The two brothers maintained a cordial distance. School life did not bring them together. Willie treated Oscar ‘always… as a younger brother’.52 But Oscar – quietly confident of his own powers – refused to be patronized.53 Although the headmaster might frequently hold Willie up to him as an example, Oscar was unimpressed. He merely smiled. As he recalled, ‘I never for a moment regarded [Willie] as my equal in any intellectual field… and in my own opinion always went about “crowned”.’54
Oscar began to cultivate a certain sense of refined singularity. ‘I always wanted everything about me to be distinctive’, he claimed.55 His look – having been distinctly scruffy – became distinctly smart.56 He grew ‘more careful in his dress than any other boy’.57 The lilac shirt was only one element in the campaign. He took to wearing his Sunday hat throughout the week.58 His hair – ‘long, straight, fair’ and swept back from his forehead – proclaimed a determined otherness.59 Indeed his hair length, perhaps more than anything, marked him out in the memory of his peers: ‘he had a good wisp of hair’ was still said of him in Enniskillen, some thirty years after he left the school.60 Every aspect of school life, though, offered scope for the same sort of calculated individualism. Rather than using the conventional school textbooks, he began to affect ‘handsome editions of the classics’.61 He worked at his handwriting, in an effort to achieve a script that was ‘clear and beautiful and peculiar to me’.62
Much of Oscar’s time was still spent – when not dreaming away the hours – in reading for his own pleasure. He devoured, as he put it, ‘too many English novels, and too much poetry’.63 He read with phenomenal speed, developing a rare ability to absorb (and retain) information almost as quickly as he turned the pages.
He took in the English classics, coming to know Walter Scott, Jane Austen, Thackeray and Stevenson.64 He read both Dickens, the great sentimental comic moralist of the age, and Disraeli, the less-regarded ‘silver fork’ literary and political dandy. And, in line with his desire to be ‘distinctive’ in all things, he declared a preference for the latter.65 In this heresy, as in so much else, he drew encouragement from his mother. She lent him copies of Disraeli’s books, and shared his delight in their ‘epigrammatic style’ and aristocratic settings.66 Oscar also indulged a taste for the ‘romantic’ Gothic tales of Wilhelm Meinhold, reading his mother’s translation of Sidonia the Sorceress, and Lady Duff Gordon’s version of The Amber Witch.67 He developed, too, an enthusiasm for the tales of that ‘lord of romance’, Edgar Allan Poe, along with a reverence for ‘uncle’ Maturin’s stupendously bizarre Melmoth the Wanderer.68
His love of poetry developed through reading Shakespeare and the English Romantics, together with his mother’s great favourites, Tennyson and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Not long after leaving school he would solemnly declare Hamlet, In Memoriam and Barrett Browning’s verse-novel Aurora Leigh to be ‘much the greatest work[s] in our literature’.69 And it was probably his mother’s influence, too, that gave him a precocious interest in the impassioned free verse of Walt Whitman.70
Oscar’s immersion in literature did not shut him off from his contemporaries. Even if he was considered ‘somewhat reserved and distant in his manners’, he was neither unsociable nor unpopular.71 He might have had no ‘very special chums’, but he was well liked and sometimes admired.72 To those who knew him best he appeared ‘generous, kindly [and, for the most part,] good tempered’.73 He would take an occasional outing on Lough Erne, though he was a poor hand at an oar.74 He could sometimes be induced to join in schoolboy larks – even breaking his arm while playing ‘chargers’ mounted on the back of a senior boy.75 The incident marked what he called his ‘first introduction to the horrors of pain, the lurking tragedies of life’. And he hated it. Physical pain, he would always assert, was ‘a thousand times worse than mental suffering’.76
Sex seems to have played little part in Oscar’s schooldays. Awareness of it came to him late: he later gave ‘16 as the age at which sex begins’. ‘Of course,’ as he explained, ‘I was sensual and curious, as boys are, and had the usual boy imaginings; but I did not indulge in them excessively.’77 In contrast to many of England’s larger public schools, sex between pupils was all but unknown at Portora: ‘Nine out of ten boys only thought of football or cricket or rowing. Nearly every one went in for athletics – running and jumping and so forth; no one appeared to care for sex. We were healthy young barbarians and that was all.’78 In later life Oscar would recall the touching devotion of one junior boy – ‘a couple of years younger than I’ – who clearly had a schoolboy crush on him, about which Oscar – wrapped up in the drama of his own thoughts and plans – was entirely oblivious. Oscar enjoyed the boy’s company because he provided an audience: ‘My friend,’ he explained, ‘had a wonderful gift for listening.’79 Audiences were becoming important to Oscar.
As his school career advanced, Oscar developed into, if not quite the class clown, an accomplished performer. He had more scope after Willie left for Trinity College Dublin in the autumn of 1869. At the informal gatherings around the stove in the Stone Hall on winter afternoons, Oscar was ‘at his best’. He might amuse the other boys by striking ‘stained-glass attitudes’ – twisting his limbs into ‘weird contortions’ in imitation of saints and other ‘holy people’ (this, apparently, was also a party-trick of his father’s).80 His speed-reading offered scope for entertainment too. Often ‘for a wager’ he would ‘read a three-volume novel in half an hour so closely as to be able to give an accurate résumé of the plot’; if allowed a whole hour, he could recount, in addition, the incidental scenes and the most pertinent dialogue.81
But, above all, he talked – fluently, amusingly, interestingly and well.82 He entertained the gatherings in the Stone Hall. He amused his friends. He diverted the masters. His ‘descriptive power’ was ‘far above the average’ but his real gift was for comedy. He had a way with exaggeration that could transform even the most mundane occurrence into a vision of romance guyed by humour.83 One of his contemporaries liked to recall an incident when he and Oscar, along with two other boys, had been in Enniskillen and had played a prank on a street orator, knocking off his hat with a stick. This jape provoked a minor outcry, and the boys had to flee the scene, back up the hill to Portora. Oscar, in the scramble to escape, had collided with an old man and knocked him over. Yet, in his vivid – and solemnly humorous – retelling of the incident, the aged cripple was transformed into ‘an angry giant’ barring the path, with whom Oscar had to fight ‘through many rounds, and whom he eventually left for dead in the road after accomplishing prodigies of valour on his redoubtable opponent’.84
He developed, too, a relish for the recondite, and a penchant for the extravagant. In 1869, when reports of the prosecution for heresy of Rev. W. J. E. Bennett were filling the newspapers, and being eagerly discussed at Portora, Oscar was ‘full of the mysterious nature of the Court of Arches’ – the ancient ecclesiastical court at St Mary-le-Bow in London – where the case was being heard. Bennett, an extreme Anglo-Catholic ritualist, had outraged Protestant theology in a pamphlet claiming that the actual and perfect body of Christ was both present and visible in the Eucharist – and Oscar delighted in the drama of the proceedings. The reverberations of the Travers case had done nothing to put him off the law. He announced to his schoolfellows, gathered around the Stone Hall stove, that ‘there was nothing he would like better in after life than to be the hero of such a cause célèbre and to go down to posterity as the defendant in such a case as “Regina versus Wilde”!’85
Oscar’s ‘pungent wit’ found expression in other ways as well. He enjoyed subverting authority, making fun of those aspects of school life that had least appeal to him: he ‘never had a good word for a mathematical or science master’ and the musketry instructor and drill sergeant were held in contempt86 – though it was always admitted that ‘there was nothing spiteful or malignant in anything he said against them’.87 Only once did he overstep the mark, when he ‘cheeked’ t
he headmaster and got into ‘an awful row’.88
He also had ‘an uncanny gift for giving nicknames’. But although these ‘used to stick to his victims… they did not rankle, as there was always a gaiety and no malice about them’.89 This was an impressive and telling achievement. His own nickname was ‘Grey-crow’ – though its origins and relevance remain obscure. It apparently related in some way to one of the islands on Lough Erne, and perhaps connects with the comment of a contemporary, who remembered Oscar – grown, after his sixteenth birthday, suddenly ‘tall for his age’ and heavy – ‘flop[ping] about ponderously’.90 He, however, rather resented the name, and it was used only by those who wished to annoy him. For the most part he was called ‘Oscar’ – another distinction among peers more used to addressing each other by their surnames.91 During the 1870 prize-giving, however, at which he won the prestigious Carpenter Prize for Greek Testament, his full name – ‘Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde’ – became known, when it was read out by the headmaster, leading to much ‘schoolboy chaff’.92 The glory of the prize was, however, surely worth the teasing.
In academic terms Oscar’s passage into the upper school marked a considerable advance. There had been, as was customary, a small intake of new pupils joining that year, attracted by Portora’s growing reputation for excellence, and also by the chance of gaining one of the school’s ‘royal scholarships’ to Trinity College Dublin. Among the boys entering the school in 1868 were Edward Sullivan (son of Sir Edward, the Wildes’ counsel during the Travers trial) and the even more gifted Louis Claude Purser.93 Purser, arriving from Midleton College, Cork, was amazed by the quality of the teaching at Portora – principally of classics and mathematics, but of English too, and French ‘in its higher branches’. More than this, though, he found ‘a far greater width of culture and diffusion of ideas’ than at his previous schools. Indeed he thought the tenor of the Portora upper school ‘more like a college of a university than a middle-class school’.94
Oscar responded well to this atmosphere, albeit in his own fashion. He developed, as Purser recalled, ‘a real love for intellectual things, especially if there was a breath of poetry in them, and he often used to inveigle some of the masters (who were, I think, rather highly educated men) into spending the time usually devoted to “learning us our lessons” in giving a disquisition on some subject he would artfully suggest – for he had engaging manners when he liked – by some apparently innocent question’. On one occasion he asked ‘What is a Realist?’, drawing forth ‘a disquisition on Realism and Nominalism and Conceptualism in which we all asked questions and which proved most illuminating’.95
Although Oscar always remained ‘very exceptionally below the average in mathematics’ (requiring frantic cramming before each set of school exams), in all the other school subjects – there being ‘next to no “science” in those pre-historic days’ – he did more than tolerably well. If – as Purser put it – he was ‘not of outstanding general excellence among his fellow schoolboys… there was no one who could have been said to have been markedly his superior’. He gained a thorough and enduring knowledge of the Bible (both the King James version, and the Greek Testament), even winning a scripture prize in 1869.96 Writing, though, was not, as yet, a particular forte: neither his ‘English Essays’ nor his ‘Classical Composition’ were ‘exceptionally distinguished’.97 His literary bent – and love of poetic things – seems to have found its expression away from the classroom, in humorous poems and poses.‡
Reading, though, absorbed him more. A new world of the imagination was opening up to him. As he later recalled, ‘I was nearly sixteen [i.e. in 1870] when the wonder and beauty of the old Greek life began to dawn upon me. Suddenly I seemed to see the white figures throwing purple shadows on the sun-baked palaestra; “bands of nude youths and maidens… moving across a background of deep blue as on the frieze of the Parthenon.” I began to read Greek eagerly for love of it all, and the more I read the more I was enthralled.’98 As ever, he tended to identify with the subjects of his reading, and he noticed – ‘with some wonder’ – that it was the men of creative intellect rather than the men of military action with whom he identified most readily: ‘Alcibiades or Sophocles’ rather than ‘Alexander or Caesar’.99
They were interesting exemplars. The sketch of Alcibiades in William Smith’s workaday Smaller History of Greece, the textbook used at Portora, certainly conjured up subversive visions of transgression licensed by genius: ‘From early youth the conduct of Alcibiades was marked by violence, recklessness, and vanity. He delighted in astonishing the more sober portion of the citizens by his capricious and extravagant feats. He was utterly destitute of morality, whether public or private. But his vices were partly redeemed by some brilliant qualities. He possessed both boldness of design and vigour of action.’100
This great enthusiasm for the world of ancient Greece – perhaps heightened by his sense of Celtic affinity with Greek culture – carried Oscar’s studies forward seemingly without effort. He must have worked hard, but – as he later put it – ‘knowledge came to me through pleasure, as it always comes, I imagine’.101 His rare natural abilities at last had a subject with which to engage. The progress he made was ‘astounding’ to both peers and masters. Even Dr Steele was impressed.102 And Oscar himself always considered that it was during this period, 1870–1, that he ‘laid the foundations’ for ‘whatever classical scholarship’ he possessed.103
Oscar’s particular brilliance showed itself most clearly on ‘the literary side’ of his studies, as distinguished from ‘the scholastic’. Purser recalled ‘his appreciation of the literary merits of any author that he took the trouble to study appealed strongly to him, and his remarks and criticisms thereon were always deserving of attention’: but he was less interested in such features as ‘grammar, textual criticism, history, “antiquities” & co.’104 He also enjoyed the element of performance that the syllabus required. According to Edward Sullivan ‘the flowing beauty of his oral translations in class’ was ‘a thing not easily forgotten’.105
Oscar’s studies came to command his full attention. The life of books interested him more than real life.106 On the summer holidays at Moytura he cut a self-absorbed figure. One visitor (the son of the local doctor) found Oscar ‘very dull company’, remote, unsmiling and aloof, with his thoughts doubtless engaged on ‘Greek poetry’– a striking contrast to the gay, ebullient undergraduate Willie, who enjoyed a drink, and sang to his own accompaniment at the piano.107
Since his arrival in the upper school Oscar had been recognized as ‘a fair scholar’ – but in his final year at Portora he emerged as one of the leading figures in a very able classical sixth form – along with Purser, the McDowells (J. and R.) and E. Galbraith. They seem to have been a tight-knit and supportive group, enjoying their proficiency and challenging each other to extend it. They were all signatories of a joint letter to the assistant master, Rev. Benjamin Moffett, complaining at the impossibility of some test he had set them. And, as Purser recalled, the group was both surprised and impressed by Oscar’s stellar performance in one part of the classical gold medal exam – ‘walking easily away from us all in the viva voce examination on the Greek play [The Agamemnon of Aeschylus]’.108 He gained 25 per cent higher marks than his nearest rival.109 The literary quality of the great work appealed to him, and he had ‘made it up thoroughly’ – but ‘to the neglect perhaps of other (to him less interesting) portions of the long examination’.110
In the event – when all the different parts of the ‘long examination’ were tallied up – it was Purser who came out on top. At the 1871 prize-giving he also took the Frederick Steele memorial prize medal, as well as being first prizeman in both mathematics and holy scripture. Oscar, along with everyone else, trailed in his wake. Not that he was so very far behind: he was one of three classical prizewinners from the head class (with Galbraith and J. McDowell); he shared the assistant master’s prize in ancient history (with Galbraith) and was also
awarded a drawing prize for a sensitive watercolour of Lough Erne.111 In all, it marked a hugely impressive, and very satisfying, end to his school career. He would be going on to Trinity after the summer holidays.
Dr Steele, in bidding Oscar farewell, added – perhaps from force of habit – that if he kept up his hard work, he might yet be ‘as big a credit to the school as Willie’. Oscar was quietly amused.112 Willie, though, was doing well at Trinity: he got honours in classics in his junior freshman year; and he cut a rather glamorous figure when he re-visited Portora, possibly to see Oscar’s prize day triumph.113
Oscar’s own mind was already turning towards Dublin and university life. There were exciting possibilities – scholarly, artistic and social. He imagined that he would have his own room in the family house at Merrion Square. He hoped the Trinity dons would be friendly, and wished that they might all be poets. He could barely wait to begin. Swept up as he was in this new enthusiasm, Portora – despite all it had given him over the previous seven years – started to fade from his mind even before he had left it. He barely registered his little friend – the junior boy who had a crush on him – who insisted on coming to see him off at the station. And he was startled when the boy planted a tearful farewell kiss on his lips, as the train pulled out, heading for Dublin and the future.114
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