In the summers the Wilde family would often go to the beautiful country south of Dublin; they stayed at Dungarvan, County Waterford, and Oscar is said to have played on the seashore with a boy called Edward Carson, later to be his cross-examiner as well as the architect of Irish partition.62 (Michael MacLiammoir commented, ‘Yes, that would explain it all. Oscar probably upset Edward’s sandcastle.’) Perhaps a year or two later they were at Glencree in the Wicklow mountains. They took a farmhouse, probably Lough Bray Cottage, at the foot of the vale of Glencree, less than a mile from the newly opened Glencree Reformatory. The Reformatory chaplain, the Reverend L. C. Prideaux Fox (1820–1905), visited them. William Wilde expressed his bitter opposition to reformatories, but his wife enjoyed the chaplain’s company, and even asked if she could bring her children to his chapel. Father Fox explained there was a tribune in the chapel from which the altar could be seen without contact with the prisoners. Jane Wilde came with her children. She occasionally showed a hankering to turn Catholic, and a letter to her from Sir William Hamilton hopes that the Catholic poet Aubrey de Vere would not ‘succeed in converting, or perverting you.’63 Now she thought of having the children received, and the fact that both boys had been baptized as Protestants did not faze her. Father Fox, himself a convert, wrote, ‘It was not long before she asked me to instruct two of her children, one of them being that future erratic genius, Oscar Wilde. After a few weeks I baptized these two children, Lady Wilde herself being present on the occasion.’ Oscar would have been perhaps between four and five. At her request, Father Fox bravely called on William Wilde to say what he had done. The doctor, a resolute Protestant, one of whose books is dedicated to the Dean of St Patrick’s, cannot have been pleased, but passed the matter off lightly with the remark ‘I don’t care what the boys are so long as they become as good as their mother.’64 Soon afterwards Father Fox was given another post, and never saw the family again.
As often happened with private baptisms, this one was not registered, and doubt has been cast on this first of Wilde’s conversions as well as on his last; but there are reasons for believing that Father Fox did as he said. His account of the people living near the Glencree Reformatory is in other respects accurate.a Wilde himself told friends that he had an obscure recollection of having been baptized a Catholic.65 The incident would seem to have given rise to the second baptism planned by both Algernon and Jack in The Importance of Being Earnest, on which Lady Bracknell comments, ‘At their age? The idea is grotesque and irreligious!… I will not hear of such excess.’ But when Oscar Wilde later made some tentative overtures towards Rome, he did not regard the early ceremony as worthy of mention. Father Fox had baptized in vain, but the incident offers an example of Lady Wilde’s pleasure in ceremonies in which she had no intention of participating herself. A taste for vicarious spiritual sensations was implanted early.
On the secular plane, Wilde appears to have had an untroubled upbringing. Quite possibly he is himself a model for his fairy-tale hero, ‘The Young King,’ who in boyhood had already ‘shown signs of that strange passion for beauty that was destined to have so great an influence over his life. Those who accompanied him … often spoke of the cry of pleasure that broke from his lips when he saw the delicate raiment and rich jewels that had been prepared for him.’ Though Wilde would later theorize that one should have no possessions, he was gratified by scarlet and lilac shirts, just as at school he made a point of having beautiful large-paper editions of the classical texts that others read in more basic copies. At a time when most schoolboys were concerned with games and grades, Wilde was cultivating his tints and textures. Still, he was not all precocity. His reading was chiefly in historical romances, such as J. W. Meinhold’s The Amber Witch, and an even greater favorite, the same author’s Sidonia the Sorceress, which his mother had translated in 1849. Sidonia was one of those gifted, ferocious women who fascinated the Pre-Raphaelites; Burne-Jones did a painting of her; William Morris in later life remained so enamored of her that in 1893, through Wilde, he sought Lady Wilde’s consent to the Kelmscott Press’s republishing the book, which he praised as ‘an almost faultless reproduction of the past, its action really alive.’66
What distinguishes Sidonia from run-of-the-mill sorceresses is that she has a power of ironic speech. Brought to trial for witchcraft, she worsts her accusers point for point in a way that Lady Wilde and her courtroom-conscious son could admire. Sidonia was ‘a game old devil and fought it out like a brick to the last,’ said Morris. The book makes much of a painting of Sidonia which proves to be a double portrait: in the foreground, executed in the style of Lucas Cranach, is a woman golden-haired and richly gowned, while in the background lurks the ravening sorceress in the garments she wore at her execution, done in the manner of Rubens.67 The search for sources of Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray is unending, but here is another analogue to the benign portrait of Dorian by Basil Hallward, and the malign one of Dorian as drawn by his own soul.
The three Wilde children grew up amid increasing affluence and success. William Wilde’s knighthood in 1864 was the climax, and they all delighted in it. Oscar’s letters to his mother speak of ‘Sir William’ instead of ‘Father,’ as if to savor the title. He and his brother were allowed at an early age to sit at the foot of the dinner table, and so, as Oscar Wilde said, he heard as a child all the important questions of the day discussed. He and Willie were not allowed to speak: this childhood training in holding his tongue, Oscar said, was responsible for his wagging it so successfully in his maturity.68
As the boys approached adolescence, their parents began to think of a school to replace home tutoring. ‘My eldest boy is nearly eleven—very clever and very high spirited,’ Lady Wilde explained on 22 April 1863 to a Swedish friend, ‘and tho’ he obeys me he will scarcely obey a governess. I feel it would be a risk to leave him. But we think of sending both boys to a boarding school soon.’69 Evidently Oscar was more tractable than his brother. In May 1863 Willie was experimentally put in school near Dublin, at St Columba’s College, but in February 1864 both boys were sent to the Portora Royal School; a railway line from Dublin to Enniskillen had conveniently been opened in 1859. (It has been conjectured that their parents packed them off because of the Mary Travers case, but that suit did not go to trial until December 1864.) The boys were then twelve and almost ten, Oscar being younger than most entrants at that time.
At Portora, Willie threw himself into school activities and, though never a systematic student, became a popular ‘character,’ quick-witted, erratic, and energetic. He was inclined to boastfulness, and ridiculed for it. His best subject was drawing, which he had practiced with his father. At first the masters thought that he was the talented son, and the headmaster, the Reverend William Steele, was to amuse Oscar by suggesting that with effort he might match Willie’s standard.70 Lady Wilde had been partial to Willie as her firstborn: ‘Willie is my kingdom,’ she wrote on 22 November 1854, and announced, ‘I will rear him a Hero perhaps and President of the future Irish Republic. Chi sa? I have not fulfilled my destiny yet.’71 Four years later, on 20 December 1858, she informed Lotten von Kraemer, ‘Willie is a darling child. He is so good and so wise, but little Isola is rapidly taking her place as pet of the house.’ Oscar is conspicuously unmentioned. By 1865 Lady Wilde was remarking impartially in a letter, ‘My two boys have gone to a public school.’ In 1869 she writes, ‘My two sons were home for the vacation—fine clever fellows—the eldest quite grown-up looking.’72 By this time Willie was in his last year at Portora, and clearly being outdone by his brother, who was, for example, fourth in classics when Willie was thirteenth. Probably it was now that Lady Wilde remarked to George Henry Moore (the father of George Moore the novelist), ‘Willie is all right, but as for Oscar, he will turn out something wonderful.’73
Willie patronized Oscar, who patronized Willie. Oscar was big, languid, and dreamy. Willie was a tolerable pianist; Oscar had no musical talent. But his wit made itself felt: thanks to his misc
hievous eye, nearly all the boys in the school bore nicknames conferred by him, though good-humoredly enough.b His own nickname, which annoyed him, was ‘Grey Crow,’ perhaps premonitory of Dorian’s surname. Willie was known as ‘Blue Blood’ because he had protested, when accused of having failed to wash his neck, that its color came not from dirt but from the blue blood of the Wilde family.74
Oscar’s most marked talent, at first, was his gift for fast reading. ‘When I was a boy at school,’ he told Eugene Field in 1889, ‘I was looked upon as a prodigy by my associates because, quite frequently, I would, for a wager, read a three-volume novel in half an hour so closely as to be able to give an accurate résumé of the plot of the story; by one hour’s reading I was enabled to give a fair narrative of the incidental scenes and the most pertinent dialogue.’ He told the novelist W. B. Maxwell that he read two facing pages of a book at a time, and in a demonstration showed he had mastered the intricacies of a novel in three minutes.75 Wilde could talk on other subjects while he was quickly turning the pages. At school the more studious pupils assumed that he was a skimmer rather than a scholar. It was true that he did not cram for examinations, and read the prescribed texts for pleasure, along with much that was unprescribed, neglecting what he found boring. Still, in 1866 he was a prizeman in the Junior School, which meant he was excused from the annual examinations, and in 1869 he won a copy of Butler’s Analogy as a third prize for Scripture. What distinguished him was his excitement over the literary qualities of Greek and Latin texts, and his disinclination to enter into textual minutiae. Not until his last two years at Portora, 1869–71, when he began to make deft and mellifluous oral translations from Thucydides, Plato, and Virgil, did his fellow students realize his talent. The classical work that caught his imagination was the Agamemnon of Aeschylus, which he must have studied with a master, J. F. Davies, who published a good edition of the play with commentary in 1868. At a viva voce on it, Wilde ‘walked away’ from all others, including Louis Claude Purser, later the distinguished professor of Latin at Trinity College. The Agamemnon stirred Wilde’s sensibilities so that he never left off quoting from it.
Purser, Wilde’s classmate, wrote down his recollections of Wilde at Portora for Robert Sherard and A. J. A. Symons. These differ from those of others, perhaps because Wilde had changed his ways by 1868, when Purser entered the school. Dr Steele and two of Wilde’s other classmates remembered him as being dirty and slovenly, but Purser is firm that he ‘was more careful in his dress than any other boy.’ Perhaps he was dirty under those scarlet and lilac shirts. According to Robert Sherard, Wilde alone among the boys wore a silk hat on weekdays, though this cannot have been, as Sherard asserts, the Eton topper, which was never worn at Portora. Wilde’s refusal to participate in games made him at first unpopular. ‘Now and then he would be seen in one of the school boats on Lough Erne,’ says another classmate, ‘yet he was a poor hand at an oar.’ On one occasion when he did participate in a game, which consisted of a ‘tournament’ in which smaller boys rode on bigger boys’ shoulders and tried to unhorse one another, he was thrown and for the second time broke his arm.76
Another pupil at the school was Edward (later Sir Edward) Sullivan, who would one day publish an edition of the Book of Kells. When he and Wilde met in the autumn of 1868, Sullivan recalled, Wilde wore his straight fair hair long and had, for all his height, a boyish appearance, which he kept for some years. Outside the classroom he was restless, eager to talk. He was known for his humorous exaggerations of school occurrences. One day he and Sullivan and two other boys went into Enniskillen and happened on a street orator; tiring of the rant, one boy pushed the speaker’s hat off with a stick, and they all fled headlong towards the school with some of the indignant audience in rapid pursuit. In his hurry Wilde collided with an aged cripple and knocked him down. By the time he reached Portora, this sorry incident had undergone Falstaffian transformation: an angry giant had barred his path, he had had to fight him through round after round and eventually, after prodigies of valor, to leave him for dead. In ‘The Critic as Artist’ Wilde would attribute the foundation of social intercourse to whoever ‘first, without ever having gone out to the chase, told the wandering cavemen at sunset how he had … slain the Mammoth in single combat.’ ‘Romantic imagination was strong in him,’ says Sullivan, ‘but there was always something in his telling of such a tale to suggest that he felt his hearers were not really being taken in.’77
Like his mother, Wilde undercut his grandiosities with a smile. In later life he described a narrator of his own stamp to Charles Ricketts and others:
Now a certain man was greatly beloved by the people of his village, for, when they gathered round him at dusk and questioned him, he would relate many strange things he had seen. He would say, ‘I beheld three mermaids by the sea who combed their green hair with a golden comb.’ And when they besought him to tell more, he answered—‘By a hollow rock I spied a centaur; and, when his eyes met mine, he turned slowly to depart, gazing at me sadly over his shoulder.’ And, when they asked eagerly, ‘Tell us what else have you seen,’ he told them ‘In a little copse a young faun played upon a flute to the dwellers in the woods who danced to his piping.’
One day when he had left the village, as was his wont, three mermaids rose from the waves who combed their green hair with a comb of gold, and, when they had departed, a centaur peeped at him behind a hollow rock, and later, as he passed a little copse, he beheld a faun who played upon a pipe to the dwellers in the wood.
That night, when the people of the village gathered at dusk, saying ‘Tell us, what have you seen today?’ he answered them sadly: ‘Today I have seen nothing.’78
The kingdoms of imagination and observation are embattled. As Wilde said later, ‘The impossible in art is anything that has happened in real life.’79 At Portora during the winter the boys gathered around a stove which stood in ‘the Stone Hall,’ and here Oscar and Willie were often the raconteurs, Willie—until he left Portora for Trinity in 1869—being preferred. Sometimes Oscar would vary the entertainment by forcing his double-jointed limbs into weird contortions, in imitation of holy people in stained-glass attitudes. Later in life he learned to take on more comfortable roles.
In 1870, at one of these Stone Hall sessions (as Sullivan recalled), the boys were discussing an ecclesiastical prosecution then in the news in England. This must have been the case of the Reverend W. J. E. Bennett, vicar of Frome Selwood, accused of heresy for a book insisting that Christ was physically present in Holy Communion. Because of appeals, it was heard three times at the Court of Arches (the provincial court of appeal of the Archbishop of Canterbury), on 30 April, 18 November 1869, and 20 July 1870. Bennett was found guilty. Wilde was fascinated by the mysterious name of the court, derived from the arched steeple of its original site, and by the case itself. He announced to the other boys that nothing would please him more than to be the principal in such an action, ‘to go down to posterity as the defendant in such a case as “Regina versus Wilde.” ’80 As his mother’s son, he was determined ‘to make a sensation,’ and at any cost.
While their children pursued their studies, Sir William and Lady Wilde pursued theirs. Sir William published an ethnographic lecture on Ireland Past and Present in 1864, and then in 1867 his Lough Corrib, which he revised for a second edition in 1872. A first collection of Lady Wilde’s poems, published in 1864 (Poems), was followed by Poems: Second Series: Translations (1867), and by a reissue of both together in 1871. But in February 1867, Isola, nine years old, the only child still at home, developed a fever. On her partial recovery, she was sent, for a change of air, to stay with her uncle the Reverend William Noble at Mastrim (Edgworthtown). ‘Then she had a relapse and sudden effusion on the brain,’ wrote Lady Wilde to Lotten von Kraemer. ‘We were summoned by telegraph and only arrived to see her die [on 23 February]. Such sorrows are hard to bear. My heart seems broken. Still I feel I have to live for my sons and thank God they are as fine a pair of boys as one could d
esire.’ Sir William added, for himself, ‘It has left me a mourner for life.’ Three years later Lady Wilde declared to her Swedish friend that since Isola’s death she had gone to no dinner, soirée, theatre, or concert, ‘and never will again.’81 Oscar was equally distressed; the doctor who attended Isola thought him ‘an affectionate, gentle, retiring, dreamy boy,’ deeper than his brother, Willie. He paid regular visits to his sister’s grave,82 and wrote a poem (‘Requiescat’) about her; the melancholy which he always afterwards insisted underlay his jaunty behavior may have been first awakened by this early death.
Tread lightly, she is near
Under the snow,
Speak gently, she can hear
The lilies grow.
All her bright golden hair
Tarnished with rust,
She that was young and fair
Fallen to dust.
Lily-like, white as snow,
She hardly knew
She was a woman, so
Sweetly she grew.
Coffin-board, heavy stone,
Lie on her breast,
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