Oxford aestheticism, as developed by Wilde, proved to be of a peculiarly knowing kind. Self-parody was coeval with advocacy. Wilde could see by the time he reached Oxford that the movement was going out as much as it was coming in. Though he adopted some of its interests, such as tints and textures, he did so always with something of his mother’s high-spiritedness, poking fun at his own excess. His literary preferences were at first towards something quite unaesthetic and earnest, such as Mrs Browning’s Aurora Leigh, which he praised inordinately as ‘much the greatest work in our literature.’a29 (Ruskin said it was greater than Shakespeare’s Sonnets.) A copy Wilde presented to his friend William Ward contains passages marked with great approval.30 He knew as well as Mallock or Kierkegaard that aestheticism was limited. In a letter to a young woman enclosing a photograph of Burne-Jones’s water color Spes he wrote, ‘In so many of Burne-Jones’s pictures we have merely the pagan worship of beauty: but in this one I seem to see more humanity and sympathy than in all the others.’31 The parade of these divergent qualities, with a view to their ultimate reconciliation, was the method of Wilde’s early poems, and can be found in two that he was writing during this last full year at Oxford. One was ‘The Sphinx [or Sphynx],’ begun—he said—in 1874, and the other his poem for the Newdigate Prize, ‘Ravenna.’
They are very different works, but both are set pieces, revolving around a fixed object and brooding upon it. That they come from the same period, though ‘The Sphinx’ would not be finished for a long time, is perhaps indicated by their sharing the poet’s juvenescence:
… one who scarce has seen
Some twenty summers cast their doublet green
For Autumn’s livery …
‘Ravenna’
An extant page of the ‘Sphinx’ manuscript has a rough drawing by Wilde of some affrighted dons, and, for what it is worth, the speaker describes himself as a student.32
Both poems interweave a state of mind with a historical or legendary past. ‘The Sphinx’ is in the true aesthetic mode, foisting upon the stone monster a medley of pagan and Christian legends, the homosexual Adrian and Antinous in close conjunction with heterosexual Isis and Osiris, Venus and Adonis, and Mary and Jesus incongruously in the offing. But the student who embroiders this fantasy is gradually revolted by it, and drives the Sphinx away:
False Sphinx! False Sphinx! By reedy Styx old Charon, leaning on his oar,
Waits for my coin. Go thou before, and leave me to my crucifix,
Whose pallid burden, sick with pain, watches the world with wearied eyes,
And weeps for every soul that dies, and weeps for every soul in vain.
The final line indicates that the speaker, like Wilde, was still having difficulties accepting the doctrine of the Atonement, and it throws doubt on the speaker’s devotion to the religion he is professing.
In ‘Ravenna’ the young man recalls his journey there the year before, and muses elegiacally upon its fallen greatness. Collapse was always one of Wilde’s themes. As in ‘The Sphinx,’ the ‘fond Hellenic dream’ (which Wilde introduces as if to justify his Grecian travels) is evoked only to be rejected when the vesper bell is rung. Wilde put aside his Catholic inclinations to work into the poem the triumphal return of Victor Emmanuel to Rome in 1871, when the King ousted Pius IX from the Quirinal Palace. Hunter Blair, on reading the passage, remonstrated that Wilde had once called the dethroned Pope ‘the prisoned shepherd of the Church of God,’ but Wilde replied with disarming candor: ‘Don’t be angry, Dunskie. You must know that I should never, never have won the Newdigate if I had taken the Pope’s side against the King’s.’33 The poem is a clever hodgepodge of personal reminiscence, topographical description, political and literary history. It contains apostrophes to Dante and Byron. The latter is called ‘a second Anthony, / Who of the world another Actium made,’ but Wilde has to check his own rhetoric by lamely noting that Byron did not succumb to Egyptian wiles but went to fight for Grecian liberty. As to Ravenna, the city is alternately regarded as doomed and evergreen, and the poet, to finish off, promises inconclusively to love it forever. Wilde seems to have had Childe Harold as his model, and at a Newdigate remove the poem has something of Byron’s easy energy, even when uttering such clichés as
We see Death is mighty lord of all,
And king and clown to ashen dust must fall.…
By the end of March 1878 Wilde had finished ‘Ravenna,’ and handed it in, anonymously as required, on the very day (the 31st) when he had entered the city a year before. After that he fell ill, of an unspecified malady, and spent some days in bed in Magdalen, enjoying the luxury of being brought flowers by his friends. He then convalesced for a few days in Bournemouth. But physical sickness had perhaps revived his never-quelled anxiety about the state of his soul. In 1877, when Newman had come back to Trinity College, Oxford, for the first time in thirty-two years, to receive an honorary fellowship, Wilde had dreamed ‘of a visit to Newman, of the holy sacrament in a new Church, and of a quiet and peace afterwards in my soul.’34 But what particularly stirred him in 1878 may well have been the memory of what was advisedly called ‘a positive sin.’
It was at Oxford that an event occurred that was to alter his whole conception of himself. Wilde contracted syphilis, reportedly from a woman prostitute.b As a doctor’s son, he had been inclined to minimize illness, so this came as an especially crushing blow. In the 1870s, medical authorities followed Sir Jeremy Hutchinson’s advice that anyone contracting the disease should wait two years before marrying, and undergo a course of mercury treatment. The main physical effect of mercury on Wilde was to turn his slightly protrusive teeth black, so thereafter he usually covered his mouth with his hand while talking. (Mercury did not cure the disease, though it was reputed to do so.) But the mental effect was profound. Like his father he had been subject to fits of melancholy; now there was a new warranty for them.
The awareness of his vulnerability was related to a sense of doom which he said in De Profundis was pervasive in his works. It had distant connections with a sense of doom that he had most poignantly encountered in adolescence, in Aeschylus’s Agamemnon. That play had never been far from his thoughts, and in 1877 he published in Kottabos his translations of some speeches of Cassandra and the Chorus from it. His accompanying note emphasized ‘doom’: ‘Agamemnon has already entered the House of Doom, and Klytaemnestra has followed close on his heels—Kasandra is left alone upon the stage.… She sees blood upon the lintel, and the smell of blood scares her.… [‘I have slipped in blood. It is an evil omen,’ Wilde’s Herod would say.] Her second sight pierces the palace walls; she sees the fatal bath, the trammelling net, and the axe sharpened for her own ruin and her lord’s.’ Wilde did not confuse his own doom with Agamemnon’s, but the sense of a strange fatality hanging over him did not leave his consciousness.
His poems offer some evidence of his feelings. In ‘Taedium Vitae’ he speaks of ‘that hoarse cave of strife / Where my white soul first kissed the mouth of sin.’ This may have been the poem advertised by a bookseller as addressed to the woman from whom Wilde contracted syphilis.35 In ‘The Sphinx’ the speaker, a student, says in an impassioned moment,
Are there not others more accursed, whiter with leprosies than I?
Are Abana and Pharphar dry that you come here to slake your thirst?
This allusion is to the leprosy about which in the Old Testament Naaman, the Syrian captain, consults the prophet Elisha. On being told to bathe in the Jordan, Naaman indignantly replies, ‘Are not Abana and Pharphar, rivers of Damascus, better than all the waters of Israel?’ (II Kings 5:12) Wilde’s interest in Naaman continued; he gave his name to the executioner in Salome.c An unused line for ‘The Sphinx’ addresses her as ‘You mirror of my malady.’ The portrait of Dorian Gray was another such mirror. Its composition was contemporary with his being ‘grievously ill, of a “nervous fever,” ’ which Lionel Johnson suspected to be the result of ‘Tiberian excess.’36
Upset as he was, Wil
de came as close now to becoming Catholic as he ever would until his deathbed. The month after he was confined to his bed, April 1878, he went to speak confidentially to the fashionable priest of the day, the Reverend Sebastien Bowden, at the Brompton Oratory in London. Bowden was known for his conversions among the well-to-do. What was said can be divined from the letter Bowden wrote to Wilde afterwards:
My dear Mr. Wilde,
Whatever your first purpose may have been in your visit yesterday there is no doubt that as a fact you did freely and entirely lay open to me your life’s history and your soul’s state. And it was God’s grace which made you do so.
You would not have spoken of your aimlessness and misery or of your temporal misfortune to a priest in a first interview unless you hoped that I should have some remedy to suggest, and that not of man’s making. Be true to yourself then, it was no power or influence of mine (which is nonsense to speak of) but the voice of your own conscience urging you to make a new start, and escape from your present unhappy self, which provoked your confession. Let me then repeat to you as solemnly as I can what I said yesterday, you have like everyone else an evil nature and this in your case has become more corrupt by bad influences mental and moral, and by positive sin; hence you speak as a dreamer and sceptic with no faith in anything and no purpose in life. On the other hand God in His mercy has not let you remain contented in this state. He has proved to you the hollowness of this world in the unexpected loss of your fortune and has removed thereby a great obstacle to your conversion; He allows you to feel the sting of conscience and the yearnings for a holy pure and earnest life. It depends therefore on your own free will which life you lead. As God calls you, He is bound, remember, to give you the means to obey the call.
Do so promptly and cheerfully and difficulties disappear and with your conversion your true happiness would begin. As a Catholic you would find yourself a new man in the order of nature as of grace. I mean that you would put from you all that is affected and unreal and a thing unworthy of your better self and live a life full of the deepest interests as a man who feels he has a soul to save and but a few fleeting hours in which to save it. I trust then you will come on Thursday and have another talk; you may be quite sure I shall urge you to do nothing but what your conscience dictates. In the meantime pray hard and talk little.
Yours very sincerely,
H. SEBASTn BOWDEN37
At last Wilde had been brought to the point of decision. Although Bowden’s letter has been available for some time, what Wilde did in response to it has not been known. But André Raffalovich, himself a convert, was told by Father Bowden what happened next. On the Thursday, when Wilde was to be received into the Church, there arrived at the Brompton Oratory, instead of Wilde, a large package. On being opened this proved to contain a bunch of lilies. It was Wilde’s polite way of flowering over his renunciation.38 What he would say later of Dorian Gray was true of himself: ‘It was rumoured of him that he was about to join the Roman Catholic communion; and certainly the Roman ritual had a great attraction for him.… But he never fell into the error of arresting his intellectual development by any formal acceptance of creed or system, or of mistaking, for a house in which to live, an inn that is but suitable for the sojourn of a night in which there are no stars and the moon is in travail.… no theory of life seemed to him to be of any importance compared with life itself.’d A few years later, asked by Asquith what his religion was, Wilde replied, ‘I don’t think I have any. I am an Irish Protestant.’39 He adopted mercury rather than religion as the specific for his dreadful disease. Perhaps now the parable of Dorian Gray’s secret decay began to form in his mind, as the spirochete began its journey up his spine towards the meninges.
It was perhaps soon after this that Wilde exhibited the obverse of his penitence. His turn had come to read the lesson in the Magdalen chapel, with Prince Leopold present. Wilde leafed over the pages and began in a languorous voice, ‘The Song of Solomon.’ Dean Bramley swooped down from his stall and, thrusting his beard into Wilde’s face, cooed out, according to Atkinson, ‘You have the wrong lesson, Mr Wilde. It is Deuteronomy 16.’ In later life, as Ainslie recalled, Wilde was facetiously opposed for membership in the Crabbet Club on the grounds that as a Magdalen Demy he had read the lessons in a surplice. Wilde admitted the offense but pleaded in extenuation, ‘I always read the lessons with an air of scepticism, and was invariably reproved by the President after Divine Service, for “levity at the lectern.” ’40
In June, Wilde took the examinations for Final Schools. A future scholar named Horton, who was present, observed him ‘with his flabby face and ruffled hair striding up to the desk for fresh paper after the first hour; then handing in his book half an hour before time was up. He was a genius, and for him to pose was second nature.’41 Whatever his demeanor, he expected a fourth, not a first, as he confided to his friends. But some of the questions played into his hands. For example, he was asked about ‘the geographical position and military importance of the following places:—Potidaea, Heracleia, Plataea, Naupactus, Mantieneia [sic].’ It was as if he were being quizzed on his travels with Mahaffy, and he knew all the answers. (In ‘Ravenna’ he had written, ‘O Salamis! O lone Plataean plain!’) Another question that suited him was ‘What causes led Aristotle to insist on the superiority of the speculative to the practical life?’ His Commonplace Book shows that he had been pondering this question:
If Philosophy aims at some good to man it comes too late in the day for that: for while religions preside over the birth of nations, philosophy often follows them to their grave. It is not till the twilight comes that the owl of Athena begins its flight.
So in Aristotle the philosophic life is the contemplative life: He expressly disavows any philanthropic aim to Sophia.…
It is good says Aristotle for its own sake because it is an ‘arete of the soul’: the fact of its existence is the reason of its existence.
Bacon’s scornful words are its glory. Like a virgin consecrated to God, it bears no fruit. Its duty is to comprehend the world not to make it better.
Its sphere is the Universal—the Universal law of the Mind’s movement. It examines not what ought to be but what is. It is the possession of real wisdom, not the love of wisdom.
He adduced Plato for support—‘The end of life is not action but contemplation, not doing but being’—and added, ‘to treat life in the spirit of art is to treat it as a thing in which means and end are identified. To witness the spectacle of life with appropriate emotions …’ He is delighted when Euripides—a favorite of his—makes a character say, ‘Stand off and view my sorrow as a painter might.’
In ‘The Critic as Artist’ Wilde would flesh out this skeleton. Of course his equation of art and contemplation extends Aristotle and Plato in a way those philosophers would scarcely approve:
Society often forgives the criminal. It never forgives the dreamer. The beautiful sterile emotions that art excites in us, are hateful in its eyes, and so completely are people dominated by the tyranny of this dreadful social ideal that they are always coming shamelessly up to one at Private Views and other places that are open to the general public, and saying in a loud stentorian voice, ‘What are you doing?’ whereas ‘What are you thinking?’ is the only question that any single civilised being should ever be allowed to whisper to another.… But someone should teach them that while, in the opinion of society, Contemplation is the gravest sin of which any citizen can be guilty, in the opinion of the highest culture it is the proper occupation of man.… To Plato, with his passion for wisdom, this was the noblest form of energy. To Aristotle, with his passion for knowledge, this was the noblest form of energy also.… To us, at any rate, the Bios Theoretikos is the true ideal.
When he was asked by the examiners what Aristotle would have thought of Whitman, he must have divorced Whitman’s cult of ‘myself from any considerations except that of self-development.
While the scripts were being read by the examiners, Magdalen held
a commemoration ball. Wilde was there, evidently with another grand coat on, for Margaret Woods recalled a conversation with him about it. He did not dance well, so they stood talking, away from the dance floor. He suddenly swung round and said to her, ‘Isn’t it sad for me, when I love beauty so much, to have a back like this?’ She recognized that it was a cue to praise his back, and the coat that covered it, but she found herself replying unhelpfully, ‘You should join the Volunteers. They will soon straighten it for you.’ Wilde’s boyish vanity was wounded.e42
But it would soon receive a surfeit of gratifications. First came the results of the Newdigate, on 10 June. It had been judged by the Public Orator (T. F. Dallin), the Professor of Poetry (J. C. Shairp), and three members of Congregation whose names are unrecorded. On 11 June the President of Magdalen noted in his Minute Book: ‘The Newdigate Prize has been awarded to Oscar O’F Wilde, Demy of Magdalen.… The last time the College gained the Newdigate was in 1825 by R. Sewell. By obtaining this prize Mr Wilde becomes entitled to the following bequest by Dr Daubeny, who died on December 13, 1867: “I desire my Executor to retain my Marble Bust of the young Augustus, and give it as a Prize to the first Member of Magdalen College after my decease who shall gain the Newdigate Prize Poem.” ’ The bust was duly presented. Meanwhile, the public announcement had earned Wilde a great deal of praise. A congratulatory letter came from Aubrey de Vere in Dublin. But the most ecstatic praise came of course from Lady Wilde, who saluted her son ‘To the Olympic Victor’ and wrote:
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