Whistler took neither praise nor mockery in good part. ‘I have read your exquisite article in the Pall Mall,’ he wrote to Wilde, leaving the word ‘exquisite’ to cut both ways, though he had used the word favorably himself. That Wilde should fancy his title to the name Poet as good as Whistler’s to the name Painter was only one of the irritations: ‘Nothing is more delicate, in the flattery of “the Poet” to “the Painter,” than the naïveté of “the Poet,” in the choice of his Painters—Benjamin West and Paul Delaroche!’ Wilde scuttled beyond his grasp:
Dear Butterfly, By the aid of a biographical dictionary I discovered that there were once two painters, called Benjamin West and Paul Delaroche, who recklessly took to lecturing on Art.
As of their works nothing at all remains, I conclude that they explained themselves away. Be warned in time, James; and remain, as I do, incomprehensible: to be great is to be misunderstood. Tout à vous
OSCAR
Private
Jimmy! You must stamp your letters—they are dear at twopence—and also do send them in proper time. 2.30 on Monday. Ciel!23
The antagonists were sharpening their weapons for a clash which did not come until more than a year later. It was precipitated by Whistler’s discovery that a committee devoted to art reform and opposed to the Royal Academy was to number among its members Harry Quilter and Oscar Wilde. He wrote at once:
Gentlemen, I am naturally interested in any effort made among Painters to prove that they are alive, but when I find, thrust in the van of your leaders, the body of my dead ’Arry, I know that putrefaction alone can result. When, following ’Arry, there comes an Oscar, you finish in farce, and bring upon yourselves the scorn and ridicule of your confrères in Europe.
What has Oscar in common with Art? except that he dines at our tables and picks from our platters the plums for the pudding he peddles in the provinces. Oscar—the amiable, irresponsible, esurient Oscar—with no more sense of a picture than of the fit of a coat, has the courage of the opinions—of others!
With ’Arry and Oscar you have avenged the Academy.
I am, Gentlemen, yours obediently.
[Butterfly emblem]
Again Whistler sent his letter to The World, where Edmund Yates reliably published it on 17 November 1886. It could hardly have been more savage. To attack the dandy’s clothes was injury enough; to link him with Quilter, whom Wilde had so recently reviewed with contempt in the Pall Mall Gazette, exacerbated the injury. Whistler knew it would. He also appeared to begrudge Wilde those Sunday-morning breakfasts where he had been his guest: in other words, if Whistler was short, as Wilde had said, then Wilde was fat. Still, no one ever outdid Wilde in hospitality, as Whistler knew well enough.
Whistler sent a copy of his letter to Wilde with a line, ‘Oscar, you must really keep outside “the radius”!’ The note suggests that he thought Wilde would put up with his insults. He was right. Wilde salvaged a little by replying on 24 November in The World, ‘Atlas, this is very sad! With our James “vulgarity begins at home,” and should be allowed to stay there. À vous, OSCAR WILDE.’ Whistler replied privately, or claimed he had,’ “A poor thing,” Oscar—but, for once, I suppose, “your own”!’ Wilde swallowed this insult as well. We can be sure he did, because on 29 November of the following year, 1887, he helped Whistler receive visitors to the Suffolk Gallery, where Whistler was exhibiting some of his paintings; they were back on good terms, except that Wilde was drawing off some of Whistler’s admirers, a situation Whistler could not brook.24 It was a tribute to Wilde’s good company that Whistler waited so long before depriving himself of it.
The Murder of Whistler
One should never make one’s debut with a scandal. One should reserve that to give an interest to one’s old age.
Faced with this hostility, Wilde might well relish the company of worshipful young men. His unconsummated attachment for Marillier had whetted his appetite for a love more perfect, or at least more poisonous. Shortly before his death, Wilde told Reggie Turner how he went shopping with his wife at Swan & Edgar’s in Piccadilly Circus, and saw the painted boys on the pavement. ‘Something clutched at my heart like ice,’ he said.25 Curiously, his ‘ideal husband’ in the play of that name uses the same figure: ‘I never knew what terror was before. It is as if a hand of ice were laid upon one’s heart.’ Ice was to turn to fire.
For more than two years Wilde had restlessly performed his roles as husband and father. Whistler dubbed him ‘le bourgeois malgré lui,’ a label Wilde was determined not to accept. He required stronger seasoning than an adoring wife and adorable sons could provide. He was conscious of regions of his personality that he had not yet explored, on Aristotle’s principle of total self-realization as the goal of every organism. Wilde was not comfortable reposing in his previous phases. He was fond of quoting Pater’s admonition ‘Failure is to form habits,’ and Emerson’s remark ‘I am always insincere, as knowing that there are other moods’ His letter to Marillier had said, ‘To be master of these moods is exquisite, to be mastered by them more exquisite still.’ Self-exfoliation might come through self-abandonment. He vaulted from stance to stance, putting on new selves as he put on new clothes.
Though never one to keep a secret, he had always been attracted by a secret life. Both Vera and The Duchess of Padua offered concealed identities and hidden propensities. This secret life was related to contrary impulses which he found within himself, a ‘voracious Irony’ (as Baudelaire called it) which led him to say in ‘Humanitad’ that we are both ‘The lips betraying and the life betrayed,’ every man his own Judas. He wanted to offer and withdraw himself at the same time, as his letter to Marillier said: ‘I would go to the stake for a sensation and be a sceptic to the last!’ That this policy might lead to the stake, or at least to calamity, he had always understood, from the days when he told his Portora schoolfellows that he longed to be the defendant in ‘Regina versus Wilde.’
He was well aware of the dangers of being homosexual, though he had consorted freely with those who were. His delight in young male bodies and in intense friendships with men was patent. Yet he had till now managed not to commit himself about physical as once about spiritual things. This was his state of mind when he met Robert Ross at Oxford in 1886. Ross, with ‘the face of Puck’ (as Wilde said), and short stature, looked like a boy. He had been beaten for reading Wilde’s poems. What must have astonished Wilde was that Ross, so young and yet so knowing, was determined to seduce him. For an ‘antinomian,’ as Wilde described himself, there could be no objection on moral grounds. Wilde acceded, perhaps out of curiosity or caprice. He was not attracted to anal coition, so Ross presumably introduced him to the oral and intercrural intercourse he practiced later. First as lover and then as friend, Ross was to keep a permanent place in Wilde’s life.
The young man was a grandson of the Governor General of Canada, and a son of Canada’s Attorney General. After his father’s early death, the family moved to London, and he was put under the guardianship of his elder brother, Alexander. When Ross and Wilde met, he was being prepared by the well-known London crammer W. B. Scoones for admission to King’s College, Cambridge. Their affair was carried on sporadically when Ross went up to King’s in the autumn of 1888.
There he entered with zest into college life: though small, he rowed bow in the college boat, and in his first term he helped start an iconoclastic publication called The Gadfly. His tutor was, appropriately, Wilde’s old friend Oscar Browning. Ross, deeply affected by Wilde, annoyed his fellow Kingsmen with his version of Wilde’s aesthetic manner, including long hair. He also wrote an article in the Granta on 1 March 1889 attacking the choice for a new dean (E. H. Douty). There followed an unpleasant event: a junior tutor named A. A. Tilley, one of the dean’s supporters, egged on a group of undergraduates to grab Ross as he came out of hall and dump him in the college fountain. (This was on 8 March 1889.) The joke turned sour when Ross caught pneumonia and a mental disturbance diagnosed as brain fever. The Gran
ta on 15 March carried a rhyme about it:
With joy and exultation
Still shall the tale be told
How six men nobly set on one
In the brave days of old.
Browning tried unsuccessfully to have Tilley dismissed, and Ross and his brother contemplated legal action. But the other students declined to testify against Tilley, and Ross’s only satisfaction was that Tilley was obliged to apologize publicly to him in hall.26
Ross left Cambridge in the winter term. He had quarreled with his mother and sister by disclosing his homosexuality, and was not welcome at home. At his brother’s suggestion he went to Edinburgh in the autumn of 1889 and took a job on Henley’s Scots Observer. He would later run an art gallery and write art criticism. His self-written epitaph was ‘Here lies one whose name was writ in hot water.’ Wilde’s verdict was that Ross was ‘wasting a youth that has always been, and always will be, full of promise.’27
What endeared him to Wilde was his wit, his ease, his loyalty, his buoyancy. They liked each other, and for a time their friendship was passionate. It marked a transformation of Wilde’s life. The effect can be measured by comparing two versions of a passage in The Picture of Dorian Gray. Dorian has won a bad reputation for unspecified acts, then commits himself irrevocably to an evil life by stabbing the painter of his portrait. In the first version, published in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine, Wilde wrote, ‘It was the 7th of October, the eve of his own thirty-second birthday, as he often remembered afterwards.’ When the novel was republished in book form, he altered the date and Dorian’s age: ‘It was on the ninth of November, the eve of his own thirty-eighth birthday, as he often remembered afterwards.’ Altering Dorian’s age would be gratuitous if Wilde had not begun to feel that the first reference was too close to actuality, since October 1886 had marked his own thirty-second birthday, and his thirty-third year had been dislocated by the beginning of his affair with Ross.
Both Ross and Wilde told friends that their homosexual encounter had been Wilde’s first. Ross said to his close friend Christopher Millard (Wilde’s bibliographer) that he felt responsible for Wilde’s two sons because he had led their father into homosexual activity. Arthur Ransome stated in his study of Wilde, on the basis of Ross’s information, that the incident had happened in 1886. ‘Who do you think seduced me?’ Wilde asked Reggie Turner, who could not guess. ‘Little Robbie,’ Wilde confided.28 Ross turned seventeen on 25 May 1886, and this age is one that Wilde returns to in his writings as if it meant something special to him. It is the age of Dorian’s first love, Sibyl Vane, and also the age of Shakespeare’s boy lover, Willie Hughes, as Wilde reconstructs that relationship in ‘The Portrait of Mr. W.H.’ Wilde seems to have his initiation by Ross in mind when he canonizes him in a letter as ‘St Robert of Phillimore’ (Phillimore Gardens being where Ross’s family lived), ‘Lover and Martyr—a saint known in Hagiographia for his extraordinary power, not in resisting, but in supplying temptations to others. This he did in the solitude of great cities, to which he retired at the comparatively early age of eight.’29
Ross earned the canonization partly because of his devout Catholicism, a subject they joked about. Wilde twitted Ross in a pseudo-religious story recalled by Ada Leverson. ‘There was a certain saint, who was called Saint Robert of Phillimore. Every night, while the sky was yet black, he would rise from his bed and, falling on his knees, pray to God that He, of His great bounty, would cause the sun to rise and make bright the earth. And always, when the sun rose, Saint Robert knelt again and thanked God that this miracle had been vouchsafed. Now, one night, Saint Robert, wearied by the vast number of more than usually good deeds he had done that day, slept so soundly that when he awoke the sun had already risen, and the earth was already bright. For a few moments Saint Robert looked grave and troubled, but presently he fell down on his knees and thanked God that, despite the neglectfulness of His servant, He had yet caused the sun to rise and make bright the earth.’30
That Dorian Gray should kill a painter, who in the original draft (as Wilde told the translator Jean-Joseph Renaud31) was clearly and libelously Whistler, makes the book more a record of Wilde’s personal feelings than might appear. His homicidal impulse towards Whistler ran concurrently with his homosexual impulse towards Ross, also shadowed in the novel. One fantasy remained a fantasy and, for fear of a libel action, the image of Whistler was removed from the text. The other was realized. For Wilde, homosexual love roused him from pasteboard conformity to the expression of latent desires. After 1886 he was able to think of himself as a criminal, moving guiltily among the innocent. His wife was the most innocent of all. (For the invert,’ says Proust in Sodome et Gomorrhe, Vice begins … when he takes his pleasure with women.’) Up to that time Wilde could think of himself as misunderstood; now he had to promote misunderstanding. Instead of challenging Victorian society by words, he engaged it by deeds as well.
Constance was the mother of their children, and he had no intention of giving them up. She was as loving as ever, in a way he could no longer enjoy. He had to find a pretext for their remaining sexually apart. Her brother Otho said there was a virtual divorce, meaning that sexual relations ceased.32 According to Otho, Constance suspected her husband’s reorientation only once, and that was not until 1895, when she came back to the house unexpectedly. Since she continued to live with him, she must have been told something absolutely convincing. A likely conjecture is that he confessed to having caught syphilis at Oxford, perhaps telling her that he had suffered a recurrence of the disease after a long remission. Celibacy was the only answer.
One day Louise Jopling showed Constance a photograph taken at a party at which Constance had not been present. Mrs Jopling had posed with her arms around Oscar Wilde’s neck. Constance’s response was strange. She showed no sign of jealousy, only looked at the picture for a moment and said, with unexpected sadness, ‘Poor Oscar!’33 The serious embrace of women was forbidden him.
* In his lecture to art students, Wilde had clarified his attitude: ‘All archaeological pictures that make you say, “How curious,” all sentimental pictures that make you say, “How sad,” all historical pictures that make you say, “How interesting,” all pictures that do not immediately give you such artistic joy as to make you say, “How beautiful,” are bad pictures.’9
† Wilde’s lectures in the British Isles at this time included: October 1884: 1st, lecture on ‘Dress’ at Ealing; 6th, Liverpool; 8th, Manchester; 9th, ‘The Value of Art in Modern Life’ and ‘Dress’ at the Exhibition Hall, York; 14th, ‘Dress’ at Lesser Victoria-Room, Clifton (near Bristol). November: 5th, ‘The Value of Art in Modern Life’ in Town Hall, Stoke-on-Trent. December: 4th, ‘Beauty, Taste and Ugliness in Dress,’ at Albert Hall, Leeds; 7th, Glasgow; 11th, Southport; 13th, ‘Dress’ at Carlisle, ?19th, Glasgow; 20th, ‘Dress’ and ‘The Value of Art in Modern Life,’ at Queen Street Hall, Edinburgh; ?21st, Crystal Palace.
There followed twenty-one Irish engagements, December 1884–January 1885, including: January 1885: 5th, ‘Dress’ and ‘The Value of Art in Modern Life,’ at Gaiety Theatre, Dublin; 14th, Clonmel; 17th, Dundalk.
Then: January 1885: 21st–22nd, College Hall, Sheffield; 23rd, Huddersfield; 24th, King’s Lynn; 25th, Lincoln; 26th, Halifax; 28th, Gainsborough; 29th, Harrogate; 30th, Chesterfield; 31st, York. February: 1st, Scarborough; Darlington and Falkirk; 27th, Chesterfield; Stockton, Newcastle, Maryport, Cockermouth, Ulverston, Sunderland, Leicester. March: 7th, Leamington; Cheltenham; 10th, Wolverhampton; nth, Walsall; 12th, Leicester; 14th, Northampton; Colchester, Ipswich, Yarmouth, Norwich, Bury St Edmunds, Cardiff, Swansea; 31st, Newport; Appleton, Birmingham, Peterborough, Edinburgh.
‡ ‘I find the earth as beautiful as the sky—and the body as beautiful as the soul.’
Exaltations
CHAPTER XI
Disciple to Master
Personality is a very mysterious thing. A man cannot always be estimated by what he does. He may keep the law and yet be worthless
. He may break the law, and yet be fine. He may be bad, without ever doing anything bad. He may commit a sin against society, and yet realize through that sin his own perfection.
New Anatomies
At Oxford, Wilde had made the problem of becoming or not becoming a Roman Catholic the nub of much of his verse. He was now able to make his experience of marriage and countermarriage the center of his career in prose. Homosexuality fired his mind. It was the major stage in his discovery of himself. Much of what he had sponsored up to now, beauty as understood by the Pre-Raphaelites or embodied in Lillie Langtry, ceased to interest him. The earnestness with which he had lectured both in America and in England did not go with his changed outlook. Although he kept much of his admiration for old idols like Ruskin and Pater, he could now see that Ruskin was too innocent, and Pater too hesitant, to serve him as models. They were also too serious. Ironic frivolity, with dark insinuation, was the compound through which he now sought to express himself.
Oscar Wilde Page 39