Oscar

by Sturgis, Matthew;

  All this, moreover, was achieved in a swirling current of intoxicating verse, more suggestive than descriptive. Swinburne was a master of metre, an artist in rhythm and rhyme. The glorious melodic Choruses of Atalanta in Calydon echo and re-echo with the unceasing flow of assonance and alliteration:

  When the hounds of spring are on winter’s traces,

  The mother of months in meadow or plain

  Fills the shadows and windy places

  With lisp of leaves and ripple of rain.

  The poems have an almost hectic force that carries the reader ineluctably from line to line; in ‘Dolores’ the poet asks:

  Can you hurt me, sweet lips, though I hurt you?

  Men touch them, and change in a trice

  The lilies and languors of virtue

  For the raptures and roses of vice.

  Although some said that ‘sound’ often outran ‘sense’, none could deny the music of Swinburne’s verse. His poetry demanded to be uttered, even sung. Wilde was swept away on the tide. He became ‘an intense admirer’, constantly reading and re-reading Swinburne’s poems.47 Everything about them was calculated to appeal to his youthful mind. There were the settings: a classical world he knew well, a medieval one he was excited to discover. There were the sentiments: daringly contrary to all the accepted norms and established values. There was the skilful adaptation of classical metres to English verse, and the rapturous love of words. Wilde judged Swinburne ‘the greatest master of the English language living’: language, he suggested, was to him ‘what the beautiful musical instrument is to the musician – the violin from which he draws the tunes he wishes’.48 And then there was the erotic charge: Swinburne – for Wilde – was the first English poet to ‘sing divinely the song of the flesh’.49 It was a beguiling air, wonderfully different from the coarse ditties, and coarser experiences, of the average Trinity student, separated from sordid reality, and heightened by the mingled senses of transgression and hopelessness.

  Wilde steeped himself in Swinburne’s poetry. Atalanta in Calydon he loved.50 He was impressed too by Poems Before Sunrise, Swinburne’s stirring 1871 collection about the heroic struggle for Italian unification – a unification only achieved in the year before the book’s publication.51 But it was Poems and Ballads that held the first rank in his affections. He described its verse as ‘very perfect and very poisonous’ – and he drank the poison in great draughts.52 The volume became for him a ‘golden book’ – the first of several – a constant source of reference, consolation and inspiration. He later claimed that he would rather have written it ‘than anything else in literature’.53

  Immersion in Swinburne’s verse also carried Wilde into an exciting new cultural world: the realm of the Pre-Raphaelites. Among Swinburne’s closest friends and allies were the painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti (a founder member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood), and Rossetti’s two young disciples, William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones. It was a world of close connections: both Rossetti and Morris, besides their painting (and designing) practice, were also poets, and their verse, though different in some ways from Swinburne’s – and from each other’s – still shared many common elements: a fascination with past ages, a weary yet exquisite sensibility, a relish for sensual detail. Certainly to hostile critics they all seemed to belong to the same ‘Fleshly School of Poetry’, as it had been memorably dubbed by Robert Buchanan. It was a school variously condemned as ‘sub-Tennysonian’, ‘erotic’, ‘hysteric’ and ‘aesthetic’.54 To one conservative critic the common artistic and moral deficiencies of its practitioners might be traced back to a shared allegiance to Liberalism and a shared artistic debt to Keats.55

  Of course such critical abuse became an incitement to exploration for the undergraduate Wilde. He came to love William Morris, whose grand Chaucerian-style epic The Earthly Paradise retold the Greek and Scandinavian myths.56 In the ‘precious melodies’ of Rossetti, he found another writer able to draw ‘the quintessential music out of words’, as well as a ‘dominant personality’ that radiated ‘strength and splendour’.57 And – following the artistic genealogy mapped out by the critics and indeed by Rossetti himself – he was led back to Keats, the ‘spiritual leader’ of the Pre-Raphaelites: the doomed, maligned and half-forgotten Romantic who had died half a century before at the age of twenty-five.58 Keats, the ‘god-like boy’, became Wilde’s enduring touchstone of poetic excellence.59

  For Rossetti and his circle the pictorial was inextricably linked to the poetic, the two arts fed and supported each other. Immersion in the poetry of Keats and Rossetti, of Morris and Swinburne, soon made Wilde aware of the artistic achievements of the Pre-Raphaelite school – the paintings of Burne-Jones, Simeon Solomon, Ford Madox Ford and of Rossetti himself. All employed the same medieval and classical subjects, the same overloading of sensual detail; all shared the same genius for colour and – as one critic pointed out – the same want of perspective.60

  But if Wilde was intrigued by tales of Pre-Raphaelite art, he must also have endured some frustration. There was scant first-hand knowledge of such work in Dublin, and no opportunity for seeing it. The recently established National Gallery of Ireland had no examples among its modest gathering of Old Masters and classical casts.61 Even in London, Rossetti had for many years refused to exhibit his pictures publicly. Nevertheless photographic reproductions were available. And Swinburne wrote enthusiastically about the work of his friends. His booklet, Notes on the Royal Academy Exhibition, 1868, contained glowing accounts of numerous works not in the Royal Academy show. There was lavish praise for – and lush descriptions of – several Rossetti paintings. There was also a rapt account of the daring impressionistic works – ‘symphonies’ in colour – by the American-born ‘genius’ James McNeil Whistler (another friend and neighbour).62 Wilde’s artistic horizons began to expand. ‘The knowledge of the beautiful is personal,’ he would suggest, ‘and can only be acquired by one’s own eyes and ears.’63 At Trinity Wilde’s eyes and ears were always open, straining to catch new sights and sounds.

  The strongly aesthetic approach to experience that Wilde encountered in the poems and pictures of the Pre-Raphaelites found an echo in the work of another young writer: John Addington Symonds. His 1873 volume Studies of the Greek Poets provided an elegant overview of Greek literature; it too was ‘perpetually’ in Wilde’s hands.64 Wilde was beguiled by the music of its prose, and stimulated by the boldness of its ideas. Two in particular struck home. In a chapter on ‘The Genius of Greek Art’, Beauty – ‘the true province of the Greeks, their indefeasible domain’ – was identified by Symonds as not only a key element in their world-view, but as the very basis and sanction of their morality. ‘Beauty to the Greeks was one aspect of the universal Synthesis, commensurate with all that is fair in manners and comely in morals. It was the harmony of man with nature in a well-balanced and complete humanity, the bloom of health upon a conscious being, satisfied, as flowers and beasts and stars are satisfied, with the conditions of temporal existence.’65 ‘Individualism’, too, was exalted. The ideal of Greek life, Symonds averred, ‘imposed no commonplace conformity to one fixed standard on individuals, but each man was encouraged to complete and realise the type of himself to the utmost’.66

  Wilde also noted Symonds’ habit of likening modern writers to classical ones. Keats was compared with Theocritus for his expression of ‘the sensuous charms of rustic idleness’ (Theocritus, in due course, joined Keats as one of Wilde’s favourite poets).67 And Walt Whitman was praised as being ‘more truly Greek than any other man of modern times… Hopeful and fearless, accepting the world as he finds it, recognizing the value of each human impulse, shirking no obligation, self-regulated by a law of perfect health’.68

  Although Mahaffy disagreed with some of the specifics in Symonds’ ‘very brilliant but inaccurate book’, his own general outlook was not dissimilar.69 He loved to draw parallels between past and present. And his focus, too, was strongly upon the aesthetic elements of Greek life. Ind
eed Wilde came to recognize that his tutor, like Symonds, ‘took deliberately the artistic standpoint towards everything’. It was an attitude that chimed with his own burgeoning sensibility. And under Mahaffy’s daily influence it became ‘more and more’ Wilde’s own considered ‘standpoint’.70

  This ‘artistic’ outlook encouraged, and directed, Wilde’s creative energies. He continued to draw and paint in his own time.71 He was also writing verse. One of his college notebooks contains a ringing sixty-line piece of Swinburnian declamation, titled ‘Ye Shall be Gods’:

  Before the dividing of days

  Or the singing of summer or spring

  God from the dust did raise

  A splendid and goodly thing:

  Man – from the womb of the land,

  Man – from the sterile sod

  Torn by a terrible hand –

  Formed in the image of God.

  But the life of man is a sorrow

  And death a relief from pain,

  For love only lasts till tomorrow

  And life without love is vain.

  It borrows its metre from Atalanta in Calydon and its vision of a cruel Venus from Poems and Ballads. In a further obeisance to Swinburne’s determined Hellenism, alternate verses are headed, as in a Greek chorus, ‘strophe’ and ‘apostrophe’. The same notebook also contains another yearning stanza, addressed to some implacable femme fatale, as well as a few lines of cod-medieval verse-drama involving ‘Rosamund’ and ‘Violetta’ (Swinburne’s first published play, issued in 1860, had been titled Rosamond).72 Wilde was overflowing with Swinburnian literary schemes.

  There was, however, no forum where he felt that he could share his ideas and enthusiasms. It was not that his new heroes were completely unknown at Trinity. Willie’s friend Bram Stoker had read a paper on Rossetti’s poetry at the Philosophical Society in the session before Wilde’s matriculation. And it is probable that Wilde listened to the lecture on Keats given at the society by John Todhunter, the young professor of English literature from Alexandra College, Dublin.73

  Professor Tyrrell had started a college literary magazine called Kottabos (after an ancient Greek drinking game) – but it was focused almost exclusively on translations, usually from or into Greek and Latin. They were learnedly droll productions by dons and gifted pupils, playful variations upon the usual examination exercises: Tennyson in the style of Horace, Horace in the style of Tennyson. Tyrrell excelled in these performances, as well as in such jeux d’esprit as an account of Dublin life in the manner of Herodotus or a captain’s address to his cricket team in the style of Xenophon. Wilde admired his skill but recognized the danger in such purely imitative work. He later remarked of Tyrrell: ‘If he had known less he would have been a poet. Learning is a sad handicap.’74 Oscar was perhaps further discouraged from seeking to make his debut in Kottabos by the fact that – as at ‘the Phil’ – Willie had got there before him. The ‘Hilary 1872’ issue contained W. C. K. W.’s deft translation of Victor Hugo’s ‘Amica Silentia Luna’, and subsequent issues carried further works from his pen.75

  Of like-minded friends there seem to have been few. That informal exchange among peers, which Mahaffy identified as such an important part of university life, was almost completely lacking from Wilde’s experience of Trinity.76 The majority of his fellow undergraduates remained – in his eyes – boors. ‘When I tried to talk,’ he recalled, ‘they broke into my thoughts with stupid gibes and jokes. Their highest idea of humour was an obscene story.’77 Art had no interest for most of them. When Wilde did read out one of his poems in the semi-formal setting of a ‘class symposium’ an oaf – ‘the bully of the class’ – laughed sneeringly at it. This was too much for the normally amiable Wilde. As a contemporary reported:

  I never saw a man’s face light up with such savagery… He strode across the room and standing in front of the man asked him by what right he sneered at his poetry. The man laughed again and Wilde slapped him across the face. The class interfered, but inside of an hour the crowd was out behind the college arranging for a fight… No one supposed that Wilde had a ghost of a show, but when he led out with his right it was like a pile-driver. He followed the surprised bully up with half a dozen crushers and that ended it.

  The incident impressed his fellow students, and ‘Wilde’s stock was high’.78 But it did not seem to bring him a circle of real friends, still less of literary confreres.

  Purser he saw only occasionally, at exam time. Another student, Edward Carson, whom Wilde had encountered as a toddler, when they had been under the supervision of the same nanny during a seaside holiday, impressed him with his diligence, if not his academic achievements79 (Carson’s arena was ‘the Phil’ rather than the examination schools). They went about together a bit, but – as Mahaffy recorded – ‘there was no camaraderie between them. They were utterly different types. Carson was the plodding quiet student’ whose intellect would blossom later on in life, whereas Wilde had both brilliance and an irrepressible sense of fun.80 The connection cannot have been encouraged when Wilde pointed out Carson to a female friend with the remark, ‘There goes a young man destined to reach the very top of affairs,’ only for his companion to reply, ‘Yes. And one who will not hesitate to trample on his friends in getting there.’81 Edward Sullivan arrived from Portora in Trinity term 1872, and he must have been one of the ‘two or three people’ who made Trinity bearable.82

  Wilde found his social life largely outside the college. Merrion Square remained a hub of excitement. Shortly before Oscar began at Trinity, his mother had started to hold regular Saturday afternoon receptions. It was, she claimed, the only way that she could satisfy the many friends who wanted to see her, since – following Isola’s death – she had ceased altogether to attend dinners, soirees, theatres, concerts and other evening parties.† These ‘conversaziones’ – running from three o’clock until six – became popular, indeed celebrated, events: ‘generally we have about a hundred assembled’, she told her friend Lotten von Kraemer. ‘I find them pleasurable for many clever men drop in, who would not come in the evening. We hear very good music, and often recitations. There is a table for the coffee and wine in the corridor and I have no further trouble… everything is sans gêne.’83

  The grand high-ceilinged reception rooms at Merrion Square provided a fit setting, though there was often a throng on the stairs. Lady Wilde, magnificent in shawls and crinolines, might be encountered ‘elbowing her way through the crush and crying out, “How ever am I to get through all these people.”’ The crowd was an impressive one: political leaders, actors, poets, journalists, doctors, and scientists. ‘It was,’ reported one newspaper, ‘like a Paris salon in a Dublin house.’84 The occasions were ‘devoid of that snobbism generally so fatal to social gatherings in Ireland’.85 Talent was the sole basis for inclusion: ‘Father Healy’s humorous face was often seen there. W. J. Fitzpatrick, the biographer of Lever, melancholy and aristocratic, and Professor Mahaffy, observant and cynical, were constant visitors. Dr Tisdall sometimes recited with a fun all his own.’86

  Principally, though, there was talk, ‘stimulating and brilliant’;87 true to the spirit of a Paris salon, no one took any interest in the refreshments. Lady Wilde was, of course, a great talker herself; ‘remarkably original, sometimes daring, and always interesting’.88 But, more importantly, she encouraged others. She could draw out the shy, and deflect the boring. At her gatherings ‘everyone talked their best’.89 For Oscar these Saturday afternoon receptions offered a stimulating theatre – for practising his conversational gambits, for trying out ideas, for sharing enthusiasms, for experiencing the adult world. His gifts were challenged and honed. There were other forums, too, from vice-regal receptions to private dinner parties. As Edward Sulllivan recalled, Oscar ‘mixed freely at… Dublin society functions of all kinds and was always a very vivacious and welcome guest at any house he cared to visit’.90

  Such diversions, however, never dulled Wilde’s capacity for study. Although he clai
med that his reading ‘was done at odd hours’, this must be doubted.91 His formidable academic triumphs continued. Through the ceaseless round of examinations, he never dropped below the ‘first rank’.92 In the final honour examination in classics at the end of his junior freshman year (1872) he was top of the whole class: ‘first of the first’.93 His excellent grounding at Portora and his photographic memory were powerful weapons, but so too were his verbal gifts. At Trinity the examiners still placed a particular premium on ‘elegant and fluent viva voce translations’ as a ‘test of intelligence’.94

  The following year Wilde put in for a coveted ‘foundation scholarship’, open to all members of the university ‘up to MA standing’ – a gruelling course of papers in Latin, Greek and English composition. Only ten were awarded. He, though, was successful, ranked sixth of the fifty candidates, behind his old schoolfellow Purser, but ahead of William Ridgeway, who would later become professor of archaeology at Cambridge. He scored the highest mark in both English composition and Greek translation.95 The scholarship brought glory, along with £20 a year, free tuition and the right to a set of rooms in college.96

  Oscar found accommodation on the north side of the quad known as ‘Botany Bay’.97 Although he never entertained there, and the rooms were remembered by a contemporary as ‘exceedingly grim and ill-kept’, they did bring him more into the life of the college.98 There was, too, a greater scope for self-expression following Willie’s graduation in December 1873. Willie gained his own glory with a gold medal (or first class) in ‘ethics and logics’, the final part of his honours course. His impressive debating achievements at the historical and philosophical societies had encouraged him to consider taking up the law – perhaps as a prelude to a political career. He had already been admitted to the King’s Inns in Dublin, while still an undergraduate – a common occurrence with Trinity students wishing to follow a legal career. And he continued to ‘keep terms’ there, as well as at the Middle Temple in London.99