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“My friends are extraordinary. They beg me to be careful. Careful? But how can I be careful? That would be a backward step. I must go on as far as possible. Something is bound to happen… something else.”
Wilde's answer to Andre Gide when the latter warned him not to return to England at a time when the Marquis of Queensberry was threatening to expose Wilde's homosexual connection with Lord Alfred Douglas. Queensberry's son.
Oscar Wilde's approaching centenary, 1956, has been marked by an abundance of professional nonsense, emitted by professional biographers, on the reasons which impelled Wilde to turn to homosexuality. The “explanations” range from “moral degradation” to biology, from the notorious fact that his father was a “rake” to the assertion that his mother had wanted him to be a girl. The admission, in at least one case, that the biographer is helpless to explain the “un-explainable” is also included. The most intelligent explanation so far adduced is that contained in the introduction to the verbatim transcript of “The Trials of Oscar Wilde”, edited by H. Montgomery Hyde, who also wrote the foreword:
There are strong grounds for believing that Wilde was initiated into homosexual practices by Robert Ross in 1886. This was the year following the passing of the Criminal Law Amendment Act, of which section 11 made indecencies between males an offense even if practiced in private. This legislation thus added a spice of danger to conduct which, how ever repugnant to the majority of human beings, had not hitherto been regarded as criminal in England. This element was certainly not lost upon Wilde. “It was like feasting with panthers,” as he wrote in DE PROFUNDIS, “the danger was half the excitement.”
Here, at least, a psychological motive is suggested: masochistic Angstlust under a provocative guise of épater le bourgeois. Of course, this explanation leaves an important question unanswered: why had Wilde's previous—and more harmless —techniques of provocation, such a