"Or, he might have applied to the visiting magistrates. In either case there would be a record of such facilities, and the Governor of Reading Gaol, the chaplain, and other officials can satisfy the public as well as the Prison Commissioners. If the book was written in prison then it is clear the officials made a distinction between Oscar Wilde and other prisoners.

"There is some glamour about books written in prisons. The 'Pilgrim's Progress' is a prison book, but Bedford Gaol was a pretty easy dungeon. Under the old régime such men as William Corbett, Orator Hunt, and Richard Carlile, conducted their polemic warfare in prison. The last Chartist leader (the late Mr Ernest Jones) used to tell how he wrote the 'Painter of Florence' and other poems in a London gaol while confined for sedition. It was a common subject of conversation with his young disciples how, as ink was denied in Coldbath Street Prison, he made incisions in his arm and wrote his poetry in his own blood. We believed it then, but as we grew older that feeling of doubt made us sceptical. Thomas Cooper's prison rhyme, the 'Purgatory of Suicides,' and his novel, the 'Baron's Yule Feast,' were written during his two years' imprisonment in Stafford Gaol for preaching a 'universal strike' as a means of establishing a British Republic.

"As 'De Profundis' is likely to be a classic, is it not as well to have this question thrashed out at the beginning and not leave it to the twenty-first century?"

The editor of "De Profundis" replied in a short letter saying, in effect, that he was not concerned to add anything to his definite statement in the preface of the book, a course with which everyone will be in agreement. To answer a busybody throwing doubts upon the statement of an honourable gentleman is a mistake. The matter, however, went a little further and was eventually set finally at rest.

In The Daily Mirror a facsimile of a page of the manuscript written on prison paper was reproduced, and Mr Hamilton Fyfe accompanied the letterpress by informing the public that he had seen the whole of the manuscript of "De Profundis." It was written on blue foolscap paper with the prison stamp on the top. There were about 60,000 words, of which altogether not more than one-third were published in the English edition. The explanation of the fact that the prisoner was allowed to write in his cell is perfectly simple.

Oscar Wilde handed this roll of paper to Mr Robert Ross on the day of his release, and gave him absolute discretion as to printing it. He had written most of it during the last three months of his two years' sentence. It was during the last half-year of his term that Wilde was allowed the special privilege of writing as much as he pleased. His friends represented to the Home Office that a man who had been accustomed to use his brain so continually was in danger of having his mind injured by being unable to write for so long a time as two years.

Dr Nicholson, of Broadmoor, who was consulted on the point, said he thought this danger was quite a real one. So the necessary permission was given, and Wilde could write whatever he liked.

Later on the prison regulations were relaxed again. As a rule, prisoners are not allowed to take away with them what they have written in their cells. Strictly, the MS. of "De Profundis" ought to have remained among the archives of Reading Gaol.

The authorities realised, however, that to enforce this rule in Wilde's case would have been harsh and unreasonable, so when (in order to defeat the intentions of the late Lord Queensberry and his hired bullies) he was removed from Reading to Wandsworth Prison, on the evening before his release he took the MS. with him; and he had it under his arm when he left the gloomy place next morning a free man.

This statement, and the facsimile printed above, should make it impossible henceforward for anyone to suggest, as many have been suggesting quite recently, that there is any doubt about the whole of the book having been written by Oscar Wilde during the time he was in prison.

The development of Oscar Wilde during his incarceration has, of course, been summed up and stated for all time by himself in the marvellous pages of "De Profundis." Yet, there are various accounts of that time of agony which do but go to show what a really purifying and salutary influence even the awful torture he underwent had upon the unhappy man. By those who knew him in prison he is described as living a life which, in its simple resignation, its kindly gentleness, its sweetness of demeanour, was the life of a saint. No bitterness or harsh word ever escaped him. When opportunity occurred of doing some tiny and furtive kindness that kindness was always forthcoming. Those who rejoiced at the fact of Wilde's imprisonment may well pause now when the true story of it has filtered through various channels and is generally known. He himself told Monsieur André Gide a strange and pathetic story of those silent, unhappy hours.

He speaks of one of the Governors under whose rule he lay in durance, and says that this gentleman imposed needless suffering upon his unhappy charges, not because of any inherent cruelty or contravention of the rules for prison discipline, but because he was entirely lacking in imagination.

On one occasion, during the hour allowed for exercise, a prisoner who walked behind Wilde upon the circular pathway of the yard addressed him by name, and told him that he pitied him even more than he pitied himself, because his sufferings must be greater than his. Such a sudden word of sympathy from an unknown fellow-convict gave the poor poet an exquisite moment of pleasure and pain. He answered him appropriately with a word of thanks. But one of the warders had been a witness of the occasion, and the matter was reported to the Governor. Two convicts had been guilty of the outrage of exchanging a few words. The unknown convict was taken first before the Governor. It is a prison regulation that the punishment is not the same for the man who speaks first and the man who answers him. The first offender has to pay a double penalty. The Convict X., when before the Governor, stated that he was the culprit and that he had spoken first. When afterwards Wilde was taken before the martinet, he very naturally told him that he himself was the principal offender. The Governor stated that he was unable to understand the matter at all. He grew red and uneasy, and told Wilde that he had already given X. fifteen days' solitary confinement. He then stated that as Wilde had also confessed to be the principal offender he should award him fifteen days' solitary confinement also!

This touching incident shows both Wilde and the unknown convict in a noble light, but the gentle way in which Oscar told of the incident to the French journalist is even a greater tribute to the innate dignity of his character, so long obscured by the exigencies of his life, so beautifully laid bare when he had paid his debt to society.

There are other anecdotes extant which confirm the above. All go to show that the third period brought out the finest traits in Wilde's character. We have in this period another and most touching side of the complex temperament of this great genius, this extraordinary and unhappy man. Much will have to be said on this point when the criticism of "De Profundis" is reached.

Meanwhile, I close the "third period" with a sense that here, at anyrate, there is nothing to be said which is not wholly fragrant and redolent of sincerity.

THE FOURTH PERIOD

It is with a sense of both reluctance and relief that I enter upon a short account of the fourth period, insomuch as this or that incident during it throws a light upon the character of him of whom we speak.

With a relief, because it is a far happier and more gracious task to endeavour to criticise and appreciate the literary works of a great genius than it is to chronicle facts in the life of a most unhappy man which may help to elucidate the puzzle of his personality.

With reluctance, because the fourth period is again one of almost unadulterated gloom and sadness. I shall be as brief as possible, and too much already has been written about the last days of Oscar Wilde after his release from prison.

A considerable amount of information has been placed at my disposal, but I design to use none of it. The facts that are already known to those who have taken an interest in Oscar Wilde may be briefly touched upon here, and that is all. An eloquent plea from a near relation of the poet should be respected here, and only such few facts as are really necessary to complete this incomplete study shall be given. "Nothing could have horrified him more than that men calling themselves his friends should publish concerning his latter days details so disgusting as those appearing in your issue of yesterday." Thus a paragraph from the appeal I have mentioned, an appeal which was prompted by the publication of many controversial articles as to the truth, or otherwise, of Mr Wilde's reception into the Roman Church, his debts, his manner of living towards the end. "I should be glad to think that this expression of my wish may put an end to this unpleasant correspondence. If it does not, I can only appeal to your correspondents to be very careful of what they write, and to reflect upon what Mr Oscar Wilde would think if he could read their letters. In life, he never said or countenanced a coarse or common thing. Personally, I write with too much reluctance to reply to them again, and I leave the matter to their sense of decency and chivalry."

Immediately upon his release from prison Oscar Wilde wrote his famous letters to The Daily Chronicle on "Children in Prison and Other Cruelties of Life in Gaol." He told a terrible story of a poor little child whose face was "like a white wedge of sheer terror," and in his eyes "the mute appeal of a hunted animal." Wilde had heard the poor little fellow at breakfast-time crying and calling to be let out. He was calling for his parents, and every now and then the elder prisoner could hear the harsh voice of the warder on duty telling the little boy to be quiet. The child had not been convicted of the offence with which he was charged, but was simply on remand. A kind-hearted warder, finding the little fellow crying with hunger and utterly unable to eat the bread and water given it for breakfast, brought it some sweet biscuits. This, Mr Wilde truthfully said, was a "beautiful action on the warder's part." The child, grateful for the man's kindness, told one of the senior warders about it. The result was that the warder who had brought the biscuits to the starving child was reported and dismissed from the service.

It is not too much to say that this story, told in the prose of a master of prose, written with a crushing and sledgehammer force all the more powerful because it was most marvellously simple, thrilled the whole of England. There followed an even more terrible story.

Three months or so before his release, Wilde had noticed, among the prisoners who took exercise with him, a young prisoner who was obviously either half-witted or trembling upon the verge of insanity. This poor creature used to gesticulate, laugh and talk to himself. "At chapel he used to sit right under the observation of two warders, who carefully watched him all the time. Sometimes he would bury his head in his hands, an offence against the chapel regulations, and his head would be immediately struck up by a warder.... He was on more than one occasion sent out of chapel to his cell, and of course he was continually punished.... I saw that he was becoming insane and was being treated as if he were shamming." There was a terrible denouement to this hideous story. Mr Wilde went on to say in words that do him eternal credit and which no one who has read them could ever forget:

"On Saturday week last, I was in my cell at about one o'clock occupied in cleaning and polishing the tins I had been using for dinner. Suddenly I was startled by the prison silence being broken by the most horrible and revolting shrieks, or rather howls, for at first I thought some animal like a bull or a cow was being unskilfully slaughtered outside the prison walls. I soon realised, however, that the howls proceeded from the basement of the prison, and I knew that some wretched man was being flogged. I need not say how hideous and terrible it was for me, and I began to wonder who it was being punished in this revolting manner. Suddenly it dawned upon me that they might be flogging this unfortunate lunatic. My feelings on the subject need not be chronicled; they have nothing to do with the question.

"The next day, Sunday, I saw the poor fellow at exercise, his weak, ugly, wretched face bloated by tears and hysteria almost beyond recognition. He walked in the centre ring along with the old men, the beggars and the lame people, so that I was able to observe him the whole time. It was my last Sunday in prison, a perfectly lovely day, the finest day we had had the whole year, and there, in the beautiful sunlight, walked this poor creature—made once in the image of God—grinning like an ape, and making with his hands the most fantastic gestures."

The story continued with even more terrible details than these. It is no part of my plan to harrow the feelings of my readers by a reprint of such horrors. I have said enough, I trust, to fulfil my purpose in quoting Oscar Wilde's letters to all—to show how powerfully he himself was moved with pity, and how he strove, even in his own terrible re-entrance to a world which would have none of him, to influence public opinion on the behalf of one who was being done to death, not perhaps by conscious cruelty, but by the awful stupidity of those who live by an inflexible rule which can make no allowance for special circumstances, which is as hard as the nether millstone and as cold as death itself.

So Oscar Wilde passed out of England with pity flowing from his pen and with pity in his heart. I wish that it was possible to end this memoir here. As I have set out to give all the facts which seem necessary to provide a complete picture for readers who know little or nothing of Oscar Wilde's nature, beyond the fact of his triumphs as a playwright and his subsequent disgrace, I must not shrink from proceeding to the end, as I have not shrunk from frankly recording facts in the first and second periods. It would be a fault, and insincere, to allow a deep and very natural sympathy to interfere with the performance, however inadequately it has been carried out, of the task I set out to complete.

Oscar Wilde crossed immediately to Dieppe, and shortly afterwards installed himself in a villa at a small seaside place some miles away from the gay Norman bathing place. His life at Berneval was simple and happy. His biographer, Mr Robert Harborough Sherard, who visited him there, has told of the quiet repose and healing days which Oscar Wilde enjoyed. He had a sufficient sum of money to live in comfort for a year or so, and all would doubtless have gone well with him had it not been for certain malign influences which had already been prominent factors in wrecking his life, and which now appeared again to menace his newly found salvation of mind and spirit. Such references are not within the province of the book, the story has been told elsewhere. The thing would not have been referred to at all, did it not illustrate the impatience and weakness of Wilde's character, even at this point in his history. The malign influences eventually had their way with the poet—that is to say, certain companions whom it was most unwise of him to see or recognise, once more entered into his life in a certain degree.

A letter which was written to a gentleman who has translated a French memoir dealing with the poet, says: "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. But he tried, he honestly tried, and in prison he succeeded." The forces of evil were too strong.

Oscar Wilde spent the last few years, and alas! miserable years, of his life in alternations of sordid poverty and sudden waves of temporary prosperity, in the city of Paris. There have been all sorts of stories about these last few years. The truth is simply this. Wilde's intellect was crushed and broken. The creative faculty flamed up for the last time in that brilliant and terrible poem, "The Ballad of Reading Gaol." Then it sank again and was never revived. When I say "creative faculty" I mean the faculty of producing a sustained artistic effort. As a talker the poet was never more brilliant. "Every now and again one or other of the very few faithful English friends left to him would turn up in Paris and take him to dinner at one of the best restaurants, and anyone who met him on these occasions would have found it difficult to believe that he had ever passed through such awful experiences. Whether he was expounding some theory, grave or fantastic, embroidering it the while with flashes of impromptu wit, or deepening it with extraordinary intimate learning, or whether he was keeping the table in a roar with his delightfully whimsical humour, a summer lightning that flashed and hurt no one, he was equally admirable. To have lived in his lifetime and not to have heard him talk is as though one had lived at Athens without going to look at the Parthenon."

I think we should be glad to know that in the wrecked life of this period the poet had some happy moments when he could reconstruct in bright and brilliant surroundings some slight renewal of other days that were gone for ever. There is no doubt at all that friends, both those who had had a good and those who had had a bad influence on his past life, were very kind to him.

He was supplied with enough money to have lived in considerable comfort had he not been incurably reckless and a spendthrift. It has been said that he died in wretched poverty and in debt. This is partly true, but it was entirely his own fault. There is indubitable proof of the fairly large sums he received from time to time. Some of his letters to a man in London, who occasionally employed his pen, have been sold to the curious, and such poignant passages as: "I rely on your sending me a little money to-morrow. I have only succeeded in getting twenty francs from the Concierge, and I am in a bad way," or, "I wish to goodness you could come over, also—send me, if you can, £4 or even £3. I am now trying to leave my hotel and get rooms where I can be at rest, and so stay in during the morning."

These letters seem to show that Oscar Wilde was nearly starving. I can assure my readers this was not the case. With the realisation that there would never be any more place for him in the world had come a carelessness and recklessness to all but immediate and petty sensual gratifications from day to day.

His landlord stated that towards the end it became very difficult for Wilde to write at all. "He used to whip himself up with cognac. A litre bottle would hardly see him through the night. And he ate little. And he took little exercise. He used to sleep till noon, and then breakfast, and then sleep again till five or six in the evening."

This is enough. I have said as little as can well be said. But let us remember the frightful and crushing disabilities under which Wilde suffered. Who is there who dare cast a stone? His death came as a happy release, and it was sordid and dreadful enough to complete the grim tragedy of his life without deviation from its completeness. True, an attached friend was by him at the end. True, the offices of the Holy Catholic Church lightened his passing. Yet, nevertheless, there was an abiding and sinister gloom about all his last hours. Details can be found in other places. "How Oscar Wilde died" was a journalistic sensation at the time.

I will simply quote the words of a French critic, who, after the end, went to pay his last sad duties to the shell which had held the poet's soul: "... The hotel in which he died was one of those horrible places which are called in the popular papers 'Houses of Crime.' A veritable Hercules of a porter led me through a long, evil-smelling corridor. At last the odour of some disinfectant struck my nostrils. An open door. A little square room. I stood before the corpse. His whitish, emaciated face, strangely altered through the growth of a beard after death, seemed to be lost in profound contemplation. A hand, cramped in agony, still clutched the dirty bed cloth. There was no one to watch by his body. Only much later they sent him some flowers. The noise of the street pierced the thin walls of the building. A stale odour filled the air. Ah, what loneliness, what an end!"

If I have quoted this ugly and vulgar picture of the poet's body in the sordid room I have done so with intention.

It is in the contemplation of such scenes as this that our minds and hearts are uplifted from the material to the supreme hope of all of us. The man who had suffered and sinned and done noble things in this world had gone away from it. Doubtless, when the Frenchman with his prying eyes and notebook was gloating over the material sensation of the scene, the soul of the poet was hearing harmonies too long unknown to it, and was beginning to undergo the Purification.

Requiescat.

Oscar Wilde was always a loving student of Dante. In that contempt for the world's opinion, which is sometimes the strength and also the ruin of great geniuses, Wilde bore a strong resemblance to the great Italian who said "Lascia dir le genti." The versatility of Oscar Wilde was supreme, and that is in itself the real solution of whatever is most astonishing in his power or startling in his madness, of all that most draws us towards him or repels us with an equal strength. "A variety of powers almost boundless, a pride not less vast in displaying them—a susceptibility of new impressions and impulses, even beyond the usual allotment of genius ... such were the two great and leading sources of all that varied spectacle which his life exhibited; and that succession of victories achieved by his genius, in almost every field of mind that genius ever trod, and of all those sallies of character in every shape and direction that unchecked feeling and dominant self-will can dictate."

It is not for the author of this memoir, whose attitude has been studiously impersonal throughout, to attempt any dictation to his readers as to the judgment they shall ultimately form upon the character of Oscar Wilde.

At the same time, he hopes that it may not be forbidden him to give his own, and doubtless very imperfect, view. He thinks that in regarding the whole field of the poet's life, as far as it can be known to others, one finds him to be a sweet and noble nature with much of the serenity of "highness" which accompanies a great genius, yet, obscured, soiled, overlapped, and periodically destroyed by a terrible and riotous madness, both of talk and of thought. It is a facile and dangerous thing to attribute all the good and noble actions of any man to his "real self," and to say that all the evil he wrought and did came from madness or irresponsibility. If such a doctrine were to be generally accepted and believed, laws would lose their raison d'être, punishment would become a mockery, and society would inevitably end.

Yet, possibly it may be that some few souls exist and have existed of whom such a statement may be true. If such exceptions do exist and have existed, then surely Oscar Wilde was one of them. There seems to be no other explanation of him but just this; and if we do not accept it I, at anyrate, cannot see any other.

Let each reader of this book appropriate his own, and I conclude the first part of it by repeating the old, old prayer—

Requiescat.