Another new, and equally combative, literary companion was W. E. Henley, who until the year before had been the editor of Cassell’s Magazine of Art and was now acting as consultant for its rival, the Art Journal. Five years Wilde’s senior, Henley was a striking figure, tall and broad-shouldered, with unkempt red hair and beard. As a result of tuberculosis of the bone his left leg had been amputated below the knee. He walked with a crutch, and had, famously, served Stevenson as the model for Long John Silver in Treasure Island. Veering between rollicking joviality and furious indignation, he was both ‘astoundingly clever’ and astoundingly opinionated. In politics he was a rabid unionist and imperialist, while in art and literature he favoured ‘realism’. It was said of him that he was affected by Pre-Raphaelitism ‘as some people are affected by a cat in the room’.27
Given these prejudices it was unsurprising that, in the past, he had tended to regard Wilde with suspicion. Now, though, he was anxious to meet, and he persuaded a former Cassell’s associate to arrange a dinner. According to legend, Henley attempted to rile Wilde with insults and contradictions throughout the meal, and although at first Wilde turned aside these thrusts, remarking blandly ‘Yes,’ ‘No,’ ‘Is that so?’, he eventually roused himself, and a long, impassioned argument ensued. Their host turned them out of the house in the early hours, still arguing. And when he saw Wilde the next day at the office and asked how matters had ended, Wilde replied, ‘Oh, we finished the argument over a rasher just one hour ago.’28
The incident proved the basis for a sudden – and short-lived – friendship. W. B. Yeats recalled meeting Wilde for the first time at one of the regular ‘Sunday evenings’ that Henley hosted at his home in Chiswick. Wilde had been hugely impressive, talking brilliantly, and – to Yeats’s amazement – in perfectly rounded sentences. It was on that evening that he described Pater’s Renaissance as his ‘golden book’, claiming, ‘I never travel without it; but it is the very flower of decadence; the last trumpet should have sounded the moment it was written.’ To the dullard who asked, ‘Would you not have given us time to read it?’ he replied, ‘Oh no – there would have been plenty of time afterwards – in either world.’ Wilde had also impressed Henley with his account of how he kept the Cassell’s management in its place by never answering their letters: ‘I have known men come to London full of bright prospects and seen them complete wrecks in a few months through a habit of answering letters.’
Afterwards Henley had remarked approvingly of Wilde, ‘No, he is not an aesthete [a term of abuse in Henley’s book]; one soon finds that he is a scholar and a gentleman.’ Wilde would have been pleased at the verdict. He wanted to impress Henley. As he later confessed to Yeats, ‘I had to strain every nerve to equal that man at all.’29
This tension created a stimulating energy to their relationship. The art-journalist C. Lewis Hind recalled one evening of ‘wild, wilful’ talk at Chiswick, when Henley and Wilde had discoursed on Shelley: it had been ‘broadsword against rapier’.30 The tension, however, was always likely to tip out of balance. Another contemporary remembered seeing the two men leaving the theatre in conversation; Wilde said something, and Henley threw his crutch at him.31 Wilde described the basis of literary friendship as ‘mixing the poison bowl’, and the description would prove apt in the case of Henley. Wilde himself, though, was no poisoner. His instincts were all for human sympathy and professional generosity. When Henley’s elderly mother fell ill, he wrote to condole: ‘All poets love their mothers, and as I worship mine I can understand how you feel.’32 And he wrote a very positive – if slightly arch – review of Henley’s Book of Verse, praising ‘the strong humane personality’ revealed in the work.33
Associations such as these served to draw Wilde closer to the heart of the literary establishment. He became a member of the Society of Authors, which had been set up by Robbie Ross’s older brother, Alec. He attended their banquet in recognition of the American authors who were working to achieve international copyright – although the evening proved something of a fiasco as he found himself sitting next to Lady Colin Campbell, with whom he had not been on speaking terms since she had referred to him as ‘that Great White Caterpillar’.34 He had a jollier time as the guest of honour at a bibliophiles’ dinner given by the ‘Sette of Odd Volumes’, where he had delivered ‘a most brilliant speech’ in praise of Buffalo Bill, who had recently brought his Wild West show to London.35 Henley offered to put him up for membership of the Savile Club, the leading literary club of the day. Wilde had thought that his appearing there even for lunch was akin to ‘a poor lion’ rashly intruding ‘into a den of fierce Daniels’, and that membership would be a step too far; so it proved. Despite the backing of Henry James, Edmund Gosse, Rider Haggard, Alec Ross, George Macmillan and some twenty-five others, Wilde’s election was never secured.36
Nevertheless, despite such occasional rebuffs, Wilde was increasingly willing to involve himself in public life and public questions. He had become a figure at meetings, a member of committees. At one gathering to discuss a proposed ‘British Association for the Advancement of Art and Industry’ he good-humouredly denounced Edmund Gosse for quoting Board of Trade statistics: ‘Things,’ Wilde declared, ‘which we do not want to hear about at all.’37 Much to Whistler’s irritation he was also asked to join the committee of the National Art Exhibition that was being established by a group of Chelsea-based artists in opposition to the Royal Academy. Whistler promptly published a letter in the World condemning Wilde’s involvement: ‘What has Oscar in common with Art? except that he dines at our tables and picks from our platters the plums for the pudding he peddles in the provinces. Oscar – the amiable, irresponsible, esurient Oscar – with no more sense of a picture than the fit of a coat, has the courage of the opinions – of others!’38 Wilde replied the following week, ‘Atlas, this is very sad! With our James “vulgarity begins at home”, and should be allowed to stay there.’39
He began to look beyond cultural issues to social and political ones. Although always, nominally, a Liberal voter, Wilde had previously stood aloof from party politics. Beyond espousing a firm belief in Irish Home Rule, a poetical Republicanism and a vague attachment to ‘socialist’ ideals, Wilde had concentrated his political creed into the statement that he was in favour of ‘civilization’ in its struggle against ‘barbarism’.40
By the mid-1880s such splendid isolation was harder to maintain. In 1885, the seventy-five-year-old Gladstone, recently returned to office, ‘converted’ to the cause of Irish Home Rule and Land Reform, aligning himself and the Liberals with the eighty-six MPs of the Irish Parliamentary Party under their charismatic leader, Charles Stewart Parnell. Together with these new allies, Gladstone hoped to carry a Home Rule Bill. But the measure, brought before parliament in June 1886, was defeated when a large section of the Liberal Party rebelled and voted against it. The debacle split the Liberals between the ‘Gladstonians’ and the ‘Unionists’ and sharpened the divisions in British political life. Gladstone called an immediate election – effectively a referendum on the Home Rule question. He was soundly defeated, the Tories and ‘Liberal Unionists’ securing a large majority. Nevertheless the great hope of achieving political devolution for Ireland through the British parliamentary system had been kindled. Both Gladstone and Parnell were optimistic that victory was possible. And many people felt inspired to rally to the cause. Wilde was one of them.
In the summer of 1887 he became a member of the Eighty Club. It was a public proclamation of his political commitment. Founded in 1880 to promote ‘the Liberal cause’, the club was rapidly developing into the core ground for Gladstonian liberalism and a ‘think tank’ for Irish Home Rule policy. In the wake of the 1886 general election the club’s ‘Unionist’ members had been obliged to resign en masse; to replace them some eighty new members were elected at a meeting on 29 June 1887. Wilde was almost certainly part of this intake. He found himself among familiar faces. Others who joined at the same time included George Macmillan, Just
in McCarthy and Lord Houghton; E. T. Cook (who edited the literary pages of the Pall Mall Gazette) and Charles Dilke were already members, and may have proposed Wilde for membership.
Whatever optimism was felt by the Eighty Club membership, it was tempered by concern and anger over the immediate political situation. In August 1887 Arthur Balfour, the Conservative chief secretary of Ireland, introduced his Coercion Act, assuming sweeping powers to ‘restore order’ in the face of widespread rural unrest. Aided by his implacable legal officer, Wilde’s old Trinity contemporary Edward Carson, he secured summary convictions against prominent Home Rule campaigners working in Ireland. The English poet Wilfrid Scawen Blunt and the Irish politician William O’Brien were among those imprisoned.
Wilde deplored such measures, and worked – in his own way – to counter them. Besides attending official Eighty Club events, he also supported such occasions as Justin McCarthy’s lecture at the Southwark Irish Literary Club on the revolutionary ‘Literature of ’48’. He even gave an impromptu address at the event, mentioning that his mother (whose work had been quoted in the lecture) was bringing out a volume on Irish Legends, and that he would ‘present a copy of the work to every Irish club in London’.41 He also began to salt his articles, and the occasional book reviews that he continued to contribute to the Pall Mall Gazette, with Home Rule sentiment and anti-Tory rhetoric. Old friends who espoused the wrong side of the debate were taken to task.
He penned a witty demolition of ‘Mr Mahaffy’s new book’, an overview of ‘Greek Life and Thought’ that drew numerous parallels with the current Irish situation from a strong Unionist point of view – calling it an ‘unworthy’, ‘biased’ and ‘provincial’ attempt ‘to treat the Hellenic world as “Tipperary writ large”… and to finish the battle of Chaeronea on the plains of Mitchelstown [where William O’Brien had been convicted]’.42 When Wilfrid Blunt produced a volume of poems, In Vinculis, based on his Irish prison experiences, Wilde reviewed it enthusiastically, remarking on the ‘admirable effect’ that incarceration had had on his poetry. Literature, he suggested, may not be ‘much indebted to Mr. Balfour for his sophistical Defence of Philosophic Doubt, which is one of the dullest books we know, but it must be admitted that by sending Mr. Blunt to gaol he has converted a clever rhymer into an earnest and deep-thinking poet.’43
All the while Wilde introduced into Woman’s World regular articles on Irish subjects, containing hints of the oppressive conditions of English rule and emphasizing the distinctiveness of Irish culture. Lady Wilde contributed a compendium of ‘Irish Peasant Tales’ to the November 1888 number, and only a few months later Wilde himself devoted his ‘Literary Notes’ to a discussion of Yeats’s ‘charming little book Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry’. Recalling his mother’s earlier strictures, he included a long quotation from Yeats’s book praising Lady Wilde’s own works on the subject. He printed, too, Lady Sandhurst’s ringing call to the pro-Irish Liberal cause, entitled ‘A Woman’s Work in Politics’.44
The specific concerns of Irish Home Rule also drew Wilde into the currents of political radicalism in general, and socialism in particular. As one contributor to Woman’s World put it, the ‘socialistic legislation’ advocated by Gladstonian Liberals over Irish land reform meant that ‘the Irish question is really a branch of socialism’. And this connection was dramatically reinforced in November 1887 when a mass rally in Trafalgar Square, organized by the Irish National League and the Social Democratic Federation to protest against Irish coercion and British unemployment, was brutally broken up by police and armed troops. ‘Bloody Sunday’, as it was soon dubbed, became a defining moment in the narratives of both Irish Home Rule and British socialism. Among those arrested were the Liberal MP Robert Cunninghame-Graham and the radical trade unionist John Burns.
The word ‘socialism’ had long had an attraction for Wilde. He had met it in the writings of William Morris. He had used it at the beginning of the 1880s to try and impress Violet Hunt. During the second half of the decade, however, he began to explore it more thoroughly. At the end of 1885 he took out a subscription to William Morris’s socialist paper, Commonweal.45 He also came to know his near coeval – and fellow Pall Mall Gazette reviewer – George Bernard Shaw. A Dubliner living in London and struggling to make a living with his pen, Shaw was an avowed radical. Together with his sister, Lucy, he attended a few of Lady Wilde’s receptions, and he recalled Wilde’s generous but ill-fated, attempts to be kind to him (‘We put each other out frightfully’.) The lower-middle-class autodidact Shaw insisted on regarding the university-trained Wilde as a ‘Dublin snob’. Yet, despite their differences of temper, outlook, education and background, they developed a certain mutual regard. Each recognised the other as ‘a man of distinction’, and one unfairly judged by the popular estimate. If they did not quite become friends they shared an awkward, but real, admiration.
Shaw, an enthusiastic convert to socialism and a member of the Fabian Society, was always anxious to advance his views. Wilde was present at one small gathering, in the rooms of the Irish novelist Joseph Fitzgerald Molloy, when Shaw held forth at length on his plans for founding a magazine as an organ for his political thought. Wilde listened with interest; although when Shaw declared emphatically that the periodical was to be called ‘Shaw’s Magazine – Shaw! Shaw! Shaw!’ – he did gently subvert the moment with the inquiry (punning on ‘pshaw’), ‘And how would you spell it?’46
Despite this quip, Wilde ‘thought highly’ of Shaw as an original and challenging political thinker; indeed one mutual friend unkindly suggested that Wilde’s whole admiration for socialism derived from the fact that ‘it was odd and Shaw was Irish’. Although this was an exaggeration, the connection with Shaw certainly sharpened Wilde’s interest in the subject. And Shaw, for his part, recognized that such interest was genuine. He was greatly impressed when Wilde – alone of all his literary contacts – signed his 1887 petition seeking clemency for six anarchists condemned to death after a bomb blast at a rally in Chicago.47
Wilde’s growing engagement with social injustice – in his work and his life – was coloured by emotion as much as by thought. Although he hoped to ‘mirror modern life’ and ‘deal with modern problems’ in his fairy stories, the actions of the Happy Prince and the little swallow were perhaps examples more of Christian self-sacrifice than socialist engagement.48 And although intellectually Wilde might espouse the socialist idea that charity degrades and demoralizes the poor by offering a temporary palliative rather than providing a permanent solution, in his own personal dealings he was always generous, if almost invariably quixotic. Edgar Saltus recalled arriving back at Tite Street with Wilde one winter’s evening, and being approached by a poor thinly clad man, shivering against the bitter chill. Saltus gave the fellow a shilling. Wilde ‘with entire simplicity took off his overcoat’ and put it about the man’s shoulders. The action was made more striking by the fact that Wilde – temporarily abandoning his socialist pose – had been holding forth earlier in the evening, declaring, ‘If I were king I would sit in a great hall and paint on green ivory and when my ministers came and told me that the people were starving, I would continue to paint on green ivory and say: “Let them starve.”’ On another occasion, when approached by a beggar who lamented that he had ‘no work’ to do and ‘no bread to eat’, Wilde had replied, ‘Work! Why should you want to work? And bread! Why should you eat bread?’ He had continued solemnly, ‘Now, if you had come to me and said that you had work to do, but you couldn’t dream of working, and that you had bread to eat, but couldn’t think of eating bread – I would have given you half a crown.’ Then, after a pause: ‘As it is, I give you two shillings.’49
Nevertheless Wilde showed his commitment to the socialist cause in many direct ways. Although (unlike Shaw) he was not present at the ‘Bloody Sunday’ riot, he involved himself in its aftermath. He was at Bow Street police court on 14 November when Cunninghame-Graham and Burns were charged with assaulting the police.50 He
attended meetings promoting the various shades of socialist opinion, from moderate ‘gradualism’ to extreme ‘anarchism’. He was seen – albeit an incongruous figure, beautifully dressed and decidedly fat – at the regular talks hosted by the Fabian Society and others at Willis’s Rooms, off St James’s. He was present at a ‘crowded evening meeting in William Morris’s Coach House’ at Hammersmith – his buttonhole ‘a very large dahlia, crimson, beautiful in its amplitude but not’, according to one observer, ‘what one would expect to find on a man’s coat’.51
In his engagement with public and political life, Wilde was supported by Constance. She shared, and encouraged, his interests. She wrote to the papers on matters of dress reform, and became (in 1886) a member of the Rational Dress Society, even editing its journal from April 1888 to July 1889. She overcame her shyness to develop into an impressive platform speaker. She contributed two articles to Woman’s World, both on dress.52 She espoused Home Rule and the Liberal cause, signing up with the Women’s Liberal Association, speaking at their events, and earning a reputation as a ‘pretty little radical’. When Cunninghame-Graham came to trial, it was Constance rather than Oscar who was in the gallery.53
Politics drew the Wildes into the circles of the Liberal elite. They were present, along with Gladstone, at Lady Sandhurst’s party on Portland Place, in aid of the Liberal Association of Marylebone.54 They attended the crowded breakfast receptions hosted by T. P. O’Connor, the editor of the fervently radical Star newspaper. It was at one of these occasions that Wilde, in ‘fairly scintillating’ form, charmed his hostess with a characteristic spark of wit. With T. P. O’Connor talking intently to ‘a radiant blonde’, Wilde asked ‘Mrs T. P.’ if she wasn’t jealous? She denied it, claiming that T. P. didn’t know a pretty woman when he saw one. Harold Frederic (the London correspondent of the New York Times) cut in with, ‘I beg leave to differ; what about yourself?’ Mrs T. P. answered, ‘Oh, I was an accident.’ ‘Rather,’ Wilde corrected, ‘a catastrophe!’55
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