Oscar

by Sturgis, Matthew;

  He is happy to be hated by the Nihilists, since ‘indifference is the revenge they take on mediocrities’ (not that he wastes time reading their ‘violent proclamations’ against him, because ‘they are so badly spelt as a rule’). For himself the only immortality he desires is to invent a new sauce: ‘I have never had time enough to think seriously about it, but I feel it is in me.’ Politics he hopes may have prepared him for such gastronomic challenges. One of his aperçus runs: ‘To make a good salad is to be a brilliant diplomatist – the problem is so entirely the same in both cases. To know exactly how much oil one must put with one’s vinegar.’ When a cabinet colleague complains that ‘there seems to be nothing in life about which you would not jest’, Prince Paul replies, ‘Ah! My dear Count, life is much too important a thing ever to talk seriously about.’5

  Prince Paul (who, having been sacked by the new czar, joins the Nihilists, and subjects them to his caustic asides) gave Wilde an opportunity to indulge his own wit. He was very pleased with the results.6 Many of the character’s mots Wilde had probably used already in his own conversation; certainly he would use them again.7 Dramatically, though, he felt that humour served a real purpose; it would intensify, rather than undermine, the central tragedy.8 And although Wilde was strongly in sympathy with the forces of ‘democracy’, Prince Paul allowed him to sound a note of caution about the violent demagogy of the Nihilists. And the character’s statement that ‘in a good democracy every man should be an aristocrat’ may have been an echo of Wilde’s own ever-shifting view.

  The four-act play was finished over the summer. It was a substantial achievement, and Wilde had great hopes for it. He read the manuscript to his friends. He spent money on having a few copies printed up, and he dispatched them to the various theatrical contacts he had cultivated during the previous eighteen months – Henry Irving, Ellen Terry, Hermann Vezin, Genevieve Ward, Norman Forbes-Robertson, Dion Boucicault, and even E. F. S. Pigott, the examiner of plays for the Lord Chamberlain’s office – seeking their approval and advice.9 He invited Helena Modjeska to tea in the hope of soliciting her interest.10

  The response was underwhelming. The actress Genevieve Ward did write to suggest a meeting so that she could tell him ‘all I think about it’. But no one leapt forward with an offer to produce the play, or even a suggestion that it should be produced. Dion Boucicault – a hugely successful playwright himself, and an old family friend – wrote a generous letter of practical advice, finding the ‘spinal column’ of the work – the relationship between Vera and the czarevitch – ‘good, and dramatic’, but pointing out that ‘the ribs and the limbs do not proceed from the spinal column. Your other characters, your subjects of dialogue – which occupy 5/6th of the play – are not action but discussion… Your action stops for dialogue, whereas dialogue should be the necessary outcome of action exerting its influence on the characters.’11

  After the gradually building achievements of his poetic appearances in the World and elsewhere, this was another rude check to set beside his earlier failure to find a publisher for a volume of his poems. Wilde, however, refused to be downhearted. The hated word ‘failure’ was not wholly applicable to the situation. The play was written; it existed, and would, he believed, find a producer in due course – even if the process was to take rather longer than expected or desired. In the meantime it could also be improved. Wilde was more than happy to ‘take every actor’s suggestion [he] could get’. Indeed he had had the play printed with interleaved blank pages to allow for the making of corrections and additions.

  His immediate reaction, though, when confronted by the chorus of indifference, was to flee. He went for a late summer holiday to France, travelling again with his ‘youthful disciple’ Rennell Rodd – himself fresh from winning the Newdigate, and preparing for his final exams that December.12 ‘As we did not wish to be known,’ Wilde explained with mock seriousness to George Lewis’s twelve-year-old son, Rodd ‘travelled under the name of Sir Smith, and I was Lord Robinson.’ They visited Chartres and travelled down the Loire – ‘one of the most wonderful rivers in the world, mirroring from sea to source a hundred cities and five hundred towers’.13 They spent a charmed time at Amboise – ‘that little village with its gray slate roofs and steep streets’ – sketching, idling, and making ‘plans pour la gloire, et pour ennuyer les philistins’.14 Wilde then went on, alone, to Paris, where he enjoyed himself ‘very much’.15*

  Back in London at the end of October 1880, Wilde found that, despite the setback to his play-writing career, his profile as the exemplary Aesthete was continuing to rise – and rise steeply. Du Maurier’s cartoons were maintaining his proxy presence in Punch. And there was more to come. On 20 November a new comedy opened at the Criterion Theatre, a ridiculous farce called Where’s the Cat?. One of the principal characters, an Aesthetic poet named Scott Ramsay, was played by Herbert Beerbohm Tree as a broad caricature of Wilde. His colourful neckties, his ‘putting himself into classical attitudes’ and his ‘sighing over a sunflower’ were all accounted ‘comical in the extreme’.16 Beerbohm Tree claimed that he was reproducing ‘not an individual, but a type’, but few accepted this demurral. Beerbohm Tree, it was known, was acquainted with Wilde and had clearly ‘studied his peculiarities’ of dress and behaviour ‘very closely’. According to the reviewer in the Era, ‘there could be no mistaking’ the impersonation of Wilde, ‘the poet of society’.17 It helped, too, that the twenty-seven-year-old actor shared Wilde’s height and physique. On the night that Wilde’s friend Lady Lonsdale attended the theatre, ‘the name “Oscar Wilde” passed from lip to lip the moment… Beerbohm Tree set foot upon the stage, one trouser leg turned up at the bottom, after the manner of the poet.’18

  Wilde went to the show.19 And though he made no public comment upon it, the society paper Life did carry a paragraph reporting that, while ‘one of the Aesthetic School has been absurd enough to write to Mr. Beerbohm Tree demanding an apology for having dared to imitate him’, ‘another of the School was, I am told, wise enough to write and congratulate Mr. Tree upon his felicitous performance’.20 Given Wilde’s cheerful attitude to du Maurier, and his ‘happy facility for discovering compliments’, it is difficult not to suppose that he was the second Aesthete.21 Certainly the success of Beerbohm Tree’s performance, and of the play (it ran into the following year, and toured the provinces), raised Wilde’s celebrity another notch.

  And the ratchet continued to turn. The new year saw two further hugely successful productions, each satirizing the excesses of the Aesthetic ‘craze’: The Colonel (a farce by F. C. Burnand, the new editor of Punch) opened at the Prince of Wales Theatre on 2 February 1881, and Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic opera Patience premiered on 23 April at the Opera Comique, produced by Richard D’Oyly Carte.† Wilde attended the first nights of both productions, conspicuous in the stalls. Taking his seat at the Opera Comique, looking ‘unutterably utter’, he was almost immediately ‘spotted’ by the ‘denizens of the gallery’, and ‘had to bear a considerable amount of chaff’. He endured this with what one newspaper described as ‘remarkable nonchalance’ and ‘much good nature’.22 He ensured that he was part of the show. His enjoyment of the opera was noted, too, in several papers.23 The Colonel was a less distinguished offering, hastily cobbled together. But although Wilde confessed privately to finding it ‘dull’ he took care to make no public pronouncement against it.24

  Neither piece offered a direct caricature of Wilde. The comic villain of The Colonel – Lambert Streyke, ‘professor’ of Aestheticism, ‘tone poet’ and founder of the ‘Aesthetic High Art Company’ – was an elderly charlatan who merely used the fad to dupe the gullible female members of a well-to-do family out of large amounts of money so that he could fund his quite unaesthetic tastes. Gilbert and Sullivan’s two ‘Aesthetic’ poets, Reginald Bunthorne and Archibald Grosvenor, were also ‘shams’ – posing as Aesthetes in the hope of winning the hand of the beautiful Patience. Nevertheless, many details of Lambert Streyke’s creed
– cribbed as they were from du Maurier’s Punch cartoons – had a recognizably Postlethwaitian, and hence Wildean, tenor. Steyke claimed, for instance, that he ‘could feed on a lily in a glass of water’, and instructed one of his disciples to ‘live up to’ her teapot (provoking the response from the worldly Mrs Blyth, ‘I understand living up to my income, but not up to my teapot’).25

  Gilbert, for his part, was praised by many critics for eschewing personal attacks on ‘any particular representatives of aesthetic tastes’. He was adjudged to have presented, instead, a general satire upon their mannerisms and poses: the affected air of languorous melancholy, the self-absorption, the velvet jackets and china-mania, the love of things either Japanese or medieval, the delight in low tones, the reverence for the Grosvenor Gallery, the sentimental passion for flowers (which might extend even to ‘an attachment à la Plato for a bashful young potato’). Many in his audience, however, were only too happy to make good such tactful omissions – even if they were in some dispute as to which personalities were being lampooned, and how.

  The Times critic considered that Bunthorne, as played by the diminutive George Grossmith, had been modelled upon Swinburne. Others noted that the actor, with his eyeglass and a distinctive lock of white hair, was made up to look like Whistler. Most commentators, however, recognized a debt to Wilde. Bunthorne’s declaration that admission to the ‘high aesthetic band’ could be won ‘if you walk down Piccadilly with a poppy or a lily in your mediaeval hand’ seemed to carry a reference to Wilde’s supposed actions; while Bunthorne’s description of his own poem as ‘a wild, weird, fleshly thing’, appeared to be nothing short of a namecheck. Although some people ventured that it was, rather, the ‘mild’ self-regarding Archibald Grosvenor who derived from Wilde, the identification with Bunthorne very quickly prevailed.26 Indeed, shortly after the opera’s opening night, Wilde was introduced at a party where Grossmith had just performed Bunthorne’s lament, with the line, ‘this is the man’.27

  After these three fusillades – Where’s the Cat?, The Colonel and Patience – it was open season on the London stage for satires upon Aestheticism. By the middle of 1881 the Illustrated London News was reporting that the theatrical scene was ‘thickly sown all over with a crop of lilies and sunflowers… There are aesthetes in every burlesque and comic opera produced.’ And many of these stage Aesthetes made deliberate reference to Wilde: ‘Even Mr. Toole’ – the noted comedian-proprietor of the Folly Theatre – posing with a sunflower in one skit, as he emerged from a Margate bathing-machine, announced, ‘it does make me so Wilde’.28

  Fame seemed to nourish itself. References in the London papers were repeated across the provincial and metropolitan press. They were recycled in America, Australia, South Africa and New Zealand. Willie, and Oscar, fanned the flames. They had both learnt thoroughly ‘the trick of advertisement’ (as Willie called it), supplying the ever-proliferating ‘society’ papers with tidbits of news and personal information. One short-lived periodical, The London Cuckoo, even carried an interview with Willie about how he helped promote his brother.29

  In May 1881 du Maurier tried to kill off Postlethwaite, producing a farewell cartoon – ‘Frustrated Social Ambition’ – depicting the distraught poet, weeping together with Maudle and Mrs Cimabue Brown, ‘on reading in a widely circulated contemporary journal that they only exist in Mr Punch’s vivid imagination. They had fondly flattered themselves that universal fame was theirs at last.’30 Wilde, however, survived his alter-ego’s demise. His own fame was, indeed, fast becoming ‘universal’. Other caricaturists and sketch-writers, in other magazines, readily filled the breech left by du Maurier. And, indeed, Wilde continued to be parodied in Punch, appearing variously over the ensuing months as ‘Oscuro Wildegoose’, ‘Drawit Milde’ and ‘the Wilde-eyed Poet’.31 Linley Sambourne, the magazine’s other leading artist, depicted him – as ‘Punch’s Fancy Portrait No. 37’ – his head emerging from a sunflower.32 Wilde was heralded everywhere as ‘the “Poet” and self-constituted high priest of beauty and high art’.33

  He cut so distinctive a figure, surrounded by adoring females, at the opening of that year’s Royal Academy summer exhibition, that W. P. Frith felt he must include him – alongside such luminaries as Millais and Browning – in the large-scale painting he was composing of the private view. Wilde, of course, was delighted to sit for the painter.34 His face was everywhere. Photographs of him began to appear ‘in all the shop-windows’ – ‘long hair, close-shaved face, loose cravat, & velvet coat, with his hands clasped under one cheek, gazing into vacancy’.35 One commentator considered that Wilde was now ‘more talked about and paragraphed than any other male individual not being a murderer or a statesman’.36‡

  If Wilde had achieved a quite remarkable position, it was at a certain cost. The tide of parodies, satires and caricatures, although they had spread his name, had also reinforced the notion that he was, somehow, an absurd and comical figure. Attending the theatre one evening, he overheard a playgoer declare, ‘There goes that bloody fool, Oscar Wilde.’ At which he remarked brightly to his companion, ‘It is extraordinary how soon one gets known in London.’37 Wilde felt he could afford such equanimity. He knew that he was not a fool. He knew that in the private social sphere he could always rectify such an impression by the charm and intelligence of his talk. And he believed that, among the wider public, he could effect the same conversion through his art.

  He had, however, perhaps underestimated how hard this would be. The lukewarm response to Vera gave him a first indication that popular fame might not translate directly into artistic advancement. He seems, though, to have been less aware that it could actually prove a hindrance. Wilde’s great celebrity – and the way in which it had been achieved – produced huge resentment. In the literary world there might be few who considered him a fool, but there were many who thought him a buffoon. They found his self-advertising vulgar, and his affectations absurd. They resented too that he had been able to attract such attention without having actually produced any substantial work. Fastidious spirits like Pater considered ‘the whole panorama’ of Wilde’s fledgling career ‘utterly distasteful’.38

  Among some sections of the press there was resentment too at the social position Wilde had won. Wilde liked to present his eager engagement with society as an important part of his Aesthetic campaign: an attempt ‘to sweep away all barriers and bring the artist in direct communication with his patrons’.39 But many suspected less exalted motives. It was claimed that, like Lambert Streyke or Bunthorne, he must be ‘an aesthetic sham’, an upstart who had adopted his ‘ridiculous’ pose and his ‘repulsive’ long hair simply to impress fashionable hostesses and gain access to ‘good society’ – while all the time ‘laughing in his sleeve’. Wilde had too much respect for society, and too much anxiety about his position in it, not to resent the imputation. One of the rare occasions on which he complained – albeit privately – to an editor, was over a piece in the World that charged him with such duplicity. Yates apologized, claiming not to have read the article before publication, having – he said – given ‘distinct instructions’ that nothing ‘unpleasant’ to Wilde was to be said in the piece.40

  Another source of (male) resentment was Wilde’s attractiveness. Already much admired by women, his fame only made him more alluring. He developed a reputation as a ‘ladykiller’. It was noted that ‘in many a London drawing room’ young artistically inclined women could now be seen ‘hovering around [him] with admiring eyes, and in attitudes suggestive of Grosvenor Gallery pictures’.41 Willie fondly imagined that his brother would marry an heiress.42 But Oscar gave little encouragement to the notion. Although he did provoke comment, at one informal dance, by monopolizing the ‘very pretty’ Lilian Major, pronouncing her ‘a soothing gem’ and even paying a visit to her family home at Sheen, the connection was not pursued further.43 He continued to flirt mildly with Violet Hunt, calling on her parents almost every week. She, however, was not an heiress. Nor did she seem i
nclined to follow Wilde to the ends of the earth. When, discoursing on old maps, he described how vast tracts of Africa were often left blank except for the legend ‘hic sunt leones’ – adding, excitedly, ‘Miss Violet, let you and me go there’ – she replied, ‘And get eaten by lions?’44

  More promising, perhaps, was a girl he met that summer. Constance Lloyd was the granddaughter of old Dublin friends, and the sister of Otho Lloyd, whom Wilde had known slightly at Oxford. She had come to live in London with her paternal grandfather and a maiden aunt at Lancaster Gate, while her widowed mother (now remarried to a Mr Swinburne-King) lived nearby on Devonshire Terrace. Wilde was clearly struck by the beautiful blue-green-eyed twenty-two-year-old when they were introduced at a tea party hosted by Constance’s mother. According to family legend, he announced to his own mother, as they left the reception, ‘By the by, mamma, I think of marrying that girl.’ Opportunities were soon engineered for them to meet again: an ‘at home’ given by Constance’s aunt at Lancaster Gate; one of Lady Wilde’s Saturday ‘salons’ – at which Wilde monopolized Constance ‘nearly all the time’; an invitation to see Henry Irving’s Othello at the Lyceum. Constance may have been shy. She confessed to ‘shaking with fright’ on first meeting Wilde. But she was attractive, with literary interests and artistic leanings, and also a ready intelligence. Her brother noted that she was ‘surprisingly quick at detecting the flaw or weak point in any reasoning’. She could, he added, ‘carry her own in any argument well, and always had the courage of her opinions’ together with a ‘quiet humour and a sense of the ridiculous’.45

  Wilde would also have been aware that Constance had money, or the prospect of money. Her grandfather and de facto guardian, Horatio Lloyd, had made a great fortune as the inventor of a legal document ‘familiar to investors in railway securities, known as a Lloyd’s bond’ – before an unfortunate scandal had led to him being temporarily disbarred (exhausted by overwork, he had run naked through the Temple Gardens, alarming a group of nursemaids). Constance, as one of Horatio Lloyd’s grandchildren, might indeed be considered an heiress.46 It was not a motive for romance, but it was a happy addition to the picture.