Oscar Wilde

by Richard Ellmann

  The letter reveals that his thirteen-year-old tastes in clothing were a dandy’s, discriminating between his own scarlet and lilac shirts and the unmentionable colors of Willie’s. (Wilde was wearing a lilac shirt, with a heliotrope tie, when the two women who halved the pen name of ‘Michael Field’ came to see him in 1890.5) His predilection for scarlet and related tints was shared with his mother, who is reported as wearing into her sixties a scarlet dress, and whom a Dublin observer, Lord Rathcreedan, claims to have seen flaunting a red shawl.6 ‘Vermilion’ was a word that Wilde liked to draw out lingeringly, in his inflection of tints and shades. (On the other hand, he had a horror of magenta.7) In The Ballad of Reading Gaol, the last indignity suffered by the condemned man is that he cannot be hanged in his scarlet coat. When it was pointed out to Wilde that the regiment to which the man belonged was the Blues, he offered instant revision:

  He did not wear his azure coat

  For blood and wine are blue.8

  More than aesthetic preference lay behind his eagerness to read his mother’s new poem in the National Review. It bore the patriotic title ‘To Ireland’ and renewed a plea that Lady Wilde had made in her youth, for someone to blow the trumpet of rebellion. A new edition of her poems was to appear from a Scottish publisher, and the new poem would replace the dedication in the first edition of 1864, which read,

  Dedicated to my sons Willie and Oscar Wilde

  ‘I made them indeed

  Speak plain the word country. I taught them, no doubt,

  That country’s a thing one should die for at need’

  lines of her own with more fervor than style. The young Wilde had a taste for both her poetry and her politics.

  He also enjoyed his mother’s practical jokes. ‘Aunt Warren’ in the letter was Lady Wilde’s much older sister, Emily Thomazine, who in 1829 had married Samuel Warren, then a captain, and later, like his brother Nathaniel, a lieutenant-colonel in the British Army. Mrs Warren, her Unionist politics befitting an army wife, frowned on her sister, who as a nationalist frowned back. Irking Aunt Warren with green notepaper was a shared subversive delight. Emily Warren, except as co-owner with the Wildes of certain properties, does not appear on the scene again. Her husband had died about 1850, and she herself in 1881. Like her older brother, who became a judge in Louisiana, she kept her distance from sister Jane. Yet perhaps a bit of Emily Thomazine Warren survives in Aunt Augusta Bracknell, whose husband’s brother is a general with a first name, Ernest, more solemn than Samuel and Nathaniel. Lady Bracknell issues English commands which are promptly disobeyed by Irish hearts.

  (Jane) Speranza Francesca Wilde

  All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That’s his.

  The mother to whom this boy of thirteen addressed himself was no ordinary person. Lady Wilde had a sense of being destined for greatness, and imparted it. Her son subscribed to her view, and treated her with the utmost consideration and respect, almost as though he were her precursor rather than she his. Four years before she received that letter from school, her husband had been knighted. The title helped, because she had always been uneasy about her first name, which was Jane, and had modified her second name, almost certainly Frances, into Francesca, regarding the new name as a brilliant vestige of the Elgee family’s origins in Italy, where—according to what she maintained was a family tradition—they had been called Algiati. From Algiati to Alighieri was an easy backward leap, and Dante could not save himself from becoming Jane Elgee’s ancestor. (Her son in turn was to claim a visual resemblance to and a spiritual kinship with both Shakespeare and Nero.) What signature to use became a complicated matter. To tradesmen or correspondents of no consequence, she signed herself Jane Wilde; to those she liked she was Francesca or J. Francesca Wilde. But she had another forename as well, altogether of her own devising. This was Speranza. It was part of the motto with which her notepaper was embossed: Fidanza, Speranza, Costanza. In her correspondence with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, translator of Dante, she signed herself Francesca Speranza Wilde.9

  That she found a certain humor in her nom de plume is evident from a cheering letter she sent to the Irish novelist William Carleton: ‘In truth I cannot bear this despondency of yours—unrecognised genius may name its miseries, deep and poignant, but not yours.… Let St. Speranza, if you will allow my canonisation, work the miracle of your restoration, for your gloom is all imaginary.…’ Carleton responded by praising ‘the great Ocean’ of her soul.10

  The rivering waters that formed that great Ocean have been traced. Among her ancestors, if not Dante, there was on her mother’s side the Reverend Charles Maturin, whose Melmoth the Wanderer, with its mysterious, satanic hero, exercised fascination upon Scott, on Balzac, who wrote a sequel to it, on Baudelaire, who found in Melmoth an alter ego, and on Oscar Wilde, who would one day take Melmoth as his own name. Lady Wilde’s maternal great-grandfather, Dr Kingsbury, was a well-known physician and friend of Jonathan Swift. Her father, Charles Elgee (1783–1821), took up the law, and his father, John Elgee (1753–1823), was a rector and archdeacon in the Church of Ireland. Her mother, Sarah, was the daughter of another cleric, Thomas Kingsbury, who besides being vicar of Kildare held the secular post of Commissioner of Bankruptcy. Further back, Lady Wilde’s paternal great-grandfather, Charles Elgee (1709–87), was a well-off farmer in County Down; another ancestor on her mother’s side was English: a bricklayer (died 1805) who emigrated from County Durham in the 1770s because of the Irish building boom.11 Given these unexceptionable antecedents, Lady Wilde still opted for her hypothetical Tuscan origins.

  Like her son, she enjoyed improving upon reality. She allowed it to be understood that she had been born in 1826. When pressed, she responded airily that her birth had never been recorded, no Registry Office having been required when giants still walked the earth. The parish register that might have refuted her has not been found. ‘Indeed,’ says Lady Bracknell, ‘no woman should ever be quite accurate about her age. It looks so calculating.’ Though biographers have sought the date of Lady Wilde’s birth in vain, it is possible now gracelessly to reveal, on the basis of her application for a grant from the Royal Literary Fund in November 1888, by which time age rather than youth was to her advantage, that she was born on 27 December 1821, a mere half-decade earlier than she had said. Her son Oscar was a match for her: he regularly claimed to be two years younger than he was, even on his marriage certificate; and Lady Wilde went along with this chronology, congratulating him on winning the Newdigate Prize at the age of ‘only 22,’ when she knew he was close to twenty-four.

  Lady Wilde communicated to her son both her nationalism and her determination to embody it in verse. One version she gave of how she had made her debut on the national stage was that she had come upon a book or pamphlet by Richard D’Alton Williams, who was tried for treason, though acquitted, in 1848. Presumably it was the work of his that began with the poem ‘The Nation’s Valentine, To the Ladies of Ireland,’ which called upon women to ‘sing us no songs but of FATHERLAND now.’ She was moved, she was fired. ‘Then it was I discovered I was a poet.’12 She did manage a rhetoric close to her master’s. But for W. B. Yeats she evolved a different account. ‘Walking through some Dublin street, she came upon so great a crowd that she could go no further,’ Yeats recalled her telling him. ‘She asked a shopman what brought so many people into the street and he said: “It is the funeral of Thomas Davis.” And when she answered, “Who was Thomas Davis? I have never heard of him,” he said, “He was a poet.” ’13 That a poet should be so multitudinously mourned decided her to be a poet too.

  Thomas Davis’s poetry did in fact convert many to nationalism, including Yeats’s friend John O’Leary. But Davis’s funeral was in 1845, when Jane Wilde was a good twenty-two rather than eighteen, and she could not have been ignorant of his identity as leader of Young Ireland.14 Williams’s verse and Davis’s funeral contributed to the rising sentiment among sensitive Irishmen, Protestants as well as Cat
holics, that they must take up the nationalist cause. Jane Elgee began to write verse on the coming revolution, on the famine, and on the exodus from Ireland of the famished. These she submitted to Charles Gavan Duffy, editor of the Nation (which had been founded in 1842), under the name of ‘Speranza.’ They were enclosed in letters signed ‘John Fanshaw Ellis,’ in echo of Jane Francesca Elgee. When Gavan Duffy liked and printed her patriotic poems, she submitted some love poetry, which he liked less and did not print. Still, his curiosity was awakened and he asked Ellis to come and see him. Ellis responded by asking Gavan Duffy to pay a visit instead to 34 Leeson Street. There, as Gavan Duffy recounts, the smiling maid, on being asked for Mr Ellis, showed him into a drawing room, where he found only George Smith, publisher to the university. ‘What! my loyal friend, are you the new volcano of sedition?’ asked Gavan Duffy. Smith left the room and returned ‘with a tall girl on his arm, whose stately carriage and figure, flashing brown eyes, and features cast in an heroic mould, seemed fit for the genius of poetry, or the spirit of revolution.’15 The stage-managing was characteristic: as Jane Elgee confided later to the mathematician Sir William Hamilton, she loved ‘to make a sensation.’ Gavan Duffy wrote to her that one day she would ‘win a reputation not second to Mrs Browning.’16

  Speranza’s verses were inflammatory. ‘The Young Patriot Leader’ was on Thomas Francis Meagher, convicted of treason in 1849 in a trial she attended. The government, however, took more notice of the prose in the Nation. Gavan Duffy as editor and leader-writer was put in prison to await trial for sedition. In his absence, Jane Elgee wrote editorials for two successive issues of the paper, which said outright what Gavan Duffy had put circumspectly. In ‘The Hour of Destiny,’ on 22 July 1848, she announced that ‘The long pending war with England has actually commenced,’ and a week later, in ‘Jacta Alea Est’ (‘The Die Is Cast’), fiercely exclaimed: ‘O! for a hundred thousand muskets glimmering brightly in the light of Heaven.’ But she was willing to allow, if England capitulated promptly, ‘the golden link’ of the monarchy to continue to unite the two nations. These articles inflamed the government if not the populace, and were tacked on to the charges against Gavan Duffy as being his work, even though he was in prison. When the barrister pleading his case, Isaac Butt, said he could defend everything except the ‘Jacta Alea Est,’ Jane Elgee went to the Solicitor General, denounced herself as author of the articles, and asked to have the added charge removed from Gavan Duffy’s indictment. She was refused. ‘I think this piece of Heroism will make a good scene when I write my life,’ she boasted to a Scottish friend.17 When the prosecutor interrogated Gavan Duffy about the articles, a tall woman arose in the gallery to interrupt. ‘I, and I alone, am the culprit, if culprit there be.’ The judge gaveled her down, but the prosecution dropped this line of questioning.18 Gavan Duffy was tried four times. Jury after jury being unwilling to convict, he was at last set free. Jane Elgee’s intervention was the most effective act in the three great courtroom dramas in which the Wilde family performed. It must have been in her mind forty-seven years later, when she insisted that her son Oscar stand trial rather than run away, anticipating that he too might have a famous victory.

  Immoderateness was a policy with her. In December 1848 she wrote, ‘I should like to rage through life—this orthodox creeping is too tame for me—ah, this wild rebellious ambitious nature of mine. I wish I could satiate it with Empires, though a St. Helena were the end.’ ‘All virtue must be active,’ she declared at another time. ‘There is no such thing as negative virtue.’19 If heroic deeds were not possible, she could at least dress with derring-do. At the Lord Lieutenant’s ball on St Patrick’s Day, 1859, she vaunted a dress that was ‘three skirts of white silk niched round with white ribbon and hooped up with bouquets of gold flowers and green shamrocks.’20 In her salon in Dublin, and later in London, she cut a figure in increasingly outlandish costumes, surmounted by headdresses and festooned with outsize and bizarre jewelry.

  Her remarks were in keeping with her attire. Oscar Wilde would comment later, ‘Where there is no extravagance there is no love, and where there is no love there is no understanding.’21 In its lower range Lady Wilde’s conscious rhetoric could be quite forthright, as when she wrote in an essay on ‘The Bondage of Woman,’ ‘We have now traced the history of women from Paradise to the nineteenth century, and have heard nothing through the long roll of the ages but the clank of their fetters.’22 Her son would turn this round in A Woman of No Importance: ‘The history of woman is the history of the worst form of tyranny the world has ever known. The tyranny of the weak over the strong. It is the only tyranny that lasts.’ His mother did not see history in this way. She interrupted the feminist Mona Caird to say, ‘Every woman will give the top of the jug to some man till the end of the chapter.’23

  In conversation she was iconoclastic. When someone asked her to receive a young woman who was ‘respectable,’ she replied, ‘You must never employ that description in this house. It is only tradespeople who are respectable. We are above respectability.’24 In The Importance of Being Earnest, when Lady Bracknell asks, ‘Is this Miss Prism a female of repellent aspect, remotely connected with education?,’ Canon Chasuble replies, ‘She is the most cultivated of ladies, and the very picture of respectability.’ ‘It is obviously the same person,’ says Lady Bracknell. Wilde once announced that his mother and he had decided to found a society for the suppression of virtue, and it says something for their kinship of minds that either of them might have originated the idea.

  What Lady Wilde contributed to the Irish scene was a talent for magnifying parochial matters. For her, poetry meant oratory. Coulson Kernahan reports her rebuke to a friend of his, ‘You, and other poets, are content to express only your little soul in poetry. I express the soul of a great nation. Nothing less would content me, who am the acknowledged voice in poetry of all the people of Ireland.’25 When she moved to England, after her husband’s death, she complained with pomp and dejection, ‘I have a habit of looking at souls, not forms. Alas now I only feel the agony and loss of all that made life endurable, and my singing robes are trailed in London clay.’26 She claimed her aquiline look came from having been an eagle in a previous existence, and to the young Yeats, whom she befriended, she said, ‘I want to live in some high place, Primrose Hill or Highgate, because I was an eagle in my youth.’27

  Yet she did not want to lead the troops like Joan of Arc, only to inspire them as ‘a priestess at the altar of freedom.’28 It was up to men to wage the wars. Women should be free, and the highest form of their freedom was to suffer for a cause.29 Other forms of freedom did not attract her. She would rebuke George Eliot for having characters in Middlemarch say ‘By God!’ when ‘By Jove!’ would have been enough. Her own part after her marriage, she said, when ‘at last my great soul is imprisoned within a woman’s destiny,’30 was to provide the poetry to go with her husband’s prose.

  An All-Round Man

  ALGERNON: The doctors found out that Bunbury could not live … so Bunbury died.

  LADY BRACKNELL: He seems to have had great confidence in the opinion of his physicians.

  William Robert Wilde, who married Jane Elgee on 14 November 1851, was worthy of her regard. She had testified to it in the Nation by an extremely laudatory review of his The Beauties of the Boyne in 1849, which may have been the agent of their first meeting. His family, like hers, was resolutely middle-class. His great-grandfather was a Dublin merchant; his grandfather Ralph Wilde settled as a farmer in Castlereagh; Ralph’s son Thomas, a physician, married Amalia Flynn (born about 1776). Two of their three sons became Church of Ireland priests, and only the third, William Robert Wilde (born March 1815), followed his father’s profession.

  William Wilde had his detractors, but no one in Ireland, or perhaps even in Britain, knew as much as he about the eye and ear. St Mark’s Hospital, Dublin, which he founded in 1844, was the first in Ireland to treat afflictions of these organs. His books Aural Surgery (1853) and Epidemi
c Ophthalmia (1851) were the earliest textbooks in their fields, and stood up well for years. Even today surgeons use the terms ‘Wilde’s incision’ for mastoid, ‘Wilde’s cone of light,’ and ‘Wilde’s cords.’ He displayed great skill in amassing medical data for books about Austria and the Mediterranean coast. When a census of Ireland was undertaken in 1851, Wilde was appointed Census Commissioner to organize the collection of medical information. His statistics on the incidence of deafness and blindness and eye and ear diseases were the first ever compiled in Ireland. He was appointed Surgeon Oculist to the Queen in Ireland in 1863, and the next year was knighted.

  However demanding his medical work was, he pursued other interests. He wrote easily, and on many subjects. The skull of Swift came into his hands, and he published a short, valuable book to prove that the great satirist in his last years was not insane but physically ill. William Wilde trained his own eye on Irish archaeological remains, and his ear on folklore. He was the first to find and identify a lake dwelling; he brilliantly and speedily catalogued the great collection of antiquities now in the National Museum of Ireland. From his peasant patients, often in lieu of fees, he collected superstitions, legends, cures, and charms that might have been lost. An attendant wrote them down at the time, and Wilde’s widow would edit and publish them in two posthumous volumes that had a great influence on Yeats. The catalogue of antiquities is still in use, and William Wilde’s little book of Irish Popular Superstitions (1852), dedicated to Speranza, can still engage and amuse.

  Like his wife, William Wilde was a nationalist. Discouraged by the failure of the 1848 uprising, both dissociated themselves from the republican Fenianism of the late 1860s. (Speranza expressly disavowed democracy.) William Wilde’s nationalism expressed itself in a love for the countryside, past and present. Two of his books deal with Lough Corrib and Lough Mask in the west (1867) and with the Boyne and Blackwater in the east of Ireland (1849). He not only knew the places thoroughly, he could also re-create their history. The legendary battle of Moytura, for example, in which the Tuatha De Danaan defeated the Fomorians near Cong, was so much in his mind that he claimed to have found the grave of one of its heroes, and in 1864 built Moytura House on the supposed site of the battle. When the British Association visited the Aran Islands in 1857, William Wilde was their official guide, and so impressed the governor of Uppsala, who was among the visiting dignitaries, that he invited the Wildes to Sweden. In 1862, he conferred on Wilde the Order of the Polar Star.*