His ‘customary apparel’, though not outlandish, had the stamp of self-conscious style: light-coloured trousers; black frock coat, with only the lower button fastened, to allow a glimpse of brightly flowered waistcoat beneath; white silk cravat, held together by an old intaglio amethyst set as a pin.20 The lack of facial hair gave to his visage an especial prominence, reinforced by the pallour of his complexion. It showed off his ‘great eager eyes’ to advantage, but also made his few large pale freckles oddly noticeable, and did nothing to hide his prominent and ‘greenish hued’ teeth.21 A few found the effect – at least on first meeting – ‘grotesque’ or even ‘revolting’.22 One new acquaintance called him ‘slab-faced’.23 Others, though, subsuming the parts to the whole, could refer to him as ‘a young man of beautiful appearance… more like the incarnation of Apollo than an ordinary human being’.24 His refusal to adopt the conventional masculine tropes was disorientating to many. Julian Hawthorne – the son of the novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne – was not alone in being repelled by ‘a sort of horribly feminine air’ that he detected about Wilde. This unsettling ‘effeminacy’ seems, though, to have been regarded as disturbing to social norms, rather than to the sexual ones.25
In Hawthorne’s case the disquiet was soon obliterated by awe at Wilde’s conversation. Certainly, from the first, Wilde was recognized as ‘an admirable talker’ – fluent, vivid, assured, and with a ‘wonderful “Stage Presence”’.26 The move from Oxford to London did nothing to diminish his self-confidence, or his sense of command. He would give dramatic point to his gestures – ‘which were many and varied’ – with a pair of ‘pale lavender’ gloves carried in one hand. It helped, too, that he had developed, as a friend put it, ‘one of the most alluring voices I have ever listened to, round and soft, and full of variety and expression’.27 ‘Exquisite’ in ‘timbre and cadence’, it was marked by ‘a peculiar inflection characteristic of Oxford men’, as well as by more personal ‘tricks of emphasis’, including a ‘slight susurration… the sucking up of his breath – something much less than a hiss’ with which Wilde would mark the end of a story.28 All trace of his Irish accent had been effaced – if not the ease of his Celtic manner.* There was, moreover, a remarkable positive energy about all he said. He spoke ‘with enormous gusto, evidently enjoying thoroughly his own imagination and turns of speech’. And his enjoyment was transferred to others. His ‘sense of humour (as distinct from wit) was great and very infectious’; so too was his laugh – a ‘very full and hearty’, and frequent, eruption.29
Wilde arrived in the capital as an enthusiast, and one whose enthusiasms were both unforced and contagious.30 He was, at this stage of his career, ‘really ingenuous’.31 Those who met him recalled him as ‘invariably smiling, eager, full of life and the joy of living and, above all, given to unmeasured praise of whatever and whoever pleased him’. This ‘gift of enthusiastic admiration’ was, in the society of those days, something both ‘unexpected and delightful’. It won him many friends, especially among the acting profession, and it opened many doors. If Wilde could not praise, he ‘shrugged his shoulders and kept silent’ – at least in public.32 In private he could be engagingly acerbic, making fun of ‘friend and foe alike’. One disagreeable old lady was dismissed as ‘that old woman who keeps the artificial roses in place on her bald head with tin tacks’.33
He did, though, in talking of art, maintain the ‘extravagant’ expression that he had evolved at Oxford. This amused some and annoyed others. Quite a few doubtless followed the actor-manager Squire Bancroft in regarding such excesses as ‘the affectations of youth’. The literal-minded, however, often failed to register the element of self-satirizing humour, and were tempted, on first meeting, to dismiss Wilde as a mere ‘poseur’.34 Julian Hawthorne was so unsettled that he felt the need to intervene. ‘Wilde,’ he said, coming away from a party one evening, ‘why should you waste yourself in these fantastic make-believes? The very tones of your voice are a give-away; you’ll be found out sooner or later… Can’t you, for a few minutes, at least, be sincere?’ Wilde unsettled him yet further by replying: ‘I am always absolutely sincere!’35 He understood already that a mask might reveal, rather than conceal. Very soon he began to achieve a reputation – in London drawing rooms at least – as a young man ‘full of love of the arts’. It was a love that ran from literature to the stage, from music to dress, from painting to home decoration.36
He was fortunate in coming to know – almost from his first days in London – some of the leading figures of the Aesthetic movement. He developed a friendship with the pre-eminent Aesthetic architect – and designer of avant-garde ‘Anglo-Japanese’ furniture – E. W. Godwin. Godwin, besides being a friend of the Forbes-Robertsons, and the former lover of Ellen Terry, was designing a studio house for Frank Miles in Chelsea’s newly fashionable Tite Street. Wilde met the artist and illustrator Walter Crane, a fellow regular at Combe Bank, and impressed him with his ‘genuine love of beauty’. He also met Whistler again. The timing, however, was not propitious. Whistler, bankrupted by the costs of his recent legal battle with Ruskin, was on the verge of departing for an unknown period to Venice, where he hoped to recoup his fortunes by producing a series of etchings for the Fine Art Society. The White House (which Godwin had created for him in Tite Street) was up for sale.37
More immediately fruitful was Wilde’s connection with the unconventional Sickert family in Kensington.38 Mrs Sickert took him under her wing. She had a ready sympathy for outsiders, being, herself, the illegitimate offspring of a Cambridge mathematician and an Irish dancer; while her husband, Oswald, a Paris-trained painter, was Danish by birth. The eldest of their six children was the nineteen-year-old Walter, a mercurial youth who, despite ambitions to be a painter, was trying to make a career on the stage, ‘walking on’ at the Lyceum as one of ‘Mr Irving’s Young Men’.
Wilde, on coming to London, had also hoped to make ‘literary friends’.39 Progress on this front, however, was slow. If the poetic calling cards that he had sent out to Gladstone, Michael Rossetti and others were followed up in person, the results were disappointing – though he does seem to have built upon his slight acquaintance with the hospitable Lord Houghton.40 And he did manage to meet Matthew Arnold, and perhaps George Eliot too. He attended Eliot’s funeral at Highgate Cemetery in December 1880, taking a large wreath of lilies, which he attempted – with limited success – to attach to the coffin as it passed by on its carriage.41 And among the younger men he made some slight headway. He was introduced to Henry James, and expressed an admiration for his novels.42 He managed to disconcert the literary critic Edmund Gosse. When, at their first encounter, Gosse responded to Wilde’s generous enthusiasm with the self-deprecatory remark, ‘I was afraid you would be disappointed,’ Wilde had replied, ‘Oh no, I am never disappointed in literary men, I think they are perfectly charming. It is their works I find so disappointing.’43 He established rather more of a bond with the beautiful and fashionable Mrs Singleton, who wrote what was considered daringly outspoken verse under the pen name ‘Violet Fane’.44 And he was befriended too by Charles G. Leland, a middle-aged American comic writer and folklorist, who was then living in London, pursuing – among other projects – an interest in industrial design. Leland hoped to get Wilde elected to the Savile, the most literary of London’s clubs, though nothing came of the plan.45
The most important of Wilde’s early London friendships, however, was neither literary nor artistic. It was with Lillie Langtry. He met her again in Miles’s studio. She had achieved much in the two years since her arrival on the London scene, and was now an established celebrity; the acknowledged doyenne of ‘professional beauties’ and the all-but-acknowledged mistress of the Prince of Wales. Crowds gathered to watch her pass, artists vied to paint her. Here was ‘success, fame, even notoriety’ – and all at the age of twenty-five. Wilde was both impressed and smitten. When Miles boasted to a friend that he had ‘discovered… Mrs Langtry’, Wilde remarked gravely: ‘A more important
discovery than America, in my opinion.46 Langtry, for her part, was intrigued by Wilde; attracted by the ‘splendour’ of his eyes, she registered, beneath the bubbling of youthful enthusiasm, both real intelligence and the outline of a ‘remarkably fascinating and compelling personality’.47
A rapport was quickly established between them. If Wilde admired Langtry’s beauty and envied her fame, she was drawn by his energy and his intellect. Both might be useful to her. Although at the apogee of her success, she was very aware that her position was tenuous. About to embark on her third ‘season’, the tide of her fortunes was almost imperceptibly on the turn. Her relationship with the Prince of Wales was unlikely to be sustained. She was beset with difficulties – financial, marital and romantic. To have, at such a juncture, a new ally who was brilliant, amusing and optimistic, was a very welcome thing.48
Wilde’s own hopes for fame quickly concentrated themselves on his writing. He decided that his primary literary ambition was to be recognized as a poet. After his campaign of undergraduate sonnet-writing, he had been working on some longer compositions: ‘The Burden of Itys’, with its vision of the Greek gods disporting themselves in the Oxfordshire countryside; ‘The Garden of Eros’, charting his poetic debts to Keats, Swinburne, Morris and Rossetti; and a highly sensual Keatsian classical fantasy titled ‘Charmides’. Although they were not suitable for periodical publication, they would lend bulk and interest to a slim volume. That was Wilde’s goal. Initial attempts, though, to interest a publisher in such a venture proved disappointing. A succession of editors refused even to read his work. Wilde was obliged to acknowledge that, in the estimation of the London book trade, he was still an unknown.49 It was a first indication that progress might be slower than he had expected. Other options needed to be considered.
While many of his poetry-writing contemporaries sought to take their first step into the wider literary world by writing a novel (always a more commercially attractive proposition for a publisher), Wilde turned in a different direction.50 He began working on a play. The theatre after all was one of his great passions. Drama, in his estimation, was ‘the meeting place of art and life’, dealing ‘not merely with man, but with social man, with man in relation to God and to humanity.’ More prosaically, it was popular – ‘the democratic art’ of the day: a stage success would bring with it both real fame and real money.51
Wilde was also interested to discover that many actors, and some writers, had parallel careers in the visual arts. Johnston Forbes-Robertson had studied painting at the Royal Academy, and continued to exhibit, while the playwright W. G. Wills – a member of the Irish Wills family to which the Wildes had long felt a bond of connection – maintained a successful sideline as a portrait painter.52 And such examples encouraged him to maintain his undergraduate notion that he might someday follow the same path.53 There is no evidence, though, that he ever did anything towards actually achieving this fantasy.
More effort was put into avoiding the lure of popular journalism. Although writing for the newspapers offered ready rewards, it was scarcely a passport to ‘fame’, as almost all articles were unsigned. Journalism, moreover, was the preserve of his brother. Willie had made a bright start in his new profession. Even before moving to England he had kept up a steady stream of ‘scraps’ for the World, and on his arrival in London he was given a much larger role on the paper. He combined this with other commissions, such as contributing to the fashionable weekly Vanity Fair, and writing theatre reviews for the Irish Daily News.54 For Oscar, the grander role of cultural critic – as played by Arnold, Pater, Swinburne or Ruskin – had more attractions. But its forums, the great monthly journals, were beyond his reach. If he perhaps hoped, one day, to write on artistic subjects for Blackwood’s, the Nineteenth Century or the Fortnightly Review – he had, at the moment, to settle for contributing an overview of the 1879 Grosvenor Gallery summer exhibition to the Irish Daily News. It was a vivid indication of how far he had to travel.
Nevertheless the review (signed ‘O. F. W.’) did give Wilde a chance to praise a catalogue of admired heroes and would-be allies across the whole spectrum of the Aesthetic movement, from Burne-Jones and G. F. Watts (‘the most powerful of all our living English artists’) to William Blake Richmond and Whistler (that ‘wonderful and eccentric genius’). It also allowed him to puff such friends and connections as Eugene Benson (Julia Constance Fletcher’s stepfather), Johnston Forbes-Robertson (who had painted a ‘very lifelike’ portrait of the actor Hermann Vezin), ‘Mrs Valentine Bromley’ (née Ida Forbes-Robertson, another of the talented siblings), Mary Stuart-Wortley (sister of an Oxford friend) and W. G. Wills. And although the Irish Daily News scarcely circulated outside Dublin, Wilde took care to send copies of his article to the various artists mentioned – with apologies for the ‘shocking’ quality of the printing.55
At the outset of his London life Wilde did receive one very fortunate break. He secured the interest of Edmund Yates, Willie’s employer at the World. Yates was planning to bring out a new literary monthly called Time, a companion to the weekly World, and was in search of contributors. He wrote to Willie, asking to be put ‘en rapport’ with Oscar – ‘the Newdigate man, of whom I hear so much and so favourably’56 (one of those who had been telling Yates about Oscar may well have been Violet Fane, herself a regular contributor to the World). Yates – recognized as a ‘brilliant talker’ himself – was pleased to meet another inspired conversationalist.57 Wilde was duly asked to a write a poem for the inaugural number of Time.
He produced the appropriately titled ‘Conqueror of Time’ – a sixty-line poem about a ‘white flower’ grown from a seed found in a sarcophagus at the British Museum, which endures as ‘the child of all eternity’.58 The magazine and Wilde’s contribution – both extensively trailed in the World and other papers – appeared in April 1879: it marked his first appearance in an English (rather than an Irish) periodical, and his formal debut on London’s literary scene.
Yates was an adept at building up the reputations of his star contributors. The World of 4 June carried an account of Mrs Douglass-Murray’s ‘fancy ball’ in Portland Place, mentioning among those who ‘pre-eminently looked the character’: Violet Fane as a ‘Hindoo Princess’, ‘Mr. Whistler in a “nocturne” of black velvet, as a Spaniard of the Middle Ages’ and ‘Oscar Wilde as a Venetian noble’.59 It was distinguished company, and Wilde was distinguished by association. The report may well have been written up by Willie. Certainly Willie’s journalistic positions enabled him to do ‘a good deal to make Oscar’s name known’ in London circles. And he entered into the game with enthusiasm, reporting – either in the press or among friends and colleagues – ‘every clever thing that Oscar said or that could be attributed to him’, and helping to form the beginnings of ‘a sort of myth around him’.60
Despite these promising first steps in the capital, Wilde was concerned to keep open a second professional front: academia. He continued to work on his prize essay (though it is by no means certain that he ever handed it in).61 He corresponded with George Macmillan about doing some translation work for his firm – selections from Herodotus and perhaps a play by Euripides. And he involved himself in Macmillan and A. H. Sayce’s plans to establish a Hellenic society for the encouragement of ancient Greek archaeology.62 He inquired about the archaeological studentships that had recently been founded at Athens.63 And he determined to apply for the next open fellowship that was offered at Oxford.64
Oxford remained a significant element in Wilde’s life. He still, it seems, had rooms there. He kept in touch with Pater and continued to use him as a sounding board for his ideas. Once (according to Wilde’s own account), while seated on a bench together ‘watching the students bathing in the river’ and talking of how ‘the enchanting perfume of romance [might] be wedded to the severe beauty of classic form’ to achieve a new ‘synthesis of art’, Pater – overcome by Wilde’s inspired eloquence – slipped from his seat, knelt down and kissed his hand.65 But if Wilde
saw old friends, he also made new ones. He found a kindred spirit, and admiring disciple, in Rennell Rodd, a Balliol undergraduate of poetical sensibilities and Aesthetic leanings. Rodd had started a little poetry magazine, Waifs and Strays, to which Wilde agreed to contribute.66 And Wilde, as he seems often to have done with new friends, took Rodd down to Windsor to see Lord Ronald Gower.67 Cambridge too was on Wilde’s horizon. He made several ‘charming’ visits to the ebullient Oscar Browning at King’s College, though he confessed to Reggie Harding, ‘I wish he was not called Oscar’ (Wilde misled Browning by telling him that he – like his host – had been ‘named after the King of Sweden’).68
In London Wilde and Miles started entertaining together. Apparently reviving Wilde’s Oxford practice, they hosted ‘tea and beauty’ parties, graced though by the celebrated, and often aristocratic, ‘professional beauties’ of Miles’s connection, rather than by the daughters of Oxford dons. These ‘bachelor at homes’ were held in Wilde’s Aesthetically adorned room, and were – according to one youthful visitor – ‘about the most amusing things in their way in all London’.69 The decor created its own sensation: the flowers, the feathers, and the fact that many of the theatrical and literary celebrities who attended had inscribed their names on the white panelling. Not that all the guests were famous. The twenty-one-year-old Laura Troubridge, taken along by her cousin, Charlie Orde, an Oxford friend of Wilde’s, wrote in her diary: ‘Great fun, lots of “intense” young men, such duffers, who amused us awfully.’70
But for most guests the chance of seeing Mrs Langtry was the great draw. Wilde often mentioned her probable attendance when sending out invitations, and he kept up a constant propaganda for her. Likening her to a classical statue, he would tell everyone that she was ‘the loveliest thing that had ever come out of Greece’.71 On overhearing one visitor inquire which of the ladies present was the famous beauty, he remarked dramatically, ‘What an absurd question! If the sun shone I should know it was the sun.’72 The guest, in any case, should have been assisted by the fact that the room was decked with numerous photographs of Langtry.73
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