in good company 33

in good company 33

Yonder man into whose great brain I entered, working strange

madness within! Him first I taught to love Beauty, because it is

of Thee. Him I haunted of beauty, haunted with visions of forms

more fair than earthly eyes may know, luring him at last to look

upon Beauty as of greater worth than all else, and as a law unto

itself.

 

And because the love of beauty is not far removed from the love

of pleasure, it was not difficult for me to lead on such as he

to love pleasure for itself. With innocent pleasures at first I

plied him, and when they staled, I enticed him with grosser joys,

till the pleasure-seeker became the voluptuary, and, in the veins

of the voluptuary, desire soon quickened into lust.

 

Next, because wine, like water to drooping flowers, lent

fictitious strength to his flagging pulse, made the live

thoughts to quicken in his tired brain, and set the tongue of

his wit a-wagging; because he loved to stand well with his

comrades, among whom to chink glasses together was the sign of

fellowship--because of all these I enticed him to drink and yet

again to drink, until Alcohol, the Arch Destroyer, had stolen

away his will power, silenced his conscience, perverted his moral

sense, inflamed with foul passion his degenerate brain, and made

the wreck and the ruin of him that he now is.

 

Yet even now, as I steal gloatingly through the dark chambers of

that House of Shame which was once the fair temple of the living

God, even now there still smoulders under the ashes of a fouled

hearthstone some spark of the fire which was kindled of God, a

fire which I strive in vain to trample out, since, because it is

of God, it is inextinguishable and eternal.

 

If therefore when I seem most to have conquered, there never yet

was God wholly defeated--of what use is it further to wage the

unequal conflict? For God never entirely lets go His hold on a

human soul; and that to which God holds fast, Satan shall never

finally wrest from Him. Say the world, think the world, what it

will, in the warfare for souls God wins, and has won all along

the line.

 

It was, as I say, Wilde who was in my mind when I penned that passage

commencing “Yonder man into whose great brain I entered, working

strange madness within.” To me he seems to have been less hopelessly

bad than partly mad.

 

We are told that it is possible, by locating and destroying certain

cells or nerve-centres in the brain, so to affect the mind of the

subject as to destroy his sense of colour, his sense of touch, or

even, it is believed, to destroy his sense of right and wrong.

 

Wilde died of meningitis, which is a brain affection, and I think

that the fact should be considered retrospectively. A post-mortem

examination would possibly have revealed some disease or degeneration

of certain brain-cells which may account for much that is painful

in his career and character. This degeneration of brain-cells may

have been inherited and congenital, in which case, condemnation

on our part is silenced; or it may have been due to excesses of

his own choosing and committing. Even if this be so, the price he

paid was surely so terrible, and so tragic, as in a sense to be

accounted an atonement, and even to entitle him to our pity. In the

passage quoted from my dream-parable, I have hinted at some form of

demoniacal possession which may or may not be a positive, as opposed

to a negative form of madness. There is a brain derangement by which

the power to reason aright and to co-ordinate ideas is lost; a brain

derangement which results mainly in vacancy of mind. But there is

yet another and more terrible form of derangement in which, so it

seems to me, that unseen evil powers, outside himself, seize upon

and possess the brain chambers, thus vacated, and direct and rule

the unhappy victim, not according to his own will, which indeed has

passed out of his control, but according to the wish or will of the

power by which he is possessed.

 

On such a question we dare not dogmatise; but I am humbly of opinion

that in the great re-awakening to the realities (not to the outward

forms) of religion, which some of us think will follow the war,

there will be a return to simplicity of belief, and that the too

often disregarded New Testament explanation of certain mysterious

happenings will be proved to be more in accordance with the later

discoveries of Science than some advocates of the Higher Criticism

now think. For my own part I have never doubted the accuracy of the

Gospel records in regard to demoniacal possession. We have Christ’s

own words: “For this saying go thy way; the devil is gone out of

thy daughter,” “Howbeit this kind goeth not out but by prayer and

fasting,” and “I charge thee come out of him and enter no more into

him.”

 

That some men and women whose wills are weakened--possibly by

habitual disregard of conscience or by continued wrongdoing for which

they cannot be held irresponsible--_do_ commit, under the urging and

direction of evil spirits by which they are possessed, crimes and

cruelties for which they are not in the fullest sense responsible,

I think more than possible. My friend, the late Benjamin Waugh,

Founder of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children,

on more than one occasion placed before me the full facts and the

indisputable proofs of acts so fiendish as to be difficult to ascribe

to human motive or passions.

 

In the most terrible sonnet ever penned, Shakespeare says:

 

The expense of spirit in a waste of shame

Is lust in action, and till action, lust

Is perjured, murderous, bloody, full of blame,

Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust,

 

and, to lust, some particularly bestial outrages which came before

the Society were clearly attributable. Others were as clearly the

outcome of avarice, greed, hatred, jealousy and blind fury of anger.

But some crimes there were, such as the torturing of her own children

by a mother, and, in another case, the deliberate jabbing out of the

eyes of an unoffending pony by a woman, not under the influence of

drink, and in whom the medical experts declared they otherwise found

no symptoms of insanity, which, if only for the sake of our common

humanity, one would be relieved to think were due to demoniacal

possession, for which the victim was, in this last stage at least,

irresponsible.

 

In the near future it is possible that Science will by closer

inquiry and by completer records be found once more in harmony with

scripture. Hypnotism, a science which as yet is not a science, but

merely a haphazard accumulation of unorganised data, pointing to the

possession of unexplained powers and possibilities by the individual,

has established the fact that the living can thus be influenced

and obsessed by the living. If so, why not by the dead, who, when

emancipated from the body, may possibly be able to concentrate

even greater spiritual force upon the living than when they were

themselves alive?

 

I am not likely to live to see it, but my belief is that all these

so-called occult matters, Hypnotism, Thought-reading, Obsession,

Clairvoyance, Spiritualism, and the like will one day fall into line

with Science, and be proved to be not supernatural, but merely the

manifestation of natural laws--of certain psychical powers and forces

which may be easily explainable and demonstrable with further and

exacter knowledge, but concerning the working of which we are at

present very much in the dark.

 

I have written at greater length than I intended, in hinting and in

hoping that Wilde was at times under the subjection of powers and

forces of darkness outside himself. I say “at times” intentionally,

and for the following reason. It would be gratifying to one’s

_amour propre_ (I use a French term for once, as it expresses my

meaning more nearly than any English equivalent) could I take high

ground, and aver that I was vaguely conscious--warned, as it were,

by some fine instinct--of evil in the presence of Wilde, but so to

aver would be untrue. I have not lived to nearly threescore years

without meeting men from whom one does thus instinctively shrink,

and concerning whom one found it impossible to breathe the same air.

I experienced nothing of the sort in Wilde’s company, and, since

his guilt seems uncontrovertible, I ask myself whether it is not

possible that Wilde lived a sort of Jekyll and Hyde life, of the

latter of which I saw nothing, inasmuch as just as some wounded or

plague-stricken creature withdraws itself from the herd, so, during

the Hyde period of madness or of obsession, some instinct moved him

to withdraw from his home, his haunts and the companions of his

everyday life, only to return when the obsession or madness had

passed, and once again he was his sane and normal self.

 

This “periodicity” is not infrequent in madness, whether the madness

be due to a brain derangement, explainable by pathology, or to

some such demoniacal possession as that of which I have spoken. A

memorable instance is that of Mary Lamb, who was herself aware of the

return of homicidal mania, and at such times of her own accord placed

herself under restraint. Recalling the fact that I saw in Wilde no

sign either of the presence of evil or of insanity, I ask myself

whether in picturing Dorian Grey as at one season living normally

and reputably, and at another disappearing into some oblivion of

iniquity, he was not consciously or unconsciously picturing for us

his own tortured self. I write “tortured” advisedly, for whether

he were wholly, or only partly, or not at all, responsible, I

refuse to believe that the man, as in his saner moments I knew him,

_could_ sink thus low, without fighting desperately, if vainly--how

desperately only the God who made him knows--before allowing himself

in the hopelessness of despair to forget his failures in filth, as

other unhappy geniuses have before now drowned their souls in drink.

 

One talk with him I particularly remember. I had been reading the

proofs of _Dorian Grey_, and, on our next meeting, I said that he had

put damnable words into the mouth of one of his characters.

 

“Such poisonous stuff is not likely to affect grown men and women,” I

said, “but for a writer of your power and persuasiveness to set up a

puppet like Lord Henry to provide ready-made excuses for indulgence,

and to make evil seem necessary, unavoidable, and easy, by whispering

into the ears of readers, of impressionable age and inflammable

passion, that ‘the only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to

it’--when you do that, you are helping to circulate devils’ doctrines

in God’s world.”

 

Wilde was visibly perturbed.

 

“You are quite right,” he said. “It _is_ damnable; it _is_ devils’

doctrine. I will take it out.”

 

But, alas, other influences, whether within himself in the shape of

the whisperings of some evil spirit, by which he was, as I believe,

at times possessed, or in the form of so-called friends, whose

influence over him was of the worst, I cannot say, but some days

after the conversation recorded above I received the following letter:

 

GRAND HÔTEL DE L’ATHENÉE,15 RUE SCRIBE, PARIS.