CHAPTER XCV

THE GREEN CARNATION

Eight years ago Frank Harris published his two volumes entitled “Oscar Wilde: His Life and Confessions.” I wrote him that it was one of the half dozen greatest biographies in the English language, and he replied, characteristically: “Name the other five.” That story never fails to raise a laugh; but in fairness to Frank Harris I ought to add that when I sat down and thought it over seriously I could not name the other five. Here is the story of a terrific human tragedy, told plainly and completely, with profound insight and deep pity. How can the man who wrote it not know that it is great?

The subject of this sermon in action was born in Dublin in 1854. His father was a wealthy baronet, a physician who was accustomed to seduce his women-patients; his mother was an excessively vain society poetess. The son was burdened with the label Oscar Fingal O’Flahartie Wills Wilde, and received the usual public school and Oxford education. In these so-called “public” schools, which are ruling class boarding-schools, the boys live semi-monastic lives, entirely withdrawn from woman’s influence; they are fed upon Greek literature and art, which glorifies homosexuality, and therefore English upper-class life is rotten with this odious vice. Frank Harris narrates that at the time of Wilde’s trial, when general exposures on this subject were threatened, great numbers of London’s prominent club members suddenly discovered that they had important business on the Continent.

Oscar Wilde had extraordinary gifts; a vivid imagination, a flow of eloquence, and charming wit. He was the perfect fine flower of leisure-class art, a gentleman about town, a literary dandy who learned the lesson that it pays to advertise, and made himself the most talked about man in London by dressing in knee breeches and silk hose, carrying a large sunflower in his hand, and greeting men and women with sweet impertinences. There is a satiric portrait of this elegant “esthete” in Robert Hichens’ novel, “The Green Carnation.”

Oscar wrote comedies dealing with the London world of fashion in which he lived. These plays delighted that world, and still delight audiences of the fashionable. Frank Harris regards them as imperishable classics; and all I can do is to record the fact that they put me to sleep. Nearly twenty years ago I saw “The Importance of Being Earnest” in New York, and cannot recall that I was ever more bored in a theater. The interest of the play is supposed to lie in its “smart” dialogue, and the formula for that smartness is one which anyone can learn in two minutes. Take any statement involving the simple common sense of mankind, the moral heritage of the race for countless ages; and then make an epigram proclaiming the opposite, and you have a “line” for a society play. “Charity creates a multitude of sins.... It is better to be good-looking than to be good.... All charming people are spoiled.... A man can be happy with any woman as long as he does not love her.... It is a dangerous thing to reform anyone.... The real drawback to marriage is that it makes one unselfish.... Democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people.... There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written.... The sphere of art and the sphere of ethics are absolutely distinct and separate.”

A man who is absorbed in useful work, and therefore has few impulses to depravity, can encounter such Wildeness with indifference; but the average man, who is never sure of his own self-control, and who has sons and daughters to train in as much decency as he can, is made frantic by such perversity, the deliberate bedeviling of the wits of our blindly struggling humanity. These “epigrams” of Oscar Wilde are like the snapping of a whip-lash in the face of men’s everyday moral sensibility. So naturally this too-clever young esthete was cordially loathed, and his enemies whetted their knives for him.

Oscar came over to America to exhibit his whimsicalities to the wives and daughters of our steel kings and pork packers. To the custom’s officer he remarked: “I have nothing to declare but my genius”; and so his success was assured. He went back to London and wrote more plays, one of them, “Salome,” assuredly the most cruel, cold, and disgusting piece of lewdness in the English language. Its heroine is the young daughter of King Herod, who attempts to seduce John the Baptist to her sensual desires, and when he repels her, has him executed, and has his head brought in upon a platter, and strips herself as nearly naked as stage-customs allow, and dances before this bloody object and fondles and kisses it. The climax of modern art depravity was reached when Richard Strauss set this drama to elaborate and costly music. When I saw audiences of bedizened and bejewelled fat beasts, male and female, having their sick nerves thrilled by this “grand” opera, I knew that European capitalism was ready for the slaughterman’s ax.

Out of these plays Oscar reaped much money, and spent it in eating too much, drinking too much, and pursuing his cultured vices. Among his favorites was a young heir of the nobility, who has since become Lord Alfred Douglas, assuredly the most disagreeable little wretch that ever displayed himself in the British world of letters. Lord Alfred’s father, the Marquis of Queensbury, made an effort to separate his son from Wilde, and in so doing he wrote letters concerning Wilde which brought about a great literary scandal.

It is the privilege of elegant British gentlemen to pursue their vices without interference; but they must display discretion, and not step upon the toes of marquises. Oscar Wilde brought suit for slander against Queensbury; and his lordship rallied his aristocratic friends, defended himself successfully, and then had the audacious playwright arrested and prosecuted for sodomy.

The ordinary British citizen had, of course, no knowledge of the inside circumstances of this case; all he saw was that a writer of nasty plays tripped jauntily into the limelight and brought a libel suit against a father for trying to save his son. Of the fact that the father was a bad one, and the son worse, and that the courts were being used to maintain a corrupt ruling class--those things the average Englishman did not know. He will never know them until there is a Socialist daily press in England, with the right to tell the truth about the ruling class, something which at present the libel laws prevent.

Here is material for a drama, far greater than any that Wilde wrote; and Frank Harris gives us the whole story. In the early part of it he sees Oscar clearly as the pitiful victim of his own will-less nature; but when the tragedy of this nature reaches its climax, Harris lets himself be tempted into offering Wilde to us in a new rôle, that of a persecuted hero and martyred genius. Much as Harris may abhor Oscar’s sin, he abhors the leading British virtues still more; so he is in the position of Milton dealing with Satan--he cannot keep from sympathizing with his character, in spite of logic. To be sure, he gives us the facts, so that we can judge for ourselves, if we have the brains; and we must try to be worthy of that trust!

It seems evident enough that Oscar was sent to prison, not because of his genius, nor yet because of his vices, but simply because he attacked in a conspicuous and aggravating way a member of the hallowed ruling caste of Britain. You may call that turning the tragedy into a Socialist tract; but a man cannot interpret any case of social persecution unless he sees its economic implications--unless, in other words, he understands the class struggle. If Frank Harris had been a conscious social revolutionist, his book would have been more powerful and convincing, because he would have been less tempted to blame individuals for evils which are social in their origin. He would have given us an economic interpretation of Oscar, the spoiled darling of a putrescent leisure class, thrown overboard, like Jonah, as a sacrifice in a middle-class hurricane of virtue.

Oscar Wilde was convicted and sent to prison; and of course Frank Harris does not like prisons--he, too, has been sent there by the British ruling caste. It is only natural that he should overlook in his book the significance of the fact which he himself records, that this imprisonment was the best thing that ever happened to Oscar. Harris interceded for him, and was able to get him good food and the right to have his books; he tells us that he noticed during his visits a “spiritual deepening” in Oscar, due to the rigid disciplining of his selfish nature. He was never so well or so much in possession of his mental faculties as when he came out; but immediately he went back to his vomit, and ate and drank and loafed himself to death, according to the customs prevailing in that putrescent leisure class.

It seems to me that the true conclusion to be drawn from Frank Harris’

## book is that decadent poets should be sent to prison and kept there

permanently. Anything to save them from smart society! While Oscar was at large, the pet of the cultured rich, he idled and wrote futile plays; but when he was locked up, he took life seriously, and wrote great literature: “De Profundis,” a study of his spiritual reactions to his disgrace; and “The Ballad of Reading Gaol,” a supremely eloquent and noble poem, the poet’s excuse for having lived.

Reading these two works we say, by all means let us have prisons for will-less men; places where such unhappy beings may have as much self-government as they can use, together with plain wholesome food, moderate work outdoors, and enforced abstinence from alcohol and tobacco and drugs. Having set up such prisons, let us keep in them, not merely all thieves and highwaymen and esthetes, but men of fashion, princes, lords and dukes, bishops, stock-brokers and fat persons.

Says Mrs. Ogi: “You said you were going to label all your jokes.”

Her husband, after meditating, remarks: “What Oscar needed was the right sort of a wife.”

She answers: “Almost any wife would have told him that a guilty man cannot bring a slander suit.”

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