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