Yet Willie carved out a fragile place for himself in London. His knack for drawing was shown in some illustrations he made for his father’s books, but he did not persevere. His piano playing led him to compose his own ‘improved’ endings for Chopin’s Preludes—an enterprise that might have made a better man quail.59 Journalism was the least demanding occupation he could find, and for some years he was successful at it. He liked nothing better than to puff Oscar in a gossip column. Once in a while, as when he reported on the Parnell Commission (some of whose sessions Oscar also attended), he wrote well, perhaps because he passionately accepted his mother’s verdict that ‘Parnell is the man of destiny. He will strike off the fetters and free Ireland, and throne her as queen among the nations.’ The Wildes triumphed vicariously in Parnell’s vindication. But in general the life was too easy for Willie. At a nightclub called the Spoofs in Maiden Lane he would hold forth on the delightfulness—meaning the idleness—of the journalist’s profession. A. M. Binstead in Pitcher in Paradise renders a bit of Willie’s talk, which Jimmy Glover certifies to be representative; it was delivered at great speed, unlike his brother’s stately rhythms:
The journalistic life irksome? Dear me, not at all. Take my daily life as an example. I report at the office, let us say at twelve o’clock. To the Editor I say, ‘Good morning, my dear Le Sage,’ and he replies, ‘Good morning, my dear Wilde, have you an idea today?’ ‘Oh yes, Sir, indeed I have,’ I respond. ‘It is the anniversary of the penny postage stamp.’
‘That is a delightful subject for a leader,’ cries my editor, beaming on me.…
I may then eat a few oysters and drink half a bottle of Chablis at Sweeting’s.… I then stroll towards the park. I bow to the fashionables, I am seen along incomparable Piccadilly.… But meanwhile … I try to recall all that I ever heard about penny postage stamps. Let me see? There is Mr. So-and-so the inventor, there is the early opposition, the first postal legislation, then the way stamps are made, putting the holes in the paper; the gum on the back; the printing.… I think of all the circumstances as I stroll back along Pall Mall. I might go to the British Museum and grub up a lot of musty facts, but that would be unworthy of a great leader writer, you may well understand that.
And then comes the writing. Ah! here is where I earn my money. I repair to my club. I order out my ink and paper. I go to my room. I close the door.… Three great meaty, solid paragraphs each one-third of a column—that is the consummation to be wished. My ideas flow fast and free. Suddenly someone knocks at the door. Two hours have fled. How time goes! It is an old friend. We are to eat a little dinner at the Café Royal and drop into the Alhambra for the new ballet. I touch the button, my messenger appears. The leader is despatched to 141, Fleet Street, in the Parish of St Bride, and off we go arm in arm.60
There were times when he ran out of postage stamps to write about, and on these occasions, particularly when the editor asked him to turn out a short story, he consulted his brother. Oscar spun off half a dozen tales during breakfast.
Still, Lady Wilde and Willie could hope to impinge only upon parts of London life, whereas Oscar had set himself to be the center of it. He had by this time a large acquaintance, in which royalty was not lacking. The Prince of Wales asked to meet him, fetching up an epigram for the purpose, ‘I do not know Mr Wilde, and not to know Mr Wilde is not to be known.’61 On 4 June 1881 the Prince came to a thought-reading séance, predictably attended by Lillie Langtry, at the house shared by Miles and Wilde. He obviously enjoyed the witty company. The two young men had now changed their address from 13 Salisbury Street to the newly fashionable Tite Street, Chelsea. Miles had long since asked Edward Godwin, as the architect whose views they found most congenial, to redesign a house, as he had already done for Whistler with The White House. A design was prepared as early as June 1878, but the Works and General Purposes Committee objected to it, as they had objected to the original design for Whistler’s house. A modified plan was submitted on 30 September, and in July 1880 the house was at last ready for occupancy. The design was of interlocking rectangles. The brickwork was red and yellow, the roof was covered in green slates, and the windows had balconies. It was an aesthetic creation, and the young men happily installed themselves. Wilde, profiting from the fact that two women named Skeates had occupied it before them, or from the presence of Shelley House (occupied by a descendant of the poet) around the corner, renamed it Keats House.
Among Wilde’s friends of this period, Whistler and Rennell Rodd, along with Lillie Langtry and Miles, were the most conspicuous. Wilde’s Oxford acquaintance with Rodd had continued. Rodd failed to get a first in Greats, and Wilde offered consolation:
Keats House
Dear Rennell,
My best congratulations. Greats is the only fine school at Oxford, the only sphere of thought where one can be, simultaneously, brilliant and unreasonable, speculative and well-informed, creative as well as critical, and write with all the passion of youth about the truths which belong to the august serenity of old age.
I wish you had got a First—that my compeers should not all be sluggish and syllogistic Scotchmen. Still, a Second is perhaps for a man of culture a sweeter atmosphere than the chilly Caucasus of an atheistical First.
Come back very soon.
Truly yours,
OSCAR WILDE62
During the summer of 1879, Wilde and Rodd took a trip together. Rodd, his parents and sister, and Wilde all stayed in the Hôtel Meunier in Laroche, Belgium, in July. It happened that other residents at the hotel took particular note of them. One was a boy of eight, Paul de Reul, the son of a Belgian geologist, poet, and novelist named Xavier de Reul. Paul de Reul remembered distinctly the impression Wilde made. He wrote later that Wilde was ‘grand et blême, face glabre, cheveux longs, noirs et plats, il se vêtait de blanc, blanc des pieds à la tète, depuis le large et haut chapeau de feutre jusqu’à la canne, un sceptre d’ivoire, au pommeau tourné, avec lequel j’ai joué bien souvent. Nous l’appelions Pierrot.’a Pierrot would walk to the valley of the Bronz, and, in a place called the Tombs because the grass there is covered with flat stones, read his poems aloud with a dragging voice and monotonous cadence which struck the boy as funny. Another resident in the hotel was a Dutch poet, Jacques Perk (1858–81), who wrote a poem which described Wilde beside a beautiful woman,
A son côté debout, comme elle de jeunesse
Etincelant, en l’adolescent Anglais,
D’intelligence plein, de gaité, d’allégresse,
Au coeur poète, qui hait tout ce qui est mauvais.b63
From Laroche, Wilde and Rodd went on to Tournai, where they saw and remembered the tomb of a knight on which was inscribed ‘Une heure viendra qui tout paiera [An hour will come when all will be paid].’ Rodd wrote a poem about it, and Wilde, in an ‘Envoi’ to Rodd’s second book of poems two years later, spoke of ‘an old grey tomb in Flanders with a strange legend on it, making one think how, perhaps, passion does live on after death.…’64 He chose to deflect the ominousness of the augury.
The next year, 1880, Rodd published his first book, Songs in the South, and, after inscribing it ‘Rennell to Oscar, July 1880,’ added an inscription not less startling for being in Italian:
Al tuo martirio cupida e feroce
Questa turba cui parli accorera;
Ti vertammo a veder sulla tua croce
Tutti, e nessuno ti compiagnera.c
Wilde’s life is as full of tragic prolepses as an Ibsen play. Rodd continued to be alarmed by Wilde, and by some of Wilde’s poems. Particular lines were certain to offend. In substance he gave the same warning as the dead knight. Wilde refused to alter the lines. As Rodd says in his memoirs, though sensitive to his friends’ complaints of Wilde’s influence, he ‘took a certain defiant pride in their criticism,’65 a response easily borrowed from Wilde’s imperiousness.
So during the summer of 1881 they traveled together again, this time along the Loire. Wilde wrote George Lewis’s twelve-year-old son
a playful description: ‘I was with a delightful Oxford friend and, as we did not wish to be known [presumably to keep Rodd’s friends from suspecting that their intimacy was so constant], he travelled under the name of Sir Smith, and I was Lord Robinson. I then went to Paris—a large town, the capital of France—and enjoyed myself very much.’ It was perhaps now that they went also to Chartres, and certainly they were at Amboise, of which Wilde was to write the next year:
We were staying once, he and I, at Amboise, that little village with its grey slate roofs and steep streets and gaunt, grim gateway.… And above the village, and beyond the bend of the river, we used to go in the afternoon, and sketch from one of the big barges that bring the wine in autumn and the wood in winter down to the sea, or lie in the long grass and make plans pour la gloire, et pour ennuyer les philistins, or wander along the low, sedgy banks, ‘matching our reeds in sportive rivalry,’ as comrades used in the old Sicilian days.…66
Rodd, like Hunter Blair, is at some pains to indicate that Wilde’s relation to him was not sexual. Still, in all the forms of attachment, the relationship of arrogant master and timid disciple bore a resemblance to love.
Love did not enter into Wilde’s relationship with James McNeill Whistler. Whistler demanded admiration bordering on sycophancy and gave in return domination bordering on enmity. To Wilde, gazing down at him, Whistler was short but formidable. During the early period of Wilde’s residence in London, Whistler had to endure an enforced absence. His minimally successful libel suit against Ruskin, heard on 25 November 1878, in which he was awarded a farthing damages and no costs, had led to bankruptcy; he fled to Venice from September 1879 until November 1880, and there executed a series of etchings brilliant enough to enable him to return. Though he could not wrest his old abode, The White House, away from the art critic Harry (or ’arry, as Whistler called him) Quilter, he found another house, in Tite Street, and so was a neighbor of Miles and Wilde. In 1879 Wilde was still obscure; in 1880 he was famous. For the time the two suited each other. Whistler was twenty years older, American (not ‘a great Virginia gentleman,’ as Wilde called him to Robert Sherard,67 but a New England one). He had spent several years in France, and was well acquainted with the principal artists and writers there. Wilde aspired to be the same. Whistler lived a life made up of seemingly firm friendships which regularly ended in brief, conclusive quarrels. To be his friend was to court dismissal; Wilde managed it successfully for half a dozen years. He received the master’s barbs in good part, one of his most attractive characteristics being his enjoyment of jokes against himself.
Although Wilde’s approbation of Whistler’s paintings in the first Grosvenor Gallery exhibition had been equivocal, his taste being then almost exclusively ‘Pre-Raff,’ he made up for it with his review, in a Dublin newspaper on 5 May 1879, of a later exhibition.68 This time he praised The Gold Girl as ‘very wonderful.’ He even approved some of the Nocturnes. He no longer questioned that Whistler was the greatest painter in London, although, in defiance of Whistler, he clung to an admiration for Burne-Jones. Whistler was as irreverent towards Ruskin’s favorite, Turner, ‘that old amateur,’ as towards Burne-Jones and the other Pre-Raphaelites. J. and E. Pennell quote him as saying, ‘Rossetti, well, you know, not a painter, but a gentleman and a poet. As for the others dangling after him, with them it was all incapacity and crime.’69 Wilde, a welcome guest at Whistler’s studio, could marvel at such judgments while the master chatted away at work. Together, Wilde and Whistler constituted a London spectacle. As Ellen Terry commented long afterwards, ‘The most remarkable men I have ever known were Whistler and Wilde.… There was something about both of them more instantaneously individual and audacious than it is possible to describe.’70
Whistler’s friendly hand was always extended in a bullying way. An invitation to take a trip with him is peremptory and has his customary edge of being funny at the recipient’s expense:
Sunday Night
Now Oscar you have simply to get on your disguise again and come off with me tomorrow to Jersey.
I shall be down at the studio tomorrow—and shall send for you at about 12—we can make our final arrangements and probably leave by the 5 o’clock train—
[Butterfly signature]
[Pen drawing of woman’s head on blotting paper enclosed]
The ‘disguise’ must have been some new coat that Wilde was showing off. Still, the letter shows they understood each other, as does this one:
Oscarino!—I have unwittingly broken the seal of the enclosed—Mille pardons—
I have read nothing—but the first word—‘Electra’—and know not who it is from—so you must tell me when we meet—
[Butterfly signature]
Another letter of this period commends to Wilde (then in Paris), or, rather, foists upon him, Whistler’s disciple—the artist Walter Sickert:
No, Oscar!—I can spare him longer if needs must—behave well to him—and attempt not to palm off wine of inferior quality upon my ambassador!
Remember, he travels no longer as Walter Sickert—of course, he is amazing—for does he not represent the Amazing One—and his tastes are for the nonce necessarily of the most refined—even the Louvre holds for him no secrets.…
What more shall I say?—He can explain to you the Amazing Catalogue—and for the rest has he not my blessing and his return ticket?71
That Whistler humorously exaggerates his vanity does nothing to undercut it.
Both men being clever and eager to talk, a rivalry developed in which Wilde, the kinder-hearted, was usually worsted. Douglas Sladen describes a reception in 1883 at the house of Louise Jopling, in Beaufort Street. Wilde and Whistler arrived separately but early, and were obviously disconcerted to see almost no one else there. Sladen reproduces their badinage in a way that sounds genuine:
‘Jimmy, this time last year, when I was in New York, all we men were carrying fans. It should be done here.’
[No reply from Whistler.]
‘I hear that you went over to the Salon by Dieppe, Jimmy. Were you economising?’
‘Don’t be foolish. I went to paint.’
‘How many pictures did you paint?’
‘How many hours did it take?’
‘You went, not I. No gentleman ever goes by the Dieppe route.’
‘I do, often,’ said Mrs Jopling. ‘It takes five hours.’
‘How many minutes are there in an hour, Oscar?’
‘I am not quite sure, but I think it’s about sixty. I am not a mathematician.’
‘Then I must have painted three hundred.’72
Sladen claims that it was at this party that Wilde remarked of something a woman had said, ‘How I wish I had said that,’ and Whistler replied, ‘You will, Oscar, you will’; but a more likely account says it was a remark of Whistler to Humphry Ward, art critic of the Times, which aroused Wilde’s envy. Ward had been calling one of Whistler’s pictures good, another bad, until the artist said, ‘My dear fellow, you must never say this painting is good or that bad. Good and bad are not terms to be used by you. But you may say “I like this” or “I don’t like that”, and you will be within your rights. Now come and have a whisky: you’re sure to like that.’73 Wilde had no hesitation in borrowing what he needed, partly because he usually touched it up. As he wrote in a review of Wills’s Olivia on 30 May 1885, ‘It is only the unimaginative who ever invents. The true artist is known by the use he makes of what he annexes, and he annexes everything.’ Whistler, on the other hand, was too vain to realize that his own theories of art were derived largely from Gautier.
The two men enjoyed each other’s company for somewhat different reasons. What Wilde did not know was that Whistler, the future author of The Gentle Art of Making Enemies, was temperamentally inclined to make new enemies of old friends. There were many examples. When, later on, the breach occurred, Wilde could not understand it. For if he had borrowed, he had also given. He had sung Whistler’s praises, had entertained him verbally and at
table, had been in every way generous and loyal. But Wilde always had a measure of innocence, and never more so than when dealing with someone who was cruel, because cruelty was not in his own nature. He was prepared to believe that disciples might be treacherous to the master, but not that the master might prey on the disciples.
The personalities of Tite Street were increasingly the talk of London. They became fair game for parodist playwrights at the end of the seventies. A first attempt to caricature them in December 1877 was The Grasshopper, a burlesque of the opening of the Grosvenor Gallery, in which a dance of three persons was reputed to be Whistler, Miles, and Wilde. Then came Where’s the Cat?, adapted from a German source by James Albery, which opened at the Criterion Theatre on 20 November 1880. It contained lines such as ‘I feel like—like a room without a dado,’ spoken by a character called Scott Ramsay, a writer. Herbert Beerbohm Tree played the role with Wilde’s mannerisms, and the play was a success. Wilde made a point of not seeing it. At last, three months after the opening, Ellen Terry was able to persuade him to share her box. He observed then that the play was poor. F. C. Burnand, the editor of Punch, in adapting Un Mari de la campagne for the Bancrofts, decided to twit Wilde and aestheticism. He called his play The Colonel and submitted it to the Bancrofts, who decided against it. But it was produced by another company at the Prince of Wales Theatre in February 1881 and scored a hit. Even Queen Victoria was persuaded by the Prince of Wales to see it, and a command performance was held at Balmoral. J. Fernandez in the London production, and W. G. Hawtrey in the provinces, both played an aesthete called Lambert Stryke with Wilde’s mannerisms. The vogue of aestheticism was ripe to be succeeded by the vogue of anti-aestheticism.
A more lasting work was in the process of being composed, Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience. Gilbert’s plan had been at first to dramatize his ballad ‘The Rival Curates,’ who outvie each other in mildness until one on compulsion is obliged to play the opposite role. But he quickly perceived that the cultural climate required rival aesthetes, although Max Beerbohm insisted that they were already out of date. By November 1880 Gilbert had written half the libretto, which was kept as secret as possible to discourage imitators. Then Patience opened on 23 April 1881. Wilde had been informed that it took him off, and he wrote to George Grossmith, who was playing Bunthorne:
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