The Green Carnation was published in September 1894. It pretended to be a parody, but was more like a documentary. Its fictional veneer is thin and there could be no doubt of the identities of Lord Reggie and Mr Amarinth. The moral of the book—and, like Dorian Gray, it has too much moral—is Lord Reggie’s slavish imitation of Amarinth’s conversational leads. In the process he ceases to be himself or anyone at all. The book bore out the Queensberry version of the relationship. (Douglas’s lifetime work was to consist of telling and retelling his life with Wilde.) What Hichens saw, not unlike what Queensberry saw, was that Wilde was taking Bosie over, swallowing him up as in some of Beerbohm’s caricatures.
The book’s main burden of imitation was in the stance taken towards experience. Solemnity was something for other people, triviality was its antidote. Wilde said later that he had made literature out of brilliant triviality, but it was triviality of a special kind, subversive of established modes. Such a remark as ‘I can resist anything but temptation’ is as destructive of hypocrisy as St Augustine’s recollection of his youthful prayer ‘Make me a good man, but not yet.’ But the pointedness of such remarks might quickly be lost in impercipient wordplay. Hichens appears, for example, to be reproducing Douglas’s actual remark—or a comparable one—about having laughed at a relative’s funeral when Lord Reggie says, ‘I forced my grief beyond tears, and then my relations said that I was heartless!’ Or he says, ‘We always return to our first hates.’ It is all a languid patina spread over appetites which are energetic enough, as Hichens demonstrates by showing Lord Reggie chasing a boy.
At first Wilde and Douglas were amused. (Queensberry, who read it, was not.) ‘Hichens I did not think capable of anything so clever,’ Wilde wrote to Ada Leverson, perhaps suspecting Beerbohm’s assistance. ‘The doubting disciple [Hichens] who has written the false gospel is one who has merely talent unrelieved by any flashes of physical beauty.’25 He telegraphed Hichens that the secret was out, and Douglas sent another, comically warning Hichens to flee the vengeance to come. What added to the irritation which Wilde began to feel over the book was the rumor that he himself had written it. He felt it necessary to write to the editor of the Pall Mall Gazette on 1 October:
Sir, Kindly allow me to contradict, in the most emphatic manner, the suggestion, made in your issue of Thursday last, and since then copied into many other newspapers, that I am the author of The Green Carnation.
I invented that magnificent flower. But with the middle-class and mediocre book that usurps its strangely beautiful name I have, I need hardly say, nothing whatsoever to do. The flower is a work of art. The book is not.
The book made its small but noticeable contribution to the growing disfavor Wilde was encountering. That it was written by a homosexual added savor and the hint of authenticity. Wilde received as little consideration from Hichens as from Raffalovich, for that matter, although they shared his proclivities. Hichens parodied the green carnation, Raffalovich wrote a sonnet against it.
One other major change took place in the summer of 1894. Constance Wilde, like her husband, had long been friendly with the manager of Hatchard’s bookstore, Arthur L. Humphreys. They talked of making a small volume of Wilde’s aphorisms, chosen by Constance (though Wilde would thoroughly revise it).b (A separate publication of ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism’ was also arranged.) But in 1894 Constance Wilde wrote Humphreys two letters which suggest that she had taken on a more than editorial role. The first, dated 1 June, testifies to an intense admiration for Humphreys such as she had once owned for her husband. ‘I stepped past the limits perhaps of good taste in the wish to be your friend and to have you for my friend.’ She had spoken openly about her unhappy childhood and felt apologetic in retrospect. Humphreys in return had spoken of his marriage; she calls him ‘an ideal husband,’ a phrase that took on a special meaning in her husband’s play. The second letter is dated more than two months later, 11 August 1894, and has a different tone. The first began, ‘Dear Mr Humphreys,’ the second, ‘My darling Arthur.’ She thanks him for having made her so happy that day and for giving her his love. She is pleased that he is so kind to both her children and to Oscar.26 Constance was clearly in love. She may have had a brief affair with Humphreys, but she was away for much of the time in late summer and autumn, and early the next year she spoke of having an operation on her back, made necessary by a fall on the stairs at Tite Street. Her pleasure in the attachment could only have been brief.
Queensberry Furens
Put out the torches. Hide the moon! Hide the stars!
During the summer, Queensberry was off in the wings, but he was prepared to upstage Wilde with even grander gestures of paternal love. The Green Carnation had upset him in September, and then two things happened in October to drive him frantic. One was at least expected, the final decree of nullity of his second marriage on 20 October 1894. The other was not: the death two days earlier of his eldest son, Drumlanrig, heir to the title, and the only one of his four sons for whom, in spite of quarrels, he had any respect. The newspapers reported a shooting accident, but suicide was generally suspected. Drumlanrig may have been afraid of blackmail over his relations with Lord Rosebery, of which his father had long been suspicious, and (unlike his brother) feared he would bring down the Foreign Minister as well as himself. Queensberry, writing to his first wife’s father, Alfred Montgomery, was full of new suspicions:
November 1st 1894
Queensberry Estate Office
Comloncon Castle,
Ruthwell, N. B.
Sir
Now that the first flush of this catastrophe and grief is passed, I write to tell you that it is a judgement on the whole lot of you. Montgomerys, The Snob Queers like Roseberry & certainly Christian hypocrite Gladstone the whole lot of you / Set my son up against me indeed and make bad blood between us, may it devil on your own heads that he has gone to his rest and the quarrel not made up between him and myself. It’s a gruesome message: If you and his Mother did not set up this business with that cur and Jew friend [?] Liar Rosebery as I always thought—
At any rate she [Lady Queensberry] acquiesced in it, which is just as bad. What fools you all look, trying to ride me out of the course and trim the sails and the poor Boy comes to this untimely end. I smell a Tragedy behind all this and have already got Wind of a more startling one. If it was what I am led to believe, I of all people could and would have helped him, had he come to me with a confidence, but that was all stopped by you people—we had not met or spoken frankly for more than a year and a half. I am on the right track to find out what happened. Cherchez la femme, when these things happen. I have already heard something that quite accounts for it all
QUEENSBERRY27
The conviction that one son had died in a homosexual scandal resolved Queensberry to make sure that a second did not die the same way. He was not certain how best to get at Wilde, but settled on a public demonstration at the first performance of The Importance of Being Earnest, scheduled, provocatively enough, for 14 February 1895.
Wilde again felt the discomfort of loving Bosie. Not only had he become an easy target for satire, but he was subjected to Bosie’s caprices. Douglas had disliked the house in Worthing, and got Wilde to take him in October 1894 to the Grand Hotel at Brighton. In Brighton he caught influenza and had to be put to bed. All Wilde’s solicitude was aroused, and he performed the functions of friend, reader, and nurse with the greatest patience. After four or five days Douglas recovered, and they moved into lodgings so Wilde could write some parts of his play. Then it was Wilde’s turn to fall ill. Bosie had no intention of playing the nurse’s part. Wilde was left unattended, could not get up even for water, and was subjected in the middle of the night to one of Douglas’s more fiendish displays of temper. In the morning he repeated the scene, so threateningly that Wilde felt in physical danger and dragged himself down the stairs so that he could call for help if necessary. Douglas packed his bags and left for the Grand Hotel. On 16 October, Wilde’s
fortieth birthday, a letter came from Douglas gloating over having charged all his hotel expenses to Wilde, and congratulating him on having had the prudence to go downstairs: ‘It was an ugly moment for you, uglier than you imagine.’ The letter concluded, ‘When you are not on your pedestal you are not interesting. The next time you are ill I will go away at once.’ These sentences Wilde was never able to forget.28
He was well enough to return to London on Friday, 19 October, and intended to ask Sir George Lewis to inform Queensberry that he would never under any circumstances see Douglas again. But as he looked at the morning paper before taking the train from Brighton, he saw the announcement of Drumlanrig’s death. With one of those whirlarounds so valuable in his work, and so destructive in his life, he suddenly felt for Douglas nothing but ‘infinite pity,’ and telegraphed him to say so. The old dance began again.
There was another imprudence late in 1894. The attempt to win acquiescence at Oxford for homosexuality, begun by Douglas in the Spirit Lamp, was continued in a new magazine started by an undergraduate named Jack Bloxam. (His last name is used in The Importance of Being Earnest.) Being acquainted with George Ives, he went to London to talk over the idea with him. Ives proposed calling it the Chameleon, envisaging protective coloration. Bloxam was introduced to Wilde in Ives’s room, E4 Albany. (Albany also appears in The Importance.) Wilde found him an ‘undergraduate of strange beauty,’ and promised him ‘Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young,’ a collection of epigrams that began with ‘The first duty in life is to be as artificial as possible. What the second duty is no one has as yet discovered.’ Bloxam showed Wilde and Ives his story, ‘The Priest and the Acolyte,’ in which a priest, caught with a boy, poisons the wine in the chalice before administering the sacrament to his young communicant and himself. Wilde amused Ada Leverson by commenting only, ‘The story is, to my ears, too direct: there is no nuance: it profanes a little by revelation: God and other artists are always a little obscure. Still, it has interesting qualities, and is at moments poisonous: which is something.’29
Ives, on the other hand, took alarm. He was still recovering from the one daring action of his life—an article in the October 1894 Humanitarian taking issue with Grant Allen’s condemnation of homosexuality in the March Fortnightly. On that occasion Wilde had urged against publication ‘at the outset of your career.’ But now Wilde was encouraging Bloxam to publish ‘The Priest and the Acolyte,’ which Ives thought degraded homosexual love when it ought to have ennobled it. To his protests Wilde replied, ‘You set off a bomb, and object to a cracker.’30 But Ives was right. The Chameleon, which appeared only once, in December 1894, attracted adverse comment in To-Day on 14 December from Jerome K. Jerome, whose novel Three Men in a Boat Wilde had once described as ‘funny without being vulgar.’ To-Day recommended police action. More important, the Chameleon fell into the hands of Queensberry, who assumed that the unsigned story was by Wilde and was still more inflamed.
In late December An Ideal Husband went into rehearsal, and Wilde insisted upon the cast’s meeting even on Christmas Day. This was too much for Charles Brookfield, who, not wanting to learn many of Wilde’s lines, had consented to take the smallest part in the play, that of Lord Goring’s servant, and felt particularly abused to have to give up his holiday to it. ‘Don’t you keep Christmas, Oscar?’ he asked. ‘No, Brookfield,’ replied Wilde, ‘the only festival of the Church I keep is Septuagesima. Do you keep Septuagesima, Brookfield?’ ‘Not since I was a boy.’ ‘Ah, be a boy again,’ said Wilde.31
The play opened on 3 January 1895 to an audience that included the Prince of Wales, Balfour, Chamberlain, and many government ministers. Their applause called for the author, but Tree said Wilde had left the theatre. Afterwards Wilde, Beerbohm, Tree, and Douglas had dinner at the Albemarle Club.
Among the reviews, Bernard Shaw’s in The Saturday Review was the most discerning. He remarked, ‘I am the only person in London who cannot sit down and write an Oscar Wilde play at will.’ He particularly welcomed what he called ‘the modern note’ in ‘Sir Robert Chiltern’s assertion of the individuality and courage of his wrongdoing as against the mechanical idealism of his stupidly good wife, and in his bitter criticism of a love that is only the reward of merit.’ He would deal with the same theme himself in Major Barbara.
Wilde, about 1891. (Courtesy of the William Andrews Clark Library)
Lord Alfred Douglas (center rear) with schoolmates at Winchester College, about 1890.
Wilde and Douglas at Felbrigg, near Cromer in Norfolk, about September 1892.
Wilde and Douglas in Oxford, about 1893. (Library of Congress, Kaufmann Collection)
Lord Alfred Douglas.
Wilde, about 1894. (Courtesy of the William Andrews Clark Library)
‘A Dream of Decadence on the Cherwell’: Wilde and Douglas caricatured in The New Rattle, Oxford, May 1893.
The Marquess of Queensberry, as shown in The Cycling World Illustrated, 1896.
Frank Harris, photographed by A. L. Coburn. (Courtesy of the International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House)
André Gide, 1891.
Robert H. Sherard.
Aubrey Beardsley, by William Rothenstein. (Courtesy of Sotheby’s, London)
Caricature of Wilde in a top hat, by Whistler. (Courtesy of the Hunterian Art Gallery; University of Glasgow, Birnie Philip Bequest; and Weidenfeld Archives)
Caricature of Wilde dressed as a woman, by Alfred Bryan. (The Raymond Mander and Joe Mitchenson Theatre Collection)
Wilde in costume as Salome. (Collection Guillot de Saix, H. Roger Viollet, Paris)
Full of this success, Wilde wanted to help in George Alexander’s rehearsals of The Importance,c and begged Douglas to let him stay in London, ‘but,’ as Wilde wrote dryly to Ada Leverson, ‘so beautiful is his nature that he declined at once.’ Instead Wilde took a trip he had long had in mind, and which had been promised him by a London clairvoyante. On 17 January 1895 he and Douglas went off to Algeria, as Theatre (1 March) reported; Wilde stayed in Algiers and Blida until 3 February. A letter to Ross says, ‘The beggars here have profiles, so the problem of poverty is easily solved.’33 They also sampled the delights of hashish.
A partial record of the visit is in André Gide’s autobiography, Si le grain ne meurt … Gide arrived in Blida, a town thirty miles from Algiers much frequented by Englishmen in search of boys. He was about to sign the register when to his consternation he saw the names of Wilde and Douglas already on it. The memory of their uncomfortable meeting in Florence was only seven months old, and to be at the same hotel seemed to him too compromising. His own homosexual life had begun, but surreptitiously. He took his bags and started to go back to the station, only to decide that he was behaving ridiculously. He went back, registered, and soon after met with Wilde and Douglas.
When Gide expressed astonishment at Wilde’s being there, Wilde said, ‘I am running away from art. I want to worship only the sun. Have you noticed how the sun despises all thought, makes it retreat, take refuge in the shadows. Once thought lived in Egypt; the sun conquered Egypt. It lived for long in Greece; the sun conquered Greece. Then Italy, and then France. Today all thought is pushed back to Norway and Russia, where the sun never comes. The sun is jealous of art.’ They spent the evening together, after which Wilde and Gide both returned to Algiers while Douglas, having once more quarreled fiercely with Wilde, took a boy off to Biskra for some weeks. In Algiers, Wilde remarked, ‘I have a duty to myself to amuse myself frightfully.’ Then he added, ‘Not happiness. Above all not happiness. Pleasure! You must always aim at the most tragic’ He bore Gide off to a café, where the young man was captivated by an Arab boy playing the flute. Outside Wilde asked him, ‘Dear, vous voulez le petit musicien?’ Gide, ‘in the most choked of voices,’ said yes. Wilde burst into what Gide called ‘satanic laughter’ and made the arrangements. Gide felt he knew now what was normal for him.
They had several days in Algiers together. As he went thr
ough the streets, Wilde was followed by a band of petty thieves. He talked with each, observed them with joy, and scattered money among them. ‘I hope I have thoroughly demoralised this city,’ he said. He confided that Queensberry was tormenting him. Gide warned him, ‘But if you go back, what will happen? Do you realise the risk?’ ‘That one can never know. My friends advise me to be prudent. Prudent! How could I be that? It would mean going backward. I must go as far as possible. I cannot go any further. Something must happen … something else.…’ He had what Henry James calls ‘the imagination of disaster.’ Nothing less than total ruin would do. He left next day and stopped in Paris en route. There he called on Degas and said cheerily, ‘You know how well known you are in England?’ To which Degas replied, ‘Fortunately less so than you.’ He repeated to Wilde a comment he had made on the opening of a Liberty’s shop in Paris: ‘So much taste will lead to prison.’34 Both remarks were ominous.
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