OSCAR WILDE
3..5
society for help and protection." But this act was fully in character,
as
will become apparent. Even Wilde's offense seems symbolic in
this
way: the pertinent point about homosexuality is that it is not a crime
at
all,
while the point about Byron'S incest,
if
we take that as the
symbolic crime of the early part of the century, is that it is almost
always and everywhere a crime.
All Wilde's discussion of homosexuality suffers from senti–
mentality. Though he tries to relate it to his general sense of guilt
at having been undisciplined, he cannot come to grips with it in
moral terms. That is why
De Pro/undis,
when read in its censored
version, is like a stage confession, and when read in its totality (in
Hart-Davis's edition), is chiefly an exposure of another man's faults.
As
Wilde says to Lord Alfred Douglas, to whom it is addressed, "I
blame myself for the entire ethical degradation 1 allowed you to
bring on me." (To Robert Ross he wrote, "I admit 1 lost my head.
I
let him do what he wanted.") Yet even this confession ends in a
proposal that, almost as soon as Wilde
is
released from prison, they
should meet. Wilde's real view of his offense was quite different
from the judicial point of view of his time, but he could never
bring himself to say so in print, and the principle of sexual freedom,
which has been maintained by others with some moral grandeur, as
he knew, is never expressed in his writings. At his trial he made
his famous defense of the friendship of old men and young, with
Greek examples (though
Dorian Gray
moralized an opposite view),
but in the context of his own relations with boys at a male brothel
this was appealing to courtly love as a defense of whoring.
Wilde was reluctant to try to stop people from regarding him
as
a sinner;
it
was a kind of reputation he had enjoyed from the
time his first poems appeared, when respected citizens like Colonel
Thomas Wentworth Higginson of Boston complained in the press
that they were indecent, a distinction they could not really claim. So
far from curbing this talk about himself, Wilde assisted it; he sur–
prised Andre Gide by the open imprudence of his behavior in Algiers
in
1891,
he wrote his interpretation of Shakespeare's friendship with
Mr. W. H. and published it when it was bound to add to the talk
about him, and he surrounded Dorian Gray with the atmosphere
of unmentionable acts. So we are obliged to say that the role of
public sinner was one that Wilde had for a long time aspired to
