HIS LIFE AND CONFESSIONS

BY

FRANK HARRIS

VOLUME II

[Illustration:  Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas About 1893]

PRINTED AND PUBLISHED BY THE AUTHOR

29 Waverley place new York city

MCMXVIII

Imprime en Allemagne
Printed in Germany

    For he who sins a second time
      Wakes a dead soul to pain,
    And draws it from its spotted shroud,
      And makes it bleed again,
    And makes it bleed great gouts of blood,
      And makes it bleed in vain.

—­The Ballad of Reading Gaol.

Copyright, 1916, BY FRANK HARRIS

BOOK II

CHAPTER XVII

Prison for Oscar Wilde, an English prison with its insufficient bad food[1] and soul-degrading routine for that amiable, joyous, eloquent, pampered Sybarite.  Here was a test indeed; an ordeal as by fire.  What would he make of two years’ hard labour in a lonely cell?

There are two ways of taking prison, as of taking most things, and all the myriad ways between these two extremes; would Oscar be conquered by it and allow remorse and hatred to corrupt his very heart, or would he conquer the prison and possess and use it?  Hammer or anvil—­which?

Victory has its virtue and is justified of itself like sunshine; defeat carries its own condemnation.  Yet we have all tasted its bitter waters:  only “infinite virtue” can pass through life victorious, Shakespeare tells us, and we mortals are not of infinite virtue.  The myriad vicissitudes of the struggle search out all our weaknesses; test all our powers.  Every victory shows a more difficult height to scale, a steeper pinnacle of god-like hardship—­that’s the reward of victory:  it provides the hero with ever-new battle-fields:  no rest for him this side the grave.

But what of defeat?  What sweet is there in its bitter?  This may be said for it; it is our great school:  punishment teaches pity, just as suffering teaches sympathy.  In defeat the brave soul learns kinship with other men, takes the rub to heart; seeks out the reason for the fall in his own weakness, and ever afterwards finds it impossible to judge, much less condemn his fellow.  But after all no one can hurt us but ourselves; prison, hard labour, and the hate of men; what are these if they make you truer, wiser, kinder?