Such evenings often ended with Wilde, Ward, and Hunter Blair, like the friends in ‘The Decay of Lying,’ sitting up until the morning whitened. Hunter Blair recalled that Wilde talked fancifully of the future, until Bouncer Ward tried to pin him down. ‘You talk a lot about yourself, Oscar,’ said Ward, ‘and all the things you would like to achieve. But you never say what you are going to do with your life.’ Wilde discouraged such blunt questions, and only replied, ‘God knows. I won’t be a dried-up Oxford don, anyhow.’‖ He was not being altogether candid, for his mother’s letters to him in 1875 and 1876 show that he had not given up hope in this quarter. But in the dead of night at Magdalen he soared above donship: ‘I’ll be a poet, a writer, a dramatist. Somehow or other, I’ll be famous, and if not famous, notorious.’ He was modulating his old aspiration, from Portora days, of being tried for heresy at the Court of Arches. ‘Or perhaps I’ll lead the [life of pleasure] for a time and then who knows rest and do nothing. What does Plato say is the highest that man can attain here below? —to sit down and contemplate the good. Perhaps that will be the end of me too.’ Hunter Blair would have none of this: ‘Rot, Oscar. That’s just what you won’t do. Sitting down and doing nothing will never be in your line. You are much more likely to get up and knock about and do all sorts of queer things.’ ‘You wait and see, my boy,’ Wilde replied. ‘I may begin like that, but the end will be very different. These things are on the knees of the gods. What will be, will be.’ The words are Hunter Blair’s, but the reply is in character. Wilde was always ready to reverse his field. The hurly-burly attracted him, but so did quietism. And beyond both was a quality noted by Yeats, ‘the enjoyment of his own spontaneity.’25
Between Ruskin and Pater
Who cares whether Mr Ruskin’s views on Turner are sound or not? What does it matter? That mighty and majestic prose of his … is at least as great a work of art as any of those wonderful sunsets that bleach or rot on their corrupted canvases in England’s Gallery.
Wilde was too much an intellectual buccaneer to confine himself to the requirements of Greats. He became interested in the Orientalist Friedrich Max-Muller, then translating the Vedas, and was given breakfast by him at All Souls, as he allowed his mother to know. She allowed her correspondents to know it too.26 Max-Muller may have encouraged Wilde’s Vedic contempt for mere English getting-on, which Wilde would express more largely later in a strong endorsement of the contemplative philosophy of Chuang-Tsu. But in sorting out the intellectual universe with which Oxford amazed him, the two principal people at Oxford, and the ones he said he most wanted to meet, were John Ruskin and Walter Pater. For an undergraduate with artistic tastes, they were the inevitable poles of attraction. Ruskin, at fifty-five, occupied the respected position of Slade Professor of Fine Art; Pater, at thirty-five, a fellow of Brasenose College, tried in vain to become his successor. Wilde cannot have known in advance how opposed to each other they were: Pater, once Ruskin’s disciple, disagreed with his master without naming him; Ruskin loftily ignored Pater’s aspirations.
Wilde did not meet Pater in person until his third year at Oxford, but during his first term he came under the spell of his Studies in the History of the Renaissance, published the year before. He never ceased to speak of it as ‘my golden book,’ and in De Profundis he described Pater’s work as the ‘book which has had such a strange influence over my life.’27 Much of it, especially the celebrated ‘Conclusion,’ he had by heart. Pater declared that, life being a drift of momentary acts, we must cultivate each moment to the full, seeking ‘not the fruit of experience, but experience itself.’ Dorian Gray quotes this without acknowledgment. ‘Success in life,’ said Pater, is to ‘burn always with this hard gemlike flame’—Wilde now adopted ‘flamelike’ as one of his favorite adjectives, and longed, as he said in ‘Humanitad,’ ‘to burn with one clear flame.’ We can bum variously, through the passions (of which Pater strongly approved), through political or religious enthusiasms or what he called the religion of humanity, and, best of what life offers, through art. To expose one’s sensibility as fully as possible was an ideal that attracted Wilde: in ‘The Burden of Itys’ he would write,
I would be drunk with life,
Drunk with the trampled vintage of my youth.
He would, however, indicate his reservations when he had Lord Henry Wotton in The Picture of Dorian Gray talk this kind of Paterese to Dorian Gray with evident ill-effects.
Ruskin had made England art-conscious by a different approach, in which morality played a major part. Artists could display their morality by fidelity to nature, and by eschewing self-indulgent sensuality. The word ‘aesthetic’ became a bone of contention between Ruskin’s disciples and Pater’s. Ruskin sometimes used the term favorably, as when, in Michaelmas (autumn) term 1874, he offered a series of eight lectures, from 10 November to 4 December, on ‘The Aesthetic and Mathematic Schools of Art in Florence.’ By ‘Mathematic’ he meant the science of perspective, by ‘Aesthetic’ everything else. Though his use of the term indicates how much it was part of the university vocabulary, Ruskin was enraged when it was used to mean self-justified amoral art. As early as 1846 he denounced the aesthetic as a slogan that degraded the arts into mere amusements, ‘ticklers and fanners of the soul’s sleep.’ But in 1868 Pater commended the Pre-Raphaelites as ‘The Aesthetic School of Poetry,’ the vogue of the word having spread. Biding his time to respond, Ruskin declared in 1883 that the growing habit of calling ‘aesthetic’ what was only ‘pigs-flavouring of pigs’ wash’ argued a ‘moral deficiency.’28 His own art criticism harked back to the medieval period, with its faith and its Gothic, while he argued that the more the Renaissance bloomed, the more it decayed. Wilde would accept this point of view in De Profundis. But what he read in Pater was different: for Pater the medieval period was valued only as an anticipation of the Renaissance, and the best of the Renaissance was still going on. As for decadence, Pater did not shrink from welcoming what he called ‘a refined and comely decadence.’29
Wilde could see that he was being offered not only two very different doctrines, but two different vocabularies. Though both Ruskin and Pater welcomed beauty, for Ruskin it had to be allied with good, for Pater it might have just a touch of evil. Pater rather liked the Borgias, for example. Ruskin spoke of faith, Pater of mysticism, as if for him religion became bearable only when it overflowed into excess. Ruskin appealed to conscience, Pater to imagination. Ruskin invoked disciplined restraint, Pater allowed for a pleasant drift. What Ruskin reviled as vice, Pater caressed as wantonness.
Wilde was as concerned for his soul as for his body, and however titillated he was by Pater, he looked to Ruskin for spiritual guidance. He made a point of attending Ruskin’s lectures on Florentine art (in Michaelmas term 1874) in the University Museum. ‘Wilde was always there,’ Atkinson recalled, and H. W. Nevinson also remembered him in constant attendance, ‘leaning his large and flabby form against the door upon our right, conspicuous for something unusual in his dress, still more in his splendid head, his mass of black [really dark-brown] hair, his vivacious eyes, his poet’s forehead, and a mouth like a shark’s in formlessness and appetite.’30 Ruskin’s lectures, as formally printed in Cook and Wedderburn’s edition, do not of course include the asides with which he punctuated them. He would, as Atkinson writes, give ‘a loving exposition of a picture, and then suddenly break off into an appeal to his hearers to fall in love at the first opportunity.’ His eloquence led them to clap for him as for no other professor, or even—greatest tribute of all—to forget to clap.
During one of his impromptu exhortations, Ruskin apparently reminded his hearers that the previous spring (1874) he had proposed to them that instead of developing their bodies in pointless games, in ‘fruitless slashing of the river,’ in learning ‘to leap and to row, to hit a ball with a bat,’ they should join him in improving the countryside.31 Wilde, as ready to spurn sports as Ruskin, did not need persuasion. Ruskin asked them to help complete a project he had initiated
some months before, of constructing a flower-bordered country road in Ferry Hinksey, where there was only a swampy lane. It would be like building a medieval cathedral, an ethical adventure, rather than a Greek and narcissistic game. In an undergraduate ballad of the period, he was made to say,
My disciples alack, are not strong in the back,
And their arms than their biceps are bigger.
Yet they ply pick and spade, and thus glorify Slade:
So to Hinksey go down as a digger!
Although Wilde found rising at dawn more difficult than most men—preferring, like his mother, not to rise till afternoon—he overcame his languor for Ruskin’s sake. Later he bragged comically that he had enjoyed the distinction of being allowed to fill ‘Mr Ruskin’s especial wheelbarrow,’ and of being instructed by the master himself in the mysteries of wheeling such a vehicle from place to place.32 The road was in the process of being paved, digging having been finished the previous spring. It was not much of a road, but for Wilde it was the road to Ruskin, who invited his sweaty workers to breakfast after their exertions. The work went on in November to the end of term, after which Ruskin was off to Venice, and Wilde could again rise late, as the road for its part slowly sank from sight.
The roadbuilding fostered Wilde’s conviction that art had a role to play in the improvement of society. A good deal of his talk at Magdalen was devoted to the social regeneration of England. Ruskin was apt to Anglicize the afterlife with such remarks as ‘At Paddington station I felt as if in hell,’ and Wilde as disciple told his friends that all the factory chimneys and vulgar workshops should be taken up and placed on some far-off island. ‘I would give Manchester back to the shepherds and Leeds to the stockfarmers,’ he magnanimously announced.33
When Ruskin came back from Venice he encouraged Wilde to call, and they saw each other often. To Wilde the friendship was gratifying and instructive. ‘The dearest memories of my Oxford days are my walks and talks with you,’ he wrote to Ruskin after going down, ‘and from you I learned nothing but what was good. How else could it be? There is in you something of prophet, of priest, and of poet, and to you the gods gave eloquence such as they have given to none other, so that your message might come to us with the fire of passion, and the marvel of music, making the deaf to hear, and the blind to see.’34 This acknowledgment of discipleship suggests, perhaps, that Wilde knew how much in need of reassurance the great Ruskin was. Bodley’s journal describes how on 25 April 1875 he went to see William Money Hardinge, a Balliol friend, very much the aesthete. As Bodley came in, Hardinge broke off playing Weber on the piano to tell of his tea with Ruskin. The table had been lit with unduly ceremonious wax candles. Ruskin soon began to confide in Hardinge, ‘True sorrow does a man good; false sorrow does one harm. I only loved but one woman and I still feel chivalrous towards her and the man who robbed her from me.’ To be an intimate of Ruskin was to be admitted to his disappointments as well as his achievements.
Wilde knew about Ruskin’s white marriage, as he shows in a letter of 28 November 1879. He tells there of going with him that night in London to see Henry Irving play Shylock, after which he went, without him, to the Millais ball. ‘How odd it is,’ Wilde remarked.35 The oddity lay in attending The Merchant of Venice with the author of The Stones of Venice, and then going on to a ball which celebrated the marriage of the Millaises’ daughter. Mrs Millais had been for six years Mrs Ruskin, and for three of those years Millais had been Ruskin’s special friend and protégé. That Ruskin’s marriage had been annulled on grounds of nonconsummation was public knowledge, and much of the information that has since filled a dozen books was already well known at Oxford by word of mouth. There was an element of sympathy as well as respect in Wilde’s attitude to Ruskin, and greatly as he admired the older man, he could hardly disregard the failings of his life.
Wilde accepted, at least sometimes, Ruskin’s conception of Venice as a medieval Virgin who became a Renaissance Venus, specific works of architecture and painting marking the change. In De Profundis he spoke of ‘Christ’s own renaissance which had produced the Cathedral of Chartres, the Arthurian cycle of legends, the life of St Francis of Assisi, the art of Giotto, and Dante’s Divine Comedy’; and then was unfortunately ‘interrupted and spoiled by the dreary classical Renaissance that gave us Petrarch, and Raphael’s frescoes, and Palladian architecture, and formal French tragedy, and St Paul’s Cathedral, and Pope’s poetry, and everything that is made from without and by dead rules, and does not spring from within through some spirit informing it.’36 Yet at Oxford and afterwards Wilde also followed Pater in speaking with great favor of much in the Italian Renaissance and after. Where Ruskin was all severance, Pater was all blend. The essays in Pater’s book deal with subjects from the thirteenth to the eighteenth century, but they all tend to glorify the same thing, male friendship, as found in the medieval Amis and Amile, in Pico della Mirandola and Ficino, in Leonardo and his model for St John, in Michelangelo and the amorous addressee of his sonnets, and in Winckelmann, murdered on his way to meet Goethe. An atmosphere of suppressed invitation runs through Pater’s book, just as an atmosphere of suppressed refusal runs through Ruskin’s work. As to homosexuality, Ruskin refused to allow that it was sanctified because practiced in Athens, arguing that ‘the partial corruption of feeling’ for women and the excessive ‘admiration for male physical beauty’ had conduced to the fall of Greece.37 But Ruskin’s own obsession with the child Rose La Touche made it difficult to take his pronouncements about normal sexuality seriously. Pater’s blandishments were more persuasive. Something of the extraordinary effect of the Studies upon Wilde came from their being exercises in the seduction of young men by the wiles of culture. As against the resolute ‘Noli me tangere’ of Ruskin, Pater drew from the Renaissance the subversive lesson that we must continue it, hand in male hand.
For Wilde the two stood like heralds beckoning him in opposite directions. If he needed evidence for what he would say later, that ‘Criticism is the highest form of autobiography,’ he could find it in their unconscious self-revelation. The rhythms with which one denounced were matched by the rhythms with which the other beguiled. One was post-Christian, the other postpagan. Ruskin was sublime, full of solemn reproof, and fanatical; Pater insidious, all vibration, but cautious. Neither offered a way which Wilde could follow unequivocally or gravely. He liked to refer to Pater as ‘Sir Walter,’ and came to criticize the style of the Studies as too studied, lacking ‘the true rhythmical life of words.’ When Pater died, Wilde commented, according to Max Beerbohm, ‘Was he ever alive?’38 In later life he disparaged Pater as man, as writer, and as an influence, as Robert Ross noted with some distress.39 As to Ruskin, Wilde would present another prophet named John as the frenzied, untouchable Iokanaan in Salome. He outgrew them both.
* His disciple Max Beerbohm, asked if he were going down to the river for the boat races, replied, ‘What river?’8
† ‘O Lord! give me the strength and the courage / To contemplate my heart and my body without disgust!’
‡ ‘Beauty is perfect / Beauty is capable of all things / Beauty is the only thing in the world which does not excite desire.’
§ Another story, recounted by Douglas Sladen, is that some students broke into Wilde’s rooms, smashed his china, and held his head under the college pump. Hesketh Pearson investigated this report and satisfied himself that it happened not to Wilde but to a disciple of Wilde after Wilde had gone down.16
‖ He voiced this sentiment again in his poem ‘Humanitad,’
And yet I cannot tread the Portico
And live without desire, fear and pain,
Or nurture that wise calm which long ago
The grave Athenian master taught to men,
Self-poised, self-centered, and self-comforted,
To watch the world’s vain phantasms go by with unbowed head.
CHAPTER III
Rome and Greece
I have suffered very much for my Roman fever in mind and po
cket and happiness.
Manningism
Wilde was at home in Oxford now. He was not, however, carefree. His studies did not trouble him; the state of his soul did. Roman Catholicism attracted him more powerfully at Oxford than at Trinity, and his letters frequently betray his anxiety. He knew that Ruskin had spent the summer before they met in a monastic cell at Assisi, though he refused to be converted on the grounds that he was more Catholic than the Roman Catholics. Pater used to visit Roman Catholic churches to admire the rituals and decorations, and in Marius the Epicurean he would praise their ‘aesthetic charm,’ while treating the dogmas with reserve. Others at Oxford were less resistant: the apostasies of Henry Edward Manning of Balliol and John Henry Newman of Trinity, the one all force, the other all sinuosity, were now historic. More recently, Gerard Manley Hopkins, also of Balliol, had gone over. For Wilde in Magdalen the issue was brought home by his friend David Hunter Blair.
Oscar Wilde Page 8