Keats House
Tite Street,
Chelsea
Dear Grossmith,
I should like to go to the first night of your new opera at Easter—and would be very much obliged if you would ask the Box Office to reserve a three guinea box for me, if there is one to be had; on hearing from the office I will forward a cheque for it.
With Gilbert and Sullivan I am sure we will have something better than the small farce of the Colonel. I am looking forward to being greatly amused.
Very truly yours,
OSCAR WILDE
Gilbert wanted his aesthetes to be composites, though he could scarcely ignore Wilde as the most conspicuous representative. Still, he made the two characters different; Reginald Bunthorne is fleshly and Archibald Grosvenor spiritual. Wilde was an example of both. Perhaps to deflect attention from Wilde, Grossmith played Bunthorne as Whistler, black curls interrupted by a white lock of hair, mustache, tuft, eyeglass, with the famous Whistler ‘Ha Ha.’74 Although Rossetti’s ethereality, Swinburne’s sensuality, and Ruskin’s Gothicizing were amalgamated, in one aesthete or the other, both Bunthorne and Grosvenor have aspects that come unmistakably from Wilde as the most articulate standardbearer of aestheticism at the time.
The maidens’ hopeless love for Bunthorne came naturally out of Wilde’s gatherings in Keats House, at which Professional Beauties were in constant attendance. Bunthorne wears his hair long like Wilde, and writes a poem which is described as ‘a wild, weird, fleshly thing.’ Though Wilde had not pre-empted all the lilies of the Pre-Raphaelites, his obsession with the flower is probably reflected in Bunthorne’s words ‘It is the wail of the poet’s heart on discovering that everything is commonplace. To understand it, cling passionately to one another and think of faint lilies.’ It was Wilde too who had ‘walked down Piccadilly with a poppy or a lily in his medieval hand’—rather a Renaissance hand—or at least was said to have done so. He would say later that ‘To have done it was nothing, but to make people think one had done it was a triumph.’75 Bunthorne is described as ‘such a judge of blue-and-white and other kinds of pottery,’ and though Wilde was not alone in his collection of blue china and had been preceded by Rossetti and Whistler, he had made the best remark about it.
As for Grosvenor, he claims to be a ‘trustee for Beauty,’ an extrapolation of Wilde’s possessiveness about it. His reference to ‘Francesca da Rimini, mimini piminy,’ may draw Jane Francesca Wilde, as well as Rossetti, into the circle. The preference for secondary colors, for the greenery yallery in which the once crimson walls of the Grosvenor Gallery were now painted, caught others in its net, but Wilde with them. Patience conferred upon the aesthetic movement a single identity, but could do so because of Wilde’s exaggerations. Max Beerbohm is probably right in saying that Patience prolonged the aesthetic movement. But it was only a parry to Wilde’s thrust.
In his libretto, Gilbert profited from a relentless sequence of caricatures by George du Maurier in Punch. As an art student du Maurier had lived with Whistler in Paris. The sight of his old friend with Wilde probably stirred du Maurier early in 1881 to conceive two aesthetic types, the poet Maudle and the painter Jellaby Postlethwaite. Week after week these caricatures appeared, never mentioning Whistler, too distinguished to be an easy target, but constantly involving Wilde. Great fun was made of his flowing locks, his lilies, his rondeaux and other French forms, the Grosvenor Gallery, blue china, poems entitled ‘Impressions.’ His name became Oscuro Wildegoose, Drawit Milde, the Wilde-eyed poet, ‘Brother Jonathan’ Wilde, Ossian Wilderness. At least once Maudle’s face was obviously Wilde’s. If by no means always clever, this parody was good-humored, and Wilde was too aware of the usefulness of publicity to quarrel with Punch. He made a point of always greeting du Maurier graciously. Once, at a showing of Whistler’s work, the painter came up to them as they stood talking together and asked, ‘Which of you two discovered the other?’ Du Maurier wished he had replied, ‘We have both invented you,’ but Whistler had slipped away. He did, however, include this bit of repartee in the original text of Trilby.76 But, as Burne-Jones understood, the merits of du Maurier and Wilde were not of a kind. When du Maurier’s friend Hamilton Aidé praised du Maurier’s caricatures to the skies, Burne-Jones cried, ‘You may say what you like, but there is more wit in Wilde’s little finger than in the whole of du Maurier’s wretched little body!’
Wilde’s wit proved to be more than a match, also, for the librettist of Patience: they met at a supper party at the Haymarket Theatre, and Wilde held the table with his brilliant talk for perhaps half an hour. Gilbert seized the first opportunity to say, ‘I wish I could talk like you,’ and then added, self-righteously, ‘I’d keep my mouth shut and claim it as a virtue!’ Wilde retorted, ‘Ah that would be selfish! I could deny myself the pleasure of talking, but not to others the pleasure of listening.’77 He finished off Gilbert and Sullivan in The Importance of Being Earnest, where the stage direction says of Jack and Algernon, ‘They whistle some dreadful popular air from a British opera.’
So Wilde found ways to act and speak in full knowledge that they could and would be mocked. To be derided so was part of his plan. Notoriety is fame’s wicked twin: Wilde was prepared to court the one in the hope that the other would favor him too.
The Drifter Apotheosized
We live in an age when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography.
Wilde’s Vera had circulated in privately printed form for seven months when he decided that the moment had come to issue a book of his poems. By this time he had published in magazines thirty out of the sixty-one poems he wished to include. He was particularly eager to balance his many short poems with extended lyrics, and Rennell Rodd came upon him one day, a book of botany open before him, choosing mellifluous flowers to plant in one of the three longest, ‘The Burden of Itys.’78d The floral surge with which the poem began is botanically a little suspect:
This English Thames is holier far than Rome,
Those harebells like a sudden flush of sea
Breaking across the woodland, with the foam
Of meadow-sweet and white anemone
To fleck their blue waves.…
The meadow-sweet blooms in June and the anemone in April, while the harebell, unlike the bluebell, does not grow in oceanic profusion.
Rodd had set him an example by publishing his first book of poems with a small house, David Bogue, and in April 1881 Wilde wrote to Bogue expressing a similar wish. The contract signed on 17 May made Wilde responsible for all the costs of publication; Bogue was to receive, accordingly, only a small share (something over ten percent) of the profits. The binding, specified by Wilde, was to be white parchment, and the printing on Dutch handmade paper. He followed the examples of Morris, Rossetti, and Swinburne in wanting the cover and typography to be distinctive. The initial printing was 750 copies, but they were grouped into three ‘editions’ of 250 each, released during the first year. In Boston a firm called Roberts Brothers brought out three American ‘editions,’ also in 1881. In England the demand went on, so that there were two further printings in 1882, after which the book was not reprinted until 1892.
The earliest plan of the book shows that Wilde intended to place on the title page, just beneath the terse title Poems and the author’s name, an epigraph saying,
Mes premiers vers sont d’un enfant, mes seconds d’un adolescent.e80
It was a plea for indulgence, though at twenty-six he was a somewhat retarded adolescent. Wisely he decided at last to omit this epigraph, as well as a quotation from Keats intended for the page following:
I have not the slightest feeling of humility towards the public or to anything in existence but the Eternal Being, the Principle of Beauty, and the Memory of great men.
Not much would be gained by flouting his audience, and Wilde substituted for the quotation a sonnet, ‘Hélas!,’ which he called the ‘Proem’ to the volume. It was a serious, if flamboyant, attempt to explain himself.
He told Yeats, who asked to anthologize ‘Requiescat,’ that ‘Hélas!’ was his most characteristic poem:
Hélas!
To drift with every passion till my soul
Is a stringed lute upon which all winds can play,
Is it for this that I have given away
Mine ancient wisdom and austere control?
Methinks my life is a twice-written scroll
Scrawled over on some boyish holiday
With idle songs for pipe and virelay
Which do but mar the secret of the whole.
Surely there was a time I might have trod
The sunlit heights, and from life’s dissonance
Struck one clear chord to reach the ears of God:
Is that time dead? lo! with a little rod
I did but touch the honey of romance—
And must I lose a soul’s inheritance?
The sonnet reflected the state of mind he had experienced at Oxford, of which he had complained in his letter of 3 March 1877, saying that he shifted ‘with every breath of thought and am weaker and more self-deceiving than ever.’ But maturity consists of finding justification for affirming what, in immaturity, one felt apologetic about. Sighing in French is not quite the same as sighing in English, nor is poeticizing about drifting the same as drifting.
‘Hélas!’ was a poem that came down naturally from Oxford. The word ‘drift’ and the image of touching honey with a little rod both reached Wilde through his golden book, Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance. In the ‘Conclusion’ which constitutes the final chapter, Pater argued that, just as physical life was not known to be a concurrence of forces rather than a group of objects, so the mind must be regarded as a fluid process rather than an adhesion to fixities and definites. William James and Henri Bergson were soon to depict consciousness as a river or stream; for Pater it is, more intensely, a whirlpool. There is nothing ‘but the race of the mid-stream, a drift of momentary acts of sight and passion and thought.’ Drifting is not blameworthy but inevitable. To drift more splendidly we should rely on ‘great passions,’ so as to get ‘as many pulsations as possible into the given time.’ ‘Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end.’
The closing image for ‘Hélas!,’ like the opening one, was furnished by Pater, in his penultimate essay on Winckelmann, where he quotes Jonathan’s appeal to Saul, ‘I did but taste a little honey with the end of the rod that was in mine hand, and lo! I must die.’ For Pater this statement epitomizes ‘the artistic life, with its inevitable sensuousness,’ and can be contrasted with Christian asceticism and its antagonism to touch. In translating this sentiment into his poem, Wilde introduces a compunction foreign to Pater. He recognizes a counterforce which would bring him towards the ‘august heights’ (an earlier version of ‘the sunlit heights’): this is a restraint which has both classical and Christian components, and is his ‘soul’s inheritance.’ To be so torn, as Wilde is in this poem, between cadence and decadence, austerity and laissez-faire, has its flamboyance. And as Jonathan was saved, so Wilde, for all his alases, has hope of being saved too, because though he has practiced self-indulgence, it was never without remorse.
By placing this poem first, Wilde acknowledged a division in himself, a division pervasively developed and sporadically reconciled in his book. He liked to attribute it to his parents, his father an antiquarian, his mother a libertarian, one with a passion for the past, the other for the future. But he also acknowledged that ‘for the aesthetic mind’ Catholicism was more attractive than Protestantism, although in his case the lure of the former was checked by his interest in the Greeks. It might be thought that he had a double nature, but he actually claimed to have a triple one: ‘I am certain,’ he told Mrs Julian Hawthorne, ‘that I have had three separate and distinct souls.’81 For in addition to his counterurges, he had a third urge to contemplate the other two. His title page bore an emblem, designed on his instructions, which showed a papal tiara above a Masonic rose, both enclosed in an egg-shaped oval along the sides of which is printed the rubric ‘Sub hoc signo vinces [Under this sign thou shalt conquer].’ The tiara and the rose invoke the two dispensations, Catholic and pagan, as well as their possible reconciliation in Freemasonry. It was a triple conflict, which he knew to be more inclusive than that of the prominent nineteenth-century poets he admired, from Keats to Morris. For he had the same impulse towards paganism in ‘The Garden of Eros’ as Swinburne, in whose ‘Hymn to Proserpine,’
The new Sign grows dim and grey before its conqueror.
But the victory of paganism is checked by Wilde’s question in ‘The Garden of Eros’:
why must I still behold
The wan white face of that deserted Christ?
Similarly, the Pope is ‘The gentle shepherd of the Fold’ in ‘Rome Unvisited,’ but in ‘Humanitad’ Pius IX, with whom Wilde had had an audience at the Vatican, is depicted, in sharp contrast to the patriot Mazzini, as ‘an old man who grabbled rusty keys,’ ‘alone with God and memories of sin,’ and the Church, once ‘the wondrous Temple’ in ‘Rome Unvisited,’ turns into ‘That murderous mother of red harlotries.’ ‘The Burden of Itys’ declares challengingly, ‘This English Thames is holier far than Rome,’ and prefers English poppies to the Italian popes, while ‘Italia’ laments that
Rome’s desecrated town
Lies mourning for her God-anointed King!
He had turned away from Catholicism with as much éclat as he had turned towards it.
As if to contradict ‘Hélas!,’ where he admits and regrets having given away his ancient wisdom, ‘Humanitad’ insists that he has renounced Venus for Athena:
For I am Hers who loves not any man
Whose white and stainless bosom bears the sign Gorgonian.
In accord with this sentiment Wilde wrote his most ambitious poem, ‘Charmides,’ which he considered his best. Pater’s essay on Winckelmann declared that ‘Greek religion too has its statues worn with kissing,’ and spoke of Winckelmann’s ‘handling’ of ‘pagan marbles … with no sense of shame.’ These phrases coalesced in Wilde’s mind with a story he remembered from Lucian, of a young man who embraced a statue of Aphrodite. He decided to alter the goddess to Athena, because, being virginal, she would feel particularly violated and vindictive. Charmides is hot enough:
And nigher came, and touched her throat, and with hands violate
Undid the cuirass, and the crocus gown,
And bared the breasts of polished ivory,
Till from the waist the peplos falling down
Left visible the secret mystery
Which to no lover will Athena show,
The grand cool flanks, the crescent thighs, the bossy hills of snow.
• • •
And then his lips in hungering delight
Fed on her lips, and round the towered neck
He flung his arms, nor cared at all his passion’s will to check.
Never I ween did lover hold such tryst,
For all night long he murmured honeyed word,
And saw her sweet unravished limbs, and kissed
Her pale and argent body undisturbed,
And paddled with the polished throat, and pressed
His hot and beating heart upon her chill and icy breast.
Athena avenges herself by luring Charmides to drown himself. His body floats to shore, where a nymph falls in love and, after seeking ineffectually to awaken him, dies of unrequited passion, giving Wilde full scope to describe male beauty. Aphrodite intervenes and arranges for the two, purged of sacrilege and necrophilia, to enjoy each other in the fields of Acheron:
And all his hoarded sweets were hers to kiss,
And all her maidenhead was his to slay.
Charmides’ love for a statue and the nymph’s for a corpse lend the poem a certain gaminess. Wilde lingers like Keats over sweets, and like Swinburne over sours, but what animates the poem is the imagery of psychosexual transgression.
Like
Gautier, Wilde opens his book to unusual as well as usual forms of love. His book is polymorphously perverse. He is fond of Heracles’ page, Hylas, and at first Charmides is mistaken for Hylas,
that false runaway
Who with a Naiad now would make his bed
Forgetting Herakles.
Hylas appears also in ‘The Garden of Eros.’ Narcissus, his love turned inward, is also much in evidence. In ‘The Burden of Itys’ Wilde presents Antinous and Salmacis, one Hadrian’s catamite, the other a hermaphrodite. Sensuality appears in figuring nonsexual things, as when in ‘Humanitad’ Wilde speaks of Wordsworth living ‘blamelessly’ yet daring ‘to kiss the smitten mouth of his own century!’ He is eager to make clear that these are songs of experience:
Those who have never known a lover’s sin
Let them not read my ditty.
(‘Charmides’)
Charmides’ life takes up the anguished reference to ‘my sin and shame’ from ‘San Miniato,’ but for him they become ‘A fiery pulse of sin, a splendid shame.’
The book moves gradually towards ‘Humanitad,’ the last long poem. It is a winter poem, where ‘The Burden of Itys’ was spring and ‘The Garden of Eros’ summer. The young pagan proves as unhappy as any Christian; he longs to make the spirit and body one, but finds such union elusive. Wilde anticipates here what he would say in ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism,’ that we are obliged to ‘live each other’s lives and not our own / For very pity’s sake.’ We are brought to a new Calvary, in which the whole Christian parable is enacted in each man, a point Wilde was to prove on his pulses. Christ does no more than prefigure what all men discover, that everyone is both victim and oppressor,
Oscar Wilde Page 20