Oscar

by Sturgis, Matthew;

  Wilde exerted himself to charm her – disarmingly dropping his more extravagant affectations. ‘When he’s talking to me alone,’ Constance explained, ‘he’s never a bit affected and speaks naturally excepting that he uses better language than most people.’47 He also took trouble with her grandfather, escorting him and Constance on a tour of the Pall Mall art galleries. The ploy was successful. ‘Grand Papa I think likes Oscar,’ Constance reported to her brother, though she was obliged to admit that the other Lloyd relations were inclined to laugh at him, ‘because they don’t choose to see anything but that he wears long hair and looks aesthetic’. She added, ‘I like him awfully much but I suppose it is very bad taste.’48 It is unclear at what level the intimacy established that June was kept up through the rest of 1881. But there is no doubt that Constance at least retained a romantic interest in the long-haired Aesthete, and even a hope that it might resolve itself into something more permanent.49

  If Wilde was becoming a lion himself, he remained keenly aware that there were many older and greater lions at large. He used his newfound fame to get close to the heroic figures of the Aesthetic movement. Eager to build upon his acquaintanceship with Whistler, he sought the painter out, following up a general invitation to one of his celebrated ‘breakfasts’. And although Whistler claimed to have been rather bounced into the friendship, he was impressed by Wilde’s informed flattery, obvious intelligence and growing fame, as much as by his close associations with Lillie Langtry and Ellen Terry – both of whom the painter knew and adored.50 When Whistler moved into a new studio in Tite Street over the summer, the friendship between the two men rapidly developed into a camaraderie. Whistler liked to work among company, and a small throng of supporters gathered regularly at his new address. Besides Wilde – and Frank Miles – there was Rennell Rodd, just down from Oxford, the painter Mrs Jopling, the American expatriate artists Harper Pennington and Waldo Story, the beautiful Lady Archibald Campbell, who was posing for a portrait, and a broken-down former pottery painter called Matthew Elden.51

  For Wilde real glamour attached to the new association. The forty-seven-year-old Whistler, despite the setbacks of recent years, was undimmed in either vitality or self-belief. He retained all his audacious individuality and style, all the fabled sharpness of his wit and dress sense. He had returned to London as convinced as ever that he was the greatest artist of the age, and, notwithstanding much evidence to the contrary, he behaved as though everyone else was of the same opinion. His professional vanity was no less real for being tinged with deliberate absurdity. When an admirer flattered him with the remark, ‘There are only two great painters – you and Velazquez’, he replied, ‘Oh, why drag in Velazquez?’ Wilde accepted such judgements: whatever his own cheerful self-conceit he ‘reckoned himself… a small figure’ besides the ‘Master’.52 Though he did not forsake his established Pre-Raphaelite idols, he now maintained a parallel belief in the genius of Whistler. The painter became a new ‘hero’ – one to set beside Henry Irving.53 The qualified approval of Wilde’s earlier Grosvenor Gallery reviews gave way to fulsome praise. Whistler’s ‘Symphony in White’ was accounted ‘the most beautiful picture’ Wilde had ever seen.54

  Painting, though, was only ever part of Whistler’s performance. He overflowed with bracing ideas and striking opinions about art. He championed the culture of Japan and the work of the French Impressionists. He ‘reviled’ Turner (‘that old amateur’) and disparaged the Pre-Raphaelites. His old friend Rossetti was patronized as ‘not a painter, but a gentleman and a poet’; while Burne-Jones (usually referred to as plain ‘Jones’) was dismissed as knowing ‘nothing about painting’.55§ From his years in Paris, Whistler knew many of the noted provocateurs, poets and painters of the French capital. He was friendly with Degas and Mallarmé, familiar with the ideas of Théophile Gautier and Baudelaire. He projected a cosmopolitan intellectual sophistication to which Wilde aspired. His work – Wilde came to realize – reflected all that was most daring and novel (and French) in contemporary thought. It was Gautier’s doctrine of l’art pour l’art – with its insistence that art be free from all political, social and moral considerations, and concerned only with its own formal perfection, that stood behind Whistler’s vague low-toned ‘harmonies’. It was Gautier’s idea that, with all motifs now available to the artist, there was a virtue in selecting the untried and the disparaged, that encouraged Whistler to paint fleeting impressions of the modern metropolis.

  Although Wilde had already met Gautier’s notions of ‘art for art’s sake’ in the writings of Pater, it was another thing to encounter them in action, in an artist’s studio. The effect was electric. Wilde hastened to pay his new friend a poetic homage, publishing in the World an avowedly Whistlerian verse, entitled – with a greater sense of French style than French grammar – ‘Impression de Matin’.56 The little vignette, beginning ‘The Thames nocturn [sic] of blue and gold / Changed to a harmony of gray’, sought to transpose the achievement of Whistler’s impressionist art into verse. Aiming solely at formal perfection, it repudiated the idea that poetry should be either ‘intellectual or emotional’.57

  But if Wilde learnt something about art from Whistler, he learnt even more about self-advertisement. As one contemporary observed, ‘Whistler taught him that men of genius stand apart and are laws unto themselves; showed him too that all qualities – singularity of appearance, wit, rudeness even, count doubly in a democracy.’58 These were hugely important lessons that did much to mould Wilde’s developing talent and developing style – although when it came to ‘rudeness’ for the sake of controversy, Wilde’s good nature made him wary of accepting them fully. The two men, for all their enjoyment of each other’s company, had very different temperaments. Wilde lacked Whistler’s diabolical contempt for others and ‘joy in conflict’. Indeed he often tried to restrain his hero’s ‘too brutal’ campaigns.59 Wilde’s wit, too, was of a different stamp: abundant, inventive, generous, ‘always brimming over’, compared to Whistler’s sharp, explosive, wounding ways.60

  During the early part of their friendship, Wilde knew his place, and was kept in it. When he too eagerly approved Whistler’s rebuke to the Times art critic about the limits of press criticism, with the aside ‘I wish I had said that’, Whistler shot back: ‘You will, Oscar, you will.’61 Nevertheless, despite such digs, Whistler remained a supportive presence. He sought Wilde’s company, proposing trips to Paris and the Channel Islands (‘Now Oscar you have simply to get on your disguise again and come off with me tomorrow to Jersey’).62 He involved him in schemes. They collaborated – along with Frank Miles – on plans for a house in Tite Street for Lillie Langtry, to be built by Godwin. Langtry recalled that her ‘triumvirate of counsellors’ got so carried away with ideas and suggestions that when their ‘rough sketches’ were inspected by the architect ‘it was discovered that there was no possibility of a staircase’. The project was subsequently abandoned.63 Together Whistler and Wilde visited the medievalist architect William Burges on his deathbed, and attended the opening of Patience; Whistler responded to George Grossmith’s caricaturing of his appearance in the role of Bunthorne by writing an enthusiastic letter of praise to the actor – another example from which Wilde profited.64

  This comradeship with Whistler was, however, never all-consuming. Wilde chose to ignore the rift that had opened up within the Aesthetic ranks after the Ruskin–Whistler trial. He continued to advance his connections with the great figures of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, becoming increasingly friendly with Burne-Jones. It was a mark of both his social confidence and tact that he was able to carry off this double game. Wilde was a welcome guest at The Grange, Burne-Jones’s house in West Kensington. Burne-Jones’s teenage niece, Alice Kipling (sister of Rudyard), encountering Wilde there at a family dinner, suspected that her uncle was slightly embarrassed by Wilde’s worship – and ‘winced, I think, when Oscar addressed him as “Master”’.65 Burne-Jones’ son, Phil, then an Oxford undergraduate, had – she noted, by c
ontrast – an obvious ‘adoration’ for Wilde. But, in fact, a happy intimacy soon developed between the middle-aged painter and his young admirer. To the surprise of some, the two became really ‘good friends’.66 They shared many of the same loves in art and literature,67 and Wilde made the kindly, melancholic Burne-Jones laugh. Indeed the painter considered ‘Oscar the funniest of all men I ever knew’ – with a rare ability ‘to beguile the merriment out of one’.68 Wilde induced him to enjoy life: when Burne-Jones was dreading the ‘martyrdom’ of receiving an honorary doctorate from Oxford at the often rowdy Encaenia, it was Wilde who reconciled him to his fate: ‘[he] was very nice to me and came across the other day to say how pleased he was – and he looked so genuinely glad that I loved him’.69 Burne-Jones seems to have repaid such kindnesses by giving Wilde several drawings.70 Their friendship was fostered too by George Lewis and his wife, who – friends of both men – regularly brought them together, either at Portland Place or at their weekend retreat near Walton-on-Thames.71

  Burne-Jones’s endorsement perhaps encouraged William Morris to set aside his prejudices against Wilde. When they first met, in the spring of 1881, Morris confessed, ‘I must admit that as the devil is painted blacker than he is, so it fares with O.W. Not but what he is an ass: but he certainly is clever too.’72 At other meetings Wilde proved himself both ‘a superb raconteur’ and ‘uncommon good company’.73 He had, after all, a flattering enthusiasm for Morris’s poetry and designs, as well as an openness to his political ideas. Wilde was already espousing ‘socialism’ – albeit partly perhaps for effect (when he first met Violet Hunt, he declared, ‘I am a socialist. Have you been taught to dread them?’).74 In due course Morris came also to recognize Wilde’s distinctive ‘vein of good nature’. A friendship of sorts developed between them.75

  Cosier, though, was the bond Wilde established with the ageing Ford Madox Brown. Wilde found the old painter’s company restful, claiming that his was ‘the only house in London where he did not have to stand on his head’. He would often call by for tea on Saturday afternoons. Madox Brown’s grandson (the future novelist Ford Madox Ford) recalled Wilde on these visits as ‘a quiet individual’, who ‘would sit in a high-backed armchair, stretching out one hand a little towards the blaze of the wood fire on the hearth and talking of the dullest things possible… the Home Rule for Ireland Bill or the Conversion of the Consolidated Debt’, while ‘on the other side of the fire in another high-backed chair and, stretching out towards the flames his other hand’, sat Ford Madox Brown, usually disagreeing with his guest’s views.76

  Such easy intimacy, however, proved harder to achieve with Wilde’s two greatest ‘Pre-Raff’ heroes. Swinburne was wary of his over-enthusiastic and self-promoting disciple. Indeed Wilde had become something of a bête noir for the poet. The two men did, though, come together at a reception chez Lord Houghton. Wilde, seizing the opportunity, persuaded a ‘considerably embarrassed’ Watts Dunton (Swinburne’s friend and companion), to effect an introduction. Swinburne consented to the meeting with the remark, ‘Very well, introduce us. But I will not exchange a dozen words with him.’ And he was true to his word. The encounter lasted barely three minutes. It would be their only meeting. Wilde, though, refused to acknowledge any sort of snub. He had done enough to claim a connection, even a friendship; Swinburne came away with the impression that Wilde was ‘a harmless young nobody’.77

  Rossetti, however, though he lived just round the corner from Tite Street, on Cheyne Walk, proved to be altogether out of reach. Prone to dark moods, he ‘bitterly resented the way in which Oscar’s name was linked with him and his circle’, and refused to have anything to do with the upstart. He even berated Burne-Jones, his old friend, for ‘taking up with the man who was posing as the leader of the new aesthetic movement’ (Burne-Jones stoutly defended Wilde’s talents).78 Denied access, Wilde was reduced to constructing a sort of proxy relationship, eagerly gathering up anecdotes about Rossetti from his old intimates.79

  The wider artistic world, less anxious about their supposed relationship to Wilde, proved more welcoming. William Blake Richmond, the new Slade Professor at Oxford, became a friend.80 And Wilde was a frequent guest at the Aesthetic home of Laurence Alma-Tadema and his wife in St John’s Wood.81 He attended their regular Tuesdays, and was present at the ‘brilliant’ masked costume ball that they threw for fifty choice friends. Wilde, alone, insisted on coming unmasked. ‘The Tademas think this most conceited of him,’ Edmund Gosse reported, ‘and beg that everyone will tease him as much as possible.’82 Wilde also offered the painter advice about early Greek orthography for his picture of Sappho and her circle.83

  But, of all Wilde’s new connections, the grandest was the Prince of Wales. Wilde’s friendships with Lillie Langtry and Frank Miles had always given him a sense of contiguity with royalty, but it had never crystallized into an actual meeting until now. Intrigued by Wilde’s rising fame, the prince asked his friend Christopher Sykes to give a dinner to bring them together, fixing his request with the mot, ‘I do not know Mr Wilde, and not to know Mr Wilde is not to be known.’84 The dinner itself was not an unqualified success: one of the other guests, Bernal Osborne (the prince’s licensed ‘clown’), kept up such a barrage of crude witticisms that Wilde left the room. It was, however, some consolation that Osborne received a ‘merited reproof’ from the annoyed prince; and even more satisfactory that news of the dinner became widely known. Indeed Edmund Yates celebrated the event with a poem – published in the World – under the title ‘Ego up to Snuffibus Poeta’.85

  There were other royal encounters too – duly advertised by Wilde, with Willie’s enthusiastic co-operation.86 Republican sentiments were trumped by social prestige. Wilde was thrilled to welcome the prince to Keats House, where he attended a ‘startling’ thought-reading demonstration given by W. Irving Bishop. Other guests included Whistler, Irving, the Lewises, Lady Archibald Campbell and Lillie Langtry.87 At a Grosvenor Gallery reception the prince ‘left the line’ as he progressed through the crowded Long Gallery and, ‘with extended hand’, cordially greeted his new friend.88 Wilde also attended a garden party at Marlborough House.89¶ He was certainly ‘up to snuff’. Those irritated by his social success, became more irritated still.

  * It was perhaps on this trip that Wilde displayed his Aesthetic outlook even in the midst of an altercation with a railway ticket collector. Rodd recalled in a letter of 1882 (now at Trinity College Dublin): ‘Oscar, when the ticket collector would not let him pass the barrier senza ticket, in spite of his imposing appearance, and he protesting that it was really ridiculous. The collector extended him arms to press the poet back. Restrained but not subdued Oscar exclaimed, “Oh dear, What dreadful hands!”’

  † Patience ran for a then record 578 performances, initially at the Opera Comique, then at the newly completed Savoy Theatre. The Colonel ran for 550 performances. On 4 October 1881 there was even a command performance for Queen Victoria, at Abergeldie Castle, the Prince of Wales’s retreat, near Balmoral, the first play the queen had seen since the death of Prince Albert, twenty years previously. She declared herself ‘very much amused’.

  ‡ Wilde, drinking with a company of journalists at Romano’s restaurant one day in 1881, remarked – ‘in his ineffably superior way’ – ‘“If I were not a poet, and could not be an artist, I should wish to be a murderer.” “What!” exclaimed one [of the company], “and have your portrait-sketch in the Daily Telegraph?” “Better, that,” cooed Wilde, “than to go down to the sunless grave unknown.”’ Extraordinarily this admission has not – thus far – encouraged anyone to suggest that Wilde was ‘Jack the Ripper’.

  § One of Whistler’s quips against Burne-Jones was, ‘Well, you know, I don’t go so far as to Burne-Jones, but really somebody ought to burn Jones’ pictures!’

  ¶ The garden party gave Wilde a close-up view of Queen Victoria. He was entranced by her ‘exquisite bearing’. She looked, he explained, ‘like a ruby mounted in jet. She is very small…
Everybody moved aside as she approached. By the rules of Court etiquette no one is allowed to look at her face in front, but only in profile. This makes it rather difficult, for you have to take care when her eye rests on you. Then you must bow and move towards her. She gives her hand… She has the most beautiful hands and the most beautiful wrists.’

  4

  An English Poet

  ‘’Tis a great advantage, I admit, to have done nothing, but one must not abuse even that advantage.’

  oscar wilde, quoting antoine da rivarol

  Wilde was determined to make practical use of his fame, and to fix his position as the new Aesthetic poet, by publishing a book of poems. After his previous frustrations on this front, the time now seemed ripe. Yet, for all his burgeoning celebrity, he still could not find a commercial publisher willing to support the venture. Impatient of further delay, he took matters into his own hands. That May (1881) he wrote to David Bogue – the publisher of The Byron Birthday Book, Kenna’s Kingdom (a ‘quaint’ history of Kensington), and A Cricketer’s Notebook – asking whether he might be able to bring out a volume of poems ‘immediately’.1 Wilde – as was not uncommon at the time – agreed to underwrite the costs of production. But Bogue does seem to have shown some confidence in the venture, amending his standard ‘Memorandum of Agreement’ at several places in Wilde’s favour, and reducing his commission in acknowledgement of Wilde’s financial contribution.2

  Wilde conceived the book as a handsome Aesthetic production, a showcase for his taste. He lavished his resources upon it, and the project must have taken him further into debt. The forty-two poems – which included all his periodical-published verses – were to be printed on ‘hand-made Dutch paper’ with generous margins, the top of the pages gilded, the whole bound in ‘white parchment’ decorated with panels stamped in gold with a japonesque design of stylized prunus blossoms.3 The proposed retail price – a substantial 10s 6d (or half a guinea) – marked the book as a choice product for an exclusive readership.