Oscar Wilde Blooms Classic Critical Views
Bloom’s Classic Critical Views
O S C A R W I L D E
Benjamin Franklin
The Brontës
Charles Dickens
Edgar Allan Poe
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Henry David Thoreau
Herman Melville
Jane Austen
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Mark Twain
Mary Shelley
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Oscar Wilde
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Walt Whitman
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Bloom’s Classic Critical Views
Bloom’s Classic Critical Views
O S C A R W I L D E
Edited and with an Introduction by
Harold Bloom
Sterling Professor of the Humanities
Yale University
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Contents
QQQ
Series Introduction vii
Introduction by Harold Bloom ix
Biographyxiii
Personal
3 Thomas F. Plowman “The Aesthetes: The Story of a Nineteenth-Century Cult” (1895)
7 Chris Healy (1904)
8 Wilfred Scawen Blunt (1905)
11 Robert H. Sherard (1905)
12 Ford Madox Ford (1911)
18 Katharine Tynan (1913)
20 General
23 Ambrose Bierce “Prattle” (1882)
29 W.B. Yeats “Oscar Wilde’s Last Book” (1891)
30 Arthur Symons “An Artist in Attitudes: Oscar Wilde” (1901)
32 Max Beerbohm “A Lord of Language” (1905)
36 Wilfrid M. Leadman “The Literary Position of Oscar Wilde” (1906)
40 J. Comyns Carr (1908)
49 St. John Hankin “The Collected Plays of Oscar Wilde” (1908)
50 Lord Alfred Douglas “The Genius of Oscar Wilde” (1908)
53 G.K. Chesterton “Oscar Wilde” (1909)
57 James Joyce “Oscar Wilde: The Poet of Salomé” (1909)
60 Lewis Piaget Shanks “Oscar Wilde’s Place in Literature” (1910)
63 Archibald Henderson (1911)
70 Arthur Ransome “Afterthought” (1912)
73 Holbrook Jackson “Oscar Wilde: The Last Phase” (1913)
78 Edward Shanks “Oscar Wilde” (1924)
94 WORKS 107
112 Julian Hawthorne “The Romance of the Impossible” (1890) 112 Walter Pater “A Novel by Mr. Wilde” (1891) 114
The Picture of Dorian Gray
117 Richard Le Gallienne (1891) 117 Agnes Repplier “The Best Book of the Year” (1892) 120
Contents vi
Intentions
A House of Pomegranates
Salomé
The Importance of Being Earnest
148 E.V. Lucas (1905) 148
132 William Archer “A Woman of No Importance” (1893) 132 George Bernard Shaw “Two New Plays” (1895) 136
128 Lord Alfred Douglas (1893) 128 Edward E. Hale, Jr. “Signs of Life in Literature” (1894) 130
124 H.L. Menken “A House of Pomegranates” (1918) 124
A Woman of No Importance and An Ideal Husband
139 George Bernard Shaw (1895) 139 J.T. Grein “The Importance of Being Earnest” (1901) 140 Max Beerbohm “A Classic Farce” (1909) 143 John Drinkwater (1923) 145
De Profundis
168
167 Index
G. Lowes Dickinson (1905) 151 Hugh Walker “The Birth of a Soul: (Oscar Wilde:
The Closing Phase)” (1905) 154 Chronology
Series Introduction
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Bloom’s Classic Critical Views is a new series presenting a selection of the most
important older literary criticism on the greatest authors commonly read in high
school and college classes today. Unlike the Bloom’s Modern Critical Views series,
which for more than 20 years has provided the best contemporary criticism on great
authors, Bloom’s Classic Critical Views attempts to present the authors in the con-
text of their time and to provide criticism that has proved over the years to be the
most valuable to readers and writers. Selections range from contemporary reviews
in popular magazines, which demonstrate how a work was received in its own era,
to profound essays by some of the strongest critics in the British and American tradi-
tion, including Henry James, G.K. Chesterton, Matthew Arnold, and many more.Some of the critical essays and extracts presented here have appeared previously
in other titles edited by Harold Bloom, such as the New Moulton’s Library of Literary
Criticism. Other selections appear here for the first time in any book by this publisher.
All were selected under Harold Bloom’s guidance.In addition, each volume in this series contains a series of essays by a
contemporary expert, who comments on the most important critical selections,
putting them in context and suggesting how they might be used by a student
writer to influence his or her own writing. This series is intended above all for
students, to help them think more deeply and write more powerfully about great
writers and their works.
Introduction by Harold Bloom
QQQ
The Divine Oscar, as I delight in naming him, was the overt disciple of the Sublime Walter Pater, whose anxiety of influence in regard to John Ruskin resulted in no mentions of Ruskin anywhere in Pater’s writings. We remember Wilde for his stage comedies, The Importance of Being Earnest in particular, and tend to forget that he was also a strong literary critic. My favorite among his critical ventures is a delightful dialogue, “The Decay of Lying.” Here is Vivian, Wilde’s surrogate, in a grand epiphany:
No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist. Take an example from our own day, I know that you are fond of Japanese things. Now, do you really imagine that the Japanese people, as they are presented to us in art, have any existence? If you do, you have never understood Japanese art at all. The Japanese people are the deliberate self-conscious creation of certain individual artists. If you set a picture by Hokusai, or Hokkei, or any of the great native painters, beside a real Japanese gentleman or lady, you will see that there is not the slightest resemblance between them. The actual people who live in Japan are not unlike the general run of English people; that is to say, they are extremely commonplace, and have nothing curious or extraordinary about them. In fact that whole of Japan is a pure invention. There is no such country, there are no such people. One of our most charming painters went recently to the Land of the Chrysanthemum in the foolish hope of seeing the Japanese. All he saw, all he had the chance of painting, were a few lanterns and some fans.
Harold Bloom
x The greatness of this centers in the outrageously funny: “In fact the whole of Japan is a pure invention. There is no such country. There are no such people.” Wilde’s wisdom leads to a memorable redefinition of the highest criticism:
That is what the highest criticism really is, the record of one’s own soul. It is more fascinating than history, as it is concerned simply with oneself. It is more delightful than philosophy, as its subject is concrete and not abstract, real and not vague. It is the only civilized form of autobiography as it deals not with the events, but with the thoughts of one’s life; not with life’s physical accidents of death and circumstance, but with the spiritual moods and imaginative passions of the mind.
To call criticism “the only civilized form of autobiography” is beautifully to transform accepted ideas both of criticism and of autobiography. When I want biography of Samuel Johnson, I happily return to Boswell. When I require Johnson on Johnson, I turn to The Lines of the Poets, his critical masterwork. For sly parody of Johnson, I cheerfully resort to Lady Augusta
Bracknell in Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. Nonsense literature— Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, Gilbert and Sullivan—is the genre Earnest joins itself to; Patience and Iolanthe are particularly close by.
I am found of quoting what I call “Wilde’s Law,” splendidly set forth by Algernon in the original, four-act version of Earnest:
My experience of life is that whenever one tells a lie one is corroborated on every side. When one tells the truth one is left in a very lonely and painful position, and no one believes a word one says.
This reverberates strongly in the company of Vivian’s declaration in “The Decay of Lying”:
They never rise beyond the level to misrepresentation, and actually condescend to prove, to discuss, to argue. How different from the temper of the true liar, with his frank, fearless statements, his superb irresponsibility, his healthy, natural disdain of proof of any kind! After all, what is a fine lie? Simply that which is its own evidence. If a man is sufficiently unimaginative to produce evidence in support of a lie, he might just as well speak the truth at once.
Introduction
xi tragedy came from being born out of date. In our time, his homoeroticsm would not have martyred him. His wisdom survives even his own wit. For years I have agitated in vain to have universities inscribe over their doorposts his grand admonition: “all bad poetry is sincere.”
BIOGRAPHY
Oscar Wilde (–)
Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde was born in Dublin on October 16, 1854, the
son of Dr. William (later Sir William) Wilde, a surgeon, and Jane Francesca Elgee, well
known under the pen name Speranza. Wilde studied classics at Trinity College,
Dublin (1871–74), and then at Magdalen College, Oxford (1874–78), where in 1878 he
won the Newdigate Prize for his poem Ravenna. In 1881 Wilde published Poems, a
volume that was successful enough to lead to a lecture tour in the United States in
1882. In all his public appearances Wilde, who proclaimed himself a disciple of Pater,
displayed a flamboyant aestheticism that did much to increase his notoriety.Wilde returned to the United States in 1883 in order to attend an unsuccessful
New York production of his play Vera, written the year before. In 1884, after moving
to London, he married Constance Lloyd, although shortly afterwards he began to
have homosexual affairs. The Happy Prince and Other Tales, a volume of fairy tales
written for his two sons, appeared in 1888 and was followed by his only novel, The
Picture of Dorian Gray, which appeared in Lippincott’s Magazine in 1890 and in book
form in 1891. Also in 1891, Wilde’s play The Duchess of Padua was produced in New
York under another title and anonymously, without much success. Wilde’s essay “The
Soul of Man under Socialism,” a plea for artistic freedom, appeared in 1891, as did
Intentions, containing the critical dialogues “The Decay of Lying” and “The Critic as
Artist”; Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime and Other Stories; and another collection of fairy tales,
The House of Pomegranates.Wilde first found theatrical success with his play Lady Windermere’s Fan (1893),
which combined social observation with a witty, epigrammatic style. This formula
was pursued successfully in the plays that followed, including A Woman of No
Importance (1894), An Ideal Husband (1899), and The Importance of Being Earnest
(1899). Salomé, published in French in 1893, was translated into English by Lord
Alfred Douglas in 1894 and performed in Paris by Sarah Bernhardt in 1896, after being
denied a license in England. Lord Alfred, whom Wilde had first met in 1891, was
Biography
Wilde’s lover, and their relationship so disturbed the Marquess of Queensberry,
Lord Alfred’s father, that he publicly insulted Wilde on several occasions beginning
in 1894. This prompted Wilde to bring a charge of criminal libel against Lord
Queensberry, but the suit was dismissed, and Wilde, after two trials, was imprisoned
for homosexual offenses in 1895. In prison, where he remained for two years, Wilde
wrote a letter to Lord Alfred that was partially published in 1905 as De Profundis. It
contained his own justification for his conduct. After his release in 1897, Wilde went
to France, where he published “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” (1898), inspired by his
prison experiences. In exile, he adopted the name Sebastian Melmoth, taken from
Charles Robert Maturin’s gothic romance Melmoth the Wanderer. Wilde died in Paris
on November 30, 1900. His Collected Works were edited by Robert Ross (12 vols.,
1909). His Letters, edited by Rupert Hart-Davis, appeared in 1962; a supplementary
volume was published in 1985.PERSONAL
The following extracts present various views of Wilde’s character, a number given
by his friends, some by acquaintances of varying degree, at least one in which the
author claims no personal relationship with Wilde at all. What the extracts have in
common is just how difficult it was, and remains for critics today, to justify absolute
statements about Wilde’s personal qualities. Almost every extract’s author feels that
he or she has some form of insight into Wilde’s character, but those impressions are
always specific to a particular meeting and a momentary appreciation of the man at
a single point in time. The only author who seems uniformly comfortable in defining
Wilde’s character is Thomas F. Plowman, the one person quoted here who does not
claim a personal reminiscence or acquaintance with Wilde.This tendency to describe Wilde’s personality as revealed during a particular
meeting with him is not uncommon. It is no coincidence that Plowman’s statements
are so self-assured, for anyone who was acquainted with Wilde knew that he was
the consummate performer, that just as he brought dramatic characters into
being for the stage, so he staged his own personality for various people, at various
times, in a variety of ways. Like his novel’s antihero, Dorian Gray, Wilde did not
understand identity “as a thing simple, permanent, reliable, and of one essence” but
as a succession of masks and guises to be put on and taken off as he desired. But, if
identity is constantly shifting, how then does a writer critically assess an individual’s
character? What the majority of writers presented here have pursued is perhaps the
only possible course presented them: to capture Wilde at a single moment or in a
series of momentary poses. The most intelligent of these authors do not extrapolate
from the singular to the general; they recognize that their recollections are unique
to only one particular instance of who Wilde was and that this is perhaps the most
profound understanding that one might formulate of the man.Plowman, a few months before the first of the 1895 trials, discusses Wilde’s
“attitudinised” role as the leader of the “cult” of aestheticism. He describes Wilde’s
Oscar Wilde
self-promotion as a commodity that the educated classes, in search of the latest
shocking fashion, are served up by journalists eager to cash in on an author’s celebrity.
In contrast to Plowman’s assaults on Wilde, journalist Chris Healy’s recollections are
kind and sympathetic and present both Wilde’s wit and “attitude” as counter to the
prevailing conventions and fashions of the day.The next two extracts portray Wilde’s closest friends and their reactions to his
downfall: The first is a description by Wilfred Scawen Blunt of a conversation he had
with Robert (“Robbie”) Ross, Wilde’s close friend and literary executor, about the
author’s final days in Paris. The second is Robert Harborough Sherard’s memory of
the climactic period of Wilde’s last trial and his account of the passing of the guilty
verdict and the general glee in the aftermath among those who had not personally
known Wilde. Despite the fact that these two Roberts were arguably Wilde’s closest
long-term friends, the way each man portrays his memories is distinctly different.
Ross is remembered by Scawen Blunt as being thoughtfully and introspectively
saddened by the end of Wilde’s life, as he considers the sincerity of his friend’s
possible conversion to Roman Catholicism. Sherard’s reminiscence is a melodrama,
and he seems to have cast himself as its hero. It is an extract that highlights the
importance for any critical reader of discerning the possible intentions of the author,
for Sherard had been attacked for breaking with Wilde, as many of his former friends
had done. As Wilde’s most prolific biographer in the years immediately following his
death, Sherard had the opportunity to favorably rewrite his relationship with Wilde.
Has he done so? Certainly the extract presented here suggests at least an overly
imaginative and dramatic recollection on Sherard’s part.The final two extracts come from Ford Madox Ford and Katharine Tynan, each
a well-known novelist and poet, contemporaries and sometime acquaintances
of Wilde. Madox Ford’s extract, like Ross’s remembrance of Wilde’s final days, is
unromanticized and honest. He critiques both Wilde’s witticisms and his writing but
appreciates his scholarly ability and the fact that Wilde’s art gave a great deal of
pleasure to many people. Tynan’s memory of a younger Oscar, before his marriage, is
one of vague amusement. She concentrates on his posing and self-publicizing even
in those early days of his London career, but, in contrast to Plowman’s sneering, she
does little more than gently tease Wilde’s memory. Her pity for Constance, Wilde’s
wife-to-be, is more seriously presented in light of his later downfall and the amount
Constance would suffer by association with her husband.No one extract can absolutely gainsay another in the depiction of Wilde, even
though each suggests a very different picture of the man. The fact that these
attitudes could simultaneously coexist testifies to the insight of Robbie Ross when
he said that one could never be sure of Wilde. Wilde had attempted to turn his own
life into a work of art and had said that, “A truth in art is that whose contradictory is
also true.” Such attitudes are precisely those that should be kept in mind by any critic
Personal
Thomas F. Plowman “The Aesthetes: The Story of a Nineteenth-Century Cult” ()
The following extract, written a few months before Wilde’s trial and
subsequent incarceration, typifies the general public’s view of Wilde’s
character, art, and lifestyle. Thomas Plowman barely conceals his sneering
tone and belief that Wilde adopted an “attitude” for vulgar financial rea-
sons and that the journalistic marketplace encouraged such behavior as it
made money along with the writer it helped to publicize and popularize.
The educated classes are described by Plowman as foolishly following the
latest fad, delighting in the shock value of Wilde’s views. The suggestion
at the conclusion of the extract is that Wilde was fully aware of his power
to entertain these “smart people” who were so eager to listen to him and
quite knowingly used them to advance himself before the general public
via the press. Plowman describes the aestheticism proposed by Wilde as
a “cult,” pronouncing Wilde an artistic charlatan and his admiring follow-
ers dupes.QQQ
Mr. Wilde laid himself out to play a certain role, and when he attitudinised he did it sufficiently well to make it pay, and to induce the world to take him seriously. When he was interviewed by newspaper correspondents his remarks made what is professionally known as “good copy,” because he usually said something that startled a serious world by its audacity. When, after crossing the Atlantic, he responded to an inquiry on the subject by expressing his disappointment with the “mighty ocean,” persons of a superior type, who expect poetic rhapsodies on such an occasion, in accordance with precedent, were naturally shocked.
He set conventionality at defiance in other respects, and in his lectures expressed some revolutionary sentiments with reference to modern costume, from an art point of view. He had a good word to say for knee-breeches and silk stockings, but spoke disrespectfully of coats and trousers, and more in sorrow than in anger of the chimney-pot hat, which he did not regard as “the thing of beauty” referred to by the poet as “a joy for ever.” He even had the hardihood to insinuate that the nineteenth-century Englishman in his “Sunday best” was not, from a spectacular point of view, comparable to the ancient Greek in his temple get-up. As neither the fashionable tailors nor Mrs. Grundy could endorse anything so heterodox, it need hardly be said that he made but few converts to his views on costume, and we go on “just in the
Oscar Wilde
as we prefer to term them nowadays, the “smart people,” who are always on the look-out for something piquant, to flock to his lectures in order to listen to the next dreadful thing he would say; and this must have been very much in consonance with Mr. Wilde’s expectations and desires.
—Thomas F. Plowman, “The Aesthetes: The Story of a Nineteenth-Century Cult,”
Pall Mall Magazine, January 1895, pp. 41–42
Chris Healy ()
Chris Healy was a young Irish poet and journalist working as a freelance
correspondent in Paris when Wilde left prison and then England for France
and Italy. Wilde spent much of his time in the French capital, and it was
there that Healy became acquainted with him. On the Continent, Wilde
lived under the assumed name of Sebastian Melmoth, the first name recol-
lecting the martyred saint, the second an allusion to the God-cursed, gothic
antihero of his great-uncle Charles Maturin’s novel Melmoth the Wanderer.
Wilde wrote to his friend Robert Ross in 1898 that at the time he was seeing
few other people apart from Healy, his young Irish compatriot.In Confessions of a Journalist, Healy fondly describes his friendship with
Wilde and champions the disgraced writer’s memory. There is a sense of the
young Healy’s pride from the opening line of the following extract when he
includes himself as one of “the few” who could appreciate Wilde’s character
and mind. He is no sycophant to Wilde’s memory, however: He describes
Wilde’s homosexuality as a “most terrible and loathsome” type of madness.
But it is clear that his recollections of Wilde are of a kind, generous, and rare
individual, a great artist, and a cultivated gentleman. He remarks several
times on how Wilde has suffered, essentially claiming that he was made a
martyr for his “sins” by “the many” from whom Healy has already distanced
himself at the beginning of the extract. If Wilde had suffered physically from
his time in prison, the conversation relayed in this extract makes it apparent
that his wit and intellectual verve remained undiminished.
QQQ
To the many Wilde was an unspeakable person, but to the few he was an accomplished scholar and gentleman, suffering from one of the most terrible and loathsome forms of insanity, which two years of prison life increased rather than diminished. I met him in Paris a few weeks after he finally left England, and his appearance was burnt in on my memory. A tall, stalwart figure, with a face scored with suffering and a mistaken life. The gray, wearied
Personal
eyes, the mocking curves of the mobile mouth, reminded me of Charles Reade’s description of Thomas of Sarranza at the time that he sat in the Fisherman’s Seat—‘a gentilhomme blase, a high-bred and highly-cultivated gentleman who had done, and said, and seen, and known everything, and whose body was nearly worn out.’
Wilde was then living in the Rue des Beaux Arts, under the name of Sebastian Melmoth. He invited me to lunch, and we had dejeuner at a little restaurant on the Boulevard St. Michel, where for over two hours he talked with the same delightful insouciance which had characterized him in his best days. Wilde detested coarse language or coarse conduct, and I remember him moving his chair away from the vicinity of some students who, with their Mimis and Marcelles, were talking in a strain that would have made Rabelais blush. He talked lightly about his trial, but his face lighted up with savage indignation when he spoke of his prison treatment. Of one prison official he said: ‘He had the eyes of a ferret, the body of an ape, and the soul of a rat.’ The chaplains he characterized as ‘the silliest of God’s silly sheep,’ and gave an instance of the kind of reading they select for the prisoners under their charge.
A man had been sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment, six months of which was to be endured in solitary confinement.
The book served out to him by the chaplain at ---- Prison was ‘Sermons Delivered at ---- Prison to Prisoners under Sentence of Death.’ I had had the advantage of reading The Ballad of Reading Gaol in manuscript some days before I met the author, and I asked him whether he intended to write further in the same vein.
‘Do not ask me about it!’ Wilde said with a sigh. ‘It is the cry of Marsyas, not the song of Apollo. I have probed the depths of most of the experiences of life, and I have come to the conclusion that we are meant to suffer. There are moments when life takes you, like a tiger, by the throat, and it was when I was in the depths of suffering that I wrote my poem. The man’s face will haunt me till I die.’
The conversation drifted on to Aubrey Beardsley, who was then on the point of becoming a Catholic. ‘I never guessed,’ said Wilde, ‘when I invented Aubrey Beardsley, that there was an atom of aught but pagan feeling in him.’ I happened to mention something that Herr Max Nordau had told me the day before on the subject of ‘The Degenerates,’ and on Nordau’s firm belief that all men of genius were mad.
‘I quite agree with Dr. Nordau’s assertion that all men of genius are insane,’
Oscar Wilde
He leaned back in his chair, lit a cigarette, and gazed reflectively at the beautiful scarab ring on his finger. ‘I shall start working again, and trust to the generosity of the English people to judge it on its merits, and apart from their Philistine prejudices against myself. I do not acknowledge that I have ever been wrong . . . only society is stronger than I. Should the English people refuse my work, then I shall cross to America, a great country which has always treated me kindly. I have always been drawn towards America, not only because it has produced a very great poet—its only one—in Walt Whitman, but because the American people are capable of the highest things in art, literature, and life.’
‘Do you not care for Longfellow, then?’ ‘Longfellow is a great poet only for those who never read poetry. But
America is great because it is the only country in the world where slang is borrowed from the highest literature. I remember some years ago, when I was travelling out West, I was passing by a store when a cowboy galloped past. The man with me said: “Last night that fellow painted the town red.” It was a fine phrase, and familiar. Where had I heard it? I could not remember, but the same afternoon, when I was taken to see the public buildings—the only ones in this place were the gaols and cemeteries—I was shown a condemned cell where a prisoner, who had been sentenced to death, was calmly smoking a cigarette and reading The Divine Comedy of Dante in the original. Then I saw that Dante had invented the phrase “painting the town red.” Do you remember the scene where Dante, led by Virgil, comes to the cavernous depths of the place swept by a mighty wind, where are confined those who have been the prey of their passions? Two pale faces arise from the mist—the faces of Francesca da Rimini and her lover. “Who art thou?” cries Dante in alarm, and Francesca replies sadly: “We are those who painted the world red with our sin.” It is only a great country which can turn the greatest literature into colloquial phrases.’ . . .
The end of his meteoric career is too sad to be dealt with here. Suffice it to say that, if his terrible mania made him sin in the eyes of the world, he suffered no less terribly. Apart from this side of his character, he had a rare delicacy in the things of this world, and his remark that Zola was a writer of immoral books, to which my ‘Mawworm’ critic objected, was made in all sincerity. Those who really knew him made due allowance on his behalf, ignoring the maniac who had fallen under the ban of English displeasure, and recking only of the rare artist, the accomplished scholar, the greatest
Personal
and the kindly gentleman whose heart was a mine of generosity and good nature. May his soul rest in peace and his sins be forgiven him! —Chris Healy, Confessions of a
Journalist, 1904, pp. 131–138
Wilfred Scawen Blunt ()
Wilfred Scawen Blunt was an English poet, political essayist, and polemi-
cist. In this extract from his diaries, he describes a conversation he had
with Robert Ross, Wilde’s closest friend and his literary executor. It
depicts Ross’s impressions of Wilde’s difficult time in prison, the writing
of his essay De Profundis, and his sad physical decline after his release.
The Roman Catholic Ross describes Wilde’s flirtation with conversion and
his deathbed baptism into the Roman Catholic Church. Blunt highlights
Ross’s portrayal of Wilde’s “artificial temperament,” his variable sinceri-
ties, and the difficulty even his closest and oldest friend had in simply
understanding Wilde. Scawen Blunt largely refrains from passing any
personal comments since he is receiving his information secondhand
from Ross. Ross, however, has a very firm conviction about the compli-
cated nature of Wilde’s personality and temperament: He states simply
that “It was difficult to be sure about him.”QQQ
Yesterday I saw (Robert) Ross, Oscar Wilde’s friend, who was with him in his last hours. I was curious to know about these and he told me everything. Ross is a good honest fellow as far as I can judge, and stood by Oscar when all had abandoned him. He used to go to him in prison, being admitted on an excuse of legal business, for Ross managed some of Mrs. Wilde’s affairs while her husband was shut up. He told me Oscar was very hardly treated during his first year, as he was a man of prodigious appetite and required more food than the prison allowance gave him, also he suffered from an outbreak of old symptoms and was treated as a malingerer when he complained of it. Ross’s representation got attention paid to these things, and in the last eight months of his imprisonment, Wilde had books and writing materials in abundance and so was able to write his De Profundis. I asked him how much of this poem was sincere. He said, ‘As much as possible in a man of Oscar’s artificial temperament. While he was writing he was probably sincere, but his “style” was always in his mind. It was difficult to be sure about him. Sometimes when
Oscar Wilde
prison he had the idea of becoming a Catholic, and he consulted me about it, for you know I am a Catholic. I did not believe in his sincerity and told him if he really meant it, to go to a priest, and I discouraged him from anything hasty in the matter. As a fact, he had forgotten all about it in a week, only from time to time he used to chaff me as one standing in the way of his salvation. I would willingly have helped him if I had thought him in earnest, but I did not fancy religion being made ridiculous by him. I used to say that if it came to his dying I would bring a priest to him, not before. I am not at all a moral man, but I had my feeling on this point and so the matter remained between us. After he had been nearly a year out of prison he took altogether to drink, and the last two years of his life were sad to witness. I was at Rome when I heard that he was dying and returned at once to Paris and found him in the last stage of meningitis. It is a terrible disease for the bystanders, though they say the sufferer himself is unconscious. He had only a short time to live, and I remembered my promise and got a priest to come to him. I asked him if he would consent to see him, and he held up his hand, for he could not speak. When the priest, an Englishman, Cuthbert Dunn, came to him he asked him whether he wished to be received and put the usual questions, and again Oscar held up his hand, but he was in no condition to make a confession nor could he say a word. On this sign, however, Dunn allowing him the benefit of the doubt, gave him conditional baptism, and afterwards extreme unction but not communion. He was never able to speak and we do not know whether he was altogether conscious. I did this for the sake of my own conscience and the promise I had made.’ Wilde’s wife died a year after he left prison. She would have gone to see him at Paris but he had already taken to drink, and Ross did not encourage her to do so. Ross made £800 by the De Profundis. He had intended to pay off Oscar’s Paris debts with £400 of it and devote the rest to the use of the boys, but just as he was going to do this the whole sum was claimed by the bankruptcy court and the affair is not yet settled.
—Wilfred Scawen Blunt, My Diaries (entry for November 16, 1905), 1920, vol. 2, pp. 125–126
Robert H. Sherard ()
Robert Sherard was an English journalist and poet, the great-grandson of
William Wordsworth. He was the prolific biographer of Wilde in the early
twentieth century and one of his closest friends, until anger at Wilde’s
continued same-sex relations after his release from prison caused a
Personal for a reconciliation between Wilde and his wife, Constance, up until that point. In the copy of De Profundis sent to Sherard, Wilde wrote an inscription expressing sadness, and perhaps resentment, because of this estrangement from his erstwhile friend.
The following extract gives a personal and detailed account of the
last days leading up to Wilde’s conviction in the Old Bailey courtroom. Considering that Sherard had broken with Wilde before the latter’s death, it is impossible to assess just how much faith should be placed in Sherard’s account of his feelings, as they are related here. There is reason to doubt his despair and pain so dramatically, indeed so melodramatically, described; but this typifies the problem with so many people who wrote of Wilde after his death. Those who had chosen to ignore Wilde or break with him upon his release from prison for whatever reason would often be the same individuals claiming to have been closest to him, members of his inner circle, the few who never betrayed him. Sherard claims to feel as if he is being lashed as each “Guilty” verdict is announced. He maintains he had to be held back from leaping up and causing a scene as his condemned friend was led away and says of himself that he was close to collapse as he left the courtroom after the sentencing.
Sherard states that he was the only friend of Wilde’s prescient enough
to have held little hope of his receiving an acquittal. His disgust with the establishment’s hypocrisy is evident in the detestation he feels for the male prostitutes (“The Evidence”) who perjured themselves to convict his friend, their laughing and smoking during the jury’s deliberations and after the trial ended. Sherard says that only one of nine guilty of a crime was sentenced in the courtroom that day. The general public is described as cavorting with glee when the verdict was announced outside the court, behaving much as the mob might have done at a nobleman’s execution during the French Revolution. They dance an ugly farandole and behave with “mad joy” in the muddy street.
The conclusion of the extract describes Sherard’s difficult visit
the same evening to the French writer Alphonse Daudet (Sherard had published his biography only the year before). The Frenchman is pleased with the verdict and displays no sympathy for the downfall of a fellow writer. Sherard dines luxuriously with Daudet and others that evening but claims the food tastes terrible as he imagines Wilde’s prison fare. The suggestion for a story about a hermit seems to be Sherard’s insinuation that he can no longer abide becoming friends with those who will cause him pain: whether this is a statement about his future relationship
Oscar Wilde
being the misanthrope of the title, who has adopted such a state simply
because he loves others so much: he cannot be happy in a world where
his own love is transformed into suffering. It is a fittingly melodramatic
conclusion to the extract and expresses, unfortunately, a not uncommon