25 September 1900

 

Scandal has always followed my name, of course, but the rumours about me began in earnest during the controversy over Dorian Gray and The Portrait of Mr W.H.; at first they made me quite ill.  I thought that I had created works of the imagination, and yet I was assailed on all sides by whispers of terrible perversities.  I was nervous, with the nervousness of one who cannot calculate the effects which he is producing, and I could not sleep or rest.  I thought that in Art I might conceal myself, and yet in the newspapers my books were taken as an extraordinary form of self-revelation.  There would have been no use in reciting to the St James Gazette the first law of the imagination, that in his work the artist is someone other than himself - it would have come as too great a shock.  And, in any event, I have always been used as a whipping boy by journalists.

      But it was quite otherwise when my social life was affected.  As a result of the scandal, I was blackballed from the Savile Club and insulted in the Hogarth.  Henley snubbed me in the street on the day Dorian Gray was published in volume form and, to complete his extraordinary idea of manners among civilised people, he never ceased to attack me in his own newspaper - Henley of all people, whom I had invited to my house and who had proclaimed from the rooftops his devotion to art and the things of art.  The man who could abuse me after that is capable of anything.  Those who have kissed Apollo - even, like Henley, if it has only been on the cheek - should not lie down in the street with Thersites.

      By the time I was writing comedies, my reputation was in alien hands, and I could no more have controlled it than I could have silenced the wind.  Of course I became an even greater attraction at the more advanced dinner parties - people wished to lift the mask from my face and find the one which they themselves had placed there.  I grew used to this.  I became accustomed to the sudden silence when I entered the room and I did not object to it.  I thought of it as the silence of an audience before the curtain rises.  But Constance felt it, and grew ashamed.

      But if Society talked about me behind my back, the lower classes had the courage to insult me to my face.  I was as well known as the Bank of England, although I am in some respects more solid, and there were areas of Piccadilly and Leicester Square where I could not walk without provoking public attention.  I remember once standing outside Fortnum and Mason while my wife was making some small purchases - I did not accompany her into the shop, for fear that I might recognise one or two of the assistants - when a young woman passed me, turned her head, looked me in the face and laughed, a strange, mad laugh which left me shaken and bereft of feeling.  It was as if she had found my heart and placed a dagger there, for hers was the laughter of Atropos, who cuts the thread of life.

      From the beginning, even when I first left my house in search of dangerous adventure, I feared that I should be found out - but that made the final reckoning all the more surprising to me.  I had believed that such fear might act as an amulet, and prevent what was most feared from occurring.  But it was not so: what was dreaded came to pass.  And it is curious, is it not, that although I could face scandal in public, although I could mock it or turn it aside in conversation, I could not endure it alone?  I would lie on my bed and, in a fever of imagination, conjure up scenes of doom and damnation which rivalled those of Dante or of Jeremiah, scenes in which I of course was the principal character and the world was a malevolent thing which harried me.  I felt helpless: sometimes I would cry out in my sleep where, once, I had laughed.

      When I began to be blackmailed, I lost my head.  I was once found with a boy in the Albermarle Hotel, by one of the staff there.  Although I paid the servant what was apparently a large sum for his silence, several times he came to my house and asked for 'Mr Wilde'.  I would hand him a banknote and demand that he leave: when my wife asked me who it was, I said only that it was a tradesman who had called with a bill.  But there were others, many others; some of them, like Wood and Clibborn, would not let me rest and pursued me from Tite Street to the Café Royal.  I felt like a wounded animal assailed on all sides, and I longed for oblivion, in the grave or any other place.  I was to find that peace in prison.

      But, although my fate was rushing towards me, I did not think that eventually it would take the form of the Marquess of Queensberry.  To be strung up by a clown, and kicked by a pantomime horse: that was my destiny.  Some people are terrible because they have no law of being and thrust themselves blindly into the world: Queensberry was such a one.  He had no feelings save those of anger and revenge.  He had the habit of 'speaking his mind' without realising that he had no mind to speak of.  On the few occasions I met him, he said things which I did not understand.  He was mad, and I have always felt a terrible unease in the presence of mad people.  When he started his campaign against me and Bosie, I was frightened only because I knew there would be no constancy and no predictability to his course - and that such was his rage that no words of mine could avert it.

      Queensberry would have put Christ on the cross again to see me ruined.  He hounded me through London; he would warn the managers of hotels not to receive me, and he would send absurd communications to the restaurants where I was accustomed to dine, threatening to cause a 'scene' of hideous proportions.  With the madness of his family, Bosie goaded him with telegrams or open postcards, outlining in wonderful detail our itinerary for the day, and then he would turn to me for praise for doing so.  Queensberry even called at my house one evening - fortunately, Constance and the children were in Worthing - and spoke to me in the most insulting fashion.  I threw him out, but the taint was there: the beast had penetrated the labyrinth.  When I told Bosie he laughed: it simply gave him another opportunity for a telegram.

      Not satisfied with destroying the harmony of my house, Queensberry attacked my professional life by appearing at the St James's Theatre with a bunch of vegetables.  It was absurd: and, if I had been able to convince myself that it was only absurd, I might have become merely another spectator of the melodrama as it unfolded.  But I lost my head, alas, and became a participant in it.

      I was not the only object of his vengeance.  The terrible scandal about Rosebery was formented by him, a scandal which was to affect me more than I than had reason to suspect.  Queensberry accused him of unnatural vices, and carried about everywhere with him a picture of Rosebery which was entitled 'the new Tiberius': it was quite obscene.  But he was not content merely with innuendoes of a malicious kind.  By chance, he discovered the proof he was seeking - although there is proof of guilt everywhere, for those who wish to find it.

      He wrote to Rosebery about a certain supper party of Bourne End in which Queensberry's eldest son, Drumlanrig, was found to play a larger role, shall we say, that the private secretary as which Rosebery employed him.  He threatened to reveal Rosebery's relationship with his son to the world.  In his distress Drumlanrig, who imagined that he had betrayed his employer no less than his family, took his life with a gun.  He was found in a field in Somerset.  Of course the matter was at once 'hushed up', and only a few knew the truth of it, but it was a tragedy that cast a dark shadow over my own life simply because it promised no escape from the wrath of the scarlet Marquess except under the most lurid circumstances.

      I met Rosebery a little after this.  He avoided me, of course - he was a politician, and politicians mix with artists at their own risk - but I could see in his face the pain which he was suffering.  He gave me his hand when we were introduced; he looked at me - only momentarily, but it was a look of fear - and then turned away.

      On all sides I was urged to take stern and definite action against my persecutor.  When Constance heard from our cook that he had visited the house - if her cooking is anything to go by, it would have been a melodramatic account - she was outraged and insisted that I took steps to prevent him doing so again.  I went so far as to consider my solicitors, but at first I drew back from the brink.  I feared the consequences of a public scandal - I was terrified that, if I became involved in action of a legal nature, my wife and my mother might learn of the truth.

      But when his note came, accusing me of 'posing' as a sodomite, I knew that I could delay no longer.  I sued him for libel.  How simple it seems now - and how easy to say that, if I had allowed the matter to pass, similar blows would fall upon me again and again until my position became quite insupportable.  But I do not remember thinking of such things at the time.  I was lost in an agony of indecision and conflicting emotions, and relied upon the advice of others.  I did not wish to 'consider my position', as my friends put it, for it was more dangerous than they knew and I must have suspected even then that any action which I instigated would, inevitably, go against me.  And how could it not be so?  Perhaps I ran towards my fate, as towards a bride - perhaps I wished to see it clearly for the first time, after the years I had beckoned to it and taunted it.  I simply do not know.

      Nevertheless, my lawsuit was unforgivable - the one really foolish action of my life.  Instead of mastering life, I allowed it to master me; instead of being the extraordinary dramatist which I was, I became an actor merely, mouthing the lines of others and those which fear and cowardice murmured to me.  I let my fate rest in the hands of Society rather than shaping it for myself: I appealed to the very authorities whom I professed to despise.  For that I cannot be forgiven, and the memory of my failure haunts me still.  It is the reason, I think, why I cannot do the work which I should - the confidence which an artist needs has gone from me.  In one fatal minute, in the signing of a piece of paper in a solicitor's office, I abrogated all the responsibilities which attached to me as an artist; and, now, I have inherited only the remains of a personality from which the guiding spirit has fled.

      And so I went to trial.  But Queensberry's vengeance did not end there: it had a terrible momentum of its own.  He had kept in his possession, unknown to anyone, a letter from Rosebery to Drumlanrig - a letter which, as they said of my own at the trials, was 'open to curious construction'.  He had discovered it after Drumlanrig's suicide, and it was his 'trump card', his 'ace' - this was his boast to his family during my imprisonment.  After I had been acquitted at my first trial, and he seemed cheated of his prey, Queensberry sent a copy of that letter to someone at the Home Office who knew what might be made of it.  He threatened to reveal the letter publicly, unless the authorities continued their prosecution against me in a further trial.  Of course they yielded; I became a scapegoat for Rosebery as well as Queensberry's son.  I was as a martyr who takes on the responsibilities of an entire Church.  That is the truth behind the terrible process I was forced to undergo in the courts.