What can I tell you by letter? Alas! nothing that I would tell you. The messages of the gods to each other travel not by pen and ink and indeed your bodily presence here would not make you more real: for I feel your fingers in my hair, and your cheek brushing mine. The air is full of the music of your voice, my soul and body seem no longer mine, but mingled in some exquisite ecstasy with yours. I feel incomplete without you.
Ever and ever yours
OSCAR
Here I stay till Sunday.16
The easy assonance of ecstasy and exquisite might have disquieted some wives, but Constance had no complaint. Her pregnancy occupied her and her husband delighted her. She does not seem to have guessed that he felt a growing distaste for her swollen body. This has been related in the unreliable testimony of Frank Harris, whose made-up speeches for Wilde rarely ring true. Yet it seems plausible from the sequel that Wilde did say the substance of what Harris relates:
When I married, my wife was a beautiful girl, white and slim as a lily, with dancing eyes and gay rippling laughter like music. In a year or so the flowerlike grace had all vanished; she became heavy, shapeless, deformed. She dragged herself about the house in uncouth misery with drawn blotched face and hideous body, sick at heart because of our love. It was dreadful. I tried to be kind to her; forced myself to touch and kiss her; but she was sick always, and—oh! I cannot recall it, it is all loathsome.… I used to wash my mouth and open the window to cleanse my lips in the pure air.17
It was unfortunate, given a husband so easily disgusted, that Constance had their two sons in rapid succession. Cyril was born on 5 June 1885. His godfather was an explorer, Walter Harris. In less than eight months Constance was pregnant again, the second child being born on Guy Fawkes Day, 5 November 1886. The parents changed the birthdate to 3 November. Wilde had hoped for a girl, as his mother had hoped for one at the time of his own birth—another Isola, perhaps. But it was a boy, christened androgynously Vyvyan. Ruskin, asked to stand as godfather for him as he had done for a son of Burne-Jones and a daughter of Alfred Hunt, declined on the grounds of age, so Mortimer Menpes, a disciple of Whistler then in good standing with the artist, was asked and consented.
The two years of childbearing tended to separate the parents. Eager to promote dress reform, Wilde had to make do during his wife’s pregnancies without a model. Loving dinner parties as others might love hunting, and performing at them so prodigiously, he had to accept for himself many invitations intended for both. At their own parties, Constance became conspicuous for little practicalities, which she would often voice in the middle of one of her husband’s grand flights, which she had heard rehearsed many times. Jean-Joseph Renaud, a French writer who translated some works of Wilde, was occasionally at dinner, and recalled how Constance would sometimes complain, ‘But Oscar, yesterday you told that story differently,’ or, impatient with his embellishments, would brusquely interrupt and finish the story herself. Mrs Claude Beddington tells of a dinner when someone asked Wilde, ‘Where have you been this past week?’ He answered that he had been at ‘an exquisite Elizabethan country house, with emerald lawns, stately yew hedges, scented rose-gardens, cool lily ponds, gay herbaceous borders, ancestral oaks, and strutting peacocks.’ ‘And did she act well, Oscar?’ asked Constance in a small voice.18 He had gone to a play.
Little by little Wilde, though he remained fond of Constance, lost enthusiasm for playing husband. He did not feel this way about being father, for his boys delighted him. His partiality for Cyril was already patent, but he loved and watched over both of them. His disaffection from his wife seems implicit in the eagerness of his return to the society of young men, especially in Oxford and Cambridge.
Perilous Connections
The proper basis for marriage is a mutual misunderstanding.
One of these was Harry Marillier, the boy who had brought Wilde his coffee at the house in Salisbury Street and had received in return tutoring in Greek. At the beginning of November 1885, Marillier, who was at Peter-house in Cambridge, wrote to Wilde and urged him to come see a performance of the Eumenides at the beginning of December. Wilde was charmed by the invitation, and in accepting it advanced the date of their meeting. He invited Marillier to visit him in London, and afterwards bewailed that he had had to leave his friend, probably for a lecture engagement:
Harry, why did you let me catch my train? I would have liked to have gone to the National Gallery with you, and looked at Velasquez’s pale evil King, at Titian’s Bacchus with the velvet panthers, and at that strange heaven of Angelico’s where everyone seems made of gold and purple and fire, and which, for all that, looks to me ascetic—everyone dead and decorative! I wonder will it really be like that, but I wonder without caring. Je trouve la terre aussi belle que le ciel, et le corps aussi beau que I’âme.‡ If I do live again I would like it to be as a flower—no soul but perfectly beautiful. Perhaps for my sins I shall be made a red geranium!!
And your paper on Browning? You must tell me of it. In our meeting again there was a touch of Browning—keen curiosity, wonder, delight.
It was an hour intensely dramatic and intensely psychological, and, in art, only Browning can make action and psychology one. When am I to see you again? Write me a long letter to Tite Street, and I will get it when I come back. I wish you were here, Harry. But in the vacation you must often come and see me, and we will talk of the poets and forget Piccadilly!! I have never learned anything except from people younger than myself and you are infinitely young.
OSCAR WILDE
The French quotation was from Gautier’s Mademoiselle de Maupin, which Wilde characterized in a review of this time as ‘that golden book of spirit and sense, that holy writ of beauty.’19 Since Pater had lent it to Wilde at the inception of their close friendship, it was perhaps indicative that he should cite it to Marillier at a comparable moment of waxing interest.
On 27 November 1885 they met again, at Cambridge. Marillier belonged to a group that called itself ‘cicadas’ and he had secured the invitation for Wilde to come to see the Eumenides as their common guest. Another ‘cicada’ was J. H. Badley, later to found Bedales School; it fell to Badley to entertain Wilde for breakfast in his rooms. A dish of oeufs à l’Aurore placed before Wilde moved him to say with pleasure that it was like ‘the standard of the Emperor of Japan,’ the allusion if not the enthusiasm being lost on Badley. They talked of poetry: Badley’s favorite was Shelley, a choice Wilde would not allow because Shelley was ‘merely a boy’s poet.’ ‘Keats is the greatest of them,’ he assured the young man. Wilde observed that Badley did not smoke, and asked him why. ‘An inherited aversion,’ said Badley, ‘though I have no doubt that I’m missing thereby what is good in moderation.’ ‘Ah, Badley,’ Wilde rejoined, ‘nothing is good in moderation. You cannot know the good in anything till you have torn the heart out of it by excess.’ He would give the same advice to André Gide later on.
It was during his visit to Cambridge for the Eumenides that Wilde was prompted to entertain his young friends with a story. His having a child perhaps made the story take the form of a fairy tale, though Cyril was as yet too young to listen. He would call it later ‘The Happy Prince,’ and it was so well received by the Cambridge students that on returning to his room he wrote it down. ‘The Happy Prince’ turns on the contrast, used in some of his later writings too, of an older, taller lover with a younger, smaller beloved. In this case the roles are played by members of different species and even different orders of existence, for the Prince is a statue and the beloved a swallow.
In the story, the swallow is at first in love with a reed, who is female, but he renounces her in favor of the Prince. The Prince passes his entire life in the palace of Sans-Souci, but has a keen sympathy for the oppressed and destitute. On his pedestal above the city he sees and laments its wretchedness and sorrow, tears falling from his sapphire eyes. He begs the swallow to take, one by one, the ruby from his sword pommel, and the sapphires from his eyes, to alleviate three of the w
orst cases, a sick boy, a struggling playwright, and a little match-girl. The swallow, though pressed for time (he is waited for in Egypt), carries out the commissions, then comes to take leave and asks to kiss the Prince’s hand. ‘No, no,’ says the Prince, ‘you must kiss me on the lips, for I love you.’ As he does so, the Prince’s heart breaks, and so does the swallow’s—their love is perfected, and disinfected, in death. They are transfigured and borne off to God’s hand. The self-canceling nature of their love, which dies in its expression, conforms with a notion of Wilde and Pater about the limit of every energy. In De Profundis, Wilde explained that he had always known that the garden had another half besides the beautiful one, and that in ‘The Happy Prince’ he had given expression to it.
The day after Wilde told this story, half a dozen of the ‘cicadas’ went down to the station to see him off. They clustered round his carriage window as he kept up a stream of epigrams, timed to culminate as the train drew out of the station. But something went wrong, and the train, having started, backed in again. The students were still on the platform, but Wilde, rather than risk anticlimax, closed his window and remained absorbed in his newspaper until the train drew out again. From London he wrote to Marillier:
Does it all seem a dream, Harry? Ah! what is not a dream? To me it is, in a fashion, a memory of music. I remember bright young faces, and grey misty quadrangles, Greek forms passing through Gothic cloisters, life playing among ruins, and, what I love best in the world, Poetry and Paradox dancing together!
Wilde’s strongest and most invitational letter to Marillier came early in 1886. By now he was imparting a doctrine rather than recalling a mood, and the doctrine is one that might well evoke thoughts of sin without commitment, as if to exonerate those thoughts before they became blameworthy.
You too have the love of things impossible——l’amour de l’impossible (how do men name it?). Sometime you will find, even as I have found, that there is no such thing as a romantic experience; there are romantic memories, and there is the desire of romance—that is all. Our most fiery moments of ecstasy are merely shadows of what somewhere else we have felt, or of what we long some day to feel. So at least it seems to me. And, strangely enough, what comes of all this is a curious mixture of ardour and of indifference. I myself would sacrifice everything for a new experience, and I know there is no such thing as a new experience at all. I think I would more readily die for what I do not believe in than for what I hold to be true. I would go to the stake for a sensation and be a sceptic to the last! Only one thing remains infinitely fascinating to me, the mystery of moods. To be master of these moods is exquisite, to be mastered by them more exquisite still. Sometimes I think that the artistic life is a long and lovely suicide, and am not sorry that it is so.
And much of this I fancy you yourself have felt: much also remains for you to feel. There is an unknown land full of strange flowers and subtle perfumes, a land of which it is joy of all joys to dream, a land where all things are perfect and poisonous.
After such knowledge, what virtue? Wilde had combined at last poison and perfection, qualities he found also in Baudelaire,20 decadence and renaissance. ‘Rappacini’s Daughter’ of Hawthorne, as well as Huysmans’s A Rebours, was also in his mind. He wanted to exhibit for Marillier an image of life as delicious decline rather than wholesome growth. A latter-day Faust, he knew in advance that every pleasure would discontent him at last, and saw himself as the prey to the very moods he sought to experience. To fall victim to himself was to bring his experience to the utmost bound; unfortunately, it was like committing suicide, as Dorian Gray would discover.
The Poet and the Painter
One cannot extort affection with a knife. To awaken gratitude in the ungrateful were as vain as to try to waken the dead by cries.
Wilde’s urge to find a new life for himself was adumbrated in his correspondence with Marillier and reinforced by tension with Whistler. This increased also in 1886. Their relationship had always been nervous. Whistler, twenty years older, could never quite accept that Wilde, however imperfect his early writings, had genius too; but he had put up with Wilde’s praise for almost ten years contentedly enough. Wilde liked to joke at his own expense, and Whistler was glad to joke at Wilde’s expense too. His advantage was that he talked to score, whereas Wilde talked merely to enthrall. A Whistler breakfast served generous helpings of gall along with the coffee. Over the years there had been many humiliations. One day at the Lambs Club, Wilde showed Whistler a poem he had written, probably an impressionistic one such as ‘Le Panneau’ or ‘Les Ballons.’ Whistler returned it to him without a word. Wilde was obliged to ask, ‘Well, do you perceive any worth?’ ‘It’s worth its weight in gold,’ said the artist. The poem was written on the thinnest of tissue paper. Then there had been a meeting of the Hogarth Club which they both attended in November 1883; Wilde was quoted in Punch as having compared Mary Anderson, whom he had seen again in Romeo and Juliet, with Sarah Bernhardt. According to Punch, he said, ‘Sarah Bernhardt is all moonlight and sunlight combined, exceedingly terrible, magnificently glorious. Miss Anderson is pure and fearless as a mountain daisy. Full of change as a river. Tender, fresh, sparkling, brilliant, superb, placid.’ On reading this, Wilde telegraphed to Whistler, ‘Punch too ridiculous. When you and I are together we never talk about anything except ourselves.’ To this came the reply, also by wire, ‘No, no, Oscar, you forget, When you and I are together, we never talk about anything except me.’ The telegrams were published by mutual consent in The World of 14 November. A third one is said to have contained Wilde’s reply: ‘It is true, Jimmy, we were talking about you, but I was thinking of myself.’21 The narcissists outdid each other.
Whistler tended to come out on top in these exchanges, but that was because he was ready to kill as well as wound. He had begun to cherish a resentment of Wilde ever since the speech to the art students of the Royal Academy. Although at the time he had offered his suggestions freely enough, he disliked hearing Wilde credited with ideas he regarded as his own. Worse still, Wilde had a way of not sticking to Whistler’s script. He was as apt to correct the master as to copy him. So Whistler decided to do something unprecedented for him, and give a lecture himself. Archibald Forbes, that old enemy of Wilde, was consulted, and introduced Whistler to Mrs D’Oyly Carte. She arranged for him to lecture in the Prince’s Hall, where Wilde had delivered his ‘Impressions of America’ to the audience that included Whistler. He would give the same lecture later in Oxford and Cambridge, and to several groups in London, including the Royal Academy art students whom Wilde had addressed. To make clear the singularity of the occasion, Whistler scheduled the lecture at the unheard-of time of ten o’clock, on the evening of 20 February 1885. An elaborate seating plan was drawn up so as to leave nothing to chance, and he had a dress rehearsal the day before.
A good deal of what became known as ‘Mr Whistler’s Ten o’Clock’ was devoted to scoffing at Wilde. The phrasing was heavy with Biblical inversions: ‘lamented not,’ ‘attracted him not,’ ‘questioned not.’ Whistler chortled from the outset—‘Art is upon the town!’—and went on to declare with distaste, ‘The voice of the aesthete is heard in the land.’ He was not to be identified with aestheticism. Without naming him, he took Wilde to task for a series of offenses, beginning with dilettantism about dress reform. What the aesthete wanted, he said, was costume, but ‘costume is not dress.’ As for Grecian wear, Whistler mocked it: ‘Haphazard from the shoulders hang the garments of the hawker—combining in their person the motley of many manners with the medley of the mummers’ closet.’ He disagreed with Wilde (and so with Ruskin) over the idea that once society decayed, art had to decay too. ‘It is false, this teaching of decay. The master stands in no relation to the moment at which he occurs.’ Art moved in sublime indifference to social change. The rest of the world might grow as melancholy as it wished, but art went on rejoicing in its own creation. It had no concern with social betterment; indeed, it was so capricious as to prefer th
e artistic opium-eaters of Nanking to the artless do-gooders of Switzerland. He then delivered himself of two snubs. One was to humanity: ‘There never was an artistic period, there never was an artistic nation.’ The other was directed to nature: ‘To say to the painter, that Nature should be taken as she is, is to say to the player, that he may sit on the piano.’ Nature was tolerable only insofar as it was susceptible of artistic improvement.
Wilde retorted with two articles, in the Pall Mall Gazette for 21 and 28 February 1885. His tone was less ruffled than Whistler had hoped, mixing banter and approval for ‘the fine Virginia gentleman’ whom he still thought of as his friend. The lecture was a masterpiece, he declared. Having said that, he felt free to say other things. He can hardly have expected to please by echoing the alliterative m’s of Whistler’s reference to Wilde’s ‘motley of many manners’ in his altitudinous description of the five-foot-four-inch Whistler as ‘a miniature Mephistopheles mocking the majority.’ He disagreed with Whistler’s onslaught upon humanity: ‘the arts are made for life and not life for the arts.’ To encourage people to ignore the environment—the vulgar objects in their rooms, or the unattractive clothes they felt obliged to wear—was to encourage ugliness. Wilde agreed that ‘all costumes are caricatures. The basis of Art is not the Fancy Ball. Where there is loveliness of dress, there is no dressing up.’ His innovations were not to be dismissed as stagy. He might have replied, in Charles Ricketts’s words, that Whistler, ‘with his yellow tie, wasp-waist, beige-coloured overcoat, wand-like stick and flat-brimmed top hat,’ gave the impression ‘of a Hungarian band-master.’22
Wilde went on to make clearer his radical differences from Whistler. Art, he insisted, did have a relation to society and was the product of a certain milieu. It rose or fell as society progressed or decayed, and could be renewed only if society were renewed. Whistler had asserted that only painters can judge painting. Wilde insisted that only artists can judge art, but the supreme artist is not the painter (in whose work Whistler had found ‘poetry’) but the poet, in whose work the painter’s images or the musician’s sounds or ideas are enclosed. ‘And so to the poet beyond all others are these mysteries known; to Edgar Allan Poe and to Baudelaire, not to Benjamin West and Paul Delaroche.’ His report concluded with the tribute ‘For that he is indeed one of the very greatest masters of painting is my opinion. And I may add that in this opinion Mr Whistler himself entirely concurs.’
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