Delphi Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (Illustrated) (277 page)

The gravest result of the magistrate’s refusal to accept bail was purely personal. Oscar’s income dried up at the source. His books were withdrawn from sale; no one went to see his plays; every shop keeper to whom he owed a penny took immediate action against him. Judgments were obtained and an execution put into his house in Tite Street. Within a month, at the very moment when he most needed money to fee counsel and procure evidence, he was beggared and sold up, and because of his confinement in prison the sale was conducted under such conditions that, whereas in ordinary times his effects would have covered the claims against him three times over, all his belongings went for nothing, and the man who was making £4,000 or £5,000 a year by his plays was adjudicated a bankrupt for a little over £1,000. £600 of this sum were for Lord Queensberry’s costs which the Queensberry family — Lord Douglas of Hawick, Lord Alfred Douglas and their mother — had promised in writing to pay, but when the time came, absolutely refused to pay. Most unfortunately many of Oscar’s MSS. were stolen or lost in the disorder of the sheriff’s legal proceedings. Wilde could have cried, with Shylock, “You take my life when you do take away the means whereby I live.” But at the time nine Englishmen out of ten applauded what was practically persecution.

A worse thing remains to be told. The right of free speech which Englishmen pride themselves on had utterly disappeared, as it always does disappear in England when there is most need of it. It was impossible to say one word in Wilde’s defence or even in extenuation of his sin in any London print. At this time I owned the greater part of the
Saturday Review
and edited it. Here at any rate one might have thought I could have set forth in a Christian country a sane and liberal view. I had no wish to minimise the offence. No one condemned unnatural vice more than I, but Oscar Wilde was a distinguished man of letters; he had written beautiful things, and his good works should have been allowed to speak in his favour. I wrote an article setting forth this view. My printers immediately informed me that they thought the article ill-advised, and when I insisted they said they would prefer not to print it. Yet there was nothing in it beyond a plea to suspend judgment and defer insult till after the trial. Messrs. Smith and Sons, the great booksellers, who somehow got wind of the matter (through my publisher, I believe), sent to say that they would not sell any paper that attempted to defend Oscar Wilde; it would be better even, they added, not to mention his name. The English tradesman-censors were determined that this man should have Jedburg justice. I should have ruined the
Saturday Review
by the mere attempt to treat the matter fairly.

In this extremity I went to the great leader of public opinion in England. Mr. Arthur Walter, the manager of
The Times
, had always been kind to me; he was a man of balanced mind, who had taken high honours at Oxford in his youth, and for twenty years had rubbed shoulders with the leading men in every rank of life. I went down to stay with him in Berkshire, and I urged upon him what I regarded as the aristocratic view. In England it was manifest that under the circumstances there was no chance of a fair trial, and it seemed to me the duty of
The Times
to say plainly that this man should not be condemned beforehand, and that if he were condemned his merits should be taken into consideration in his punishment, as well as his demerits.

While willing to listen to me, Mr. Walter did not share my views. A man who had written a great poem or a great play did not rank in his esteem with a man who had won a skirmish against a handful of unarmed savages, or one who had stolen a piece of land from some barbarians and annexed it to the Empire. In his heart he held the view of the English landed aristocracy, that the ordinary successful general or admiral or statesman was infinitely more important than a Shakespeare or a Browning. He could not be persuaded to believe that the names of Gladstone, Disraeli, Wolseley, Roberts, and Wood, would diminish and fade from day to day till in a hundred years they would scarcely be known, even to the educated; whereas the fame of Browning, Swinburne, Meredith, or even Oscar Wilde, would increase and grow brighter with time, till, in one hundred or five hundred years, no one would dream of comparing pushful politicians like Gladstone or Beaconsfield with men of genius like Swinburne or Wilde. He simply would not see it and when he perceived that the weight of argument was against him he declared that if it were true, it was so much the worse for humanity. In his opinion anyone living a clean life was worth more than a writer of love songs or the maker of clever comedies — Mr. John Smith worth more than Shakespeare!

He was as deaf as only Englishmen can be deaf to the plea for abstract justice.

“You don’t even say Wilde’s innocent,” he threw at me more than once.

“I believe him to be innocent,” I declared truthfully, “but it is better that a hundred guilty men go free than that one man should not have a fair trial. And how can this man have a fair trial now when the papers for weeks past have been filled with violent diatribes against him and his works?”

One point, peculiarly English, he used again and again.

“So long as substantial justice is done,” he said, “it is all we care about.”

“Substantial justice will never be done,” I cried, “so long as that is your ideal. Your arrow can never go quite so high as it is aimed.” But I got no further.

If Oscar Wilde had been a general or a so-called empire builder,
The Times
might have affronted public opinion and called attention to his virtues, and argued that they should be taken in extenuation of his offences; but as he was only a writer no one seemed to owe him anything or to care what became of him.

Mr. Walter was fair-minded in comparison with most men of his class. There was staying with him at this very time an Irish gentleman, who listened to my pleading for Wilde with ill-concealed indignation. Excited by Arthur Walter’s obstinacy to find fresh arguments, I pointed out that Wilde’s offence was pathological and not criminal and would not be punished in a properly constituted state.

“You admit,” I said, “that we punish crime to prevent it spreading; wipe this sin off the statute book and you would not increase the sinners by one: then why punish them?”

“Oi’d whip such sinners to death, so I would,” cried the Irishman; “hangin’s too good for them.”

“You only punished lepers,” I went on, “in the middle ages, because you believed that leprosy was catching: this malady is not even catching.”

“Faith, Oi’d punish it with extermination,” cried the Irishman.

Exasperated by the fact that his idiot prejudice was hurting my friend, I said at length with a smile:

“You are very bitter: I’m not; you see, I have no sexual jealousy to inflame me.”

On this Mr. Walter had to interfere between us to keep the peace, but the mischief was done: my advocacy remained without effect.

It is very curious how deep-rooted and enduring is the prejudice against writers in England. Not only is no attempt made to rate them at their true value, at the value which posterity puts upon their work; but they are continually treated as outcasts and denied the most ordinary justice. The various trials of Oscar Wilde are to the thinker an object lesson in the force of this prejudice, but some may explain the prejudice against Wilde on the score of the peculiar abhorrence with which the offence ascribed to him is regarded in England.

Let me take an example from the papers of to-day — I am writing in January, 1910. I find in my
Daily Mail
that at Bow Street police court a London magistrate, Sir Albert de Rutzen, ordered the destruction of 272 volumes of the English translation of Balzac’s “Les Contes Drolatiques” on the ground that the book was obscene. “Les Contes Drolatiques” is an acknowledged masterpiece, and is not nearly so free spoken as “Lear” or “Hamlet” or “Tom Jones” or “Anthony and Cleopatra.” What would be thought of a French magistrate or a German magistrate who ordered a fair translation of “Hamlet” or of “Lear” to be burnt, because of its obscenity? He would be regarded as demented. One can only understand such a judgment as an isolated fact. But in England this monstrous stupidity is the rule. Sir A. de Rutzen was not satisfied with ordering the books to be burnt and fining the bookseller; he went on to justify his condemnation and praise the police:

“It is perfectly clear to my mind that a more foul and filthy black spot has not been found in London for a long time, and the police have done uncommonly well in bringing the matter to light. I consider that the books are likely to do a great deal of harm.”

Fancy the state of mind of the man who can talk such poisonous nonsense; who, with the knowledge of what Piccadilly is at night in his mind, can speak of the translation of a masterpiece as one of the “most filthy black spots” to be found in London. To say that such a man is insane is, I suppose, going too far; but to say that he does not know the value or the meaning of the words he uses, to say that he is driven by an extraordinary and brainless prejudice, is certainly the modesty of truth.

It is this sort of perversity on the part of Sir A. de Rutzen and of nine out of ten Englishmen that makes Frenchmen, Germans and Italians speak of them as ingrained hypocrites. But they are not nearly so hypocritical as they are uneducated and unintelligent, rebellious to the humanising influence of art and literature. The ordinary Englishman would much prefer to be called an athlete than a poet. The Puritan Commonwealth Parliament ordered the pictures of Charles I. to be sold, but such of them as were indecent to be burnt; accordingly half a dozen Titians were solemnly burnt and the nucleus of a great national gallery destroyed. One can see Sir A. de Rutzen solemnly assisting at this holocaust and devoutly deciding that all the masterpieces which showed temptingly a woman’s beautiful breasts were “foul and filthy black spots” and must be burnt as harmful. Or rather one can see that Sir A. de Rutzen has in two and a half centuries managed to get a little beyond this primitive Puritan standpoint: he might allow a pictorial masterpiece to-day to pass unburnt, but a written masterpiece is still to him anathema.

A part of this prejudice comes from the fact that the English have a special dislike for every form of sexual indulgence. It is not consistent with their ideal of manhood, and, like the poor foolish magistrate, they have not yet grasped the truth, which one might have thought the example of the Japanese would have made plain by now to the dullest, that a nation may be extraordinarily brave, vigorous and self-sacrificing and at the same time intensely sensuous, and sensitive to every refinement of passion. If the great English middle class were as well educated as the German middle class, such a judgment as this of Sir A. de Rutzen would be scouted as ridiculous and absurd, or rather would be utterly unthinkable.

In Anglo-Saxon countries both the artist and the sexual passion are under a ban. The race is more easily moved martially than amorously and it regards its overpowering combative instincts as virtuous just as it is apt to despise what it likes to call “languishing love.” The poet Middleton couldn’t put his dream city in England — a city of fair skies and fairer streets:

And joy was there; in all the city’s length I saw no fingers trembling for the sword; Nathless they doted on their bodies’ strength, That they might gentler be. Love was their lord.

Both America and England to-day offer terrifying examples of the despotism of an unenlightened and vulgar public opinion in all the highest concerns of man — in art, in literature and in religion. There is no despotism on earth so soul-destroying to the artist: it is baser and more degrading than anything known in Russia. The consequences of this tyranny of an uneducated middle class and a barbarian aristocracy are shown in detail in the trial of Oscar Wilde and in the savagery with which he was treated by the English officers of justice.

CHAPTER X
V

As soon as I heard that Oscar Wilde was arrested and bail refused, I tried to get permission to visit him in Holloway. I was told I should have to see him in a kind of barred cage; and talk to him from the distance of at least a yard. It seemed to me too painful for both of us, so I went to the higher authorities and got permission to see him in a private room. The Governor met me at the entrance of the prison: to my surprise he was more than courteous; charmingly kind and sympathetic.

“We all hope,” he said, “that he will soon be free; this is no place for him. Everyone likes him, everyone. It is a great pity.”

He evidently felt much more than he said, and my heart went out to him. He left me in a bare room furnished with a small square deal table and two kitchen chairs. In a moment or two Oscar came in accompanied by a warder. In silence we clasped hands. He looked miserably anxious and pulled down and I felt that I had nothing to do but cheer him up.

“I am glad to see you,” I cried. “I hope the warders are kind to you?”

“Yes, Frank,” he replied in a hopeless way, “but everyone else is against me: it is hard.”

“Don’t harbour that thought,” I answered; “many whom you don’t know, and whom you will never know, are on your side. Stand for them and for the myriads who are coming afterwards and make a fight of it.”

“I’m afraid I’m not a fighter, Frank, as you once said,” he replied sadly, “and they won’t give me bail. How can I get evidence or think in this place of torture? Fancy refusing me bail,” he went on, “though I stayed in London when I might have gone abroad.”

“You should have gone,” I cried in French, hot with indignation; “why didn’t you go, the moment you came out of the court?”

“I couldn’t think at first,” he answered in the same tongue; “I couldn’t think at all: I was numbed.”

“Your friends should have thought of it,” I insisted, not knowing then that they had done their best.

At this moment the warder, who had turned away towards the door, came back.

“You are not allowed, sir, to talk in a foreign language,” he said quietly. “You will understand we have to obey the rules. Besides, the prisoner must not speak of this prison as a place of torture. I ought to report that; I’m sorry.”

The misery of it all brought tears to my eyes: his gaolers even felt sorry for him. I thanked the warder and turned again to Oscar.

“Don’t let yourself fear at all,” I exclaimed. “You will have your chance again and must take it; only don’t lose heart and don’t be witty next time in court. The jury hate it. They regard it as intellectual superiority and impudence. Treat all things seriously and with grave dignity. Defend yourself as David would have defended his love for Jonathan. Make them all listen to you. I would undertake to get free with half your talent even if I were guilty; a resolution not to be beaten is always half the battle.... Make your trial memorable from your entrance into the court to the decision of the jury. Use every opportunity and give your real character a chance to fight for you.”

I spoke with tears in my eyes and rage in my heart.

“I will do my best, Frank,” he said despondingly, “I will do my best. If I were out of this place, I might think of something, but it is dreadful to be here. One has to go to bed by daylight and the nights are interminable.”

“Haven’t you a watch?” I cried.

“They don’t allow you to have a watch in prison,” he replied.

“But why not?” I asked in amazement. I did not know that every rule in an English prison is cunningly devised to annoy and degrade the unfortunate prisoner.

Oscar lifted his hands hopelessly:

“One may not smoke; not even a cigarette; and so I cannot sleep. All the past comes back; the golden hours; the June days in London with the sunshine dappling the grass and the silken rustling of the wind in the trees. Do you remember Wordsworth speaks ‘of the wind in the trees’? How I wish I could hear it now, breathe it once again. I might get strength then to fight.”

“Is the food good?” I asked.

“It’s all right; I get it from outside. The food doesn’t matter. It is the smoking I miss, the freedom, the companionship. My mind will not act when I’m alone. I can only think of what has been and torment myself. Already I’ve been punished enough for the sins of a lifetime.”

“Is there nothing I can do for you, nothing you want?” I asked.

“No, Frank,” he answered, “it was kind of you to come to see me, I wish I could tell you how kind.”

“Don’t think of it,” I said; “if I’m any good send for me at any moment: a word will bring me. They allow you books, don’t they?”

“Yes, Frank.”

“I wish you would get the ‘Apologia of Plato’,” I said, “and take a big draught of that deathless smiling courage of Socrates.”

“Ah, Frank, how much more humane were the Greeks. They let his friends see him and talk to him by the hour, though he was condemned to death. There were no warders there to listen, no degrading conditions.”

“Quite true,” I cried, suddenly realising how much better Oscar Wilde would have been treated in Athens two thousand years ago. “Our progress is mainly change; we don’t shed our cruelty; even Christ has not been able to humanise us.”

He nodded his head. At first he seemed greatly distressed; but I managed to encourage him a little, for at the close of the talk he questioned me:

“Do you really think I may win, Frank?”

“Of course you’ll win,” I replied. “You must win: you must not think of being beaten. Take it that they will not want to convict you. Say it to yourself in the court; don’t let yourself fear for a moment. Your enemies are merely stupid, unhappy creatures crawling about for a few miserable years between earth and sun; fated to die and leave no trace, no memory. Remember you are fighting for all of us, for every artist and thinker who is to be born into the English world.... It is better to win like Galileo than to be burnt like Giordano Bruno. Don’t let them make another martyr. Use all your brains and eloquence and charm. Don’t be afraid. They will not condemn you if they know you.”

“I have been trying to think,” he said, “trying to make up my mind to bear one whole year of this life. It’s dreadful, Frank, I had no idea that prison was so dreadful.”

The warder again drew down his brows. I hastened to change the subject.

“That’s why you must resolve not to have any more of it,” I said; “I wish I had seen you when you came out of court, but I really thought you didn’t want me; you turned away from me.”

“Oh, Frank, how could I?” he cried. “I should have been so grateful to you.”

“I’m very shortsighted,” I rejoined, “and I thought you did. It is our foolish little vanities which prevent us acting as we should. But let me know if I can do anything for you. If you want me, I’ll come at any moment.”

I said this because the warder had already given me a sign; he now said:

“Time is up.”

Once again we clasped hands.

“You must win,” I said; “don’t think of defeat. Even your enemies are human. Convert them. You can do it, believe me,” and I went with dread in my heart, and pity and indignation.

Be still, be still, my soul; it is but for a season: Let us endure an hour and see injustice done.

The Governor met me almost at the door.

“It is terrible,” I exclaimed.

“This is no place for him,” he answered. He has nothing to do with us here. Everyone likes him and pities him: the warders, everyone. Anything I can do to make his stay tolerable shall be done.”

We shook hands. I think there were tears in both our eyes as we parted. This humane Governor had taught me that Oscar’s gentleness and kindness — his sweetness of nature — would win all hearts if it had time to make itself known. Yet there he was in prison. His face and figure came before me again and again: the unshaven face; the frightened, sad air; the hopeless, toneless voice. The cleanliness even of the bare hard room was ugly; the English are foolish enough to degrade those they punish. Revolt was blazing in me.

As I went away I looked up at the mediæval castellated gateway of the place, and thought how perfectly the architecture suited the spirit of the institution. The whole thing belongs to the middle ages, and not to our modern life. Fancy having both prison and hospital side by side; indeed a hospital even in the prison; torture and lovingkindness; punishment and pity under the same roof. What a blank contradiction and stupidity. Will civilisation never reach humane ideals? Will men always punish most severely the sins they do not understand and which hold for them no temptation? Did Jesus suffer in vain?

Oscar Wilde was committed on the 19th of April; a “true bill” was found against him by the grand jury on the 24th; and, as the case was put down for trial at the Old Bailey almost immediately, a postponement was asked for till the May sessions, on the ground first that the defence had not had time to prepare their case and further, that in the state of popular feeling at the moment, Mr. Wilde would not get a fair and impartial trial. Mr. Justice Charles, who was to try the case, heard the application and refused it peremptorily: “Any suggestion that the defendant would not have a fair trial was groundless,” he declared; yet he knew better. In his summing up of the case on May 1st he stated that “for weeks it had been impossible to open a newspaper without reading some reference to the case,” and when he asked the jury not to allow “preconceived opinions to weigh with them” he was admitting the truth that every newspaper reference was charged with dislike and contempt of Oscar Wilde. A fair trial indeed!

The trial took place at the Old Bailey, three days later, April 27th, 1895, before Mr. Justice Charles. Mr. C.F. Gill and A. Gill with Mr. Horace Avory appeared for the Public Prosecutor. Mr. Wilde was again defended by Sir Edward Clarke, Mr. Charles Mathews and Mr. Travers Humphreys, while Mr. J.P. Grain and Mr. Paul Taylor were counsel for the other prisoner. The trial began on a Saturday and the whole of the day was taken up with a legal argument. I am not going to give the details of the case. I shall only note the chief features of it and the unfairness which characterised it.

Sir Edward Clarke pointed out that there was one set of charges under the Criminal Law Amendment Act and another set of charges of conspiracy. He urged that the charges of conspiracy should be dropped. Under the counts alleging conspiracy, the defendants could not be called on as witnesses, which put the defence at a disadvantage. In the end the Judge decided that there were inconveniences; but he would not accede to Sir Edward Clarke’s request. Later in the trial, however, Mr. Gill himself withdrew the charges of conspiracy, and the Judge admitted explicitly in his summing up that, if he had known the evidence which was to be offered, he would not have allowed these charges of conspiracy to be made. By this confession he apparently cleared his conscience just as Pilate washed his hands. But the wrong had already been done. Not only did this charge of conspiracy embarrass the defence, but if it had never been made, as it should never have been made, then Sir Edward Clarke would have insisted and could have insisted properly that the two men should be tried separately, and Wilde would not have been discredited by being coupled with Taylor, whose character was notorious and who had already been in the hands of the police on a similar charge.

This was not the only instance of unfairness in the conduct of the prosecution. The Treasury put a youth called Atkins in the box, thus declaring him to be at least a credible witness; but Atkins was proved by Sir Edward Clarke to have perjured himself in the court in the most barefaced way. In fact the Treasury witnesses against Wilde were all blackmailers and people of the lowest character, with two exceptions. The exceptions were a boy named Mavor and a youth named Shelley. With regard to Mavor the judge admitted that no evidence had been offered that he could place before the jury; but in his summing up he was greatly affected by the evidence of Shelley. Shelley was a young man who seemed to be afflicted with a species of religious mania. Mr. Justice Charles gave great weight to his testimony. He invited the jury to say that “although there was, in his correspondence which had been read, evidence of excitability, to talk of him as a young man who did not know what he was saying was to exaggerate the effect of his letters.” He went on to ask with much solemnity: “Why should this young man have invented a tale, which must have been unpleasant to him to present from the witness box?”

In the later trial before Mr. Justice Wills the Judge had to rule out the evidence of Shelley
in toto
, because it was wholly without corroboration. If the case before Mr. Justice Charles had not been confused with the charges of conspiracy, there is no doubt that he too would have ruled out the evidence of Shelley, and then his summing up must have been entirely in favour of Wilde.

The singular malevolence of the prosecution also can be estimated by their use of the so-called “literary argument.” Wilde had written in a magazine called
The Chameleon
.
The Chameleon
contained an immoral story, with which Wilde had nothing to do, and which he had repudiated as offensive. Yet the prosecution tried to make him responsible in some way for the immorality of a writing which he knew nothing about.

Wilde had said two poems of Lord Alfred Douglas were “beautiful.” The prosecution declared that these poems were in essence a defence of the vilest immorality, but is it not possible for the most passionate poem, even the most vicious, to be “beautiful”? Nothing was ever written more passionate than one of the poems of Sappho. Yet a fragment has been selected out and preserved by the admiration of a hundred generations of men. The prosecution was in the position all the time of one who declared that a man who praised a nude picture must necessarily be immoral. Such a contention would be inconceivable in any other civilised country. Even the Judge was on much the same intellectual level. It would not be fair, he admitted, to condemn a poet or dramatic writer by his works and he went on: