Oscar Wilde: Quotations (2)

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Letters
Letter to Royal Theatrical Fund: ‘I would like to protest against the statement that I have ever called a spade a spade. The man who did it should be condemned to use one. I have been accused of lashing vice, but I can assure you that nothing was further from my intentions. Those who have seen Lady Windermere’s Fan will see that if there is one particular doctrine contained in it, it is that of sheer individualism. It is not for anyone to censure what anyone else does, and everyone should of his own way to whatever place he chooses, in exactly the way he chooses.’ (Quoted in Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, 1987, pp.347-48; cited in Mooney, op. cit., 1999, p.42; cf. comic remarks on ‘spade’ in extracts from Importance of being Earnest - as attached.)

Letter to Arthur Balfour - in answer to the question, ‘What is your religion?’: ‘I don’t think I have one, Mr Balfour, I am an Irish Protestant.’ (q. source.)

Wilde to Bosie [Lord Alfred Douglas] (Summer 1894): ‘Your father is on the rampage again - been to the Café Royal to enquire for us, with threats &c. I think now it would have been better for me to have had him bound over to keep the peace, but what a scandal! Still, it is intolerable to be dogged by a maniac.’ (Letters, ed. Rupert Hart-Davis, 1962; q.p.; quoted in Katherine Walker, UG Diss., UUC 2006.)

Letter to Lord Douglas [Bosie]: ‘[O]ur ill-fated and lamentable friendship has ended in ruin and public infamy for me’ (Letters of Oscar Wilde, London 1962, p.424). ‘Your terrible lack of imagination, the only really fatal defect in your character, was entirely the result of the Hate that lived in you.’ (Ibid.). ‘[...] in your hideous game of hate together [Bosie and Queensberry], you had both thrown the dice for my soul, and you happened to have lost. That is all.’ (Ibid., p.448.)

Letter to Anne de Bremont: ‘I wrote when I did not know life, now that I know the meaning of life, I have no more to write.’ (cited in Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, 1987, p.544.)

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On his own works
An Ideal Husband [asked by a reader what the critics had missed]: ‘Its entire psychology - the difference in the way in which a man loves a woman from that in which a woman loves a man, the passion that women have for making ideals (which is their weakness) and the weakness of a man who dares not show his imperfections to the thing that he loves. The end of Act I, the end of Act II, and the scene in the last act, where Lord Goring points out the higher importance of a man’s life over a woman’s - to take three prominent instances - seem to have been quite missed by most of the critics. They failed to see their meaning; they really thought it was a play about a bracelet.’ (The Sketch, 12 Jan. 1895; quoted in Fionnula Henderson, “Oscar Wilde and Aestheticism: A Study of the Social Comedies”, UG Disseration on Wilde, UUC [2001].)

[Cf., ‘the love that dares not speak its name’ - as infra.]

Lady Windermere’s Fan: in a letter to his American agent, Wilde calls his Lord Darlington ‘not a villain, but a man who really believes that Windermere is treating his wife badly, and wishes to save her.’ (Rupert Hart-Davis, ed., More Letters, 1985, p.119.)

The Importance of Being Earnest : ‘[It is an] exquisitely trivial, and a delicate bubble of fantasy, and it has its philosophy … that we should treat all the trivial things of life very seriously and all the serious things of life with sincere and studied triviality.’ [q. source.]

The Picture of Dorian Gray: ‘My story is an essay in decorative art. To give plot issue Dorian had to be surrounded with an atmosphere of moral corruption, but this atmosphere was kept vague and indeterminable. Each man sees his own sin in Dorian Gray, what Dorian’s sins are no one knows. He who finds them has brought them. (Letters, p.266.) ‘Basil Hallward is what I think I am, Lord Henry what the world thinks of me, Dorian what I would like to be - in other ages, perhaps [...] To the world I seem, by intention on my part, a dilettante and a dandy merely - it is not wise to show one’s heart to the world [...] In so vulgar an age as this we all need masks.’ (Letters, 352.) ‘All excess as well as renunciation brings its own punishment.’ (Letters, p.263.) ‘His chief war was against the Philistines [...] Philistinism was the note of the age and community in which he lived. In their heavy inaccessibility to ideas, their dull respectability, their tedious orthodoxy, their worship of vulgar success, their intense preoccupation with the gross materialistic side of life, and their ridiculous estimate of themselves and their own importance, the Jews of Jerusalem were the exact counterpart of the British Philistine of our own [day]’, Letters, p.485.) ‘I used to rely on my personality, now I know that my personality really rested on the fiction of a position. Having lost position, I find my personality of no avail.’ (Letters, p.791). On his own plays: ‘I took the drama, the most objective form known to art, and made of it as personal a mode of expression as the lyric or the sonnet; at the same time I widened its range and enriched its characterisation.’ (De Profundis, q.p.) On Lady Windermere’s Fan: ‘[I]t is [a] quality of fashionable ease which represents his greatest contribution to the stage.’

The Happy Prince: ‘I like to fancy that there may be many meanings in the Tale - for in writing it [...] I did not start with the idea and clothe it in form, but began with a form and strove to make it beautiful enough to have many secrets and many answers.’ (Letter to Thos. Hutchinson, 7 May 1888; Hart-Davis, ed., Letters, p.218; quoted in Angela Kingston, ‘Homeroticism and the Child in Wilde’s Fairy Tales’, in The Wildean, July 2001, p.44.)

“Reading Gaol” (1895): ‘The poem suffers under the difficulty of a divided aim in style. Some is realistic, some is romantic: some poetry, some propaganda [...] but as a whole I think the production interesting: that it is interesting from more points than one is artistically to be regretted.’ (Letter to Robert Ross; quoted in Seamus Heaney, ‘Speranza in Reading: On “The Ballad of Reading Gaol”’, in The Redress of Poetry [Oxford Poetry Lectures], London: Faber & Faber 1995, p.88; note that Heaney conjectures with Yeats that Wilde might have revised the poem [as Yeats himself did for Modern Verse ].)

“The Happy Prince”: ‘I like to fancy that there may be many meanings in the Tale - for in writing it [...] I did not start with the idea and clothe it in form, but began with a form and strove to make it beautiful enough to have many secrets and many answers.’ (Letter to Thos. Hutchinson, 7 May 1888; Hart-Davis, Letters, p.218; quoted in Angela Kingston, ‘Homeroticism and the Child in Wilde’s Fairy Tales’, in The Wildean, July 2001, p.44; cited in Terry Eagleton, ‘The Doubleness of Oscar Wilde’, in The Wildean, 19, July 2001, pp.2-9.) Note that the authors contests the suggestion that there was any hint of pedophilia in Wilde’s sexuality.

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Aestheticism: ‘Aestheticism is a search after the signs of the beautiful. [...] It is, to speak more exactly, the search after the secret of Life.’ Further: ‘It is a wide field which has no limit, and all definitions are unsatisfactory. [...] But the search, if carried on with the right laws would constitute aestheticism.’ (interview in America; q.source.) Also: ‘I myself would sacrifice everything for a new experience and know that there is no such thing as a new experience at all .. I would go to the stake for a sensation and be sceptic to the last … There is an unknown land full of strange flowers and subtle perfumes, a land of which it is a joy of all joys to dream, a land where all things are perfect and poisonous.’ (Letter to young man in Cambridge; quoted in Merlin Holland, Wilde Album, 1997, pp.126-27.)

Irishness: ‘I am Irish by race, but the English have condemned me to speak the language of Shakespeare’ (Letter to de Goncourt, Letters, p.100; Selected Letters, p.197.) ‘We have sold our birthright for a mess of facts’ (The Critic as Artist, ed. Ellmann, London 1970, p.300). But cf.: ‘It is only by contact with the art of foreign nations that the art of a country gains that individual and separate life that we call nationality ...’ (Ibid., p.373.)

Celticity (1): ‘It is the Celt who leads in art [...] there is no reason why in future years this strange Renaissance should not be almost as mighty in its way as that new birth of art that woke many centuries ago in the cities of Italy.’ (Critic as Artist, ed. Ellmann, London 1970, p.396; The Works of Oscar Wilde, Galley Press Edn., 1987, p.989.)

Celticity (2): ‘Indeed the poetic genius of the Celtic race never flags or wearies. It is as sweet by the groves of California as by the groves of Ireland, as strong in foreign lands as in the land which gave it birth. And indeed I do not know anything more wonderful, or more characteristic of the Celtic genius, than the quick artistic spirit in which we adapted ourselves to the English tongue. The Saxon took our lands from us and left them desolate - we took their language and added new beauties to it.’ (Quoted in Montgomery Hyde, Oscar Wilde, 1976, 68-69; all the foregoing cited in John Jordan [essay on Shaw, Wilde, Synge and Yeats], in Richard Kearney, ed., The Irish Mind, 1985, p.213; see also Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, 1995, p.35.]

Celticity (3): ‘I do not know anything more wonderful, or more characteristic of the Celtic genius, than it quick artistic spirit in which we adapted ourselves to the English tongue.’ (Selected Letters, p.100; cited in Selina Mooney, UUC DMA Diss. 1999.)

Irish art: ‘Since the English occupation, we have had no national art in Ireland at all. And there is not the slightest chance of our ever having it until we get that right of legislative independence so unjustly robbed from us, until we are really an Irish nation.’ (Quoted in Harrry Browne, ‘Wildean Nationalism’, review of Thomas Davis Wilde memorial lectures, RTE, in The Irish Times [q.d.])

Anglo-Irish authors [Croker and Lover]: ‘a humorist’s Arcadia [...] they came from a class that did not - mainly for political reasons - take the populace seriously [...] of its passion, its gloom, its tragedy, they knew nothing.’ (Artist as Critic, ed. Ellmann, London 1970, p.130.)

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English civilisation: ‘England will never be civilised till she has added Utopia to her dominions [...] there is more than one of her colonies that she might with advantage surrender for so fair a land.’ (ibid., p.386) [All the foregoing cited in Declan Kiberd, ‘Oscar Wilde: The Artist as Irishman’, in Inventing Ireland, London: Cape 1995, pp.33-50.]

Young Irelanders: ‘As regards these men of forty-eight, I look on their work with peculiar reverence and love, for I was indeed trained by my mother to love and reverence them, as a catholic child is the saints of the calendar. The earliest hero of my childhood was Smith O’Brien, whom I remember well - tall and stately with a dignity of one who had fought for a noble idea and the sadness of one who had failed [...]. John Mitchel, too, on his return to Ireland I saw, at my father’s table with his eagle eye and impassioned manner. Charles Gavan Duffy is one of my friends in London, and the poets among them were men who made their lives noble [and wrote noble] poems also, men who had not merely written about the sword, who not only could rhyme to liberty, but could die for her also, if need had so been. [...] The greatest of them all, and one of the best poets of this century in Europe was, I need not say, Thomas Davis. Born in the year 1814 at Mallow in County Cork, before he was thirty years of age, he and the other young men of the Nation newspaper had, to use Father Burke’s eloquent words, created ‘by sheer power of Irish intellect, by sheer strength of Irish genius, a national poetry and a national literature which no other nation can equal.’ ‘Of the quality of Speranza’s poems I, perhaps, should not speak, for criticism is disarmed before love, but I am content to abide by the verdict of the nation, which has so welcomed her genius and understood the song - noticeably for its strength and simplicity - that ballad of my mother’s on  “The Trial of The Brothers Sheares” in ’98.’ (‘The Irish Poets of ’48’, an address given in San Francisco on 5 April 1882; rep. in Montgomery Hyde’s Oscar Wilde and cited in John Jordan’s essay on Irish dramatist’s in Richard Kearney, ed., The Irish Mind, 1985, p.213; also cited at length in Seamus Heaney, ‘Speranza in Reading: On “The Ballad of Reading Gaol”’, The Redress of Poetry [Oxford Poetry Lectures], London: Faber & Faber 1995, pp.98-99 [presumably from Ellmann, 1987]; also in part in Montgomery Hyde, Oscar Wilde, London 1976, pp.68-69).

Wilde to Yeats: ‘Ah, Yeats, we Irish are too poetical to be poets; we are a nation of brilliant failures.’ Further, on John Butler Yeats in reply to the question, ‘Could he paint?’: ‘Not in the least; that was the beauty of it.’ (Both the foregoing remarks quoted in A. N. Jeffares, W. B. Yeats: A New Life, 1988, quoting Richard Ellmann’s life of Wilde (1987);

Cf. R. F. Foster, Luck and the Irish: A Brief History of Change 1970-2000 (London: Allen Lane: 2007): ‘W. B. Yeats liked to remember Oscar Wilde announcing to him over Christmas dinner, “we are a nation of brilliant failures, but are the greatest talkers since the Greeks”. The failure has been replaced by success, but the talk goes on’ (p.29) - and also: ‘Wilde’s “nation of brilliant failures” decided to get lucky and decided to become successful, not before time.’ (Ibid., p.36.)

C. S. Parnell: ‘at home [Charles Stewart Parnell] had but learnt the pathetic weakness of nationality, but in a strange land realised what indomitable forces nationality possesses.’ (Quoted in Ellmann, Wilde, p.389.)

Music: ‘Music always [...] creates for one a past of which one has been ignorant, and fills one with a sense of sorrows that have been hidden form one’s tears. I can fancy a man who had led a perfectly commonplace life, hearing by chance some curious piece of music, and suddenly discovering that his soul, without his being conscious of it, had passed through terrible experiences, and know fearful joys, or wild romantic loves, or great renunciations.’ (“Intentions”, in The Artist as Critic, ed. Ellmann, NY: Vintage 1970, p.343; quoted in Sheldon Brivic, Joyce the Creator, Wisconsin UP 1985, pp.6-7.)

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Reviews
‘Mr Froude’s Blue Book’, review of The Two Chiefs of Dunboye by J. A. Froude, in Pall Mall Gazette (13 April 1889): ‘Blue Books are generally dull reading but Blue Books on Ireland have always been interesting. They form the record of one of the greatest tragedies of modern Europe. In them England has written down her indictment against herself, and has given to the world the history of her shame. If in the last century she tried to rule Ireland with an insolence that was intensified by race-hatred and religious prejudice, she has sought to rule her in this century with a stupidity that is aggravated by good intentions.’ (p.3.) [Cont.]

‘Mr Froude’s Blue Book’ (Pall Mall Gazette, April 1889) - cont.: ‘Mr Froude admits the martyrdom of Ireland, but regrets that the martyrdom was not completely carried out [... his] resumé of the History of Ireland [no ital., sic] is not without power, though it is far from being really accurate [...] on every second page we come across aphorisms on the Irish character [...] it is dull [...] there are some who will welcome with delight the idea of solving the Irish question by doing away with the Irish people.’ [See also under Froude.] Further, Wilde on Froude as epitome of England’s error: ‘If in the last century she tried to govern Ireland with an insolence that was intensified by race hatred and religious prejudice, she has sought to rule her in this century with a stupidity that is aggravated by good intentions’. Wilde closes the review by inverting the author’s declared purposes, of the book considered as ‘a record of the incapacity of a Teutonic to rule a Celtic people against their own wishes his book is not without value.’ (Quoted in Declan Kiberd, ‘Oscar Wilde: The Artist as Irishman’, Times Literary Supplement, Dec. 1994; see also Inventing Ireland, 1995, p.37.) [Cont.]

‘Mr Froude’s Blue Book’ (Pall Mall Gazette, April 1889) - cont.: ‘In a strange land [America], the Irish have realised ‘what indomitable forces nationality possesses. What captivity has been to the Jews, exile is to the Irish. America and American influence have educated them. [...] There are some who will welcome with delight the idea of solving the Irish question by doing away with the Irish people. There are others who will remember that Ireland has extended her boundaries, and that we have now to reckon with her not merely in the Old World but also in the New.’ (review of J. A. Froude, Two Chiefs of Dunboye ; in The Artist as Critic, rep. in The Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde, ed. R. Ellmann, W. H. Allen 1973; quoted in Neil Sammells, ‘Oscar Wilde: Quite Another Thing’, Irish Writing, Exile and Subversion, ed. Paul Hyland & Sammells, London: Macmillan 1991, pp.116-25; p.117; see also under Froude, supra.)

Wilfred Scawen Blunt (review of Poems), ‘The opening sonnets, composed in the bleak cell in Galway Gaol, and written down on the fly-leaves of the prisoner’s prayer-book, are full of things nobly conceived and nobly uttered, and show that though Mr Balfour may enforce “plain living” by his prison regulations, he cannot prevent “high thinking” or in any way limit or constrain the freedom of a man’s soul. [...] Literature is not much indebted to Mr Balfour for his sophistical Defence of Philosophic Doubt, which is one of the dullest books we know, but it must be admitted that by sending Mr Blunt to gaol he has converted a clever rhymer into an earnest and deep-thinking poet. The narrow confines of a prison cell seem to suit the “sonnet’s scant plot of ground”, and an unjust imprisonment for a noble cause strengthens as well as deepens the nature.’ (Pall Mall Gazette, 3 Jan. 1889; quoted by Owen Dudley Edwards, ‘The Soul of Man under Hibernicism’ in Irish Studies Review, Summer 1995, p.p.12-13.) [See further under Blunt, infra.]

Defence of Dorian Gray [1] - letter to St James’s Gazette: ‘What is important is that the editor of a paper like yours should appear to countenance the monstrous theory that the government of a country should exercise a censorship over imaginative literature. This is a theory against which I, and all men of letters of my acquaintance, protest most strongly; and any critic who admits reasonableness of such a theory shows at once that he is quite incapable of understanding what literature is, and what right literature possess. A Government might just as well try to teach painters how to painters how to paint, or sculptors how to make models, as attempts to interfere with the style, treatment and subject matter of the literary artist; and no writer, however eminent or obscure, should ever give his sanction to a theory that would degrade literature far more than any other didactic or so-called immoral book could possibly do.’ (in Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde, ed. Richard Ellmann, London: W. H Allen 1968), p.241.

Defence of Dorian Gray [2] - letter to The Daily Chronicle (30 June 1890): ‘As for what your moral is, your critic states that it is this - that when a man feels himself becoming “too angelic” he should rush out and make a “beast of himself!” I cannot say that I consider this a moral. The real moral of the story is that all excess, as well as all renunciation, brings its punishment, and this moral is so far artistically and deliberately suppressed that it does not enunciate its law as a general principle, but realises itself purely in the lives of individuals, and so becomes simply a dramatic element in a work of art, and not the object of the work of art itself.’ (Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde, ed. Richard Ellmann (London: W. H Allen 1968, p.246; the preceding letters to newspapers quoted in Danielle Moore, UU Diss., UUC 2012.)

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The Trial & After

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The love that dares not speak its name: OW [in response to a question asked by Charles Gill, prosecuting, 26 April 1895]: ‘The “Love that dare not speak its name” in this century is such a great affection of an elder for a younger man as there was between David and Jonathan, such as Plato made the very basis for his philosophy, and such as you find in the sonnets of Michelangelo and Shakespeare. It is that deep, spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect. It dictates and pervades great works of art like those of Shakespeare and Michelangelo, and those two letters of mine, such as they are. In this century [it is] misunderstood, so much misunderstood that it may be described as the “Love that dare not speak its name”, and on account of it I am placed where I am now. It is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest form of affection. There is nothing unnatural about it. It is intellectual, and it repeatedly exists between an elder and a younger man, when the elder man has intellect, and the younger man has all the joy, hope and glamour of life before him. That it should be so the world does not understand. The world mocks at it and sometimes puts one in the pillory for it.’ (Q. source; ?Montgomery Hyde.) Cf., ‘weakness of a man who dares not show his imperfections’ - as supra.

Note: In 1894 Bosie published a poem “Two Loves” (Chameleon, Dec. 1894), in which he writes: ‘I am the love that dares not speak its name’ - as given under Notes > infra:

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Note: The first letter (Jan. 1893 - as supra) was introduced be Wilde’s defence barrister, Sir Edward Clarke, to forestall its use by the prosecution.

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On boy-love (after release from Reading Gaol): ‘a patriot put in prison for his loving his country loves his country, and a poet in prison for loving boys loves boys.’ (Letters, p.705).

Cf. his remark on Constance, reported by Robert Ross: ‘[I cannot stand] ‘the Romany smells of her body’. (Quoted by James Douglas [Radio Éireann preview of his Oscar Wilde series, May 1995]).

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Children in prison - Letter to the Editor, The Daily Chronicle [London], Friday 28th May 1897) - written by Wilde shortly after his release from Reading Gaol.

‘The present treatment of children is terrible, primarily from people not understanding the peculiar psychology of a child’s nature. A child cannot understand a punishment inflicted by society. It cannot realise what society is. With grown up people it is, of course, the reverse. Those of us who are either in prison, or have been sent there, can understand, and do understand, what that collective force called society means, and whatever we may think of its methods or claims, we can force ourselves to accept it.

‘The child consequently, being taken away from its parents by people whom it has never seen, and of whom it knows nothing, and finding itself in a lonely and unfamiliar cell, waited on by strange faces, and ordered about and punished by representatives of a system that it cannot understand, becomes an immediate prey to the first and most prominent emotion produced by modern prison - the emotion of terror.  

‘The terror of a child in prison is quite limitless. I remember once, in Reading, as I was going out to exercise, seeing in the dimly-lit cell right opposite my own, a small boy. Two warders - not unkindly men - were talking to him with some sternness apparently, or perhaps giving him some useful advice about his conduct. One was in the cell with him, the other was standing outside. The child’s face was like a white wedge of sheer terror. There was in his eyes the terror of a hunted animal.

‘The next morning I heard him at breakfast time crying, and calling to be let out. His cry was for his parents. From time to time I could hear the deep voice of the warder on duty telling him to keep quiet. Yet he was not even convicted of whatever little offence he had been charged with. He was simply on remand. That I knew by his wearing his own clothes, which seemed neat enough. He was, however, wearing prison socks and shoes. This showed that he was a very poor boy, whose own shoes, if he had any, were in a bad state. Justices and magistrates, an entirely ignorant class as a rule, often remand children for a week, and then perhaps remit whatever sentence they are entitled to pass. They call this “not sending a child to prison”. It is, of course, a stupid view on their part. To a little child whether he is in prison on remand, or after conviction is not a subtlety of social position he can comprehend. To him the horrible thing is to be there at all. In the eyes of humanity it should be a horrible thing for him to be there at all. [...]

‘There is not a single man in Reading Gaol that would not gladly have done the three children’s punishment for them. When I saw them last, it was on the Tuesday following their conviction. I was taking exercise at half-past eleven with about twelve other men, as the three children passed near us in the charge of a warder, from the damp, dreary stone-yard in which they had been at exercise. I saw the greatest pity and sympathy in the eyes of my companions as they looked at them. Prisoners are, as a class, extremely kind and sympathetic to each other.

It is not the prisoners who need reformation. It is the prisons.

Of course no child under fourteen years of age should be sent to prison at all. It is an absurdity, and, like many absurdities, of absolutely tragic results. If, however, they are to be sent to prison, during the daytime they should be in a workshop or schoolroom with a warder. At night they should sleep in a dormitory, with a night-warder to look after them. They should be allowed exercise for at least three hours a day. The dark, badly ventilated, ill-smelling prison cells are dreadful for a child, dreadful indeed for anyone. One is always breathing bad air in prison. The food given to children should consist of tea and bread-and-butter and soup. Prison soup is very good and wholesome.

A resolution of the House of Commons could settle the treatment of children in half-an-hour. I hope you will use your influence to have this done. The way that children are treated at present is really an outrage on humanity and common sense. It comes from stupidity.

       Sir, your obedient servant,
                             Oscar Wilde

May 27th 1897’

[Quoted in part in Lynsey Turner, UG Diss, UUC 2008; in part in Danielle Moore, UG Diss., UUC 1212; available at The National Archive - online.]

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All wrong ...?: A letter of 1887 to the young journalist Richard Vian (22 - and formerly a Balliol student) which came to auction in Sept. 2010 shows Wilde propositioning him shortly before he meets his fatal amour Bosie:

Note: The letter, with four others spannig 1885-87, were auctioned by Bamfords on 24 Sept. 2010. The proposed article would deal with answers given by American school-children. An estimate of £10,000 was placed on the letters. (See article by Andy McSmith in The Guardian, 16 Sept. 2010 - online; accessed 19.10.2010.)

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Letter to Frank Harris, ‘[…] while the public liked to hear of my pain - curiosity and autobiographical form being elements of interest - I am not sure that they will welcome me again in airy mood and spirit, mocking at morals, and defiance of social rules.’ (Letters, 1962, p. 780; see also under Harris, infra.)

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Life-style: ‘Of course I have passed through a very terrible punishment and have suffered to the very pitch of anguish and despair. Still I am conscious that I was leading a life quite unworthy of an artist in every way and unworthy of the a son of my dear mother whose nobility whose nobility of soul and intellect you always appreciated, and who was herself always one of your warmest and most enthusiastic admirers.’ (Letter to Mrs. Stannard, 28 May 1897; written shortly after his liberation from gaol; sold at Sothebys for £10,000.)

Last words? [remark to Robert Ross]: ‘My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or other of us has got to go!’ (Martin F. Nolan, ‘We’re still Wilde about Oscar ’, Boston Globe, 22 Nov. 2000.) [Commonly given as ‘either that wallpaper goes or I do.’]