The Trial
of
Oscar Wilde
Issued for Private Circulation Only and Limited
to 50 Copies on Japanese Vellum and
Five Hundred Copies on Handmade Paper
Numbered from One to Five Hundred
and Fifty.
No 184
PREFACE
“It is wrong for us during the greater part of the time to handle thesequestions with timidity and false shame, and to surround them withreticence and mystery. Matters relating to sexual life ought to be studiedwithout the introduction of moral prepossessions or of preconceived ideas.False shame is as hateful as frivolity. It is a matter of pressing concernto rid ourself of the old prejudice that we “sully our pens” by touchingupon facts of this class. It is necessary at all costs to put aside ourmoral, esthetic, or religious personality, to regard facts of this naturemerely as natural phenomena, with impartiality and a certain elevation ofmind.”
PREFACE
I blame equally as much those who take it upon themselves to praiseman, as those who make it their business to blame him, together withothers who think that he should be perpetually amused; and only thosecan I approve who seek for truth with tear-filled eyes.
Pascal.
In “De Profundis,” that harmonious and last expression of the perfectartist, Wilde seems, in a single page to have concentrated in guise ofsupreme confession, all the pain and passion that stirred and sobbed inhis soul.
“This New Life, as through my love of Dante I like sometimes to call it,is of course no new life at all, but simply the continuance, by means ofdevelopment, and evolution, of my former life. I remember when I was atOxford saying to one of my friends as we were strolling round Magdalen’snarrow bird-haunted walks one morning in the year before I took my degree,that I wanted to eat of the fruit of all the trees in the garden of the[Pg iv]world, and that I was going out into the world with that passion in mysoul. And so, indeed, I went out, and so I lived. My only mistake was thatI confined myself so exclusively to the trees of what seemed to me thesun-lit side of the garden, and shunned the other side for its shadow andits gloom. Failure, disgrace, poverty, sorrow, despair, suffering, tearseven, the broken words that come from lips in pain, remorse that makes onewalk on thorns, conscience that condemns, self-abasement that punishes,the misery that puts ashes on its head, the anguish that choosessack-cloth for its raiment and into its own drink puts gall:—all thesewere things of which I was afraid. And as I had determined to know nothingof them, I was forced to taste each of them in turn, to feed on them, tohave for a season, indeed no other food at all.”
Further on, he tells us that his dominant desire was to seek refuge in thedeepest shade of the garden, for his mouth was full of the b