The article gave Wilde a first small toehold in the art world of the day. To reinforce his position, he hastened to send copies of the review to many of the artists mentioned. And much to his gratification he received several ‘delightful letters’ back.11 The art world, though, was changing even as he began to engage with it. Ruskin’s review of the same Grosvenor exhibition, for the Fors Clavigera, had not been as temperate as Wilde’s. His comments on Whistler’s ‘Nocturne in Black and Gold’ had provoked a libel action. Whistler won the case but was awarded only a farthing’s damages, and had to pay his own costs. The debacle bankrupted the painter, and created a rift at the heart of the English art scene. Sides were taken. Burne-Jones, who – against his will – appeared as a witness for Ruskin, found himself on the other side of the line from his former friend, Whistler. It was awkward terrain that Wilde would have to negotiate.
The art world, though, was not Wilde’s only concern in writing about the Grosvenor show. His review can also be read as a carefully contrived letter of introduction to Walter Pater. Wilde has been at Oxford for three years without, apparently, seeking to meet Pater; perhaps he was moved to do so now in part by a desire to keep up with Julia Constance Fletcher’s Paterian enthusiasms. Pater is quoted once, and would have been quoted again but for the editorial blue pencil. He is also cited as one of the select band – along with Swinburne, Symonds and Morris – contributing to ‘that revival of culture and love of beauty which in a great part owes its birth to Mr Ruskin’. There are mentions in the article of Heraclitus, the philosopher who provided the epigraph to Pater’s celebrated ‘Conclusion’; of Correggio, an artist whose work adorned Pater’s study at Brasenose; and of Simeon Solomon, a painter, and friend of Pater’s, who no longer exhibited following his conviction, in 1873, for attempted sodomy in a public urinal off Oxford Street.
Wilde sent a copy of the review to Pater at Oxford, and received a gracious letter of recognition:
Dear Mr Wilde
Accept my best thanks for the magazine and your letter. Your excellent article on the Grosvenor Gallery I read with very great pleasure; it makes me much wish to make your acquaintance, and I hope you will give me an early call on your return to Oxford.
I should much like to talk over some of the points with you, though on the whole I think your criticism very just, and it is certainly very pleasantly expressed. It shows that you possess some beautiful, and for your age quite exceptionally cultivated, tastes; and a considerable knowledge also of many beautiful things. I hope you will write a great deal in time to come.
Very truly yours
Walter Pater12
It was a trophy too precious to be parted from. Wilde copied it out when excitedly relaying news of its contents to Ward and Harding.13
Wilde’s literary efforts also had their effect closer to home. They aided his courtship of Florence Balcombe. On receiving the copy of the Monitor containing ‘Urbs Sacra Aeterna’ Florrie wrote to congratulate Wilde on his ‘sublime’ sonnet: ‘I can quite understand the priests going into ecstasies over it… We want to hear you read it yourself to us. Do come tomorrow evening if you can.’ She added as a playful postscript, ‘Was it quite right to send the Monitor to a good Protestant home like ours?’14 The one person not impressed by the flow of spiritual poems was Hunter-Blair. Finally losing patience with Wilde’s continued failure to commit to the Catholic Church, he declared ‘Do not send me your sonnets. I do not care to see them.’ They, nevertheless, remained friends.15
Home life showed signs of improvement. Oscar’s half-brother Henry Wilson, buoyed by his position at St Mark’s, had agreed to buy the Merrion Square house, and to allow Lady Wilde and her sons to continue in residence, at least for the moment. It was a happy solution that seemed to offer the possibility of a continued family life in Dublin. The vision, however, had no sooner been conjured up, than it vanished. On 9 June 1877 Wilson was taken ill. Three days later he was dead.16 The blow was a hard one.
All the Wildes were ‘very much attached’ to their so-called ‘cousin’. He had, moreover, both the practicality and the earning power to assist the family through the upheaval of Sir William’s death. But now he was gone. And there was worse to come. His will was, as Oscar reported, ‘an unpleasant surprise, like most wills’.17 Oscar and Willie had always understood that they were to be his heirs, but the bulk of his £8,000 fortune was left to St Mark’s Hospital. Willie did receive £2,000. But Wilson, ‘bigotedly intolerant of Catholics’ and sensing Oscar ‘on the brink’ of conversion, had all but disinherited him. Oscar received just £100, together with Wilson’s half-share in Illaunroe, and that only on condition he remained a ‘Protestant’. It was ‘a terrible disappointment’. Oscar had, so he claimed, become used to suffering ‘in mind’ from his ‘Romish leanings’, and had turned those sufferings into verse. Now, though, he was suffering ‘in pocket’. It was not a subject for poetry.18
In the short term Willie’s £2,000 windfall meant that Merrion Square could be kept on. Despite his round of pleasures, Willie was making small advances in his legal career (at least he was invited to dinner with Mr Larkin, a prominent Dublin solicitor), and he continued to think of a political future. One well-connected friend told Lady Wilde, much to her gratification, that ‘he knew Willie would be returned MP for many places [in Ireland], by mere love of Speranza’s name’. He advised Willie ‘to start next election on Free Liberal principles’.19
Oscar matched his brother’s ambition. Alongside his poetry and his art criticism, he was hoping to publish a paper on ancient Greece, perhaps derived from one of his Alexandra College lectures.20 He was, though, rather aware that, among all these plans, he was not getting on with the prescribed work for his Magdalen tutors. He intended to rectify this during a summer of quiet – and sport – in the west of Ireland. He even hoped that Ward, recently returned from Constantinople, might join him, as an encouragement to study. In the event, though, he had to console himself with his old Irish friends, Dick Trench and Jack Barrow.
Very little reading got done. When not out with rod and gun, or indulging in ‘Pool, Ecarté and Potheen Punch’, there was a new claim upon Wilde’s attention. The subject for the following year’s Newdigate Prize poem had been announced in the Oxford University Gazette at the beginning of June: by extraordinary good fortune it was ‘Ravenna’ – a city that Wilde had visited earlier that year. The prize (worth £21), for a poem ‘in heroic couplets’, was accounted the university’s blue riband of literature. It had been won by both Matthew Arnold and Ruskin (as well as by many wholly forgotten young men). And Wilde was anxious to add his name to the roll of honour.21
Over the ensuing months he brought all his resources to bear, in order to give himself the best possible chance of winning. His opening lines proclaimed the fact that he had actually been to Ravenna. He pushed home this advantage with his evocations of the spirit of the place – glimpsed first ‘across the sedge and mire’, a ‘holy city rising clear, / Crowned with her crown of towers’. He plundered his existing poems for what he considered his best lines and choicest images (the ‘throstle’ makes a re-appearance). And conscious of the probable political sympathies of the judges, he praised unified Italy’s new king, rather than the defiant and dethroned pope in the Vatican: ‘for at last / Italia’s royal warrior hath passed / Rome’s lordliest entrance, and hath worn his crown / In the high temples of the Eternal Town!’22
In August Wilde was at Clonfin again, for the grouse shooting. He joined a jolly house party that included some members of the Fox family, American relations of his hostess, over from Chicago. The daughter, Selena ‘Teenie’ Fox, had brought with her a ‘mental photograph’ album, in which the houseguests were invited to write down their ‘Tastes, Habits, and Convictions’. Wilde filled in the questionnaire with fluent aplomb: ‘What is your favorite game?’ – ‘Snipe and Lawn Tennis.’
He listed his least favourite traits in others as ‘vanity, self-esteem and conceitedness’, before cheerfull
y giving his own most ‘distinguishing characteristic’ as ‘inordinate self-esteem’. It was an answer supported by many of his other entries. Favourite poets: ‘Euripides, Keats, Theocritus and myself’; idea of happiness: ‘absolute power over men’s minds, even if accompanied by chronic toothache’; idea of misery: ‘living a poor and respectable life in an obscure village’; dream: ‘getting my hair cut’; desired characteristic in a spouse: ‘devotion to her husband’. He gave as one of his ‘favourite amusements’ ‘writing sonnets’, and as his ‘favorite occupation’ ‘reading my own sonnets’.
It is a sprightly performance, by a young man eager both to test and show off his powers. For him the ‘sweetest words in the world’ were ‘Well Done!’ and the ‘saddest’ – ‘Failure!’. He considered the ‘sublimest passions of which human nature is capable’ to be ‘ambition’ and (less obviously) ‘asceticism’. And – reiterating his comments to Ward and Hunter-Blair – he gave as his ‘aim in life’ ‘success; fame or even notoriety’.23
Although at the beginning of the summer the local estate agents had managed to rent one of the Bray cottages (for £75 pa minus commission), Wilde was still anxious to sell the properties outright. And, back in Dublin in the last week of September, he was approached directly by a family friend, John Quain, with an offer of £2,800 for all four houses. Wilde was inclined to accept. At almost the same moment, another party made an offer (of £2,700) through Wilde’s agents, Messers Battersby. Apprised of this, Wilde called at Battersby’s office, to explain that he already had a higher offer; the Battersby clerk asked if Wilde might settle the matter in favour of their client for £2,900. Wilde replied that if he received formal notification of such an offer by the following Monday morning (eleven o’clock, 1 October) he would accept it. Monday, however, arrived without an offer having been received, so Wilde agreed the sale to Mr Quain for £2,800.
It should have been a small moment of triumph, or at least achievement. But the sale was halted. The other would-be purchasers, Watson & Pim (acting for a Mr Kernihan, the tenant of one of the Bray cottages), insisted that Messers Battersby, as Wilde’s appointed agents, had accepted their offer of £2,900 on Wilde’s behalf, before the Monday morning deadline. And that, even if Wilde himself knew nothing about it, the purchase should be theirs. To support this claim Messers Battersby lodged a registered ‘memorial’ of their ‘sale’ to Watson & Pim. As neither side consented to yield, Wilde was forced to begin legal proceeding to get this claimed agreement between Battersby and Watson & Pim set aside. It was a slow, expensive and uncertain business.24
Nor was it his only financial setback. Returning to Oxford to start his fourth year in October, he learnt that the college authorities would be upholding ‘the loss of the emoluments of his Demyship for the year ending Michaelmas 1877’. It could, though, have been even worse. He arrived back without having completed the work assigned by his tutor, and had to use his powers of persuasion to convince the ‘officers’ not to impose any ‘further penalty’.25 Unpaid bills also began to be called in. He was twice summoned before the vice-chancellor’s court and ordered to settle accounts (with his tailor, Joseph Muir, and with G. H. Ormond, the ‘Jeweller’ from whom he had purchased his Masonic regalia) – as well as to pay the accompanying costs.26
Despite these irritations, Wilde was happy to be back at Oxford, and back in his beautiful rooms. They were a fit setting in which to receive Walter Pater; Wilde had lost no time in following up Pater’s letter, calling on the author of The Renaissance, and inviting him to return the visit. The occasion, though, was nearly sabotaged by Bodley, who, turning up by chance and finding Wilde delicately laying the table, announced his intention of staying. Wilde was moved to protest, ‘No, no! Impossible to have a Philistine like you. I have Walter Pater coming to lunch.’27
Other meetings followed. There were tea parties, walks, lunches, exchanges of books and photographs. Pater lent Wilde a copy of Flaubert’s Trois Contes, with its jewelled account of Herodias and Salome.28 Art was their common ground. Bodley, who did see them together on occasion, found it ‘hard to follow the exquisite jargon that rippled between them’.29 He nevertheless considered Pater a corrupting influence upon the ‘blameless’ and ‘impressionable’ Wilde. And certainly there was a slightly cloying homoerotic charge about his company. Mark Pattison, the rector of Lincoln, has provided a glimpse of the milieu in his diary of 5 May 1878: ‘To Pater’s to tea, where Oscar Browning, who is more like Socrates than ever. He conversed in one corner with 4 feminine looking youths “paw dandling” there in one fivesome, while the Miss Paters & I sat looking on in another corner – Presently Walter Pater, who I had been told, was “upstairs” appeared, attended by 2 more youths of similar appearance.’ Although it is unlikely that Wilde, on the verge of his exams, was present on that occasion, it was through Pater that he came to know the Socratic Cambridge don Oscar Browning at around this time.30
Pater, for all the diffidence of his manner, challenged and stimulated Wilde. At their first meeting he asked, ‘Why do you always write poetry? Why do you not write prose? Prose is so much more difficult.’ It was a notion that Wilde took some time to comprehend and respond to.31 And, in this, it was like much else of Pater’s thought. The daring theories of The Renaissance opened up vistas to be explored over the coming years. In the meantime Wilde came to consider his new mentor as ‘a sort of silent, sympathetic elder brother’. Pater’s reticence, he claimed, encouraged him to talk: ‘He was an admirable listener, and I talked to him by the hour. I learned the instrument of speech with him for I could see by his face when I had said anything extraordinary. He did not praise me but quickened me astonishingly, forced me always to do better than my best – an intense vivifying influence, the influence of Greek art at its supremest.’32
He was not, though, the only influence. Walks and talks with Pater were matched by walks and talks with Ruskin.33 The Slade Professor was back in Oxford in Michaelmas Term 1877, giving a series of lectures, ostensibly on his book Modern Painters. They were memorable affairs – each one ‘more like a talk than a lecture’, with many digressions and diversions; he might ‘give a loving exposition on a picture by Turner’, or ‘a description of some delicate architectural drawing of his own’, or a diatribe against ‘modern times’, and then ‘suddenly break off into an appeal to his hearers to fall in love with each other at the earliest opportunity’.34 In the crowded hall, Wilde cut a distinctive figure, always leaning against a door to one side of the hall, ‘conspicuous’ – according to one contemporary – ‘for something unusual in his dress. Still more for his splendid head.’35
He delighted in ‘the fire of passion, and the marvel of music’ that Ruskin brought to the performance. He relished his ideas on the horrors of the modern industrial age, and extended them further. In hall one evening Wilde diverted his companions with a vision in which ‘all the factory chimneys and vulgar workshops [were] herded together in some out-of-the-way island’ so that Manchester might be given back to the shepherds and Leeds to the stock-farmers and ‘England [made] beautiful again’.36
Beauty, the great theme of Ruskin’s (and Pater’s) discourse, was much in Wilde’s thoughts. He constantly sought to understand its range and define its power. One page of his commonplace book – gleaned from Plato, from Swinburne’s Essays and Studies, and from the French writers who stood behind many of Swinburne’s ideas – runs:
‘Rien n’est vrai que le beau’ [Nothing is true but the beautiful]
Beauty may be strange, quaint, terrible, she may play with pain as with pleasure, handle a horror till she leaves it a delight.
Art is one though the service of art is diverse – Beauty also may become incarnate in a myriad of diverse forms but the worship of beauty is simple and absolute.
As it is the crown and prize of life – the flower which fadeth not, the joy which never disappoints – so it [is] the aim of early education.
Let a boy says Plato from his childhood find things of beaut
y a del-ight… and in another place he says the end of music is the love of beauty… And these expressions come in a scheme of the noblest education –
La beauté est parfait [beauty is perfect]
La beauté peut tout chose [beauty can do all things]
La beauté est la seule chose au monde qui n’existe pas à demi [beauty is the only thing in the world that does not exist by halves].’37
Wilde expressed his own personal commitment to the cult of Beauty with increasing flamboyance. He was evolving a distinct and distinctive persona. The decor of his rooms became yet more studied and conspicuous. To the eclectic mix of ‘odds and ends’ were now added ‘Greek rugs’ – brought back by Ward from Constantinople – and ‘Tanagra figures’, souvenirs of his own Peloponnesian travels.38 He seems to have raided Merrion Square for a Guido Reni print, a marble head of the pope, and a selection of ‘small china’.39 He even had plans for a gilt ceiling. When faced with financial worries, extravagance was always his first resort. He assembled the key markers of the new Aesthetic look, ordering reproductions of several of Burne-Jones’s pictures, including the three paintings that had dominated the Grosvenor Gallery exhibition. He also built up a collection of ‘blue and white china’ – even if his enthusiasm rather outran his connoisseurship. He confessed that, in purchasing one china service, he had been badly ‘taken in’.40
The regular gatherings in his rooms took on an ever more Aesthetic flavour: less cosy collegiate affairs than assemblies of like-minded devotees. Wilde gathered about him what he described as ‘an aesthetic clique’, fellow undergraduates who shared his enthusiasms for art and literature and home decoration.41 Women, too, were admitted. He began hosting ‘Beauty Parties’, as he called them; tea parties to which the daughters of dons – suitably chaperoned – were invited. Margaret Bradley (daughter of the master of University College) thought that she was asked principally on account of her resemblance to ‘the portrait of the young Shelley’. Marian Willets, stepdaughter of the first Oxford professor of Chinese, was another regular attendee; she met her future husband at one gathering, and Wilde also presented her with one of his Burne-Jones reproductions. As the host, Wilde dominated these occasions. May Harper (daughter of the new principal of Jesus College) noted that people ‘were beginning to sit at his feet’.42
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