Those who hold our mortal vesture in respect for the sake of the spirit will know how to thank Robert Ross for the supreme devotion he showed to his friend’s remains:  in his case at least love was stronger than death.

One can be sure, too, that the man who won such fervid self-denying tenderness, had deserved it, called it forth by charm of companionship, or magic of loving intercourse.

FOOTNOTES: 

[38] See Appendix:  p. 589 and especially p. 592.

CHAPTER XXVII

It was the inhumanity of the prison doctor and the English prison system that killed Oscar Wilde.  The sore place in his ear caused by the fall when he fainted that Sunday morning in Wandsworth Prison chapel formed into an abscess and was the final cause of his death.  The “operation” Ross speaks of in his letter was the excision of this tumour.  The imprisonment and starvation, and above all the cruelty of his gaolers, had done their work.

The local malady was inflamed, as I have already said, by a more general and more terrible disease.  The doctors attributed the red flush Oscar complained of on his chest and back, which he declared was due to eating mussels, to another and graver cause.  They warned him at once to stop drinking and smoking and to live with the greatest abstemiousness, for they recognised in him the tertiary symptoms of that dreadful disease which the brainless prudery in England allows to decimate the flower of English manhood unchecked.

Oscar took no heed of their advice.  He had little to live for.  The pleasures of eating and drinking in good company were almost the only pleasures left to him.  Why should he deny himself the immediate enjoyment for a very vague and questionable future benefit?

He never believed in any form of asceticism or self-denial, and towards the end, feeling that life had nothing more to offer him, the pagan spirit in him refused to prolong an existence that was no longer joyous.  “I have lived,” he would have said with profound truth.

Much has been made of the fact that Oscar was buried in an out-of-the-way cemetery at Bagneux under depressing circumstances.  It rained the day of the funeral, it appears, and a cold wind blew:  the way was muddy and long, and only a half-a-dozen friends accompanied the coffin to its resting-place.  But after all, such accidents, depressing as they are at the moment, are unimportant.  The dead clay knows nothing of our feelings, and whether it is borne to the grave in pompous procession and laid to rest in a great abbey amid the mourning of a nation or tossed as dust to the wind, is a matter of utter indifference.

Heine’s verse holds the supreme consolation: 

    Immerhin mich wird umgeben
    Gotteshimmel dort wie hier
    Und wie Todtenlampen schweben
    Nachts die Sterne ueber mir.