Oscar

by Sturgis, Matthew;

  From Naples Wilde hastened on alone to Rome, where Ward and Hunter-Blair were waiting for him at the Hotel d’Inghilterra. It was a happy reunion. Together they toured the ancient remains, expertly guided by Hunter-Blair’s friend George Gilbert Murray, professor of humanities at Glasgow. But, after Greece, Wilde had perhaps supped full of ruins. It was, Hunter-Blair recalled, ‘Rome, Christian and Catholic’ which chiefly occupied his attention and ‘evoked his enthusiasm’. The ‘inexhaustible treasures’ laid up by early Christian martyrs and high Renaissance popes were eagerly explored.

  Nor was Rome’s Christian present ignored. Hunter-Blair, ever anxious about Wilde’s soul, was hopeful that the visit might ‘do something to guide [his] wandering steps into the Fold’. The friends would often dine, at some local restaurant, together with Grissel and Ogilvie-Fairlie, two young Oxonian converts, who, like Hunter-Blair, had been made ‘papal chamberlains’. And another Vatican contact, Monsignor Edmund Stoner, arranged a private audience with Pope Pius for Wilde and Hunter-Blair. In a memorable moment, the aged pontiff placed his hands on Wilde’s head in benediction, and ‘expressed the hope and wish that he would soon follow his [friend] into the City of God’. Wilde sat silent in the carriage on the drive back to the Inghilterra. But instead of making any decisive step, he retreated to his room and wrote a sonnet.57

  That evening the three friends drove out to the great basilica of S. Paolo fuori le Mura. Wilde insisted that they stop at the beautiful non-Catholic cemetery, by the Pyramid of Cestius, in the lee of the city wall. It was where Keats was buried (and Shelley too). Wilde wished to pay homage to the author of ‘Endymion’, who had died of tuberculosis in an apartment close to the Spanish Steps. His simple tombstone bore the epitaph ‘This grave contains all that is mortal of a young English poet, who on his death bed, in the bitterness of his heart, at the malicious power of his enemies, desired these words to be engraven… Here Lies One Whose Name Is Writ In Water.’ Keats’s bitterness was supposedly towards his critics. It was said that their harsh reviews had hastened his end. And Wilde, standing by the grave, with its carpet of spring flowers, was struck by the idea that Keats too was a martyr, ‘worthy to lie in the City of Martyrs… a Priest of Beauty slain before his time’. He saw him as ‘a lovely Sebastian’, slain ‘by the arrows of a lying and unjust tongue’.58

  The power of this vision was slightly undercut, Wilde felt, by the proximity of a recently erected marble tablet, set in the cemetery wall. It carried ‘some mediocre lines of poetry’ in praise of Keats, and a medallion profile that made the poet appear ‘ugly’, ‘hatchet-faced’ and thick-lipped – quite unlike Wilde’s personal vision of him as an ideal Greek type of male beauty, to rank alongside Apollo, Charmides or Guido Reni’s St Sebastian. But Wilde refused to let this ‘marble libel’ destroy the moment. To Hunter-Blair’s disgust, he prostrated himself upon the hallowed turf.59

  If Wilde could divine the spiritual in the aesthetic, Rome also helped him appreciate the worldly in the religious. The opulence of papal splendour dazzled him. And though he might still hesitate actually to become a Catholic, he was sure that he would like to be cardinal. It became his stated ambition – or one of them. To have been a prince of the church, certainly at the time of the Renaissance, would have allowed him to blur the line between popery and paganism. For Wilde one of the chief pleasures of his Roman sojourn was finding ‘the Greek gods and the heroes and heroines of Greek story, throned in the Vatican’. Among the masterpieces of antiquity assembled by Julius II and his successors, a marble statue of a long-limbed athlete scraping the sweat from his body (a version of the ‘Apoxymenos’ carved by Lysippus, one-time court-sculptor to Alexander the Great) became Wilde’s especial favourite.60

  The sheer abundance and variety of Rome’s art treasures amazed Wilde; he would later joke that the city was ‘the Whiteleys of art’. Exposure extended his Aesthetic tastes, or perhaps corrupted them. Having already strayed from the approved Ruskinian canon in admiring Guido Reni, he developed an enthusiasm for the similarly ‘sensual’ and ‘impure’ Correggio. The artist’s ‘Danae’ was one of the jewels of the Borghese Collection.61 But if Wilde had hoped his travels would ‘mark an era in his life’ by producing a resolution to his spiritual waverings, he was disappointed: they simply heightened his sense of both paganism and popery, imbuing them with brighter colours and quicker fire.

  Wilde could air his new enthusiasms with a new companion. Through Ward and Hunter-Blair he met a young American called Julia Constance Fletcher; they went riding together in the Campagna. She lived in Rome with her mother and stepfather, an American-born painter, Eugene Benson. Although not yet twenty, Fletcher had already written one novel (published – under the pseudonym ‘George Fleming’ – by Macmillan & Co.) and was working on another. Clever, amusing, well-travelled and well-read, Wilde found himself ‘much attracted to her in every way’.62 Her vision of him can be caught in the pages of the romance that she was writing that spring. Mirage (a three-volume novel about a party of travellers on a tour of Syria) contains, in the character of ‘Claude Davenant’, a portrait of an Oxford-educated poet, recently returned from Greece.

  His face was almost an anachronism. It was like one of Holbein’s portraits; pale, large-featured, individual; a peculiar and interesting countenance, of singularly mild yet ardent expression. Mr Davenant was very young – probably not more than two and twenty; but he looked younger. He wore his hair rather long, thrown back, and clustering about his neck like the hair of a mediaeval saint. He spoke with rapidity, in a low voice, with peculiarly distinct enunciation; he spoke like a man who made a study of expression. He listened like one accustomed to speak.

  Fletcher certainly registered, and seems to have enjoyed, the elements of Wilde’s developing pose: the mind set on higher things (Davenant repeatedly falls off his horse while lost in thought); the air of hieratic inscrutability (when asked what one of his poems ‘means’, he replies in his ‘most languid tone’, ‘Ah, but I never explain things’); the divided allegiance between ‘those two stars of the material and the spiritual life – the Venus of the Greeks and the Virgin of the Italians’; and – most distinctively – the adoption of the Aesthetic viewpoint upon every question. Davenant spends all his money on an old textile (‘I should call it an inspiration, a poem in colour’) to prevent one of the other travellers buying it and re-backing it with ‘a new piece of stuff’. He insists on a young messenger boy being brought into a bare waiting room because ‘He’s got a beautiful face… and it will be something to look at.’ He admits that he rarely visits his sister, ever since she married a man who furnished his Elizabethan manor house with gilt-encrusted Louis Quinze furniture (‘I’m sorry, for I was very fond of my sister’).

  Fletcher not only appreciated Wilde’s humour; she also shared his intellectual curiosity. Walter Pater was one of her heroes. She would dedicate Mirage to ‘The author of The Renaissance’. Wilde promised to send her some of Pater’s uncollected articles – as well as, for comparison, one of J. A. Symonds’ books (Fletcher found Symonds rather ‘redundant in style – less an artist – less daring than Pater. I can imagine Mr Symonds to be married, and his wife’s relations reading his book’).63

  Wilde finally returned to England and Oxford at the end of April. Full of the joys of Greece and Rome, he was shocked to discover that the college authorities – at last losing patience – had passed a resolution, rusticating him until the end of the academic year (October), and docking half his demyship (£45). During his suspension he would be expected to prepare a set amount of work, and any failure on this score would result in the loss of his demyship.64 That he should be sent down from Oxford for being – as he put it – ‘the first undergraduate to visit Olympia’ confirmed all his worst thoughts about the ungentlemanly Mr Allen and ‘that old woman in petticoats’ the dean. He railed against the verdict, consulted the ‘statutes’, and appealed to the schools clerk, but in vain.65 The Magdalen authorities were not to be moved. He
secured just one small concession: if he returned in October with the prescribed work satisfactorily completed, half the fine would be remitted.66

  Wilde retreated in disgust. He passed a ‘delightful’ couple of weeks in London ‘with Frank Miles and a lot of friends’.67 It was stimulating to be in artistic company and in town – and at the start of the ‘season’ too. There were concerts to attend: Wagner at the Albert Hall, Anton Rubinstein playing at St James’s.68 The Royal Academy summer exhibition opened on 5 May: Lord Ronald Gower had two sculptures in the show, and Frank Miles a view of ‘Lough Muck, Connemara’. That year, however, the Royal Academy had a rival.

  The great cultural excitement of the summer was the opening of the new Grosvenor Gallery on Bond Street. It was to be a novel type of exhibition space: luxurious, well appointed and up to date. The wealthy and artistic Sir Coutts Lindsay, supported by his wealthy and artistic young wife, had poured his energy, taste and resources into creating a modern ‘Temple of Art’. It was also a temple to the new Aesthetic style. Every detail of its opulent decor proclaimed the allegiance: damask wall hangings in the approved Aesthetic shades of ‘sage green’ and ‘dead crimson’; dadoes of ‘dull green and gold’; salvaged Palladian doorways; rich ‘Turkey carpets’ and artfully placed ‘Japanese China’.69

  The inaugural exhibition, carefully selected by the Lindsays, confirmed the Aesthetic connection. Pictures were hung ‘on the line’, rather than being crammed on to the walls (as at the Academy). They included works by many of the heirs to the Pre-Raphaelite tradition: Holman Hunt, Millais (including a portrait of Lord Ronald Gower), Walter Crane, and indeed the Lindsays themselves. But the most arresting works in the show were those by Burne-Jones and Whistler. The former had contributed three large closely worked canvases – the ‘Beguiling of Merlin’, the ‘Days of Creation’ and the ‘Mirror of Venus’ – and the latter offered something completely different. Whistler eschewed both detail and narrative in a succession of low-toned impressionistic ‘symphonies’ (usually landscapes), ‘harmonies’ and ‘arrangements’ (usually portraits).

  The private view on 30 April was a glittering occasion. ‘Everybody’, as the papers reported excitedly, ‘was there’: aristocrats, politicians (Gladstone among them), artists, writers, actors, distinguished prelates, and ‘a dream of fair women’.70 Wilde, thanks to his connections, was there too, delighted to be in the midst of London’s celebrities. It was an opportunity to meet literary figures such as Mahaffy’s friend Lord Houghton (biographer of Keats), and to make the acquaintance of Whistler.71 As an introduction to London’s fashionable cultural life it could not be bettered. But if Wilde hoped to be noticed, he found that he was not the most conspicuous figure making a debut that season.

  A new beauty had appeared in the London firmament: a young woman of grave yet languorous demeanour, fair-skinned, grey-eyed and with corn-gold hair. Her features had a definite sculptural quality: the arched brow, the full chin, the nobly chiselled mouth, the ‘augustly pillared’ throat. Beauty, like everything else, has its fashions. And to the eye of the time she seemed the ideal of female loveliness: a Greek statue come to life.72 Frank Miles had been among the first to notice her, one night at the theatre, and among the first to meet her, at a reception hosted by Lady Sebright in Lowndes Square. She was Mrs Langtry, twenty-three-year-old daughter of a Channel Island clergyman, recently married to a portly and undistinguished yachting enthusiast. Her great ambition was to make her way in society. She was not rich: she arrived in London with one black dress and no jewellery except for her wedding ring. Nor was she well connected. But in Lady Sebright (the friend of a friend) she found an able sponsor.73

  By the end of that first Lowndes Square ‘At Home’, Lillie Langtry had acquired numerous aristocratic admirers and two artists eager to celebrate her beauty – and to catch something of its reflected glory. Besides Frank Miles, Millais was also present that evening. And as a fellow Channel Islander (and a Royal Academician) he secured both the honour of taking her in to dinner, and the promise of a portrait sitting.

  Miles, however, not to be outdone, made an impromptu pencil sketch of her as she stood. He planned to reproduce it as the first salvo in a campaign to establish her fame. It was a campaign in which he wanted to enlist Wilde’s assistance.74 An introduction was effected: Wilde thought her ‘the loveliest woman in Europe’.75 And when Lord Ronald Gower called on Miles, not long afterwards, he reported that the artist was ‘quite in ecstasies’ about Mrs Langtry, declaring that ‘he with his pencil and his friend Oscar Wilde with his pen, will make her the Joconde [Mona Lisa] and Laura of this century!’76 The surprise is that Wilde, who had been writing poems all year, did not at once dash off a sonnet in her honour.77 Instead he returned to Dublin.

  4

  Specially Commended

  question: ‘What are the sweetest words in the word?’

  oscar wilde: ‘Well Done!’

  Both Lady Wilde and Mahaffy were outraged at the actions of the Magdalen authorities. Mahaffy took it as almost a personal insult. Willie, typically, supposed that there must be some scandal behind it all, and wrote from Moytura to ask Oscar about the ‘real’ reason for his rustication.1 Exiled from Oxford, Wilde devoted himself to literature and the intellect. He agreed to give a series of lectures on classical subjects to the young women of Dublin’s Alexandra College. It would be a noteworthy undertaking: Mahaffy himself had given a similar course of lectures in 1869.2 Wilde continued to write his verse – although, conscious of the need to enhance his standing, he put quite as much energy into building up his network of literary contacts. To the roster of periodicals willing to publish his work, he added the Illustrated Monitor, another Dublin-based Catholic magazine.3 He attended an open meeting of the Catholic University Literary Society at which ‘the foundation of an Irish National literature’ was discussed by a gathering of Dublin’s cultural worthies.4 He dined out regularly, delighted that everyone thought he was a fellow of Magdalen and listened to him.5

  But his horizons now reached beyond the Irish shore. With a precocious grasp of the power of association, he set about establishing links to the wider literary world. His poems were his calling cards. Having written a sonnet on the ‘Recent Massacre of Christians in Bulgaria’, he sent a copy to Gladstone; the former Liberal prime minister, then in opposition, was campaigning against Turkish atrocities in the Balkans. ‘I am little more than a boy,’ Wilde claimed disingenuously, ‘and have no literary interest in London, but perhaps if you saw any good stuff in the lines I send you, some editor (of the Nineteenth Century perhaps or the Spectator) might publish them.’6 Gladstone’s ‘sympathetic’ words of praise encouraged Wilde not only to send the politician another poem (‘a poor return on your courtesy’) but also to submit some verses to both the Nineteenth Century and the Spectator, with a note that Gladstone ‘saw some promise in them’.7 Such promise, however, was not quite enough to secure their publication.

  His sonnet ‘On the Grave of Keats’, accompanied by a plea for a better monument to the poet’s memory, Wilde sent off to Lord Houghton, Buxton Forman (editor of both Keats and Shelley), and William Michael Rossetti, brother of Dante Gabriel, and another Keats enthusiast. The responses were perhaps more polite that enthusiastic. Lord Houghton pointed out that – as his biography made clear – Keats’s life was not the tragedy of neglect suggested by Wilde’s poem, before adding that the medallion portrait at Rome, so objected to by Wilde, was in fact ‘very like’ the poet, and ‘having been put up by enthusiastic friends’ it would not do to try and displace it.8

  He had better success with an article he wrote for the Dublin University Magazine, an extended review of the Grosvenor Gallery exhibition. It was an assured performance. The ‘art critic’ was a new role for him, though one endorsed by the examples of Ruskin and Swinburne; and Wilde readily assumed an equality with his heroes. When the Dublin University Magazine editor suggested some alteration to his strictures on Alma-Tadema’s draughtsmanship, Wilde repli
ed insufferably, ‘I and Lord Ronald Gower and Mr Ruskin, and all artists of my acquaintance, hold that Alma-Tadema’s drawing of men and women is disgraceful. I could not let an article signed with my name state he was a powerful drawer.’9

  The review, when it appeared in July 1877, was a mixture of lush description, discerning praise and lofty qualification. Almost every sentence subtly proclaimed the author’s own connections, accomplishments and allegiances: Millais’s portraits of the daughters of the Duke of Westminster were endorsed as ‘very good likenesses’, while his portrait of Lord Ronald Gower ‘will be easily recognized’, though it is not in the same class as the artist’s picture of Ruskin ‘which is in Oxford’ (not on public display, but at the home of Sir Henry Acland). William Blake Richmond’s painting of ‘Electra at the Tomb of Agamemnon’ captured ‘exactly that peculiar opal blue’ of a Greek sky – even if the treatment of the women’s dresses showed clearly that Richmond had not studied Aeschylus’ ‘elaborate and pathetic’ account of the scene in the Choephorae. A postscript gratuitously recorded that Whistler – creator of the famous ‘Peacock Room’ – was, unlike the reviewer, unaware of the peacock-patterned mosaics at Ravenna.10

  If Wilde hailed Whistler as ‘The Great Dark Master’, he used the artist’s low-toned images principally as grounds for humour. His comment upon ‘Nocturne in Black and Gold’ (‘The falling rocket’), and its companion piece ‘Nocturne in Blue and Silver’, carried facetiousness dangerously close to derision: ‘These pictures are certainly worth looking at for about as long as one looks at a real rocket, that is, for somewhat less than a quarter of a minute.’ The most generous praise was lavished upon the works of Burne-Jones.