Oscar Wilde

by Richard Ellmann

  He arranged, while still lecturing, to meet Mary Anderson and the Griffin in Boston, at the Hotel Vendome, on Sunday, 23 September. They indicated that Miss Anderson would produce the play, and proposed to open on 22 January. Wilde warned that Mackaye felt the scenery and costumes would cost $10,000, but Miss Anderson indicated she was ready to spend ‘any money’ on it. (In The Duchess of Padua Wilde would speak of ‘a prize / Richer than all the gold the Griffin guards / In rude Armenia.’) Wilde saw his opening and said that Steele Mackaye might be induced to direct, provided that he had absolute control of everything. ‘They agree,’ he jubilantly informed his friend. He and Mackaye would produce the Duchess, and after that Vera, ‘and then the world is at our feet!’ On 4 October, Mackaye let Wilde know that Mary Anderson and Griffin had decided to defer the Duchess until September 1883, when they would try for a long run.72 On the 12th, Mary Anderson wrote to Wilde, formally accepted Mackaye as director, and agreed to take Booth’s Theatre. The final agreement was signed early in December as a result of an ultimatum from the Griffin of 1 December, offering Wilde £1000 on signature, and £4000 more conditional upon Mary Anderson’s acceptance of the completed version of the play, due 1 March 1883. She would produce it within a year. ‘Mere starvation wages,’ Wilde told the writer Edgar Saltus that night at Delmonico’s.73

  Meanwhile, Mackaye, though he had had to put off his dream theatre for lack of funds, continued to work in Wilde’s behalf. He approached the actress Marie Prescott early in November and urged her to play Vera. Miss Prescott wrote to Wilde with great respect on 9 November, and arranged for him to breakfast with her and her husband, William Perzel, two days later. She felt that Vera would suit her, but asked him to rewrite the long scene in Act II and some of Alexis’s speeches in Act I. The only remaining questions were financial. This time Wilde held out, as he had not with Mary Anderson, for permanent control of the acting rights, besides a sizable advance. Wilde mentioned to Saltus that some changes had been asked of him, ‘But who am I to tamper with a masterpiece?’74 Actually he consented. When, in December, Perzel and Wilde failed to agree on terms, Wilde imperiously demanded the play back. But on 9 January 1883 Miss Prescott proposed new terms that mollified him, $1000 down and $50 for each performance. She would stage the play in the autumn of 1883. To this Wilde agreed. On 11 February 1883 the play was announced in the newspapers, and soon after, Miss Prescott’s $1000 arrived. He had now, or seemed to have, a contract for a play in either pocket. He celebrated by lending Mackaye $200.

  By arranging the production of his plays Wilde was not in any way unfaithful to his principal motive of ‘civilizing America.’ The lecture method was necessarily a limited one. At the Lotos Club on 28 October he was called upon to speak, and described the drama as a school for developing artistic taste. He also took his chance to comment formally on the unpleasant way in which American newspapers had treated him, one of the worst of the unnamed offenders being the toastmaster on this occasion at the Lotos Club, Whitelaw Reid of the New York Tribune. Wilde said to Vincent O’Sullivan later, ‘Praise makes me humble. But when I am abused I know I have touched the stars.’ When Wilde left the country on 27 December, seen off by Modjeska and Norman Forbes-Robertson, the Tribune relentlessly quoted him, or claimed to quote him, as admitting that his American tour had been ‘a failure.’75

  But in what sense had it failed? It was true, as Wilde would have said himself, that the country still kept the same shape on the map as when he had first arrived. Otherwise, however, there were many indications of success. Oscar Wilde was now an unforgettable name throughout the United States and Canada, and scarcely less than that in Great Britain; he had arranged for productions of his two plays; he had earned and spent a lot of money; he had disseminated his theories and annoyed, bored, amused, and converted large numbers of people by them. He had made people heartily sick of the words ‘beauty’ and ‘beautiful.’ Perhaps the knee breeches, though they had shown off his handsome legs, had been a mistake; if so, they were the kind of mistake Wilde would always make, outraging the people he wanted to please and then contriving to please most of them nonetheless.

  Apart from his effect upon Americans, Wilde’s tour had an effect upon him. ‘How changed you will be,’ his mother had written him in some trepidation. He could better estimate his own value after withstanding his critics. He had learned a good deal about playing up to audiences, and had also come to recognize the range of possibility implicit in the aesthetic movement. The aesthete was not the shadow of a man. Wilde had put on quite a few pounds to prove it. Perhaps the aesthete might, rather, be the type of the only entire man, for to be an artist was to add constantly to one’s image of oneself, and not to be an artist was to be merely a creature of habit. So far Wilde had said only in perorations what later he would argue more substantially, that in art lay not only life’s secret but also life’s future, discovering and satisfying fresh needs and pleasures, initiating a new civilization.

  * ‘Warning to critics: It is a great advantage to have done nothing, but one not to be exploited.’

  † The critic Sidney Colvin’s attitude towards Wilde at this time is not known, but in a letter to D. S. MacColl of 27 July 1914 he spoke of ‘Oscar Wilde-ism’ as ‘the most pestilent and hateful disease of our time.’

  ‡ The attribution of the article to Bodley is proved not only by internal evidence—references to Masonic costume, Willie Wilde, and other matters which only Bodley knew—but also by a letter from Bodley’s mother to him on 20 February 1882, in which she says, ‘I don’t suppos? Mr. O. O. F. Wilde will like your strictures on his Oxford life very much, but so far as I know anything of him it is very correct, I remember him best as a perfectly unsophisticated young man talking to me in the Botanical Gardens and afterwards escorting me and the girls to Magdalen Tower; do you remember poor Beta declaring she never could or would get down again! it was not in his mind then, the Osth—knee breeches tail coat and lily and sunflower—What a mass of unmanly absurdity.’10

  § Howells said to Vincent O’Sullivan, who had linked the names of Wilde and Andrew Lang, ‘It is a different thing. Lang simply lives by literature. Wilde would have invented literature if it had never existed.’

  ‖ He had some new clothing made to his order, by a New York tailor named Wirtz. Two new suits were designed by Wilde, one of black velvet and the other the shade of a lake glistening in the moonlight, ‘couleur du lac au clair de la lune,’ which turned out to be mouse color. The black suit had ‘a plain black velvet doublet fitting tight to the body, without any visible buttons, after the style of Francis I.’ The lower part of the sleeves was of ‘embossed velvet, with embroidered field-flower designs and fitting tight to the arm. The upper part of the arm is to be in large puffs of the same material, only of a larger pattern, and the body of plain velvet. The sleeves are of two designs of brocaded velvet edges with a delicate ruffle of mousseline de soie. Around the neck is a narrow frill in three rows of the same material as that which edges the sleeves. The breeches are to come to the knee and to be tight fitting, with two small buttons at the bottom. The stockings are to be of black silk and the shoes cut low and secured with a silver buckle. It may be interesting to know that the following are the dimensions of the costume in inches: trousers, 30 inches; bottom of doublet, 45¼; waist 38½; and breast 36½. The puffs at the upper part of the sleeves 32 inches, at the bottom 11 inches, the collar being 17 inches in size.’ (New York World, 4 May 1882)

  a An old artist was not so reverential: George Inness, talking to students in the Art Students’ League in New York in May, refused to allow Wilde to break in.

  b He was not impressed by Beecher. At a dinner of the Royal Literary Fund in London later, someone said, ‘We were just saying, Mr Wilde, how impossible it is to compare a man like Dr Talmadge with a person like Henry Ward Beecher.’ ‘Indeed yes,’ said Wilde, ‘it would be like comparing the pantaloon with the clown.’

  c He would say later that in the South, whenever one
mentioned anything, people would reply, ‘You should have seen it before the War.’ He had never felt what ruin war could bring about until one night in Charleston he turned to someone and said, ‘How beautiful the moon is!’ and had for reply, ‘You should have seen it, sir, before the War.40

  d The description was less suited to Rodd’s poems than to two ‘Impressions’ by Wilde which his friend Robert Stewart Davis published in his Philadelphia magazine, Our Continent, on 15 February. The first, ‘Le Jardin,’ was written in response to a promise of a guinea a line for a poem mentioning a lily and a sunflower. The second, ‘La Mer’ (‘A white mist drifts across the shrouds, / A wild moon in this wintry sky / Gleams like an angry lion’s eye / Out of a mane of tawny clouds’), was probably written during the crossing from England. Each of these poems is sheer description, deliberately devoid of any significance beyond itself.

  e He spoke afterwards of her having had her photograph taken ‘with Niagara Falls as a kind of unpretentious background.’64

  f Wilde made Australia rather than Scotland the butt of his regional jokes. In February 1889 he published ‘Symphony in Yellow’ in the Centennial Magazine in Australia, and was quoted in an Australian magazine as having said: ‘So they are desirous of my beauty at Botany Bay. I have inquired concerning this Botany Bay. It is the abode of anthropophagi, the abode of lost souls, whither criminals are transported to wear a horrible yellow livery. Even they are called “canaries.” So I have written for them a Symphony in Yellow—they will feel the homely touch. I rhyme “elms” with “Thames.” It is a venial offense in comparison with theirs. A symphony with sympathy—how sweet! Suppose I were to add a stanza:

  And far in the Antipodes

  When swelling suns have sunk to rest

  A convict to his yellow breast

  Shall hug my yellow melodies.’67

  In Lady Windermere’s Fan a character from Australia is given the name ‘Hopper.’

  CHAPTER VIII

  Countering the Renaissance

  And when that day dawns, or sunset reddens, how joyous we shall all be! … The very aspect of the world will change to our startled eyes. Out of the sea will rise Behemoth and Leviathan.… Dragons will wander about the waste places, and the phoenix will soar from her nest of fire into the air. We shall lay our hands upon the basilisk, and see the jewel in the toad’s head.

  An Irishman in Paris

  On his return to London, Wilde was in excellent spirits. He had lots of stories to tell, and many people to listen. George Lewis was to be thanked for intervening in the dispute with Archibald Forbes, Edmund Yates of the World and Labouchere of Truth for treating his tour kindly when the temptation to deride it had been so widely unresisted. His mother and brother could rejoice in his reminiscences and his stunning international fame. As a movement, aestheticism had been rendered passé: Wilde would use the word and its cognates in a more gingerly fashion from now on. But the dying movement’s vivacious leader was more likely than ever to be consulted on all subjects related to it.

  Of course Wilde, dressed for the occasion in a red suit, went to call on Whistler, and was welcomed, though with ironies that prompted him to say, as he often did, ‘Jimmy, you’re a devil.’ He greatly admired the second set of etchings Whistler had done in Venice—‘such water paintings as the gods never beheld,’ he wrote to Waldo Story.1 The meeting was somewhat impaired by the raised eyebrows of Rennell Rodd, who liked neither the suit nor the manner. Wilde looked to him like Heliogabalus or Sardanapalus, and was as unwilling to listen as Rodd had long ago jocularly predicted. When Rodd tried to protest against the high-handed manner in which Rose Leaf and Apple Leaf had been exploited by Wilde, he got no satisfaction; Wilde regarded himself as the aggrieved party. In January or February, Rodd wrote him a long-meditated letter ending their friendship. Wilde’s comment was ‘The only schools worthy of founding are schools without disciples.’ As for Rodd’s stinging letter, ‘What he says is like a poor little linnet’s cry by the roadside, along which my immeasurable ambition is sweeping forward.’ He would not always be so contemptuous of linnets’ cries. Rodd, measurable in his ambitions, hereafter shunned Wilde’s company. From now on he was for Wilde ‘the true poet, and the false friend.’2 The break with Rodd, who had largely replaced Wilde in Whistler’s affection, augured ill for his subsequent relations with that artist.

  In London, Wilde went back to Charles Street. But he had no intention of settling back at once into London life. After his flamboyant tour in America, with black valet and white manager, plush hotel rooms and sumptuous invitations to the wealthiest homes, this would have been anticlimactic. To dramatize his return he must first go somewhere else and finish The Duchess of Padua. A year before, he had written to Archibald Forbes that with his American earnings he hoped for a few months in Venice, Rome, and Athens. But, keyed up for conquest of another nation, he needed one whose language he could speak fluently, so he went to Paris. He had been there several times before; his mother had translated two books of Lamartine and had been thanked by the great man himself. Wilde was at home in French literature, and venerated in particular Balzac, Gautier, Flaubert, and Baudelaire.

  He crossed the Channel at the end of January 1883. After a few days at the Hôtel Continental he moved to the Hôtel Voltaire, on the Left Bank. He had furnished himself, as usual, with letters of introduction from friends and with copies of his Poems. The American journalist Theodore Child, who wrote for the World, was among the first to give a dinner for him, and others followed. The artist Jacques-Emile Blanche did a painting of a young woman reading Wilde’s Poems.

  One person who assisted him in settling into Paris was a young Englishman, scarcely twenty-one, named Robert Harborough Sherard. He was to become Wilde’s biographer several times over, with The Story of an Unhappy Friendship, The Life of Oscar Wilde, The Real Oscar Wilde, and numerous other, less sustained accounts. Though the information is needed, perhaps few men have been so peculiarly served by a biographer. Sherard was bumptious, wrongheaded, uncomprehending. That Wilde put up with him at all was due to Sherard’s possession of three compensatory merits: he was young, blond, and idolatrous. Not precisely handsome, he was ‘beau laid.’ Within four months he asked permission to dedicate to Wilde a book of poems called Whispers, and Wilde praised it and consented to receive the dedication, this time without having, as with Rennell Rodd, to write it himself. Sherard’s wording was ‘To Oscar Wilde, Poet and Friend, Affectionately and admiringly Dedicated.’ Oscar Wilde’s indulgence did not weigh with his brother Willie, who in a Vanity Fair review announced that whispers were what the poems were and what they should have remained. Oscar reviewed a later book of Sherard more generously, saying that he has ‘come through “early poems,” a three-volume novel, and other complaints common to his time of life.’3

  Sherard was a great-grandson of Wordsworth. Wilde twitted him about this ancestry. His father, whose surname was Kennedy, was an Anglican priest who had taken his family with him to the Continent and then to Guernsey, where they shared a house with Victor Hugo and became friendly with him. Sherard went up to New College, Oxford, in 1880, but during his first year was sent down for nonpayment of debts. He had made his way to Paris with the intention of becoming a writer, changed his name from Kennedy to Sherard, and published a novel before he and Wilde met. Truculent by disposition, he was not disposed to like Wilde on the basis of what he had heard about him. When his friend Maria Cassavetti-Zambaco (a beautiful Greek who had been the model for Vivian in Burne-Jones’s The Beguiling of Merlin and for Galatea in his Pygmalion and Galatea series) invited him to dinner to meet Wilde, Sherard almost refused. As soon as he entered the room the appearance of Wilde confirmed his forebodings: there were no knee breeches, but the costume was Count d’Orsay, with cuffs turned back over jacket sleeves, tight trousers, colored handkerchief, boutonnière, heavy rings, and an elaborate coiffure. (Wilde’s mother wrote that his trousers and sleeves were so tight as to be remarked on the Boulevards.) It w
as all Sherard could do to avoid bursting into mocking laughter; to keep in countenance he joined dour Paul Bourget and grave John Singer Sargent. Wilde did not at first take to Sherard either. ‘I fancied, because of your long blond hair, that you were Herr Shulz on the violoncello.’ He later found a kindlier comparison: ‘It is the head of a Roman emperor of the decadence—the head of an emperor who reigned but for one day—a head found stamped upon a base coin.’4

  Only when they sat down to dinner did Sherard suspect that his preliminary estimate of Wilde as a fraud or pretender would not do. There was no doubt who ruled the table that night. Wilde probably made use of some of the conversational gambits that he had begun to write down in his notebook, such as:

  Artiste en poésie, et poète, deux choses très différentes: cf. Gautier et Hugo.

  Pour écrire il me faut du satin jaune.

  La poésie c’est la grammaire idéalisée.