André Gide

“ He seemed to devote all his zeal and all his worth to over-rating his destiny, and over-reaching himself. 'My special duty,' he used to say, 'is to plunge madly into amusement.' He used to make a point of searching for pleasure as one faces an appointed duty. Nietzsche surprised me less, on a later occasion, because I had heard Wilde say, 'No, not happiness! Certainly not happiness! Pleasure. One must always set one's heart upon the most tragic.'
He would walk about the streets of Algiers preceded, escorted, and followed by an extraordinary mob of young ruffians. ”

“ I went into prison with a heart of stone, thinking only of my own pleasure, but now my heart is utterly broken—pity has entered into my heart. I have learned now that pity is the greatest and most beautiful thing in the world. And that is why I cannot bear ill-will towards those who caused my suffering and those who condemned me; no, nor to any one, because without them I should not have known all that. —— writes me terrible letters. He says he does not understand me, that he does not understand that I do not wish every one ill, and that every one has been horrid to me. ”

“ One feels in them, and one cannot help feeling in them, the three periods of their generation. The first idea contained in them is very beautiful, simple, profound, and certain to make itself heard; a kind of latent necessity holds the parts firmly together, but from that point the gift stops. The development of the parts is done in an artificial manner; there is a lack of arrangement about them, and when Wilde elaborates his sentences and endeavours to give them their full value, he does so by overloading them prodigiously with tiny conceits and quaint and trifling fancies. ”

“ On one of those last evenings in Algiers, Wilde seemed to have made up his mind not to say a single serious word. At last I became somewhat annoyed at the exaggerated wit of his paradoxes, and I said to him, 'You have got something better to talk about than this nonsense; you are talking to me as if I were the public. You ought rather to talk to the public as you know so well how to talk to your friends. Why is it your plays are not better? The best that is in you, you talk ”

“ Instead of trying to shelter the man behind his work, it was necessary to show forth first the man as an object of admiration—as I am going to try to do now—and then the work itself illuminated by his personality. 'I have put all my genius into my life; I have put only my talent into my works,' said Wilde once. Great writer, no, but great viveur, yes, if one may use the word in the fullest sense of the French term. ”

“ A literary friend who, a few years later, in collaboration, with another, translated Dorian Gray into French.
[2] 'No more beautiful life has any man lived, no more beautiful life could any man live than Oscar Wilde lived during the short period I knew him in prison. He wore upon his face an eternal smile; sunshine was on his face, sunshine of some sort must have been in his heart. People say he was not sincere: he was the very soul of sincerity when I knew him. If he did not continue that life after he left prison, then the forces of evil must have been too strong for him. ”

“ A work of art is always unique. Nature, who makes nothing durable, is ever repeating herself, so that nothing she makes may be lost. A single narcissus produces many blooms—that is why each one lives but a day. Every time Nature invents a new form she at once makes a replica. [Pg 31] A sea-monster in one sea knows that in another sea there is another monster like itself. When God creates in history a Nero, a Borgia or a Napoleon He puts another one on one side. No one knows it, but that does not matter; the important point is that one may be a success. ”

“ In the presence of others, as I have mentioned, Wilde would put on an air of showing off in order to astonish, or amuse, or even exasperate people. [Pg 27] He never listened to, and scarcely took any notice of an idea from the moment it was no longer purely his own. When he was no longer the only one to shine, he would shut himself up, and emerge again only when one found oneself alone with him once more. ”

“ I wanted to lead Wilde on to talk to me in a more serious vein. I sat down again, and rather timidly asked him if he had read Souvenirs de la Maison des Morts.
He gave me no direct answer, but began:—'Russian writers are extraordinary. What makes their books so great is the pity they put into [Pg 63] them. You know how fond I used to be of Madame Bovary, but Flaubert would not admit pity into his work, and that is why it has a petty and restrained character about it. It is sense of pity by means of which a work gains in expanse, and by which it opens up a boundless horizon. ”

“ And a short time afterwards, Wilde went back to Paris. [1]
His play was not written—it will never be written now. Society well knows what steps to take when it wants to crush a man, and it has means more subtle than death. Wilde had suffered too grievously for the last two years, and in too submissive a manner, and his will had been broken. ”

“ Warders watch us, and there are terrible punishments for any one caught talking. Those who are in prison for the first time are spotted at once, because they do not know how to speak without moving their lips. I had already been in prison six weeks and I had not spoken a word to anyone—not to a soul [4] .
'One evening we were walking as usual, one behind the other, during the hour's exercise, when suddenly behind me I heard my name called. It was the prisoner who followed me, and he said, [Pg 67] "Oscar Wilde, I pity you, because you must suffer more than we do." ”

“ My first impression was one of astonishment at finding him in Algeria.
'Oh,' he said to me, 'just now I am fleeing from art. I want only to adore the sun. Have you ever noticed how the sun detests thought? The sun always causes thought to withdraw itself and take refuge in the shade. Thought dwelt in Egypt originally, but the sun conquered Egypt; then it lived for a long time in Greece, and the sun conquered Greece, then in Italy, and then in France. Nowadays all thought is driven back as far as Norway and Russia, places where the sun never goes. ”

“ Sadly I reminded him of the promise he had made not to show himself in Paris without having finished one book. 'Ah!' I began, 'why did you leave Berneval so soon, when you ought to have stayed there so long? I cannot say that I am angry with you, but—'
He interrupted me, laid his hand on mine, looked at me with his most sorrowful look, and [Pg 88] said, 'You must not be angry with one who has been crushed [5] .'
Oscar Wilde died in a shabby little hotel in the Rue des Beaux Arts. ”

“ And this man one day had an idea, an idea of The Pleasure that Abideth for a Moment. And he felt that he must give expression to it. But in the whole world there was but one single piece of bronze, for men had used it all up. And this man felt that he would go mad if he did not give expression to his idea. ”

“ Those who became acquainted with Wilde only in the latter years of his life form a wrong conception of the wonderful creature he formerly was, if they judge from the enfeebled and crushed being given back to us from prison, as Ernest Lajeunesse paints him, for instance, in the best or rather the only passable article on the great reprobate which any one has had the talent or the courage to write [1] .
It was in 1891 that I met him for the first time. Wilde had then what Thackeray calls 'one of the [Pg 22] greatest of a great man's qualities'—success [2] . ”

“ Wilde was a believer in a certain fatality besetting the path of the artist, and that the Man is at the mercy of the Idea. 'There are,' he used to say, 'artists of two kinds: some supply answers, and others ask questions. It is necessary to know if one belongs to those who answer or to those who ask questions; for the one who asks questions is never the one who answers them. ”

“ Solitary confinement does not mean in a dark cell. The prisoner still remains in his own cell, but is debarred from exercising with the other prisoners, or accompanying them to Divine Service. The confinement is not consecutive, but applies to every alternate day only—thus, a prisoner sentenced to seven days' bread and water, or solitary confinement, does but four days.
[6] Salome was played in Paris early in 1896.
[7] Oscar Wilde found the prison library quite unable to satisfy his wants, and he was allowed to receive books from outside. Such books are then added to the prison library. ”

“ Wilde. He could not forgive it its miracles. The pagan miracle lies in the work of Art; Christianity encroached on it. Every strong departure from realism in art demands a realism which is convinced in life. His most ingenious fables, his most alarming ironies were uttered with a view to confront the two moralities—I mean, pagan naturalism and Christian idealism, and to put the latter out of countenance in every respect. This is another of his stories:—
'When Jesus was minded to return to Nazareth, Nazareth was so changed that He no longer recognised His own city. ”

“ One morning Wilde handed me an article in which a sufficiently dense critic congratulated him on 'knowing how to write pretty stories in which the better to clothe his thoughts.'
'They think,' began Wilde, 'that all thoughts come naked to the birth. They do not understand that I cannot think otherwise than in stories. The sculptor does not try to reproduce his thoughts in marble; he thinks in marble, straight away. Listen:—
'There was once a man who could think only in bronze. ”

“ It is because they are giving answers to questions that have not yet been asked—for the question often comes a terribly long time after the answer.'
And he added further, 'The soul is born old in the body; it is to rejuvenate the soul that the body becomes old. ”

“ So, to humour him, I began recounting some trifling incidents, and noticed while I was speaking that Wilde's face was growing gloomy.
'You really did that?' he said.
'Yes,' I answered.
'And you are speaking the truth?'
'Absolutely.'
'Then why repeat it? You must see that it is not of the slightest importance. You must [Pg 28] understand that there are two worlds—the one exists and is never talked about; it is called the real world because there is no need to talk about it in order to see it. The other is the world of Art ”

“ The Nazareth where He had lived was full of lamentations and tears; this city was filled with outbursts of laughter and song. And Christ entering into the city saw some slaves laden with flowers, hastening towards the marble staircase of a house of white marble. [Pg 34] Christ entered into the house, and at the back of a hall of jasper He saw, lying on a purple couch, a man whose disordered locks were mingled with red roses, and whose lips were red with wine. Christ drew near to him, and laying His hand on his shoulder said to him, "Why dost thou lead this life?" ”

“ Its authorship was acknowledged [Pg 9] shortly afterwards in an autograph edition. Since that time countless editions of this famous work have been issued in England and America, and translations have appeared in French, German and Spanish. Of this poem a reviewer in a London journal said,—'The whole is awful as the pages of Sophocles. That he has rendered with his fine art so much of the essence of his life and the life of others in that inferno to the sensitive, is a memorable thing for the social scientist, but a much more memorable thing for literature. ”

“ I know him so well. He writes to me every day. I also am of opinion that he ought to finish his play first, but after that he will come back here. He has never done anything good in solitude; he needs to be constantly drawn out of himself. It is by my side that he has written all his best work. Besides, just look at his last letter.'
He thereupon read it to me. In it Wilde begged —— to let him finish his Pharaoh in [Pg 78] peace, but, in effect, the letter implied that as soon as his play was written he would come back, he would find him again ”

“ Then he went on:—
'Once upon a time there was a man who was beloved in his village because he used to tell tales. Every morning he left the village, and when he returned in the evening all the labourers of the village who had been working all the day would crowd round him and say, "Come, now, tell us a tale. ”

“ This was, however, played in America by the late Lawrence Barrett in 1883, as was also another play in blank verse, entitled Vera, or the Nihilists, during the previous year. He had already published in America and England a volume of Poems, which went through several editions in a few months.
In 1884 Oscar Wilde married [8] Miss Constance Mary Lloyd, a daughter of the well-known Q. C., by whom he had two sons, born in June, 1885, and November, 1886, respectively. Mrs. Wilde died in 1898, and his only brother, William, in March of the following year. ”

“ Joseph Addison, who continues:—''T is the result of all the others; 't is a latent power in him which compels the favour of the gods, and subjugates fortune.'
[3] Oscar Wilde's first play, Lady Windermere's Fan, was produced at the St. James's Theatre on February 20, 1892. This was followed by A Woman of No Importance, April 19, 1893, and An Ideal Husband, January, 3, 1895, at Haymarket; and The Importance of Being Earnest, February 14, 1895, at the St. James's.
[4] This story appeared under the title of 'The Master' with other Poems in Prose in The Fortnightly Review for July, 1894. ”