Oscar Wilde

by Richard Ellmann

  Still I get so wretched and low and troubled that in some desperate mood I will seek the shelter of a Church which simply enthrals me by its fascination.34

  Wilde had absorbed enough of the Victorian work ethic to be eager to be earnest, though being fascinated was more natural to him. He came later to a benign indulgence of the spiritual mobility over which he fretted when he was young.

  In December 1876 Wilde moved into Ward’s rooms, his friend having gone down with a second in Greats. The rooms were the best in the college. He could now decorate their paneled splendor more lavishly, and fill them with his piano, his portfolio of pictures, his gray carpet to cover the stained floor. The pictures included photographs of his favorite Burne-Jones paintings: The Beguiling of Merlin, The Days of the Creation, The Mirror of Venus, and Christ and Magdalen.35 Other Magdalen men twitted him for his lavish decor when they came to his Sunday evenings. During the second term he applied himself to study for the Ireland scholarship in classical learning and taste, but the six weeks of study he devoted, as opposed to the years expended by others, were not enough, and he did not win the scholarship on 5 March 1877. He castigated himself in a letter to Ward, ‘I am too ridiculously easily led astray.’36

  Hellas

  To be Greek one should have no clothes: to be mediaeval one should have no body: to be modern one should have no soul.

  The only spirit which is entirely removed from us is the mediaeval; the Greek spirit is essentially modern.

  Wilde’s melancholy fit was broken by the spring vacation of 1877. Ward and Hunter Blair, an ill-assorted couple, were traveling to Rome, and urged him to join them there. Wilde, having given up a ‘pilgrimage’ the previous year on which Gower and Miles invited him, was eager to do so, but he was again short of money, having just paid the membership fee of £42 at his first London club, a new one called St Stephen’s. (Whistler and the architect Edward Godwin were founder members.) Hunter Blair determined to make a final effort to bring Wilde into the Roman Catholic Church, and thought the sight of eternal Rome would overcome his temporizing quibbles. To get over the money problem he proposed that, since he was on his way to Menton to see his family, he should stop off at Monte Carlo and lay £2 on Wilde’s behalf. If pagan Fortune smiled on this Christian undertaking, he would realize enough money to pay for Wilde’s trip. Soon £60 arrived, ostensibly Hunter Blair’s winnings. It seemed that Wilde had no choice but to go. He wrote to a friend, ‘This is an era in my life, a crisis. I wish I could look into the seeds of time and see what is coming.’37

  He qualified his acceptance, however, by arranging with Professor Mahaffy, who was taking two young men to Greece, to accompany him as far as Genoa. Accordingly, they met at Charing Cross Station, Mahaffy having with him Goulding, as before, and also George Macmillan, recently out of Eton and about to join his family’s publishing firm. As they proceeded to Genoa by way of Paris and Turin, Mahaffy, as an arch-Protestant, attempted to dissuade Wilde from going to Rome in favor of going to Greece. ‘No, Oscar, we cannot let you become a Catholic but we will make you a good pagan instead.’ Wilde was firm. Then Mahaffy said sternly, ‘I won’t take you. I wouldn’t have such a fellow with me.’ Proof against argument, Wilde was not proof against disdain. He agreed to go to Greece. On 2 April, Mahaffy boasted to his wife in a letter, ‘We have taken Oscar Wilde with us, who has come round under the influence of the moment from Popery to Paganism. He has a lot of swagger about him which William Goulding vows he will knock out of him as soon as he gets him on horseback in Arcadia.… The Jesuits had promised him a scholarship in Rome, but, thank God, I was able to cheat the Devil of his due.’38

  Wilde had not, however, forsaken Hunter Blair altogether. Faced with two alternatives, he had chosen both, as he liked to do. He would return from Athens via Rome. The solution was not so clever as it appeared, for it meant being late for term. Still, he thought he could rely upon the indulgence of Dean Bramley, with whom he had had friendly theological debates about Catholicism. How could anyone object to a student of classics going to Greece with Professor Mahaffy? He promised to come back directly from Athens, which they would reach by 17 April. He forbore to mention that he planned to stop in Rome,39 a detail as certain to displease Bramley as it would please Hunter Blair, and for the same reason. Bramley had been dismayed by the recent conversions in Magdalen.

  The Mahaffy party proved as congenial as on the previous trip. In Genoa, Mahaffy had to spend several days with his sister and his ailing mother, so the rest of the party were free to go about. Macmillan now took stock of Wilde, and liked what he saw. In a letter to his parents he said that their new companion was ‘very nice … aesthetic to the last degree, passionately fond of secondary colours, low tones, Morris papers, and capable of talking a good deal of nonsense thereupon, but for all that a very sensible, well-informed and charming man.’40 This is the fullest hint of what being an aesthete entailed in the way of special tastes. Macmillan gives no details of costume, but Wilde sported a new brownish-yellow coat in Genoa.

  The colors in Genoa were not secondary during Holy Week but primary, and low tones were hard to come by in the general raucousness. Wilde had in mind a new poem, and he observed with attention the churches decorated with flowers and with images of Jesus in the sepulcher guarded by soldiers. He was equally affected by the ripe oranges, flamboyant birds, and narcissi of the Scoglietto gardens. After visiting these the travelers went on to the Palazzo Rossi to see Guido Reni’s San Sebastian.f Macmillan, expressing their consensus, called it ‘about the most beautiful picture I ever saw.’41 Wilde glowed about it later. The collation of pagan and Christian spectacles affected the imagery of Wilde’s ‘Sonnet Written in Holy Week at Genoa,’ in which he pretends for the poem’s sake that he has already been to Greece and so is in need of having his pagan thoughts checked by Christian ones:

  I wandered in Scoglietto’s green retreat,

  The oranges on each overhanging spray

  Burned as bright lamps of gold to shame the day;

  Some startled bird with fluttering wings and fleet

  Made snow of all the blossoms, at my feet

  Like silver moons the pale narcissi lay:

  And the curved waves that streaked the sapphire bay

  Laughed i’ the sun, and life seemed very sweet.

  Outside the young boy priest passed singing clear,

  ‘Jesus the son of Mary has been slain,

  O come and fill his sepulchre with flowers.’

  Ah, God! Ah, God! those dear Hellenic hours

  Had drowned all memory of Thy bitter pain,

  The Cross, the Crown, the Soldiers and the Spear.

  Phrases such as ‘fluttering wings and fleet,’ ‘life seemed very sweet,’ and the waves that ‘laughed i’ the sun’ are limp. Yet the poem is faithful to Wilde’s conception of himself as a soul trembling between two waves not of thought but of feeling, and finally falling back to the Christian out of a surge of pity rather than of awe. The boy-priest (originally ‘a little child’) adds a further inducement.

  Mahaffy was not free to leave Genoa until Good Friday, the day on which they set out for Ravenna. It was a fortunate stop, because the town turned out to be the next subject for the Newdigate, giving Wilde an advantage over other competitors. In his poem he would describe his own entry into the city on horseback:

  O how my heart with boyish passion burned,

  When far away across the sedge and mere

  I saw that Holy City rising clear,

  Crowned with her crown of towers!—On and on

  I galloped, racing with the setting sun,

  And ere the crimson after-glow was passed,

  I stood within Ravenna’s walls at last!

  A train was actually the mode of transport. He found the fourth-century mosaics most interesting because they showed the Virgin being adored long before the Middle Ages invented mariolatry, and in the letter to Dean Bramley he was concocting he decided to convey this bit of somewhat unpal
atable information.42

  On Easter Sunday, 1 April, they went to Brindisi and the same night took ship for Greece. They woke at dawn to see Corfu before them. On 3 April they traveled to Zante, where on a hill Wilde suddenly came upon a young shepherd with a small lamb slung round his neck, as in a picture of the Good Shepherd.43 At Katakolo, their next stop, they were joined by Dr Gustav Hirschfeld, director of the German excavations at Olympia, who conducted them to the site on horseback next day. In later life Wilde told Charles Ricketts, ‘Yes, during the excavation I was present when the great Apollo was raised from the swollen river. I saw his white outstretched arm appear above the waters. The spirit of the god still dwelt within the marble.’44 In fact, the head of Apollo, not his arm, had been found, but on dry land, and some days before Wilde got there. Neither Macmillan nor Mahaffy mentions, as they would doubtless have done if they had been eyewitnesses, this rescue of the drowned god. Robert Ross, in the preface to the German edition of Wilde’s works, gives another variant he must have heard from Wilde, that the Hermes of Praxiteles was discovered while he was present, but this happened after Wilde’s departure. As Wilde would say in ‘The Critic as Artist,’ ‘To give an accurate description of what has never occurred is not merely the proper occupation of the historian, but the inalienable privilege of any man of arts and culture.’

  The next day, 7 April, they rode under pear trees covered with blossom to Andritzena, and then on to the Temple of Bassae. They were touristic enough to have themselves photographed in native costume, to great effect. Two incidents enlivened the trip. Their guide, who owned the horses, objected to their fast pace. When they paid no attention, he approached one member of the party and made threats. We do not know which member it was—there is no reason to assume it was Wilde—but whoever it was recalled he had a revolver, drew it, and pointed it at the guide. The guide swallowed his tongue. The other incident, on the way to Tripolitza on 9 April, was the disappearance of ‘the General,’ Professor Mahaffy. It was feared he had fallen into the hands of brigands, and the others searched for hours and then appealed to the police. Mahaffy was found at last. He had been looking for his greatcoat, which had been torn off his pack as he negotiated a short cut.45

  After having visited Argos and Nauplia, they took ship to Aegina and Athens. The sight of Athens on 13 April made a great impression upon them, and was described in print by both Mahaffy and Macmillan. Wilde, if a novel in which he appears can be relied upon, spoke of it as ‘the city of the early morning—rising in the cool, pale, steady light of dawn, a new Aphrodite from out the lapping circle of the waves.’ For him the Parthenon was ‘the one temple as complete, as personal, as a statue.’ Wilde missed the Elgin marbles, however, and a few years later, in his lecture to art students, would call Lord Elgin a thief.46 Apart from the absence of the marbles, Greece had been all that he hoped, and Rome must prove an anticlimax.

  Wilde made a final excursion with his friends to Mycenae, where Mahaffy’s name earned them access to Schliemann’s recently discovered treasures. It was now 21 April, and Wilde was already seventeen days late for term. He sailed to Naples, and experienced on the way a terrifying storm. (The Atlantic would distress him in 1882 by not providing such a good one.) He hurried on to Rome and joined Hunter Blair and Ward at the Hotel d’Inghilterra. Now he hurried no more. A professor of humanities from Glasgow, G. G. Ramsay, showed them around the city, and at dinner they usually had the company of two Englishmen, both papal chamberlains—H. de la G. Grissell (to reappear late in Wilde’s life) and Ogilvie Fairlie.

  But Hunter Blair had something grander in store for Wilde, a meeting with the Pope. Wilde had in several poems expressed his sympathy with Pius IX, ‘the prisoned shepherd of the Church of God,’ and regretted that, because Victor Emmanuel had marched into the Papal States in 1870, in evil bonds a second Peter lay’ (‘Sonnet on Approaching Italy’). Pius IX received them in a private audience, and expressed to Wilde the hope that he would follow his ‘condiscipulus’ (so popes talk) into the city of God. On the way back to the hotel Wilde was too awestricken to speak, and once there he locked himself in his room. When he emerged he had completed a sonnet, perhaps ‘Urbs Sacra Aeterna,’ which Hunter Blair liked, feeling, as often before, that his long struggle for Wilde’s soul was successful at last. Wilde sent a copy to Pius IX.47 Hunter Blair more effectually sent a copy to Father Coleridge, editor of The Month, where the poem appeared in September 1876 under the title ‘Graffiti d’Italia.’

  But poems are not so good as prayers. As before, Wilde’s soul was elusive. There was Ward to keep it Protestant. There was Greece to keep it Hellenic. And even without Ward, Wilde did not behave like one of the faithful. Some hours later, on the very day he had been received by the Pope, the carriage in which he and his friends were riding came to the basilica of St Paul Without the Walls, and Wilde could not be dissuaded by Hunter Blair from stopping at the Protestant Cemetery nearby. There, before the grave of Keats, ‘the holiest place in Rome,’ he prostrated himself on the grass. It was a humbler obeisance than he had offered to the Pope, and irritated Hunter Blair because of its confusion of aesthetic and religious postures. To submit to a poet as one should to a prelate was to undermine the meaning of submission. And the poem, ‘The Grave of Keats,’ which Wilde now wrote, medleyed Guido’s San Sebastian with a hero of literature:

  The youngest of the martyrs here is lain,

  Fair as Sebastian, and as early slain.g

  Hunter Blair did not give up, but he began to see where it would end. He refused to read any more sonnets: ‘I don’t want to see them,’ he said. ‘It is useless to talk of your weakness and want of principle—truly a strange reason for turning your back on what alone will make you strong … and as for your want of faith and enthusiasm, you cannot pretend to believe that God, who has given you grace to see His truth, will not also keep you firm when you choose to embrace it.’ Pagan Greece was having some of the subversive effect upon papal Rome that Mahaffy desired. Wilde was pleased to see Greek statues in the Vatican, as later he would note that the Greek chorus survived in the servitor answering the priest at Mass.49 There was a creed older than Christendom to which the divided Wilde had also pledged allegiance.

  During his week or ten days in Rome, not all Wilde’s time was spent in the company of his Oxford friends. He made the acquaintance of a gifted young woman of twenty, Julia Constance Fletcher, who was said to have been romantically engaged to an earl, Lord Wentworth, only to jilt or be jilted by him at the last moment.50 She and Wilde rode in the Campagna together. Miss Fletcher was determined to become a novelist, and observed Wilde attentively as a possible character. Within a few weeks of their encounter she turned out a three-volume novel entitled Mirage, published (under the pseudonym of George Fleming) the same year, and with enviable speed processed Wilde in it under the name of Claude Davenant. Many novels star him later, but this was the first. He would reciprocate by dedicating ‘Ravenna’ to her. She describes him well:

  That face was almost an anachronism. It was like one of Holbein’s portraits, a pale, large-featured individual: a peculiar, an interesting countenance, of singularly mild yet ardent expression. Mr Davenant was very young—probably not more than one or two and twenty; but he looked younger. He wore his hair rather long, thrown back, and clustering about his neck like the hair of a medieval saint. He spoke with rapidity, in a low voice, with peculiarly distinct enunciation; he spoke like a man who has made a study of expression. He listened like one accustomed to speak.

  Other characteristics are caught to the life. At one point Davenant almost falls off his horse from absent-mindedness, so enwrapt is he in what he is saying. He flaunts one of his poems, a Pre-Raphaelite ballad with varying refrains, such as Wilde had used in ‘The Dole of the King’s Daughter’ the year before. When asked what it means, Davenant replies, ‘Ah, but I never explain things’ in his ‘most languid tone.’51 Both mystery and languor had become part of the aesthetic presentation.

  To C
onstance Fletcher, Wilde-Davenant was ‘an early Christian brought down to date—and adapted—like a restored Church.’ His religious formula was ‘a Venus re-baptised into a Virgin, and the halo was newer than the smile.’ The influence of aesthetes from Gautier to Pater was detectable in all this, and also in Davenant’s advice to the heroine to accept existence, multiply emotions, heighten and intensify the quality of sensations.52 Lord Henry Wotton was to sing the same tune to Dorian, but in a tone of moral irony.

  What Constance Fletcher’s novel helps to make clear is that in the course of his spring travels, Wilde had found topographic symbols for his inclination on the one hand towards ‘earnestness and purity’ and on the other towards self-realization and beauty. Earlier, the ethical Ruskin and the aesthetic Pater had epitomized these urges; but now the inclinations could be envisaged as papal Rome and pagan Greece as well. Whatever Hunter Blair might say, Wilde could see that to deny either impulse would be to contract his nature, which might otherwise remain happily binary; he would be the contemplative or ‘Theoretikos’ (the title of another sonnet), ‘neither for God nor his enemies.’ (He borrowed this idea from Pater’s phrase ‘Neither for Jehovah nor for his enemies’ in an essay on Botticelli.) In the sonnet ‘Vita Nuova,’ which Father Russell first published in the Irish Monthly in 1877, the poet walks by ‘the unvintageable sea’ and feels despair,

  When lo! a sudden brightness! and I saw

  Christ walking on the waters! fear was past;

  I knew that I had found my Perfect Friend.

  Christ had become a kind of boy lover. When, after an interval, Wilde republished the poem in a book, he changed the lines in a way that Father Russell could not have stomached: