Oscar Wilde

by Richard Ellmann

  A masque of death weaves in and out of Wilde’s life during these months. His public life was smooth and confident. He would lunch with the Asquiths, and W. S. Blunt describes such an occasion on 17 July 1894 when Wilde outshone a brilliant company, perversely crossing swords with each person in turn, and making special fun of Asquith, who would soon, as Home Secretary, be prosecuting him. This may have been the occasion when Asquith complained of a Wilde mannerism, ‘The man who uses italics is like the man who raises his voice in conversation and talks loudly in order to make himself heard.’ Wilde’s rejoinder was ‘How delightful of you, Mr Asquith, to have noticed that! The brilliant phrase, like good wine, needs no bush. But just as the orator marks his good things by a dramatic pause, or by raising and lowering his voice, or by gesture, so the writer marks his epigrams with italics, setting the little gem, so to speak, like a jeweller—an excusable love of one’s art, not all mere vanity, I like to think—.’2 On the other hand, imputations of scandal involving Wilde and Douglas were so commonplace in London—that metropolitan small town—that the Marquess of Queensberry needed no private detectives to learn of them.

  Wilde’s difficulties were multiplied because, as was well known, the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885,† which for the first time prohibited indecent relations between consenting adult males, had seen in the age of the blackmailer. Given Douglas’s carelessness with letters received, and his own recklessness in writing them, Wilde could never be free of harassment on this score. The harshest persecution he suffered, however, came not from greedy boys or an indignant father, but from Alfred Douglas. Douglas liked to live on a knife edge, and to have company there. He challenged Wilde into expenditures hitherto undreamed of, in a half-conscious effort to bog his friend down in debt-ridden emotions and emotion-ridden debts. If he wanted proof of his hold over Wilde, and no proof was ever enough, he had it every day in lavish meals and presents.

  It says much for Wilde’s seriousness as an artist that under such pressure he worked at his best. His art was his anodyne for the malice of his enemies and the profligacy that Douglas was making obligatory. Wilde explained this in a letter of condolence he wrote to his sometime friend Henley, in which he urged work as the only consolation for the convergence of love and death that life offers. ‘That is what remains for natures like ours,’ he declares. ‘Work never seems to me a reality, but a way of getting rid of reality.’3 The fifteen months from December 1893 to the beginning of his legal proceedings against Queensberry, with presages of coming disaster thick around him, were as productive as the beginning of the 1890s, when all his powers seemed to find expression.

  Douglas Away

  The centaurs have hidden in the rivers, and the sirens have left the rivers and he under the leaves of the forest.

  Wilde wrote most of four plays and planned a fifth. With Douglas out of the way in Egypt for three months, he was able to finish the last three acts of An Ideal Husband. He said to Ricketts, ‘It was written for ridiculous puppets to play, and the critics will say, “Ah, here is Oscar unlike himself!—” though in reality I became engrossed in writing it, and it contains a great deal of the real Oscar.’4 He was right. The play joined his two previous comedies in demonstrating the universal incapacity to come up to the ideal. The offense of Sir Robert Chiltern is the most serious in the three plays, since eighteen years before, at twenty-two, he has sold a state secret and with the money established his wealth and political position. Beside his, Mrs Erlynne’s and Mrs Arbuthnot’s offenses in earlier years are only indiscretions. The parallels are, rather, with Dorian Gray’s murder of Hallward and Arthur Savile’s of the chiromancer, one treated seriously, the other frivolously. Wilde must have had in mind how he, at about the same age as Chiltern—and also eighteen years before—contracted syphilis at Oxford. Like murder, disease will out.

  With this theme of youthful wrongdoing which was ineradicable in his work, Wilde built up the play by devising characters who, though they resemble those in his other plays, behave quite differently. Mrs Cheveley is an adventuress, like Mrs Erlynne in Lady Windermere’s Fan, but instead of sacrificing herself for her daughter, she wants to sacrifice Chiltern to her own ends. The cleverest character in A Woman of No Importance is Lord Illingworth, a dandy; in An Ideal Husband Lord Goring is equally clever, and equally a dandy, but he behaves well whereas Illingworth behaves villainously. Wit is no criterion of decency. Lady Chiltern, like Lady Windermere, is a puritan, whose puritanism must be made to vanish in the air in a scene of forgiveness and love. Even ideal husbands are, like other people, a bit criminal. The comic spirit, Wilde told Arthur Roberts, is a necessity in life, as a purge to all human vanity.5

  The play’s charm derives not from the exposure of hypocrisy, but from the gradual expansion of tenderness. Goring and Chiltern’s daughter Mabel are witty and loving, and the affectionate relations of Goring and his father are an object lesson to the Queensberrys. The Chilterns too rediscover their bond. The kindness of the playwright is more evident here than in the other plays.

  During these months Wilde wrote also A Florentine Tragedy and most of La Sainte Courtisane. As usual, he counterposed two forms of love, one moving to reconciliation and the other to antipathy. La Sainte Courtisane was an attempt to dramatize and perhaps improve upon Anatole France’s Thaïs: an anchorite converts a courtesan to Christianity, in the process is himself converted to paganism, then rejected by his convert. (This too was like an ‘Early Church’ story of Wilde’s.) He had a fresher plot in A Florentine Tragedy, which he wrote in blank verse, a blank verse more mature and subtle than in The Duchess of Padua. This play seems virtually finished. A Jewish cloth merchant finds a nobleman visiting his wife in his shop, and pretends to think it is a business visit. There is a good deal of verbal sparring before he forces the nobleman into a duel and kills him. The ending surprises: his wife expresses neither grief for her lover, nor revulsion from her husband. She asks, ‘Why did you not tell me you were so strong?,’ and he replies, ‘Why did you not tell me you were beautiful?’ Wilde seems to have intended a trio of short plays, variations on love’s cross-purposes, but could not finish them. He blamed their incompleteness on the return of Douglas.

  Yet his productive period was stalled, not stopped. On the morning of 1 August he invented a plot which he immediately sent off to George Alexander. This one was also a reversal, of Lady Windermere’s Fan. It was as if Wilde were trying to illustrate his aphorism that ‘A truth in art is one whose contrary is equally true.’ In this play, instead of the wife’s staying with her husband, as in his earlier play, she runs off with her lover. The play diverges from its antitype even further, for the husband begs his wife’s lover to beg her to return. The lover self-sacrificially promises, but she refuses. ‘All this self-sacrifice is wrong,’ she insists; ‘we are meant to live. That is the meaning of life.’ She and the lover go off, but the husband eventually challenges the lover to a duel. In a final interview, the husband learns to his discomfiture that his wife hopes for his death, and that she is pregnant by the lover. He goes out, shots are heard, the lover complains that the husband has not turned up for the duel, then learns that he has killed himself. Wilde explained to Alexander that the play was to present ‘the sheer passion of love,’ with ‘No morbid self-sacrifice. No renunciation.’ It was a theme that he felt increasingly to be his own. But the husband does practice self-sacrifice and renunciation, as Wilde was to do in ways he did not expect. The plot of The Cardinal of Avignon failed to disapprove of incest, and this play failed to disapprove of adultery.6 Alexander’s response to the new plot is not recorded, but in August and September 1894, Wilde turned to writing his last and greatest play, The Importance of Being Earnest.

  With all his literary and amorous preoccupations, he continued to be the same generous man he had always been. Nelly Sickert tells how when her father, Oswald Sickert, died, Wilde came to call on her mother. Mrs Sickert had shut herself up in dumb despair. Nelly told Wilde he would not be received, b
ut he insisted. The widow as stubbornly refused. When Nelly relayed this message, Wilde said, ‘But she must see me. She must. Tell her I will stay here till she does.’ Back she went to be met by another refusal, her mother wringing her hands and saying, ‘I can’t. Send him away.’ But she got up and went crying into the room where he was waiting. Nelly saw Wilde take both her hands and draw her to a chair, and then left. ‘He stayed a long time, and before he went I heard my mother laughing.… She was transformed. He had made her talk, had asked questions about my father’s last illness, and allowed her to unburden … those torturing memories. Gradually he had talked of my father, of his music, of the possibilities of a memorial exhibition of his pictures. Then, she didn’t know how, he had begun to tell her all sorts of things, which he contrived to make interesting and amusing. “And then I laughed,” she said. “I thought I should never laugh again.” ’7

  A letter of 28 April 1891 from some unknown person thanks Wilde for saving the family home. Edgar Saltus tells how he and Wilde were accosted in Chelsea on a cold night by a man who opened his jacket to show he had nothing on underneath. Saltus gave the man a gold coin but Wilde took off his overcoat and put it round him. Another such witness is Gertrude Pearce, who for about a year and a half was tutor to Vyvyan Wilde. In the summer of 1893 she accompanied the family to Goring and returned with them to London, remaining in their employ well into the following year. Wilde offered every kind of assistance to her. She wrote down in 1906 what she remembered of those days:

  We all spent a very lovely time at ‘The Cottage’, Goring on Thames, where he wrote his play The Ideal Husband in which I believe I was one of the women mentioned, Gertrude [Chisholm]. It was an ideal country place, lovely gardens, and meadows which led on to the towing path to the river, of course there were all kinds of boats for our use, punts, skiffs, canoes, and to show how generous Oscar Wilde was, he told me if ever I went to the boat house and found the particular boat I wanted was out, to be sure to go to Saunders boat house and get what I wanted and put it down to his account.

  We absolutely lived in the most luxurious style, there were 8 servants and everything done on a lavish scale. The servants I believe used to drink champagne in the kitchen, he told me how amusing it had been to him as he engaged all the servants and paid them very high wages. I spent one Christmas with them and Mr Wilde was as happy as a boy, doling out the Christmas pudding, pulling crackers and I have even now a small china doll he gave me from the pudding. I very much regret I destroyed all his photographs and I could have had the manuscript of the play I was mentioned in, or any play if I had wanted it.

  I can also remember the time when things were not so prosperous (after our return from Goring) [October 1893] and the butcher even refusing to send a joint until the account was settled, Oscar himself driving round in a hansom and settling up, after which we were of course allowed to have a dinner. It may also sound strange when I tell you I once went to a well known shop to hire a few knives but as I had no money with me to pay at the time, they also refused and I very ignominiously had to return home to fetch the money.…

  Did I ever tell you that, when they decided to send my charge [Vyvyan] to school, they asked me to live with them, … knowing my parents were dead, even offering to send me to college to take up any particular subject I wished to, when I very stupidly refused this more than kind offer they then said knowing how independent I was would I live there and take a daily engagement so that they would have me with them. This too I regret to say I refused.8

  Wilde’s high spirits at Christmastime of 1893 reflected his temporary detachment from Douglas. For the time he was wonderfully disencumbered. He could write, he could talk to his friends, he could enjoy himself without the competitive strain which Douglas introduced into the pursuit of young men. As the weeks passed, Wilde strengthened his resolve to have nothing more to do with his lover. Resolutions were all very well, but Douglas had his own sensitivity, and knew that the reconciliation he had extorted from Wilde before he left—by the threat of not leaving—was only a perfunctory one. Wilde still dominated his existence. On the eve of departure he had a long talk with his mother, who was explicit in her insistence that he break off with Wilde. She told him she would almost like to murder Wilde for what he had done to him. Even Bosie, she said, had never pretended that Wilde was a good man.

  Douglas reacted to the word ‘good’ with all an aesthete’s verbosity. In a letter he sent from Cairo on 10 December 1893, he said that he did not speak of anybody as good, and did not regard the word as applicable to individuals. He indiscreetly quoted Wilde’s remark in his preface to Dorian Gray, ‘There is no such thing as a moral or immoral book, a book is well written or badly written, that is all.’ What he claimed for Wilde was not goodness but character and distinction. Then, as if realizing that the arguments had not been very convincing so far, he added that Wilde had taught him how one could be good and splendid too, and had even inculcated a kind of religion. Douglas, once like his father a scoffer, now recognized that religion had a value and that Biblical stories had meanings. As for Wilde’s effect on him, ‘Why, I tell you I don’t believe I had a soul before I met him.’ Wilde had persuaded him to give up gambling and betting and going to race meetings, because they were unworthy of him. (This renunciation proved temporary.) Their relationship was that of the philosopher and the disciple, like that of Shakespeare and Mr W.H., or of Socrates and Plato, and much nobler than that of Socrates and Alcibiades.

  Lady Queensberry was not moved. She responded, ‘If Mr Wilde has acted as I am convinced he has the part of a Lord Henry Wotton to you I could never feel differently towards him than I do, as the murderer of your soul.’ She too had been obliged to read Dorian Gray, and must also have read the poem by Bosie’s cousin Lionel Johnson, which was entitled ‘To the Destroyer of a Soul,’ addressed secretly to Wilde.‡ It was from Wilde, she said, that her son had learned his ‘eccentricities and peculiar views of morality.’ No, said Douglas, he had come to these views two years before he met Wilde. He took the occasion to lecture her about Dorian Gray: Wilde was in no sense like Lord Henry Wotton, who had none of Oscar’s ‘sunny nature, his buoyant “joie de vivre,” his quick wit and splendid sense of humour, and his loyal kind and forgiving nature which make him altogether more like a grown up boy than the sort of cynical subtle and morbid creature which you want to make him out.’ Neither mother nor son showed signs of yielding; Lady Queensberry did not slacken her efforts to keep her son abroad.

  Douglas also received in Cairo a series of letters from his father, to much the same effect as his mother’s. Queensberry interpolated into his complaints about Bosie’s life lamentations about the misery and loneliness of his own. Douglas read both without sympathy, and answered with growing impertinence. What he wanted was a letter from Wilde, but none came. Those that he wrote to Wilde were read and torn up. But Douglas knew Wilde and his own power, and had pleasant diversions in Egypt.10 If Lord Cromer had no post to offer him, he and Lady Cromer were hospitable. There was the good fortune, perhaps not wholly accidental, that a number of Douglas’s friends had come to Egypt at the same time, and were going up the Nile. He joined them. He could hardly have hoped for better company outside of London than Robert Hichens and E. F. Benson, both novelists, and Reggie Turner and his half-brother Frank Lawson. Lawson had a stronger claim on the family wealth than Reggie, who was illegitimate, but was generous with his brother. He had taken a gilded barge moored in the Nile, which Douglas visited often.

  Turner had met Max Beerbohm at Oxford, and they had formed a close and unending friendship. His father, one of the Lawsons who owned the Daily Chronicle, was Jewish, and Turner seems always to have been considered so too, though his mother was probably not. He was an easy and frequent subject for Max’s caricature, being large-nosed and small-headed, with eyelids that blinked accidentally as well as deliberately. He was also excellent company, given to mimicry of sermons and the repartee that Wilde favored.§ Beerbohm thought h
e detected latent tendencies in Turner towards heterosexuality, which he was eager to encourage, and warned off Ross from proselytizing for homosexuality. But such efforts were ineffective. Wilde would christen Turner ‘the boy-snatcher of Clement’s Inn.’

  Hichens, Benson, Lawson, and Turner all knew Dorian Gray almost by heart and vied with one another in quoting bits of it now, as they floated up the Nile to Luxor. Whether letters arrived from Wilde or not, he could not help being an unseen companion on their trip, constantly invoked in quotation and anecdote. Hichens listened attentively, and made notes for The Green Carnation, in which Wilde occupied literally, as Mr Amarinth, the place he had occupied only in their talk on their voyage.

  When Wilde continued to leave Douglas’s letters unanswered, the young man resorted to desperate stratagems. He used his wiles to cajole his mother herself, unwilling as she was, to urge Wilde to write to him. Wilde was astonished to receive a letter from her enclosing Bosie’s address in Athens, where he had gone on the invitation of Benson, who was doing some archaeological work. He still did not write to Bosie, but he did urge Lady Queensberry to keep her son away from England at all costs. In fact the Cromers had arranged for Douglas to go to Constantinople as honorary attaché to Lord Currie, the British Ambassador. But his mother’s plans went awry, for Douglas seems to have taken the appointment very lightly, and not only visited Athens but determined to see Wilde again in Paris before he went among the Turks. Because of the delay or because of his association with Wilde, Currie, tipped off perhaps by his aide Rennell Rodd, denied him the post. Whether Douglas knew he had lost it before he departed for Paris in the hope of an assignation with Wilde is unclear. (His Autobiography is never reliable.)