text:
The New International Encyclopædia/Falashas

FALASHAS, fȧ-lä'shȧz (Ethiop., wanderers). The inhabitants of the Abyssinian Kingdom of Amhara. They claim to be of Jewish race and to be descended from emigrants of the period of disorder in Israel during and following the reign of Jeroboam. Whether they are true Jews, or descendants merely of proselytes of the period of close connection between Abyssinia and Israel, is uncertain. They practice debased Jewish rites, but are not acquainted with the Babylonian or Jerusalem Talmud, make no use of the tephillin, and observe neither the Feast of Purim nor that of the Dedication of the Temple. They possess, in Geez, an Ethiopic dialect of great antiquity, the foundation of the Amharic, the canonical and apocryphal books of the Old Testament: a volume of extracts from the Pentateuch, with comments, given, as they think, from God to Moses on Mount Sinai; the Te-e-sa-sa Sanbat, or laws of the Sabbath; the Ardit, a book of secrets revealed to twelve saints, which is used as a charm against disease; lives of Abraham, Moses, etc., and a translation of Josephus, called Sana Aihud. A copy of the Orit, or Mosaic law, is kept in the holy of holies in every synagogue. Various pagan observances are mingled in their ritual; every newly built house is considered uninhabitable till the blood of a sheep or fowl has been spilt in it; a woman guilty of a breach of chastity has to undergo purification by leaping into a flaming fire; the Sabbath has been deified, and, as the goddess Sanbat, receives adoration and sacrifice, and is said to have ten

thousand times ten thousand angels to wait on her commands. There is a monastic system, said to have been introduced in the fourth century. The monks must prepare all their food with their own hands, and no lay person, male or female, may enter their houses. Celibacy is not practiced by the priests, but they are not allowed to marry a second time, and no one is admitted into the order who has eaten with a Christian, or is the son or grandson of a man thus contaminated. Belief in the evil eye or shadow is universal, and spirit-raisers, sooth-sayers, and rain-doctors are in repute.

Education is in the hands of the monks and priests, and is given only to boys. Fasts, obligatory on all above seven years of age, are held on every Monday or Thursday, on every new moon, and at the Passover (the 21st or 22d of April). The annual festivals are the Passover, the Harvest feast, the Baala Mazālat or Feast of the Tabernacles (during which, however, no booths are built), the Day of Covenant or Assembly, and Abraham's Day. It is believed that after death the soul remains in a place of darkness till the third day, when the first taskar or sacrifice for the dead is offered; prayers are read in the mesgeed (synagogue) for the repose of the departed, and for seven days a formal lament takes place every morning in his house. No coffins are used, and a stone vault is built over the corpse so that it may not come into direct contact with the earth. The Falashas are an industrious people, living for the most part in their own villages, or, if they settle in a Christian or Mohammedan town, occupying a separate quarter. They engage in agriculture, manufacture pottery, ironware, and cloth, and are especially sought after for their skill in mason-work. Their number is variously estimated at from 100,000 to 250,000. Consult: Flad, The Falashas of Abyssinia, English translation (London, 1869); Stern, Wanderings Among the Falashas in Abyssinia (London, 1862); Halévy, Travels in Abyssinia, English translation (London, 1878). M. Halévy was a Jew, sent to Abyssinia to offset the effects of Christian missionary work.


text:
Page:The Daughters of England.djvu/144

Rh illness mitigated by the skill of modern science, and the comforts of civilized life, that a slight degree of bodily indisposition is looked upon as an evil scarcely worth the pains which any systematic means of remedy would require.

It is only when health is lost, and lost beyond the hope of regaining it, that we become sensible of its real value. It is then we tax the ingenuity of the physician, and the patience of the nurse, to bring us back, if only so near as to stand upon the verge of that region of happiness from which we are expelled. It is then we see the folly of those who play upon the brink of the precipice which separates this beautiful and blessed region from the troubled waters below. It is then we resign our wealth, our friends, our country, and our home, in the hope of purchasing this treasure. It is then we feel that, although, when in the possession of health, we neglected many opportunities of kindness, benevolence, and general usefulness, yet when deprived of this blessing, we would kneel at the footstool of mercy, to ask those opportunities again, in order that we may use them better.

In early youth, however, little of this knowledge can be experimentally acquired. Little does the pampered child of fond and indulgent parents know what illness is to the poor and the destitute; or what it may be to her when her mother's hand is cold and helpless in the tomb, and when her own head is no longer sheltered by a father's roof. Thus we find young girls so often practising a certain kind of recklessness, and contempt of health, nay, even encouraging, I will not say affecting, a degree of delicacy, feebleness, and liability to bodily ailments, which, if they were not accustomed to the kindest attentions, would be the last calamity they would wish to bring upon themselves. How important is it for such individuals to remember, that the

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Page:The Daughters of England.djvu/144


text: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Mullins, George


text:
Page:The Daughters of England.djvu/145

134 constitution of the body, as well as that of the mind, is, in a good degree, of their own forming; that the season of youth is the time when the seeds of disease are most generally sown; and that no one thus circumstanced, can suffer a loss of health without inflicting the penalty of anxious solicitude, and, frequently, of unremitting personal exertion, upon those by whom she is surrounded, or beloved.

Fanciful and ill-disciplined young women are apt to think it gives them an attractive air, and looks like an absence of selfishness, to be indifferent about the preservation of their health; and thus they indulge the most absurd capriciousness with respect to their diet, sometimes refusing altogether to eat at proper times, and eating most improperly; at others, running about upon wet grass with thin shoes, as if they really wished to take cold, making no difference between their summer and their winter clothing, or casting off a warm dress for an evening party; refusing to take medicine when necessary, or taking it unsanctioned by their parents, or their best advisers; all these they appear to consider as most engaging features in the female character. But there are those who could tell them such conduct is, in reality, the most consummate selfishness, because it inevitably produces the effect of making them the objects of much necessary attention, and of inflicting an endless catalogue of troubles and anxieties upon their friends. How soon does the stern discipline of life inflict its own punishment for this folly! but, unfortunately, not soon enough, in all instances, to stop the progress of the host of maladies which are thus produced.

Let it not for a moment be supposed, that I would recommend to young women over solicitude on the score of health; for, I believe nothing is more likely than this to induce real or fancied indisposition. Neither would I presume to interfere with the proper province of the physician; yet am I

title: Page:The Daughters of England.djvu/145


text: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Mulock, Dinah Maria


text:
The New International Encyclopædia/Falb, Rudolf

FALB, fälp, (1838-1903). An Austrian meteorologist, born at Obdach, Styria. He studied theology at Gratz, and although ordained to the priesthood subsequently became converted to Protestantism. From 1869 to 1872 he studied mathematics, physics, geology, and astronomy at Prague and Vienna, and from 1877 to 1880 he traveled through North and South America. Subsequently he became established at Berlin. He became widely known by his theory that the influence of the sun and moon, exercised conjointly on the atmosphere and on the molten material beneath the earth's surface, produces earthquakes and other disturbances of nature. This theory has, however, found no acceptance among scientists. He was popularly known for his predictions of ‘critical days.’ In 1868 he founded the popular astronomical periodical Sirius (conducted from 1882 by Klein). His works include: Von den Umwälzungen im Weltall (3d ed. 1890); Das Wetter und der Mond (2 ed. 1892); Kalender der kritischen Tage (1892 et seq.).


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Rh strongly disposed to think, that if the rules I am about to lay down were faithfully adhered to, that worthy and important personage would much less frequently be found beside the couch where the bloom of youthful beauty wastes away.

My first rule is, to let one hour every day, generally two, and sometimes three, be spent in taking exercise in the open air, either on horseback, or on foot. Let no weather prevent this; for, with strong boots, waterproof cloak, and umbrella, there are few situations where an hour's walk, at some time or other of the day, may not be accomplished; and when the air is damp, there is sometimes more need for exercise, than when it is dry. I am perfectly aware of the unpleasantness of all this, unless when regarded as a duty; I am aware, too, that where the health is good, it appears, at times, a work of supererogation; but I am aware, also, of the difference there is in the state both of mind and body, between sitting in the house, or by the fire all day, and taking, during some part of it, a brisk and healthy walk.

How often have I seen a restless, weary, discontented being, moving from chair to chair, finding comfort in none, and tired of every employment; with contracted and uneasy brow, complexion dry and grey, and eyes that looked as if their very vision was scorched up. How often have I seen such a being come in from a winter's walk, with the countenance of a perfect Hebe, with the energy of an invigorated mind beaming forth from his eyes as beautiful as clear, and with the benevolence of a young warm heart reflected in the dimpling freshness of a sunny smile. How pleasant is it then to resume the half-finished work—how refreshing the social meal—how inviting the seat beside the glowing hearth—how frank and free the intercourse with those who form the circle there! And if such be the effect of one

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text:
The New International Encyclopædia/Falck, Niels Nikolaus

FALCK, fälk, (1784-1850). A German jurist. He was born at Emmerlef, Schleswig, and was educated at Kiel. In 1814 he became professor of law at Kiel, and in 1838

he was appointed president of the Schleswig-Holstein Assembly of the States, but lost the support of the Liberals by his vacillating policy. He published a Juristische Encyklopädie (5th ed. 1851), and was a prolific author in the history and jurisprudence of Schleswig-Holstein. His works include: Handbuch des schleswig-holsteinischen Privatrechts (1825-48); and Sammlungen zur nähern Kunde des Vaterlandes (1819-25). He also edited the Staatsbürgerliches Magazin (10 vols., 1821-31; continued as Neues Staatsbürgerliches Magazin, 10 vols., 1833-41).


text: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Multon, Thomas de


text: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Murchison, Roderick Impey


text: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Murcot, John


text:
The New International Encyclopædia/Falcón

FALCÓN, fȧl-kōn'. A maritime State of Venezuela, occupying the territory around Lake Maracaibo in the northwestern part of the Republic (Map: Venezuela, C 1). Including the former State of Zulia, annexed since 1881, Falcón covers an area of 36,212 square miles. It is traversed by a chain of low mountains, and the soil in the valleys is very fruitful, though the coast regions are dry and barren. The chief products are coffee, cacao, corn, cotton, sugar-cane, cocoanuts, fruits, and tobacco. Stock-raising is of importance, and the State has some mineral wealth. Population of Falcón, in 1894, 141,689. Maracaibo is the capital.


text: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Murdac, Henry


text: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Murdoch, John


text: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Murdoch, Patrick


text: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Murdoch, Thomas William Clinton


text: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Murdock, William


text: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Mure, William (1594-1657)


text: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Mure, William (1718-1776)


text: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Mure, William (1799-1860)


text:
Page:A masque of poets 1878.djvu/230

 THE FORSAKEN BRIDE.

ORESEEING all her friends immense astonishment,

Going to meet it with an equal dread,

Florinda gave her maid a strict admonishment

Just what to say, and what to leave unsaid,

To questions soon to shower upon her head ;

For, first suspicions having proved unjust,

The girl was granted all the greater trust.

Deep was the dear old Aunt's amazement, meeting

At the hall door the unexpected bride.

Then, having passed the first tumultuous greeting,

"Your husband, Florie! where is he?" she cried,

Still more bewildered ; while the niece replied,

"Some sudden and important information

Obliged him to return by his plantation."

title: Page:A masque of poets 1878.djvu/230


text: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Murford, Nicholas


text: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Murgatroid, Michael


text: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Murimuth, Adam


text: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Murlin, John


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Page:David Baron – The History of the Ten "Lost" Tribes.djvu/15

 "Ask of Me, and I will give thee the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession," will be found again and again in Anglo-Israel literature applied to the British nation. It also substitutes the British Empire for the Church. A favourite Scripture on which almost every Anglo-Israel writer fastens is Matt. xxi. 43: "Therefore I say unto you, The Kingdom of God shall be taken from you and given to a nation bringing forth the fruits thereof," taking it for granted that England is that "nation"—which, as a nation, is bringing forth the fruits of God's kingdom.

Now I need not explain to you that this is an utterly unspiritual and baseless assumption, for it is the Church—God's elect and converted people out of all nations—which is that "nation," which during the period of Israel's national unbelief bears fruit unto God; as is clear from 1 Peter ii. 9, where believers in Christ are addressed as "a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation (εθνος), that ye should show forth the praises of Him who hath called you out of darkness into His marvellous light."

Let me give you one or two more samples of Anglo-Israel perversion of Scripture and history:—

"The tribe of Benjamin has a singular special place in the history of Israel and Judah. Neither Old or New Testament can be well understood unless one understands the place of this tribe in Providence. They were always counted one of the Ten Tribes, and reckoned with them in the prophetic visions. They were only loaned to Judah about 800 years (read 1 Kings xi.). They were to be a


text:
Oscar Wilde, His Life and Confessions

 * /Introduction/

 * Part One
 * 1) Oscar's Father and Mother on Trial
 * 2) Oscar Wilde as a Schoolboy
 * 3) Trinity, Dublin: Magdalen, Oxford
 * 4) Formative Influences: Oscar's Poems
 * 5) Oscar's Quarrel with Whistler and Marriage
 * 6) Oscar Wilde's Faith and Practice
 * 7) Oscar's Reputation and Supporters
 * 8) Oscar's Growth to Originality About 1890
 * 9) The Summer of Success: Oscar's First Play
 * 10) The First Meeting with Lord Alfred Douglas
 * 11) The Threatening Cloud Draws Nearer
 * 12) Danger Signals: the Challenge
 * 13) Oscar Attacks Queensberry and is Worsted
 * 14) How Genius is Persecuted in England
 * 15) The Queen vs. Wilde: The First Trial
 * 16) Escape Rejected: The Second Trial and Sentence

Prison and the Effects of Punishment Mitigation of Punishment; but not Release His St. Martin's Summer: His Best Work The Results of His Second Fall: His Genius His Sense of Rivalry; His Love of Life and Laziness "A Great Romantic Passion!" His Judgments of Writers and of Women We Argue About His "Pet Vice" and Punishment
The Last Hope Lost

The End

A Last Word

 * Part Two

 * Memories of Oscar Wilde, by George Bernard Shaw

title: Oscar Wilde, His Life and Confessions


text: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Murphy, Arthur


text: Talk:Oscar Wilde, His Life and Confessions


text: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Murphy, Denis Brownell


text: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Murphy, Edward


text:
Oscar Wilde, His Life and Confessions/Introduction

I was advised on all hands not to write this book, and some English friends who have read it urge me not to publish it.

"You will be accused of selecting the subject," they say, "because sexual viciousness appeals to you, and your method of treatment lays you open to attack.

"You criticise and condemn the English conception of justice, and English legal methods: you even question the impartiality of English judges, and throw an unpleasant light on English juries and the English public—all of which is not only unpopular but will convince the unthinking that you are a presumptuous, or at least an outlandish, person with too good a conceit of himself and altogether too free a tongue."

I should be more than human or less if these arguments did not give me pause. I would do nothing willingly to alienate the few who are still friendly to me. But the motives driving me are too strong for such personal considerations. I might say with the Latin:

"Non me tua fervida terrent, Dicta, ferox: Di me terrent, et Jupiter hostis."

Even this would be only a part of the truth. Youth it seems to me should always be prudent, for youth has much to lose: but I am come to that time of life when a man can afford to be bold, may even dare to be himself and write the best in him, heedless of knaves and fools or of anything this world may do. The voyage for me is almost over: I am in sight of port: like a good shipman, I have already sent down the lofty spars and housed the captious canvas in preparation for the long anchorage: I have little now to fear.

And the immortals are with me in my design. Greek tragedy treated of far more horrible and revolting themes, such as the banquet of Thyestes: and Dante did not shrink from describing the unnatural meal of Ugolino. The best modern critics approve my choice. "All depends on the subject," says Matthew Arnold, talking of great literature: "choose a fitting action—a great and significant action—penetrate yourself with the feeling of the situation: this done, everything else will follow; for expression is subordinate and secondary."

Socrates was found guilty of corrupting the young and was put to death for the offence. His accusation and punishment constitute surely a great and significant action such as Matthew Arnold declared was alone of the highest and most permanent literary value.

The action involved in the rise and ruin of Oscar Wilde is of the same kind and of enduring interest to humanity. Critics may say that Wilde is a smaller person than Socrates, less significant in many ways: but even if this were true, it would not alter the artist's position; the great portraits of the world are not of Napoleon or Dante. The differences between men are not important in comparison with their inherent likeness. To depict the mortal so that he takes on immortality—that is the task of the artist.

There are special reasons, too, why I should handle this story. Oscar Wilde was a friend of mine for many years: I could not help prizing him to the very end: he was always to me a charming, soul-animating influence. He was dreadfully punished by men utterly his inferiors: ruined, outlawed, persecuted till Death itself came as a deliverance. His sentence impeaches his judges. The whole story is charged with tragic pathos and unforgettable lessons. I have waited for more than ten years hoping that some one would write about him in this spirit and leave me free to do other things, but nothing such as I propose has yet appeared.

Oscar Wilde was greater as a talker, in my opinion, than as a writer, and no fame is more quickly evanescent. If I do not tell his story and paint his portrait, it seems unlikely that anyone else will do it.

English "strachery" may accuse me of attacking morality: the accusation is worse than absurd. The very foundations of this old world are moral: the charred ember itself floats about in space, moves and has its being in obedience to inexorable law. The thinker may define morality: the reformer may try to bring our notions of it into nearer accord with the fact: human love and pity may seek to soften its occasional injustices and mitigate its intolerable harshness: but that is all the freedom we mortals enjoy, all the breathing-space allotted to us.

In this book the reader will find the figure of the Prometheus-artist clamped, so to speak, with bands of steel to the huge granitic cliff of English puritanism. No account was taken of his manifold virtues and graces: no credit given him for his extraordinary achievements: he was hounded out of life because his sins were not the sins of the English middle-class. The culprit was in much nobler and better than his judges.

Here are all the elements of pity and sorrow and fear that are required in great tragedy.

The artist who finds in Oscar Wilde a great and provocative subject for his art needs no argument to justify his choice. If the picture is a great and living portrait, the moralist will be satisfied: the dark shadows must all be there, as well as the high lights, and the effect must be to increase our tolerance and intensify our pity.

If on the other hand the portrait is ill-drawn or ill-painted, all the reasoning in the world and the praise of all the sycophants will not save the picture from contempt and the artist from censure.

There is one measure by which intention as apart from accomplishment can be judged, and one only: "If you think the book well done," says Pascal, "and on re-reading find it strong; be assured that the man who wrote it, wrote it on his knees." No book could have been written more reverently than this book of mine.

Nice, 1910.

Frank Harris.


text: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Murphy, Francis (1795-1858)


text:
Oscar Wilde, His Life and Confessions/Part One

 * 1) Oscar's Father and Mother on Trial
 * 2) Oscar Wilde as a Schoolboy
 * 3) Trinity, Dublin: Magdalen, Oxford
 * 4) Formative Influences: Oscar's Poems
 * 5) Oscar's Quarrel with Whistler and Marriage
 * 6) Oscar Wilde's Faith and Practice
 * 7) Oscar's Reputation and Supporters
 * 8) Oscar's Growth to Originality About 1890
 * 9) The Summer of Success: Oscar's First Play
 * 10) The First Meeting with Lord Alfred Douglas
 * 11) The Threatening Cloud Draws Nearer
 * 12) Danger Signals: the Challenge
 * 13) Oscar Attacks Queensberry and is Worsted
 * 14) How Genius is Persecuted in England
 * 15) The Queen vs. Wilde: The First Trial
 * 16) Escape Rejected: The Second Trial and Sentence


text: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Murphy, Francis (1809-1891)


text:
Oscar Wilde, His Life and Confessions/Chapter 1

On the 12th of December, 1864, Dublin society was abuzz with excitement. A tidbit of scandal which had long been rolled on the tongue in semi-privacy was to be discussed in open court, and all women and a good many men were agog with curiosity and expectation.

The story itself was highly spiced and all the actors in it well known.

A famous doctor and oculist, recently knighted for his achievements, was the real defendant. He was married to a woman with a great literary reputation as a poet and writer who was idolized by the populace for her passionate advocacy of Ireland's claim to self-government; "Speranza" was regarded by the Irish people as a sort of Irish Muse.

The young lady bringing the action was the daughter of the professor of medical jurisprudence at Trinity College, who was also the chief at Marsh's library.

It was said that this Miss Travers, a pretty girl just out of her teens, had been seduced by Dr. Sir William Wilde while under his care as a patient. Some went so far as to say that chloroform had been used, and that the girl had been violated.

The doctor was represented as a sort of Minotaur: lustful stories were invented and repeated with breathless delight; on all faces, the joy of malicious curiosity and envious denigration.

The interest taken in the case was extraordinary: the excitement beyond comparison; the first talents of the Bar were engaged on both sides; Serjeant Armstrong led for the plaintiff, helped by the famous Mr. Butt, Q.C., and Mr. Heron, Q.C., who were in turn backed by Mr. Hamill and Mr. Quinn; while Serjeant Sullivan was for the defendant, supported by Mr. Sidney, Q.C., and Mr. Morris, Q.C., and aided by Mr. John Curran and Mr. Purcell.

The Court of Common Pleas was the stage; Chief Justice Monahan presiding with a special jury. The trial was expected to last a week, and not only the Court but the approaches to it were crowded.

To judge by the scandalous reports, the case should have been a criminal case, should have been conducted by the Attorney-General against Sir William Wilde; but that was not the way it presented itself. The action was not even brought directly by Miss Travers or by her father, Dr. Travers, against Sir William Wilde for rape or criminal assault, or seduction. It was a civil action brought by Miss Travers, who claimed L2,000 damages for a libel written by Lady Wilde to her father, Dr. Travers. The letter complained of ran as follows:—

 * Tower, Bray, May 6th.

 * Sir, you may not be aware of the disreputable conduct of your daughter at Bray where she consorts with all the low newspaper boys in the
 * place, employing them to disseminate offensive placards in which my name is given, and also tracts in which she makes it appear that she
 * has had an intrigue with Sir William Wilde. If she chooses to disgrace herself, it is not my affair, but as her object in insulting me is
 * in the hope of extorting money for which she has several times applied to Sir William Wilde with threats of more annoyance if not given,
 * I think it right to inform you, as no threat of additional insult shall ever extort money from our hands. The wages of disgrace she has
 * so basely treated for and demanded shall never be given her.

 * Jane F. Wilde.

 * To Dr. Travers.

The summons and plaint charged that this letter written to the father of the plaintiff by Lady Wilde was a libel reflecting on the character and chastity of Miss Travers, and as Lady Wilde was a married woman, her husband Sir William Wilde was joined in the action as a co-defendant for conformity.

The defences set up were:—

First, a plea of "No libel": secondly, that the letter did not bear the defamatory sense imputed by the plaint: thirdly, a denial of the publication, and, fourthly, a plea of privilege. This last was evidently the real defence and was grounded upon facts which afforded some justification of Lady Wilde's bitter letter.

It was admitted that for a year or more Miss Travers had done her uttermost to annoy both Sir William Wilde and his wife in every possible way. The trouble began, the defence stated, by Miss Travers fancying that she was slighted by Lady Wilde. She thereupon published a scandalous pamphlet under the title of "Florence Boyle Price, a Warning; by Speranza," with the evident intention of causing the public to believe that the booklet was the composition of Lady Wilde under the assumed name of Florence Boyle Price. In this pamphlet Miss Travers asserted that a person she called Dr. Quilp had made an attempt on her virtue. She put the charge mildly. "It is sad," she wrote, "to think that in the nineteenth century a lady must not venture into a physician's study without being accompanied by a bodyguard to protect her."

Miss Travers admitted that Dr. Quilp was intended for Sir William Wilde; indeed she identified Dr. Quilp with the newly made knight in a dozen different ways. She went so far as to describe his appearance. She declared that he had "an animal, sinister expression about his mouth which was coarse and vulgar in the extreme: the large protruding under lip was most unpleasant. Nor did the upper part of his face redeem the lower part. His eyes were small and round, mean and prying in expression. There was no candour in the doctor's countenance, where one looked for candour." Dr. Quilp's quarrel with his victim, it appeared, was that she was "unnaturally passionless."

The publication of such a pamphlet was calculated to injure both Sir William and Lady Wilde in public esteem, and Miss Travers was not content to let the matter rest there. She drew attention to the pamphlet by letters to the papers, and on one occasion, when Sir William Wilde was giving a lecture to the Young Men's Christian Association at the Metropolitan Hall, she caused large placards to be exhibited in the neighbourhood having upon them in large letters the words "Sir William Wilde and Speranza." She employed one of the persons bearing a placard to go about ringing a large hand bell which she, herself, had given to him for the purpose. She even published doggerel verses in the "Dublin Weekly Advertiser", and signed them "Speranza," which annoyed Lady Wilde intensely. One read thus:—

 * Your progeny is quite a pest
 * To those who hate such "critters";
 * Some sport I'll have, or I'm blest
 * I'll fry the Wilde breed in the West
 * Then you can call them Fritters.

She wrote letters to "Saunders Newsletter", and even reviewed a book of Lady Wilde's entitled "The First Temptation," and called it a "blasphemous production." Moreover, when Lady Wilde was staying at Bray, Miss Travers sent boys to offer the pamphlet for sale to the servants in her house. In fine Miss Travers showed a keen feminine ingenuity and pertinacity in persecution worthy of a nobler motive.

But the defence did not rely on such annoyance as sufficient provocation for Lady Wilde's libellous letter. The plea went on to state that Miss Travers had applied to Sir William Wilde for money again and again, and accompanied these applications with threats of worse pen-pricks if the requests were not acceded to. It was under these circumstances, according to Lady Wilde, that she wrote the letter complained of to Dr. Travers and enclosed it in a sealed envelope. She wished to get Dr. Travers to use his parental influence to stop Miss Travers from further disgracing herself and insulting and annoying Sir William and Lady Wilde.

The defence carried the war into the enemy's camp by thus suggesting that Miss Travers was blackmailing Sir William and Lady Wilde.

The attack in the hands of Serjeant Armstrong was still more deadly and convincing. He rose early on the Monday afternoon and declared at the beginning that the case was so painful at the beginning that he would have preferred not to have been engaged in it—a hypocritical statement which deceived no one, and was just as conventional-false as his wig. But with this exception the story he told was extraordinarily clear and gripping.

Some ten years before, Miss Travers, then a young girl of nineteen, was suffering from partial deafness, and was recommended by her own doctor to go to Dr. Wilde, who was the chief oculist and aurist in Dublin. Miss Travers went to Dr. Wilde, who treated her successfully. Dr. Wilde would accept no fees from her, stating at the outset that as she was the daughter of a brother-physician, he thought it an honour to be of use to her. Serjeant Armstrong assured his hearers that in spite of Miss Travers' beauty he believed that at first Dr. Wilde took nothing but a benevolent interest in the girl. Even when his professional services ceased to be necessary, Dr. Wilde continued his friendship. He wrote Miss Travers innumerable letters: he advised her as to her reading and sent her books and tickets for places of amusement: he even insisted that she should be better dressed, and pressed money upon her to buy bonnets and clothes and frequently invited her to his house for dinners and parties. The friendship went on in this sentimental kindly way for some five or six years till 1860.

The wily Serjeant knew enough about human nature to feel that it was necessary to discover some dramatic incident to change benevolent sympathy into passion, and he certainly found what he wanted.

Miss Travers, it appeared, had been burnt low down on her neck when a child: the cicatrice could still be seen, though it was gradually disappearing. When her ears were being examined by Dr. Wilde, it was customary for her to kneel on a hassock before him, and he thus discovered this burn on her neck. After her hearing improved he still continued to examine the cicatrice from time to time, pretending to note the speed with which it was disappearing. Some time in '60 or '61 Miss Travers had a corn on the sole of her foot which gave her some pain. Dr. Wilde did her the honour of paring the corn with his own hands and painting it with iodine. The cunning Serjeant could not help saying with some confusion, natural or assumed, "that it would have been just as well—at least there are men of such temperament that it would be dangerous to have such a manipulation going on." The spectators in the court smiled, feeling that in "manipulation" the Serjeant had found the most neatly suggestive word.

Naturally at this point Serjeant Sullivan interfered in order to stem the rising tide of interest and to blunt the point of the accusation. Sir William Wilde, he said, was not the man to shrink from any investigation: but he was only in the case formally and he could not meet the allegations, which therefore were "one-sided and unfair" and so forth and so on.

After the necessary pause, Serjeant Armstrong plucked his wig straight and proceeded to read letters of Dr. Wilde to Miss Travers at this time, in which he tells her not to put too much iodine on her foot, but to rest it for a few days in a slipper and keep it in a horizontal position while reading a pleasant book. If she would send in, he would try and send her one.

"I have now," concluded the Serjeant, like an actor carefully preparing his effect, "traced this friendly intimacy down to a point where it begins to be dangerous: I do not wish to aggravate the gravity of the charge in the slightest by any rhetoric or by an unconscious overstatement; you shall therefore, gentlemen of the jury, hear from Miss Travers herself what took place between her and Dr. Wilde and what she complains of."

Miss Travers then went into the witness-box. Though thin and past her first youth, she was still pretty in a conventional way, with regular features and dark eyes. She was examined by Mr. Butt, Q.C. After confirming point by point what Serjeant Armstrong had said, she went on to tell the jury that in the summer of '62 she had thought of going to Australia, where her two brothers lived, who wanted her to come out to them. Dr. Wilde lent her L40 to go, but told her she must say it was L20 or her father might think the sum too large. She missed the ship in London and came back. She was anxious to impress on the jury the fact that she had repaid Dr. Wilde, that she had always repaid whatever he had lent her.

She went on to relate how one day Dr. Wilde had got her in a kneeling position at his feet, when he took her in his arms, declaring that he would not let her go until she called him William. Miss Travers refused to do this, and took umbrage at the embracing and ceased to visit at his house: but Dr. Wilde protested extravagantly that he had meant nothing wrong, and begged her to forgive him and gradually brought about a reconciliation which was consummated by pressing invitations to parties and by a loan of two or three pounds for a dress, which loan, like the others, had been carefully repaid.

The excitement in the court was becoming breathless. It was felt that the details were cumulative; the doctor was besieging the fortress in proper form. The story of embracings, reconciliations and loans all prepared the public for the great scene.

The girl went on, now answering questions, now telling bits of the story in her own way, Mr. Butt, the great advocate, taking care that it should all be consecutive and clear with a due crescendo of interest. In October, 1862, it appeared Lady Wilde was not in the house at Merrion Square, but was away at Bray, as one of the children had not been well, and she thought the sea air would benefit him. Dr. Wilde was alone in the house. Miss Travers called and was admitted into Dr. Wilde's study. He put her on her knees before him and bared her neck, pretending to examine the burn; he fondled her too much and pressed her to him: she took offence and tried to draw away. Somehow or other his hand got entangled in a chain at her neck. She called out to him, "You are suffocating me," and tried to rise: but he cried out like a madman: "I will, I want to," and pressed what seemed to be a handkerchief over her face. She declared that she lost consciousness.

When she came to herself she found Dr. Wilde frantically imploring her to come to her senses, while dabbing water on her face, and offering her wine to drink.

"If you don't drink," he cried, "I'll pour it over you."

For some time, she said, she scarcely realized where she was or what had occurred, though she heard him talking. But gradually consciousness came back to her, and though she would not open her eyes she understood what he was saying. He talked frantically:

"Do be reasonable, and all will be right. . . I am in your power . . . . spare me, oh, spare me . . . . strike me if you like. I wish to God I could hate you, but I can't. I swore I would never touch your hand again. Attend to me and do what I tell you. Have faith and confidence in me and you may remedy the past and go to Australia. Think of the talk this may give rise to. Keep up appearances for your own sake. . . . ."

He then took her up-stairs to a bedroom and made her drink some wine and lie down for some time. She afterwards left the house; she hardly knew how; he accompanied her to the door, she thought; but could not be certain; she was half dazed.

The judge here interposed with the crucial question:

"Did you know that you had been violated?"

The audience waited breathlessly; after a short pause Miss Travers replied:

"Yes."

Then it was true, the worst was true. The audience, excited to the highest pitch, caught breath with malevolent delight. But the thrills were not exhausted. Miss Travers next told how in Dr. Wilde's study one evening she had been vexed at some slight, and at once took four pennyworth of laudanum which she had bought. Dr. Wilde hurried her round to the house of Dr. Walsh, a physician in the neighbourhood, who gave her an antidote. Dr. Wilde was dreadfully frightened lest something should get out. . ..

She admitted at once that she had sometimes asked Dr. Wilde for money: she thought nothing of it as she had again and again repaid him the monies which he had lent her.

Miss Travers' examination in chief had been intensely interesting. The fashionable ladies had heard all they had hoped to hear, and it was noticed that they were not so eager to get seats in the court from this time on, though the room was still crowded.

The cross-examination of Miss Travers was at least as interesting to the student of human nature as the examination in chief had been, for in her story of what took place on that 14th of October, weaknesses and discrepancies of memory were discovered and at length improbabilities and contradictions in the narrative itself.

First of all it was elicited that she could not be certain of the day; it might have been the 15th or the 16th: it was Friday the 14th, she thought. . . . It was a great event to her; the most awful event in her whole life; yet she could not remember the day for certain.

"Did you tell anyone of what had taken place?"

"No."

"Not even your father?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"I did not wish to give him pain."

"But you went back to Dr. Wilde's study after the awful assault?"

"Yes."

"You went again and again, did you not?"

"Yes."

"Did he ever attempt to repeat the offence?"

"Yes."

The audience was thunderstruck; the plot was deepening. Miss Travers went on to say that the Doctor was rude to her again; she did not know his intention; he took hold of her and tried to fondle her; but she would not have it.

"After the second offence you went back?"

"Yes."

"Did he ever repeat it again?"

"Yes."

Miss Travers said that once again Dr. Wilde had been rude to her.

"Yet you returned again?"

"Yes."

"And you took money from this man who had violated you against your will?"

"Yes."

"You asked him for money?"

"Yes."

"This is the first time you have told about this second and third assault, is it not?"

"Yes," the witness admitted.

So far all that Miss Travers had said hung together and seemed eminently credible; but when she was questioned about the chloroform and the handkerchief she became confused. At the outset she admitted that the handkerchief might have been a rag. She was not certain it was a rag. It was something she saw the doctor throw into the fire when she came to her senses.

"Had he kept it in his hands, then, all the time you were unconscious?"

"I don't know."

"Just to show it to you?"

The witness was silent.

When she was examined as to her knowledge of chloroform, she broke down hopelessly. She did not know the smell of it; could not describe it; did not know whether it burnt or not; could not in fact swear that it was chloroform Dr. Wilde had used; would not swear that it was anything; believed that it was chloroform or something like it because she lost consciousness. That was her only reason for saying that chloroform had been given to her.

Again the judge interposed with the probing question:

"Did you say anything about chloroform in your pamphlet?"

"No," the witness murmured.

It was manifest that the strong current of feeling in favour of Miss Travers had begun to ebb. The story was a toothsome morsel still: but it was regretfully admitted that the charge of rape had not been pushed home. It was felt to be disappointing, too, that the chief prosecuting witness should have damaged her own case.

It was now the turn of the defence, and some thought the pendulum might swing back again.

Lady Wilde gave her evidence emphatically, but was too bitter to be a persuasive witness. It was tried to prove from her letter that she believed that Miss Travers had had an intrigue with Sir William Wilde, but she would not have it. She did not for a moment believe in her husband's guilt. Miss Travers wished to make it appear, she said, that she had an intrigue with Sir William Wilde, but in her opinion it was utterly untrue. Sir William Wilde was above suspicion. There was not a particle of truth in the accusation; "her" husband would never so demean himself.

Lady Wilde's disdainful speeches seemed to persuade the populace, but had small effect on the jury, and still less on the judge.

When she was asked if she hated Miss Travers, she replied that she did not hate anyone, but she had to admit that she disliked Miss Travers' methods of action.

"Why did you not answer Miss Travers when she wrote telling you of your husband's attempt on her virtue?"

"I took no interest in the matter," was the astounding reply.

The defence made an even worse mistake than this. When the time came, Sir William Wilde was not called.

In his speech for Miss Travers, Mr. Butt made the most of this omission. He declared that the refusal of Sir William Wilde to go into the witness box was an admission of guilt; an admission that Miss Travers' story of her betrayal was true and could not be contradicted. But the refusal of Sir William Wilde to go into the box was not, he insisted, the worst point in the defence. He reminded the jury that he had asked Lady Wilde why she had not answered Miss Travers when she wrote to her. He recalled Lady Wilde's reply:

"I took no interest in the matter."

Every woman would be interested in such a thing, he declared, even a stranger; but Lady Wilde hated her husband's victim and took no interest in her seduction beyond writing a bitter, vindictive and libellous letter to the girl's father. . . ..

The speech was regarded as a masterpiece and enhanced the already great reputation of the man who was afterwards to become the Home Rule Leader.

It only remained for the judge to sum up, for everyone was getting impatient to hear the verdict. Chief Justice Monahan made a short, impartial speech, throwing the dry, white light of truth upon the conflicting and passionate statements. First of all, he said, it was difficult to believe in the story of rape whether with or without chloroform. If the girl had been violated she would be expected to cry out at the time, or at least to complain to her father as soon as she reached home. Had it been a criminal trial, he pointed out, no one would have believed this part of Miss Travers' story. When you find a girl does not cry out at the time and does not complain afterwards, and returns to the house to meet further rudeness, it must be presumed that she consented to the seduction.

But was there a seduction? The girl asserted that there was guilty intimacy, and Sir William Wilde had not contradicted her. It was said that he was only formally a defendant; but he was the real defendant and he could have gone into the box if he had liked and given his version of what took place and contradicted Miss Travers in whole or in part.

"It is for you, gentlemen of the jury, to draw your own conclusions from his omission to do what one would have thought would be an honourable man's first impulse and duty."

Finally it was for the jury to consider whether the letter was a libel and if so what the amount of damages should be.

His Lordship recalled the jury at Mr. Butt's request to say that in assessing damages they might also take into consideration the fact that the defence was practically a justification of the libel. The fair-mindedness of the judge was conspicuous from first to last, and was worthy of the high traditions of the Irish Bench.

After deliberating for a couple of hours the jury brought in a verdict which had a certain humour in it. They awarded to Miss Travers a farthing damages and intimated that the farthing should carry costs. In other words they rated Miss Travers' virtue at the very lowest coin of the realm, while insisting that Sir William Wilde should pay a couple of thousands of pounds in costs for having seduced her.

It was generally felt that the verdict did substantial justice; though the jury, led away by patriotic sympathy with Lady Wilde, the true "Speranza," had been a little hard on Miss Travers. No one doubted that Sir William Wilde had seduced his patient. He had, it appeared, an unholy reputation, and the girl's admission that he had accused her of being "unnaturally passionless" was accepted as the true key of the enigma. This was why he had drawn away from the girl, after seducing her. And it was not unnatural under the circumstances that she should become vindictive and revengeful.

Such inferences as these, I drew from the comments of the Irish papers at the time; but naturally I wished if possible to hear some trustworthy contemporary on the matter. Fortunately such testimony was forthcoming.

A Fellow of Trinity, who was then a young man, embodied the best opinion of the time in an excellent pithy letter. He wrote to me that the trial simply established, what every one believed, that "Sir William Wilde was a pithecoid person of extraordinary sensuality and cowardice (funking the witness-box left him without a defender!) and that his wife was a highfalutin' pretentious creature whose pride was as extravagant as her reputation founded on second-rate verse-making. . . . . Even when a young woman she used to keep her rooms in Merrion Square in semi-darkness; she laid the paint on too thick for any ordinary light, and she gave herself besides all manner of airs."

This incisive judgment of an able and fairly impartial contemporary (As he has died since this was written, there is no longer any reason for concealing his name: R. Y. Tyrrell, for many years before his death Regius Professor of Greek in Trinity College, Dublin.) corroborates, I think, the inferences which one would naturally draw from the newspaper accounts of the trial. It seems to me that both combine to give a realistic photograph, so to speak, of Sir William and Lady Wilde. An artist, however, would lean to a more kindly picture. Trying to see the personages as they saw themselves he would balance the doctor's excessive sensuality and lack of self-control by dwelling on the fact that his energy and perseverance and intimate adaptation to his surroundings had brought him in middle age to the chief place in his profession, and if Lady Wilde was abnormally vain, a verse-maker and not a poet, she was still a talented woman of considerable reading and manifold artistic sympathies.

Such were the father and mother of Oscar Wilde.


text: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Murphy, Francis Stack


text: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Murphy, James Cavanah


text: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Murphy, John (1753-1798)


text: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Murphy, John (fl.1780-1820)


text: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Murphy, Marie Louise


text: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Murphy, Michael


text:
Page:David Baron – The History of the Ten "Lost" Tribes.djvu/16

 light for David in Jerusalem. God, foreseeing that the Jews would reject Christ, kept back this one Tribe to be in readiness to receive Him; and so they did. At the destruction of Jerusalem they escaped, and after centuries of wanderings turn up as the proud and haughty Normans. Finally, they unite with the other Tribes under William the Conqueror. A proper insight into the work and mission of Benjamin will greatly aid one in interpreting the New Testament. He was set apart as a missionary Tribe, and at once set to work to spread the Gospel of Jesus. Most of the disciples were Benjaminites. Then, after 800 years of fellowship with Judah, they were cut loose and sent after their brethren of the House of Israel. It was needful that the Lion and the Unicorn should unite."

Again:—

It is difficult to characterise statements like these given out by Anglo-Israel writers in ex cathedra style


text:
Oscar Wilde, His Life and Confessions/Part Two

 * 1) Prison and the Effects of Punishment
 * 2) Mitigation of Punishment; but not Release
 * 3) His St. Martin's Summer: His Best Work
 * 4) The Results of His Second Fall: His Genius
 * 5) His Sense of Rivalry; His Love of Life and Laziness
 * 6) "A Great Romantic Passion!"
 * 7) His Judgments of Writers and of Women
 * 8) We Argue About His "Pet Vice" and Punishment
 * 9) The Last Hope Lost
 * 10) The End
 * 11) A Last Word


text: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Murphy, Patrick


text: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Murphy, Robert


text:
Page:David Baron – The History of the Ten "Lost" Tribes.djvu/17

 for the consumption of the ignorant and credulous. But—

I. This "history" of the tribe of Benjamin (which may be taken also as a fair sample of their "histories" of Dan, Manasseh, etc.) is entirely the product of the perverted fancy of the writers, and is without a vestige of historic basis for its support. The only reference given in the first extract is 1 Kings xi. Now that chapter gives the account of God's warning to Solomon, and of the announcement that in the reign of his immediate successor the kingdom would be rent from the house of David. "Howbeit," we read, "I will not rend away all the kingdom, but will give one tribe to thy son (i.e., Rehoboam) for David My servant's sake, and for Jerusalem's sake, that David My servant may have a lamp alway before Me in Jerusalem, the city which I have chosen to put My Name there."

The "one tribe" which during the time of the schism would be left to the house of David is, of course, not Benjamin, as the writer of the above extract supposes, but Judah, "with which Benjamin was indissolubly united by the very position of the capital on its frontier." This is seen from verses 31, 32 of the same chapter, where the Ten Tribes "are given to Jeroboam," and the remaining two of the twelve are called "one tribe."

It is, of course, a pure invention also, of the fairytale type, that Benjamin as a tribe received Christ while the Jews rejected Him, or that Benjamin became "the missionary tribe," or that "most of the disciples were Benjamites." Not one single tribe as a tribe, or even one local community as a community, received Christ; but the "as many" of His own "as received Him" were "Jews," which, as we shall see farther on,


text: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Murray, Adam


text:
Memories of Oscar Wilde

MY DEAR HARRIS:—

"I have an interesting letter of yours to answer; but when you ask me to exchange biographies, you take an unfair advantage of the changes of scene and bustling movement of your own adventures. My autobiography would be like my best plays, fearfully long, and not divided into acts. Just consider this life of Wilde which you have just sent me, and which I finished ten minutes ago after putting aside everything else to read it at one stroke.

"Why was Wilde so good a subject for a biography that none of the previous attempts which you have just wiped out are bad? Just because his stupendous laziness simplified his life almost as if he knew instinctively that there must be no episodes to spoil the great situation at the end of the last act but one. It was a well made life in the Scribe sense. It was as simple as the life of Des Grieux, Manon Lescaut's lover; and it beat that by omitting Manon and making Des Grieux his own lover and his own hero.

"Des Grieux was a worthless rascal by all conventional standards; and we forgive him everything. We think we forgive him because he was unselfish and loved greatly. Oscar seems to have said: 'I will love nobody: I will be utterly selfish; and I will be not merely a rascal but a monster; and you shall forgive me everything. In other words, I will reduce your standards to absurdity, not by writing them down, though I could do that so well—in fact, have done it—but by actually living them down and dying them down.'

"However, I mustn't start writing a book to you about Wilde: I must just tumble a few things together and tell you them. To take things in the order of your book, I can remember only one occasion on which I saw Sir William Wilde, who, by the way, operated on my father to correct a squint, and overdid the correction so much that my father squinted the other way all the rest of his life. To this day I never notice a squint: it is as normal to me as a nose or a tall hat.

"I was a boy at a concert in the Antient Concert Rooms in Brunswick Street in Dublin. Everybody was in evening dress; and—unless I am mixing up this concert with another (in which case I doubt if the Wildes would have been present)—the Lord Lieutenant was there with his blue waistcoated courtiers. Wilde was dressed in snuffy brown; and as he had the sort of skin that never looks clean, he produced a dramatic effect beside Lady Wilde (in full fig) of being, like Frederick the Great, Beyond Soap and Water, as his Nietzschean son was beyond Good and Evil. He was currently reported to have a family in every farmhouse; and the wonder was that Lady Wilde didn't mind—evidently a tradition from the Travers case, which I did not know about until I read your account, as I was only eight in 1864.

"Lady Wilde was nice to me in London during the desperate days between my arrival in 1876 and my first earning of an income by my pen in 1885, or rather until, a few years earlier, I threw myself into Socialism and cut myself contemptuously loose from everything of which her at-homes—themselves desperate affairs enough, as you saw for yourself—were part. I was at two or three of them; and I once dined with her in company with an ex-tragedy queen named Miss Glynn, who, having no visible external ears, reared a head like a turnip. Lady Wilde talked about Schopenhauer; and Miss Glynn told me that Gladstone formed his oratorical style on Charles Kean.

"I ask myself where and how I came across Lady Wilde; for we had no social relations in the Dublin days. The explanation must be that my sister, then a very attractive girl who sang beautifully, had met and made some sort of innocent conquest of both Oscar and Willie. I met Oscar once at one of the at-homes; and he came and spoke to me with an evident intention of being specially kind to me. We put each other out frightfully; and this odd difficulty persisted between us to the very last, even when we were no longer mere boyish novices and had become men of the world with plenty of skill in social intercourse. I saw him very seldom, as I avoided literary and artistic society like the plague, and refused the few invitations I received to go into society with burlesque ferocity, so as to keep out of it without offending people past their willingness to indulge me as a privileged lunatic.

"The last time I saw him was at that tragic luncheon of yours at the Café Royal; and I am quite sure our total of meetings from first to last did not exceed twelve, and may not have exceeded six.

"I definitely recollect six: (1) At the at-home aforesaid. (2) At Macmurdo's house in Fitzroy Street in the days of the Century Guild and its paper 'The Hobby Horse.' (3) At a meeting somewhere in Westminster at which I delivered an address on Socialism, and at which Oscar turned up and spoke. Robert Ross surprised me greatly by telling me, long after Oscar's death, that it was this address of mine that moved Oscar to try his hand at a similar feat by writing 'The Soul of Man Under Socialism.' (4) A chance meeting near the stage door of the Haymarket Theatre, at which our queer shyness of one another made our resolutely cordial and appreciative conversation so difficult that our final laugh and shake-hands was almost a reciprocal confession. (5) A really pleasant afternoon we spent together on catching one another in a place where our presence was an absurdity. It was some exhibition in Chelsea: a naval commemoration, where there was a replica of Nelson's Victory and a set of P. & O. cabins which made one seasick by mere association of ideas. I don't know why I went or why Wilde went; but we did; and the question what the devil we were doing in that galley tickled us both. It was my sole experience of Oscar's wonderful gift as a raconteur. I remember particularly an amazingly elaborate story which you have no doubt heard from him: an example of the cumulation of a single effect, as in Mark Twain's story of the man who was persuaded to put lightning conductor after lightning conductor at every possible point on his roof until a thunderstorm came and all the lightning in the heavens went for his house and wiped it out.

"Oscar's much more carefully and elegantly worked out story was of a young man who invented a theatre stall which economized space by ingenious contrivances which were all described. A friend of his invited twenty millionaires to meet him at dinner so that he might interest them in the invention. The young man convinced them completely by his demonstration of the saving in a theatre holding, in ordinary seats, six hundred people, leaving them eager and ready to make his fortune. Unfortunately he went on to calculate the annual saving in all the theatres of the world; then in all the churches of the world; then in all the legislatures; estimating finally the incidental and moral and religious effects of the invention until at the end of an hour he had estimated a profit of several thousand millions: the climax of course being that the millionaires folded their tents and silently stole away, leaving the ruined inventor a marked man for life.

"Wilde and I got on extraordinarily well on this occasion. I had not to talk myself, but to listen to a man telling me stories better than I could have told them. We did not refer to Art, about which, excluding literature from the definition, he knew only what could be picked up by reading about it. He was in a tweed suit and low hat like myself, and had been detected and had detected me in the act of clandestinely spending a happy day at Rosherville Gardens instead of pontificating in his frock coat and so forth. And he had an audience on whom not one of his subtlest effects was lost. And so for once our meeting was a success; and I understood why Morris, when he was dying slowly, enjoyed a visit from Wilde more than from anybody else, as I understand why you say in your book that you would rather have Wilde back than any friend you have ever talked to, even though he was incapable of friendship, though not of the most touching kindness on occasion.

"Our sixth meeting, the only other one I can remember, was the one at the Café Royal. On that occasion he was not too preoccupied with his danger to be disgusted with me because I, who had praised his first plays handsomely, had turned traitor over 'The Importance of Being Earnest.' Clever as it was, it was his first really heartless play. In the others the chivalry of the eighteenth century Irishman and the romance of the disciple of Théophile Gautier (Oscar was really old-fashioned in the Irish way, except as a critic of morals) not only gave a certain kindness and gallantry to the serious passages and to the handling of the women, but provided that proximity of emotion without which laughter, however irresistible, is destructive and sinister. In 'The Importance of Being Earnest' this had vanished; and the play, though extremely funny, was essentially hateful. I had no idea that Oscar was going to the dogs, and that this represented a real degeneracy produced by his debaucheries. I thought he was still developing; and I hazarded the unhappy guess that 'The Importance of Being Earnest' was in idea a young work written or projected long before under the influence of Gilbert and furbished up for Alexander as a potboiler. At the Café Royal that day I calmly asked him whether I was not right. He indignantly repudiated my guess, and said loftily (the only time he ever tried on me the attitude he took to John Gray and his more abject disciples) that he was disappointed in me. I suppose I said, 'Then what on earth has happened to you?' but I recollect nothing more on that subject except that we did not quarrel over it.

"When he was sentenced I spent a railway journey on a Socialist lecturing excursion to the North drafting a petition for his release. After that I met Willie Wilde at a theatre which I think must have been the Duke of York's, because I connect it vaguely with St. Martin's Lane. I spoke to him about the petition, asking him whether anything of the sort was being done, and warning him that though I and Stewart Headlam would sign it, that would be no use, as we were two notorious cranks, and our names would by themselves reduce the petition to absurdity and do Oscar more harm than good. Willie cordially agreed, and added, with maudlin pathos and an inconceivable want of tact: 'Oscar was not a man of bad character: you could have trusted him with a woman anywhere.' He convinced me, as you discovered later, that signatures would not be obtainable; so the petition project dropped; and I don't know what became of my draft.

"When Wilde was in Paris during his last phase I made a point of sending him inscribed copies of all my books as they came out; and he did the same to me.

"In writing about Wilde and Whistler, in the days when they were treated as witty triflers, and called Oscar and Jimmy in print, I always made a point of taking them seriously and with scrupulous good manners. Wilde on his part also made a point of recognizing me as a man of distinction by his manner, and repudiating the current estimate of me as a mere jester. This was not the usual reciprocal-admiration trick: I believe he was sincere, and felt indignant at what he thought was a vulgar underestimate of me; and I had the same feeling about him. My impulse to rally to him in his misfortune, and my disgust at 'the man Wilde' scurrilities of the newspapers, was irresistible: I don't quite know why; for my charity to his perversion, and my recognition of the fact that it does not imply any general depravity or coarseness of character, came to me through reading and observation, not through sympathy.

"I have all the normal violent repugnance to homosexuality—if it is really normal, which nowadays one is sometimes provoked to doubt.

"Also, I was in no way predisposed to like him: he was my fellow-townsman, and a very prime specimen of the sort of fellow-townsman I most loathed: to wit, the Dublin snob. His Irish charm, potent with Englishmen, did not exist for me; and on the whole it may be claimed for him that he got no regard from me that he did not earn.

"What first established a friendly feeling in me was, unexpectedly enough, the affair of the Chicago anarchists, whose Homer you constituted yourself by 'The Bomb.' I tried to get some literary men in London, all heroic rebels and skeptics on paper, to sign a memorial asking for the reprieve of these unfortunate men. The only signature I got was Oscar's. It was a completely disinterested act on his part; and it secured my distinguished consideration for him for the rest of his life.

"To return for a moment to Lady Wilde. You know that there is a disease called giantism, caused by 'a certain morbid process in the sphenoid bone of the skull—viz., an excessive development of the anterior lobe of the pituitary body' (this is from the nearest encyclopedia). 'When this condition does not become active until after the age of twenty-five, by which time the long bones are consolidated, the result is acromegaly, which chiefly manifests itself in an enlargement of the hands and feet.' I never saw Lady Wilde's feet; but her hands were enormous, and never went straight to their aim when they grasped anything, but minced about, feeling for it. And the gigantic splaying of her palm was reproduced in her lumbar region.

"Now Oscar was an overgrown man, with something not quite normal about his bigness—something that made Lady Colin Campbell, who hated him, describe him as 'that great white caterpillar.' You yourself describe the disagreeable impression he made on you physically, in spite of his fine eyes and style. Well, I have always maintained that Oscar was a giant in the pathological sense, and that this explains a good deal of his weakness.

"I think you have affectionately underrated his snobbery, mentioning only the pardonable and indeed justifiable side of it; the love of fine names and distinguished associations and luxury and good manners. You say repeatedly, and on certain planes, truly, that he was not bitter and did not use his tongue to wound people. But this is not true on the snobbish plane. On one occasion he wrote about T.P. O'Connor with deliberate, studied, wounding insolence, with his Merrion Square Protestant pretentiousness in full cry against the Catholic. He repeatedly declaimed against the vulgarity of the British journalist, not as you or I might, but as an expression of the odious class feeling that is itself the vilest vulgarity. He made the mistake of not knowing his place. He objected to be addressed as Wilde, declaring that he was Oscar to his intimates and Mr. Wilde to others, quite unconscious of the fact that he was imposing on the men with whom, as a critic and journalist, he had to live and work, the alternative of granting him an intimacy he had no right to ask or a deference to which he had no claim. The vulgar hated him for snubbing them; and the valiant men damned his impudence and cut him. Thus he was left with a band of devoted satellites on the one hand, and a dining-out connection on the other, with here and there a man of talent and personality enough to command his respect, but utterly without that fortifying body of acquaintance among plain men in which a man must move as himself a plain man, and be Smith and Jones and Wilde and Shaw and Harris instead of Bosie and Robbie and Oscar and Mister. This is the sort of folly that does not last forever in a man of Wilde's ability; but it lasted long enough to prevent Oscar laying any solid social foundations.

"Another difficulty I have already hinted at. Wilde started as an apostle of Art; and in that capacity he was a humbug. The notion that a Portora boy, passed on to T.C.D. and thence to Oxford and spending his vacations in Dublin, could without special circumstances have any genuine intimacy with music and painting, is to me ridiculous. When Wilde was at Portora, I was at home in a house where important musical works, including several typical masterpieces, were being rehearsed from the point of blank amateur ignorance up to fitness for public performance. I could whistle them from the first bar to the last as a butcher's boy whistles music hall songs, before I was twelve. The toleration of popular music—Strauss's waltzes, for instance—was to me positively a painful acquirement, a sort of republican duty.

"I was so fascinated by painting that I haunted the National Gallery, which Doyle had made perhaps the finest collection of its size in the world; and I longed for money to buy painting materials with. This afterwards saved me from starving: it was as a critic of music and painting in the World that I won through my ten years of journalism before I finished up with you on the Saturday Review. I could make deaf stockbrokers read my two pages on music, the alleged joke being that I knew nothing about it. The real joke was that I knew all about it.

"Now it was quite evident to me, as it was to Whistler and Beardsley, that Oscar knew no more about pictures than anyone of his general culture and with his opportunities can pick up as he goes along. He could be witty about Art, as I could be witty about engineering; but that is no use when you have to seize and hold the attention and interest of people who really love music and painting. Therefore, Oscar was handicapped by a false start, and got a reputation for shallowness and insincerity which he never retrieved until it was too late.

"Comedy: the criticism of morals and manners viva voce, was his real forte. When he settled down to that he was great. But, as you found when you approached Meredith about him, his initial mistake had produced that 'rather low opinion of Wilde's capacities,' that 'deep-rooted contempt for the showman in him,' which persisted as a first impression and will persist until the last man who remembers his esthetic period has perished. The world has been in some ways so unjust to him that one must be careful not to be unjust to the world.

"In the preface on education, called 'Parents and Children,' to my volume of plays beginning with Misalliance, there is a section headed 'Artist Idolatry,' which is really about Wilde. Dealing with 'the powers enjoyed by brilliant persons who are also connoisseurs in art,' I say, 'the influence they can exercise on young people who have been brought up in the darkness and wretchedness of a home without art, and in whom a natural bent towards art has always been baffled and snubbed, is incredible to those who have not witnessed and understood it. He (or she) who reveals the world of art to them opens heaven to them. They become satellites, disciples, worshippers of the apostle. Now the apostle may be a voluptuary without much conscience. Nature may have given him enough virtue to suffice in a reasonable environment. But this allowance may not be enough to defend him against the temptation and demoralization of finding himself a little god on the strength of what ought to be a quite ordinary culture. He may find adorers in all directions in our uncultivated society among people of stronger character than himself, not one of whom, if they had been artistically educated, would have had anything to learn from him, or regarded him as in any way extraordinary apart from his actual achievements as an artist. Tartufe is not always a priest. Indeed, he is not always a rascal: he is often a weak man absurdly credited with omniscience and perfection, and taking unfair advantages only because they are offered to him and he is too weak to refuse. Give everyone his culture, and no one will offer him more than his due.'

"That paragraph was the outcome of a walk and talk I had one afternoon at Chartres with Robert Ross.

"You reveal Wilde as a weaker man than I thought him: I still believe that his fierce Irish pride had something to do with his refusal to run away from the trial. But in the main your evidence is conclusive. It was part of his tragedy that people asked more moral strength from him that he could bear the burden of, because they made the very common mistake—of which actors get the benefit—of regarding style as evidence of strength, just as in the case of women they are apt to regard paint as evidence of beauty. Now Wilde was so in love with style that he never realized the danger of biting off more than he could chew: in other words, of putting up more style than his matter would carry. Wise kings wear shabby clothes, and leave the gold lace to the drum major.

"You do not, unless my memory is betraying me as usual, quite recollect the order of events just before the trial. That day at the Café Royal, Wilde said he had come to ask you to go into the witness box next day and testify that Dorian Gray was a highly moral work. Your answer was something like this: 'For God's sake, man, put everything on that plane out of your head. You don't realize what is going to happen to you. It is not going to be a matter of clever talk about your books. They are going to bring up a string of witnesses that will put art and literature out of the question. Clarke will throw up his brief. He will carry the case to a certain point; and then, when he sees the avalanche coming, he will back out and leave you in the dock. What you have to do is to cross to France to-night. Leave a letter saying that you cannot face the squalor and horror of a law case; that you are an artist and unfitted for such things. Don't stay here clutching at straws like testimonials to Dorian Gray. I tell you I know. I know what is going to happen. I know Clarke's sort. I know what evidence they have got. You must go.'

"It was no use. Wilde was in a curious double temper. He made no pretence either of innocence or of questioning the folly of his proceedings against Queensberry. But he had an infatuate haughtiness as to the impossibility of his retreating, and as to his right to dictate your course. Douglas sat in silence, a haughty indignant silence, copying Wilde's attitude as all Wilde's admirers did, but quite probably influencing Wilde as you suggest, by the copy. Oscar finally rose with a mixture of impatience and his grand air, and walked out with the remark that he had now found out who were his real friends; and Douglas followed him, absurdly smaller, and imitating his walk, like a curate following an archbishop. You remember it the other way about; but just consider this. Douglas was in the wretched position of having ruined Wilde merely to annoy his father, and of having attempted it so idiotically that he had actually prepared a triumph for him. He was, besides, much the youngest man present, and looked younger than he was. You did not make him welcome: as far as I recollect you did not greet him by a word or nod. If he had given the smallest provocation or attempted to take the lead in any way, I should not have given twopence for the chance of your keeping your temper. And Wilde, even in his ruin—which, however, he did not yet fully realize—kept his air of authority on questions of taste and conduct. It was practically impossible under such circumstances that Douglas should have taken the stage in any way. Everyone thought him a horrid little brat; but I, not having met him before to my knowledge, and having some sort of flair for his literary talent, was curious to hear what he had to say for himself. But, except to echo Wilde once or twice, he said nothing. You are right in effect, because it was evident that Wilde was in his hands, and was really echoing him. But Wilde automatically kept the prompter off the stage and himself in the middle of it.

"What your book needs to complete it is a portrait of yourself as good as your portrait of Wilde. Oscar was not combative, though he was supercilious in his early pose. When his snobbery was not in action, he liked to make people devoted to him and to flatter them exquisitely with that end. Mrs. Calvert, whose great final period as a stage old woman began with her appearance in my Arms and the Man, told me one day, when apologizing for being, as she thought, a bad rehearser, that no author had ever been so nice to her except Mr. Wilde.

"Pugnacious people, if they did not actually terrify Oscar, were at least the sort of people he could not control, and whom he feared as possibly able to coerce him. You suggest that the Queensberry pugnacity was something that Oscar could not deal with successfully. But how in that case could Oscar have felt quite safe with you? You were more pugnacious than six Queensberrys rolled into one. When people asked, 'What has Frank Harris been?' the usual reply was, 'Obviously a pirate from the Spanish Main.'

"Oscar, from the moment he gained your attachment, could never have been afraid of what you might do to him, as he was sufficient of a connoisseur in Blut Bruderschaft to appreciate yours; but he must always have been mortally afraid of what you might do or say to his friends.

"You had quite an infernal scorn for nineteen out of twenty of the men and women you met in the circles he most wished to propitiate; and nothing could induce you to keep your knife in its sheath when they jarred on you. The Spanish Main itself would have blushed rosy red at your language when classical invective did not suffice to express your feelings.

"It may be that if, say, Edmund Gosse had come to Oscar when he was out on bail, with a couple of first class tickets in his pocket, and gently suggested a mild trip to Folkestone, or the Channel Islands, Oscar might have let himself be coaxed away. But to be called on to gallop ventre à terre to Erith—it might have been Deal—and hoist the Jolly Roger on board your lugger, was like casting a light comedian and first lover for Richard III. Oscar could not see himself in the part.

"I must not press the point too far; but it illustrates, I think, what does not come out at all in your book: that you were a very different person from the submissive and sympathetic disciples to whom he was accustomed. There are things more terrifying to a soul like Oscar's than an as yet unrealized possibility of a sentence of hard labor. A voyage with Captain Kidd may have been one of them. Wilde was a conventional man: his unconventionality was the very pedantry of convention: never was there a man less an outlaw than he. You were a born outlaw, and will never be anything else.

"That is why, in his relations with you, he appears as a man always shirking action—more of a coward (all men are cowards more or less) than so proud a man can have been. Still this does not affect the truth and power of your portrait. Wilde's memory will have to stand or fall by it.

"You will be blamed, I imagine, because you have not written a lying epitaph instead of a faithful chronicle and study of him; but you will not lose your sleep over that. As a matter of fact, you could not have carried kindness further without sentimental folly. I should have made a far sterner summing up. I am sure Oscar has not found the gates of heaven shut against him: he is too good company to be excluded; but he can hardly have been greeted as, 'Thou good and faithful servant.' The first thing we ask a servant for is a testimonial to honesty, sobriety and industry; for we soon find out that these are the scarce things, and that geniuses and clever people are as common as rats. Well, Oscar was not sober, not honest, not industrious. Society praised him for being idle, and persecuted him savagely for an aberration which it had better have left unadvertized, thereby making a hero of him; for it is in the nature of people to worship those who have been made to suffer horribly: indeed I have often said that if the crucifixion could be proved a myth, and Jesus convicted of dying of old age in comfortable circumstances, Christianity would lose ninety-nine per cent. of its devotees.

"We must try to imagine what judgment we should have passed on Oscar if he had been a normal man, and had dug his grave with his teeth in the ordinary respectable fashion, as his brother Willie did. This brother, by the way, gives us some cue; for Willie, who had exactly the same education and the same chances, must be ruthlessly set aside by literary history as a vulgar journalist of no account. Well, suppose Oscar and Willie had both died the day before Queensberry left that card at the Club! Oscar would still have been remembered as a wit and a dandy, and would have had a niche beside Congreve in the drama. A volume of his aphorisms would have stood creditably on the library shelf with La Rochefoucauld's Maxims. We should have missed the 'Ballad of Reading Gaol' and 'De Profundis'; but he would still have cut a considerable figure in the Dictionary of National Biography, and been read and quoted outside the British Museum reading room.

"As to the 'Ballad' and 'De Profundis,' I think it is greatly to Oscar's credit that, whilst he was sincere and deeply moved when he was protesting against the cruelty of our present system to children and to prisoners generally, he could not write about his own individual share in that suffering with any conviction or sympathy. Except for the passage where he describes his exposure at Clapham Junction, there is hardly a line in 'De Profundis' that he might not have written as a literary feat five years earlier. But in the 'Ballad,' even in borrowing form and melody from Coleridge, he shews that he could pity others when he could not seriously pity himself. And this, I think, may be pleaded against the reproach that he was selfish. Externally, in the ordinary action of life as distinguished from the literary action proper to his genius, he was no doubt sluggish and weak because of his giantism. He ended as an unproductive drunkard and swindler; for the repeated sales of the Daventry plot, in so far as they imposed on the buyers and were not transparent excuses for begging, were undeniably swindles. For all that, he does not appear in his writings a selfish or base-minded man. He is at his worst and weakest in the suppressed part of 'De Profundis'; but in my opinion it had better be published, for several reasons. It explains some of his personal weakness by the stifling narrowness of his daily round, ruinous to a man whose proper place was in a large public life. And its concealment is mischievous because, first, it leads people to imagine all sorts of horrors in a document which contains nothing worse than any record of the squabbles of two touchy idlers; and, second, it is clearly a monstrous thing that Douglas should have a torpedo launched at him and timed to explode after his death. The torpedo is a very harmless squib; for there is nothing in it that cannot be guessed from Douglas's own book; but the public does not know that. By the way, it is rather a humorous stroke of Fate's irony that the son of the Marquis of Queensberry should be forced to expiate his sins by suffering a succession of blows beneath the belt.

"Now that you have written the best life of Oscar Wilde, let us have the best life of Frank Harris. Otherwise the man behind your works will go down to posterity as the hero of my very inadequate preface to 'The Dark Lady of the Sonnets.'"

G. BERNARD SHAW.

title: Memories of Oscar Wilde


text: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Murray, Alexander (d.1777)


text:
Page:David Baron – The History of the Ten "Lost" Tribes.djvu/18

 were the representatives of the Israel of the whole "Twelve Tribes scattered abroad," and the Twelve Apostles (though Paul, indeed, was a Benjamite) were in a way representative of all the Twelve Tribes of Israel.

II. Then note the absurdities and contradictions of Anglo-Israel assertions. "Israel," you are told—by which is meant the Ten Tribes—while themselves idolaters and sunk so low as not only to forget their origin, but, as another exponent of the theory has it, lapsed "into a state of semi-barbarism like the first pioneer settlers in North America"; and, being without records, in a brief period lost all memory of their former name and condition —became, while in such a condition, "a blessing to the world, and gave to the surrounding nations the only true idea of God"!

And what shall be said of the terrible perversion of such a plain and beautiful Scripture as Matt. x. 5, 6? In the introduction to that chapter (Matt. ix. 36–38) we read how our Lord Jesus, beholding the multitudes which were pressing around Him, was moved with compassion for them because they fainted (or rather, according to the now accepted reading, "were harassed," "plagued"), "and were scattered abroad as sheep having no shepherd." Then, after saying to His disciples that the harvest truly is plenteous but the labourers are few, and commanding them to pray the Lord of the harvest that He may send, or thrust forth, labourers into His harvest, He calls the twelve individual Jewish disciples, and commissions and empowers them to go forth on the definite mission of mercy to their countrymen, warning them not to go beyond the bounds of the land "into the way of the Gentiles," nor even within the bounds of Palestine to visit "the cities of


text: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Murray, Alexander (1736-1795)