Guilty?—let those
Who know not what a thing temptation is,
Let those who have not walked as we have done,
In the red fire of passion, those whose lives
Are dull and colourless, in a word let those,
If any such there be, who have not loved,
Cast stones against you.
This is a theme to which Wilde’s plays regularly return, the pervasiveness of sinful passion, and its pardonableness. Guido is also aesthete enough to feel that his life has not been wasted:
What, Beatrice, have I not
Stood face to face with beauty; that is enough
For one man’s life.
In his letter to Mary Anderson, Wilde pointed to the sensational moments in the role she would be playing. The first act would culminate in her entrance as the Duchess. The Duchess’s character would be compounded first of pity and mercy, then, these being overcome by passion, of remorse, and then of passion and remorse together. There were, as he pointed out, comic bits to relieve the pathos. But, as with his later plays, he insisted that the supreme dramatic virtue was an intellectual basis. Unlike Dumas fils’s La Dame aux camélias, which lacked intellect and simply played upon the audience’s sympathy for a woman ‘who is dying young (and has a dreadful cough!),’ Wilde held that his own play showed passion as a kind of daemonic possession for which the possessed may ask and receive mercy.26
The correspondence with Mary Anderson was somewhat one-sided. She sent him some newspapers with notices of her current productions. But otherwise there was silence, and at the end of April, Wilde, funds almost gone, cabled to her. A return cable arrived from Victoria, British Columbia, as he was sitting with Sherard. He opened it, read it without emotion, tore a tiny strip off the blue form, rolled it into a pellet, and put it in his mouth. Then he passed the cable over and said, ‘Robert, this is very tedious.’ Mary Anderson had given a definite no. ‘We shan’t be able to dine with the Duchess tonight,’ he said. ‘It is rather a case of Duke Humphrey. But what do you say to a choucroute garnie at Ziminer’s?’e Sherard had been a guest for weeks because Wilde had insisted that ‘Friends always share,’ but now he rose to the occasion and asked Wilde, ‘Will you not be my guest for once, at a little place on the other side of the water, where they don’t do you too badly?’ Wilde agreed, and Sherard, who knew Paris well, led him by a circuitous route to a side door of the Café de Paris. When they were inside Wilde fell in with the joke, saying, ‘Quite a nice little place!’ Their conversation did not touch on the Duchess, but they went to the Folies-Bergère afterwards, and Wilde, finding himself stared at, insisted that they leave well before the curtain. This was the only sign that he was upset.28
Mary Anderson’s letter arrived some days later. It offered no comfort:
Dear Mr Wilde:
… The play in its present form, I fear, would no more please the public of today than would ‘Venice Preserved,’ or ‘Lucretia Borgia.’
Neither of us can afford failure now, and your Duchess in my hands would not succeed, as the part does not fit me. My admiration of your ability is as great as ever. I hope you will appreciate my feelings in the matter.…29
It was a major reverse, but Wilde’s amour-propre was not to be underestimated. Of his major talent he had no doubts, and Miss Anderson’s were irrelevant. He could prove it any night he chose by charming people who thought they disliked him. Fortunately, he still had his arrangement with Marie Prescott for Vera. He had rewritten Act II at her request, and also the love scene at the end of Act IV. She asked him to write in a part for a child, and he complied. The actress was pleased with the revisions. She was grateful to him for sending a samovar that Sarah Bernhardt had presented to him as an item of Slavic decor. The rehearsals would begin at Long Branch, and she asked him to come by 18 August to attend the final rehearsals.
Les Décadents
‘I believe in the race,’ she cried.… ‘It has development.’
‘Decay fascinates me more.’
‘What of art?’ she asked.
‘It is a malady.’
Wilde’s theatrical efforts did not interfere with his social life in Paris. This time he met mostly older writers and artists, as eight years afterwards he would meet younger ones. He gave a clever speech about his American tour to some American artists and journalists who entertained him at dinner. At the house of the painter Giuseppe de Nittis he talked with Degas, Cazin, and the Pissarros, on the way out remarking, with Whistlerian vanity, ‘I was quite amazing.’ The power and vitality he exuded seemed to have been remarkable, even for him. He brought Sherard along to the Vaudeville Theatre to see Bernhardt in the title role of Sardou’s Fédora. It was extraordinarily close to his own Vera, though independently conceived, for Sardou also had scented a good subject in the nihilists of Turgenev and Dostoevsky, dashed with aristocracy and seasoned with love. As the Princess Fédora, involved in a nihilist plot and victim of a series of misapprehensions, Bernhardt was able to span several octaves of emotion as she loved, grieved, hated, dissimulated, conspired, confessed in anguish, and committed suicide. It was as silly a play as Vera, but with a slicker sense of theatre. Clearly Wilde had no hope of producing Vera in Paris, with or without Bernhardt, and The Duchess of Padua, in blank verse, did not lend itself to translation or production.
Whatever consternation he may have felt he suppressed. Between the acts of Fédora Wilde and Sherard were ushered into the little salon next to her dressing room, as Sarah Bernhardt changed costumes behind the curtains. She put her head through them long enough to welcome Wilde with her warmest smile. Her current lover, Jean Richepin, was less pleased. Some days later they were invited to her house on the avenue de Villiers at the corner of the rue Fortune. On the way Wilde bought a mass of wallflowers from a street hawker. Sherard thought them vulgar, but Sarah, stretched on a cluster of many-colored cushions by the fireplace, received them with pleasure. As an old friend from London, Wilde commanded more deference here than in the greenroom. Alexandre Parodi, who had written Rome vaincue, Sarah’s first triumph, addressed him respectfully as ‘Maître.’30
It was perhaps on this occasion that Wilde had a conversation, which he himself recorded, with Coquelin, who asked him what The Duchess of Padua was about. Wilde replied: ‘Mon drame? du style seulement. Hugo et Shakespeare ont partagé tous les sujets: il est impossible d’être original, même dans le péché: ainsi il n’y a pas d’émotions, seulement des adjectifs extraordinaires. La fin est assez tragique, mon héros au moment de son triomphe fait un épigramme qui manque tout à fait d’effet, alors on le condamne à être académicien avec discours forcés.’f Coquelin shifted to ampler topics:
COQUELIN: Qu’est-ce que c’est la civilisation, Monsieur Wilde?
EGO: L’amour du beau.
COQUELIN: Qu’est-ce que c’est le beau?
EGO: Ce que les bourgeois appellent le laid.
COQUELIN: Et ce que les bourgeois appellent le beau?
EGO: Cela n’existe pas.g31
The actor seems to have enjoyed rather than resented the enigmatic responses.
Sarah Bernhardt told them of her latest protégé, Maurice Rollinat, whom she had presented to the world the previous November as a talented poet and tragedian, an inspired musician, a marvelous artist, and ‘one of the curiosities of Paris.’ Rollinat had just published his second book of poems, Les Névroses, and was being talked about as a second Baudelaire. Wilde contrived to meet him at the house of the hospitable painter Giuseppe de Nittis. De Nittis painted picturesque street scenes of Paris. His house was full of japonaiseries, which reflected a taste he shared with his friend Edmond de Goncourt. (Goncourt’s most recent novel, La Faustin [1882], was dedicated to de Nittis.) Wilde, his back to a tapestried wall, talked with Degas, Cazin, and the Pissarros, taking stock of Rollinat himself, in his mid-thirties, with fiery eyes and a nervous and impassioned manner. Albert Wolff, writing in Le Figaro on 9 November 1882, had described him as the very figu
re of the artist. On being asked to recite a poem after dinner, Rollinat obliged with ‘Le Soliloque de Troppmann’ from his Les Névroses. This required gesturing and grimacing, for Troppmann was a monster who first killed a husband, his grandson, and then his wife and their five children. The soliloquy described in detail his thoughts as he tricked the mother and children into his house and carried out his plan. What made the poem impressive was its total absence of compunction, as if evil had its assured place in the scheme of things. (The same method is used in Ten, Pencil and Poison.’) Wilde registered the poem’s power, and invited Rollinat to dinner.h
Rollinat in turn invited Wilde, and in a letter accepting Wilde wrote, at three o’clock in the morning, that he had just reread from Rollinat’s book the poem ‘La Vache au taureau.’ The poem describes two young country people, a boy and a girl, who watch the mating of a cow and bull, and silently recognize that that night they will be repeating the same process. The description of copulation was strong, and moved Wilde to write with genuine enthusiasm, ‘c’est un chef d’oeuvre. Il y a dedans un vrai soufflé de la Nature. Je vous en félicite. Depuis le De Natura de Lucretius, le monde n’a rien encore lu de pareil: c’est l’hymne la plus magnifique que la Vénus des Champs a jamais reçu, car c’est le plus simple.’i What drew Wilde particularly was Rollinat’s affinity to Baudelaire. This was evident throughout Les Névroses, in which the opening poem, ‘Le Fantôme du crime’ (dedicated to Edmond Haraucourt, whose own recent volume was avowedly ‘poèmes hysteriques’), offered
Le meurtre, le viol, le vol, le parricide
as Baudelaire’s ‘Au Lecteur’ had offered
La sottise, l’erreur, le péché, la lésine.j
Rollinat’s subjects also included suicide, disease, hypochondria, cadavers, embalming, live burial, specters, madness, diabolism, and putrefaction, with Poe presiding as dark angel. Sherard was convinced that Rollinat was taking drugs and in need of help. ‘If you saw a man throw himself into the river, would you go after him?’ he felt prompted to ask Wilde, apparently indifferent to Rollinat’s addiction. ‘I should consider it an act of gross impertinence to do so,’ Wilde replied.33
The spokesman for the English Renaissance had stumbled into Paris en pleine décadence. Decadence characterized two new reviews which had just begun their short lives in 1882, Le Chat noir and La Nouvelle Rive gauche. Jean Lorrain, who would dedicate one of his stories to Wilde, began in 1882 to take up the theme of homosexuality, first in relation to women (‘Modernité,’ 2 September 1882, in Le Chat noir) and then to men (‘Bathylle,’ 1 July 1883, in the same review). Whether or not Wilde saw these, he must have discussed the subject with his new friend Paul Bourget, who was occupied in writing a book on decadence in contemporary literature. Then there was Verlaine, whom Wilde met once at a café. It was a bad time for him; his lover Lucien Létinois had died of malaria a year before. Wilde was put off by Verlaine’s seedy appearance, but recognized his genius. Like Lorrain, Verlaine was beginning to publish poems about homosexuality, and may have recited to Wilde his recent poem, ‘Langueur,’ which begins, ‘Je suis l’Empire à la fin de la Décadence.’ Besides writing about sexual aberration and decay, in November 1882 Verlaine had published ‘Art poétique,’ a poem which dismissed all verse not musical and nuanced as mere littérature. Artistic composition, it seemed, entailed moral decomposition. For Wilde, who had been celebrating the ‘sunlit heights,’ it was a dizzy delight to find himself in the decadent depths. No wonder ‘The Sphinx’ oozed into existence.
He was eager to meet a pillar of French letters, the surviving brother, Edmond, of the frères Goncourt. He sent him a letter with a book,
Monsieur,
Daignez recevoir mes poèmes, témoignage de mon admiration infinie pour l’auteur de La Faustin.
Je serai bien content de penser qu’il y aura une place, peut-être, pour mes premières fleurs de poésie, près de vos Watteau, et de vos Boucher, et de ce trésor de laque, d’ivoire, et de bronze, que dans votre Maison d’un Artiste vous avez pour toujours immortalisé.k
The approach was successful, since a letter from Wilde to Théodore Duret says he will accompany Duret to Goncourt’s on the following Wednesday, and adds praise for another Goncourt novel: ‘il est, pour moi, un des plus grand maîtres de la prose moderne, et son roman de Manette Salomon est un chef-d’oeuvre.’34
Manette Salomon, along with La Faustin, was an offshoot of the aesthetic movement: both dealt with art and its relation to life. Manette, a Jewish model, dominates her lover and (expressing Goncourt’s misogyny) destroys his talent. La Faustin was closer to what Wilde was looking for, especially since the artist is an actress, modeled on Bernhardt and Rachel. Here the conflict of life and art is bald enough: La Faustin is better at playing at love than at loving. This point is driven home to her English lover, Lord Annandale, in a deathbed scene. As Annandale grimaces with pain, La Faustin unthinkingly reproduces his grimace, then realizes that he has seen her mimicry. He summons his last strength to cry out to his attendants in English, with ‘all the implacability of the Saxon race,’ ‘Turn out that woman!’ She frantically kisses his hands, but he repulses her: ‘Une artiste … vous n’êtes que cela … la femme incapable d’aimer.’ And, shunning her imploring look, he repeats even more peremptorily, ‘Turn out that woman!’ (A helpful footnote explains that the English phrase means ‘Mettez cette femme dehors!’) This ending, the most memorable part of the novel, stayed with Wilde as a model for a curtain speech. In ‘The Sphinx,’ he concludes with the adjuration ‘Get hence! Get hence!’ and in Salome, Herod, turning to see Salome kiss the head with necrophilic passion, cries to the guards, ‘Tuez cette femme!’
What could not have failed to draw Wilde’s attention was that the aesthetic movement, which he had celebrated in the United States for lofty idealism, had a much more dubious aspect which was being enthusiastically developed in France. In the American lectures he had naively argued that we must aestheticize our lives by surrounding ourselves with beautiful objects. Here was a novel which showed that such aestheticizing might become unwholesome. La Faustin contributed to the story of Sibyl Vane in The Picture of Dorian Gray; Sibyl loses her powers as an actress by falling in love, reversing La Faustin’s behavior. More precisely, both possibilities are mustered by La Faustin. She feels the need to be in love in order to play Phèdre, but warns her lover that, if she should leave the stage, he would cease to love her in six months. A contrary impulse makes her renounce her career for his sake, only to find that without it life is drab. A husband may be good, but a theatre audience is better. Wilde found in such tensions between life and art a source of dramatic excitement, and developed them variously in the next fifteen years.
There was something else in La Faustin which he found fascinating. Lord Annandale has a friend, the Hon. George Selwyn, who exerted a baleful influence upon his youth, leading him towards unspecified ‘salissantes débauches,’ from which his love for La Faustin has rescued him. Selwyn pays a visit to the lovers, and Annandale explains to La Faustin that his friend is ‘un sadique,’ ‘un homme aux amours … aux appétits des sens déréglés, maladifs [a sadist, a man whose love affairs and appetites are disordered, sick].’ As if to confirm this view, Selwyn, watching a hen yard with La Faustin, points out two homosexual cocks who remain apart from the other fowl of both sexes. La Faustin is shocked and hopes for an end to his visit; it comes rather suddenly when he receives a letter headed ‘Chaumière de Dolmancé.’ The name means nothing to her, but everything to the two men, who know that Dolmancé is the philosopher in La Philosophie dans le boudoir, one of the most terrible of Sade’s fantasies. Goncourt seems to raise the specter of sadism gratuitously, then to drop it; it has no importance in the plot; neither Annandale nor Selwyn is in the least believable. But the sense of ministering to the ‘dérèglement de tous les sens’ (as Rimbaud called it) must have encouraged Wilde to conceive of Dorian’s evil influence as a titled Englishman, though Lord Henry echoes mildly the gamy ap
petites suggested by Goncourt. Dorian’s bizarre loves derive from La Faustin as well as from A Rebours, a book influenced by it, and one which pays tribute to Goncourt’s novel explicitly and implicitly.
Wilde’s visit to Edmond de Goncourt’s ‘grenier d’Auteuil’ took place on 21 April 1883. Keeper of journals and recorder of malice, Goncourt wrote down some of Wilde’s conversation. It amused him, especially when Swinburne was discussed. There was another encounter with Goncourt on 5 May. Returning from dinner at de Nittis’s, Goncourt wrote in his journal of having seen Wilde again, disparaging him as homosexual (‘au sexe douteux’) but quoting some of his reminiscences of America.
To listen to heralds of decadence after heralding a renaissance was invigorating for Wilde. What he had said in America was too wholesome to be stomached in Paris—even Sherard’s gross rebuke about the Venus de Milo had demonstrated that. On the other hand, Parisian decadence, pretending candor, was edged with absurdity, like his own contribution, ‘The Sphinx.’ Three months in Paris stopped him from speaking so glibly about a renaissance, but perhaps—and this was a slowly acquired intimation—it would go down with a dash of decadence. Such a blend had been foreshadowed, but forsaken, by Pater. Wilde had more courage.
Meanwhile, decadent rather than renascent, Wilde was running out of his American money, though he lent some to Sherard, who wanted to return to London. Wilde followed him there in mid-May.
* ‘Artist in poetry, and poet; two very different things: cf. Gautier and Hugo.
‘To write, I must have yellow satin.
‘Poetry is idealised grammar.
‘I must have lions in golden cages: it’s frightful—after eating human flesh lions like bones, and they’re never given them.’
† In a review of a book by Balzac, he said, ‘A steady course of Balzac reduces our living friends to shadows and our acquaintances to the shadows of shades; who would care to go out to an evening party to meet Tomkins, the friend of one’s boyhood, when one can sit at home with Lucien de Rubempré? It is pleasanter to have the entrée to Balzac’s society than to receive cards from all the duchesses of Mayfair.’6
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