Oscar Wilde

by Richard Ellmann

  ‡ In later life Wilde told Augustus John about his friend Ernest La Jeunesse, who spoke in a falsetto. His publisher crudely maintained that it was because of impotence. La Jeunesse, hearing of this, reciprocated by making a long but ultimately successful play for the publisher’s wife.12 It was, Wilde said, ‘The Greatest Repartee in History.’

  § ‘Where are our lovers? / They are in the tomb.’

  ‖ ‘And yet you will come to resemble this filth, / This horrible infection. / Star of my eyes, sun of my being, / You, my angel and my passion!’

  a ‘With a sublime look he cried joyfully: / “The future! the future! the future belongs to me!” ’ … ‘No, the future belongs to no one! / Sire, the future belongs to God!’

  b ‘Wilde jotted down a remark by Degas that interested him, ‘Il y a quelque chose plus terrible encore que le bourgeois—c’est l’homme qui nous singe [There is something more awful than the bourgeois—it’s the man who apes us].’

  c Degas, a man with a scorching tongue, commented to Sickert about Wilde, ‘Il a l’air de jouer Lor’ Byron dans un théâtre de banlieue [He has the look of someone playing Lor’ Byron in a suburban theatre].’ As for Whistler, Degas said to him, ‘Whistler, you behave as though you have no talent,’17 and when Whistler was preening himself on a new flat-brimmed hat, Degas said to him, ‘Oui; il vous va très bien; mais ce n’est pas ça qui nous rendra l’Alsace et la Lorraine [Yes; it suits you very nicely; but that’s not how we’ll get back Alsace and Lorraine].’

  d Wilde’s hairdresser delighted him with his conversation, from which Wilde noted down: ‘J’aime assez les applaudissements, mais enfin j’ai trouvé que le public ne peut pas découvrir les fautes: dans les arts, monsieur, on peut toujours dissimuler; moi-même j’ai fait des fautes: mais je les ai toujours caché.… Quand je vais dans un nouveau pays j’observe les coiffures; je sais bien qu’il y a des gens qui s’occupent avec les bâtiments publics mais je me fiche de tout ça: pour moi rien n’existe que les coiffures … mais pour être coiffeur il faut être physionomiste aussi.’21

  [‘I quite like applause, but actually I’ve found that the public can’t spot mistakes; in the arts, sir, you can always dissimulate; I myself have made mistakes; but I have always hidden them.… When I travel in a new country I always look at the hairstyles; I know well enough that there are people who busy themselves with public buildings, but I don’t care about all that; for me nothing counts but hairstyles … but to be a hairdresser, one must be a physiognomist too.’]

  e (To dine with Duke Humphrey means to go without dinner.) Wilde once dropped in unexpectedly on the Sickerts and asked if he could join them for a meal, since he was going to some house nearby. Mrs Sickert explained that they had just had midday dinner, but could give him, as the Scots say, ‘an egg to tea.’ Wilde, when the egg had been served, stared disconsolately at it, as if he had never seen one before. Oswald Sickert laughed.27

  f ‘My drama? It’s all about style. Between them, Hugo and Shakespeare have used up all the subjects; it is impossible to be original, even in sin: so there are no emotions, just extraordinary adjectives. The ending is quite tragic; my hero, at his moment of triumph, makes an epigram which falls flat, so he’s condemned to make forced speeches as an Academician.’

  g ‘C: What is civilization, Mr Wilde? / E: The love of the beautiful. / C: What is the beautiful? / E: What the bourgeois call the ugly. / C: And what the bourgeois call the beautiful? / E: That does not exist.’

  h His conversation impressed Wilde enough for him to write it down. On a page headed Rollinat are the following notes:

  Il n’y a qu’une forme pour le beau mais pour chaque chose chaque individu a une formule: ainsi on ne comprend pas les poètes [There is only one form for the beautiful but for each object everyone has a formula: for this reason, poets cannot be understood].

  Je ne crois pas au progrès: mais je crois à la stagnation de la perversité humaine [I don’t believe in progress: but I do believe in the stagnation of human perversity].

  Il me faut les rêves, le fantastique: j’admire les chaises Japonaises parce qu’il[s] n’ont pas etaient [sic] faites pour s’asseoir [Dreams and the fantastic are necessary to me: I admire Japanese chairs because they have not been made to sit on].

  —his idea of music continuing the beauty of poetry without its idea.32

  i ‘… it’s a masterpiece. There is a true breath of nature in it. I congratulate you on it. Not since the De Natura of Lucretius has the world ever read its like: it is the most magnificent hymn ever received by Venus of the Fields, because it is the simplest.’

  j Rollinat’s ‘Murder, rape, theft, parricide’; Baudelaire’s ‘Stupidity, error, sin, meanness.’

  k ‘Dear Sir,

  Pray accept my poems as testimony of my infinite admiration for the author of La Faustin.

  ‘I shall be very happy to think that my first poetic flowers may perhaps find a place near your Watteaus and your Bouchers, and the treasure in lacquer, ivory, and bronze which you have forever immortalized in your Maison d’un artiste.’

  CHAPTER IX

  Two Kinds of Stage

  LORD CAVERSHAM: Damme, sir, it is your duty to get married. You can’t be always living for pleasure. Every man of position is married nowadays. Bachelors are not fashionable any more. They are a damaged lot. Too much is known about them. You must get a wife, sir.

  Wilde Nubile

  Wilde stayed for a time with his mother at 116 Park Street, Grosvenor Square, getting together enough money to resume being host as well as guest. An obliging moneylender, probably one named E. Levy whom he had dealt with before in the United States, lent him £1200. Wilde also exerted himself, with uncertain success, to call in a debt from Steele Mackaye. He wrote Mackaye on 17 May 1883,

  116 Park Street, Grosvenor Square

  My dear Steele,

  Will you kindly let me have the $200 I lent you. I have had a great many expenses over here, and bills of my Oxford days (black and white spectres of dead dissipations!) have crowded on me as thick as the quails in the desert, and not as nice. Norman [Forbes-Robertson] told me he saw you in New York looking brilliant, I have been in Paris and written my play for Mary Anderson. I am greatly pleased with it, it is the strongest work I have ever done, and got capital comedy in it, and wonderful picturesque effects. I hope all your people are well and have not forgotten me. I will expect to hear soon from you.

  Very sincerely yours

  OSCAR WILDE1

  The letter was noticeably silent about Mary Anderson’s failure to be as pleased with The Duchess of Padua as its author. Nor did he mention its lack of progress in London. Julia Frankau’s sister, Mrs Aria, got Henry Irving to read it. ‘Oscar has certainly read The Merchant of Venice,’ she remarked. Irving replied, ‘I expect so, and thought little of it.’

  Wilde was unequivocally high-spirited when he reported his reception in England. He wrote to Sherard, ‘the splendid whirl and swirl of life in London sweeps me from my Sphinx,’ as if the Sphinx were muse as well as poem. ‘Society must be amazed, and my Neronian coiffure has amazed it. Nobody recognises me, and everybody tells me I look young: that is delightful, of course.’ The World took note of his new style in amiable doggerel:

  Our Oscar is with us again, but, O,

  He is changed who was once so fair!

  Has the iron gone into his soul? O no!

  It has only gone over his hair.2

  Wilde could feel he had earned a respite from work by his sporadic application in Paris. Still, of his two plays only Vera had the certainty of being staged, and that was not until August. He had several months in which to meditate the wisdom of his mother’s urgings that he and Willie improve their financial position by marriage. Willie was only too ready, yet women either laughed him off or lost interest as his enthusiasm waned. His brother Oscar moved slowly too, though not for the same reason. The stirrings of varied impulses, the kisses of Walt Whitman and Sherard, made him delay.

&n
bsp; There was no doubt, however, that marriage would silence the gossip. If he felt ennobled by victimization, he liked better not being victimized, a point not always recognized by students of his character. Punch had recently called him a ‘Mary-Ann,’ Bodley had spoken of him in The New York Times as ‘epicene,’ and if Wilde could not yet have read the entry in Goncourt’s 1883 Journal picturing him as ‘au sexe douteux,’ he could guess that others took this view. A wife would save him from the moralists, and a rich one from the moneylenders. He would no longer need to make laborious conquests of those who would have been unresistingly at his feet if they had not been put off by rumor. Married, he might confront society without having to affront it. Stability, uxoriousness, and routine might prove boring—Pater had warned that failure lies in forming habits—but Wilde could at least imagine playing the role of husband as debonairly as that of bachelor.

  The idea of marriage was in the air. Florence Balcombe had been the first prospect, in a dreamy future, until Bram Stoker carried her away in the importunate present. Then Lillie Langtry had occupied Wilde’s thoughts, though scarcely as a potential wife, since she was still married and as hard up as he was. The second woman he seriously thought of marrying, at the beginning of the 1880s, was Violet Hunt, daughter of the landscape artist Alfred William Hunt and the novelist Margaret Hunt, and destined to be a novelist herself. Wilde described her as ‘the sweetest violet in England.’ They had met in London when she was not yet seventeen. ‘I feel like a young conqueror,’ he said as they talked intensely together. ‘We will rule the world—you and I—you with your looks and I with my wits. But you will write too, surely, you who have inherited the literary art from your dear mother, you who have assisted at two tragedies and a triumph.’ (The tragedies were Rossetti and Swinburne, the triumph Robert Browning.) In July 1881 she wrote to congratulate him on his poems, which proved ‘you quite deserve your four Burne-Jones drawings!’ He responded that she made up for the ‘Slander, Ridicule, and Envy’ the poems had awakened. In her autobiography, The Flurried Years (1926), Violet Hunt recalled how one day, speaking of maps of Africa, Wilde said, ‘Oh, Miss Violet, think of a map drawn of a whole continent, and beside the names of an insignificant city or two a blank and: Hic sunt lẹones! Miss Violet, let you and me go there.’ To which she replied, ‘And get eaten by lions?’ His more serious proposal was perhaps made in 1880. She does not mention it in her autobiography but, according to Douglas Goldring in South Lodge, constantly boasted of it in later life.3 The same practical sense which made her fear lions made her reluctant to marry one. She later lived, unmarried and undevoured, with Ford Madox Ford.

  There were two other prospects. One was the charming Charlotte Montefiore, whose brother Leonard had been up at Balliol when Wilde was at Magdalen. (He died in September 1879, aged only twenty-six.) Wilde seems to have proposed to her but was refused, probably in 1880 or 1881. That evening he sent her a note: ‘Charlotte, I am so sorry about your decision. With your money and my brain we could have gone so far.’4 She tore it up but remembered it. The other prospect was better. It had begun in May 1881, perhaps soon after the refusals of Violet Hunt and Charlotte Montefiore. Wilde went with his mother to call on a woman belonging to the Atkinson family, whom the Wildes had known in Dublin. His hostess introduced her granddaughter, Constance Lloyd, three years younger than Wilde (she was bom 2 January 1858). Constance was five feet eight inches tall, according to her brother; she had long wavy chestnut-colored hair, prominent eyes, a good figure.5 She was interested in music, painting, embroidery, could read Dante in Italian (and did), was logical, mathematical, shy yet fond of talking. Wilde paid her marked attention. On leaving the house he said to Lady Wilde, ‘By the by, Mama, I think of marrying that girl.’6 Constance’s father had died in 1874; she did not live with her remarried mother—their relationship was strained from her childhood—but, since the age of twenty, with her grandfather, a Queen’s Counsel named John Horatio Lloyd.* Lloyd had a mansion at 100 Lancaster Gate, and a niece, Emily Lloyd (Constance’s aunt), to look after it for him. The understanding between Wilde and Constance was slow in forming. Lady Wilde invited her to one of her Saturday afternoons, and Oscar was there. Emily Lloyd invited Wilde to tea at Lancaster Gate on 6 June 1881. Constance wrote of the visit to her brother Otho who had known Wilde slightly when they were both up at Oxford. ‘O.W. came yesterday at about 5.30 (by which time I was shaking with fright!) and stayed for half an hour, begged me to come and see his mother again soon, which little request I need hardly say I have kept to myself. [Emily Lloyd did not encourage her niece to go about unchaperoned.] I can’t help liking him, because when he’s talking to me alone he’s never a bit affected, and speaks naturally, excepting that he uses better language than most people.’ Otho must have regaled her with some Oxford misadventure of Wilde, for she added, ‘I’m glad they didn’t duck him though you would have enjoyed it!’8

  Wilde became a frequent visitor: Lloyd, as well as Constance and her brother Otho, took a liking to him. Aunt Emily, however, kept her distance. While Wilde was in the States in 1882 and in Paris for the first months of 1883, Constance attended an art school, and inclined towards an aesthetic style of dress. Their relations began to encourage the connection: in December 1882, Charles Hemphill (sergeant-at-law and later Baron Hemphill), whom the Wildes had known as a fellow resident of Merrion Square, called on Lady Wilde and ‘praised Constance immensely.’ She wrote knowingly to her son in the States, ‘I had nearly in mind to say I would like her for a daughter-in-law, but I did not. It was Constance told him where we lived. I thought the visit looked encouraging.’9 For her part, she had Constance and Otho to an at-home on 28 February 1883, and sang the praises of Oscár.

  Wilde had no sooner returned from Paris in May than he invited Constance to come to his mother’s house on the 16th. She came, chaperoned by Otho, and heard him remonstrate with Switzerland for being ‘that dreadful place—so vulgar with its big ugly mountains, all black and white like an enormous photograph.’ He preferred everything small, he said, but well proportioned to give the effect of height. Constance and Otho attended a reception at Lady Wilde’s next day, where Oscar failed to turn up; but on the 19th he appeared at the Lloyds’ with his hair cut short. Invitations continued on both sides. Constance had agreed to come to Lady Wilde’s on the 24th, but was tempted away to the Isle of Wight. In apologizing, she invited the Wildes for the 28th. Lady Wilde accepted, urged her to come to her own reception on the 26th, and said of the missed occasion, ‘Oscar talked like Plato, divinely, but said at intervals that women were not to be trusted, and that you had broken your promise.’

  Otho Lloyd was rather baffled by Wilde’s interest in his sister, but put it down to her intelligence. Constance, who had once been engaged, only to have her fiancé break it off, did not confide in him. At the beginning of June, Wilde and his mother visited the Lloyds, and Constance merely remarked to Otho that in her long conversation she and Wilde had not agreed on a single thing. On the 3rd, at Lady Wilde’s, Oscar invited them both to the Exhibition of Fisheries next day. Constance put him off till the 7th. When they got there, they saw little of the fish, because Wilde was talking the whole time, concluding as they parted, ‘I hope that you have enjoyed your stay as much as I have mine.’ On reaching home, Constance was relieved to find only an aunt about, and said, ‘O how delightful it is to see you, Aunt Carrie, after spending three hours and a half with a clever man.’

  By this time Otho had decided that anyone but Wilde would have been assumed to be in love. On 30 June he and Constance attended, as Wilde did, a reception for a member of a society advocating the rights of women. Constance, herself unsure what Wilde intended, emboldened herself to remark, ‘You know everybody says, Mr Wilde, that you do not really mean half of what you say.’ Wilde threw back his head and laughed. A few days later, on 6 July, at Lady Wilde’s, Wilde as usual was devoting himself to Constance when his mother reproved him for not speaking to other guests. He moved away, but Otho
noticed he followed Constance with his eyes. By this time Constance’s mother felt that something would come of the relationship. A week later Wilde asked particularly for Constance to come to Lady Wilde’s that day, because it would be his last chance of seeing her before he went to America. It was his most declarative statement to date, and of course she went. But he had one concern more pressing than matrimony on his mind.

  Verbal Arts

  The Nihilist, that strange martyr who has no faith, who goes to the stake without enthusiasm, and dies for what he does not believe in, is a purely literary product. He was invented by Tourgénieff and completed by Dostoieffski.

  If Constance Lloyd was timidly taking her place in his mind, his nihilist heroine Vera Sabouroff was boldly established there. Much depended upon Marie Prescott’s success with his play. Wilde did not greatly admire her as an actress, but she had the merit, exceptional among readers of Vera, of liking the play tremendously. During the early months of 1883 they corresponded about it intensively. There were still some points about the finances to be settled, but Marie Prescott went ahead with the arrangements. Rather to his dismay, she booked for four weeks at the Union Square Theatre beginning on 20 August, when the heat in New York was bound to be intolerable. Wilde protested; she explained vigorously that no other theatre was available, that she could not afford to start the play in high season, that it must open in New York so that theatre managers elsewhere would book it in repertory, and that she would bring it back to New York at Christmas. Since she was taking the entire financial risk, she had her way.