort of Jekyll and Hyde life, of the latter of which I saw nothing, inasmuch as just as some wounded or plague-stricken creature withdraws itself from the herd, so, during the Hyde period of madness or of obsession, some instinct moved him to withdraw from his home, his haunts and the companions of his everyday life, only to return when the obsession or madness had passed, and once again he was his sane and normal self.

This “periodicity” is not infrequent in madness, whether the madness be due to a brain derangement, explainable by pathology, or to some such demoniacal possession as that of which I have spoken. A memorable instance is that of Mary Lamb, who was herself aware of the return of homicidal mania, and at such times of her own accord placed herself under restraint. Recalling the fact that I saw in Wilde no sign either of the presence of evil or of insanity, I ask myself whether in picturing Dorian Grey as at one season living normally and reputably, and at another disappearing into some oblivion of iniquity, he was not consciously or unconsciously picturing for us his own tortured self. I write “tortured” advisedly, for whether he were wholly, or only partly, or not at all, responsible, I refuse to believe that the man, as in his saner moments I knew him, could sink thus low, without fighting desperately, if vainly—how desperately only the God who made him knows—before allowing himself in the hopelessness of despair to forget his failures in filth, as other unhappy geniuses have before now drowned their souls in drink. One talk with him I particularly remember. I had been reading the proofs of Dorian Grey, and, on our next meeting, I said that he had put damnable words into the mouth of one of his characters.

“Such poisonous stuff is not likely to affect grown men and women,” I said, “but for a writer of your power and persuasiveness to set up a puppet like Lord Henry to provide ready-made excuses for indulgence, and to make evil seem necessary, unavoidable, and easy, by whispering into the ears of readers, of impressionable age and inflammable passion, that ‘the only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it’—when you do that, you are helping to circulate devils’ doctrines in God’s world.”

Wilde was visibly perturbed.

“You are quite right,” he said. “It is damnable; it is devils’ doctrine. I will take it out.”

But, alas, other influences, whether within himself in the shape of the whisperings of some evil spirit, by which he was, as I believe, at times possessed, or in the form of so-called friends, whose influence over him was of the worst, I cannot say, but some days after the conversation recorded above I received the following letter:

Grand HÔtel de L’athenÉe,
15 Rue Scribe, Paris.

My Dear Kernahan,

Thank you for your charming letter. I have been very ill and unable to correct my proofs, but have sent them off now. I have changed my mind about the passage about temptation. One can’t pull a work of art about without spoiling it, and after all it is merely Luther’s “Pecca Fortiter” put dramatically into the lips of a character.

Do you think I should add to preface the definition of “morbid” and “unhealthy” art I gave in the Fortnightly for February? The one on morbidity is really good.

Will you also look after my “wills” and “shalls” in proof! I am Celtic in my use of these words, not English.

You are excellent on Rossetti. I read you with delight.

Your sincere friend,
Oscar Wilde.

When next I met Wilde I recurred to the matter, but it was then too late, for the book, he said, was in great part printed. Moreover, he had now another excuse to put forward.

“After I had left you,” he said, “I remembered that a friend of mine, a well-known critic, had read the book in manuscript when it was first written. He said something to the same effect as you did, but less strongly. Honestly it was that, more than anything else, which finally decided me to leave the passage in. Had I taken it out, he would have claimed that I did so in deference to his strictures, and haul down my flag to a professional critic I never have and never will.”

This incident (though Wilde has been dead sixteen years I have neither written of it nor spoken of it before) shows Wilde as weak, it shows him as yielding—as we all, alas, too often yield—to evil influences, and to inclination as opposed to conscience, and as a man who was determined to shine at all costs. His vanity would not allow him to withhold the word that he was pleased to think daring, original, and above all brilliant, though he knew that word to be only brilliantly bad. Even in his sinning, it seems to me, he fed and flattered his insatiable vanity, by electing, even in sin, to be unlike others; and how far vanity, even more than viciousness, was accountable for Wilde’s downfall, only the God who made him and the devil who fostered and fed that vanity, till it less resembled a pardonable human weakness than a hideous excrescence and disease, can ever truly say.

The setting of Wilde’s sun (which had risen on so fair a prospect, and with such promise of splendour) in foul quagmires of sin and shame, was the greatest tragedy I have known. I met his friend and mine, Mr. Hall Caine, immediately after the verdict and sentence. I have seen Caine ill, and I have seen him deeply moved, even distressed, but I remember always to his honour (for Wilde not seldom made Caine’s writing the butt of his wit) the anguish in his face as he said:

“God pity him in this hour when human pity there seems none! To think of it! that man, that genius as he is, whom you and I have seen fÊted and flattered! whose hand we have grasped in friendship! a felon, and come to infamy unspeakable! It haunts me, it is like some foul and horrible stain on our craft and on us all, which nothing can wash out. It is the most awful tragedy in the whole history of literature.”

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