If Wilde had pulled down the temple of art upon himself, it was clear that others were to be injured in its fall. All modern artistic expression stood condemned, ‘lumped’ together as part of a perceived ‘Oscar Wilde’ tendency.24 Six prominent Bodley Head authors cabled John Lane, away in America, stating that unless he at once removed Wilde’s name from the Bodley Head catalogue and suppressed Beardsley’s work in the forthcoming volume of The Yellow Book they would withdraw their books. Lane hastened to comply.25‡
Having been denied bail, Wilde was moved from the police cells at Bow Street to Holloway to await his further committal hearings. Although he might be in gaol, as a prisoner on remand he was allowed to wear his own clothes. By paying a small supplement he received a large, fully furnished ‘special’ cell. He could have food sent in from a local restaurant. He was permitted to read books, write letters and see visitors. Despite such amenities, incarceration still took his toll. Smoking was not permitted. At his subsequent committal hearings, the press noted – with evident satisfaction – Wilde’s rapid physical decline. By the end of fortnight it was reported that his face was ‘grey’, his cheeks ‘fallen in’, his hair ‘unkept’ and his mien one of ‘general depression and sudden age’.26
He had few allies to hand. Both Ross and Reggie Turner found it advisable to leave the country and go over to France. Ross’s flight was, it seems, precipitated not by fear of arrest but by the fact that had been subpoenaed by the Crown to give evidence against Wilde.27 The Leversons remained wonderfully loyal and attentive. Sherard wrote a cheering letter from Paris to say that Wilde had the sympathy and support of Bernhardt, Goncourt, Pierre Louÿs, Stuart Merrill and other ‘artists’. Slightly less welcome was a letter from Willie saying that he was ‘defending’ him ‘all over London’. ‘My poor brother’, Wilde remarked; ‘he could compromise a steam-engine.’28
Wilde’s one constant visitor at Holloway, besides his lawyers, was Bosie. He had remained in London. He came daily but the interviews – held amid a cacophony of other prison visitors, across a divide patrolled by a warder – were distressing. Wilde, following his ear infection, found it increasingly hard to hear. Nevertheless the mere sight of Bosie brought comfort. ‘A slim thing, gold-haired like an angel, stands always at my side,’ Wilde wrote to the Leversons. ‘His presence overshadows me. He moves in the gloom like a white flower.’29 Wilde had come to dramatize his predicament as the climax of a doomed romantic passion. He had, so he now claimed, been motivated in his legal action solely by a desire to defend Bosie from his father.30 And now, in his misery, he was sustained by ‘the beautiful and noble love’ that he and Douglas shared:31
What wisdom is to the philosopher, what God is to his saints, you are to me. To keep you in my soul, such is the goal of this pain which men call life. O my love, you whom I cherish above all things, white narcissus in an unmown field, think of the burden which falls to you, a burden which love alone can make light. But be not saddened by that, rather be happy to have filled with an immortal love the soul of a man who now weeps in hell, and yet carries heaven in his heart. I love you. I love you, my heart is a rose which your love has brought to bloom, my life is a desert fanned by the delicious breeze of your breath, and whose cool springs are your eyes; the imprint of your little feet makes valleys of shade for me, the odour of your hair is like myrrh, and wherever you go you exhale the perfume of the cassia tree. Love me always, love me always. You have been the supreme, the perfect love of my life; there can be no other.32
It was a notion that Douglas readily endorsed. He announced that, should Wilde be convicted, he would buy a house next to the prison, and live there until his release. That Douglas might be himself arrested, and charged along with Wilde and Taylor, was a prospect eagerly anticipated in many quarters. But Bosie’s relatives were aware, from early on, that there would be ‘no case’ against him;33 the authorities had convinced themselves that not only was there insufficient evidence to secure a conviction, but that Douglas’s ‘moral guilt’ in the matter ‘(assuming his guilt)’ was ‘less’, since he had been corrupted and led astray ‘when a boy at Oxford’ by the ‘great influence’ that Wilde had exerted over him.34
Constance, having rescued her personal effects from Tite Street, had retreated again to Babbacombe, taking Vyvyan with her. She was now being advised and assisted by George Lewis, and also by Burne-Jones’s son, Philip. Both men counselled that she must abandon her husband to his troubles, his debts and his fate. Tite Street, too, should be given up. ‘If the landlord means to distrain for rent – let him,’ counselled Lewis; ‘Simply leave it – for the landlord to enter and distrain if he wishes.35
Trapped at Holloway, Wilde struggled to attend to the details of his disintegrating life. He was distraught at not being on hand to help his mother with the regular doles that he ‘provided for her subsistence’.36 He had little time to prepare his defence. Despite the efforts of his counsel to delay the case, it was set for trial on 26 April. Meanwhile his many creditors were anxious to recover their debts (even before Queensberry could add his legal costs to the equation). Wilde, though, had little money to hand; his plays might continue to run, but to ever-dwindling houses.§ And there was no hope from America. An Ideal Husband, which had opened to good reviews in New York on 12 March, had already been taken off; The Importance of Being Earnest, which opened on 22 April, lasted barely a week.37 Sarah Bernhardt’s plans for a Parisian production of Salomé were abandoned. Wilde’s hope that the actress might buy the rights to the play (for £400) was not fulfilled. Bernhardt sent messages of sympathy and made promises of help. But, in the event, the time was inconvenient. She had nothing to give.38
Three tradesmen succeeded in getting a judgement against Wilde for their outstanding bills – totalling ‘about £400’ – ‘principally for cigarettes and cigarette cases’. The bailiffs were put into Tite Street. And in a chaotic ‘sheriff’s auction’ held on the premises, on 24 April, there was a general sale of Wilde’s effects – his books, his pictures, his papers, his furniture, his clothes, even the toys from his children’s nursery.¶ Some of Wilde’s friends attended, in an effort to salvage something from the ruins. The Leversons, ever ready to assist, bought the Harper Pennington full-length portrait, among other pieces (they got it for £14, the same amount as was paid for ‘Carlyle’s writing desk’). Although a few items fetched ‘fancy prices’ – notably the inscribed copies of Wilde’s own books – many pieces, especially towards the end of the sale, went for absurdly low amounts. Will Rothenstein got a Monticelli for £8; Joseph Pennell picked up a Whistler etching for a shilling. The total realized was slightly under £300.39
On the same day as the auction Douglas, yielding to the pleas of his family and Wilde’s legal team, finally left London for France, joining Ross and Turner at Calais. The afternoon before his departure he had seen Wilde at Newgate, where the prisoner had been brought while the grand jury made their ruling that the trial could go ahead. Wilde kissed the end of Douglas’s finger through the iron grating, and begged him to remain true to their love.40 They could, at least, continue to correspond. Over the coming days Wilde reported to Ada Leverson of his regular letters from ‘Jonquil’ or ‘Fleur de Lys’, and told of the joy they brought him. To Bosie he wrote: ‘Your love has broad wings and is strong, your love comes to me through my prison bars and comforts me, your love is the light of all my hours… I stretch out my hands towards you. Oh! may I live to touch your hair and your hands. I think your love will watch over my life.’41
In An Ideal Husband Sir Robert Chiltern remarks, ‘when the gods wish to punish us they answer our prayers’. As a schoolboy Wilde had hoped that he might be the hero of a cause célèbre – the defendant in such a case as ‘Regina versus Wilde’. Now that moment had come. On the morning of Friday 26 April 1895, he found himself in the dock at the Old Bailey, together with Alfred Taylor. Justice [Arthur] Charles was presiding. The two men were charged under a single indictment. There were twenty-five counts all
eging acts of gross indecency by both men, as well as conspiracy to procure the commission of such acts. Taylor was also charged with having acted as the procurer for Wilde. The charges against Wilde concerned his ‘misconduct’ with Charles Parker, Fred Atkins, Sidney Mavor, Alfred Wood, with unknown ‘male persons’ at the Savoy, and with Edward Shelley.
After three weeks on remand, Wilde looked ‘haggard and worn’, his long hair no longer carefully arranged. Taylor appeared dapper beside him, as the long list of charges was read and legal arguments were entertained. Clarke tried, unsuccessfully, to have the conspiracy charges removed, as being different in kind to the charges of gross indecency. Charles Gill then opened for the prosecution, outlining – at some length – the circumstances of the case, and his proposed plan of procedure. It was a tedious recital and the spectators in the crowded courtroom grew restless. Wilde appeared bored. His boredom, however, soon passed when the witnesses began to be called.
Charles Parker came first. The reticence of the police court proceedings was abandoned. Gill encouraged the witness to give graphic accounts of his assignations with Wilde. However, it was perhaps to the surprise of his own counsel that Parker – going beyond the charges on the indictment – declared that, on their first night together at the Savoy, Wilde ‘committed the act of sodomy with me’. He went on to describe Wilde asking him ‘to imagine that I was a woman and that he was my lover. I had to keep up this illusion. I used to sit on his knees and he used to play with my privates as a man might amuse himself with a girl.’ Although Parker readily admitted to ‘tossing [Wilde] off’, and being tossed off by him in return, he claimed that he had resisted Wilde’s several attempts ‘to insert “it” in my mouth’.
And so it went on and on for five gruelling days (with the Sunday off): William Parker telling of how, over dinner at Kettner’s, his brother had repeatedly accepted preserved cherries from Wilde’s own mouth; Alfred Wood recounting how, during dinner in a private room at the Florence restaurant, Wilde had put his hand inside Wood’s trousers, and persuaded Wood to do the same to him; Fred Atkins describing how he had come back from the Moulin Rouge to find Wilde in bed with Maurice Schwabe; Edward Shelley reluctantly confessing that Wilde had ‘kissed’ and ‘embraced’ him after supper at the Albemarle Hotel; most of them telling of how they had slept with Taylor in the low double bed at his draped and scented lodgings. And, in between, came a succession of landladies, hotel servants and others, all willing to link Wilde to Taylor and both men to the key witnesses. Mary Applegate, the landlady at Atkins’s lodgings in Osnaburgh Street, like the chambermaid at the Savoy, reported finding horribly stained bed sheets following Wilde’s several visits to her tenant.
On the third day Gill read out the full transcript of Wilde’s cross-examination from the Queensberry trial, adding its revelations and arguments to the record. At the beginning of the fourth day Gill announced that the conspiracy charges would, after all, be withdrawn. If this had been done at the start of the trial – Clarke pointed out – there would have been a strong argument for the cases against the two prisoners being heard separately. Now it was too late. As Gill remarked of Wilde’s chances, ‘only a miracle can save him’.42
Clarke did his best to discredit the main witnesses, pointing out that the young men (except for Mavor and Shelley) were self-confessed blackmailers, thieves and liars. Atkins, indeed, was ordered from the witness box by the judge after it was proved that he had perjured himself in denying that he had ever been taken to Rochester Row police station in connection with an attempt to blackmail a gentleman that he had picked up at the Alhambra Music Hall. Clarke was able to show that Shelley, besides being mentally unstable, had continued to see, and to write to, Wilde as a friend for many months after the supposedly distressing incidents at the Albemarle had taken place. As to the ‘disgusting’ state of Wilde’s bed sheets at the Savoy and Osnaburgh Street, he suggested they might have been the result of nothing worse than diarrhoea.43**
In Wilde’s defence Clarke suggested that no man would have instituted proceedings against Queensberry if he were guilty of any wrongdoing; and that it was even less possible to believe a guilty man would have stayed in the country having seen Queensberry’s plea of justification. ‘Insane would hardly be the word for it, if Mr Wilde really had been guilty [of the deeds listed in the plea] and yet faced the investigation.’44
Wilde then stepped from the dock into the witness box. While admitting his ‘association’ with the various witnesses, and the various presents bestowed and dinners given, he denied that any of the ‘alleged improper behaviour’ had taken place. He gave his evidence with quiet deliberation. Although Clarke had sought to dismiss all discussion of Wilde’s works – such as had occupied Carson during the libel trial – Gill insisted on addressing ‘the literary part of the case’. Ignoring The Picture of Dorian Gray, though, he turned his attention to The Chameleon – and not to Wilde’s own contribution, but rather to Douglas’s two sonnets ‘In Praise of Shame’ and ‘The Two Loves’. Both were read out. At the close of the second, Gill demanded to know, ‘What is the “Love that dare not speak its name”?’ – was it ‘unnatural love’?
Wilde replied:
The ‘Love that dare not speak its name’ in this century is such a great affection of an elder for a younger man as there was between David and Jonathan, such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy, and such as you find in the sonnets of Michelangelo and Shakespeare. It is that deep, spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect. It dictates and pervades great works of art like those of Shakespeare and Michelangelo, and those two letters of mine, such as they are. It is in this century misunderstood, so much misunderstood that it may be described as the ‘Love that dare not speak its name,’ and on account of it I am placed where I am now. It is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest form of affection. There is nothing unnatural about it. It is intellectual, and it repeatedly exists between an elder and a younger man, when the elder man has intellect, and the younger man has all the joy, hope and glamour of life before him. That it should be so the world does not understand. The world mocks at it and sometimes puts one in the pillory for it.
Wilde’s words created a sensation in court, and there was an outburst of clapping from the public gallery – mingled with some hisses. These were ideas, and even phrases, that Wilde had been rehearsing for many years: they informed ‘The Portrait of Mr W. H.’; they echoed the defence of his own behaviour that he had made to the Crabbet Club. But to deliver them, unprepared, in court, with such wonderful fluency and assurance, was something exceptional. The writer Robert Buchanan considered it nothing short of ‘marvellous’. By some it was declared to be ‘the finest speech of an accused man since that of St Paul before Agrippa’.45
Max Beerbohm (back from America, and in the court that day) wrote to Reggie Turner:
Oscar has been quite superb. His speech about the Love that dares not tell his name [sic] was simply wonderful, and carried the whole court right away, quite a tremendous burst of applause. Here was this man, who had been for a month in prison and loaded with insults and crushed and buffeted, perfectly self-possessed, dominating the Old Bailey with his fine presence and musical voice. He has never had so great a triumph, I am sure, as when the gallery burst into applause – I am sure it affected the gallery.46
How much it affected the jury was another matter. While it may have reflected Wilde’s idealized vision of his love for Lord Alfred Douglas, it was scarcely germane to his fleeting encounters with Parker, Wood and co. The social and intellectual imbalance in these relationships was certainly dwelt on by Gill in his cross-examination:
Gill: Why did you take up with these youths?
Wilde: I am a lover of youth!
Gill: You exalt it as a sort of god?
Wilde: I like to study the young in everything. There is something fascinating in youthfulness.
Gill: So you would prefer puppies to dogs and kittens to cats?
Wilde:
I think so. I should enjoy, for instance, the society of a beardless, briefless barrister quite as much as the most accomplished QC.
Gill added to the laughter in court with the rejoinder: ‘I hope the former, whom I represent in large numbers, will appreciate the compliment.’ He then went on: ‘These youths were much inferior to you in station?’
‘I never inquired, nor did I care, what station they occupied. I found them, for the most part, bright and entertaining. I found their conversation a change. It acted as a kind of mental tonic.’47††
At the end of that fourth day, after Wilde and Taylor had given evidence, counsel made their closing speeches. Sir Edward Clarke argued that Wilde’s openness – in his association with the various witnesses, in his dealings with staff at the Savoy, in his appearing in the witness box, in his initiation of the libel action against Queensberry – was the ‘best proof of his innocence’. His behaviour throughout had shown none of ‘the cowardice of guilt’. ‘Mr Wilde,’ he admitted, ‘is not an ordinary man’. His writings might be ‘inflated, exaggerated, absurd’ – but that should not condemn him. In his generous association with the young Atkins, Wood and Parker he had found himself sadly ‘taken in’ by an unscrupulous gang of practised blackmailers. ‘I do not defend Mr Wilde for this,’ he intoned; ‘he has unquestionably shown imprudence, but a man of his temperament cannot be judged by the standards of the average individual’. If these ‘tainted witnesses’ now came forward ‘in a conspiracy to ruin’ his client, their evidence should not be credited. Urging the jury to put from their minds all the ‘bias’ occasioned by the prejudicial reporting and discussion of the case, he trusted that ‘the result of your deliberations will be to gratify those thousands of hopes which are hanging upon your decision, and will clear from this fearful imputation one of our most renowned and accomplished men of letters of to-day, and, in clearing him, will clear society of stain’. His final ringing words were greeted with applause. Wilde was visibly affected by the oration, and scribbled a note of appreciation and gratitude. It was handed down to Clarke, who returned a nod of thanks to the prisoner in the dock.48
Oscar Page 74
