The best contemporary record of Wilde’s first two years at Oxford is a journal kept by Bodley. It tells how the two young men had first met in Grafton Street in Dublin on 24 August, during Horse Show Week, and quickly discovered that both were going up to Oxford (Bodley to Balliol), and that they had mutual friends, the Tennants. (Wilde would dedicate one of his fairy tales, ‘The Star-Child,’ to Margot Tennant.) They renewed their acquaintance on 25 October in the Pembroke Common Room, and succeeding entries show a steady intimacy. On 7 November Bodley bet Wilde £10 even money that their friend Rowland Childers would take a first class in Honour Moderations (the examinations at the end of the second year) and that Wilde would not. It was one of Bodley’s many errors of judgment.
Wilde’s friend was the son of a rich pottery owner. He hoped for a first in history, but got a second. Socially he was more of a success, being a bon vivant, and among the friends he made at Oxford was Prince Leopold, Queen Victoria’s youngest son, a commoner at Christ Church. They shared an ardent interest in Freemasonry, which, partly because Leopold was Grand Master of the Order, was much in fashion in the 1870s. Bodley had a sharp eye and some journalistic ability, of which Wilde would suffer the sting. They remained good friends.
Bodley’s journal is about diversions rather than studies; he and Wilde devoted themselves to being flamboyant rather than workaday. In January, during their second term, the journal makes frequent references to meals at the Mitre and long drives. Wilde’s large physique was such that one entertainment (which he shared with Dr Johnson) was to go to the top of a hill and be rolled down it. On 29 January they went to the theatre to hear some Tyrolese yodelers, and their party, spread over two adjoining boxes, indulged in a ‘grand ballyrag, hats and umbrellas playing a not inconsiderable part.’ Wilde climbed into Bodley’s box to say that his brother Willie had come on a visit, and as soon as the performance had ended Willie and Oscar, Bodley, and the rest mounted the proscenium and Willie strummed a Strauss waltz on the piano. Ejected by stagehands, they gathered up the yodelers and took off to the Mitre for more singing. Wilde lent his monotone. That their gambols affected their studies is indicated by the fact that Childers, instead of taking his first as Bodley had wagered, had to accept rustication from January to the end of the summer. Bodley tried in vain to intercede with the Master of Balliol, Benjamin Jowett.
Bodley had become a Mason himself in his first term, and was determined to recruit Wilde for the Apollo Lodge—the university lodge—in the second. On 3 February he wrote to him about it, and on 16 February Wilde was voted in. Before the ensuing initiation, Bodley and another Mason, named Williamson, had a long talk with him and showed Wilde the Masonic properties. Bodley’s note is perceptive: ‘Wilde was as much struck with their gorgeousness as he was amazed at the mystery of our conversation.’ The Masonic costume, which included knee breeches along with tail coat, white tie, silk stockings, and pumps, was to have its effect upon Wilde. (To this day the Apollo Lodge, alone of all the lodges in Great Britain, requires this raiment.) He was received into the Apollo Lodge by special dispensation—because he was under twenty-one—on 23 February 1875. After the meeting came a dinner at which, Bodley notes, ‘Wilde got very festive, and at my request hedged in John the B[aptist]. “I have heard,” he said, that S[aint] J[ohn] the B[aptist] was the founder of this Order [yells of laughter]. I hope we shall emulate his life but not his death—I mean we ought to keep our heads.” ’ (It was his first mention of Salome.) The next morning, as Bodley was about to begin breakfast, Wilde appeared and carried him off to the Mitre, where he had ordered salmon and deviled kidneys as a sign of gratitude. Wilde’s father was a Mason, and had been in 1841–42 Worshipful Master of the Shakespeare Lodge (No. 143) in Dublin. His son took to the pomp and quasi-religious ritual of Masonry, and its fashionable secrecy, and rose quickly through the next degrees, being raised to the second on 24 April and to the third (Master Mason) on 25 May.
Bodley’s journal reports a series of high-spirited entertainments during their first year. On 21 April he and Wilde lunched together, then drove to Woodstock. On the way back they were delayed by a heavy rain and were late for dinner, a punishable offense. ‘Proctored at nine-fifteen by Shadwell,’ Bodley says sadly, but the next day he writes, ‘Wilde’s plausibility won the heart of Shadwell and he did not take the fine.’ On 6 May Bodley’s mother came to Oxford, and Bodley telegraphed his sisters, presumably in London, to come too. ‘We drove down to the Eights [the boat race].… Walking back through the Cherwell walks Wilde talked “Art” to Agnes.’ Agnes was more interested in such matters than her down-to-earth brother. The next day they all came by invitation to Wilde’s rooms and were escorted up the Magdalen tower. One sister was so excited at the prospect that she declared she would stay there all day. ‘Wilde performed prodigies of valour and we succeeded in getting her down.’ Another excursion is recorded for 14 May, when Wilde and Bodley, with another student, named Goldschmidt, took a ‘tub’ on the Cherwell before dining at the Mitre.
Free and easy as this life sounds, Wilde did not totally neglect his classical studies except when the exercises were boring. The course included ancient history and philosophy as well as literature. He had an advantage over other students because of his excellent preparation at Portora and Trinity, and could treat his Oxford tutors with some arrogance. (His performance would not be assessed by them but by other examiners, at the end of his second and fourth years.) Much of his time went into reading in other fields. He kept up with Swinburne, whose Essays and Studies (1875) gave him the idea of uniting ‘personality’ and ‘perfection’ that he made much of later. While at Oxford he kept a Commonplace Book in which the range of reference is wide. He read Herbert Spencer and the philosopher of science William Kingdon Clifford; he was on easy terms not only with Plato and Aristotle, as required by his course, but with Kant, Hegel, Jacobi, Locke, Hume, Berkeley, and Mill. He alludes knowledgeably to Alfieri and quotes Baudelaire’s ‘O Seigneur! donnez-moi la force et le courage I De contempler mon coeur et mon corps sans dégoût!’† And he characteristically draws together contemporary and classical concerns, as when he announces that ‘In modern times Dante and Dürer, Keats and Blake are the best representatives of the Greek spirit.’
The headings in the Commonplace Book invoke abstractions such as Culture, Progress, Slavery, Metaphysics, and Poetry, as if he already saw the need for taking positions on these matters. Questions of art and artistic attitudes are a common theme. He writes about beauty as a believer about God, though his use of French suggests that his veneration of beauty, while more than a flourish, was less than a creed:
La beauté est parfaite
La beauté peut toute chose
La beauté est la seule chose au monde qui n’excite pas le désir‡
More committed is his defense of Keats’s and Swinburne’s ‘effeminacy and languor and voluptuousness which are the characteristics of that “passionate humanity” which is the background of true poetry.’
One subject to which he returns again and again is the conflict between progress and authority. He is on the side of those who resist: ‘To Dissenters we owe in England Robinson Crusoe, Pilgrim’s Progress; Milton: Matthew Arnold is unjust to them because “not to conform to what is established” is merely a synonym for progress.’ In fact, ‘Progress in thought is the assertion of individualism against authority,’ or even ‘simply the instinct of self-preservation in humanity, the desire to affirm one’s own essence.’ Therefore, he concludes, ‘Mankind has been continually entering the prisons of Puritanism, Philistinism, Sensualism, Fanaticism, and turning the key on its own spirit: But after a time there is an enormous desire for higher freedom—for self-preservation.’ So rebellion has a Darwinian or Spencerian justification.
Although he was keeping the book for his private use, Wilde fell into stylish phrasing. In praise of Euripides, he declares, ‘And we who toil in the heated quarries of modern life may perhaps—or is it our fancy—gain some freedom of
soul from his genius who was the great humanist of Hellas, the cor cordium of antiquity.’ He moves constantly towards epigram, not so rehearsed as later, but already condensing large subjects into small, pungent, and cadenced phrases:
The danger of metaphysics is that men are often turning nomina into numina.
Socrates and Kant brought philosophy back to man: Aristotle and Hegel set out again to reconquer the World.…
Berkeley annihilated the non-ego: Hume did the same for the ego: and when these were followed up by the resolving of the laws of cause and effect into a mere association of subjective ideas all honest folk thought the world was coming to an end.
Survival of Fittest in Thought
Nature kills off all those who do not believe in the Uniformity of Nature and the Law of Causation.
However passionately he read in philosophy, the history of science, and literature, the reputation Wilde sought was of being brilliant without zeal. On 24 November 1874 he suffered a check in the examination called Responsions, which consisted of questions on Greek and Latin authors and mathematics. Wilde was put down in the college records as ‘plucked,’ an unseemly result for a Demy. On 18 January the President of Magdalen, Dr Frederick Bulley, formally admonished him, and two months later (18 March) Wilde penitently passed the examination by answering questions on Euripides’ Medea and Hippolytus, Virgil’s Georgics, and geometry.10 One of his friends, David Hunter Blair, was convinced that Wilde plugged away secretly in the small hours so as to keep up his air of insouciance.11 He did not do more than pass the examination given at the end of the first term, but settled down in the second and third to secure mild commendation.
Wilde’s fellow Demy Atkinson has left a brief account of the classics teaching at Magdalen at this time. Their tutor was John Young Sargent, who had a reputation for his work in Latin composition. Five students would gather round the fire in Sargent’s rooms at five o’clock in the evening. A silver tankard of beer was always warming at the hearth, but not for them. The ‘lecture’ was delivered drowsily, and listened to in the same way. Wilde did not care much for Latin, having absorbed Mahaffy’s contempt ‘for any Roman thing,’12 and never succeeded in becoming adept at Latin prose. But poetry, even in Latin, excited his best efforts, and his compositions won high praise from Sargent, though he was not considered good enough to be put forward for the Hertford scholarship in Latin, the winner of which generally went on to a college fellowship.13
So far he had not made much of a mark in his studies, but the first important examination, in Honour Moderations, was still a year away. He was more successful in creating a legend about himself among his fellow students. His aestheticism remained tenacious, not merely on walks with Agnes Bodley, and his attitudes were precious enough to arouse hostility. His fellow students in classics considered him a freak.14 He scorned and was scorned by the athletes, who according to one story avenged themselves by dragging him to the top of a high hill, and only then releasing him. He got to his feet, flicked off the dust, and commented, ‘The view from this hill is really very charming.’15 Atkinson doubted that the incident ever took place, but, as Wilde remarked, What is true in a man’s life is not what he does, but the legend which grows up around him.… You must never destroy legends. Through them we are given an inkling of the true physiognomy of a man.’§ The spirited defense of his poem which he had insisted upon at Trinity might make one expect a defense of another kind, and Sir Frank Benson in his memoirs vouches that Wilde came off with more obvious heroism. According to Benson, himself an athlete, Wilde was ‘far from being a flabby aesthete,’ and ‘only one man in the college, and he rowed seven in the Varsity Eight [J. T. Wharton] … had a ghost of a chance in a tussle with Wilde.’ To prove his point Benson quotes Wharton’s respectful comment about Wilde’s muscularity and goes on to tell how the Junior Common Room at Magdalen decided one evening to beat up Wilde and break up his furniture. Four undergraduates were deputed to burst into his rooms while the rest watched from the stairs. The result was unexpected: Wilde booted out the first, doubled up the second with a punch, threw out the third through the air, and, taking hold of the fourth—a man as big as himself—carried him down to his rooms and buried him beneath his own furniture. He then invited the spectators to sample the would-be persecutor’s wines and spirits, and they accepted.17
Whatever hostility he provoked, Oxford’s bosom was capacious enough to take him to it. Within Magdalen College his closest friends in his first year were three near neighbors. The first was William Walsford Ward, later a lawyer, who was halfway through the Greats course (classical literature for two years, ancient history and philosophy for two more) that Wilde also was taking. Wilde called him ‘the only man in the world I am afraid of,’18 perhaps because of his opposition to Wilde’s flirtation with Catholicism. There was also a fair, good-looking student named Reginald Richard Harding, later a stockbroker, whom Wilde described as ‘my greatest chum.’19 His letters to both Harding and Ward have survived. They make much use of nicknames, Ward being ‘Bouncer’ after a character in a comic novel, and Harding ‘Kitten,’ after the song ‘Beg your parding, Mrs Harding, Is my kitting in your garding?’ Wilde was called ‘Hosky.’ This circle was enlarged to include David Hunter Blair, a serious-minded young man whom Ward enticed downstairs with the promise that Wilde’s conversation would be worth hearing. Hunter Blair, a Scottish baronet with a large property at a place called Dunskey, and known therefore as ‘Dunskie,’ was deeply religious and, though a Mason, was meditating conversion. He became a Benedictine and rector of St Benet’s Hall in Oxford. Wilde would compare him to Sir Blaise in Mrs Browning’s Aurora Leigh, whose style rises to ‘So fie! no blasphemy, I pray you.’20
Lady Wilde in youth. (Courtesy of the William Andrews Clark Library)
Sir William Wilde as a young man, from a drawing by J. H. Maguire, 1847. (Courtesy of the William Andrews Clark Library)
Wilde as a child. (Courtesy of the William Andrews Clark Library)
Lady Wilde (‘Speranza’), painted by J. Morosini.
Wilde’s half-brother, Henry Wilson. (Courtesy of the William Andrews Clark Library)
Wilde (standing) during his first year at Oxford, 1875. His elder brother Willie, in Oxford on a visit, is at far right, and his friend J. E. C. Bodley is at left.
Wilde in his sophomore year. (Courtesy of the William Andrews Clark Library)
Florence Balcombe, Wilde’s early love.
A gathering at Magdalen College, Oxford. Wilde is standing at right. (Library of Congress, Kaufmann Collection)
Ruskin’s crew of roadbuilders at work in Ferry Hinksey, on the edge of Oxford. (Oxford City Library)
Wilde (left) in the Prince Rupert costume he wore to a fancy-dress ball, 1 May 1878. (Courtesy of The Hyde Collection)
Wilde’s cello coat, worn to the opening of the new Grosvenor Gallery, 1 May 1877, as imagined by Lucy Ellmann.
In Greek costume during a trip to Greece, April 1877. (Courtesy of The Hyde Collection)
Two of Wilde’s favorite paintings: San Sebastian by Guido Reni (Palazzo Rosso, Genoa), and Love and Death by George F. Watts. (City of Bristol Museum and Art Gallery)
Hunter Blair describes Wilde in an autobiographical book (In Victorian Days), and is quick to point out that there was no indecorum in his conversation or action. One of his chief interests was in furnishing his rooms. To judge from three of his early Oxford poems, Pre-Raphaelite lilies were always about. On several occasions Hunter Blair went shopping with Wilde, once to help him buy two large vases of blue china, possibly Sèvres, to hold the lilies. These vases may have inspired the remark which reverberated first round the university, then round the country, ‘I find it harder and harder every day to live up to my blue china.’ Punch got hold of it, but not until George du Maurier’s drawing in the issue of 30 October 1880. Before that an Anglican sermon was preached in St Mary’s, Oxford, against its vicious tendencies: the priest, Dean Burgon, declaimed, ‘When a young man says not in p
olished banter, but in sober earnestness, that he finds it difficult to live up to the level of his blue china, there has crept into these cloistered shades a form of heathenism which it is our bounden duty to fight against and to crush out, if possible.’21 It remains one of Wilde’s most memorable assertions, and the earliest to achieve currency. Pater used it as the epigraph to the unpublished part of his last book, Gaston de Latour. Its authenticity has been questioned, but Oscar Browning records that when he met Wilde in Oxford in 1876, Wilde was already famous for the remark.22 No one else could have said it. The Oxford and Cambridge Undergraduate’s Journal confirms this in a satirical piece on Wilde as ‘O’Flighty’ on 27 February 1879, which comments, ‘ “How often I feel how hard it is to live up to my blue china” is a favourite remark of his.’ The longing has something of his mother’s high-spiritedness, which revels in excess and pokes fun at the speaker.
Other purchases were made at Spiers’s Emporium in the High Street; Spiers’s bill for three of Wilde’s years at Oxford has survived.23 (In those days tradesmen were willing to wait for students to settle their bills, but even Spiers lost patience with Wilde and dunned him in the Vice-Chancellor’s Court.) During Wilde’s first term he bought two blue mugs and some candle ornaments; a claret decanter and some playing cards are mentioned for the second term. In October of his second year he bought four soda-water tumblers, four plain tumblers, and six port glasses. During the spring vacation of 1876 he stayed in college and on 21 March, momentarily disloyal to his blue china, bought a china déjeuner service ‘richly gilt.’ The following January, 1877, he added six coffee cups and saucers, six Venetian hock glasses, two green Rumanian claret decanters, a water filter, and six ruby champagne tumblers. Clearly the drinks were flowing and the company growing. Hunter Blair remembered Wilde’s entertaining lavishly even during his first year. Perhaps in imitation of his mother’s Saturday afternoons, he used to hold open house on Sunday evening after coffee had been served in the Common Room. Two bowls of gin-and-whiskey punch were on a table (his mother had contented herself with coffee and wine), and there were long churchwarden pipes filled with choice tobacco. As in Merrion Square, musical entertainment was often provided: the college organist Walter Parrott sat at Wilde’s piano and accompanied the singer Walter Smith-Dorrien. Atkinson says that Wilde made his servant (at Oxford called a scout) wear felt slippers, because a creak caused him ‘agony,’ and extract corks in the bedroom, for fear that guests might hear the plebeian pop.24
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