Oscar

by Sturgis, Matthew;

  Back in Dublin other demands and interests soon began to draw him away from Catholic piety. He spent time out at Howth with ‘that dear Mahaffy’, helping him correct the proofs of his new book, Rambles and Studies in Greece. He toyed with other literary projects, undertaking to edit an unfinished work of his father’s – a ‘memoir’ of the Irish topographical artist Gabriel Beranger, and starting on a review of J. A. Symonds’ Studies in the Greek Poets (Second Series). There was more tennis, and regular sea bathing; Wilde confessed to ‘always feeling slightly immortal when in the sea’. And sometimes in the early evening he would go for a ride.88

  There was also the matter of his Bray houses. He had already missed the best selling season (June) but, in consultation with his solicitors, decided to put the properties up for auction in early September, offering them as four separate lots. In the meantime, though, he had to pay for them to be advertised in the press.89 He was able to escape from these practical concerns when Frank Miles came over in the second week of August, and together they headed west for a fortnight’s sport and recreation.

  Exhilarated by the beauties of the landscape, Wilde immediately felt ‘years younger’. At Moytura there was sailing on the lough, and painting too. Miles did some ‘wonderful sunsets’ and Wilde, encouraged to emulation, produced a sensitive crepuscular watercolour of Lough Corrib, dotted with islands and bounded by purple hills.90 The pair moved on to Illaunroe, where Wilde hoped to make Miles – who had never fired a gun in his life – ‘land a salmon and kill a brace of grouse’. In the event, the sport consisted mainly of sea trout and hares. It is doubtful that Miles added much to the bag; his energies were channelled into painting a mural, depicting himself and Oscar as two fishing putti, above the legend ‘tight lines’.91 Lady Wilde had suggested they supplement their diet with ‘chopped nettles’, advising they ‘make a good drink’ or could be eaten ‘like spinach’.92

  When the weather was ‘too bright for fishing’, Wilde would reluctantly lay down his ‘rod and gun’ and pick up his ‘quill’. He worked on his Symonds’ review – but never finished it (the Beranger project was never started; Lady Wilde eventually took it on). Wilde’s critique of Symonds’ book focused on the chapter about women in Homer. And certainly women were on Wilde’s mind. It had been a summer of romance. There had been the lovely Miles sisters at Bingham. One of the attractions of London was a girl described by an Oxford contemporary as ‘your little friend with the smiling countenance’.93 Perhaps she was the ‘Eva’ from whose cousin Wilde received a long, rambling and conspiratorial letter, asking him about his ‘intentions’ and offering to further his suit.94 And then in Dublin, shortly before leaving for Moytura, he had met ‘an exquisitely pretty girl’ – Florence Balcombe, the eighteen-year-old daughter of a retired lieutenant-colonel. She had, Wilde informed ‘Kitten’ Harding, ‘the most perfectly beautiful face I ever saw and not a sixpence of money’. They were potent ingredients for a doomed romance.95

  Wilde presented her with his Moytura painting, made a charming little portrait drawing of her, and – later in the year – gave her a silver cross, inscribed with his name (one of their first dates had been to an afternoon service at Dublin’s Anglican cathedral).96 Curiously, though, Wilde does not seem to have rushed to compose any verse for, or about, his new love. He did write one unpublished ‘Love Song’, and several unfinished erotic reveries, but it is hard to connect them to any individual, least of all to the exquisitely pretty Miss Balcombe.97 Perhaps there is a trace of her in some of the would-be aphorisms he scrawled in one of his Oxford notebooks: ‘Love – a Godlike intoxication. The wine which God gives us to make us greet him on the road’; ‘Love is always partly a misunderstanding’; and – less promisingly – ‘Love itself is the worst misunderstanding of all.’98

  He could, though, look the part of the love-struck poet. He cut a romantic figure, ‘leaning over the bulwarks looking seawards’, when he went to see Willie off on the boat over to England in early September. Willie introduced him to a girl he was trying to impress as ‘my brother the poet’.99† Oscar perhaps wished that he were travelling too. There had been plans to visit Rome with Frank Miles and Lord Ronald Gower (‘we would have been a great Trinity’) but at the last moment Gower had had to cry off. Instead Oscar was obliged to linger in Dublin – consoling himself, perhaps, with the presence of ‘Florrie’ – before heading north to Clonfin, to end the holidays with a final bout of ‘sport’.100

  Wilde started his third year at Oxford oppressed by financial anxieties. At auction the four Bray houses had failed to reach their reserve of £3,500 and so remained unsold. Instead of yielding money they were demanding expenditure. Perhaps at the agent’s suggestion, a programme of repairs was put in hand. Wilde received from the local contractor a daunting six-page ‘Estimate for Painting, Papering, Repairing & Whitening Ceilings & co & co’. And, as a local property owner, he also felt obliged to contribute £1 to a fund for ‘White’s widow and orphan’ following ‘the late disaster at Bray’.101 Oscar wrote to his mother, lamenting that he would have to give up all thought of a fellowship, after his degree, as he would not be able to afford it.

  Lady Wilde, overwhelmed by far greater financial troubles, was not impressed. She wrote with some asperity:

  I should be sorry that you had to seek a menial situation and give up the chance of the Fellowship but I do not see that, so far, your state is one that demands pity or commiseration – from May last (just five months) you have received cash for your own private personal expenses £145 and the rents of Bray and the sale of your furniture may bring you over the year till Spring. Then you can sell your houses for £3,000. £2,000 of which [after repayment of the mortgage] will give you £200 a year for ten years. A very ample provision to my thinking… £2,000 is a splendid sum to have in hand – and with your college income in addition I do not think you will need to enter a shop or beg for bread – I am very glad indeed you are so well off.102

  As fiscal advice it displayed an alarming want of foresight: Lady Wilde’s notion of financial planning seemed to be spending capital at a fixed rate, in the hope that something would turn up before funds ran out completely. It was, however, a simple method, and both Oscar and Willie were ready to grasp it – in principle. It is doubtful, though, that Oscar ever regarded £200 a year as ‘ample’ – or even adequate – provision. Among his extravagances of the moment was a fine array of Masonic regalia, acquired when, proceeding into the Apollo Rose Croix Chapter, he was ‘perfected into the 18th Degree of the Rose Croix’. He ran up a bill for over £13 on a special ‘apron and collar’, ‘jewel’, sword, belt, and sword-strap, along with an embossed case.103

  Financial constraint was not the only thing encouraging Wilde to look beyond academe for his future. Although he certainly considered that an Oxford fellowship would be, in its way, a ‘great honour’, his first literary achievements, his contacts with Miles and Lord Ronald Gower, and his growing knowledge of London, had all made him eager for a larger stage. When Ward and Hunter-Blair – both in their final term, and both contemplating their long-destined careers as, respectively, ‘a blameless lawyer’ and a ‘Scottish laird’ – quizzed Wilde one evening as to his own ambitions, he replied with sudden seriousness, ‘God knows, I won’t be a dried up don, anyhow. I’ll be a poet, a writer, a dramatist. Somehow or other I’ll be famous, and if not famous, I’ll be notorious.’ Then, undercutting this call to action and self-assertion, he added, ‘Or perhaps I’ll lead the [life of pleasure] for a time, and then – who knows – rest and do nothing. What does Plato say is highest end that man can attain to here below?... to sit down and contemplate the good. Perhaps that will be the end of me too.’104

  Ward’s final examinations (which he sat that November) did not go as planned, and despite excellent philosophy papers he did not achieve his expected First. Wilde consoled him with the observation that ‘it is a great thing to do well in the subjects worth doing well in’. And he still hoped that Ward might return and
read for a fellowship. Ward, however, was determined to leave Oxford behind and visit Italy. As a parting gift Wilde and ‘Kitten’ Harding presented him with a gold ring – ‘a memento of friendship, from two friends to another’.105 ‘Bouncer’ would be a loss to Wilde’s Magdalen life.

  * Hardinge’s friends (and, it seems, Pater’s too) had been alarmed to discover letters between the two men in which they addressed each other as ‘darling’. Pater by temperament was both cautious and discreet. Hardinge was anything but. A flamboyant figure with literary aspirations, who larded his conversation and his poetry with ‘allusion to unnatural profligacy’, he had – in the brief year since his matriculation – achieved a Varsity-wide ‘notoriety’ as ‘the Balliol Bugger’. And although there was an element of pose in his behaviour – a desire to ‘startle’ – his letters all but confirmed the charge against him. As his friend Alfred Milner wrote to another college mate, ‘When a man confesses to lying in another man’s arms kissing him & having been found doing it… When verses are written from one man to another too vile to blot this paper, what hope can you have that a criminal act, if not committed already, may not be committed any day?’ Leonard Montefiore, another of Hardinge’s contemporaries, had mentioned these concerns to a friend among the Balliol dons. Jowett, the head of the college, was informed. He acted quickly to suppress the matter, anxious to preserve the good name of Balliol without destroying the reputations of either Hardinge or Pater. Hardinge was sent down until the end of the year. Pater (a former protégé of Jowett’s) was summoned for a ‘dreadful’ interview – one that left him ‘crushed [and] despairing’. Although there was no threat of exposure, Jowett does appear to have used his influence to prevent Pater being awarded a valuable university proctorship. It was an injury added to insult. The debacle left Pater with a sense of anger and pain at how circumscribed his life and relations must be for the future. Embracing the notion of himself as a victim of unjust forces, he made the glorification of suffering one of his enduring literary themes.

  † The girl was the eighteen-year-old Ethel Smyth (future composer and suffragist). By the end of the journey back to London Willie had proposed to her – despite the fact that Ethel had been violently sick on the crossing, and that Willie had, only a few weeks earlier, been courting a girl called Maud Thomas. The engagement was kept secret at Willie’s insistence, and broken off after a few weeks. Ethel kept the ring.

  3

  Hellas!

  ‘The spirit of the god still dwelt within the marble.’

  oscar wilde

  Wilde’s exploration of the world beyond Oxford was continued at every opportunity. After the Michaelmas term ended, and before returning to Dublin for Christmas, he plunged into London’s cultural round. He visited exhibitions, concerts; and, above all, theatres. Despite the attractions of pictorial art and music, plays and players tended to dominate his talk. And Henry Irving dominated above all. Irving’s performance as Macbeth, at the Lyceum, made a huge impression on him. As Edward Sullivan recalled, ‘he was fascinated by it’; though he feared that the general public ‘might be similarly affected – a thing which he declared, would destroy his enjoyment of an extraordinary performance’.1

  Wilde paid a very enjoyable visit to Lord Ronald Gower at Windsor, taking with him a new friend, Arthur May. ‘He is quite charming in every way and a beautiful artist,’ Wilde told Harding, ‘and we have rushed into friendship.’2 Gower’s well-appointed new ‘lodge’ on the edge of Windsor Great Park was full of beautiful and curious things: fine French furniture, Old Master drawings, eighteenth-century portraits, and one of Marie Antoinette’s fans.3 Wilde, though, was developing his own ideas about interior decoration. It was a subject with which not only Ruskin but also the Pre-Raphaelites had long engaged. In a desire to escape from the ugliness of ill-designed mass-produced furniture, with its machine-tooled ornamentation and ostentatious opulence, Morris, Rossetti and Burne-Jones had collaborated in the early 1860s on the quasi-medieval decor for Morris’s ‘Red House’ at Bexleyheath, devising painted settles, decorative murals, carved tables and embroidered wall hangings. And the three friends were all involved in the company that Morris had established in the wake of this project, to produce furniture, fittings, fabrics, stained glass and wallpapers that reflected their shared passion for past ages and their shared respect for the traditions of hand-craftsmanship.

  A rarified taste to begin with, supported by a few wealthy patrons, examples of Morris & Co.’s decorative work had gradually become more widespread, and more visible. One of the firm’s first commissions had been to design the dining room at the new South Kensington Museum (now the V&A). And by the mid-1870s increasing numbers of individuals with moderate means but advanced tastes were using Morris-designed fabrics, papers and furniture – together with carefully chosen antique, modern and oriental objects – to adorn their rooms in what was being termed the ‘Aesthetic’ style.

  The various distinctive elements of this decor had, by 1877, become well enough defined to be laid out – and lampooned. In September of that year Punch ran a decorator’s guide to the Aesthetic fad, by its in-house expert, ‘Mr Fernando F. Eminate’. He explained: ‘It’s a wide term, but I think I may say that the outcome of aestheticism is a mixture of antique quaintness, dingy and washed out colour, and oddity combined with discomfort.’ Among his specific recommendations were: ‘sage green’ and ‘dull yellow’ colour-schemes; ‘rugs in the most dull and neutral tones’ over bare boards or matting; curtains ‘with grotesque patterns’, wallpapers ‘of sombre or sickly ground’, and ‘spidery’ design; a recess filled with ‘delft and blue china’; and – for pictures – either ‘E. B[urne]. Jones, or an occasional nocturne of Whistler’s.’4

  If this advanced decorative style was most closely associated with the newly developed west London suburb of Brompton, it was also recognized as flourishing in north Oxford, where the wives of many newly married dons – ‘anxious to be up to date’ – furnished their houses ‘with Morris papers, old chests and cabinets and blue pots’.5 Nor was the style confined to the details of home decor. There was an understanding that the so-called Aesthetics who did up their drawing rooms in low tones and Morris papers were adherents of a new creed, a creed with a ‘passionate’ belief in the importance of culture, and the value of art (medieval, oriental or Greek). It was a creed that also found expression in ‘eccentricities of attire’ – long, flowing corsetless robes for the women; velvet jackets and capes for the men – in ‘dishevelled hair’ for both sexes; in esoteric jargon (‘intense’ was the adjective of choice); and in a ‘general appearance of weary passion’.6

  Wilde, steeped in the Pre-Raphaelite vision, and instinctively up to date, had lately become a devotee: ‘aesthetic to the last degree’ as one new acquaintance described him. And although he was too overflowing with enthusiasms to suggest a ‘general appearance of weary passion’, when it came to decor he was now ‘passionately fond of secondary colours, low tones [and] Morris wallpapers’.7 With Ward having gone down, Wilde was given his fine three-room first-floor set at the beginning of 1877, and he set about making them beautiful. A suitably ‘neutral’ grey carpet was set on the stained floorboards. Although it is not known whether he hung Morris wallpapers above the panelled wainscot, he filled the ‘inner room’ with china, pictures, a portfolio (for unframed works) and a piano. He acquired some ‘Venetian hock glasses’, six ‘ruby champagne tumblers’ and a pair of green ‘Rumanian claret decanters’. ‘The whole get up’, he confessed to Ward, ‘is much admired and a little made fun of on Sunday evenings.’ Wilde kept up his tradition of informal Sunday evening entertaining – and, to do full justice to the splendour of the rooms, also laid on frequent ‘breakfasts, lunches, etc’.8

  He was, though, finding rather a want of stimulating company in college. As he complained to Ward, ‘Kitten’ Harding, for all his charms, ‘never exerts my intellect or brain in any way’. And although he had hopes for some of the new demys, as well as for �
�Gussy’ Creswell who, like Ward, was both an Old Radleian and ‘Psychological’, the majority of the younger set, while ‘capital good fellows’, talked mostly ‘nonsense or smut’.9

  In the face of such puerility, art – its contemplation and creation – offered a welcome refuge. Closeted in the ‘too charming’ seclusion of his new rooms, with ‘the sunshine, the crowing rooks and waving tree branches and the breeze at the window’, Wilde did ‘nothing but write sonnets and scribble poetry’. The literary successes of the previous year had to be built upon. And they were. Wilde would publish a further twelve poems during 1877, all but two of them sonnets. The discipline of the sonnet form, with its fourteen lines and fixed rhyme patterns was, he considered, an admirable exercise and ‘trial of strength’ for a young poet like himself.10

  A love of beauty, though, was not to be confined to the page, the canvas, the concert hall, or the details of room decoration; it could touch every part of life. Symonds, in his Studies of the Greek Poets (1873) had urged his readers to ‘seek some living echo’ of the beauty of Greek sculpture by visiting ‘the field where boys bathe in early morning, or the playgrounds of our public schools in summer, or the banks of the Isis when the eights are on the water’.11 Wilde embraced the notion, going to the running track to watch the athletes train, and declaring of one sportsman that ‘his left leg is a poem’.12 At the university sports in March he singled out the running of F. Bullock Webster in the three-mile race as ‘the most beautiful thing I ever saw’.13 Nor was this self-consciously Hellenic admiration confined to the athletics field; Wilde was soon praising the ‘Greek face’ of one the new demys – as ‘Greek’ became a key term of approbation in his Aesthetic lexicon.14