Having walked around for quarter of an hour, Shadwell returned to find the revellers just as they had been. He ordered them to leave at once. They were more impertinent than ever. ‘Wilde strutted about the room with his hat on till I told him that it would be proper for him to remove it.’ One of the Oriel men lit up a cigar. Even by the general standards of undergraduate insubordination it was a noteworthy display. Shadwell decided to hand the offenders over to Thursfield for reprimand, as he found they were also on his list (perhaps on account of their antics earlier in the evening); he suggested only ‘that it is a case for severe penalty and that they should be gated on the 5th [Guy Fawkes’ Night]’.89
The incident seems to have marked both the nadir and a turning point of Wilde’s undergraduate career. It was followed by an ‘especially painful’ proctorial interview, and – it is to be supposed – a heavy fine. Thursfield, however, was not perhaps totally unsympathetic. A brilliant classicist himself, and still in his early thirties, he reminded Wilde that ‘Moderations were at hand’, and impressed on him the need to apply himself to these examinations.90 For Wilde, conscious of his powers and desirous of success, it was a timely warning.
* The exact brownish shade of Wilde’s hair is hard to fix. Referred to as ‘fair’ during his schooldays, it had clearly darkened over time. In was subsequently described variously as ‘of an indistinctive brown colour’ and ‘mouse coloured and stringy’.
† Wilde’s friend Bodley encountered Ruskin one evening walking unsteadily over Magdalen Bridge. For a moment he thought Ruskin might be drunk, but then realized that the Slade Professor was in fact walking with his eyes closed. On being asked the reason, Ruskin replied that he had ‘just seen a very beautiful sunset and wished to keep it in his mind’s eye, uncontaminated by any other sights, until he could be alone in his rooms’.
‡ Henry Wainwright, a London tradesman, was tried for the murder of his mistress during the autumn of 1875. He had killed and buried her the previous year, but subsequently tried to move her dismembered body with the aid of his brother. He was convicted, and hanged on 21 December 1875. The case was widely reported, and – as Bodley’s diary records – was much talked about at Oxford (‘[Barton] was as usual full of chaff about the Wainwright case and the “fatal gift of beauty”.’) It is not – as has been previously supposed – a reference to Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, the eighteenth-century artist and poisoner about whom Wilde would later write.
§ Wilde was disappointed by Italian female beauty, telling his mother, ‘After marriage the Italian women degenerate awfully, but the boys and girls are beautiful. Amongst married women the general types are “Titiens” and an ugly sallow likeness of “Trebelli Bettini”.’ Titiens and Bettini were generously proportioned opera divas of the period.
2
Heart’s Yearnings
‘Thou knowest all: – I seek in vain
What lands to till or sow with seed.’
oscar wilde, ‘the true knowledge’
There were, at Magdalen, some good influences to encourage Wilde in his new commitment to work. William Ward, a fellow classical demy in the year above, had rooms almost directly over Wilde’s set, and the two scholars soon established a ready friendship. An Old Radleian, and scion of a line of Bristol solicitors, Ward had taken a ‘first’ in ‘Mods’ the previous year. His interests included both philosophy and Freemasonry. But he combined these with a self-deprecatory humour. He was – according to another Magdalen contemporary – ‘a very charming little fellow’.1 His nickname, ‘Bouncer’, was borrowed from a diminutive but lively character in the great comic novel of 1850s Oxford life, The Adventures of Mr Verdant Green. Ward provided not just an academic example to follow, but also a foil and a stimulus to Wilde’s intellect. On delightful rides ‘through the greenwood’ he would ‘rouse [Wilde] to talk or think’ – and to laugh at himself.2 Wilde, to Ward’s amusement, proved a ‘most shocking rider’ – wrapped up in his arguments, he would tumble off almost every time they went out.3
‘Bouncer’ Ward also drew Wilde into his circle of Magdalen friends. These included the Harding brothers, James (another classicist, in Ward’s year) and Reginald, who had just matriculated that October. In the camaraderie of their college clique, the younger Harding soon acquired the nickname ‘Kitten’, perhaps from Wilde, after the music hall song, ‘Beg your Parding, Mrs Harding, Is my Kitting in your Garding?’ As a result, his older brother became known as ‘Puss’. Wilde was called ‘Hosky’. At the end of the Michaelmas term, ‘Puss’ Harding and ‘Bouncer’ Ward deepened Hosky’s interest in Freemasonry by inducting him into the university’s other lodge, the Churchill.4 Ward also introduced Wilde to an amiable Magdalen pass-man, David Hunter-Blair, or ‘Dunskie’, as he was known, after his family’s Scottish estate.5
Hunter-Blair was immediately taken with Wilde’s attractive personality – ‘the large features lit up with intelligence, sparkling eyes, and broad cheerful smile’ – and impressed by his ‘extraordinary conversational abilities’. And the three of them – Ward, Hunter-Blair and Wilde – would often linger on after the other guests had departed from Wilde’s Sunday evening gatherings, and talk into the night. They ranged far and wide, conversing – as Hunter-Blair recalled – unrestrainedly ‘about everything and other things as well’. Wilde ‘was always the protagonist in these midnight conversations, pouring out a flood of… untenable propositions, quaint comments on men and things, and sometimes… “dropping into poetry”, spouting yards of verse, either his own, or that of other poets whom he favoured… We listened and applauded and protested against some of his preposterous theories.’6
There was one topic to which they returned often: religion. Hunter-Blair, an Old Etonian and heir to a baronetcy, had, that April, converted to Roman Catholicism, while on a visit to Rome. Wilde, still full of the spiritual beauties of Florentine art, was ‘greatly interested’ in the step his new friend had taken. He asked numerous questions, and confessed to his own earlier Catholic leanings – regretting that his father had been (and would still be) so opposed to them. ‘Lucky you, my dear Dunskie, to be as you are independent of your father and free to do what you like. My case is very different.’7 Although Wilde’s manner, as so often, was ‘half in jest and half in earnest’, Hunter-Blair was convinced of his real interest in – and sympathy for – the Catholic faith.
And, indeed, Wilde took to attending occasional services with Hunter-Blair at the little church of St Clement on the Marston Road, where there was excellent music and a sympathetic priest. Wilde also accompanied his friend to the inauguration of Oxford’s grand new Catholic church, St Aloysius, at the foot of the Woodstock Road, where Cardinal Manning preached the sermon, taking as his text the university motto Dominus Illuminatio Mea (‘The Lord is my light’). And although Manning’s words – ‘a fierce denunciation of the tone and teaching of the University’ – rather depressed Wilde, and indeed Hunter-Blair, there was an inescapable glamour about the occasion, and the cardinal.8 A photograph of Manning was added to the clutter of Wilde’s rooms, along with a cheap print of the pope (Pius IX) and a plaster-of-Paris Madonna.9
‘Romanism’ also provided Wilde with a new vehicle for self-dramatization. He was ‘wearying of his sporting pose’; the role of the convert – or, at least, the putative convert – was rich in potential. It gave him, most importantly, a new and vital subject for his verse. The battle between faith and doubt was a worthy theme – and one that, in the late nineteenth century, might have a wide interest. Alongside his Pre-Raphaelite pastiches, his Greek translations and his conventional lyrics he began to write ‘personal poetry… full of the feeling of Roman Catholicism’.10 He reworked his poem ‘San Miniato’ into a hymn to the Blessed Virgin Mary (‘could I but see thy face / Death could not come too soon’). His poem on ‘Rome Unvisited’ became a lament over his failure to see the pope (‘Him who holds the awful keys… The gentle Shepherd of the Fold… The only God-anointed King’).11
Hunter-B
lair was encouraged by these signs. The priest at St Clement’s, however, though impressed by Wilde as a person, was less sanguine, perceiving that despite his ‘genuine attraction towards Catholic belief and practice’, the time was not right – ‘the finger of God had not yet touched him’; Wilde was, for the moment, ‘in earnest about nothing except his quite laudable ambition to succeed in the schools’, and even that, the priest noted, ‘he keeps in the background’.12
Despite his academic goals, Wilde did not focus exclusively on the curriculum. Ruskin was lecturing again that term, ‘on the Discourses of Joshua Reynolds’.13 The lectures were less formal than his previous performances. Reynolds’ work formed ‘little more than a starting point’ for Ruskin’s impassioned ‘excursions in many and various directions’ – from the horrors of the industrial townscape to the frivolous prettiness of Mendelssohn’s ‘Oh for the wings of a dove’. Although some listeners found the effect disconcerting, even on occasions ‘grotesque’, for Wilde it was a chance to bathe again in Ruskin’s glorious eloquence.14
But the moral message of Ruskin’s teaching was now being tempered by a rather different strain of thought. Wilde had a made a new discovery: the work of Walter Pater. In 1873, Pater, a thirty-four-year-old classics don at Brasenose College, had published a small volume of Studies in the History of the Renaissance. Its eight essays, and more importantly its ‘Preface’ and ‘Conclusion,’ carried the themes of Ruskin’s discourse into new territories – territories recently opened up by the French writer Théophile Gautier. Following Gautier’s lead, Pater ignored the moral and social claims of art and beauty proclaimed by Ruskin and suggested instead a purely sensory, indeed sensual, engagement with the world. Confronted with the state of flux revealed by modern science, he abandoned the search for certainties and absolutes, for overarching systems of belief, and retreated to the line of his own consciousness. Embracing the spirit of relativism, he suggested that man should simply concern himself with his own fleeting sensations and impressions. And that, for want of any other possible goal, he should devote himself to experiencing the greatest number of the finest sensations with the highest degree of discrimination:
Not the fruit of experience but experience itself is the end. A counted number of pulses only is given to us of variegated, dramatic life. How may we see in them all that is to be seen in them by the finest senses? How can we pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in the purest energy? To burn always with this hard gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.15
Such impressions and sensations might be found in all aspects of changing life – some disposition of ‘hand or face; some tone on the hills or sea… some mood of passion or insight or intellectual excitement’. But, they were to be met with most surely and most intensely – not in nature – but in ‘the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for art’s sake’ – for, as Pater put it, ‘art comes to you frankly professing to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for that moment’s sake’.16 It was a purely aesthetic creed that acknowledged no limitations of ‘abstract morality’, in the quest for experience. If Ruskin, viewing art from a moral standpoint, held out a vision of art for life’s sake, Pater, treating morals (and everything else) from the standpoint of art, offered a vision not just of ‘art for art’s sake’, but of life for art’s sake too.
The book had provoked a degree of anxiety, if not alarm, at its first appearance. It was thought particularly to be dangerous to the young. The bishop of Oxford even preached a sermon against it. Such strictures, though, were unlikely to deter the interested. Wilde discovered the volume early in his Oxford career, though it took him time to unpack its secrets. In due course it became for him another sacred text – ‘the golden book of spirit and sense, the holy writ of beauty’.17 He delighted in the control and formal elegance of its language. He judged that it contained ‘a page or two of the greatest prose in all literature’ – passages from which he might learn ‘the highest form of art: the austerity of beauty’.18 And although he considered that Pater’s ideas derived in part from Ruskin’s sense of the vital connection between art and life, he recognized, too, that they led in rather different directions.19
There was a different colouring, too, to Pater’s aesthetic preferences. While Ruskin, in The Stones of Venice, had proclaimed the moral and spiritual superiority of Gothic to Renaissance architecture, and while he had praised Giotto and the early Trecento painters over later masters in his lectures on Florentine art, Pater adopted a different perspective. He favoured ‘late’ periods to ‘early’ ones. In the recurring pattern of austere development, balanced perfection and elaborated decline by which nineteenth-century historians tended to mark out the trajectories of past cultures, Pater was inclined to find worth and beauty in the latter phases of each cycle.20 As he charted the course of the Renaissance he fixed approvingly upon the products of its late phases with their subtle notes of perversity and decay: the ‘refined and comely decadence’ of late Provençal poetry, or the art of Leonardo da Vinci with its ‘interfusion of extremes of beauty and terror’, its ‘fascination of corruption’, its delineation of ‘strange thoughts, and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions’.21 To a devotee of Swinburne, such as Wilde, this endorsement of the beauties of pain, strangeness and decay was both comprehensible and beguiling.
And as Pater expanded the range of aesthetic possibilities, he also hinted at alternative modes of conduct. His chapter about the eighteenth-century art historian Johann Winckelmann drew upon the writings of Plato to give, not a vision of quasi-Christian spiritual life, such as Jowett might endorse, but a coded account of Greek pederasty and its virtues.22 The topic remained controversial. That very year, 1875, Mahaffy had felt obliged, following hostile reviews, to remove all mention of pederasty from the second edition of his Social Life in Greece. At the same moment John Addington Symonds was drawing similar critical fire for his incautious references to the subject in the second series of his Studies of the Greek Poets. It was ground on which most classicists still refused to stray. Jowett considered that he had avoided the question by claiming Plato’s pederasty was little more than a ‘figure of speech’ and was easily transposable, for modern readers, into a love of women: ‘Had [Plato] lived in our own times he would have made the transposition himself.’23
While Pater’s book was considered dangerous, Pater himself was deemed only slightly less so. Steeped in the Socratic tradition described by Plato, he had sought to achieve something of its flavour by gathering a select circle of bright young men for tea parties at the house that he shared with his two sisters in north Oxford. It was an atmosphere that delicately blurred the border between pedagogy and pederasty. This was a perilous game. Early in the previous year, 1874, prior to Wilde’s arrival at Oxford, Pater had been embroiled in a largely suppressed scandal over his relationship with a Balliol undergraduate, William Money Hardinge.24* Whether Wilde (or anyone else not closely involved) knew the details of the case is uncertain. Montefiore, Milner, Toynbee, and Hardinge’s other friends, had all resolved to keep ‘an absolute silence’ upon the subject. Nevertheless some hint of danger lingered around Pater’s name – and probably (as far as Wilde was concerned) added to his attractiveness.
Pater and Ruskin, ancient Greece, Freemasonry and Roman Catholicism: Wilde was accumulating creeds and perspectives. But among these contending ideas, he seemed inclined neither to make a choice nor seek a synthesis; he preferred to play with each in turn. Although he might hesitate to commit himself at St Clement’s, religion continued to fascinate him. By early December he was confiding to Bodley that he was ‘swaying between Romanism (Manningism) and Atheism’.25 And essentially he kept on swaying throughout the rest of his time at Oxford. It was a performance that provoked the interest, amusement and exasperation of his friends.
Over Christmas 1875 Oscar was back in Ireland. The atm
osphere at Merrion Square was not cheerful. Sir William’s health seemed to be failing. There was even talk of letting the house, and retreating full time to Moytura.26 Oscar, escaping the gloom, went to stay with an old Dublin friend, Richard Trench, up at Clonfin. The house, in Co. Longford, belonged to Trench’s uncle and aunt. ‘With horses, dogs, guns, plenty to eat and lots of whiskey’ they contrived to ‘make the time fly pretty pleasantly’.27 There was scope for poetry too. Wilde, ‘swaying’ away from ‘Romanism’ over the holiday season, began work on another exercise in Pre-Raphaelite lubricity, anatomizing his beloved in cloying detail:
As a pomegranate, cut in twain,
White-seeded is her crimson mouth,
Her cheeks are as the fading stain
Where the peach reddens to the south.
The poem, finished after his return to Oxford, and titled ‘The Rose of Love and With a Rose’s Thorns’, was accepted by Tyrrell for a forthcoming issue of Kottabos.28 It would be one of eight poems that Wilde published that year: four in the Dublin University Magazine, two in Kottabos, one in the Irish Monthly (a Jesuit-run journal) and one that appeared in both the Month and the Boston Pilot (his first American publication). It was an impressive achievement for an undergraduate. His mother was justly proud, thrilled that the family ‘muse was not yet worn out’. She detected ‘the evident spirit of a Poet Natural’ in his work. Not that she was uncritical. Reading the first section of his reworked ‘San Miniato’, with its new closing stanza
O! crowned by God with love and flame,
O! crowned by Christ the holy one,
O! listen, ere the searching sun
Show to the world my sin and shame
she remarked ‘I would have left out “Shame” – Sin and repentance are highly poetical, “Shame” is not – any other monosyllable would do that expressed moral weakness.’29
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