Oscar Wilde and Modern Culture - Ohio University Press & Swallow ...

that deeper personality, without which a man must be content to go on saying
what other people have said before him.”₆³
No matter how many deficiencies these commentators identified in Wilde’s
oeuvre, the fact that they expended so much energy on the Collected Works served
Wilde’s legacy well. Just after the final two volumes of this major edition appeared
in late 1908, Ross delivered a speech at a large dinner held in his honor.
His audience comprised more than 160 guests—among them Wilde’s sons (then
in their twenties), Frank Harris, W. Somerset Maugham, William Rothenstein,
and H. G. Wells. This was distinguished company. Once he gave his thanks, Ross
disclosed that he had received a large anonymous gift of £2,000 “to place a suitable
monument to Oscar Wilde at Père Lachaise” in Paris.₆⁴ This generous donor
stipulated that the commission should go to the young American sculptor Jacob
Epstein. In the course of disclosing this good news, Ross stressed that there were
three people in particular “to whom this dinner should really have been given—
Mr. Methuen, Mr. Stuart Mason, and [Ross’s] solicitor, Mr. Holman” (156). None
of these men, as Ross observed, had had any personal contact with Wilde.
Noticeably, Ross made no tribute to Douglas. As it turned out, Douglas chose
to stay away from an “absurd dinner” that, as he informed Ross, brought together
people who either had no connection with Wilde or were “not on speaking terms
with him” when he died.₆₅ But at the time, Douglas’s relations with Ross were
under strain, not least because this literary executor, as soon became clear, had
not treated Wilde’s former lover with sufficient respect. Certainly, as Ross said
in his after-dinner speech, he had fulfilled the promise he made to himself “at the
deathbed of Oscar Wilde” (154). Eight years after his friend’s impecunious passing,
Ross made sure that both Wilde’s estate and his reputation were in good
order. This was more than Douglas ever did. Certainly, Douglas helped reverse
the Academy’s former antipathy toward Wilde by using his recent editorship of
that journal to print his fine sonnet “The Dead Poet,” which honors his former
lover’s memory.₆₆ Moreover, in the Academy he went out of his way to expose the
recently deceased Henley as a man whose repeated attacks on Wilde’s works had
not “the smallest nobility of soul.”₆⁷ Yet Douglas soon held an extremely vexed,
if on occasion misunderstood, place in Wilde’s legacy. Ross had knowingly taken
risks in publishing De Profundis, and in the Collected Works he included a
slightly expanded version of this text, which once again made no mention of
Douglas’s name.
Introduction 19