• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1207 0

of aesthete, voluptuary and wit, he had hitherto been protected by the enamel of success. His incomparable talk enraptured friends as his plays did the public. But his arrogance as artist became overweening and his appetites uncontrolled, so that he grew fat and loose and heavy-jowled and, as a friend remarked, “all his bad qualities began to show in his face.” Nor did success satisfy him, for satiety required that he must taste the ultimate sensation of ruin. “I was a problem,” he said in sad self-knowledge, “for which there was no solution.” He precipitated his own arrest by taking action for libel against the Marquess of Queensberry. The ensuing trials tore away Society’s screen of discretion and gave everyone a shuddering look at the livid gleam of vice: panders, male prostitutes, hotel-room assignations with a valet, a groom, a boat-attendant picked up on a beach, and blackmail. No charges were brought against Lord Alfred Douglas, son of the Marquess of Queens-berry, the flowery and seductive young man who shared these practices as well as Wilde’s company and affections. Nor had there been any charges when Lord Arthur Somerset, a son of the Duke of Beaufort and a friend of the Prince of Wales, had been found in a homosexual brothel raided by the police in 1889. He had been allowed to take himself off and live comfortably after his fashion on the Continent while the Prince had asked Lord Salisbury that he might occasionally be permitted to visit his parents quietly in the country “without fear of being apprehended on this awful charge.”

Frank Harris, then editor of the Fortnightly Review, thought that the solidarity of the governing class would close protectively around his friend Oscar in the same way. He supposed that aristocratic prejudice was a matter of favoring the exceptional over the common and would operate equally for the lord, the millionaire and the “man of genius.” He was mistaken. Wilde had done the unforgivable in forcing public notice of his sin. And as artist-intellectual caught in scarlet depravity he evoked the howl of the philistines and plunged the British public into one of the most virulent of its periodic fits of morality. The judge was malevolent, the public vituperative, the society which he had amused turned its back, cabbies and newsboys exchanged vulgar jokes about “Oscar,” the press reviled him, his books were withdrawn from sale and his name pasted out on the playbills advertising The Importance of Being Earnest, his brightest diamond, then playing to enchanted audiences. His downfall, said the gentleman-Socialist H. M. Hyndman, “was the most grievous thing I have ever known in the literary world.” With it was dissipated, in England, if not on the Continent, the yellow haze of fin de siècle decadence.

Lord Salisbury’s appointment of a Poet Laureate at the end of the year could not have provided a greater contrast in men of letters or done more to re-enthrone Respectability. Since the death of Tennyson in 1892, the post had remained vacant because neither Mr. Gladstone nor Lord Rosebery, who took their responsibility to literature seriously, could find a worthy successor. Swinburne, owing to his distressing habits and opinions, was, regrettably, “absolutely impossible” (although Mr. Gladstone “admired his genius”), William Morris was a Socialist, Hardy was known so far only by his novels and the younger poetic talents tended to wear the colors of the Yellow Book and the Mauve Decade. The young Anglo-Indian, Rudyard Kipling, in his Barrack Room Ballads of 1892, had certainly sounded a virile and imperial note but in a rather rough idiom, and neither he nor W. E. Henley nor Robert Bridges was considered. All other candidates were mediocrities, one of whom, Sir Lewis Morris, offered an opening to what a contemporary called “the most spontaneously witty thing ever uttered in England.” Morris, author of an effusion entitled The Epic of Hades, who wanted the Laureateship badly, complained to Oscar Wilde in the days before his ruin, “There is a conspiracy of silence against me, a conspiracy of