Oscar Wilde

by Richard Ellmann

  At last he went and cut his hair—

  The soil proved poor and arid

  And things are much as once they were—

  He’s settled down and married!

  (9 February 1886)

  The same magazine, observing him at a matinee of The Lady of Lyons on 23 March 1886, when Mrs Langtry was playing Pauline, reported, ‘there was Oscar Wilde subdued, meditative, married.’ But Wilde was neither settled down nor subdued. He was still outraging the world with his talk, even while amusing it. He played the married man with a flair which suggested that for him it was an adventure rather than a quiescence.

  What dandyism he continued to practice he was able to impose, to her discomfort, upon Constance. How could she refuse instruction from the adviser to Lillie Langtry? Her natural shyness consorted ill with the boldness required of her. At his request she had to bedeck herself, a half-convinced martyr to his evangel of dress reform. Sometimes her dresses suited her: when Anna de Brémont, an American woman who had married a putative count, met her for the first time. Constance was wearing a Greek costume of cowslip yellow and apple-leaf green. Her hair, ‘a thick mass of ruddy brown, was wonderfully set off by bands of yellow ribbon supporting the knot of hair on the nape of the neck and crossing the wavy tresses above her brow.’ Her boyish face, her full dark eyes, had their effect. But when the young couple came for tea to Laura Troubridge’s house in July 1884, Miss Troubridge noted in her diary, ‘She dressed for the part in limp white muslin with no bustle, saffron coloured silk swathed about her shoulders, a huge cartwheel Gainsborough hat, white and bright yellow stockings and shoes—she looked too hopeless and we thought her shy and dull—he was amusing of course.’7 Yet Constance persisted, and showed considerable variety. She attended a meeting on Rational Dress in the Westminster Town Hall in March 1886, and when she rose to propose a motion showed herself to be clad in cinnamon-colored cashmere trousers and a cape with the ends turned under to form sleeves. The Bat, in its worldly way, found this attire strictly irrational, and said so on 30 March 1886. On 6 November 1888 she addressed an audience of women at the Somerville Club on the subject ‘Clothed and in Our Right Minds.’ The lecture was reported in the Rational Dress Society Gazette for January 1889.

  Another observer, Louise Jopling, being an artist, was much more willing than Laura Troubridge to see departures from French fashions. One Sunday morning when Mrs Jopling had invited the Wildes to visit her, she saw them arrive in resplendent style. Wilde was dressed in a brown suit with innumerable little buttons that gave it the appearance of a glorified page’s costume. Constance wore a large picture hat with white feathers, and a dress of equal flourish. ‘As we came along the King’s Road,’ Wilde reported, ‘a number of rude little boys surrounded and followed us. One boy, after staring at us, said, “ ’Amlet and Ophelia out for a walk, I suppose!” I answered, “My little fellow, you are quite right. We are!” ’8 As always, he was amused by his own finery, as well as by the reactions it elicited.

  Wilde and Constance were on excellent terms with Lady Wilde and with Willie. When Willie, who had become dramatic critic of Vanity Fair, took a vacation in August 1884, Oscar filled his post. Lady Wilde maintained her salon, and her own standards of dress. A young German artist unfortunately named Herbert Schmalz (later changed to Carmichael) visited her in May 1886 and recorded his impressions. In the double drawing room into which Schmalz and his wife were shown, they had to grope their way because, though it was early afternoon, thick curtains were drawn over the windows; the only light was supplied by candles. The atmosphere was made more mysterious by pastilles burning on the mantelpiece, and large mirrors placed between floor and ceiling, with curtains over the edges, so that when the room was crowded it was impossible to see how far it extended.

  Lady Wilde received her guests wearing a lavender silk dress over a crinoline with a piece of crimson velvet about a foot deep around the skirt. Hanging loosely around her waist was a Roman scarf, bright green in color, with stripes of scarlet, blue, and yellow. The dress was cut low at the neck, and on her breast she wore a large miniature about six inches by four. Her hair was dressed in ringlets, surmounted by a high headdress of lace. Incongruous as the costume was, Schmalz said, ‘she managed to look more weird and imposing than ridiculous.’

  As they arrived, a little American girl, with a face like a cherub, was reciting a poem imitating birds and another imitating the echoes of a charcoal burner’s voice dying away. When she had finished, Oscar Wilde went up to Schmalz and his wife to say, ‘Is she not charming? So like a dear little rose-bud, bespattered with dew.’ After a time the visitors decided to leave. ‘As I said goodbye to Lady Wilde,’ Schmalz recalled, ‘she gazed at me like a Sphinx for a little, then said, “I hear you have a large picture in the Royal Academy. And are you not very young to have passed that dreaded council?”

  ‘ “I hope you like it, Lady Wilde,” I answered.

  ‘ “I have not seen it,” she replied, “but Oscar shall guide me to it. Oscar shall guide me to it.” ’

  At the door Wilde stopped them. ‘ “Ah, Schmalz! leaving Mamma so soon?” ’

  ‘ “Yes, I have a picture I must get on with.”

  ‘ “Might one ask, what subject?”

  ‘ “A Viking picture.”

  ‘ “But, my dear Schmalz,” ’ said Wilde (slowly gathering himself for a witticism), ‘ “why so far back? You know, where archaeology begins, art ceases.” ’*

  To the young couple, as they went out into the broad daylight of the Brompton Road, it seemed they had ‘just awakened from some unearthly dream.’10

  From Speech to Print

  It is only the shallow people who do not judge by appearances.

  When autumn came, Wilde started his lecturing again. The subjects he offered were ‘The Value of Art in Modern Life,’ a recasting of what he had been saying in America and after, and a new lecture on ‘Dress.’ In this he commended a recent revival of the sense of beauty in England, and only regretted that so far it had not extended to what people wore. To promote radical change he urged that children be taught drawing before they were taught their letters, to imbue them with a sense of the contours of the body. The child would learn that the waist was a beautiful and delicate curve, and not, as the milliner placed it, an abrupt right angle suddenly occurring in the middle of the body. The enemy of proper dress was fashion. ‘A fashion is merely a form of ugliness so unbearable that we are compelled to alter it every six months.’ French influence was pernicious, and had been so since the time when William the Conqueror landed to find that the English were wearing a dress at once beautiful and simple, and promptly changed it. In the second quarter of the seventeenth century, English dress had again been delightful, and Charles II chose that moment to reimport French fashions.

  What Wilde proposed was that clothing be hung from the shoulders rather than from the waist. This would be healthier and, better still, Grecian. ‘In Athens there was neither a milliner, nor a milliner’s bill. These things were absolutely unknown, so great was the civilization.’11 Bustles, stays, corsets must go, and high heels, which tilt the body forward. He thought better ways of dressing could be learned not only from the Greeks, but from the Assyrians and Egyptians. The trousers worn by Turkish women won his approval. Men must change their attire too. Wilde illustrated his own theories. He announced himself as now opposed to the old knee breeches, because, like the ‘dress improver,’ they were too tight for comfort. He had substituted close-fitting light trousers, above which he wore a broad rolling collar, a high dark waistcoat, and a black stock with a pendant bunch of seals. He opposed the stovepipe hat and favored a broad-brimmed one (perhaps influenced by the Leadville miner’s hat) to keep the rain out of the eyes. He spoke in favor of doublets and cloaks. Such ideas, though elegantly phrased and illustrated, did not command instant allegiance. Moreover, people simplified what he said to the point of absurdity.

  His new lecture on ‘The Value of Art in Modern Life’
rested on three principal tenets. The first was that ornament consisted not of superfluities, but of their purgation. ‘I have found that all ugly things are made by those who strive to make something beautiful, and that all beautiful things are made by those who strive to make something useful.’ He had come a long way from Gautier’s dictum that all art is useless. The second was that bad art arises from taking nature as the ideal. The true painter is not a specialist painting Scottish cattle in an English mist or English cattle in a Scottish mist. His examples of genuine painters were Corot and the Impressionists, by whom he meant Monet and Camille Pissarro, whose shows at Durand Ruel in March and May had evidently won him.12 He conspicuously failed to celebrate the Pre-Raphaelites, who had occupied a central place in his American lectures. The third tenet was that artistic value cannot be measured by its quotient of didacticism. He bowed to Ruskin as one of the greatest men ever produced in England, before he took issue with his old master for estimating a picture ‘by the number of noble and moral ideas that he found in it.’ His greatest praise was reserved for Whistler as perhaps the first artist not just in England but in all of Europe. Whistler ‘had rejected all literary titles for his pictures; indeed, none of his works bore any name but that which signified their tone, and colour, and method of treatment. This, of course, was what painting ought to be; no man ought to show that he was merely the illustrator of history.’13 High-minded as these views were, they did nothing to infiltrate renaissance with decadence in the way that he had begun to envisage. They were all a bit too sunny. To engage his whole mind, Wilde felt a need for shadows.

  The itinerary of Wilde’s lectures took him to many places in England, Ireland, and Scotland, from 1 October 1884 to the end of March 1885.† In Edinburgh for the last of them, he called on his old friend Hunter Blair, now a monk, and suddenly sank to his knees and said, Tray for me, Dunskie, pray for me.’14

  Wilde’s initial lecture on dress was reported in the press, and a controversy about it began in the Pall Mall Gazette. He contributed letters there, defending and expanding his original position, in October and November 1884. Audience interest in dress and home decoration was unfortunately limited, and in the face of shrinking attendance he had no choice but to supplement his lecturing income with some ignoble journalism. Eventually the lectures stopped altogether. Perhaps as a result of his eloquence about dress, he became, early in 1885, a contributor to the Pall Mall Gazette, which in 1882 had been hostile to him. His articles here were unsigned, as was customary, though the custom was one he hated. He also wrote signed articles for the Dramatic Review and later for other journals.

  The review was a form that Wilde enjoyed. He made it into a form of chat. Most of the works he dealt with had only an ephemeral interest; instead of reproving them for this, he described them pleasantly and usually made them more entertaining than they were. His random comments were best of all. A book on Dinners and Dishes enabled him to say that ‘the two most remarkable bits of scenery in the States are undoubtedly Delmonico’s and the Yosemite Valley.’ Daniel Deronda was ‘that dullest of masterpieces.’ While praising the poems of young Marc-André Raffalovich beyond their merits, he noted that they were ‘unhealthy and bring with them the heavy odours of the hothouse.’ But this, he resumed, ‘is to point out neither their defect nor their merit, but their quality merely.’ He did, however, object to Raffalovich’s treating the first word of his title, Tuberose and Meadowsweet, as if it were a trisyllable, when it should be a disyllable. Raffalovich, as a foreigner not eager to be found guilty of a mispronunciation, wrote to the editor to say that Shelley had committed the same offense, to which Wilde responded cheerfully with a contrary example from the same poet. Raffalovich, a rancorous man, was not pleased.

  Several writers had ceased to interest Wilde, Mrs Browning and Symonds among them. Only three aroused his critical antagonism. Rhoda Broughton was one. She was related to the Le Fanus, whom he had known in Merrion Square, but her Irish blood had if anything made her impatient with his aestheticism. Reviewing her novel Betty’s Visions, Wilde commented that ‘whatever harsh criticisms may be passed on the construction of her sentences, she at least possesses that one touch of vulgarity that makes the whole world kin.’ George Saintsbury may not have annoyed Wilde personally, as Miss Broughton had, but Wilde was irritated by his pretensions in writing a book about prose style when his own abounded in solecisms. So Saintsbury could say without a quiver, ‘constantly right in general,’ or ‘He saw the rise, and in some instances, the death of Tennyson, Thackeray, Macaulay, Carlyle, Dickens.’ The third target was Harry Quilter, well known for his art criticism. Quilter had fulminated in newspaper leaders against the aesthetic movement, and defended Ruskin’s views against Whistler’s. He dared to buy, he even dared to reconstruct, Whistler’s White House in Tite Street, which Godwin had designed and Whistler adorned. Wilde dealt merrily with Quilter as a ‘jolly’ art critic: ‘With the present tendencies of decorative art in England Mr Quilter … has but little sympathy, and he makes a gallant appeal to the British householder to stand no more nonsense. Let the honest fellow, he says, on his return from his counting-house tear down the Persian hangings.’ (Wilde was busy putting them up in his own Tite Street house.) ‘Mr Quilter is quite earnest in his endeavours to elevate art to the dignity of manual labour.’

  On larger questions, Wilde was slowly moving towards more complex answers. He is surprisingly willing to consider afresh issues that aestheticism might appear to have already resolved. Perhaps because he so much admired George Sand, as did his mother, he treats with unexpected sympathy her arguments in the famous battle with Flaubert over form and content. He agrees with her that form is not the aim, only the effect. He allows validity to her view that truth and goodness (neither invoked often in his criticism) must accompany beauty, his only reservation being that she puts too high a value on good intentions. Since Wilde is often thought to be an advocate of art for art’s sake, that he abjures it here is important; he says it ‘is not meant to express the final cause of art, but is merely a formula for creation.’ The artist in composition must think only of artistic criteria, but his motive in writing, and the purpose of artistic work in general, are not to be restricted. Wilde was going far beyond Whistler and Gautier in recognizing the limitations of the old aestheticism they had promulgated.

  One subject that embarrasses him is dealt with in ‘The Scenery of Shakespeare’s Plays,’ and several other reviews. Wilde set himself to defend recent efforts by Godwin and others to produce Shakespeare’s plays, and neo-Greek plays such as Todhunter’s Helena in Troas, with archaeological accuracy. He argued that Shakespeare himself had a keen historical sense, and was always filling in by verbal description what was lacking in the scenery and costume of his plays. But realism was a subject that Wilde had pondered since the days at Portora when he asked a master what it meant, and he knew its pitfalls. So he is uneasy, at once endorsing accuracy of detail and acknowledging that the real desideration is unity of artistic effect. He proposes that this unity is best achieved by accuracy of detail, so that perfect accuracy may make for perfect illusion, as long as it is subordinated to the general motive of the play. He distinguishes between fussy archaeology and archaeology used for artistic effect, yet is haunted by the opposite idea, that ‘the truest poetry is the most feigning.’ In rewriting and retitling the essay later for Intentions he calls it ‘The Truth of Masks, A Note on Illusion,’ when its subject was in fact ‘The Truth of Replicas: A Note on Realism.’ Reprinting it in Intentions, he suddenly turned upon himself, realizing that the essay was incompatible with others in the same volume, and added an important palinode:

  Not that I agree with everything that I have said in this essay. There is much with which I entirely disagree. The essay simply represents an artistic standpoint, and in aesthetic criticism, attitude is everything. For in art there is no such thing as a universal truth. A truth in art is that whose contradictory is also true. And just as it is only in art-criticism, an
d through it, that we can apprehend the platonic theory of ideas, so it is only in art-criticism, and through it, that we can realise Hegel’s theory of contraries. The truths of metaphysics are the truth of masks.

  Even so qualified, or reversed, the essay did not please him, and he recognized that one day he must discard it from the volume altogether.15

  Writing about other people’s books and plays and lectures, and talking about art, could not satisfy for long the ambition of which he had boasted to Sherard at the time of Rennell Rodd’s disaffection. Nothing else was available at the moment, and he and Constance must eat, and eat as well as possible. He abounded in vitality and expectation. He renewed his attempt to get a position as inspector of schools, using Curzon, Mahaffy, and Sayce as references; nothing came of it. For the moment he could not hope, after the fiasco in New York, that any actress could be persuaded to undertake either of his plays. Still, he stayed close to the theatre, and persuaded Constance to play a minor part in Helena in Troas.

  Meanwhile, his home life had assumed more definite form. He was often away from Tite Street giving lectures. He consoled Constance with letters, written in his best Olympian:

  Dear and Beloved, Here am I, and you at the Antipodes. O execrable facts, that keep our lips from kissing, though our souls are one.