The writings of Oscar Wilde

Front matter

UNIFORM EDITION

THE WRITINGS

OF

Foreword

If pity, the sweet and desolate pity exhaled in every line of the poem entitled "The Ballad of Reading Gaol," could have softened the wasted, wandering life of him who elected to be called Sebastian Melmoth, and paved the arduous, almost impossible, road whereon the Sisyphus-like task of regeneration was to have been attempted, it happily cannot be gainsaid that in Paris, the city of light and learning, there was no lack of heartfelt commiseration showered upon the ill-fated Napoleon of epigram. And pure and honest wielders of the pen, men with talent and position, albeit of another race and speaking another tongue, did not disdain to welcome the solitary giant, bent beneath the weight of former vice and perversion, accumulated by his own hand, self-murdered by the miserable mania that had seized and gripped him fast, despite the efforts of his reasoning self.

In all men, but more especially in those of strongly developed intellect, there are two beings, 1 eternally disputing and never in harmony, and yet one cannot live without the other, and each reacts upon the other. One is all logical and discriminating, presiding over the easel, the writing desk, the house of law or justice, and the other is made up of sensuality and impulsion. Such are the two halves of our miserable selves. Happy the male who can govern his passions, and is sufficiently conscious of his weaknesses to be able to avoid the dangers they carry in their wake.

"In all men's hearts a slumbering swine lies low," says the French poet; so come ye, whose porcine instincts have never been awakened, or, if rampant, successfully hidden, and hurl the biggest, sharpest stones you can lay your hands on at your wretched, degraded, humiliated brother, who has hren found out.

When the history of modern' French literature is impartially written, it is to be hoped that the Gallic movement of generous sympathy and revolt, in the face of the terrible punishment and fearful expiation in a foreign land of the faults of a man of genius, will be faithfully chronicled. Then credit will be given to the men of letters who triod to lighten the hoavy days and make him forget his sorrows, if only for an hour.

FOREWORD. 3

The wanderer never complained. He lived in the glorious past, waiting until the pressure of the deadly present should have terminated its crushing task, and stifled his body as it had already done his soul; for future he felt there was none for him.

So why work or labour at pages of manuscript that he knew no publisher would dare to put upon the open market ? Some desultory leaves, now lost and scattered, were the only fruits that matured on the blasted tree, and among them the translation of Barbey d'Aurevilly's impassioned novel, "Ce Qui ne Meurt Pas"— "What Never Dies"— the gospel of infinite pity. It so struck the excommunicated Melmoth, the daily recipient of the warmest and kindest compassion, that he never rested until his pen, growing facile as of old for one brief, lucid moment, had transformed the tortured, lurid prose of the romantic Frenchman into the polished, chosen phraseology of "Dorian Grey."

The story of strange passion exercised a weird fascination over the mind of Sebastian Melmoth, and the work, well worthy of perusal in its original form, becomes all the more entrancing by reason of the knowledge of the translator's talent.

It is difficult to praise the poet and at the same time blame the man. We forget the sin when we remember the end, and shudder to think that he is perhaps even now not at rest in the Parisian cemetery, so far away as to discourage the pilgrim, and not allow an echoing prayer to reach him. No criticism of his posthumous work will awake or lull him. Now and again, perchance, some scandalous breeze will waft his own real name over the forgotten tomb, the shadow of an insult, the ghost of a jeering affront.

Who could think that one so despised by a merciless world had in happier times as admirably caught and sustained the blase, cynical, paradoxical style of modern society of the special class as did Dean Swift during the eighteenth century in his "Polite Conversation."

Not only did he think in epigrams, he almost seemed to dream them. But an intellectual existence cannot be sustained by epigrams only, and it is no secret that many of his detractors found fault with his poems. Knowing this, when ostracised, declassed and forsaken, he found in France a few moments of forgetfulness in wrestling with the thorny, prickly prose of the great French master of the romantic school. The translation of Bar-

FOREWORD. 5

bey's throbbing tale is a tour de force, which none but the wretched writer could have made presentable to the English reader.

Let those who can feel nothing but disgust for the erring Sebastian Melmoth, and who have no pity in their hearts, evoke a little charity for his last brilliant effort during the monotony of an atrocious and mummified existence^ when the poet called each day on death to come and claim him out of the squalid, narrow room of the struggling students' furnished hotel. And if naught but ill can be spoken of him, surely it would be as well to be mute and carve out his epitaph in his own words, where resounds the honest cry of a remorseful soul, brimming over with bitter anguish:

"And there, till Christ call forth the dead, In silence let him lie; No need to waste the foolish tear,

Or heave the windy sigh; The man had killed the thing he loved, And so he had to die."

WHAT NEVER DIES.

FIRST PART.

In some parts of Lower Normandy— and especially in the (Jotentin peninsula— there are landscapes so much like certain views in England that the Normans who cast anchor in either of these countries could fancy, by the scenery of the land they had just conquered, that they had not left their birthplace. This resemblance had probably but very little influence on the fierce imagination of our ancestors, the sea-kings, for whom the ocean itself, with its sublime outlook, was but a highway, to be audaciously followed towards unknown quarry and pillage, scented from afar by these sea-lions, with their piratical instinct. But for us, their descendants, seated for centuries on the shores they have kept, and whose modern im- 7

S THE WRITINGS OF OSCAR WILDE.

agination loves leisurely to contemplate the countries that they only dreamt of with designs of concjiiest, the resemblance between English and Norman landscapes is striking in many ways. Even the sky, the sky of our western regions, so often grey and cloudy, which so deeply penetrates our heart with its melancholy light, and when we are far away places home-sickness therein, adds again in Normandy to this illusion of England, and sometimes seems to push the sameness so far that they become identical.

And this applied, above all. to the manor that was called the Chateau of the Willows. Among all the mansions that stood on the coast of the Cotentin peninsula, there was certainly none that gave a better impression of one of those country houses of which so many are to be seen in England, suddenly emerging from a lake that encircles them, bathing their feet of stone in the vacant stillness of its waters. Situated on the Channel, not far from Sainte Mere-Eglise, this village, which had only preserved its Catholic name and its secular fairs from the Middle Ages, between La Here and Picauville, recalled vanished feudal •lavs in no other way. If one could have judged by what remained of this Chateau, now unfortunately in ruins, it must have been built at the beginning of the seventeenth century, on the banks of the Douve, which runs by through open marshes, and it might have been named the Chateau of Open-Marsh just as well as the house that faced it, and which was so baptised. Open-Marsh and the Willows, separated by the vast fens through which passed the Douve, meandering like a long blue eel, languidly losing itself under the bridges of Saint-L6, in the department of La Yire, and so far distant on the river that passed between them that they could not see each other in the remote background of their frequently foggy horizons, even on the days when the weather was clearest.

Isolated in these vast latitudes were the two aristocratic and solitary dwellings, needing formerly a certain amount of courage to live in them. The atmosphere of the surrounding marshes had been for some time as murderous as that of the Maremma before the epoch of the domestic drama of which the Chateau of the Willows was the obscure theatre. Not many years had passed since drainage, intelligently carried out, had purified the locality of the influence, nearly always mortal, under which generations of dwellers on the river banks and inhabitants of these swamps, a wan and sickly population, had lived miserably, "trembling the fevers,*' as they would say, year in and year out. But towards the year 1845, these people had lost the look of languor and illness which had so long saddened the eye of the traveller passing through these typhus bogs, and health had returned there to mankind as well as to the land; Rendered healthy by culture that had transformed them into meadows, the marshes then offered, as far as the eye could reach, the rich view of a stretch of turf, with thick, close grass, almost bushy, where the grazing oxen were buried up to their breasts in the plentiful abundance of their pasture, on the brilliant green of which they stood out in their different postures, either in slow wanderings as they cropped their nourishment, with low-bent necks, or prone upon the flank, in the somnolence of their ruminating repose. This wet herbage, cut, here and there, by narrow ditches of alluvion, of opal transparency in their emerald depths, had also — stagnant hither and thither — round ponds of pure water, originating from the frequent rains of this damp climate of the west, and the primitively spongy soil in the neighbourhood of the Douve.

In some parts, they were large enough to form real lakes, furrowed and clouded in a thousand folds and ripples, of hues that shimmered and changed, according to the sky or the wind. Certainly one of the most striking beauties of this marshy landscape was these numerous kinds of lakes, which in autumn and winter assumed proportions of grandeur, but in summer, although diminished, never disappeared entirely, and became, beneath the sunlight, garden-plots of sparkling metallic plates, and islands of light. The Chateau of the Willows, which took its name from a copse of those trees surrounding, it, rejoiced in a large garden, closed on the side of the marsh, which it overhung a few feet, by a long terrace, with a balustrade of stone, ornamented at intervals by those beautiful granite vases of Italian design which the seventeenth century has scattered everywhere. The entrance of the Chateau, together with the gate, was on the other side, on the land; but seen from the fens, it appeared inaccessible in its vast blue lake, from the bottom of which rose what seemed a white water-fairy — and that was the poetry of the house. Those who dwelt therein in the midst of this desert of earth and water could fancy themselves at the world's end. Even the railway, from Carentan to Isigny, and which cut in two the swamps that had become pasture-lands, is too far away for its insolent whistle to be heard in this fenny corner, or to force one to see a fragment of its proud plume of smoke trailing across the horizon. Naught, then, except at rare intervals, but the strident cry of some wild duck or snipe troubled the thick silence of this Chateau, made, as it seemed, for the reveries of profound souls or for the mystery of passionate hearts who would have wished to hide there.

That evening — for it was in the evening, a summer evening, warmer in this open space by the same reason that makes it colder when the weather is chilly — the Chateau of the Willows gave out from its open windows, so long closed, but which at this moment were once more ajar, the noise of music and voices that said how life — worldly life — had at last returned to this Chateau so long uninhabited. An August sun now only touched with an oblique ray the tepid waters of the numerous lakes which all day had been its ardent mirrors. At this hour of tranquil vespers, the dragon-flies, which were called demoiselles in that part of the country, these turning azure marsh-haunters, tired of their immaterial skating on the crystal surface of the torpid waters, danced their last waltzes to the dying breezes of the twilight before retiring to their bulrushes, when a young man, bare-headed, came down the steps of the Chateau of the Willows, and went and sat at the bottom of the garden on a bench placed at the edge of the sleeping water, which, on this side, encircled it in its folds. This youth was of almost divine beauty. He was of that age between adolescence and youth which partakes of each, and which might be called a third sex during the short time it lasts — for its beauty lasts still less than the swiftly evaporated charm of womankind. Once virility has dawned, this delicious and perishable comeliness disappears, and no trace of it is to be recognised, even in the handsomest man. That evening the young fellow seemed to be the pensive genius of solitude incarnated. But if that is what he sought for there, his hopes are soon destroyed. A voice, lighter and purer than the air that wafted it to him, twice pronounced the name, foreign to France, of Allan. If the dew could make a noise when falling into the chalice of a flower, it might have such celestial softness.

Such a voice could only belong to a being still more immaterial than a woman, to a child destined to be a woman one day, to the white dawn not yet daybreak. It was the voice of a little girl. At the slightest touch of the awkward hand of man on the strings of the marvellous instrument, it would have no longer such sounds.

The child to whom that voice belonged ran to him whom she had called Allan, and putting her hand on his shoulder, leaning on it with a bird's weight :

"See !" said she, breathlessly. "Oh, I had to run to get it, but at last I captured the demoiselle. See, Allan ! Is she not of a most beautiful blue ?"

She opened the fingers of her other hand a little to show Allan all the treasures of her conquest; but the young dreamer, with the dull inattention of some one waking up, had lifted his forehead from the hollow of his hands, and seemed to understand nothing of these childish joys he had forgotten, although he was still but a boy.

The child, seeing the morose indifference of Allan for the triumph which made her so joyful, stopped in her brilliant enumeration of the qualities of her captive with the slender bodice; poor, charming, tortured thing struggling in the depths of its furnace in the scarlet cup of a full-blown nasturtium.

"Begone, then, my poor little dear, since he does not find you pretty/' said the lassie, with sadness and vexation, letting go the insect and the flower.

There are cruel deceptions even at the age of fourteen. The disdainful glance of Allan covered the happy brow of the little girl with shame, as the reproach of a mother would have done. He could well see that he had hurt her, and it was not only her hand too roughly pressed as he had pushed it away, hut the heart, more delicate still. The susceptible child said never a word, and was about to go, but Allan, reproaching himself for his violence, held her back gently, his hand in hers, and looked at that hand he had reddened, and which he kissed.

"Did I hurt you ?" he asked uneasily.

"No," said she, proudly lying.

But her face, so open but a moment before, was now closed, and her charming brows were knitted.

"Pardon me that unwitting movement," continued Allan pressingly, "pardon me if I have been cruel. For the last few days, the state of my soul has been so miserable that I am truly unworthy to play with you. Leave me, I pray you, my dear Camilla. Go indoors. The evening chill will soon be falling. I want to be alone a little more. Go, I will soon join you."

She listened, and departed slowly, but rigid, cold, and dumb. It could be seen that she had accepted none of Allan's words of reparation. But the thoughts that went with her she kept to herself. She moved away, the left forefinger between her lips, which had grown serious, and her look was oblique and dark. At the side of the fresh and lively joys of childhood, there was something deep that caused surprise in that little girl of fourteen. Camilla was of the age when young girls possess the least charm, and when they traitorously hide, beneath the signs of uncertain puberty and thinness of outline, that scourge of beauty which later strikes all hearts. Might it not be said that this ungraceful age is the first involuntary trick of these beings, who a few years afterwards are so slily and voluntarily artificial? Soon the terrible beauty blossoms forth ; and it could be foreseen in Camilla by the oval shape of her face and her large black eyes, as beautiful and brilliant as the morning of a stormy day. They were close to a nose which would have been of Grecian purity without the palpitating nostrils, a striking, restless feature of what would have been an ideal face without it. Camilla's hair was of that red adored nowadays, but which at that time caused the despair of parents. To darken it, her mother used a leaden comb and made her wear it cut very short, and without curls, like a boy, as she seemed when seen at the side of Allan, who looked like a young girl in youth's clothes, by virtue of his beauty. When no longer animated by play, and accidentally seated quietly in the drawing-room at her mother's side, the unruly hoyden of the garden could not be recognised in that other silent child, who languidly held her hands, full of grace, the ma&- cap auburn head suddenly pensive.

She had gone back to the house. Allan had not always driven her away when she came to him, inviting him to her innocent games, as on that evening. Brought up side by side and under the same roof, separated only by the three years that made Allan that much older than herself, they had already, since they were in this neighbourhood, passed many hours together in these solitary marshes open to their lazy rambles, seeking rare flowers on the borders of the pools, stars of water which riddled the swamps and formed constellations like vast mosaic work of crystal with luminous incrustations. Often, profiting by the liberty granted them, or which they were allowed to take, they went as far as the Douve, which is a little distance from the Chateau of the Willows, and tore from its creeks the water-lilies, flower of sleeping rivers, and brought garlands of them back to the Chateau. Of these long walks of the first days of life, the remembrance remains long in the heart; but their sweetness can only be tasted in the past, when it has all been poisoned ! These strolls and tete-a-tete of children, who to-morrow will be men and women, possess secret intoxication, even for innocence. Did they feel that delirium? When they rambled thus the livelong day in the country where they met no one, did they only think of living? Did they live simply and unconsciously like the flower that opens and blooms beneath the vivifying ray; like the thousand created objects surrounding them, and which palpitated unknowingly ? When they spoke together in hushed tones, did their voices kiss the air which passed between their young heads with lips as fresh as the breeze, that cruel coquette to whom the flowers cannot return the enticing caress she bestows upon them? And when Allan passed his arm around Camilla's serpentine, undulating waist, was it like the ivy round the tree, that it entwines without warmth ?

Of the imprudent mothers of these children, the mother of Allan, had she lived, would have been the more guilty. Her son had the troubles, the blushings, the bent head of an age which may be looked upon as a second birth in life. With imagination of such plenitude that it desired no aliments and fed on its own substance, Allan, whose studies were hardly concluded, repudiated every kind of book. The poets, those divine fairies of the tales they concoct for us, had but few wonders for him, who, as he read them, extracted all the gold from their most shining pages. The panther, sleeping in the lair of the man's heart, began to wake in his, and marked his brow with her claw. He suffered from the malady of being seventeen.

His eyes no longer possessed, if they had ever had it, the morning light of Camilla's glance. His veiled pupils rolled beneath half-closed lids, like those of an insolent sultana as she leaves her bath. Between long eyebrows imperceptibly knitted by continual reverie, a fold was marked, expiring furrow of mysterious, hidden thought, and his forehead was like unto a voluptuous cup by the shape and grace of its adorable outline. Allan's mother, an Englishwoman, it was rumoured, had passed her entire pregnancy in looking, with superstitious obstinacy, at the portrait of Lord Byron, whom she doted on, and this brow, charming and sublime, of a genius— where the pudicity of England sees the mark of madness, boldly prolonged under the mass of curly hair that surrounds it — she had given to her son. This struck all who saw Allan for the first time, and it was only afterwards that one could perceive the original beauty of a face that only resembled itself. Habitually, Allan's eyes were sad, as are nearly always the eyes of those who look more in their heart than on life; but at the least emotion or at the least caprice of the young man, whose soul was more passionate than strong, but which would perhaps become robust before having a character of its own, there sparkled from his large, dull eyeballs a spear of light, like the golden trace of a shooting star in a black sky, through the still blacker branches of a forest, Allan's neck was bare like Camilla's, and he wore his hair cut short as she did. Only Camilla had the straight and bushy hair of a boy, while Allan's locks curled naturally and thickly round his dark face, as if they were the tresses of a young girl, and, by this singular contrast, these two children again gave the illusion which was unceasingly presented when they were seen, of their two sexes being transposed.

For some months past Allan had shown sadness, or, to speak more correctly, an inequality of humour which went so far as to attain Camilla. The cause of this change was unknown to the inhabitants of the Chateau of the Willows. Among all the women who had come there to pass the summer, among all those who looked at the handsome dreamer, whose beauty perhaps aroused a reverie also in their souls, there must have been at least one who had penetrated Allan's secret; for in studying this frail and almost transparent young man, in whom the emotions, mounting from the depths to the surface, made it easy to see that there was something more than mysteries of organization. Besides, is it at the beginning of life and at Allan's age that one can veil anything from her who causes you to feel everything? Later, even, is he sure that he can trust to his mask? It may be of bronze, or of marble, but these glances of women, seemingly so soft, and which are so penetrating, will easily pierce metal and stone, and see beneath the sentiment they have inspired, and that one most desires to hide from them.

Allan remained so long on the bench where he was reclining that he did not notice how the light was failing, until the last fold of the purple robe of twilight floated no longer on the horizon, where often it is to be seen still trailing across the sky when the sun has disappeared. Darkness, swallowing up everything, suited his thoughts so well that he would have remained still longer at the same spot if he had not heard steps near him. He thought it was Camilla returning.

"Is it you, Camilla?" he asked.

But a voice no longer the musical tones of the child— a voice that the experience of life had broken (at least, one would have thought so, in listening to its profound intonations, which were a little hollow), replied:

"No ! it is not Camilla."

And this voice, with its altered ring, like the irresistible appeal of a syren's chant, made Allan jump up at once.

A tall lady advanced.

"What are you doing there, Allan, all alone, at this time of day?" said she. "The night, which is icy and cold, should have driven you within. Camilla, whom I have just seen, is sulking in a corner of the drawing-room. Have you had any quarrel with my daughter?"

"No, madame," he answered, like a guilty schoolboy, and his voice had such trembling accents that one could have sworn he was lying.

"Then why not come back? Why did you fly from the room just now? Why do you get so unsociable? Everybody is complaining of you at the Chateau."

"That is because everybody bores me!" he answered with lassitude.

"Oh ! you are too great a poet for us, Allan !" she exclaimed, and her voice was full of slight irony. But the sarcasm fell flat, and all was silent again, until she added, in a more genuine tone :

"Do you know that I am uneasy, Allan? I ignore what is passing in your mind, but you seem to be suffering greatly. Are you ill, my friend? Or if you are not, why this inexplicable moroseness? What is the matter with you? Confide in me."

And the implacable woman took the burning palm of the young man in her hand of ice.

"No! never!" he retorted, imperiously drawing away his fingers, and he escaped to the willow copse behind him ; but his sobs could be heard.

"Poor child !" she murmured.

Her face could not be seen, and with slow steps she took the path conducting to the Chateau.

II

The Chateau of the Willows in olden times, like most of the mediaeval castles, had probably been some formidable war-nest, hidden like an ambush in these Cotentin marshes, then inexpugnable quagmires ; but the feudal fortress, destroyed after the religious wars of the sixteenth century, had been rebuilt at the commencement of the seventeenth, and transformed into spacious and peaceful dwellings. In 1845, it belonged to the Countess Yseult de Scudemor, widow of the last descendant of the old Norman family of that name, and whose very short life had been spent away from France, in the highest diplomatic employment at foreign courts.

This Countess de Scudemor, espoused far away, and who did not belong to the neighbourhood, but who had sojourned there with her husband some little time after her marriage, had recently returned thither with her daughter. By what had she been drawn there? The visit she had paid with her husband had been too short for it to have remained in her memory. When she reappeared at the Willows, the world of the neighbouring chateaux had almost forgotten her. Moreover, she was so changed that those who had caught a glimpse of her formerly would probably not have recognised her if they had not known in advance that it was she. Her absence, her travels, the dispersal in distant climes of all the gifts of beauty, of all the brilliancy of youth which she was known to possess, and which she seemed to have left behind her; the child she called her daughter, and whose birth had not been known in these parts; the youth who accompanied her, and to whom she only gave the Scotch name of Allan, all this surrounded her with unknown mystery which was difficult to penetrate; for her reserved manner, full of nobility, but icy cold, never allowed the most attentive observation to bore into her thoughts and surprise her secrets.

She was a woman of strange and silent charm. Society, which she overawed — even unwittinglycalled her distinguished, and generously understood by that word, nowadays so common, the respect of intellect that she did not show. Her mind might have been cultivated, she was perhaps witty, but she made no sign. She was quite as indifferent to this wit attributed to her as she was to life, which had perhaps been cruel. Although she had still enough of the beauty which suffices to make women prize existence, she enjoyed the careless calm of a being who wishes for nothing, and neither boasts nor complains. She was therefore natural and simple. Doubtless on account of her extreme coldness, women loved her not, although she had no jealousy, as she had no longer any pretensions to the successes of vanity. She was supposed to profess very audacious opinions. Have you noticed that society always attributes bold ways of thinking to those who do not appear to have much respect for the dogmas of the world ? So much daring is required for this. But, once this assertion made, it would not have been possible to justify it by facts. In society, the Countess Yseult de Scudemor was in the habit of only joining in conversation when it turned upon vague and general subjects. Did she act thus out of disdain or indolence? Did she fear to betray, in the heat of small talk, some thought or sentiment, and thus give a glimpse of the perspective of her past life? No one knew, and the manner in which her whole bearing imposed respect was such that she would have bewildered the most insolent observer.