Oscar Wilde

by Richard Ellmann

  As aesthete Wilde found it essential to cultivate more than one art. At Trinity, Sullivan indicates, when Wilde was not living at home, he had rooms in a building known as Botany Bay. These were evidently dingy after Merrion Square, and Wilde made no effort to keep them clean or to receive friends there. Sometimes, however, a visitor called, and would find in the sitting room an easel prominently placed, which held an unfinished landscape in oils by the host. ‘I have just put in the butterfly,’ Wilde would say, indicating that he was familiar with Whistler’s already famous signature.105 At Oxford he used the same easel for the same purpose. Sullivan also establishes that Wilde continued at Trinity the elaborate style of dressing which he had invented at Portora. He came into Sullivan’s rooms one day wearing an outlandish pair of trousers. When Sullivan started to tease him about them, Wilde begged him with mock solemnity not to make them an object of jest. He was planning a trip to Umbria, he explained: ‘These are my Trasimeno trousers, and I mean to wear them there.’ Happily, his taste in clothing was not so fastidious as to prevent him from smiling (as he told Sullivan) at the recollection of a down-at-heels classical scholar, John Townsend Mills, who had tutored him for the Berkeley Prize. Mills wore a tall hat, which one day was covered with crepe; on Wilde’s commiserating with his supposed loss, Mills explained that he was simply covering a hole in the hat.

  * * *

  Wilde can be seen slowly accumulating at Trinity the elements of his Oxford behavior—his Pre-Raphaelite sympathies, his dandiacal dress, his Hellenic bias, his ambiguous sexuality, his contempt for conventional morality. These positions were taken, at least on occasion, with a slight air of self-mockery, just as his delight in Swinburnian passion would continue to be mitigated by that ‘chaffable innocence’ which his Oxford friend J. E. C. Bodley (who first met him in Dublin during the summer of 1874) ascribed to him.106 One further change in his behavior—also to persist—was his dallying with the idea of turning Catholic. Much to his father’s displeasure, Wilde made friends with some priests in Dublin. The doctrine of papal infallibility had just been declared, and this, and the rise of the Catholic University in Dublin which Cardinal Newman had founded, had given new alarm to members of the (Protestant) Church of Ireland. No doubt Newman’s prose style, its beauty just demonstrated again in his Grammar of Assent (1870), had as much to do with Wilde’s interest as papal infallibility; and a delight in the forms of Catholicism, rather than its content, accounted for his newfound admiration, just as it probably explained his mother’s arrangement for his Catholic baptism years before. Yet he preferred to ascribe his remaining a Protestant to his father’s threat of disinheriting him. His father need not have worried. Wilde was fostering self-contradictory inclinations.

  In any event, he had other interests, other ambitions. His reading made the Irish scene parochial, and his excitement over Pre-Raphaelitism—an English movement—was regarded in Dublin as an amiable folly, not to be entertained without derision in that city. The claustral quality of Irish life, which Yeats would describe as ‘great hatred, little room,’ rendered the possibility of promulgating some new aesthetic evangel at home exceedingly remote. If Wilde was beginning to leave Ireland spiritually, he had still to leave it physically. The particular suggestion may have come from Mahaffy: another excellent pupil of his, Leech, after taking a Trinity degree, had gone on to Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, for a second undergraduate degree. Mahaffy did not think that the study of the classics could be carried out better in England than at Trinity College, but he had a worldly respect for the older English universities, and would send one of his own sons to Oxford, the other two to Cambridge. He knew that Wilde, brilliant classicist though he was, could not be sure of being offered a fellowship in classics at Trinity in preference to his fellow student Purser. On the other hand, if he should be conspicuously successful at Oxford, he might return to Ireland, as Leech eventually did, to take up a chair.

  It was necessary to persuade not only Oscar Wilde but his father. Mahaffy is said to have concerted with Sir Henry Acland, Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford and a friend of Sir William, for this purpose.107 But Sir William had his own reason for agreeing, the mistaken hope that the move to Oxford would cause his son to break off his dalliance with Catholicism. England would keep him Protestant. Willie was already in the Middle Temple in London, ‘ready,’ as his mother said, ‘to spring forth like another Perseus to combat evil.’108 She added, ‘His hope is to enter Parliament and I wish it also. He has a good prospect and can be anything if he cares to work,’ a qualification which is the first warning of Willie’s inadequacies. (He left the Middle Temple in a few months, and was called to the Irish bar on 22 April 1875.) Sir William made no objection to his second son’s going off too.

  So Wilde was free to respond to the announcement in the Oxford University Gazette of 17 March 1874, that Magdalen College would award two Demyships (scholarships) in classics by examination on 23 June. Each paid £95 a year and could be held for five years. Wilde felt confident enough of success not to bother to take the Trinity examinations for his third year. He presented himself at Magdalen on the day, bearing the required testimonial of good conduct and certification that he was under twenty years of age. One of the four other candidates, G. T. Atkinson, who came second to Wilde and was also awarded a Demyship, recalled fifty-four years later how Wilde, older than the others and much more assured in manner, kept coming up to the invigilator for more paper, because he wrote only four or five words to a line. Atkinson remembered Wilde’s writing as ‘huge and sprawling, somewhat like himself.’ Actually it was spidery and lingering. He observed Wilde’s colorless, moonlike face with its heavy eyes and thick lips, and his swinging walk. (Edith Cooper, who noted also his china-blue eyes and protrusive teeth, said his face was like ‘a rich yet ungainly fruit.’109) Wilde breezed through his examination and was obviously the best.

  Afterwards, he met his mother and brother in London.110 It was his first important excursion into the city where he would make and break his name. Sir William, feeling ill, did not join them. The examination results were announced to Wilde soon after his arrival, and the family celebration took the form of visits to literary people with whom Lady Wilde had some acquaintance or had corresponded. They called upon Thomas Carlyle, whom Wilde would later characterize as ‘a Rabelaisian moralist.’111 (After Carlyle’s death he bought and used his writing table.) Carlyle had sent Lady Wilde a copy of Tennyson’s poems during a visit to Ireland, and presented her with another book, inscribed with four lines from Goethe, translated by himself:

  Who never ate his bread in sorrow,

  Who never spent the midnight hours

  Weeping and wailing for the morrow,

  He knows you not, ye heavenly powers.

  She would often quote the lines to her son, who responded insouciantly but never forgot them. The Wildes were delighted with their stay, and Lady Wilde wrote to her friend in Sweden, Mrs Rosalie Olivecrona, wife of a professor, ‘This is truly a great and mighty city—the capital of the world.’112 After 9 July they crossed over to Geneva and came back by way of Paris. They stayed at the Hôtel Voltaire on the Quai Voltaire, and Wilde later told Robert Ross that while there he began work on his poem ‘The Sphinx.’113 Its subject matter came from reading Swinburne and Edgar Allan Poe, for the poem spanned the gnomic message of ‘The Raven’ and the imputation of ageless profligacy in ‘Dolores.’

  On their return to Dublin that summer, they found Sir William Wilde broken in health. Lady Wilde wrote Mrs Olivecrona on 31 December 1874, ‘he is low and languid, and scarcely goes out—he complains of gout, but along with this, he seems fading before our eyes—and has grown so pale and wan and thin and low-spirited that I too have failed like an unstringed instrument, and no poet-music can be struck from my heart.’ Sir William had been declining for some time; he reduced his practice and went as often as he could to his beloved Moytura House near Cong. His income had declined with his health, and in February 1872
he had had to take a £1000 mortgage on the house at 1 Merrion Square. His sons’ expenses in England made it necessary to capitalize some of Lady Wilde’s property. In late November 1874 he obtained £1260, of which he, Lady Wilde, Willie, and Oscar each received £315. In August 1874 he had gathered himself to give the address to the opening session of the Anthropological Section of the British Association in Belfast.

  Oscar’s concern for his father did not spoil his delight in being admitted to Oxford on such favorable terms. There was general applause among his friends. Mahaffy rose to the occasion by remarking, ‘You’re not quite clever enough for us here, Oscar. Better run up to Oxford.’114 Tyrrell was amused and said that Oxford was the place where German philosophies go when they die. But the decision was momentous. Childhood ties were broken, and Wilde’s Dublin reputation as scholar and wit would have to be built again in new surroundings. Hellene and aesthete, but Irishman still, Wilde at almost twenty left on the packet boat from Kingstown in October to pit himself against the most ancient university in England.

  * Reports circulated later that during a stay in Sweden Wilde had operated on King Oscar’s eye, and while the King was temporarily blinded seduced the Queen. The Boccaccian rumor was sufficiently widespread for Prince Gustav, on a visit to Dublin, to claim waggishly that he was Oscar Wilde’s half-brother. The Wildes did meet the royal family once in Uppsala,31 but the royal archives give no evidence of Wilde’s having operated on the King. Nor of the King’s having agreed to be godfather to Oscar Wilde.

  † At dinner one evening, Sir William expatiated to his guests on salmon fishing. Yeats’s grandfather, a country rector, heard him out and muttered under his breath, ‘He knows nothing about it.’ But Oscar Wilde used to tell how one morning Yeats’s father, trained as a barrister, came down to breakfast and announced, ‘Children, I am tired of the law, and shall become a painter.’ ‘Could he paint?’ Wilde was asked. ‘Not in the least, that was the beauty of it.’36

  ‡ However, the Northern Standard for 25 November 1871 announced tersely that Emily Wilde, aged twenty-four, had died on the 8th and Mary, twenty-two, on the 21st. Family influence was strong enough to prevent any other Irish paper from carrying even this much mention of an event which would ordinarily have commanded headlines.

  § Mary Josephine Travers died 18 March 1919, aged eighty-three, at Kingston College, an almshouse in Mitchelstown, County Cork.

  ‖ When an Englishman said that in the nineteenth century the Mac’s had done everything and the O’s nothing, Wilde replied, ‘You forget. There are O’Connell and O. Wilde.’50

  a Another reason, modestly volunteered by a member of the same order, is that Father Fox, before he became an Oblate, was a Quaker, and, whatever Oblates may do, ‘Quakers never lie.’

  b In later life he called Claire de Pratz ‘la bonne déesse’ and Mrs Potter ‘Moonbeam.’

  c Mahaffy in the Common Room said, ‘I was only once caned in my life, and that was for telling the truth.’ The Provost observed, ‘It certainly cured you, Mahaffy.’

  d Wilde’s marks in the 1873 scholarship examination were:

  Viva Voce Thucydides 8

  Viva Voce Tacitus 7, ½

  Greek Prose Composition 5

  Greek Translation 7 [best mark given]

  Greek Tragedians 7

  Latin Comedians 7

  Latin Prose Translation 6

  Demosthenes 5

  Ancient History 7

  Greek Verse 5

  Greek Verse Composition 1 [Purser had 5]

  Greek Viva Voce 6

  Latin Viva Voce 5, ½

  Translation from Latin Poets 4

  English Composition 6 [highest mark scored by a candidate]

  Latin and Greek Grammar 4

  e It was not long before Wilde sought out Swinburne’s acquaintance. His copy of Studies in Song (1880) is inscribed:

  To Oscar Wilde from Algernon Ch. Swinburne.

  Amitié et remerciements.

  CHAPTER II

  Wilde at Oxford

  LADY BRACKNELL: Untruthful! My nephew Algernon? Impossible! He is an Oxonian.

  First Truancies

  For Irishmen, Oxford is to the mind what Paris is to the body. Wilde was as receptive as anyone to this fabled equation. The university, gathering in a disproportionate number of the best talents in the islands, treated them with a mixture of tenderness and rigor, and dispatched them permanently classified as brilliant, clever, or just average, but Oxford average. The students felt affection towards this mighty mother and awe of her power to define their lives.

  Wilde had no reason to regard himself as a Lucien de Rubempré coming from the provinces to find in Oxford the great world. Dublin was not Skibbereen. He already knew many Englishmen—talented people were always attending his mother’s Saturday afternoons—and his family name was English. Many of his relations lived in England, and so did friends like Henry S. Bunbury,1 once at Trinity and now resident in Gloucestershire, who would give his name to the errant behavior of Algernon in The Importance of Being Earnest. The antiquity of Oxford could not overwhelm a man familiar with cromlechs and barrows. Yet, in Dryden’s words, Oxford still seemed to be Athens, and everywhere else Thebes. ‘The most beautiful thing in England,’ Wilde said of it. Henry James, after a visit the year before Wilde came up, commented on ‘the peculiar air of Oxford—the air of liberty to care for intellectual things, assured and secured by machinery which is in itself a satisfaction to sense.’ Wilde put it lyrically: he said his stay in Oxford was ‘the most flower-like time’ in his life.2

  He matriculated the day after his twentieth birthday, on 17 October 1874, before the Reverend J. E. Sewell, Warden of New College and Vice-Chancellor. For once he gave his age and even his birthplace in Westland Row with irreproachable accuracy, though he underestimated as two the nearly three years he had studied at Trinity College. For the first year he was assigned Magdalen rooms in No. 1, 2 Pair Right, in Chaplain’s; the next two years in No. 8, Ground Floor Right, in Cloisters; and the fourth year, most sumptuously, in Kitchen Stairs, 1 Pair Left. His fellow students constituted a scene more varied and complex than Trinity’s. They had larger expectations, more confidence, more money. Most of them were younger than he was, a new experience for someone used to being youngest in his class. Their persistent affection for their old schools, such as Eton, Harrow, and Winchester, struck him as absurd. Neither Portora nor Trinity had aroused him to sentimental feeling; he was free to bestow it entirely upon Oxford.

  Still, nostalgia is one thing, and the student world of old Etonians and Wykehamists another. In his writings Wilde presents himself with a high polish which has been the envy of young people since. But at the start he committed his gaucheries. A friend of his at Balliol, J. E. C. Bodley, who wrote for The New York Times in 1882 a malicious but probably accurate account of Wilde as an undergraduate,3 said Wilde was naïve, embarrassed, had a convulsive laugh, a lisp, and an Irish accent. The first time he dined in hall, according to Bodley, he happened to be seated next to a guest from another college—an athlete in his third year and therefore someone not to be taken lightly. Wilde talked well and, feeling that he had ingratiated himself, presented the athlete with his card. By the unsurmisable rules of Oxford decorum, this was not done. Rebuffed on this occasion, and no doubt on others, Wilde determined to be beyond rather than behind the English. His lisp and native intonation disappeared. ‘My Irish accent was one of the many things I forgot at Oxford,’ he said, and the actor Seymour Hicks, among other witnesses, vouched that no trace of it was audible. In the course of remaking his speech, Wilde adopted that stately and distinct English which astonished its hearers. Max Beerbohm said that Wilde’s was ‘a mezzo voice, uttering itself in leisurely fashion, with every variety of tone.’ Wilde’s perfect sentences seemed to Yeats to have been written ‘overnight with labour and yet all spontaneous.’4 In a poem, ‘Ave Imperatrix,’ he would speak of ‘our English land,’ as though he had been born east of the Irish Sea.
He developed a great appetite for formal wear, and told a friend, ‘If I were all alone marooned on a desert island and had my things with me, I should dress for dinner every evening.’5 (Who would cook for him he did not say.) By day, he put aside his Dublin clothing and became sportier than his friends, as Bodley says, by donning tweed jackets with even larger checks than theirs, bird’s-eye-blue neckties, tall collars, curly-brimmed hats balanced on one ear. His thick brown hair was cut acceptably short at Spiers’s barber shop in the High. This was only the first phase of his sartorial revolution: it would be succeeded a couple of years later by a more bizarre dandyism.

  Wilde had curiosity enough to become familiar with the various kinds of life at his new university. He watched cricket. He went out to see the famous Stevenson training for the three-mile distance, and lyrically commented, ‘His left leg is a Greek poem.’6 Like his fellow Demy Atkinson, he allowed himself to be persuaded to train in the college barge for Eights Week. Being tall and strong, Wilde was assigned to stroke, Atkinson to bow. Wilde insisted upon keeping a gentlemanly and unhurried pace. To the coxswain’s exhortation to row with a straight back, he remarked to Atkinson, ‘I am sure the Greeks never did so at Salamis.’ One day the Varsity eight approached the Magdalen barge and signaled for Magdalen to move over quickly. Wilde shrugged off the scoldings of both coxes as he maintained his stately stroke. When dismissed from the crew, he remarked, ‘I don’t see the use of going down backwards to Iffley every evening.’7* Still, he had other moods: he did a little boxing with another Irishman, Barton, later a judge, and he proposed one day that an Oxford friend join him in rowing from Oxford to London. (In 1878 he paddled a canoe with Frank Miles as far as Pangbourne.) His eye for Greek precedent did not extend to sports of the palaestra. ‘Exercise!’ he said to an interviewer, ‘the only possible exercise is to talk, not to walk.’ ‘It is so exhausting not to talk,’ a character would say in Vera. When asked at a country house later which outdoor athletics he preferred, Wilde replied, ‘I am afraid I play no outdoor games at all. Except dominoes. I have sometimes played dominoes outside French cafés.’9 Ever since Lucinde (1799), aesthetes had known from Schlegel that ‘the most perfect way of life is pure vegetating.’