Oscar Wilde Part 6

We are told that the first attempts of the sparkling talker were by no means successful in the Parisian salons.

"In the house of Victor Hugo, seeing he must wait to let the veteran sleep out his nap whilst others among the guests slumbered also, he made up his mind to astonish them. He succeeded, but at what a cost! Although he was a verse writer, most sincerely devoted to poetry and art, and one of the most emotional and sensitive and tender-hearted amongst modern wielders of the pen, he succeeded in gaining only a reputation for artificiality.

"We all know his studied paradoxes, his five or six continually repeated tales, but we are tempted to forget the charming dreamer who was full of tenderness for everything in nature."

Thus M. Charles Grolleau, and there is much in his point of view. The writer of "The Happy Prince" and "The House of Pomegranates" is a different person from the paradoxical _causeur_ who went cometlike through a few London and Paris seasons before disappearing into the darkness of s.p.a.ce.

And it was the encouragement and applause bestowed upon Oscar Wilde during the second period that not only confirmed him in his determination to live as the complete _flaneur_, but which prevented even sympathetic critics from appreciating his work at its true worth.

The late M. Hugues Rebell, who knew him fairly intimately, said of him:

"It is true that Mallarme has not written much, but all he has done is valuable. Some of his verses are most beautiful, whilst Wilde seemed never to finish anything. The works of the English aesthete are very interesting, because they characterise his epoch; his pages are useful from a doc.u.mentary point of view, but are not extraordinary from a literary standpoint. In the 'd.u.c.h.ess of Padua,' he imitates Hugo and Sardou; the 'Picture of Dorian Gray'

was inspired by Huysmans; 'Intentions' is a _vade mec.u.m_ of symbolism, and all the ideas contained therein are to be found in Mallarme and Villiers de l'Isle-Adam. As for Wilde's poetry, it closely follows the lines laid down by Swinburne. His most original composition is 'Poems in Prose.' They give a correct idea of his home-chat, but not when he was at his best; that, no doubt, is because the art of talking must always be inferior to any form of literary composition. Thoughts properly set forth in print after due correction must always be more charming than a finely sketched idea hurriedly enunciated when conversing with a few disciples. In ordinary table-talk we meet nothing more than ghosts of new-born ideas foredoomed to perish. The jokes of a wit seldom survive the speaker. When we quote the epigrams of Wilde, it is as if we were exhibiting in a gla.s.s case a collection of beautiful b.u.t.terflies, whose wings have lost the brilliancy of their once gaudy colours.

Lively talk pleases, because of the man who utters it, and we are impressed also by the gestures which accompany his frothy discourse. What remains of the sprightly quips and anecdotes of such celebrated _hommes d'esprit_ as Scholl, Becque, Barbey d'Aurevilly! Some stories of the eighteenth century have been transmitted to us by Chamfort, but only because he carefully remodelled them by the aid of his clever pen."

Yet during all the time of his success, when he was receiving flattery enough, celebrity enough, money enough to turn the head of a far stronger-willed man than he was, there is abundant evidence of a frequent aspiration after better things. Serene and lofty moods came to him now and again and found utterance in his words or writings.

From the very beginning of his career he had been in the public eye. Now he had, it seemed, come into his own. The years of ridicule and misrepresentation, the years of the first period, were over and done with. A real and solid popularity seemed to be his. Yet, just as he had spoilt and obscured his aesthetic message by those eccentricities which the Anglo-Saxon mind will not permit in anyone who comes professing to teach it, so now Oscar Wilde was to spoil the triumphs of the second period by a mental intoxication that led him step by step to ultimate ruin and disgrace.

At this moment let us sum up the results at which we have arrived in the study of this complex character. We are all of us complex, but Wilde was more strangely compounded than the ordinary man in exact proportion as his intelligence was greater and his power beyond the general measure.

This much and no more.

We have seen that the great fault of Wilde's career up to this period was that of an unconquerable egoism. He was complex only because such mighty gifts as those with which he was dowered were united to a temperament naturally gracious, kindly, and that of a gentleman in the best sense of the word, while both were obscured by a self-appreciation and confidence which reached not only the heights of absurdity but surely impinged upon the borders of mental failure. As he himself said over and over again after his downfall, he had n.o.body but himself to blame for it. Generous-hearted, free with all material things, kind to the unfortunate, gentle to the weak--Oscar Wilde was all these things.

Yet, at the same time, he committed the most dreadful crimes against the social well-being; without a thought of those his influence led into terrible paths, without a thought of those nearest and dearest to him, he deliberately imposed upon them a horror and a shame with an extraordinary and almost unparalleled callousness and hardness of heart.

Bound up in the one man were the twin natures of an angel of light and an angel of dark. It is the same with all men, but never perhaps in the history of the world, certainly never in the history of literature, is there to be found a contrast so astonis.h.i.+ng. It is not for the writer of this study to hold the balance and to say which part of his nature predominated. Opinion about him is still divided into two camps, and this book is a statement from which everyone can draw his own conclusion, and does not attempt to do more than provide the materials for doing so. Yet, the explanation of it all, if explanation there is, seems simple enough. There was an extraordinary and abnormal divorce between will-power and intelligence. Heavy indulgence grew and grew and gradually obscured the finer nature until he imagined his will was supreme and his wishes the only law. The royal intellect dominated the soul and grew by what it fed on, until it unseated the reason, and Wilde fell never to rise again, except only in his work.

At the end of the second period came the frightful exposure and scandals which sent the author into prison. It is no part of this book to touch upon these scandals or to do more than breathe the kindly hope that Wilde was unconscious of what he did, and was totally incapable of realising its enormity.

The third period, in this attempt at chronicling the various phases of his life and temperament, might be said to have begun on the day of his arrest, when his long agony and punishment were to begin. Greatly as he deserved a heavy punishment, not so much as for what he did to himself but because of the corrupting influence his life and a.s.sociation with others had upon a large section of society, it is yet a moot point whether he did not suffer for others and was made their scapegoat. The true history of this terrible period cannot be written and never will be written. Yet, those who know it in its entirety will say that Wilde bore the penalty for the transgressions of many other people in addition to the just punishment he received for his own.

Few n.o.bler things can be said of any man than this. Let it be eternally placed to his credit that he made no endeavour to lighten his own punishment by implicating others. In more than one instance the betrayal of a friend would undoubtedly have lessened the c.u.mulative burden of the indictment brought against him. He betrayed none of his friends.

THE THIRD PERIOD

This beautiful thread of brightness in the dark warp and woof of Wilde's life at this moment must not be forgotten by those who would estimate his character. It is one of the few relieving lights in the blackness with which the third period opens. And yet, there is still something that can be said for Wilde at this time which certainly provides the student with another aspect of him. It is the way in which he met his fate and was prepared to endure his punishment, although it would have been simple for him to have avoided it. To avoid the consequences of what he had done, inasmuch as the ruin of his career is concerned, was, of course, impossible. That, indeed, was to be the heaviest part of his penalty. Yet, had he so chosen, imprisonment and the frightful agony of the two years need never have been his portion. A French critic writing of him in the _Mercure de France_ takes an a.n.a.lytical view of this fact, which I do not think is the true one, though, nevertheless, it is interesting. He says: "Neither his own heedlessness nor the envious and hypocritical anger of his enemies, nor the sn.o.bbish cruelty of social reprobation were the true cause of his misfortunes. It was he himself who, after a time of horrible anguish, consented to his punishment, with a sort of supercilious disdain for the weakness of human will, and out of a certain regard and unhealthy curiosity for the sportfulness of fate. Here was a voluptuary seeking for torture and desiring pain after having wallowed in every sensual pleasure. Can such conduct have been due to aught else but sheer madness?"

That is all very well, but it does not bear the stamp of truth. It is an interesting point of view and nothing more. The conduct of Wilde when he at last came athwart the horror of his destiny, when he realised what all the world realised, that he must answer for his sins before the public justice of England, was not unheroic, nor without a fine and splendid dignity. At this time I would much prefer to say, and all the experiences of those around him confirm it, that Wilde knew that it was his duty to himself to endure what society was about to mete out to him.

To say that he was a mere gloomy and jaded voluptuary who wished to taste the pleasures of the most horrible and sordid pain, is surely to talk something perilously like nonsense, though full of one of those minute psychological presumptions so dear to a certain type of Latin mind.

Let it be remembered that Oscar Wilde refused to betray his friends, and in the light of that fact, let us see whether his motive for remaining in England to "face the music," as his brother, William Wilde, expressed it, was not something high and worthy in the midst of this hideous wreck and bankruptcy of his fortune. A friend who was with him then, his biographer, and a man of position in English letters, said that when the subject of flight was discussed, he declared to Wilde that, in his opinion, it was the best thing he could do, not only in his own interests but in those of the public too. This self-sacrificing friend offered to take all the responsibility of the flight upon his own shoulders and to make all the arrangements for it being carried out.

It must be remembered that, at the time Wilde was out on bail, and it has since been proved, with as much certainty as anything of the sort can be proved, that he was not watched by the police, and that even between the periods of his first and second trials, if he had secretly left the country and sought a safe asylum on the Continent, everybody would have felt relieved and the public would have been spared a repet.i.tion of the horrors which had already filled the pages of the newspapers to repletion. After the collapse of the action Oscar Wilde brought against Lord Queensberry, he was allowed several hours before the warrant for his arrest was executed in order that he might leave the country. "But imitative of great men in their whims and fancies, he refused to imitate the base in acts which he deemed cowardly. I do not think he ever seriously considered the question of leaving the country, and this, in spite of the fact that the gentleman who was responsible for almost the whole of the bail, had said, 'it will practically ruin me if I lose all that money at the present moment, but if there is a chance, even after conviction, in G.o.d's name let him go.'"

Whatever Wilde's motive was for staying to "face the music," we cannot deny that it was fine. Either he felt that he must endure the punishment society was to give him because he had outraged the law of society, or else he was unwilling to ruin the disinterested and n.o.ble-minded man--a gentleman who had only the slightest acquaintance with him--who had furnished the amount of his bail.

Let these facts be written to his credit and considered when the readers of this memoir pa.s.s their judgment upon his character.

At the beginning of this third period public opinion which, but a short time ago, had simply meant a chorus of public adulation, except for a minority of people who either envied his successes or honestly reprobated his att.i.tude towards art and life, was now terribly bitter, venomous, and full of spleen and hatred.

Society, however much society was disposed to deny the fact, had set up an idol in their midst. It was partly owing to the senseless and indiscriminate adulation of its idol that its foundations were undermined and that it fell with so resonant a crash. When it was down society a.s.sailed it with every ingenuity of reprobation and hatred that it knew how to voice and use.

Nothing was too bad to be said about the erstwhile favourite who, let it be remembered, was not yet adjudged guilty but who, if ever a man was, was denied the application of the prime principle of English criminal law, which says that every man accused is to be deemed innocent until guilt has been proved against him. People gloated over the downfall.

When Wilde was first arrested and placed in Holloway, and before he was admitted to bail, the more scurrilous portion of the press was full of sickening pictures, both in line and words, of the fallen creature's agony.

Contrasts were drawn by little pens dipped in venom, and the writer of this memoir has in his possession a curious and saddening collection of the screeds of those days, a collection which shows how innate the principle of cruelty is still in the human mind despite centuries of civilisation and the influence of the Cross, which forbids gladiators to slay each other in the arena but allows a more subtle and terrible form of savage sport than anything that Nero or Caligula ever saw or promulgated.

It is unnecessary to quote largely from the productions which disgraced the English press at this time. One single article will serve to prove the point. Let those who read it learn tolerance from this mock sympathy and cruel dwelling upon the tortures of one so recently high in public popularity and esteem, still presumably innocent by English law, and yet placed under the vulgar microscope of the morbid-minded and the lovers of sensation at any cost.

"Figuratively speaking but yesterday Oscar Wilde was the man of the hour, and to him, and him alone, we looked for our wit, our epigrams, and our learned and interesting plays. But what a change!

To-day, Oscar Wilde, the wit, the epicure, is gone from his world, and is languis.h.i.+ng in a dreary cell in Holloway Prison. In short, Mr Wilde, in a moment of weak-headedness, walked over the side of the mountain of fame and fell headlong from its height to the mora.s.s below, to lie there forgotten, neglected and abused.

"Yes, although I have little or no sympathy with Oscar Wilde I cannot but help feeling for him in his altered circ.u.mstances. He is a man who from his very infancy has been nursed in the lap of luxury, and has systematically lived on the fat of the land. Mr Wilde's residence in t.i.te Street was elegantly and luxuriously furnished. His rooms at the Cadogan Hotel were all that comfort could desire. His room, or rather cell, in Holloway Prison is altogether undesirable, is badly furnished, ill-lighted, and uncomfortable. Picture to yourself this change--yes, a change effected within twenty-four hours--and then you can imagine what the mental and physical sufferings of a man of the Oscar Wilde temperament must be. It is in this sense alone that my sympathy goes out towards him, and I feel as a man for another man who has been suddenly s.n.a.t.c.hed from the lap of indolent, free livelihood and suddenly pitched foremost into the icelike creva.s.se of a British prison cell.

"I will now describe in as few words as I possibly can, but with absolute accuracy and detail, the cell in which Mr Wilde spends his time and the manner in which he lives. The cell in which Oscar is incarcerated is not an ordinary one--that is, it is not one that is used by any condemned or ordinary prisoner under remand. The cell is known in prison _parlance_ as a 'special cell,' for the use of which a fee is payable to the authorities, and is the same one as was occupied by a certain well-known d.u.c.h.ess some few months back when she was committed by the Queen's Bench Judges for contempt of court. The prison authorities only supply the 'cell,' the prisoner himself has to find his own furniture, which he usually hires, by the advice of one of the warders, from a local firm who have a suite they keep for the use of this 'special cell' in Holloway.

When Mr Wilde arrived at the prison last Sat.u.r.day week afternoon this 'cell' was vacant. He promptly gave orders for the furniture to be brought in, and in an incredibly short s.p.a.ce of time the cell was furnished, and the distinguished prisoner took possession of his apartment. I will first describe the room, and then take one typical day in the prison routine, which will clearly show the kind of life that Mr Wilde is compelled to live.

"Now to the cell. The room is situated at the far end of the east wing of the prison, and is entered from the long pa.s.sage which runs from the head warder's rooms past the convict cells, and terminates at the door which protects Oscar from the common herd, and helps to make him secure. The door is an ordinary prison cell door, possessing spyholes and flaptrap, and large iron bars and locks.

The cell itself is about 10 ft. broad, 12 ft. long, and 11 ft.

high. The walls are not papered but whitewashed, and the light by which the room is supplied is obtained through an iron-barred window in the wall placed high up and well out of the prisoner's reach. A small fireplace is also fixed securely at the end of the room, but it is seldom lit, as the room is well heated by hot-water pipes. Now to the furniture in the room. Just on the right-hand side of the window is placed a table made of hard, white wood. No cloth covers it, but at the back is placed a looking-gla.s.s, whilst on the table itself is a water jug and a Bible. Near the table and almost under the window is an arm-chair, in which Oscar spends most of his time. But more of this anon. In the corner near the fireplace is placed a small camp bedstead, which is so small that it seems almost an impossibility that so ma.s.sive a form as that of Oscar could recline with any ease upon so small a s.p.a.ce. No feather bed is upon the iron supports, and the sleeper is compelled to repose upon hard--probably too hard--mattresses. The bed is supplied with sheets, blankets, and a cover quilt, made up of patches of all colours of the rainbow. This quilt is not pretty, and most considerably upsets the artistic being of a man like Wilde. A small table on the other side of the room, another chair, and a small metal was.h.i.+ng stand, go to make up all the furniture the room possesses. No carpet is on the floor, but the boards are kept scrupulously clean. This I think briefly comprises a description of Mr Wilde's residential and sleeping compartment. Now to his daily routine and the life he is compelled to lead. He is awakened by a warder at six o'clock, and whether he likes it or not, is compelled to get up. After was.h.i.+ng himself in cold water--hot is not permitted--and using ordinary common soap, Mr Wilde dresses himself, and to do him justice, he turns himself out very neat and span considering he has no valet to wait upon him. At seven o'clock one of the convicted prisoners enters Mr Wilde's cell, cleans up the room, makes the bed, and generally tidies up the place. For this service the prisoner receives 1s. per week, and it usually takes him quite half-an-hour per day to get through his work. Truly a munificent remuneration, but then prison regulations, whenever reasonable, are on the side of liberality. At half-past seven o'clock Wilde's breakfast, usually consisting of tea, ham and eggs, or a chop, toast and bread and b.u.t.ter, arrives from a well-known restaurant in Holloway. Of course Mr Wilde pays for the food, and, within reason, can eat and drink what he pleases.

"At nine o'clock Mr Wilde is compelled to leave his cell, and proceed to the exercising yard of the prison, and for one hour he is compelled to walk at regulation pace round a kind of tower erected in the centre of the yard. After exercise the distinguished prisoner returns to his cell, and the daily newspapers are brought to him, for which he also pays. Mr Wilde sits during the time he is in his cell in the chair by the window, and then reads his papers.

He, however, has moments of very low-spiritedness, and becomes almost despondent in the moods. The sketch in this issue represents him seated in his favourite chair, with a paper in his hand, and, after an interview with his solicitor, Mr Wilde is very fond, when his active brain is working too deeply, to push back his hair from off his forehead and then leave the hand on the head, and, as if staring into vacancy, sit for hours in this position thinking deeply. But, to continue, at twelve o'clock Mr Wilde's lunch arrives from the restaurant, for which he pays. It consists of a cut off the joint, vegetables, cheese, and biscuits and water, or one gla.s.s of wine. After lunch he is again taken to the exercise ground for an hour, and then sent back to his cell. Still seated in his chair, he still reads his papers, and thinks out improbable problems. Sometimes one of his friends comes to see him. On these occasions he brightens up, but after the visits of his solicitor he is visibly very low-spirited and morose. At six o'clock Mr Wilde's dinner--for which he pays--arrives. It consists usually of soup, fish, joint, or game, cheese, and half-a-pint of any wine he chooses to select. The dinner finished, Mr Wilde sits again in his chair, and the agony he endures at not being allowed even a whiff at his favourite cigarette must to him be agony indeed. At eight o'clock a warder enters his room and places a lamp on the table to light the room. At nine o'clock the same warder again enters the room and gives Oscar five minutes to undress himself and get into bed. He complies willingly but with a sigh. When he is safely in bed the warder removes the lamp, bolts and locks the door, and leaves Oscar to sleep or remain awake thinking, just as he pleases.

Oscar, however, does not sleep much. He is out of bed most of the night, and in unstockinged feet paces the room in apparently not too good a mood. Yes, poor Oscar, I do pity you."

So much for popular kindness!

The trial, at which the accused man was admitted by everyone to have comported himself with a dignity and resignation that had nothing of that levity and occasional pose which must be allowed to have characterised his att.i.tude during the two former ordeals, came to a close. Wilde was sentenced to prison for two years' hard labour.

During the trial, of course, no comment was permissible, though there were not wanting some papers who committed contempt of court. When, however, the sentence had been p.r.o.nounced and Wilde as a man with a place in society--I am using the word society here not in its limited but its economic sense--had ceased to exist, then the thunders of the important and influential journals were let loose.

_The Daily Telegraph_ which, to do it justice, had never been sympathetic to Wilde in his days of prosperity and fame, came out with a most weighty and severe condemnation. The article, from which I am about to quote an extract, certainly represented the opinion of the country at the time--as _The Daily Telegraph_ has nearly always represented the ma.s.s of opinion of the country at any given moment. To the sympathisers with Wilde this article will seem unnecessarily cruel and severe. But to those who have taken into account the best that has been written herein about him during this terrible third period, and who have realised that the writer simply states facts and does not desire to comment on them, the article will seem only a natural and dignified expression of a truth which was hardly controvertible.

"No sterner rebuke could well have been inflicted on some of the artistic tendencies of the time than the condemnation on Sat.u.r.day of Oscar Wilde at the Central Criminal Court. We have not the slightest intention of reviewing once more all the sordid incidents of a case which has done enough, and more than enough, to shock the conscience and outrage the moral instincts of the community. The man has now suffered the penalties of his career, and may well be allowed to pa.s.s from that platform of publicity which he loved into that limbo of disrepute and forgetfulness which is his due. The grave of contemptuous oblivion may rest on his foolish ostentation, his empty paradoxes, his insufferable posturing, his incurable vanity. Nevertheless, when we remember that he enjoyed a certain popularity among some sections of society, and, above all, when we reflect that what was smiled at as insolent braggadocio was the cover for, or at all events ended in, flagrant immorality, it is well, perhaps, that the lesson of his life should not be pa.s.sed over without some insistence on the terrible warning of his fate.

Young men at the universities, clever sixth-form boys at public schools, silly women who lend an ear to any chatter which is petulant and vivacious, novelists who have sought to imitate the style of paradox and unreality, poets who have lisped the language of nerveless and effeminate libertinage--these are the persons who should ponder with themselves the doctrines and the career of the man who has now to undergo the righteous sentence of the law. We speak sometimes of a school of Decadents and aesthetes in England, although it may well be doubted whether at any time its prominent members could not have been counted on the fingers of one hand; but, quite apart from any fixed organisation or body such as may or may not exist in Paris, there has lately shown itself in London a contemporary bias of thought, an affected manner of expression and style, and a few loudly vaunted ideas which have had a limited but evil influence on all the better tendencies of art and literature.

Of these the prisoner of Sat.u.r.day const.i.tuted himself a representative. He set an example, so far as in him lay, to the weaker and the younger brethren; and, just because he possessed considerable intellectual powers and unbounded a.s.surance, his fugitive success served to dazzle and bewilder those who had neither experience nor knowledge of the principles which he travestied, or of that true temple of art of which he was so unworthy an acolyte. Let us hope that his removal will serve to clear the poisoned air, and make it cleaner and purer for all healthy and unvitiated lungs."

It was the duty of a great journal to say what it said. Yet, nevertheless, a certain wave of sorrow seemed to pa.s.s over the press generally, and hostile comment on the _debacle_ was not unmingled with regret for the unhappy man himself. The doctrines he was supposed to have preached to the world at large were sternly denied and thundered against. His own fate was, in the majority of cases, treated with a sorrowful regret.

Yet, n.o.body realised at all that in condemning what was supposed to be the teaching and doctrine of Oscar Wilde, they were condemning merely supposit.i.tious deduction from his manner of life, which could not be in the least substantiated by any single line he had ever written.

All through this first part of the book I have insisted upon the fact that the man's life and the man's work should not be regarded as identical. To-day, as I write, that att.i.tude has taken complete possession of the public mind. As was said in the first few pages of the memoir, the whole of Europe is taking a sympathetic and intelligent interest in the supreme art of the genius who produced so many beautiful things. The public seems to have learned its lesson at last, but at the beginning of what I have called the third period it was unable to differentiate between the criminal, part of whose life was shameful, and the artist, all of whose works were pure, stimulating, and splendid. I quote but a few words from the printed comments upon Wilde's downfall.

They are taken from the well-known society paper _Truth_, and the writer seems to strike only a note of wonder and amazement. The horrible fact of Wilde's conviction had startled England, had startled the writer, and a writer by no means unsympathetic in effect, into the following paragraphs:--

"For myself, I turned into the Lyceum for half-an-hour, just to listen, when the performance was actually stopped by the great shout of congratulation that welcomed the first entrance of 'Sir Henry.' Yet, through all these cheers I seemed to hear the dull rumble of the prison van in which Oscar Wilde made his last exit--to Holloway. While the great actor-manager stood in the plenitude of position bowing and bowing again, to countless friends and admirers, again there rose before my eyes the last ghastly scene at the Old Bailey--I heard the voice of the foreman in its low but steady answer, 'Guilty,' 'Guilty,' 'Guilty,' as count after count was rehea.r.s.ed by the clerk. I heard again that last awful admonition from the judge. I remembered how there had flitted through my mind the recollection of a night at St James's, the cigarette, and the green carnation, as the prisoner, broken, beaten, tottering, tried to steady himself against the dock rail and asked in a strange, dry, ghostlike voice if he might address the judge. Then came the volley of hisses, the prison warders, the rapid break-up of the Court, the hurry into the blinding suns.h.i.+ne outside, where some half-score garishly dressed, loose women of the town danced on the pavement a kind of carmagnole of rejoicing at the verdict. 'He'll 'ave 'is 'air cut regglar _now_,' says one of them; and the others laughed stridently. I came away. I did not laugh, for the matter is much too serious for laughter.

"The more I think about the case of Oscar Wilde, my dear d.i.c.k, the more astounding does the whole thing seem to me. So far as the man himself is concerned, it would be charitable to a.s.sume that he is not quite sane. Without considering--for the moment--the moral aspect of the matter, here was a man who must have known that the commission of certain acts const.i.tuted in the eye of the Law a criminal offence. But no thought of wife or children, no regard, to put it selfishly, for his own brilliant prospects, could induce him to curb a depraved appet.i.te which led him--a gentleman and a scholar--to consort with the vilest and most depraved sc.u.m of the town."