Yes, I know … but listen:

“When, in the evening, Joseph of Arimathaea went down from Mount Calvary where Jesus had just died he saw a young man seated on a white stone and weeping. And Joseph approached him and said, ‘I understand that your grief is great, for certainly that Man was a just Man.’ But the young man answered, ‘Oh! that’s not why I’m weeping. I’m weeping because I too have performed miracles! I too have restored sight to the blind, I have healed paralytics and I have raised up the dead. I too have withered the barren fig-tree and I have changed water into wine … And men have not crucified me.’”

And it seemed to me more than once that Oscar Wilde was convinced of his representative mission.

The Gospel disturbed and tormented the pagan Wilde. He did not forgive it its miracles. The pagan miracle is the work of art: Christianity was encroaching. All robust artistic unrealism requires an earnest realism in life.

His most ingenious apologues, his most disturbing ironies were designed to bring the two ethics face to face with one another, I mean pagan naturalism and Christian idealism, and to put the latter out of countenance.

“When Jesus wished to return to Nazareth,” he related, “Nazareth was so changed that He no longer recognized His city. The Nazareth in which He had lived had been full of lamentations and tears; this city was full of bursts of laughter and singing. And Christ, entering the city, saw slaves loaded with flowers hastening toward the marble stairway of a house of white marble. Christ entered the house, and at the rear of a room of jasper He saw lying on a regal couch a man whose disheveled hair was entwined with red roses and whose lips were red with wine. Christ approached him, touched him upon the shoulder and said, “Why leadest thou this life?’ The man turned about, recognized Him and replied, ‘I was a leper; Thou hast healed me. Why should I lead another life?’

“Christ went out of that house. And lol in the street he beheld a woman whose face and garments were painted, and whose feet were shod with pearls; and behind her walked a man whose coat was of two colors and whose eyes were laden with desire. And Christ approached the man, touched him upon the shoulder and said, ‘Why dost thou follow that woman and regard her thus?’ The man, turning about, recognized Him and replied, ‘I was blind; Thou hast healed me. What should I do otherwise with my sight?’

“And Christ approached the woman. ‘The road which you follow,’ He said to her, ‘is that of sin; wherefore follow it?’ The woman recognized Him and laughingly said to Him, ‘The road which I follow is a pleasing one and Thou hast pardoned me all my sins.’

“Then Christ felt His heart full of sadness and wished to leave that city. But as He was leaving it, He saw at length beside the moats of the city a youth who was weeping. Christ approached him, and touching his locks, said to him, ‘My friend, wherefore weepest thou?’

“The youth lifted up his eyes, recognized Him, and replied, ‘I was dead and Thou hast raised me up; what should I do otherwise with my life?’”

“Would you like me to tell you a secret?” Wilde began another day—it was at the home of Heredia; he had taken me aside in the midst of a crowded drawing-room—“a secret … but promise me not to tell it to anyone … Do you know why Christ did not love His mother?” This was spoken into my ear, in a low voice and as if ashamedly. He paused a moment, grasped my arm, drew back, and then bursting into laughter, said, “It’s because she was a virgin!…”

Let me again be permitted to quote this tale, a most strange one and a tough nut for the mind to crack—it is a rare spirit that will understand the contradiction, which Wilde hardly seems to be inventing.

“… Then there was a great silence in the Chamber of God’s Justice.—And the soul of the sinner advanced stark naked before God.

And God opened the book of the sinner’s life:

‘Certainly your life has been very bad: You have …(followed a prodigious, marvelous enumeration of sins).1—Since you have done all that, I am certainly going to send you to Hell.’

‘You can not send me to Hell.’

‘And why can I not send you to Hell?’

‘Because I have lived there all my life.’

Then there was a great silence in the Chamber of God’s Justice.

‘Well, since I can not send you to Hell, I am going to send you to Heaven.’

‘You can not send me to Heaven.’

‘And why can I not send you to Heaven?’

‘Because I have never been able to imagine it.’

And there was a great silence in the Chamber of God’s Justice.”2

One morning Wilde handed me an article to read in which a rather dull-witted critic congratulated him for “knowing how to invent pleasant tales the better to clothe his thought.”

“They believe,” Wilde began, “that all thoughts are born naked … They don’t understand that I can not think otherwise than in stories. The sculptor doesn’t try to translate his thought into marble; he thinks in marble, directly.

“There was a man who could think only in bronze. And one day this man had an idea, the idea of joy, of the joy which dwells in the moment. And he felt that he had to tell it. But in all the world; not a single piece of bronze was left; for men had used it all. And this man felt that he would go mad if he did not tell his idea.

“And he thought about a piece of bronze on the grave of his wife, about a statue he had made to adorn the grave of his wife, of the only woman he had loved; it was the statue of sadness, of the sadness which dwells in life. And the man felt that he would go mad if he did not tell his idea.

“So he took the statue of sadness, of the sadness which dwells in life; he smashed it and made of it the statue of joy, of the joy which dwells only in the moment.”

Wilde believed in some sort of fatality of the artist, and that the idea is stronger than the man.

“There are,” he would say, “two kinds of artist: one brings answers, and the other, questions. We have to know whether one belongs to those who answer or to those who question; for the kind which questions is never that which answers. There are works which wait, and which one does not understand for long time; the reason is that they bring answers to questions which have not yet been raised; for the question often arrives a terribly long time after the answer.”

And he would also say:

“The soul is born old in the body; it is to rejuvenate it that the latter grows old. Plato is the youth of Socrates …”

Then I remained for three years without seeing him again.

1 The sc of scepticisme (scepticism) is pronounced as though it were s alone.—(Translator’s note.)

1 The written version which he later made of this tale is, for a wonder, excellent.

2 Since Villiers de l’Isle-Adam betrayed it, everybody knows, alas! the “great secret of the Church”: There is no Purgatory.

II

HERE BEGIN THE TRAGIC MEMORIES.

A persistent rumor, growing with each of his successes (in London he was being played at the same time in three theatres), ascribed strange practices to Wilde; some people were so kind as to take umbrage at them with a smile, and others took no umbrage at all; it was claimed moreover that he took no pains to hide them, that, on the contrary, he flaunted them; some said, courageously; others, cynically; others, affectedly. I listened to this rumor with great astonishment. Nothing, since I had been associating with Wilde, could have ever made me suspect a thing.—But already, out of prudence, a number of former friends were deserting him.