by Franny Moyle
Juliet had told Constance that she was about to read The Kreutzer Sonata, a highly controversial novella by Tolstoy about married life. It is the story of a husband’s carnal lust for his wife, a lust that ultimately leads not only to a great number of children but also to the man murdering his wife out of jealousy when she has an affair. The novella argues that the sentiment men and women mistake for ‘love’ is in fact nothing more than basic sexual attraction.
‘You told me that you were going to read the “Kreutzer Sonata”,’ Constance wrote. ‘Please don’t imagine that all men and women are like that. I think and hope that very few are, and that very few lives are so absolutely sordid as these.’
For Constance, in contrast to Tolstoy, love within marriage could be based on something other than sex. At a moment when this element of her own relationship had waned, the perfect harmony Yeats perceived in the Wilde household stemmed from Constance’s continuing admiration for the poet and freethinker who had so impressed her as a younger woman.
In return for such loyalty and love, Oscar fiercely guarded Constance and his family. His determination to protect her in public life is evidenced by an odd incident that happened in 1889. A journalist and writer called Herbert Vivian published a memoir titled Reminiscences of a Short Life, which was then serialized in the Sun. Vivian claimed that Oscar had encouraged him to write these memoirs and was to all intents and purposes the ‘fairy-godfather of the work’. But to Oscar and Constance’s horror, on reading the memoir they discovered that some very personal details of Oscar’s family life had been included in it.
Vivian recounted that Oscar had revealed he plastered the nursery walls in Tite Street ‘with texts about early rising and sluggishness, and so forth, and I tell them that when they grow up, they must take their father as a warning, and occasionally have breakfast earlier than two in the afternoon’.
‘The story of Cyril’s altruism is also well imagined,’ Vivian went on. ‘That youth, not a lustrum old, bewildered his family one morning by announcing that he did not mean to say his prayers any more. It was pointed out to him that he must pray to God to make him good, but he demurred … after a prolonged altercation, the young philosopher offered a compromise, and said that he wouldn’t mind praying to God make baby good.’18
The story is amusing, but it distressed Constance immensely. Oscar wrote in the strongest terms to Vivian, explaining,
Meeting you socially, I, in a moment which I greatly regret, happened to tell you a story about a little boy. Without asking,my permission you publish this in a vulgar newspaper and in a vulgar, inaccurate and offensive form, to the great pain of my wife, who naturally does not wish to see her children paraded for the amusement of the uncouth.19
It is likely that Constance’s objection was rooted in a concern that was wider than that indicated by Oscar. It was not just that Cyril was being paraded in the press, but it was the manner in which he was being paraded, as the heir to his father’s perceived vices. Cyril wanted God to make baby good so that he could be ‘bad’ like Oscar.
Just before Vivian went to press with this story, Oscar had managed to stir up a level of controversy, and the notion of Oscar as a man of dubious morality was topical once again. In July 1889 he had published ‘The Portrait of Mr W. H.’ in Blackwood’s Magazine. Taking its title from the dedication in Shakespeare’s Sonnets, the story is an account of Cyril Graham and his identification of Mr W. H. as Willie Hughes, a beautiful, young actor ‘whose physical beauty was such that it became the very corner stone of Shakespeare’s art’.
Oscar had contrived the story in conjunction with Robbie Ross, and it is a barely concealed exploration of and apology for homosexuality. Not only is the object of Shakespeare’s love a man, but Cyril Graham, who is described as ‘effeminate’ and ‘wonderfully handsome’, also becomes an object of fascination for another character in the story, his friend Erskine.
Oscar was all too aware of the story’s explosive potential. Prior to publication he sought advice from two politicians in his circle, Arthur Balfour and Herbert Asquith. Both warned him against publication in the light of the damage that such a story could do to his reputation. All the implications of his own ‘effeminacy’ that had been so widely bandied in the early 1880s and partially dispelled by his marriage were bound to be resurrected. But Oscar ignored the advice. Whether it was out of his own genuine infatuation with young men ignited by Ross, a more profound liberal belief that homosexuality could be noble and should not be outlawed or simply his sense that publicity, no matter how controversial, could be commercially beneficial, he decided to publish and be damned. His friend the magazine editor Frank Harris later observed that this move delivered Oscar incalculable injury, providing his detractors with the ammunition they had so long sought.
While some review magazines such as The Graphic saw nothing but a very clever and convincing story woven around a conundrum that had kept scholars guessing for years, others were quick to pounce. Oscar’s indulgent descriptions of Willie Hughes were ‘unpleasant’, The World noted. His ‘peculiarly offensive’ work was not the kind of thing ‘one would have expected’ in Blackwood’s.
Constance could not have been unaware of such comments about her husband’s work. While she knew Oscar was more than capable of defending himself against such damaging implications, she most certainly did not want her husband’s notoriety attaching to the rest of the family. In fact, Constance was adamant that Cyril would never suffer the abuse that perceived ‘effeminacy’ invited. Perhaps informed by the fact that her former house guest Robbie Ross had been so persecuted when he went to Cambridge that he had to leave, she had decided that Cyril was destined for a thoroughly masculine naval career.
Of course, those critics who interpreted ‘The Portrait of Mr W. H.’ as a reflection of the author’s own sexual preferences were justified. Since his affair with Robbie Ross in 1887, Oscar had continued flirtatious relationships with several young men, some of whom may well have become sexual lovers. Robbie had made Oscar adventurous and bold. In fact, between 1887 and the end of 1889 it has been suggested that Oscar could count among his conquests: the artist Graham Robertson, the actor Harry Melvill, the clerk Fred Althaus, the young American playwright Clyde Fitch and the extremely handsome writer John Gray, who would inspire the title of Oscar’s first novel.
With the exception of Fred Althaus, whom it seems Oscar picked up at The Crown public house in Charing Cross, most of the young men he became involved with were in the vein of the literary-minded Douglas Ainslie and Harry Marillier, whose friendship Oscar and Constance had so encouraged in their inaugural year in Tite Street. Constance no doubt considered the frequent visits of such men, whom Oscar’s friend the writer André Raffalovich dubbed his ‘sons’, as part of her husband’s commitment to encouraging and inspiring the younger generation. Oscar introduced her to them, and they often dined with her and Oscar en famille. There are indications that Constance was quite conscious that not only was the behaviour of Oscar and his friends, open to misinterpretation, but also that their conversation could stray into controversial territories.
One day in 1889 Raffalovich arrived at Tite Street to be greeted by Constance. ‘Oscar likes you so much,’ Constance told him. ‘He says you have such nice improper talks together.’ Raffalovich was apparently appalled by this comment and swore never to talk to Oscar again ‘without witnesses’.20 Perhaps he was all too aware of the danger Oscar was already courting, and terrified that Oscar’s loose tongue might do his own reputation significant damage. Their friendship ceased.
Oscar’s affairs took him away from his family more than ever before. Once again Constance suspected that Oscar had fallen for another woman. This time it was a young woman called Bibidie Leonard, Constance thought.21 Speranza had brought Miss Leonard to Oscar’s attention and had asked him to consider her as a contributor to The Woman’s World. His frequent visits to see Bibidie at her home in York Terrace seemed to Constance excessive.
; Despite that altruistic expression of marital loyalty in her letter to Juliet Latour Temple, Constance’s more intimate letters to Juliet’s mother reveal that this did little to offset her terrible, growing jealousy when it came to Oscar. This was becoming ‘the almost greatest, if not the very greatest’ of Constance’s ‘soul-temptations’, an aspect of character that she was in ‘constant warfare against’. And Constance was beginning to discuss this aspect of her marriage with her close female friends, not least Bertha Lathbury, wife of the Guardian editor, Daniel Lathbury, whom Constance visited regularly at her home in Witley in Surrey. She wrote to Georgina Mount-Temple:
Darling, I have been for years thinking about this terrible passion of jealousy, and I am quite certain that Mrs Lathbury is right that the only way to conquer it is to love more intensely; love will swallow up even the pangs of jealousy. Surely if one is jealous of one’s husband, it is because one thinks it possible to make him love one more, and the only way to do that is to love him more, and make him feel that no-one else loves him as much. It is comparatively easy to conquer jealousy when one has a claim and a right to the best love. One can demand it, and demand it by the power of love … Jealousy cannot be anything but a sin, for envy is at the root of it. When I am jealous of my friends, it is not so much that they may love me more, but that they may love someone else less for I have not very much faith at any time in my power of attracting love, and I know that unconsciously I really fall back upon that. And here it is surely that love comes in to help in the struggle.22
Constance never states who is the focus of her jealousy. Was it Bibidie or another female mistress she suspected Oscar of keeping? Or was she jealous of those ‘sons’ whose company her husband was increasingly seeking out in preference to her own? And when it came to his young male acolytes, was Constance just jealous of the time Oscar dedicated to these men and the inspiration he found in their society, or did she, at some subconscious, instinctive level, also acknowledge there was more to be green-eyed over? There is a slight suggestion in her letter that Oscar was forced to find sexual comfort elsewhere because she herself could no longer provide it. Tantalizingly, she admitted that the focus of her jealousy offered her husband something she was unable to provide. Again the notion that post-natal complications after Vyvyan’s birth had left Constance unable to have full sex is just possible.
‘For even I am not jealous when I know that the one I am jealous of fills a place that I cannot fill,’ Constance said, ‘and when one realises that everyone fills the place that they are needed for, and that if this place is not filled, the happiness of those we love is touched and marred, then truly unselfish love steps in and says I am satisfied.’
Constance, it seems, had an extraordinary capacity to adjust to circumstances.
10
My own darling mother
THE 1890s WERE not so much the ending of a century as the beginning of a new one. This was the observation of the poet Richard Le Gallienne, one of Oscar’s ‘sons’. Looking back in the 1920s, he saw that in the last ten years of the nineteenth century ‘all our present conditions, socially and artistically, our vaunted new “freedoms” of every kind … not only began then, but found a more vital and authoritative expression than they have found since because of the larger, more significant personalities bringing them about.’1 Victorian society was disintegrating as different factions re-evaluated its spiritual, moral and artistic aspects.
In fact, it was as if London had become a huge recruitment fair, with these ‘personalities’ in their respective booths inviting passers-by to join their cause. Amid all the competing schools and philosophies being bandied about, Le Gallienne remembered the ‘mystic looking booth, flying a green flag with an Irish harp figured upon it’, offering talk of ‘Rosicrucianism and fairies’, and then there were the ‘Socialist Clergymen, preaching High Church Anglicanism, and pre-Raphaelite art for the slums of Whitechapel’.
For Le Gallienne, Oscar was assuming a unique place amid such chaos. He was becoming a living synthesis of all the new, emergent ideas, borrowing from everything and combining all in a personality that defied definition. As such, he was becoming perhaps the most potent personality of the era – the individualist.
In contrast to her husband, Constance was by nature a fanatic who would throw herself wholeheartedly into one fad or craze before moving on to another. After her profound commitment to occult mysticism in the late 1880s, in the ’90s Constance moved on from ‘Rosicrucianism and fairies’ to the booth presided over by the socialist clergymen. In her pursuit of Christian socialism she became, according to Le Gallienne, ‘almost evangelical’.
As Oscar pursued individualism and Constance became involved in Christian socialism, the couple that had once been welded together through joint ventures and common interests were now following decidedly different interests. With both jealously guarding their right to their own intellectual freedom, their marriage took on a new shape: they began to lead increasingly separate lives.
Constance’s renewed interest in Christianity was prompted initially by the work of Professor Henry Drummond, whose writings attempted to reconcile a belief in God with Darwin’s science.2 But if it “was Drummond who opened her eyes, the person who sustained this renewed interest in Christianity was Georgina Cowper-Temple, Lady Mount-Temple, the stepdaughter-in-law of Lord Palmerston. The wife of the deceased William Francis Cowper-Temple, Lord Mount-Temple, a Whig statesman and philanthropist, Georgina was not only a significant friend to and patron of many of the great Pre-Raphaelite artists of the day; she had also become well known in public for her campaigning for sanitary knowledge for women. She was an ardent anti-vivisectionist and a promoter of vegetarianism. Bereaved in 1888, by the outset of the 1890s she was looking to fill the hole that her husband’s death left in her life. Constance was a perfect cause.
Constance’s friendship with Georgina Mount-Temple crystallized in the autumn of 1889. Her main point of introduction was through Georgina’s daughter Juliet Latour Temple, with whom Constance had already developed a warm friendship. Her association with Juliet led to an invitation to stay at Babbacombe Cliff in September 1889. She was ‘dreadfully shy about going’, she confided to Emily Thursfield. But she added, ‘Perhaps I shall make my mind to go next week.’3
Constance’s first visit to Babbacombe began a love affair with the place and its elderly owner. Everything about the house held a kind of magic for Constance. Babbacombe Cliff was a temple to Pre-Raphaelitism and full of the most exquisite treasure. Georgina Cowper-Temple and her husband had spent a lifetime building one of the best collections of Pre-Raphaelite paintings in Britain. To house them they had created a seaside retreat that was in itself an architectural delight. On approaching the house one could see Crow’s Nest, a tower built specifically for people to look out and pretend they were at sea, gazing out from the masts of some ancient ship. Referencing the medieval scenes that Pre-Raphaelite art so often featured, ‘Babb’ also had its own gated archway with mock portcullis.
Once inside, further wonders met the eye. The entrance hall was decorated with tiles designed by William Morris, and its staircase led to a corridor illuminated by stained glass designed by Edward BurneJones. Each room was papered and carpeted by Morris’s famous interior design company, Morris & Co., and then named after the featured design: Marigold or Lily.
Then there was Wonderland, a room at the very heart of the building, designed to be sun-filled all day long, decorated with scenes from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. It was surmounted by a huge vaulted ceiling of turquoise Morris tiles and sported an enormous marble inglenook fireplace.
By June 1890 Constance was meeting Juliet’s mother regularly at Sunday lectures,4 possibly at St Barnabas Church, which was close to both Georgina’s London home at 9 Cheyne Walk and Tite Street.5 By the end of 1890 Constance and Georgina had become so close that Constance was referring to the older woman as her ‘mother’. And when Constance fell ill on Christ
mas Day, Georgina came to her aid, a gesture that delighted Constance and prompted expressions of friendship so passionate that it is clear Georgina had now surpassed Viscountess Harberton, Lady Sandhurst and even Speranza in Constance’s collection of matriarchs.
‘Beloved Mother, my throat is a little better, but having begun to be wise, I am going to continue, and stay in bed to-day!’ Constance wrote on Boxing Day.
Darling, how beautiful you made my Xmas Day for me, as you do everything that you touch. I had been trying all the morning to feel happy and to be with you spiritually in your communion, and then you came and set the seal to my uncertain efforts, and made even belief seem possible to me. My little room is consecrated to me by your beloved words of peace.6
The following day Constance sent her friend a further note to reassure her that ‘Oscar says I no longer look tired’.7
The timing of Georgina’s arrival in Constance’s life is key. Having given up the secure position he had enjoyed at The Woman’s World, Oscar was pursuing his other literary ambitions, to write more stories and novels and also to write for the theatre. In doing so, he had thrown the Wilde household back into the financial uncertainty that goes hand in hand with a freelance career.
In addition to this, Oscar was spending more time away from Tite Street and his wife. Apart from the socializing that was necessarily linked to his business, and his liking for the theatre crowd which often led to his ‘talking witty nonsense in the dressing-rooms of his friends’ of an evening,8 Oscar was also increasingly combining his passion for young men with that for fine wine and food by using the finest hotels and restaurants in London as the arenas of his flirtations.