Part 3

A certain traveller, passing through the streets of a great city, came there upon a man whose countenance indicated a grief which he could not fathom. The traveller, being a curious student of the human heart, stopped him and said: “Sir, what is this grief which you carry before the eyes of all men, so grievous that it cannot be hidden, yet so deep that it cannot be read?”

The man answered: “It is not I who grieve so greatly; it is my soul, of which I cannot get rid. And my soul is more sorrowful than death, for it hates me, and I hate it.”

The traveller said: “If you will sell your soul to me, you can be well rid of it.” The other answered: “Sir, how can I sell you my soul?” “Surely,” replied the traveller, “you have but to agree to sell me your soul at its full price; then, when I bid it, it comes to me. But every soul has its true price; and only at that, neither at more nor at less, can it be bought.”

Then said the other: “At what price shall I sell you this horrible thing, my soul?”

The traveller answered: “When a man first sells his own soul he is like that other betrayer; therefore its price should be thirty pieces of silver. But after that, if it passes to other hands, its value becomes small; for to others the souls of their fellow men are worth very little.”

So for thirty pieces of silver the man sold his soul; and the traveller took it and departed.

Presently the man, having no soul, found that he could do no sin. Though he stretched out his arms to sin, sin would not come to him. “You have no soul,” said sin, and passed him by. “Wherefore should I come to you? I have no profit in a man that has no soul?”

Then the man without a soul became very miserable, for though his hands touched what was foul they remained clean, and though his heart longed for wickedness, it remained pure; and when he thirsted to dip his lips in fire, they remained cool.

Therefore a longing to recover his soul took hold of him, and he went through the world searching for the traveller to whom he had sold it, that he might buy it back and again taste sin in his own body.

After a long time the traveller met him; but hearing his request he laughed and said: “After a while your soul wearied me and I sold it to a Jew for a smaller sum than I paid for it.”

“Ah!” cried the man, “if you had come to me I would have paid more.” The traveller answered: “You could not have done that; a soul cannot be bought or sold but at its just price. Your soul came to be of small value in my keeping; so to be rid of it I sold it to the first comer for considerably less money than I paid in the beginning.”

So parting from him the man continued his quest, wandering over the face of the earth and seeking to recover his lost soul. And one day as he sat in the bazaar of a certain town a woman passed him, and looking at him said: “Sir, why are you so sad? It seems to me there can be no reason for such sadness.” The man answered: “I am sad because I have no soul, and am seeking to find it.”

The other said: “Only the other night I bought a soul that had passed through so many hands that it had become dirt-cheap; but it is so poor a thing I would gladly be rid of it. Yet I bought it for a mere song; and a soul can only be sold at its just price; how, then, shall I be able to sell it again—for what is worth less than a song? And it was but a light song that I sang over the wine-cup to the man who sold it me.”

When the other heard that, he cried: “It is my own soul! Sell it to me, and I will give you all that I possess!”

The woman said: “Alas, I did but pay for it with a song, and I can but sell it again at its just price. How then can I be rid of it, though it cries and laments to be set free?”

The man without a soul laid his head to the woman’s breast, and heard within it the captive soul whimpering to be set free, to return to the body it had lost. “Surely,” he said, “it is my own soul! If you will sell it to me I will give you my body, which is worth less than a song from your lips.”

So, for his body, the other sold to him the soul that whimpered to be set free to return to its own place. But so soon as he received it he rose up aghast: “What have you done?” he cried, “and what is this foul thing that has possession of me? For this soul that you have given me is not _my_ soul!”

The woman laughed and said: “Before you sold your soul into captivity it was a free soul in a free body; can you not recognize it now it comes to you from the traffic of the slave-market? So, then, your soul has the greater charity, since it recognizes and returns to you, though you have sold your body miserably into bondage!”

And thus it was that the man had to buy back, at the cost of his body, the soul which he let go for thirty pieces of silver.

(_With occasional pauses imposed for effect, but without any hesitation or change in the choice of word, the ordered narrative has run its course. But in spite of the decorative form, and the decorative modulations of tone, there is an under-current of passion; and his friends, undeceived by that quiet deliberateness of speech, know that the speaker is greatly moved. And so, at the end, there is a pause while nobody speaks. At the kiosk opposite a newsboy arrives, and delivers a bundle of papers to the woman in charge. Over her is an announcement to the Englishman, in his native tongue, that his own papers are there on sale. From the restaurant comes a garçon charged with a message, and wishing to have instructions. The two, who have shared in the arrangement, exchange glances interrogatively; R.R. looks at his watch and nods. L.H. signs to the garçon who has served the aperitifs._)

R.R. Let us go in to lunch. Jerrold is not coming; he has forgotten us.

O.W. Not all of us, Robbie. He came, but he has gone again.

(_They all look at him in astonishment; and, for a moment, nobody speaks. Then_:)

R.R. Came? _Here_, do you mean?

O.W. Looking as young and charming as ever. But, as soon as he looked at me, I saw he had entirely forgotten me.

(_There is nothing possible to be said. L.H. makes haste to pay for the aperitifs; and with the anxiety of an Englishman, unpractised in foreign ways, to do what is right for the reputation of his country in a strange land, he puts down an additional pour-boire, five bronze pieces in all, to correspond to the number who have been served. With grave apologetic politeness his guest lays an arresting hand upon his arm; and (while the garçon whisks away the douceur with cheerful alacrity) instructs him for future occasions_.)

O.W. My dear L.H., you should not do that! The Frenchman, for these casual services, gives what you call a penny. The Englishman gives what some of them call “tuppence”; not because he does not know that the Frenchman’s penny is sufficient, but because he is an Englishman. If you give more than that the waiter only thinks that you do not know where you are.

L.H. (_who has a weakness for putting himself in the right, even in quite small matters_.) Ah, yes, Mr. Wilde, that may be, but here, at St. Helena, one tips the waiters differently.

(_It is touching to see what pleasure that foolish but fortunate little “mot” has given to the man for whom it was designed. They have all now risen; and their next move will be to the tabled interior, where pleasant courses are awaiting them. But the forward movement is delayed; and it is with a curious air of finality, as though already taking his leave, that O.W. speaks._)

O.W. My friends, we have had a wonderful hour together. I have been very happy. Excuse me: I am going across to get an English paper. The woman at the kiosk, who sells them, is a charming character: she compliments my accent by pretending to think that I am French. Go in: I beg you not to wait for me.

(_They see him cross the street, with his accustomed air of leisurely deliberation—a little amused to notice how the vehement traffic has to pause and make way for him. At the kiosk he and the woman exchange words and smiles. He lifts his hat and turns away._)

L.H. (_startled_). He’s not coming back?

R.R. Harvey Jerrold wants kicking. Poor Oscar!

H.A. Shall I go after him?

R.R. No, no! Let him go. We understand.

(_And they all stand and watch, as he passes slowly down the street, till he disappears in the crowd._)

Footnote

Twenty years after a man’s death is usually a sufficient time to compose, in their proper unimportance, the prejudices and enmities which have surrounded his career. But in this particular case, I suppose, it has hardly done so; and the man who was so greatly over-rated by his own following, during those ten years of literary and social triumph which made him the vogue, was, in the ten years after, as carefully under-rated, not because the quality of his work had proved itself poor and ephemeral, but because of something that he had done.

The blight which fell on his literary reputation was about as sensible in its application as it would have been for historians to deny that Marlborough was a great general because he peculated and took bribes, or that Mahomet was a great religious leader because he had a number of wives, or that David was a great poet because he preferred the love of Jonathan to the love of women. In which last-named absurdity of critical inconsequence we have something very much to the point; and it is upon that point, and because the world has been so unintelligently slow in seizing it, that I am moved to write this footnote to my dialogue, with which, in subject, it has so little to do.

Always, so long as it stays remembered, the name of Oscar Wilde is likely to carry with it a shadowy implication of that strange pathological trouble which caused his downfall. And whatever else may be said for or against the life of promiscuous indulgence he appears to have led, his downfall did at least this great service to humanity, that—by the sheer force of notoriety—it made the “unmentionable” mentionable; and marks the dividing of the ways between the cowardice and superstitious ignorance with which the problem had been treated even by sociologists and men of science, and the fearless analysis of origins and causes which has now become their more reputable substitute.

Obscurantists may still insist on treating as an acquired depravity what medical research has now proved to be an involuntary or congenital deflection from a “normality” which exact science finds it harder and harder to define. But in spite of these surviving resistances to the formation of a new social conscience, intelligence is at work, and to-day it is no longer eccentric or disreputable to insist that the whole problem shall henceforth be studied and treated from the medical, rather than from the criminal standpoint; so that in future, whatever limitation of reticence or segregation society decides to impose on men whose tendencies are ineradicably homo-sexual, the treatment shall be health-giving in character and purpose, carrying with it no social or moral damnation of those who, in the vast majority of cases, have been made what they are by forces outside their own volition, either at their birth or in early infancy.

The comical ignorance and ineptitude of which quite brilliant minds are capable in regard to a matter that they wish to relegate to mental obscurity, was well exemplified in the remarks made to me on this subject, only ten years ago, by one who ranked then as now among the most eminent of British bacteriologists. He had been told, he said, that homo-sexuality came from meat-eating; and his solution of the problem was to have all homo-sexuals put to death. But the subject, he went on to say, did not interest him; nor did he propose to give the meat-eaters (of whom he himself was one) any warning of their pathological danger, or of his proposed remedy for the pathological condition to which their meat-eating habits might bring them. Having escaped the infection himself, he was quite willing, apparently, to leave the rest to chance. It was, he had been told, very prevalent, but personally he had not come across it. And so he continued to interest himself in bacteriology, through which fame, wealth, and title had come to him.

As I left his consulting-room I felt as though I had just emerged from the Middle Ages, and from listening to the discourse of some learned theologian—a marvellous expert in the doctrine of the Incarnation and the Procession of the Holy Spirit, but still believing that the sun went round the earth, and that the earth was flat; and though—God aiding him—he would put to death any who thought otherwise, the subject did not interest him!

He remains to me a portentous example of how a really brilliant mind can totter into second infancy when called upon to dig for the roots of knowledge outside his own cabbage-patch in hitherto uncultivated ground.

What led me to this strange scientific experience was very much to the point. For it was just then, ten years ago, that I had been asked to join a society having for its object the formation of a more intelligent and less servile public opinion on this and various other difficult sex problems which are a part of human nature. I agreed to do so upon one condition—that membership should be open to men and women on equal terms, and that women should be upon the executive committee. Even in that comparatively enlightened group the proposal seemed revolutionary; and I was asked whether I realized that such things as homo-sexuality would have to be openly discussed. My answer was: “That is why we must include women.” I contended that where a problem concerns both sexes alike, only by the full co-operation of both sexes can it be rightly solved.

My contention was admitted to be sound, and the society was formed on the equal basis I had advocated; and perhaps one of its best discoveries is that, in a body of social goodwill, there is no such thing as “the unmentionable.” Since then, women have been called to juries, and it has become a duty of good citizenship for them to share with men the knowledge of things which the obscurantists, in order to keep them as a male perquisite, chose to describe as “unmentionable.”

“E pur se muove”: that wise old saying continues to have its application in every age. Always, at some contentious point in the affairs of men, belief in knowledge and belief in ignorance stand as antagonists. The nineteenth century had its superstitions, quite as much as the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries, when loyalty to the Mosaic law made the persecution of witchcraft a religious duty. And a surviving superstition of our own time has been that false and foolish moral insistence on regarding certain maladjustments of nature as something too horrible to be mentioned, and of putting the victims thereof in a class apart, rather lower than the ordinary criminal. The old theological idea that the world was flat reproduced itself in another form; and so, in spite of the advance of science, the moral world had to remain flat and simple, unencumbered by nature-problems, for fear of the terrible things it might have to contain and account for if once admitted to be round.

Twentieth-century science is busy proving to us that the moral world is dangerously round; and it is no use trying to fall off it by walking about it with shut eyes. From a flat world that method of escape might be conceivably possible, but not from a round. A round world has us in its grip; and it is our duty as intelligent human beings to face the danger and get used to it.

What a strange irony of life that the man who tried most to detach himself from the unlovely complications of modern civilization should have become the symbol, or the byword, of one of its least solved problems; and that society’s blind resentment toward a phenomenon it had not the patience or the charity to trace to its origin, should have supplied him so savagely with that “complete life of the artist” which success could never have given him.

Transcriber’s Notes

pg 44 Changed: Oscar, you are perfectly asburd! to: Oscar, you are perfectly absurd!