Delphi Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (Illustrated) (292 page)

“It is,” I said, “a great scene; why don’t you write it?”

“Perhaps I shall, Frank, one of these days, but now I am thinking of some poetry, a ‘Ballad of a Fisher Boy,’ a sort of companion to ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol,’ in which I sing of liberty instead of prison, joy instead of sorrow, a kiss instead of an execution. I shall do this joy-song much better than I did the song of sorrow and despair.”

“Like Davidson’s ‘Ballad of a Nun,’” I said, for the sake of saying something.

“Naturally Davidson would write the ‘Ballad of a Nun,’ Frank; his talent is Scotch and severe; but I should like to write ‘The Ballad of a Fisher Boy,’” and he fell to dreaming.

The thought of his punishment was oft with him. It seemed to him hideously wrong and unjust. But he never questioned the right of society to punish. He did not see that, if you once grant that, the wrong done to him could be defended.

“I used to think myself a lord of life,” he said. “How dared those little wretches condemn me and punish me? Everyone of them tainted with a sensuality which I loathe.”

To call him out of this bitter way of regret I quoted Shakespeare’s sonnet:

“For why should others’ false adulterate eyes Give salutation to my sportive blood? Or on my frailties why are frailer spies, Which in their wills count bad what I think good?”

“His complaint is exactly yours, Oscar.”

“It’s astonishing, Frank, how well you know him, and yet you deny his intimacy with Pembroke. To you he is a living man; you always talk of him as if he had just gone out of the room, and yet you persist in believing in his innocence.”

“You misapprehend me,” I said, “the passion of his life was for Mary Fitton, to give
her a name; I mean the ‘dark lady’ of the sonnets, who was Beatrice, Cressida and Cleopatra, and you yourself admit that a man who has a mad passion for a woman is immune, I think the doctors call it, to other influences.”

“Oh, yes, Frank, of course; but how could Shakespeare with his beautiful nature love a woman to that mad excess?”

“Shakespeare hadn’t your overwhelming love of plastic beauty,” I replied; “he fell in love with a dominant personality, the complement of his own yielding, amiable disposition.”

“That’s it,” he broke in, “our opposites attract us irresistibly — the charm of the unknown!”

“You often talk now,” I went on, “as if you had never loved a woman; yet you must have loved — more than one.”

“My salad days, Frank,” he quoted, smiling, “when I was green in judgment, cold of blood.”

“No, no,” I persisted, “it is not a great while since you praised Lady So and So and the Terrys enthusiastically.”

“Lady —— ,” he began gravely (and I could not but notice that the mere title seduced him to conventional, poetic language), “moves like a lily in water; I always think of her as a lily; just as I used to think of Lily Langtry as a tulip, with a figure like a Greek vase carved in ivory. But I always adored the Terrys: Marion is a
great actress with subtle charm and enigmatic fascination: she was my ‘Woman of no importance,’ artificial and enthralling; she belongs to my theatre— “

As he seemed to have lost the thread, I questioned again.

“And Ellen?”

“Oh, Ellen’s a perfect wonder,” he broke out, “a great character. Do you know her history?” And then, without waiting for an answer, he continued:

“She began as a model for Watts, the painter, when she was only some fifteen or sixteen years of age. In a week she read him as easily as if he had been a printed book. He treated her with condescending courtesy,
en grand seigneur
, and, naturally, she had her revenge on him.

“One day her mother came in and asked Watts what he was going to do about Ellen. Watts said he didn’t understand. ‘You have made Ellen in love with you,’ said the mother, and it is impossible that could have happened unless you had been attentive to her.’

“Poor Watts protested and protested, but the mother broke down and sobbed, and said the girl’s heart would be broken, and at length, in despair, Watts asked what he was to do, and the mother could only suggest marriage.

“Finally they were married.”

“You don’t mean that,” I cried, “I never knew that Watts had married Ellen Terry.”

“Oh, yes,” said Oscar, “they were married all right. The mother saw to that, and to do him justice, Watts kept the whole family like a gentleman. But like an idealist, or, as a man of the world would say, a fool, he was ashamed of his wife; he showed great reserve to her, and when he gave his usual dinners or receptions, he invited only men and so, carefully, left her out.

“One evening he had a dinner; a great many well-known people were present and a bishop was on his right hand, when, suddenly, between the cheese and the pear, as the French would say, Ellen came dancing into the room in pink tights with a basket of roses around her waist with which she began pelting the guests. Watts was horrified, but everyone else delighted, the bishop in especial, it is said, declared he had never seen anything so romantically beautiful. Watts nearly had a fit, but Ellen danced out of the room with all their hearts in her basket instead of her roses.

“To me that’s the true story of Ellen Terry’s life. It may be true or false in reality, but I believe it to be true in fact as in symbol; it is not only an image of her life, but of her art. No one knows how she met Irving or learned to act, though, as you know, she was one of the best
actresses that ever graced the English stage. A great personality. Her children even have inherited some of her talent.”

It was only famous actresses such as Ellen Terry and Sarah Bernhardt and great ladies that Oscar ever praised. He was a snob by nature; indeed this was the chief link between him and English society. Besides, he had a rooted contempt for women and especially for their brains. He said once, of some one: “he is like a woman, sure to remember the trivial and forget the important.”

It was this disdain of the sex which led him, later, to take up our whole dispute again.

“I have been thinking over our argument in the train,” he began; “really it was preposterous of me to let you off with a drawn battle; you should have been beaten and forced to haul down your flag. We talked of love and I let you place the girl against the boy: it is all nonsense. A girl is not made for love; she is not even a good instrument of love.”

“Some of us care more for the person than the pleasure,” I replied, “and others — . You remember Browning:

Nearer we hold of God Who gives, than of His tribes that take, I must believe.”

“Yes, yes,” he replied impatiently, “but that’s not the point. I mean that a woman is not made for passion and love; but to be a mother.

“When I married, my wife was a beautiful girl, white and slim as a lily, with dancing eyes and gay rippling laughter like music. In a year or so the flower-like grace had all vanished; she became heavy, shapeless, deformed: she dragged herself about the house in uncouth misery with drawn blotched face and hideous body, sick at heart because of our love. It was dreadful. I tried to be kind to her; forced myself to touch and kiss her; but she was sick always, and — oh! I cannot recall it, it is all loathsome.... I used to wash my mouth and open the window to cleanse my lips in the pure air. Oh, nature is disgusting; it takes beauty and defiles it: it defaces the ivory-white body we have adored, with the vile cicatrices of maternity: it befouls the altar of the soul.

“How can you talk of such intimacy as love? How can you idealise it? Love is not possible to the artist unless it is sterile.”

“All her suffering did not endear her to you?” I asked in amazement; “did not call forth that pity in you which you used to speak of as divine?”

“Pity, Frank,” he exclaimed impatiently; “pity has nothing to do with love. How can one desire what is shapeless, deformed, ugly? Desire is killed by maternity; passion buried in conception,” and he flung away from the table.

At length I understood his dominant motive:
trahit sua quemque voluptas
, his Greek love of form, his intolerant cult of physical beauty, could take no heed of the happiness or well-being of the beloved.

“I will not talk to you about it, Frank; I am like a Persian, who lives by warmth and worships the sun, talking to some Esquimau, who answers me with praise of blubber and nights spent in ice houses and baths of foul vapour. Let’s talk of something else.”

CHAPTER XXI
V

A little later I was called to Monte Carlo and went for a few days, leaving Oscar, as he said, perfectly happy, with good food, excellent champagne, absinthe and coffee, and his simple fisher friends.

When I came back to La Napoule, I found everything altered and altered for the worse. There was an Englishman of a good class named M —— staying at the hotel. He was accompanied by a youth of seventeen or eighteen whom he called his servant. Oscar wanted to know if I minded meeting him.

“He is charming, Frank, and well read, and he admires me very much: you won’t mind his dining with us, will you?”

“Of course not,” I replied. But when I saw M —— I thought him an insignificant, foolish creature, who put to show a great admiration for Oscar, and drank in his words with parted lips; and well he might, for he had hardly any brains of his own. He had, however, a certain liking for the poetry and literature of passion.

To my astonishment Oscar was charming to
him, chiefly I think because he was well off, and was pressing Oscar to spend the summer with him at some place he had in Switzerland. This support made Oscar recalcitrant to any influence I might have had over him. When I asked him if he had written anything whilst I was away, he replied casually:

“No, Frank, I don’t think I shall be able to write any more. What is the good of it? I cannot force myself to write.”

“And your ‘Ballad of a Fisher Boy’?” I asked.

“I have composed three or four verses of it,” he said, smiling at me, “I have got them in my head,” and he recited two or three, one of which was quite good, but none of them startling.

Not having seen him for some days, I noticed that he was growing stout again: the good living and constant drinking seemed to ooze out of him; he began to look as he looked in the old days in London just before the catastrophe.

One morning I asked him to put the verses on paper which he had recited to me, but he would not; and when I pressed him, cried:

“Let me live, Frank; tasks remind me of prison. You do not know how I abhor even the memory of it: it was degrading, inhuman!”

“Prison was the making of you,” I could not help retorting, irritated by what seemed to
me a mere excuse. “You came out of it better in health and stronger than I have ever known you. The hard living, regular hours and compulsory chastity did you all the good in the world. That is why you wrote those superb letters to the ‘Daily Chronicle,’ and the ‘Ballad of Reading Gaol’; the State ought really to put you in prison and keep you there.”

For the first time in my life I saw angry dislike in his eyes.

“You talk poisonous nonsense, Frank,” he retorted. “Bad food is bad for everyone, and abstinence from tobacco is mere torture to me. Chastity is just as unnatural and devilish as hunger; I hate both. Self-denial is the shining sore on the leprous body of Christianity.”

To all this M —— giggled applause, which naturally excited the combative instincts in me — always too alert.

“All great artists,” I replied, “have had to practise chastity; it is chastity alone which gives vigour and tone to mind and body, while building up a reserve of extraordinary strength. Your favourite Greeks never allowed an athlete to go into the palæstra unless he had previously lived a life of complete chastity for a whole year. Balzac, too, practised it and extolled its virtues, and goodness knows he loved all the mud-honey of Paris.”

“You are hopelessly wrong, Frank, what madness will you preach next! You are always bothering one to write, and now forsooth you recommend chastity and ‘skilly,’ though I admit,” he added laughing, “that your ‘skilly’ includes all the indelicacies of the season, with champagne, Mocha coffee, and absinthe to boot. But surely you are getting too puritanical. It’s absurd of you; the other day you defended conventional love against my ideal passion.”

He provoked me: his tone was that of rather contemptuous superiority. I kept silent: I did not wish to retort as I might have done if M —— had not been present.

But Oscar was determined to assert his peculiar view. One or two days afterwards he came in very red and excited and more angry than I had ever seen him.

“What do you think has happened, Frank?”

“I do not know. Nothing serious, I hope.”

“I was sitting by the roadside on the way to Cannes. I had taken out a Vergil with me and had begun reading it. As I sat there reading, I happened to raise my eyes, and who should I see but George Alexander — George Alexander on a bicycle. I had known him intimately in the old days, and naturally I got up delighted to see him, and went towards him. But he turned his head aside and pedalled past me delib
erately. He meant to cut me. Of course I know that just before my trial in London he took my name off the bill of my comedy, though he went on playing it. But I was not angry with him for that, though he might have behaved as well as Wyndham,
who owed me nothing, don’t you think?

“Here there was nobody to see him, yet he cut me. What brutes men are! They not only punish me as a society, but now they are trying as individuals to punish me, and after all I have not done worse than they do. What difference is there between one form of sexual indulgence and another? I hate hypocrisy and hypocrites! Think of Alexander, who made all his money out of my works, cutting me, Alexander! It is too ignoble. Wouldn’t you be angry, Frank?”

“I daresay I should be,” I replied coolly, hoping the incident would be a spur to him.

“I’ve always wondered why you gave Alexander a play? Surely you didn’t think him an actor?”

“No, no!” he exclaimed, a sudden smile lighting up his face; “Alexander doesn’t act on the stage; he behaves. But wasn’t it mean of him?”

I couldn’t help smiling, the dart was so deserved.

“Begin another play,” I said, “and the Alexanders will immediately go on their knees to you again. On the other hand, if you do nothing you may expect worse than discourtesy. Men love to condemn their neighbours’ pet vice. You ought to know the world by this time.”

He did not even notice the hint to work, but broke out angrily:

“What you call vice, Frank, is not vice: it is as good to me as it was to Cæsar, Alexander, Michelangelo and Shakespeare. It was first of all made a sin by monasticism, and it has been made a crime in recent times, by the Goths — the Germans and English — who have done little or nothing since to refine or exalt the ideals of humanity. They all damn the sins they have no mind to, and that’s their morality. A brutal race; they overeat and overdrink and condemn the lusts of the flesh, while revelling in all the vilest sins of the spirit. If they would read the 23rd chapter of St. Matthew and apply it to themselves, they would learn more than by condemning a pleasure they don’t understand.
Why, even Bentham refused to put what you call a ‘vice’ in his penal code, and you yourself admitted that it should not be punished as a crime; for it carries no temptation with it. It may be a malady; but, if so, it appears only to attack the highest natures. It is disgraceful to punish it. The wit of man can find no argument which justifies its punishment.”

“Don’t be too sure of that,” I retorted.

“I have never heard a convincing argument which condemns it, Frank; I do not believe such a reason exists.”

“Don’t forget,” I said, “that this practice which you defend is condemned by a hundred generations of the most civilised races of mankind.”

“Mere prejudice of the unlettered, Frank.”

“And what is such a prejudice?” I asked. “It is the reason of a thousand generations of men, a reason so sanctified by secular experience that it has passed into flesh and blood and become an emotion and is no longer merely an argument. I would rather have one such prejudice held by men of a dozen different races than a myriad reasons. Such a prejudice is incarnate reason approved by immemorial experience.

“What argument have you against cannibalism; what reason is there why we should not
fatten babies for the spit and eat their flesh? The flesh is sweeter, African travellers tell us, than any other meat, tenderer at once and more sustaining; all reasons are in favour of it. What hinders us from indulging in this appetite but prejudice, sacred prejudice, an instinctive loathing at the bare idea?

“Humanity, it seems to me, is toiling up a long slope leading from the brute to the god: again and again whole generations, sometimes whole races, have fallen back and disappeared in the abyss. Every slip fills the survivors with fear and horror which with ages have become instinctive, and now you appear and laugh at their fears and tell them that human flesh is excellent food, and that sterile kisses are the noblest form of passion. They shudder from you and hate and punish you, and if you persist they will kill you. Who shall say they are wrong? Who shall sneer at their instinctive repulsion hallowed by ages of successful endeavour?”

“Fine rhetoric, I concede,” he replied, “but mere rhetoric. I never heard such a defence of prejudice before. I should not have expected it from you. You admit you don’t share the prejudice; you don’t feel the horror, the instinctive loathing you describe. Why? Because you are educated, Frank, because you know that the passion Socrates felt was not a
low passion, because you know that Cæsar’s weakness, let us say, or the weakness of Michelangelo or of Shakespeare, is not despicable. If the desire is not a characteristic of the highest humanity, at least it is consistent with it.”

“I cannot admit that,” I answered. “First of all, let us leave Shakespeare out of the question, or I should have to ask you for proofs of his guilt, and there are none. About the others there is this to be said, it is not by imitating the vices and weaknesses of great men that we shall get to their level. And suppose we are fated to climb above them, then their weaknesses are to be dreaded.

“I have not even tried to put the strongest reasons before you; I should have thought your own mind would have supplied them; but surely you see that the historical argument is against you. This vice of yours is dropping out of life, like cannibalism: it is no longer a practice of the highest races. It may have seemed natural enough to the Greeks, to us it is unnatural. Even the best Athenians condemned it; Socrates took pride in never having yielded to it; all moderns denounce it disdainfully. You must see that the whole progress of the world, the current of educated opinion, is against you, that you are now a ‘sport,’ a pecul
iarity, an abnormality, a man with six fingers: not a ‘sport’ that is, full of promise for the future, but a ‘sport’ of the dim backward and abysm of time, an arrested development.”

“You are bitter, Frank, almost rude.”

“Forgive me, Oscar, forgive me, please; it is because I want you at long last to open your eyes, and see things as they are.”

“But I thought you were with us, Frank, I thought at least you condemned the punishment, did not believe in the barbarous penalties.”

“I disbelieve in all punishment,” I said; “it is by love and not by hate that men must be redeemed. I believe, too, that the time is already come when the better law might be put in force, and above all, I condemn punishment which strikes a man, an artist like you, who has done beautiful and charming things as if he had done nothing. At least the good you have accomplished should be set against the evil. It has always seemed monstrous to me that you should have been punished like a Taylor. The French were right in their treatment of Verlaine: they condemned the sin, while forgiving the sinner because of his genius. The rigour in England is mere puritanic hypocrisy, shortsightedness and racial self-esteem.”

“All I can say, Frank, is, I would not limit individual desire in any way. What right has
society to punish us unless it can prove we have hurt or injured someone else against his will? Besides, if you limit passion you impoverish life, you weaken the mainspring of art, and narrow the realm of beauty.”

“All societies,” I replied, “and most individuals, too, punish what they dislike, right or wrong. There are bad smells which do not injure anyone; yet the manufacturers of them would be indicted for committing a nuisance. Nor does your plea that by limiting the choice of passion you impoverish life, appeal to me. On the contrary, I think I could prove that passion, the desire of the man for the woman and the woman for the man, has been enormously strengthened in modern times. Christianity has created, or at least cultivated, modesty, and modesty has sharpened desire. Christianity has helped to lift woman to an equality with man, and this modern intellectual development has again intensified passion out of all knowledge. The woman who is not a slave but an equal, who gives herself according to her own feeling, is infinitely more desirable to a man than any submissive serf who is always waiting on his will. And this movement intensifying passion is every day gaining force.

“We have a far higher love in us than the Greeks, infinitely higher and more intense than
the Romans knew; our sensuality is like a river banked in with stone parapets, the current flows higher and more vehemently in the narrower bed.”

“You may talk as you please, Frank, but you will never get me to believe that what I know is good to me, is evil. Suppose I like a food that is poison to other people, and yet quickens me; how dare they punish me for eating of it?”

“They would say,” I replied, “that they only punish you for inducing others to eat it.”

He broke in: “It is all ignorant prejudice, Frank; the world is slowly growing more tolerant and one day men will be ashamed of their barbarous treatment of me, as they are now ashamed of the torturings of the Middle Ages. The current of opinion is making in our favour and not against us.”