I have commented the document as it stands mainly for the sake of clearness and because it justifies7 in every particular and almost in every epithet8 the shadows of the portrait which I have endeavoured to paint in this book. Curiously9 enough Oscar Wilde depicts10 himself unconsciously in this part of “De Profundis” in a more unfavourable light than that accorded him in my memory. I believe mine is the more faithful portrait of him, but that is for my readers to determine.
FRANK HARRIS.
NEW YORK, December, 1915.
H.M. Prison, Reading.
DEAR BOSIE,
After long and fruitless waiting I have determined11 to write to you myself, as much for your sake as for mine, as I would not like to think that I had passed through two long years of imprisonment12 without ever having received a single line from you, or any news or message even, except such as gave me pain.
Our ill-fated and most lamentable13 friendship has ended in ruin and public infamy14 for me, yet the memory of our ancient affection is often with me, and the thought that loathing15, bitterness and contempt should for ever take the place in my heart once held by love is very sad to me; and you yourself will, I think, feel in your heart that to write to me as I lie in the loneliness of prison life is better than to publish my letters without my permission, or to dedicate poems to me unasked, though the world will know nothing of whatever words of grief or passion, of remorse16 or indifference17, you may choose to send as your answer or your appeal.
I have no doubt that in this letter which I have to write of your life and mine, of the past and of the future, of sweet things changed to bitterness and of bitter things that may be turned to joy, there will be much that will wound your vanity to the quick. If it prove so, read the letter over and over again till it kills your vanity. If you find in it something of which you feel that you are unjustly accused, remember that one should be thankful that there is any fault of which one can be unjustly accused. If there be in it one single passage that brings tears to your eyes, weep as we weep in prison, where the day no less than the night is set apart for tears. It is the only thing that can save you. If you go complaining to your mother, as you did with reference to the scorn of you I displayed in my letter to Robbie, so that she may flatter and soothe18 you back into self-complacency or conceit19, you will be completely lost. If you find one false excuse for yourself you will soon find a hundred, and be just what you were before. Do you still say, as you said to Robbie in your answer, that I “attribute unworthy motives21” to you? Ah! you had no motives in life. You had appetites merely. A motive22 is an intellectual aim. That you were “very young” when our friendship began? Your defect was not that you knew so little about life, but that you knew so much. The morning dawn of boyhood with its delicate bloom, its clear pure light, its joy of innocence24 and expectation, you had left far behind you. With very swift and running feet you had passed from Romance to Realism. The gutter25 and the things that live in it had begun to fascinate you. That was the origin of the trouble54 in which you sought my aid, and I, unwisely, according to the wisdom of this world, out of pity and kindness, gave it to you. You must read this letter right through, though each word may become to you as the fire or knife of the surgeon that makes the delicate flesh burn or bleed. Remember that the fool to the eyes of the gods and the fool to the eyes of man are very different. One who is entirely26 ignorant55 of the modes of Art in its revelation or the moods of thought in its progress, of the pomp of the Latin line or the richer music of the vowelled27 Greek, of Tuscan sculpture or Elizabethan song, may yet be full of the very sweetest wisdom. The real fool, such as the gods mock or mar28, is he who does not know himself. I was such a one too long. You have been such a one too long. Be so no more. Do not be afraid. The supreme29 vice30 is shallowness. Everything that is realised is right. Remember also that whatever is misery31 to you to read, is still greater misery to me to set down. They have permitted you to see the strange and tragic32 shapes of life as one sees shadows in a crystal. The head of Medusa that turns living men to stone, you have been allowed to look at in a mirror merely. You yourself have walked free among the flowers. From me the beautiful world of colour and motion has been taken away.
I will begin by telling you that I blame myself terribly. As I sit in this dark cell in convict clothes, a disgraced and ruined man, I blame myself. In the perturbed33 and fitful nights of anguish34, in the long monotonous35 days of pain, it is myself I blame. I blame myself for allowing an intellectual friendship, a friendship whose primary aim was not the creation and contemplation of beautiful things, entirely to dominate my life. From the very first there was too wide a gap between us. You had been idle at your school, worse than idle56 at your university. You did not realise that an artist, and especially such an artist as I am, one, that is to say, the quality of whose work depends on the intensification37 of personality, requires an intellectual atmosphere, quiet, peace, and solitude38. You admired my work when it was finished: you enjoyed the brilliant successes of my first nights, and the brilliant banquets that followed them: you were proud, and quite naturally so, of being the intimate friend of an artist so distinguished40: but you could not understand the conditions requisite41 for the production of artistic42 work. I am not speaking in phrases of rhetorical exaggeration, but in terms of absolute truth to actual fact when I remind you that during the whole time we were together I never wrote one single line. Whether at Torquay, Goring43, London, Florence, or elsewhere, my life, as long as you were by my side, was entirely sterile44 and uncreative. And with but few intervals45, you were, I regret to say, by my side always.
I remember, for instance, in September, ‘93, to select merely one instance out of many, taking a set of chambers46, purely48 in order to work undisturbed, as I had broken my contract with John Hare, for whom I had promised to write a play, and who was pressing me on the subject. During the first week you kept away. We had, not unnaturally49 indeed, differed on the question of the artistic value57 of your translation of Salomé. So you contented50 yourself with sending me foolish letters on the subject. In that week I wrote and completed in every detail, as it was ultimately performed, the first act of an An Ideal Husband. The second week you returned, and my work practically had to be given up. I arrived at St. James’s Place every morning at 11.30 in order to have the opportunity of thinking and writing without the interruption inseparable from my own household, quiet and peaceful as that household was. But the attempt was vain. At 12 o’clock you drove up and stayed smoking cigarettes and chattering51 till 1.30, when I had to take you out to luncheon52 at the Café Royal or the Berkeley. Luncheon with its liqueurs lasted usually till 3.30. For an hour you retired53 to White’s. At tea time you appeared again and stayed till it was time to dress for dinner. You dined with me either at the Savoy or at Tite Street. We did not separate as a rule till after midnight, as supper at Willis’ had to wind up the entrancing day. That was my life for those three months, every single day, except during the four days when you went abroad. I then, of course, had to go over to Calais to fetch you back. For one of my nature and temperament54 it was a position at once grotesque55 and tragic.
You surely must realise that now. You must see now that your incapacity of being alone: your nature so exigent in its persistent56 claim on the attention and time of others: your lack of any power of sustained intellectual concentration: the unfortunate accident — for I like to think it was no more — that you had not been able to acquire the “Oxford57 temper” in intellectual matters, never, I mean, been one who could play gracefully59 with ideas, but had arrived at violence of opinion merely — that all these things, combined with the fact that your desires and your interests were in Life, not in Art, were as destructive to your own progress in culture as they were to my work as an artist. When I compare my friendship with you to my friendship with still younger men, as John Gray and Pierre Louys, I feel ashamed. My real life, my higher life, was with them and such as they.
Of the appalling62 results of my friendship with you I don’t speak at present. I am thinking merely of its quality while it lasted. It was intellectually degrading to me. You had the rudiments58 of an artistic temperament in its germ. But I met you either too late or too soon. I don’t know which. When you were away I was all right. The moment, in the early December of the year to which I have been alluding63, I had succeeded in inducing your mother to send you out of England, I collected again the torn and ravelled web of my imagination, got my life back into my own hands, and not merely finished the three remaining acts of the Ideal Husband, but conceived and had almost completed two other plays of a completely different type, the Florentine Tragedy and La Sainte Courtesane, when suddenly, unbidden, unwelcome, and under circumstances fatal to my happiness, you returned. The two works left then imperfect I was unable to take up again. The mood that created them I could never recover. You now, having yourself published a volume of verse, will be able to recognise the truth of everything I have said here. Whether you can or not it remains64 as a hideous65 truth in the very heart of our friendship. While you were with me you were the absolute ruin of my art, and in allowing you to stand persistently66 between Art and myself, I give to myself shame and blame in the fullest degree. You couldn’t appreciate, you couldn’t know, you couldn’t understand. I had no right to expect it of you at all. Your interests were merely in your meals and moods. Your desires were simply for amusements, for ordinary or less ordinary pleasures. They were what your temperament needed, or thought it needed for the moment. I should have forbidden you my house and my chambers except when I specially36 invited you. I blame myself without reserve for my weakness. It was merely weakness. One half-hour with Art was always more to me than a cycle with you. Nothing really at any period of my life was ever of the smallest importance59 to me compared with Art. But in the case of an artist, weakness is nothing less than a crime when it is a weakness that paralyses the imagination.
I blame myself for having allowed you to bring me to utter and discreditable financial ruin. I remember one morning in the early October of ‘92, sitting in the yellowing woods at Bracknell with your mother. At that time I knew very little of your real nature. I had stayed from a Saturday to Monday with you at Oxford. You had stayed with me at Cromer for ten days and played golf. The conversation turned on you, and your mother began to speak to me about your character. She told me of your two chief faults, your vanity, and your being, as she termed it, “all wrong about money.” I have a distinct recollection of how I laughed. I had no idea that the first would bring me to prison and the second to bankruptcy67. I thought vanity a sort of graceful58 flower for a young man to wear, as for extravagance — the virtues68 of prudence69 and thrift70 were not in my own nature or my own race. But before our friendship was one month older I began to see what your mother really meant. Your insistence71 on a life of reckless profusion72: your incessant73 demands for money: your claim that all your pleasures should be paid for by me, whether I was with you or not, brought me, after some time, into serious monetary74 difficulties, and what made the extravagance to me, at any rate, so monotonously75 uninteresting, as your persistent grasp on my life grew stronger and stronger, was that the money was spent on little more than the pleasures of eating, drinking and the like. Now and then it is a joy to have one’s table red with wine and roses, but you outstripped76 all taste and temperance. You demanded without grace and received without thanks. You grew to think that you had a sort of right to live at my expense, and in a profuse77 luxury to which you had never been accustomed, and which, for that reason, made your appetites all the more keen, and at the end, if you lost money gambling78 in some Algiers Casino, you simply telegraphed next morning to me in London to lodge79 the amount of your losses to your account at your bank, and gave the matter no further thought of any kind.
When I tell you that between the autumn of 1892 and the date of my imprisonment, I spent with you and on you, more than ￡5,000 in actual money, irrespective of the bills I incurred80, you will have some idea of the sort of life on which you insisted. Do you think I exaggerate? My ordinary expenses with you for an ordinary day in London — for luncheon, dinner, supper, amusements, hansoms, and the rest of it — ranged from ￡12 to ￡20, and the week’s expenses were naturally in proportion and ranged from ￡80 to ￡130. For our three months at Goring my expenses (rent, of course, included) were ￡1,340. Step by step with the Bankruptcy Receiver I had to go over every item of my life. It was horrible. “Plain living and high thinking,” was, of course, an ideal you could not at that time have appreciated, but such an extravagance was a disgrace to both of us. One of the most delightful81 dinners I remember ever having had is one Robbie and I had together in a little Soho Café, which cost about as many shillings as my dinners to you used to cost pounds. Out of my dinner with Robbie came the first and best of all my dialogues. Idea, title, treatment, mode, everything was struck out at a 3 franc 50c. table d’h?te. Out of the reckless dinners with you nothing remains but the memory that too much was eaten and too much was drunk. And my yielding to your demands was bad for you. You know that now. It made you grasping often: at times not a little unscrupulous: ungracious always. There was, on far too many occasions, too little joy or privilege in being your host. You forgot — I will not say the formal courtesy of thanks, for formal courtesies will strain a close friendship — but simply the grace of sweet companionship, the charm of pleasant conversation, and all those gentle humanities that make life lovely, and are an accompaniment to life as music might be, keeping things in tune82 and filling with melody the harsh or silent places. And though it may seem strange to you that one in the terrible position in which I am situated83, should find a difference between one disgrace and another, still I frankly84 admit that the folly85 of throwing away all this money on you, and letting you squander86 my fortune to your own hurt as well as to mine, gives to me and in my eyes a note of common profligacy87 to my bankruptcy that makes me doubly ashamed of it. I was made for other things.
But most of all I blame myself for the entire ethical88 degradation89 I allowed you to bring on me. The basis of character is will power, and my will power became absolutely subject60 to yours. It sounds a grotesque thing to say, but it is none the less true. Those incessant scenes that seemed to be almost physically90 necessary to you, and in which your mind and body grew distorted, and you became a thing as terrible to look at as to listen to: that dreadful mania91 you inherit from your father, the mania for writing revolting and loathsome92 letters: your entire lack of any control over your emotions as displayed in your long resentful moods of sullen93 silence, no less than in the sudden fits of almost epileptic rage: all these things in reference to which one of my letters to you, left by you lying about in the Savoy or some other hotel, and so produced in court by your father’s counsel, contained an entreaty94 not devoid95 of pathos96, had you at that time been able to recognise pathos either in its elements or its expression — these, I say, were the origin and causes of my fatal yielding to you in your daily increasing demands. You wore me out. It was the triumph of the smaller over the bigger nature. It was the case of that tyranny of the weak over the strong which somewhere in one of my plays I describe as being “the only tyranny that lasts.” And it was inevitable97. In every relation of life with others one has to find some moyen de vivre.
I had always thought that my giving up to you in small things meant nothing: that when a great moment arrived I could myself re-assert my will power in its natural superiority. It was not so. At the great moment my will power completely failed me. In life there is really no great or small thing. All things are of equal value and of equal size. My habit — due to indifference chiefly at first — of giving up to you in everything had become insensibly a real part of my nature. Without my knowing it, it had stereotyped98 my temperament to one permanent and fatal mood. That is why, in the subtle epilogue to the first edition of his essays, Pater says that “Failure is to form habits.” When he said it the dull Oxford people thought the phrase a mere23 wilful99 inversion100 of the somewhat wearisome text of Aristotelian Ethics101, but there is a wonderful, a terrible truth hidden in it. I had allowed you to sap my strength of character, and to me the formation of a habit had proved to be not failure merely, but ruin. Ethically102 you had been even still more destructive to me than you had been artistically103.
The warrant once granted, your will, of course, directed everything. At a time when I should have been in London taking wise counsel and calmly considering the hideous trap in which I had allowed myself to be caught — the booby trap, as your father calls it to the present day — you insisted on my taking you to Monte Carlo, of all revolting places on God’s earth, that all day and all night as well, you might gamble as long as the casino remained open. As for me — baccarat61 having no charms for me — I was left alone outside by myself. You refused to discuss even for five minutes the position to which you and your father had brought me. My business was merely to pay your hotel expenses and your losses. The slightest allusion104 to the ordeal105 awaiting me was regarded as a bore. A new brand of champagne106 that was recommended to us had more interest for you. On our return to London those of my friends who really desired my welfare implored107 me to retire abroad, and not to face an impossible trial. You imputed108 mean motives to them for giving such advice and cowardice109 to me for listening to it. You forced me to stay to brazen110 it out, if possible, in the box by absurd and silly perjuries111. At the end, of course, I was arrested, and your father became the hero of the hour.
As far as I can make out, I ended my friendship with you every three months regularly. And each time that I did so you managed by means of entreaties112, telegrams, letters, the interposition of your friends, the interposition of mine, and the like to induce me to allow you back.
But the froth and folly of our life grew often very wearisome to me: it was only in the mire39 that we met: and fascinating, terribly fascinating though the one62 topic round which your talk invariably centered was, still at the end it became quite monotonous to me. I was often bored to death by it, and accepted it as I accepted your passion for music halls, or your mania for absurd extravagance in eating and drinking, or any other of your to me less attractive characteristics, as a thing that is to say, that one simply had to put up with, a part of the high price one had to pay for knowing you.
When you came one Monday evening to my rooms, accompanied by two63 of your friends, I found myself actually flying abroad next morning to escape from you, giving my family some absurd reason for my sudden departure, and leaving a false address with my servant for fear you might follow me by the next train. . . .
Our friendship had always been a source of distress113 to my wife: not merely because she had never liked you personally, but because she saw how your continual companionship altered me, and not for the better.
You started without delay for Paris, sending me passionate5 telegrams on the road to beg me to see you once, at any rate. I declined. You arrived in Paris late on a Saturday night and found a brief letter from me waiting for you at your hotel stating that I would not see you. Next morning I received in Tite Street a telegram of some ten or eleven pages in length from you. You stated in it that no matter what you had done to me you could not believe that I would absolutely decline to see you; you reminded me that for the sake of seeing me even for one hour you had travelled six days and six nights across Europe without stopping once on the way; you made what I must admit was a most pathetic appeal, and ended with what seemed to me a threat of suicide and one not thinly veiled. You had yourself often told me how many of your race there had been who had stained their hands in their own blood: your uncle certainly, your grandfather possibly; many others in the mad bad line from which you come. Pity, my old affection for you, regard for your mother, to whom your death under such dreadful circumstances would have been a blow almost too great for her to bear, the horror of the idea that so young a life, and one that amidst all its ugly faults had still promise of beauty in it, should come to so revolting an end, mere humanity itself — all these, if excuses be necessary, must serve as an excuse for consenting to accord you one last interview. When I arrived in Paris, your tears breaking out again and again all through the evening, and falling over your cheeks like rain as we sat at dinner first at Voisin’s, at supper at Paillard’s afterwards, the unfeigned joy you evinced at seeing me, holding my hand whenever you could, as though you were a gentle and penitent114 child; your contrition115, so simple and sincere at the moment made me consent to renew our friendship. Two days after we had returned to London, your father saw you having luncheon with me at the Café Royal, joined my table, drank of my wine, and that afternoon, through a letter addressed to you, began his first attack on me. . . . It may be strange, but I had once again, I will not say the chance, but the duty, of separating from you forced on me. I need hardly remind you that I refer to your conduct to me at Brighton from October 10th to 13th, 1894. Three years is a long time for you to go back. But we who live in prison, and in whose lives there is no event but sorrow, have to measure time by throbs116 of pain, and the record of bitter moments. We have nothing else to think of. Suffering, curious as it may sound to you, is the means by which we exist, because it is the only means by which we become conscious of existing; and the remembrance of suffering in the past is necessary to us as the warrant, the evidence, of our continued identity. Between myself and the memory of joy lies a gulf117 no less deep than that between myself and joy in its actuality. Had our life together been as the world fancied it to be, one simply of pleasure, profligacies and laughter, I would not be able to recall a single passage in it. It is because it was full of moments and days tragic, bitter, sinister118 in their warnings, dull or dreadful in their monotonous scenes and unseemly violences, that I can see or hear each separate incident in its detail, can indeed see or hear little else. So much in this place do men live by pain that my friendship with you, in the way through which I am forced to remember it, appears to me always as a prelude119 consonant120 with those varying modes of anguish which each day I have to realise, nay121 more, to necessitate122 them even; as though my life, whatever it had seemed to myself and others, had all the while been a real symphony of sorrow, passing through its rhythmically123 linked movements to its certain resolution, with that inevitableness that in Art characterises the treatment of every great theme. . . . I spoke124 of your conduct to me on three successive days three years ago, did I not?
I entertained you, of course, I had no option in the matter; but elsewhere, and not in my own home. The next day, Monday, your companion returned to the duties64 of his profession, and you stayed with me. Bored with Worthing, and still more, I have no doubt, with my fruitless efforts to concentrate my attention on my play, the only thing that really interested me at the moment, you insist on being taken to the Grand Hotel at Brighton.
The night we arrive you fall ill with that dreadful low fever that is foolishly called the influenza125, your second, if not your third, attack. I need not remind you how I waited on you, and tended you, not merely with every luxury of fruit, flowers, presents, books and the like that money can procure126, but with that affection, tenderness and love that, whatever you may think, is not to be procured127 for money. Except for an hour’s walk in the morning, an hour’s drive in the afternoon, I never left the hotel. I got special grapes from London for you as you did not care for those the hotel supplied; invented things to please you; remained either with you or in the room next to yours; sat with you every evening to quiet or amuse you.
After four or five days you recover, and I take lodgings128 in order to try and finish my play. You, of course, accompany me. The morning after the day on which we were installed I feel extremely ill.
The doctor finds I have caught the influenza from you.
There is no manservant to wait on me, not even any one to send out on a message, or to get what the doctor orders. But you are there. I feel no alarm. The next two days you leave me entirely alone without care, without attendance, without anything. It was not a question of grapes, flowers and charming gifts: it was a question of mere necessities.
And when I was left all day without anything to read, you calmly tell me that you bought the book I wanted, and that they had promised to send it down, a statement which I found by chance afterwards to have been entirely untrue, from beginning to end. All the while you are, of course, living at my expense, driving about, dining at the Grand Hotel, and indeed only appearing in my room for money. On the Saturday night, you having completely left me unattended and alone since the morning, I asked you to come back after dinner, and sit with me for a little. With irritable129 voice and ungracious manner you promise to do so. I wait till 11 o’clock, and you never appear.
At three in the morning, unable to sleep, and tortured with thirst, I made my way in the dark and cold, down to the sitting-room130 in the hopes of finding some water there. I found you. You fell on me with every hideous word an intemperate131 mood, an undisciplined and untutored nature could suggest. By the terrible alchemy of egotism you converted your remorse into rage. You accused me of selfishness in expecting you to be with me when I was ill; of standing132 between you and your amusements; of trying to deprive you of your pleasures.
You told me, and I know it was quite true, that you had come back at midnight simply in order to change your dress-clothes, and go out again.
I told you at length to leave the room; you pretended to do so, but when I lifted up my head from the pillow in which I had buried it, you were still there, and with brutality133 of laughter and hysteria of rage you moved suddenly towards me. A sense of horror came over me, for what exact reason I could not make out; but I got out of my bed at once, and bare-footed and just as I was, made my way down the two nights of stairs to the sitting-room.
You returned silently for money; took what you could find on the dressing134 table, and mantelpiece, and left the house with your luggage. Need I tell you what I thought of you during the two lonely wretched days of illness that followed? Is it necessary for me to state, that I saw clearly that it would be a dishonour135 to myself to continue even an acquaintance with such a one as you had showed yourself to be? That I recognised that the ultimate moment had come and recognised it as being really a great relief? And that I knew that for the future my art and life would be freer and better and more beautiful in every possible way? Ill as I was, I felt at ease. The fact that the separation was irrevocable gave me peace.
Wednesday was my birthday. Amongst the telegrams and communications on my table was a letter in your handwriting. I opened it with a sense of sadness on me. I knew that the time had gone by when a pretty phrase, an expression of affection, a word of sorrow, would make me take you back. But I was entirely deceived. I had underrated you.
You congratulated me on my prudence in leaving the sick bed, on my sudden flight downstairs. “It was an ugly moment for you,” you said, “uglier than you imagine.” Ah! I felt it but too well. What it had really meant I do not know; whether you had with you the pistol you had bought to try to frighten your father with, and that thinking it to be unloaded, you had once fired off in a public restaurant in my company; whether your hand was moving towards a common dinner knife that by chance was lying on the table between us; whether forgetting in your rage your low65 stature136 and inferior strength, you had thought of some special personal insult, or attack even, as I lay ill there; I could not tell. I do not know to the present moment. All I know is that a feeling of utter horror had come over me, and that I had felt that unless I left the room at once and got away, you would have done or tried to do something that would have been, even to you, a source of lifelong shame. . . .
On your return to town from the actual scene of the tragedy to which you had been summoned, you came at once to me very sweetly and very simply, in your suit of woe137, and with your eyes dim with tears. You sought consolation138 and help, as a child might seek it. I opened to you my house, my home, my heart. I made your sorrow mine also, that you might have help in bearing it. Never even by one word, did I allude139 to your conduct towards me, to the revolting scenes, and the revolting letter.
The gods are strange. It is not our vices140 only they make instruments to scourge141 us. They bring us to ruin through what in us is good, gentle, humane142, loving. But for my pity and affection for you and yours, I would not now be weeping in this terrible place.
Of course, I discern in all our relations, not destiny merely, but Doom143 — Doom that walks always swiftly, because she goes to the shedding of blood. Through your father you come of a race, marriage with whom is horrible, friendship fatal, and that lays violent hands either on its own life, or on the lives of others.
In every little circumstance in which the ways of our lives met, in every point of great or seemingly trivial import in which you came to me for pleasure or help, in the small chances, the slight accidents that look, in their relation to life, to be no more than the dust that dances in a beam, or the leaf that flutters from a tree, ruin followed like the echo of a bitter cry, or the shadow that hunts with the beast of prey144.
Our friendship really begins with your begging me, in a most pathetic and charming letter, to assist you in a position appalling to anyone, doubly so to a young man at Oxford. I do so, and ultimately, through your using my name as your friend with Sir George Lewis I begin to lose his esteem145 and friendship, a friendship of fifteen years’ standing. When I was deprived of his advice and help and regard, I was deprived of the one great safeguard of my life. You send me a very nice poem of the undergraduate school of verse for my approval. I reply by a letter of fantastic literary conceits146; I compare you to Hylas, or Hyacinth, Jonquil or Narcissus, or some one whom the Great God of Poetry favoured, and honoured with his love. The letter is like a passage from one of Shakespeare’s sonnets147 transposed to a minor149 key.
It was, let me say frankly, the sort of letter I would, in a happy, if wilful moment, have written to any graceful young man of either university who had sent me a poem of his own making, certain that he would have sufficient wit, or culture, to interpret rightly its fantastic phrases. Look at the history of that letter! It passes from you into the hands of a loathsome companion66, from him to a gang of blackmailers, copies of it are sent about London to my friends, and to the manager67 of the theatre where my work is being performed, every construction but the right one is put on it, society is thrilled with the absurd rumours150 that I have had to pay a high sum of money for having written an infamous151 letter to you; this forms the basis of your father’s worst attack.
I produce the original letter myself in court to show what it really is; it is denounced by your father’s counsel as a revolting and insidious152 attempt to corrupt153 innocence; ultimately it forms part of a criminal charge; the crown takes it up; the judge sums up on it with little learning and much morality; I go to prison for it at last. That is the result of writing you a charming letter.
It makes me feel sometimes as if you yourself had been merely a puppet worked by some secret and unseen hand to bring terrible events to a terrible issue. But puppets themselves have passions. They will bring a new plot into what they are presenting, and twist the ordered issue of vicissitude154 to suit some whim155 or appetite of their own. To be entirely free, and at the same time entirely dominated by law, is the eternal paradox156 of human life that we realise at every moment; and this, I often think, is the only explanation possible of your nature, if indeed for the profound and terrible mystery of a human soul there is any explanation at all, except one that makes the mystery all the more marvellous still.
I thought life was going to be a brilliant comedy, and that you were to be one of the graceful figures in it. I found it to be a revolting and repellent tragedy, and that the sinister occasion of the great catastrophe157, sinister in its concentration of aim and intensity158 of narrowed will power, was yourself stripped of the mask of joy and pleasure by which you, no less than I, had been deceived and led astray.
The memory of our friendship is the shadow that walks with me here: that seems never to leave me: that wakes me up at night to tell me the same story over and over till its wearisome iteration makes all sleep abandon me till dawn: at dawn it begins again: it follows me into the prison yard and makes me talk to myself as I tramp round: each detail that accompanied each dreadful moment I am forced to recall: there is nothing that happened in those ill-starred years that I cannot recreate in that chamber47 of the brain which is set apart for grief or for despair; every strained note of your voice, every twitch159 and gesture of your nervous hands, every bitter word, every poisonous phrase comes back to me: I remember the street or river down which we passed: the wall or woodland that surrounded us; at what figure on the dial stood the hands of the clock; which way went the wings of the wind, the shape and colour of the moon.
There is, I know, one answer to all that I have said to you, and that is that you loved me: that all through those two and a half years during which the fates were weaving into one scarlet160 pattern the threads of our divided lives you really loved me.
Though I saw quite clearly that my position in the world of art, the interest that my personality had always excited, my money, the luxury in which I lived, the thousand and one things that went to make up a life so charmingly and so wonderfully improbable as mine was, were, each and all of them, elements that fascinated you and made you cling to me; yet besides all this there was something more, some strange attraction for you: you loved me far better than you loved anyone else. But you, like myself, have had a terrible tragedy in your life, though one of an entirely opposite character to mine. Do you want to learn what it was? It was this. In you, hate was always stronger than love. Your hatred68 of your father was of such stature that it entirely outstripped, overgrew, and overshadowed your love of me. There was no struggle between them at all, or but little; of such dimensions was your hatred161 and of such monstrous162 growth. You did not realise that there was no room for both passions in the same soul: they cannot live together in that fair carven house. Love is fed by the imagination, by which we become wiser than we know, better than we feel, nobler than we are; by which we can see life as a whole; by which and by which alone, we can understand others in their real as in their ideal relations. Only what is fine, and finely conceived, can feed love. But anything will feed hate. There was not a glass of champagne that you drank, not a rich dish that you ate of in all those years, that did not feed your hate and make it fat. So to gratify it, you gambled with my life, as you gambled with my money, carelessly, recklessly, indifferent to the consequences. If you lost, the loss would not, you fancied, be yours. If you won, yours, you knew, would be the exultation163 and the advantages of victory.
Hate blinds people. You were not aware of that. Love can read the writing on the remotest star, but hate so blinded you that you could see no further than the narrow, walled in, and already lust-withered garden of your common desires. Your terrible lack of imagination, the one really fatal defect in your character, was entirely the result of the hate that lived in you. Subtly, silently, and in secret, hate gnawed164 at your nature, as the lichen165 bites at the root of some sallow plant, till you grew to see nothing but the most meagre interests and the most petty aims. That faculty166 in you which love would have fostered, hate poisoned and paralysed.
The idea of your being the object of a terrible quarrel between your father and a man of my position seemed to delight you.
You scented167 the chance of a public scandal and flew to it. The prospect168 of a battle in which you would be safe delighted you.
You know what my art was to me, the great primal169 note by which I had revealed, first myself to myself, and then myself to the world, the great passion of my life, the love to which all other loves were as marsh170 water to red wine, or the glow worm of the marsh to the magic mirror of the moon. . . . Don’t you understand now that your lack of imagination was the one really fatal defect of your character? What you had to do was quite simple, and quite clear before you; but hate had blinded you, and you could see nothing.
Life is quite lovely to you. And yet, if you are wise, and wish to find life much lovelier still, and in a different manner you will let the reading of this terrible letter — for such I know it is — prove to you as important a crisis and turning point of your life as the writing of it is to me. Your pale face used to flush easily with wine or pleasure. If, as you read what is here written, it from time to time becomes scorched171, as though by a furnace blast, with shame, it will be all the better for you. The supreme vice is shallowness. Whatever is realised is right.
How clearly I saw it then, as now, I need not tell you. But I said to myself, “At all costs I must keep love in my heart. If I go into prison without love, what will become of my soul?” The letters I wrote to you at that time from Holloway were my efforts to keep love as the dominant172 note of my own nature. I could, if I had chosen, have torn you to pieces with bitter reproaches. I could have rent you with maledictions.
The sins of another were being placed to my account. Had I so chosen, I could on either trial have saved myself at his expense, not from shame indeed, but from imprisonment.69 Had I cared to show that the crown witnesses — the three most important — had been carefully coached by your father and his solicitors173, not in reticences merely, but in assertions, in the absolute transference deliberate, plotted, and rehearsed, of the actions and doings of someone else on to me, I could have had each one of them dismissed from the box by the judge, more summarily than even wretched perjured174 Atkins was. I could have walked out of court with my tongue in my cheek, and my hands in my pockets, a free man. The strongest pressure was put upon me to do so, I was earnestly advised, begged, entreated175 to do so by people, whose sole interest was my welfare, and the welfare of my house. But I refused. I did not choose to do so. I have never regretted my decision for a single moment, even in the most bitter periods of my imprisonment. Such a course of action would have been beneath me. Sins of the flesh are nothing. They are maladies for physicians to cure, if they should be cured. Sins of the soul alone are shameful176. To have secured my acquittal by such means would have been a life-long torture to me. But do you really think that you were worthy20 of the love I was showing you then, or that for a single moment I thought you were? Do you really think that any period of our friendship you were worthy of the love I showed you, or that for a single moment I thought you were? I knew you were not. But love does not traffic in a market place, nor use a huckster’s scales. Its joy, like the joy of the intellect, is to feel itself alive. The aim of love is to love; no more, and no less. You were my enemy; such an enemy as no man ever had. I had given you my life; and to gratify the lowest and most contemptible177 of all human passions, hatred and vanity and greed, you had thrown it away. In less than three years you had entirely ruined me from every point of view.
After my terrible sentence, when the prison dress was on me, and the prison house closed, I sat amidst the ruins of my wonderful life, crushed by anguish, bewildered with terror, dazed through pain. But I would not hate you. Every day I said to myself, “I must keep love in my heart today, else how shall I live through the day?” I reminded myself that you meant no evil to me at any rate. . . .
It all flashed across me, and I remember that for the first and last time in my entire prison life, I laughed. In that laugh was all the scorn of all the world. Prince Fleur de lys! I saw that nothing that had happened had made you realise a single thing. You were, in your own eyes, still the graceful prince of a trivial comedy, not the sombre figure of a tragic show.
Had there been nothing in your heart to cry out against so vulgar a sacrilege, you might at least have remembered the sonnet148 he wrote who saw with such sorrow and scorn the letters of John Keats sold by public auction178 in London, and have understood at last the real meaning of my lines:
“ . . . I think they love not art
Who break the crystal of a poet’s heart
That small and sickly eyes may glare or gloat.”
One cannot always keep an adder179 in one’s breast to feed on one, nor rise up every night to sow thorns in the garden of one’s soul.
I cannot allow you to go through life bearing in your heart the burden of having ruined a man like me.
Does it ever occur to you what an awful position I would have been in if, for the last two years, during my appalling sentence, I had been dependent on you as a friend? Do you ever think of that? Do you ever feel any gratitude180 to those who by kindness without stint181, devotion without limit, cheerfulness and joy in giving, have lightened my black burden for me, have arranged my future life for me, have visited me again and again, have written to me beautiful and sympathetic letters, have managed my affairs for me, have stood by me in the teeth of obloquy182, taunt183, open sneer184 or insult even? I thank God every day that he gave me friends other than you. I owe everything to them. The very books in my cell are paid for by Robbie out of his pocket money. From the same source70 are to come clothes for me when I am released. I am not ashamed of taking a thing that is given by love and affection. I am proud of it. But do you ever think of what friends such as More Adey, Robbie, Robert Sherard, Frank Harris, and Arthur Clifton have been to me in giving me comfort, help, affection, sympathy and the like? . . .
I know that your mother, Lady Queensberry, puts the blame on me. I hear of it, not from people who know you, but from people who do not know you, and do not desire to know you. I hear of it often. She talks of the influence of an elder over a younger man, for instance. It is one of her favourite attitudes towards the question, as it is always a successful appeal to popular prejudice and ignorance. I need not ask you what influence I had over you. You know I had none.
It was one of your frequent boasts that I had none, the only one indeed, that was well founded. What was there, as a mere matter of fact, in you that I could influence? Your brain? It was undeveloped. Your imagination? It was dead. Your heart? It was not yet born. Of all the people who have ever crossed my life, you were the one, and the only one, I was unable in any way to influence in any direction.
I waited month after month to hear from you. Even if I had not been waiting but had shut the doors against you, you should have remembered that no one can possibly shut the doors against love forever. The unjust judge in the gospels rises up at length to give a just decision because justice comes daily knocking at his door: and at night time the friend, in whose heart there is no real friendship, yields at length to his friend “because of his importunity185.” There is no prison in any world into which love cannot force an entrance. If you did not understand that, you did not understand anything about love at all. . . .
Write to me with full frankness, about yourself: about your life: your friends: your occupations: your books. Whatever you have to say for yourself, say it without fear. Don’t write what you don’t mean: that is all. If anything in your letter is false or counterfeit186 I shall detect it by the ring at once. It is not for nothing, or to no purpose that in my lifelong cult61 of literature, I have made myself,
“Miser of sound and syllable187, no less
Than Midas of his coinage.”
Remember also that I have yet to know you. Perhaps we have yet to know each other. For myself, I have but this last thing to say. Do not be afraid of the past. If people tell you that it is irrevocable, do not believe them. The past, the present and the future are but one moment in the sight of God, in whose sight we should try to live. Time and space, succession and extension, are merely accidental conditions of a thought. The imagination can transcend188 them and more, in a free sphere of ideal existences. Things, also, are in their essence what we choose to make them. A thing is, according to the mode in which one looks at it. “Where others,” says Blake, “see but the dawn coming over the hill, I see the sons of God shouting for joy.” What seemed to the world and to myself my future I lost irretrievably when I let myself be taunted189 into taking the action against your father, had, I daresay, lost in reality long before that. What lies before me is the past. I have got to make myself look on that with different eyes, to make the world look on it with different eyes, to make God look on it with different eyes. This I cannot do by ignoring it, or slighting it, or praising it, or denying it. It is only to be done fully60 by accepting it as an inevitable part of the evolution of my life and character: by bowing my head to everything that I have suffered.
How far I am away from the true temper of soul, this letter in its changing, uncertain moods, its scorn and bitterness, its aspirations190 and its failures to realise those aspirations shows you quite clearly. But do not forget in what a terrible school I am setting at my task. And incomplete, imperfect, as I am, yet from me you may have still much to gain. You came to me to learn the pleasure of life and the pleasure of art. Perhaps I am chosen to teach you something much more wonderful, the meaning of sorrow and its beauty.
Your affectionate friend,
OSCAR WILDE.
This letter of Oscar Wilde to Lord Alfred Douglas is curiously self-revealing and characteristic. While reading it one should recall Oscar’s provocation191. Lord Alfred Douglas had driven him to the prosecution192, and then deserted193 him and left him in prison without using his influence to mitigate194 his friend’s suffering or his pen to console and encourage him. The abandonment was heartless and complete. The letter, however, is vindictive: in spite of its intimate revelations Oscar took care that his indictment195 should be made public. The flagrant self-deceptions of the plea show its sincerity196: Oscar even accuses young Alfred Douglas of having induced him to eat and drink too much.
The tap-root of the letter is a colossal197 vanity; the bitterness of it, wounded egotism; the falseness of it, a self-righteous pose of ineffable198 superiority as of a superman. Oscar denies to Alfred Douglas imagination, scholarship, or even a knowledge of poetry: he tells him in so many words:— he is without brain or heart. Then why did he allow himself to be hag-ridden to his ruin by such a creature?
Yet how human the letter is, how pathetic!
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1
discrediting
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| 使不相信( discredit的现在分词 )； 使怀疑； 败坏…的名声； 拒绝相信 | |
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reiteration
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| n. 重覆, 反覆, 重说 | |
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accusations
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| n.指责( accusation的名词复数 )；指控；控告；（被告发、控告的）罪名 | |
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nagging
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| adj.唠叨的，挑剔的；使人不得安宁的v.不断地挑剔或批评（某人）( nag的现在分词 )；不断地烦扰或伤害（某人）；无休止地抱怨；不断指责 | |
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passionate
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| adj.热情的，热烈的，激昂的，易动情的，易怒的，性情暴躁的 | |
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vindictive
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| adj.有报仇心的，怀恨的，惩罚的 | |
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justifies
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| 证明…有理( justify的第三人称单数 )； 为…辩护； 对…作出解释； 为…辩解（或辩护） | |
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epithet
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| n.（用于褒贬人物等的）表述形容词，修饰语 | |
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curiously
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| adv.有求知欲地；好问地；奇特地 | |
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depicts
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| 描绘，描画( depict的第三人称单数 )； 描述 | |
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determined
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| adj.坚定的；有决心的 | |
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imprisonment
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| n.关押，监禁，坐牢 | |
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lamentable
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| adj.令人惋惜的，悔恨的 | |
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infamy
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| n.声名狼藉，出丑，恶行 | |
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loathing
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| n.厌恶，憎恨v.憎恨，厌恶( loathe的现在分词)；极不喜欢 | |
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remorse
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| n.痛恨，悔恨，自责 | |
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indifference
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| n.不感兴趣，不关心，冷淡，不在乎 | |
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soothe
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| v.安慰；使平静；使减轻；缓和；奉承 | |
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conceit
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| n.自负，自高自大 | |
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worthy
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| adj.(of)值得的，配得上的；有价值的 | |
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motives
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| n.动机，目的( motive的名词复数 ) | |
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motive
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| n.动机，目的；adv.发动的，运动的 | |
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mere
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| adj.纯粹的；仅仅，只不过 | |
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innocence
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| n.无罪；天真；无害 | |
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gutter
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| n.沟，街沟，水槽，檐槽，贫民窟 | |
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entirely
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| ad.全部地，完整地；完全地，彻底地 | |
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vowelled
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| Vowelled | |
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mar
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| vt.破坏，毁坏，弄糟 | |
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supreme
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| adj.极度的，最重要的；至高的，最高的 | |
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vice
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| n.坏事；恶习；[pl.]台钳，老虎钳；adj.副的 | |
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misery
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| n.痛苦，苦恼，苦难；悲惨的境遇，贫苦 | |
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tragic
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| adj.悲剧的，悲剧性的，悲惨的 | |
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perturbed
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| adj.烦燥不安的v.使（某人）烦恼，不安( perturb的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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anguish
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| n.(尤指心灵上的)极度痛苦，烦恼 | |
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monotonous
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| adj.单调的，一成不变的，使人厌倦的 | |
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specially
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| adv.特定地；特殊地；明确地 | |
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intensification
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| n.激烈化，增强明暗度；加厚 | |
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solitude
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| n. 孤独; 独居,荒僻之地,幽静的地方 | |
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mire
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| n.泥沼，泥泞；v.使...陷于泥泞，使...陷入困境 | |
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distinguished
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| adj.卓越的，杰出的，著名的 | |
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requisite
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| adj.需要的，必不可少的；n.必需品 | |
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artistic
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| adj.艺术(家)的，美术(家)的；善于艺术创作的 | |
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goring
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| v.（动物）用角撞伤，用牙刺破( gore的现在分词 ) | |
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sterile
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| adj.不毛的，不孕的，无菌的，枯燥的，贫瘠的 | |
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45
intervals
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| n.[军事]间隔( interval的名词复数 )；间隔时间；[数学]区间；（戏剧、电影或音乐会的）幕间休息 | |
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46
chambers
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| n.房间( chamber的名词复数 )；（议会的）议院；卧室；会议厅 | |
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chamber
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| n.房间，寝室；会议厅；议院；会所 | |
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purely
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| adv.纯粹地，完全地 | |
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unnaturally
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| adv.违反习俗地；不自然地；勉强地；不近人情地 | |
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50
contented
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| adj.满意的，安心的，知足的 | |
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51
chattering
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| n. （机器振动发出的）咔嗒声，(鸟等)鸣，啁啾 adj. 喋喋不休的，啾啾声的 动词chatter的现在分词形式 | |
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52
luncheon
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| n.午宴，午餐，便宴 | |
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53
retired
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| adj.隐退的，退休的，退役的 | |
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temperament
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| n.气质，性格，性情 | |
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grotesque
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| adj.怪诞的，丑陋的；n.怪诞的图案，怪人（物） | |
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persistent
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| adj.坚持不懈的，执意的；持续的 | |
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Oxford
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| n.牛津（英国城市） | |
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graceful
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| adj.优美的，优雅的；得体的 | |
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gracefully
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| ad.大大方方地；优美地 | |
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fully
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| adv.完全地，全部地，彻底地；充分地 | |
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cult
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| n.异教，邪教；时尚，狂热的崇拜 | |
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appalling
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| adj.骇人听闻的，令人震惊的，可怕的 | |
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63
alluding
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| 提及，暗指( allude的现在分词 ) | |
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64
remains
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| n.剩余物，残留物；遗体，遗迹 | |
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hideous
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| adj.丑陋的，可憎的，可怕的，恐怖的 | |
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persistently
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| ad.坚持地；固执地 | |
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bankruptcy
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| n.破产；无偿付能力 | |
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virtues
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| 美德( virtue的名词复数 )； 德行； 优点； 长处 | |
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69
prudence
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| n.谨慎，精明，节俭 | |
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70
thrift
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| adj.节约，节俭；n.节俭，节约 | |
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71
insistence
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| n.坚持；强调；坚决主张 | |
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72
profusion
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| n.挥霍；丰富 | |
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73
incessant
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| adj.不停的，连续的 | |
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74
monetary
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| adj.货币的，钱的；通货的；金融的；财政的 | |
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75
monotonously
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| adv.单调地，无变化地 | |
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76
outstripped
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| v.做得比…更好，（在赛跑等中）超过( outstrip的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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77
profuse
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| adj.很多的，大量的，极其丰富的 | |
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78
gambling
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| n.赌博；投机 | |
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79
lodge
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| v.临时住宿，寄宿，寄存，容纳；n.传达室，小旅馆 | |
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80
incurred
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| [医]招致的，遭受的； incur的过去式 | |
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81
delightful
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| adj.令人高兴的，使人快乐的 | |
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82
tune
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| n.调子；和谐，协调；v.调音，调节，调整 | |
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83
situated
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| adj.坐落在...的，处于某种境地的 | |
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84
frankly
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| adv.坦白地，直率地；坦率地说 | |
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85
folly
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| n.愚笨，愚蠢，蠢事，蠢行，傻话 | |
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86
squander
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| v.浪费，挥霍 | |
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87
profligacy
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| n.放荡，不检点，肆意挥霍 | |
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88
ethical
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| adj.伦理的，道德的，合乎道德的 | |
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89
degradation
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| n.降级；低落；退化；陵削；降解；衰变 | |
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90
physically
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| adj.物质上，体格上，身体上，按自然规律 | |
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91
mania
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| n.疯狂；躁狂症，狂热，癖好 | |
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92
loathsome
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| adj.讨厌的，令人厌恶的 | |
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93
sullen
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| adj.愠怒的，闷闷不乐的，(天气等)阴沉的 | |
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94
entreaty
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| n.恳求，哀求 | |
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95
devoid
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| adj.全无的，缺乏的 | |
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96
pathos
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| n.哀婉，悲怆 | |
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97
inevitable
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| adj.不可避免的，必然发生的 | |
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98
stereotyped
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| adj.(指形象、思想、人物等)模式化的 | |
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99
wilful
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| adj.任性的，故意的 | |
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100
inversion
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| n.反向，倒转，倒置 | |
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101
ethics
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| n.伦理学；伦理观，道德标准 | |
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102
ethically
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| adv.在伦理上，道德上 | |
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103
artistically
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| adv.艺术性地 | |
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104
allusion
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| n.暗示，间接提示 | |
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105
ordeal
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| n.苦难经历，（尤指对品格、耐力的）严峻考验 | |
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106
champagne
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| n.香槟酒；微黄色 | |
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107
implored
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| 恳求或乞求（某人）( implore的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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108
imputed
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| v.把（错误等）归咎于( impute的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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109
cowardice
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| n.胆小，怯懦 | |
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110
brazen
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| adj.厚脸皮的，无耻的，坚硬的 | |
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111
perjuries
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| n.假誓，伪证，伪证罪( perjury的名词复数 ) | |
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112
entreaties
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| n.恳求，乞求( entreaty的名词复数 ) | |
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113
distress
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| n.苦恼，痛苦，不舒适；不幸；vt.使悲痛 | |
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114
penitent
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| adj.后悔的；n.后悔者；忏悔者 | |
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115
contrition
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| n.悔罪，痛悔 | |
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116
throbs
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| 体内的跳动( throb的名词复数 ) | |
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117
gulf
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| n.海湾；深渊，鸿沟；分歧，隔阂 | |
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118
sinister
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| adj.不吉利的，凶恶的，左边的 | |
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119
prelude
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| n.序言，前兆，序曲 | |
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120
consonant
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| n.辅音；adj.[音]符合的 | |
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121
nay
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| adv.不；n.反对票，投反对票者 | |
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122
necessitate
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| v.使成为必要，需要 | |
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123
rhythmically
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| adv.有节奏地 | |
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124
spoke
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| n.（车轮的）辐条；轮辐；破坏某人的计划；阻挠某人的行动 v.讲，谈（speak的过去式）；说；演说；从某种观点来说 | |
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125
influenza
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| n.流行性感冒，流感 | |
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126
procure
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| vt.获得，取得，促成；vi.拉皮条 | |
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127
procured
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| v.（努力）取得， （设法）获得( procure的过去式和过去分词 )；拉皮条 | |
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128
lodgings
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| n. 出租的房舍, 寄宿舍 | |
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129
irritable
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| adj.急躁的；过敏的；易怒的 | |
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130
sitting-room
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| n.（BrE）客厅，起居室 | |
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131
intemperate
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| adj.无节制的，放纵的 | |
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132
standing
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| n.持续，地位；adj.永久的，不动的，直立的，不流动的 | |
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133
brutality
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| n.野蛮的行为，残忍，野蛮 | |
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134
dressing
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| n.(食物)调料；包扎伤口的用品，敷料 | |
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135
dishonour
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|
| n./vt.拒付（支票、汇票、票据等）；vt.凌辱，使丢脸；n.不名誉，耻辱，不光彩 | |
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136
stature
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| n.（高度）水平，（高度）境界，身高，身材 | |
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137
woe
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| n.悲哀，苦痛，不幸，困难；int.用来表达悲伤或惊慌 | |
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138
consolation
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| n.安慰，慰问 | |
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139
allude
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| v.提及，暗指 | |
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140
vices
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| 缺陷( vice的名词复数 )； 恶习； 不道德行为； 台钳 | |
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141
scourge
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| n.灾难，祸害；v.蹂躏 | |
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142
humane
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|
| adj.人道的，富有同情心的 | |
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143
doom
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| n.厄运，劫数；v.注定，命定 | |
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144
prey
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| n.被掠食者，牺牲者，掠食；v.捕食，掠夺，折磨 | |
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145
esteem
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| n.尊敬，尊重；vt.尊重，敬重；把…看作 | |
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146
conceits
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| 高傲( conceit的名词复数 )； 自以为； 巧妙的词语； 别出心裁的比喻 | |
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147
sonnets
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| n.十四行诗( sonnet的名词复数 ) | |
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148
sonnet
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| n.十四行诗 | |
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149
minor
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| adj.较小(少)的，较次要的；n.辅修学科；vi.辅修 | |
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150
rumours
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| n.传闻( rumour的名词复数 )；风闻；谣言；谣传 | |
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151
infamous
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| adj.声名狼藉的，臭名昭著的，邪恶的 | |
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152
insidious
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| adj.阴险的，隐匿的，暗中为害的，（疾病）不知不觉之间加剧 | |
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153
corrupt
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|
| v.贿赂，收买；adj.腐败的，贪污的 | |
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154
vicissitude
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| n.变化，变迁，荣枯，盛衰 | |
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155
whim
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| n.一时的兴致，突然的念头；奇想，幻想 | |
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156
paradox
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| n.似乎矛盾却正确的说法；自相矛盾的人(物) | |
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157
catastrophe
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| n.大灾难，大祸 | |
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158
intensity
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| n.强烈，剧烈；强度；烈度 | |
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159
twitch
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| v.急拉，抽动，痉挛，抽搐；n.扯，阵痛，痉挛 | |
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160
scarlet
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| n.深红色，绯红色，红衣；adj.绯红色的 | |
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161
hatred
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| n.憎恶，憎恨，仇恨 | |
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162
monstrous
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| adj.巨大的；恐怖的；可耻的，丢脸的 | |
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163
exultation
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| n.狂喜，得意 | |
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164
gnawed
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| 咬( gnaw的过去式和过去分词 )； （长时间） 折磨某人； （使）苦恼； （长时间）危害某事物 | |
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165
lichen
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| n.地衣, 青苔 | |
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166
faculty
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| n.才能；学院，系；(学院或系的)全体教学人员 | |
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167
scented
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| adj.有香味的；洒香水的；有气味的v.嗅到(scent的过去分词) | |
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168
prospect
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| n.前景，前途；景色，视野 | |
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169
primal
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| adj.原始的；最重要的 | |
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170
marsh
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| n.沼泽，湿地 | |
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171
scorched
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| 烧焦，烤焦( scorch的过去式和过去分词 )； 使（植物）枯萎，把…晒枯； 高速行驶； 枯焦 | |
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172
dominant
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|
| adj.支配的，统治的；占优势的；显性的；n.主因，要素，主要的人(或物)；显性基因 | |
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173
solicitors
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| 初级律师( solicitor的名词复数 ) | |
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174
perjured
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|
| adj.伪证的，犯伪证罪的v.发假誓，作伪证( perjure的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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175
entreated
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| 恳求，乞求( entreat的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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176
shameful
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| adj.可耻的，不道德的 | |
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177
contemptible
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| adj.可鄙的，可轻视的，卑劣的 | |
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178
auction
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| n.拍卖；拍卖会；vt.拍卖 | |
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179
adder
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| n.蝰蛇；小毒蛇 | |
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180
gratitude
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| adj.感激，感谢 | |
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181
stint
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| v.节省，限制，停止；n.舍不得化，节约，限制；连续不断的一段时间从事某件事 | |
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182
obloquy
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| n.斥责，大骂 | |
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183
taunt
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| n.辱骂，嘲弄；v.嘲弄 | |
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184
sneer
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| v.轻蔑；嘲笑；n.嘲笑，讥讽的言语 | |
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185
importunity
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| n.硬要，强求 | |
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186
counterfeit
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|
| vt.伪造，仿造；adj.伪造的，假冒的 | |
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187
syllable
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| n.音节；vt.分音节 | |
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188
transcend
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| vt.超出，超越(理性等)的范围 | |
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189
taunted
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| 嘲讽( taunt的过去式和过去分词 )； 嘲弄； 辱骂； 奚落 | |
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190
aspirations
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| 强烈的愿望( aspiration的名词复数 )； 志向； 发送气音； 发 h 音 | |
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191
provocation
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| n.激怒，刺激，挑拨，挑衅的事物，激怒的原因 | |
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192
prosecution
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| n.起诉，告发，检举，执行，经营 | |
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193
deserted
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| adj.荒芜的，荒废的，无人的，被遗弃的 | |
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194
mitigate
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| vt.（使）减轻，（使）缓和 | |
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195
indictment
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| n.起诉；诉状 | |
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196
sincerity
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| n.真诚，诚意；真实 | |
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197
colossal
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| adj.异常的，庞大的 | |
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198
ineffable
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| adj.无法表达的，不可言喻的 | |
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