Oscar

by Sturgis, Matthew;

  Wilde secured Ruskin’s attendance at one of Lady Wilde’s Ovington Square ‘at homes’.126 He also brought the great critic to the Tennants’ house in Richmond Terrace, to see Dolly Tennant’s drawings of children. Ruskin was impressed by the pictures and delighted by the vivacious twenty-four-year-old artist. He cancelled the planned afternoon visit to Lillie Langtry, telling Mrs Tennant that he had lost his heart to Dolly and her sister, Evie, ‘those two dear girls’.127 To Wilde he later confided, ‘I do think that Dorothy and I “got on” in a little way, and I think we shall get on a little further – you had best look out – I always take all the love I can possibly get, from such girls (not that I’ve seen her like before).’128 He felt that she had the potential to become great, if she worked.129

  Wilde’s own plans of working his way towards greatness were not unfolding as quickly as he had hoped. At the end of November 1879 he wrote ruefully of going to see his friends the Hick-Beaches ‘to kill time and pheasants and the ennui of not having set the world quite on fire as yet’.130 One society lady recorded a telling exchange when Wilde’s friend and champion, Mrs Spottiswoode, arrived at a tea party announcing that she could only stay a minute, ‘as I am on the way to Oscar Wilde’s, to meet Mrs Langtry and several other professional beauties’. An eminent professor, surprised at hearing the name ‘Oscar Wilde’ spoken without the prefix ‘Mr’, inquired, ‘Who is Oscar Wilde?’, to which Mrs Spottiswoode, even more surprised, replied, ‘Oscar Wilde is a poet.’ Asked what he had written, however, she foundered, until the young man whom she had brought with her came to her aid, ‘Hmm – ha – Oscar Wilde has not written much yet... But his university prize poem is great.’ This elicited from the professor ‘a sardonic look’. And, from the hostess, the confession ‘I found myself rather out in the cold yesterday, because I owned to ignorance about this Oscar Wilde. But if his works are still in the future, I don’t see that I need have been glared at as I was.’131

  * The most complete account of Wilde’s voice was provided by his sometime sister-in-law: ‘Voice – (light baritone) without a trace of Irish accent or “brogue,” of wide gamut – varied in pace – sometimes hurrying, bright, animated and gay, but more usually measured and deliberate, and even languid (unlike his brother Willie, who spoke very rapidly); its tones were rounded and velvety in character, sometimes slightly throaty and purring; enunciation very distinct and studied; he gave full value to the double letter, in a way unusual in England, in such words as “adding”, “yellow” etc., and lingers caressingly on the vowels.’

  † Willie also passed on an overheard ‘fragment’ of critical reaction to the poem, and its reference to ‘the heavy fields of scentless asphodel’ that, according to Greek mythology cover a portion of Hades:

  Crutch (to Tooth Pick): ‘Say, what the deuce is asphodel?’

  Tooth Pick: ‘Don’t know – forget it – some sort of extinct vegetable I fancy!’

  (‘Tooth Pick’ and ‘Crutch’ were the generic nicknames for society swells of the period.)

  ‡ Bernhardt also wrote her name on the glass of a drawing that Wilde had bought for 5 guineas at the sale of Whistler’s affects from the White House. The picture had been catalogued as a ‘portrait of Sarah Bernhardt’, and the actress wrote it was ‘very like’ her. Whistler, when he subsequently saw the work, declared that Bernhardt had never sat for him.

  § After another ‘silly quarrel’ she sought to make it up with Wilde by presenting him with her much-cherished stuffed peacock. The gift, however, was deliberately double-edged, as she had just learnt that peacocks were supposed to be unlucky. Perhaps fortunately for Wilde, when the present was delivered, Frank Miles assumed it was intended for him, and carried it off to his studio.

  ¶ ‘Tall and pale, clean-shaven, long hair, black and straight, he was clothed in white – white from head to foot, from the wide-brimmed tall felt hat to his cane, an ivory sceptre, with a turned pommel, which I played with often. We called him Pierrot.’

  ** ‘The English youth, full of intelligence, of gaiety, of joy. At heart a poet who hates everything that is bad.’

  †† Wilde took Ruskin backstage after the performance to meet Irving. Ruskin praised Irving’s acting as ‘noble, tender and true’ – as was reported in the Theatre Magazine – though he later clarified the point that he did not approve of Irving’s revolutionary portrayal of Shylock as ‘a victim to the support of the principles of legitimate trade’.

  2

  The Jester and the Joke

  ‘He’s a deuced sight cleverer than they think.’

  charles reade

  The world, clearly, was not yet alight. Indeed by the close of his first year in London, notwithstanding an advertised connection with Lillie Langtry, and the fading glory of his Newdigate poem, Oscar Wilde was perhaps best known for being less well known than his friends and supporters thought he should be.

  Nevertheless the tide was beginning to turn. Wilde was working hard – at fostering connections and following up invitations. With no regular employment, he had, as one ungracious observer put it, nothing else to do but ‘trot round London and jump down people’s throats’. He strove to make himself agreeable, and succeeded.1 He was helped by the fact that conventional society– once closed, aristocratic and partisan – was beginning both to broaden and to open up. Although there were subtly graded hierarchies within the so-called ‘upper ten thousand’, and many of the ancient landed families continued to hold themselves aloof, old divisions were gradually eroding and new money was finding a place. Different political creeds were allowed to mix at receptions and dinners. The professions were gaining access to fashionable drawing rooms. Artists might be admitted. Even the stage was sometimes allowed. A few advanced hostesses (wealthy if not actually aristocratic) led the way, throwing open their houses ‘to everyone who was interesting and distinguished’.2 Wilde benefited from this new mood: if he was not yet ‘distinguished’ he was undeniably ‘interesting’.

  Women, moreover, liked him, and women ruled society. It was they who drew up the dinner party guest lists and sent out the invitations. Men might consider Wilde ‘effeminate’ and ‘affected’, they might resent the way professional beauties treated him as a favourite, they might joke about him in their smoking rooms, but they found themselves welcoming him into their homes. Their wives appreciated Wilde’s flow of conversation, his depth of culture, his intelligence, his views on interior decoration and opinions on dress; they welcomed his flattery and they enjoyed his good humour.3 He improved their parties. To sit next to Wilde at dinner was accounted a treat. One aristocratic lady who encountered him at ‘a Huxley dinner’ soon after he left Oxford, considered that she had ‘never met so wonderful and brilliant a creature’.4*

  Women were charmed, too, by Wilde’s fondness for children. The seven-year-old Violet Maxse, daughter of Mrs Cissie Maxse, was just one of many young girls whom he enthralled with tales and jokes.’5 Older girls found him equally engaging. His perceived ‘effeminacy’ made him attractive, rather than otherwise, to the opposite sex. Laura Troubridge and one of her sisters ‘both fell awfully in love’ with him, thinking him – as Laura recorded in her diary – ‘quite delightful.’6 Wilde certainly welcomed such admiration. He induced Gussie Greswell to bring the Troubridge girls to his Salisbury Street tea parties in exchange for introducing Gussie to Sarah Bernhardt.7

  But if Wilde enjoyed female attention, he made few efforts seriously to follow it up. The memory of Florence Balcombe continued to linger. Julia Constance Fletcher, whom he admired so much, had suffered a disappointment in love, and seemed out of reach. With Francesca (Frankie) Forbes-Robertson he achieved a special rapport, but it was the basis for an enduring friendship rather than a romance. The tragic death of Leonard Montefiore did bring Wilde close to Leonard’s sister, Charlotte. And, according to family tradition, he even proposed to her. But she, despite a genuine fondness, turned him down, eliciting the scrawled response, ‘I am so sorry about your decision. With
your money and my brain we could have gone so far.’8

  Wilde, for the most part, preferred the more distant glamour of the great. When the celebrated Polish-born actress Helena Modjeska arrived in London, from America, early in February 1880, he elected himself her champion.9 He introduced her to important people, composed a poem to her beauty, talked up her productions, arranged for her the use of Frank Miles’s studio so that she could have her portrait painted, acted as one of her ‘henchmen’ when she was running a stall at a charity bazaar, proposed adapting a play for her, and ‘translated’ her Polish poem ‘Sen Artysty’ (‘The Artist’s Dream’) into English, for publication in Routledge’s Christmas Annual. And he made her laugh; she was delighted with his description of her achievement in making an English society audience cry when reciting a poem to them in incomprehensible Polish, as having ‘tickled with [her] voice the tendrils of their nervous system’.10 Though swept up by his enthusiasm, she remained somewhat bemused by her young champion: ‘What has he done, this young man, that one meets him everywhere?’ she inquired. ‘Oh yes, he talks well, but what has he done? He has written nothing, he does not sing or paint or act – he does nothing but talk. I do not understand.’11

  Of all the subjects upon which Wilde talked it was art that proved the most important, and the most useful in advancing his name. Having failed to establish himself as a newspaper art critic, a tenured academic, a successful writer or a travelling tutor, he became a sort of cultural chaperone, a self-elected arbiter of taste, squiring fashionable women around art galleries and exhibitions.12 Women were interested in art, or thought that they should be. And in 1880 they were particularly interested in Aesthetic art. For so long the taste of a small initiated coterie, Aestheticism was finally achieving a social vogue. It was a vogue that Wilde both contributed to and benefited from. Anyone who had visited his rooms at Salisbury Street knew that he was a devotee. And he soon became a conspicuous figure, at the Grosvenor and the Royal Academy, not merely looking at the pictures himself, but pointing them out to ‘a herd’ of eager female ‘worshippers’, and ‘explaining his theories to willing ears’.13

  Wilde’s knowledge and taste were widely admired. The novelist Charles Reade cautioned those who dismissed Wilde as a poseur that ‘he’s a deuced sight cleverer than they think… He knows a lot about art and nearly everything about painting.’ Reade recounted how he had run across the ‘airy young gentleman’ at the Royal Academy one morning – and witnessed him ‘spot, with unerring accuracy, every picture worth looking at. It’s true there were not many; but such as they were he spotted ’em.’14 Wilde’s humour was enjoyed too. He greatly amused one young listener with his statement that there was ‘really no objection to be urged’ against the rather conventional pictures gathered at the Royal Academy, ‘except that they are not paintings, and are not art at all’.15

  Wilde, all the while, sought to enhance his own Aesthetic credentials by drawing closer to the circles of the Pre-Raphaelites – the precursors and creators of the movement. He was taken up first by the painter and poet William Bell Scott, a great friend of both Rossetti and Swinburne – and ‘one of the so-called Fathers of Pre-Raphaelitism’. Scott’s wife was a serial promoter of ‘promising young men’ and thought that in Wilde – ‘a wonderful young Irishman just up from Oxford’ – she had found a new tyro. At one of her ‘afternoons’ – at Bellvue House on Cheyne Walk, Chelsea – Wilde met the Alfred Hunts and their seventeen-year-old daughter, Violet.

  Mr Hunt he admired as a delicate water-colourist and fringe member of the Pre-Raphaelite group, and Mrs Hunt (a popular novelist) too, but Violet he admired most of all; with her mass of auburn hair, her large eyes and expressive mouth, she was – as Ellen Terry put it – ‘out of Botticelli by Burne-Jones’.16 Wilde became a friend of the family, inviting them to his Salisbury Street tea parties, visiting them at their Chelsea home and initiating a flirtation with Violet (‘the sweetest Violet in England’).17 He encouraged her to write, and if he did not actually propose, he flattered her with the (half-recycled) line, ‘We will rule the world – you and I – you with your looks and I with my wits.’18

  Wilde also came to know Arthur Hughes, another Pre-Raphaelite painter. He spent happy Saturdays at the Hughes family’s welcoming home at Wandle Bank, on the southern outskirts of London. There would be dancing in the studio, cheerful suppers and long walks through the meadows to the little river Wandle. Other regular guests included the Tom Taylors, the Sickerts and the actor Corny Grain.19 Wilde delighted the family; one of the three Hughes daughters, the ‘farouche’ eighteen-year-old Agnes, thought him ‘the most amusing, comprehending and kindly’ of all the friends who visited. He told them ghost stories and amused them with his extravagances. He used to drive all the way down from London in a hansom cab: ‘Such vulgar things, dear Agnes, and soh useful!’ Sometimes he brought friends with him: one he announced as ‘such a gifted boy – he’s painted his coal scuttle white, and it looks soh lovely!’ Wilde, for his part, was impressed by the ‘soft, flowing’ Aesthetic dresses that Agnes made for herself, in ‘clear colours and just off the ground’.20

  It was perhaps through the Hughes family that Wilde came to know Edward Burne-Jones at this time.21 Certainly when Sarah Bernhardt returned to London, in June 1880, Wilde arranged for the star-struck painter to meet her. And then, building up the web of connection, he sought Burne-Jones’s assistance in getting access to the collection of Pre-Raphaelite pictures owned by William Graham; not for himself, but on behalf of the French artist Jules Bastien-Lepage, who was also in town that summer painting a portrait of Henry Irving.22

  Wilde’s most significant new connection, however, came from outside the cultural sphere. George Lewis was a forty-seven-year-old criminal and divorce lawyer: Jewish, wily, discreet, and with a growing reputation for taking on those cases ‘where the sins and follies of the wealthy classes threaten exposures and disaster’ – and keeping them safely out of court. The Prince of Wales employed him when dealing with his mistresses. As a result Lewis had come to know Lillie Langtry, and it was perhaps through her that Wilde met him.† Lewis, however, was not only a fixer, he also loved to bring people together, to make useful connections, to launch interesting schemes. He and his astringently vivacious second wife were establishing a remarkably vital meeting place for painters, politicians, writers and lawyers at their opulent house on Portland Place. For a ‘young man with a future’ it was the place to be.23

  And Wilde remained convinced that he did have a future. It was during 1880 that his public profile began to change. Aside from occasional mentions in the World, the spread of his reputation had – up until then – largely depended upon word of mouth. Now a new element entered the equation: Punch. The comic weekly of middle-class humour and middle-class prejudice had been mocking the ‘Aesthetic Craze’ for the previous five years – in skits, parodies and, most particularly, in the cartoons of Gerald du Maurier. Indeed for many people, du Maurier’s drawings, featuring such imaginary denizens of ‘passionate Brompton’ as the ‘tender young bard’, the Hon. Fitz-Lavender Belairs, the precious art critic, Prigsby, and the loose-robed, wildly-coiffed, Burne-Jones-profiled, Mrs Cimabue Brown – defined the movement. And as Aestheticism became both more prevalent and more fashionable, du Maurier intensified the attack. At the beginning of 1880 he added two new figures to his cast.

  On 14 February Punch published ‘Mutual Admiration Society’, a du Maurier cartoon depicting ‘the poet, Jellaby Postlethwaite’, accompanied by ‘the painter, Maudle’, arriving at one of the Cimabue Brown’s receptions and receiving a warm encomium from his hostess: ‘Oh, look at his grand head and poetic face, with those flowerlike eyes, and that exquisite sad smile! Look at his slender willowy frame, as yielding and fragile as a woman’s.’ She describes him as ‘the great poet’ – though an accompanying note adds that he is ‘quite unknown to fame’.

  Du Maurier did not intend Wilde as the specific subject of this caricature. His ‘Aesthetic�
�� characters were stock ‘types’ (even if it was said that Mrs Cimabue Brown was partly based on Alice Comyns Carr, wife of Joe, manager of the Grosvenor Gallery). Self-regarding versifiers were not uncommon in the period. And the lean, bent figure of Postlethwaite did not look anything like Wilde, even if he was clean-shaven and longish-haired.24 Nevertheless Wilde’s growing reputation as a poet and Aesthete – extolled by enthusiastic friends, but largely ‘unknown to fame’ – meant that some people did make a connection. And this connection was not broken over subsequent weeks, as the ‘intense’ yet languorous Postlethwaite became a recurring figure in du Maurier’s Aesthetic pantheon.25

  Wilde recognized an opportunity. He not merely encouraged the idea of a link, he insisted upon it. Ignoring the lack of physical resemblance, he claimed that he was, in fact, the model for Postlethwaite. By taking the generalized ridicule of du Maurier’s caricature, and accepting it as a personal tribute, Wilde was seeking to draw a bright clear beam of attention on to himself. Punch had a wide circulation and a deep influence. If Wilde could become identified in the public mind with the Aesthetic ‘Postlethwaite’, he might assume Postlethwaite’s position as Aestheticism’s exemplary poet – perhaps even its exemplary figure.

  The position, after all, was vacant. By 1880 the acknowledged figureheads of the Aesthetic movement were still the old-established Pre-Raphaelite coterie of Rossetti, Swinburne, Morris and Burne-Jones, with the additions of Godwin and their one-time friend Whistler. For a press that increasingly desired to frame issues in terms of personalities this was proving a drawback. Almost all these figures had withdrawn from public view or become respectable. With the exception of Whistler, none of them now even evinced any notable ‘eccentricity of costume or manner’.26 Rossetti was a virtual recluse. Swinburne had retired to Putney. Morris was taken up by business and politics. Burne-Jones, though his art was regularly lampooned, shied away from all personal publicity. Godwin was too busy. The press needed a new face, a new personality – a living embodiment of Aestheticism. Wilde – by projecting himself as the model for ‘Postlethwaite’ – might claim that role.