He sent others his sonnet on Keats. He was of the opinion that the medallion portrait of Keats placed beside the grave in February 1876 was not like the poet, and in writing to Lord Houghton, whom he had met with Mahaffy in Dublin, made this point. Unfortunately he did not trouble first to read Houghton’s life of Keats, for in his reply Houghton, after referring politely to the poem, insisted that its description of Keats as an unhappy warrior was unwarranted. ‘Keats,’ he said, ‘was anything but unhappy, and he was recognised with unusual rapidity.’ As for the medallion, Houghton insisted that the likeness was a good one. A similar letter from Wilde to W. M. Rossetti elicited no rebuff, but Rossetti took a long time to reply, and then said that while he agreed with the proposal that Keats should have a statue, there was no hurry, since in the fullness of time all the deserving poets would have all the statues they deserved.11§ Wilde’s tentatives were not brilliantly successful, but they served at least to bring his name forward and sometimes to prompt further correspondence.
When the Dublin University Magazine appeared in July with his review of the Grosvenor Gallery, he sent Pater a copy. In many ways the article was a declaration of his congruence with Pater, whom he had still not met. Its references to paintings of boys included the telltale sentences: ‘in the Greek islands boys can be found as beautiful as the Charmides of Plato. Guido’s “St Sebastien” in the Palazzo Rossi at Genoa is one of these boys, and Perugino once drew a Greek Ganymede for his native town, but the painter who most shows the influence of this type is Correggio, whose lily-bearer in the cathedral at Parma, and whose wild-eyed, open-mouthed St John in the “incoronata Madonna” of San Giovanni Evangelista, are the best examples in art of the bloom and vitality and radiance of this adolescent beauty.’ Pater caught the signal, and recognized the ability. He wrote promptly, on 14 July, to thank Wilde for his ‘excellent article’ and to ask him to call as soon as he returned to Oxford. ‘I should like much to talk over some of the points with you, though on the whole I think your criticism very just, and it is certainly very pleasantly expressed. It shows that you possess some beautiful, and for your age quite exceptionally cultivated, tastes, and a considerable knowledge also of many beautiful things. I hope you will write a great deal in time to come.’12
Vaunting this approval, Wilde copied out Pater’s letter for his friends Ward and Harding. He followed up his initial overture in prose by sending Pater a sonnet, perhaps several, for when, rustication over, they met in late October, Pater asked him with a smile, ‘Why do you always write poetry? Why do you not write prose? Prose is so much more difficult.’13 But he praised a poem of Wilde’s, ‘Magdalen Walks.’ Wilde soon came over to Pater’s view, and wrote to Ernest Radford, ‘For myself, prose so fascinates me that I prefer to sit at its organ, than to play on the pipe or reed.’ He said to Michael Field, ‘There is only one man in this century who can write prose.’ Next to Pater, he found ‘Carlyle’s stormy rhetoric, Ruskin’s winged and passionate eloquence,’ to be the product of enthusiasm rather than art. Prose in previous centuries was also defective. Jacobean prose was ‘too exuberant,’ Queen Anne prose ‘terribly bald and irritatingly rational.’ (His own was sometimes hirsute.) But Pater’s essays remained ‘the golden book of spirit and sense, the holy writ of beauty.’14
Pater and Wilde were not slow to become friends. Bodley came in one day to see Wilde and, finding him laying the table for luncheon, said he would stay and join him. Wilde replied, ‘No, no! Impossible to have a Philistine like you. Walter Pater is coming to lunch with me for the first time.’ Bodley, alarmed at Hardinge’s fall from grace for receiving those letters from Pater signed ‘Yours lovingly,’ thought the intimacy ominous. He said later that it had turned Wilde into an ‘extreme aesthete,’ in context almost a euphemism for homosexual.15
The intimacy flourished. Pater lent Wilde a copy of Trois Contes, just published in Paris. In this work of ‘the sinless master whom mortals call Flaubert,’ as Wilde described him in a letter,16 were the stories of St Julien, Herodias, and St John. These particularly impressed Wilde, who thereafter began to compose his skeptical revisions of Biblical narratives. He borrowed from Flaubert also the Greek form of John’s name (Iokanaan). (Pater would get into trouble later for lending Flaubert’s books to undergraduates.) In January 1878 Pater thanked Wilde for his photograph, and on numerous occasions went for walks and had tea with him.
What tea with Pater was like is suggested by the entry for 5 May 1878 in the diary of Mark Pattison, Rector of Lincoln College: ‘To Pater’s to tea, where Oscar Browning who [was] more like Socrates than ever. He conversed in one corner with 4 feminine looking youths “part dawdling” there in our presence, while the Miss Paters and I sat looking on in another corner. Presently Walter Pater, who, I had been told was “upstairs” appeared, attended by 2 more youths of similar appearance … [Pattison’s dots]’‖
Although this account may offer a contrary impression, Pater was generally cautious, and more so since the publication in 1873 of his Studies in the History of the Renaissance. ‘Yes,’ said Wilde to Ricketts later, ‘poor dear Pater has lived to disprove everything he has written.’ Wilde reminisced about him to Robert Ross some years later, ‘Dear Pater was always frightened of my propaganda.’18 Another of his memories was of visiting Pater to find him brooding over an article that ridiculed his essay on Charles Lamb. Wilde said to Vincent O’Sullivan, ‘Just imagine! Pater! I could not conceive how one could be Pater and yet be susceptible to the insults of the lowest kind of journalist.’ Secretly he thought, and would venture to say later, that Pater’s prose was too far from actual speech. Pater, for his part, considered Wilde’s prose too close to speech. Robert Ross felt that Pater disliked Wilde personally while admiring his cleverness, and Vincent O’Sullivan confirmed that Pater talked to him of ‘the strange vulgarity which Mr Wilde mistakes for charm.’ At Oxford Wilde never attended Pater’s lectures, as he did Ruskin’s, but in 1890 he went with Ross to hear Pater on Mérimée. As was his custom, Pater the lecturer spoke in a low tone, never glancing at the audience. Afterwards he said to Wilde and Ross, ‘I hope you all heard me.’ Wilde replied, ‘We overheard you.’ ‘You have a phrase for everything,’ said Pater reprovingly.19 But in Wilde’s fourth and final year in the Greats course, Pater was his great enthusiasm, as Ruskin had been in the first year. Thereafter he would often begin letters to him, according to Thomas Wright, ‘Homage to the great master.’20
Wilde knew that in June of 1878 he must take the Schools Examinations on which the class of his degree depended. The academic year (1877–78) began with money troubles, for when he failed to submit the required work to his tutor, the college withdrew the remission of half his fine. It required all his eloquence to persuade the officers not to keep to that decision. The President’s Minute Book at Magdalen reads:
15 October 1877: Resolved. That the officers having considered the reasons given by Mr Wilde for not having prepared the work assigned to him by his tutor, in accordance with the Orders of April 26, and thereby are so far satisfied that they will inflict no further penalty than that already imposed, of the loss of the emoluments of his Demyship for the half-year ending Michaelmas 1877.
Wilde had never been thrifty, had overspent before Sir William Wilde died, and continued to do so now, when the income available was much smaller. As early as the autumn of 1876, he wrote to his mother that he thought he must give up all hope of a college fellowship because he could not afford it even if elected, and must seek instead some sort of ‘paid work’—a desperate alternative. (He could not marry Florence Balcombe for the same reason.) Speranza was not one to allow her son the luxury of hopelessness, and she wrote back:
I should be sorry that you have to seek a menial situation and give up the chance of the fellowship. But I do not see that, for so far, your state is one that demands pity or commiseration—from May last, (just five months) you have received in cash for your own private personal expenses £145 and the rents of Bray, and the sale of
your furniture may bring you over the year till spring. Then you can sell your houses for £3000, £2000 of which will give you £200 a year for ten years. A very wonderful provision to my thinking—I wish I could have £200 a year for ten years—of course, like all of us, you will have to live on your house? money—but £2000 is a splendid sum to have on hand—and with your college income in addition I do not think you will need to enter a shop—or beg your bread—I am very glad indeed you are so well off as in any case you are certain of £300 a year for the next ten years.…21
Wilde continued to complain of his straitened circumstances, though his Bray houses brought him in some money in rent and eventually more through sale. He was nevertheless always in debt. In November 1877 he twice (on the 16th and the 30th) suffered the fashionable Oxford indignity of being called up before the Vice-Chancellor’s Court, which had the power to enforce tradesmen’s unpaid debts. The first case was for £20 owed to a tailor, Joseph Muir of 20 High Street, for such items as a ‘Super Fancy Angola Suit.’ Wilde had to pay the debt plus almost £3 more for court costs. The second case was for £5/18/6 still owed to M. G. H. Osmond, Jeweller, at 118 St Aldates, out of a former debt of almost £16, largely for Masonic regalia. On this occasion he was ordered to pay the debt plus 25 shillings in costs. The archives of the university have a letter from Wilde protesting the amount:
Monday
Magdalen College, Oxford
Dear Sir I desire to have the enclosed bill taxed [inspected] as I consider it a most extortionate and exorbitant claim. The balance of the bill for which the tradesman summoned me was I think £5.10: certainly a good deal under six—and it appears to me that if nearly £3 costs are allowed on a £5 bill, the Vice Chancellor’s Court must be conducted on a system which requires the investigation of the University Commission: I trust that this monstrous claim will not be allowed. I remain your obedient servant
OSCAR WILDE22
Clearly he has mixed up the court costs for the first bill with those for the second. It is hard to imagine any other undergraduate of the time making this mistake, let alone accusing the Vice-Chancellor’s Court of embezzlement.
Another blow had come after his half-brother Henry Wilson’s early death on 13 June 1877. Wilde had dined with Wilson only a few days before, and had not sensed how alarmed his half-brother was by poems published in Catholic magazines. He and Willie expected to be the sole heirs, but Wilson left £8000 to St Mark’s Hospital, with £2000 going to Willie and £100 to Oscar, and that only if he remained a Protestant. As to Illaunroe, which Wilson and Oscar Wilde owned jointly, Wilson’s share was made over conditionally upon Wilde’s not becoming a Catholic for five years. Otherwise it would go to Willie.23 Oscar persuaded Willie to give up his reversionary interest for £10, but his sense of the Catholic Church as an unaffordable luxury deepened.
Vindication
The mind of a thoroughly well-informed man is a dreadful thing. It is like a bric-à-brac shop, all monsters and dust, with everything priced above its proper value.
Neither now nor later did Wilde allow his uncertain future to interfere with present enjoyments. His mother’s idea that he might live comfortably on the £200 annual interest from his inherited capital was not his. Whether or not money came in, he spent it. Some went to enable him to dress magnificently. Not only were there the cello coats and the Super Fancy Angola suits, but on 1 May 1878 he dazzled an all-night fancy-dress ball, given by Mr and Mrs Herbert Morrell at Headington Hill Hall for three hundred guests, by wearing a Prince Rupert costume with plum-colored breeches and silk stockings. This finery pleased him so well that he bought it from the hiring firm and wore it playfully in his rooms. Those rooms in turn were filled with exquisite objects, not only blue china but Tanagra statuettes brought back from Greece, Greek rugs bought with the help of William Ward, photographs of his favorite paintings, and his famous easel sporting its unfinished painting. He would explain the easel by owning that he sometimes felt the need to ‘find expression through the veiling medium of colour. Some artists feel their passion too intense to be expressed in the simplicity of language, and find in crimson and gold a mode of speech more congenial because not quite so translucent.’ So, as Wilde informed The Biograph, he might some day become an artist.
His decor included also the talismanic lily, sanctified by Ruskin in The Stones of Venice as one of the most beautiful and most useless things in the world. Gilbert and Sullivan were to parody lily love in Patience in 1881. Some have assumed that this cult began later. But Wilde himself said that he filled his rooms at Oxford with lilies. A friend of his, Douglas Sladen, recalls in Twenty Years of My Life, ‘At one time he banished all the decorations from his rooms, except a single blue vase of the true aesthetic type which contained a “Patience” lily.’24 This testimony connects with that to be found in a novel, Second Thoughts by Rhoda Broughton, published in May 1880 but written during the two preceding years.
Rhoda Broughton had come to live in Oxford at this time, and had put Wilde off by her skill in combats of wit. She was therefore not invited to his ‘Beauty Parties,’ but her friend, the novelist Margaret Woods, was, so Rhoda Broughton was well informed of aesthetical goings-on. In Second Thoughts she introduced a ‘long pale poet’ named Francis Chaloner, who is ‘flaccid limbed,’ has an ‘early Byzantine face,’ and wears the hair of his ‘botticelli head’ very long.25 Given the still-sparse population of aesthetes in Oxford at the time, Wilde seems definitely meant. The poet escorts the heroine to ‘a great white lily standing in a large blue vase,’ the same one that Sladen observed. The decor of Chaloner’s rooms sounds like an exaggeration of Wilde’s; here too are unfinished pictures on easels, one a portrait of Venus, the other of Heracles’ page Hylas (also a subject of the sculptor Roderick Hudson in Rhoda Broughton’s friend Henry James’s novel), as if to point up the sexual ambiguity of aesthetic young men. Wilde’s Pateresque patter, and Rhoda Broughton’s repartee, are rendered in Chaloner’s question ‘Do you never wish for a larger life? more utterly human? more rhythmical? Fuller?’ and the heroine’s reply, ‘Never!’ Chaloner writes poems about ‘sweet-sick’ subjects, and thinks they ‘should be read … to the low pale sound of the viol or virginal, with a subtle perfume of dead roses floating about, while the eye is red with porphyry vases and tender Tyrian dyes.’ Wilde’s delayed rejoinder came in a review of 28 October 1886, where he said, ‘In Philistia lies Miss Broughton’s true sphere, and to Philistia she should return.’
As this early satire indicates, the figure of the aesthete, once the Pre-Raphaelite, was being reconstituted at Oxford in the late seventies. On 26 April and again on 3 May 1877, the Oxford and Cambridge Undergraduate’s Journal took official note of the movement, first praising it faintly as a civilizing influence, then recanting to dispraise it for seeking ‘insidiously’ to obtain not open but ‘implicit sanction’ for ‘Pagan worship of bodily form and beauty,’ and for renouncing ‘all exterior systems of morals or religion’ in the name of liberty and nature. The Journal was of two minds about it.
Wilde was aware that aestheticism had a history which long preceded the coinage in 1750 of the word ‘aesthetic’ by the philosopher Baumgarten. In an article of 4 September 1880, he pointed out that in Plato’s Symposium the host, Agathon, was ‘the aesthetic poet of the Periclean age.’26 The proponent of the lily called attention to the title of Agathon’s lost play, ‘The Flower.’ (Wilde confused Antheus with Anthos.) Not only Plato but also Aristophanes had portrayed Agathon in ‘brilliant colours,’ said Wilde. Actually the latter, in his Thesmophoriazusae, mocked aesthetic effeminacy more sharply than Rhoda Broughton by having Agathon go among the women in drag.
If the classical world was divided about its ‘aesthetic poet,’ the nineteenth century was equally so. Aestheticism had been given a sanction by Kant when he spoke of art as disinterested, and as creating a second nature through human agency. Such ideas were absorbed by Théophile Gautier, a favorite of Wilde, and expressed in his celebrated preface to
Mademoiselle de Maupin. Against conventional notions, Gautier announced that art was completely useless, amoral, and unnatural. His novel illustrated his views by nonchalantly presenting a heroine with bisexual tastes, which in the end she lavishly gratifies. The theme of variable sexuality was set by Gautier’s heroine for the rest of the century. Wilde particularly liked a later manifestation of it in Rachilde’s Monsieur Vénus.27
Yet Mademoiselle de Maupin had scarcely begun to make her way in the world when the movement she authorized was subjected to an equally powerful attack. Within six years Søren Kierkegaard published his Either/Or, in which he anatomized aesthetic man. Unlike ethical man, aesthetic man is so caught up in a succession of moods, to each of which he surrenders wholly, that he loses touch with the personality he wished to express. For fear of losing the mood, he cannot afford to reflect, nor can he attempt to be more than what he for that mood-moment is. He moves from sensation to sensation, much in the manner that Pater was later to extol. Kierkegaard seems to be refuting Pater before Pater wrote.
Wilde did not know Kierkegaard’s book, but he knew an up-to-date assault on aestheticism in W. H. Mallock’s The New Republic, which he pronounced to be ‘decidedly clever’ when he read it in 1877, soon after its publication.28 Mallock contrasted aesthetic man, whom he calls ‘Mr Rose’ (based upon Walter Pater), with ethical man, ‘Mr Herbert’ (based upon Ruskin), and gives Herbert the victorious part. Their views are instructively divergent: for Herbert the modern age is degenerate, for Rose it is the best age of all, since it commands all the possibilities of sensation that earlier ages have discovered, along with its own. Indeed, it is implied that the Renaissance has never ended, but has expanded in modern times. Against Herbert’s eloquent insistence upon restraint and moral improvement, Rose delights in a poem which he says was written by an eighteen-year-old undergraduate. In its equal treatment of pagan and Christian, it reads like a parody of Wilde’s ‘Sonnet Written in Holy Week at Genoa.’ The poet recounts three ‘visions’ he has had in one night’s sleep, the first of white-limbed Narcissus, the second of Venus rising from the sea, the third of the lean Thomas Aquinas in his cell. When the first two flee, the poet turns, with diminished enthusiasm, to the saint and Christ. As in Gautier, the object of sexual interest is variable, though Mallock presents Rose as a pornographic brooder rather than an active lover. It was a charge that Wilde would echo later when he accused Pater of detachment, meaning that he lacked the courage to act.
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