To the rest of the world he appeared to be lying fallow, or, to use the metaphor of the Pall Mall Gazette on 16 September 1887, ‘Oscar’s star has been low in the horizon since he cut his hair and became “Benedick the married man.” ’ But during these years he began to think and talk the narratives and dialogues which he would almost casually write down in the next decade. ‘Talk itself is a sort of spiritualised action,’ he said on 4 May 1887.1 There were more fairy tales, then short stories, and then dialogues, all closely bound to his experience though held at some distance in fictional and dramatic forms.
His audiences were his own children, especially Cyril; women, who had always been eager to listen to him; and a new group, with whom he flirted by spellbinding them. Among them Ross had a permanent but not exclusive place. Harry Marillier and the Cambridge group faded out, but other young men interested in the arts and one another were not hard to find. For a time Wilde was friendly with André Raffalovich, the young poet and novelist from Paris who had heard him lecture in the United States in 1882, and had himself emigrated to London two years later. Raffalovich had a good deal of money and entertained lavishly. Wilde came to lunch with Pater and Maxwell at his house, and attended evening parties where Mrs Jopling, Comyns Carr, Henry James, George Moore, and many others congregated. Raffalovich was said to be so ugly that his mother had sent him to London because she could not bear to look at him. Still, Wilde did not complain about his looks until later. At the beginning, Raffalovich recalls, Wilde remarked to him, ‘You could give me a new thrill. You have the right measure of romance and cynicism.’ They met often enough for Wilde to caution the young man, ‘You know, you and I, Sandy, we must be most careful of the people we are seen with. I am so conspicuous and you are not le premier venu.’ A particular reason for behaving circumspectly after September 1889 was the Cleveland Street scandal, which drove Lord Arthur Somerset out of England because of alleged offenses with telegraph boys at a homosexual brothel. Wilde and Raffalovich talked openly about sexual matters, and Raffalovich was struck by Wilde’s evident excitement over Rachilde’s Monsieur Vénus, in which a lesbian dresses her lover as a man—a costume which eventually leads to the lover’s death in a duel. Wilde delighted in telling the story to his friends. Such conversations eventually led to a rupture with Raffalovich; it was unwittingly precipitated by Constance’s remark ‘Oscar says he likes you so much—that you have such nice improper talks together.’ Raffalovich took offense, or says he did.2
He began his role of incubus in Wilde’s life with a novel, A Willing Exile, published in 1890. It made Wilde’s circle sound as obnoxious as Dorian Gray made it sound fascinating. Raffalovich represented the Wildes as Cyprian and Daisy Brome:
Mrs Brome, of course, knew many men. Cyprian was, or seemed to be, intimate with countless young or youngish men; they were all curiously alike. Their voices, the cut of their clothes, the curl of their hair, the brims of their hats, the parties they went to: Daisy could not see much difference between them.… Affectation characterised all these men, and the same sort of affectation. They were all gushers, professional gushers.… Married (some were married) or unmarried, they gushed alike, only some were ruder than others, and some were duller than others.…
Cyprian’s cult for his own looks … increased instead of diminished. He lived with people who talked much about beauty.… He had acquired the habit of comparing himself to every one he met and of debating who was better looking, he or the other.… He had two flowers (or rather, bunches of flowers) sent him every day, one before lunch, and the other before dinner. His clothes much occupied him; he was never tired of discussing male fashions, and sometimes Daisy, after having been away an hour, would find him and a chum still pursuing their analysis of another man’s garments.3
Having accustomed himself to hostile trumpeting, Wilde did not bother about Raffalovich’s penny whistle.
Relations were easier with Richard Le Gallienne, who at seventeen heard Wilde lecture in Birkenhead in 1883, and instantly found his own literary calling in Wilde’s example. By the late eighties the handsome poet, whom Wilde called the Angel Gabriel in Rossetti’s Annunciation and Swinburne called ‘Shelley with a chin,’ was a friend and frequent guest. He stayed with the Wildes for three days, and was presented with a copy of Poems inscribed ‘To Richard Le Gallienne, poet and lover, from Oscar Wilde. A summer day in June ’88.’ To which he responded with a poem entitled ‘With Oscar Wilde, A Summer-Day in June ’88,’ printed on handmade paper with a silk-sewn paper cover and the further inscription ‘This copy of verse I have made for my friend Oscar Wilde, as a love-token, and in secret memory of a summer day in June ’88. R. Le G.’ Le Gallienne accepted Wilde’s praise with pleasure but had the prudence to remark to a friend in 1888 that two letters from the master were ‘very rich.’ In a letter of a slightly later date, 1 December 1890, Wilde, after fulsomely evaluating Le Gallienne’s latest book, went on, ‘I want so much to see you: when can that be? Friendship and love like ours need not meetings, but they are delightful. I hope the laurels are not too thick across your brow for me to kiss your eyelids.’4
Another exceptionally handsome young man was Bernard Berenson, who came to Wilde with an introduction and was at once invited to stay in Tite Street. He found Wilde exhausted by society, whose luncheon parties he would return from in the late afternoon. ‘What was it like?’ Berenson asked. ‘Oh, terrible.’ ‘Then why did you stay so long?’ The people fascinated him, Wilde said. ‘There is something about them that is irresistibly attractive. They are more alive. They breathe a finer air. They are more free than we are.’ Wilde found Berenson equally irresistible, and made advances which were resisted. ‘You are completely without feeling, you are made of stone,’ he informed him.5
Not content with the company of possible or actual lovers, Wilde prided himself on leading a life not double but multiple. He could be with Parnell and Gladstone one night, with Wilson Barrett and Ellen Terry the next, with young men the next. And Constance, with his children, was always there, to neglect or not. She had her own interests, on which he looked benevolently. These led her to political meetings. Ross, who felt that Constance disliked him, was inclined to deprecate her spirit and individuality. The newspapers of the time give evidence to the contrary. She had things to say, worthy if not exhilarating, and overcame her shyness to say them. On 16 April 1888 she addressed a conference sponsored by the Women’s Committee of the International Arbitration and Peace Association. ‘Children should be taught in the nursery to be against war,’ she declared. ‘It has been suggested that toy soldiers and toy guns should be kept from the children. I do not think much good can be done that way. It is impossible in London for children not to see soldiers, and, seeing them, to like their bright clothes and upright bearing. At the same time, a wise mother can instill into the child a dislike of war.’6 She published, in 1889 and 1892, two books of children’s stories. During 1888 and 1889 she edited the Gazette of the Rational Dress Society. The speech she gave on 6 November 1888 advocated lighter clothing and divided skirts instead of petticoats. (When she was presented to the Queen in 1887, however, the dress she wore was an exact copy of the fashion at the time that Victoria had ascended the throne.)* She brought her husband along to a Hyde Park demonstration in support of the dock strike on 1 September 1889. When Lady Sandhurst campaigned on a feminist platform for a seat on the London County Council, Constance took an active part. Her candidate had a majority, but was disqualified, being a woman.7
On 24 May 1889, W. T. Stead reported in the Pall Mall Gazette, ‘I was astonished and delighted to note yesterday at the conference of the Women’s Liberal Foundation how very much Mrs Oscar Wilde has improved in public speaking, and I shall not be surprised if in a few years Mrs Wilde has become one of the most popular among “platform ladies.” ’ He also commended her ‘tasteful and elegant costume of some golden brown material.’
In 1885 and later, Constance and Oscar Wilde were moving into larger circles, toget
her or separately. Wilde had stopped lecturing: to the extent that Britain could be made beauty-conscious, he had done the job. To the extent that America could be satirized, he had done that too. The messages had worn thin from repetition. His last reported lecture took place in March 1888, and was on a new subject, the poet Chatterton. In some ways Chatterton, whom Wilde had read carefully, was a better model for him than Keats, because of his criminal propensities, and a better model than the forger Wainewright, because of his artistic power. Wilde sought eagerly for analogues to his own new mode of life, and found one in a young man who used his genius to forge Jacobean plays. The lecture notes show how Wilde rehearsed the events of Chatterton’s short life, and proposed a justification for them:
Was he [a] mere forger with literary powers or a great artist? The latter is the right view. Chatterton may not have had the moral conscience which is truth to fact—but he had the artistic conscience which is truth to Beauty. He had the artist’s yearning to represent and if perfect representation seemed to him to demand forgery he needs must forge. Still this forgery came from the desire of artistic self-effacement.
He was the pure artist—that is to say there was something in him of ‘the yearning of great Vishnu to create a world’—
He concluded the lecture with an unpublished poem which illustrates the complexity he relished in this new hero:
With Shakespeare’s manhood at a boy’s wild heart
Through Hamlet’s doubt to Shakespeare near allied
And kin to Milton through his Satan’s pride.
At death’s sole door he stooped and craved a dart
And to the dear new bower of England’s art
Even to that shrine Time else had deified,
The unuttered heart that seared against his side,
Drove the fell point and smote life’s seals apart.
Thy nested homeloves, noble Chatterton,
The angel trodden stair thy soul could trace
Up Redcliffe spire, and in the world’s armed space
Thy gallant swordplay: these to many a one
Are dear for ever—as thy grave unknown
And love-dream of thine unrecorded face.8
(The ‘homeloves’ were Chatterton’s mother and sister; ‘swordplay’ is a reference to the poet’s political satire. His face was ‘unrecorded’: there are no known portraits.) Wilde was working out new variations of his poem ‘Humanitad’; the young man destroying himself by his own lasting song was like the nightingale in his new fairy tale, ‘The Nightingale and the Rose,’ who puts her breast against the thorn until, by her death agony, a rose is born. Mallarmé had written in his ‘Plainte d’automne’ that ‘the literature from which my spirit asks pleasure will be the dying poetry of the last instants of Rome,’ and there was something of this delight possible in the threnodic contemplation of ‘the marvellous boy.’ Wilde could share with Chatterton Hamlet’s doubt and Satan’s pride, a sense of forging a life as Chatterton did, as well as a sense that he might one day be his own victim, a sacrifice to himself.
A Miller’s Thumb
The poor reviewers are apparently reduced to be the reporters of the police-court of literature, the chroniclers of the doings of the habitual criminals of art.
Lecturing gave way to journalism, the only other means readily available to supplement Constance’s income. However outside the law Wilde had begun to think himself, he was not yet pursued by the policeman, but only by the policeman’s brother—the bill collector. In his work for W. T. Stead’s Pall Mall Gazette, which was his principal outlet, he made a virtue of necessity and wrote much better than he had to. The articles were a way of organizing his attitudes towards literature, art, nature, and life; they exhibit a freshness not often present in his earlier work, as if to suggest that running foul of the law in his sexual life was a stimulus to thought on every subject. At last he knew where he stood. His new sexual direction liberated his art. It also liberated his critical faculty. From 1886 on, but especially in 1887 and 1888, Wilde wrote a series of about a hundred reviews, many of them dealing with more than one book. After that profusion the reviews came to a virtual end, with almost the same abruptness as the lectures. Journalism was for Willie. For Oscar it had served its purpose.
Many of the reviews are of such inconsequential works that close criticism was not required, and in these Wilde offers patience and indulgence. He can be simply funny, as when he mentions James Aitchison’s The Chronicle of Mites:
The Chronicle of Mites is a mock-heroic poem about the inhabitants of a decaying cheese who speculate about the origin of their species and hold learned discussions upon the meaning of evolution and the Gospel according to Darwin. This cheese-epic is a rather unsavoury production and the style is at times so monstrous and so realistic that the author should be called the Gorgon-Zola of literature.
At other times he is legislative, if only for a moment: ‘Indeed, properly speaking, there is no such thing as Style; there are merely styles, that is all.’ His old mannerism, ‘That is all,’ appeared more often, to puff up what might look casual. He had not yet achieved any large statement of principles, but isolated sentences showed where he was going: ‘Every century that produces poetry is, so far, an artificial century, and the work that seems to us the most natural and simple product of its kind is probably the result of the most deliberate and self-conscious effort. For Nature is always behind the age. It takes a great artist to be thoroughly modern.’9
A sense of his role as arbiter in English letters made him reconsider old admirations. When he turned to Whistler now, it was in quite a different tone from that which he had adopted in the days of discipleship. Then, on 28 February 1885, he had praised the artist as an orator who combined ‘the mirth and malice of Puck with the style of the minor prophets.’ On 26 January 1889 he found the combination infelicitous:
Mr Whistler, for some reason or other, always adopted the phraseology of the minor prophets.… The idea was clever enough at the beginning, but ultimately the manner became monotonous. The spirit of the Hebrews is excellent but their mode of writing is not to be imitated, and no amount of American jokes will give it that modernity which is essential to good literary style. Admirable as are Mr Whistler’s fireworks on canvas, his fireworks in prose are abrupt, violent and exaggerated.
Wilde had received Whistler’s taunts in the old days with saintly mildness; now it was Whistler’s turn to feel the lash. The painter waited to strike.
With the same independence, Wilde reviewed a book by a man who had once been his follower as well as Whistler’s, and had remained Whistler’s: Rennell Rodd. In ‘L’Envoi’ to Rose Leaf and Apple Leaf in 1883, Wilde had been full of admiration; now he looked at a subsequent volume of Rodd with a harsher eye:
Mr Rodd looks at life with all the charming optimism of a young man, though he is quite conscious of the fact, that a stray note of melancholy, here and there, has an artistic as well as a popular value; he has a keen sense of the pleasurableness of colour, and his verse is distinguished by a certain refinement and purity of outline; though not passionate he can play very prettily with the words of passion, and his emotions are quite healthy and quite harmless.10
The review was fair, but Wilde had once been more than fair in his estimate of Rodd. Rose leaf and apple leaf had withered.
Another writer whom he did not spare was his old teacher J. P. Mahaffy, two of whose books Wilde reviewed on 9 November and 16 December 1887. Wilde might have treated Mahaffy nostalgically, but the erect pen has no conscience. For his part, Mahaffy had disapproved of Wilde’s grand tour of the United States after their grand tours together of Greece and Italy; worse than that, he had become absurdly Tory in his sympathies, and contemptuous of Irish home rule just when, through Parnell’s advocacy and Gladstone’s support, home rule was becoming a distinct possibility. So, while his former pupil was almost prepared to stomach Mahaffy’s absurd manual, The Principles of the Art of Conversation, regretting only ‘the arid and je
june character of the style,’ Wilde was much more severe with the other book, Greek Life and Thought: From the Age of Alexander to the Roman Conquest. (It was a sequel to Greek Social Life and Thought, which Wilde had helped with.) The publisher was Macmillan, which meant that it had passed through the hands of their old traveling companion in Greece, George Macmillan. But the implied reunion was cheerless: Wilde complained of the disagreeable provinciality and violent Unionism of Mahaffy. ‘There is always something peculiarly impotent about the violence of a literary man,’ he said. He gathered vehemence as he proceeded, and summed up in the manner of Matthew Arnold: ‘In fact, not merely does Mr Mahaffy miss the spirit of the true historian, but he often seems entirely devoid of the temper of the true man of letters. He is clever, and, at times, even brilliant, but he lacks reasonableness, moderation, style and charm.’ Instead of solicitously touching up the manuscript, the pupil was now lecturing the master.
As for Swinburne, whose poetry had delighted his youth, Wilde was now much more quizzical. One of his last and best reviews, in the Pall Mall Gazette on 27 June 1889, is of Poems and Ballads (Third Series). He recapitulates the poet’s career, and conveys, with a surer sense of his own individuality, a growing disapprobation:
Mr Swinburne once set his age on fire by a volume of very perfect and very poisonous poetry. Then he became revolutionary, and pantheistic, and cried out against those who sit in high places both in heaven and on earth. Then he returned to the nursery, and wrote poems about children of a somewhat over-subtle character. He is now extremely patriotic, and manages to combine with his patriotism a strong affection for the Tory party. He has always been a great poet. But he has his limitations, the chief of which is, curiously enough, the lack of any sense of limit. His song is nearly always too loud for his subject. His magnificent rhetoric, nowhere more magnificent than in the volume that is before us, conceals rather than reveals. It has been said of him, and with truth, that he is a master of language, but with still greater truth it may be said that language is his master.…
Oscar Wilde Page 40