Less poetic but more emphatically sexual was his relationship with the twenty-year-old Fred Althaus, which began towards the end of 1888. The pace of Wilde’s clandestine affairs was quickening. The Greeks – according to J. A. Symonds – had counted homosexual desire as ‘a mania’, both ‘more exciting’ and ‘more absorbent of the whole nature’ than the love of women, and certainly Wilde was finding it so.31 Althaus was the son of the distinguished German professor at University College London. A small cache of surviving letters from him to Wilde charts the course of their brief affair.32 Wilde – it seems – swept the impressionable young man up, taking an interest in him, giving him concert tickets, exerting his charm. ‘I hardly know a greater pleasure than being in your society,’ Fred told him; ‘and I am very grateful to you for the kindly interest you seem to take in me.’33 They would meet at the receptions given by Ray Lankester, the eccentric, art-loving professor of zoology at University College, or else at the newly established Lyric Club, on Coventry Street, to which they both belonged. Althaus, conscious of his good looks, sent Wilde his photograph, ‘an enlarged one of the one taken in flannels with my German friend – but he of course is not in it’.34
Although Althaus had a job in the City, his interest seems to have been the theatre, or at least dressing up. He was described as ‘looking splendid’ – together with Harry Melvill – in some ‘Tableaux Vivants’ staged for charity by Mrs Bancroft; his performance in Jim the Penman, with the St Swithin’s Amateur Dramatics Club, however, was rated only ‘fairly good’.35 He and Wilde were soon arranging assignations and meetings out of town. ‘I have heard from Barnes [where the Lyric Club had an annexe] that I can have a room there for 2 nights or more,’ Althaus reported; he hoped ‘very much’ that Wilde would ‘run down some time or other’. Over the holidays he suggested that they could ‘perhaps go away together’ for a few days.36 If he was both vain and demanding, that seems to have been part of the attraction. He told Wilde of his hope that they could spend some summer days at the seaside, ‘in heavenly sunlight in which I adore basking thinking that it was perhaps generous enough to lend some of its beauty to its admirers’.37
As Wilde juggled the different elements of his double life, his work seemed to offer a commentary. Certainly the two projects on which he was engaged during the latter part of 1888 were both concerned, in their different ways, with deception. One was an unconventional biographical essay on the early nineteenth-century artist, critic and dandy Thomas Griffiths Wainewright (the friend of Charles Lamb and William Blake) who had forged bank drafts and murdered relations to pay his debts and support his lifestyle.
Wilde’s essay – a brilliant jeu d’esprit – cast Wainewright as a decadent avant le lettre: ‘Like Baudelaire he was extremely fond of cats’; he shared ‘with Gautier’ (and Swinburne) a fascination for ‘that “sweet marble monster”’ – the classical statue of the twin-sexed ‘Hermaphrodite’ in the Louvre; and his writings – touching on the Mona Lisa, the Italian Renaissance, the early French poets and the classical romance of Cupid and Psyche – seemed to anticipate the works of Walter Pater. He had, moreover, ‘that curious love of green, which in individuals is always the sign of a subtle artistic temperament, and in nations is said to denote a laxity, if not decadence of morals’. Aside from the legend that Baudelaire had once claimed to have green hair, this supposed association between the colour and ‘decadence’ seems to have been a cheerful invention of Wilde’s.38
Wainewright’s varied careers – artistic, social and criminal – were then sketched from a determinedly Aesthetic point of view. This game had, of course, been played before, most memorably by Thomas De Quincey in his 1827 essay, ‘On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts’, but Wilde brought his own brio to proceedings, blithely recording (among other atrocities) how, when a friend reproached Wainewright with the murder of his sister-in-law, ‘he shrugged his shoulders and said, “Yes; it was a dreadful thing to do, but she had very thick ankles.”’ Wilde went on:
It may be partly admitted that, if we set aside [Wainewright’s] achievement in the sphere of poison, what he has actually left to us hardly justifies his reputation. But then it is only the Philistine who seeks to estimate a personality by the vulgar test of production. This young dandy sought to be somebody, rather than to do something. He recognized that life itself is an art, and has its modes of style no less than the arts that seek to express it.
Wilde seems to have fixed upon Wainewright as a subject, having abandoned his plans for writing on that other artist-forger, Chatterton.39 Wainewright’s story had become part of Wilde’s repertoire of spoken tales; a London gossip columnist reported how, at ‘a social literary gathering’ towards the end of 1888, ‘Oscar Wilde gave such an interesting account’ of the poisoner ‘that some listeners lost their last train’. On that occasion Wilde was ‘urged to put his story on paper’ – and it is likely that he was already at work on his written essay, using the spoken performance to try out his ideas and test his effects. The article, entitled ‘Pen, Pencil and Poison’ (a phrase borrowed, with acknowledgement, from Swinburne), was finished by the end of the year, and accepted by Frank Harris for the Fortnightly Review.40
In tandem with this essay, Wilde was also composing a brilliantly playful ‘Dialogue’ on the nature of art for the Nineteenth Century. He called the piece ‘The Decay of Lying’. The ‘idea, title, treatment, mode, everything,’ Wilde later recalled, was ‘struck out’ over a delightful dinner with Robbie Ross in a modest Soho restaurant.41 Wilde had been wanting to write an overview of contemporary culture from an Aesthetic point of view for some time, but had perhaps been struggling to find the right form. His dinner with Ross suggested a solution, and suddenly brought his ideas into a new focus.42
A modern Socratic ‘dialogue’ – modelled on the example of Plato – would allow him to explore his ideas without having to come to anything so limiting as a conclusion, or to maintain anything so dull as consistency. Thought would take flight in conversation, winged with paradox, epigram, overstatement, humour and ambiguity. Talk – his own preferred mode of expression – could be honed and refined to become literature. And the whole would reflect, more closely than anything he had previously attempted, his own personality and his own voice. The result was a tour de force: he was able to achieve with the greatest success yet his vision of art as self-expression.43
Wilde created two cultured exquisites, calling them (like his sons) ‘Cyril’ and ‘Vivian’; and he set them in ‘the Library of a country house in Nottinghamshire’, another thinly veiled allusion to his having been at Clumber.44 Vivian is working on a paper – to be called ‘The Decay of Lying: A Protest’ – for the Retrospective Review, house journal of his club ‘The Tired Hedonists’ (‘we are supposed to wear faded roses in our button-holes when we meet, and to have a sort of cult of Domitian’.) He reads extracts from this essay to the sometimes sceptical and dismissive Cyril. Vivian’s article is concerned with the two great cultural debates of the day – the relationships between ‘Art and Nature’, and between ‘Realism and Romance’. And it adopts the most extreme views possible, extending the ideas of Baudelaire and Gautier, of Pater and Whistler, and of Huysmans’ des Esseintes, to their very limits.45
Vivian, in his ‘new Aesthetics’, sets art entirely above both nature and life: ‘All bad Art comes from returning to Life and Nature, and elevating them into ideals.’ Advancing the claims of the imagination and ‘romance’ above the tedious ‘realism’ of facts, he declares that ‘lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art’. He insists upon the absolute autonomy – and uselessness – of art: ‘Art never expresses anything but itself.’ It is really only concerned with it own perfection. But he does admit also art’s power, claiming that it is artists – through their personal vision and style – who fashion our understanding of the world. ‘No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.’ What we think of as the Middl
e Ages is the invention of medieval artists. The whole of Japan is the creation of Hokusai and his fellow ‘native painters’. ‘Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life.’ Wilde had been rehearsing these ideas over the previous months, in his conversation, his book reviews and his notes. Now he brought them all together with a scintillating energy.
He refined and re-used many of his critical aperçus: ‘There is such a thing as robbing a story of its reality by trying to make it too true, and [Mr Robert Louis Stevenson’s] The Black Arrow is so inartistic as not to contain a single anachronism to boast of, while the transformation of Dr. Jekyll reads dangerously like an experiment out of the Lancet.’ ‘Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty, and wastes upon mean motives and imperceptible “points of view” his neat literary style, his felicitous phrases, his swift and caustic satire.’ ‘M. Zola… is determined to show that, if he has not got genius, he can at least be dull. And how well he succeeds!’ ‘Ah! Meredith! Who can define him? His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning. As a writer he has mastered everything except language: as a novelist he can do everything, except tell a story: as an artist he is everything, except articulate.’
Whistler, also, was alluded to, if not by name. ‘There may have been fogs for centuries in London. I dare say there were. But no one saw them, and so we do not know anything about them. They did not exist till Art had invented them. Now, it must be admitted, fogs are carried to excess. They have become the mere mannerism of a clique, and the exaggerated realism of their method gives dull people bronchitis. Where the cultured catch an effect, the uncultured catch cold.’
Wilde seems to have been particularly – and understandably – pleased with the piece. He read aloud from the proofs to his guests after Christmas dinner. Yeats was at Tite Street that evening. Although he would later borrow from the dialogue’s ideas about the power of art to create meaning in the world, at that first hearing he was swept up by the language and the wit of the piece: they seemed both ‘an imitation and a record’ of Wilde’s ‘matchless talk’.46
Yeats was impressed too by the domestic scene that he encountered at Tite Street: the restrained Aesthetic decor; the unexpected white dining room, its table decorated with ‘a diamond-shaped red cloth’ upon which stood a terracotta statuette illumined by a red shaded ceiling-light; the ‘beautiful wife’; the two young children. There was also a kitten, a present from Robbie Ross. ‘It does not look white,’ Wilde reported in his thank-you letter, ‘indeed it looks a sort of tortoise-shell colour, or a grey barred with velvety dark browns, but as you said it was white I have given orders that it is always to be spoken of as the “white kitten.” The children are enchanted with it, and sit, one on each side of its basket, worshipping.’47
It was a charming scene. Indeed Yeats wondered if it was not almost ‘too perfect’. He came away from the evening thinking that the ‘perfect harmony of life’ that he had witnessed ‘suggested some deliberate artistic composition’. And perhaps he recalled too that the true aim of artistic composition was – according to Wilde’s new Aesthetic – ‘Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things.’48
* As with Poems Wilde persuaded Roberts Bros of Boston to produce a simultaneous American edition, offering them ‘the advance sheets and electros’ from the English publishers. He was dismayed, though, when they trimmed down the pages to produce a very much smaller book: ‘Why oh! why did you not keep my large margin,’ he lamented. ‘I assure you that there are subtle scientific relations between margin and style, and my stories read quite differently in your edition.’ Wilde to Thomas Niles, partner at Roberts Bros (Columbia).
† Wilde did have to endure some criticism from literal-minded ornithologists. A Mr J. R. Earl wrote to point out that Wilde’s description of the nightingale making her nest ‘in the holm-oak tree’ was inaccurate, as ‘the nightingale almost invariably builds her nest upon the ground’.
‡ OW did still engage with impressive thoroughness on many fronts. On 26 September 1889, he wrote to Charlotte Stopes (mother of the more famous Marie) returning her article on frozen meat: ‘With your contention that frozen meat ought to come into the scope of the Adulteration Act, I fully agree, and so I should think must everyone, but as to the prejudicial effects of the process of refrigeration on the flavour and nutritious properties of meat... I cannot help feeling that your views are somewhat exaggerated and should be glad if you could see your way to modify your expressions.’
§ A stalwart of numerous late-night establishments, such as the Fielding Club and the Spoofs, Willie was also a founder member of the Owl Club off St James’s Square. Asked to compose a poetic motto for the club, he dashed off the couplet: ‘We fly by night, and this resolve we make, / If the dawn must break, let the d-d thing break.’
-PART VI-
The Young
King
1889–1892
age 34–37
Oscar Wilde at Felbrigg near Cromer, 1892.
1
A Man in Hew
‘Make some sacrifice for your art and you will be repaid – but ask of art to sacrifice herself for you and a bitter disappointment may come to you.’
oscar wilde
For the first four weeks of 1889 it was quite hard to pick up a British periodical that did not contain an article by Oscar Wilde. ‘Pen, Pencil and Poison: A Study’ filled fourteen pages in the Fortnightly Review, ‘The Decay of Lying’ was a prominent feature of the Nineteenth Century, ‘London Models’ (after Wilde had threatened to reclaim it) finally made its appearance in the English Illustrated Magazine, with pictures by Harper Pennington, while Woman’s World was graced by the editor’s ‘Literary Notes’. It was a notable achievement.
‘London Models’ was accounted ‘exceedingly entertaining’ by the reviewers. Lady Wilde thought the piece ‘capital – & modest too’; while Willie, she remarked, was also ‘highly appreciative of it’.1 In a ‘very strong’ literary number of the Fortnightly Review, including contributions by Swinburne, J. A. Symonds, Edmund Gosse and Henry Curzon, ‘Pen, Pencil and Poison’ was judged ‘the most entertaining’ piece, an ‘original’ and ‘well-merited success’.2 Even with Woman’s World it was noted that Wilde had ‘excelled himself’, though less on account of his ‘Literary Notes’ than on his coup in securing an article by the queen of Romania.3
But in the general swell of praise ‘The Decay of Lying’ received the greatest approbation. If Wilde was pleased with the half-dazzled, half-bemused press comments upon it, he was more delighted by the private praise of friends. ‘I am so very pleased that you like my article,’ he wrote to Walter Pollock, editor of the Saturday Review; ‘the public so soon vulgarize any artistic idea that one gives them that I was determined to put my new views on art, and particularly on the relations of art and history, in a form that they could not understand, but that would be understood by the few who, like yourself, have a quick artistic instinct.’4
It was a brilliant start to the year. ‘I am so glad you have struck oil in Literature,’ declared Lady Wilde with characteristic enthusiasm. ‘I know of no writer at once so strong & so beautiful – except Ruskin.’5 But Wilde was aware, too, that February would bring to the newsstands fresh issues of all the periodicals, and that (bar Woman’s World) none of them would carry his name; in journalism – even the higher journalism of the Fortnightly and the Nineteenth Century – achievement was fleeting. Yeats recalled how Wilde, at this time, deprecated the ‘general belief in his success’ or even ‘efficiency’, and with sincerity too; he remained conscious of how little he had yet done. While he still wrote verse occasionally, he had come to realize that he would not be challenging the great poetic voices of the previous generation. His masters – Swinburne, Rossetti, Morris, Arnold, Tennyson, Browning – remained masters still. Perhaps seeking an explanation or an excuse, he told Yeats, ‘We Irish are too poetical to be poets; we are a nation of brilliant failures, but we are the greatest talkers since the Greeks.’6
But he was making progress in prose; and it is hard not to connect the energy and invention of his work at this time, with the liberating effects of his new sexual life. His personality, as Ross noted, ‘intensified’ as he became ‘an habitual devotee’.7 There was a conspicuous buoyancy about him. Yeats, indeed, thought Wilde at his happiest during this period of his life.8 His ambition remained undimmed. And even if the way forward was not immediately clear, he had a belief in the possibilities of his art, and a faith in his ability to explore them.
He continued to weave his elaborately cadenced fairy stories. ‘The Birthday of the Princess’ appeared in the innovative bilingual weekly Paris Illustré. ‘In point of style it is my best story,’ he told one friend. He was intrigued, though, that the tale of Spanish court life, which he described as ‘black and silver’ in its original, ‘came out pink and blue’ in the accompanying French translation.9 He considered proclaiming the debt that his multi-coloured prose owed to Flaubert by producing a translation of La Tentation de St Antoine.10 But there were other energies at play. ‘The Decay of Lying’ had been such fun to write, he wanted to return to the dialogue form. And then there was also his long-mooted article on Shakespeare’s sonnets – a daring play of fact and fiction, history and invention.
Oscar Page 50
