![]() (Wilde was always less concerned with the veracity of a story than the effect it had on its listener.) In any case, it was Ross who introduced Wilde to London’s underground world of men who loved men. ![]() Neil McKenna in The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde makes the case that Wilde already had some experience in this arena, but Wilde certainly led Ross to believe he was the first whether it was true or not. Robert Ross, Wilde’s literary executor, was also his former lover, perhaps his first male lover. After Wilde’s death, two of his closest friends would spend years locked in furious conflict. There was still a tragic third act to come. “Each man kills the thing he loves.” It was as closest thing to a confession and an apology as she was to receive after her husband reunited with Douglas. “Quite why Constance continued to show pride in her husband’s work, in spite of his condemnation of her, and quite why she continued to provide for him are difficult questions,” Moyle wrote. Oscar Wilde, found this a bit contradictory. I have no hatred for him, but I confess that I am afraid of him.”Ī few days later she wrote to the same friend and asked “… Have you see Arthur Symons’ review of the Ballad in the last Saturday Review? I think it I excellent and the best that has appeared and I would like to know what you think of it when you have seen it.”įranny Moyle, who wrote the biography Constance: The Tragic and Scandalous Life of Mrs. “This is true abstractedly, but his was an unnatural love, a madness that I think is worse than hate. “ says that he loved too much and that that is better than hate!” she wrote to a friend. The line cut both ways, and Douglas must have been trying to figure out whether Wilde regretted the damage he had done to his young love or the damage that his young love had done to him.Īlthough Constance was deeply wounded by her husband’s return to the infamous aristocrat, she loved The Ballad of Reading Gaol. It definitively ended any hope that Wilde would reunite with his wife, Constance, who had seen her family and her way of life torn apart by the trials.īy his own account, Douglas repeatedly asked Wilde what “each man kills the thing he loves” meant. The reunion had infuriated the friends and families of both men. ![]() The ballad was written during a brief post-prison period when Wilde and Douglas were sharing a house in Naples. Years later that young man, Lord Alfred Douglas would remember his role in in Wilde’s imprisonment as “the cruel position of being, just because I was as God made me, the innocent cause of the ruin of my friend.” His outraged father did everything in his power to stop what he saw as the unnatural and deviant influence of Wilde over him. It all began when a young man fell in love. No one who loved him emerged unscathed, just as he had been damaged by the one he most loved. It was, however, all too true of Wilde’s life. There are contexts, certainly, in which it is true, but I do not think it to be a general truism about the nature of love. In the play, Bassanio asks “Do all men kill the things they do not love?” “Each man kills the thing he loves” is beautiful and affecting as poetry, but I am not sure I set any high store on it as an axiom. The line was an allusion to Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, reversed in typical Wildean fashion.
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