The Trial
of
Oscar Wilde

Issued for Private Circulation Only and Limited
to 50 Copies on Japanese Vellum and
Five Hundred Copies on Handmade Paper
Numbered from One to Five Hundred
and Fifty.

No 184

Text of Title Page

PREFACE

“It is wrong for us during the greater part of the time to handle these questions with timidity and false shame, and to surround them with reticence and mystery. Matters relating to sexual life ought to be studied without the introduction of moral prepossessions or of preconceived ideas. False shame is as hateful as frivolity. It is a matter of pressing concern to rid ourself of the old prejudice that we “sully our pens” by touching upon facts of this class. It is necessary at all costs to put aside our moral, esthetic, or religious personality, to regard facts of this nature merely as natural phenomena, with impartiality and a certain elevation of mind.”

PREFACE

In “De Profundis,” that harmonious and last expression of the perfect artist, Wilde seems, in a single page to have concentrated in guise of supreme confession, all the pain and passion that stirred and sobbed in his soul.

“This New Life, as through my love of Dante I like sometimes to call it, is of course no new life at all, but simply the continuance, by means of development, and evolution, of my former life. I remember when I was at Oxford saying to one of my friends as we were strolling round Magdalen’s narrow bird-haunted walks one morning in the year before I took my degree, that I wanted to eat of the fruit of all the trees in the garden of the world, and that I was going out into the world with that passion in my soul. And so, indeed, I went out, and so I lived. My only mistake was that I confined myself so exclusively to the trees of what seemed to me the sun-lit side of the garden, and shunned the other side for its shadow and its gloom. Failure, disgrace, poverty, sorrow, despair, suffering, tears even, the broken words that come from lips in pain, remorse that makes one walk on thorns, conscience that condemns, self-abasement that punishes, the misery that puts ashes on its head, the anguish that chooses sack-cloth for its raiment and into its own drink puts gall:—all these were things of which I was afraid. And as I had determined to know nothing of them, I was forced to taste each of them in turn, to feed on them, to have for a season, indeed no other food at all.”

Further on, he tells us that his dominant desire was to seek refuge in the deepest shade of the garden, for his mouth was full of the bitterness of the dead-sea fruit that he had tasted, adding that this tomb-like aroma was the befitting and necessary outcome of his preceding life of error.

We are inclined to think he deceived himself.

The day wherein he was at last compelled to face the horror of his tragical destiny his soul was tried beyond endurance. He strode deliberately, as he himself assures us, towards the gloomiest nook of the garden, inwardly trembling perhaps, but proud notwithstanding ... hoping against hope that the sun’s rays would seek him out even there ... or in other words, that he would not cease to live that Bios theoretikos, which he held to be the greatest ideal.

“From the high tower of Thought we can look out at the world. Calm, and self-centred, and complete, the æsthetic critic contemplates life, and no arrow drawn at a venture can pierce between the joints of his harness.”

We all know what arrows struck him, arrows that he himself had sharpened, and that Society had not forgotten to tip with poison.

“Neither his own heedlessness nor the envious and hypocritical anger of his enemies, nor the snobbish cruelty of social reprobation were the true cause of his misfortunes. It was he himself who, after a time of horrible anguish, consented to his punishment, with a sort of supercilious disdain for the weakness of human will, and out of a certain regard and unhealthy curiosity for the sportfulness of fate. Here was a voluptuary seeking for torture and desiring pain after having wallowed in every sensual pleasure.... Could such conduct have been due to aught else but sheer madness?”

The true debauchee has no such object. He seeks only for pleasure and discounts beforehand the conditions that Life dictates for the same; the conditions laid down containing no guarantee that the pleasure will be actually grasped except only in promise and anticipation. Later, too proud to acknowledge his cruel disappointment, he will gravely assure us that the bitterness left in the bottom of the goblet whose wine he has quaffed, has indeed the sweet taste that he sought after. Certain minds are satisfied with the fantasmagoria of their intelligence, whereas the voluptuary finds happiness only in the pleasure of realisation. In his heart he concocts for himself a prodigious mixture of sorrow and of joy, of suffering and of ecstacy, but the great world, wotting naught of this secret alchemy and judging only according to the facts which lie upon the surface, slices down to the same level, with the same stupid knife, the strange, beautiful flower, as well as the evil weed that grew apace.

Remy de Gourmont said of the famous author, Paul Adam, that he was “a magnificent spectacle.” Wilde may be pronounced a painful problem. He seems to escape literary criticism in order to fall under the keen scalping knife of the analytical moralist, by the paradoxical fact of his apparently imperious purpose to hew out and fashion forth his life as a work of art.

“Save here and there, in Intentions and in his poems, the Poem of Reading Gaol, nothing of his soul has he thrown into his books; he seemed to desire, one can almost postulate as a certainty, the stupendous tragedy that blasted his life. From the abyss where his flesh groaned in misery, his conscience hovered above him contemplating his woeful state whilst he thus became the spectator of his own death-throes.”[1]

That is the reason why he stirs us so deeply.

Those who might be tempted to search in his work for an echo however feeble, of a new message to mankind, will be grievously disappointed. The technical cleverness of Wilde is undeniable, but the magnificent dress in which he has clothed it appears to us to have been borrowed. He has