The conventional aspects of the play perhaps stimulated a desire to try out other, less orthodox, forms and effects. Although Constance had described his ‘mystery play’ as ‘not for acting, but to be read’ – Wilde seems to have evolved other ideas. He thought La Sainte Courtisane could form part of a ‘triple bill’ of experimental one-act pieces. It was a notion he proposed to the young actor-manager Lewis Waller, who was negotiating with George Alexander for the British touring rights to Lady Windermere’s Fan, and was looking for additional works for the tour repertory. Wilde already had a possible second piece well in hand – a short Renaissance-set drama in blank verse entitled The Florentine Tragedy. Having almost finished both this piece and the Sainte Courtisane, Wilde was confident that he could complete the whole triple bill by the end of March.5
Overflowing with schemes, he also thought of writing another full-length historical verse tragedy, to build upon the New York ‘success’ of The Duchess of Padua. He approached the American Shakespearean actor Richard Mansfield with a proposal that he should commission The Cardinal of Avignon, the Renaissance drama that he had first mooted back in 1882. The play remained unwritten, but Wilde redrafted the scenario, mapping out a tale of thwarted loves and vaulting ambitions, deliberate falsehoods and impassioned suicides.* It was, Wilde considered, the sort of piece that Mansfield could do ‘splendidly’.6
There was in all this slightly hectic activity – besides the excitement of creation – a pressing need for funds. Money, once more, was tight in Tite Street, and bills were overdue: £13 was still owing from the summer at Goring. There were several threats of legal action. ‘London is very dangerous,’ Wilde complained; ‘writters come out at night and writ one, the roaring of creditors towards dawn is frightful, and solicitors are getting rabies and biting people.’ Matters were not helped by the newspapers reporting that Wilde had made £2,000 out of royalties from Lady Windermere’s Fan in the two years since it opened. That money was long since spent.7
Some semblance of literary productivity was maintained with the appearance in February of the English edition of Salome. The volume appeared to the press and public as the very distillation of fin de siècle decadence. But Wilde was uncomfortably aware that the project had been unbalanced – if not hijacked – by Beardsley’s extraordinary illustrations. It was a point made by many of the critics. To Ricketts Wilde might admit ‘I admire, [but] I do not like Aubrey’s illustrations. They are too Japanese, while my play is Byzantine.’ And privately he might even confess to loathing them. To the public, though, he projected an informed enthusiasm. Taking Beardsley to see The Second Mrs Tanqueray, he wrote a note Mrs Patrick Campbell, who was playing the title role, asking whether he could bring the artist round to her dressing room so that he might lay a copy of the édition de luxe of Salome at her feet. ‘His drawings,’ Wilde declared, ‘are quite wonderful.’8
Wilde continued to see much of Beardsley (and Beardsley presented the drawing that he subsequently made of Mrs Patrick Campbell to Wilde). But there was a certain tension in the relationship. Wilde was disposed to patronize his precocious protégé. ‘Aubrey is too Parisian,’ he declared on one occasion; ‘he cannot forget that he has been to Dieppe – once.’ ‘Don’t sit on the same chair as Aubrey. It’s not compromising’ was another of his lines. He even likened him to a ‘monstrous orchid’. The effect, however, was strained. Beardsley might borrow something of Wilde’s dandified manner and wit (he declared he had caught a chill having left the tassel off his cane), but his powers of assimilation were such that he never appeared to be a mere echo of the ‘master’. Indeed Frank Harris, who saw the two men together often, considered that Wilde was more influenced by Beardsley than vice versa. He took from the younger – and much abused – artist a reinforced sense of ‘artistic boldness and self-assertion’, of ‘contempt’ for critics and public alike.9
Beardsley’s ‘contempt’, it sometimes seemed, might extend even to Wilde himself. Certainly Wilde was conscious of the artist’s sly satirical attitude: the caricatures that had littered Salome were followed by others. When a reviewer complained of Beardsley’s poor taste in introducing a recognizable likeness of Wilde (wreathed in vine leaves) among the fantastical figures in his frontispiece to John Davidson’s Plays, the artist had written to the paper suggesting that Wilde was ‘surely beautiful enough to stand the test even of portraiture’. Such flourishes, though seemingly playful, contrived to irritate Wilde. At one lunch he declared that, when Beardsley was present, he would henceforth only drink absinthe: ‘Absinthe is to all other drinks what Aubrey’s drawing are to other pictures; it stands alone; it is like nothing else; it shimmers like southern twilight in opalescent colouring; it has about it the seduction of strange sins… It is just like your drawings, Aubrey; it gets on one’s nerves and is cruel.’10
There were similar undercurrents in Wilde’s friendship with the young Max Beerbohm. Indeed Beerbohm was busy working on a new satirical article about Wilde during the first months of 1894. Entitled ‘A Peep into the Past’, it professed to be an interview with the half-forgotten ‘old gentleman, Oscar Wilde’, who had ‘at one time’ amused the readers of Punch. It was shot through with knowing allusions: ‘As I was ushered into [his] little study, I fancied that I heard the quickly receding frou-frou of tweed trousers, but my host I found reclining, hale and hearty, though a little dishevelled, upon the sofa.’ Despite such dangerous asides, Beerbohm was actually considering the piece for a new periodical – to be called The Yellow Book – that John Lane was planning to launch that spring, with Beardsley as art editor and the American novelist Henry Harland as editor. In another small but wounding cut, by the agreement of all concerned, Wilde was to be excluded from the venture.
Ada Leverson, too, sometimes parodied Wilde in her pieces for Punch, despite Burnand’s determination not to revive a ‘cult’ of ‘the Great Aesthete’ in the magazine. Her tone, though, was gentler, chiming with Wilde’s notion that successful parody ‘requires a light touch… and, oddly enough, a love of the poet whom one caricatures. One’s disciples can parody one – nobody else.’ And Wilde certainly enjoyed the ‘brilliant’ sketches that Leverson produced. Nevertheless such pieces contributed in their small way to the re-gathering sense of Wilde as a figure who might be laughed at by the public, and even disparaged.11
His position was further compromised by the return of Lord Alfred Douglas that March. If Wilde had felt relief at their separation, Bosie had been overcome with remorse and longing. He had begun a campaign of letter writing, pleading for a full reconciliation. When Wilde refused to engage, Douglas had persuaded his mother to intercede on his behalf, having striven to convince her that his relationship with Wilde, far from being destructive to his soul, was necessary to his artistic development. And when that failed he turned to Constance. Despite her personal dislike of Douglas, and her awareness of his ill effect on Wilde’s character, she took the extraordinary step of urging her husband to write back. Steeped in Christian notions of forgiveness, she could not bear to see him being ‘unkind’ to a ‘friend’. Even so Wilde hesitated. It was only when Douglas hastened to Paris, and from there sent a long and desperate telegram that seemed to hint at suicide, that he relented. They met in the French capital, and over a dinner of mingled tears and champagne the old passion was renewed with all its old force – and with all its the old extravagance too. Wilde calculated that their eight days together in Paris cost him nearly £150. Constance understood too late what she had done. Wilde’s failure to write from Paris, or to let her know of his plans, suggested the decisive realignment in his affections.12
Wilde and Douglas returned to London for what was supposed to be a brief continuation of their season of pleasure and love. Douglas, while in Cairo, had received the offer of an unpaid diplomatic position from Lord Currie at the embassy in Constantinople, and intended to take it up in June. On their second day back in London, though, Wilde and Bosie were spotted lunching together at the Café Royal by Lord Qu
eensberry. He was shocked to see his son back in England, and in such company. And although he made no comment – and even joined their table – he immediately afterwards wrote to Bosie, expressing his disapproval, first, at his idle way of life and, secondly, at his ‘intimacy with this man Wilde’. He demanded that it cease:
Or I will disown you and stop all money supplies. I am not going to try and analyse this intimacy, and I make no charge; but to my mind to pose as thing is as bad as to be it. With my own eyes I saw you both in the most loathsome and disgusting relationship as expressed by your manner and expression… No wonder people are talking as they are. Also I now hear on good authority, but this may false, that his wife is petitioning to divorce him for sodomy and other crimes. Is this true, or do you not know of it? If I thought the actual thing was true, and it became public property, I should be quite justified in shooting him at sight. These Christian English cowards and men, as they call themselves, want waking up. Your disgusted so-called father, Queensberry.13
Douglas did not recognize his father’s right to dictate terms to him. Without consulting Wilde he replied by telegram: ‘WHAT A FUNNY LITTLE MAN YOU ARE.’ He was immensely pleased with this riposte: the line was borrowed from a music hall song of the moment – ‘Oh Kicklebury-Brown of Camden Town, What a funny little man you are.’ It provoked the expected reaction. ‘You impertinent young jacknapes,’ Queensberry fired back:
If you send me any more such telegrams, or come with any impertinence… I will give you the thrashing you deserve… If I catch you again with that man I will make a public scandal in a way you little dream of; it is already a suppressed one. I prefer an open one, and at any rate I shall not be blamed for allowing such a state of things to go on. Unless this acquaintance ceases I shall carry out my threat and stop all supplies… So you know what to expect.14
Wilde found himself in the midst of a conflict between two reckless and intemperate foes, over whom he could exert little influence and no control.† Douglas relished the thought of confrontation; Wilde did not. And he was spared for the moment when Lady Queensberry dispatched Bosie to Florence. While Wilde was envying him the sight of ‘Giotto’s tower’ and Cellini’s ‘green and gold god’, Douglas was asking his friend Kains Jackson for the address of the notorious Lord Arthur Somerset – still in exile after the Cleveland Street Scandal – as well as for other tips regarding ‘the eternal quest for beauty to which I am bound!’15
Wilde remained in town, lost ‘in the purple valleys of despair’ about his want of ‘gold coins’ – although, typically, when approached by the impecunious Edward Shelley, he responded generously. ‘As he betrayed me grossly I, of course, gave him money and was kind to him,’ he explained to Douglas. ‘I find that forgiving one’s enemies is a most curious morbid pleasure; perhaps I should check it.’ There were other irritations. He had to endure the appearance of the first Yellow Book: ‘It is dull and loathsome,’ he told Douglas, ‘a great failure. I’m so glad.’ The magazine – with its distinctive yellow and black cover by Beardsley – in fact created a sensation and, despite many hostile reviews, sold well. Beerbohm’s essay on Wilde did not appear. In its stead he provided a paradoxical ‘Defence of Cosmetics’. Wilde thought it ‘wonderful… quite delightfully wrong and fascinating’. Despite Wilde’s absence from the magazine as either contributor or subject, his association in the public mind with Beardsley and decadence ensured that many assumed he was involved. Indeed one review even described The Yellow Book as ‘the Oscar Wilde of periodicals’.16
About An Ideal Husband there was frustrating news from Hare: although he seems to have liked the play well enough, it had arrived so late that his forthcoming season at the Garrick had already been scheduled, and it was uncertain when the play could be put on. Hare offered to return the manuscript if they could not agree on a satisfactory way forward. Wilde seized the opportunity to offer the play instead to Lewis Waller, and his partner Harry Morrell: not for their tour, but for a London run. They agreed to pay a handsome advance of £500, undertaking to perform the play before 1 February 1895, in a theatre to be decided upon. This coup was followed by the pleasing news that Miss Marbury had also negotiated a handsome advance for the play’s American performing rights from Daniel Frohman.17
These arrangements allowed Wilde – at the beginning of May – to travel to Italy. Constance had hoped, the previous year, to be in Florence with her husband; instead Wilde would be there with Douglas. The visit, though, was clandestine. Perhaps to obscure his real destination, he went via Paris, where he spent a few days. Henri de Régnier saw him on the boulevards flanked by two young men. By an unspoken mutual agreement they did not greet each other.18
In Florence Wilde saw much of Bernard Berenson and his mistress (later wife) Mary Costelloe, who were now living in the city. Mary took him to call on his old acquaintance, Violet Paget (who now wrote under the name Vernon Lee), and her brother, the invalid poet Eugene Lee Hamilton. ‘It was a great success,’ she reported to her sister. ‘Oscar talked like an angel, and they all fell in love with him – even Vernon, who had hated him almost as bitterly as he had hated her.’ He, on his part, was charmed with her, finding her less ‘restless and self-assertive’ than when he had known her in London. ‘Oscar,’ as Costello explained, ‘likes people without souls, or else with great peace in their souls.’19
Bosie – as so often before – proved an agent of division. Mary Costello sensed, beneath Wilde’s charm and brilliance, the corrupting influence of the younger man; Douglas’s appetite and indulgence were ‘somehow’ transforming him into ‘a loathsome beast’. Berenson – who back in London had already expressed to Wilde his dislike of Douglas (‘that dreadful man’) – was distressed to find them still together. He tried to intervene, telling Wilde that he was courting destruction, but his efforts were turned aside with ‘elegant insolence’. Wilde terminated their interview – if not quite their friendship – with the remark: ‘Bernard, you forget that in every way I want to imitate my Maker, and like him I want nothing but praise.’20
Wilde needed to return to London at the end of May. He had received news that Richard Mansfield considered the scenario of The Cardinal of Avignon ‘very fine’, and might be interested in producing the play not only in America but also in London. He was due to arrive in England on 1 June, and was anxious for a meeting.21 Douglas would be accompanying Wilde back to town under a cloud. Lord Currie, furious at Douglas’s delay in coming to Constantinople, had withdrawn the job offer. On their last day in Florence they bumped into André Gide and were able to offer him their flat overlooking the Arno, which they had taken for a month but were leaving after two weeks. Although Wilde was, initially, rather taken aback at the encounter – concerned as he was to preserve the secret of his Florentine visit – he was soon pouring out a succession of ‘delicious stories’ over the café table while Gide sipped a vermouth in ‘imbecilic’ silence.22
The meeting with Mansfield did not produce any definite commitment or advance. More immediately satisfactory was the appearance, on 11 June, of Wilde’s poem ‘The Sphinx’. It was a masterpiece of fin de siècle production: beautifully bound in ‘vellum and gold’, printed in three colours (red, black and green), ‘decorated throughout’ by Ricketts, and dedicated to Marcel Schwob. The meagre text, widely spaced and set in small capitals, was elegantly disposed over some forty pages. Wilde liked to claim that his first idea had been ‘to print only three copies: one for myself, one for the British Museum, and one for Heaven’ – though he admitted he ‘had some doubt about the British Museum’. Commercial considerations pushed by John Lane and the American publishers Copeland & Day resulted in an only slightly expanded edition of 250 copies plus twenty-five large-paper ‘specials’ priced at a massive 5 guineas. It was generally acknowledged that, as a piece of clever marketing, it must be ‘an immediate and complete success’. About the poem itself the reviewers were more grudging, remarking on its debt to Poe, its ‘cynical’ use of the meter from In Memoria
m, and the ‘daring eccentricity’ of its erotic imagery.23
For unqualified approval the thirty-nine-year-old Wilde relied on Bosie and his other young friends. He was now often to be found sitting in the upstairs room the Café Royal, surrounded by adoring young disciples, ‘men newly down from the Universities’, who regarded him as ‘sort of god’. Among the new additions to the circle were two young men whom Douglas had met, and travelled with, during his brief sojourn in Egypt: the comical gnome-like Reggie Turner (Max Beerbohm’s great Oxford friend), and Robert Hichens, a music-loving journalist with literary ambitions. There was much real talent and wit in the group, though Willie Wilde considered them no more than ‘a gang of parasites’ who offered up a continual hymn of praise in return for Oscar’s generosity.24‡
Society still opened its doors to Wilde. Indeed, to some, he seemed at ‘the height of his social glory’ that season. He was conspicuous as one of ‘six poets’ at the fashionable Knightsbridge wedding of Violet Maxse to Lord Edward Cecil (the Marquess of Salisbury’s third son). Together with Constance he attended Countess Spencer’s grand reception at the Admiralty. And Wilfrid Blunt recorded his presence at ‘a brilliant luncheon’ given by Margot Tennant (as was) and her new husband, the home secretary, Herbert Asquith. Asquith had married Margot earlier that year, following the death of his first wife. With all the guests ‘immensely talkative,’ it was – Blunt recalled – ‘almost like a breakfast in France’; only Asquith seemed ‘rather out of it’. When the company dispersed, Wilde remained ‘telling stories’ to Margot and Blunt late into the afternoon.25
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