His efforts continued. On 28 May 1879 he had written to A. H. Sayce, Oxford Professor of Comparative Philology, whom he had come to know through Mahaffy, to ask about the possibility of an archaeological studentship at Oxford. On 8 December he pursued the matter:
I think it would suit me very well—as I have done a good deal of travelling already—and from my boyhood have been accustomed, through my Father, to visiting and reporting on ancient sites, taking rubbings and measurements and all the technique of open air archaeologica—it is of course a subject of intense interest to me—and I should give myself to it with a good deal of enthusiasm. Your support would of course be invaluable—I hear there are many competing.6
Too many, or the wrong ones—Wilde did not get it.
He kept up his interest in Greek. Faithful as always to the Agamemnon of Aeschylus, he proposed to Frank Benson that the play be put on at Oxford in the original Greek. He claimed to have distributed the parts, chosen the costumes, and arranged the scenery for the production that took place the next year.7 His friend Rennell Rodd was the scene painter. Benson played Clytemnestra, and W. L. Courtney the Watchman, when the play was produced on 3 June 1880 in the hall of Balliol. Wilde was in the audience, along with Browning, Tennyson, and Andrew Lang. In the same year he confided to The Biograph that he planned to publish two or three essays about ‘Greek matters.’ One was probably an essay he wrote for the Chancellor’s Essay Prize in 1879. (By a quirk of the Oxford statutes he was still eligible, in spite of having gone down, to compete for this prize.) The subject, ‘Historical Criticism in Antiquity,’ seemed cut out for him; the essay he offered was longer than anything he would ever write in the discursive mode, and did not escape an uncharacteristic tediousness.
The praise he gave to ancient historians for secularizing history by refusing to accept myths and legends he would not have given later;* he did it now, no doubt in part with an eye to his chances. The subject had a ticklish corner: what to do when Christianity took over from paganism? Wilde was veering away from his former devoutness, but bore in mind that his examiners were probably in orders. So he qualified his praise of the historian Polybius by adding an orthodox sigh: ‘But the turning of all men’s hearts to the East, the first glimmering of that splendid dawn which broke over the hills of Galilee and flooded the earth like wine, was hidden from his eyes.’ When he quotes a skeptic like Herbert Spencer, he is quick to remind his readers that even Spencer covertly acknowledged the existence of a reality subsuming both spirit and matter.
Otherwise, the organization of this essay was rickety, a defect which Wilde attempted to override by making frequent references to his structural ‘plan.’ The range of reference, to Fichte, Hegel, Vico, Comte, Montesquieu, and De Tocqueville, was impressive. But in only a few paragraphs does he appear to be writing in character. His praise of Polybius, unusual for the time, showed his independence, and testified to a fellow feeling for Polybius’s idea of a universal history. ‘He indeed of all men,’ he said, ‘is able, as from some lofty tower, to discern the whole tendency of the ancient world, the triumph of Roman institutions and of Greek thought which is the last message of the old world and, in a more spiritual sense, has become the Gospel of the new.’ The catholicity of Christianity was in his mind, but Wilde seems also to be thinking of his own place at the end of a romantic century, and of his aspiration towards a synthesis, heralded by his essay on the Grosvenor Gallery, that would reconcile Pater, Ruskin, Morris, Swinburne, Symonds, and the painters of the time.
In fifth-century Athens Wilde finds an analogy to the Victorian age. ‘The new age is the age of style. The same spirit of exclusive attention to form which made Euripides often, like Swinburne, prefer music to meaning and melody to reality, which gave to the later Greek statues that refined effeminacy, that overstrained gracefulness of attitude, was felt in the sphere of history.’ The reference to effeminacy is characteristic; Wilde never fails to seek out dangerous ground. Similarly, he calls attention to the overthrow of the Peisistratid tyranny ‘not by the love of freedom, but, as Thucydides insisted, by the jealous love of tyrant and liberator alike for Harmodius, then a beautiful boy in the flower of Greek loveliness.’ He cannot resist his own suspect cadences.
The examiners may have disagreed with the ideas or disliked the lack of structure in the essay. They took the unusual course of not awarding the prize. Wilde’s response is not recorded. But he continued various attempts to make use of his classical learning. He wrote to George Macmillan, his old traveling companion in Greece, that he would gladly translate Herodotus for the latter’s publishing house, and would like also to edit a play—preferably Hercules Furens or The Phoenician Maidens—of Euripides, on whom he had been working a good deal lately.8 He did not carry out either of these projects. He also sketched an essay on Greek women, in which he awarded the palm to Nausicaä, Andromache, Penelope, and Helen. The beauty of Nausicaä was such that Sophocles, himself beautiful, played the role in a drama. Wilde did not publish this essay.
On 4 September 1879 he wrote anonymously for the Athenaeum the greater part of a long review of Volumes X and XI of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, in which R. C. Jebb had contributed essays on Greek history and literature. Jebb, the Irish-born scholar at Cambridge famous for his work on Sophocles, was a bête noire of Mahaffy, who had conducted a long controversy with him in 1876 and 1877, and Wilde shared his old tutor’s dislike. In his historical essay, Wilde said, Jebb had wrongly stated that Themistocles was ostracized for intriguing with the Persians, a misunderstanding of ostracism, which was a punishment never inflicted on any definite accusation and least of all for high treason. More centrally, Jebb had no inkling of the enormous interests at stake at Marathon and Salamis, and no general views on the relation of Greek history to modern. But the literary essay was worse still: Jebb failed to mention Menander or Agathon, ‘the aesthetic poet of the Periclean age,’ or ‘Hero and Leander,’ treated Polybius as a ‘mere chronicler,’ and presented Theocritus only as a pastoral poet. In so doing, Wilde said, Jebb ignored the ‘Pharmaceutria,’ which ‘for fiery colour and splendid concentration of passion is only equalled by the “Attis” of Catullus in the whole range of ancient literature.’ Wilde’s attack was, as E. R. Dodds commented, ‘an early example of the romanic reaction against the orthodox Victorian assumption that the hallmark of all the best Greco-Roman literature was its serenity and balance. Jebb was throughout his life an exponent of this view. Wilde is quite justified in citing against it the “Pharmaceutria” of Theocritus and Catullus’s “Attis,” two splendid poems which no one could call serene or balanced.’9 Wilde was perhaps too captious for the Athenaeum, for he was never to review in its pages again.
Still probing for a chink in the wall, Wilde during this period of confusion applied for a post as inspector of schools. The position had been dignified by Matthew Arnold’s having held it. In a letter written probably early in 1880 to Oscar Browning, Wilde remarks that rents in Ireland are ‘as extinct … as the dodo or moly,’ and asks him for a testimonial.10 ‘Any Education work,’ Wilde says, ‘would be very congenial to me,’ and assumes that Browning’s name would carry weight with the authorities. He shows here an unaccustomed naïveté, for Browning’s forced resignation from Eton in suspicious circumstances made his recommendation of doubtful value. Wilde was turned down. He disapproved of contemporary methods of education. ‘People say that the schoolmaster is abroad,’ he would say in ‘The Critic as Artist,’ and add, ‘I wish to goodness he were.’ He thought that ‘the man who is so occupied in trying to educate others … has never had any time to educate himself.’ ‘Nothing that is worth knowing can be taught,’ he insisted, and urged that the true goal should be self-culture. In pursuit of this he remembered fondly how he himself had been educated at home for most of his childhood, and would offer his own children the same privilege. Such opinions could hardly have won over the electors of an inspector of schools.
His failure in these applications, and his sense
that his money from the sale of the houses at Bray was slipping through his generous fingers, did not cause him great concern. He had increasing confidence. So did his mother, envisaging a career in Parliament for him as once she had envisaged it for Willie, who by this time was back in Ireland, idling. A letter from Wilde to Reginald Harding admitted that he had not ‘set the world quite on fire as yet,’11 but in a way he had begun to do so. London, though slow to welcome newcomers, had welcomed him. He had met Gladstone, Asquith, Balfour, Rosebery, and others, who soon learned the pleasure of his company. On meeting Disraeli, Wilde said, ‘I hope you are very well,’ only to have that eminence rejoin, ‘Is one ever very well, Mr Wilde?’12 His antics were sometimes remarkable. The artist Louise Jopling recalled opening the door to him, to find him with a large snake twisted around his neck. He assured her that its poison sac had been extracted. But it was his tongue, not his reptilian collar, that won attention. This was not always favorable. Frank Benson, meeting him at a theatre, heard someone say, ‘There goes that bloody fool Oscar Wilde.’ Wilde brightly remarked, ‘It’s extraordinary how soon one gets known in London.’ More solemnly, he remarked to the wife of Julian Hawthorne, ‘I should never have believed, had I not experienced it, how easy it is to become the most prominent figure in society.’13 London offered him the opportunity to carry out the project he had set for himself earlier; as he wrote in De Profundis, ‘I remember when I was at Oxford saying to one of my friends … that I wanted to eat of the fruit of all the trees in the garden of the world, and that I was going out into the world with that passion in my soul. And so, indeed, I went out, and so I lived.’14 Amid that orchard the tree of life, with its ‘blind lush leaf,’ stood next to the tree of knowledge, with its ‘staring fury.’
The residue of £2800 for his Bray houses enabled Wilde to set himself up in London, sharing bachelor quarters with Frank Miles. In conversation with the actress Elizabeth Robins he found a lofty precedent: ‘Shakespeare wrote nothing but doggerel lampoon before he came to London and never penned a line after he left.’15 In the early months of 1879, he and Miles found a place at 13 Salisbury Street, off the Strand. The house, Wilde said, was ‘untidy and romantic.’ According to Lillie Langtry, it had old staircases, twisting corridors, and dim corners. The family that ran it was Dickensian in its eccentricities.16 Wilde promptly named it Thames House, since they had a view of the river. There were three floors; Miles and his studio occupied the top; Wilde the floor below; and on the ground floor a Bluecoat schoolboy named Harry Marillier was allowed to keep his books and to study. One day Wilde ran into Marillier on the stairs and asked him who he was. The boy spoke of his school and his study of Greek, and Wilde invited him upstairs. What he saw amazed Harry: a long sitting room was done entirely in white paneling, utterly at variance with the disheveled character of the house; there was blue china, and lilies were everywhere. Edward Poynter’s portrait of Lillie Langtry stood on an easel at one end of the room like an altar. Wilde had brought down from Oxford his Damascus tiles, some drawings by Blake and Burne-Jones, his Greek rugs and hangings, his Tanagra figures, and had bought some expensive furniture.17 Harry needed no persuasion to bring Wilde coffee in the mornings in exchange for help with his Greek.
Frank Miles was in many ways a congenial fellow tenant. Two years older than Wilde, he had decided early on an artistic career. His representation of clouds had roused Ruskin to comment, ‘With his love for his mother and his ability to paint clouds he must get on.’ He had encouraged him as ‘the coming Turner.’18 Miles won the Turner Prize at the Royal Academy in 1880. That he was almost colorblind, as he confessed in secret to Lillie Langtry, restricted his success in any medium except drawing, but he could do skillful likenesses, making his women sitters prettier than they were but still recognizable. Heinrich Felberman, editor of the magazine Life, appointed Miles his artist-in-chief, and ran a series of society portraits by him. His drawings were often reproduced under titles such as I’ve Been Roaming, The Widow’s Mite, The Young Blind Girl, Pity, and The Gardener’s Daughter, and were sold in editions of many hundreds as Victorian pinups. The Prince of Wales purchased Miles’s portrait of The Flower Girl.
Miles was tall, blond, good-looking, and affable. His father, rector of Bingham in Nottinghamshire, was well-to-do, and fond of his mildly gifted and apparently high-minded son. But ‘high-minded’ did not quite describe Miles, as Wilde had reason to know. There was his puzzling intimacy with Lord Ronald Gower, who took Miles abroad and also invited him often to his house in Windsor. More suspect was his intimacy with young girls. A violet seller named Sally who had been painted by Lord Leighton, Marcus Stone, and W. F. Britten was among those taken into his house by Miles.19
The world knew nothing of this. Thames House offered a kind of salon. The ‘P.B.s’ (Professional Beauties) whom Miles sketched were frequent visitors, along with artists such as Whistler and Burne-Jones, actors and actresses, even the Prince of Wales. There was one guest who was specially prized.
Beauties on the Stage
Poets know how useful passion is for publication. Nowadays a broken heart will run to many editions.
Lillie Langtry, arising from Jersey like Venus from the foam, if we can tolerate Wilde’s opulent metaphor, was a breathing myth. Her first official appearance was at a party at Lady Sebright’s house, 23 Lowndes Square, in May 1876. There her classic features—the grave low forehead, the exquisitely arched brow; the noble chiseling of the mouth, shaped as if it were the mouthpiece of an instrument of music; the supreme and splendid curve of the cheek; the augustly pillared throat† which bears it all,’ as Wilde with careful rapture described them—instantly overwhelmed the assembled guests.21 She was like an unprepared actress suddenly given a new part to play. Whistler and Millais asked to paint her, Frederick Leighton to do her head in marble; and Frank Miles on the spot made two sketches of her and handed her one as an oblation. The actors Henry Irving and Squire Bancroft, also among the guests, were not behindhand in their praise, nor was George Lewis, the astute solicitor. Just when London needed a new Professional Beauty, Lillie Langtry suddenly was there.
Soon she was posing for the portrait which Millais, also from Jersey, entitled The Jersey Lily, although in it she holds a Guernsey one. G. F. Watts painted her with a more demure rubric, and a Quaker bonnet, as The Dean’s Daughter (her father combined the functions of cleric and rake). She posed in a yellow gown for Edward John Poynter, whose portrait Wilde acquired and displayed on the easel at the end of his sitting room. He had photographs of her as well. When she refused, from fatigue rather than artistic preference, to sit for Edward Burne-Jones, he stood outside her window and serenaded her cruelty towards artists until she relented and agreed to pose. The serenaders must have tripped over each other, for there is an account of Wilde singing in the same place his apologies for having annoyed her with the remark ‘I will predict, accurately, all human behavior except that which governs the human heart. Man is constant in his infidelity and woman puts him to shame because she is, by nature, fickle.’ He compared her to Helen of Troy, and said, like Yeats after him, ‘Yes, it was for such ladies that Troy was destroyed, and well might Troy be destroyed for such a woman.’22 Max Beerbohm, writing much later, called her Cleopatra, or, more archly, Cléopâtre.
Wilde had met her soon after the Sebright party. His friend Bodley, judged unworthy to lunch with Pater, was again left out; after Wilde and he saw Our Boys at the Vaudeville Theatre in 1876, Wilde excused himself with the enthusiastic explanation ‘I am going to meet the loveliest woman in Europe.’23 The introduction took place in Frank Miles’s studio. In The Days I Knew, Mrs Langtry described the tall young man, with his profusion of brown hair worn long, and his face ‘so colourless that a few pale freckles of good size were oddly conspicuous. He had a well-shaped mouth, with somewhat coarse lips and greenish-hued teeth. The plainness of his face, however, was redeemed by the splendour of his great, eager eyes.’ She took in his ‘large and indolent hands,’ with poin
ted fingers and ‘perfect shaped filbert nails,’ like his father’s not always clean. ‘He had one of the most alluring voices that I have ever listened to, round and soft, and full of variety and expression.’ She welcomed him as a friend.24 For him, her beauty was ‘a form of genius.’ He was engaged in the same storming of London by his wits that she was achieving by her looks. Then too, they were both weary, Wilde of being an overage undergraduate, Mrs Langtry of being wife to a nondescript Irish yachtsman, and both eager to perform on a larger stage. She complaisantly allowed her two young admirers, Wilde and Miles, to dedicate themselves to her interests. Miles predicted to Ronald Gower that he and Wilde, by pencil and pen, would make Lillie Langtry ‘the Joconde and the Laura of this century.’25 His drawings of her were reproduced and circulated, and Wilde wrote, with comparable fanfare, half a dozen poems. Once he went to Covent Garden to purchase some lilies to give to her, and was waiting for a hansom when an unkempt child, fascinated by the mass of flowers, exclaimed, ‘How rich you are!’ Wilde told the story to Ruskin, who was enchanted by it.26
After he moved to London in December 1878 Wilde’s friendship with Lillie Langtry flourished. She liked having him about. Though indiscreet by nature and conviction, he was perhaps thinking of her when he said to André Raffalovich, ‘A woman’s name should be like the secret name of Rome, never mentioned.’27 He mentioned Lillie Langtry’s a good deal. Near the end of his life he talked of her in such a way as to allow Vincent O’Sullivan to wonder if he had been one of her lovers.28 That he was close to being so appears to be confirmed by two poems. In one, ‘Humanitad,’ he refers to her Greek features when he speaks of ‘the arched splendour of those brows Olympian,’ and declares, ‘of thy too perilous bliss / My lips have drunk enough—no more, no more.…’ The other poem, which he published after his marriage under the unconfiding title of ‘Roses and Rue,’ bore in manuscript the title ‘To L.L.,’ and eventually regained it under Robert Ross’s editorship. The various versions of this poem and some attendant poems describe something like the following incidents. The lover and his beloved had met often by a garden seat. One day in June, probably 1879, their relationship became more intense when he ‘stooped and kissed her.’ But a shower interrupted these overtures, and she ran towards the house, only allowing him to catch up and kiss her once more just before they went inside. She was wearing an amber-brown dress, with two little bows that rose from her shoulders, and she looked at him with her gray-green eyes. (Some said Lillie Langtry’s eyes were blue, some gray.) The lover must have offered an apology for his lack of worldly accomplishments. Unencouragingly, the beloved said, ‘You have wasted your life. You have only yourself to blame that you are not famous.’ The rejected lover rushed off through the garden gate, turning back to see her hand waved in farewell. It was a subject for a Grecian urn. In his poem Wilde insists, in an unexpected way for an aesthete, upon his sincerity rather than his art:
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