I vex my heart alone,
She is at rest.
Peace, Peace, she cannot hear
Lyre or sonnet,
All my life’s buried here,
Heap earth upon it.
Wilde’s dandyism and Hellenism became conspicuous at Portora, as did a certain independence of judgment, often of a paradoxical kind. A question he put to one master, ‘What is a Realist?,’ anticipates his later redefinitions of that term.83 (In ‘The Decay of Lying’ he would say, ‘As a method Realism is a complete failure.’) When Dickens died in 1870, Wilde made a point of expressing his dislike for the dead man’s novels, preferring, he said, those of Disraeli, a man who could write a novel and govern an empire with either hand. Wilde would have relished Coningsby, in which the old Jewish hero bears the name Sidonia, like the sorceress, and is of mysterious alien origin, with unusual power over others, bent upon shaping the lives and minds of young men. The novel seemed in a line of descent from his great-uncle’s Melmoth the Wanderer. Disraeli had urged along the Young England movement; Wilde was perhaps beginning to glimpse a movement of his own to lead, cultural rather than political, of a vaguely neo-Hellenic sort.
Wilde’s showing at Portora in 1870 and 1871 was triumphant. When he won the Carpenter Prize for Greek Testament in 1870, Dr Steele summoned him to the platform by calling out ‘Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde,’ to the great amusement of the other pupils, who until then had no idea of his abundant cognomens. Wilde got his own back the following year, according to vague reports, by treating Steele with insolence. In 1871 he was one of three pupils awarded a Royal School scholarship to Trinity College, Dublin, and his name was duly inscribed in gilt letters on Portora’s black notice-board. In 1895, the year of his disgrace, it was painted out, and the initials ‘O.W.’ which he had carved by the window of a classroom were scraped away by the headmaster. Now his name has been regilded.
Aesthete Among the Classicists
The new Individualism is the new Hellenism.
Oscar Wilde liked surprises, but Trinity College, Dublin, notwithstanding its scholarly distinction, had few to offer him. He had grown up close to its gates and knew its principal scholars from their frequent attendance at his mother’s receptions. Then too, his brother Willie was already much in evidence there, the winner of a number of prizes, including a Gold Medal for Ethics; Willie would leave the next year, 1872, to study law in the Middle Temple in London. While at Trinity, he played a leading part, as Oscar scorned to do, in the Philosophical Society, to which both belonged. The Trinity students included many whom Wilde had known before, such as his old Portora competitor Louis Claude Purser, and his sometime playmate in sandcastle building, Edward Carson. Wilde and Purser were not close, but Wilde recalled wryly later that he and Carson used to walk about arm in arm, or with arms draped around each other’s shoulders, schoolboy fashion. Carson denied that he and Wilde had been such friends, claiming, rather, that he had disapproved of Wilde’s ‘flippant approach to life.’84 It seems likely that they were friendly at first and then drew apart, perhaps because Wilde’s character altered so much during his Trinity years. He became aesthetic as Carson became political.
Wilde’s tutor was the Reverend J. P. Mahaffy, since 1869 professor of ancient history. The association was mutually important. Wilde had met Mahaffy at Merrion Square, but could scarcely have seen all the facets of his personality. That it was many-faceted, Mahaffy was not the last to divulge. ‘Take me all round,’ he was heard to say, ‘I am the best man in Trinity College.’85 His pupil would seek to brag less parochially. Wilde and Mahaffy were of the same height, six feet three inches, but Mahaffy was born an authority figure, and at thirty-two was already known as ‘the General,’ while Oscar Wilde at sixteen was a delicate and modulated noncombatant. Mahaffy’s hair was auburn or ginger and descended into impressive side whiskers; his forehead was broad, his jaw and mouth firm. A caricature of Wilde at Trinity shows him with side whiskers too, perhaps in emulation of his tutor. If Wilde avoided games, at Trinity as at Portora, Mahaffy had captained the Trinity cricket eleven and shot with the Irish team in an international marksmanship competition at Wimbledon. Wilde, thanks to his mother’s tutoring arrangements, was fluent in French and probably competent in German; Mahaffy, having spent his early years in Europe, spoke German easily and was very good in French, Italian, and, as a final fillip, Hebrew. He also knew theology, to which Wilde was indifferent, and music, always a closed book to his pupil.
Apart from such interests Mahaffy was a connoisseur of claret and cigars, old silver and furniture, and Wilde might well struggle to reach his tutor’s standard as he began to collect exquisite bric-a-brac. Perhaps most impressive of all Mahaffy’s accomplishments was his skill in making friends with the great, including several reigning monarchs. This he attributed to his regal mastery of the art of conversation.c Mahaffy wrote a book about that art later, and his old pupil, in reviewing it, candidly regretted that the professor could not write as well as he could speak.86 Mahaffy boasted that he had taught Wilde the conversational art in which he himself took such pride; but at Portora, Wilde had already demonstrated how well he could talk. There was also an important difference between them. The caustic dismissals of the liberal, the innocent, and the ignorant, which were Mahaffy’s flourishes, were at variance with Wilde’s republican ideals. From Wilde’s point of view, Mahaffy lacked charm and style.87
Their politics were different, the tutor Tory and Unionist, his pupil anti-Tory and nationalist. When George Russell asked Mahaffy to sign a petition of protest against the knouting of peasants by the Czar of Russia, Mahaffy replied in character, ‘Why, my dear fellow, if he doesn’t knout them, they’ll knout themselves.’ Wilde, whose play Vera was to express sympathy with the knouted, may have drawn on Mahaffy’s manner and opinions for the character of the unsympathetic Prince Paul in the play. That Mahaffy was a snob was generally recognized, but Oliver Gogarty—a close friend of Mahaffy who himself liked to talk of the lower classes ‘with their backs aching for the lash’—defended Mahaffy against the accusation. It was, in Gogarty’s attempted palliation, only ‘the justifiable arrogance of the wellbred.’88 Still, a rhyme that circulated in college about Mahaffy registered the justifiable disapproval of the snubbed:
Yclept Mahoof by those of heavenly birth
But plain Mahaffy by the race of earth.89
Yet Wilde, without fully approving of Mahaffy, felt gratitude to him. In a letter written probably in 1893, he complimented him as ‘my first and my best teacher’ and ‘the scholar who showed me how to love Greek things.’ His mother reminded him that Mahaffy gave ‘the first noble impulse to your intellect and kept you out of the toils of meaner men and pleasures.’90 Part of the reason was Mahaffy’s absolute preference for Greece: ‘The touch of Rome,’ he wrote, ‘numbed Greece and Egypt, Syria and Asia Minor.’ Wilde would write of the Roman religion, ‘They had not the creative imagination and the power of the Greeks to give life to the dry bones of their abstractions: they had no art; no myths. For 170 years says Varro, there were no statues at Rome.’91 To Mahaffy the Greeks—he called them the ‘Gweeks,’ r’s not being one of his talents92—might be our modern next-door neighbors. Wilde followed him when he wrote in ‘The Critic as Artist’ that ‘Whatever in fact is modern in our life we owe to the Greeks. Whatever is an anachronism is due to medievalism.’ In defense of Greek wholesomeness, Mahaffy ventured to touch gingerly upon the vexed question of Greek homosexuality. No previous scholar, writing in English for a general audience, had done as much. Mahaffy characterized it as an ideal attachment between a man and a handsome youth, and acknowledged that the Greeks regarded it as superior to the love of man and woman. Unless debased, as he conceded it sometimes was, it was no more offensive ‘even to our tastes’ than sentimental friendship. In his Commonplace Book Wilde would write, ‘The Roman was educated for the family and the state: to be a pater familias and a civis: the refinement of Greek culture comes through the roman
tic medium of impassioned friendship; the freedom and gladness of the palaestra were unknown to the boy whose early recollections were those of the senate house and the farm.’
That Wilde read Mahaffy on Greek love is proved by an acknowledgment, in the preface of Social Life in Greece from Homer to Menander (1874), to ‘Mr. Oscar Wilde of Magdalen College’ and to another former pupil, H. B. Leech, for having ‘made improvements and corrections all through the book.’ One can only speculate as to these improvements, but a remark about the unnaturalness of homosexuality sounds distinctly more like Wilde than like Mahaffy: ‘As to the epithet unnatural, the Greeks would answer probably, that all civilisation was unnatural.’93 Mahaffy quickly recognized that he had gone too far. When a second edition appeared the year after, he dropped the pages about homosexual love. He also omitted the acknowledgment to his two pupils, perhaps feeling that it was beneath his dignity to be assisted by such young men.
Wilde did not have to depend upon Mahaffy alone for his classical knowledge, since the rival eminence at Trinity, Robert Yelverton Tyrrell, was as good a classicist and a pleasanter man. Tyrrell had just been made professor of Latin at only twenty-five. His interest was in Latin and Greek, it was said, Mahaffy’s in Romans and Greeks. He committed fewer errors in scholarship than Mahaffy, though he ventured less far afield; he did not quarrel so much with other classicists, but he stood up to Mahaffy willingly enough. His wit, like Wilde’s, was more jovial than Mahaffy’s, and he had a genuine literary inclination, which prompted him to found and edit the magazine Kottabos. He published in it some of his own excellent parodies, and Wilde would later contribute to it translations and his own poems. The professor married in Wilde’s last year, and Mrs Tyrrell commented long afterwards that she and her husband saw a good deal of Wilde at Trinity, and found him ‘amusing and charming.’94 In 1896 Tyrrell compassionately signed a petition asking for Wilde’s early release from prison, when Mahaffy, who before this had boasted of having created Wilde, just as conspicuously refused to affix his name and referred to Wilde as ‘the one blot on my tutorship.’
Wilde’s excellence as a classicist made itself obvious at Trinity. Portora had prepared him well; he worked conscientiously during his first year, and at the end of it had the satisfaction of beating Louis Purser by being named first of those in the first class. After that he fell back a little, out of indifference to the technicalities of scholarship, and Purser drew ahead. Still, in a competitive examination in 1873, Wilde received one of ten Foundation Scholarships awarded, which entailed many privileges; he had come sixth out of ten successful candidates, and the man behind him in seventh place was William Ridgeway, later professor of archaeology at Cambridge.d Wilde crowned his classical career at Trinity by winning the Berkeley Gold Medal for Greek, achieving the highest score in a difficult examination on Meineke’s Fragments of the Greek Comic Poets. He would repeatedly pawn and redeem the medal in later life.95
At Trinity, Wilde was already an aesthete. Becoming one was not difficult. The college offered a course in aesthetics; its Philosophical Society dealt with such subjects as Rossetti and Swinburne, and Willie Wilde even gave a paper on ‘Aesthetic Morality.’ Mahaffy ended his Social Life in Greece by invoking the Greek example for ‘the aesthetical education of our lower classes.’ Wilde would try to educate the upper classes aesthetically as well. The interminable German novel The First Temptation, or ‘Eritis Sicut Deus’ by M. Schwab, of which Lady Wilde published a translation in 1863, was the history of an overweening aesthete who turned aesthetics into a religion of beauty and died tragically. In this atmosphere Wilde, at eighteen, thought of becoming a writer. A recorded incident at Trinity is possibly concocted: Wilde read out a poem to a class. A bully sneered. Wilde went up to him and asked by what right he did so. The man laughed again, and Wilde struck him in the face. Soon everyone was outside and the two antagonists squared off. No one gave Wilde a chance, but to general astonishment he proved to have a devastating punch and utterly worsted his opponent.96
More reliable and surprising evidence is in the Suggestion Book of the Philosophical Society, in which members might write down random comments about their fellow members.97 Two adjoining pages of this book deal with Wilde, one overtly and one implicitly. One page has a caricature of him, hirsute and hatted, staring indignantly at a policeman who is evidently rebuking him for some midnight (aesthetic?) meeting. Another student, (John B.) Crozier, is quoted as calling the policeman ‘The Benevolent Bobby,’ while Wilde characterizes him as ‘That Prig of a Policeman.’ On the second page a heading presumably mocks Wilde as the recent winner of the Berkeley Gold Medal Examination:
A glimpse at
The Aesthetic Medal Examination
U.P.S. 1874
———
Is Mrs Allen (whose Lylobalsamum has attained such
world-wide reputation) the subject of:—
Ruskin’s ‘Queen of the ‘air’
or Spenser’s ‘Fair-’airy Queen’?
+ The corruption (hitherto undiscovered) of this title into ‘Fairy Queen’ has arisen through the copyist’s avoidance of dittography. Some MSS exhibit ‘Faierie’ which led to the discovery of the true reading.
N.B. In connexion with this question candidates are: recommended to study her Works of Art (chignons) to be seen in most barbers’ shops and on the heads of certain fair individuals.
The play on ‘airy fairy’ implies effete and effeminate. There is gibing at hairstyles (chignons), and the reference to Lylobalsamum (which would be slightly misspelt Latin for ‘lily balsam’) suggests that Wilde, in pursuit of the Pre-Raphaelites, was already extolling the attributes of the lily. The two pages together appear to confirm that by early 1874, six months before he went up to Oxford, Wilde was an exponent of aestheticism, and flaunted his doctrine with a certain style which needed mockery.
The memories of Wilde in Trinity confirm that he was well on his way towards his later attitudes. Sir Edward Sullivan, fellow migrant from Portora, mentions that Wilde’s favorite reading was Swinburne. ‘Dolores’ and ‘Faustine’ in Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads (1866) were just the poems to appeal to an admirer of Sidonia the Sorceress.98 The impact of ‘Hymn to Proserpine’ is still being registered in Wilde’s poem ‘The Garden of Eros,’ written half a dozen years later, where he says of Swinburne,
And he hath kissed the lips of Proserpine
And sung the Galilaean’s requiem,
That wounded forehead dashed with blood and wine
He hath discrowned.…
He found an analogy in the way that Euripides ‘was criticized by the conservatives of his own day much as Swinburne is by the Philistines of ours,’ as he was to write.99 Perhaps for this reason, in 1876 he translated a Euripidean chorus into Swinburne’s rhythm and vocabulary:
Without love, or love’s holiest treasure,
I shall pass into Hades abhorr’d,
To the grave as my chamber of pleasure,
To death as my Lover and Lord.
Swinburne’s Songs Before Sunrise, which appeared during Wilde’s first year at Trinity, offered democratic passion to go with amorous passion. The following year he obtained Atalanta in Calydon (his copy is dated Michaelmas 1872).100 He would praise both books in his ‘The Garden of Eros.’e The same poem celebrates William Morris, whose Love Is Enough he obtained, hot from the press, in the same term at Trinity.101 He evidently got hold of the Pre-Raphaelites’ books the moment they appeared. He would also have read Rossetti’s first book of verse in 1870, and would have known Robert Buchanan’s article ‘The Fleshly School of Poetry’ (1871), which berated the Pre-Raphaelites for their sensuality. Reading Swinburne put him on to Baudelaire and Whitman—the latter the subject of a lecture by Professor Edward Dowden at the Philosophical Society in 1871. In his admiration for these writers Wilde had an immediate reason for repudiating the evaluation of poetry in terms of its message, as he did forever after.
According to Sullivan, he was also reading Joh
n Addington Symonds’s Studies of the Greek Poets, the first volume of which was published in 1873. Although Mahaffy disapproved of the book, Wilde admired the style for its Pateresque ‘picturesqueness and loveliness of words.’ (He later dismissed it as being poetical prose, rather than the prose of a poet.)102 Its final chapter confirmed the all-importance of the word ‘aesthetic’ It was not that Symonds coined it; Baumgarten had done that in 1750. But Symonds, agreeing with Pater, conspicuously related it to the Greeks: ‘If their morality was aesthetic and not theocratic, it is none the less on that account humane and real,’ he said.103 ‘The Greeks were essentially a nation of artists,’ he went on, a remark Wilde remembered. ‘When we speak of the Greeks as an aesthetic nation,’ Symonds explained, ‘this is what we mean. Guided by no supernatural revelation, with no Mosaic law for conduct, they trusted their aesthesis, delicately trained and preserved in a condition of the utmost purity.’ Wilde was so delighted by Symonds’s book that he wrote to him, and a correspondence (mostly lost) now began. In 1878 Symonds had copies of his Sonnets of Michael Angelo Buonarroti and Tommaso Campanella sent to twelve persons, including Browning and Swinburne, and Oscar Wilde at Magdalen College, Oxford. The following year Wilde bought a copy of Symonds’s Shelley, and marked, among other passages, one on an intimate friendship of the adolescent Shelley with another boy.104
Another aspect of Greek thought was not directly touched upon in The Greek Poets. But by this time, 1873, Symonds had written his pamphlet, A Problem in Greek Ethics, privately printed a decade later, which dealt with homosexuality. In his youth at Harrow, he had informed on the headmaster and ruined his life; now he was all indulgence. His silence on the subject in The Greek Poets was pointed, since he avoided the customary reproof for the practices referred to in the Greek poems. Mahaffy was not as emancipated as that.
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