Oscar Wilde

by Richard Ellmann

  I had wasted my boyhood, true:

  But it was for you.

  You had poets enough on the shelf,

  I gave you myself.

  The versification is so bad as to hint that the sentiment was genuine. The related poem, ‘Glokokris Eros’ (‘The Flower of Love’), finds another mode of self-defense:

  I have made my choice, have lived my poems, and, though youth is gone in wasted days,

  I have found the lover’s crown of myrtle better than the poet’s crown of bays.

  Whatever his preference, he seems, except perhaps for a brief interlude, to have contented himself with the poet’s crown of bays, as far as Lillie Langtry was concerned. It was a period, 1879–80, when Mrs Langtry had caught the eye of the most important lover in England, the Prince of Wales. Edward constituted himself her protector, refusing invitations to parties unless she was invited, so ensuring that she was at once respected and available. Two contretemps, however, he could not prevent. In October 1880 Edward Langtry went bankrupt and all the Langtry possessions were sold up. About the same time or a little earlier, Lillie Langtry conceived a child. To prevent gossip, she spent the months of obvious pregnancy in Jersey, and only returned to London in the summer of 1881, leaving her daughter, Jeanne (not by her husband), to be discreetly brought up on the island. Wilde was almost certainly among the few who knew the delicate line Mrs Langtry was treading between social prestige and opprobrium, and he delighted in her success in braving out the role of virtuous wife on the London proscenium. He used the incident as the basis for his first successful play, Lady Windermere’s Fan (1891), where Mrs Erlynne returns from the Continent to find her abandoned daughter grown up. When he offered her the part, Mrs Langtry scoffed at the notion that she could play a woman with a grown-up daughter. (She was then thirty-nine.)29 So Wilde took the play away, and gave Mrs Erlynne the speech ‘Besides, my dear Windermere, how on earth could I pose as a mother with a grown-up daughter? I have never admitted that I am more than twenty-nine, or thirty at the most. Twenty-nine when there are pink shades, thirty when there are not.’

  Aside from her beauty, Lillie Langtry had a good deal of shrewdness. Recognizing her own shortcomings, she was glad to have Wilde’s help in rectifying them. He talked to her about the classics, and brought her in 1881 to King’s College, London, to hear the lectures of Sir Charles Newton, the discoverer of Halicarnassus. This became a morning ritual: the students would wait outside the building until the cab bringing her and Wilde arrived, and cheer them in. He told her about Ruskin, and even brought them together, though Ruskin drove her out of the room in tears with one of his diatribes against Jezebels. ‘Beautiful women like you hold the fortunes of the world in your hands to make or mar,’ he called after her retreating form.30 Wilde tutored her in Latin, and although it is tempting to believe that if the lessons began with Caesar they ended with Ovid, a letter referring to them, probably written in 1879, gives nothing away:

  Sunday

  Beaconsfield, Milehouse, Nr Plymouth

  Of course I’m longing to learn more Latin but we stay here till Wednesday night so I shan’t be able to see my kind tutor before Thursday. Do come and see me on that afternoon about six if you can.

  I called at Salisbury Street about an hour before you left. I wanted to ask you how I should go to a fancy ball here, but I chose a soft black Greek dress with a fringe of silver crescents and stars, and diamond ones in my hair and on my neck, and called it Queen of Night. I made it myself.

  I want to write more but this horrid paper and pen prevent me so when we meet I will tell you more: (only don’t tell Frank)

  LILLIE LANGTRY31

  Evidently she was accustomed to following his taste in dresses, though capable of striking out for herself. Wilde’s fascination with her Queen of Night costume is probably behind the line in his poem ‘The New Helen’ when he considers that perhaps she is Semele:

  Or didst thou rule the fire-laden moon?

  He suggested that she wear a more extreme version still. As he told Graham Robertson, ‘The Lily is so tiresome, she won’t do what I tell her. I assure her that she owes it to herself and to us to drive daily through the Park dressed entirely in black, in a black victoria drawn by black horses, and with “Venus Annodomini [a good pun on Anadyomene]” emblazoned on her black bonnet in dull sapphires. But she won’t.’32 What all this came to was that he accustomed the imperfectly educated but teachable Mrs Langtry to conversation, and helped not only to publicize but also to create her, as he was creating himself.

  Another of the three surviving letters from her to Wilde apologizes for having forgotten the brougham, and says that since she cannot forgive herself she must ask him to forgive her. The wording is confident and shows who had control. Evidently he received many slights and, losing her favor, was forbidden her house. At one such time she appeared in the theatre, where he and Frank Miles had taken their seats; on seeing her, Wilde burst into tears and had to be helped out by Miles.33 Given her obligations to the Prince of Wales and other more favored lovers, Mrs Langtry—as she says in The Days I Knew—found Wilde occasionally in the way. Still, he was wonderful company, and rumor had it that each day he carried a lily in his hand to her, a custom from which W. S. Gilbert profited in Patience. It seems likely that Wilde did so sometimes, because Frank Miles was an ardent gardener and cultivated lilies and narcissi in particular, as if in tribute to Mrs Langtry and to Wilde, respectively. Wilde was also ostentatiously writing his poem ‘The New Helen’ for her, and insisted that he had to find equivalents for artist’s sittings, the better to inspire his muse. So once Edward Langtry, the Menelaus to Lillie’s Helen, came home in the early-morning hours to trip over Wilde huddled on the doorstep, waiting for a glimpse of Mrs Langtry as she alighted from her carriage after some still later engagement. Even if Wilde had only to go around the corner to huddle (at this time they were living near each other), it was a fine bit of stage business, and perhaps more heartsick than that.

  ‘The New Helen’ insists upon the mythological character of Lillie Langtry. Wilde had always a great appreciation of women as spreaders of havoc, Salome, the Sphinx, and, in ‘Charmides,’ Athena, being among them. He wrote ‘The New Helen’ to a late-nineteenth-century prescription, begotten by Gautier upon Swinburne upon Pater upon Wilde. The object was to link the living woman with both pagan and Christian prototypes. So while she is mostly Helen—

  Where hast thou been since round the walls of Troy

  The sons of God fought in that great emprise?

  —she is keenly aware of the new dispensation, and like Aphrodite has been hiding from

  The face of Her, before whose mouldering shrine

  To-day at Rome the silent nations kneel;

  Who gat from Love no joyous gladdening.…

  But she is, like Mona Lisa, closer to Christianity still, even to the point of heresy:

  And at thy coming some immortal star,

  Bearded with flame, blazed in the Eastern skies,

  And waked the shepherds on thine island-home.

  He borrows from the Litany of the Blessed Virgin some of his epithets:

  Lily of love, pure and inviolate!

  Tower of ivory! red rose of fire!

  So he salutes her both for her experience, as Helen of Troy, and for her innocence, as the embodiment of ‘spiritual love.’ Though he begs her to be ‘kind to me, / While yet I know the summer of my days,’ he defers to ‘the red lips of young Euphorion,’ as a subject must to the Prince of Wales. Lillie Langtry liked the poem enough to print it in its entirety in her autobiography, a compliment Wilde would have appreciated.

  A problem more pressing for Mrs Langtry than to arise ‘from the depths of sapphire seas’ to please her poet friend was to make ends meet. The Prince was generous, but volatile, and not to be depended upon for a monthly stipend. Miles, the eager gardener, proposed that she go in for horticulture. Wilde was quick with a reproof: ‘Would you compel the Lily to tramp the fields in m
uddy boots?’34 Miles proposed that she become a landscape gardener, an idea also discarded. Whistler urged her to become an artist. Wilde insisted that she become an actress. Having beauty already, he said, she could quickly develop technique. She saw it as a way of becoming her own mistress rather than someone else’s. Her friends rallied, and Henry Irving offered her a big part for which she decided she was not ready. A good job on Life, where Frank Miles’s drawings were featured, was also offered and refused.35 Wilde introduced her to Henriette Labouchere, the wife of the MP and editor of Truth, Henry Labouchere. Mrs Labouchere had been an actress, and was now coaching prospective players. She trained Mrs Langtry to take a part with her in a two-character play lasting a half-hour, A Fair Encounter, on 19 November 1881. From this the pupil quickly graduated to playing Kate Hardcastle in She Stoops to Conquer on 15 December 1881, and then on 19 January she had a small part in Tom Taylor’s Ours. The Prince of Wales favored her performances with his presence, and in no time she was an established actress. Although never so proficient on the stage as she was beautiful, Lillie Langtry did well enough. Wilde, as much as anyone, kept her up to the mark.

  His insistence that she become an actress reflected his own delight in the theatre. He was a regular theatregoer, and the possibility of writing a play was beginning to take hold of him. He longed to have a great performer speak lines he had written, and when the fiery Polish actress Helen Modjeska came to London in 1880 to play in Heartsease (an adaptation of La Dame aux camélias), he was one of the first to seek her acquaintance. For the moment he had nothing to show her, and she found the phenomenon of Wilde astonishing. ‘What has he done, this young man,’ Mme Modjeska asked, ‘that one meets him everywhere? Oh yes he talks well, but what has he done? He has written nothing, he does not sing or paint or act—he does nothing but talk. I do not understand.’36 (Wilde said in his own behalf, ‘Talk itself is a sort of spiritualised action,’37 and he praised the criminal Wainewright because ‘The young dandy sought to be somebody, rather than to do something.’)‡ Modjeska was at first resistant to his overtures, and declined an invitation to his house by saying, ‘Mr Borenta is unwell and cannot possibly accompany me. It is true that an old woman like me [she was forty] ought not to be afraid to pay visits to young men—but it is always better to avoid danger et je tiens beaucoup rester un ange.’38 But she was gradually won over, and by late 1880 she was glad to avail herself of Wilde’s abilities by having him translate a hundred-line poem she had written, ‘Sen Artysty; or The Artist’s Dream.’ Clement Scott then published it in Routledge’s Christmas Annual for 1880. And probably soon afterwards she came to tea at last, with Lillie Langtry and the painter Louise Jopling. Wilde sounded her out about acting in a play he was writing. When they left, he ceremoniously presented each of the three women with a long-stalked Annunciation lily.39

  Two other actresses for whom he also hoped some day to write parts were Ellen Terry and the great Bernhardt herself. Sarah Bernhardt arrived in London in May 1879. Histrionic gestures were expected of her admirers, and perhaps the most successful was that of Pierre Loti, who the year before had had himself carried in to her, wrapped in a large and expensive Persian carpet. Wilde could not match this extravagance, but he did well enough. He went to Folkestone with his friend the actor Norman Forbes-Robertson, as a quasi-official delegation to meet her boat. Forbes-Robertson had only a gardenia to hand her, and someone was heard to say, ‘They will soon be making you a carpet of flowers.’ Wilde, sensing his cue, said ‘Voilà!’ or its English equivalent, and cast an armful of lilies at her feet.40 Bernhardt was charmed. She soon inscribed her signature on the white paneling of Thames House as one of Wilde’s guests, and one night she offered to show how high up the wall her foot could kick.

  She seemed to have lived the life of sensations as fully as a disciple of Pater could wish. With a bankrupt’s nonchalance, she urged her young friends, ‘Money’s meant to be spent. Spend it, spend it!’41 Wilde had no need of particular exhortation, but he could recognize a daemonic element in her. He described how, when he took tea with her, she was ‘lying on a red couch like a pallid flame.’42 Robert Sherard fancied that Wilde had copied from Bernhardt her golden voice, but beside hers (in spite of elocution lessons from the actor Hermann Vezin), his was only gilded. Mme Bernhardt paid him a compliment too. ‘Most men who are civil to actresses and render them services have an arrière-pensée,’ she said. ‘It is not so with Oscar Wilde. He was a devoted attendant, and did much to make things pleasant and easy for me in London, but he never appeared to pay court.43 To be praised for lack of inclination was scarcely praise.

  Still, if he wanted an impulse to write for the theatre, she gave it to him. On 2 June 1879 she opened in Phèdre, as if to challenge the supremacy of Rachel, whose succès fou in the same play twenty-four years before in London was legendary. Wilde was of course at the first night. It was ‘not until I heard Sarah Bernhardt in Phèdre,’ he commented, ‘that I absolutely realised the sweetness of the music of Racine.’44 He wrote a sonnet to her, which Edmund Yates published in The World on 11 June. As with Lillie Langtry, he traced Bernhardt to ancient Greece—his ultimate tribute—but found appropriately infernal imagery for her:

  Ah, surely once some urn of Attic clay

  Held thy wan dust, and thou hast come again

  Back to this common world so dull and vain,

  For thou wert weary of the sunless day,

  The heavy fields of scentless asphodel,

  The loveless lips with which men kiss in hell.

  He had said that Lillie Langtry’s head could be found only on silver coins of Syracuse, and now he enlisted Mrs Langtry’s aid in searching among the Greek coins in the British Museum for Sarah Bernhardt’s profile. Mrs Langtry put up with this rival with good grace, even when it was rumored that the Prince of Wales had temporarily defected from her arms to those of Bernhardt. She was rewarded by Bernhardt’s gracious prediction of a stage future for her, ‘Avec ce menton elle ira loin.’45 Wilde probably had this in mind when Lady Bracknell says to Cecily, ‘The chin a little higher, dear. Style largely depends on the way the chin is worn. They are worn very high, just at present.’ Wilde formed a lifetime ambition of having Bernhardt act in one of his plays.§

  The most agreeable of the actress friends he made in these years was Ellen Terry. She pleased him by encouraging Mrs Langtry’s stage ambitions, and condoning the lapses in her acting, of which Mrs Langtry was sensibly aware. Her own career had been arrested for four years because of marriage to Watts and then a love affair with Edward Godwin, during which she bore two children; but Irving brought her back in 1878 to be his leading lady at the Lyceum. Wilde was swept away by her performance as the Queen, Henrietta Maria, in his quasi-kinsman W. G. Wills’s play Charles I, on 27 June 1879. Her appearance in the second act inspired Wilde’s sonnet, written at the theatre, with its lines,

  In the lone tent, waiting for victory,

  She stands with eyes marred by the mists of pain,

  Like some wan lily overdrenched with rain.…

  He never found a better display for his ubiquitous talisman of the lily. Close to cliché as it was, it struck Ellen Terry, at least, as exactly what she was trying to represent. He would soon follow up this advantage by sending her, in September 1880, a privately printed copy of his first play, bound in dark-red leather, with her name in gold letters. ‘Perhaps some day I shall be fortunate enough to write something worthy of your playing’ was his tactful accompanying note. Ellen Terry did not respond with the immediate offer to play the heroine that he hoped for, and Henry Irving, another recipient, offered only polite thanks. Another actress, the American Genevieve Ward, to whom an ornate copy also went, proved pleasant but uncooperative, as had Mme Modjeska. But Wilde had forcefully answered Modjeska’s and Lillie Langtry’s complaint of idleness. Neither his hobnobbing with players nor the enactment of a new role in English culture exhausted his capacity. It was as a playwright that he claimed his place.

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bsp; Irishman Among the Muscovites