The circumstances of Hunter Blair’s conversion were spectacular. During the winter term of 1875 he obtained leave to study music in Leipzig and from Leipzig proceeded to Rome in time to attend the ceremony at which Manning was created a cardinal, on 15 March 1875. Manning was a special hero because of his stern espousal of the doctrine of papal infallibility, which he had recently defended against Gladstone’s charge that it ‘equally repudiated modern thought and ancient history.’ Swept away by enthusiasm, Hunter Blair, ten days after the Manning ceremony, was himself received into the Church. He was a notable convert: Archbishop (later Cardinal) Howard confirmed him; Pius IX himself blessed him and conferred on him the honorary post of papal chamberlain.
On his return to Magdalen at the end of April, Hunter Blair urged Wilde and others to follow him. Several Magdalen students did. William Ward smiled and said nothing; Wilde did not smile and said a good deal. His main impediment was Sir William Wilde’s opposition. ‘I am sure that if I had become a Catholic,’ he said, referring to his Trinity College days, ‘he would have cut me off altogether, and that he would do the same today. That is why he rejoiced at my winning a scholarship to Oxford, where I should not be exposed to these pernicious influences. And now my best friend turns out to be a Papist!’ Their situations were not to be compared. Hunter Blair had his own property. ‘Lucky you, my dear Dunskie, to be as you are independent of your father and free to do what you like. My case is very different.’1
Hunter Blair was unimpressed by this financial argument and continued his persuasions. Wilde was tempted: he felt guilty and sinful; he liked what he called ‘the perfume of belief’,2 and adorned his third finger with an oval amethyst ring that looked faintly ecclesiastical. He put his own case in describing later the seductiveness of the Roman ritual for Dorian Gray. ‘The daily sacrifice, more awful really than all the sacrifices of the antique world, stirred him as much by its superb rejection of the evidence of the senses as by the primitive simplicity of its elements and the eternal pathos of the human tragedy that it sought to symbolise. He loved to kneel down on the cold marble pavement, and watch the priest, in his stiff flowered vestment, slowly and with white hands moving aside the veil of the tabernacle, or raising aloft the jewelled lantern-shaped monstrance with that pallid wafer … or, robed in the garments of the Passion of Christ, breaking the Host into the chalice, and smiting his breast for his sins. The fuming censers, that the grave boys, in their lace and scarlet, tossed into the air like great gilt flowers, had their subtle fascination for him.’3 By June 1875 Wilde’s interest in Catholicism was ostentatious enough to astonish his visitors. Among these was the sculptor Lord Ronald Gower, the younger son of the second Duke of Sutherland,* who came to see Wilde, bringing with him Frank Miles, a young portrait sketcher with whom he had become acquainted. Gower described Wilde in his diary for 4 June 1875 as ‘A pleasant cheery fellow, but with his long-haired head full of nonsense regarding the Church of Rome. His room full of photographs of the Pope and of Cardinal Manning.’4 (Wilde also had a Madonna done in plaster.) Gower, himself attracted to Newman earlier, cautioned Wilde about the blandishments of Hunter Blair. Wilde remained more Protestant heresiarch than Catholic zealot.
The summer vacation of 1875 affirmed his indecision. He spent the first part of it in Italy, looking at the paintings which Ruskin’s descriptions had made him eager to see. Oddly enough, in view of his adhesion to Hunter Blair, his companions there were his old tutor from Trinity, Professor Mahaffy, in Protestant orders and dead-set against Roman Catholicism, and a young man named William Goulding, the son of a wealthy Dublin businessman and also inflexibly Protestant. It may have been to protect himself against Hunter Blair’s persuasions that Wilde went with them. His letters home gave his father no anxiety about a possible religious upheaval, and described Etruscan tombs and Titian’s Assumption (‘the best painting in Italy’) with equal pleasure. What he did not describe was the turmoil he felt at the sight of so many artistic memorials of Catholic piety. A poem he wrote just after a visit to San Miniato in Florence, about 15 June 1875, conveys his delight in metaphysical sensation on the one hand and the shows of this world on the other.
Wilde’s first impulse to write stemmed largely from his awareness of this tension, and much of his work deals with the sale of souls, the attempt to repurchase them, and the states of the negotiators’ minds. The early manuscript version of ‘San Miniato’ differed markedly from the later:
San Miniato
(June 15th)
I
See, I have climbed the mountain side
Up to this holy house of God,
Where the Angelic Monk has trod
Who saw the heavens opened wide.
The oleander on the wall
Grows crimson in the morning light;
The silver shadows of the night
Lie upon Florence as a pall.
The myrtle-leaves are gently stirred,
By the sad blowing of the gale,
And in the almond-scented vale
The lonely nightingale is heard.
II
The day will make thee silent soon
O! nightingale sing on for love,
While yet upon the shadowy grove
Fall the bright arrows of the moon.
While yet across the silent lawn
In golden mist the moonlight steals,
And from love-wearied eyes conceals
How the long fingers of the dawn
Come climbing up the Eastern sky
To grasp and slay the shuddering night,
All careless of my heart’s delight,
Or if the nightingale should die.5
He praises Fra Angelico, but Fra Angelico among the nightingales, and among the unchastened oleanders and myrtles. The Christian scene is more than faintly subverted by the pagan birds, and by the imagery of love, theft, and murder—arrows falling, moonlight stealing, dawn slaying night. In the battle of sacred and profane for Wilde’s soul, the profane is inching ahead. But when the poem was revised for publication in the Dublin University Magazine in March 1876, the sacred had taken over all but the last words, and his passive tolerance of nature had given way to a desperate longing for supernatural intervention.
San Miniato
See, I have climbed the mountain-side
Up to this holy house of God,
Where that Angelic Monk once trod,
Who saw the heavens opened wide,
And throned upon the crescent moon
The Queen of heaven and of grace—
Mary, could I but see thy face,
Death could not come at all too soon.
• • •
O! crowned by God with love and flame,
O! crowned by Christ the Holy One,
O! listen, ere the searching sun
Show to the world my sin and shame.
The opening lines remain the best, but fall into the abyss with ‘Death could not come at all too soon.’ Sir William was delighted to see his son’s poem. Lady Wilde made no comment about the pietism of the poem, but offered a professional objection: ‘Sin is respectable and highly poetical, Shame is not.’6 Wilde had borrowed the conjunction from an even more professional poet, Tennyson (In Memoriam, 48).† In Wilde it becomes stagy, penitential self-preening. He would learn to keep such confessions to himself.
On 19 June the travelers went on from Florence to Bologna, and then to Venice. Wilde would remember how ‘the pearl and purple of the seashell is echoed in the church of St Mark.’ On 22 June they stopped briefly in Padua to see the Giottos, of which Wilde, like his master Ruskin, could fully approve, and then traveled late on the 23rd to Verona. Wilde wrote a sonnet about Dante’s exile there in 1303–4, which for the first time surrounds a poet with prison imagery, though Dante was not imprisoned in Verona:
behind my prison’s blinded bars
I do possess what none can take away
My love, and all the glory of the stars.
&nbs
p; These consolations—so facilely offered here—were less dependable than he supposed.
After Verona, Mahaffy and Goulding proceeded to Rome; Wilde had spent all his money and had to start for home on the 25th. He had the subject of a new poem, ‘Rome Unvisited,’
And here I set my face towards home,
For all my pilgrimage is done,
Although, methinks, yon blood-red sun
Marshals the way to holy Rome.
The poem delighted Hunter Blair,‡ because it expressed Wilde’s desire to meet the Pope as ‘the only God-appointed King,’ and his hope that, if he could sing as a religious poet, his heart would be free of fears. As he moved physically away from Rome, he moved imaginatively close to it.
The rest of the summer brought secular pleasures. Wilde returned home to Ireland by way of Paris, and spent some weeks in the west of Ireland. He could travel freely between Moytura House near Cong, where the view of Lough Corrib was magnificent, and Illaunroe, the hunting lodge in the middle of a lake. He could row, shoot, fish, ride, and sail as he pleased. In August he returned to Dublin to welcome his friend Frank Miles, who had come on a brief visit to him. Miles at this time made a sketch of Wilde that showed him essaying a small mustache, to be given up not long after.
In August 1875 too, Wilde met the first of a series of beautiful women with whom he would be associated for the rest of his bachelor days. She was Florence Balcombe, third of five daughters of an English lieutenant-colonel who had served in India and the Crimea. Though dowerless, she was, according to Wilde, ‘exquisitely pretty.’8 They met at her house at 1 Marion Terrace, Clontarf. She was seventeen to Wilde’s twenty. On 16 August Wilde escorted her to the afternoon service at the Protestant cathedral, St Patrick’s. A lively affection for each other developed. At Christmas in 1875, it appears, Wilde presented her with a small gold cross which united their names. The idea of marriage was in the air, there was evidently some mild lovemaking, but Wilde could not marry while still a student. It is hard to gauge the intensity of his feelings, which he exaggerated and she later minimized. Wilde’s affection may have been largely self-regarding. It did not prevent him from dandling on his knee another young woman in Dublin, named Fidelia,§ or from flirting with one called Eva.‖ But Florence Balcombe came close to being an official beloved. In September 1876 he sent her a water color he had painted of Moytura House. The love poems he wrote during their period of putative commitment to each other imply tentativeness. Two of them envisage the death of lover or beloved—a convenient way out for halfhearted suitors—as in the poem eventually entitled ‘Chanson’:
A ring of gold and a milk-white dove
Are goodly gifts for thee,
And a hempen rope for your own love
To hang upon a tree.
Swinburne is invoked to describe her ‘delicate / Fair body made for love and pain,’ and Rossetti to name her ‘white lily overdrenched with rain.’ In ‘The Dole of the King’s Daughter,’ the title character has committed seven sins, which turn out to be the murders of her seven admirers. The poems show more interest in phrasing than feeling, and in complications than consummations.
When Wilde returned to Oxford in the autumn of 1875 for his second year, he had religion as well as love on his mind. Cardinal Manning preached derisively on the Oxford motto, ‘Dominus Illuminatio Mea,’ on 23 November 1875 at the dedication of the new Church of St Aloysius in St Giles’. This was the first Roman Catholic church to be built in Oxford since the Reformation. Wilde inscribed his name among those who listened to the cardinal denounce Oxford for its spiritual apathy and decay. Now and later Wilde found Manning ‘fascinating,’10 a word more secular than spiritual. Hunter Blair may have expected that this visit would bring Wilde to decision, but he did not take into account Wilde’s enjoyment of half-choice. Extended discussions of the state of Wilde’s soul went on. One night even Hunter Blair lost patience. He hit Wilde on the head and exclaimed, ‘You will be damned, you will be damned, for you see the light and do not follow it.’ William Ward, who had been listening to their talk, asked, ‘And I?’ ‘You will be saved by your invincible ignorance,’ Hunter Blair allowed.11 Wilde paid a visit to Bodley early in December to confess that he was ‘swaying’ (in Bodley’s words) ‘between Romanism (Manningism), and Atheism.’ Bodley acidly reminded him that one Irish Papist the more would not disturb the universe. Wilde continued to sway, attending the Reverend Henry James Coleridge’s sermons in St Aloysius, writing to Ward that he was more than ever ‘in the wiles of the Scarlet Woman,’12 and backing altar-wards with an eye to the exit.
Along with his incipient apostasy to his family religion went the first hint of ambiguity in his relations with men. Atkinson and others noted something effeminate in his swaying walk, and Julian Hawthorne (the son of Nathaniel) remarked in his diary that ‘there is a sort of horribly feminine air about him.’13 His friends in Magdalen were not homosexual, but the artist Frank Miles probably hovered on the edges, as might be inferred from the great interest taken in him by Lord Ronald Gower, with whom he went off to Paris. That other friendships of Wilde at Oxford were equivocal is indicated by a note in Bodley’s journal, dated 4 December 1875—Wilde’s second year at the university. It read, ‘Called on Wilde, who leaves foolish letters from people who are “hungry” for him and call him “Fosco” for his friends to read. Fitz lent him a fiver and we did not make hay in his rooms.’ That Wilde wrote warmly to men is borne out by a letter sent from Magdalen to an unidentified friend:
My dear Harold: I really never thought to hear from you again. I wish music was not such a siren to you as to make you forget everybody else. Will you come in and see me tonight at 9 o’c or any time when you can escape from ‘Sir John’—whom by the bye I believe you like much better than
Yours scy
OSCAR WILDE
I have some men dining tonight with me—not very intellectual—but you will find Vaughan Hughes amongst them.14
Whatever uneasiness Bodley may have felt about Wilde’s reception of male endearments he decided to disregard, for the next day he played a practical joke on Wilde and on 6 December noted ironically its success: ‘Wilde does not like to have the heads of cods and the London Journal sent him. The former, he said, he dropped stealthily in the Cherwell, feeling quite like Wainewright (the murderer).’ (This is the first sign of Wilde’s affinity for criminals, especially artistic ones like Wainewright, about whom he would later write ‘Pen, Pencil and Poison.’) But there was another incident of a more alarming kind.
It happened in Balliol and involved Bodley’s friend (and Ruskin’s) William Money Hardinge, whom Wilde knew as one of Ruskin’s roadbuilders. Hardinge was near the end of his course when it was discovered that he had received letters from Walter Pater signed ‘Yours lovingly.’ He made matters worse by his ‘indecency’ in talk and behavior. Although the subject was kept as quiet as possible, it was well known in Balliol, especially among the Ruskin disciples. Alfred Milner (later Viscount Milner), a friend of Hardinge, had to admit that Hardinge was known as ‘the Balliol bugger.’ It was the time when ‘boy worship’ was conspicuous at Oxford.a Hardinge was considered to be giving the college a bad name, and in the spring of 1875, R. L. Nettleship, a classics tutor in the college, was informed. When nothing happened, Leonard Montefiore, an undergraduate, and like Milner a Ruskin roadbuilder, made a formal complaint to the Master of Balliol, Benjamin Jowett, about Hardinge’s blasphemy and impiety, the evidence apparently being some homosexual sonnets. Milner and Arnold Toynbee (1852–83)—another roadbuilder—tried to help Hardinge, Toynbee by getting him to destroy his incriminating correspondence, Milner by defending the sonnets as mere literary exercises intended to startle. Early in 1876 Jowett was told of the letters and given copies of the sonnets. He was deeply shocked, as much at Pater, with whom he broke off relations, as at Hardinge. Himself a bachelor and a Platonist, Jowett found excuses for Plato’s love of men, on the grounds that this was easily transposable by modern readers i
nto love of women. ‘Had he lived in our own times he would have made the transposition himself.’15 But he found no excuses for Hardinge, whom he summoned on the official charge of ‘keeping and reciting immoral poetry.’ At first Hardinge denied it. In disgust Jowett then offered him the choice of being sent down quietly or facing a proctorial inquiry. He chose to be sent down. Jowett wrote to his father that his son was ‘living here in a way which might ultimately harm himself and was already throwing discredit on his college. His conversation and writings are indecent, his acquaintance bad, his work = O2. Why should he remain at Oxford?’ Hardinge’s father, a distinguished physician, acquiesced. The only difficulty was that Hardinge had won the Newdigate Prize for his poem on Helen of Troy, and would in the normal course of events have come back and recited it in the Sheldonian at the June Encaenia (conferment of honorary degrees). Under pressure, he gracefully acknowledged himself to be too ill to come, and Bodley, like others, pretended to accept the reason as true.16b
If any confirmation was needed, the incident defined the peril of conduct like Hardinge’s at Oxford. Wilde was a close friend of Milner and Montefiore, and knew the risk. At the same time, he began to display an interest in relations between men. André Raffalovich, an unfriendly witness, says that Wilde boasted of having as much pleasure in talking about the subject of homosexuality as others in practicing it.18 Anything might trigger a compromising response. So Violet Troubridge, a young artist friend, showed him a pastel she had done entitled Wasted Days, with a double portrait, of a boy idle in summer and hungry in winter. Wilde was moved to a sonnet, which began,
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