Wilde edged back towards playwriting with the dialogues in 1889 and 1891. In 1889 he had an unexpected and unsought piece of luck. Lawrence Barrett, a well-known American actor, wrote to him about The Duchess of Padua. Barrett had read it in New York years before and liked it; he thought he might stage it successfully, and asked Wilde to meet him in July at a place on the Rhine called Kreuznach. Wilde responded at once:
July 1889
My dear Mr Barrett, I am very proud and pleased to learn that you have not forgotten the Duchess of Padua. I should be very glad to make any alterations in it you can suggest, and indeed I have no doubt that the play could be vastly improved.
I could go to Kreuznach the end of this month for five or six days, but would it be impossible to arrange the alterations by correspondence? I do not know what the expense of the journey is, and have not much money to spare. Your kind offer to be your guest I accept with great pleasure.
It is right to tell you that before I received your letter Miss Calhoun had approached me on the subject of the play. But nothing is settled, as she has, as yet, made me no offer. Personally I would sooner that my work should be presented to the public by an artist of your experience and knowledge. I know how very perfect all your productions are, and what unity of effect you have been able to present by means of right balance and artistic tact. ‘Francesca da Rimini,’ which I saw in New York, always remains in my memory as one of the best modern productions of our stage.
OSCAR WILDE37
Barrett evidently defrayed his expenses; and Wilde wrote to Robert Ross, ‘I thought it would be a superb opportunity for forgetting the language.’ They agreed on some changes, and now or later Barrett told Wilde that the play would have more success if given a new title, Guido Ferranti, and staged anonymously. The shadow of Vera might otherwise hang over it. Wilde agreed. It was the first of two occasions when his name would be left off the billboards.
Barrett did not get round to producing Guido Ferranti until January of 1891, that year so triumphant for Wilde. The newspapers, as if their old venom had been drained by lapse of time and Barrett’s reputation, let Wilde off lightly this time. The New York Herald and New York Times reviewers treated it respectfully. The New York Tribune reviewer, William Winter, commented on 27 January 1891:
In the Broadway Theatre last night, in the presence of a numerous, eagerly attentive, and often kindly responsive audience, Lawrence Barrett, whose enterprise is incessant and whose noble ambition never tires, produced another new piece, under the name of ‘Guido Ferranti.’ … The new play is deftly constructed in five short acts, and is written in a strain of blank verse that is always melodious, often eloquent, and sometimes freighted with fanciful figures of rare beauty. It is less a tragedy, however, than a melodrama.… The radical defect of the work is insincerity. No one in it is natural. The chief part is the woman—Beatrice, Duchess of Padua; and Beatrice is practically insane.… she … stabs and murders her objectionable husband, in order that she may remove all obstacles to the gratification of her passion.…
The authorship of ‘Guido Ferranti’ has not been disclosed. There need not have been any hesitation about it—for he is a practiced writer and a good one. We recognize in this work a play that we had the pleasure of reading several years ago, in manuscript. It was then called ‘The Duchess of Padua.’ The author of it is Oscar Wilde.
After the first night the advertisements read, ‘Oscar Wilde’s Love Tragedy.’ Barrett stopped the performances after three weeks, possibly because of ill health (he died in March), but Wilde was pleased by the run, and hoped to have the play put on in London. He reminded Henry Irving that he already had a copy, and urged him to produce it. Irving refused. Then George Alexander, late in 1890, took over the St James’s Theatre with the intention of producing plays by English rather than continental or Scandinavian writers. He approached Wilde for a play, and was offered The Duchess of Padua. Although he liked it, he decided the scenery would cost too much, and asked Wilde to write on a modern subject. In February he offered him £50 (not £100, as he afterwards said) in advance, on a play to be submitted by 1 January 1891, and Wilde accepted. But as the months passed and Alexander importuned in vain, Wilde offered to return the advance. Alexander shrewdly declined.
In the summer of 1891 Wilde suddenly saw how he might write the play. He said to Frank Harris, ‘I wonder can I do it in a week, or will it take three? It ought not to take long to beat the Pineros and the Joneses.’38 (Pinero was well known to take, like Ibsen, a year on each play, affording producers a much-desired respite.) Wilde went to the Lake Country to stay with a friend, and on the way back stopped in a hotel, where Ross joined him. He returned saying he had borrowed the name of the principal part from the longest lake. (Actually he had used ‘Lady Windermere’ in ‘Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime’ several years before.) On his trip he had passed through Selby, to which the Windermeres are going at the end of the play.39 He finished the play in October, and asked Alexander when he might read it to him. An appointment was made, but Wilde was late because at the last moment he was summoned to help John Barlas, who had been arrested. In the flurry of departure, the script fell to the ground, curled up. He was glad to see that it had not fallen flat, and remembered it afterwards as a good omen.40
The play he now read aloud avoided the method of Ibsen, which Shaw was to expound in The Quintessence of Ibsenism the same year. Wilde did not underrate his Norwegian rival; he allowed that Hedda Gabler was Greek in its power to generate pity and terror. But his own goal, he saw, was to make dialogue as brilliant as possible, while Ibsen confined his characters to ordinary words in ordinary life. Ibsen, said Wilde, was analytic; his own method he called ‘dramatic.’ One probed a situation to uncover an infection; the other relied on verbal ricochet, to express ‘a conflict between our artistic sympathies and our moral judgment.’41 For Wilde, unlike Ibsen, the setting had to be in the leisure class, people with time, money, and education, proficient in conversation. The taut opening scene of Lady Windermere’s Fan foreshadowed later events, but its more original contribution was to counterpose two language systems, one of platitude, the other of epigram. ‘Believe me,’ says Lady Windermere, ‘you are better than most other men, and I sometimes think you pretend to be worse,’ to which Lord Darlington, instead of disclaiming such an intention, replies, ‘We all have our little vanities.’ His remark embraces the fascination of wickedness, which he reverses in another speech: ‘As a wicked man, I am a complete failure. Why, there are lots of people who say I have never really done anything wrong in the whole course of my life. Of course they only say it behind my back.’ Here he turns nonwickedness—or goodness—into a fault. Such remarks disturb conventional morality by proposing its absurdity, as the play does on a larger scale.
When he had finished reading the play to Alexander, Wilde asked, ‘Did you like it?’ ‘Like it is not the word, it is simply wonderful.’ ‘What will you give me for it?’ ‘A thousand pounds,’ said Alexander. ‘A thousand pounds! I have so much confidence in your excellent judgement, my dear Alec, that I cannot but refuse your generous offer—I will take a percentage.’42 As a result, he made £7000 in the first year.
Shortly after the agreement was signed for a production early in 1892, Wilde was asked by William Heinemann to write the introduction for two plays of Maeterlinck in English translation. He came to lunch to discuss the matter on 16 October 1891. Heinemann was astonished at his guest’s wearing deep mourning and melancholy looks. On being pressed about his bereavement, Wilde replied, ‘This day happens to be my birthday, and I am mourning (as I shall henceforth do on each of my anniversaries) the flight of one year of my youth into nothingness, the growing blight upon my summer.’43 (He was thirty-seven.) It was a costume that he would assign, with the same mock seriousness, to John Worthing in The Importance of Being Earnest. As for introducing Maeterlinck, he must wait for inspiration. It never came. As a successful playwright, Wilde no longer needed this kind of work.
* In 1895, when Wilde was convicted, Jeyes editorialized (on 27 May) that the St James’s Gazette had been right to say that Dorian Gray was a matter for the police, not the critic.
† In Paris on 11 March 1891, Wilde went with Sherard and Carlos Blacker to call on Zola. ‘I consider it a great honor to receive your visit,’ Zola said. He discussed his novel La Guerre, and said he must go down to Sedan to visit the battlefield. But before that he must go through heaps of documents about the battle. ‘You believe absolutely in the value of documents for novel-writing then?’ asked Wilde. ‘Oh, absolutely. There is no good novel which is not based on documents.’ ‘It’s what I was saying last night at Daudet’s,’ said Wilde. ‘In writing my Dorian Gray I studied long lists of jewelry. The other day I spent hours over a catalogue published by a firm of horticulturists, to learn the names of various kinds of flowers and their technical descriptions. You cannot draw a novel from your brain as a spider draws its web out of its belly.’
But with Max Beerbohm he was more candid: ‘Do you know, whenever that man writes a book he always takes his subjects directly from life. If he is going to write about dreadful people in hovels he goes and lives in a hovel himself for months in case he shouldn’t be accurate. It is strange. Take me for example. I have conceived the idea for the most exquisite tale that was ever written. The period is the eighteenth century. It would require a morning’s reading at the British Museum. Therefore,’ he sighed, ‘it will never be written.’27
‡ ‘In Honor of Dorian and His Creator
‘Bless you, Oscar, for honoring me with this book for friendship’s sake. Casting in the Roman tongue praises that befit Dorian, I thank you.
‘This lovely rose of youth blossoms among roses, until death comes abruptly. Behold the man! Behold the God! If only my soul could take his part.
‘He avidly loves strange loves and, fierce with beauty, he plucks strange flowers. The more sinister his spirit, the more radiant his face, lying—but how splendidly!
‘Here are apples of Sodom, here are the very hearts of vices, and tender sins. In heaven and hell be glory of glories to you who perceive so much.
Lionel the Poet.’
§ Wilde’s reaction to the theft of his family’s silver in this year is unrecorded.35
CHAPTER XIII
Hellenizing Paris
Only the great masters of style ever succeed in being obscure.
Mallarmé
London at his feet, though unwillingly so, Wilde turned his attention to France. He was in a triumphant mood. Success, said André Gide, seemed to run ahead of him, and he had only to collect it.1 Wilde had been gradually enlarging his acquaintance in Paris, but he could now celebrate his transformation from conversationalist to author. Most of the writers he had come to know in the eighties were décadents, but he had signaled the passing of this movement in ‘The Decay of Lying,’ not only in its title, but in the allusion to ‘a sort of cult for Domitian.’ In England decadence had always been tinged with self-mockery. By 1890, symbolism, not decadence, had the cry, as Wilde acknowledged in the preface to Dorian Gray: ‘All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril.’ These aphorisms were a bow to Stéphane Mallarmé, whom he had visited in February 1891, when he was writing the preface.
Mallarmé was a new phenomenon for Wilde. His eloquence, depending upon uncommon vocabulary and syntax and a refusal to grandstand for an audience, was quite unlike the manner of great talkers. His mardis were famous, and his disciples came to listen to him rather than talk themselves. Wilde was prepared to perform the same sacrifice, though with all his attentiveness to the ‘maître’ he made his mark. He went to his first mardi on 24 February 1891, and the conversation must have lit upon Poe, for whom he and Mallarmé shared an admiration. Mallarmé presented Wilde with ‘Le Corbeau,’ his translation of Poe’s ‘The Raven,’ which he had republished a year before. Next day Wilde thanked him for it:
Mercredi
Hôtel de L’Athénée
Cher Maître, Comment dois-je vous remercier pour la gracieuse façon avec laquelle vous m’avez présenté la magnifique symphonie en prose que vous a inspiré [sic] les mélodies du génie du grand poète celtique, Edgar Allan Poe. En Angleterre nous avons de la prose et de la poésie, mais la prose française et la poésie dans les mains d’un maître tel que vous deviennent une et la même chose.
Le privilège de connaître l’auteur de L’Apres-midi d’un Faune est on ne peut plus flatteur, mais de trouver en lui l’accueil que vous m’avez montré est en vérité inoubliable.
Ainsi, cher maître, veuillez agréer l’assurance de ma haute et très parfaite considération
OSCAR WILDE*2
He attended a second mardi the following week, and the disciples took account of Mallarmé’s tacit endorsement.
The situation was a little touchy, because Mallarmé was on close terms with Whistler, whom he had met years before in Manet’s studio. He had the greatest regard for him, and addressed a prose poem to him as the type of the artist. Wilde trusted to Mallarmé’s intelligence, and his own, to overcome the difficulty, and was not disappointed. He was made to feel that he was welcome at Mallarmé’s every time he visited Paris, and so, when he returned at the end of October, he announced that he would be coming on 3 November. He enclosed a copy of The Picture of Dorian Gray with homage to Mallarmé’s ‘noble and severe art.’ This happened to be a time when Whistler was also in Paris, supervising some color lithographs and trying to speed up the sale of his portrait of his mother to the French government. He was determined not to meet Wilde. They had not spoken for years. Still, if he left the field to his rival, he would do so with as bad grace as he could muster. On Monday, 2 November, Whistler wrote to Mallarmé with his usual disregard of spelling and accents:
Mon cher ami—Le travail est fini—ainsi je pars—Vous m’avez rendu ma visite bien charmante—comme c’est bien de votre habitude—C’est donc un peu ingrat de ma part de ne pas rester pour dénoncer Oscar devant vos disciples demain soir!—
C’est un service que je vous dois—je le sais bien—et cela aurait peut être même ajouté à l’agrément de votre Soirée!—
Les Mardis de Mallarmé sont maintentant historiques—exclusifs—et réservés aux artistes honêtes—L’entrée est un privilège—et une preuve de valeur—Une distinction dont nous sommes fier—Et la Porte du Maître ne doit pas être enfoncée par tout farceurs qui traverse[nt] la Manche pour plus tard s’imposer en détaillant, à bon marché les belles fleurs de conversation et les graves verits que pratique Notre Poete en bel humeur!—Adieu …†
This was not enough. The following evening a telegram from Whistler arrived a few minutes before Wilde. It said—with an allusion to Wilde’s Preface to Dorian Gray and its propositions, to which latter Whistler laid claim:
PREFACE PROPOSITIONS PREVENIR DISCIPLES
PRECAUTION FAMALIARITE [sic] FATALE SERRER LES
PERLES BONNE SOIREE
WHISTLER‡3
Mallarmé knew that Whistler was overwrought about the visit, and made a point of smoothing him down, assuring him that the soirée had been dull without him—‘le personnage même de l’artiste’—although the telegram had amused the company. The disciples had seen Whistler’s portrait at a Paris gallery, and when once Mallarmé had ‘thrown Whistler’s name aloft, they spread themselves in admiration, which Wilde echoed; and such were the highlights of this mardi. The telegram, placed on a table at the side, had to amuse itself.’
Whistler returned to the charge. He alerted Mallarmé to Wilde’s telling the newspapers that he basked in the Master’s admiration and frequented the cafés with the disciples. Mallarmé replied that there was a to-do about Wilde, but that he had not seen him again, having been obliged to decline two dinner invitations from disciples when Wilde was also to be a guest. Whistler interpreted this letter to mean that Mallarmé had been slighted:
No O.W
.—! comment toujours! Il pousse donc l’ingratitude jusqu’à l’indécence?—Et toutes ses anciennes rengainnes—il ose les offrir à Paris comme du neuf!—les histoires du Tourne-Soleil—ses promenades au lis—ses culottes—ses plastrons rose—que sats-je!—et puis l’ ‘Art’ par ici—l’ ‘Art’ par là—C’est vraiment obscène—et cela finira mal—Enfin nous verrons—et vous me le raconterez—§
Whistler had become manic on the subject of Wilde. He met Huysmans and Jules Bois at the Louvre and, to prove how jealous Wilde was of him, said, ‘Since the Luxembourg has taken one of my paintings, Wilde has deposited one of his books there.’ Bois and Huysmans concluded that the jealousy was on Whistler’s side.4
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