Oscar

by Sturgis, Matthew;

  Living in Botany Bay, Oscar began to take a small part in college activities. He even spoke at ‘the Hist’, to which he had been elected in November 1873 (proposed by Willie). At the meeting on 21 January 1874 he supported the motion that ‘The principle of Trades-Unionism is sound’.100 The experiment, however, was not repeated. Among friends, he joined in the occasional game of cards. And he seems not to have shied away from all conviviality, though he was considered, at least by Irish university standards, ‘an extremely moderate drinker’.101 While never striking his contemporaries as ‘a very exceptional person’, he did become more generally known.102 His love of the arts was acknowledged and (following his triumph over the class bully) respected.103 If he was occasionally chaffed on account of his enthusiasms, the fun was mild.104 He began to be generally liked.105 He was recognized by friends and acquaintances as being not merely ‘kind-hearted’ and ‘good natured’ but also very funny. His attitude to college life was both amused and amusing.106

  He had an eye for the comic detail. One incident with a college tutor – a broken-down young don, Townsend Mills, who was coaching him for an exam – entertained him richly. On seeing Mills come into his rooms wearing a tall hat covered in funereal black crape, he hastened to express his condolences, only for Mills to reply, with a smile, that no one was dead – ‘it was only the vile condition of his hat that had made him assume so mournful a disguise’.107 Oscar shared his mother’s gift for dramatic overstatement, and her delight in shocking bourgeois sensibilities. Certainly he startled one college friend by inviting him to a Merrion Square reception with the decidedly Swinburnian line, ‘I want to introduce you to my mother, we have founded a Society for the Suppression of Virtue.’108 Although he was always delighted to achieve an épat there remained a playfulness about his provocations. He relished his own absurdities. Indeed the notion of the notably ‘pureminded’ Wilde being involved in a movement for the ‘Suppression of Virtue’ must have had a comical aspect of its own.

  At Trinity he also developed his trope of treating trivial matters with mock gravity or exaggerated force. One evening, when a tremendous row was heard coming from his rooms, the two neighbours who rushed to his assistance were amazed to discover him ‘jumping about the floor in a half-dressed condition’: ‘“There’s a huge fly in my room, a great buzzing fly”, he explained; “I can’t sleep till I drive it out.”’ His reluctance simply to squash the insect was regarded as quaintly ridiculous.109 If he frequently made grand claims, he then deftly undercut them. Visitors to his Botany Bay rooms would find – conspicuously propped on an easel – an unfinished landscape in oils, to which Wilde would claim he had just added ‘the butterfly’. But this casual assumption of kinship with Whistler (who had taken to signing his work with a stylized butterfly) was subverted by the ‘humorously unconvincing way’ in which Wilde delivered his aside.110

  Wilde’s aesthetic enthusiasms, for all their self-conscious Swinburnian ‘fleshliness’, were balanced by a contrary impulse: a fascination with the Catholic Church. The details are obscure, but he seems to have come under the influence of a local group of Jesuits, making friends with some of them, and attending occasional services.111 There was, no doubt, an aesthetic element even in this new interest. Certainly the ‘artistic side’ of Catholicism’s rites and rituals had a great appeal. But, so too, Wilde claimed, did ‘the fragrance of its teachings’.112 And these were things that he failed to find in the Church of Ireland.113 Perhaps too the delicious sense of ‘sin’ explored in Swinburne’s verses required the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church to provide both a proper context and a proper dynamic. Sin only made sense when set between the possibilities of absolution and damnation. Tannhauser, the doomed hero of ‘Laus Veneris’, made an abortive pilgrimage to Rome to seek forgiveness, before returning to the Venusberg.

  Wilde considered conversion. His father, though, forbade it.114 It is hard to know why – having been unperturbed by news of the infant Oscar’s baptism by Fr Fox – Sir William should now disapprove so strongly of the connection. He himself does not appear to have been a man of great religious convictions – even if both his brothers, and his brother-in-law, were Anglican clergymen. It may be that his objections were more social and practical. Although Roman Catholics had long since achieved emancipation, the old prejudices of the Anglo-Irish ruling class persisted in many quarters. Sir William himself seems not to have harboured such views: his dinner table was a meeting place for all.115 But he perhaps considered that conversion would put Oscar at a disadvantage at the outset of his career. Strong anti-Catholic prejudices still prevailed at the universities. Although Catholics had been able to study at Trinity since 1793, it was only in 1873 that they were allowed to hold fellowships, or even scholarships. In his disapproval Sir William was supported by Mahaffy, and – very probably – by Tyrrell as well. Tyrrell, though a proclaimed agnostic, held a poor view of ‘the effect of Roman Catholicism on the Irish people’. Mahaffy was an altogether more voluble critic of the Church of Rome.116

  It was perhaps as a means of removing Oscar from the sphere of Jesuit influence that Mahaffy suggested that he should be sent to finish his studies at Oxford. The motive for this momentous scheme may, though, equally well have been academic. It was not that Mahaffy ever admitted the superiority of the ancient English universities, but he did concede that they offered a stimulating alternative – and an opportunity for professional advancement.117 Oscar’s father had, it appears, some initial doubts about the plan. It would, apart from anything else, carry additional expense, at a time when he was still recovering from his ambitious building operations at Moytura (in February 1872 he had taken a £1,000 mortgage on the Merrion Square house). Nevertheless his reservations were assuaged by Mahaffy, as well as by an Oxford contact, Sir Henry Acland, Regius Professor of Medicine, stalwart of the British Association, and a long-time friend of Dr William Stokes.118

  Oscar himself must surely have been excited at the idea. Oxford was the university of Swinburne, Burne-Jones and Morris; and it was there that Rossetti had enlisted their help in decorating the debating chamber of the Oxford Union. Oxford would be an escape from the boors of Trinity and the provincial familiarity of Dublin. It might also offer a new stage for glory.

  In February 1874 Oscar had surpassed even his earlier academic triumphs by winning the prestigious Berkeley gold medal for Greek – answering a series of papers on that year’s set text, Auguste Meineke’s monumental seven-volume compendium, Fragments of the Greek Comic Poets.‡ It was a signal distinction, one achieved by neither Mahaffy nor Tyrrell – though the medal had been won, in 1862, by Townsend Mills, who coached Oscar for the exam, and, rather further back, by Oscar’s great-uncle Ralph Wilde. Sir William was justly proud of his son’s achievement, writing to Sir John Gilbert, president of the RIA, ‘We are asking a few old friends upon Moytura cheer [i.e. for whiskey] on Thursday, and also to cheer dear old Oscar on having obtained the Berkeley Gold Medal last week with great honour. You were always a great favourite of his, and he hopes you will come.’119 The medal itself was a handsome (and valuable) thing, cast in solid gold from a die presented to Trinity by the distinguished eighteenth-century philosopher of ‘Immaterialism’, Bishop Berkeley. It would be an enduring, and material, memento of Wilde’s time at Trinity.

  Although, from the outside, Oxford University might appear to exist as a singular institution, it was (and remains) an agglomeration of self-governing colleges. Wilde had to decide to which college he wanted to apply. Mahaffy’s closest Oxford connection was A. H. Sayce, a brilliant young Assyrologist at Queen’s. But Oscar chose Magdalen. It did not have the intellectual reputation of Balliol, the social cachet of Christ Church, or the historical associations of Merton or New College, but it was known to be beautiful. A Dublin neighbour, Louis Perrin, had recently matriculated there,120 and John Addington Symonds had briefly been a fellow. The Oxford University Gazette (17 March 1874) announced that the college would be awarding at least two ‘demy
ships’ – or scholarships – in classics that year, each worth £95 per annum and tenable for five years.

  Wilde travelled over to Oxford that summer, presenting himself to the college president, Rev. Frederic Bulley, on Monday 22 June, armed with his birth certificate (to prove he was under twenty years old) and a testament of ‘good conduct’. The following day he sat the scholarship exam along with eighteen other candidates. He unsettled at least one of them by the ‘reams of foolscap’ that he got through. The young man was not to know that this was because Wilde’s flowing cursive hand – now even more individual and distinctive than in Portora days – only ran to about four words a line.121

  Wilde then joined his mother and brother ‘a-pleasuring’ in London (Sir William was busy in Ireland, preparing for the meeting of the British Association at Belfast later that summer). The news that Oscar had won a scholarship followed him up to town. It must have lent a pleasing glow to his first proper exploration of the English capital – or, as his mother called it, that truly ‘great and mighty city – the capital of the world’. Dublin’s local heroes were replaced with titans of international renown. In a round of literary visits they went to Cheyne Row, and called on Thomas Carlyle, the aged and sometimes cantankerous ‘Sage of Chelsea’.122 Lady Wilde had corresponded with him during a visit he made to Ireland in the 1840s; they had shared their enthusiasm for Tennyson, and she had received from him a book inscribed with a stanza of Goethe in his own translation:

  Who never ate his bread in sorrow,

  Who never spent the darksome hours

  Weeping and watching for the morrow,

  He knows you not, ye gloomy powers.

  These were lines that she often turned to in times of trouble, though the youthful Oscar affected to find them depressing.123 He preferred the singing cadences of Carlyle’s History of the French Revolution, whole passages of which he could recite from memory. ‘How great he was!’ Wilde later remarked of the author: ‘He made history a song for the first time in our language. He was our English Tacitus.’124

  After almost a month in London the three Wildes crossed over to the continent, travelling to Geneva, and then returning via Paris, where they put up at the Hôtel Voltaire, on the Left Bank. The hotel had, during the mid-1850s, been the home of Swinburne’s great hero, Baudelaire, the poet who, in his Fleurs du Mal, had expressed so vividly the beauties of ugliness, corruption and sin. And it was under the influence of these twin guides (with additional notes from Poe and Rossetti) that Oscar began his own elaborately rhymed poem upon the Sphinx – a jewelled and sensual account of the monstrous Egyptian temptress, whose strange image lay close at hand in the Louvre.125

  Back in Dublin later that summer Mahaffy invited Oscar to look over the manuscript of his latest book, Social Life in Ancient Greece. Much of the book’s recondite information about Greek customs was drawn from Meineke’s Fragments, and Wilde’s exceptional knowledge of that work must have been a useful resource (Mahaffy, in his preface, would thank his former student for the ‘many improvements and corrections’ he had made ‘all through’ the volume.126 The shared enterprise gave Wilde an even clearer sense of Mahaffy’s defiantly ‘artistic standpoint’. In one passage, for instance, Mahaffy described how late Greek commentators had ‘degraded’ Homer (the great delineator of human character and human passion) ‘into a moral teacher’ by accrediting him ‘with definite theories of life and duty’. It was, Mahaffy suggested, ‘the same sort of blunder that we should make were we to dilate on the moral purpose of Shelley and Keats, and insist upon classing them with the school of Mr Tupper and Mr Watts’.127 The notion that, in art, aesthetic considerations might stand, not just apart, but above moral obligations, was a novel and arresting one for the Victorian mind.

  Even more arresting, though, was Mahaffy’s treatment of the usually suppressed subject of pederasty or paiderastia – the erotically charged, and usually sexual, relationship between an older male ‘lover’ and a younger male ‘beloved’, that had been such a feature of ancient Greek life. The topic had for generations been taboo even among scholars, but a rising spirit of objective rigour, pioneered by German academics, had begun to bring it into the light. K. O. Müller’s 1830 study of the ancient ‘Dorians’, or Spartans, had been perhaps the first work to broach the subject with anything approaching frankness. In warlike Sparta pederasty had been martial and educational in origin, but elsewhere in Greece it had evolved other emphases.

  Amongst the Athenians of the fifth and fourth centuries bc it became a vital element of intellectual life, certainly as described by Plato. Pederasty underpinned several of his dialogues, and stood at the heart of his Symposium – where Socrates and his friends debated its exact nature and correct expression. Socrates, in his own contribution to the discussion, described how the priestess Diotima had mapped out the matter for him, explaining that Love was always drawn towards the Beautiful, the Good and the immortal. And the activity that brings man closest to these goals is creation – either physical (the conceiving of children) or mental (creating ideas and works of art). To achieve the former a man finds a beautiful women to love, to achieve the latter – and higher – goal he seeks a beautiful youth, a young male whose physical beauty and willingness to learn will stimulate his ideas and, through conversation, help them to gain form and expression.128

  Mahaffy, considering the subject too central to ignore, devoted half a dozen pages to ‘the peculiar delight and excitement felt by the Greeks in the society of handsome youths’. Aware that he was on dangerous ground, he sought to obscure the sexual element in the equation, framing these attachments as ‘romantic and chivalrous’ and essentially chaste – not so very different from ‘romantic friendships’ between modern men and women. Nevertheless he did admit that, occasionally, they might become allied with ‘passion’, that there were sometimes ‘excesses’ – and, indeed, that in places such as Thebes and Elis ‘no one objected to such relations being even physical’. He emphasized the civic virtues of the practice, and suggested that if the nineteenth century considered it unnatural, ‘the Greeks would answer probably, that all civilization was unnatural’.129 For Wilde it was a first intriguing encounter with a subject that, over the coming years, was to emerge as a fine but contentious strand in both classical scholarship and intellectual life. He would, though, be exploring it elsewhere.

  At the end of the summer he made ready to depart for Oxford. Mahaffy dispatched his brilliant pupil with his blessing, and a quip that perhaps carried a first hint of competitive rivalry. ‘Go to Oxford,’ he said. ‘You’re not clever enough for us here in Dublin.’130

  * Willie’s enthusiasm for sexual adventures was – like his Christian name – something that he shared with his father. This could lead to complications. One (possibly apocryphal) anecdote relates how a girl wrote to Willie at Merrion Square to say that he was responsible for her unborn child. Sir William opened the letter by mistake, and – when his son came down to breakfast – declared, ‘Here is the most disgraceful letter.’ To which Willie, having read the letter over, remarked gravely, ‘Well, sir, what are you going to do about it.’

  † Sir William Wilde endured another great personal tragedy at the end of 1871, when his two illegitimate daughters, Emily and Mary Wilde, who were in the care of his brother, died from burns sustained when their crinoline dresses caught fire. They were aged just twenty-four and twenty-two.

  ‡ Besides detailed textual queries, the questions included: ‘Give an instance of real humour (if there be in your opinion any) in the fragments of Old Comedy’ (set by Tyrrell), and ‘What evidence do the Comic Fragments give us as to the peculiarities of dinner parties in various cities? (set by Mahaffy). Sadly Wilde’s answers do not survive.

  -PART II-

  The Nightingale

  and the Rose

  1874–1878

  age 20–24

  Oscar Wilde at Oxford, 1876.

  1

  Young Oxford

  ‘He was ver
y cheery and festive.’

  bulmer de sales la terrière

  The loveliness of Oxford in the 1870s was something remarkable. The ancient university dominated the little town: a medieval air still pervaded its colleges and quadrangles, its domes and towers, the honey-coloured stonework of its buildings, the ‘dreaming spires’ of its churches. Broad Street and ‘the High’ were cobbled thoroughfares. The city, not hemmed by suburbs, gave on to the gentle Oxfordshire countryside, ‘that characteristic landscape,’ as one contemporary recalled it, ‘whose loveliness sinks into the soul rather than strikes the eye’.1

  Wilde, alive to beauty and imbued with the spirit of romance, responded to its charms. ‘My very soul seemed to expand within me to peace and joy,’ he would remember. ‘Oxford was paradise to me.’ And in this paradise Magdalen held a special place. Perhaps the most beautiful of all the colleges, it was set slightly apart, at the bottom of the meandering ‘stream-like’ High Street, bounded on one side by the crenelated wall of its little deer park, and on the other by the stream of the river Cherwell. Over its ‘venerable and picturesque’ buildings, its fritillary-starred walks, its grey cloister and its vaulted chapel, rose Waynflete’s graceful Gothic tower – from the summit of which surpliced choristers would greet the spring at sunrise on May morning. Arriving there for his first term, Wilde accounted himself ‘the happiest man in the world’.2