A fair slim boy not made for this world’s pain,
With hair of gold thick clustering round his ears …
Pale cheeks whereon no kiss hath left its stain,
Red under-lip drawn in for fear of Love,
And white throat whiter than the breast of dove—
It was published so in Kottabos, 1877, but when he revised it for his volume of poems four years later, he made the boy into a girl,
A Lily-girl, not made for this world’s pain,
With brown, soft hair close braided by her ears …
Pale cheeks whereon no love hath left its stain,
Red underlip drawn in for fear of love,
And white throat, whiter than the silvered dove,
and called it ‘Madonna Mia.’
In 1876, Wilde noticed another Oxford student sitting with a choirboy in a private box in a Dublin theatre. Gossipy yet alerted, he wrote to William Ward,
Myself I believe Todd is extremely moral and only mentally spoons the boy, but I think he is foolish to go about with one, if he is bringing this boy about with him.
You are the only one I would tell about it, as you have a philosophical mind, but don’t tell anyone about it like a good boy—it would do neither us nor Todd any good.19
Still, he refused to take alarm. When, early in 1876, he heard that Oscar Browning, who had just lost his teaching position at Eton in December 1875 because of excessive intimacy with such pupils as George Curzon, was in Oxford, Wilde asked to meet him on the ground that ‘I have heard you so much abused that I am sure you must be a most excellent person.’20 Neither now nor later would he hesitate to take risks. He could find learned sanction in Aristotle, for he wrote in his copy of the Nicomachean Ethics (inscribed ‘Magdalen College 1877 October’), following Aristotle’s preface, ‘Man makes his end for himself out of himself: no end is imposed by external considerations, he must realize his true nature, must be what nature orders, so must discover what his nature is.’21
His hopes of a fellowship in classics were in danger of being dashed if he did not do well in Honour Moderations, which he would have to take in June 1876. In a burst of zeal, he was spending the spring vacation studying in Oxford when he received alarming news from Dublin about his father’s health. Sir William’s decline had continued. Attacks of asthma and gout were frequent and destructive. He managed to keep up some of his activities, and as late as February 1876 attended an official function, wearing, as he loved to do, his Order of the Polar Star and the uniform that went with it. But the next day he had to take to his bed, short of breath. From the beginning of March he was bedridden. On his return to Dublin, Oscar was saddened by his father’s condition. He marveled at his mother, for during what were obviously Sir William’s last weeks, she permitted an unidentified veiled woman—perhaps the mother of one or more of Sir William’s three illegitimate children—to come and sit by the bedside, silent and grief-stricken. Sir William died on 19 April, with his family about him. An elegy by his friend Sir Samuel Ferguson bade him farewell,
Dear Wilde, the deeps close o’er thee; and no more
Greet we or mingle on the hither shore …
and praised his healing power, his kindness, his wonderful acts of preserving and collecting antiquities, his communion with the rural landscape. It was no little life that Sir William had led.
His will proved to be a disaster, for he had spent his money as he made it, and perhaps had conveyed substantial sums to the mothers of his illegitimate children. No. 1 Merrion Square and Moytura House were heavily mortgaged; only the Bray houses and Illaunroe were free and clear. Lady Wilde discovered that her marriage jointure was much reduced. Though each had a share—Oscar the Bray houses, Willie the house in Merrion Square, Lady Wilde Moytura, and Henry Wilson and Oscar jointly the lodge at Illaunroe—the income from the estate was not likely to be enough for any of them to live on. Wilde returned to Oxford in a sad and self-pitying mood. He saw financial troubles ahead, perhaps for life, and wondered whether, for the sake of so small a legacy, he had been wise to put off the purification of becoming a Catholic.
He now had to concentrate on studying for his second-year examinations. He knew that an examination on Divinity would come first, but he did not bother to prepare for it. In June he went up to the proctor at the Examination Schools for his paper. The proctor asked, ‘Are you taking Divinity or Substituted Matter?’ (The substituted matter was for non-Anglicans.) ‘Oh, the Forty-Nine Articles,’ Wilde replied indifferently. ‘The Thirty-Nine, you mean, Mr Wilde,’ said the proctor. ‘Oh, is it really?’ asked Wilde in his weariest manner. (He would talk later of the Twenty Commandments. To miscount was to discount.) ‘In examinations,’ he would say later, ‘the foolish ask questions that the wise cannot answer.’22 He did not pass.
But the principal examination, in classical literature, went well. He translated adeptly from and into Greek and Latin, and demonstrated his familiarity with a large number of Greek texts. One congenial question was ‘What account do you gather that Aristotle would have given of the nature and office of Poetry? Compare any later definition of Poetry with that which in your opinion he would have given, and explain his point of view.’23 Wilde had a strong conviction that Aristotle, unlike Plato, offered a theory of art ‘from the purely aesthetic point of view’ and not from the ethical one. As he wrote long after his time for taking examinations was over, in ‘The Critic as Artist,’ Aristotle found art’s ‘final aesthetic appeal … in a sense of beauty realised through the passions of pity and awe. That purification and spiritualising of the nature which he calls catharsis is, as Goethe saw, essentially aesthetic, and is not moral, as Lessing fancied.’ In this paper Wilde felt confident he had done well. But he was also examined in logic, a subject he knew less about. He guessed resignedly that he had achieved only a second class, but much depended still on the viva voce, which would take place a few weeks later.
To while away the time he visited his father’s brother, John Maxwell Wilde, vicar of West Ashby in Lincolnshire. His cousin asked him to drill her in geography and history, and he remembered these lessons when he came to write Cecily’s in The Importance of Being Earnest. Her father liked his nephew Oscar but was scandalized at his financial extravagance in sending telegrams (‘Would not the penny post do as well?’) and at his religious extremism. After all, two of his uncles were in orders in that Church of England which he spoke so genially of renouncing. Though mild in disposition, John Wilde was strenuous in argument, and when his nephew showed obstinacy, the vicar preached two sermons on a Sunday, the morning one in opposition to Rome and the evening one in favor of humility. Wilde was not improved by either. He left next morning for London, where he called on Frank Miles, bearing a great basket of roses from West Ashby. Miles was fast becoming the favorite artist for society women, and to Wilde’s un-Catholic delight was sketching ‘the most lovely and dangerous woman in London’ (Lady Desart, then well on her way to a divorce).24
By the evening of Monday, 3 July, he was again in Oxford to brush up Catullus before the viva on Thursday. He went to bed reading not Catullus but Swinburne, intending to sleep late; at ten in the morning an insistent rapping at his door roused him. It was the Clerk of Schools asking why he was not at his viva. He had nonchalantly mixed up the days. He arrived in a leisurely manner at the Examination Schools at one o’clock. First came his viva voce in Divinity. The examiner, the famous W. H. Spooner of New College, reproved him for being late. Wilde replied, ‘You must excuse me. I have no experience of these pass examinations.’ This reference to the fact that no marks except ‘pass’ or ‘fail’ were given was so patronizing that Spooner told Wilde to copy out the twenty-seventh chapter of Acts. After a time, as Wilde was writing away, Spooner relented and said he had done enough. But Wilde continued to write. Spooner said, ‘Did you hear me tell you, Mr Wilde, that you needn’t write any more?’ ‘Oh yes, I heard you,’ Wilde answered, ‘but I was so interested in what I was copying that I could not
leave off. It was all about a man named Paul, who went on a voyage and was caught in a terrible storm, and I was afraid that he would be drowned; but do you know, Mr Spooner, he was saved; and when I found that he was saved, I thought of coming to tell you.’25c Spooner, himself in orders and a nephew of the Archbishop of Canterbury, was as outraged as Wilde could wish. ‘I was ploughed of course,’ Wilde informed a friend afterwards. He would have to take ‘Divers’ again.
The viva in classics was more to his taste. The questions were not about Catullus, as he had feared, but about Homer and epic poetry, dogs, and women. His examiner led him on to Aeschylus, from whom Wilde had translated a set passage, and asked for a comparison with Shakespeare and then with Walt Whitman, already one of Wilde’s enthusiasms. The examiner was pleased with him, but the possibility remained that his papers in logic would drag him down. After the viva was over, Wilde ‘swaggered’ to his friends that he had got a first, as if he had no doubt at all. That evening he was walking with them past the Examination Schools at eight o’clock and was told that the list of honours had just been posted. Wilde declined to look at it: ‘I know I have a first,’ he said. ‘It’s all a bore.’ In a letter to Ward afterwards he laughed at his own pretended cocksureness: ‘I made them all very ill, absolutely.’ As a result, he remained in trepidation until the next day at noon, when, breakfasting at the Mitre, he read the list in the Times. ‘My poor mother is in great delight and I was overwhelmed with telegrams on Thursday from everyone I know. My father would have been so pleased about it. I think God has dealt very hardly with us.’ In a cooler mood he confided to Frank Benson, ‘My weakness is that I do what I will and get what I want.’27
Wilde went up to London and heard his favorite preacher, Cardinal Manning, at the Pro-Cathedral, on Sunday, 9 July 1876. Next day he traveled to Bingham Rectory in Nottinghamshire to stay with Frank Miles and his family. Miles’s mother was an artist, his father a Church of England priest. There were many debates between the rector and Wilde about Roman Catholicism. Canon Miles was dismayed at the Vatican Council’s verdict that Mary had been immaculately conceived; Wilde thought it ‘very strange’ that the English Church should be ‘so anxious to believe the Blessed Virgin conceived in sin.’28 He parted amicably with his hosts, and it was arranged that Frank Miles should come to Illaunroe later in the summer and paint a mural. He did, and it still exists, showing two cherubs, one light and one dark, as fisherboys; the title, Tight Lines, was a fisherman’s good-luck cry, incongruous with the uncherubic models Miles and Wilde.
Roman Catholicism threads its way through all Wilde’s activities. He carried some of Newman’s books with him to Ireland, evidently anxious to see how Newman’s conversion had come about. His copy of Thomas à Kempis’s Imitation of Christ is dated 6 July 1876.29 But in writing to the more skeptical Ward, Wilde said the books were not persuasive. ‘About Newman I think that his higher emotions revolted against Rome but that he was swept on by Logic to accept it as the only rational form of Christianity. His life is a terrible tragedy. I fear he is a very unhappy man.’ This was common talk about Newman at the time, though mostly dispelled when he was created cardinal in 1879. Wilde remained skeptical of Newman. In ‘The Critic as Artist,’ he wrote, ‘The mode of thought … which seeks to solve intellectual problems by a denial of the supremacy of the intellect—may not, cannot, I think, survive. But the world will never weary of watching that troubled soul in its progress from darkness to darkness.’30 Ward took advantage of his friend’s doubts to urge the reasonableness of Protestantism as against Catholicism, but failed to convince Wilde, who declined to worship at the Temple of Reason. He noted, however, that his mother was close to Ward’s views: ‘Except for the people, for whom she thinks dogma necessary, she rejects all forms of superstition and dogma, particularly any notion of priest and sacrament standing between her and God.’ Wilde praises the beauty, as well as the necessity, of the Incarnation, acknowledging doubts about the Atonement. ‘But I think since Christ the dead world has woke up from sleep.’31 (He was later to imagine the world reawakening through art rather than religion.) For the time he continued to read Thomas à Kempis.
Many of his early poems marked stages in his spiritual history. His Catholic friends Hunter Blair and the Irish poet Aubrey de Vere recommended him to the Reverend Matthew Russell, S.J., editor of the Irish Monthly, and Russell welcomed seven of his poems, mostly religious, from 1876 to 1878. Another Dublin Catholic magazine, the Illustrated Monitor, published two of Wilde’s poems in the same period. Kottabos, Professor Tyrrell’s magazine at Trinity College, published six of his poems between 1876 and 1879, and the Dublin University Magazine five others. Reflecting his Greats course, several were translations or bore epigraphs or titles in Greek. What his poems show is not freshness of thought, but a sense of the fascination of his personal pageant, and a not always discriminating love of evocative words. Colors such as gold and white and blue, attributes such as shadowy, the canopy of sky, sun, and moon, and flowers—especially the lily—recur often enough to suggest that he wants them to echo and re-echo. Being a poet is vital to him.
* * *
Fortified by his first in Honour Moderations, Wilde, on his return to Oxford for his third year in October 1876, took a lofty line with the authorities. On 1 November he was found with three other undergraduates (Fitzgerald and Harter of Oriel, and Ward of Christ Church) at supper in the coffee room of the Clarendon Hotel.d Their names were taken and they were ordered to finish their supper and go to their colleges. The junior proctor reported to his senior, J. R. Thursfield, ‘I did this because I was told that they had been about the streets all evening. Their manner to me was as impertinent as it well could be and the chief joke at their command seemed to be getting me to mention the College [Jesus] at which they were to call. In answer to repeated enquiries Where? Where? I told them that Mr Fitzgerald could inform them (He had been to my rooms and was fined £1 for dining at the Mitre).’ In fifteen minutes he returned and found them in the same places. ‘I ordered them at once to leave the room and go to College. They were, if possible, ruder than before. Wilde strutted about the room with his hat on till I told him that it would be proper for him to remove it.… One of them calmly lighted a cigar.… I, of course, made him put it out immediately.… I will hand them over to you only suggesting that it is a case for a severe penalty and that they shd be gated on the 5th [Guy Fawkes Day].’32
Wilde treated the dons with the same insolence. He was now in Litterae Humaniores, which meant ancient history and philosophy, and his tutor for Michaelmas term was William Dennis Allen. It was easy to take offense at Allen’s conduct of his teaching. According to Atkinson, the students entered Allen’s sitting room and sat down, faced by a mastiff in front of the fire. Allen did not appear in person, but his voice came eerily, and no doubt drearily, from the bedroom, reading out ‘notes’ through the half-opened bedroom door. On cold days, Allen would sport his oak and go ice-skating, leaving a lame excuse tacked to the closed door. Wilde resolved to treat Allen with equal discourtesy. At Collections in January 1877, with the dons and students assembled in hall for progress reports, the mild President of Magdalen, Dr Bulley, asked, ‘How do you find Mr Wilde’s work, Mr Allen?’ Allen answered angrily, ‘Mr Wilde absents himself without apology from my lectures. His work is most unsatisfactory.’ ‘That is hardly the way to treat a gentleman, Mr Wilde,’ said Bulley, seeing a chance to turn insubordination into bad manners. ‘But Mr President,’ said Wilde, not similarly disposed, ‘Mr Allen is not a gentleman.’ Bulley ordered him out of the hall.33
The main activity of the first term of this third year was not classical study, or even tergiversation over becoming a Catholic, but a new burst of Masonic interest. On 27 November 1876 Wilde elected to proceed not into the Apollo Royal Arch Chapter but into the Apollo Rose-Croix Chapter, which suited him because, unlike the other, it was High Church.e It had been ‘consecrated’ only four years before. The earlier degrees he had taken were based on t
he Masonic allegory of the building of Solomon’s temple by the architect Hiram Abif, his subsequent death, its destruction and rebuilding. Now, as he took the eighteenth degree, he learned that the Rose-Croix dealt explicitly with Christ’s death and resurrection and offered a ritualized progress towards illumination and a communion rite. The ornate regalia included lambskin apron and red collar, sword and swordbelt, and a jeweled rose-cross. The scene was set in three rooms, one black, one funerary, and one red, with various symbolic implements. Wilde performed as Raphael, his duty being to conduct the candidates during the Perfection (joining) ceremony. This role commanded a resounding if stale rhetoric: ‘I come to conduct you from the depths of darkness and the Valley of the Shadow of Death to the Mansions of light.’ He was an active proselytizer, sponsoring four new Magdalen students into the order. On 3 March 1877 he wrote to Ward, himself a Mason, ‘I have got rather keen on Masonry lately and believe in it awfully—in fact would be awfully sorry to have to give it up in case I secede from the Protestant Heresy.’ Hunter Blair had had to give it up for this reason. But the same letter indicates how complicated were Wilde’s spiritual sensations:
I now breakfast with Father Parkinson, go to St Aloysius, talk sentimental religion to Dunlop [one of Hunter Blair’s student converts] and altogether am caught in the fowler’s snare, in the wiles of the Scarlet Woman—I may go over in the vac[ation]. I have dreams of a visit to Newman, of the holy sacrament in a new Church, and of a quiet and peace afterwards in my soul. I need not say, though, that I shift with every breath of thought and am weaker and more self-deceiving than ever.
If I could hope that the Church would wake in me some earnestness and purity I would go over as a luxury, if for no better reasons. But I can hardly hope it would, and to go over to Rome would be to sacrifice and give up my two great gods ‘Money and Ambition.’
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