Oscar Wilde

by Richard Ellmann

  There was a man who could think only in bronze. And one day this man had an idea, the idea of joy, of the joy which dwells in the moment. And he felt that he had to tell it. But in all the world, not a single piece of bronze was left; for men had used it all. And this man felt that he would go mad if he did not tell his idea. And he thought about a piece of bronze on the grave of his wife, of a statue he had made to ornament the tomb of his wife, the only woman he had loved; it was the statue of sadness, of the sadness which dwells in life. And the man felt that he would go mad if he did not tell his idea. So he took the statue of sadness, of the sadness which dwells in life; he smashed it, he melted it down, and he made of it the statue of joy, of the joy which dwells only in the moment.45

  Each new work repudiates its predecessor, as its successor will repudiate it. Gide adopted this idea too, as he declares in a letter to Francis Jammes of 6 August 1902: ‘Each of my books is an immediate reaction against the preceding one. No one of them ever completely satisfies me, and I never dance on more than one foot a time: the main thing is to dance well all the same; but with every book I change feet, as one is tired from having danced, and the other from having rested all that time.’ He was fond of having his books murder one another, and proposed that Wilde’s De Profundis was the opposite of Intentions, as if he recognized that Wilde had subjected himself to the same law. He must also have been aware that ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism’ is killed by Salome as certainly as L’Immoraliste—that hollow victory of the flesh—is killed by La Porte étroite—that hollow victory of the spirit.

  For Wilde this oscillation is a cardinal principle; it can be observed at work within each book as well as between books. In Dorian Gray, Wilde writes that ‘Nothing can cure the soul but the senses just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.’ (Gide writes likewise in Les Nourritures terrestres, ‘I owed the health of my body only to the irremediable poisoning of my soul.’) In Salome Wilde reinterprets the Biblical legend and, in putting both Salome and Iokanaan to death, turns virtue into a kind of sin, a debauchery of the spirit not to be exalted over other forms of debauchery.

  What Wilde provided for Gide, at a crucial moment in the latter’s youth, was a way of extricating himself from an aestheticism which had not yet come to grips with love, religion, or life, and from a religion which offered safety only at the cost of being perpetually on guard. He did this not by rejecting aesthetics or ethics, but by turning sacred things inside out to make them secular, and secular things inside out to make them sacred. He showed souls becoming carnal and lusts becoming spiritual. He showed the aesthetic world not isolated from experience, but infused into it. This was the new Hellenism of which he liked to speak. Gide developed it.

  Wilde knew that his effect on the French had been extraordinary and unprecedented. Whistler tried to minimize it. He wrote from Paris that Wilde had ‘left Paris precipitately—utterly collapsed—saddened and demoralized—knowing that the Gaff was blown, and that it would be hopeless ever to try it on again. Besides, my “Oscar, le bourgeois malgré lui,” nearly finished him.’46 In fact, Wilde returned home in late December well pleased with himself and with Salome, which he had nearly finished. There had been talk of putting it on in Paris, though nothing had come of it. But Lady Windermere’s Fan was soon to be staged, and its success would set his literary course for the next four glorious years.

  * ‘Dear Master, How can I thank you for the gracious way in which you presented me with the magnificent symphony in prose which the melodies of the great celtic poet Edgar Allan Poe have inspired in you. In England we have prose and we have poetry, but French prose and poetry become in the hands of such a master as you one and the same thing.

  ‘The privilege of acquaintance with the author of L’Après-midi d’un faune is more flattering than I can say, but to receive from him the welcome that you have accorded me is really unforgettable.

  Yours faithfully,

  OSCAR WILDE’

  † ‘My dear friend—my tasks are done—so I am leaving—You have made my visit very pleasant—as you always do—So it’s a bit ungrateful of me not to stay and denounce Oscar in front of your disciples tomorrow evening!

  ‘It’s a service I owe you—I’m well aware of that—and it would even have contributed to the conviviality of your evening!

  ‘Mallarmé’s mardis are now historical—exclusive—and reserved for artists who are honest—Entry to them is a privilege—and a proof of worth—A distinction that makes us proud—And the Master’s Door should not be crashed by every jokester who crosses the Channel so as to gain respect later by retailing on the cheap the conversational blooms and the weighty truths Our Poet offers in such good temper!—Farewell …’

  ‡ ‘PREFACE PROPOSITIONS FOREWARN DISCIPLES

  PRECAUTION FAMILIARITY FATAL HIDE THE

  PEARLS HAVE A GOOD EVENING

  WHISTLER’

  § ‘No O.W—! just like him! He pushes ingratitude to the point of indecency, then?—And all the old chestnuts—he dares offer them in Paris like new ones!—the tales of the sunflower—his walks with the lily—his knee breeches—his rose-colored stiff shirts—and all that!—and then ‘Art’ here—‘Art’ there—It’s really obscene—and will come to a bad end—As we shall see—and you will tell me how it happens—’

  ‖ ‘I am finishing the book, one of the few that can take hold of the reader, since from an inner revery and the strangest perfumes of the soul it stirs up a storm. To make it poignant again, amid the outrageous refinement of intellect, and human as well, in so perverse an atmosphere of beauty, is a miracle that you bring about, and necessarily by all the writer’s arts!

  ‘ “It was the portrait that had done everything.” This full-length disquieting portrait of a Dorian Gray will haunt, but by virtue of being written, has itself become a book.

  STÉPHANE MALLARMÉ’

  a ‘Am I not the ugliest woman in Paris, M. Wilde?’ ‘In the world, Madame.’ It was like his remark to Mrs T. P. O’Connor. Wilde had asked her if she were not jealous of her husband’s flirtation with a young blonde. ‘No,’ she said, ‘T.P. doesn’t know a pretty woman when he sees one.’ Harold Frederic, who was present, said, ‘I beg leave to differ—what about yourself?’ ‘Oh, I was an accident.’ ‘Rather,’ said Wilde, ‘a catastrophe.’29

  b ‘Dear Monsieur de Goncourt:

  ‘Although the intellectual basis of my aesthetic is the Philosophy of Unreality, or perhaps because of that, I ask you to permit me a small rectification of your notes on the conversation in which I spoke to you about our dear and noble English poet M. Algernon Swinburne.… No doubt it was my fault. One can adore a language without speaking it well, as one can love a woman without understanding her. French by sympathy, I am Irish by race, and the English have condemned me to speak the language of Shakespeare.

  ‘You said that I represented M. Swinburne as a flaunter of vice. That would surprise the poet very much, since he lives an austere life in a country dwelling, consecrated entirely to art and literature.

  ‘Here is what I meant to say.… In Shakespeare, and in his contemporaries Webster and Ford, there are cries of nature. In Swinburne’s work, we meet for the first time the cry of flesh tormented by desire and memory, joy and remorse, fecundity and sterility. The English public, as usual hypocritical, prudish, and philistine, has not known how to find the art in the work of art: it has searched for the man in it. Since it always confuses the man and his creations, it thinks that to create Hamlet you must be a little melancholy, to imagine Lear completely mad. So it has built around M. Swinburne a legend of an ogre and a devourer of children. M. Swinburne, an aristocrat by birth and an artist by temperament, has merely laughed at these absurdities.…

  ‘I hope that when I have the honor of meeting you again, you will find my way of expressing myself in French less obscure than on 21 April 1883.’

  c ‘To the young man who adores Beauty / To the young man whom Beauty adores / To the young man I adore’r />
  d ‘One should not look either at things or people. One should look only in mirrors. Because mirrors only show us masks.’

  e ‘Wilde contrives piously to kill what was left to me of soul, because he says that to know an essence, one must suppress it, he wants me to miss my soul. The effort to destroy a thing takes its measure. Everything constitutes itself only by being rendered void … etc.’

  As Lord Illingworth says, ‘Thought is by its nature destructive. Nothing survives being thought of.’

  f Wilde had a moral tale about Androcles, who he said was one of the best dentists of his age. In the desert he found a lion who had broken his teeth in trying to eat someone. Androcles was moved to construct a new set of gold teeth for the lion, which fitted him perfectly. Some years later Androcles, being a Christian, was exhibited in the Roman circus before being thrown to the wild beasts. A lion came out of a gilded cage and went for him, his mouth gaping wide. But Androcles recognized his handiwork, and the lion recognized the dentist, and began to lick his feet. Then he thought, ‘How can I show my gratitude to this man who saved my life? I must give him enormous publicity.’ So saying, he gathered himself, and, to demonstrate to all the excellence of the set of false teeth, in a few mouthfuls he ate him up.37

  g Gide had another Wilde fable, which he did not much like and therefore recalled only for its ending. The ghosts of two saints, one a woman and one a man, converse from opposite sides of the river Nile. At the end of their dialogue, the man, who has been describing his life of renunciation and sacrifice, concludes: ‘And this body, to which I refused all its natural joys, this body that I mortified, that whips have lashed, that torturers have burned and broken, this wretched body that I’ve always treated as an enemy—after my death, do you know what they did? They embalmed it!’40

  CHAPTER XIV

  A Good Woman, and Others

  ‘And what sort of lives do these people, who pose as being moral, lead themselves? My dear fellow, you forget that we are in the native land of the hypocrite.’

  Success in Piccadilly

  Wilde was back in London about 22 December 1891, in time to spend Christmas with his wife and sons. He called on his mother, now a little better off because of the Civil List grant he had obtained for her in 1890. There was news about Willie, whose last memorable act had been to get himself declared bankrupt on 31 August 1888. This time his prospects sounded more encouraging. During the summer of 1891 he had met Mrs Frank Leslie, a wealthy American widow and newspaper publisher. She was fifty-five, he was thirty-nine. Within a few days Willie proposed, but she left London in early August without committing herself. Oscar urged Willie to get a prenuptial settlement. Willie did not do so. But in September 1891 he had pursued her to New York and had married her there on 4 October in the Church of the Strangers, 229 Mercer Street.

  The new Mrs Wilde did not understand her husband’s indolence or his drinking. It soon became clear that Willie was not planning to do even as much work as he had done in London. ‘What New York needs,’ he said, ‘is a leisure class, and I am determined to introduce one.’ He spent his time and his wife’s money at the fashionable Lotos Club. Their sexual relations were unsatisfactory. ‘He was of no use to me, either by day or night,’ was his wife’s verdict. Early in 1892 she came to London with him, and said to a friend, ‘I’m taking Willie over, but I’ll not bring Willie back.’ She told Lady Wilde that she would not go on supporting him in idleness. ‘I hear your marriage has broken up,’ said Oscar when he and Willie met. ‘No,’ said Willie, ‘it’s broken down.’ ‘What’s the difference?’ ‘She’s up, I’m down.’1 Willie went back to the Daily Telegraph to offer his services again, but was taken on only for occasional assignments.

  Willie was difficult to help and beyond the reach of admonition. In the last days of December 1891 his industrious brother went to Torquay, and stayed there until January finishing Salome. Lady Windermere’s Fan also needed some last-minute work before George Alexander produced it in February. For the moment Wilde called the play A Good Woman, to the annoyance of his mother, who assured him that the title would attract no one. Wilde probably had the final title in mind, but he remembered his American experience of having both Vera and The Duchess of Padua written about exhaustively before they could be produced. He also liked the ambiguity of ‘good,’ and when he published it as a book, the play was given the composite title: Lady Windermere’s Fan: A Play About a Good Woman.

  Writing about a good woman and a bad one at the same time illustrated his belief that in art contraries are equally true. But neither Lady Windermere nor Salome lived up to her advance billing. Salome is fatal to herself as well as to the young Syrian captain and to Iokanaan. Lady Windermere’s pursuit of the good is tortuous; she is prepared to run off with a lover rather than admit an adventuress to her ball. Puritanism, as Wilde never tired of showing, produces its viciousness as much as debauchery. Thoughtless goodness is as self-destructive as evil, and becomes what it despises. In this play Wilde was continuing the dialectic of Dorian Gray, where the degradation of the anchorite’s self-denial is ‘infinitely more terrible than that degradation from which, in their ignorance, they had sought to escape.’ It was also the dialectic of ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism,’ in which he warned that the world has to suffer more from its martyrs than its sinners. Of the two heroines, Salome might be defended, since she serves and expresses love, if perversely, while Lady Windermere represses it.

  Lady Windermere’s Fan is a more radical play than it appears. To dismiss it as about a fallen woman’s rescue of her puritan daughter, who eventually becomes less puritan, is to ignore Wilde’s critique of catch phrases and conventional moral blame. Lady Windermere is tempted by her own morality to behave in a way alien to her character as well as to that morality; she has to be rescued by the maternal adventuress, who knows much more about goodness than her daughter ever will. On the other hand, Lord Darlington, who has been taken for a man about town, and who talks like Lord Henry Wotton, differs from Wotton in his possession of deep feelings. He seems to be parading Pater-like phrases about ‘living one’s own life, fully, entirely, completely,’ instead of ‘dragging out some false, shallow, degrading existence that the world in its hypocrisy demands.’ But he means them. This hinting at Lord Windermere’s putative infidelity is not really ungentlemanly. When the play was given in New York with Maurice Barrymore (the father of John, Ethel, and Lionel) in the role, Wilde complained that Barrymore had failed to see that ‘Darlington is not a villain, but a man who really believes that Windermere is treating his wife badly, and wishes to save her. His appeal is not to the weakness, but to the strength of her character (Act II): in Act III his words show he really loves her.’ It is because of her that he is leaving England for many years; he is a better man than Windermere.

  Wilde is ingenious in his ending. He resolved not to admit the total recognition which was the staple of comedy. Three secrets are left at the end, undisclosed: Windermere will never know that his wife was at Darlington’s rooms, on the verge of running away with him; Lady Windermere will never know that Mrs Erlynne is her mother; Lord Augustus will never recognize how Mrs Erlynne has hoodwinked him. Lady Windermere’s Fan withholds the conventional ending of comedy, and concludes with collusive concealment instead of collective disclosure. Society profits from deception. Wilde also shelves the stereotype of the fallen woman: Mrs Erlynne is singularly impenitent. She gives way to an access of maternal feeling, which she has never felt, and abruptly sheds it. As Wilde explained, by the next day she feels, ‘ “This passion is too terrible. It wrecks my life. I don’t want to know it again. It makes me suffer too much. Let me go away. I don’t want to be a mother any more.” And so the fourth act is to me the psychological act, the act that is newest, most true.’2 It is this act which prompts him to claim for Mrs Erlynne that her character is ‘as yet untouched by literature.’ She follows that pattern which Wilde had discovered in himself, of venting a passion to exhaust it. Lady Wind
ermere, blinded by puritanism, is obliged to see a different world. Both bear out Wilde’s idea that emotions are finite, their limits defined only when exceeded. In this sense we kill the thing inside us that we love. Goodness turns out to be a subtler commodity than it has appeared.

  In February 1892, Lady Windermere’s Fan went into rehearsal. As with all his plays, Wilde attended every day and was full of suggestions and revisions as he observed the effect of his lines. He did not hesitate to tell Alexander his views, and they often disagreed. Two of his surviving letters to Alexander from the rehearsal period refer to discourtesy and friction. Wilde dictated the finest details of position and inflection. He wanted no word of the dialogue to be lost. At first he rejected Alexander’s suggestion that the audience be allowed to know at the end of Act II that Mrs Erlynne and Lady Windermere are mother and daughter. (After the first night he gave in on this point and rewrote the speeches.) The stress of rehearsal, and of quarreling with Alexander, made Wilde so ill that he said he would have to go away for a rest after the opening night. In fact, his malaise dissipated in euphoria.

  The theatre was fully booked for the first performance, on 20 February 1892. Wilde’s old flames Florence Balcombe, now Stoker, and Lillie Langtry were there, and so was his wife. He got tickets for friends, though not nearly so many as he wished. One went to Pierre Louÿs, who came over from France, and one to Edward Shelley, a clerk at the Bodley Head whom Wilde was courting and would take to bed that night at the Albemarle Hotel. He sent one to the young artist Graham Robertson and asked him to participate in a little subplot. Robertson was to buy a green carnation at Goodyear’s in the Royal Arcade—‘They grow them there,’ said Wilde—and to wear it at the performance. Other friends, such as Robert Ross, were to be similarly adorned, and so was Ben Webster, who played Cecil Graham (a surname borrowed back from ‘The Portrait of Mr W.H.’). ‘And what does it mean?’ asked Robertson. Wilde replied, ‘Nothing whatever, but that is just what nobody will guess.’3 The suggestion of a mysterious confraternity enigmatically binding one of the players with some members of the audience, gave Wilde the delight he had found in Masonic signs. The green carnation was to take on some of the suggestiveness of lilies and sunflowers. With a hint of decadence, the painted flower blended art and nature.