Oscar Wilde by André Gide Read Free Book Online Page A

don’t know what they’ve done with it. ”
    From the depth of his “humility,” the bursts of his former pride are even more dismal: “ I am not prepared, ” he announces, “ to sit in the grotesque pillory they put me into, for all time; for the simple reason that I inherited from my father and mother a name of high distinction in literature and art, and I can not for eternity allow that name to be degraded.”—“She and my father,” he announces again, “had bequeathed me a name they had made noble and honoured … I had disgraced that name eternally. I had made it a low byword among low people. I had dragged it through the very mire … What I suffered then, and still suffer, is not for pen to write. ” Elsewhere, he is preoccupied with acting “ as a gentleman by bowing my head and accepting everything. ”
    Wilde, still strangely lucid, when, however, he did not attempt to give himself illusions about the failure of his pride, was not mistaken about the nature of his fault: it was out of a deficiency of individualism, not out of an excess of individualism, that he had succumbed. “ People used to say of me that I was too individualistic … Indeed, my ruincame not from too great individualism of life, but from too little. The one disgraceful, unpardonable, and to all time contemptible action of my life was to allow myself to appeal to society for help and protection. ” We all know the story: it was he who brought action against the most illustrious of his defamers and entered as accuser into “that chamber of men’s justice” … False boldness, ignorance, folly! I imagine a Byron thus appealing to the society which he was braving … “ Of course, ” he continues, “ once I had put into motion the forces of society, society turned on me and said, ‘Have you been living all this time in defiance of my laws, and do you now appeal to these laws for protection? You should have those laws exercised to the full. You shall abide by what you have appealed to’ The result is that I am in gaol. ”
    Yes, a deficiency of individualism, and that is why what he blushes at is not what society accuses him of, his “sins,” but at having allowed himself to be caught in such an unfavorable position; “ I don’t regret for a single moment having lived for pleasure. I did it to the full, as one should do everything that one does ” Yes, a deficiency of individualism, hence this exasperation. “ Everything about my tragedy has been hideous, mean, repellant, lacking in style. ” Or: “ Certainly no man ever fell so ignobly, and by such ignoble instruments, as I did. ” Or again:“ Indeed my entire tragedy seems to me grotesque and nothing else.”— Certainly it was not for him, it is for us to perceive its grandeur. The prison, which yesterday was his shame, magnifies him and today gives his tragic figure an importance which could not have been loaned for long to this playboy of genius by the footlights of the London drawing-rooms and stages where he paraded.
    From the depth of his dungeon, he is astounded as he recalls that departed splendor, that glory which he hardly exaggerates; he is astounded as he now recounts it to himself. “ The gods had given me almost everything. ” he cries.
    Few men held such a position in their own lifetime, and have it so acknowledged ” His tongue seems to play over the slight taste of honey that remains on his lips. “ I used to live entirely for pleasurem, ” he writes, and elsewhere: “ I filled my life to the very brim with pleasure, as one might fill a cup to the very brim with wine. ”
    But through the excess of pleasure, I admire the secret advance toward a more significant destiny. As he becomes less wilful, he becomes more representative. This fatality was leading him on as if there were something