When lo! a sudden glory! and I saw
The argent splendour of white limbs ascend,
And in that joy forgot my tortured past.
The order of rhymes has been sacrificed so that Jesus can turn into Hylas. Wilde had begun to find better lines in pagan than in Christian imaginings.
* Gower, a homosexual, adopted a young man named Frank Hird, leading Wilde to warn a friend about them, ‘Gower may be seen but not Hird.’
† ‘And [Sorrow] holds it sin and shame to draw / The deepest measure from the chords.…’
‡ It also pleased John Henry Newman, to whom Wilde sent it.7
§ The girl’s mother wrote to him,
Dear Oscar, I was very much pained the last time I was at your house when I went into the drawing room and saw Fidelia sitting upon your knee. Young as she is, she ought to have had (and I told her) the instinctive delicacy that would have shrunk from it—but oh! Oscar, the thing was neither right, nor manly, nor gentlemanlike in you. You have disappointed me.…
Now to touch another matter—I have been almost amused at the way you have often treated me as though I were a fool—as to kissing Fidelia when you met her—that is, trying to do it out of sight as it were … as for instance the last day I saw you—you left me, a lady, to open the hall door for myself, you staying behind at the same time in the hall to kiss Fidelia. Did you think for a moment that I was so supremely stupid as not to know that you always kissed F. when you met her, if you had an opportunity?
‖ A letter to him from Edith J. Kingsford of Brighton, 11 October 1875, suggests that he has been flirting with her cousin Eva, who is obviously taken with him, and offers to help arrange a match if that is in accord with his intentions, even though Eva’s mother will never agree.9
a A pamphlet on Boy Worship, by Charles Edward Hutchinson though not signed, was published there in April 1880, and led to an animated correspondence in the Oxford and Cambridge Undergraduate’s Journal over three weekly issues (22 and 29 April, 6 May) until it was halted by the university authorities.
b Wilde eleven years later would review one of Hardinge’s novels and comment good-humoredly that its hero was an ‘Arcadian Antinous and a very Ganymede in gaiters.’17
c A variant of the story is that Spooner asked Wilde to construe from Greek those verses in Matthew which record the sale of the Saviour by Judas for thirty pieces of silver. Wilde construed a few verses correctly and was stopped: ‘Very good, that will do, Mr. Wilde.’ ‘Hush, hush,’ replied the candidate, raising an admonitory finger, ‘let us proceed and see what happened to the unfortunate man.’ Wilde once informed Bishop Wilberforce that the chief argument against Christianity was the style of St Paul. In extenuation, he said of the bishop, ‘I fear he tempted me.’26
d The proctorial rules of the time barred students from all houses where drinks or tobacco were sold, and required them to be in their rooms by nine o’clock in the evening.
e In a burst of enthusiasm in 1878, Wilde took the Mark degree in the University Mark Lodge. The degree, having to do with the design, loss, and rediscovery of an arch in Solomon’s temple, had been a separate Masonic order since 1856. Wilde presumably joined because he had friends in it.
f Sebastian, always iconographically attractive, is the favorite saint among homosexuals. André Raffalovich, when admitted to the third order of Dominicans, took the name Brother Sebastian, and Wilde took Sebastian as his Christian name for his alias in France.
g Wilde glossed the poem with a prose note a few weeks later: ‘As I stood beside the mean grave of this divine boy, I thought of him as of a Priest of Beauty slain before his time; and the vision of Guido’s St Sebastian came before my eyes as I saw him at Genoa, a lovely brown boy, with crisp, clustering hair and red lips, bound by his evil enemies to a tree and, though pierced by arrows, raising his eyes with divine, impassioned gaze towards the Eternal Beauty of the opening Heavens.’48
Father Russell, to whom Wilde submitted the poem and note, suggested that, before its publication in the Irish Monthly, at least one of the two references to ‘boy’ might be changed to ‘youth.’ Wilde did not oblige him.
CHAPTER IV
An Incomplete Aesthete
Modern pictures are, no doubt, delightful to look at. At least, some of them are. But they are quite impossible to live with; they are too clever, too assertive, too intellectual. Their meaning is too obvious, and their method too clearly defined. One exhausts what they have to say in a very short time, and they become as tedious as one’s relations.
Joys of Rustication
Voyages to Greece were not common in the seventies of the last century. That they were necessary to a classical course in Oxford was more than Magdalen was ready to concede. Wilde returned to find that his request for ten days’ leave had not sat well with the authorities. Bramley, as college dean and a devout Anglican who believed in eternal punishment, was already concerned that a gifted student in their principal course might prove an apostate to his religion. The trip to Rome, even if diluted with another one to Greece, was not reassuring. It was during just such a stopover in Rome two years before that Hunter Blair had become a Roman Catholic, and his friendship with Wilde was well known. But the immediate reason for collegiate severity was one that Wilde never acknowledged: he had asked for ten days’ leave, and after ten days he was not there. The six-week Easter term began on 4 April 1877; no Oscar Wilde had appeared by the 26th. On that day the Magdalen officers lost patience with his effrontery, and resolved ‘that Mr Wilde having absented himself during this term up to the present time without permission, be not allowed to reside for the Easter and Trinity Term, and that he be deprived of the emoluments of his Demyship for the half-year ending Michaelmas 1877; and that he be informed that unless he return punctually on the appointed day of October Term, 1877, with an amount of work prescribed by his tutor satisfactorily prepared, the officers will consider whether he shall retain his Demyship.’1 The official language, barely concealing official fury, peremptorily put Wilde at the mercy of Allen, his hated tutor.
Two or three days after this grim edict, Wilde arrived. Kind and childlike by nature, inclined to like and be liked, he was, as Charles Ricketts said, staggered and then indignant at his rustication. Long afterwards he complained to Ricketts, ‘I was sent down from Oxford for being the first undergraduate to visit Olympia.’2 There was no recourse. He examined the statutes carefully, and then had them examined by the Clerk of Schools to see if the fellows of Magdalen were within their rights. They were. To his distress, they also reassigned his beautiful rooms during his absence.
One way of mitigating the injustice of rustication was by taking a few days in town. Wilde went to London and stayed with his sympathetic friend Frank Miles. The London season was a brisk one. Wilde apparently went to hear Richard Wagner conduct the Spinning Wheel Chorus in The Flying Dutchman, and also to hear Anton Rubinstein play what Wilde carelessly miscalled in print the ‘Sonata Impassionata.’3 (He got it right in ‘The Critic as Artist.’) He felt more comfortable with the visual arts, and the event of the season was the opening of the new Grosvenor Gallery by Sir Coutts Lindsay. With artist friends such as Miles and Gower, Wilde had no trouble being invited to the private showing on 30 April 1877, and he was not one to shirk the official opening next day, when the Prince of Wales, Gladstone, Ruskin, Henry James, and other dignitaries were also present.
The occasion was intended to be memorable. Lindsay’s gallery offered to present the contemporary art scene more fairly and vivaciously than the jealous Royal Academy. The year before, Sir Charles Dilke had complained on the floor of the House that the Academy excluded from its exhibitions certain important painters, chiefly Pre-Raphaelites. Lindsay intended his new gallery to present not only paintings of this school and others, but to constitute in itself a work of art. Accordingly, a new Palladian façade was imposed upon the front of 135–37 New Bond Street (now the Aeolian Hall). Whistler, with whom Wilde had struck up an acquaintance,
was commissioned to do a frieze on the coved ceiling of the West Gallery, showing in silver, against a subdued blue ground, the moon in its phases and the accompanying stars. The gallery walls, as Wilde approvingly noted, were ‘hung with scarlet damask above a dado of dull green gold.’ Henry James’s fastidious eye observed that these strong colors, especially ‘the savage red,’4 distracted the eye from the paintings, and Ruskin made the same objection, but Wilde rejoiced in the lavishness of the spectacle.
Part of this spectacle was himself. No ordinary clothing would serve for what he recognized to be his London debut, so he was pranked out in a new coat even more astonishing than the yellow-brown one which had dazzled the Genovese. A contemporary diarist reports the answer he gave when questioned about this acquisition.5 He had had a dream, he said, in which a ghostly personage appeared in a coat of a shape and color that somehow reminded him of a violoncello. On waking, he hastily sketched out what he had seen and brought the drawing to his tailor. The coat was cut to meet the dream specifications: in some lights it looked bronze, in others red, and the back of it (Wilde was proud of his back) resembled the outline of a cello.
That anyone should care what a young man of twenty-three was wearing confirms that Wilde was becoming a wonder. It was his first rehearsal of the role of art critic at exhibitions, in which Frith was to paint him ironically a few years later, dominating a crowd.* The attention he drew with his cello coat he was able to hold with his wit and enthusiasm. He felt so enamored of his newly revealed ability that he decided, virtually on the spot, to ‘take up the critic’s life.’ As a start, he memorialized the opening and his presence at it by writing his first published work in prose, ‘The Grosvenor Gallery,’ for the Dublin University Magazine. The editor, Keningale Cook, balked at a number of Wilde’s comments and mannerisms, but Wilde stood his ground. ‘I always say I and not “we,” ’ he informed Cook, insufferably, and insisted that he and all his artist friends were agreed that Alma Tadema could not draw. He added some passages in the proofs and then arrogantly prevented Cook from leaving them out: ‘Please have all my corrections attended to. Some of them are merely “style” corrections, which, for an Oxford man, must be always attended to.’6 He emphasized his precocity in a sentence speaking of ‘those of us who are yet boys,’ and, oblivious to rustication, he signed the article ‘Oscar Wilde, Magdalen College, Oxford.’ If he had dropped the panoply of ‘Fingal O’Flahertie Wills’ from his name, his being what Lady Bracknell calls ‘an Oxonian’ was by no means to be lost upon his editor or readers.
Wilde’s article on the exhibition may be compared with one by Henry James. The new gallery was particularly well disposed towards the Pre-Raphaelites, and James, like Wilde, praised Burne-Jones. James feared, however, that he detected in this painter a want of ‘manliness.’† By chance both critics described the first important painting in the show, one by G. F. Watts entitled Love and Death. James attempts exactitude but not exuberance:
On a large canvas a white draped figure, with its back to the spectator, and with a sinister sweep of garment and gesture, prepares to pass across a threshold where, beside a rosebush that has shed its flowers, a boy figure of love staggers forth, and, with head and body reverted in entreaty, tries in vain to bar its entrance.
Wilde is moved by the same subject to go overboard. He lushly perceives
a marble doorway, all overgrown with white-starred jasmine and sweet briar-rose. Death, a giant form, veiled in grey draperies, is passing in with inevitable and mysterious power, breaking through all the flowers. One foot is already on the threshold, and one relentless hand is extended, while Love, a beautiful boy with lithe brown limbs and rainbow coloured wings, all shrinking like a crumpled leaf, is trying, with vain hands, to bar the entrance.
Judicious, cautious James finds that the painting ‘has a certain graceful impressiveness’; aesthetic, incautious Wilde ranks it with Michelangelo’s God Dividing the Light from the Darkness. When they come to the beautiful boy, Wilde is all atremble, James all aslant.
James appears to less advantage when he comes to Whistler. As yet he was unprepared for the innovations of this painter, and it would take him the better part of twenty years to acknowledge his greatness. He dismissed him contemptuously now. Wilde had reservations also, but fewer. Whistler’s connections were with both the poeticized paintings of the Pre-Raphaelites and with the anti-anecdotal work of the French Impressionists. Wilde, as yet committed only to anecdotal painting, praises Whistler for his traditional portrait of Carlyle, but balks at the more venturesome one of Henry Irving, and is not even patronizing towards the ‘symphonies in colour.’ The more unconventional they are, the less he likes them. When he comes to the Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket, the most daring of all, Wilde banters about it like a simple-minded realist: it ‘is worth looking at for about as long as one looks at a real rocket, that is, for somewhat less than a quarter of a minute.’ He grants, however, as James did not, that Whistler has great power when he chooses to exercise it. Keningale Cook expressed anxiety that Whistler would be offended, but Wilde confidently assured him, ‘I know he will take them [Wilde’s remarks] in good part, and besides they are really clever and amusing.’ (He also has a footnote to the article, obviously based on conversation with Whistler, saying eruditely that Whistler was not aware, when he executed his famous peacock ceiling, that there was an ancient one like it in Ravenna.) Whistler did not trouble himself about Wilde’s banter, especially when it was sweetened with praise, but he did take seriously Ruskin’s unsweetened remark in Fors Clavigera about Falling Rocket, that he had ‘never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face.’7 The libel suit that resulted split the English art world, breaking up established friendships. Wilde contrived to remain on good terms with Ruskin and Burne-Jones on the one hand, and with Whistler on the other, in the circumstances an acrobatic feat.
In the course of a few pages Wilde cultivates the art of self-advertisement as well as that of criticism. He comments readily on his travels in Greece and Italy. There is no want of back-scratching. Both Ruskin and Pater come in for favorable mentions: Ruskin because of Millais’s long-since finished portrait of him, which was not in the exhibition, Pater because of his description of color in his essay on Botticelli as ‘a spirit upon [things] by which they become expressive to the spirit.’ Wilde applies this comment to Burne-Jones and manages to quote it twice. (He had still another quotation from Pater in the article, but Keningale Cook deleted it.) As Wilde circles through the rooms, he comments knowingly that Millais’s portraits of the Duchess of Westminster and her children are remarkably like the originals. (He had met her as Lord Ronald Gower’s sister.) Gower wins his commendation too, for two sculptures not in the exhibition, but then hanging in the Royal Academy.
Though Wilde allowed himself occasional stringencies about other exhibited artists, he declares in the Dublin University Magazine his Irish conviction that ‘this dull land of England, with its short summer, its dreary rains and fogs, its mining districts, and factories, and vile deification of machinery, has yet produced very great masters of art.’ He continues the tribute in his last sentence when he unites the artists with the writers to praise ‘that revival of culture and love of beauty which in great part owes its birth to Mr Ruskin, and which Mr Swinburne, and Mr Pater and Mr Symonds, and Mr Morris, and many others, are fostering and keeping alive, each in his own peculiar fashion.’ He has not yet proclaimed an English Renaissance, but is almost ready to do so.
After his stylish week in London, Wilde went home to Dublin. His mother was disgusted with the stupidity of the Magdalen officers, and Mahaffy raged at what seemed derogation of his valuable companionship in Greece. He might well do so, for the previous year, in somewhat similar circumstances, he had been censured by his Trinity colleagues for extending his first trip to Greece into term time. Only Willie Wilde was so callous as to ask his brother Oscar what the reason for being sent
down had ‘really’ been, since the ostensible one seemed to him only a dodge.8 He was perhaps beginning to suspect that his brother had unusual propensities. Wilde took what action he could: he wrote a persuasive letter to Magdalen, and on 4 May the authorities modified their previous decision to the extent of reducing his fine from £47/10/0 to £26/15/0, provided that the work prescribed by his tutor was satisfactorily done. The condition did not please Wilde.
The indignity at least helped him to clarify his aims. He would be an art critic, as he had informed Cook, and he would also be a poet. For the latter he needed poems first, and influential friends second, and he composed and cajoled during the summer. His method, so disingenuous as to be naïve, was to dispatch a poem with a charming letter, referring to his youth and Oxford connections. (Matthew Arnold as a young man had done the same, with Sainte-Beuve.) He sent Gladstone a sonnet in Miltonic style which protested against the massacre of the Christians in Bulgaria in May 1876, as Gladstone had protested in prose, and mentioned in the accompanying letter that he was ‘little more than a boy.’‡ Since, he said, young men love to have their works published for others to read, perhaps Gladstone, if he liked it, would recommend the sonnet to the Nineteenth Century and the Spectator.10 Gladstone responded cordially enough to be sent more sonnets, which Wilde sent off at the same time to the Spectator, using Gladstone’s name with permission. The Spectator declined them. Yet Wilde’s letter to Gladstone about the first sonnet is not mere toadying: he explains the two lines
And was thy Rising only dreamed by Her
Whose love of thee for all her sin atones?
as meaning that Mary Magdalene was the first to see Christ after his Resurrection; he then adds, in worldly fashion, ‘Renan says somewhere this was the divinest lie ever told.’ He enclosed, more appropriately, his poem ‘Easter Day,’ in which he is Protestant enough to compare unfavorably the splendor of the Pope with the poverty of Jesus.
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