Oscar

by Sturgis, Matthew;

  He was not alone in such views. The celebration of male beauty was becoming something of a fad at Oxford. Wilde’s Brasenose contemporary, Charles Edward Hutchison, produced an anonymous pamphlet in 1880 on ‘Boy Worship’ – declaring that it was not restricted to the self-conscious ‘aesthetes’, but had ‘many an ardent follower’ among the sportsmen too (the term ‘boy’ was, it seems, a broad one, encompassing both the oarsmen in the Varsity boat and the young choristers of the college chapel). Although such enthusiasms might claim to be a mode of Aesthetic contemplation, they could shade by degrees into sexual yearning and even sexual contact. Many undergraduates, after all, had come from large public schools where sexual relations between boys were commonplace.

  Wilde was certainly aware of this possibility, but not approving. When he spotted his fellow Magdalen undergraduate Charles Todd sitting in a private box at the theatre with one of the young college choristers, he wrote to Ward: ‘In our friend Todd’s ethical barometer, at what height is his moral quicksilver?... Myself I believe Todd is extremely moral and only mentally spoons the boy [a thirteen-year-old], but I think he is foolish to go about with one, if he is bringing this boy about with him... don’t tell anyone about it like a good boy – it would do neither us nor Todd any good.’15 For Wilde male beauty provided scope not only for admiration but also for creation: he began one slightly bathetic poem upon a ‘Choir Boy’, and completed a rather more successful one, ‘Wasted Days’, inspired by the image of a ‘fair slim boy’ painted on a tile by Violet Troubridge, one of ‘Gussy’ Creswell’s young cousins.16

  But if a decorated tile, a chorister or a long-distance runner could produce an Aesthetic response, an art exhibition might furnish a spiritual one. Wilde remained, as ever, teetering on the brink of Catholicism, caught ‘in the wiles of the Scarlet Woman’.17 When he took ‘Kitten’ Harding up to London to the ‘Old Masters’ at the Royal Academy, he was delighted to note that it brought out his friend’s ‘Popish tendencies’. The show that year included a good scattering of Italian religious works, amid the usual round-up of British portraits and Dutch landscapes.18 It was perhaps on that same visit that Wilde, calling at Miles’s studio, was introduced to Ronald Gower’s sister, Constance, wife of the Duke of Westminster. She was his first duchess, and he was greatly impressed, pronouncing her ‘the most fascinating, Circe-like brilliant woman’ he had ever met, ‘something too charming’.19

  Amid such distractions – social, cultural and spiritual – Wilde’s academic work drifted. He had been put up for the ‘Ireland scholarship’ – the university’s premier classics prize – but did not get it (‘What stumped me was Philology’). He hated the taste of failure, and rued the fact that he had not worked harder.20 But, although he resolved to reform and read hard for Greats, it would be on his terms.21 At the end of term, that March, with all the students assembled in the college hall and the dons ranged at the high table, Wilde was called up by Dr Bulley for his ‘terminal examination’. Mr Allen, the Roman history tutor, was asked, ‘How do you find Mr Wilde’s work?’. When Allen answered, ‘Mr Wilde absents himself without apology from my lectures, his work is most unsatisfactory’, the president remarked, in his distinctive courtly manner, ‘That is hardly the way to treat a gentleman, Mr Wilde.’ The temptation to make an épat was too great: Wilde replied, ‘But, Mr President, Mr Allen is not a gentleman.’ Consternation followed. For an undergraduate to make such an assertion about a tutor in a formal and semi-public setting had an electric effect. The fact that it was true did nothing to lessen the impact. Wilde was told to leave the hall.22

  He already had a reputation within the college for subverting authority. There had been frequent run-ins with the proctors; or the incident in the college chapel, when – with Prince Leopold and Mrs Liddell (wife of the dean of Christ Church) in the congregation – Wilde was scheduled to read the first lesson. Reaching the lectern he turned over the pages of the Bible, then began in a languorous voice, ‘The Song of Solomon…’ Before he could get very far into that great hymn to female loveliness, the dean swooped down from his stall, and ‘thrusting his beard into Wilde’s face, cooed out, “You have the wrong lesson, Mr Wilde. It is Deuteronomy XVI.”’ The incident at collections, however, was of a new order, and set the dons firmly against the ‘bad boy’ of the college.23

  Wilde chose not to care. He could convince himself that the Magdalen Senior Common Room was a backwater, dwarfed by the beckoning ocean of London life and London opportunity. The same month as the Mr Allen incident, Wilde forged his first permanent London connection. He was elected to the St Stephen’s Club in Westminster, flatteringly put up by David Plunket – solicitor general for Ireland, MP for Dublin University and uncle of his friend Barton. Although the club, founded in 1870 by Disraeli and others, was a Tory institution, it also had artistic sympathies: Whistler was a member. So too was Hunter-Blair. Wilde was conscious of the honour, but slightly annoyed that it had come so soon. The entrance subscription was a hefty £42.24

  Saddled with this expense, and – once again – ‘irretrievably broke’, he felt unable to contemplate a trip to Rome that Easter to meet up with Ward and Hunter-Blair. He was sad to lose the opportunity. Hunter-Blair was disappointed too; he still nursed hopes of Wilde’s conversion, and thought that a visit to Rome ‘to see something of Catholicism at headquarters’ might prove decisive. Placing the matter in the hands of ‘Lady Luck’, if not St Peter, he told Wilde that – since he was travelling via the South of France – he would stake ‘a couple of pounds’ on the tables at Monte Carlo; ‘and if it is predestined that you are to come to Rome, I shall certainly win the money’. Wilde subsequently received a telegram with the extraordinary news that his friend had realized nearly £60. Alive to the drama of the moment he set off almost at once. ‘This is an era in my life,’ he told Harding. ‘I wish I could look into the seeds of time and see what was coming.’ He might have been surprised.25

  On reaching London, Wilde discovered that Professor Mahaffy was passing through town on his way to the continent, en route for a tour of Greece. He was with two students, Goulding (his, and Wilde’s, companion of the year before) and young George Macmillan, who had gone straight from Eton into the family publishing firm. Wilde resolved to travel with them down to Genoa. The journey proved to be spiritual as much as physical. From the moment they left Charing Cross, Mahaffy set about trying to divert Wilde from Rome and Roman Catholicism, ‘using every argument he can’, as Macmillan reported to his father. ‘At first he tried hard to persuade him to come to Greece with us, pointing out to him by the way all the worst faults of Popery. Finding this not altogether effective, though it had some weight, he changed tack, and [by the time they reached Genoa] when Wilde began to say that perhaps he would come, Mahaffy said, “I won’t take you. I wouldn’t have such a fellow with me,” which of course, as Wilde is somewhat of a wilful disposition, has raised in him a firm determination to come, and I quite expect he will, and hope so.’26

  Still debating his final decision, Wilde lingered in Genoa with Macmillan and Goulding, while Mahaffy called on his sister and invalid mother, who were staying in the town. He and his companions marvelled at the great Renaissance palaces, the general profusion of white marble doorways, the sparkling Mediterranean, the gaily painted houses (‘blue, orange, deep red’) and the gardens full of ‘camellias, oranges, lemons, olives, and luxuriant shrubs’. They visited the Palazzo Rosso, and saw Guido Reni’s languorously posed painting of the martyred St Sebastian. Macmillan thought it ‘about the most beautiful picture’ he had ever seen.27 He was not alone in his verdict. Wilde, ignoring the fact that Ruskin dismissed Guido’s art as sentimental and insincere, allowed himself to be seduced by the remote sensuality of the image: the ‘lovely brown boy with crisp, clustering hair and red lips, bound by his evil enemies to a tree, and though pierced with arrows, raising his eyes with divine impassioned gaze towards… the opening heavens’.28 Guido’s ‘Sebastian’ acceded to Wilde’s personal pant
heon, joining the Greek youths of Plato and the Parthenon frieze as an ideal of adolescent male beauty, in all its ‘bloom of vitality and radiance’.29

  Easter was approaching and the city was en fête. Wilde framed the moment in his ‘Sonnet written in Holy Week at Genoa’, suggesting that he had been recalled from the sensual paganism of the ‘sweet and honied hours’ spent in the Scaglietto Gardens to a remembrance of the Passion’s ‘bitter pain’ on hearing ‘a little child’ pass by singing an Easter hymn.30 But, not untypically, having made this poetic declaration, setting the Catholic above the Hellenic, he decided to put off Christian Rome for the moment and go to pagan Greece. Mahaffy was delighted to have swayed his former pupil from ‘the Jesuits’ and ‘cheat[ed] the Devil of his due’.31

  The party left Genoa on Good Friday by train, crossed Italy to Ravenna (where Wilde was amazed at the sixth-century mosaics) and then travelled down to Brindisi to find their ship. They were, as Macmillan described them, a diverse but happy band: Mahaffy – the ‘General’ – ‘amusing and interesting’; Goulding ‘very full of spirits – delightfully innocent of what we call culture but still thoroughly entering into the delight of what we see – whether scenery, pictures, palaces etc. In fact a downright honest wild Irishman, with no end of fun in him and no particular harm’; and the ‘aesthetic’ Wilde, resplendent in a new brownish-yellow coat.32 Wilde might be ‘capable of talking a good deal of nonsense’ on Aesthetic topics but, for all that, he was deemed ‘a very sensible, well-informed and charming man’.33

  They set sail from Brindisi on the evening of Easter Sunday (1 April, 1877), and woke at dawn to see ‘the low mountainous coast’ of Epiros (or ‘Thessaly’ as Wilde dubbed it with more poetic feeling than geographical accuracy).34 They put in at Corfu, and from there Wilde wrote with breezy unconcern to Mr Bramley, the dean of Magdalen. Term was due to begin in two days’ time; he would not be there. ‘The chance,’ he explained of visiting Mycenae and Athens in ‘such good company’ as Dr Mahaffy’s, ‘was too great for me.’ Surely to see Greece with such a guide was ‘quite as good as going to lectures’. The country was still very little visited in the 1870s. He hoped Mr Bramley would not mind if he were ‘ten days’ late for term. Although he failed to mention his plan to take in Rome on the way home, his stated expectation that he would be reaching Athens around 17 April made it clear that his absence would be rather longer than ten days.35 Magdalen’s grey quadrangles no doubt seemed very far away.

  The colour of life, bright at Genoa, intensified still further as they touched upon the Greek world, even at its very edge. Mahaffy considered a market day in Corfu, among ‘the most picturesque sights in Europe’. For the young classicists it was thrilling to hear Greek words being spoken, to see Greek letters on the shop signs. The streets were thronged with people: ‘royal-looking peasant lads, clothed in sheepskins’, their ‘brown throats and limbs’ set off by ‘scarlet fezes’ and thick clustering curls’.36 The beauty of these young men was striking. Macmillan thought they ‘might well have sat to Phidias’. For Wilde they seemed the living type of Plato’s Charmides or Guido’s St Sebastian.37

  That year the Greek Orthodox Easter fell a week later than the Western festival, so they found themselves once more in Holy Week. And Wilde, keeping up his sonnet sequence, produced at Corfu another poem balancing the pagan and Christian powers. This time he reversed the dynamic, imagining that though the classical deities are supposed dead, and ‘Mary’s Son is King’, perhaps somewhere in the ‘sea-trancèd isle’ a ‘God lies hidden in the asphodel’ waiting to spring forth.38 Although the poem suggested lingering to ‘watch a-while’ in the hope of seeing this lurking deity, the party moved on. They sailed the next day, 3 April, via the island of Zante (still gratifyingly ‘woody’ as Homer had described it) for Katakolo, on the northwest coast of the Peloponnese.39

  This was the land about which Wilde had read and dreamed and thought since his days at Portora, the cradle of Alcibiades and Plato, of Homer, Euripides and Alexander the Great. ‘Hellas! Hellas!’ as Wilde called it in the sonnet which described the moment when, with the red sun setting into the sea, he ‘stood upon the soil of Greece at last!’

  The fact that Katakolo was an unlovely little port, and the surrounding landscape unexceptional, could be ignored. Wilde (like his companions) was not just arriving upon an actual shore, but returning to a land of the imagination. There were other accommodations to be made. For classicists, imbued with an idea of Greece’s majesty, the ‘smallness’ of the country came as a shock (Mount Parnassus was visible from Zante). At Olympia – the first stop on their ride across the Peloponnese – they had to overlook the archaeologists’ ugly earthworks and rude wheelbarrows, and confront the fact that the temples were built not of gleaming Parian marble but of coarse pitted stone. Macmillan’s initial disappointment on this score transformed itself within a few hours into an admiration for the ‘rugged grandeur’ of the work.40 Much else, however, struck them with an immediate sense of wonder. Dr Gustav Hirschfeld, director of the excavations at Olympia, showed them a ‘colossal head’ of Apollo that had just been unearthed. Mahaffy considered it among ‘the grandest relics of the highest and purest Greek Art’.41 And perhaps it first gave Wilde that sense of how – in the finest Hellenic sculpture – ‘the spirit of the god still dwelt within the marble’.42

  Their trip across the Peloponnese took eight days. They visited the great temple of Apollo upon its high and lonely eminence at Bassae. They wandered in the vast theatre at Argos (subject of another sonnet). They saw ancient Mycenae with its cyclopean remains. Although Wilde surrendered himself to Greece and its classical and pagan associations, he could not quite forget Christian Rome. Even in the theatre at Argos he recalled – amid the ruins – the pope, captive in the Vatican and ‘half-dethroned for Gold!’43 And ‘topping the crest of a hill near Olympia’ he was struck by the sight of a young peasant lad with a small lamb ‘slung around his neck’ – the very image of Jesus as ‘the Good Shepherd’.44

  There were other pleasures and distractions too. It was a week of Arcadian scenery, of spring flowers – young corn, scarlet anemones and purple cistus – of glorious profiles and stupendous hair. They put up with short rations during the fast of Holy Week, subsisting on sour cheese, resined wine (‘a liquor we could only liken to furniture polish’), Easter eggs (‘pink!!!’) and ‘the invigorating powers of Greek air’. They enjoyed life in the saddle. Goulding had hoped to knock the ‘swagger’ out of Wilde once he got him on to a horse, but Oscar seems to have kept up well. He was fortunate perhaps that Greek horse owners were not keen on having their mounts ridden above a gentle amble. On the ride to Megalopolis, the horse provider, who was accompanying them on foot, finding his wishes ignored, pulled a knife to try and enforce his point. He was immediately trumped by a member of the party – almost certainly not Wilde – producing a revolver.45

  Brigands, a serious danger in northern Greece, were not much in evidence. The few they met were ‘disposed to be friendly’.46 There was one anxious moment, when the three younger members of the group rode on ahead and lost sight of Mahaffy. When he failed to catch up to them, they began to fear the worst. But, before they could raise the alarm, he re-appeared, much put out at having spent a fruitless hour searching for his greatcoat and rug which had fallen from his saddle while he negotiated a ‘short-cut’.47

  Crossing by sea from Epidaurus (via Aegina), the group of travellers reached Athens on 13 April.48 George Macmillan at once declared himself ‘in the Seventh Heaven’, and Wilde was probably upon the same exalted plain. To anyone familiar with ancient Greek history and literature it was a thrilling thing to stand upon the Acropolis, before the Parthenon, the Erechtheion, and the little temple of Athena Nike, to walk – as Macmillan put it – on ‘the very pavement… trodden by so many mighty spirits’.49 This was the literal and figurative high point of the trip. Something of Wilde’s wonder was caught (albeit in fictionalized form) by one of his female friends:


  He was speaking to her of Greece, of Athens – the city of the early morning – rising in the cool, pale, steady light of dawn, a new Aphrodite, from out of the lapping circle of the waves. He spoke to her of the Parthenon, the one temple – not a building – a temple, as complete, as personal as a statue. And that first sight of the Acropolis, the delicate naked columns rising up in the morning sunshine: It was like coming upon some white Greek goddess. It made one feel.50

  The Acropolis was followed by other wonders. They viewed the plain of Marathon. They visited monuments and museums, delighting in the little terracotta ‘Tanagra’ statuettes, so ‘remarkable for the marvellous modernness of their appearance’.51 Wilde acquired a ‘white walking stick’ cut from the olive groves of the Academia. It was not his only souvenir: he also had himself photographed – looking suitably Byronic – in Greek national dress. Mahaffy’s name opened all doors, securing them a private view of the extraordinary golden treasures that Schliemann had brought back from his excavations at Mycenae. The Irish contingent registered their ‘strong resemblance to various old Irish things’ – suggestive of that common ancestry between Greek and Celt.52 Treasure of a different kind had been waiting for Wilde at the Athens poste restante: an Easter card from Florence Balcombe.53

  Wilde and his companions left Athens on Saturday 21 April, seventeen days after the start of the Oxford term.54 They travelled by steamer to Naples. Wilde was amused to hear, from his adjoining cabin, the ‘piously inclined’ Macmillan unleash a volley of ‘oaths and profanity’ at the legions of mosquitoes and fleas by which he was being tormented.55 And neither Macmillan’s woes nor Wilde’s amusement ended there. During a ‘frightful storm’ that assailed the ship as they passed through the Aegean, the young publisher was ‘sent crashing neck and crop into the keys of a piano in the small saloon’.56