1 Merrion Square, North
Tuesday—one o’c
Oh, Gloria, Gloria! thank you a million times for the telegram. It is the first pleasant throb of joy I have had this year. How I long to read the poem. Well, after all, we have Genius—that is something attorneys can’t take away.
Oh, I do hope you will now have some joy in your heart. You have got honour and recognition—and this at only 22 [he was twenty-three] is a grand thing. I am proud of you—and am happier than I can tell—This gives you a certainty of success in the future—You can now trust your own intellect, and know what it can do. I should so like to see the smile on your face now. Ever and ever with joy and pride
Your loving MOTHER43
The letter discloses that she accurately recognized his spiritual malaise, which involved anxiety over his future as well as compunction over his past. As she predicted, his spirits were lifted with the award of the Newdigate. The winner had the duty of reading it aloud at Encaenia, but the Professor of Poetry, Shairp, had the duty of suggesting improvements before the official ceremony. Wilde listened to all Shairp’s suggestions and respectfully took notes, but left the poem as it was.44 His public reading on 26 June, for which Mahaffy and Willie Wilde came over, went well. The Oxford and Cambridge Undergraduate’s Journal reported next day, ‘The Newdigate was listened to with rapt attention and frequently applauded.’f Magdalen asked Wilde to stay on for a few days until the Magdalen Gaudy, where they ‘said nice things about me. I am on the best terms with everyone including Allen! who I think is remorseful of his treatment of me.’45
Now came his second great achievement. The examiners in Final Schools summoned him for his viva voce on his written papers, and instead of questioning spent their time complimenting him. They discussed further his view of what Aristotle would have thought of Whitman. He had feared that his technical work, as opposed to his essays, would bring him down, but his tutor Sargent told Hunter Blair that Wilde’s examination as a whole was the best of his year. The same had been true of his Honour Moderations examination two years earlier. He was awarded a rare double first. The news made almost as much impact as the Newdigate, not least in Magdalen. ‘The dons are “astonied” beyond words—the Bad Boy doing so well in the end!’ Wilde wrote to William Ward.46 With minimal prompting from Wilde, the college on 7 November 1878 remitted to him the amount that had been deducted from his Demyship the previous year. Since he had yet to pass the Divinity examination, without which he could not take his degree, his Demyship was extended for a fifth year.g
Where all this would lead was not clear. No fellowship had been offered him. A career in poetry or criticism looked financially bleak. There remained the course that his mother was always urging upon both him and Willie, to marry an heiress.h Unfortunately, Florence Balcombe could not qualify, and no one else was in his mind. But if he had no marital prospects or career prospects, he had evidence, as his mother said, that he could not fail.
And so Wilde created himself at Oxford. He began by stirring his conscience with Ruskin and his senses with Pater; these worthies gradually passed into more complicated blends of Catholicism, Freemasonry, aestheticism, and various styles of behavior, all embraced fervently but impermanently. Initially, his letters reveal, he tried to resolve his own contradictions and berated himself for being weak and self-deceiving. But gradually while at Oxford he came to see his contradictions as a source of strength rather than of volatility. His contemporaries, ‘the dullard and the doctrinaire,’ might have their world of decisionmaking and conformity, but in having it they had to deny another world of secret impulse and furtive doubt. His paradoxes would be an insistent reminder of what lay behind the accepted or conventional. ‘A truth in art is that whose contradictory is also true,’ he would declare in ‘The Truth of Masks.’ This was the great lesson which his immersion in various movements had taught him, first about art, then about life. He would be neither a Catholic nor a Freemason; aesthetic one moment, he would be anaesthetic the next. This conclusion jibed with what was perhaps involuntary, his oscillation between the love of women and of men.
As a result, Wilde writes his works out of a debate between doctrines rather than out of doctrine. In ‘Hélas!,’ the poem which he would preface to his first book of verse, he indicates that in yielding to pleasure he has given up his austerity, that the heights as well as the depths still attract him. In his first play, Vera, the heroine plans to kill the Czar, but instead saves his life, as if she had suddenly been made aware of her own contradictory impulse and decided not to resist it. When Wilde writes a ‘Sonnet to Liberty’ about political revolutionaries, he disparages them in the octave but at the end of the sestet is suddenly impelled to say, ‘God knows it I am with them, in some things.’ The Picture of Dorian Gray is a critique of aestheticism, which is shown to bring Dorian to ruin; yet readers have been won by Dorian’s beauty and regretful, rather than horrified, at his waste of it, so that he has something of the glamour of a Faust rather than the foulness of a murderer and drug addict. And Wilde, feeling that the book had too much moral, subverts it with a preface which expounds sympathetically some of that aesthetic creed by which the book shows Dorian to be corrupted. In Salome, Wilde allows the tetrarch Herod to pass from sensual delectation as he watches Salome dance the dance of the seven veils, to spiritual revulsion as he watches her kiss the dead lips of Iokanaan, and finally to outraged conscience as he orders the guards to kill her. Lady Windermere has to discover that in all her puritanism she is capable, like other people, of doing something utterly adverse to her principles. In An Ideal Husband, Lady Chiltern has to reconcile herself to the fact that behind every ideal husband is a real secret. In The Importance of Being Earnest, Wilde parodies his own tendency to look for contradictions by having serious Jack turn out to be frivolous Ernest. ‘The wise contradict themselves,’ Wilde declares in his ‘Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young,’ and in De Profundis, which he wrote in prison, Wilde offers himself as a penitent but within this guise begins to turn into a martyr, to be released and reborn and justified. In his last work, The Ballad of Reading Gaol, the hero of which has slit his wife’s throat with a razor, Wilde suddenly turns upon the hypocrite lecteur to say that we are all murderers of the thing we love.
This sudden perception of a truth opposed to the home truth we are all prepared to acknowledge, and just as plausible, was Wilde’s answer to what he called the ‘violence of opinion’ exhibited, as he saw, by most of his contemporaries. He traced his own detachment from that violence to Oxford, where he said he had learned ‘the Oxford temper,’ though it was really his own temper. By the time he left the university he could see that life’s complexity could not easily be codified into thirty-nine or even forty-nine articles, into ten or twenty commandments, into pluses and minuses awarded to this person or that creed. Wilde was a moralist, in a school where Blake, Nietzsche, and even Freud were his fellows. The object of life is not to simplify it. As our conflicting impulses coincide, as our repressed feelings vie with our expressed ones, as our solid views disclose unexpected striations, we are all secret dramatists. In this light Wilde’s works become exercises in self-criticism as well as pleas for tolerance.
* Wilde’s riposte came in the dialogue ‘The Critic as Artist,’ with reference to Frith’s Derby Day: ‘It seems,’ says Earnest, ‘that a lady once gravely asked the remorseful Academician … if his celebrated picture of “A Spring-Day at Whiteley’s,” or “Waiting for the Last Omnibus,” or some subject of that kind, was all painted by hand?’ To which Gilbert replies, ‘And was it?’
† This objection was also made to Pater. On 3 May 1877 the Oxford and Cambridge Undergraduate’s Journal attacked Pater’s idea of enjoying moments ‘simply for those moments’ sake,’ on the grounds that ‘we have a manhood within us, and … there is a man’s work for us to do not only in the world that is beyond Oxford, but also in Oxford itself.…’
‡ When someone complained about the Miltonic echo i
n his sonnet, Wilde replied, ‘What the critic calls an echo is really an achievement. I set myself to write sonnets like Milton’s which should be as good as Milton’s.’9
§ Wilde said in a review of Rossetti’s life of Keats on 27 September 1887 that it was ‘a great failure.’
‖ Pater’s behavior with young men is also reflected in a letter written in all innocence in 1907 to Thomas Wright, Pater’s biographer, by Ed Dugdale, a barber in Spiers & Son’s haircutting saloon. Dugdale wrote that, as a young man of twenty-two, he was chosen from among several other barbers by Pater; while he was arranging his client’s hair, Pater ‘suddenly stooped down and gazed intently at my slippered feet; without saying a word, he took up one of my feet and placed it upon his knee, and stroked it and observed it from every angle possible. Evidently he admired some curves or lines which the foot exhibited. He invited me to come to his rooms at B.N.C. [Brasenose College], but being then unacquainted with the great reputation of this great man … I did not avail myself of what would now appeal to me as a high privilege.’17
a Eventually he wished it had been written in prose.
b My belief that Wilde had syphilis stems from statements made by Reginald Turner and Robert Ross, Wilde’s close friends present at his death, from the certificate of the doctor in charge at that time (see this page), and from the fact that the 1912 edition of Ransome’s book on Wilde and Harris’s 1916 life (both of which Ross oversaw) give syphilis as the cause of death. Opinion on the subject is, however, divided, and some authorities do not share my view of Wilde’s medical history. Admittedly the evidence is not decisive—it could scarcely be so, given the aura of disgrace, shame, and secrecy surrounding the disease in Wilde’s time and after—and might not stand up in a court of law. Nevertheless I am convinced that Wilde had syphilis, and that conviction is central to my conception of Wilde’s character and my interpretation of many things in his later life.
c If the imagery of Naaman may be taken as an index, Wilde seems to have contracted his illness before he met Constance Fletcher, for in her novel Mirage, Davenant (Wilde) suddenly asks, like Naaman, ‘Are not Abana and Pharphar, rivers of Damascus, better than all the waters of Israel?’ (II:175) The question makes little sense in Mirage, but more in ‘The Sphinx.’ Presumably Wilde, beset with guilty thoughts, startled Miss Fletcher with the question. In The Duchess of Padua, Guido echoes the line when he says, ‘Are there no rivers left in Italy?’
d Lord Henry Wotton is more cynical: ‘Religion consoles some. Its mysteries have all the charm of a flirtation, a woman once told me, and I can understand it. Besides nothing makes one so vain as being told that one is a sinner.’
e He still praised highly her novel, A Village Tragedy, in a review of November 1887.
f The Journal would later think better of its praise, issuing a vicious review of the printed text on 30 January 1879.
g As was customary, however, he had to leave his college rooms, and he seems to have moved into lodgings with a Mrs Brewer at 76 High Street.
h His brother Willie was giving the game away by his eagerness. Ethel Smyth describes how he persuaded her into an engagement after only a few hours of acquaintance. She found strange his request to keep the arrangement quiet for the moment. He was probably similarly committed to someone else. She shortly broke it off but kept his ring.47 He was unsuccessful with other young women as well.
Advances
CHAPTER V
Setting Sail
There is nothing like youth. The middle-aged are mortgaged to Life. The old are in life’s lumber room. But youth is the Lord of Life. Youth has a kingdom waiting for it. Everyone is born a king, and most people die in exile, like most kings. To win back my youth … there is nothing I wouldn’t do—except take exercise, get up early, or be a useful member of the community.
Looking for Work
Summer diminished Wilde’s euphoria. He had an anxious time over his Bray houses, which unwittingly he and an estate agent with whom they were listed sold at almost the same moment to different purchasers. The unsuccessful bidder sued to invalidate the sale, but Wilde, in his first appearances in a law court, on 8, 11, 17 July 1878, was able to win a verdict with costs. He had, however, incidental expenses which, since he regarded them as heavy, must indeed have been so. His vacation came to an end with bitter news. Shortly before he was to return to Oxford, he learned, though not from her, that Florence Balcombe, now twenty years old, had accepted a proposal of marriage from Bram Stoker. (They were married on 4 December 1878.) Stoker, later the author of Dracula, was at this time known as an enterprising Irish civil servant and drama critic, seven years older than Wilde. He had often come to 1 Merrion Square, and at Trinity had put Wilde up for the Philosophical Society. Two years before, he had promoted an Irish tour by Henry Irving, and in October—without Wilde’s knowing—he agreed to become business manager of the Lyceum Theatre, which Irving had just taken over. On the strength of this new position, Stoker was better than Wilde for Florence Balcombe, who had aspirations to become an actress. In any case, Wilde, though he now almost had his degree, evidently did not feel he was in a position to marry. His obligatory two years’ wait after syphilis had been diagnosed was not over. He wrote to her a proud and eternal farewell. He was leaving Ireland, he announced, ‘probably for good,’ so they would never see each other again. He asked her to give him back the gold cross he had presented to her two years before. Because it bore his name conjoined with hers, she could never wear it, and he would keep it in memory of two years during which ‘the currents of our lives’ had flowed together, ‘the sweetest of all the years of my youth.’ His sense of disappointment was still keen two and a half years later, when, on 3 January 1881, he sent her anonymously a crown of flowers for her stage debut. ‘She thinks I never loved her, thinks I forget. My God how could I!’ he wrote to Ellen Terry as intermediary.1 Yet his letters to Florence Balcombe in 1878, after her engagement, sound distressed, not shattered. She probably provided the occasion for five poems expressing dejection. In London later on they would become friends again.
His friends the Oswald Sickerts, with whom he stayed at Neuville near Dieppe early in October, saw no sign of depression. Their fifteen-year-old daughter, Helena, whom Wilde called Miss Nelly, testified later to his joyfulness and wholehearted laughter. He took pleasure in quoting his poem ‘Ravenna’ to her, and, seeing her interest in verse, presented her with a copy of Matthew Arnold’s poems. Her two brothers, aged seven and five, found him a delightful playmate. He told them all preposterous stories, and when Helena showed skepticism he would reply, with mock sadness, ‘You don’t believe me, Miss Nelly. I assure you … well, it’s as good as true.’2
He left Neuville for Oxford, and prepared to pass in November the Divinity examination which had proved a stumbling block two years before. This being no great matter after his double first, he whiled away the time in sociability. It was now that he became friendly with a paler poet, Rennell Rodd, four years younger than he was. Rodd, later raised to the peerage as Lord Rennell of Rodd for his work in the diplomatic service, was Wilde’s successor as Oxford aesthete. As he acknowledged in his autobiography, Wilde liberated him from convention in thought and action. Rodd was also spurred on to win the Newdigate in 1880. Wilde took his disciple everywhere, to Windsor to visit Lord Ronald Gower, who pronounced him ‘full of artistic desires, unable to develop them at Balliol,’3 and to London, to meet Whistler, in whose friendship Rodd was eventually to take Wilde’s place. Rodd was the prime mover in a little magazine of verse published in Oxford by Blackwell’s from 1880 to 1882, entitled Waifs and Strays, to which he persuaded Wilde to contribute. Yet almost from the first their friendship was discountenanced by Rodd’s family, and Rodd himself seems to have been both stimulated and made uneasy by Wilde, foreseeing that his friend’s iconoclasm might lead to trouble.
On 22 November Wilde passed his Divinity examination, and took his degree of Bachelor of Arts six days later. Soon afterwards he was off
to London. The departure from Oxford’s age-old surroundings and assured friendships was not easy for him. In March he went back for a visit and in years to come did not lack pretexts for frequent returns. In the early nineties his love affair with Alfred Douglas reintroduced him to undergraduate life. Not long before his death, casting about for a humorous epithet by which posterity might remember him, he canonized himself as ‘the infamous St Oscar of Oxford, Poet and Martyr.’4 Oxford had replaced Dublin as his provenance.
Not to be at Oxford was unpleasant enough for him to take steps to reconnect himself. Unfortunately, Magdalen, where he was at last in favor, had no vacancy in classics. (Herbert Warren, destined to be the college’s next president, had been elected to the last fellowship to fall vacant in classics, in 1877.) The years 1878 and 1879 happened to be unusually lean ones in all the colleges as far as classics fellowships were concerned. Three were offered, at Trinity, Jesus, and Merton. Wilde is known to have applied for that at Trinity, which entailed a six-hour examination extending over two days. His behavior at the examination was recalled by another candidate, Lewis Farnell, later a distinguished Oxford classicist though also unsuccessful in this instance. After Wilde had looked at the first part, which was in philosophy and contained such lazy questions as ‘What is the relation between metaphysic and ethic? metaphysic and religion? metaphysic and art?,’ he stood up and stretched before the hall fire. He then turned to his fellow applicants to say, ‘Gentlemen, this paper is really the work of a very uncultured person. I observe the word “metaphysic” [without the s] in every question. That word is never heard in polite society.’5 He was right about metaphysics, but the examiners, whether or not they heard of his fastidiousness, did not elect him.
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