Oscar

by Sturgis, Matthew;

  To an Irish audience the flurry of publications confirmed Oscar as the worthy offspring of the illustrious Speranza. Lady Wilde delightedly reported the general hymn of praise to Oscar’s ‘poesie’ at one of her ‘matinee’ receptions,30 while the verses, even though confined to Irish periodicals, gave Wilde a standing as a poet among his Oxford contemporaries. To confirm and enhance his status, he allowed his hair to grow long again.31

  The published poems ranged from the Swinburnian lushness of ‘The Rose of Love’ to the graceful lyricism of ‘Spring Days to Winter’ – a poem featuring that most poetical of birds, the ‘throstle’ (‘What,’ Lady Wilde demanded, ‘is a throstle?’).32 There was also a translation from Euripides’ Hecuba. But the most frequently recurring note was one of Catholic soul-yearning. It pulsed through the two ‘brief and Tennysonian’ compositions (as Wilde called them), ‘Tristitiae’ and ‘The True Knowledge’; it was present in his reworked version of ‘San Miniato’ and, most conspicuously, in his poem on ‘Rome Unvisited’.33

  These religious compositions attracted considerable attention in Dublin circles. The poet Aubrey De Vere (a Catholic convert and friend of Lady Wilde’s) interested himself in them, suggesting corrections and using his influence to secure their publication.34 Their appearance in print first prompted and then strengthened the rumour that Oscar had actually converted ‘to the true and ancient church’.35 Nor was their appeal limited to the Irish capital. ‘Rome Unvisited’ garnered ‘high praise’ from Cardinal Newman and even an anonymous verse tribute in the pages of the New Zealand Tablet.36 Mahaffy, predictably, was less enthusiastic about the Catholic sentiment – ‘[he] say’s “This thing won’t do,”’ Lady Wilde reported. ‘All very well up to 25, after that stuff and nonsense.’37

  Wilde’s poetic achievements usefully distracted attention from his academic efforts. Although he was eager to succeed in his exams, he was equally keen not to appear so. He cultivated his pose as a ‘dilettante’ – and with considerable success.38 Nevertheless a few of his close friends were aware that he was doing a huge amount of work ‘surreptitiously’. Hidden away in his tiny back bedroom, he would often work through the small hours, surrounded by a seemingly ‘hopeless confusion’ of books.39 He stayed up during the Easter vacation to continue his reading, together with his fellow demy Atkinson. The only two undergraduates left in college, they dined (very badly) in each other’s rooms, at least until they realized they had almost nothing in common, after which they fed alone. Wilde had amused Atkinson one night in hall, with his assertion that he would dress for dinner even if he were alone on a desert island; and perhaps he was true to his word on the occasion of these solitary repasts.40

  The regime of study was interrupted by news from Merrion Square: Sir William was seriously ill. Oscar returned home to find his father confined to bed, and palpably fading. He was only sixty-one. There was, as Lady Wilde recorded, ‘no pain – thank God, no suffering’; just ‘quietness and stillness, and the gradual diminution of strength’.41 The sober scene of the sickroom was given an unexpected twist by the arrival each morning of a woman ‘dressed in black and closely veiled’. She would enter the room, unhindered by Lady Wilde or anyone else, and silently take her place at the head of the bed. She was one of Sir William’s mistresses (possibly the mother of his two dead daughters), yet Lady Wilde, rising far above feelings of ‘vulgar jealousy’, made no objection; not – as Oscar admiringly observed – because she did not love her husband, but ‘because she loved him very much’, and recognized that it would be a ‘comfort’ for him to have the woman there.42 Although hostile rumour claimed that Oscar and Willie vexed their father’s last days by coming in late and traipsing noisily up the stairs, they were beside his bed when – on the afternoon of 19 April 1876 – he quietly passed away, Lady Wilde holding his hand.43

  The grief of the moment was briefly obscured by practical imperatives: there was the large and public Dublin funeral, attended by the lord mayor, and a host of medical and antiquarian dignitaries; there were letters of condolence to answer and newspapers to read; laudatory obituaries appeared across the Irish press, although the World, a new English society weekly, noted that the ‘London papers generally have given very scant recognition’ to the passing of ‘one of the kindest-hearted and most genial of Irishmen’.44 But the true awfulness of Sir William’s death could not be denied. Lady Wilde was bereft, confessing to one friend that she felt ‘like one shipwrecked’, her eyes ‘blinded with tears’, her mind filled with many sad bewildering cares and anxieties, her life ‘broken [and] desolate’.45 Oscar too was overwhelmed by grief. He had revered and loved his father, and cherished both his approval and his advice.46 Over the coming months he tried to resolve his sense of loss into verse, hoping – among other things – that the radiant ‘glory’ now about Sir William’s head would prevent him from seeing too clearly his son’s many inadequacies: ‘that I / Am weak where thou dids’t think me strong / And foolish where you feigned me wise’.47

  To these emotional woes others were soon added. When Sir William’s will was proved it was discovered that he had almost no money.48 This was an appalling shock, and one that threatened the foundations of the Wildes’ stable family life. It had always been assumed that Sir William was a wealthy man, and, indeed, at the height of his powers he was earning some £3,000 a year. But he had never been prudent, entertaining on a grand scale in Dublin, and pouring money into ambitious building schemes and charitable works. For the last few years, absorbed in his scholarly pursuits and Moytura estates, he had neglected his medical practice, leaving much of the work to his illegitimate son, Henry Wilson. Instead of earning money he had, as Lady Wilde lamented, been living on capital ‘until all is gone’.49 Scarcely a year before his death, he had taken out two large loans of £1,000, one secured against the Merrion Square house, the other against his Bray properties.50 What the money had been spent on remained a mystery, but it was gone.51 Instead of a secure inheritance for his family, he had left ‘large debts’, and very little with which to meet them.52

  The £2,500 that Sir William had borrowed from his wife’s marriage settlement back in 1862 had been entirely ‘sunk’ in Moytura.53 The property was left to Willie, as the eldest son, together with the house in Merrion Square. Lady Wilde, however, was to receive, during her lifetime, the rents from the Moytura estate. These, however, amounted to barely £150 a year, far less than the annual £200 that Sir William had apparently promised his relict. And even that amount was dependent upon the rents being actually paid – something that, in an era of Irish agricultural depression and tenant recalcitrance, very rarely occurred.

  Oscar, for his part, inherited the four terraced houses at Bray, a half-share (with Henry Wilson) in the little fishing lodge at Illaunroe, and also a part-interest in a property at Clonfeacle (in Co. Armagh) that had come into the family via the Maturins.54 The excitement of being a property owner was tempered by the fact that the Bray houses (like 1 Merrion Square) were heavily mortgaged. Interest payments (and possibly principal repayments too) were falling due and there was no money available to meet them.55

  Willie, as a fledgling barrister, was not yet earning more than the occasional fee. Lady Wilde’s writing brought in very little (the Dublin University Magazine, which published one of her several sorrow-filled lyrics on Sir William’s death, had ceased even to pay its contributors).56 She felt paralysed by grief, worry and exhaustion. She had hopes that the government might give her a pension either on her own account or in recognition of Sir William’s contributions to Irish public life. Her own fiery Nationalist past, however, counted against her. On learning that the prime minister, Disraeli, required recipients to be ‘loyal, orthodox, moral, and to praise the English!’, she declared, ‘Jamais – my descending to this level. Fancy! I have stood a priestess at the altar of freedom!’57

  ‘It is all a horrid dream,’ she lamented to Oscar. ‘Were I young like you I would take a pupil to read with. Youth can earn, age cannot.’58
Oscar, though, was too busy preparing for his exams to think of taking a pupil. And although the houses at Bray could produce some rent (as much as £120 a year each, when let), he now required such funds to cover the expenses of his Oxford life. No one in the family had either the knowledge or the will to deal with the situation. Debts continued to accumulate. Outgoings continued to flow. Tradesmen went unpaid. When the bailiffs arrived at Merrion Square Lady Wilde retreated to the drawing room with her copy of Aeschylus.59

  From such scenes Oscar escaped back to Oxford to prepare for Mods – and, also, the compulsory (and generally resented) oral ‘Divinity’ exam that preceded it. The classics papers began on 2 June, a punishing schedule of unseen translations, textual criticisms, historical essays and compositions in prose and verse.60 Having learnt – from Mahaffy, Tyrrell and J. A. Symonds – the habit of bringing the ancient and modern worlds into dialogue, he was delighted to find that the Oxford examiners encouraged the same perspective, and that he might be allowed to match his classical erudition with his love of contemporary verse. He was doubtful, though, about his performance in the Logic paper, and even feared he might miss the hoped-for First.61

  The college authorities had more confidence in him. The results of the exam would not be known for over a month, but Wilde’s diligence in preparation was recognized. He had the distinction of being ‘specially commended’ at his terminal examination on 16 June (ever since the debacle of his first term, he had been consistently in the middle ‘commended’ category). With this endorsement, and the ordeal of the exams over, Wilde threw himself into Oxford’s summer pleasures.

  ‘Commemoration week’ was coming on. There were breakfasts, picnic lunches, outings, dinners and dances. There was female company to be entertained. Ward’s mother and sisters (Gertrude and Florence) came up for ‘Commem’, as did the Hardings’ mother and sister (‘the child Amy’) together with a German friend. Wilde spent much time going about with them. He took the Wards sightseeing round the colleges (‘I am more charmed than ever with Worcester Chapel,’ Wilde informed ‘Kitten’ Harding). They visited Radley, William Ward’s old school, and played lawn tennis there. Wilde liked Mrs Ward ‘immensely’ and found the older sister Gertrude ‘very charming indeed’. He drew comment by his marked attention to her on a group outing to Blenheim (where the nineteen-month-old Winston Churchill lay, unaware, in the nursery).62 At a dance held by the Alfred Masonic lodge, he impressed – or amused – Florence Ward with his soulfulness. ‘I think Wilde found me very green,’ she confided to her diary, ‘and tried to puzzle me by asking me such questions as “whether I found the world very hollow?”’63

  When Ward gave a little dinner party in his rooms, Wilde ‘took the top of the table’ after Ward and ‘Puss’ Harding had to leave early in order to prepare for the Magdalen concert. He had to contend with Amy Harding having drunk too much Mosel cup – and getting into ‘very excellent spirits’. He hosted a reciprocal dinner two days later.64 Wilde was a punctilious host – insisting that the ‘scout’ (his college servant) wore felt slippers, and that he use the back bedroom as his pantry, so that the vulgar sound of corks popping could be avoided.65

  For all Wilde’s anxieties about the hollowness of the world, a spirit of infectious jollity predominated. Mr Guggenheim, the Oxford photographer, had much trouble in taking a large group picture in the Magdalen cloister – including the Wards, Wilde and numerous other undergraduates – because people kept ‘bursting’ with laughter. One elderly visitor who went on the picnic excursion to Blenheim was amazed at all the good-natured chaff that the Magdalen friends indulged in – and put up with. Jokes were many: spraying with soda-water syphons, practising on the post-horn, dressing up in drag. At another lunch party given by Wilde that week, one of his college friends (Bulmer de Sales la Terrière), arriving early and finding himself alone in Wilde’s rooms, took the opportunity of discreetly ‘clothing’ the Frank Miles nudes that adorned the walls with ‘some penny postage stamps’ that were at hand. This intervention was only noticed once the lunch had begun. There were ladies in the party. As the prankster recalled, ‘First one looked up, giggled and blushed, and then another, till the whole party was convulsed.’ Even Wilde laughed.66

  In the carefree period immediately after sitting his exams Wilde also saw something of Frank Miles. He had come up to Oxford for a few days at the beginning of June, bringing with him a new friend, Lord Ronald Gower (they had met at a party given by Millais). Gower was thirty years old, the youngest son of the Duke of Sutherland; he had recently abandoned a career in Liberal politics to pursue his passions for sculpture and writing. Miles took him to Magdalen; ‘there,’ Gower recorded in his diary, ‘I made the acquaintance of young Oscar Wilde… A pleasant cheery fellow, but with his long-haired head full of nonsense regarding the church of Rome.’67

  Wilde was rather more impressed by the encounter. Gower was a figure of fascination: urbane and dandified, well connected, ‘handsome, nobly born and passably rich’. He was a man of real artistic attainments.68 His cultural interests were eclectic and intriguing. He had recently published a guidebook to the art galleries of Holland and Belgium, a set of auto-lithographed portraits by the sixteenth-century French court artist Clouet, and the preface to a volume on the life of the rakish Restoration poet the Earl of Rochester.69 He was amusing, too, even if he did – in the first instance – employ his gifts of ridicule and sarcasm to try and laugh Wilde out of his ‘Catholic proclivities’.70

  If friendship with Frank Miles had given Wilde a first sense of connection to the exciting worlds of London ‘society’ and cultural achievement, the meeting with Lord Ronald Gower enhanced and strengthened that sense. It was, though, a realm that still lay just out of reach, even if it seemed to be getting closer. Wilde was thrilled when, passing through London soon afterwards, he called on Miles and found him sketching Lady Desart, ‘the most lovely and dangerous woman in London’.71 It was a rare hint of perilous excitement. Wilde filled most of the time before his viva voce (the oral part of his exam) by visiting his father’s older brother, John, the vicar of West Ashby, near Horncastle, in Lincolnshire. He spent some happy summer days at the vicarage. Throwing himself into the life a country parish, he ‘examined schools in geography and history, sang glees, ate strawberries’, made himself ‘the “bellus homo” of a tea party’, and played a great deal of lawn tennis.72

  ‘My uncle is milder than ever,’ Wilde reported to Ward, ‘says “Dear me now, wouldn’t you have found the penny post more convenient than a telegram?” about six times a day.’ Nevertheless he was roused by his nephew’s professed interest in Catholicism. After they had argued ‘fiercely’ on the subject, ‘he revenged himself on Sunday by preaching on Rome in the morning and humility in the evening’.73

  Wilde returned to Oxford on 3 July, allowing himself – as he thought – a couple of days to prepare for his viva. But the very next morning, while lying in bed ‘with Swinburne (a copy of)’ he was roused by the clerk of schools, wanting to know why he had not presented himself. Arriving at the schools at about one, he was ‘ploughed immediately in Divinity’. The failure was something of a badge of honour; it was, apparently ‘considered poor form if one passed “Divvers” on the first attempt’.74

  The serious part of the viva went rather better: on the Odyssey they discussed ‘epic poetry in general, dogs and women’; in Aeschylus they talked of ‘Shakespeare, Walt Whitman and the Poetics’; then followed an altogether ‘delightful’ discussion about his essay on poetry in the Aristotle paper.75 When Bodley learnt that Wilde had been asked by the examiner ‘what Aristotle would have said to Walt Whitman’ he instantly offered to bet that ‘Oscar had either been ploughed or taken a First’.76 Wilde, fortunately for Bodley, was not on hand to take the bet. From the tenor of the questioning at the viva, he gauged at once that he had got his First, and – as he admitted to Ward – ‘swaggered horribly’ during the interview. His papers were indeed exceptional: the most brilliant of his year.77r />
  The news was confirmed two days later in The Times. It was a real, and gratifying, achievement. Wilde was ‘overwhelmed’ with telegrams and messages of congratulation. His mother was ‘in great delight’. Wilde, however, kept returning to the thought that his father ‘would have been so pleased about it’. Exaggerating an emotion that was nonetheless real, he told Ward, ‘I think God has dealt very hardly with us. It has robbed me of any real pleasure in my First.’78

  Pleasure, in fact, was never very far away. Wilde spent a few days in London, seeing Oxford friends. There was a visit to the zoo and a trip to the ‘Pro-Cathedral’ to hear Cardinal Manning (‘more fascinating than ever’). Conscious of his continued ‘swaying’, Wilde declared, ‘I must do something decided.’ But he could not decide what.79

  Then, equipped with a splendid new ‘Levant Morocco leather’ travelling bag, he moved on for a week with the Miles family in ‘the enchanted isle of Bingham Rectory’.80 Wilde was swept up by the beauty of it all: the garden, with its white lilies and long rose-walks (‘only that there are no serpents or apples it would be quite Paradise’); the decorated church (‘simply beautiful’); and Frank’s four sisters (‘all very pretty indeed… My heart is torn in sunder with admiration for them all’).81 He made himself generally ‘charming’, played more lawn tennis (‘I am awfully good’), attended more garden parties, ate basketfuls more strawberries.82 Canon Miles, Frank’s father, proved a stimulating and informative companion; a ‘very advanced Anglican’, he had known both Manning and Newman during his Oxford days.83

  Cardinal Newman ranked in fascination alongside Cardinal Manning. Wilde regarded him as one of the Catholic Church’s ‘great men’ – ‘like St Augustine, a good philosopher as well as a good Christian’.84 It became one of Wilde’s fantasies that he might one day visit Newman and, unable to resist ‘that divine man’, he would at last commit, finding ‘a quiet peace in his soul’. But, of course, the belief that an interview might actually lead to decisive action made Wilde doubt that it would ever take place; his courage would fail him.85 Before departing Oxford, Wilde had bought several of Newman’s works, and planned to read them over the course of the summer holidays.86 But there seems to have been a good deal of affectation in this regime of theological study. Certainly all that he retained from his reading of Newman was the memory of a passage about a ‘snapdragon under the windows’ of Trinity College, Oxford.87