Oscar Wilde

by Richard Ellmann

  A Russian who lives happily under the present system of government in Russia must either believe that man has no soul, or that, if he has, it is not worth developing.

  Agitators are a set of interfering, meddling people, who come down to some perfectly contented class of the community and sow the seeds of discontent among them. That is the reason why agitators are so absolutely necessary.

  The play that Wilde had circulated with such fanfare was Vera; or, The Nihilists. His subtitle introduced a current problem into a tale of old Russia. Having disengaged himself from both Roman Catholicism and Freemasonry—the first public yet subversive, the second secret but respectable—he moved on to a similar perplexity in the political sphere. As he hunted success among foreigners, he expressed in his writing a sense, largely dormant at Oxford, of himself as Speranza’s son, eager to free his country from the yoke of the English whose favor he needed.

  In verses and in conversation he gave evidence of mounting political emotions. His sonnet to Ellen Terry praised her pathos in the queenly role for making him briefly forget ‘my life Republican.’ In another, ‘Sonnet to Liberty,’ he expressed his dislike of agitators,

  Not that I love thy children, whose dull eyes

  See nothing save their own unlovely woe,

  Whose minds know nothing, nothing care to know—

  but found in roaring Democracies, reigns of Terror, and great Anarchies congenial images of his own wildness. Yet, as if to renounce such sanction, he concludes equivocally but honestly,

  and yet, and yet,

  Those Christs that die upon the barricades,

  God knows it I am with them, in some things.

  Wilde was like his mother in hating mob rule and excess, and in admiring personal heroism and feeling fellowship with the oppressed. Rennell Rodd recorded how, at this time, when a flood forced many people out of thei houses in Lambeth, Wilde took him to see if they could be of help. There was an old bedridden Irish woman in a tenement whom Wilde so cheered with his stories, and with some money, that she cried out to him, ‘May the Lord give you a bed in glory.’47 His politics were grounded in such sympathies.

  He was not satisfied with paternalism. In conversation with young Violet Hunt, he declared himself: ‘I am a Socialist.’ By socialism he did not mean any specific variety, but a general hatred of tyranny. He would say later that socialism was ‘beautiful,’48 and that ‘Socialism is enjoyment,’ a definition that he knew might be applied to aestheticism as well, an ultimate rapprochement of these two being dimly apprehended. In his play, nihilism, socialism, and democracy are compounded. Prince Paul in Vera appears to be speaking for the author when he says, ‘in good democracy, every man should be an aristocrat.’ And Alexis, in a grandiloquent speech Wilde inserted in the play in 1883, is made to say, ‘I do not know if I be king or slave: but if a slave what should I do but kneel, and if a king—where should kings sit, but at the feet of some democracy casting their crowns before it!’49

  The politics of Vera reflected this aristocratic socialism. The general reputation of the czars for cruelty served him well, although the Czar of Russia at that time, Alexander II, had at least, while carrying out the customary tortures, emancipated the serfs. Wilde felt himself to be the voice of a large-scale liberation. As he wrote to the actress Marie Prescott about Vera, ‘I have tried in it to express within the limits of art that Titan cry of the peoples for liberty, which in the Europe of our day is threatening thrones, and making governments unstable from Spain to Russia, and from north to southern seas. But it is a play not of politics but of passion.’50 He was eager to have it both ways. The time of the prologue was supposed to be 1795, and that of the four acts following, 1800. He could rely on his audience’s vagueness about Russian history, and perhaps his own as well, since the assassination of the reactionary Paul I took place not in 1800 but in 1801, and Alexander I, who followed him, was only ostensibly liberal. To avoid any idea of transcription, Wilde boldly rechristened these czars Ivan and Alexis. He was offhand about anachronisms such as trains and freed serfs, and to talk of nihilists in 1800 was also precipitate, since Turgenev only coined the term in 1861 in Fathers and Sons. Wilde would admit the provenance later: ‘The Nihilist, that strange martyr who has no faith, who goes to the stake without enthusiasm, and dies for what he does not believe in, is a purely literary product. He was invented by Tourgénieff and completed by Dostoieffski.’51 His nihilists in the play are united in their detestation of torture and martial law, and they insist that whatever is, is wrong.

  If Wilde was cavalier about Russian history, he grounded his plot upon actual events. Wilde, like Walter Sickert, William Morris, and Shaw, was a friend of Sergei Mikhailovich Kravchinski, better known as Stepnyak—a Russian revolutionary of noble birth who assassinated General Mezentsev, chief of the Russian secret police.52 But the play’s source is another episode, not obscure in the newspapers in 1878, though time has obliterated it. On 24 January of that year a twenty-two-year-old woman shot the chief of police of St Petersburg, General Fyodor Fyodorovich Trepov, in an assassination attempt. She was the daughter of an officer of the Line, and belonged to the gentry, but had been a revolutionary since the age of seventeen. Trepov had infuriated her by imprisoning ‘her lover, a Nihilist,’ as the Times reported, and by ordering that one of their women friends who was in prison be flogged. The case aroused international attention. The Pall Mall Gazette of 14 December 1889 said that ‘her pistol shot rang like a bugle across Europe.’ In the end the jury acquitted her of the crime in spite of her having confessed it, and Trepov was forced to resign his post. As the woman was leaving the courtroom, the police tried to rearrest her, but her student friends prevented them. One student, said to be her brother-in-law, fired on the crowd and then turned his gun on himself.

  The young woman’s name was Vera Zassoulich, and Wilde took her over, along with her fierce revolutionary and amorous passions, for his heroine, Vera Sabouroff (originally called Katinski). He embroidered the facts by situating them in Moscow rather than in St Petersburg, and having the old Czar as the object of assassination. The brother-in-law turned into Vera Sabouroff’s brother. Her nihilist lover is retained, but is transformed into the Czarevich. Wilde shadowed forth experiences of his own in fobbing off the proctors and other authorities with a comparable scene of soldiers pounding on the door in pursuit of nihilists, only to be cajoled by Alexis into thinking that he and his masked associates are actors rehearsing a tragedy together.

  While he borrowed the nihilists’ oath from ‘The Catechism of a Revolutionary’ by S. C. Nechayev and Mikhail Bakunin, for the ritualistic opening of the nihilists’ meetings Wilde drew upon an unexpected English source. His friends in the Oxford Rose-Croix would have been astounded to read the beginning of Act I:

  PRESIDENT: What is the word?

  FIRST CONSPIRATOR: Nabat. [This means ‘Tocsin,’ and was the actual name of a revolutionary newspaper of the time.]

  PRESIDENT: The answer?

  SECOND CONSPIRATOR: Kalit.

  PRESIDENT: What hour is it?

  THIRD CONSPIRATOR: The hour to suffer.

  PRESIDENT: What day?

  FOURTH CONSPIRATOR: The day of oppression.

  PRESIDENT: What year?

  FIFTH CONSPIRATOR: The year of hope.

  PRESIDENT: How many are we in number?

  SIXTH CONSPIRATOR: Ten, nine, and three.

  For this exchange Wilde took over a theatrical Masonic ritual, ‘Opening of a Lodge,’ and turned the Worshipful Master into the President, the Senior Warden into the First Conspirator, and the Junior Warden into the Second. The President’s questions are roughly those used in the ritual, although the Conspirators’ replies are altered to suit their violent purposes.

  Although the play had a political subject, most of it was devoted to impugning revolutionary tenets. Alexis assumes the throne but remains a nihilist, a royalist nihilist bent upon reform; Vera is torn between revolutionary fervor and amorous submission. ‘Why
does he make me feel at times as if I would have him as my king, Republican though I be?’ Why, indeed. The most interesting character is Prince Paul Maraloffski, the Prime Minister, who on being banished by the Czar throws in his lot with the nihilists, disbelieving equally in both sides. Paul it is who stamps the play as Wilde’s and no one else’s. He is an Irishman in court and cabal, blasting shibboleths with his wit. ‘He would stab his best friend,’ says someone, ‘for the sake of writing an epigram on his tombstone.’ After reading the bill of rights of the nihilists, which proclaims, ‘Nature is not a temple, but a workshop: we demand the right to labour,’ Paul comments, ‘Ah, I shall surrender my own rights in that respect.’ On reading another clause, ‘The family as subversive of true socialistic and communal unity is to be annihilated,’ he comments, ‘I agree completely with Article 4. A family is a terrible encumbrance especially when one is not married.’ Prince Paul is the first of that series of aristocratic dilettantes in whom Wilde delights even while punishing them for being detached and heartless. Paul is fond of saying ‘Parbleu!,’ though he is happily free of such archaisms as ‘methinks’ and ‘methought,’ in which Vera Sabouroff—her rhetoric lagging behind her politics—indulges.

  The promotion of Vera Zassoulich’s modest attempt to kill the Leningrad chief of police into Vera Sabouroff’s mission to kill the Czar of All the Russias makes for a number of operatic scenes. In the final one Vera has to decide between her political and her amorous passions. The old Czar has been killed. She has planned to kill the new one for the sake of Russia; in an unexpected turn, she alters her resolution out of love and kills herself instead, saying, ‘I have saved Russia.’ Prolonging the Czar’s life proves a nobler course than abbreviating it. She exhibits her bloody dagger to the nihilists so they will be deluded into thinking she has carried out her original purpose. Of the two causes for which Vera Sabouroff may be said to die, she no longer believes in nihilism, but she does believe in love. In the complex exaltation of this ending, as Wilde insisted, his political play was more than political.

  Granted that Vera, in spite of Prince Paul’s efforts to save it, was a wretched play, it did not fall disastrously below the standard set by drama in a century when, as Stendhal said, plays could not be written. Wilde loftily submitted it to the chief theatrical personages in London, and to the actress Clara Morris in New York. Mrs Bernard Beere accepted the part. She had made her debut at the Opéra Comique in the Strand four years before. Vera was scheduled for performance at the Adelphi Theatre on the afternoon of 17 December 1881.53

  London Life

  Extraordinary thing about the lower classes in England—they are always losing their relations. They are extremely fortunate in that respect.

  Oscar Wilde was not the only member of his family in London. His mother and brother despaired of Dublin, Lady Wilde because tenants were failing to pay rents on her properties, and Willie because no Irishwoman with ready money was prepared to take him on as a husband. The house at 1 Merrion Square was sold by Willie early in 1879, and he and his mother arrived in London on 7 May of that year, in pursuit of Oscar. For a few days they used his address at 13 Salisbury Street, then installed themselves at 1 Ovington Square, then at 116 Park Street off Grosvenor Square, and eventually moved to 146 Oakley Street, Chelsea.

  In surroundings less imposing than Merrion Square, Lady Wilde was not slow in starting up a London salon. On Saturday afternoons at first, then on Wednesday afternoons as well, she presided over a tea table where informed guests knew better than to try to drink the tea. The gatherings were preposterous yet picturesque, and those who attended came to laugh but stayed to marvel. Although Oscar Wilde was the principal drawing card, Willie did his bit as well, and Lady Wilde moved people purposefully about. She had grown heavier over the years, and sailed among her guests with swelling canvas. Her black wig was often topped with an imposing headdress, and her costumes, in the style of the 1860s, had large bodices and many flounces surmounted by strings of beads and pendants. Now almost sixty, she was not eager to exhibit either her wrinkles or her lack of a housekeeper, so the curtains were drawn at three in the afternoon, the gas jets were covered with red shades, candles flickered in the corners, and the guests peered at one another in the dim light.

  Yet she was a grande dame, and could be depended upon for flashes of her familiar rhetoric. Her assumption was that all her guests were famous or about to become so. On meeting Helena Sickert, Walter’s younger sister, who was still at school, she looked at her sharply and then pronounced, ‘A highly intellectual countenance! I shall hear of you in the literary world.’ Oscar, standing by, laughed and said, ‘Oh come now, Mother! That’s too bad.’ She was equally unabashed in her introductions. ‘Miss X,’ she would say, ‘allow me to present Mr Y, who has painted that picture the whole of London is talking about, which will be exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery next season, and Mr Y, I must tell you that Miss X is going to be a London prima donna. You should hear her sing that aria from Lohengrin!’54 That Mr Y could not paint or Miss X sing was no reason to stint praise. Perhaps they would be able to some day. Wilde parodied her in a Pickwickian passage of Dorian Gray, which out of filial piety he later removed: ‘ “Sir Humpty Dumpty—you know—Afghan frontier. Russian intrigues: very successful man—wife killed by an elephant—quite inconsolable—wants to marry a beautiful American widow—everybody does nowadays—hates Mr Gladstone—but very much interested in beetles: ask him what he thinks of Schouvaloff.” ’ Lady Wilde was a guileless and goodhearted showoff. Her house became a place to meet people, and guests such as Bernard Shaw and Yeats, newcomers to London, were grateful to her.

  The death of her husband had freed her for the literary life, and she was the most industrious of the three Wildes in London. She began by finishing her husband’s memoir of an antiquarian and illustrator named Gabriel Beranger. Her son Oscar had contemplated this task but willingly relinquished it to her. Then she turned to the notes she had made in Sweden when she and Sir William visited the governor of Uppsala in 1859, and put them together into a volume entitled Driftwood from Scandinavia. Next she gathered together, as he had intended, Sir William’s vast collection of unsorted stories and legends which his country patients had written down for him in lieu of a fee, rewrote them as necessary, and published them in two important books of Irish folklore. (Yeats among others borrowed for his plays from them.) They show her to be warm and humorous. She filled two further volumes with the essays she had published over the years (many of them in the Nation in Dublin) on social and cultural subjects, which featured determined views on everything from George Eliot to hairstyles. Besides these, she wrote some more verse, often with Oscar’s dubious help over particular lines, and published it in magazines. These books brought in a little money, but she had trouble paying the rent, and was grateful when, through Oscar’s efforts in enlisting distinguished supporters, she received in 1888 a grant of £100 from the Royal Literary Fund, and then, on 24 May 1890, a Civil List Pension of £70 a year from the Prime Minister of the nation against which she had once sponsored a revolution. It was given ‘in recognition of the services rendered by her late husband Sir William Wilde, M.D., to statistical science and literature.’‖ She took an active part in London literary life, especially among its Irish members, and was delighted to become, along with Willie and Oscar, a charter member of the Irish Literary Society.

  The situation of Willie Wilde was more problematic. Back in Ireland, though admitted to the Irish bar, he was a personage in pubs. Asked what he was working at, he would reply, ‘At intervals.’56 His relations with Oscar were troubled, one reason being that they resembled each other closely in appearance, and superficially in manners. Willie did not mind but Oscar, feeling his uniqueness at risk, minded a great deal. They were both over six feet—Willie by four inches, Oscar by three—both inclined to be fat, both languid. ‘Scratch Oscar and you will find Willie,’ Max Beerbohm remembered someone saying. But Beerbohm could tell the brothers apart very we
ll. Willie, he said, was ‘very vulgar and unwashed and inferior.’ In more extended comment, he said of Willie, ‘Quel monstre! Dark, oily, suspect yet awfully like Oscar: he has Oscar’s coy, carnal smile and fatuous giggle and not a little of Oscar’s esprit. But he is awful—a veritable tragedy of family likeness.’57 Willie began to wear a beard, and claimed that Oscar paid him to do so. Lady Wilde devoted herself to keeping the brothers on good terms with each other, and for some periods was successful. But Willie’s inferiority appeared in every department of his life. To be a man about town on Oscar’s model required more capacity than he had. He kept trying regardless. If Oscar was a poet, Willie fancied he could be one too, and brought with him to London a poem he had published in Kottabos on the strength of which he hoped for entrée into literary circles. It was a sonnet, of sorts, on a subject—Salome—that was later to obsess his brother. Willie could recite it well enough to persuade his hearers for a moment that it was not drivel:

  And every soul was mine, mine utterly,

  And thrice each throat cried out aloud my name.

  ‘Ask what thou wilt,’ black-bearded Herod said.

  ‘God wot a weird thing do I crave for prize;

  Give me I pray thee, presently, the head

  Of John the Baptist.’ Twixt my hands it lies.

  Ah, mother, see the lips, the half-closed eyes,

  Dost think he hates us now that he is dead?

  But not for long. If Oscar wrote plays, Willie tried his hand at drama too. Two of his plays, printed in Dublin, were entitled French Polish and Evening Stream. Since Oscar had told The Biograph in 1880 that he was hesitating between a career as a painter and one as a writer, Willie had aspirations to become a sculptor as well as a journalist. Oscar’s comments on his efforts were severe: ‘Willie’s sculpture shows palpable signs of death, but no hopes of living.’58