Oscar

by Sturgis, Matthew;

  This was an original idea, and a bold ploy for a young man to adopt at the outset of his career. To most serious-minded Victorians, engaged in the high calling of the Arts, the notion of welcoming ridicule and accepting satire was incomprehensible. Wilde, though, thought differently. With what one of his contemporaries described as a ‘keen insight into his age’ he understood that ‘the curiosity one raises is one of the ingredients of fame’.27 And it mattered little how such curiosity was piqued. He had, since his schooldays, always been prepared to subvert his own pretensions with humour. If he had often made fun of himself, this was a merely a case of extending the privilege to others. He, of course, insisted on his own complicity in the game. He made a point of seeking out du Maurier and being civil to him, even offering (so he said) to sit for the artist so that he might be able to get a better likeness. He refused to be affronted by any of the jokes made at his expense, affecting only an Aesthetic concern for the artistic quality of the cartoons. He let it be thought that he actually supplied du Maurier with material for his drawings.28

  Du Maurier, for his part, found himself swept along. He did begin to borrow from Wilde. On 17 June, Postlethwaite (in his fourth Punch appearance) was depicted sitting alone at a café table, on which stood a lily in a vase: to the waiter’s inquiry, ‘Shall I bring you anything else, Sir?’, he replies, ‘Thanks, no! I have all I require, and shall soon be done.’ The notion of an Aesthetic poet being sustained by contemplating a flower carries an echo of Wilde’s remark to May Harper that he had once ‘lived upon daffodils for a fortnight’. And it seems likely that du Maurier was re-using some version of this Wildean comment.29 There was an even clearer debt when, a few months later, du Maurier depicted an ‘Aesthetic bridegroom’ (looking passably like Wilde) together with his ‘intense bride’, contemplating their ‘six mark’ Chinese teapot, with the caption: ‘Oh, Algernon, let us live up to it.’ The recycling of Wilde’s celebrated Oxford mot was recognized – and commented on – by many.30

  Whistler, back in London from Venice towards the end of the year, and encountering Wilde and du Maurier together at an exhibition, asked, ‘I say, which one of you two invented the other, eh?’ The remark was calculated primarily as an insult to du Maurier (a contemporary and one-time friend of Whistler’s) but it did also reflect the growing congruity in the popular imagination between the Aesthetic ‘Postlethwaite’ and the Aesthetic Wilde.31 And during the course of 1880, as ‘Postlethwaite’ became more like Wilde, Wilde became more like ‘Postlethwaite’.32 With remarkable ‘clearsightedness’ he set about projecting ‘the character’.33 He amplified his persona. His mannerisms became more flamboyant, his postures more languishing, his talk more studiedly affected. Perhaps he even used the key Aesthetic terms (as recorded in Punch) – ‘consummate’, ‘utter’, ‘supreme’, ‘too-too’. Certainly he developed his gift for shocking conventional expectations, treating serious things lightly and frivolous things gravely. But he did even more than this. Stepping well beyond Postlethwaite’s role as a ‘poet’ (a role that, after all, he had barely achieved himself), Wilde sought to become the very essence of Aestheticism – ‘to embody’, as one friend put it, ‘in the eye of his fellow men a conception of life founded on the worship of beauty’. His own life, he seemed to declare, was ‘a work of art’.34 It was a vision for which he found an increasingly receptive audience.

  His sayings – which imposed Aesthetic criteria upon every aspect of life – soon became part of the capital’s social currency. He ‘amused all London’ with his assertion (adapted from another of his Oxford mots) that both Henry Irving’s ‘legs are distinctly precious, but his left leg is a poem’.35 It was repeated that, when he saw a blossoming almond tree in the front garden of a London house, he exclaimed, ‘I should like to be invited to this house simply to meet that almond-tree; I should even prefer it to a tenor voice.’ An anecdote went the rounds about Wilde refusing to take some medicine on account of its being ‘a dingy brown’ colour. The chemist promptly replaced it with a bottle of beautiful ‘rose-red’ liquid and some pills that ‘shone like gold’, which Wilde was delighted to ingest. He recovered from his illness, though not before confessing that he would hate to be really robust.36 When he remarked imperturbably to a group of street urchins, who were making fun of him, ‘I am glad to afford amusement to the lower classes’, the press reported it.37

  Other popular anecdotes included him coming down to breakfast, while staying at a country house, looking pale; asked if he were ill, he replied, ‘No, not ill, only tired. The fact is, I picked a primrose in the wood yesterday, and it was so ill, I have been sitting up with it all night.’38 His concern for primroses was also supposed to have led him into a Jermyn Street florists; he requested them to remove several bunches of the flower from the window. Asked how many bunches he wanted to have, he replied, ‘Oh I don’t want any, thank you. I only asked to have them removed from the window because they looked so tired.’39 Much of this, of course, was apocryphal. The story that he paraded down Piccadilly with a lily in his hand – although it may have carried some memory to his floral gifts for Lillie Langtry – was essentially an invention. But, as he remarked, with mock pride: ‘Anyone could have done that.’ He had achieved ‘the great and difficult thing’ of making the ‘world believe that [he] had done it’.40 The world – encouraged by Punch and ‘Postlethwaite’ – was growing eager to believe. But although such stories spread Wilde’s fame, it was not always clear whether the audience was being invited to laugh with Wilde for his wit, or laugh at him in his folly.

  He, though, was not concerned. He chose to see a useful tension in the discrepancy. The gap between the calculated exaggerations of his public persona and the patent intelligence of his private self offered further scope to bemuse and confound. As one journalist was obliged to admit, ‘if you light upon Postlethwaite [i.e. Wilde] alone, and take him off his guard, and discuss with him any subject which is not cognate to art, you may or you may not be astonished to find what a shrewd, sensible, practical fellow he is’.41 On other occasions Wilde might abruptly abandon his affectations to achieve a sudden and disarming intimacy. Asked to take the Swedish opera diva Christine Nilsson in to dinner, he, making some graciously stilted compliment, drew the retort, ‘Look here Mr. Wilde, Mme. Christine Nilsson will put up with no such stuff. This is all put on, and there is nothing in it but nonsense.’ To which he deftly responded, ‘Thank you. You are the first sensible woman and true friend that I’ve met.’ After that, according to La Nilsson, they got on famously.42

  There were other tensions, too, in Wilde’s Postlethwaitian pose. In the popular imagination and the pages of Punch, ‘Aesthetes’ were supposed to be etiolated, weary, and consumed by the hopelessness of existence. Wilde, over six feet tall and well built, retained conspicuous appetites for food, life and, indeed, lawn tennis;‡ his utterances were invariably leavened with humour and intermingled with ‘happy phrases of native wit’, and, though his poems might flirt with despair, his general outlook on life was buoyed with infectious optimism. But these discrepancies, enjoyed by some, were ignored by most.43 Only the earnest and kindly American Charles G. Leland mistook Wilde’s occasional poetic posturing for real ‘pessimism’, and vowed to bounce him out of ‘all morbid nonsense’ and transform him into ‘a clear-headed, vigorous, healthy, manly writer’.44

  Wilde – in his distinct Postlethwaitian persona – was becoming an increasingly visible public figure, ‘impossible to ignore’ at fashionable occasions, artistic and theatrical.45 He lent his support to an all-male undergraduate production of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon (in Greek) at Balliol that June; his friend Walter Parratt composed the music, while Rennell Rodd was one of the chorus.46 Later in the year, when the company gave three well-publicized performances in London, Wilde hosted a tea party for the cast, inviting friends to meet ‘Clytemnestra’ (F. R. Benson) and ‘Cassandra’ (George Lawrence) along with some of the ‘Argive elders’.47

  The party was held in a new setti
ng. In the summer of 1880 Wilde and Frank Miles moved into 1 Tite Street, the ‘unpretentious’ three-storey red-brick ‘studio house’ designed for Miles by Godwin. It was a distillation of up-to-date Aesthetic elements – light interiors, sparse furnishings, bare boards, and ‘balconies and other accessories to meet the taste of [Miles as] a lover of flowers’ – all set on the most distinctively artistic street in London’s most avowedly Bohemian suburb.48 Godwin had now designed four houses in Tite Street. Whistler’s ‘White House’ stood on the other side of the thoroughfare – even if Whistler no longer owned it.

  Wilde relished his new abode. The house, he told Mrs Hunt, was ‘very pretty’, even if the address was ‘horrid’. To improve the latter point, the property was renamed ‘Keats House’.49 There was scope to continue the entertaining traditions of Salisbury Street. Miles’s new model, Sally Higgs, an elfin teenage beauty ‘of the Rossetti type’, became a beguiling figure at their elegant ‘studio teas’, robed in a kimono, a teapot in one hand, a lily in the other.50 Living up to his creed of excess, Wilde decorated his own room with a determined disregard for economy. He overspent on a new desk, explaining to Norman Forbes-Robertson, ‘I couldn’t really have anything but Chippendale and satinwood – I shouldn’t have been able to write.’51

  Wilde was busy with literary schemes. His hopes of a parallel academic career, having met with little encouragement, seem gradually to have faded. The translation work for Macmillan was not followed up. And although he did announce plans to ‘bring out… some essays on Greek Art’ the only piece to come to fruition was an unsigned review for the Athenaeum of Professor Jebb’s entries on Greek history and literature in the Encyclopedia Britannica.52 Poetry remained Wilde’s main concern, even if it was sometimes less obviously Aesthetic than might be expected. Following the example of Swinburne, he addressed not only the passions but politics too. ‘Ave Imperatrix’, a long, patriotic but questioning ‘Poem on England,’ which appeared in the World, attracted considerable attention.53 The work, composed amid the setbacks of the Afghan War, gave an overview of the glorious achievements of the British empire framed as a narrative not of military triumph, but of Christ-like sacrifice; and beyond the sufferings of the moment it looked forward to a national resurrection as a republic. Wilde considered that the poem held a special place among his writings; he told one friend, ‘I was never touched by anything not tangible and visible but once, and that was just before writing “Ave Imperatrix”.’54 He was justly proud of the work, sending a copy to the painter G. F. Watts.55 Among the various tributes it received were a parody in Truth and a letter from a mess of British officers in Afghanistan, impressed by the ‘truth and beauty’ of its references to that country.56 To build upon its success, Wilde reiterated his political preference for the ‘State Republican’ (provided it could be achieved without the violent ‘kiss of anarchy’) in another poem for the World – the sonnet ‘Libertatis Sacra Fames’.57

  A more determinedly Aesthetic venture was PAN, a satirical weekly, of which he was ‘installed as the poet’. It was printed on ‘bilious’ green paper, and Wilde’s first contribution, a villanelle beginning, ‘O Goat-foot God of Arcady… This northern isle hath need of thee!’, provoked a parodic response (printed in the Whitehall Review) starting, ‘Commissioner of Lunacee… Oscar Wilde hath need of thee.’58

  Some of these modest literary achievements were mentioned in an article on Wilde that appeared in the August issue of Biograph and Review, a popular monthly that profiled figures from the worlds of politics, religion and the arts. The entry on ‘Mr. Oscar Wilde’ – compiled by a friendly hand – gave a glowing account of his family background, university career and literary prospects, as well as quoting several of his sonnets, and getting the year of his birth wrong (either through journalistic incompetence or misinformation from the subject they gave it as 1856, rather than 1854).59 Another fashionable paper – Fact – responded to the Biograph piece with a long article suggesting that Wilde, for all his talent and potential, scarcely merited such treatment, yet.60 In the self-referential world of 1880s journalism, Wilde’s very unworthiness of publicity could become a source of additional publicity.

  * There were occasional missteps. Wilde disgraced himself by accepting an invitation to dinner from a ‘Mrs Smith’ and then – on receipt of a better invitation, which offered the chance to meet Robert Browning – writing to his hostess ‘grieved’ that he was unable to keep the engagement as he found he ‘had to go North that evening’. The Browning dinner was an intimate affair at the house of some friends who lived near Regent’s Park. Wilde and Browning were deep in conversation when – to Wilde’s horror – ‘Mrs Smith’ was announced. Having received Wilde’s second letter, she had not proceeded with plans for her own dinner party. She was not amused to discover Wilde ensconced. ‘Is this what you call “Going North”?’ she remarked. But, although she threatened never to speak to him again, by the end of the evening Wilde had soothed her ruffled feelings, and ‘they were as great friends as ever’.

  † Lady Augusta Fane records a, doubtless apocryphal, anecdote that has Wilde calling on Lewis and being shown into a room where several women were waiting. He complains to the manservant, ‘This is the room for women with a past. I want the room kept for men with a future.’ The mot, however, certainly reflects Wilde’s sentiments, and could be a distant echo of something he did say.

  ‡ In the summer of 1880 he was still cutting a dashing figure, playing tennis with Willie and the spirited Davis sisters, on a ‘lumpish lawn’ in the public gardens behind the Davis family home, dressed ‘in a high hat with his frock-coat tails flying and his long hair waving in the breeze’.

  3

  Up to Snuff

  ‘A most intense young man,

  A soulful-eyed young man,

  An ultra-poetical, super-aesthetical,

  Out-of-the-way young man!’

  w. s. gilbert, patience

  Among the claims of the Biograph article was the statement that Wilde was currently at work on a ‘blank-verse tragedy in four acts’. This – like many of the specific details in the piece – was not quite accurate. Wilde had indeed been working hard on a play, but it was not a blank-verse tragedy. It was a prose melodrama set in contemporary Russia, entitled Vera; or The Nihilists. And he readily confessed that its ‘literary merit’ was ‘very slight’.1 Wilde’s heroine, Vera Sabouroff, was a young Nihilist determined to overthrow the hated regime of ‘Czar Ivan’. She falls in love with a fellow conspirator, Alexis, not realizing that he is in fact the youthful czarevitch (the czar’s son and heir), who has disguised himself to join the plot against the cruel regime of his father. In the second half, following the czar’s assassination by the Nihilists, Alexis, newly crowned in his stead, plans for a republican Russia. But the Nihilists, convinced that he has deserted them and their cause, conspire to assassinate him too. Lots are drawn, and Vera is chosen for the task. She steals into the royal bedchamber ready to carry out the deed, only for Alexis to wake and declare his undying love for her. She reciprocates. But then, to save Alexis’s life, she stabs herself, and flings the bloodied dagger out of the window to indicate to the waiting Nihilists below that the assassination has been accomplished. ‘What have you done?’ Alexis cries. ‘I have saved Russia!’ declares Vera, as she dies. ‘Tableau’.

  The subject, if it was not Aesthetic, was a topical: the autocracy of Czar Alexander II and the doings of the Nihilists were much in the news. In 1878 a young Nihilist called Vera Sussalich had been put on trial in St Petersburg for the attempted assassination of the city’s governor. Her acquittal, greeted in the British press as a victory for liberty over oppression, unleashed a wave of further plots, assassinations and authoritarian reactions. As the Era, London’s leading theatrical paper, remarked, ‘On Russia’s stage is… being played the most eventful and stirring drama of the century.’ The same paper also carried an article entitled ‘Modern History and Tragedy’, urging the claims of contemporary history
as a subject for modern drama. Whether this prompted or merely reflected Wilde’s engagement with the Nihilists is uncertain. Although he had no personal ties to Russia, as both an Irish Nationalist and a Swinburnian, the themes of liberty and republicanism were close to his heart.2

  The action of Wilde’s play was dominated by the romantic idealism of its two principal characters – Vera and the czarevitch – but in Act II Wilde introduced the figure of ‘Prince Paul’, the czar’s delightfully cynical prime minister, an aristocrat, autocrat and dandy who – according to his enemies – ‘would stab his best friend for the sake of writing an epigram on his tombstone, or experiencing a new sensation’. His opening exchange, with a fellow government minister, sets the tone:

  Prince Paul: For my own part, at least, I find these Cabinet Councils extremely exhausting.

  Prince Petrovitch: Naturally; you are always speaking.

  Prince Paul: No; I think it must be that I have to listen sometimes.3

  Every remark of his lumbering colleagues – or of the impassioned young czarevitch – is skewered with an epigram, a paradox or an absurdity. To the czarevitch’s desire for ‘a change of air’ he replies, ‘A most revolutionary sentiment! Your Imperial father would highly disapprove of any reforms with the thermometer in Russia.’ Challenged about a want of ‘experience’ in some field, he observes, with a shrug of the shoulders, ‘Experience is the name men give to their mistakes.’4