A few days later Wilde wrote from Paris to a friend what The New York Times (possibly through Bodley again) called on 8 June ‘a silly and thoroughly characteristic letter.’ In it Wilde proclaimed that ‘he has not been disappointed in married life.’ The negative phrasing may suggest that he had been thinking the unthinkable. The Times paraphrase went on: ‘He feels confident of his ability to sustain its labours and anxieties, and sees an opportunity in his new relation, of realizing a poetical conception which he has long entertained. He says that Lord Beaconsfield taught the peers of England a new style of oratory, and that he intends to set an example of the pervading influence of art on matrimony.’ This was a heavy burden of theory for Constance Wilde to bear. For the moment the aestheticizing of marriage only meant her being pliantly dressed up, and commissioning the Tite Street house to be done up in extraordinary fashion by Godwin. (Wilde’s only self-transformation was to have his hair cut short and waved instead of curled.) But latent was a darker possibility, that some place would have to be found in this marriage for low aesthetic as well as for high aesthetic, for sphinxes and gamy savors as for stately conversations and rapturous orthodox couplings.
The outward events of the wedding trip were entertaining enough. The young couple went to the Salon to see Whistler’s paintings; they visited an exhibition of Meissonnier; they saw a light opera called Lilt; and, best of all, they watched Sarah Bernhardt play or, as Constance Wilde said, ‘storm’ the part of Lady Macbeth. Besides Mme Bernhardt only two other French friends are mentioned. At breakfast with Catulle Mendès, Wilde remarked, ‘There is no modern literature outside France.’33 Paul Bourget came to meet Constance, and Vernon Lee (pen name of Violet Paget) remembered his comment: ‘J’aime cette femme—j’aime la femme annulée et tendre.’34 Another friend in attendance was John Donoghue, the Chicago sculptor whom Wilde had helped. John Singer Sargent had the couple to dinner, and Henrietta Reubell, a wealthy American who had a salon and was a friend of Henry James, entertained them. She committed the barbarism of asking the name of Constance Wilde’s dressmaker so that she might order an identical dress—to the horror of Constance’s designer-husband. After Paris the young couple spent a week in Dieppe.
An important element of the honeymoon was recorded in the Morning News interview. It was not an event, but a book, a book which was to be for Wilde in the eighties what Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance had been in the seventies. Joris-Karl Huysmans’s A Rebours had been published just two weeks before, in mid-May, and shook up the literary scene. Whistler rushed to congratulate Huysmans the next day on his ‘marvellous book.’ Bourget, at that time a close friend of Huysmans as of Wilde, admired it greatly; Paul Valéry called it his ‘Bible and bedside book,’ and this is what it became for Wilde. He said to the Morning News, ‘This last book of Huysmans is one of the best I have ever seen.’35 It was being reviewed everywhere as the guidebook of decadence. At the very moment that Wilde was falling in with social patterns, he was confronted with a book which even in its title defied them. The book’s hero, Des Esseintes, was dandy, scholar, débauchée, his appetites and pleasures raffinés beyond all example. When Dorian Gray reads a book resembling Huysmans’s novel, ‘The hero, the wonderful young Parisian … became to him a kind of prefiguring type of himself. And indeed, the whole book seemed to him to contain the story of his own life, written before he had lived it.’ Wilde could regard it as the exfoliation of Pater’s theory of self-development, for Des Esseintes ‘spent his life trying to realize in the nineteenth century all the passions and modes of thought that belonged to every century except his own, and to sum up, as it were, in himself, the various modes through which the world-spirit had ever passed, loving for their mere artificiality those renunciations that men have unwisely called virtue, as much as those natural rebellions that men still call sin.’ In short, ‘It was a poisonous book.’ Wilde drank of it as a chaser after the love potions of matrimony.
Part of the book’s attraction was the author’s reserved attitude. Huysmans could not be said to endorse his hero, for each chapter was a little parable of spent passion for books, perfumes, jewels, or sexual pleasures. While each burst of energy is deflated, and Huysmans withholds sympathy, the sense of the hero’s jusqu’au-boutisme almost redeems the absurdity and prevents his being altogether discredited. Certain sections had a staggering effect upon Wilde. One was Huysmans’s description of Gustave Moreau’s paintings of Salome, another the description of English Pre-Raphaelite paintings as evoking not the month of April, as Wilde had said in America, but of October. The art which Wilde had thought of as part of his renaissance turned up as part of Huysmans’s decadence. Again the possibility of uniting the two movements must have occurred to him. He had always been both comme il faut and à rebours too, Apollonian gentleman and Dionysian subverter. There was a singular passage in Huysmans’s book: Des Esseintes recalls a sexual exploit which, being homosexual, was different from all others he had experienced, and in memory dominated them. For some months he had taken up with a young man. According to André Raffalovich’s hostile witness, Wilde was particularly fascinated by this part of A Rebours.36 The book as a whole revived those months which Wilde had spent the year before among the decadents, months when he had written ‘The Harlot’s House’ and much of ‘The Sphinx.’ It summoned him towards an underground life totally at variance with his aboveboard role as Constance’s husband.
The ambiguous nature of Paris as helmsman of Wilde’s bateau ivre on its wedding trip was mildly reflected in notes for poems which he jotted down in that city. One, entitled ‘Impression de Paris: Le Jardin des Tuileries,’ wholesomely described children running about his chair as he sat in the gardens:
And sometimes in shrill flight they flee,
And sometimes rush, a boisterous band,
And, tiny hand on tiny hand,
Climb up a black and leafless tree.
Ah, cruel tree! if I were you
And children climbed me, for their sake,
Though it be winter, I would break
Into spring blossoms white and blue.
On his return he touched up these lines and contributed them to a benefit volume for a hospital, entitled In a Good Cause. His friend Laura Troubridge made an illustration of it, complaining the while that the poem was not to her taste. Still, it suggested some of the transfigurative imagery that Wilde was soon to use in his fairy tales.
On the same page with these jottings were others in keeping with another mood:
The moon is like a yellow seal
Upon a dark blue envelope,
And down below the dusky slope
Like a black sword of polished steel
With flickering damascenes of gold
Flows the dark Seine.…
Imagining his lune de miel as a seal upon a dark-blue envelope essays that approximation of modern idiom which Wilde occasionally attempted. Swords and damascenes of gold, on the other hand, hark back to a familiar heroic diction. Yet the image of the Seine as a dark sword calls up a Baudelairean Paris, in which Wilde saw himself for a moment as experienced among intriguers rather than innocent among children. He was occupying himself with two impulses, one associative and the other deviant.
He was constitutionally incapable of being single-minded for long. While he was in love with Constance, he could not help regarding himself in love with her. He could say with Rousseau’s Narcissus, ‘Je m’aime aimant.’ Or, as he would conjecture in ‘The Portrait of Mr W.H.,’ ‘Perhaps, by finding perfect expression for a passion, I had exhausted passion itself. Emotional forces, like the forces of physical life, have their positive limitations.’ These limitations he would gradually experience.
From double-natured Paris, the double-natured Wilde returned with Constance on 24 June 1884. The Thames was not so chthonic as the Seine, and for a time Wilde embraced the domesticity that lay in wait for him on its banks. There were moments of doubt, however. Not long after his return, he was approached
by a friend who said, ‘Hullo, Wilde. I hear you’ve got married.’ ‘Yes,’ he answered dejectedly, ‘gone deuced cheap, too!’37 For Constance, her first season after marriage, as she tried to keep up with her husband’s dizzy pace, was painful.
* Wilde, according to Constance’s brother, was unsympathetic when Constance tried to describe the unhappiness of her upbringing. People who went back to their childhoods for their tragedies bored him.7
† Coleridge says in Table Talk that ‘Plato … leads you to see that propositions involving … contradictory conceptions are nevertheless true; and which, therefore, must belong to a higher logic—that of ideas. They are contradictory only in the Aristotelian logic, which is the instinct of the understanding.’
CHAPTER X
Mr and Mrs Wilde
LANE: I have often observed that in married households the champagne is rarely of a firstrate brand.
Matrimonial Wear and Tear
Not much time was required for Constance Wilde to perceive that her modest income could never float so brave a venture as the Oscar Wilde argosy. ‘Enough is as good as a meal; too much is as good as a feast,’ said her husband. ‘Those who pay their bills are soon forgotten,’ he added, or, phrasing it more formally, ‘It is only by not paying one’s bills that one can hope to live in the memory of the commercial classes’1 On their return from the wedding trip, Constance announced to her brother that she thought of taking a job. This prospect was dashed by her becoming pregnant in September. Most of her time went in seconding her husband’s wishes for splurging guineas rather than saving pennies. The fifty pounds presented by an aunt of his to start them off in married life went for the purchase of two Apostle spoons, much to the aunt’s disgust.2 It was Wilde who determined how they should live, on what Whistlerian avenue and in what Godwinian style. Never a fluent talker, Constance seemed almost mute beside her husband. Asked how he had happened to fall in love with her, Wilde said, ‘She scarcely ever speaks. I am always wondering what her thoughts are like.’ In his story ‘The Happy Prince,’ the swallow falls out of love with a reed for several reasons, one being ‘She has no conversation.’ At a reception, Constance happened to pass by, looking pretty; he observed her admiringly, then murmured, half to himself and half to Louise Jopling, ‘If only I could be jealous of her!’3 The sentiment had been aroused easily enough by Mrs Langtry and Florence Balcombe, but then neither of them had had any idea of worshipping him.
Still, Constance could be lively in private, and she was intelligent and well informed. She spoke French and Italian fluently, and was well read in the two literatures. At Wilde’s urging, Constance learned German so they could enjoy reading new books in the language together. She and her husband could sympathetically share misadventures as well. Immediately on their return, the young couple stayed for two nights at the Brunswick Hotel, in Jermyn Street. With their depleted resources, the 2 guineas a night they had to pay seemed a good deal. They went to call on Emily Lloyd and Constance’s dying grandfather at 100 Lancaster Gate, hoping that Emily would invite them to stay. She was not forthcoming, however, and finally Constance had to ask directly. Emily allowed them to remain for a few days until they found other accommodation. They soon moved from Lancaster Gate to 7 Great College Street, Westminster, and some days later back to Wilde’s familiar lodgings at 9 Charles Street, near Grosvenor Square. They had perhaps expected that Tite Street would be ready for occupancy shortly after their return. It was not.
The redecoration of 16 Tite Street prolonged itself over seven more months, so they could not move in until January 1885. Godwin had ambitious plans, and the builders were slow and inept in carrying them out. Wilde dropped the first firm, owned by a man named Green, without paying his bill, and with Godwin’s help found another builder, Sharpe. Sharpe charged even more exorbitantly than Green. Meanwhile, Green sued for his unpaid bill and, when Wilde ignored him, had the furniture seized. Wilde counterclaimed, and the case was proceeding towards trial until, the day before it was to be heard, the solicitors on both sides agreed to a settlement. After having paid Green, Sharpe, Godwin, and the solicitor, Wilde, confident in his star, remained ebullient.
With Godwin, if not with the builders, he stayed on the best of terms. Godwin had succeeded in winning acceptance for his theories not only of house decoration but of scenery and of dress, and Wilde found occasion to praise him in several of the reviews that he now began to write. Both men intended that the house in Tite Street should set a new standard in interior design. Gone were the Morris wallpapers and other vestiges of Pre-Raphaelite decor. In came the new era of white high-gloss enamel, varied by golds, blues, greens. Godwin’s plans4 give some sense of what the house looked like, though it is clear from Wilde’s correspondence, and from the testimonies of visitors, that considerable changes were made in the course of the Wildes’ ten-year occupancy.
The house was on four floors with a basement, or lower ground floor, where the kitchen was. The door to the house was white, with a brass knocker and letterbox flap, and a window of frosted glass. Godwin’s plan envisaged an entrance hall painted gray to the height of the dado (five feet six inches) and white above, with a yellow ceiling. A small lamp of beaten iron hung from the ceiling, and on the walls were two large engravings in white frames, one of Apollo and the Muses, the other of Diana and Her Nymphs Bathing, as if in tribute to husband and wife. The hall colors were apparently changed: Alexander Teixeira de Mattos (the second husband of Willie Wilde’s second wife) remembered it as orange below and blue frieze above. But earlier the gray was changed to white, the color remembered by Laura Troubridge’s fiancé, Adrian Hope, a relative of Constance. Hope is probably accurate, since the dining room, also originally intended to be gray, was actually painted in various tones of white and off-white, and had white curtains embroidered with yellow silk.
One unusual feature of the dining room was a sideboard about nine inches wide, which was built round much of the room and was used to serve from. The dining-room table Hope irreverently described as dirty brown, remembering also the maroon napkins with deep fringes, and delicate china, especially the yellow cups. On the floor was a green-blue Morris carpet with a white pattern. The other room on the ground floor was the library, executed in a style variously described as Turkish, Moorish, and North African. Over the doorway and along the sides of the room ran a heavy beam and an architrave bearing, in gilt, red, and blue, an inscription from Shelley:
Spirit of Beauty! Tarry still awhile,
They are not dead, thine ancient votaries,
Some few there are to whom thy radiant smile
Is better than a thousand victories.
The library had a high dado painted dark blue, with pale gold on the walls above it and on the ceiling. Along two sides of the room was a low divan, in front of which were ottomans, lanterns, and hangings, an Eastern inlaid table and—no chairs. The window appears to have been covered at first with a wooden grating, eventually with a glass-bead curtain to cut off the unpleasant view at the back, as well as the light. It was in this room that Wilde smoked, conducted têtes-à-têtes, and did most of his writing.
The white staircase had a curtain in front of it; the stairs were covered with gold-yellow matting and led to the drawing rooms on the second floor. These were separated by folding doors. The larger one was to the rear, with dark-green walls and pale-green ceiling, the fireplace and woodwork painted brown-pink. On either side of the fireplace, filling the room’s corners, were two three-cornered divans, very low, with cushions. On the mantelpiece was a small green bronze figure of Narcissus. There were also a Chippendale table, a curule armchair, and three white-lacquered straight-back chairs. A portrait of Wilde by Harper Pennington was hung on one wall, and in a corner there was also the bust of Augustus Caesar which Wilde had received after the Newdigate. The ceiling originally had two gold dragons at opposite corners painted by Whistler; these gave way at some point to large Japanese feathers inserted into the plaster, also at Whistler’s sugges
tion. Hung on the green walls were small white-framed lithographs by Whistler and Mortimer Menpes, a drawing by Beardsley (later), and the framed manuscript of Keats’s sonnet given to Wilde in America. There were also red crayon sketches of some of Mrs Wilde’s friends. The front drawing room had flesh-pink walls but the cornice was gilded dull lemon-gold and the ceiling covered with Japanese leather, which Wilde somehow acquired. Above the fireplace was displayed the bronze plaque of a young girl by John Donoghue, illustrating Wilde’s poem ‘Requiescat.’
On the floor above were two bedrooms, Mrs Wilde’s in front, with pink walls and apple-green ceiling. It contained an artistically shaped bath. Wilde made a point of never entering her room without permission. As he said in a review, ‘men must give up the tyranny in married life which was once so dear to them, and which, we are afraid, lingers still, here and there.’5 The back bedroom, originally Wilde’s, had dark-blue walls and a pale-blue ceiling. It contained a large plaster cast of the Hermes of Olympia. Eventually this room became the children’s bedroom. The third floor at first contained Wilde’s study, executed in shades of red, the woodwork in his favorite vermilion. The front room on the third floor was all white except for the yellow ceiling. Eventually these rooms became night and day nurseries. On the top floor were the servants’ quarters.
While the House Beautiful was in the process of construction, Wilde and Constance were always being invited out, often by people who had looked at him askance before. Respectability was achieved overnight, as he had anticipated, though it had never been his ideal any more than his mother’s. On meeting Olive Schreiner, he asked her why she lived in the East End. ‘Because the people there don’t wear masks.’ ‘And I live in the West End because the people there do.’ He announced also, ‘A gentleman never goes east of Temple Bar.’6 A weekly magazine called The Bat lamented the aesthete’s decline:
Oscar Wilde Page 36