As regards your letter to me in answer to this, it may be as long or as short as you choose. Address the envelope to “The Governor, H.M. Prison, Reading.” Inside, in another, and an open envelope, place your own letter to me: if your paper is very thin do not write on both sides, as it makes it hard for others to read. I have written to you with perfect freedom. You can write to me with the same. What I must know from you is why you have never made any attempt to write to me, since the August of the year before last, more especially after, in the May of last year, eleven months ago now, you knew, and admitted to others that you knew, how you had made me suffer, and how I realised it. I waited month after month to hear from you. Even if I had not been waiting but had shut the doors against you, you should have remembered that no one can possibly shut the doors against Love for ever. The unjust judge in the Gospels rises up at length to give a just decision because Justice comes knocking daily at his door; and at night-time the friend, in whose heart there is no real friendship, yields at length to his friend “because of his importunity.” There is no prison in any world into which Love cannot force an entrance. If you did not understand that, you did not understand anything about Love at all. Then, let me know all about your article on me for the Mercure de France. I know something of it. You had better quote from it. It is set up in type. Also, let me know the exact terms of your Dedication of your poems. If it is in prose, quote the prose; if in verse, quote the verse. I have no doubt that there will be beauty in it. Write to me with full frankness about yourself: about your life: your friends: your occupations: your books. Tell me about your volume and its reception. Whatever you have to say for yourself, say it without fear. Don’t write what you don’t mean: that is all. If anything in your letter is false or counterfeit I shall detect it by the ring at once. It is not for nothing, or to no purpose, that in my lifelong cult of literature I have made myself

  Miser of sound and syllable, no less

  Than Midas of his coinage. 72

  Remember also that I have yet to know you. Perhaps we have to know each other.

  For yourself, I have but this last thing to say. Do not be afraid of the past. If people tell you that it is irrevocable, do not believe them. The past, the present and the future are but one moment in the sight of God, in whose sight we should try to live. Time and space, succession and extension, are merely accidental conditions of Thought. The Imagination can transcend them, and move in a free sphere of ideal existences. Things, also, are in their essence what we choose to make them. A thing is, according to the mode in which one looks at it. “Where others,” says Blake, “see but the Dawn coming over the hill, I see the sons of God shouting for joy.” What seemed to the world and to myself my future I lost irretrievably when I let myself be taunted into taking the action against your father: had, I dare say, lost it really long before that. What lies before is my past. I have got to make myself look on that with different eyes, to make the world look on it with different eyes, to make God look on it with different eyes. This I cannot do by ignoring it, or slighting it, or praising it, or denying it. It is only to be done by fully accepting it as an inevitable part of the evolution of my life and character: by bowing my head to everything that I have suffered. How far I am away from the true temper of soul, this letter in its changing, uncertain moods, its scorn and bitterness, its aspirations and its failure to realise those aspirations, shows you quite clearly. But do not forget in what a terrible school I am sitting at my task. And incomplete, imperfect, as I am, yet from me you may have still much to gain. You came to me to learn the Pleasure of Life and the Pleasure of Art. Perhaps I am chosen to teach you something much more wonderful, the meaning of Sorrow, and its beauty. Your affectionate friend

  OSCAR WILDE

  Notes

  1. Bosie. Lord Alfred Bruce Douglas, born in 1870, was the son of the Marquess of Queensberry, a difficult man who made his reputation by modernizing the rules of boxing in England and the United States. A prominent writer, Wilde was married and middle-aged when in 1891 he met Douglas, who was studying at Magdalen College, Oxford. The two commenced an avuncular and affectionate relationship that soon became passionate and tempestuous. Douglas lived until 1945, and he published his own account of his affair with Wilde in his 1928 autobiography. “Bosie” was a family nickname for Douglas.

  2. Robbie. Robert Ross (1869–1918), Wilde’s most stalwart friend during his trials, imprisonment, and finally his release, was Canadian by birth. Ross’s father died when he was two years old, and his mother brought him to England to educate him there. Wilde met Ross, who was studying at King’s College, Cambridge, in 1886. Ross later worked as a journalist and art critic.

  3. John Gray. Gray (1866–1934) was the author of a book of poems, Silverpoints (1893); the coauthor of The Blackmailers (1893), a play produced at the Prince of Wales Theatre; and the editor of Last Letters of Aubrey Beardsley (1904). Gray and Wilde were reputed to be lovers. There is little evidence to suggest that he was, as has been argued, the model for Wilde’s protagonist in The Picture of Dorian Gray. He wrote an elegy for Wilde in 1931 entitled “The Lord Looks at Peter.”

  4. Pierre Louys. Louys was a French poet and writer who founded La Conque, a literary review, in 1889 and whose first book, Astarte, was published in 1892. Wilde’s play Salome is dedicated to Louys.

  5. Plain living and high thinking. From Wordsworth’s “Sonnet written in London, September 1802.”

  6. the only tyranny that lasts. From Wilde’s play A Woman of No Importance, act III (1893).

  7. moyen de vivre. Way of being, lifestyle.

  8. Gilles de Retz and the Marquis de Sade. French marshall Gilles de Laval, Sire de Retz or Raiz (1404–40), comrade-in-arms of Joan of Arc, notorious for debauchery and devil worship, was executed for murdering a child. The Marquis de Sade (1740–1814), also French, was the author of Justine and Philosophy in the Bedroom. The term sadism was coined with de Sade in mind because his writings were known for the extreme sex and violence they depicted. He was sentenced to death for a variety of offenses but was never executed. He died in a lunatic asylum.

  9. Aeschylus. Subsequent phrases are quoted from Agamemnon by ancient Greek playwright Aeschylus (525–456 BC), lines 717–728.

  10. Your tutor. Douglas’s tutor, Campbell Dodgson (1867–1948), was an author and iconographer who was a scholar at New College, Oxford.

  11. candidissima anima. Most candid soul.

  12. many others in the mad, bad line from which you come. There was a substantial history of violent deaths among Douglas’s relatives on his father’s side. His grandfather was killed in a shooting accident, and his uncle committed suicide by cutting his own throat.

  13. lacrimae rerum. Tearful or sad condition.

  14. It is not of our vices only they make instruments to scourge us. From King Lear, act V, scene iii. Wilde is paraphrasing Edgar: “The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices / Make instruments to plague us.”

  15. Hylas, or Hyacinth, Jonquil or Narcisse. Mythological figures known for youthful beauty.

  16. Saturday Review. In December 1894, the Chameleon, a magazine issued by a group of Oxford undergraduates, published a collection of thirty-five aphorisms written by Wilde. The aphorisms and “Two Loves,” a poem published by Douglas in the same magazine (and containing the infamous line “the love that dare not speak its name”) were used against Wilde during the trials. The Saturday Review was a Victorian magazine in which Wilde published anonymously a collection of nineteen additional aphorisms entitled “A Few Maxims for the Instruction of the Over-Educated.”

  17. fatal Friday. March 1, 1895, the day Wilde registered a formal complaint with the police against Queensberry.

  18. Humphreys’s office. Charles O. Humphreys (1828–1902) was the solicitor who defended Wilde in all three trials.

  19. scies. Dull phrases.

  20. Holloway. The prison where Wilde was held April 6–26, 1895, when his first trial began.

  21. feuilletoniste. A writer of light, amusing, and sensational newspaper stories.

  22. I think they love not Art / … eyes may glare or gloat. Lines from Wilde’s sonnet “On the Sale by Auction of Keats’ Love Letters.”

  23. Lombroso. Cesare Lombroso (1836–1909) was an Italian physician and criminologist whose The Criminal (1890) and The Female Offender (1893) were highly influential throughout Europe.

  24. Henri Bauer. An influential French critic of literature and drama, Bauer published an article in support of Wilde after he was sentenced.

  25. Sandford and Merton. The History of Sandford and Merton by Thomas Day (1748–89) was a children’s book published in the 1780s that remained popular throughout the nineteenth century.

  26. Non ragioniam de lor, ma guarda, e passa. From Dante’s Inferno, iii, 51: “Let us not speak of them, but look, and pass on.”

  27. Branca d’Oria. A character from Dante’s Inferno.

  28. Edwin Levy. Two letters written to Wilde from Levy (in the archives of the Clark Library at the University of California, Los Angeles) suggest that he was a moneylender.

  29. causerie intime. An intimate conversation.

  30. Alfred Austin. Austin (1835–1913) was declared poet laureate in 1896. Wilde was publicly critical of his work.

  31. Street. George Slythe Street (1867–1936), journalist.

  32. Mrs. Meynell. Coventry Patmore (1823–96), author of The Angel in the House (1854–1863), a widely read sequence of poems written in praise of love and marriage, had written to the Saturday Review in 1895 recommending poet and essayist Alice Meynell (1847–1922) for the post of poet laureate.

  33. my two children. In 1897 Constance Wilde was granted sole custody of the children, Cyril and Vyvyan.

  34. glimpses of the moon. In Hamlet, act I, scene iv, Hamlet asks the following when he sees the ghost of his dead father: “What may this mean / That thou, dead corpse, again in complete steel, / Revisits thus the glimpses of the moon, / Making night hideous, and we fools of nature / So horridly to shake our disposition / With thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls?”

  35. Suffering is permanent, obscure and dark / And has the nature of infinity. From Wordsworth’s only play, The Borderers (1794), a tragedy in blank verse, act III.

  36. the world is shrivelled to a handsbreadth. From A Woman of No Importance, act IV.

  37. Tristi fummo / nell’ aer dolce che dal sol s’allegra. From Dante’s Inferno, vii, 121–122: “Sad once were we, / In the sweet air made gladsome by the sun” (translation by H. F. Cary).

  38. sorrow remarries us to God. From Dante’s Purgatorio, xxii, 81.

  39. He knows you not, ye Heavenly Powers. From Wilhelm Meisters’s Apprenticeship (book 2, chapter 13) by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) and translated by Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881).

  40. Queen of Prussia. Queen Louisa (1776–1810) and King Frederick William III were exiled after the Battle of Jena (1806) during the Napoleonic wars.

  41. a woman. Adeline Shuster, the daughter of a German banker, known for her generosity and insight.

  42. heights that the soul is competent to gain. From Wordsworth’s The Excursion (1814), a philosophical poem chronicling the travels of a poet.

  43. to contemplate the spectacle of life with appropriate emotions. From Appreciations (1889) by Walter Pater (1839–94).

  44. of Caesar Borgia, of Alexander VI., and of him who was Emperor of Rome and Priest of the Sun. Caesar Borgia (1476–1507), Italian military leader and cardinal; Alexander VI (1431–1503) served as pope 1492–1590 and was the father of Caesar Borgia; “Emperor of Rome and Priest of the Sun” refers to Heliogabalus, Emperor of Rome from 218 to 222.

  45. pity and terror. Wilde refers to Aristotle’s theory, in his Poetics, that tragedy should elicit and therefore purge pity and terror from audiences.

  46. possess their souls. From “A Southern Night” by Matthew Arnold (1822–88).

  47. an act of his own. From a lecture entitled “The Preacher” by American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82).

  48. how steep their stairs. From Dante’s Paradiso, xvii, 59–60.

  49. O Seigneur … / De contempler … sans dégoût. From Les Fleurs de Mal (1857) by Charles Baudelaire. “God, give me the strength and the courage / To look upon my body and my heart without disgust.”

  50. … and we hid as it were our faces from him. Isaiah 53:3.

  51. His visage was marred more than any man’s, and his form more than the sons of men. From Isaiah 52:14.

  52. some strangeness of proportion. From “Of Beauty,” by philosopher and essayist Francis Bacon (1561–1626).

  53. bloweth where it listeth and no man can tell whence it cometh or whither it goeth. From John 3:8.

  54. of imagination all compact. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Theseus speaks the following words in act V, scene i: “The lunatic, the lover, and the poet / Are of imagination all compact.”

  55. Charmides. Charmides is the eponymous central figure of one of Plato’s dialogues, in which he is characterized as a beautiful young man who typifies moderation, the dialogue’s main theme. Wilde wrote a poem titled “Charmides.”

  56. . From John 10:11 and 10:14: “I am the good shepherd.”

  57. . From Matthew 6:28: “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin.”

  58. . From John 19::30: “It is finished.”

  59. crumbs that the children let fall. From Mark 7:26-30.

  60. Domine, non sum dignus. God, I am not worthy.

  61. a guisa di fanciulla, che piangendo e ridendo pargoleggia. From Dante’s Purgatorio, xvi, 86–87.

  62. … Is not the body more than raiment? From Matthew 6:25 and 6:34.

  63. Liber Conformitatum. The title of Fr. Bartholomaeus de Pisa’s fourteenth-century book comparing the lives of Christ and Saint Francis.

  64. Verlaine and Prince Kropotkin. Paul Verlaine, French poet (1844–96); Prince Kropotkin, Russian anarchist and writer (1842–1921).

  65. dalla vagina delle membre sue. From Dante’s Paradiso, i, 20.

  66. It is said that all martyrdoms seemed mean to the looker-on. From Emerson’s “Essay on Experience.”

  67. Voilà où mènent les mauvins chemins! Where evil ways lead. From Balzac’s Splendeurs et Misères des Courtisanes.

  68. George Wyndham. George Wyndham (1863–1913) was a member of Parliament who was related to Lord Alfred Douglas and who wrote several books on literary topics.

  69. Lockwood’s. Sir Frank Lockwood (1847–97), the solicitor general who served as prosecutor in the second of Wilde’s trials.

  70. . From Euripides’s Iphigenia in Tauris.

  71. pour qui le monde visible existe. For whom the visible world exists. A phrase Wilde borrowed from French poet and novelist Théophile Gautier to describe Dorian Gray.

  72. Miser of sound and syllable, no less / Than Midas of his coinage. From “Sonnet on the Sonnet” by John Keats (1795–1821).

  COMMENTARY

  W. H. AUDEN

  Wilde on Jesus or redemption through suffering is as childish and boring as Gide on the same subjects, but Wilde on Bosie Douglas displays the insight, honesty, and unself-conscious style of a great writer. Their relationship is of the greatest psychological interest. It is clear that Wilde’s infatuation for Bosie was not primarily a sexual one; one surmises that any sexual relations they may have had were infrequent and probably not very satisfactory. Bosie was leading a promiscuous life when they first met, he continued to lead it, and Wilde shows no signs of having been jealous. So far as sex was concerned, the main importance of Bosie in Wilde’s life was that it was he who introduced Wilde, whose affairs had thitherto been confined to persons of his own class, to the world of male prostitution. When they met, Bosie, who was only just twenty-two, was already being blackmailed.

  Your defect was not that you knew so little about life, but that you knew too much…. The gutter and the things that live in it had begun to fascinate you…. terribly fascinating though the one topic round which your talk invariably centred was, still at the end it became quite monotonous to me.

  Their mutual attraction—incapable of love as Bosie was, Wilde’s existence was more important to him than the existence of anybody else except his father—was an affair of their egos rather than of their senses; one might say that the Overloved met the Underloved, and such an encounter is always extremely dangerous. Any child who discovers, as Bosie had, that he is hated and rejected by his father is bound to suffer from a feeling, however deeply he represses it, of profound unworthiness. If, when such a child grows up, he meets someone who appears to love him, particularly if this someone be older, his subconscious finds it impossible to believe that such a love is genuine, and he is driven, therefore, continually to test it by behaving badly. If the other rejects him, his suspicion is confirmed, but however often the other forgives, his suspicion can never be laid to rest for good and all. Further, if the feeling of unworthiness is strong enough, he may feel again subconsciously, a contempt for anyone who offers him affection: if his father was right to reject him, then anyone who accepts him is a fool and deserves to be tormented. Wilde was a famous and successful author; the first test, therefore, was to find out whether his love for Bosie was stronger than his love of writing. Wilde’s time had to be wasted:

  At twelve o’clock you drove up, and stayed smoking cigarettes and chattering till 1.30, when I had to take you out to luncheon at the Café Royal or the Berkeley. Luncheon with its liqueurs lasted usually till 3.30. For an hour you retired to White’s. At tea-time you appeared again and stayed till it was time to dress for dinner. You dined with me either at the Savoy or at Tite Street. We did not separate as a rule till after midnight, as supper at Willie’s had to wind up the entrancing day. That was my life for those three months, every single day, except during the four days when you went abroad.