OSCAR WILDE
HIS LIFE AND CONFESSIONS
BY
FRANK HARRIS
VOLUME II
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
CONTENTS
XVII. Prison and the Effects of Punishment 321
XVIII. Mitigation of Punishment; but not Release 345
XIX. His St. Martin's Summer: His Best Work 363
XX. The Results of His Second Fall: His Genius 406
XXI. His Sense of Rivalry; His Love of Life andLaziness 433
XXII. "A Great Romantic Passion!" 450
XXIII. His Judgments of Writers and of Women 469
XXIV. We Argue About His "Pet Vice" and Punishment488
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas About 1893
"Speranza": Lady Wilde as a Young Woman
[Transcriber's Note: The complete Table of Contentsand List of Illustrations for both volumes are contained in Volume I,also available on Project Gutenberg.]
BOOK II
CHAPTER XVII
Prison for Oscar Wilde, an English prison with its insufficient badfood[1] and soul-degrading routine for that amiable, joyous, eloquent,pampered Sybarite. Here was a test indeed