76_bkinside5_c

SAN FRANCISCO EXAMINER
December 13, 1900

Edgar Saltus Says: OSCAR WILDE DIED SEVERAL TIMES.

OSCAR WILDE died not merely the other day, but several times. Several people died because of him, too. There was his mother; there was his wife. The latter died a thousand times. Her passing was a release. It is regrettable that she should have lived at all. Many a woman has beheld the transformation of the perfect lover into the perfect beast. Few were less fitted for the spectacle than she. Many a woman has supped on horrors. No woman has had them fed to her on a longer spoon.

As a young girl she was the image of Spring. The phrase may sound affected. It is exact. Were Browning here he would testify to it. For that matter, he has. In her album he wrote: "From a poet to a poem." It were difficult to be more precise. As she looked she acted. Ethereal in presence, she was ethereal in ways. There was about her the breath of books. In her infrequent laughter was the ripple of the rain. From a creature such as that suffering should be shut. Needless at best and stupid at worst, there pain is a brutal thing. And suddenly in her face it leaped. It came in her sleep, stood at her side, plucked at her sleeve, woke her with a start and shook insanity at her. It made her heart its lair, turned her days into nightmares, accompanied her into unconsciousness and followed her out, followed her everywhere. No wonder she died. Her passing was a release. Even the weariest river winds somewhere safe to sea.

We can't say as much of Oscar. His passing is a relief. But he had his share of dying, too. As he put it in his last and best bit of work, "He who lives more lives than one more deaths than one must die." And he put it rightly. For he died at the dock, he died in jail, and he died all along he boulevards of Paris.

His death is a relief. But his conviction was the tragedy of literature. Sydney Smith, Theodore Hook and Douglas Jerrold rolled into one could not have been as brilliant as he. He was the wittiest man of a century of wits. We never heard him utter a platitude save once, and in the mouth of any one else that one platitude would have been a paradox. He exuded epigram. He showered it even on blackmailers, and put one of that lot to flight with but the point of his tongue.

It was on that unequaled wit of his which he relied to annihilate Queensberry's charges. "I have all the criminal classes with me," he announced, and that was his one platitude, yet one also of his million mistakes. After that, technically speaking, he ceased to be.

We can't help regarding the whole episode as a great pity. For though the man was put in jail for no other reason than because he should have been, yet in the man was a mind, and in that mind a mine of gems more brilliant than any which the world has seen since the dazzling days of Aristophanes. The exhaustion of it was the tragedy of literature.

---------------

THE MORNING APPEAL.
H. R. MIGHELS...LESSEE.
SUNDAY..DECEMBER 2

DEATH OF OSCAR WILDE.

Yesterday's dispatches announce the death of Oscar Wilde in an obscure corner in Paris. His spirit and health were broken by imprisonment, and his literary career was ruined in his punishment. His poems will live after him, and only the better side of his nature will be considered in the libraries of the world. The following poem, entitled "Helas!" is from his pen:

To drift with every passion til my soul
Is a stringed lute on which all winds can play,
Is it for this that I have given away
Mine ancient wisdom, and austere control? --
Methinks my life is a twice-written scroll
Scrawled over on some boyish holiday
With idle songs for pipe and virelay
Which do but mar the secret of the whole.
Surely there was a time I might have trod
The sunlit heights, and from life's dissonance
Struck one clear chord to reach the ears of God:
Is that time dead? lo! with a little rod
I did but touch the honey of romance --
And must I lose a soul's inheritance?