Oscar Wilde Blackmailed

Abstract

He had written a number of fanciful, extravagant and artificially expressed letters, which he called prose poems, to Douglas,¹ and certain phrases in them would have startled anyone unacquainted with the Elizabethan sonneteers. For example: ‘… it is a marvel that those red rose-leaf lips of yours should be made no less for the madness of music and song than for the madness of kissing. Your slim-gilt soul walks between passion and poetry. I know Hyacinthus, whom Apollo loved so madly, was you in Greek days… when do you go to Salisbury? Do go there to cool your hands in the grey twilight of Gothic things…’ Some of these letters had been stolen from Douglas’s coat-pocket, and it occurred to the thieves or their accomplices that the writer might be willing to purchase them. In order to show that they meant business, a copy of the letter just quoted was sent to Tree,² who was then rehearsing A Woman of No Importance.³ Tree promptly handed it to Wilde, with the remark that the sentiments expressed in it were open to misconstruction; but Wilde explained that it was a prose poem, and if put into verse might be printed in such a respectable anthology as the Golden Treasury. ‘Yes, but it is not in verse’, objected Tree. ‘That no doubt explains why it is not in the Golden Treasury’, answered Wilde.

The Life of Oscar Wilde (London: Methuen, 1946) pp. 274–6. Editor’s title.