15 September 1900

 

Wherever I run, I cannot find peace.  Yesterday evening the pain in my ear abated, and I decided to celebrate on the boulevards.  I went with a few acquaintances to a little restaurant near the Madeleine; almost as soon as I had entered the door the proprietor, with many expressions of rather fulsome regret, asked me to leave.  It seemed that my presence had startled some English tourists.  I looked at them and bowed, and they turned their heads away; I feel sure they came from Bayswater.  They always do.  Of course I left the restaurant although my companions, of a more phlegmatic temperament than my own, stayed.  Contrary to popular belief, I shrink from confrontations of such a kind.  I seek the night, like the Hamadryades, but only to hide myself.

      My companions, I admit it, were two or three of the boys I know here.  Although I cannot shower gold upon them - I am no longer mythological - I can on occasions produce banknotes.  My favourites, Eugène and Léon, will stand by me in anything except adversity - their age has taught them wisdom.  Eugène is sixteen, and he has the eyes of Antinous; he is the protector of a younger boy who sells matches.  At least I have not seen him without matches, but I believe he gives them away to tourists of the Socratic kind who smile upon him.  Léon haunts the cafés, although he has never been known to eat or drink in them.

      It is fitting perhaps that I, who sought youth and the pleasures of youth, now have no friends of my own age.  Indeed even those who have been closest to me - Bobbie Ross, Bosie, Reggie Turner - have always been much younger than myself.  I feel more at ease with them because I need to make no definite impression.  With people like Frank Harris or W.E. Henley, conversation was a kind of rugby football - I was continually forced to strike attitudes, and defend myself.  Where I sought friendship and beauty they desired competitors and the struggle in the dust.   And so I shunned them.  Now, ancient and alone, I have become a monument to another era.

      My friends in England telegraph me to say that I can begin my life anew, that like the old man in Anatole France's fable I can still add 'a new wing to the building'.  I have told myself the same thing in the past - that my recent experience would create in me a new and deeper art, that the personality is changed by suffering as an iron glows when it is placed in the fire.  But such hopes are illusions.  The appetites and aspirations of man are endless but, alas, the experience is confined.  The tragedy of my life is that my growth has been arrested - I trudge round and round the circle of my personality.  It is as if I had been condemned to haunt the scenes of my crimes and frighten those who came near to me.  The places are the same; the boys are the same.

      I am not Rabelaisian.  I find it difficult now to write about my vices.  And yet I wrote once to Bosie that a man's highest moment comes when he kneels in the dust and tells the sins of his life.  I must now tell mine.  I have of course no models on which to draw for inspiration.  Baudelaire wished to interest heaven and hell in his sins and, since he did not write at length, he may have succeeded.  I cannot perform such miracles: I cannot turn the mire to silver, or the white stains to gold.  I can provide only this chronicle which in confusion I set down.  I must do like the Romans - take my entrails in my hands, and die twice over.

      I first experienced the pleasures of Greek love with Harry Marriller.  Before that I had glimpses merely - from Lord Ronald Gower, that strange carved figure, and from the dark streets of great cities.  But then it seemed to me to be a carnival for which I had not found the appropriate mask, and I let it pass by with its strange scents and purple music.  And then I met Harry.  I had known him when he was a boy: he used to live in Thames House where Frank Miles and I had found lodgings on leaving Oxford.  Quite unexpectedly, he wrote to me one day at Tite Street.  I remember the year precisely, for it was the year in which Cyril was born: 1885.  I was thirty-one, and Harry was twenty.  It was a perfectly delightful letter and in my reply I asked him to visit us in Chelsea.  I believe that even then the weight of domestic life was becoming burdensome to me.

      Harry came and dined with us.  He was an agreeable boy, with that fondness for romantic poetry which only the young possess.  He was at Cambridge still, and we talked of Plato and the fiery visions of Heraclitus.  Constance left the table - she grew easily tired then - and I remember quite well the nervousness I felt when I was alone with Harry.  We drank heavily, and I believe I said marvellous things about the Symposium.  And then, with the spell of Greek words around us, I put a hand on Harry's arm and he did not resist.  I experienced then for the first time that passion which was to haunt me and which I was to pursue through the folly of my years - that weakening of the body and that heightening of sensation which leaves one the prey solely of appetite.

      The intimacies which passed between us were schoolboyish, and yet they awakened in me both a fierce joy and a terrible shame.  I resoled that I would not see him again - and, indeed, after that night we exchanged letters but not confidences.  He had opened my eyes, however, and awakened in me a nature which had previously lain dormant.  I had known that physical beauty is not the property of any one sex but hovers above both like the putti in the paintings of Fra Angelico, but I had thought such beauty to be merely an abstraction - I had not understood that it could be tasted and enjoyed without losing its savour.  But, when I abjured the wonderful idealism of my art, I took the first step on the path which was to lead me into the wilderness.  I had been sitting with Socrates, but now I found Alcibiades on my other hand, and I took my meat, and drank my wine, with him.

      A year passed, a year in which I fled from the nature that had been revealed to me.  If I had hinted at the truth to Constance, I believe she would have turned from me in horror and contempt.  And so I kept my secret, nursed it, nourished it with sighs and with groans.  But the gods are cruel and play with us: I had gone on a pilgrimage to Oxford to visit Pater, and it was after I had attended one of his long exequies on the life of sensation without passion, that I fell for the second time.

      For, after the lecture, a young student came up to me in the street and introduced himself.  I see now that I have always been the seduced, not the seducer; although in popular imagination I now sit in the Inferno beside Gilles de Retz, I do not believe that I ever instigated the passions which were to consume me.  The student, of course, was Robert Ross.  His is a sweet character, with the sweetness of those without ambition, and in those days he had the quick responsiveness of a child.  I liked him at once, and my first impressions are never wrong.

      After we had met, I invited him to Tite Street and, in the months that followed, he became a regular visitor there.  Robbie was amusing, and he had the gift of asking questions that only I could answer.  He admired me, and so in his company I became admirable: in conversation with him, I was able to evolve some of my best dialogues.  It is strange, is it not, how a person can adore one's soul so much that they adore one's body also?  We were intimate with each other, but the passion in our friendship was only a passing thing.  And indeed I was quite happy to allow the physical intimacies between us to lapse.  I have never been for long attracted to those of my own class - it is to lie with oneself rather than with another.  But Robbie had shown me the path, which then I trod willingly but, later, with ever more weary steps.  It seemed to me, however, that Socratic love brought out the finest qualities in me; the imagination which had before been stifled, flourished and grew strong in its light.  I grew to understand myself, and was greedy for further revelations.

      Robbie introduced me to a circle of Uranians - More Adey, Maurice Schwabe, Reggie Turner.  They were perfectly frank about their lives, and unfamiliar vistas were opened out to me: of ugly cast-iron urinals in the North of London, of parks where the red and blue of the soldiery might be glimpsed between the trees, of a skating rink in Knightsbridge where strange flowers blossomed upon the ice.  I found it fascinating, but in those days I did not allow the new passion to control my life, as it did theirs.  I preferred to immerse myself in their company rather than their crimes.  We would visit the Crown public house in the Strand, or a scented bar in St James's, and consume the evening in drinks and cigarettes while strange, painted creatures walked past.

      The Crown, like all Cities of the Plain, was a charming place from which to watch the world.  There were boxing prints upon the wall, some of which appeared to be signed, and dark red shades which obscured the gaslight in an admirable manner.  Young men with sporting papers and old men with cheroots gathered around the 'Marjeries', as they were called in a charmingly old-fashioned way, and laughed with them.  I can still recall one young man who went by the name of Kitty Fisher; he walked the Strand and Fleet Street.

      'I love my City gents,' he told me one evening, 'they're so regular.  Are you a City man yourself, Mr Wilde?'

      'No.  I am a writer, my dear.'

      'A writer, really?  Well, that must be interesting.  Would I have caught your name in the News?'

      'No, my dear.  I have not had that pleasure.'  I order him a port.

      'And what does a writer like yourself do of an evening, then?  Would he like to feel Kitty's prickle by any chance?'

      'No, my dear, I have already had that pleasure.'

      'Oh, go on.  I never forget a face, not of a handsome gentleman like yourself.'

      And so the hours would pass.  Nothing was serious there, and all that seemed to be serious was reduced to a mist of laughter.  I remember that every public figure could, in their conversation, be turned to absurd caricature - Gladstone was referred to as Milady Gladstone and Rosebery known simply as 'the princess'; Sir Charles Dilke was, to his admirers, the 'empress of Chelsea'.  This amused me, and it came also as something of a relief.  Modern civilisation can only be endured when it is mocked, and the great and famous are quite impossible when they are placed on pedestals.  I liked the notion that they could be brought down by humour.  I was playing with fire, but it is the prettiest thing in the world to play with.

      Through Robbie's friends, I met others.  There were actors who frequented the same places, young men like Roland Atwood, Oswald Yorke and Sidney Barraclough who had decided that the life of the theatre was a perfect extension of their own rather dramatic sensibilities.  And their company was charming to me, filled with a gaiety quite absent in the charnel house of journalism or the poisoned garden of professional literary men.

      It was in the Crown that I met John Gray, a poet with a profile.  I had dreamed, I think, of perfect Socratic companionship, of a life of love and art conducted on terms of equality.  With Gray I believed it to be possible, but he made it clear to me that he did not like me in that way'; it was an atrocious phrase to fall from the lips of a poet.  Still, he graciously allowed me to pay for the publication of his first volume.  For me, alas, the love of equals was to prove an idle dream.  I, who aspired so high, both in art and in life, was doomed to be betrayed by my inferiors.  It could not have been otherwise.

      For even in those days, some years before my trial, I met certain of the young men who were to be implicated in my later sorrows: some of them because spectators only, but there were others who were to betray me and, through their betrayal, hasten the course of my downfall.  Edward Shelley was one of those - a pale, tense young man but not without the beauty of those who suffer from quite imaginary anxieties.  I met him at my publishers, where he worked as a clerk; he asked me to autograph one of my books, and so great was his embarrassment that he hardly dared to look at me as he did so.  I felt for him both pity and affection - sentiments agreeable in themselves, but terribly dangerous in combination.  But there has always been something in those who have no sense of their own worth which moves me.

      When I gave Edward a seat at the first night of Lady Windermere's Fan, I had placed him beside the young French poet, Pierre Louys - with what paroxysms of embarrassment, Edward confessed to me later, did he sit there and make conversation with the young Frenchman.  He was nervous precisely because he felt unworthy of his position as my friend: can anything be more ridiculous, or more piteous?  It touches me still, even though later he betrayed me in the grossest manner.  Indeed, he betrayed me three times - I will not draw the obvious parallel - once with lies to the private detectives whom Queensberry had hired to destroy me and twice when he committed perjury in the witness box at the Old Bailey.

      All regret is quite useless - I, who have so much to regret, have learned that at least - but there was something in Edward Shelley's temperament which should have warned me, if I were of a character to be affected by warnings.  For I noticed in him the weaknesses by which the Uranian temperament is marked - the guilt and hysteria which, in flawed characters like Edward's, follow always on passion with swift feet.  After I had known him for some months, he would write appalling letters to me, accusing himself of sins which he had not the spirit to commit, and of self-betrayal when he was in reality betraying only me.  When he involved me in domestic arguments with his father, to the extent that I was asked to bail him out from a police station in the suburbs after an assault, I should have sent him out of my life with a few stern but well-chosen words.  I did not do so: well, in the memorable phrase of Arthur Pinero, I have 'learned my lesson'.

      There was one boy who warned me of the dangers that I was courting - Peter Burford, who stood by me until the end and, in his nobility of character, refused to testify against me.  I met him at the Alhambra, during one of those intervals which one finds so necessary at most theatrical productions.  Constance was in the country, and I took him back with me to Tite Street.  He was no stranger to the ways of lust but he had also a curious innocence which, because I had never possessed it, fascinated me.  He was of course from a much lower station than myself - he worked as a carpenter in Grape Street - but he had a soundness of instinct which I was to find invaluable.  I have never found it difficult to associate with those of an inferior position.  Such matters are of no consequence to me.  I am an Irishman.  Indeed it is possible that the English grew to hate me only when I was revealed as a member of the only truly classless society in London, although I do not think it could be described as socialistic - some of the young men would have been quite happy to become duchesses.  Two of them did.

      Peter Burford and I became great friends.  We would eat simply meals together at the Florence - all meals are simple there - and he would lecture me about the dangers of my life.  He had a true appreciation of my genius, and as a result found several glaring faults in my character.  I would accept his criticisms in silence: only from the young can one accept criticism, because only they see life as it really is.  I would tell him everything, even those shadowy things which I did not reveal to those who knew me best, and he would advise me.  It was he who warned me about Edward Shelley: 'He blows up easy and down again ditto,' he told me one evening.  'Don't mash him, Oscar.'  His prescience was quite extraordinary.  Who would have thought that of boy of humble origin would have shown more insight than I myself possessed?  And that he would in the end demonstrate to me more loyalty and affection than the members of my own class?  Perhaps it is not surprising, for when the real history of the world comes to be written it will reveal a great secret - that love and intelligence belong only to those who have been wounded by life.

      I have said that with Robbie, and those whom I met with him, my friendship was social only.  Although I sought for physical joy, I could not do so in their company.  Sin should be solitary, and my expeditions were always alone.  There were certain evenings when that fatal passion took possession of me - I would make an excuse to Constance, usually of an absurd kind, and then I would seek the night.  I have never understood the nature of that fierce need which drove me forward: a scarlet speck fell across my brain, and all I could see were as yet unknown figures beckoning to me.  The curious thing is that I was perpetually disappointed and yet perpetually hopeful also - the expectations ran forward from the experience, as familiar and ever-renewed as the beak of the vulture became for Prometheus.

      The mind has its Whitechapel as well as its West End, and, in my hunger for new sights of degradation and new sins, I loved to enter narrow rookeries.  I wandered through the grey and sordid streets of the city with only my lust for company.  I was warned by my companions that there were terrible dangers, as well as terrible delights, to be found there and that I was risking my life upon such expeditions.  But what a fine thing, I would say, to risk one's entire life for a moment's pleasure.  And in reality I was never afraid - doubtless that was the reason why I was never attacked.  In pursuit of a certain house, or a certain alley, I would cross grassless squares where children slept in heaps upon the ground.  I have seen mad women who in their poverty and neglect bayed to the moon to bring them release, the drunken fights which end in death in mean streets and the shadows which move quickly as the naptha lamps flicker.  I saw all this, and I exulted in it.  The sinners were sordid; the sins splendid.

      In the first months, I went occasionally to a boys' brothel in the Lower Cut.  It was designed as a tailor's shop, although no clothes were ever made there.  It often seemed curious to me that such a place should exist so close to the Strand - that such infamy and vice should burn so near to the fashionable world and yet not set it on fire.  It was a narrow, tall building where on each floor a number of cheap wooden frames had been constructed to form a series of small rooms - each with its own squalid bed.  I would be taken to one, and there a boy would come to me.  The conversation was always the same - 'God the dibs, guv'nor?' was a favourite phrase, I remember - and the lust was always the same, that wonderful liberation of the personality in a small, damp room.  There, for the first time in my life, I felt wholly free.  Sometimes, afterwards, the boys would talk to me - I was fascinated by their lives, and by the quite frank manner in which they talked of them.  They were not ashamed of what they did: indeed, they considered themselves lucky for the opportunities of income which were now available to them.

      But when I returned to Tite Street, and to my sleeping children, I felt shame - shame that I had allowed passion so to master my personality that I quite forgot my family and my own position even as an artist.  But shame is a curious thing: it is quite helpless in the face of more powerful emotions.  I could not stop: I wanted the best, and I sought the worst.  Like the philosopher Sardanapalus, I would have given a large sum of money to anyone who invented a new pleasure.  In my madness I wished to sin beautifully, to perfect its techniques.  The great mystery of Faust lies not in the separation between the intellect and the senses, but rather that sensation was for him an actual refinement of the intelligence.  And so, in homage to German thought, I did not check my impulses - perhaps it would have been wrong to do so, for they would have turned to poison if they had been denied entrance into the world.  I believe that the wildest profligate has, for that reason, a saner and better philosophy of life than the Puritan has.  The Puritans are the great enemies of civilisation because they do not understand that it is founded upon joy.

      You can understand, can you not, why I became as well known among a certain proportion of the lower classes as I was among those who ruled them?  The narrow lanes off Oxford Street were quite familiar to me, and the boys of Piccadilly would whistle and hoot when by chance I passed them: it was for that reason, of course, that I rarely accompanied my wife to Swan and Edgar.

      But, as I grew skilled in the ways of vice, I found other places in which to sate it.  The names of those streets are burned in my imagination, as if I had entered the portals of Hell and seen the terrible words which Virgil points to: Blue Anchor Lane, Bombay Street, Grace's Alley, Wellclose Square.  I searched the night-houses and the shameful corners of those streets for Lazarus, and when I found him I insisted upon kissing his lips: so I became ill of a great fever.  There were houses where boys were auctioned to the old and to the depraved, rooms where strange lusts were gratified and new ones born.  In the delirium of my lust, in such rooms I would kiss the boys all over their bodies; I could glimpse dimly then the secret of those sexual rites in which gods and spirits are raised.

      Sometimes I would run from such places in fear and trembling; the least cry or shout would then seem to be raised against me, the prowling hansom with its amber light was like the carriage which would hurry me to Hell.  If a policeman, on his rounds, shone his torch upon me as I hastened through the blackened, empty streets, I would start back in terror.  The dirty yellow and blue light from the gas lamps would pursue me as I walked on, my heart beating in a hollow place.  Such had my life become.

      But there were times when I walked away from the night-houses with a sweet feeling of calm and well-being.  It was in those moments of supreme physical release that wonderful lines and phrases would come to me unbidden; I would write them into my notebook and then use them in my art.  I can recall composing an entire poem - 'Symphony in Yellow', it was called, in the days when my poems had names - as I walked home through the quiet streets of London in the early dawn.  Those dawns were marvellous to me then; the darkness of the houses and the squares turned to the pearl grey shadows acquiring shape.  As I walked by the Park, the waggons would pass me on their way to Covent Garden, and the countrymen would shout good morning to me.  A city is like a human body: it can rise undefiled each day, and take on the raiments of wonder and of glory.

      And in the same manner my own personality rose up.  It was then that I experienced the strange fantasies of the double life.  I sympathised truly with the poor and, through some atavistic instinct, wished to immerse myself in their lives.  But it became an intellectual excitement to do so - to walk in the shadows of London and watch from a distance the brightness of a life that had been mine only hours before, and would be mine against as soon as I wished for it.

      Sex came, in the end, to gratify my pride rather than my pleasure.  I was head and not body, like the pictures of the goddess Laverna, for the memory of my sins was more pleasurable than the doing of them.  They lent to me a quickened sense of joy, which sprang from my intellect and not my senses.  I experienced every pleasure because I gave myself to none, but held myself apart, individual and indissoluble.  I could see my own image in the eyes of those boys as I bent over them: I was two personalities - the one watching with heavy-lidded eyes the other's experience of bliss.