by Jean Findlay
It could have been autobiography, with the last description, driven by the gale of his passions, fitting him well. In his poetry, his classical education and the high ideals of chivalrous and romantic love allowed him to transform his longings. Love could justify the occasional failings of the flesh; the golden conversion of lust into love, and the triumph of virtue over vice:
Were you but vain, your vanity
To read my love might move you:
But were you vain, that could not be
For then I should not love you:
Strange cozenage, that I cannot gain
You humble, nor desire you, vain.6
Ralph Wright, a fellow scholar, later a second master at College, remembered that in his first year Charles had a rough time. He was different from the ‘healthy barbarians’ of his year, even the scholars, and he was teased heartily when they found a poem beginning, ‘God built a worm’. The following year, Ralph and Charles got on better and Ralph became more interested in Charles’s unique taste in books, also through mutual friends ‘such as that amazingly attractive boy Guy Lawrence, for whom we both had a deep sentimental admiration’.7 Two years older than Charles, Guy Lawrence was prefect of chapel and captain of fives, handsome and good at sports, and he was to play a part later in his life.
Meanwhile Charles’s reading matter widened, with him often devouring ten books a week and writing a commentary to his mother. Aged fifteen he read The Challoners by E. F. Benson, a novel that described a familiar view over a hazy valley to the grey towers of Winchester, ‘Old Challoner is the Puritanic rector. His son becomes a Romanist from a love of beauty, shocked by the crudities of the father’s church; the daughter reads George Eliot to her father’s horror and then marries an atheist.’8 These were actions that struck a chord with Charles’s own life. In the same batch came Henry James, F. T. Bullen, Geikie’s Scottish Reminiscences, G. K. Chesterton’s Heretics, The Road in Tuscany by Maurice Hewlett, The Sacred Cup by Vincent Brown, Laurence Housman’s Cloak of Friendship, and The Hill by Horace Annesley Vachell.
He read novels, travel, history, theology, poetry and journalism. Vachell’s The Hill is a romantic story about the passionate love of two Harrow schoolboys. Laurence Housman, (the brother of A. E.), was a Uranian poet. ‘At its most pure,’ wrote historian Paul Fussell, ‘the program of the Uranians favoured an ideal of Greek love’ – in other words the worship of young male beauty without sex. But more often than not the model was impossible to sustain ‘and earnest ideal paedophilia found itself descending to ordinary pederastic sodomy’.9
James Steuart Wilson, another schoolboy friend, sang as a soloist in the choral society to which Charles belonged and where boys were encouraged to write songs and compose music to be performed by themselves. Charles dedicated a poem to him which described a pure, idealised and untouchable love that verges on cruelty. In his private notebook he dated and recorded each time he fell in love by writing a poem. Sometimes there was joy, but not without pain, as in ‘The Prince’s Page’:
Down the street the young Prince rode
Very fair for the eye to see
My head was bowed to my heart’s grave load
No woman turned to smile at me
I was but the Prince’s page: and he
The cause of all my misery.
Charles’s sexuality was something he would by turns embrace joyfully, then regard as an affliction which heralded great anguish. Charles realised that his father would never be understanding about his homosexuality. A lifetime as a judge in the criminal sector meant no one could fool him about his son’s activity. He had looked into the eyes of the sodomites and the sodomised at the saddest, most degrading end of the human scale. For him there was no literary, spiritual or positive emotional aspect to homosexuality. Meg, on the other hand, without knowing anything about the physical details, had been reading Charles the poetry of Walt Whitman since he was eight. He grew up loving the literature of those outside conventional morality. He told his mother he had found a first edition of Hadrian the Seventh by Baron Corvo,10 a comedy about an Englishman who becomes Pope and reforms the Vatican by getting rid of its wealth, in Wells Bookshop, and he treasured it all his life. He was also drawn to the writing of the fin-de-siècle sensualists. He read Walter Pater whose Renaissance is suggested as one of the books that corrupts Dorian Grey in Wilde’s novel about the man who never ages no matter what his transgressions, while his portrait, which reflects his soul, rots in the attic. Oscar Wilde, playwright, novelist, essayist, was recently dead, but his reputation would never die, and his spirit was kept alive by his friends. Charles knew all about the drama of Wilde’s life and the court case of 1895 where he had been tried for gross indecency and condemned to two years’ hard labor, breaking his health and confidence; although he had written one of his most poignant pieces, De Profundis, in prison and been inspired while there to compose the Ballad of Reading Gaol.
Robert Ross was a dedicated friend of Oscar Wilde, who continued to campaign for the rehabilitation of his reputation long after Wilde’s death.11 His house at 40 Half Moon Street, just off Piccadilly, acted as a salon for poets, writers and critics. He was also an art connoisseur who collected fine old paintings and furniture, papered his walls with gold wallpaper and liberally gave out Turkish delight and expensive cigars.
The date and circumstances of Charles’s first meeting with Ross are unclear, although it certainly happened when Charles was sixteen. It is possible that the first meeting was a casual conversation in a second-hand bookshop on the Charing Cross Road, where Charles used to pass time on trips to London to visit Colin, who only had time for him in the very late evening. There was a poem dedicated to Robert Ross in Charles’s poetry notebook called ‘Hylas’, which was published in The Wykehamist in November 1906, without the dedication, and a year later in the Academy.
Charles wanted to impress Ross with his poetic ability and his knowledge of the Greek myth, which told that Heracles took on the young Hylas as an armour-bearer and taught him to become a warrior, whereupon Hylas left him for female Naiads and stayed with them, while Heracles cried in vain for his loved one.
… Yet he came not.
Lies he on some green bed
Mute trophy of their fruitless victory
That round him mourn? Perhaps he is not dead
But rules their region, and is fancied free
While lank-stemmed lilies, wreathed about his head,
Rise to the air, and plead for liberty.12
Charles’s poem spoke of the loss of any loved one, and the loss of Wilde to Ross; the longing for the dead lover who still ‘rules their region’. Wilde would have approved of the ‘lank-stemmed lilies, wreathed about his head’ especially as they plead for liberty. Charles felt close to the religious inspiration of Wilde’s work, and he was told by Robert Ross of the author’s deathbed conversion to Catholicism and of Wilde’s description of the Roman Catholic Church as being ‘for saints and sinners alone – for respectable people, the Anglican Church will do’. During his time at Trinity College, Dublin, and later in prison, Wilde had pored over the works of Augustine, Dante and Cardinal Newman.13
The character Algernon in Wilde’s Importance of Being Earnest has the surname Moncrieff. That must have lent Charles an amusing aura with Wilde devotees; in the letters which discuss Charles, Robert Ross always called him ‘Moncrieff’. It is clear that Charles made trips to London from Winchester and visited Ross at Half Moon Street, a haunt of the literary homosexual coterie. Robert Ross wrote in a letter in May 1907, ‘Scott Moncrieff is due to come here Monday or Tuesday. He has told me the hour of his arrival and the method of his arrival: indeed everything except the date. He is obviously a real poet…’14 Charles was nervous over his initial invitation, something he could not share with any of his family or friends. It was only thirteen years after the Wilde trial and the idea of a schoolboy going to London to meet Wilde’s associates would have been met with horror from school and home alik
e. On the other hand, it appealed to his pride to be accepted by an elite minority with exclusive intellectual tastes. Ross wrote again that month, ‘Moncrieff came here as he will have told you, and was as charming as ever. But he is very very shy, except when he is talking about books and he writes delightful letters full of racy criticisms about literature.’15 Charles’s fears were allayed when his mother came to London in August and Charles brought Ross to tea with her and the Rays at the Lyceum Club. Meg’s intellectual snobbery and her own naivety far outstripped any suspicions she might have that her teenage son would be seduced.
At that time Ross had engaged Christopher Sclater Millard, a charismatic and seductive bookseller, as his secretary. Charles was soon invited to visit Millard’s house, which had a large garden with a hammock slung between apple trees. Here all the birds and squirrels of the area were fed by Millard who collected first editions and looked after his books with as much care as his birds. Millard was reluctant to give away books, but for the fine-looking and poetic Charles he would part with anything. It was he who gave him the first edition of Hadrian the Seventh by Baron Corvo. Charles had told his mother he had found it in Wells bookshop in Winchester: the first of many lies. Anything to do with his visits to London was obscured. The more he lied, the more separate he became from his parents and the principles of his upbringing. Like Corvo, Millard was a Catholic convert of a decadent type. Ten years Charles’s senior, with an MA in Theology, Millard was a disciple of Wilde and was currently engaged in his impressive and thorough lifework, a bibliography of Wilde’s writings – which he dedicated, ‘To CSM from CSM’. This dedication was against the advice of Ross who wrote to Millard in May 1907, ‘Try like a good fellow and leave Moncrieff out of the bibliography. You are nearly as bad as Mr Dick.’16
The writer A. J. A. Symons gave a vivid description of Millard as a tall, striking figure and a ‘natural philosopher’. Always hatless, with thick, curly, greying hair, he wore a blue shirt, green jacket and grey trousers, which he patched and mended himself, but there was a great dignity about him, ‘he was perhaps the most self-possessed man I have ever known.’17
To add to this, Millard was described by one of the editors of the Burlington Magazine18 as ‘the sort who couldn’t resist, when out on a country walk, leaping the hedge and raping a ploughboy’.19 In March 1907 he also gave the sixteen-year-old Charles a small leather-bound copy of the Little Office of the Blessed Virgin Mary,20 and beside his dedication in Latin stuck a halfpenny postage stamp from the British Virgin Islands; two allusions to virginity. He was imprisoned twice for homosexual offences: the first time just before he met Charles, for three months from June 1906,21 for gross indecency22. Undoubtedly his influence on Charles was more than literary, aesthetic and religious. Moreover, his chosen Catholicism was a religion which offered the forgiveness that society could not provide. In April 1907 Charles spent the first week of his ‘Easter holiday with Millard at Coulsdon and Worthing, and was afterwards deposited by him at 15 Vicarage Gardens, before going home to my astonished parents in Scotland’.23 His mother commented in her diary, ‘Charlie has had a pleasant week going about with various literary friends.’24 Charles wrote much later about the holiday, ‘There has been hardly any single thing in my life since that is not affected by his influence and teaching at that time.’25
Millard impressed Charles with the ancient Greek tradition of pederasty where an older man would take a youth as a disciple and lover and instruct him both in knowledge and in the ways of eros. However this was not a Greek city state, this was London in 1907 where the punishment for boy love was prison; a life to which these lovers of beauty and ideals were entirely unsuited. Millard was imprisoned with other sexual offenders: paedophiles, rapists and suspected sodomites charged with indecency were categorised in the same group. Prisons in 1907 were grim places where squalor, neglect and moral depravity ruled. Food was basic, heating minimal, tobacco was banned; access to books, letters and visits had to be earned. Prison terms were not long, but few who sampled them wished to do so again. The Half Moon Street atmosphere was both liberating and frightening; no wonder Charles was halting and shy with Ross: he was being brave just being there at all. But that was his outward behaviour; internally, he felt he was living the drama of Milton’s Fall. ‘Do you know Richard de Castre’s prayer in Lyra Sacra page 4-6? How “Jesus snapped sin’s fetters and burst the gates of Hell”,’ he wrote in a letter to his mother in 1907.
Charles tried to turn his attention to a young lady he had met. ‘Miss Daphne, driven by hunger like a winter wolf, has come to room in Winchester. She walks 8 miles a day. Rain or snow. To teach two thankless boys. Thus fame is made.’26 Miss Daphne was an impoverished governess who was befriended by the whole family. She came home to stay at Lanark when Charles was seventeen and Meg noted that she was very good and kind and pretty. She was also educated and useful, unlike the society girls who were sisters of Charles’s school friends. Any hoped-for romance with Charles did not flourish, but he liked her as a friend and she accompanied the Scott Moncrieffs to the Belgian seaside on their summer holiday. While there Charles wrote and dedicated to her a poem called, ‘Sunset in Flanders’:
… Harshly a Flemish mother speaks;
Two Flemish infants wail
While, heaving high each warped and rusted sail
To be hurled down again,
The mill, convulsed by age-long pain,
Shudders and shrieks …27
The poem is hardly romantic. The terrific noise and pain of the mill suggests a fear of womanhood, childbirth and all that family life entails. But Charles did contemplate the sort of future his parents so obviously hoped for when they encouraged friendships with girls. He dedicated poems to other women including one called ‘A Ghost Story’ to Gladys Dalyell, sister of a schoolfriend. This was written in 1906 and published a year later. These dedications were in some ways to reflect what was expected of him, but he also charmed girls and had lively friendships with them.
Charles wrote copious amounts of poetry and there were not enough outlets. In 1907 he and his closest friends, A. G. Hess, George Gilroy and John Chisholm-Batten founded their own literary magazine at Winchester called the New Field. It was sold by subscription stating, ‘A Subscription implies that the Paper will be sent to the Subscriber until one of the three expires.’28 ‘A Ghost Story’ appeared there – a short poem about the Ghost of Bishop Hugh. A long poem written in the same year, ‘Agnes Dead in Martolm’, another ghost story, in the form of an ancient ballad, was dedicated to Janet Robinson, a family friend, and also published in the New Field. None of the poems to women have a sensual or erotic element. ‘Agnes Dead in Martolm’ is a tragic ballad about impossible love and a ghastly, unearthly haunting.
The attraction of the sweet, hardworking Miss Daphne was nothing compared to the charisma, the erudition, the sheer drama of Millard, who had endured imprisonment for the love that dare not speak its name. For Charles, whose chief influence was literature and the scope of heroism, Millard’s stature, maturity and passion represented a fulfilment he had never come across before. And while Miss Daphne was innocently flirtatious, Millard was practised in the art of seduction.
Charles read Latin and Greek poetry. He translated pieces from the Iliad taking as his example the powerful and loving relationship of Achilles and Patroclus, brother warriors who would die side by side if necessary and who groomed each other prior to battle. He read the Symposium where Socrates said great ‘was the reward of the true love of Achilles towards his lover Patroclus’.29 On the other hand weighed the importance of his own culture and religion and the accepted codes and punishments of society. Over and above all this was his devotion and obedience to his mother. ‘A Mother’s Prayer’, published in the New Field in April 1908, is perhaps thinking of his own mother and demonstrates the power of his awareness of transgression.
A Mother’s Prayer
Beautiful James Alison,
What thing have you done?
I am your mother and
You are my son.
Is it nought to you
My days in fasting pass,
My nights in prayer and weeping
For you my son, alas.
You never loved your mother
As she you, James;
But kindled in another
Unhallowed flames. –
Who can tell for certain
The death that he shall die
Drawing fate’s close curtain?
Neither you nor I!
But you have kindled flames
And in flames your ghost will burn,
And all your vaunted beauty, James,
To leprous ashes turn.30
Charles’s conscience had been formed as an eight-year-old, reading Milton with his mother in the greenhouse: he was acutely aware of the Fall. His youthful poems are full of references to his knowledge of his own wrongdoing. He believed he was offending more than the average teenager and every return to the regular Sunday services with his father at the local Church of Scotland on visits home re-inforced the teaching that the wages of sin were death. His imagination was full of angels on the one hand and the devil on the other; the elevated and the damned. However, it was not enough to stop him. In his final year at Winchester, as editor of the New Field, which circulated among the parents, masters and old boys, Charles published under his own name an ambitious story called Evensong and Morwe Song. The title was taken from the General Prologue of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, line 830, ‘If evensong and morwesong accord’. It began:
… ‘And if we are found out?’ asked Maurice. He was still on his knees in the thicket, and, as he looked up to where his companion stood in an awkward fumbling attitude, his face seemed even more than unusually pale and meagre in the grey broken light. It was with rather forced nonchalance that Carruthers answered ‘O, the sack, I suppose’ – and he stopped aghast at the other’s expression. Then as only at one other time in a long and well-rewarded life did he feel that a millstone around his neck might perhaps be less offensive than the picture of those small, startled features hung for all eternity before his eyes.31