Oscar Wilde

by Richard Ellmann

  a ‘… tall and pallid, cleanshaven, with long, straight black hair; he dressed in white, white from head to foot, from the tall, broad felt hat to his cane, an ivory sceptre with a round top, which I played with often. We called him Pierrot.’

  b ‘Standing at her side, youth / Sparkling in the English adolescent, as in her, / Full of intelligence, of gaiety, of joy, / At heart a poet, who hates everything that is bad.’

  c ‘At thy martyrdom the greedy and cruel / Crowd to which thou speakest will assemble; / All will come to see thee on thy cross, / And not one will have pity on thee.’

  d Wilde was soon to be done with nature. He told Margot Asquith, ‘I hate views—they are only made for bad painters,’ and added, ‘Let us go in—the sound of a cuckoo makes me sick.’79

  e ‘My first verses are those of a child, my second those of an adolescent.’

  CHAPTER VI

  Declaring His Genius

  My whole life was but a schoolboy’s dream. Today my life begins.

  We have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language.

  New Prospects

  The rage of Wilde’s departure from Frank Miles’s house was succeeded in calm by the search for new lodgings. He could not afford a house of his own like the one he had happily shared for over a year in Tite Street. At first he went to stay with his mother at 1 Ovington Square, and then moved to two furnished rooms on the third floor at 9 Charles Street (now Carlos Place) off Grosvenor Square. These were oak-paneled and decorated with old engravings in black frames. A retired butler and his wife ran the house and prepared meals when asked. The real inconvenience came from having to separate himself from most of his cherished bric-a-brac and furnishings. He may have left some of these at Miles’s house for a time, because at least once he used his old Tite Street address after his abrupt departure from it; and Miles, unhappy at having been his friend’s evictor, may have obliged him in small ways.

  Otherwise the rift with Miles had no effect but to confirm that friends could betray. The hypocrisy pervading England found its expression when a molester of small children could take a high moral line with him. Wilde was fortified in his conviction that he was a poète maudit, subject to all the hazards of that species. But he continued to cherish also his quite different role, that of the man of the world, and for this he required the company and indulgence of a leisured, moneyed class to whom, as to him, language was a form of action, and no negligible one.

  To sustain this second position he needed not Frank Miles but money, and money was scarcer than ever. His slender patrimony dwindled. The record of his landed property suggests his predicament: on January 1881 he mortgaged his cherished hunting lodge, Illaunroe, on Lough Fee, and on 25 October 1882 he sold another bit of his Dublin property to one of his Maturin relations. Poetry was not lucrative. His main hope of improving his fortunes was Mrs Bernard Beere’s oncoming production of Vera. Willie Wilde, now doing dramatic criticism, warned his brother that Mrs Beere could never play the role of Vera adequately, but Oscar was more than pleased to have her try. The production would release him from the charge that Modjeska and others had leveled, that he had done nothing. It would publicly justify his way of life.

  He was sufficiently encouraged to think about writing another play. As early as 1880 he had announced in The Biograph his intention of writing a five-act tragedy in blank verse. At first this was to be entitled The Duchess of Florence; eventually it was relocated as The Duchess of Padua. Accustomed to his own oscillations, Wilde designed this play to be as aristocratic as Vera was republican. It would be in the Jacobean tradition of Webster, as Vera was in the tradition of melodramatic realism in Sardou. The new play too would include an assassination, this time not of the Little Father of All the Russias but of a treacherous uncle like those in Richard III, Hamlet, and Women Beware Women. Though Wilde had his subject well in mind, he would not write the scenario until late in 1882, and the writing of the play extended into the following year. His friend Forbes-Robertson urged him to write more plays, assuring him that nothing would be easier for him than to turn out half a dozen in record time; but Wilde could not bestir himself so easily and after his first two wrote no more until the nineties.

  While he waited impatiently for Mrs Beere’s rehearsals to begin, he was unexpectedly approached from another quarter. A cablegram, knowledgeably addressed to him at his mother’s house, proved to be from the producer Richard D’Oyly Carte in New York. Since September 1881, Carte had had Patience running in New York with as much success as in London. Another part of his enterprise was to manage lecture tours, and he snatched at a suggestion, possibly from Sarah Bernhardt (who was credited by Wilde with having initiated the idea), to give Americans a chance to see and hear the leading exponent of aestheticism. Carte expected Patience to give a fillip to Wilde’s lectures, and the lectures to give a fillip to Patience.

  He was particularly willing to bring over the purported model for Bunthorne because Americans had little direct information about the type, and no history of the mockery of it such as du Maurier’s. Of course, the United States had a subculture which was dissatisfied with money and power, but this had no single and famed exponent. Neither the shirt-sleeved Whitman, nor the bearded Longfellow, nor the tense Emerson could remotely be thought of as Gilbert’s model. The only traces of aestheticism to have reached America were women’s gowns hung from the shoulders in flowing folds, Queen Anne furniture, Morris wallpaper, Japanese screens—all just beginning to be known. Wilde might gather the strands together and give them the force of a program.

  The first idea was for Wilde to present readings, in the manner of Dickens. The cable from Carte’s office read:

  Responsible agent asks me to enquire if you will consider offer he makes by letter for fifty readings, beginning November first. This is confidential. Answer.

  It did not take Wilde long to consider. The next day, 1 October, he cabled back, ‘Yes, if offer good. Chelsea, Tite Street.’ The offer was good: Carte would cover Wilde’s expenses and would share equally with him the net profits. Wilde did not agree until December. A retired army colonel named W. F. Morse, who was managing the lecture business for Carte, corresponded with Wilde about the details. It became apparent that the tour could not be arranged so quickly, and that Wilde would need more time to prepare. He proposed some topics, and Morse in turn tried these out with booking agents around the country. From the beginning it was understood that Wilde was to be paraded as a figure in English society, not only as a writer. Morse expressly dissociated himself and Carte from Wilde’s doctrine, but thought it modish enough to be worth a tour. All this Morse conveyed in letters to booking agents, as in this one to a Philadelphia possibility:

  R. D’Oyly Carte’s Opera Companies,

  Central Office, 1267 Broadway,

  New York Nov. 8 1881

  Dear Sir,

  I have lately had a correspondence with Mr. Oscar Wilde, the new English Poet, with reference to a tour in the U.S. during the winter. My attention was first drawn to him for the reason, that while we were preparing for the opera ‘Patience’ in New York, his name was often quoted as the originator of the aesthetic idea, and the author of a volume of poems lately published, which had made a profound sensation in English society. It was suggested to me, that if Mr. Wilde were brought to this country with the view of illustrating in a public way his idea of the aesthetic, that not only would society be glad to hear the man and receive him socially, but also that the general public would be interested in hearing from him a true and correct definition and explanation of this latest form of fashionable madness.… He advises me that he has prepared three lectures or essays, one of which is devoted to a consideration of ‘The Beautiful’ as seen in everyday life, another, illustrative of the poetical methods used by Shakespeare, and the third, a Lyric Poem.… Now, should he come, I should like to place him for a public reading or lecture in your city. He will be first announced, advertised, and worked u
p in N.Y. City (where he will probably speak three or four times) following which lectures he desires to visit other parts of the country. Can you find a place for him, for one or more nights, in the list of entertainments which you have in charge, at a moderate fee, or upon a basis of shares with me in the venture.…

  Very truly yours,

  R. D’OYLY CARTE

  per W. F. Morse1

  The answers Morse received narrowed Wilde’s repertoire at once. A lyric poem was not wanted. Even ‘Charmides,’ his favorite among the poems and perhaps the one he intended to recite, could not compare with the death of Little Nell read by Dickens in America fifteen years before. Nor did the idea of still another lecture on Shakespeare rouse the provinces. What America wanted, it became clear, was ‘The Beautiful.’ In December, Wilde accepted this proposal. Evidently he asked that the tour should start at the beginning of 1882, so that he would still be in London for the opening of Vera.

  But Vera was not to open. Two assassinations had recently appalled the world, that of Czar Alexander II on 13 March and that of President Garfield, shot in July, who died on 19 September. Any hope Wilde may have entertained that these murders would make his play even more attractively topical was checked. There was a sudden burst of proroyalist sentiment, as when Victoria, at the command performance of The Colonel (the satire on aestheticism), was cheered by the audience. (Afterwards she received the actor Edgar Bruce, then playing the title role.2) Actors begged off playing the republican parts. The prospect of Vera may have come to the attention of the Russian government, for The New York Times, on 26 December 1881, said that Lord Granville (then Foreign Secretary) had received a communication on the subject. One newspaper reported that, since Wilde was now one of the ‘European powers,’ he could not give offense to a crowned head. The Prince of Wales himself or those sensitive to his wishes may have intervened, for he was married to the sister of the new Czarina, and could scarcely be expected to look with favor on an abortive assassination attempt, even on the stage. Some official pressure seems to have been applied, for in the last days of November, just as rehearsals for Vera were to begin, with Wilde’s friend Dion Boucicault as director and Mrs Beere in the title role, they were canceled.3 It was a foretaste of Wilde’s later difficulties over Salome, no less infuriating because the censorship was unofficial.

  This blow gave Wilde a new impulse for his American tour, since in a republic there could scarcely be squeamishness over the lopping of crowned heads. On the other hand, the assassination of Garfield, and the trial of Guiteau for the crime, would occupy the American press for many months to come. Wilde was not discouraged: he announced before he left that he would arrange for the production of Vera and publish a second book of poems as well as carry the benevolent and challenging message of aestheticism to America. A letter survives addressed to an unknown recipient:

  Keats House

  Tite Street

  Chelsea, London

  Dear Sir:

  At the suggestion of my friend, Mr Dion Boucicault, I beg to forward you a copy of a new and original drama on Russia. The note through which the passion of the play is expressed is democratic—and for that reason it’s unthinkable to act it in London. It is yet the tragedy, the essence of the play is human. There are two fine men’s parts for character acting—the old Prince Metternich sort of statesman full of epigram and unscrupulousness, and the Czar.

  The hero is a young enthusiast, and the heroine who gives the name to the play is conceived in all the many moods of passion that a study of Sarah Bernhardt could suggest.

  I shall be very happy if you approve of the play, to correspond on the subject of its production.

  Your obedient servant,

  OSCAR WILDE4

  He prepared carefully for his tour. What to wear came first of all. Wilde concocted a costume for his tailor to make. C. Lewis Hind saw him emerge from a furrier’s, wearing ‘a befrogged and wonderfully befurred green overcoat’ and a Polish cap. Next week The World carried a letter from Whistler,

  OSCAR,—How dare you! What means this unseemly carnival in my Chelsea!

  Restore these things to Nathan, and never let me find you masquerading the streets in the combined costumes of a degraded Kossuth and Mr Mantalini!*

  [Butterfly symbol]5

  A heavy coat made sense in the American if not the English climate. As to lecturing, Wilde was aware, as he had been at Trinity and Oxford, that he had no talent for oratory. He repeatedly confessed as much in America. What he had to do was to cultivate a way of charming rather than coercing his audience. He felt incapable of ornate gestures or heavy emphasis, but told his friend Hermann Vezin, who gave him elocution lessons, ‘I want a natural style, with a touch of affectation.’ ‘Well,’ said Vezin, ‘and haven’t you got that, Oscar?’6 The sustained and mellifluous period, his particular talent, might go down well enough with Americans jaded by obvious showmanship.

  Wilde had yet to prepare a lecture, and probably was waiting to measure the cultural temperature before doing so. In other ways he was provident: he knew the English art and literature of his time extremely well; he was also acquainted with most of the distinguished people in the arts and in politics, Disraeli and Gladstone as well as Browning, Tennyson, Swinburne, Rossetti, Millais, Alma Tadema, Burne-Jones, Whistler. As for the United States, he had read Poe, Whitman, Hawthorne, Holmes, Lowell, Howells, Longfellow, and James, and would later make a point of reading more local figures such as Cable, Fawcett, and Father Ryan. He was determined to meet important people, and wrote letters to many friends asking for letters of introduction. One, addressed to James Russell Lowell, United States Minister in London, is an example:

  9, Charles Street

  Grosvenor Square.

  Dear Mr Lowell,

  I am sailing for America on Saturday by the Arizona to give a course of lectures on the modern artistic movement in England. Might I so far presume on our slight acquaintance as to ask you for some letters of introduction. I know what a passport to all that is brilliant and intellectual in America your name is.

  Believe me

  Truly yours,

  OSCAR WILDE

  Lowell responded by writing Oliver Wendell Holmes on 21 December 1881,

  Dear Doctor Holmes,—a clever and accomplished man should no more need an introduction than a fine day, but since a stranger can no longer establish a claim on us by coming in and seating himself as a suppliant at our fireside, let me ask you to be serviceable to the bearer of this, Mr Oscar Wilde, the report of whom has doubtless reached you and who is better than his report.

  Faithfully yours,

  J. R. LOWELL7

  He reviewed Wilde’s poems rather favorably in an unsigned notice for The Atlantic Monthly in January 1882.

  A great many people on both sides of the Atlantic were alerted to Wilde’s impending voyage. Whistler, probably informed that Wilde was going to tout the Pre-Raphaelites, remarked to him, ‘If you get sea-sick, throw up Burne-Jones.’8† The press began to present the tour as an event of importance, to be frowned on or smiled at, if not often simply welcomed. In England the newspapers were divided: the Pall Mall Gazette carried in December a series of letters, gradually increasing in unpleasantness, against aestheticism. One correspondent, who manfully signed himself ‘Titus Manlius’ and was probably on the editorial staff, sent in a letter entitled ‘Bunthorne and Bunkum.’ It contained, among other gratuitous slurs, ‘Probably no one laughs (in his sleeve) at and despises these mock-hysterical aesthetes more than does the Great Prophet himself—who, by the way, is not much of a prophet in his own country, Ireland, and not much of a poet in this.’ A leading article on 28 December disparaged and dismissed Wilde’s movement.

  Still, Wilde had friends in the English press, notably Henry Labouchere of Truth and Edmund Yates of The World. They could be relied upon for a kind word, and Labouchere in particular announced on 22 December 1881, in the opening pages of Truth:

  Mr Oscar Wilde is going to the Unit
ed States at the end of this week in the Arizona, having made arrangements to bring out his Republican play ‘Vera’ there, and during his stay he will deliver a series of lectures on modern life in its romantic aspect. The Americans are far more curious than we are to gaze at all those whose names, from one cause or another, have become household words, and in this I think they are wiser than we are, for it is difficult to realise the personality of anyone, without having seen him. Mr Wilde—say what one may of him—has a distinct individuality, and, therefore, I should fancy that his lectures will attract many who will listen and look.

  He continued to endorse Wilde’s tour as it proceeded. So, in a considered three-page article on 2 February 1882, ‘The Aesthete on His Travels,’ Labouchere quoted from favorable notices of Wilde’s reception, and suggested that hyper-aestheticism might be useful as an antidote to America’s hypermaterialism. Wilde had reason in St. Louis to call Labouchere ‘the best writer in Europe, a remarkable gentleman.’9

  Morse continued to solicit lecturing engagements for Wilde, citing his parents’ titles and talents, his Oxford education and prizes, his poems, his identification with the aesthetic movement. The title of Wilde’s lecture was no longer unguardedly ‘The Beautiful,’ but had become ‘The Artistic Character of the English Renaissance’; the final form was ‘The English Renaissance.’ For this title Wilde had gone back to his favorite book of Pater. Though Studies in the History of the Renaissance was ostensibly about the Italian Renaissance, it had included the researches of Winckelmann in the eighteenth century, and implied that a renaissance was available to those looking intensively for artistic pulsations in the modern world. Wilde used ‘renaissance’ with eloquent vagueness, allowing room in it for Ruskin, Pater, the Pre-Raphaelites, Whistler, and himself.