Though he still ‘dressed like other people’ Wilde somehow contrived to look ‘remarkable’. His size helped, of course, and his hair, and also, on occasion, a ‘wide-brimmed soft hat’.* But there was something in the growing confidence of his manner too. When May Harper saw him in the street, shortly after their first meeting, her aunt remarked, ‘Look, isn’t this your eccentric friend.’ Wilde saluted them by sweeping off his hat and giving ‘a very deep bow’. He was, May remarked, ‘already noticeable everywhere’.43 Not content with his growing reputation as a published poet, Wilde asserted his claims as a painter. The easel, from his days at Trinity, was re-erected, possibly with the same unfinished landscape upon it. He let it be thought that he had spent time studying painting in Paris, and even claimed that he might – should other means fail – renounce literature and ‘live in a garret and paint beautiful pictures’. Some artists, he explained, ‘feel their passion too intense to be expressed in the simplicity of language, and find crimson and gold a mode of speech more congenial because more translucent’.44
He developed his love of flowers, another key Aesthetic marker, sanctioned by the designs of William Morris, the paintings of Burne-Jones and the verse of Rossetti. Flowers took up a prominent place in his life and his verse. The poems on which he was working grew thick with primrose, snowdrop, violet, crocus, rose, harebell, meadowsweet, white anemone and ‘bright-starred daffodil’ – even if sometimes the music of words trumped sense and observation. One Oxford friend claimed to have found Wilde, at work on a poem, poring over a botanical guide, picking out ‘the names of flowers most pleasing to the ear’ regardless of when or where they bloomed.45
But there was much real engagement too. His recipe for a perfect dinner party was ‘very little to eat, very little light, and a great many flowers’.46 When confined to his rooms by illness he told ‘Kitten’ Harding that the only thing that could console him was flowers. ‘Could you steal a branch of that lovely red blossoming tree outside the New Buildings for me? I am sick at heart for want of some freshness and beauty in life.’47 The restorative power of floral beauty became one of Wilde’s extravagant Aesthetic notions. He kept his rooms filled with lilies. And if he did not actually spend hours at a time standing ‘in an early Florentine attitude’ contemplating a single bloom, he let it be thought that he did.48 He had a special cult for the daffodil (‘our most perfect flower’), telling May Harper that he had once ‘lived upon daffodils for a fortnight’. Not quite yet having the full courage of his absurdities, he then ‘looked round suspiciously’ to gauge her reaction to this new line. Finding that she was smiling, he added hastily, ‘I don’t mean I ate them.’49
Wilde was refining and developing his wit. The innocent world of undergraduate ‘chaff’ was not completely superseded. He could still write to Ward a passage such as:
Now of course Jupp and I are not on speaking terms, but when we were I gave him a great jar; the Caliban came into Hall beaming and sniggering and said, ‘I’m very glad they’ve given the £15 exhibition to Jones’… So I maliciously said, ‘What the old Jugger [Edward Cholmeley Jones, a Magdalen music scholar] got an Exhibition! very hot indeed.’ He was too sick and said, ‘Not likely, I mean Wansborough Jones [a fellow demy]’ – to which I replied, ‘I never knew there was such a fellow up here.’ Which confined Jupp to his gummy bed for a day and prevented him dining in hall for two days.50
But now such lumbering banter was matched by more ingenious flights.
Wilde’s Oxford notebooks show him experimenting with epigrammatic formulae, condensing his knowledge, making his ideas memorable: ‘the danger of metaphysics is that men are often turning nomina into numina’; ‘in History what we are to look for are not Revolutions but Evolutions’; ‘nothing is easier than to accumulate facts, nothing is so hard as to use them’.51 In conversation he began to play with paradox, deploying ‘commonplaces turned upside down’. Margaret Bradley recalled him telling one unfortunate, ‘I remember your name, but I forget your face.’52
In talking of his Aesthetic enthusiasms, he evolved a mode of ‘extravagant’ expression (as he termed it), colouring his utterances with romance.53 But, with Wilde, fun was never far away: the extravagancies were almost invariably undercut with humour, the Romantic vision guyed by playful absurdity, or subtle satire. This became Wilde’s distinctive mode of discourse. If he made fun of himself, it was not because he did not believe in his vision, only that he wanted his words to be enjoyed and remembered. At one Sunday evening gathering, he informed the assembled company that ‘I find it harder and harder every day to live up to my blue china.’54 As a witty distillation of the Ruskinian belief that Art and Beauty had a moral force, the comment struck home. It soon acquired a currency throughout the university, raising Wilde to a new level of notoriety among his peers, and provoking in various measure merriment, approbation and outrage.55 A sermon was even preached against it in the university church, beginning (so Wilde claimed), ‘When a young man says, not in polished banter but in sober earnestness, that he finds it difficult to live up to the level of his blue china, there has crept into the cloistered shades a form of heathenism which it is our bounden duty to fight against and to crush out if possible.’56
Some of Wilde’s Oxford contemporaries grew irritated by his pose, but for the most part his good humour, and his wit, won him acceptance and even admiration.† His rooms were never ‘ragged’ by the college hearties.57 Indeed, in the spring of 1878, he was actually invited to attend the Magdalen Boat Club dinner, proposing one of the toasts.58
His tutors, however, were not impressed: Wilde’s work had been minimal since his return from rustication. They were convinced he was heading for a Third. He did not disabuse them of the notion. Instead he began an intensive – but surreptitious – regime of reading and revision. He filled the margins of his textbooks with comments. He compiled detailed notebooks. He stayed up in the vacation to read with his friend Milner.59
Not that he ignored all distractions. The Boat Race was held on the last day of term (13 April). Wilde went up to London. On the following day, Palm Sunday, he attended – as he sometimes did – the Brompton Oratory. Although Hunter-Blair might have ceased to interest himself in Wilde’s spiritual wanderings, the wanderings had continued. Wilde’s social success at Oxford seems to have provoked a reaction, a sudden sense of the affected unreality of his existence. He sought an interview with one of the Oratory priests, Fr Sebastian Bowden (an Old Etonian, former soldier, with a reputation for securing fashionable converts). Wilde spoke to him ‘as a dreamer and a sceptic with no faith in anything, and no purpose in life’. He told, too, of his financial setbacks – his exclusion from Henry Wilson’s will, and the legal impasse over the sale of the Bray houses. Fr Bowden urged him to answer the ‘sting of conscience’ and convert, accepting the ‘loss of his fortune’ as God’s proof of the ‘hollowness of the World’. He backed up his words with a letter the following day, urging Wilde to take the decisive step:
Do so promptly and cheerfully and difficulties disappear and with your conversion your true happiness would begin. As a Catholic you would find yourself a new man in the order of nature as of grace. I mean that you would put from you all that is affected and unreal as a thing unworthy of your better self and live a life full of the deepest interests as a man who feels he has a soul to save and but a few fleeting hours in which to save it. I trust then you will come on Thursday and have another talk; you may be quite sure I shall urge you to do nothing but what your conscience dictates. In the meantime pray hard and talk little.60
Thursday came. Wilde did not return to the Oratory. He sent in his stead a box of lilies – the symbol of purity and the Virgin Mary, but also the floral emblem of the Aesthetic movement.61 Having finally brought matters to a point of crisis, he had made his decision: he would not be converting. Bodley ungenerously suggested this was because Wilde felt his conversion would not be shocking enough. He was not the hope of some ancient Protestant house, turning ag
ainst the long-held traditions of his aristocratic forefathers, only the son of a Dublin doctor. By converting he would simply become ‘one more Irish Papist’.62 To Hunter-Blair, however, the matter was more mysterious. He remained convinced of Wilde’s sincere attraction to Catholicism, and could not understand how he could see the right and not choose it.63
Wilde certainly was drawn to Catholicism – aesthetically, spiritually, sentimentally – but, then, he was drawn to so many things. The drama of indecision had lent an excitement to his student years, and had given him a rich subject for his verse, but it could only be maintained for so long. Although Fr Bowden might frame conversion as a new beginning, Wilde could not but see it as an end – and not the end he wanted. He was on the brink of life, full of hopes and plans. His ‘two great gods’ were ‘Money and Ambition’. He might write to Ward that he craved ‘earnestness and purity’ of life, but it is hard to believe.64 His actions showed that he did not really believe it himself. He recognized that – for him – the formal acceptance of any exclusive creed must (as he later expressed it) be an ‘error’, one that would arrest his intellectual development, and substitute ‘a theory of life’ for ‘life itself’.65 He wanted to proliferate creeds, not choose from among them. Henceforth when quizzed about his religion he would reply, ‘I don’t think I have any. I am an Irish Protestant.’ 66
Having decided not to ‘go over to Rome’, Wilde went down to Bournemouth instead, for a few days of ozone, inspiration and rest.
Returning to Oxford, refreshed in body and spirit, he attended a fancy-dress ball given by Mr and Mrs Herbert Morrell at Headington Hill Hall. There were some 300 guests, but Wilde stood out, resplendent in doublet and hose as ‘Prince Rupert’. He danced with May Harper and told her that he was ‘perfectly happy that night because he had buckles on his shoes’. He also confided to her that ‘it was the sorrow of his life’ that he had ‘dark hair’.67 The disappointment, however, of not being a blond (or, perhaps, a redhead) did little to mar the evening. Wilde always recalled it as a night of particular triumph – a ‘gratifying proof’ of the ‘exceptional position’ he had gained.68 ‘I went as Prince Rupert, and I talked as he charged, but with more success, for I turned all my foes to friends. I had the divinest evening.’ Everyone came around him, he recalled, and made him talk. He hardly danced at all.69 To fix and extend the moment, he not only had himself photographed in costume, he also acquired the outfit so that he could wear it in his rooms.70
Wilde’s high spirits lasted until the end of the month, not even dampened by having to retake the compulsory ‘rudiments of faith and religion’. Registering for the exam, he shocked the senior proctor by replying to his inquiry as to whether he intended taking ‘divinity or substituted matter’ (the option for non-Anglicans), ‘Oh, the Forty-nine Articles’. ‘The Thirty-nine, you mean, Mr Wilde,’ corrected the proctor. ‘Oh,’ Wilde answered, affecting a tired drawl, ‘is it really?’ On the day of the examination itself, he arrived late, confident that, as his name began with a ‘W’, he would not be called for some time. On being reprimanded by Dr Spooner, one of the examiners, he replied airily, ‘You must excuse me; I have no experience of these pass examinations.’ As a punishment he was set to copying out from the Greek Testament the long twenty-seventh chapter from the Acts of the Apostles, describing St Paul’s voyage across the Mediterranean to Rome. After a while he was told he could stop, but it was noticed, almost half an hour later, that he was still working away. When asked, ‘Didn’t you hear us tell you, Mr Wilde, that you needn’t copy out any more?’ He answered, ‘Oh, yes. I heard you, but I was so interested in what I was copying, that I could not leave off. It was all about a man named Paul, who went on a voyage, and was caught in a terrible storm, and I was afraid that he would be drowned, but, do you know, Mr Spooner, he was saved, and when I found that he was saved, I thought of coming to tell you.’ Perhaps not surprisingly he was ploughed again.71
The following day, 1 June 1878, Wilde began the written exams for ‘Literae Humaniores’ or ‘Greats’. He was not convinced that he had done well, though – as ever – he managed to unnerve his fellow candidates with his pose of blithe assurance, ‘striding up to the desk for fresh paper after the first hour; then handing in his book half an hour before time was up’. Wilde’s claim to have done scarcely any reading or revision was accepted by many, and added to the general belief that he must be ‘a genius’.72
The belief received additional support the week after Wilde had sat his exams. On 10 June it was announced that his poem had won the Newdigate Prize. It was a delicious moment of triumph. His mother was ecstatic:
Oh Gloria, Gloria! Thank you a million times for the telegram. It is the first pleasant throb of joy I have had this year – How I long to read the poem – Well, after all we have genius. That is something. Attorneys can’t take that away. O, I hope you will have some joy in your heart – You have got honour & recognition – And this at only 22 [Oscar was almost 24] is a grand thing. I am proud of you – & I am happier than I can tell – This gives you a certainty of success in the future. You can now trust your own intellect & know what it can do – I should so love to see the smile on your face now –
Ever & ever, with joy & pride, your loving Mother.73
Willie raced round to ‘all the Dublin papers’ to let them know of their townsman’s achievement. Paragraphs duly appeared, and were copied in the regional press.74 Other letters of congratulation poured in.75 Augustus M. Moore (brother of George Moore) even composed an ode ‘To Oscar Wilde, author of Ravenna’, which was published in the Irish Monthly.76 Approbation was general, though Hunter-Blair was amused at Wilde’s claim to have arrived in Ravenna on horseback (rather than by train) and disgusted about his desertion of the pope for King Victor Emmanuel; and the reviewer in the Irish Monthly thought Wilde had been too generous in his comments on Byron’s moral reputation.77
Wilde hoped that Macmillan & Co. might publish the poem, but George regretted that it would not be suitable for the firm. Wilde had to fall back on the conventional expedient of having it printed by Shrimpton’s, the booksellers in the Broad. As was customary the Oxford professor of poetry – then John Campbell Shairp – went through the text before publication, suggesting amendments. Wilde listened courteously to his advice, and even took notes, but then printed the poem exactly as written. The book may have been a small paper-bound pamphlet, but it was an excitement still to see his name on a title page for the first time. Of the ‘few hundred copies’ printed by Shrimpton’s, Wilde bought ‘no fewer than 175’.78
He dedicated the work to Julia Constance Fletcher – or, as he put it, to ‘My Friend George Fleming, Author of “The Nile Novel” and “Mirage”.’ Miss Fletcher was over from Italy with her stepfather, and when she came up to Oxford Wilde could meet her as a fellow author with a book (or, at least, a booklet) to his name. He hosted a dinner for her in his rooms, and effected an introduction to her literary hero, Pater.79
At the ‘terminal examination’ that June Wilde was not only ‘specially commended’; he also received a marble bust of ‘the young Augustus’. It had been bequeathed by a former member of the college, to be given to the next Magdalen undergraduate to win the Newdigate. Wilde was photographed with the sculpture, and several friends, in the Magdalen cloister. Willie was part of the small group. He had come over for ‘Commem’ Week. Together the brothers attended both the University College ball and the Freemasons’ ball (24 and 25 June). Oscar, with his Newdigate victory secured, was becoming an Oxford celebrity. It is possible that there was even a portrait drawing of him published at this time.80 Certainly he made himself conspicuous, wearing a ‘tall white hat’ on the back of his head.81 On the day after the Freemasons’ ball he gave a reading from ‘Ravenna’ as part of the Encaenia in the Sheldonian Theatre.
This annual awards ceremony was usually a rowdy event, with frequent interruptions from the undergraduate audience. Many prizewinners dreaded having to appear. Not Wilde. Following a t
edious recital of the prizewinning English essay – ‘On the Symptoms of the Decline of Races’ – which had been listened to ‘somewhat impatiently’ – he received the ‘rapt attention’ of the audience (as the Oxford and Cambridge Undergraduates’ Journal reported). There was already a ‘great curiosity’ about him, and his reading enhanced it. He delivered the lines ‘remarkably well’. The poem, far from being interrupted, was ‘frequently applauded’, and he sat down to a great ovation. Afterwards people ‘crowded round to praise’ him, while men of ‘great distinction’ (Mahaffy among them) flattered him with ‘extraordinary compliments’. For a young man whose favourite words were ‘Well Done!’ it was a signal afternoon.82
It provided a welcome comfort during the stressful annoyance of his legal suit over sale of the Bray houses. The case of Wilde v. Watson & Pym was heard in Dublin’s vice-chancellor’s court over three days (8, 11 and 12 July 1878). Having submitted his evidence in an affidavit, Wilde did not attend in person; indeed, he seems to have gone up to London in the hope of distraction.83 He was represented by three barristers, two of them QCs. The judgement, he feared, hung in the balance. With characteristic exaggeration he told Ward that he was ‘ruined’, and that ‘the world’ was ‘too much’ for him.84 In fact, when the vice-chancellor gave his decision on 17 July, he found in Wilde’s favour, allowing the sale to Mr Quain to proceed. He also awarded Wilde his costs. They were considerable. It is uncertain, though, when – or whether – he was able to recover them.85
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