Wilde · 1895
The love that dare not speak its name
On the afternoon of Wednesday the thirtieth of April 1895, in the Central Criminal Court at the Old Bailey, on the fourth day of the first prosecution of Oscar Wilde (the trial of Wilde and Alfred Taylor on charges of *gross indecency* under section eleven of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885), cross-examined by the prosecutor Charles Frederick Gill QC on a poem written by Lord Alfred Douglas (Wilde's young lover, son of the Marquess of Queensberry, whose libel prosecution had collapsed under Wilde's own action against him at the end of March), Wilde was asked to explain the closing line of Douglas's poem *Two Loves*, the line *I am the love that dare not speak its name*. Wilde's reply, given without preparation, lasted about ninety seconds and was, by every contemporary report of the courtroom, the most affecting public statement of his career. The reply earned a spontaneous round of applause from the public gallery, hissed down by the judge Mr Justice Charles. The trial nevertheless ended in jury disagreement, was retried the following month, and on the twenty-fifth of May 1895 Wilde was convicted under the Labouchère amendment and sentenced to two years' hard labour. The reply is, in its form in the trial transcript, the central rhetorical document of the modern history of homosexual rights in Britain.
It is twenty past two on the afternoon of Wednesday the thirtieth of April 1895, in Court Number One of the Central Criminal Court at the Old Bailey, in heavy spring light through the high east windows. He is forty years old. He is Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde, born at 21 Westland Row, Dublin, on the sixteenth of October 1854, schooled at Portora Royal in Enniskillen, Trinity College Dublin, and Magdalen College Oxford, husband of Constance Lloyd (married 1884), father of Cyril (b. 1885) and Vyvyan (b. 1886), the English-language playwright of the previous five years, presently at the bar in the dock of the Old Bailey on the fourth day of the first of the two trials.
He is in a black frock coat over a cream waistcoat with a green carnation in the buttonhole. He has been on the stand under cross-examination by Charles Frederick Gill, Senior Counsel for the Crown, for about ninety minutes. Gill has, in the previous fifteen minutes, been reading aloud (with some difficulty) from the December 1894 number of The Chameleon, the Oxford undergraduate magazine in which Lord Alfred Douglas's poem Two Loves had been published.
Gill says: the last line of this poem reads, "I am the love that dare not speak its name." Was that in your opinion proper or improper?
Wilde thinks: Gill is going for the line because Gill thinks the line is the indictment. The line is, in fact, a quotation. The line is, by my own reading of Bosie's poem, the deliberate placing of a particular form of male affection in the classical tradition.
Wilde thinks: the gallery is here for the cross-examination. The English-language press of the world is in the gallery. What I say in the next two minutes will be read in the press of London, New York, Paris, Berlin and Sydney by Friday morning.
Wilde thinks: I can answer the question by denying the line means what Gill says it means. The denial is the form Gill is expecting. The denial loses the moral question.
Wilde thinks: I can answer the question by affirming what the line means. The affirmation does not save me from the conviction. The affirmation puts the line in the historical record on the moral side that, in fifty years, the country may be on.
Wilde thinks: I am on the indictment of Section Eleven of the Criminal Law Amendment Act. The indictment is going through this trial or the next one. The conviction is going to come. The conviction is two years' hard labour at the maximum. I have, on the medical advice I have had from George Wyndham this morning, perhaps two years of working capacity in me through the carceral conditions of Pentonville.
Wilde thinks: the trial is the trial. The reply is the legacy.
He speaks for about ninety seconds, by Edward Marjoribanks's standing 1932 biography of the prosecutor F. E. Smith's father (which preserves Gill's contemporary deposition of the speech): the love that dare not speak its name in this century is such a great affection of an elder for a younger man as there was between David and Jonathan, such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy, and such as you find in the sonnets of Michelangelo and Shakespeare. It is that deep, spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect. It dictates and pervades great works of art like those of Shakespeare and Michelangelo, and those two letters of mine, such as they are. It is in this century misunderstood, so much misunderstood that it may be described as the love that dare not speak its name, and on account of it I am placed where I am now. It is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest form of affection. There is nothing unnatural about it. It is intellectual, and it repeatedly exists between an elder and a younger man, when the elder man has intellect, and the younger man has all the joy, hope and glamour of life before him. That it should be so the world does not understand. The world mocks at it and sometimes puts one in the pillory for it.
By every contemporary report, the public gallery of the courtroom burst into spontaneous applause at the close of the speech. The judge Mr Justice Charles called for order and threatened to clear the court. The trial continued for two further days and ended in jury disagreement on the first of May. The retrial began on the twentieth of May before Mr Justice Wills, lasted six days, and concluded on the twenty-fifth of May 1895 with a guilty verdict on all counts. Wilde was sentenced to two years' hard labour, the maximum tariff under the Labouchère amendment. He was taken to Pentonville the same evening.
He served the first six months at Pentonville and Wandsworth in the hard-labour regime of the period (oakum-picking, the crank, the silent rule). Constance Wilde sued for separation; the boys were taken to live in Switzerland under their mother's name Holland. He was transferred to Reading Gaol on the twentieth of November 1895 and served the remaining eighteen months under the more lenient governorship of Major James Nelson. The De Profundis, the long letter to Lord Alfred Douglas written through 1897, was composed at Reading. The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898) was written in France after his release.
Wilde was released from Reading on the morning of the nineteenth of May 1897, took the ferry to France that night, and lived the remaining three and a half years of his life in exile. He had no further reunion with his sons. He died of cerebral meningitis at the Hôtel d'Alsace, 13 rue des Beaux-Arts, Paris, on the thirtieth of November 1900, forty-six years old. He is buried at Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris under the iconic Epstein angel monument of 1914. The reply on the love-that-dare-not-speak-its-name is, in the form recorded by the prosecutor Gill, on the wall of the Sexual Offences Act of 1967 (the British legislative decriminalisation of male homosexuality) commemorative plaque in the lobby of the Old Bailey. Wilde was granted a posthumous statutory pardon, alongside the other men convicted under the Labouchère amendment, by the Policing and Crime Act 2017. The British government's apology to him personally was issued by Theresa May's Home Office, by formal letter to Merlin Holland (Wilde's grandson and literary executor), on the thirty-first of January 2017.