He was assigned a pair of rooms on the second floor of the ‘Chaplain’s’ stair, close up against the stained-glass windows of the chapel transept.3 His fellow undergraduates were, he found, not boisterous Irish louts, but well-connected young men, a few, like him, reading for Honours, most studying for a less onerous ‘Pass’ degree, but almost all carrying on the cheerful codes and camaraderie of their English public schools in the charmed, emancipated world of Oxford. The change in atmosphere – both social and physical – after Trinity seemed nothing short of ‘astounding’.4
Although Wilde was slightly older than the other freshmen of his year (matriculating on 17 October 1874, the day after his twentieth birthday), his fresh-faced youthfulness disguised the fact. Not that he was otherwise inconspicuous. At six feet plus, he was taller than most of his fellows, and bigger, with a ‘sprawling’ ungainly air. His thick brown hair was ‘much too long’ and far too unpredictable, ‘sometimes parted in the middle, sometimes at the side’.5* In an age of neat moustaches and trim side whiskers, his colourless ‘moon-like’ face was strikingly clean-shaven;6 this ‘hairlessness’ seemed to some observers a ‘natural attribute’, rather than being due to the razor.7 The clothes that he had brought with him were deemed both formal and unfashionable: ‘though doubtless counted unexceptional on Dublin’s Dame Street or College Green’, they had, as one of his contemporaries observed, ‘a quaint look of “doing the High” [the regular Sunday post-evensong promenade along Oxford’s High Street]’. By the other Magdalen undergraduates he was soon being referred to, not unkindly, as ‘our queer-looking freshman’.8
Wilde, though, seems to have been blithely unaware of his otherness. His excitement in his new surroundings, his limited social knowledge, and his self-conceit, might carry him into a few awkward situations – but they also carried him cheerfully beyond them. He was deemed guilty, during his first weeks, of the ‘sin’ of ‘presumptuous affability’. Ignorant of established Oxford etiquette, he would present his card (freshly printed, and bearing the legend ‘Mr. Oscar O’Flahertie Wilde, Magd. Coll.’) to new acquaintances regardless of their age or standing. At his first dinner in hall, he caused ‘consternation’ by doing just this to an out-of-college guest (a third-year student of ‘great athletic repute’) next to whom he had happened to sit, and with whom he had got on well. He also hastened to leave cards with members of other colleges, whom he knew – or knew of – through family connections, without ‘waiting for their seniorities to make the first call’.9
Despite these minor solecisms, his overtures were not rebuffed. He reconnected with J. E. C. Bodley (a second-year student at Balliol, whom he had encountered in Dublin over the summer) and was drawn into a lively circle of friends – mainly Balliol and Oriel men. They welcomed him as ‘a good natured though unsophisticated young Irishman’. And it was – apparently – through such ‘out-of-college’ connections that Wilde came to be better known to his fellow Magdalen undergraduates.10
Magdalen was, then, a relatively small college, with fewer than a hundred undergraduates.11 And within this group Wilde and the other ‘demys’ were a select and conspicuous group, distinguished by their flowing gowns and their bundles of books. They dined together in the hall at their own table. Not that Magdalen was a notably academic place (Balliol was the academic college); Wilde was one of only three undergraduates reading for Honours in classics in his year.12 At Magdalen, it was said, ‘more importance was attached to social ability’ than to scholastic excellence or even ‘athletic superiority’.13 Wilde was well able to adapt himself to the environment. His ‘bonhomie, good-humour, [and] unusual capacity for pleasant talk’ gradually achieved for him a popularity extending beyond the circle of his fellow scholars.14
Wilde did not shirk collegiate expectations. With his fellow classical demy G. T. Atkinson, he tried out for the college boat. It was not altogether a success. They were ‘tubbed’ by a ferociously Philistine rowing coach, Wilde at ‘stroke’, Atkinson at ‘bow’. Progress, in both senses of the word, was slow. Wilde strove manfully in the face of much good-natured ridicule from his peers. But, despite some patient encouragement, he proved incapable of mastering even a rudimentary technique. His mind was inclined to wander. On one occasion, meeting the Varsity Eight coming downstream towards them, they were urged to put their backs into it and pull to the side. Wilde, however, took no notice. Ignoring the uncomplimentary remarks of the two coxes, he observed to Atkinson that ‘he saw no a priori reason for rowing with a straight back’ and did not believe that the Greeks had done so during their naval victory over the Persians at Salamis. The incident marked the end of his competitive rowing career.15 It became his line that he did not see the point in going backwards to Iffley Lock every evening.16
Some other aspects of college life proved equally unsatisfactory. The classics dons at Magdalen were an uninspiring lot, certainly when compared to Tyrrell and Mahaffy. And ‘college lectures’, the small group-tutorials through which they taught, could be dreary affairs. W. D. Allen, the young ancient history tutor, would sometimes dictate his ‘notes’ to the assembled students, through his half-open bedroom door, while his ‘huge mastiff stretched himself on the hearthrug’. On cold days, if there was skating, his door would be closed, and a card with some excuse pinned to it. John Young Sargent, the Latin tutor, would hold drowsy evening tutorials around his fire, at which he often seemed to be thinking less of his charges ‘than of a silver tankard of beer which was warming on the hearth’.17
Wilde, with his three years at Trinity behind him, felt under-stretched by the work. Although some of his contemporaries were dimly aware of his previous career in Dublin, he did not advertise the details, content that his apparently effortless accomplishments should be put down to genius.18 He dazzled with his fluent Greek translations, and – by claiming never to have done such exercises before – he greatly impressed Sargent with his Latin verse compositions. Not infrequently, though, he skipped lectures altogether.19
The wider intellectual life of Oxford was more enticing. There was a sense of anxious inquiry abroad, a search for new modes of thought and understanding. To many commentators it seemed that the advances in science and textual criticism had undermined not only the literal truths of the Bible but the religious and moral certainties that underpinned life and regulated conduct. In the face of Darwin and German philology, the sea of faith was receding. That this was taking part at a moment when Britain’s material wealth was advancing at such speed only tended to exacerbate the problem. The nation appeared in danger of being overcome by commercialization, complacency and cultural stagnation.
In seeking ways past these difficulties, Oxford men had offered a variety of solutions. Matthew Arnold (sometime fellow of Oriel, and professor of poetry from 1857 to 1867) set up ‘culture’ in the place of religion, proposing the great works of the European canon as the foundation for the traditional moral scheme once supported by the Gospels. Benjamin Jowett, master of Balliol, looked to the philosophy of Plato to provide a transcendent alternative to Christian theology.20 T. H. Green (who became the university’s professor of moral philosophy in 1877) thought the want might be supplied by Aristotle’s Ethics and a dedication to social responsibility. Friedrich Max Müller, the German-born professor of comparative philology at All Souls, sought the common roots of belief through his work on ancient Sanskrit texts, opening up the new disciplines of comparative linguistics, comparative mythology and comparative religion. And then there was Ruskin, the inaugural Slade Professor of Art, who found a spiritual assurance in Beauty – in the visual worlds of both Nature and of Art.
Wilde was drawn by these currents. He bought Arnold’s essays and Jowett’s translations of Plato; he read Green and was befriended by the lively and music-loving Max Müller.21 But among Oxford’s competing celebrities it was Ruskin who appealed most strongly. He had a charisma and energy about him: critic, polemicist, visionary, reformer, artist and poet – the champion of Turner and defender of the Pre-R
aphaelites. Wilde had already been taught by his mother to revere the great man, and he was excited to find himself, now, in such proximity.22 Still in his mid-fifties, Ruskin cut an eccentric figure about the town, daunting yet also approachable. He might be glimpsed, handsome, beak-nosed and bewhiskered, perhaps crossing the street with an arm on the shoulder of the young Prince Leopold (Queen Victoria’s youngest son, then an undergraduate at Christ Church), ‘his braided gown slipping off his shoulders and trailing in the puddles’.23† During Wilde’s first term Ruskin gave a series of public lectures on the early Italian Renaissance – eight talks on ‘The Aesthetic and Mathematic schools of Art in Florence’ beginning with Cimabue and Giotto and ending with Fra Angelico and Botticelli. Wilde attended assiduously.
The lectures had a huge impact: they introduced him to the artists who had inspired the Pre-Raphaelites, and fired him with an eagerness to see Italy and its masterpieces. But, even more than this, they vouchsafed him a new vision. Ruskin appealed to Wilde ‘immensely’. His enthusiasm and his ‘fine rhetoric’, with its ‘rhythm and colour… and marvelous music of words’ – both on the lecture platform and printed page – were intoxicating.24 He was, Wilde thought, a ‘sort of exquisite romantic flower; like a violet filling the whole air with the ineffable perfume of belief’.25 That belief was fixed upon the importance of ‘Beauty’ – its divine origin in the forms of nature, its distillation in the visual arts, its moral force and its vital connection with Life.
Wilde recognized Ruskin as ‘the Plato of England – a Prophet of the Good and True and Beautiful, who saw as Plato saw that the three are one perfect flower’.26 Wilde was ready to embrace the vision. Full of the beauties of Oxford and the wonders of art, he found Ruskin’s ‘theory of the effect of beautiful associations’ particularly suggestive.27 It was an idea that he had also encountered in Plato’s Republic – where children were to be raised in ‘a simple atmosphere of all fair things, where beauty, which is the spirit of art, will come on eye and ear like a fresh breath of wind that brings health from a clear upland, and insensibly and gradually draw the child’s soul into harmony with all knowledge and all wisdom, so that he will love what is beautiful and good, and hate what is evil and ugly (for they always go together) long before he knows the reason why’.28 Wilde determined to become Ruskin’s disciple.29
He was not alone in his enthusiasm. Ruskin’s lectures, held twice a week at noon in the theatre of the University Museum, attracted audiences in excess of 600 interested undergraduates and ardent ‘visitors’ (mainly female).30 Art and Beauty were clearly subjects with a wide appeal.
Ruskin had, the previous year, instituted a project to divert the energies of Oxford undergraduates away from useless sports and into useful labour by building a stretch of road across some marshy ground between the nearby villages of Upper and Lower Hinksey. Although most of the athletes had ignored his call, a small band of high-minded followers – mainly Balliol men – had embarked on the task, and were still carrying it on under Ruskin’s occasional direction. Wilde (naturally ‘luxurious’ as he admitted) was rather reluctant to commit himself to an undertaking that involved early rising and hard physical work; nevertheless he does seem to have visited the ‘diggings’ that winter and to have introduced himself to his new hero, establishing a connection that he hoped might be further ‘utilized in the future’.31
In his excitement at the broad horizons opened up by Ruskin’s teaching, Wilde rather ignored immediate academic concerns. He neglected to prepare properly for ‘Responsions’ (or the ‘Little Go’), a simple examination sat by all Oxford freshmen at the end of their first term. Although it is hard to believe that the Greek and Latin parts of the exam offered any sort of challenge to him, there was also a compulsory mathematics paper. And it was almost certainly this element that resulted in his failure to pass. Failure was an embarrassment as much as a setback. The college authorities were not amused. At the end-of-term interview, or ‘terminal examination’, the Magdalen president, Dr Bulley, placed Wilde in the ‘not commended’ category, a severe mark of official displeasure.32 And official disapprobation was reinforced at the start of the following term, when Wilde was formally ‘admonished’ by the president. It is likely that he was threatened with the loss of his demyship should he fail ‘Responsions’ a second time. He re-sat the exam later that term, and passed.33
This minor victory does not, however, seem to have been achieved through any significant re-engagement with academic work. Rather it occurred against a background of ever increasing distraction. At the beginning of 1875 Wilde, to the amusement of his friends, effected a radical change of look. He cropped his hair and changed his wardrobe. With his new tall-collars, his ‘Union-Jack-like’ check-suits, his ‘horsey’ birds-eye blue neckties, his ‘curly brimmed hat’ (perched jauntily on one ear), he strove to ‘out-Oxford’ the sporting undergraduates of the ‘Young Oxford’ set. He even adopted some of their slang – though not their ‘severer’ sporting practices.34
This was a pose perfected for pleasure. And over the next couple of terms Wilde seems to have dedicated himself to the heedless life of the fun-loving Oxford undergraduate. It was, as one of his companions recalled, a merry round of ‘card playing, singing, room-visiting [and] wine bibbing’. And Wilde, ‘cheery and festive’, was in the thick of it.35 He opened an account at Spiers, the emporium on the High Street, equipping his rooms during the course of the year with two china jugs, some candle ornaments, a claret decanter, eight tumblers, six port glasses and two packs of playing cards.36
He discovered the dangerous pleasures of ‘credit’. Surrounded by wealthy and well-born young men, he chose to imagine that he was wealthy and well-born too. ‘No one seemed to know anything about money,’ he recalled, ‘or care anything for it. Everywhere the aristocratic feeling; one must have money, but must not bother about it.’ And Wilde did not bother. Although he had his demyship, and money from his father too, he began to run up debts with the town’s tradesmen, and learnt to ignore their pleas for payment. At Oxford – as Wilde experienced it – ‘the realities of sordid life were kept at a distance’.37
The diary that Bodley kept during 1875 gives a vivid glimpse into this careless world. There were convivial gatherings at the Mitre for illicit dinners and slap-up breakfasts of salmon and devilled kidneys. They hosted small lunch parties and long whist drives. There were ‘constitutional’ strolls along the river, and boating trips upon it. There were excursions into the countryside on horse or by carriage: Sunday afternoon pony-and-trap races to Woodstock (which allowed Wilde to imagine himself a Greek charioteer); or more sedate jaunts by tandem cart, when Wilde, delighting in the back seat, ‘would practise the post-horn with indifferent success’ in between jumping down to open gates with ‘a singular lack of agility’. He was particularly proud, too, of a ‘dove-coloured dustcoat’, in which he could look splendid when perched atop a large ‘drag’ coach.38 Although on one occasion Bodley returned to Balliol to find Wilde and Barton boxing in his rooms, Wilde’s friends took little part in organized games. They did, nevertheless, watch them, going down to the river to see the Eights, or to the running track to watch the sports. Wilde was often ‘to be met with on the cricket field’ albeit in a spectating role. And there is even a photograph of him surrounded by the Magdalen cricket team.39
By long-established university tradition, theatrical performances were banned at Oxford during term time, but the Victoria Theatre on George Street was permitted to mount ‘concerts’ and ‘music hall entertainments’. They were popular undergraduate events, with rich potential for mayhem. Bodley records one rumbustious evening at the ‘Vic’ (29 January 1875) to hear some Tyrolese singers:
Two boxes next to one another. Grand bally-rag, hats and umbrellas playing a not inconsiderable part. During performance, Wilde, of Magdalen, climbed into our box to tell me his brother from Trinity, Dublin was there. [Willie was over in England keeping Hilary term at the Middle Temple.] After chaffing the Tyrolese we
leaped on the stage at the end of the concert. Old Wilde [i.e. Willie] was first introduced to me and then proceeded with Strauss to play on the piano a vague valse, a rush of affrighted carpenters and curtain. Three Tyrolese proceeded with us to Mitre. They yodeled and I and Welsh sang. I, Fitz, Childers, Williamson and Sharpe stand the damages. After calling at the Clarendon [Hotel] with Wilde we proceeded erratically home.40
Late hours out of college, and evening visits to licensed premises, were against university regulations, and led to regular run-ins with the proctors (the university law officers), as well as frequent fines – especially for Wilde. Indeed he gained a heroic reputation as ‘the unluckiest undergraduate of his year’ for such setbacks.41 It was, though, considered part of the fun.
Among the friends there was much good-natured ‘ragging’ and ‘chaff’. Bodley and Childers made fun of Wilde’s ‘innocence’, and Wilde retaliated with the jest that Bodley only knew eight anecdotes, which he kept ‘carefully numbered and told in rotation’.42 Practical jokes were played and spoof telegrams sent. Bodley reported that ‘Wilde does not like to have the heads of cods and the “London Journal” sent him. The former, he said, he dropped stealthily into the Cherwell, feeling quite like Wainwright [the murderer].’‡ On outings to Blenheim Park, Wilde – the stoutest member of the group – would be seized by his companions and rolled down the grassy slope in front of the palace, ‘an amusement into which he entered with the greatest good humour’.43
Aside from these many impromptu diversions the great focus of undergraduate sociability was Freemasonry. This arcane and supposedly ancient movement, which promoted fraternal fellowship and good works from behind a veil of allegorical ritual, was just then enjoying a special vogue at Oxford, enhanced by the enthusiastic support of Prince Leopold. Bodley was a keen member of the main university lodge, the ‘Apollo’, as were many of Wilde’s college compeers (Magdalen was particularly noted for its Masonic sympathies).44 Wilde soon joined up. Proposed by Frankland Hood (president of the Magdalen Junior Common Room), seconded by Bodley and approved by ballot, he was initiated into the Apollo Lodge on 23 February 1875, along with William Grenfell, a rising star at the university boat club.45 Wilde ‘lost no time in becoming the most enthusiastic of newly initiates’, rising rapidly through the ‘degrees’; he was passed to the ‘second degree’ on 24 April, and made a Master Mason on 25 May.46 He was intrigued by the symbolic rituals, and delighted by both the ‘gorgeousness’ of the accoutrements and the elegance of the costume.47 Officers of the Apollo Lodge preserved the tradition of wearing black knee-breeches, tailcoats, white tie, silk stockings and pumps.48
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