There would sometimes be an artistic focus to the parties: after Miles had won the Turner Medal at the Royal Academy for his painting of ‘An Ocean Wave’, the canvas was proudly exhibited as the centrepiece of the next ‘at home’.74 And the same honour was accorded Edward Poynter’s sumptuous portrait of Lillie Langtry, which the artist had presented to the sitter.75 The combination of art and female beauty was, Wilde recognized, a potent one, claiming both attention and admiration. He resolved to harness its power. For his second appearance in Time he abandoned the abstract and composed an extended hymn of sensual praise to Lillie Langtry. She may not have been mentioned by name, but was clearly recognizable as ‘The New Helen’ of the title – ‘Lily of love, pure and inviolate! / Tower of ivory! Red rose of fire!’76 Wilde would later reinforce the connection between Langtry and Helen of Troy through such assertions as ‘Yes, it was for such ladies [as Langtry] that Troy was destroyed, and well might Troy be destroyed for such a woman.’ Or his dedicatory inscription in a book that he gave her, ‘To Helen formerly of Troy, now of London.’77
Langtry, though, was not the only beauty eulogized by Wilde. At the end of May, Sarah Bernhardt arrived in England with the Comédie-Française for a groundbreaking season at the Gaiety Theatre in London. Bernhardt, at thirty-four, was already the greatest theatrical star of the age – the embodiment of Parisian sophistication and sexual allure. Wilde and Norman Forbes-Robertson went down to Folkestone to meet her – and the rest of the troupe – off the boat.
There was a crowd gathered. Forbes-Robertson, pressing forward, presented Bernhardt with a gardenia. One of the company remarked to the actress (in French), ‘they’ll make a carpet of flowers for you soon’. Wilde, sensing his cue, exclaimed, ‘Here is one!’ and flung down an armful of lilies on the ground in front of her. As she rather reluctantly walked over the blooms, he shouted, ‘Hip, hip, hurrah! A cheer for Sarah Bernhardt!’ – drawing an enthusiastic response from the crowd. Bernhardt was impressed by her youthful cheerleader, with his ‘luminous eyes and long hair’.78
Wilde attended the company’s opening night on 2 June, when Bernhardt won a rapturous reception for her interpretation of Racine’s Phèdre. He thought it ‘the most splendid creation’ he had ever witnessed.79 To the general clamour of press adulation he added a poetic tribute. His sonnet, beginning ‘How vain and dull our common world must seem / To such a one as Thou’, appeared the following week, not in Time but in its sister paper, the World, ensuring it an even wider notice. Willie wrote enthusiastically to a female friend asking whether she had seen that ‘Os’ had ‘poured out his soul’ at Bernhardt’s feet in the paper.80†
Having allied his name and his muse to two great luminaries – Langtry and Bernhardt – ‘Os’ promptly turned his attention to a third: the beautiful Ellen Terry. He produced one sonnet in praise of her performance in W. G. Wills’s Charles I and another apostrophising her rendition of Portia in The Merchant of Venice. Both were published in the World.81 By such tributes Wilde established himself as the laureate of female loveliness, securing a ready readership, and catching the reflected glow of his subjects’ glamour.
He worked hard to reinforce these connections, and to win the friendship of his heroines. Ellen Terry was sent a copy of his first sonnet with the assurance that ‘no actress has ever affected me as you have’.82 Wilde became Bernhardt’s ‘devoted attendant’ during her London sojourn; he was delighted to have a chance to show off his French.83 The actress came several times to Salisbury Street, adding, after one jolly supper party, her scrawled signature to the whitewashed panelling.84 ‡ Time spent with Bernhardt taught Wilde that she was not only ‘a great genius’ but also ‘a great woman’. She, for her part, appreciated her attendant’s tact and his perceptiveness. ‘Most men who are civil to actresses and render them services have an ulterior motive,’ she later recalled. ‘It is not so with Oscar Wilde. He… did much to make things pleasant and easy for me in London, but he never appeared to pay court.’85 The compliment, though it might appear backhanded, suggests something of Wilde’s great appeal to beautiful women: he treated them as people and as friends.
It helped, too, no doubt that he could present himself still as the heartbroken former lover of Florence Stoker: one who (as he put it in his poem ‘Humanitad’) must eschew the ‘noble madness’ of love, and ‘From such sweet ruin play the runaway’ even if he could never quite forget the beauty ‘Which for a little season made my youth / So soft a swoon of exquisite indolence’.86 His memories drove him to send ‘Florrie’ – anonymously, via Ellen Terry – a floral crown to wear on her stage debut, wanting ‘to think that she was wearing something of mine… That anything of mine might touch her’. He ended his letter with the melodramatic cry, ‘She thinks I never loved her, thinks I forget. My God how could I!’87
Lillie Langtry might have tempted him to forget his former love, though she did not encourage it. She wanted an accomplice, not another lover. Wilde offered her much. He became her unofficial secretary, writing her letters, doing her chores.88 He advised her on what to wear, and encouraged her in her extravagances. She occasionally demurred; Wilde once complained: ‘The Lily is so tiresome. She won’t do what I tell her… I assure her that she owes it to herself and to us to drive daily through the Park dressed entirely in black in a black victoria drawn by black horses and with “Venus Annodomini” emblazoned on her black bonnet in dull sapphires. But she won’t.’89 He fostered her sense of intellectual independence. A solitary girl in a family of boys, she had picked up the rudiments of classical learning; Wilde urged her to continue her studies. He gave her Latin lessons, took her regularly to the British Museum and accompanied her to Charles Newton’s lectures on Greek art at University College, London where the excited students would line up to greet their arrival.90 He brought his intellectual mentor, Ruskin, to see her. She noted Wilde’s unusual attitude of ‘extreme reverence and humility’ as the ‘master’ discoursed upon ‘Greek art’, and vehemently denounced Japanese culture as an inferior caricature of Chinese. Wilde noticed that Ruskin had ‘made [Langtry] cry and escape the room’ with his remark ‘Beautiful women like you hold the fortunes of the world in your hands to make or mar.’91
To his position as amanuensis and tutor, Wilde did bring an element of courtly love. Mrs Langtry was both his muse and the supposedly unapproachable object of his adoration. Poems and flowers were the currency of his worship. Both were welcome. On one occasion he bought an array of ‘Jersey lilies’ for her at Covent Garden, and, while he was waiting for a hansom cab, a street urchin, fascinated by the orange blooms, exclaimed, ‘How rich you are!’ (the story – with its apparent conflation of beauty and wealth – delighted Ruskin).92 Of course, Wilde was not rich in any financial sense, and often he had to fall back on the expedient of buying a single amaryllis for Langtry, and carrying it to her, rather than taking a cab.93
But, for all the elegant formality of such gestures, Wilde does seem to have become more than a little infatuated. Perhaps he even dared to approach the unapproachable. When he was composing ‘The New Helen’ he certainly haunted the streets around her house. One night Mr Langtry returned home late to find him curled up asleep on the doorstep.94 And some of Wilde’s unpublished poems hint maybe at a thwarted romance. ‘Roses and Rue’ – the manuscript of which is inscribed ‘To L. L.’ – recounts the poet’s passion for a tremulous bird-like beauty, who, despite allowing a few snatched kisses, deems him unworthy of her attention: ‘You have only yourself to blame’ she tells him, ‘That you have no fame’. To this the poet replies, ‘I had wasted my boyhood, true, / But it was for you, / You had poets enough on the shelf, / I gave you myself!’ There was, though, probably rather more fond imagining in such verses than recollection of actual events.95
When Wilde’s ardour grew ‘too persistent’ Langtry became irritated. It was not what she needed. As one of Wilde’s friends later remarked, ‘He was not at all the kind of game she was after.’96 To supplement her affair with
the Prince of Wales, which was beginning to cool, she had taken up not only with his cousin, the dashing Prince Louis of Battenberg, but also with the youthful Lord Shrewsbury. And in tandem with these two illustrious liaisons, she embarked on a clandestine relationship with a childhood friend of hers called Arthur Jones.97 These players might sometimes resent Wilde’s privileged access to ‘the New Helen’, and her obvious enjoyment of his company, but it is doubtful that they considered him seriously as a rival for her favours.98
She kept Wilde in his place. ‘I’m afraid that often I said things which hurt his feelings in order to get rid of him,’ she later recalled. He was dismissed once for suggesting that ‘man is constant in his infidelity and woman puts him to shame because she is, by nature, fickle’. On that occasion Wilde pleaded for forgiveness with a serenade. But, following another ‘frank’ deposal, Langtry noted, while sitting in her box at the theatre, ‘a commotion in the stalls – it was Oscar, who, having perceived me suddenly, was being led away in tears by his friend, Frank Miles’.99 A word, though, she knew could always bring him back. After one slight she wrote winningly, ‘I cannot forgive myself so must implore you to forgive me instead.’ 100 §
Wilde remained in Langtry’s thrall. Whatever his privileges and his knowledge, he was still a slave. He did not resent it. It was enough that their relationship made him both envied and conspicuous. The publication of ‘The New Helen’ had secured him an acknowledged position as ‘her bard’.101 And when the society versifier Frederick Lampson composed his own poetic tribute to Mrs Langtry, one stanza opened with the regret, ‘I cannot rhyme like Oscar Wylde’.102
During the summer of 1879 Wilde made a short cultural tour of Belgium, armed no doubt with Lord Ronald Gower’s guide to the country’s art galleries.103 He travelled with his new friend Rennell Rodd. Together they visited Tournai, where they were drawn by a Gothic tomb, depicting a knight in armour and bearing the words Une heure viendra qui tout paiera, which Rodd rendered poetically as ‘An hour will come that shall atone for all’. For Wilde the ‘strange legend’ made ‘one think how, perhaps, passion does live on after death’.104 In the museum at Brussels, it was Rubens’s ‘masterpiece’ ‘Christ Bearing the Cross’ that created the deepest impression, with its sparkling colours and swift dynamic action: ‘That,’ Wilde declared, despite the somber subject matter, ‘is joy in art.’105
Wilde also spent time with Rodd’s family at the fashionable riverside resort of Laroche in the Belgian Ardennes. Besides Rodd’s rather conventional parents and younger sister, it was a decidedly literary gathering at the Hôtel Meunier that July. Also in residence were Jacques Peck, a twenty-year-old Dutch poet with a passion for Keats and Shelley, and Xavier de Reul, a widowed geologist, novelist, poet and art historian, who was holidaying with his two young children and a female relative, the twenty-one-year-old Mathilde Thomas. Even in such company Wilde was conspicuous. De Reul’s eight-year-old son, Paul, remembered him vividly as ‘Grand et blême, face glabre, cheveux longs, noirs et plats, il se vêtait de blanc, – blanc des pieds à la tête, depuis le large et haut chapeau de feutre jusqu’à la canne, un sceptre d’ivoire, au pommeau tourné, avec lequel j’ai joué bien souvent. Nous l’appelons Pierrot.’¶ He already seemed ‘an artist in attitudes’.106
In an ambience of shared enthusiasm and endeavour, Wilde recited some of his poems, perched on one of the flat gravestone-like rocks that littered the Val du Bronze. And although young Paul found his drawling, monotone delivery pricelessly comic, the others seem to have been more impressed. Jacques Peck – breaking off from writing sonnets to Mathilde – produced a glowing verse vignette of Wilde as ‘l’adolescent Anglais, d’intelligence plein, de gaîté, d’allégresse. Au cœur poète, qui hait tout ce qui est mauvais’.107**
Later on that summer, Wilde visited the Sickerts at Dieppe, where they had taken a house. He had been invited by Mrs Sickert, and he seems to have enjoyed the happy informality of the family seaside holiday. It was remembered as a time of ceaseless laughter. Wilde made a special friend of Helena, the lone daughter of the family. She was fifteen years old and determined to go to Cambridge (the scientific university); Wilde discussed poetry and ideas with her. He also delighted her two infant brothers, Oswald and Leo, with his fantastical tales. When Helena affected to cast doubt on the veracity of his more improbable stories, he would appeal to her in mock anguish, ‘You don’t believe me Miss Nelly. I assure you… well, it’s as good as true.’108 One afternoon he was prevailed upon to recite his prize poem, ‘Ravenna’, as the company sat beneath the apple trees in the orchard; and he submitted good-humouredly to occasional interruptions from Mrs Sickert’s old schoolteacher, Miss Slee, as she corrected minor points in his pronunciation.109
The carefree summer days could not, however, be continued indefinitely. Wilde returned to London in September to the sad news that his friend Leonard Montefiore had died suddenly in America. He was just twenty-six, barely a year older than Wilde.110 But if life itself might be uncertain, the practicalities of existence were only too definite: Wilde was running into debt.111 His income was minimal, his outgoings constant, his tastes extravagant. The two stated tenets of his personal economic credo were ‘give me the luxuries, anyone can have the necessities’ and ‘nothing succeeds like excess’.112 And though he might be able to put off creditors with tales of unpaid Irish rents, there was little sign of relief.113 Occasional poems published in the papers earned very little. He began to borrow, at first from his mother (who could ill afford it), and then from a moneylender called Edwin Levy.114
Against the background of such cares, Wilde sat the open fellowship exam at Trinity College, Oxford.115 He had studied for it, but his months in London had perhaps inevitably separated him from the narrow concerns of academe. One of his fellow candidates recalled his disconcertingly urbane presence in the examination hall on the first afternoon:
The paper was on Metaphysics and was drawn up foolishly, consisting mainly of such vague questions as ‘What is the relation between metaphysics and ethics?’, ‘metaphysic and religion?’, ‘metaphysic and art?’ etc, etc. Soon after the paper was given out, Wilde rose and stretched himself before the hall-fire: and then addressed us loftily but pleasantly – ‘Gentlemen, this paper is really the work of an uncultured person. I observe the word “metaphysic” appears in every question, a word that is never heard in polite society’.116
He failed to win the fellowship. And although he remained anxious to find some sort of position with ‘an assured income’, he did not even apply for the next fellowship to become available (at Merton, in December).117 He put in instead for the ‘archaeological studentship’ at Athens, and sought Sayce’s support for the application, as he had heard that there were many other ‘competitors’.118 Too many, as it turned out. After that rebuff he thought to follow in the footsteps of Matthew Arnold and applied to join the school inspectorship, asking Oscar Browning for his endorsement.119 Again, though, he was unsuccessful.
He considered teaching. The Latin lessons he was giving to Lillie Langtry had awakened his didactic instincts – instincts further stimulated by his friendship with Harry Marillier, a pupil at Christ’s Hospital school who used his uncle’s ground-floor rooms at 13 Salisbury Street as an occasional retreat; Wilde encouraged the bright, blue-robed fourteen-year-old in his classical studies, reading Euripides with him on his half-holidays. Marillier would bring Wilde cups of coffee in return for these lessons and the informal chat that accompanied them. If Wilde were ever occupied when Marillier called, he would give the boy half a crown and send him off to the theatre.120 In an effort to turn his teaching skills – and his experience of Greece and Italy – to account, Wilde offered himself as a ‘travelling tutor’ at the rate of £30 a month. It is uncertain, though, whether he found any takers.121
Despite these setbacks, and his own continuing financial anxieties, Wilde could show an impressive concern for the plight of others. He involved himself in fundraising initiatives, writ
ing to Constance Westminster – Ronald Gower’s sister – for help with one ‘most deserving and sad case’ (the duke duly sent £10).122 On another occasion, after disastrous flooding at Lambeth, on the south bank of the Thames, Wilde went – together with Rennell Rodd – to see what could be done for the poor families who had been washed out of their homes. Rodd recalled Wilde’s encounter, in one ‘miserable tenement’, with an old bedridden Irish woman: he cheered her with ‘his merry humour’ and assisted her ‘with little necessaries for which, as he said, she had more than compensated him by praying that “the Lord would give him a bed in glory”’.123
Such interventions no doubt drew upon the traditions of practical charity that Wilde had encountered at Oxford in the teachings of T. H. Green. They were also likely to have won the approval of Ruskin, another great champion of the poor. Wilde saw a good deal of his old and increasingly infirm mentor during the latter part of 1879. And he remained in awe of Ruskin’s great-spirited engagement with society and its problems, thinking that ‘like Christ he bears the sins of the world’ (Wilde, for his own part, always felt ‘like Pilate, washing his hands of all responsibility’).124 He took Ruskin to the Lyceum to see Irving’s Shylock.†† Afterwards Wilde went on to a large ball given by Millais and his wife, to celebrate their daughter’s wedding. ‘How odd it is,’ he remarked to Reggie Harding, alive to the fact that ‘Effie’ Millais had, in the 1850s, been married to Ruskin, but had left him to elope with the painter.125
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