Although Constance had speedily come to accept Whistler’s great importance, Wilde did jokingly describe her to Waldo Story as ‘quite perfect except that she does not think Jimmy the only painter that ever really existed: she would like to bring Titian or somebody in by the back door’. He went on: ‘She knows I am the greatest poet, so in literature she is all right: and I have explained to her that you are the greatest sculptor: art instruction cannot go further.’29All who saw Wilde were struck by his happiness and excitement. Celebrating Boxing Day with the Sickerts, he inadvertently left two gold sovereigns behind on his chair. Mrs Sickert wrote, ‘I feel inclined to scold you for being so careless but you are too happy to mind even a severe lecture so I will not waste one.’30
Wilde was due to restart his own lecturing in the new year with a two-and-a-half-week tour of Ireland. He left Constance with a pet marmoset to keep her company in his absence; it was – as a further homage to Whistler – christened ‘Jimmy’.§ Alas, he barely lasted a week: ‘I am forlorn and miserable,’ Constance wrote to Wilde on 4 January. ‘Is it my fault that everything you give me has an untimely end? I don’t think he suffered much as he looks so pretty.’31 Wilde, though, remained fixed on the prettiness of his beloved. Towards the end of January 1884 he wrote to Lillie Langtry, who was back in America, to tell her – after a certain amount of tactful praise for her latest dramatic triumph – that he was ‘to marry a grave, slight, violet-eyed little Artemis, with great coils of heavy brown hair which make her flower-like head droop like a flower, and wonderful ivory hands which draw music from the piano so sweet that the birds stop singing to listen to her’. Langtry was already aware of the attachment, but happy to hear it confirmed.32
With Wilde lecturing across the British Isles almost without a break from the second half of January to the end of March, the chances for seeing the violet-eyed Artemis were few. He was obliged to console himself with the beauties of nature. In February he had a series of dates in the Lake District and its environs (lecturing at Carlisle, Workington, Cockermouth, Maryport and Ulverston). It was a landscape he knew from poetry, and also from the descriptions of Ruskin, who lived at Coniston. Between engagements Wilde visited Keswick, and, after being shown over the art school there, was taken by the principal for a walk along the banks of Derwentwater.
The local newspaper reported his enthusiastic response: ‘This,’ said he, ‘is lovely’. He was delighted to spot Lodore, the gushing cataract about which Robert Southey had written his delightful onomatopoeic poem. The effect of the atmosphere was, he considered, ‘just right for seeing a picture of this sort. The lake is just large enough for beauty. In America the lakes are like seas, where you lose sight of land, and there are cruel storms which wreck vessels.’ He declared that ‘open footpaths should exist through all beautiful places everywhere, and that it was a mistake to think the public were ruthless destroyers of property when admitted to private grounds. He inquired very closely into the subject of a railway being injurious to the effect of beautiful scenery, and said, without giving a direct opinion on the matter, “It must be a pleasant thing to look out of a first-class saloon carriage and see the beauties as you pass,” and thought they would be better enjoyed when perfectly at one’s ease.’33
Wilde’s unceasing round of lectures did keep his name before the public. In the provinces at least he remained ‘The Apostle of Aestheticism’. And his ‘mission’ – as he liked to call it – was not without effect. The design ideas of Aestheticism were gradually beginning to take hold and spread. After his lecture in Gainsborough, it was recalled, ‘much Victorian furniture went out the back door’. He inspired some of the residents to become ‘intrigued’ by Liberty furniture and to start buying it for their homes.34 The paint manufacturer Theodore Mander and his wife, having attended Wilde’s Wolverhampton talk on ‘The House Beautiful’, began to transform his own house, Wightwick Manor, into an Aesthetic showcase of Morris fabrics and Arts and Crafts design.
In London, though, Wilde was coming to be regarded essentially as a society figure: an amusing ‘sayer of smart things’. Although it was allowed that he was distinct, interesting and ‘essentially modern’, his approaching marriage and new dandified look seemed to suggest that he had given up the extravagances of his youth ‘and accepted life’. This, at least, was the verdict when he appeared, that May, elegantly caricatured by ‘Ape’ in Vanity Fair’s prestigious ‘Men of the Day’ series.35 Besides a mention of his ‘somewhat startling’ 1881 volume of poems – and a fleeting allusion to his having ‘produced a play’ – the short accompanying article did little to suggest that Wilde was actually a writer.
And, indeed, against the background of constant provincial lecturing, it was a struggle to keep sight of his literary ambitions. He managed to produce one little love poem, which was published in the brochure for a charity event held at the Royal Albert Hall.36 And he continued his search for someone to produce The Duchess of Padua – even drawing a positive, if self-deprecatory, response from the actress Ada Cavendish.37 Her other commitments, however, and her uncertain health, meant that the plan could not be carried forward at once. Wilde himself received an interesting inquiry, from the young actor-manager Courtenay Thorpe, asking if he might provide a ‘strong Play… modern dress – small cast’, suitable for the coming summer season.38 The notion of writing a modern-dress play had a definite appeal. Wilde had confided to a friend in New York that he would ‘like to write a comedy’, but ‘did not think any manager would ever produce it’.39 Here, it seemed, was a manager who might be interested in such a piece. But the pressures of Wilde’s schedule left too little time for serious composition.
Wilde’s few moments of leisure, moreover, were taken up with plans for the wedding. The date slipped back from April to the end of May. It was not to be rushed. The occasion was to be an Aesthetic event. Wilde, in his lectures on ‘The House Beautiful’, touched upon the subject of women’s dress, urging ‘more colour and brightness’, greater simplicity of line, a ban on corsets and artificial flowers, and the absence of ‘all useless and encumbering bows, flounces, knots, and other such meaningless things’. He cited as examples to follow: ‘ancient Greek drapery’, and the dresses of Renaissance Venice, Carolian England, or ‘the period of Gainsborough’.40 Anxious to see these ideals embodied, he involved himself in the design of Constance’s wedding dress, and also the dresses for the six bridesmaids. It was a happy collaboration, as Constance had a great interest in fashion, and an able accomplice in her dressmaker, Adeline Nettleship, wife of the painter John Nettleship.41
The practicalities of their future married life had also to be addressed. Where were they to live? Wilde wanted to return to Chelsea, and by the end of March Constance could tell friends, ‘We have been looking at a house in Tite Street, which I think we are likely to take.’ Number 16 was part of new terraced development, just up from where Whistler had his studio (and Frank Miles still had his house.) In due course, having paid a premium, they took a twenty-one-year lease on the property.42
Wilde asked Whistler to devise a decorative scheme for the new house, but was told, ‘No, Oscar, you have been lecturing to us about the House Beautiful; now is our chance to show us one.’43 Wilde certainly had ideas of his own, but he did enlist the assistance of Godwin to extend them and put them into practice. They evolved elaborate plans for built-in furniture, rare fabrics and interesting finishes. It soon became clear that more ready money would be needed. In the weeks before the wedding Wilde – rather than reducing his debts – was making arrangements to borrow £1,000 from Constance’s trust fund, to be repaid with interest in due course.44 It was probably over this transaction that Wilde told the Lloyd family solicitor, Mr Hargrove, that he was not sure when he could repay the amount, ‘but I could write you a sonnet, if you think that that would be of any help’.45
The wedding took place on the afternoon of Thursday 29 May at St James’s Church, Sussex Gardens, not far from Lancaster Gate.46 The time and place
had been kept out of the press to avoid the possibility of crowds gathering. Invited guests received special tickets. Horatio Lloyd was too ill to attend. ‘There is only this much to be recorded about’ the wedding ceremony, reported the World with deliberate understatement: ‘That the bride, accompanied by six pretty bridesmaids, looked charming, that Oscar bore himself with calm dignity; and that all most intimately concerned in the affair seemed thoroughly pleased. A happy little group of intimes saw them off at Charing Cross.’
This account failed to mention – as others did not – the arrival of a telegram from Whistler: ‘Fear I may not be able to reach you in time for the ceremony. Don’t wait.’47 It did not list the presence of Burne-Jones and his family, George Lewis and his wife, or Mrs Bernard Beere, in the crowd of guests, nor the fifty or so local parishioners who insisted on being admitted to the event. The World gave no details of the various dresses on view: the bride’s elegantly simple satin robe – of a pale ‘cowslip tint’– with its high ruff and puffed ‘Venetian’ sleeves; the two youngest bridesmaids in ‘somewhat startling but aesthetic costumes of ripe gooseberry colour with yellow sashes’ – ‘after Joshua Reynolds’; the four older girls in ‘faint red silk skirts over dresses of pale blue flowered mousseline de laine’. It did not describe the fine silver girdle – ‘gift of the bridegroom’ – around Constance’s waist, nor the ingenious linked wedding ring that was placed on her finger. It was silent on the various allusions to classical antiquity: the saffron-coloured veil (such as ‘Greek maidens wore on their wedding day’) arranged over a wreath of ‘highly classical’ myrtle (‘a more poetical’ adornment than the conventional orange blossom). It said nothing about Lady Wilde looking splendid in grey, or Oscar appearing ‘in the ordinary and commonplace frock coat of the period’. It ignored Willie’s role as best man and left unrecorded Wilde’s plaintive aside to Margaret Burne-Jones: ‘Miss Margaret, the clergyman was so dreadfully ugly that I have grave doubts whether the marriage is valid.’48 They were doubts he intended to overcome.
* The audience, initially, was not sympathetic. His opening remark, ‘Let there be nothing in your houses which was not a joy to the man who made it’, was received with ‘ironical laughter’. He at once embarked on a eulogy of Ireland, gradually winning over the crowd. And it was with tearful enthusiasm that they greeted his line, ‘When the heart of a nation is broken, it is broken with music.’
† This £300 repayment had probably come, not from the proceeds of lecturing, but from the sale of the fishing lodge at Illaunroe. Wilde had received an offer for this amount on 10 December 1883, and completed the sale in the new year.
‡ At the same period the papers were also reporting – rather less reliably – that Wilde was going to be touring the provinces in a play he had just completed; and that he was about to bring out a new book of poems, in which he had ‘studied more what he calls the “conventionalities” of English morality than in the old one’.
§ According to not entirely reliable press reports, Whistler repaid the compliment by naming a kitten that he had been given ‘Oscar’. He was surprised, however, when ‘Oscar’ subsequently had kittens.
4
New Relations
‘It is not easy to exhaust the message of Paris.’
oscar wilde
The honeymoon began in Paris. It was a social and cultural whirl of dinners and lunches (attended and given), play going, exhibition visiting, reading and fun. Wilde was delighted to introduce his bride to Bourget and Sargent, his companions of the previous year; and also to the young Irish-American sculptor John Donoghue, whose work Wilde had praised in Chicago and who was exhibiting in the Salon that summer (Constance was impressed by his ‘Irish blue eyes’).* All who saw them together recognized that Wilde was ‘ecstatically in love’ with his bride.1 When Sherard called on them at the Hôtel Wagram on the rue de Rivoli Wilde took him off, but paused almost immediately at a market stall to buy some flowers to send back to Constance, together with a note of ‘impassioned adoration’. He seemed eager to discourse on the joys of matrimony, though Sherard (uncharacteristically) interrupted his opening – ‘It’s wonderful when a young virgin…’ – and turned the talk to less intimate matters. Sherard, indeed, became so comically irritated by Wilde’s superabundant happiness that he claimed – following an evening spent together with the joyful newlyweds – that he wanted to draw the blade from his swordstick and run it through his friend. Constance laughingly confiscated the stick, to prevent the tragedy.2
To a journalist from the Morning News who presented himself at the Hôtel Wagram, Wilde declared himself ‘too happy to be interviewed’ – though he then proceeded to give his views about novel reading (‘I never read from the beginning… It is the only way to stimulate the curiosity that books, with their regular openings, always fail to rouse’), about dropping friends (‘I would make it a positive satisfaction instead of a regret. Why should we not joyfully admit that there are some people we do not want to see again? It is not ingratitude, it is not indifference. They have simply given us all they have to give’), and about Sarah Bernhardt’s Lady Macbeth (‘There is nothing like it on our stage, and it is her finest creation. I say her creation deliberately, because to my mind it is utterly impertinent to talk of Shakespeare’s Macbeth… Shakespeare is only one of the parties. The second is the artist through whose mind it passes. When the two together combine to give me an acceptable hero, that is all I ask’).3
The wonders of married life outstripped those of Niagara Falls and the Atlantic Ocean: Wilde, as he wrote to a friend, was ‘not disappointed’. His letter – reported in the press as ‘thoroughly characteristic’– went on to say that he felt ‘confident of his ability to sustain its labours and anxieties, and [saw] an opportunity in his new relation, of realizing a poetical conception which he has long entertained. He says that Lord Beaconsfield taught the peers of England a new style of oratory, and that he intends to set an example of the pervading influence of art on matrimony.’4
Constance was prepared to enter into this vision, certainly if it meant wearing nice frocks. Some voices in the press might snipe that she was merely ‘a lay figure on whom Oscar may exhibit practical illustrations of his grotesque ideas of the beautiful and appropriate in feminine attire’. But she was delighted to tell her brother that her newest dress was creating a ‘sensation’ in Paris.5 The Lady’s Pictorial noted that the French ladies, despite their conventional tastes, were impressed by the ‘picturesque becomingness’ of Constance’s outfits. And picturesque they were: ‘Mrs Oscar Wilde, in her large white plumed hats, in her long dust cloaks of creamy alpaca richly trimmed with ruches of coffee coloured lace, in her fresh and somewhat quaintly-made gowns of white muslin, usually relieved by touches of golden ribbon, or with yellow floss silk embroideries, is declared “charmante” and to be dressed with absolute good taste.’6
Amid the sun-filled pleasures of the honeymoon, Wilde continued his studies, begun the previous year, in the literature of French decadence. There was only one book to read: all Paris was talking of it. J.-K. Huysmans’ À Rebours – published just a fortnight beforehand – had, in its author’s words, fallen ‘like a meteorite into the literary fairground, provoking anger and stupefaction’ among the press, and awed wonder among the literary elect. It appeared as the very breviary of decadence: the strange tale of Duc Jean des Esseintes, a neurotic aristocrat, who, in flight from the materialism of the age, was devoting himself to a life of ultra-Aesthetic Paterian sensation-seeking in defiance of all conventional codes and moralities.
Grown weary of the obvious forms of hedonistic indulgence, he retreated to his country estate, and into the ever more refined realms of art and artificiality, memory and dream.7 In a progression of ornately wrought chapters Huysmans delineated his protagonist’s collection of poisonous plants and his store of hallucinatory perfumes, his fascination with late Latin prose, his delight in the paintings of Gustave Moreau and the poetry of Baudelaire, his love of the mus
ic of Wagner and the philosophy of Schopenhauer, while also mentioning his jewel-encrusted tortoise (an hommage to Robert de Montesquiou’s fabled pet). The catalogue of des Esseintes’ past excesses included a funereal banquet at which both the food and decor were black, and the guests were waited upon by naked ‘negresses’ in silver stockings. Among his past lovers were a strapping American trapeze artist, a lady ventriloquist (who would recite the dialogue between the Sphinx and Chimera from Flaubert’s Temptation of St Antony as part of their foreplay) and – in a final abandonment of the female sex – a disconcerting young man, with a mincing walk, who picked him up in the street.
Wilde gave a richly coloured evocation of the book’s ‘poisonous’ power: ‘It seemed to [the reader] that in exquisite raiment, and to the delicate sound of flutes, the sins of the world were passing in dumb show before him. Things that he had dimly dreamed of were suddenly made real to him. Things of which he had never dreamed were gradually revealed.’ To the reporter from the Morning News he remarked – rather more prosaically – that À Rebours was ‘one of the best’ books he had ever seen.8 Although des Esseintes’ project was doomed to ultimate failure, the details of his attempt were relayed with such vividness as to seem almost convincing. Certainly Wilde was tempted to believe. At the very moment that he was embracing the happy conventions of married life, he found himself beguiled by an image of defiance – against convention, against nature, against morality, against the grain. But the poison of the book was slow-working. The honeymoon was still to be enjoyed. Paris was followed by a ‘delightful week’ at Dieppe.
Oscar Page 41
