Oscar Wilde

by Richard Ellmann

  When asked later by Hesketh Pearson if he had produced the play with the help of Wilde, Tree said sourly, ‘With the interference of Wilde.’ Wilde had written in 1886 that Tree was ‘the perfect Proteus of actors,’ but now he lamented that Tree could not fail to be invariably Tree. At rehearsal he realized that certain scenes were flawed. He reluctantly removed Illingworth’s long and inappropriate denunciation of puritanism to his son in Act II.

  The play opened on 19 April 1893. Balfour, Chamberlain, and other dignitaries attended. The actors were heartily applauded, but when the author was called for there were boos, perhaps because of a line in the script (later removed) that said, ‘England lies like a leper in purple.’ Wilde, before the curtain, only said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I regret to inform you that Mr Oscar Wilde is not in the house.’ There was some disappointment at this newfound reticence. To make up, Beerbohm Tree then said, ‘I am proud to have been associated with this work of art.’ (Wilde would compliment him later: ‘I have always regarded you as the best critic of my plays.’ ‘But I have never criticised your plays,’ said Tree. ‘That’s why,’ said Wilde.)32 Max Beerbohm described the occasion to a correspondent: ‘When little Oscar came on to make his bow there was a slight mingling of hoots and hisses, though he looked very sweet in a new white waistcoat and a large bunch of little lilies in his coat. The notices are better than I had expected: the piece is sure of a long, of a very long run, despite all that the critics may say’—here Beerbohm fell into an Oscarism—‘in its favour.’33 The Prince of Wales attended on the second night, with the Duchess of Teck, noted for her hearty laugh. Both delighted in it, and the Prince enjoined Wilde, ‘Do not alter a single line.’ Wilde is reported to have replied, ‘Sire, your wish is my command.’ His pleasure in the exchange was confirmed by a subsequent comment, ‘What a splendid country where princes understand poets.’34

  That evening Wilde dined at Blanche Roosevelt’s house. Before dinner the guests put their hands through a curtain so that the palmist Cheiro could read their palms without knowing who they were. When Wilde held out his hands, Cheiro found the markings on each so different from the other that he explained how in palmistry the left hand denotes hereditary tendencies and the right hand individual developments. The left hand in front of him, he said, promised a brilliant success; the right, impending ruin. ‘The left hand is the hand of a king, but the right that of a king who will send himself into exile.’ Wilde, a superstitious man (he had refused to join the skeptics of the Thirteen Club), asked ‘At what date?’ ‘A few years from now, at about your fortieth year.’ (He was then thirty-eight.) Without another word Wilde left the party.35

  The word that triggered his response may have been ‘king.’ It was associated in his mind from Portora days with Aeschylus’s Agamemnon. Wilde’s sense of being lucky did not prevent his thinking of himself as unlucky too. In De Profundis he repeatedly used the word ‘doom’ as opposed to mere ‘destiny,’ and he pointed to ‘the note of Doom that like a purple thread runs through the gold cloth of Dorian Gray.’ Wilde was too good a classicist not to piece together from the plays of Aeschylus and Euripides and the Iliad the stages of doom for Agamemnon. Prosperous, he became blasé, the man who has everything, and later Wilde would invoke another rule and speak of ‘my Neronian hours, rich, profligate, cynical, materialistic.’36 With success, ‘I grew careless of the lives of others.’ Deaf to prudent counsel, he was an apt candidate for Nemesis. ‘By suffering they shall win understanding,’ says the Chorus in Agamemnon, quoting Zeus.

  Still, Cheiro might be wrong. The success of A Woman of No Importance could lighten dark thoughts. The play brought in £100 a week to its author. Wilde’s head hit the stars. He happened to meet Conan Doyle, and asked if he had seen the play. Doyle had not. Wilde said with a grave face, ‘Ah, you must go. It is wonderful. It is genius.’ Doyle, unused to such exaltation in a fellow author, thought him mad. Though the reviews had been mixed, and Henry James detested the play, there was a general awareness that Wilde had made a place for himself. The Times, which had been dour about Lady Windermere’s Fan, swung over to Frank Harris’s position: ‘The play is fresh in ideas and execution and is written moreover with a literary polish too rare on the English stage.’37 William Archer proved loyal: the play depended for its success not upon wit or paradox, he said, but upon the keenness of its author’s intellect, the individuality of his point of view, the excellence of his verbal style, and the genuine dramatic quality of his inspiration. He praised in particular the scene between Lord Illingworth and Mrs Arbuthnot at the end of Act II as ‘the most virile and intelligent piece of English playwriting of our day.’ The unexpected use of virility as a criterion suggests that the more usual charge was aesthetic effeminacy.

  * Wilde commented that the criticism displayed ‘in its crudest form the extraordinary Bœotianism of a country that has produced some Athenians, and in which other Athenians have come to dwell.’5

  † Jean-Joseph Renaud said that Wilde began by saying, after taking a pull on his cigarette, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, it’s perhaps not very proper to smoke in front of you, but … it’s not very proper to disturb me when I am smoking.’9

  The Boston Evening Transcript for 10 March 1892 carried an article by Marie de Mensiaux in which she reported Wilde’s speech in what appears to be a more accurate, if less spectacular, version than Alexander’s. According to her, Wilde said:

  I believe it is the privilege of an author to allow his works to be reproduced by others while he himself remains silent. But as you seem to wish to hear me speak, I accept the honor you are kind enough to confer upon me. The more especially am I pleased to do this as your goodness gives me the opportunity of thanking all who have been instrumental in securing the success that has crowned this evening’s entertainment. And to express my gratification at your so well appreciating the merits of the play. My acknowledgements are due in the first instance to Mr. Alexander, who has placed my play upon the stage with the admirable completeness that has characterized all the productions at the St. James’s Theatre during the time it has been under his management. If I praised all I wish to praise in the interpretation of the piece, I would have to read to you the entire cast as it appears upon the programme. But I have to thank the company, not only for repeating the words I have set down for them to speak, but also for entering, as it were, into the atmosphere of the world I have endeavored to reproduce before you. I have to thank them, one and all, for the infinite care they have taken to fill in every detail, until my sketch has become a finished picture. I think that you have enjoyed the performance as much as I have, and I am pleased to believe that you like the piece almost as much as I do myself.

  ‡ ‘But it’s heraldic; you’d think it was a fresco, … The word should fall like a pearl on a crystal disk, no rapid movements, with stylized gestures.’

  § ‘My dear Poet

  ‘I marvel that, while everything in your Salome is expressed in constant, dazzling strokes, there also arises, on each page, the unutterable and the Dream.

  ‘So the innumerable and precise jewels can serve only as an accompaniment to the gown for the supernatural gesture of that young Princess whom you definitively evoked

  Friendly greetings from

  STÉPHANE MALLARMÉ’

  ‖ ‘Thank you, sir, for having introduced me to your Salome—it is fine and somber like a chapter of the Apocalypse—I admire it deeply.’

  a ‘Pray excuse me, dear sir, if my circumstances have not permitted me to thank you sooner for the gift of your mysterious, strange, and admirable Salome. I expressed my thanks to you today as I emerged, for the third time, from this dream whose power I have not yet explained to myself. I assure you of my great admiration.’

  b Lytton Strachey went to see a revival of the play by Tree in 1907, and in a letter to Duncan Grant interpreted it in his own way:

  It was rather amusing, as it was a complete mass of epigrams, with occasional whiffs of grotesque melodrama and drivel
ling sentiment. The queerest mixture! Mr Tree is a wicked Lord, staying in a country house, who has made up his mind to bugger one of the other guests—a handsome young man of twenty. The handsome young man is delighted; when his mother enters, sees his Lordship and recognizes him as having copulated with her twenty years before, the result of which was—the handsome young man. She appeals to Lord Tree not to bugger his own son. He replies that that is an additional reason for doing it (oh! he’s a very wicked Lord!). She then appeals to the handsome young man, who says, ‘Dear me! What an abominable thing to do—to go and copulate without marrying! Oh no, I shall certainly pay no attention to anyone capable of doing that,’ and then suddenly enters (from the garden) a young American millionairess, with whom (very properly) the handsome young man is in love. Enter his Lordship. Handsome Y.M.: ‘You devil! You have insulted the purest creature on God’s earth! I shall kill you!’ But of course he doesn’t, he contents himself with marrying the millionairess, while his mother takes up a pair of gloves, and slashes the Lord across the face. It seems an odd plot, doesn’t it? But it required all my penetration to find out that this was the plot, as you may imagine. Epigrams engulf it like the sea. Most of them were thoroughly rotten, and nearly all were said quite cynically to the gallery. Poor old Tree sits down with his back to the audience to talk to a brilliant lady, and swings round in his seat every time he delivers an epigram. The audience was of course charmed.27

  CHAPTER XV

  A Late Victorian Love Affair

  What a silly thing love is! It is not half as useful as logic, for it does not prove anything and it is always telling one things that are not going to happen, and making one believe things that are not true.

  High Romance

  Wilde wanted a consuming passion; he got it and was consumed by it. Lord Alfred Douglas’s account of their early months of acquaintance differed from his. Douglas says that Wilde laid siege to him and after about six months won him. Wilde’s nature, however, was to court everyone, so Douglas may have mistaken for wooing what was meant only as benevolent flattery. Wilde denied that the initiative lay with him. He said their acquaintance was slight until the spring of 1892, when Douglas suddenly came or wrote to him for help. The reason was blackmail over an indiscreet letter. Wilde went up to Oxford and stayed the weekend in Douglas’s rooms in the High Street. He resolved the crisis airily enough by putting his friend and solicitor George Lewis on to it. Lewis, accustomed to saving his clients embarrassment, paid the blackmailer £100 for the incriminating document.

  The love affair began under the threat of blackmail and under this threat it flourished. Up to now Wilde had been attracted most strongly to John Gray, but that young man began to recede from his place in Wilde’s affections. The progress of the intimacy with Douglas can be gauged by gifts of two books: The first, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilde gave to Douglas soon after they met, and inscribed it discreetly,

  Alfred Douglas from his friend who wrote this book.

  July 91. OSCAR

  The second, his Poems, has a different inscription:

  From Oscar

  To the Gilt-mailed

  Boy

  at Oxford

  in the heart

  of June

  OSCAR WILDE1

  This was June 1892, and by that month Wilde was captured. They spent much of the summer in each other’s company. Robert Ross claimed no rights over Wilde, so could be confided in. A letter to Ross assumes his sympathy and confirms Wilde’s passion:

  My dearest Bobbie, Bosie has insisted on stopping here for sandwiches. He is quite like a narcissus—so white and gold. I will come either Wednesday or Thursday night to your rooms. Send me a line. Bosie is so tired: he lies like a hyacinth on the sofa, and I worship him.

  You dear boy. Ever yours OSCAR

  Douglas talked to his mother about his new friend. Lady Queensberry, at her wits’ end about Bosie’s academic difficulties at Oxford, decided to invite the Wildes to her house at Bracknell and consult them about her son. The visit, in October 1892, had all the embarrassment associated with meeting one’s beloved’s mother. Lady Queensberry always looked, according to Desmond MacCarthy, ‘as though she had been struck, and was still quivering from the blow,’ but never more than now. She appealed to Wilde for advice and help, and spoke frankly and warningly of Bosie’s vanity and extravagant habits. Wilde, vain and spendthrift himself, was too enamored to do more than smile at these alleged defects. Notwithstanding her indirection, an admonitory element was still present enough for Wilde to give the name Lady Bracknell to the proper and proprietary mother in The Importance of Being Earnest. Her effort with Wilde failed, but within a month he was to discover what a spendthrift was. His letters to Douglas become declarations of heightened financial embarrassment and deepening love. The combination had its own allure as paired abandonments of control.

  Even when Wilde became recriminatory later, he conceded that Douglas had the saving grace of being really in love with him. During this period, ‘the young Domitian,’ as he called him, began to write verse. Bosie sent him poems, the first dated November 1892, a month when Wilde was beginning to experience the effects of Bosie’s extravagance. It is likely that in this month they became firmly committed to each other. The first poem Douglas sent was entitled ‘De Profundis,’ a proleptic irony: its tenor is that he has a love but cannot say, because of its nature, who his love is. This was part of that mixed disclosure and concealment of homosexuality that Dorian Gray had popularized. It underlay Douglas’s poem ‘The Two Loves,’ written a bit later, which contained the famous line ‘I am the love that dare not speak its name.’ In fact, Douglas spoke about it a good deal. If Wilde was bold, Douglas was bolder. He was understandably boastful about Wilde’s love, and eager to lord it over other young men like John Gray who had once claimed it.

  From November 1892 to December 1893, when a three-month respite began, Wilde’s life was inseparable from that of Douglas. Until June 1893, Douglas was still at Magdalen, in his fourth and final year of Greats. He took over the editorship of an Oxford literary magazine called the Spirit Lamp, and remade it with the covert purpose of winning acceptance for homosexuality. To this end he printed contributions from Ross, Symonds, and Wilde, and included poems about Hylas and Corydon. In letters to his friend Kains Jackson he confided that Wilde had made considerable efforts for ‘the new culture’ and the ‘cause.’ ‘If Bosie has really made Oxford homosexual,’ wrote George Ives, a young supporter of the movement, in his diary on 15 November 1894, ‘he has done something good and glorious.’2*

  Aside from this covert propaganda, Douglas began to develop considerable faith in his poetic powers. Wilde lavished praise on him and on his ‘lovely’ sonnets. It was fine to bask in Wilde’s sun, but he wished to be more than what Max Beerbohm called ‘a very pretty reflection of Oscar.’ And as he felt more and more entitled to the name of poet, he grew out of the role of student.

  During this period Wilde came to realize that Douglas was not only beautiful but reckless and unmanageable. His temper was ferocious. Beerbohm, who liked him, said he was ‘obviously mad (like all his family, I believe).’ When not in a fury Douglas could be ‘very charming’ and ‘nearly brilliant.’3 He wanted to be loved, and he wanted to be treated as an intellectual equal. One way of confirming his power over his friend was by financial dependence. He had no need to importune Wilde, who was as excessive in generosity as in everything else, and it would have taken considerable restraint not to spend Wilde’s money as freely as his own. He wrote later to Ross, when Wilde was in prison, 15 July 1896, ‘I remember very well the sweetness of asking Oscar for money. It was a sweet humiliation and exquisite pleasure to both of us.’4 Being kept was part of the pleasure of being loved. Wilde’s pleasure in the arrangement was perhaps a little less exquisite. Granted that he liked being abused a little, he could have forgone being abused so much. But Douglas enjoyed demanding ever higher flights of loving-kindness. When, in 1894, his father threatene
d to cut off his allowance, Douglas encouraged him, and threw himself upon Wilde’s generosity. Since neither Wilde nor Douglas practiced or expected sexual fidelity, money was the stamp and seal of their love.

  The Queensberrys

  … the mad, bad line from which you are come.

  Alfred Douglas is perhaps best understood in relation to his father, John Sholto Douglas, ninth Marquess of Queensberry. The impression that has been given of Queensberry is that he was a simple brute. In fact he was a complex one. Insofar as he was brutal, he practiced a rule-bound brutality. That was why at the age of twenty-four he had changed the nature of boxing by persuading England and America to agree to the Queensberry rules, and also by securing adoption of weight differences, so that boxers might be evenly matched. He had channeled together his belligerence and his litigiousness. He made himself known as a fulminator against Christianity, and was always raging publicly and indecorously against someone else’s creed. He fancied himself as an aristocratic rebel, socially ostracized because of his iconoclasm.