An evil fate seems to have pursued even Oscar's wife. She died in Genoa and was buried in the corner of the Campo Santo set apart for Protestants. This is what one reads on her tombstone:
No reference to her marriage or to the famous man who was the father of her two sons.
The irony of chance wills it that the late Horatio Lloyd, Q.C., had been more than suspected of sexual viciousness: cfr. "Criticisms by Robert Ross" at end of Appendix.
I dreamed of you last night, I saw your face All radiant and unshadowed of distress, And as of old, in measured tunefulness, I heard your golden voice and marked you trace Under the common thing the hidden grace, And conjure wonder out of emptiness, Till mean things put on Beauty like a dress, And all the world was an enchanted place.
And so I knew that it was well with you, And that unprisoned, gloriously free, Across the dark you stretched me out your hand. And all the spite of this besotted crew, (Scrabbling on pillars of Eternity) How small it seems! Love made me understand.
Whoever chooses to compare this first sketch of the sonnet of 1900 with the sonnet as it was published in 1910 will remark three notable differences.
The first sketch was entitled "To Oscar Wilde," the revision to "The Dead Poet."
"I dreamed of you last night, I saw your face," has become less intimate, having been changed into:
"I dreamed of him last night, I saw his face."
Finally the sextet which in the first sketch was very inferior to the rest has now been discarded in favour of six lines which are worthy of the octave. The published sonnet is assuredly superior to the first sketch, superb though that was.
There has been so much discussion about the play entitled "Mr. and Mrs. Daventry," and Oscar Wilde's share in it, that I had better set forth here briefly what happened.
When I returned to London in the summer of 1899 after buying, as I thought, all rights in the sketch of the scenario from Oscar, I wrote at once the second, third and fourth acts of the play, as I had told Oscar I would. I sent him what I had written and asked him to write the first act as he had promised for the £50.
Some time before this I had seen Mr. Forbes Robertson and Mrs. Patrick Campbell in "Hamlet," and Mrs. Patrick Campbell's Ophelia had made a deeper impression on me than even the Hamlet of Forbes Robertson. I wished her to take my play, and as luck would have it, she had just gone into management on her own account and leased the Royalty Theatre.