From these practical concerns Wilde was summoned back to Oxford for his viva. His anxieties about his showing in the written exams proved unfounded. His papers were, once again, the best in the year.86 The examiners, rather than quizzing him on his answers, congratulated him. He had secured his First.87
If the Newdigate proclaimed to the world that he was a poet, the achievement of a Double First was an undeniable confirmation of his brilliancy and intellectual power. Although Wilde himself might disparage most of his fellow prizemen as ‘sluggish and syllogistic Scotchmen’, he was justly proud of his achievement.88 It gave him a special and recognized position in any gathering of educated Englishmen. And it provided him – at least in his own mind – with a foundation upon which all his extravagant poses and calculated absurdities could rest. It offered a shield against easy criticism: whatever foolishness he might indulge in, it was now that much harder for critics to dismiss him as a fool.
An additional pleasure was the surprise of it. The Magdalen dons, he reported to Ward, ‘are astonished beyond words – the Bad Boy doing so well in the end… I am on the best terms with everyone including [the ungentlemanly] Allen! who I think is remorseful of his treatment of me’.89 The college authorities insisted that Wilde stay up for the Gaudy Dinner on 22 July, at which Herbert Warren, the newest fellow, delivered the speech, and ‘nice things’ were said.90 Wilde’s success in Greats did not mark the end of his university career. His demyship had been awarded for five years, and he still had to pass his Divinity exam before he could take his degree. Nor had he given up entirely the idea of seeking a prize fellowship. He would return the following term.
In the meantime, though, there was the summer to enjoy. With Frank Miles he paddled from Oxford to Pangbourne in a ‘birchbark canoe’ and ‘shot rapids and did wonders everywhere’.91 He then returned to Dublin. The British Association was in town for its annual conference, and Willie, assuming his father’s mantle, was much involved with arrangements. Oscar found himself drawn in. He helped escort one group, including ‘a large number of ladies’, on a day trip to Howth. Willie, who had begun contributing paragraphs to the World, ensured that an item appeared, reporting as one of the highpoints of the afternoon ‘an introductory address by the Newdigate Prizeman of this year’ before the ancient cromlech, during which he pointed out that his legendary namesake, Oscar, son of Ossian, was buried on the site. The prizewinning poet also described how ‘the ancient Irish believed a bard could, by poetic invective, bring down temporal misfortune on the object of his satire’. In Ireland, at least, it was understood that poets had real power.92 Not everyone, though, was impressed by the self-confident young prizewinner. Otho Lloyd, an Oxford contemporary, encountered Oscar at one of the British Association receptions, startling T. H. Huxley’s beautiful and artistically inclined daughter with the languidly delivered observation, ‘To think that we are all walking about here, potential skeletons’: Dr Huxley appeared and, ‘without a world of apology, led his daughter away’.93
The conference over, Oscar and Willie went to Illaunroe. They extended their stay in the west into October, joining a house party gathered by Arthur Edward Guinness and his wife at the newly refurbished Ashford Castle. In the play of wit, ideas, poetry and lawn tennis, Oscar seems to have been at the heart of things, at least to judge from another paragraph that Willie sent to the World:
Sundry charming little New Republics are to be met with in the Far West, and I must specially congratulate Lady Olive Guinness on her first big party in the new house at Ashford. I hear brilliant accounts of garden parties and the ball, and how the counties came to dance to Slappofski’s music; and certainly, with lakes and mountains and steam-yachts and excellent company and a real live poet (not to speak of the Lawn Tennisonians), the western pilgrims are having an excellent time of it.94
Besides sport and sociability, the summer gave Oscar and Willie a chance to make plans. It was resolved that their future – and their mother’s too – should be in England. Oscar’s years at Oxford, and his growing circle of London connections, had already shifted the focus of his interests and his ambitions away from Ireland. He craved a larger stage and bigger cast than Dublin could offer. Willie, though he still harboured parliamentary ambitions (and was encouraged to believe that his name and connections might secure an Irish seat), felt the same pull. He was becoming disillusioned with the law as a career. He saw that you needed to have ‘an attorney of kin to get on’ – ‘brilliancy’ on its own was not enough.95 From his limited experience, journalism seemed easier of access, and more immediately rewarding. Newspapers and periodicals were proliferating, readerships were growing. And the centre of this world was London. Willie was encouraged by the notion that many publications, ‘tired of the old stagers’, were looking for ‘young men’.96 He had already won the approval of Edmund Yates, editor of the World, and attracted the attention of the editor of the Athenaeum, who had been impressed by Willie’s showing at the British Association. The MP David Plunket (Oscar’s sponsor at the St Stephen’s Club) was offering his support, and another contact suggested that he could ‘readily make £1,200 a year in London by Press work’.97
Lady Wilde, for her part, felt there was nothing to hold her in Dublin.98 She had allied herself to her sons, and believed that her future must lie where they chose to go. Despite all the blows that had fallen, her spirit remained undimmed. And Oscar, indeed, drew strength from her unfailing optimism.99 As a first step Merrion Square and its contents would be sold. Although Oscar’s experiences with the Bray properties suggested that this might not be a speedy business, the process was put in hand.100
Oscar’s own sense of uncoupling from Dublin life was heightened when, on passing through the city on his way back to Oxford, he learnt that Florence Balcombe had become engaged. Her fiancé was Willie’s old Trinity friend Bram Stoker, who had been working in Dublin as a civil servant and part-time drama critic. Oscar had, for some time, scarcely been an ardent suitor, if a suitor at all. Despite having been in Ireland for most of the summer, he had spent his time away from Dublin and from Florrie. Even so he allowed himself the luxury of feeling slightly heartbroken. He wrote with a show of restrained fortitude to wish her joy, and to ask whether she might return the little cross inscribed with his name that he had given her, to serve ‘as a memory of two sweet years – the sweetest of all the years of my youth’. He chose to imagine that, since he was leaving Ireland, they would never meet again – unaware that Florence was herself also relocating to London, Stoker having agreed to become manager for Henry Irving at the Lyceum Theatre.101
The spurned and lovelorn poet was a useful role. Having just relinquished the part of the wavering Catholic convert, heartbreak provided Wilde with both a new poetic voice and a new poetic subject. During the coming months he seems to have explored – or, perhaps, evolved – his feelings in a sequence of poems, ruing the transience of love, savouring the anguish of regret and the pleasures of recall:
But surely it is something to have been
The best belovèd for a little while,
To have walked hand in hand with Love, and seen
His purple wings flit once across thy smile.
Ay! Though the gorgèd asp of passion feed
On my boy’s heart, yet have I burst the bars,
Stood face to face with Beauty, known indeed
The Love which moves the Sun and all the stars!102
Back at Oxford, Wilde had to give up his beautiful rooms in college and take lodgings in the High Street (at No. 71, above a chemist’s shop). He began reading for a prize fellowship. These were a very recent innovation, instituted by a government commission that was even then sitting on the university. Worth around £200 a year, they were tenable for seven years, and had to be competed for by open examination. Very few, however, were being offered, as the colleges adjusted to the new system. And this, as one of Wilde’s contemporaries recalled, resulted in ‘a large and increasing number of first-class men waiting ab
out and competing for whatever were offered’.103 In the coming year only Trinity and Merton announced that they would be offering classical fellowships. Competition would be severe.
To give a specific focus to his continuing studies, Wilde also resolved to enter the chancellor’s essay prize. The subject for 1879 was ‘The Rise of Historical Criticism’. From the evidence of his notebooks – and indeed of a manuscript draft – he worked hard, mapping out the progress of classical historiography from Herodotus to Polybius. Perhaps because he felt it was a line more likely to appeal to the examiners (or maybe simply for the intellectual challenge), he reversed his usual preference for the poetic over the scientific, and described the development of ‘Historical Criticism’ as a progress from the ‘fatal legacy’ of Greek mythology – which concealed ‘the rational order of nature in a chaos of miracles’ – to the more scientific, fact-based approach of the later classical period.104
Wilde also assumed the mask of the conscientious Anglican examinee. On 22 November 1878 he was re-examined in the ‘rudiments of faith and religion’, and passed. As a result he was able, the following week, to receive his degree.105 At the end-of-term collections the Magdalen authorities not only agreed to remit his old 1877 fine, they also awarded him a discretionary college prize worth £10.106 The cheque might be the final monetary reward of Wilde’s student career, but Oxford would never cease enriching his life in other, less tangible, ways.
* Wilde sometimes regretted that his figure did not show his clothes off to better advantage. He told Margaret Bradley, as they sat out a dance at a ‘Commem’ ball, ‘Isn’t it sad for me when I love beauty so much, to have a back like this?’ Not rising to the bait, she suggested that he join the Volunteers.
† One of his few implacable enemies was Rhoda Broughton, a young Irish-born writer, who moved to Oxford in 1878. She – as Margaret Bradley reported, ‘loathed him’. Ill-equipped to deal with such hostility, the kind-hearted Wilde was no match for her quick, acerbic wit.
-PART III-
The Happy
Prince
1879–1881
age 24–27
Oscar Wilde, 1881.
1
A Dream of Fair Women
‘The passion for beauty is merely the intensified desire for life.’
oscar wilde
Having gained his degree, Wilde turned his attention to London and the future. His stated ambitions remained the grand, if nebulous, ideals of the previous year: ‘success, fame or even notoriety’.1 The means of achievement were equally vague. He knew only that he would not be entering any conventional profession. As he explained to Ward (dutifully embarked on his legal career), the drudgery of business ‘made men not themselves, wearers of masks of which their faces by natural mimicry took the dull shape and lifeless likeness’. Life in Wilde’s hands was to be ‘a work of art’ – something to be contemplated and fashioned.2 He would wear a different mask. Literature offered possibilities. He had told his Oxford friends that he might become ‘a poet, a writer, a dramatist’.3 Beyond this, however, he seems to have had no definite plan. It was enough that he was an Oxonian, armed with intelligence, a prize poem, self-conceit, ambition, optimism, and a passionate desire ‘to eat of the fruit of all trees in the garden of the world’.4 He also had some money, having augmented the amount he received from the sale of the Bray houses with an additional £250 raised on the Clonfeacle property.5
Bolstered by these arrangements, he took rooms at 13 Salisbury Street, the rambling Dickensian rooming-house, just off the Strand, where on the second floor Frank Miles lived and had his studio. It was recalled by visitors as a dark old-world mansion of eccentric tenants, ‘antique staircases, twisting passages, broken down furniture and dim corners’ presided over by a spinsterish landlady, who occupied rooms on the ground floor together with her aged and infirm parents.6 Wilde thought the place ‘untidy and romantic’.7 He established himself on the floor below Miles, transforming his main room, a large panelled chamber running across the full width of the house, into a vision of Aesthetic splendour. The panelling was painted white, providing a fitting background for the various artistic accoutrements he had assembled during his Oxford days: the blue and white china, the Moorish tiles, the rugs and hangings. To give added colour to the scene, fan-like displays of peacock feathers contrasted with sprays of sunflowers and lilies.8
Sharing the same house gave Wilde access to Miles’s rich social milieu, which blended the arts, haute bohemia and the more advanced elements of fashionable society. Writers, painters, actors, ‘professional beauties’, society women, men-about-town (like Lord Ronald Gower): all were drawn to Miles’s studio. Even royalty was not excluded: Miles had sold one of his early drawings of Lillie Langtry to Prince Leopold, who had called often while the sittings were in progress; and the prince’s artistically inclined sister, Princess Louise, was also a visitor. For Wilde, young and new to London, Miles’s friendship brought him into contact with an exalted realm that would otherwise have been beyond his reach. It was a realm that he romanticized – and yearned to conquer.
His own London connection comprised a modest enough circle of Oxford contemporaries and family friends, some more useful than others. Tom Taylor, the elderly editor of Punch (and a contact of Lady Wilde’s) took a kindly interest in him, even writing to one artistic hostess asking if she might send Wilde an invitation to her ball.9 Mrs Tennant (the mother of an Oxford contemporary) gave cosmopolitan receptions at Richmond Terrace. The president of the British Association, Professor Spottiswoode, and his hospitable wife, were warmly supportive, entertaining Wilde both in London, and at Combe Bank, their house in Kent. The professor also endorsed Wilde’s application for a ticket to the British Museum Reading Room.10
If Wilde arrived in London as an Oxonian, he came as an Irishman too – and an Irishman aligned, like his mother, with the ideals of nationalist self-assertion and political liberty. He was recognized as such by others. The designation marked him as an outsider, and also set him firmly on one side of the great political fault-line that ran through late Victorian society, the question of ‘Home Rule’ for Ireland. Nevertheless there was support to be gleaned from the association. Wilde ‘hunted up’ the capital’s expatriate ‘Irish brigade’, a heterodox group composed mainly of literary and political types, and dominated by the novelist, MP, and ‘delightful conversationalist’, Justin McCarthy.11 But it extended even to the fringes of the Irish aristocracy. The social highlight of Wilde’s first London season was the ball he attended given by Lady Olive Guinness at Carlton House Terrace. It was a lone – and tantalizing – glimpse of real grandeur.12
Wilde’s Hibernian connections were reinforced and augmented when his mother came over from Dublin at the beginning of May, Willie having finally sold Merrion Square and most of its contents. Lady Wilde and Willie settled together in a small white-stucco-fronted house in Ovington Square, Knightsbridge. There Lady Wilde soon began, on a modest scale, to host Saturday afternoon receptions for ‘good literary and artistic people’ gathered from her own London-Irish contacts, and those of her children. Her parties were among the few occasions where both Willie and Oscar might be seen together in London. One visitor recorded how Lady Wilde would sit, enthroned, between her dutiful and supportive boys. Otherwise Oscar sought to set a certain distance between himself and his brother in the public sphere. He wanted to assert his uniqueness. It was soon being said that he paid Willie to wear a beard in order that they should not be mistaken for each other.13
Certainly from the outset Oscar’s social and literary ambitions were set higher than those of his brother. He threw himself into the fashionable round of gallery private views and theatrical first nights. He was keen to see and be seen. But he was also interested in the cultural riches on offer. His connection with the Stokers gave him an entrée at the Lyceum, where Henry Irving had established the capital’s most exciting and innovative theatre company, with Ellen Terry as its leading lady. Wilde became a friend of
the ‘house’, and may even have contributed – occasionally and anonymously – to The Theatre, an ostensibly independent magazine (in fact founded by the publicity-savvy Irving), which gave prominent coverage to Lyceum productions.14 For the stage-struck Wilde it was thrilling to find himself so close to the heart of things. Irving became the first of his London ‘heroes’.15
The Lyceum was also becoming a focus for young people of talent and ambition. Among them was the twenty-one-year-old actor Norman Forbes-Robertson.16 Tall, spare and elegant, with a smile and a spirit that both regularly drew the epithet ‘radiant’, he was a happy companion, interested in poetry and knowledgeable about painting.17 Wilde met him soon after arriving in London and claimed him as a friend and confidant.18 Norman was one of ten picturesque Forbes-Robertson siblings, children of the art critic John Forbes-Robertson (an older brother, Johnston, was rapidly emerging as one of the leading actors of the new generation). The family held crowded Friday evening gatherings at their home off Bedford Square, bohemian parties that brought together the worlds of art and the stage. Wilde became a regular attendee, excited to find himself in such stimulating company.19 Many were excited by him too.
As a social presence he was something fresh and unexpected. He looked – and behaved – differently from most of his contemporaries, even the avowedly Aesthetic ones; among them, to judge by the cartoons of the period, drooping beards, drooping shoulders, tweed capes, and wide-brimmed hats predominated. Wilde cut a different figure. The physical attributes that had served to mark him out from his fellow undergraduates at Oxford – height, beardlessness, slightly-too-long-hair – seemed almost more conspicuous in a London setting.
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