Oscar

by Sturgis, Matthew;

  By contrast the back drawing room, on the same floor, just across the curtained-off landing, was a glowing den of low tones and rich patterning. Adrian Hope described it as having ‘a very distinct Turkish note’. There were no chairs at all – only a low divan running around two sides of the room with ‘queer little Eastern inlaid tables’ ranged about. The dado was painted some dark unspecified tint, the ceiling was ‘gorgeous’, and the floor matting was strewn with oriental rugs. The window (looking onto the ‘slum’ cottages of the inaptly named ‘Paradise Walk’ at the back of Tite Street) was obscured by a wooden lattice ‘copied from a Cairo pattern’. A square wooden pillar, just inside the doorway, was set with plaques of coloured Italian marbles, while around the architrave ran an inscription, done in gilt, red and blue, from Wilde’s ‘Garden of Eros’: ‘Spirit of Beauty! tarry still awhile, / They are not dead, thine ancient votaries, / Some few there are to whom thy radiant smile / Is better than a thousand victories.’ For many this was the most delightful room in the house. Adrian Hope fell in love with it at first sight.

  Others favoured the dining room, which was on the ground floor at the far end of the hallway. It was a symphony in white: ivory white walls; brilliant white woodwork (including a convenient foot-wide shelf running around the whole room); curtains of creamy white ‘African muslin’; a green-and-blue William Morris carpet with white patterning; white painted Chippendale chairs; and an oblong dining table covered with an unbleached linen tablecloth. Colour came from ‘the rare glass and china’, from the napkins and the carefully chosen flowers. In a period of dark-hued dining rooms the effect was startlingly original. And – as with Wilde’s views on dress reform – it claimed to combine the Aesthetic with the hygienic. The prevailing whiteness allowed the room to be kept ‘clean and fresh’, while also providing, Wilde suggested, ‘the only background against which a man looks picturesque in evening dress’.40

  At the top of the house Wilde had his study, two small attic rooms knocked into one, with a little balcony looking down on to the street. It was a cosy book-lined garret, the exposed walls covered with matting, the woodwork painted his favourite vermilion. Lending their associative magic were a mahogany writing table said to have belonged to Carlyle, and a white plaster bust of the Hermes of Olympia.41

  Although Wilde – and the world – may have considered the house a fit setting for the ‘Apostle of Aestheticism’, it was really far finer and more splendid than either his status or his own income warranted. Indeed the expense of completing the work seems to have taxed even Constance’s resources, and they were obliged to borrow a further £500 from her brother Otho.42 Wilde hoped, though, that his new vermilion study might inspire him not merely to more ‘lasting’ but to more remunerative work. It seems that, almost upon arrival at Tite Street, he may have commenced writing a new drama. Certainly at the beginning of February 1885 he sought a meeting with the successful comic dramatist B. C. Stephenson ‘to talk about a play’.43 Nothing, though, came of the project.§

  Living in Chelsea brought the Wildes new neighbours and friends. They were taken up by a wealthy young polymath called Edward Heron-Allen, who, besides interests in science, literature, heraldry, violin making and ‘asparagus culture’, was an enthusiastic chiromancer. He lost no time in reading both Constance and Oscar’s palms. Wilde inscribed his page in Heron-Allen’s hand-reading album with the legend, ‘rien n’est vrai que le Beau’; Constance embellished hers with the lines from Oscar’s ‘Garden of Eros’ that ran round their back drawing room.44

  * Sargent invited Wilde to visit his studio for a sneak preview of his own exhibition painting for that year (the soon-to-be notorious ‘Madame X’), telling him, ‘You will find me still working on my portrait of Mme Gautreau which will go to the Salon on Thursday if it is finished and good. They will tell you I’m out but you must come and knock at the door: toc – toc-toc. You will see my sitter who looks like Phryné [the celebrated ancient Greek courtesan].’

  † As the Pall Mall Gazette itself reported, with a good humour to match Wilde’s own: ‘A lecture on art from one so distinguished and so eccentric as Mr. Oscar Wilde is worth hearing. And above all he is a candid critic. “Your decorations,” he said, “are absurd. There is no system obeyed. One thought, like harmony in music, should pervade the whole. Does it? No. They show no soul. Can you exist without a soul? No soul, no harmony, and no…” “Sunflowers,” suggested some one. “No, a flower is but an incident.”’

  ‡ Not long afterwards, to add more colour and interest, the lower section of the walls were painted ‘a dull green’, and hung with pictures: a full-length portrait of Oscar in his frock coat by Harper Pennington (a wedding present from the artist), and ‘small white framed’ prints and drawings by Whistler, Walter Crane, Mortimer Menpes and others; also the manuscript of Keats’s sonnet ‘On Blue’. The ‘quiet green cushions’ were augmented with pink satin ones.

  § It is possible that a record of Wilde’s play idea is preserved in the twenty-eight draft manuscript pages of ‘The Wife’s Tragedy’ – an unfinished, unpublished and undated work now in the Clark Library. The play concerns the marital difficulties of a young English poet and his wife. Among its epigrams and witticisms are: ‘[Lord Merton has inherited] a lot of blue china… I hope he lives up to it’; and ‘Women are not made to be believed in or disbelieved in – they’re made to be loved.’

  5

  In Black and White

  ‘To the critic the work of art is simply a suggestion for a new work of his own.’

  oscar wilde

  The move into 16 Tite Street might also have been expected to draw Wilde closer to Whistler, but it had the opposite effect. Always jealous of his own position and prestige, Whistler was becoming irritated by Wilde’s continuing fame, by his gradually acknowledged role as an arbiter in matters of taste, and by the money he was earning on the lecture circuit. He convinced himself that Wilde’s success derived entirely from ideas picked up in ‘the Master’s’ studio. As early as March 1884 Alan Cole noted in his diary that Whistler was ‘strong on Oscar Wilde’s notions on Art, which he had derived from him (Jimmy)’.1 In his mind Whistler kept returning to the help he had given in preparing Wilde for his address to the Royal Academy students.2 Wilde’s new lecture on ‘The Value of Art in Modern Life’ borrowed heavily from that talk. And despite – or, perhaps, because of – its extended paean in praise of Whistler it became a particular bugbear. Whistler developed a hatred of it that verged on paranoia.3

  Although there was no direct confrontation, Wilde cannot have been unaware of his friend’s simmering resentment. At one dinner, Whistler steered the conversation to Wilde’s lecturing: ‘Now, Oscar,’ he demanded, ‘tell us what you said to them?’ Wilde was obliged to repeat all his points in turn; at each phrase Whistler rose and made a solemn bow ‘with his hand across his breast, in mock acceptance of his guests’ applause’.4 To the generous spirited Wilde, with his magpie instincts and broad understanding of intellectual history, such petty point scoring must have seemed a complete irrelevance. Certainly he refused to take offence. He retained his affection for Whistler as a man, and his admiration for him as an artist.

  Whistler’s growing animus, however, found a further outlet early in 1885. Anxious to assert his authority and reclaim his own Aesthetic theories, he had determined to give a lecture himself. Enlisting the support of Archibald Forbes, he even persuaded D’Oyly Carte to promote the venture: a single London appearance at Prince’s Hall on 20 February, at the improbable hour of ten o’clock in the evening – an hour that allowed the fashionable audience to dine beforehand.

  Whistler had laboured long on his text. The talk was a sparkling declaration of his artistic creed, a creed almost identical to the one espoused by Wilde in his recent lectures: that art was free from all moral and social obligations, that it was ‘occupied with [its] own perfection only’, and that such perfection could be achieved, not by direct imitation from nature, but only by inspired selection a
nd arrangement. Not a few of the phrase echoed Wilde’s dicta. ‘Nature,’ Whistler declared, ‘contains the elements, in colour and form, of all pictures, as the keyboard contains the notes of all music. But the artist is born to pick and choose, and group with science, these elements, that the result may be beautiful… To say to the painter, that Nature is to be taken as she is, is to say to the player, that he may sit on the piano.’ The same metaphor – albeit without the closing joke – was employed by Wilde in his talks.

  Among the several objects of Whistler’s contempt, the principal ones may have been Ruskin and Harry Quilter – ‘the Sage of the Universities’ and ‘the Art Critic’– but Wilde was not ignored. In discussing the contemporary enthusiasm for trying to educate the public about art (a matter on which they should have ‘nothing to say’), Whistler lamented the rise of the self-appointed expert: ‘the Dilettante stalks abroad! – The Amateur is loosed – the voice of the Aesthete is heard in the land – and catastrophe is upon us!’ And if all art experts were decried, special ridicule was reserved for the dress reformer: ‘Costume is not dress – and the wearers of wardrobes may not be doctors of “taste”! – For by what authority shall these be pretty masters! – Look well, and nothing have they invented! – nothing put together for comeliness’ sake… Haphazard from their shoulders hang the garments of the Hawker – combining in their person, the motely of many manners, with the medley of the mummers’ closet.’

  Wilde was, of course, in the audience (conspicuous in the sixth row).5 He was not there, however, simply to listen. He had secured a commission to review the lecture from his friends at the Pall Mall Gazette. It was a task that he carried out with aplomb, turning the occasion deftly to his own account, without appearing to rise to Whistler’s bait. Those of Whistler’s friends who had supposed that Wilde had been riled by the lecture were disabused.6

  Adopting an air of easy equality, he was gracious in his praises. He hailed the ‘really marvellous eloquence’ of the lecture – even if he promptly capped Whistler’s own rather strained attempts at alliteration by describing the artist, memorably, as ‘a miniature Mephistopheles, mocking the majority’. The opening note of genial approval sanctioned a succession of lightly phrased – and apt – caveats. Wilde pointed up the irony of Whistler lecturing an art-loving audience about how they did not, could not and should not know anything about art. For his own part, he cheerfully acknowledged that he was indeed a ‘dress reformer’ – ‘(O mea culpa!)’ – but asserted the importance of the role. ‘Of course,’ he remarked, ‘with regard to the value of beautiful surroundings I differ entirely from Mr. Whistler.’ And just because true artists could ‘find beauty in ugliness, le beau dans l’horrible’, that was no excuse for condemning ‘charming people’ to live surrounded by the hideousness of ‘magenta ottomans and Albert blue curtains’. He disputed too Whistler’s ‘dictum that only a painter is a judge of painting’ – contending, instead, that ‘only an artist is a judge of art’ – and that all the arts were one – ‘poem, picture, and Parthenon, sonnet and statue – all are in their essence the same, and he who knows one knows all’. He went on to claim that ‘the poet’ was ‘the supreme artist, for he is master of colour and form, and the real musician besides, and is lord over all life, and all arts; and so to the poet beyond all others are these mysteries known, to Edgar Allan Poe and to Baudelaire, not to Benjamin West and Paul Delaroche [two unfashionable mid-nineteenth-century history painters]’.

  The lecture, nevertheless, he declared ‘a masterpiece’ – to be remembered not only for its wit:

  But for the pure and perfect beauty of many of its passages – passages delivered with an earnestness which seemed to amaze those who had looked on Mr. Whistler as a master of persiflage merely, and had not known him as we do, as a master of painting also. For that he is indeed one of the very greatest masters of painting is my opinion. And I may add that in this opinion Mr. Whistler himself entirely concurs.

  Wilde’s article appeared prominently – under his name – on the front page of the Pall Mall Gazette the afternoon following the lecture. Despite its arch tone it was, in the general press reaction to the talk, among the more generous responses. The ‘smartly-written critique’ was soon being commented upon, and quoted from, in other papers. In such articles the reviewer was given equal weight with the reviewed; indeed one piece appeared under the headline ‘Mr. Wilde and Mr. Whistler’.7

  Although ‘Mr. Wilde’ must have been delighted by the attention – and by the ordering of their names – ‘Mr. Whistler’ was not. He responded to Wilde’s review with the inevitable letter in the World: ‘I have read your exquisite article in the Pall Mall. Nothing is more delicate, in the flattery of “the Poet” to “the Painter”, than the naiveté of “the Poet”, in the choice of his Painters – Benjamin West and Paul Delaroche! You have pointed out that “the Painter’s” mission is to find “le beau dans l’horrible”, and have left to “the Poet” the discovery of “l’horrible” dans “le beau”!’

  Wilde deftly turned away the thrust. ‘Dear Butterfly,’ he replied, ‘By the aid of a biographical dictionary I made the discovery that there were once two painters, called Benjamin West and Paul Delaroche, who rashly lectured upon Art. As of their works nothing at all remains, I concluded that they explained themselves away. Be warned in time, James; and remain, as I do, incomprehensible: to be great is to be misunderstood. Tout à vous, Oscar.’ This letter was published alongside Whistler’s in the World; the correspondence also appeared in the Pall Mall Gazette.8 In their previous exchanges, Whistler’s egotism had always secured him a victory of sorts, and certainly the final word. But on this occasion he was bested.

  Keeping the game going, the Pall Mall Gazette commissioned a second signed article from Wilde: ‘The Relation of Dress to Art: A Note in Black and White on Mr. Whistler’s Lecture.’ It allowed Wilde – amid further praise for Whistler as an orator and an artist – to contrast the passionless ‘wisdom’ of Whistler’s perfectly ‘true’ claim that art ‘can never have any other aim but own perfection’ with the ‘noble unwisdom’ of his own campaign for dress reform, which sought to make art ‘the natural and national inheritance of all’. Indeed beauty in dress, Wilde suggested, might benefit not only society, but also art:

  For Art is not to be taught in the Academies. It is what one looks at, not what one listens to, that makes the artist. The real schools should be the streets. There is not, for instance, a single delicate line, or delightful proportion, in the dress of the Greeks, which is not echoed exquisitely in their architecture. A nation arrayed in stove-pipe hats, and dress improvers, might have built the Pantechnicon [furniture bazaar], possibly, but the Parthenon, never.

  If Whistler had hoped to obliterate Wilde with his ‘Ten O’Clock’, or precipitate a definite break with him, he failed on both counts. Wilde emerged from the confrontation with his reputation as an Aesthetic reformer and a wit enhanced. Nevertheless, though he maintained a tone of generous good humour in his published comments, and continued to encounter Whistler socially (Chelsea – and, indeed, London – were too small for him not to), it was clear that the warm camaraderie of previous years was irretrievably lost. This cooling of relations was given an outward form when, shortly after the Wildes moved into their new home, Whistler moved out of Tite Street, relocating his studio to the far end of the Fulham Road, and his home to The Vale, a picturesque cul-de-sac on the far side of the King’s Road.

  The contretemps precipitated another, rather happier, alteration in Wilde’s circumstances: it opened up to him the world of journalism – or at least the world of reviewing. His several well-received contributions to the Pall Mall Gazette encouraged Milner to offer him a role as a regular book reviewer for the paper, starting in March.9 The opportunity was welcome. The charms of lecturing had been waning for some time. The ceaseless travel, the endless repetition, the stress of the occasional mix-up, fluctuating audiences, uncertain returns, absence from London and from Constance: th
ey all took their toll on Wilde’s spirit. ‘I am getting sick of the whole thing,’ he had confessed to Appleton.10 And though he held back from making an immediate break, he greatly reduced his commitments during the rest of the year. His role as the itinerant prophet of Aestheticism was gradually coming to an end.11*

  To be reviewing for a London paper was, if not a significant professional advance, at least both a change and a relief. The Pall Mall Gazette was, moreover, an appropriate berth. One of a new breed of ‘Clubland’ papers (costing, at 1d, twice as much as ‘popular’ titles such as the Evening Standard, the Echo and the Star), it had established a reputation, under the editorship of W. T. Stead, as ‘the best evening paper London ever had’: entertaining, liberal and courageous.12 Although the paper’s book reviews were unsigned, and only modestly rewarded (2 guineas per 1,000 words was the paper’s usual rate), they could be accomplished from the comfort of the ‘vermilion garret’ at Tite Street, and accomplished quickly. Wilde’s gift for speed-reading stood in his favour, even before he evolved the theory that it was both harmful and unnecessary for a reviewer to read the entire book: ‘To know the vintage and quality of a wine one need not drink the whole cask. It must be perfectly easy in half an hour to say whether a book is worth anything or worth nothing. Ten minutes are really sufficient, if one has an instinct for form.’13 He doubtless hoped that the new regime would allow him scope to pursue his own literary projects.

  Wilde, initially, expected that he would review books about art, and one of his first acts was to ask Milner if he could be sent Comyns Carr’s recently published Papers on Art. He received instead a cookery book called Dinners and Dishes. It was an early lesson in the promiscuous demands of book reviewing. Wilde, though, seems to have enjoyed the variety – and even the anonymity. Both were liberating. Certainly there is a happy holiday air about most of his Pall Mall Gazette reviews.14 Over the next five years he contributed sprightly critiques of epic poems, Irish legends, etiquette manuals, verse anthologies, handbooks on oil painting, historical biographies, collected letters, popular novels and more besides. The pieces were usually generous and always droll – ideas were sported with and phrases turned.