ABSTRACT
In April 1913, Lord Alfred Douglas having brought an action against Mr. Arthur Ransome, the author of a well-known monograph on Wilde, and claiming damages in respect of certain statements contained therein, Mr. Ross, acting on behalf of the defendant, caused parts of the unpublished portion of De Profundis to be read out in court, to prove that the incriminating passages, if libellous at all, were in every way justified by the actual facts. Full reports of this trial, which roused considerable interest, appeared at the time in the London press, and so we may be said to have anticipated to some extent the sensations that were to have been reserved for the curious of a future generation. That part of Wilde’s letter which has still been withheld from publication, may be characterized briefly, in so far as it bears on Lord Alfred Douglas, as a vicious attack on the latter, in his capacity of friend and man of letters. But of the real character of this work, commenced as a letter to Lord Alfred Douglas and bearing his address, Lord Alfred himself states that he had no knowledge whatever up to the moment the unpublished MSS. were produced against him in court,— although a copy of it is alleged to have been sent him by post on its completion. And it does not seem an unreasonable deduction, in view of what is now known, for him to describe the expurgated De Profundis as ‘a collection of elegant extracts’ affording no faithful picture of the author’s frame of mind at the time of writing, nor of the trend and spirit of the work as a whole. However, Lord Alfred, esteeming that never was fouler deed of defa-mation and backbiting perpetrated by a false friend upon an honourable and innocent man, and failing, moreover, to obtain a verdict in his libel action, set to work upon a volume that was to be, not merely a thorough and final refutation of the charges brought against him by Wilde, but also an impartial estimate of the latter, of his personality and writings, and of his influence on the thought and letters of his age. All his life, he says, from his twentieth year, had been ‘overshadowed and filled with scandal and grief through his association with Wilde;—he wished to be done with it all, to silence at a blow and forever the thousand tongues set wagging with all manner of preposterous rumours and filthy slander. As for his competence to judge Wilde as a literary man, he frankly gives it as his opinion that ‘there is no man living who can put Oscar Wilde into his true relation to the life and literature of his time more accurately.’ [In the excerpts that follow, Bendz defends Wilde as a writer against Douglas’s judgments. (For earlier estimates of Wilde by Douglas, see Nos. 49 and 104).]
We have seen that, in his position of the once intimate associate of Wilde, Lord Alfred puts forward the claim to be considered the one and only authority. Just as on the moral side it was his aim to establish, on
the strength of his own evidence, that Wilde was a scoundrel, an evil liver, and a vituperative slanderer, so he tries to make out a case against him as an author, on the plea that his works have been immensely overestimated and have exerted a disastrous influence on the literature and the journalism of the age. Or let us have it in his own words:—‘With the passing of the years and a more serious and mature outlook on the facts of life and on the responsibilities of those who seek the suffrages or merely the ears of the general reader, I had arrived at the conclusion that Oscar Wilde’s writings were ridiculously over-rated, that he was never either a great poet or a great writer of prose, and that the harm he had caused to the whole body of English literature, and the pernicious effect he had exercised on the literary movements and the journalism of the period immediately succeeding his own, very much more than counterbalanced the credit of any legitimate success he may have achieved.’
