Oscar Wilde

by Richard Ellmann

  The spear that pierces and the side that bleeds,

  The lips betraying and the life betrayed.

  But just as we re-enact the Crucifixion, we may re-enact the Resurrection.

  Nay, nay, we are but crucified, and though

  The bloody sweat falls from our brows like rain,

  Loosen the nails—we shall come down I know,

  Staunch the red wounds—we shall be whole again,

  No need have we of hyssop-laden rod,

  That which is purely human, that is Godlike, that is God.

  Here the miter and the rose come together; Catholicism blends with paganism in the same sense of mutual suffering and sin, with the promise of eventual unity of being, when opposites will be joined. Insofar as Wilde had a creed, this was it. It had the merit of being unacceptable to many of his readers. But with a sense of the tentativeness with which such a blend could be adopted, he remarked some months later, ‘My next book may be a perfect contradiction of my first.’82 Contradictoriness was his orthodoxy.

  Praise and Blame

  The primary aim of the critic is to see the object as it really is not.

  As with Vera, Wilde solicited approval for his new book among writers and friends. Lillie Langtry of course had her copy, inscribed ‘To Helen formerly of Troy, now of London.’ Robert Browning, Matthew Arnold, Swinburne, and John Addington Symonds had theirs. Wilde’s letter to Arnold has survived in part, and shows how he mingled compliments to the recipient with modesty about his own achievement:

  [June–July 1881]

  Keats House, Tite Street

  Dear Mr. Arnold, Will you accept from me my first volume of poems … of the constant source of joy and wonder that your beautiful work was to all of us at Oxford … for I have only now, too late perhaps, found out how all art requires solitude as its companion, only now indeed know the splendid difficulty of this great art in which you are a master illustrious and supreme. Still, such as it is, let me offer it to you, and believe me in all affectionate admiration, truly yours

  OSCAR WILDE

  Arnold’s reply was not discouraging, though it played safe:

  July 9th [1881]

  Pains Hill Cottage, Cobham, Surrey

  Dear Mr. Wilde, Your volume and note were put into my hands as I was leaving the Athenaeum last night. I have but glanced at the poems as yet, but I perceive in them the true feeling for rhythm, which is at the bottom of all success in poetry; of all endeavor, indeed, which is not fictitious and vain, in that line of expression. I shall read the work attentively when I get a moment of that of which we all have too little,—leisure. I see you have found out the force of what Byron so insisted on:—that one must shake off London life before one can do one’s best work.

  Your note was very kind—too kind—expressions about me and what I have done. I have not much to thank the public for; but from my fellow-workers, both in poetry and prose, I have met with kindness and recognition such as might satisfy any man.

  Sincerely yours,

  MATTHEW ARNOLD

  Arnold, having himself sung of wandering between two worlds, ‘one dead, the other powerless to be born,’ could conceive sympathy for a young man wavering between half-rejected Catholicism and half-rejected aestheticism, with a longing for a tertium quid which would satisfy his leanings in both directions. Swinburne, without having read it all, was favorably impressed, he said, by such a poem as ‘Les Silhouettes.’ No such sympathy was forthcoming from the reviewers in the Athenaeum, Saturday Review, and Spectator. Punch said it was ‘Swinburne and water.’ Wilde was accused of all the available vices, from plagiarism to insincerity to indecency, heavy charges against a first book.

  The evidence offered was less than cogent. It was true that Wilde had still to create an individual style, and in the end he would do so in prose, not verse. Plagiarism was often that homage of half-quotation which every English poet has rendered to his predecessors, and merely ‘stealing from thieves,’ as Le Gallienne said. His insincerity was the result of his representing difficult hesitations instead of pleasantly easy certainties. His indecency was a calculated risk, to portray his sensuality as frankly as he could. He belonged to ‘the fleshly school of poetry,’ and acknowledged it. The mildness of his indecency was hinted by Punch,

  The poet is Wilde,

  But his poetry’s tame.83

  Against the hostility Wilde had some support from friends. Rodd thought the book full of ‘brilliant writing.’ Wilde asked Oscar Browning to review it, and he complied, at some cost to himself, with a notice in the Academy. Browning’s welcome conclusion was that ‘England is enriched with a new poet,’ but on the way to it he objected to ‘the irregular pulsations of a sympathy which never wearies. Roman Catholic ritual, stern Puritanism, parched Greek islands, cool English lanes and streams, Paganism and Christianity, despotism and Republicanism, Wordsworth, Milton, and Mr Swinburne, receive in turn the same passionate devotion.’84 For Wilde the book’s originality lay just here, in his openness to contraries. John Addington Symonds’s letter to Wilde about the Poems also objected to some cultural confusion, but in general Symonds praised sincerity where others had failed to find any. His letter has survived only in draft:

  Dear Mr. Wilde—If length of days beget forgetfulness, you might well be excused for having forgotten me.… It is years since we exchanged letters. These years I have spent in sickness, the seclusion of these mountains, and studies. You have employed them otherwise, upon a wider stage playing a part more brilliant & … taking of life I hope not only the delights of youth but at least as much of solid satisfaction to the soul (she cares but little for time place & opportunity) as I can say my soul has gathered. The occasion for now writing is that I have read your book of poems. I should not write to you about them if they had not raised deep interest & sympathy. I feel the poet’s gift in them; their inequality is noticeable. Those wh. I presume to have been written latest … seem to me the deepest and sincerest the most free from riot of luxuriant adolescence. These in their direct & poignant utterance have, if I mistake not, the right ring, the poet’s quality. With regard to the earlier portions of the book—Impressions of Travel & pieces written at Oxford—I feel that they represent a stage already rather overlived by you. As such there is a somewhat painful contrast between their airy insouciance, their Keatsian openness at all pores to beauty, & the intensity of personal experience of the later, so murderous to the play of mere fancy, so gripping on reality. Then again though a poet should have the license of uttering diverse notes on even the most established subjects, do you not think that confusion of a cult for the Prisoner of the Vatican with the cult for Swinburne’s Mazzini rather too pronounced? The volume has you see stirred the embers of a jaded man much versed in books. How few such volumes of new poems there are! Arise & shine! This [is] really what I want to say, & why I write. The spontaneity with wh. some while ago you sought me, gives me perhaps the right to seek you now with senile urgency, & ask you how you mean to put your gifts henceforth to use? Boy, if the world gives you time, answer me this, as to one who will hear with sympathy waits to hear the word & with eagerness. There are things in Humanitad (wh. seems to me a middle stage between the earlier manners & the latest manner of the poet) strains wh., if properly developed might be trumpets to our time.85

  Symonds paid the compliment of taking him seriously, and calling him ‘Boy.’

  What became clear with Poems was that Wilde could hope for little or no indulgence, or even justice. Rennell Rodd’s warnings were well founded. The poetical scene in 1881 was not so bright that these poems required so much excoriation, but it was becoming evident that the critics were laying for Wilde, and that nothing but utter originality would silence them. One of the most galling responses was that of the Oxford Union. Its secretary wrote to Wilde asking for a copy for the library there, and Wilde inscribed one,

  To the Library of the Oxford Union my first volume of poems,

  OSCAR WILDE

  Oct
27 ’81

  When the acquisition was announced, Oliver Elton—later a historian of English literature—rose to denounce it. With the assistance of Henry Newbolt, he compiled a list of supposed borrowings from other poets. His speech was received, as Newbolt recalled, with attention at first, and finally with great cheers and hisses:

  It is not that these poems are thin—and they are thin: it is not that they are immoral—and they are immoral: it is not that they are this or that—and they are all this and all that: it is that they are for the most part not by their putative father at all, but by a number of better-known and more deservedly reputed authors. They are in fact by William Shakespeare, by Philip Sidney, by John Donne, by Lord Byron, by William Morris, by Algernon Swinburne, and by sixty more, whose works have furnished the list of passages which I hold in my hand at this moment. The Union Library already contains better and fuller editions of all these poets: the volume which we are offered is theirs, not Mr Wilde’s: and I move that it be not accepted.86

  The proceedings had a Swiftian lunacy. There was a spirited debate, with six speaking against acceptance and four, including the librarian, speaking in favor. In the division the vote was 128 for acceptance and 188 against, but a poll of the membership was requested by the librarian. The following week the president announced that 180 had voted for acceptance and 188 against. Then Wilde’s friend George Curzon intervened, ‘with a voice of scorn,’ as Wilde afterwards remembered, and ‘made some pointed observations … on the unfortunate circumstance of Mr Wilde’s volume of poems having to be returned by the Society, after having been solicited as a present by the library committee.’ The secretary had no alternative but to return the book with apologies, and Wilde responded with acerbic calm:

  9, Charles Street,

  Grosvenor Square

  Dear Sir: Pray assure the committee of the Oxford Union that, while regretting that they had not ascertained the feeling of the Society with regard to my art, I quite acquit them of any intention to be discourteous towards me, and that I readily accept an apology so sincerely offered.

  My chief regret indeed being that there should still be at Oxford such a large number of young men who are ready to accept their own ignorance as an index, and their own conceit as a criterion of any imaginative and beautiful work. I must also for the sake of the good fame and position of the Oxford Union express a hope that no other poet or writer of England will ever be subjected to what I feel sure you as well as myself are conscious of, the coarse impertinence of having a work officially rejected which had been no less officially sought for.

  Pray be kind enough to forward to my private address the volume of my poems, and Believe me yours truly

  OSCAR WILDE87

  The issue was not to be completely resolved until a year later, when the librarian’s 18 October motion that Wilde’s Poems be bought for the Coffee and Smoking Room was defeated. But there was a further response. The Oxford and Cambridge Undergraduate’s Journal for 17 November 1881 shows that the sentiment against the book was in part a sentiment against Wilde, presumably the person whose ‘evil life’ is being discussed:

  It would be well for some undergraduates if they would not allow their heads to be turned by the whirl and excitement of University life. Many seem to forget how great an effect on after years a well or ill-spent University career may have. It is better for a man not to ‘come up’ at all than, when he has come up, to be ‘sent down’ and for the rest of his life to be ashamed to confess his connection with the University. If a man leads an evil life in the University, even though he may not suffer for his acts at the time, yet his character will not have escaped the notice of his colleagues, who afterwards will always have it in their power to call his remembrance to the past. We would like to see men bear this fact in mind, and show more esprit de corps as members of this old University, so as not to allow themselves to act in such a way as to trail her honour in the dust.

  Of such college spirit, Inquisitions are made.

  Wilde’s letter to the Oxford Union speaks of 9 Charles Street as his personal address, and this also reflected a change in his fortunes which was a direct result of the publication of Poems. Frank Miles’s father, the canon, had twitted Wilde for being incomprehensible; he now found him painfully clear. He wrote to his son about the evil tendency in the poems; then, concluding that Frank Miles had not shown his two letters to Wilde, he wrote to Wilde directly on 21 August, to say that his wife had cut out the poem as being painful and dangerous. Though it could have been one of several poems, ‘Charmides’ was presumably the offender, with its monstrous coupling and knowing asides. Wilde had departed from ‘Revealed Truth’ and the tendency of his verse was anti-Christian. Copulation with statues, though imaginary and unrequited, was out of bounds. So was kissing ‘the mouth of sin’ in ‘Taedium Vitae.’ ‘As to morality I can’t help saying Frank ought to be clear—he has, I believe, often argued with you. Our first thought of course must be of him and his good name and his profession. If in sadness I advise a separation for a time it is not because we do not believe you in character to be very different to what you suggest in your poetry, but it is because you do not see the risk we see in a published poem that, which makes all who read it say to themselves, “this is outside the province of poetry,” “it is licentious and may do a great harm to any soul that reads it.” ’88

  Canon Miles did not suspect that his son had darker proclivities than the poetic lechery of his fellow tenant. Wilde casually mentioned to Robert Sherard what had happened not long before in Keats House. Miles had been ‘fooling with a young girl,’ and three policemen armed with a warrant came and pounded on the front door. ‘Open in the name of the law,’ they shouted. Wilde waited until Miles had a chance to get safely over the roof. He then unlocked the door and explained to the angry constables that Miles was away on the Continent, so he had assumed friends were playing a practical joke on him by posing as policemen. His bland assurance convinced the London police as once the Oxford proctors, and they took themselves off, bamboozled and mollified.89

  Canon Miles followed his letter to Wilde with one to his son, enjoining him to separate from his friend. Frank Miles told Wilde what his father had said. A model of Miles, Sally Higgs, daughter of a fishmonger, was present and described Wilde’s rage. He demanded to know if Miles was going to obey his father in the name of morality. Miles, financially dependent, said that, much as it distressed him, he had no alternative. ‘Very well then,’ said Wilde, ‘I will leave you. I will go now and I will never speak to you again as long as I live.’ (Wilde has Dorian Gray threaten Basil Hallward, ‘on my word of honour I will never speak to you again as long as I live.’) He tore upstairs, flung his clothes in a large trunk, and, rather than wait for help, tipped it over the banister. It crashed down on a valuable antique table and smashed it into fragments. He swept out of the house, slammed the door, hailed a cab, and was gone.90

  For Miles the sequel was not happy. His father died, and he began to go to pieces. A late letter from him to Mrs George Boughton, the artist’s wife, is written in an almost illegible scrawl: ‘Tell George I have given up his idea and Oscars—and Jimmy [Whistler] long long ago—that art is for art’s sake and if it is good [, if some] unfortunate accident happens of its doing some harm to somebody why it is the artist’s fault.’91 And so, still advocating virtue, Miles faded from Wilde’s scene. He had to be taken to Brislington asylum near Bristol in 1887, and died there four years later.

  Wilde had once outraged Hunter Blair by falling back into Protestantism, but he had outraged the Protestant canon even more. His verse had larger purposes than to flatter his public, and he was beginning to experience the victimization he had once imagined for Keats. He knew perfectly well that his ideas were shocking to the English, provincial in their conventionality, piety, and conservatism, as he, an Irishman, was not. He had no intention of changing. They must change.

  * In ‘The Decay of Lying’ he declares, ‘The ancient historian gave
us delightful fiction in the form of fact; the modern novelist presents us with dull facts under the guise of fiction.’ Elsewhere he said, ‘History never repeats itself. The historians repeat each other. There is a wide difference.’

  † Graced with the three plis de Vénus, according to Lady Randolph Churchill.20

  ‡ In Henry James’s The Tragic Muse the aesthete Gabriel defends himself against a similar charge by saying, ‘O having something to show’s such a poor business. It’s a kind of confession of failure.’

  § He dreamed, as Ricketts recalled, of having her perform in a play he would write about Queen Elizabeth.

  ‘She would look wonderful in monstrous dresses covered with peacocks and pearls!’ He thought of having ‘Princess Elizabeth and her lover, the Lord High Admiral Seymour, watched by the pathetic Catherine Parr and the sinister Lord Protector [Wilde believed that Elizabeth had borne a child by Seymour]; the Queen and Essex and the tragic passion of Lady Shrewsbury.’ He would often relate the quaint episode when the Scottish Ambassador undertook to bring Elizabeth, disguised as a page, to the court at Holyrood to see Mary Stuart. I am still astonished that this subject, and the tremendous death scene of the Queen, have remained untouched, though I have heard him say with mock seriousness ‘Of course the death of Elizabeth gave great encouragement to the revival of our literature.’46

  ‖ Those whose names were listed in support of the grant were Lords Lytton and Spencer, Sir Theodore and Lady Martin, Swinburne, Mahaffy, Oliver Plunket, Sir George Otto Trevelyan, Sir John Lisback, Professors A. N. Sayce and Edward Dowden. Only Gladstone refused to sign.55