Oscar Wilde and myself / by Lord Alfred Douglas ; with portrait of the author and thirteen other portraits and illustrations, also fac-simile letters.

  • Douglas, Alfred Bruce, 1870-1945.
Date:
1914
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Oscar Wilde and myself / by Lord Alfred Douglas ; with portrait of the author and thirteen other portraits and illustrations, also fac-simile letters. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    weeping and moralising, I have equally refrained from details of petty quarrels and misunderstand- ings. I have not accused him of gobbling my food and spilling my wine and devouring my substance; I have not charged him, as I easily might, with corrupting my intellect and assisting me in the care- less waste of some of the best years of my life. I have never said, as he says of me, that I became a child in his hands and that we never met “except in the gutter,” and never conversed except about “loathsome things.” I hold that a man’s acts are his own affairs, even if they lead to his ruin and disgrace. The shifting of responsibility is no work for me or any other person of sense. I accept full responsibility for everything I have done or said in regard to this affair. For my own indis- cretions and carelessness I could not honestly blame anybody. I have been punished for them and shall doubtless go on being punished for them; but there they are, and all the water in the sea will not wash them out. This book is not an apology for me, neither is it a work undertaken on the tu quoque or tit-for-tat principle against Wilde. I am of opinion that, in the circumstances, there is no man living who can put Oscar Wilde into his true relation to the life and literature of his time more accurately than myself. I have always known this—though, at