Oscar

by Sturgis, Matthew;

  On the surface, though, all continued swimmingly. Wilde was in fine form at a party given by Louise Chandler Moulton on 21 July, falling into conversation with the forty-three-year-old poet Katharine Bradley. Together with her niece and life-partner, Edith Cooper, Bradley made up one half of a collaborative dyad that wrote and published under the name ‘Michael Field’. They talked of Pater’s prose, French ‘colour-words’, English philistinism and the genius of Jane Austen: Wilde suggested that ‘due to their imperfect education the only works we have had from women are works of genius’. Touching on celestial matters, Wilde sketched out his vision of heaven. He said that when he got there he ‘would like to find a number of volumes [bound] in vellum that he would be told were his’.38 It was a vision to be desired. Thus far – at the age of thirty-five – Wilde had still only produced two actual books, Poems and The Happy Prince. They offered meagre assurances of immortality, and he was anxious to augment the haul. And over the next sixteen months he would succeed in impressive fashion – not by writing a great deal more, but by repackaging between hard covers what he had already written.

  Plans were already advancing with Ward, Lock & Co. for the expanded book version of Dorian Gray, though it was now thought that more than two additional chapters might be necessary to ‘counteract the damage’ of the 1s Lippincott version being so widely distributed. Carlos Blacker was dismayed at the news that Wilde’s ‘damned story’ would be making ‘a re-appearance… with additions but I fear no corrections’. ‘Have you ever known such abominable “Cussedness”?’, he remarked to the Duke of Newcastle. There was, however, some recognition that the moral message of the book might have to be emphasized and decadent details toned down.39‡

  Although Wilde remained frustrated in his hopes of finding a publisher for a book version of ‘The Portrait of Mr. W. H.’, he had more luck with his scheme for a volume of collected essays. In London that summer he met a young American publisher called Clarence McIlvaine, who was travelling together with two literary compatriots, Jonathan Sturges and Stuart Merrill. The twenty-four-year-old Bostonian was planning to establish a new Anglo-American publishing house, in partnership with the distinguished J. R. Osgood, and was in England looking for authors. Wilde set about wooing him and his two companions. ‘In spite of his glory and our obscurity,’ Merrill recalled, ‘he was charming to us without displaying the least pose or arrogance.’40 The charm had its effect: McIlvaine agreed to take on not only a collection of Wilde’s essays (including the two dialogues) but also a compendium of his four published short stories from Court and Society and the World, and a second volume of fairy tales. All three volumes would be scheduled for the following year.

  The phenomenal stir caused by ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’ encouraged other offers of work. Norman Forbes-Robertson, who was taking on the lease of the Globe Theatre at the end of the year with an aim of producing ‘good comedies well cast’, approached Wilde with a request for a play. Unfortunately, though, he was unable to offer any advance. ‘I am always in need of money,’ Wilde explained, ‘and have to work for certainties.’41 More satisfactory was an inquiry from George Alexander. The thirty-two-year-old actor was also launching himself into management, and also wanted a play from Wilde. He had reason to respect Wilde’s taste, since Wilde had written generously of his acting. And he had – as he put it – ‘long been persuaded’ that Wilde could write a good play. Reading Dorian Gray had confirmed his confidence in the author’s ‘dramatic faculty’. Alexander also wanted to gain some of the social cachet that he considered attached to Wilde’s name, in order to bring to his new theatre (the St James’s) ‘the smart society circles in which Wilde himself already moved’. As an immediate response Wilde appears to have offered him The Duchess of Padua, which was scheduled for its New York production early in following year. But Alexander’s vision was for a modern-dress ‘society play’. And he – unlike Norman Forbes-Robertson – did have the resources to pay an advance of £100: £50 due upfront, £50 due on delivery of the script. Wilde readily agreed.42

  Proving the rule of three, Wilde also received, that summer, a letter soliciting his support for a new independent theatre society, modelled on the Théatre de l’Art in Paris, which aimed to mount plays ‘from the most prominent English men of letters’ (Meredith, Hardy, Stevenson, Henry James) as well as ‘certain masterpieces of foreign uncoventionality’ (Ibsen’s Ghosts) – without the necessity of submitting the works to the lord chamberlain’s office. The club’s founders, two London-based Dutch writers, Alexander Teixeira de Mattos and J. T. Grein, hoped that Wilde might have ‘a play of unconventional interest’ which he would be prepared to ‘lend… for production’. Wilde did not; but the inquiry was flattering, and it perhaps suggested to him, for the first time, the idea of attempting something in the line of ‘experimental’ drama.43

  Any notion that the publication of Dorian Gray had led to the Wildes’ social ostracism was refuted by a summer holiday season spent staying with a succession of Scottish baronets ‘in the midst of purple heather and silver mist’. It was, Wilde confessed, ‘such a relief to me, Celt as I am, from the wearisome green of England. I only like green in art. This is one of my many heresies.’44

  Back in London after this break, as part of his work on the forthcoming book version of Dorian Gray, Wilde asked Ricketts to make some designs for the volume’s cover and title page. It was a happy collaborative project, and would prove to be the first of many. It drew Wilde closer to the world of the Vale. He became a regular at the little Friday-night gatherings, sometimes bringing a friend with him to what he called ‘the one house in London where you will never be bored’.45 He came to know the select group of artists, craftsmen and writers that Ricketts and Shannon drew into their orbit. Among them was an extraordinarily handsome, rather solemn, young man called John Gray. A minor clerk in the civil service, and of modest origins, he had taught himself French and was devoting himself to literature. The first number of The Dial had contained an article by him on ‘Les Goncourts’ as well as a distinctly Wildean fairy story about ‘The Great Worm’. He also wrote verse. Wilde was impressed by the poetry (which borrowed from the Parisian Decadents) quite as much as by the man,with his quiet air of distinction and charming manners. Gray, like Ricketts, could tell him things he did not know.46

  It was exciting for Wilde to discover that so many of the rising generation shared his fascination with contemporary French art and literature – ‘the one art now in Europe that is worth discussing,’ as he told another new literary acquaintance, the self-consciously avant-garde critic and poet Arthur Symons.47 John Gray’s own boyish good looks were, moreover, strangely suggestive of the central motif in Wilde’s novel. Indeed Wilde came to consider Gray to be almost the image of ‘Dorian’. ‘I didn’t find or see him until after I described him in my book,’ he later remarked: a wonderful confirmation of the idea that art inspires and directs nature. ‘This young man,’ he declared, ‘would never have existed if I hadn’t described Dorian.’48 The connection became a joke and a bond shared between them. Wilde would allude ‘laughingly to John Gray as his hero, “Dorian”’. And Gray even signed himself ‘Dorian’ in at least one letter to Wilde.49

  The conceit was shared with Lionel Johnson and other members of the newly established ‘Rhymers Club’, an informal grouping of young poets, inaugurated by Yeats and some like-minded friends. Wilde – and Gray – occasionally attended the club’s meetings at the Century Guild headquarters on Fitzroy Street. And Johnson, together with his fellow Rhymer Ernest Dowson was soon referring to Gray as ‘“Dorian” Gray’, or ‘the original of Dorian’; while Johnson elaborated the point in his description of Gray as ‘a youth… aged thirty with the face of fifteen’. Gray was actually twenty-five; but the exaggeration enhanced the joke.50§Art and life were bound together.

  * Willie Maxwell was one of the several young companions to whom Wilde had told the ‘portrait’ story – among numerous other tales. He later recalled how,
at around this time, ‘I informed [Wilde] that I had taken an idea he had told us, and written a short story with it. For a few moments his face clouded, then it cleared, and he spoke with a mixture of approval and reproach. “Stealing my story was the act of gentleman, but not telling me you had stolen it was to ignore the claims of friendship.” And again a cloud descended, and he became really serious. “You mustn’t take a story that I told you of a man and a picture. No, absolutely, I want that for myself. I fully mean to write it, and I should be terribly upset if I were forestalled.”’

  † When Wilde was quizzed by his friend Mrs Walter Palmer about the exact nature of Dorian’s sins, he replied ‘Really, you know, I couldn’t possibly tell about that at dinner. If you will come with me, alone, in to the conservatory, I will tell you all about it.’ After dinner he took her into the conservatory, they returned a few minutes later, Mrs Palmer ‘almost shrieking with laughter’. ‘What do you think this wretch told me?’ she announced. ‘I had asked him to tell me the wickedest thing Dorian Gray did in Whitechapel. And he bent over and whispered in my ear, “He ate peas with a knife!”’

  ‡ George Lock, one of the partners in the firm, wrote to Wilde suggesting, ‘Could you not make Dorian live longer with the face of the picture transformed to himself and depict the misery in which he ends his days by suicide or repents and becomes a better character? Lord Henry too goes off the scene very quickly. Could not he also live a little longer – and you could make an excellent contrast between the death of the two men. This is what has occurred to me. It is for you to decide if it is worth anything.’ Wilde decided that it was not.

  § Lionel Johnson, himself, was – despite an ever-increasing enthusiasm for whisky drinking – quite as youthful looking as John Gray. Indeed Wilde once remarked, ‘that any morning at eleven o’clock you might see him come out very drunk from the Café Royal, and hail the first passing perambulator’.

  3

  Suggestive Things

  ‘An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.’

  oscar wilde

  During the first days of 1891, Wilde made a nostalgic visit to his former rooms in Charles Street for a small literary gathering hosted by Robert Sherard, who was over on a visit from Paris. Among the company was Sherard’s old New College contemporary, the dashing and irascible John Barlas. Wilde was interested to meet him.

  Barlas was both a poet and radical socialist. A sometime member of the Social Democratic Federation and a contributor to William Morris’s Commonweal, he had been badly beaten by the police during the ‘Bloody Sunday’ disturbance of 1887. At Sherard’s party he had proclaimed his radical credentials by turning up with ‘a weird young female, whom he introduced as his sister-soul and Muse’. To assert her own commitment to the revolutionary cause she wore – as she confided to the company – red flannel ‘under things’. Despite the fact that Sherard considered her ‘hardly a person to bring to a “respectable” house’, Wilde treated her with great courtesy. But not enough for the ever-quarrelsome Barlas.

  When the party broke up at the end of the afternoon, Wilde, Barlas and the ‘Muse’, together with Sherard and another poet (Barlas’s friend and fellow Scot, John Davidson) all left the house together. Walking through Grosvenor Square, Barlas suddenly hailed a hansom cab, bundled his lady friend into it, and then, turning on the others, rebuked them all – and Wilde in particular – for their ‘want of respect to his sister soul’. It appears he thought that Wilde should have offered his arm to the lady when they left the house. The dramatic exit was rather spoiled when the cab driver, on hearing that Barlas lived in a Lambeth slum district, hesitated to accept the fare. Wilde stepped forward and good-humouredly reassured the cabman (‘who knew him by sight, and addressed him as “my lord”’) that all would be well.*

  The incident amused, rather than offended, Wilde; and after a contrite Barlas apologized, a friendship developed between the two men. Wilde introduced him to John Gray and others of his circle.1 Although Wilde appreciated Barlas’s lush Swinburnian verse, his political views intrigued him more. Recent months had been taxing ones for Wilde’s political allegiances. In November 1890, Parnell had found the details of his unconventional private life gleefully exposed, and picked over, in the British press, when the husband of Kitty O’Shea, his long-time mistress, finally sued his wife for divorce. The Unionist papers seized the opportunity to drag Parnell’s name through the mud. In the face of much prudish public indignation, the Liberals threatened to break their ties with the Irish Parliamentary Party, while Parnell’s refusal to stand down as leader split his own party into Parnellite and anti-Parnellite factions. In the welter of press-fuelled prurience and political infighting the hopes of achieving Irish Home Rule seemed, suddenly, to evaporate. It was a bitter moment.

  Nevertheless, at the same time that Wilde’s confidence in the ability of the British parliamentary system to deliver radical change was being frayed, his broader political ideas were taking on new colour. Towards the end of 1890 he had been approached by Archibald Grove, the editor of the recently established New Review, who hoped he might write a ‘reply’ to a forthcoming article on ‘Socialism and Literature’. Grove wanted ‘about 3500 words, from the point of view of individualism’.2 Wilde did not take up the offer, deciding instead to write his own essay on the subject and place it with Frank Harris at the Fortnightly Review.

  As Robbie Ross recalled it, Wilde wrote ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism’ ‘in three consecutive mornings’ in the library of the Ross family home at 85 Onslow Square, early in the New Year.3 ‘Socialism’ was, of course, a topic that had interested Wilde for some time. His encounters with the witty and contrarian Shaw had both broadened his understanding and encouraged him to think that it was a subject on which he might write;4 while his new friendship with Barlas – who was steeped in the writings of Proudhon, and tended more towards ‘anarchism’ in his views – offered a slightly different, and perhaps even more alluring, perspective.5

  Abandoning his favourite dialogue form – though retaining much of its open-ended epigrammatic character – Wilde laid out a captivating and highly personal vision of socialism. He proclaimed the need to replace ‘private property’ with ‘public wealth’ – so that man might be freed from the tedious cares of ownership, and co-operation might supersede competition as the driving force of society. But he saw this only as a first step on the road towards the development of Individualism. ‘The true perfection of man’, he asserted, ‘lies not in what man has, but in what man is.’ In this Wilde was veering to the anarchist end of the socialist spectrum.

  In support of his theory he held up the example of Jesus – not perhaps the divine figure of Christian orthodoxy, but the extraordinary human being, and great apostle of individualism, derived partly from Wilde’s imagination and partly from Ernest Renan’s determinedly secular 1861 book, La Vie de Jésus (Renan’s volume was added to Wilde’s select library of ‘golden books’; he dubbed it ‘the gospel according to St Thomas’).6 The message of Wilde’s Jesus was ‘Be thyself… You have a wonderful personality. Develop it… Don’t imagine that your perfection lies in accumulating or possessing external things. Your perfection is inside yourself.’

  In assisting towards this goal of self-development Wilde proclaimed the redundancy of all forms of government, and all conventional moralities. All authority was considered degrading: ‘It degrades those who exercise it, and degrades those over whom it is exercised.’ A society constituted on the lines he proposed would be a haven for all, but particularly for artists (and for Oscar Wilde), since ‘art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known’.

  Some of the large ideas adumbrated in the essay were given specific and topical point. In the wake of Parnell’s fall, Wilde incorporated a damning indictment of the prurient intrusiveness of the British press, which would seek to ‘drag before the eyes of the public some incident in the private life of a great statesman… and invite
the public to discuss the incident’. ‘In old days,’ Wilde remarked, ‘men had the rack. Now they have the press.’ It was scarcely an improvement. And taking a swipe at the critics who had condemned ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’ as ‘morbid’, Wilde declared, ‘What is morbidity but a mood of emotion or a mode of thought that one cannot express? The public are all morbid, because the public can never find expression for anything. The artist is never morbid. He expresses everything. He stands outside his subject.’

  The essay appeared in the February issue of the Fortnightly Review. If, as one critic suggested, it had been written ‘to startle and excite comment’, it succeeded well. Press opinion might be divided, but there was considerable private enthusiasm for the piece. The young Roger Fry admired it greatly. The writer Grant Allen thanked Wilde for penning such a ‘noble and beautiful essay’. And Barlas, writing to John Gray, hailed it as ‘the most perfect revolutionary essay the world has yet seen, not only as a work of art, but for knowledge and insight’.7 He had already saluted Wilde – and Gray – as fellow anarchists: ‘All artists are so unconsciously from birth,’ he had suggested.8 And he was delighted to find his insight confirmed.

  To give the text a visual – as well as a literary – distinction, Wilde had insisted on having many of his more apothegmatic statements set in italics: ‘There is only one class in the community that thinks more about money than the rich, and that is the poor.’ ‘Art should never try to make itself popular. The public should try to make itself artistic’, etc. And this conceit provoked almost as much as the political views expressed. At a fashionable lunch party the Liberal MP Herbert Asquith suggested to Wilde, with a slight edge of malice, that ‘The man who uses italics is like the man who raises his voice in conversation and talks loudly in order make himself heard.’ Wilde, however refused to rise to the bait. ‘How delightful of you, Mr Asquith, to have noticed that!’ he replied with smiling good humour. ‘The brilliant phrase, like good wine, needs no bush. But just as the orator marks his good things by a dramatic pause, or by raising or lowering his voice, or by gesture, so the writer marks his epigrams with italics, setting the little gem, so to speak, like a jeweller – an excusable love of one’s art, not all mere vanity, I like to think.’9