OSCAR WILDE AND MYSELF

LORD ALFRED DOUGLAS

PREFACE

THE manuscript of this book was completed by me and handed over to the publishers as long ago as last July. Certain persons thereupon deemed it advisable to apply to the Court for an injunction restraining me from including in my book any of the letters from Oscar Wilde which were in my possession, and they further applied for an injunction restraining me from quoting from the unpublished portion of the “ De Profundis” manuscript which is now sealed up at the British Museum and which was used against me in open Court as part of the justification in the defence to a libel action brought by me in Aprih 1913. The application for these injunctions was made in the Vacation Court before Mr. Justice Astbury, the most recent recruit to the Judicial Bench. It was immediately granted, and though I was advised by counsel to appeal against the decision, I thought it better to accept it, at any rate for the moment. Consequently, all the copious extracts I was intending to publish from the “ De Profundis,” which extracts had already been reproduced in all the newspapers at the hearing of the action of Douglas v. Ransome and The Times Book Club have been entirely removed. The same applies to those letters of Wilde’s which I had originally included in my book. As far as the letters are concerned, the omission does not very much affect the book. The letters were included not to make points against my opponents, but merely as interesting curiosities. The enforced omission of the extracts from the unpublished “De Profundis” has, on the other hand, been an undoubted handicap to me. A considerable portion of this book is devoted to a reply to the violently mendacious attacks made upon me and upon my family by Wilde in that unpublished portion of the “ De Profundis” which has been accepted by the authorities of the British Museum from the literary executor of the late author. Obviously it is very difficult to reply to an attack which one is unable to quote, and I can only say that I have met the difficulty as best 1 could, and that at a future date I look forward to being able to deal with the whole matter even more completely and finally. In this connection I refer my readers to the chapter in this book entitled “ A Challenge to Mr. Ross.”

ALFRED BRUCE DOUGLAS

Boulogne-sur-Mer April, 1914

To my Mother

Sibyl, Marchioness of Queensberry

INTRODUCTORY

OUT of little things there may come a peck of troubles. I suppose that my first meeting with Oscar Wilde was to me, at that time, a little thing. By this I do not mean that I was other than glad to meet a man of Wilde’s culture and attainments, but I was not particularly impressed by him at first, and, if I had never set eyes on him, I should certainly have lost nothing. As Fate arranges matters, our acquaintance has brought the gravest disasters, not only upon myself, but upon those nearest and dearest to me. The purpose of the present book is not to complain of what had happened or to rail against Oscar Wilde, who, for years, was my close friend and who, at one time in our friendship, held me fascinated by what I conceived to be his genius. That he had what passed for genius nobody will, I think, nowadays dispute, though it used to be the fashion to pooh-pooh him for a mere poseur and decadent. If our friendship had remained a private friendship — like many other of Wilde’s friendships —instead of being bruited abroad from every housetop, this book would never have been written. From the moment Wilde’s name became notorious, however, people have been careful to link our names together, and even more careful to link them together in scandalous ways. There are many persons now alive who were friends with Wilde in the days of his greatness and prosperity; and, without a single exception, so far as I am aware, their friendship is reckoned to their credit, and, in some instances, has proved highly advantageous to them from many points of view. Yet what was a virtue in these persons would seem to have been a crime in me. I have never boasted of my relations with Wilde and, though I have had many proposals from editors and publishers to say my say about my friend for handsome remuneration, I have never previously taken a penny piece from any of them. I have always known that there was nothing in our friendship of which I need be ashamed and, although the tongue of malice and slander has been busy with my name almost without ceasing since the day of Wilde’s downfall, I looked to time and the facts to set me right.

Since Wilde’s downfall, my life has been lived hnder conditions of which it is to be hoped few persons have had experience. Always I have had to fight the cunningly contrived innuendo which, while it could not be nailed to the counter and rebutted in the Courts of Law, nevertheless did its deadly work and threw its bitter odium over my name and fame. On occasions out of number I have had to take expensive legal proceedings in sheer self-defence. Generally, the parties concerned have been people of straw, who apologised abjectly or disappeared or got out by asserting that they did not mean what they had tried to say, immediately the writs were issued. My own determination has always been to refrain from litigation on the subject, unless it were absolutely forced upon me. How far I was wise in this determination is another affair.

It may seem a simple and easy thing to wipe out slander. How difficult it is, only the few persons who have had a really foul and abominable slander put up against them can know. In addition to the multitudinous gentlemen with ready pens who have not scrupled to decry and defame me, I have for years had to contend with the class of persons who had letters to sell or letters to print, and who have ever been handy with their documents and “inside information” when opportunity might arise whereby they hoped to turn an honest penny. For these gentry I have encouraged a proper contempt, and not one of them has had from me a single sixpence or a breath of appeal for the mercy which they believed themselves capable of extending. Later, a Mr. Arthur Ransome—whom I had not known as an acquaintance of Wilde and who had no acquaintance with myself—went out of his way to assert in a book, which purported to be an intimate study of Wilde, that the latter had attributed some measure of his public obloquy to my influence over him; and, further, that I had lived upon Wilde after his imprisonment and left him stranded at Naples when his financial resources were exhausted. I took an action for libel against Ransome and his publishers and The Times Book Club, with the result that the publishers withdrew Ransome’s book from circulation, leaving him and The Times Book Club to make what defence they could. The jury found for the defendants on the first libel, and that the second libel was not a libel at all. It will interest all parties concerned to know that this is exactly the finding which I anticipated, and it is noteworthy that the libels of which I complained have been expunged from the new edition of the book. Mr. Justice Darling and the defendants’ counsel repeatedly observed during the course of the trial that they could not understand what motive had prompted me to come into court. A letter which Wilde addressed to me previous to his imprisonment, and other letters which I had written to him, were read by defendants’ counsel. Judge, counsel and jury alike appear to have imagined that, if I had known of the existence of these letters, I should not have brought my action. In point of fact, I was well aware of their existence and I was told, while the action was still pending, that they were to be raked up and that I should be “simply eviscerated” in the witness-box. Well, I went like a lamb to the evisceration, and Mr. Justice Darling marvelled at my lack of worldly wisdom.

In the following pages I shall set out the whole details of my relationship with Oscar Wilde, and I do so, not by way of defence or apology—because I need neither—but simply with a view to making clear in the public interest, and for the benefit of posterity, the true inwardness of Wilde’s writing and character. I take this step as much for Wilde’s sake as for my own.

During his imprisonment at Reading, Oscar Wilde was permitted the use of pen and ink, and he appears to have relieved the tedium of his incarceration by writing eighty thousand words, or thereabouts, addressed to myself. A copy of the manuscript is alleged to have been sent to me by post, shortly after its completion. Half of it has been published under the aegis of Mr. Robert Ross, and is known to the world as “De Profundis.” The nature and drift of the published portion of the MSS. needs no comment from me at this juncture. The unpublished parts, however, may reasonably be described as a frantic attack upon me. Till a copy of this attack came into my hands during the time the Ransome action was pending, I had no knowledge of its existence. At the trial, it transpired that this farrago of hysterical abuse had been handed by Mr. Ross to the authorities at the British Museum as a present to the nation, and that it was not to be made public till 1960, when it is to be hoped we shall all be dead. I could have wished, for the sake of my old friend, that Mr. Ross had seen the wisdom of destroying a piece of writing which even Mr. Justice Darling conceives to be evil and discreditable to its author. Whether or not it is my property is a legal problem. I have applied to the British Museum for its return, but so far without success. Mr. Ross’s “present to the nation” may possibly abide on the British Museum’s shelves, unperused by the curious, till 1960. My own present to Mr. Ross and to the weeping worshippers of Wilde is delivered herewith, and can be opened and read by him who runs while we have still a little breath. The result of Mr. Ross’s action would seem to be that, if the British Museum do, in fact, disclose the contents of the manuscript after my death Wilde will be disgraced and confounded on his own evidence.

CHAPTER I. OXFORD

AFTER leaving Winchester, where I won the school steeplechase and edited a paper - called the Pentagram—the only literary or journalistic venture, by the way, out of which I ever made a profit—I went up to Oxford in the ordinary course. I was entered at Magdalen College, and I remained an undergraduate of the University for four years. Magdalen, as it always has been in recent times, and still continues to be, was considered a more or less fashionable college. It was the never-ending boast of Oscar Wilde that he had been there. The continuous “when I was at Oxford” which crops up in his writings was complemented by continuous “when I was at Magdalen” in his conversation. I do not know that there was anything extraordinary about Magdalen in my time. I look back upon my life there as fairly pleasant, and chiefly so because I had the companionship of my friend, the late Viscount En-combe, whose death at the early age of twenty-eight was a great blow to me. Of course, I met at Oxford all the people who were supposed to be worth meeting. There was Mr. Warren, then, as now, President of Magdalen, whom I remember on account of his black beard and his very obsequious treatment of myself. He was a profound admirer of Matthew Arnold, whose poetry he urged me to study and imitate. He also, rather incongruously, professed great admiration for the writings of his personal friend, John Addington Symonds. I say “incongruouslyfor an admiration for Matthew Arnold ought surely to preclude an admiration for Symonds, at any rate, as far as poetry is concerned.

For Oscar Wilde he also admitted a great partiality. They had been contemporaries at the University in their undergraduate days and, to a certain extent, friends. When Wilde came up to see me at Oxford, he always made a point of calling on Mr. Warren, and on these occasions I invariably accompanied him, and I thus had the advantage of profiting by their conversation, which, needless to say, generally turned on literary matters; but I cannot honestly say that I was greatly edified or that any gems of purest ray serene from these duologues have remained shining in my memory. When I first became an intimate friend of Oscar Wilde,

my mother, who had an instinctive dislike of Wilde, wrote to Mr. Warren and asked him if he considered Wilde was the sort of man who would be a good friend for me. The President, in reply, sent her a long letter in which he gave Wilde a very high character, praised his great gifts and achievements of scholarship and literature, and assured her that I might consider myself lucky to have obtained the favourable notice of such an eminent man. I mention this, not as anything to Mr. Warren’s detriment, but simply to show the sort of reputation Wilde at that time enjoyed among the big-wigs of the University.

Then there was Walter Pater, to whom I was introduced by Wilde on the first occasion when the latter visited me at Oxford. Wilde had an immense opinion of Pater and spoke of him always with reverence as the greatest living writer of prose. I tried hard to appreciate Pater and he personally was kind to me, but quite apart from the fact that he had practically no conversation and would sit for hours without saying more than an occasional word, I never could bring myself to have more than a very limited admiration for his far-famed prose, which has always seemed to me artificial, finnicking and over-elaborated to an exasperating degree. I have altogether livelier recollections of

Mr., now the Reverend Dr. Bussell, Pater’s most intimate friend at Brazenose, for he was a fine musician and had a devotion to Handel and Bach which endears his memory to me to this day.

Next to Encombe, probably my best friend among^-the undergraduates of my day was the poet Lionel Johnson, a frail, tiny man, with probably the finest head and the kindest heart in the University. We talked and wrote a considerable amount of poetry together, and it was Johnson who introduced me to Oscar Wilde. At this period Wilde had just begun to be considered a person of some promise in letters. He had outgrown “aesthetics” and had written “The Picture of Dorian Gray” and “Intentions,” and was rehearsing his first play: Lady Windermere’s Fan.

One vacation I went with Johnson to Wilde’s house in Tite Street, and over dinner commenced a friendship which was to be none too fortunate for either of us. For some reason or other Wilde insisted on being considerably more brilliant that evening than ever he was afterwards. Indeed, he fired off witticisms so persistently and with such an evident anxiety not to miss even the slenderest of opportunities that, while I had come to the meeting in the spirit of the youthful admirer, or literary hero-worshipper, I went away with a sort of feeling that I had been at a show and that I had not seen a really great man after all. However, as our acquaintance ripened, I began to understand, or imagine that I understood, Wilde’s moods. I soon perceived that he said quite half of everything he had to say with his tongue in his cheek and that one should not really take him seriously, because his only aim in conversation was not to say what he believed, but to say what he supposed to be witty, profound, whimsical or brilliant at the moment. Further, I soon discovered that Wilde was one of those conversationalists who were conscious of the value, not only of their own mots, but of those of other people, and that his or my joke or epigram let loose over lunch on Monday was bound to figure in the bit of dialogue or portion of an essay which he would indite, with the help of stiff whiskies-and-sodas and illimitable cigarettes, on a Tuesday morning. At the same time, I cheerfully admit that T found him an agreeable, entertaining and even lovable acquaintance. He had, of course, an eye for humour and beauty, he was a great deal of a scholar, he spoke good English and excellent French, and he had a pleasant voice and a charming delivery. Compared with the average man-about-town he shone, and compared with the average “man of genius” he scintillated.

During my second year at Oxford I contributed to the Oxford Magazine, the official journal of the University, a poem which pleased everybody but its author and provoked the excellent Mr. Warren to write me a lengthy letter of praise and congratulation. Unfortunately, I have not got this epistle at hand, otherwise I might be tempted to print it with a view of convincing the University Oxford that I am indeed somewhat of a poet. This was the first serious poem I ever wrote or, at any rate, preserved, and it is now included in the “City of the Soul.” I also contributed on several occasions to an undergraduate paper called The Spirit Lamp_} which was owned by a man whose name I forget, but he called on me one day and explained that he was going-down and very munificently offered to make me a present of his journalistic property if, as he diffidently put it, I cared to take it on and would promise to continue its high traditions to the best of my ability. I gave this gentleman the necessary assurances, and The Spirit Camp became mine. Six or seven subsequent numbers appeared under my editorship, and copies of these numbers are, I understand, worth considerably more than their published price in what is known as the market. Of my own contributions I have a poor opinion, though they were warmly appreciated at the time of their appearance by that class of person who makes warm appreciations a sort of hobby. I am proud of the fact, however, that I printed some of Lionel Johnson’s best verses and several contributions from the late John Addington Symonds, and I also had the advantage of various contributions from Wilde, including his prose poems “The Disciple” and “The House of Judgment,” and what I consider to be the best sonnet he ever wrote. Wilde frequently came to Oxford in those days, and on several occasions stayed as my guest in the rooms in High Street which I shared with my friend, Lord En-combe.

Although throughout my career as an undergraduate I was keenly interested in poetry and letters generally, I did not profess to belong to any literary set and I had no notion of taking to writing as a profession. My name and family traditions marked me out for the sporting and convivial side of University life rather than for serious literary endeavour. I read for the Honours school in a desultory kind of way, but relieved the tedium of my prescribed studies by a good deal of riding and boating and fairly regular attendance at such race-meetings as were within reasonable distance of what Mr. Ruskin doubtless called his Alma Mater. At the same time, my interest in poetry was well known in the University, and I was considered a poet of promise and parts.

Of course, every undergraduate who can write poetry at all is expected to compete for the Newdi-gate prize. I was frequently urged by my friends to enter for this prize, but none of the subjects set during my first three years at Oxford appealed to me. Tennyson, if I remember rightly, won the Newdigate with a poem about Timbuctoo. Such a subject while, perhaps, entertaining enough in its way, is, obviously, not very inspiring and certainly not calculated to induce the production of high poetry. As I have said, the subjects set in my first three years did not excite in me any great poetical emotion. In my fourth year, however, the subject was St. Francis of Assisi, and I felt at once that here was my opportunity. I told my friends that I should enter, and began to plan the poem. I was talking of the matter at dinner one night, with Encombe and the late Lord Warkworth—afterwards Earl Percy, who was at that time at Christchurch—and I told the latter that I was going in for the prize. He said that he, too, was having a shot at it, and pointed out that it was impossible for me to enter as I was in my fourth year. He offered to show me the rule in the Statutes, but, unfortunately, we had not a copy handy and I took it that Warkworth knew what he was talking about and let the thing drop. Lord Warkworth won the Newdigate that year himself, and it was only after the announcement of his success that I discovered that there was no such rule as the one he had told me of. Of course, I make no aspersion on Wark-worth’s good intentions in the matter; yet, in a sense, it is a pity that I did not look more closely into the rules, because, though I say it myself, I could have beaten him with a good many lengths to spare, and though to have won the Newdigate means, perhaps, very little from a literary point of view, it appears to be a good backing for a man who goes in seriously for poetry.

I have noticed with some astonishment that whenever opportunity has arisen persons who do not love me have been at pains to suggest that there was something discreditable about my Oxford career. It has been hinted that I was “sent down” in disgrace, and great capital has been made of the circumstance that I left Oxford without a degree. In point of fact, I was “sent down” in my second year for a term because I was “ploughed” in my examination for “smalls,” and I soon set this right by spending three weeks with a crammer and getting myself well posted up in Euclid and such-like subjects, which, though doubtless very important in their way, had never specially attracted me. When the time came for my examination in the Honours school I happened to be ill and was unable to attend, so that I left the University degreeless. Without any suggestion from me, the authorities offered to confer an honorary degree upon me if I cared to return in the vacation and pass two papers. I consulted my father, the late Marquis of Queensberry, on the subject, and he told me that he had never known a degree to be worth twopence to anybody, and, accordingly, I never took the trouble to avail myself of the Oxford’s kind offer. If going down without a degree is a crime, I belong to an excellent company of criminals, for Swinburne left Oxford minus a degree and so did Lord Rosebery and, if it comes to genius, so did the poet Shelley.

I need hardly say that Oscar Wilde expressed himself as entirely delighted with my remissness in failing to become an M.A. Oxon. He said, in his usual airy way, that it was “wonderful” of me and a “distinction,” and he pointed out that I should be like Swinburne, who determined to remain an undergraduate all his life. I am free to confess that personally I did not take much interest in the matter either way, though, had I understood the world then as I understand it now, I might have been a trifle less careless.

Generally, I do not wish it to be supposed that my life at Oxford was any more immaculate than that of other young men in my own position in life. I came into collision with the authorities on various small sins of omission and commission. I was gated once for going to the Derby—wicked youth that I was!—and I dare say I worried the authorities by my persistent refusal to take either ^hemselves or the University for the most serious thing in nature. But I lived with them gloriously and delicately for the full undergraduate span of four years, save one term over “smalls,” and, as I have shown, they were quite willing to take me to their bosom as a full member of the University if I had cared to fall into their embrace.

The idea that Oxford is a place entirely given over to the laborious and the assiduous pursuit of knowledge is a mistake. It can be proved quite easily that, while the assiduous and the laborious who choose to make Oxford a sort of career may do very well out of it in the way of Fellowships, scholastic appointments, and so forth, the best men Oxford turns out are, in the main, men who have been considered to have missed their opportunities. Everybody who was anybody at Oxford in my time had a disposition to be very modest about learning and a trifle shy about recommending it as the be-all and end-all of life. There is a tale attributed to a certain worthy Don—indeed, it is said to have been his stock story—which relates to two excellent youths of good family who went up to Oxford together. One of them was slack and fond of his ease; he read nothing and did nothing and, after years of dissipation, was fain to get a living by driving a hansom-cab. The other youth, the pride of his family and college, read everything and won everything and did everything that was proper. Years after, somebody found him in London doing his best to keep the wolf from the door by driving a four-wheeler. This is an old story, but it is a very good one, and anybody who knows Oxford in the intimate personal sense knows how true it may well be. For myself, I think if it had come to cab-driving the hansom would unquestionably have been my vehicle.

I was careless and desultory in the widest sense of the terms; so careless and desultory, in fact, that, with a view to saving time and trouble in my intercourse with the authorities, I had a form printed as follows:—

Lord Alfred Bruce Douglas presents his compliments to....................... and regrets that he will be unable to .....................in consequence of.......................

Filled up, this ingenious document would read as follows: —

Lord Alfred Bruce Douglas presents his compliments to Professor Smith and regrets that he will be unable to show up an essay on the Evolution of the Moral Idea in consequence of not having prepared one.

I found these missives extremely useful and used a great quantity. They were famed throughout the University and, though they angered some of the Dons to the verge of madness, nothing could be done about them, because they were obviously polite, and an undergraduate who is polite to his pastors and masters has done his duty. It may be on the strength of this form and on my being “sent down” for a failure to pass “smalls” that the legend and fiction of my alleged ignominious career at Oxford depends. I know of nothing more serious, otherwise I should be pleased to unburden myself. Both before and after I terminated my undergrad-uateship by removing my name from the books of Magdalen College, I was a frequent visitor to the scene of my old triumphs and kept up many friendships among the men of my time and among the University authorities. I removed my name from the books of my own free will and as a matter of personal convenience. What I did may have been a trifle unusual, though I am acquainted with at least one distinguished Oxford man who did precisely the same thing, and that my actions should have been twisted into a sort of horrible wickedness must have startled a good many other people besides myself.

So much for the gay Lord Alfred Douglas, undergraduate of Magdalen College, Oxford.

CHAPTER II. LOST ILLUSIONS

IT is very hard, indeed, wellnigh impossible, for me to recapture and set forth for the benefit of my readers the secret of the fascination that Oscar Wilde had for me in those far-off days. The revelation of his perfidy and vileness which came to me when, about a year ago, I first got knowledge of the existence of the unpublished portion of “De Profundis,” the shock of horror, indignation and disgust which the reading of that abominable document produced in my mind, and the ever-recurring reflection that during the last few years of his life and after his release from prison, when he was professing the greatest friendship and affection for me and living—for a time in part, and ultimately altogether—on my bounty, he was all the while the secret author of a foul and lying attack on me and on my family which he had arranged to make public after my death, combine to make the task of reconstructing a semblance of my old feeling for him almost a hopeless one. Long however before I had cognisance of the unpublished “De Pro-fundis,” my view of his character and my estimate of his value as a man of letters had undergone a profound change. With the passing of the years and a more serious and mature outlook on the facts of life and on the responsibilities of those who seek the suffrages or merely the ears of the general reader, I had arrived at the conclusion that Oscar Wilde’s writings were ridiculously overrated, that he was never either a great poet or a great writer of prose, and that the harm he had caused to the whole body of English literature and the pernicious effect he had exercised on the literary movements and the journalism of the period immediately succeeding his own, very much more than counterbalanced the credit of any legitimate success he may have achieved. Still, up till the period when the discovery of the unpublished part of “De Prof midis” was forced upon my notice, I carefully refrained from giving voice to these sentiments. The man had been my friend, I had been very fond of him, and I had formerly had an exaggerated view as to the value of his work. I did not therefore consider that I was in any way called upon to interfere with his literary reputation, even though, in my opinion, it was a specious reputation and the result, moreover, of a cleverly-engineered campaign on his behalf, made by friends who were more careful of Wilde’s fame than of the general good of letters.

Still less did I conceive it to be any part of my duty to attack what was left of his character. On the contrary, I steadily persisted in taking the best view possible of the man, and until I read the unpublished ^frDe Profundis” I kept a great measure of my affection for his memory and, in common with many other people, cherished fond illusions about his moral character. That my affection for him was real and sincere and continued to be so right up to the time when I read the unpublished part of “De Profundis” is fairly proved by the facts that I persistently defended him—even at the cost of some violence to my own literary conscience—in the columns of the Academy, when I was its editor, and that I wrote to his memory one of my best sonnets, which I here reproduce:—

The Dead Poet

I dreamed of him last night, I saw his face All radiant and unshadowed of distress,

And as of old, in music measureless,

I heard his golden voice and marked him trace Under the common thing the hidden grace,

And conjure wonder out of emptiness,

Till mean things put on beauty like a dress And all the world was an enchanted place.

And then methought outside a fast locked gate I mourned the loss of unrecorded words,

Forgotten tales and mysteries half said,

Wonders that might have been articulate,

And voiceless thoughts like murdered singing birds. And so I woke and knew that he was dead.

Now I wrote that sonnet as long ago as 1901, within a few months of Wilde’s death, but I included it in my 1909 volume of sonnets and, in face of it, I could not possibly pretend, even if I wished to do so, that I was not at one time deeply attached to him and that I continued to cherish his memory after his death. But when it comes to explaining that attachment and reproducing the atmosphere which generated it, I find that I am met at the outset by this deplorable set-back—namely and to wit: that the very qualities in him which then excited my admiration, now evoke my contempt. It must be remembered that when I met Wilde I was very young in years, and still younger in temperament and in experience. I was, in fact, a mere child. I reproduce on the opposite page a photograph of myself, taken in my second year at Oxford, just about the time I first met Wilde. It is obviously the photograph of a boy—and a fairly unsophisticated boy, at that. There are numbers of my friends and contemporaries at Oxford, now living, and they could all bear witness to the fact that even at the age of twenty-three I had the appearance of a youth of sixteen; and though, of course, I should have been woefully offended if any one had told me so at the time, there was much in my character that corresponded with my appearance. I don’t think there was ever any one so easily deceived, such an obvious mark for the designing, as I was in those days. I was never allowed to forget that I was Lord Alfred Douglas, the son of a marquis and a person of consequence. The mere fact that I thought myself very knowing and a complete man of the world only served to make me an easier victim to any accomplished teller of the literary tale. Wilde made a dead set at me. He was attracted by my youth, my guilelessness, and—to be perfectly frank—by what he considered my social importance, and he laid himself out to captivate me and to fascinate me.

He was then about forty years of age; he was a brilliant talker—every one admits that: I have never heard it denied, even by his greatest enemy; he was utterly unlike any one or anything that I had ever come across before, and he had that sort of assumption of certainty about all the problems of life which is one of the compensations—exchanged for many other better things—that comes at that age to an accomplished man of the world. He had a habit of enunciating the most entirely unmoral and subversive sentiments in a manner and with an air of final authority which could not fail to appeal to a high-spirited youth, already inclined—as is the manner of high-spirited youth— to kick over the traces. According to him, it didn’t matter in the least what one did as long as one happened to be “a charming and graceful young man, related to every one in the peerage,” and did whatever one wanted to do in “a charming and graceful manner.” This “simple and beautiful” theory appealed irresistibly to me, as it very well might to any thoughtless youth; and, coming as it did from one who was actually looked up to and admired by the President of my College, and who had been commended to my mother as a most desirable acquaintance for me, it naturally seemed the last word of wisdom. But how can I be expected now to have anything but contempt for such arts, practised by a clever man of the world on an unreflecting boy? Or how can I be blamed because the recollection of the fact that I was, for the time, attracted by such preposterous and poisonous speciousness is anything else but repugnant to me now when I look back on it?

In my desperate anxiety to do justice to the memory of one who was formerly my friend, I might be tempted to give more instances of his method of dealing with young men whose good will he was anxious to obtain; but by so doing I should add nothing to his reputation, even for cleverness. It is the easiest thing in the world to turn the head of a young fellow at Oxford or Cambridge. Any man of the world could do so, if he cared to take the trouble and was sufficiently unscrupulous. It does not require great wit or great brains or anything but impudence and a blunted sense of honour. These two “qualities” Wilde undoubtedly possessed.

It is easy for any one who has not forgotten the time of his own youth to see how Wilde contrived to attract me. He flattered me incessantly, he professed extreme admiration for the few poetical efforts which I had then produced—efforts, by the way, which, in his Reading Gaol days, became poor “undergraduate verses”—and whatever I did or whatever I said was “wonderful” in his eyes. He displayed all the outward signs and symbols of friendship and affection. He has himself set them all out faithfully, so that I am spared the necessity of reproducing them here. I will merely put it on record—to give him the whole of the credit that can possibly be due to him—that, in the matter of sending expensive bunches of muscat grapes and copies of the illustrated papers to my bedside when

I happened to be ill, promptly replying to requests for an immediate despatch of cigarettes when I had gone away to the country and forgotten to take them with me, and remembering my favourite dishes when I happened to dine with him, he was “all that a loving heart could wish.” I accepted these husks for the real bread of friendship, and because it has been all through my life my fatal habit to idealise my friends and to endow them with all sorts of qualities which they never dreamed of possessing, I conceived a great and lasting affection for this man; and, when he was in trouble, I fought for him and defended him through thick and thin and without any regard to rhyme or reason or my own interest. Hence these tears! And I am not in the least disposed to dispute that I have only myself to blame and that it served me very well right. “But this is got by casting pearl to hogs.”

CHAPTER III. WILDE IN SOCIETY

IN view of the curious anxiety of those who support and uphold the Wilde legend, to paint him for us as a man of fashion and social position, it may be interesting if I try to recall Oscar Wilde in his figure as a buck or, as we nowadays say, man about town. There can be no doubt whatever that he did really consider himself a person of fashion and social standing, outside of his claims to literary notoriety.

In his writings he is very fond of using such phrases as “men of our rank,” “people of our social class,” and so forth. “Rank” is a good word, and Wilde knew perfectly well how to use it in a manner which would lead people really to believe that he was nobly born. He was able to talk of his mother as Lady Wilde, and I have heard him refer to her in certain company as “her ladyship” with great effect. You would imagine from his manner that she was a grande dame of the first water, with two or three large places to her name, and retinues of servants.

Of Papa Wilde we did not hear quite so frequently, probably for the reason that he was not “his lordship.” At the same time, Wilde could not have put on greater airs than he was sometimes wont to don if his father had been a duke.

Now, with this feeling of “family” about him, it is not extraordinary that he should have tried to live up to it to the best of his lights. He opined that if “a gentleman of rank” is to be taken for a gentleman of rank, he must not only keep his rank duly prominent in his conversation, but he must also look, dress and, as far as possible, live the part. In the matter of looks, Wilde believed in his heart that he had the “bulge” of all the literary people of his time. Tennyson might wear prophetic robes and wideawake hats, Swinburne might look the decent little ginger gentleman he was, Pater might pass for the profound and beetle-browed thinker on the high arts, Bernard Shaw might pass for the bewhiskered fire-eater, Arthur Symons for the blonde angel, Beardsley for the delicate spider-legged artist; but when it came to nobility and beauty of features, Wilde was convinced that he had them all “beaten to a frazzle.” He was very fond of likening himself to the Roman Emperors. He had a big face, which was, as he himself put it, “delicately chiselled”; and if anybody had asked him to sit for a bust of Nero, he would have considered that person most discerning. I remember him saying to me that, while it was considered among “the dull English” to be almost criminal for a man to speak of good looks, either in himself or in another man, good looks were half the battle in society. Of course, I laughed and told him not to be a fool; but he meant it, all the same; and nothing would make him angrier than the hint that his mouth was too large or that his face was spoiled by too great an expanse of jowl. He took great care of his complexion, and I never knew a man who brushed his hair more frequently in the day than he did.

He had a defect which was the sorrow of his life —the arts of the dentist not being so well understood then as they are to-day—but on this I do not propose to dwell.

I have been astonished that the published part of “De Profundis” contains no touching and beautiful passages relating to clothes; and this is all the more surprising because, in point of fact, Wilde was, to a large extent, a tailor’s man. I sometimes think that if he had lived in the present era of Homburg hats and tweed suits he would never have been famous at all. He began his notoriety by fantastic dressing, but as he ascended on the rungs of art to the heaven of rank, his great aim was for what he termed “elegant correctness.” Hence, the Wilde of my time consisted, to a great extent, of silk hat, frock coat, striped trousers and patent leather boots. Add to these a very tall clouded cane with a heavy gold knob and a pair of grey suede gloves, and you have the outward man. On the whole, I believe that he loathed the get-up, especially in the hot weather, but he stuck to it like a Trojan, and nobody ever saw Oscar Wilde in London outside of the regulation harness from eleven o’clock till seven, or outside of the hard white shirt and swallow-tails from seven-thirty till any time you like in the morning.

Being a Roman, he must do as persons of rank did in Rome, and he always struck me as being garbed in perpetual readiness to walk out or dine out with the duke or prince of the blood who would one day surely be calling round for him. He had a large turquoise set in diamonds, which I had purchased for him in an expansive moment when we happened to be together in a jeweller’s shop. The occasion was his birthday and I took him to choose his own present. His eye fell on this sea-blue bauble in its ring of brilliants, and all question of trouble to the shopman was sunk. He wore this ornament in his shirt-front of evenings with a truly regal dignity. For myself, I used to call it “the blue light” or the “Hope-Not”—the Hope diamond being at that time very much to the fore in polite conversation.

In the country he naturally subsided into easier habiliments; but even here he must follow the fashion or be a little bit ahead of it. His suits and caps must be all of one piece, his boots as worn by “the nobility and gentry” and his general accoutrements designed subtly to convey the impression that he owned at least ten thousand acres somewhere or other.

This bucolic perfection was entirely a social affair with him, for he was most coy of being photographed otherwise than cn grande tenue. In all his official photographs, the frock coat, braided for preference, or the fur coat, with a suggestion of a silk hat on a side table, “bear the gree.”

The very suggestion of “literalism” in the matter of appearance horrified him. He desired to pass for a gentleman, a “gentleman of rank,” and nothing more. And this he undoubtedly succeeded in doing to his own satisfaction. In his intercourse with the “highest in the land”—which was, to put it plainly, of a very occasional nature—he always seemed to me to be a trifle strained and uneasy. He longed to smack certain personages on the back, but he never dared to do it. With women he succeeded a great deal better than with men. Somehow, the men made him either very stiff or very limp. His bow was wasted upon them and his diffident attempts at epigram missed fire. I think that women loved him because he would insist that everything was “charming” or “exquisite,” and because, although he was expected to talk brilliantly, he really did a great deal of listening. Late in the proceedings, when the buffet had done its harmless, necessary work, he would open fire and talk amazingly, and fifteen to twenty women would hang on his words, doubtless because their hostess had told them that Mr. Wilde was “so amusing.” But the men hung aloof. When he came away Wilde was always as eager to know how he had “gone down,” as a debutante is eager to be informed as to the figure she cut at her first ball. If one said: “You were great, Oscar,” he would glow with honest pride; if one hummed a little, he would be in the depths for a week. There were women who didn’t admire him in the least, and some of them were at no pains to disguise the fact. Long before the tongue of scandal took definite hold of his name, there were whispers that there was something wrong about him; and when Lady Blank referred to him in his hearing as “that fellow,” he became white with passion and was with difficulty restrained from making a demonstration.

On the whole, however, his social evenings were a source of joy and delight to him, and he would talk of this or that party for months after it had taken place, with continual notes of gratification in his voice. And when, as sometimes happened, he went to the houses of persons who were not friends of mine, I could make sure of brilliantly jewelled accounts of the high jinks and proceedings, and of the honour which had been rendered to him by brave and fair alike. “Dear Lady So-and-So,” he would say; “Ah! a charming woman, if you like: came down the staircase to receive me, for all the world like CEnone coming down Ida. And the Prime Minister was there, and I don't mind telling you that he glowered at me. They hate genius, my boy. And poor old Lord — have never seen him before—looked to me like a waiter. Extraordinary that a man of his position should look so rusty. However, I need not tell you that he was very civil to me.” And when I asked him what he meant by “rusty,” he said: “Well, he wore such extraordinary clothes.” The real facts of the case doubtless were that his hostess was not beautiful at all, that the Prime

Minister had not happened to look his way, and that, despite his rusty suit, old Lord-had gone out of his way to meet rather profuse deference with graciousness.

I don’t say that Wilde had no social success, but what he had was of that curious kind which is here to-day and forgotten to-morrow, and his reports of it were always slightly exaggerated. It was on such a slender basis that he built up the fabric of wonder and splendour with regard to “rank” which he afterwards spread out for us in Reading gaol. Throughout, he draws a great line between “the poor thieves and outcasts with whom I now associate” and “people of our rank”—never “people of our intellect,” never “people of our culture.” He tells us that in prison he became a great individualist, and apparently it was in prison that he became a great aristocrat.

In one passage in the published “De Profundis” he actually uses the words “I had inherited a noble name.” One need not grudge him these tender illusions, and, in a way, there is something rather pathetic about them. But their encouragement was so entirely characteristic of the man that it is impossible to avoid a reference to them in a truthful portrait. That Wilde did not happen to be nobly born is certainly nothing to his discredit; that he

should have persistently pretended to noble birth is, on the other hand, fairly contemptible, especially as in his efforts to live up to the part he had allotted to himself he invariably succeeded in behaving in an eminently unaristocratic manner. He lacked a kind heart just as surely as he lacked a coronet, and Norman blood was as alien to him as simple faith.

CHAPTER IV. THE LORD OF LANGUAGE

I AM not sure that this chapter is headed in quite the way that Oscar Wilde’s adherents would like it to be. When he wished to seem particularly important, Wilde was wont to describe himself, not only as a Lord of Language, but as the King of Life. His claims to these magniloquent titles have been suffered to pass unquestioned by his critics, and unassailed even by his enemies. The coterie of long-haired persons who weep at the mention of “dear Oscar’s” name and hold him up for a saint and a martyr, naturally take pride in his own description of himself, and will no doubt consider it remiss of me to leave out one of them from this chapter heading. The King of Life business has always appeared to me to have been settled at the Old Bailey, and since such a title as the Lord of Language is plainly literary in its bearings, I suppose I am free to discuss it from the literary point of view. And I must state at the outset that I am not concerned to deal with Wilde in other than a reasonable, critical spirit. If his fame and writings had been left to themselves instead of becoming the subject of attentions on the part of over-zealous log-rollers on the one hand and catch-penny scandalmongers on the other, Wilde would, in the nature of things, have attained to his proper position in literary history and to his proper status as an author. As it is, I maintain that the current views about his character and his writings are exaggerated and even preposterous—views very far ahead of the true facts and, in a large measure, opposed to what Wilde himself would have wished. Practically everybody nowadays who writes for pleasure or for profit about Oscar Fingall O’Flaher-tie Wills Wilde has taken him for granted as a sort of literary and artistic aristocrat who had a natural right to the best of life and for whom all beauty and delicacy were created. One of the most recent of his biographers says: “Wilde provides us with the rare spectacle of a man most of whose powers are those of a spectator, a connoisseur, a man for whom pictures are painted and books written, the perfect elaborator for whom the artist hopes in his heart.” I have never seen a fault of taste, a fault of judgment or a fault of intellect attributed to him. Even his vices are held up to us as having been necessary to the development of his chartered and immaculate soul, and as having contributed and been necessary to the perfection of his work. Greater bunkum was never propagated. Wilde was far from being in any sense a perfervid worshipper of the beautiful. To suggest that beauty was all in all for him is to suggest what is not true. He was never content that other people should write fine poetry or fine prose for him to admire, his sole ambition being to write fine things himself—not especially for the fine thing’s sake, but for the sake of being able to pose as the one great and superior person in all the world. It is not to Wilde’s discredit, perhaps, that he praised but little or, as one might say, frugally. There was nobody of his time who greatly required to be praised. He professed the stock admiration for Tennyson, Swinburne, Meredith and Pater; but when he expressed it— which was seldom—it was always with the reservation that of the five he himself was the greatest. There were occasions, of course, when he could be adulatory, and even obsequious; but this was either to dead men or to those of his contemporaries who were engaged in arts with which he was not concerned as a practitioner. His sonnets to Miss Ellen Terry and the late Henry Irving may stand for his monument in this special line. As to artists painting pictures for him, and so forth, the great quarrel of his life was with Whistler, from whom he derived practically everything that he affected to know about art and whose work he believed to be ‘Vastly overrated.” Of pictures in their relation to beauty he had little or no appreciation. Just as the far-famed blue china at Oxford was valuable to him because he could make mots over it and get himself talked about, so all his views and his expressions of opinion with respect to art were not the views and opinions of the person who loves and knows art, but were designed to illustrate his own singularity or superiority, or to support a pose. In spite of all he wrote and said on the subject, and in spite of all that has been said and written by his admirers, there is nothing of Wilde that persists in criticism on the art side which is not to be found in Whistler’s “Ten o’clock,” or which he had not gleaned either from his contemporaries or from the older writers on the literary side. In order to show more clearly what I mean, let us take the preface to “Dorian Gray,” which, as is well known, consists of a number of aphorisms concerning art and criticism as Wilde is supposed to have believed in them. I quote some of them:—

The artist is the creator of beautiful things.

To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s

aim.

The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things.

The highest, as the lowest, form of criticism is a mode of autobiography.

Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.

Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope.

They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only beauty.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all.

The nineteenth-century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass.

The nineteenth-century dislike of romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass.

The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium.

No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are true can be proved.

Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art.

Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art.

From the point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the musician. From the point of view of feeling, the actor’s craft is the type.

It is the spectator and not life that art really mirrors.

Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex and vital.

When critics disagree the artist is in accord with himself.

We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.

All art is quite useless.

These remarks have been held up to us as Wilde’s credo, and slight and few though they be, it is the fact that they do really epitomise what some people call his “teaching.” One has only to glance at them, however, to perceive that without exception they are either obvious or perverted truisms or the merest glosses on quite hoary critical adages. For example, “The artist is the creator of beautiful things” must have been said at least a thousand times before Wilde suddenly rushed upon the world with it as a new and marvellous discovery. “To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim” is a very cheap variant of the saying that language was invented to conceal one’s thoughts, or Horace’s old tag: “Ars est celare artem.” “The highest and lowest form of criticism is a form of autobiography” is merely to say what was said by Rousseau —namely: that all writing is in essence autobiographical; while “It is the spectator and not life, that art really mirrors” is merely Shakespeare’s “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” clumsily rendered. All the talk about there being no such thing as a moral or an immoral book, and about art being quite useless, is the merest perversion and fiddle-de-dee, as anybody who is not in the last stage of idiocy will perceive for himself.

I maintain that this statement of Wilde—which, by the way, did not originally appear as a preface to “Dorian Gray,” but was painfully and carefully compiled when its author was at the height of his achievement and wished to pontificate—shows us clearly the nature of the man’s mind, which was a shallow and comparatively feeble mind, incapable of grappling unaided with even moderately profound things, and disposed to fribble and antic with old thoughts for lack of power to evolve new ones. It was a mind which was continually discovering with a glow that two and two make four, or pretending to discover with a much warmer glow that two and two make five. In every scrap that he wrote, leaving out, of course, the poems, you will find this feeble, mediocre, but, withal, vain-glorious instrument hard at work on the fearful business of saying nothing in such a way that foolish people will shout about it.

Wilde knew himself for a shallow and oblique thinker. The fact that he never did anything really great has been set down to his indolence. It was due really to shallowness rather than indolence. When he found that nobody would read his poetry, he became most indolent about the writing of verses and complained that there was nothing for a poet of his eminence to write about. When he found that people would listen to lectures written on a basis of Whistler and William Morris, he wrote and delivered such lectures with an industry worthy of the best of causes. And when he found actor-managers who would produce money “on account” for such drama as “Lady Windermere’s Fan” and such comedy as '‘The Importance of being Earnest/⁵ he wrote plays till the sweat fairly rolled off him. But he was conscious, as every unbiassed contemporary critic was conscious, that he ran very far short of the achievement of which he was wont to plume himself, and he knew that when it came to serious things he was always considered more or less of a dabbler.

Like most Irishmen, he was troubled all his life with attacks of regret which he was accustomed to call remorse. He believed that he had supreme gifts and that he had squandered them; he never could see that it was impossible that a man who pretended, as he pretended, could ever have had supreme gifts. His remorse over the squandering of these alleged gifts was at times ludicrous to behold. He would bemoan his wasted life and come very nigh shedding tears about his shallowness at two o’clock in the morning; while at one o’clock the same day he would be swallowing ortolans as if they were oysters and swearing over some silly liqueur that he was the greatest genius that ever lived.

In time, this notion of shallowness became an obsession with him. He makes constant use of the word "shallow” in his writings, and right through "De Profundis” you find him crying "the supreme vice is shallowness,” in and out of season, and without the remotest reference to the context. Of course, if we endeavour to look into the psychology of the situation, we perceive clearly that it was impossible for a man of Wilde’s type to do any really big work, and he certainly never did do it. His claims to be considered as a “Lord of Language” will not bear looking into. He wrote passable verse and competent prose, but he wrote no better verse and no better prose than several other men of his time whose writings are more or less forgotten. We have it on the statement of Mr. Justice Darling that Wilde could “conjure with words.” I should like chapter and verse for any verbal conjuring which can be considered worth remembering, or which, for that matter, is remembered. I think that all Wilde did for the English language was to degrade, abuse or make ridiculous such words as “exquisite,” “wonderful,” “charming,” “delightful,” “delicate,” and so forth. He bored me to death at times with his “How perfectly wonderful of you!” while his “charming fellows” and “charming ladies,” “delicious dishes,” “exquisite liqueurs” and general ecstatics were like sands on the sea where the blue wave rolls nightly. He was plagued with the Irishman’s propensity to muddle his “shalls” and “wills,” and I found in him an utter incapacity to understand or appreciate, in the literary sense, certain plain English idioms with which any man possessed of a feeling for language would never have had the slightest trouble. I remember having a lengthy and fearful argument with him over Shakespeare’s use of the word “your” in such phrases as “your tanner will last you eleven years.” He could understand neither the force nor the sense of such usages and, though he “tumbled” in the end, he was a fearful time about it. One does not expect such dullness in a Lord of Language.

CHAPTER V. OUR MUTUAL FRIENDS

ACCORDING to the Ransome book—the biographical details in which, its author - admits, have been checked by Mr. Robert Ross—Oscar Wilde was the son of William Wilde, “knighted in 1864, a celebrated oculist and aurist, a man of great intellectuality and uncertain temper, a runner after girls, with a lusty enjoyment of life, and a delight in falling stars and thunderstorms.” This is an ingenious way of presenting a decidedly dubious and unpleasing character to an awestricken world. Wilde’s father was certainly a knight; but heaven alone knows who his grandfather was. It is also to be noted that while Sir William Wilde may have died “a celebrated oculist and aurist,” he began life as an apothecary, and for years kept a chemist’s shop in an obscure part of Dublin. The “runner after girls” admission on the part of Messrs. Ransome and Ross is also very touching, seeing that William Wilde had once been prosecuted for insulting a lady patient and that everybody knows the story of Wilde’s father and the witty veterinary surgeon who rallied him on the subject with one of the sharpest bits of sarcasm that ever fell from a man’s mouth.

It is perhaps necessary for me to say here that I have never in my life laid any great stress upon the advantages of birth. If a man’s manners and disposition are all right, I am not greatly concerned to know that his father drove pigs or got locked up for stealing spoons. At the same time, I have never been able to repress feelings of amused contempt for that numerous body of persons who, having no ancestry or forbears to speak of, make a point of proclaiming themselves to be persons of family, and invent all manner of legends to support their supposed exalted birth.

In the case of Wilde, it is due to him to say that he kept his parentage and extraction fairly in the background so far as I was concerned. He admitted that he belonged to the Irish middle classes and prided himself on having risen to academic honour, not with the help of money, but by sheer force of intellect. This was in the early days of our acquaintance. Ultimately, when he had managed to get out of the rut of bohemianism and to find his way into respectable society, he began to conceive himself in the light of a very great social figure, and it was easy for him to suppose that he was a born member of the aristocracy and that all his people belonged to what Burke, I believe, calls “The titled landed and official classes.⁵⁵ I used to smile at these pretensions and joke with him about them; and he would admit that he was foolish. But the fact remains that to the end of his life he kept up the legend of his high birth and connections, and was eager always to pass himself off as a great gentleman.

His biographers have taken up the wondrous tale and, without saying so in as many words, they lead the polite world of Wilde worshippers to believe that their saint was what the young lady called “a gentleman in his own right". The Wildes “were people of consideration in Dublin,⁵⁵ says the zealous Mr. Ransome: “his school-fellows did not have to ask Wilde who his father was". Well, possibly they didn’t—for very different reasons than those Mr. Ransome would have us conjure up. Down to the time of my first meeting Wilde, he had never had any real footing in society and, though he fought for it desperately during the period of our friendship, I doubt if he ever really got it. He was too obviously the tuft-hunter and the snob ever to be liked by the people for whose acquaintance he sighed. I never could see why a man of his talents and mode of life should have been so desperately anxious to be “hail fellow well met” with some of the dullest and silliest people in the world; but there can be no doubt that he dearly loved a lord and would put up with a great deal of pain and inconvenience on the mere chance of a casual word or two with a duchess. When our acquaintance began he knew nobody, and, though his name was in the papers and his picture turned up from time to time in Punch, you never saw him at the places where he would have given his soul to be. He told me that at Magdalen he had managed to get on terms with an unmarried duke, but before this beam of sunshine had shone upon him for a year or two, the duke incontinently married and the duchess intervened and put an end to the intimacy.

Wilde’s own set of friends and acquaintances struck one as being a peculiar assemblage; but he assured me that they were great and charming people and that they were all on the high road to eminence and fame; and, being young and unversed in the world’s ways, I took him at his word and set down my incapacity to appreciate his immediate entourage to my own dullness and lack of perspicacity. The first stars in the firmament of charming fellows and world-compelling geniuses brought to me by Wilde were Mr. Robert Ross and Mr. Reggie Turner. According to the allegations brought against me at the Ransome trial, when Wilde entertained these gentlemen at dinner he did it in Soho and with the help of a shilling bottle of Medoc; whereas when I, Lord Alfred Douglas, was his guest, it was always at Willis’s rooms and to the accompaniment of specially imported pates from Strasbourg and priceless champagnes. In point of fact, all four of us drank a good many humble whiskies and sodas at the Cafe Royal and dined and lunched at the same place without any great effusions of money on anybody’s part. Wilde was a doughty and assiduous trencherman. I would have backed him to eat the head off a brewer’s drayman three times a day, and his capacity for whisky and soda knew no bounds. The marvel of it was that he never became really drunk, though from four o’clock in the afternoon till three in the morning he was never really sober. The more he drank the more he talked, and without whisky he could neither talk nor write.

After Messrs. Ross and Turner, Wilde brought along the late Ernest Dowson, who, for some reason or other, seemed scared out of his wits; Mr. Max Beerbohm, who giggled prettily at everything either Wilde or I said; and Mr. Frank Harris, who wore the same costly furs and roared in the same sucking-dove way as still continues to delight his troops of friends. They were a merry and, I am afraid, a rather careless company. They talked art, poetry and politics; none of them seemed to have much to do, though I believe all of them were fairly busy men and, on the whole, they were pleasant enough people to meet.

Gradually, however, the acquaintance between myself and Wilde began to strengthen and become more intimate. I took him to my mother’s place near Ascot and introduced him to a good many people whom he considered to be important. He met my cousin, George Wyndham, who, I believe, asked him down afterwards to Clouds, and, at his very special request, I introduced him to my brother, Viscount Drumlanrig, at that time a Lord-in-Waiting to Queen Victoria. No two men could have less in common than Drumlanrig and Wilde. On one hand you had a soldier and a sportsman, with perhaps a bit of the courtier thrown in; on the other hand you had the overdressed Bohemian, with his hair nicely parted and very anxious to be friendly and charming. My brother was amused and, though they did not meet more than three times, it was years before Wilde ceased to talk pompously of “my friend, Lord Drumlanrig, Lord-in-Waiting to Her Majesty.” I also introduced him to my grandfather, Mr. Alfred Montgomery, who took a violent and invincible dislike to him and declined to meet him again.

In addition to the people I have mentioned, Wilde always had on hand a sort of job line of weird and wonderful acquaintances whose names were for ever on his lips and whose possessions—intellectual and otherwise—were supposed to be fabulous. He would come a few minutes late for lunch and beg to be excused for unpunctuality. “The fact of the matter is,” he would say, “I have spent a most delightful morning with my dear friend, Mr. Balsam Bassy—a charming fellow with a face like a Michel Angelo drawing and a mind like Benvenuto Cellini. I would have brought him in to lunch—he is dying to make your acquaintance—but he has to go down to his uncle’s place in Devonshire and couldn’t miss the two-fifty on any account.” There would follow a long and highly elaborate statement of Mr. Balsam Bassy’s many gifts, graces and accomplishments, his wonderful powers of conversation, the exquisite mots he perpetrated, and the charming poetry that he could write if he would only take the trouble to live his own life instead of frivolling it away in the highest circles. Wilde had, to my knowledge, at least half a dozen “Balsam Bassys” going at one time and, though I only saw one of them in the flesh, I believe they were real persons, and that Wilde believed all he had invented about them. The solitary “Balsam Bassy” he produced on an occasion when he could not help himself, as the man sailed right into us at supper, turned out to be a very mild and inoffensive gentleman who possessed an allowance of two hundred and fifty pounds a year from his uncle, a brewer, but with no more talent—let alone genius—than a box of matches. When I observed to Wilde that this particular Mr. Balsam Bassy did not seem quite to come up to expectations, he became very angry and said that the fact that Mr. Balsam Bassy was his friend was a sufficient passport for him to any society. I said that I thought it was, and there the matter dropped.

The large number of persons of eminence whom Wilde knew in a casual way would, of course, make a long list, but of his friends and intimates—the people who, so to say, gyrated immediately around him—I have given a full account. It should be added that Wilde knew Beardsley, whom he was disposed to patronise, and Mr. George Bernard Shaw, who was then a writer on the Star. Of Shaw he had a high opinion and prophesied for him a future in a walk of life far other than the one in which he has succeeded. Probably if he had never known Shaw he would never have written the “Soul of Man.” While Shaw’s socialism was a very much redder and more blatant affair in those days than it is now, it attracted Wilde because it was odd and Shaw was Irish. Though a mild Liberal by pretension, Wilde was always a rebel in his heart. “Down with everything that’s up and up with everything that’s down” was his intellectual motto. If he had not met Shaw he would probably have kept his views about the social order of things to himself. Shaw helped him to a species of socialism which looks very revolutionary but which is really designed to benefit the rich rather than the poor. Like pretty well everything else that Wilde wrote, “The Soul of Man under Socialism” fails entirely when you come to look into it. It is neither fish, flesh, fowl nor good red herring, and its main argument—namely, that human beings will never be happy till they have got rid of altruism—is, of course, the obvious reverse of the truth.

It may be that the account I have given of Wilde’s circle will come with a shock of disappointment to those who have been accustomed to the Ross-Ransome-Sherard versions as to his mode of life. The absence of distinguished names is certainly conspicuous. But as I am writing the truth and not a fairy story, I am compelled to stick to the actual facts, which are that Wilde, during all the time I knew him, was not on terms of anything like intimacy with any of the distinguished people of his day. He was continually talking of his various eminent contemporaries as if he were on terms of friendship with them; he constantly referred to Edward Burne-Jones, to William Morris, to Ruskin, to Meredith, to Tennyson, Swinburne, Browning and the rest; and he referred to them always as if he had at one time been most friendly with them. Whether this were or were not the case I have no means of settling authoritatively: I can only speak of the period of his life during which I knew him and was continually in his society—namely, from the year 1892 to the time of his death—and I say positively that during the whole of that time he never had the slightest intercourse with any of the persons mentioned. I believe Wilde had at one time a slight acquaintance with Burne-Jones; but on two occasions when I myself met the latter at Clouds, the country house of my uncle, the late Mr. Percy Wyndham, I never heard him mention Wilde’s name. I believe he knew Ruskin at Oxford, but only in the way in which any undergraduate could know him if he wished to do so. Browning he had met once or twice, and the same applies to Meredith. I do not believe that he ever saw or, at any rate, spoke either to Tennyson or Swinburne. Yet to hear him talk of all these people one would have supposed -that he was a regular member of their circle. When I was with Wilde, before his downfall and imprisonment I accepted all he told me as to his friendship with the intellectual giants of his time as gospel truth, and it was not till long afterwards that it struck me as curious that we never came across any of these celebrities; that Wilde was never able to get one of them to come to his house, and never by any chance went to see them at theirs.

A good example of Wilde’s pushfulness in this line of pretended intimacy with celebrated people is furnished by the terms of his dedication of one of his plays: “To the dear memory of Robert, Earl of Lytton.” I have it on the authority of Mr. Neville Lytton, the younger son of the late Lord Lytton, that his father scarcely knew Wilde, and had only met him on one or two occasions, and that he might or might not have been flattered by Wilde’s dedication. The same applies to his supposed French acquaintance. According to Wilde’s own account, he knew everybody in France who was worth knowing, but, as a fact, he had only the very slightest knowledge of a few of them, derived from meeting them once or twice at luncheon or dinner-parties at the time he wrote his play “Salome.” This question is settled by the articles which have appeared on the subject in France by M. Henri de Regnier and the Vicomte d’Humieres.

After he left prison, of course nobody knew him, but at the very height of his fame and success the facts were as I have stated. The same applies to social as opposed to literary and artistic lights. When I was twenty-three years of age I was elected to an institution called the Crabbet Club, which had been founded by my cousin, Mr. Wilfrid Blunt. The club met once a year at Mr. Wilfrid Blunt’s country house, Crabbet Park, for the purpose of playing lawn-tennis and reading poems composed by the members of the club for a prize. Among the members of the club were George Curzon—now Lord Curzon of Kedlestone—George Wyndham, George Leveson-Gower—then Comptroller of the Queen’s Household: the “Trinity of Georges,” as some one called them in a prize poem; Lord Houghton, now Lord Crewe, Mr. Harry Cust, Mr. Godfrey Webb, Mr. Mark Napier, the late Lord Cairns, Mr. “Lulu” Harcourt and a lot more. Mr. Blunt had made Oscar Wilde a member of this club, and Wilde attended one meeting. It was the custom that any new member should be proposed in a speech at dinner on the first night of the meeting and opposed by some one else. Wilde was opposed by George Curzon, who attacked him in a brilliant, humorous, witty but deadly speech in such a very scathing way that he never could be induced to go to another meeting of the Club. As an undoubted member of this club he certainly could claim to know the other members, and he actually passed one Saturday to Monday at Crabbet in their company. He never forgot it, and never forgot to refer to them by their Christian names ever afterwards; but none of them ever came to Wilde’s house or asked him to his, with the solitary exception of George Wynd-ham, under circumstances which I have already detailed. On the only occasion on which I attended a meeting of the Crabbet Club I was proposed by George Wyndham and opposed in a friendly way by Hubert Howard, who was afterwards killed at the battle of Omdurman. The Crabbet Club was only a club in name. There was no subscription and no entrance fee, and admittance to it was simply by invitation of Mr. Blunt, who used the annual occasion of the meeting of the club as a pretext for a charming and most lavish hospitality. I was actually the last member to join it, and the year I joined was the last year of its existence. One of the rules of the club was that Prime Ministers, Bishops, and Viceroys were not eligible for membership, and that any member found guilty of attaining such positions should be at once expelled. Nothing was said about convicts, but when two of the members (Lord Curzon and Lord Houghton) became Viceroys, and one (Oscar Wilde) was sent to prison, Mr. Blunt came to the conclusion that the Crabbet Club had better be wound up; and it lives now only as a glorious memory and by virtue of a privately printed volume of prize and other poems, mostly of a satirical nature, which would make the fortune of a dealer in rare books if he could get hold of a copy. I may be excused for mentioning with pride that I won the lawn-tennis tournament of my year, and divided the honours of the Prize Poem with the late Mr. Godfrey Webb, known as “Webber” to his numerous friends. To be strictly accurate, Mr. Godfrey Webb was declared the laureate of the year, and invested with the laurel wreath, while a special prize was awarded to me for my poem. It was a beautifully bound edition of Surrey’s and Wyatt’s sonnets, and I regret to say that I left it behind me at Naples, along with a great many other valuable and interesting books, in the charge of Oscar Wilde when I handed over my villa to him. All these books Wilde sold or lost soon after I left Naples.

The prize for the Lawn Tennis Tournament I still have in my possession. It is a handsome silver cup of the Georgian period, and is inscribed as follows:

“In Youth and Crabbed Age.”

Crabbet Club,

1894.

CHAPTER VI. LORD QUEENSBERRY INTERVENES

IN 1895 my friendship with Oscar Wilde had ripened into an intimacy which was an affair for the gossips. We were inseparable: wherever Wilde went I went, and wherever I went Wilde went. I was living at my mother’s house in Cadogan Place, and Wilde at his house in Tite Street. We lunched and dined usually at the Cafe Royal or at the Savoy; we visited the theatres and music-halls of an evening, and we often wound up the day with supper at Willis’s rooms. I had left Oxford and my time was my own. Money did not trouble me much in those days. My father allowed me three hundred and fifty pounds a year for pocket money; the necessaries and luxuries of life were always at my disposal at home and in the houses of my numerous friends and relatives; and whenever I wanted money I had merely to ask my mother or my indulgent Grandfather Montgomery for it. One way or another, I dare say I was living at the rate of at least fifteen hundred a year. Wilde was an expensive sort of friend, particularly after he began to consider himself a gourmet and a man of the great world. He gave fairly expensive entertainments, and although a chop and a pint of bitter beer at some respectable inn would always have done for me, I never professed to be insensible to the charms of good cooking, and when it came to ordering and paying for a dinner for my friends I was certainly not to be outdone by Wilde. At the Ransome trial, among the charges brought against me on the strength of the precious document which Mr. Ross has handed to the British Museum, was that of extravagance, in respect of which I had to meet Wilde’s stories of the long-departed menus of some of our Lucullian feasts. It was suggested that we lived on nothing but “delicious ortolans”—by the way, are there any ortolans that are not delicious?—and foie gras from Strasbourg, which we made a point of washing down with Perrier Jouet and topped off with fifty-year-old brandy. Of course, I do not profess to remember what I had for dinner twenty years ago; but any man about town knows that one can dine very comfortably for a sovereign, and I happen to remember that Wilde always considered a sovereign quite a good deal of money. It was further suggested that between the autumn of 1892 and the date of his imprisonment—that is to say, in less than three years—Wilde spent with me and on me more than five thousand pounds in actual money, irrespective of the bills he incurred. But in plain terms this means that he spent at least forty pounds a week in entertaining me. So that for three years I must have been eating three meals a day and twenty-one meals a week, at a cost and charge of two pounds a meal, with Oscar Wilde. I cannot have disbursed a penny on myself or on him and, at the end of the three years, I ought to have had a thousand or two in the bank and a stone or two of flesh to spare. In point of fact, even in those early days I spent a great deal more money on Wilde than he spent on me, and my weight has stood at less than ten stone five ever since I can remember, which, for a man of my height, does not point to much gourmandising. It is a pretty thing that any gentleman should be compelled to go into such matters, but as the world has already been told and is to be told again in 1960 that I got through five thousand pounds’ worth of Wilde’s ortolans and Perrier Jouet in three years, I here and now venture to tell the world that I did nothing of the kind. In the three years in question, it is exceedingly doubtful whether Wilde ever had five thousand pounds at his disposal. He had developed expensive tastes in many other directions besides food and drink: he dressed expensively, he wore expensive jewellery, he made presents of jewellery and money to all sorts of ridiculous people; the upkeep of his house in Tite Street must have run him into at least a thousand a year; he travelled a good deal and made expensive stays in Paris, at Homburg and in Italy; and, not to put too fine a point on it, he was continually short of money. On several occasions I borrowed money from moneylenders at his suggestion and instigation, and he invariably helped himself liberally, not only to these sums but to sums of money which I obtained from my mother and from my other relatives. Indeed, so far as my money was concerned, we had a common purse. It never occurred to me to refuse him anything. Nothing was too good for him, and I always regarded him as a man who, although he might have spurts of money, was without proper income and resources, and was consequently to be helped out whenever occasion demanded. To take an instance in point: just before “The Woman of no Importance” was put on at the Haymarket I went to a moneylender and borrowed two hundred and fifty pounds. At lunch I showed Wilde the money in ten-pound notes, and he took them into his hand and said: “How beautiful they are and how wonderful it is of you to be able to get them.” Then, with a laugh, he put five or six of them into his own pocket and handed me the balance. I thought no more about it at the moment than I should have thought of sharing a bottle of wine with him. Indeed, I got the money with the intention of giving him some of it because he had been groaning for over a week about his hard-upness. This is only one instance of many. All my life I have been free-handed and careless about money. I was well over thirty years of age before it dawned upon me that money did not grow on the trees on the family estate. There are plenty of people who are now living who know me well, and I should like to hear one of them who would tell me that I am “thrifty” or that I permit my friends to pay out of their turn. It is true that Wilde and I were for a long period on terms of friendship which were quite outside and beyond the “you-ask-me-to-dinner-and -1 - ask-you-back- again” principle; but it is grotesquely untrue to suggest that he wasted any appreciable part of his substance upon me. Wilde had a great way of making everything appear important. He was very fond of sending for the managers of restaurants to consult them over the merits of wine or to bid them summon the chef to receive instruction or compliment, as the case might be. These were not practices of mine, and never have been. Up to the time of my meeting Oscar Wilde, I had been accustomed to live at great houses, and the best food and the best drink were the only sort I knew about. It never occurred to me that Wilde’s “exquisite” spreads were anything out of the ordinary. I suppose the cooking at the Cafe Royal or at the Savoy Hotel is good, but it is certainly, to say the least, no better than what one gets in a good house or at a good club. Wilde made fusses and went through elaborate rituals over the ordering of his meals. I, for my part, ordered, ate and paid for them, and thought nothing further about it.

As I have said, our constant appearances together at cafes, restaurants, theatres and public places set the gossips wagging their tongues. I heard all sorts of rumours which were silly on the face of them and which were a good deal sillier when one thought about them. Naturally, I ignored them utterly. I am convinced that some of the whispers and hints that went around were set going by persons who deemed that I had supplanted them in Wilde’s good graces and who were annoyed because, while he still continued to know them, he ceased, in a great measure, to frequent their company. In any case, I was made to feel that certain people were very sore about my “monopolising Wilde.” Egged on doubtless by what she heard, even Mrs. Wilde—with whom I always had been on the most friendly terms— began to say that I took up a great deal too much of Oscar’s time, and Wilde once told me that she had made difficulties about our being so much together. I told him that we certainly did seem to be always together, and I offered to go away and leave him to his own devices; but he said that this would be unbearable to him and that he had made Mrs. Wilde understand and that he had mentioned the matter to me in the idlest way and without any notion that I should be so foolish as to take him seriously. So our lives drifted along as usual. I may here mention that for the first three years of my close intimacy with Oscar Wilde I never heard a coarse or indelicate allusion come out of his mouth. I knew him for a somewhat cynical and insincere kind of humourist; I was not blind to his faults of vanity and his occasional lapses into vulgar manners; I knew he was no saint, even as men of the world go; but I considered that he was a man of decent life, and I never heard from him a word or a sign which made me think otherwise. He treated me always with the greatest and, I may even say, the most elaborate courtesy, and I noticed particularly that when we were in the society of men who were apt to kick somewhat over the traces and indulge in Rabelaisian conversation Wilde was eagerly careful to turn or suppress the talk. He therefore seemed to be all that a man should be; and when I heard on one or two occasions certain other hints of tendencies of his, I repudiated them with indignation, believing that, as I was his close friend, I knew him through and through, and feeling that there could not possibly be any truth in what was suggested.

Some years before I met Wilde my mother had found it desirable to divorce my father, and at the time to which I am now referring the family relationships were not exactly running smooth. To be quite frank, I had conceived feelings of resentment against my father on account of his treatment of my mother which I am afraid were far from filial. You may judge, then, of my anger when Wilde one day told me that Lord Queensberry had sent him a letter in which he requested Wilde to terminate his friendship with me at once, inasmuch as he did not think it would be beneficial to me. Wilde asked me what he should do, and I told him to take no notice of the letter. Later, my father sent me a letter in which he told me what he had said to Wilde, and threatened to cut off my allowance if I did not at once terminate the acquaintance.

I was not aware of any grounds upon which Lord Queensberry could make such a request, and concluded that he had written to me for the mere purpose of annoyance and because he knew that I had taken sides with my mother since the divorce proceedings. Consequently, I sent him a fairly stinging reply, and a heated correspondence followed. Portions of that correspondence have been preserved in glass cases by careful lawyers, and these relics of an unpleasant feud have been brought up against me in various cross-examinations with a view to proving that I was an unfilial brute and that I treated my own father very badly.

In the light of what has happened since, I know that I was hasty and mistaken, but one cannot be the son of the eighth Marquis of Queensberry nor a member of the family of Douglas without having the defects of one’s qualities. I did not sit down to the abuse of my father in the manner of a person without spirit for the very simple reason that I am not devoid of spirit and never shall be. However, before he died my father sent for me and there was a complete reconciliation between us, and he left me every shilling that could possibly be arranged for me out of his very considerable estate.

Failing to make disruption between myself and Wilde, Lord Queensberry adopted a different line of tactics; and, I believe, with the sincere view of saving me from what he knew was an undesirable entanglement, he went ahead to disgrace Wilde publicly. At a theatre where one of Wilde’s plays was running he caused a bouquet of carrots to be handed up to Wilde over the footlights, and he left his card on him at his club with certain odious remarks written on the back of it. I need scarcely say that Wilde was very much distressed. He came to me in a great state about it and said that it was most wicked and cruel of my father to treat him in this way and that, unless an immediate apology was forthcoming, he would have no alternative but to prosecute Lord Queensberry for criminal libel. I was a little bit nettled at the tone he took, as he seemed to imply by his air that I was in some way to blame for what had happened; and I said at once: “You are not in the least likely to get apologies from my father and, so far as I am concerned, you can prosecute and be blowed!”

It has been widely asserted that I went out of my way to instigate these proceedings against my father. It is quite certain that I did not go on my bended knees to ask Wilde not to take proceedings. He assured me that the suggestions and accusation against him were quite false and without foundation. I had not the smallest reason to suppose that he was lying to me, and I undoubtedly allowed matters to take their course. I will go further, and say that in a sense I was not sorry that Lord Queensberry should be brought to book for what I considered to be his very bad treatment of both myself and Wilde. I went with Wilde, at his request, to see a lawyer on the subject. This lawyer had been recommended to him by Robert Ross, who also accompanied us on this occasion. He advised proceedings, and we went to Bow Street and procured a warrant for my father’s arrest. On the morning the warrant was executed Wilde came to me in a condition bordering on hysteria, told me that he had no money and that at least three hundred pounds were required in order that the case might go on. At his urgent solicitation, I gave him three hundred and sixty pounds to give to his solicitor. (The figures appear in my bankbook and were proved at the Ransome trial.) This, I am told, was most unnatural conduct. Wilde, for his part, pointed out that it was entirely through his friendship for me that he had to sufifer Lord Queensberry’s insults, and that unless he went on with the prosecution he would be branded throughout Europe for a person of vicious and abominable life; and that, as I had been the means of getting him into the trouble, it would be a poor thing if I would not find a few hundreds to get him out again. What was I to do—and what would any man so placed have done? I should have liked to have quoted verbatim Wilde’s version of this episode as it was put to me at the Ransome trial; but since the manuscript of this book was completed Mr. Robert Ross has obtained an injunction against me, by which I am precluded from quoting any part of the unpublished “I)e Profundis” manuscript. This unpublished part has been used against me in the most frightful manner. Venomous passages have been read in open court and reproduced in hundreds of newspapers, and yet I understand I am debarred from quoting from it for the purpose of replying to it and pointing out its obvious falsity. It is unnecessary for me to enlarge on the absolute negation of every principle of justice and common sense which is involved in such a decision: it is too obvious for that. I do not say that such decision may not be a correct interpretation of the law as it exists, though it is hard to believe it. What I do say is that the existence of such a law is a disgrace and a danger to the community, for it is obvious that under its provisions any man can foully slander another and so arrange his slander that reply to it becomes impossible during the lifetime of the slandered. For example, there is nothing to prevent me from writing a long letter, say, to Mr. Justice Astbury—the judge who granted Mr. Ross the interim injunction restraining me from quoting passages from the unpublished “De Profundis.” I can, if I please, accuse him in this letter of every sort of crime and impute to him every kind of baseness; I can attack his parents and his relations and I can ascribe to him imaginary words alleged to have been spoken by him, and I can invent imaginary scenes in which I allege that he has taken part. All I have to do is to hand this letter to a friend and give him instructions that after my death it is to be placed in the British Museum and kept there till such time as the friend may think fitting to bring it out and publish it. If Mr. Justice Astbury should happen to outlive me, and if he should thereupon by some chance get knowledge of the fact that a long epistle addressed to him and containing a violent attack on his character is lying in the British Museum and is to be published in fifty years’ time, he will be powerless to take the smallest step to prevent the publication of this posthumous libel, and he will not even be able to defend himself against the accusations it contains. The copyright in the manuscript will be the property of my heirs and executors, and should Mr. Justice Astbury propose to quote any part of it with a view to showing its scandalous and ridiculous falsity he will immediately be pulled up by the law of copyright. My slanderous and shameful letter will be a valuable literary property; for Mr. Justice Astbury to quote passages from it would be injurious to its market value. In vain he would protest that he was surely entitled to defend himself against an attack made on him by a dead man and designed to be made • public to the world after his own death. He would simply be told that “the law is quite clear,” and he would have to grin and bear it as well as he could, just as I have to do under precisely similar circumstances. What I can, at any rate, legitimately do—even within the narrow compass which Mr. Justice Astbury’s interpretation of the law allows me—is to set out the true facts connected with this period of Wilde’s career and my own connection with it.

I desire firstly to state emphatically that I did not force Wilde into taking proceedings against my father. The matter can be summed up in a few sentences. My father had accused Wilde of certain abominations. These accusations it seems were true. Wilde denied the truth of them to me and proceeded to take up what, in view of the facts known to himself and not to me, was a ridiculous prosecution against my father. He was, of course, beaten, and the authorities turned upon him and convicted him of crimes which he had denied. Then I became a convenient scapegoat.

I did not drag Wilde down to Bow Street to procure a warrant. I went with him, but at his own request. The suggestion of coercion—either moral or physical—is ridiculous. Here was the “King of Life”—a great big, fat, strong fellow, full of brains and forty-one years of age—“in the prime of his splendid manhood,” as one of his admirers puts it; and I was sixteen years his junior —that is to say, twenty-four years of age. The real fact is that he had something inside him that I knew nothing about—namely and to wit, a guilty conscience. He was too much of a coward to tell me that he was guilty of the charges the Marquis of Queensberry had levelled at him, and he was too much of a coward, even, to go to Bow Street for a warrant alone: so he came whimpering to me to go with him.

I did not coerce or cajole Wilde into going to Monte Carlo at this time, nor did Wilde pay my expenses or my gambling losses. Wilde said his nerves were all broken up. He had never been to Monte Carlo, and we went there in order that he might be distracted from the question of the trial, upon which he seemed to brood a great deal.

Believing him to be an innocent man, I told him that he was a fool to worry and that it was the other side who ought to do the worrying, and we went to Monte Carlo. I have frequently been to Monte Carlo, and I have never in my life spent more than two hours at a stretch in the rooms. On this particular occasion I was less frequently in the rooms and for less periods of time than I have ever been before or since, largely because Wilde was with me. More often than not he was with me in the rooms, and I gave him more than one handful of louis out of my winnings. He never had the pluck to put a louis on the table because, as I have said, he always felt that a gold piece was a good deal of money. In any case, does it stand to reason that a man who had no money wherewith to pay his solicitor’s fees was the kind of man one would take to Monte Carlo to pay one’s hotel expenses and Casino losses? No one but a fool would pretend to believe such a farrago of rubbish.

Wilde’s friends, including the never-to-be-forgotten Robert Sherard, with the “face like a Roman Emperor,” whom Wilde thought “perfectly wonderful,” have echoed the cry that I was the author of his disaster and downfall. Even Mrs. Wilde writes to tell Sherard that I had “marred a fine life.” Mr. Ransome, who tells his readers that he derives his

biographical facts from Ross, says it in print. All these people should surely have been aware that the person who ruined Oscar Wilde and brought about his disaster and marred his life was Oscar Wilde himself. He was not charged at the Old Bailey for having taken proceedings against the Marquis of Queensberry, but for having made a low, squalid and abominable brute of himself. They prefer to assume that he was convicted on false evidence and to speak always of me as the author of his debacle. Their great point seems to be that if he had not known me he would probably never have been found out and might have passed down to posterity for one of those highly respectable persons of whom he professes to be so contemptuous; and if this be their point, I will cheerfully concede it to them.

It was also a charge against me—again on Wilde’s word only—that I was, at the time of his trouble, attacking him with loathsome letters. Now, what does this mean, and what is the suggestion? Where are those letters, and how could I be accusing him in letters on the one hand, and putting up money to defend him from these very accusations on the other ? I had written him no loathsome letters: all I had written after our conversation on the subject was a letter in which I confirmed my

opinion that, as he was innocent of these charges, he had no alternative but to proceed against my father. Yet this was brought against me as being as “loathsome” as the cards on which my father had been charging him with a terrible offence. The truth was that Wilde, having once decided to take proceedings against my father, made up his mind that,_v if they failed, I was to be responsible for everything.