in good company 32

in good company 32

Similarly, in my intercourse with Wilde, I found that a certain

amount of “Cloughing,” such as, “Now then, Wilde! You know you are

only showing off, as we used to say at home when I was one of a

family of kids. Stow it, and talk sense,” had equally good result. He

would protest at first when minded to let me off lightly, that such

“engaging ingenuousness” alarmed and silenced him. At other times he

would vow that my coarseness made him shudder and wince--that it was

like crushing a beautiful butterfly, to bludgeon a sensitive creature

of moods and impulses with unseemly jibes and blatant speech. Having,

however, thus delivered himself and made his protest, he would often

stultify that protest and provide me with an excuse to myself for my

Philistinism, by throwing aside his stilts (assumed possibly because

he imagined they advertised him to advantage above the heads of

those who walk afoot in the Vanity Fair of Literature and Art), and

by showing himself infinitely more interesting when seen naturally

and near at hand than when stilting it affectedly in mid-air above

one’s head.

 

At times, and when he had forgotten his grievance at being thus

rudely pulled down, he would forget--egotist that he was--even

himself, in speaking of his hopes, his ambitions and his dreams;

and in his rare flashes of sincerity would show himself as greater

and nobler of soul than many who met and talked to him only in the

_salon_ or in society perhaps realised.

 

There is a graceful fancy of Wilde’s--I do not know whether he ever

told it in print--the hero of which was a poet lad who had dreamed

so often and written such lovely songs about the mermaid, that at

last--since the dream-world was more real to him than the waking

world--he was convinced that mermaids there really are in the seas

around our shores, and that if one watched long and patiently they

might by mortal eye be seen. So day and night the poet watched and

waited, but saw nothing. And when his friends asked him, “Have you

seen the mermaids?” he answered, “Yes, by moonlight I saw them at

play among the rollers,” telling thereafter what he had seen and with

such vividness and beauty that almost he persuaded the listeners

to believe the story. But one night by moonlight the poet did

indeed have sight of the mermaids, and in silence he came away and

thereafter told no one what he had seen.

 

So, of Wilde himself, I cannot but hope and believe that though he

told many stories of exceeding beauty, none of which were true, yet

hidden away in his heart was much that was gracious, true, noble

and beautiful, the story of which will now never be known, for like

the poet lad of his fantasy he told it to no one. Of what was evil

and what was good in his life, only a merciful God can strike the

balance, and only a merciful God shall judge.

 

 

VI

 

As one who knew Wilde personally, I am sometimes asked whether I was

not instinctively aware that the man was bad. Frankly I was not.

Possibly because scandal does not interest me, and other things do,

I had not heard the rumours which I now understand were even then

prevalent, and so I took him as I found him, an agreeable companion,

a brilliant conversationalist, a versatile and accomplished man of

letters. On the crime of which he has since been committed, I make no

comment, if only for the reason that I did not follow the evidence at

his trial, just as I abstained from reading Mr. W. T. Stead’s _Maiden

Tribute to Modern Babylon_--not because of any innate niceness on my

part, but for the same reason which causes me to turn aside if, in

my morning’s walk, I come across offal which it is not my business

to remove. The Wilde of the days of which I am writing was foppish

in dress and affected in manner. He talked and wrote much nonsense,

as I held it to be, about there being no such thing as a moral or an

immoral book or picture; that the book or picture was either a work

of art, or was not a work of art, and there the matter ended; but

much of this talk I attributed to pose, and I had even then learned

that some of the men who are most anxious to have us believe them

moralists--and stern moralists at that--are often less moral in their

life than some of those who make no pretence of any morals at all.

 

To the folk who objected that Wilde has boasted of being a “pagan”

I replied that he probably used the word--just then very much in

vogue--in the same sense in which Mr. Kenneth Grahame used it when he

entitled a volume, bubbling over with the joy of life, with animal

spirits, keen observation, and exquisite humour, _Pagan Papers_.

Wilde’s “paganism” I took as meaning no more than that he claimed

for himself freedom from formula, most of all freedom from cant in

his attitude towards the accepted conventions, whether literary,

artistic, social, or even religious.

 

That he was not an irreligious man, I had reason to know. One day

when we were chatting together, Wilde mentioned a little book

of mine of which I will say no more here than that it made no

uncertain confession of the writer’s faith in Christianity. This

led Wilde--uninvited by me, for I make it a rule never to obtrude

my religious views upon others--to express himself upon the subject

of religion, especially of Christianity, and with such intense

reverence, such manifest earnestness, that I perhaps looked something

of the surprise I felt.

 

“You are surprised,” he said, “to hear Oscar Wilde, the _poseur_,

as people call him, the man who is supposed to hold nothing too

sacred, talking seriously and on serious things. _No_, I am _not_

making believe to be earnest, as I do make believe about so much

else. I am speaking as I feel, and you will perhaps hardly realise

what an intense relief it is to meet some one to whom one can talk

about such matters without cant. It is cant and officialdom” (he

spoke bitterly) “which is keeping the men and women who think out

of the churches to-day. It is cant which more than anything else

stands between them and Christ. Shall I tell you what is my greatest

ambition--more even than an ambition--the dream of my life? Not to

be remembered hereafter as an artist, poet, thinker, or playwright,

but as the man who reclothed the sublimest conception which the world

has ever known--the Salvation of Humanity, the Sacrifice of Himself

upon the Cross by Christ--with new and burning words, with new and

illuminating symbols, with new and divine vision, free from the

accretions of cant which the centuries have gathered around it. I

should thereby be giving the world back again the greatest gift ever

given to mankind since Christ Himself gave it, peerless and pure two

thousand years ago--the pure gift of Christianity as taught by Christ.

 

“Yes,” he went on, “I hope before I die to write the Epic of the

Cross, the Iliad of Christianity, which shall live for all time.”

 

On another occasion Wilde unfolded to me the opening scene in a

sort of religious drama which he intended one day to write--the

finding to-day of the body of the Christ in the very rock-sepulchre

where Joseph of Arimathea had laid it, and a great and consequent

eclipse of faith in Him and in His resurrection. Thereafter, by a

new revelation of the Christ, Wilde was, in his drama, newly to

recreate Christianity and faith in Christianity, but of this Second

Act of his World-Drama I heard no more, as our talk was at this point

interrupted, and he never renewed it.

 

I speak of this proposed religious drama here for the singular reason

that I, too, had long been turning over in my mind some such work and

some such opening scene as in Wilde’s drama--I mean the finding of

the body of Christ.

 

Wilde went no further with his project, but in a book of mine,

written some years after, I carried my own project into effect. To

this day I am uncertain how much of my opening scene was Wilde’s,

and how much mine. The idea appears to have occurred to both, but

whereas, in Wilde’s mind, it was clear and defined, in mine it was

then no more than an idea. I sometimes wonder whether his words did

not make vivid to me what before was vague. Of one thing at least I

am sure, that he was the first to speak of such an opening scene,

which fact in itself constitutes some sort of previous claim. The

rest of the book was entirely mine, and probably the whole, but the

facts seem to me not uninteresting, and having made confession of

the possibility at least of some debt incurred, I must leave it to

the reader to say whether I ought or ought not to be condemned in

“conscience money.”

 

I have already said that I have reason to know that Wilde was not

irreligious, and I propose now to give my reasons for refusing to

believe him to be irreclaimably bad. One has some hesitation in

quoting oneself, but, in a dream-parable booklet of mine, there is

a passage which I may perhaps be forgiven for printing here, when I

say that I had Wilde in my mind when I wrote it. In my dream-parable,

Satan, even as once of old he had presented himself to speak with God

concerning Job, appears to-day before the Most High, urging that men

and women have become godless and faithless. He craves permission

to prove this by putting them to certain tests. The permission is

accorded on condition that Satan himself becomes mortal, even as

they. In the following passage Satan is supposed to be speaking,

after the failure and defeat of his projects.

 

Master and Maker, hear me ere I die. For until Thou didst in Thy

wisdom decree that ere I might work my will on mortals, myself

must become mortal even as they--until then, the thoughts of

these mortals were as foreign to my understanding as are the

thoughts in the brain of a bird, to the fowler who spreads his

net to catch the little creature. Like the fowler, I knew that

I must change my bait, according to the creature that I set out

to snare, that this one could be taken by avarice, that one by

vanity, a third by spiritual pride, a fourth by bodily lust. When

they came to my lure, and I caught them; when I saw the poor

fools struggling in my net, I laughed and hugged myself to think

of their misery and of the impotent anguish of God. And so I

grew wise in the ways and the weaknesses of men and women, while

knowing nothing of the hearts which beat in their breasts.

 

But now that I have become mortal, even as they,--now at last,

to the wonder and the mystery of mortal life, are my eyes opened.

Now perceive I that, in the least and most shameful of these

lives, is to be seen, even in uttermost wreckage, something so

sacred, so august, so beautiful, so divine, that the very angels

of light might stand amazed in envious wonder and awe.

 

For if men and women have failed greatly, at least they have

striven greatly--how greatly, how valiantly, how desperately,

only the God Who sees all, may know.

 

It may be that by Him, that very striving itself, even the

unsuccessful striving, shall mercifully be taken into account.

The sin and the shame are human: the wish and the effort to

overcome them are divine. For that which in a man’s truer, nobler

moments, he has longed unutterably to be, _that in some sense he

is, and shall be accounted_, in the eyes of the God, Who taketh

not pleasure in remembering sin, but in rewarding righteousness.

 

That even in sin, a man should think such thoughts, should carry

unsullied in his heart some white flower of his childhood, and,

in spite of what is ugly and impure in himself, should project

so pure and perfect a vision of hoped-for, longed-for Loveliness

and Purity, sets that man, even in his sins, a world removed

above the angels. When I who was once an angel fell, I fell from

uttermost light to uttermost dark. Ceasing to be an angel, I

became a devil. Man falls, but even in his fall retains something that is divine.