Although Freemasonry has moral and philosophical aspects, and the subscriptions paid by the initiates went to support ‘some very deserving charities’, among most Oxford undergraduates of the 1870s it was acknowledged to be largely ‘an excuse for more banquets and a big ball at the “Commem”!’49 Meetings were generally followed by a dinner, and much merriment: songs were sung (Wilde lending ‘his well-meaning but unsteady monotone’ to the chorus) and tricks were played.50 At the ‘festal board’ following his initiation, Wilde – who got ‘very festive’ as the evening wore on – was prompted by Bodley to make a toast to ‘J and B’ as the foundation of the order. Not realizing that the initials stood for ‘Jakin and Boaz’, the twin columns that – according to Masonic tradition – supported the portico of Solomon’s Temple, Wilde provoked ‘yells of laughter’ from his more initiated confreres, by proposing the health of ‘John the Baptist’ with the remark, ‘I have heard that [he] was the founder of this Lodge.’ Adding to the hilarity, he went on, ‘I hope we shall emulate his life but not his death. Therefore we ought to keep our heads.’51
Wilde’s commitment to art was in no way diminished by the busy round of student fun. It remained his great subject and his great interest. When Bodley’s family came to Oxford during Eights Week in 1875, it was noted with amusement that Wilde ‘talked “Art” at Agnes’, as they walked back together from the river (FitzGerald, one of Wilde’s Oriel friends, meanwhile, amused the other sister, Beta, with ‘strange stories’).52 He continued to write verse, Swinburne remaining ‘his one poet’, and certainly his greatest influence.53
Swinburne’s distinctive rhythms swing through the impressive ‘Chorus of Cloud-Maidens’ that Wilde translated from Aristophanes’ Clouds during his first year, perhaps feeling that a translation would have more chance of publication than an original poem.
Let us seek the watchtowers undaunted,
Where the well-watered cornfields abound,
And through murmurs of rivers nymph-haunted
The song of the sea-waves resound.54
When Ruskin returned to Oxford in the summer of 1875, after a term of absence, Wilde again sought him out. He seems to have spent time working on the Hinksey Road ‘diggings’ – breaking stones and laying levels; he even, so he claimed, ‘had the honour of filling Mr. Ruskin’s especial wheelbarrow’, and was taught by the great man how to push a barrow along a plank (‘a very difficult thing to do’).55 As a road-maker he enjoyed the privilege of being invited to breakfast in Ruskin’s rooms at Corpus.56 It was a thrilling chance to hear Ruskin’s matchless talk, and to forge a real, and enduring, connection with the great man. Such occasions also brought Wilde into closer contact with some of the established clique of Balliol ‘diggers’, idealistic young men such as Alfred Milner, Arnold Toynbee, Leonard Montefiore and Charles Stuart-Wortley.
It may also have been through Ruskin that Wilde came, at this time, to know a promising young artist called Frank Miles.57 It was the beginning of an important friendship. Miles, only two years older than Wilde, was the youngest son of an independently wealthy high Anglican clergyman. Of a delicate constitution, he had been educated at home, developing keen interests in art, architecture, botany and gardening. He was, in his early twenties, already responsible (together with his mother) for a lavish decorative scheme at Canon Miles’s church – All Saints, Bingham, near Nottingham – and for a glorious flower garden at the adjacent rectory.58 Despite being colour-blind, he had abandoned a fledgling architectural career to concentrate on painting. He had made his debut at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in 1874 (with ‘A study of reflections’), and was building a reputation for his tinted drawings of ‘beautiful female heads’ of ‘the most perfect and charming expressiveness’.59 Already in 1875 sets of autotype reproductions were being published and displayed in shop windows, ‘attaining great popularity’.60
How Frank Miles came to know Ruskin is not recorded, although the Miles family’s work on Bingham church was exactly the sort of artistic scheme likely to have appealed to the Slade Professor (Ruskin had examples of Mrs Miles’s work on display at his drawing school in Oxford, so it may be that she and her son spent time there).61 Certainly by 1875 Frank had secured the Slade Professor’s interest – and Wilde’s friendship. Bodley’s diary for 8 May records: ‘Wilde and Miles called, which roused my spirits a little’ (Bodley and Wilde had then gone on to lunch with ‘Fitz’ at Oriel). ‘Miles came in. He had been to Ruskin, who was charmed with one or two of his drawings.’ Ruskin maintained his encouragement, writing several times to Miles, hailing him as ‘the coming Turner’ and suggesting that ‘with his love for his mother and his ability to paint clouds he must get on’.62
There was a certain metropolitan glamour attached to Miles, which surely impressed Wilde. He was well connected, debonair and had his foot upon the ladder of fame. He was exhibiting – for the second time – at the Royal Academy that summer. His name was in the papers. He knew the London celebrities and could pass on inside stories about them (he impressed Bodley with tales of Henry Irving’s early life as a city clerk).63 For Wilde it was a first exciting glimpse of what might be achieved by youthful talent and ambition beyond the cloistered world of the university.
Wilde’s own horizons were expanding. At the beginning of the summer holidays, inspired by Ruskin’s lectures on Renaissance art, he made his first trip to Italy. With a fine sense of self-dramatization, he prepared for the adventure by acquiring a ‘very striking pair of trousers’. When his old Trinity friend, Edward Sullivan (on whom he called prior to his departure), made some ‘chaffing remark’ about them, Wilde begged him in ‘that most serious style of which he was so excellent a master not to jest about them. “They are my Trasimene trousers, and I mean to wear them there.”’64
Italy, like Oxford, seduced Wilde from the first. Everything about the country conspired to ravish the senses and the imagination: the beauty of its landscape, the colour of its everyday life, the drama of its history and the glories of its art. Italy was, he recognized, ‘the land for which my life had yearned’.65 Wilde diligently chronicled his sightseeing across the cities of northern and central Italy in detailed – and often illustrated – letters to his parents, emphasizing archaeological particulars for his father and human dramas for his mother. Sadly the account of his trip to Lake Trasimene in his ‘striking’ trousers is missing. The first surviving letter in the sequence records his visit to the archaeological museum in Florence, where he felt keenly how much his father would have been interested by the Etruscan goldwork (finer even than Irish examples). And, as a devotee of Ruskin, he noted approvingly that ‘everything, even the commonest plate or jug [was of] the greatest delicacy and of beautiful design’.66 It was, though, in the churches and galleries of Florence that – as he put it – ‘the whole splendour of Italian art was revealed’ to him.67
In Florence Wilde met up with Mahaffy, who was travelling with a young student called William Goulding. Together the three of them went on to Bologna, Venice (‘beyond description’), Padua (‘quaint’), Verona and Milan (‘a second Paris’). There were excellent meals (at Biffi in Milan) and mediocre theatrical excursions (a very ‘indifferent’ Hamlet in the amphitheatre at Verona, and a new opera ‘absolutely without merit’ at La Scala.) There were literary pilgrimages (to the Armenian monastery in the Venetian lagoon where Byron used to stay, and to the house in Padua where Dante was said to have lodged with Giotto). And, above all, there was looking at art and architecture.68
Wilde’s artistic enthusiasms reflected his Ruskinian allegiance: Venetian Gothic, Giotto (notably the ‘great picture of Heaven and Hell’ in the Scrovegni chapel, supposedly inspired by the painter’s famous house-guest), Fra Angelico, Bellini and Titian. Wilde, however, often marked his judgements with a personal stamp: he described a ‘lovely Madonna’ at Milan by Bernadino Luini (another Ruskin star) as surrounded by ‘trellised roses that Morris and Rossetti would love’. Among his favourite paintings in Venice were
Titian’s ‘Assumption of the Virgin’ – ‘certainly the best picture in Italy’ – and ‘Dives and Lazarus’ by Veronese, ‘containing the only lovely woman’s face’ he had seen on his travels.§ The city’s baroque churches he found ‘inartistic’, although better than Milan’s bristling Gothic cathedral – ‘an awful failure’.69
The beauties of Italy demanded a poetic response. Recording a (real or imagined) pre-dawn walk up the myrtle-wooded hill behind Florence, to the little early Renaissance church of San Miniato, Wilde distilled his memory of hearing a nightingale’s song into a sensual lyric of regret for the passing of time and love, and the nightingale:
san miniato
(June 15th)
I.
See, I have climbed the mountain side
Up to this holy house of God,
Where the Angelic Monk has trod
Who saw the heavens open wide.
The oleander on the wall
Grows crimson in the morning light;
The silver shadows of the night
Lie upon Florence as a pall.
The myrtle-leaves are gently stirred,
By the sad blowing of the gale,
And in the almond-scented vale
The lonely nightingale is heard.
II.
The day will make thee silent soon
O! nightingale sing on for love,
While yet upon the shadowy grove
Fall the bright arrows of the moon.
While yet across the silent lawn
In golden mist the moonlight steals,
And from love-wearied eyes conceals
How the long fingers of the dawn
Come climbing up the Eastern sky
To grasp and slay the shuddering night,
All careless of my heart’s delight,
Or if the nightingale should die.70
Although the setting of the poem, beside the church of San Miniato, seems almost accidental, and Fra Angelico, ‘the Angelic Monk’, never worked in that particular ‘holy house of God’, the combination does suggest something of how Italy – and Florence in particular – gave Wilde a new appreciation of ‘the spiritual in art’: a sense of the artistic richness and artistic harmony of the country’s Catholic tradition. He was thrilled to encounter ‘the splendour of a religion which is preached through colour and in glow’.71
The ‘glow’, however, could only be enjoyed for so long. Out of funds towards the end of June, Wilde had to part from his companions. While they went south from Milan to Rome, he headed for home, full of ‘Italy and its gorgeous art’ as well as a few regrets. Stopping at Arona, on Lake Maggiore, he began a poem, ruing that Rome must be – for the moment, at least – left ‘unvisited’.72
The rest of the summer was passed in Ireland. There were amusements to hand. Wilde received a scolding letter from an outraged mother who had come into her drawing room to discover her seventeen-year-old daughter, Fidelia, sitting on Oscar’s knee. Frank Miles came over to Dublin for a visit, and cemented their friendship with the gift of a pencil sketch: a portrait of a soulful-eyed, smooth-cheeked and perhaps even lightly moustachioed, Oscar.73 It was a rather different image from the vision of Wilde as a saturnine countryman sketched by Henry Buxton Lawrence later that summer, out in the west. Wilde had gone to Moytura for ‘peace, virtue and quiet’ – although all three may have been disturbed by Willie, who was there, anxious to escape his own romantic entanglements in Dublin. Poetry was not forgotten. Oscar suggested a couple of lines for a patriotic ode that his mother was writing to honour the centenary of Daniel O’Connell: ‘you will be handsomely remunerated,’ his mother joked, having sent the poem off to the Boston Pilot, America’s leading Catholic paper. ‘Why not make a little money by giving me delicious lines with a glowing word and a classical allusion.’74 And when Wilde returned (sans moustache) to Oxford towards the end of October, on the boat over to Holyhead he composed a little cod-medieval ballad. ‘The Dole of the King’s Daughter’ was a tale of fatal love and early death steeped in the Pre-Raphaelite spirit of Swinburne, Rossetti and Morris, beginning:
Seven stars in the still water,
And seven in the sky;
Seven sins on the King’s daughter,
Deep in her soul to lie.75
Back at Magdalen he had been allocated a new, and better, set of rooms, on the ground floor of the cloisters. Picturesque and panelled, they looked out over the Cherwell, towards the water-meadows and Addison’s Walk. Some considered them ‘the jolliest rooms in the college’.76 Wilde set about making them jollier. And if, in his furnishing scheme, he did not aspire to ‘exotic splendour’, he did display more taste – and more daring – than the average undergraduate.77 While most of his contemporaries were content to hire pictures at Rymans (‘stags crossing a lake’, Swiss mountains, or ‘sloppy’ but innocuous portraits of ‘maidens’), he put up ‘some really beautiful framed drawings’ given him by Frank Miles, ‘of mostly nude subjects’.78 There was an ever increasing array of bibelots gathered on the flat surfaces, dominated in due course by two ‘very large’ blue Sèvres-style vases.79
This elegant and well-appointed new setting offered distinct possibilities for entertaining. Wilde lost no time in purchasing six port glasses, four plain tumblers and four ‘soda water tumblers’ from Spiers’ emporium.80 He began to hold regular Sunday evening gatherings for his college friends. They were ‘gay and hilarious’ occasions, ‘but not uproarious’. Bowls of punch were provided, and ‘long church warden pipes with a brand of choice tobacco’. Wilde’s sense of ‘Irish hospitality’ had, from the outset, a tendency to run ‘beyond his modest means’. There was a piano, and the brilliant young college choirmaster – and fellow Freemason – Walter Parratt could be relied upon to play it. Songs would be sung; one of Wilde’s friends, Cholmley Jones, later became a noted opera singer. ‘Sometimes,’ as one guest recalled, ‘the general cheerfulness degenerated into a scuffle or romp, to the imminent danger of our host’s bric-a-brac.’ But generally decorum was maintained.81
Wilde had things to celebrate that term. The November 1875 issue of the Dublin University Magazine contained his poem ‘Chorus of Cloud Maidens’, translated from Aristophanes. It was a proud moment: a first appearance in print. His name was given below the poem as ‘Oscar O’F. Wills Wilde’, with the additional legend ‘Magdalen College Oxford’.82 The poem was both an achievement in itself and an assertion of fraternal power. Willie, for the past three years, had been publishing poems regularly in Professor Tyrrell’s Kottabos.83 The Dublin University Magazine, however, carried greater weight. Its past contributors included many of Ireland’s most celebrated poets, and both Wilde parents. Despite its name it was not a ‘university’ publication, nor exclusively a Dublin one. Established in 1833 and subtitled ‘A Literary and Political Journal’, it was produced in both London and Dublin, and had 90 per cent of its circulation outside the Irish capital.84
Willie, though, was advancing on other fronts. Tall, handsome and bearded, he was set – as his mother proudly declared – ‘to shine in society and in life’. He had been called to the Irish bar that April and was, Lady Wilde told her friend Lotten von Kraemer, ‘ready to spring forth like another Perseus to combat evil’. His ambition, though, she went on, was ‘to enter parliament – & this hope of his I think may be realized – There is the fitting arena for talent, eloquence & the power that comes of high culture & great mental training’.85 To another friend, however, Lady Wilde almost unconsciously sounded a faint note of caution, remarking that Willie could be ‘anything’ he chose, ‘if he cares to work’. The qualification was significant.86
Willie was already showing a tendency to extend the licence of his student years into his new life. Leisure had more attractions than work. There were drunken evenings and late nights, in his ‘usual’ round of dinners and balls. He became an habitué of Dublin’s newly established skating rink. He continued to flirt and philander. Lady Wilde’s hopes that he might marry, and marry s
oon, showed no signs of being fulfilled; the failed affair that had kept him away from Dublin over the summer was only one embarrassment among several.87 He was gaining a reputation, even among Oscar’s Oxford contemporaries, as ‘a damned compromising acquaintance’ – though a very entertaining one.88
Oscar, for his part, seemed ready to match at least some of the ‘uproarious’ aspects of his brother’s behaviour. At around ten o’clock on the evening of 1 November 1875 one of the university proctors – a young Oriel don called Lancelot Shadwell – was summoned to the Clarendon Hotel. As he reported to his co-proctor, J. R. Thursfield (of Jesus College), he there found four undergraduates ‘at supper in the coffee-room’: Fitzgerald and Harter of Oriel, Baillie Peyton Ward of Christ Church and Wilde of Magdalen.
I took their names and ordered them to finish their supper at once or as soon as possible and go to their colleges. … I was told they had been about the streets all evening. Their manner to me was as impertinent as it well could be and the chief joke at their command seemed to be getting me to mention the College at which they were to call [the following morning; i.e. Oriel]. In answer to repeated enquiries Where? Where? I told them Fitzgerald could inform them. (He had [already] been to my rooms and was fined £1 for dining at the Mitre.)
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