Oscar

by Sturgis, Matthew;

  On one evening Marillier invited a crowd of friends to his rooms to meet Wilde. The occasion nearly came to grief when – before the guests arrived, and with the room empty – a Chinese lantern caught fire and ignited the wooden panel above the mantelpiece; Marillier returned just in time to douse the flames. ‘You are careless about playing with fire, Harry,’ Wilde remarked, with a note of archness. Wilde talked ‘brilliantly’ that evening. Pressed for a story, he chose the fairy-tale form that he had first experimented with in America, and since toyed with in Paris. But, if previously he had conceived his stories as being for children, he now pitched the narrative for a more knowing adult audience.

  Tempering pathos with the occasional touch of satire, he sketched out the touching tale of little bird who falls in love with the richly adorned statue of ‘The Happy Prince’. From their vantage point, on a column, high above the town, they witness the travails of the poor and oppressed, and seek to relieve them by distributing pieces of the gold- and jewel-bedecked statue among the needy. Such charity costs the statue its splendour and the bird his life, as he misses the chance to fly south for the winter. Both are thrown on the rubbish heap. But when an angel is sent to fetch the two most valuable things in the city, he returns to heaven with the dead bird and the statue’s leaden heart. If the story affected the listeners, it affected Wilde more. After the party disbanded, still feeling ‘full of inspiration’, he sat up through the night elaborating the tale and setting it down on paper.7

  He was pleased with the result, and intrigued by its possibilities. The literary fairy tale was, after all, a rich Victorian tradition. Ruskin had done much to establish the genre with his 1841 story The King of the Golden River.8 And many others, from Dickens and Thackeray to Andrew Lang and Mrs Molesworth, had followed his example, weaving apparently simple tales that, while touching the childish imagination, also reached beyond it. The old conventions, in time, had begun to be subverted and parodied. Lewis Carroll’s Alice books were perhaps the most conspicuous instance of such playfulness, although Wilde had a particular admiration for the ingenious fables of the American Frank Stockton. And as a rival to Stockton’s ‘Floating Prince’ he could now set his own ‘Happy Prince’.9

  The next morning half a dozen excited undergraduates escorted the Wildes to the railway station. As they clustered round the carriage window Oscar kept up a stream of epigrams, timed to culminate with the train’s departure. But the start proved to be a false one. The train backed into the station again, drawing Wilde’s carriage alongside where the students were still standing. He knew better, though, than to revive the moment. He closed the window, and buried himself in his papers – the first draft of his fairy story among them.10

  Wilde found Harry Marillier an oddly quickening presence. There were further meetings. Wilde visited the Marillier family home at Hampton. Marillier dined with the Wildes at Tite Street – a charmed occasion, at which Constance’s young friend Douglas Ainslie was also present: they drank ‘yellow wine’ in green glasses to the memory of Keats, and Oscar wove fairy tales about the people who lived in Constance’s beautiful moonstone jewellery.11 There were letters too, continuing the dance of poetry and paradox. Wilde wrote from Glasgow – ‘region of snow and horrible notepaper’ – distilling a vision of the artistic life:

  You too have the love of things impossible – εθως των αδυνατων – l’amour de l’impossible (how do men term it?). Some day you will find, even as I have found, that there is no such thing as a romantic experience; there are romantic memories, and there is the desire for romance – that is all. Our most fiery moments of ecstasy are merely shadows of what somewhere else we have felt, or of what we long some day to feel. So at least it seems to me. And, strangely enough, what comes of all this is a curious mixture of ardour and of indifference. I myself would sacrifice everything for a new experience, and I know there is no such thing as a new experience at all. I think I would more readily die for what I do not believe in than for what I hold to be true. I would go to the stake for a sensation and be a sceptic to the last! Only one thing remains infinitely fascinating to me, the mystery of moods. To be master of these moods is exquisite, to be mastered by them more exquisite still. Sometimes I think that the artistic life is a long and lovely suicide, and am not sorry that it is so.

  And much of this I fancy you yourself have felt: much also remains for you to feel. There is an unknown land full of strange flowers and subtle perfumes, a land of which it is a joy of all joys to dream, a land where all things are perfect and poisonous.

  He then ended, with deliberate bathos, ‘I have been reading Walter Scott for the last week: you too should read him, for there is nothing of all this in him.’12

  With its elegantly poised paradoxes – reality and dream, ardour and indifference, martyrdom and scepticism, life and death, perfection and poison – this was a vision coloured by the wearied sensualism and the calculated inversions of Huysmans’ des Esseintes. The letter’s single French phrase, however, did not derive from À Rebours. ‘L’amour de l’impossible’ was the title of an 1882 sonnet sequence by John Addington Symonds, charting the agonies of a tortured artistic soul, seeking an ever-elusive happiness in the ‘mysteries of life’ and in ‘human affections’. One of the sonnets presented the ‘artist’ – happily married, ‘strong and wise,’ rocking ‘the cradle where his firstborn lies’ – being suddenly carried off by the bat-winged ‘Chimaera’: while his thoughts and senses rebel, he swoons, ‘desiring things impossible’.13

  Although Symonds publicly claimed that the sonnets were not autobiographical, privately he confided that the poems expressed his own desire for sexual relations with other men, and that the ‘Chimaera’ was the image of this forbidden but all-consuming lust – the desire for ‘things impossible’.14 And it seems more than likely that Wilde had divined, or learnt, this fact: that ‘l’amour de l’impossible’ had become for him a coded phrase with a specific sexual meaning, not simply an expression of abstract yearning for fulfilment. His translating of the phrase into Greek might seem an attempt to connect it with the traditions of ancient Greek pederasty that had intrigued him since his student days. The subject of homosexual passion was certainly returning to the forefront of his mind. In his contemplation of À Rebours it was the passage about des Esseintes’ relationship with the strange young man that came to fascinate him most.15

  As so often in Wilde’s life, a development in one direction stimulated a simultaneous and almost exactly contrary impulse. Happily married, apparently ‘strong and wise’ enough to consider a career as a school inspector, rocking ‘the cradle where his first born [lay]’, and with his wife already expecting another child, Wilde was suddenly carried away by that same ‘amour de l’impossible’ which found its expression in an emotional and sexual yearning for young men. He later described it as being ‘like a madness’ which falls ‘on many who think they live securely and out of reach of harm’ making them ‘sicken suddenly with the poison of unlimited desire’, and leads them on to ‘the infinite pursuit of what they may not obtain’.16

  And it seems that he could not obtain Harry Marillier. Although the ‘infinitely young’, wonderfully sympathetic and very attractive Marillier provided both a focus and a stimulus for these feelings, there is no evidence that he either recognized or reciprocated them. Throughout their association he maintained a certain detachment, addressing Oscar as ‘Mr Wilde’. In June 1886 Wilde gave tentative expression to his desire in a letter to his young friend: ‘There is at least this beautiful mystery in life, that at the moment it feels most complete it finds some secret sacred niche in its shrine empty and waiting. Then comes a time of exquisite expectancy.’17 If this was an invitation, Marillier did not accept it. The letter is the last surviving one of their correspondence; there were no further meetings. For Wilde the moment of ‘exquisite expectancy’ was prolonged; the niche remained empty.18

  Nevertheless, amid his various social cares and journalistic duties, Wil
de took time to seek out the company of other artistically inclined young men. He was drawn into the idealistic world of the ‘Century Guild’, a group established in a house on Fitzroy Street by a trio of fervent Ruskin-ites: Arthur Mackmurdo, Selwyn Image and the twenty-two-year-old Herbert Horne. Dedicated to promoting a socially engaged vision of the arts and crafts, they had founded a small quarterly magazine, to which Wilde contributed an article about Keats.19 Horne had poetic ambitions, and Wilde encouraged them. ‘Your poems are most charming,’ he declared. ‘You combine very perfectly simplicity and strangeness.’20

  Horne also shared Wilde’s enthusiasm for the doomed Romantic poet Thomas Chatterton. And together they collaborated on a scheme to preserve and commemorate his birthplace – a little schoolhouse at Pile Street, Bristol.21 In conjunction with this campaign Wilde planned to write an article on Chatterton for the Hobby Horse. The essay never appeared, but Wilde did deliver a lecture on the poet at the Birkbeck Literary and Scientific Institution, in London. Despite a night of ‘dreadful’ weather, Wilde to his amazement found 800 people in the hall, ‘and they seemed really interested in the marvellous Boy’.22

  Wilde characterized Chatterton as ‘the father of the Romantic movement in literature’, the precursor of Blake, Coleridge and Keats, of Tennyson, Morris and Rossetti.23 Wilde, too, perhaps hoped to claim him as a parent, seeking in his life and work intimations of his own ideas about art and its relation to both morality and realism. Chatterton’s brief career was certainly suggestive. He had been a literary forger. The main body of his work (completed before he took his own life at the age of just seventeen) consisted of poems that he claimed had been written by a fifteenth-century Bristol monk. It was a deception that, when revealed, had increased his romantic appeal and confused his critical standing. ‘Was he’, Wilde asked towards the end of his lecture, ‘a mere forger with literary powers or a great artist? The latter is the right view. Chatterton may not have had the moral conscience which is Truth to fact but he had the artistic conscience which is truth to Beauty. He had the artist’s yearning to represent and if perfect representation seems to him to demand forgery he needs must forge. Still this forgery came from the desire of artistic self-effacement. He was the pure artist – that is to say his aim was not to reveal himself but to give pleasure.’ Chatterton – Wilde claimed – saw that ‘the realm of the imagination differed from the realm of fact’ and understood that ‘it is the ideal, not the realistic artist who expresses his age’.24

  Chatterton, though, was not the only ‘marvellous Boy’ occupying Wilde’s thoughts. It was during 1886 that Wilde came to know the seventeen-year-old Robert (Robbie or Bobbie) Ross. Small, bright and snub-nosed, he had the look and the liveliness of Puck. Exactly how he met Wilde remains unclear, though there were many currents in London life that might have drawn them together.25 Ross was the youngest child of prominent Canadian parents. His father, a lawyer and politician, had died when he was barely two, prompting the family to move back to Europe. Ross had been brought up – and privately educated – in England, and on the continent, developing precocious interests in art and literature. He lived with his mother and two sisters at Kensington, studying at a nearby crammer in preparation for going to Cambridge. Wilde found him ‘charming and as clever as can be, with excellent taste and sound knowledge’ too.26

  Ross’s precocity, however, extended beyond taste and knowledge to sex. He had come to an early and untroubled acceptance of his homosexual nature; at seventeen he was both experienced and curious. And, early in their friendship, he seduced Wilde.27 Wilde later formulated the theory ‘that it [is] always the young who seduce the old’.28 But he also suggested that ‘no one had any real influence on anyone else… Influence depends almost entirely on the ground over which it is exercised.’ 29 And in his own case the ground had been well prepared. His intellectual fascination with sexual inversion had been long, fuelled by his work with Mahaffy, his study of Plato, his reading of Symonds and Pater, of Burton’s Arabian Nights and the novels of the French Decadents. And as the conventional constraints of married life had tightened around him, the subject seems to have assumed a new piquancy and an even greater attraction.

  His sexual interest in Constance was waning, and perhaps hers in him too. She was pregnant throughout much of the year, giving birth to a second son, christened Vyvyan, on 3 November 1886.30 And he later admitted to a certain physical revulsion at his heavily pregnant wife.31 If Wilde was slow to recognize that his own emotional and physical needs lay with men rather than women, he had become gradually aware of ‘an impending fate’ hanging over his sexual nature.32 The exquisite expectancy that he had felt in his friendship with Harry Marillier had been a presage of what was to come. With Robbie Ross it finally found fulfilment.†

  That first encounter came as a revelation to Wilde – of pleasure, excitement and liberation. It opened up new vistas of sexual activity and self-fulfilment. Wilde had always chosen to ‘stand apart’ – and now he stood apart in the matters of sex and passion. He described the ‘joy, the delirium’ that marked the discovering of his ‘originality’ and ‘independence’.33 And although to most Victorians, sex (of whatever description) was considered as something that people did – an individual act – rather than as the expression of a person’s ‘sexuality’, there is no doubt that Wilde’s new experiences gave him, in his own eyes, an enhanced and altered status.34 It changed his relationship to the world around him, and to himself. Henceforth his actions would demand secrecy, and the elaboration of a double life. He was not only betraying Constance, he was breaking the law. The timing of Ross’s seduction could scarcely have been more charged with significance. Although penetrative sex between men had been a felony in English secular law since the time of the Tudors, it was only in 1885 that all sexual contact between men became criminalized.‡ In that year, with the Criminal Law Amendment bill going through parliament to increase the age of sexual consent for women from thirteen to sixteen, and to suppress the worst excesses of female prostitution, Henry Labouchère proposed an ‘amendment’ to label any sexual act between males as ‘gross indecency’ and to make it illegal. His proposal, heard in a nearly empty House, was – after minimal debate – voted into law. Wilde, ever resistant to the conventions of society, could now count himself a criminal and an outlaw.

  He could also count himself the heir to that rich – but largely hidden – tradition, running from Plato and the Greeks to Michelangelo and the great figures of the Renaissance, about which he had read. He was keen to embrace both its creative and its sexual possibilities. As he explained to one interested friend:

  Plato, like all the Greeks, recognized two kinds of Love, sensual love, which delights in women – such love is intellectually sterile, for women are receptive only, they take everything, and give nothing, save in the way of nature. The Intellectual loves or romantic friendships of the Hellenes, which surprise us today, they considered spiritually fruitful, a stimulus to thought and virtue – I mean virtue as it was understood by the ancients and the Renaissance, not virtue in the English sense, which is only caution and hypocrisy.35

  There was now a new colouring and a new urgency to Wilde’s interest in young men. Relations could encompass both the intellectual and the sexual, though the line between the two might remain unfixed. He came to know the twenty-two-year-old Marc-André Raffalovich, son of a Russian banker from Paris, who held self-consciously artistic and theatrical gatherings at his elegant flat in Albert Hall Mansions. Wilde had generously praised Tuberose and Meadowsweet, Raffalovich’s ‘remarkable little volume’ of ‘strange and beautiful poems,’ in the Pall Mall Gazette.36 And although Raffalovich himself was anything but beautiful, he was strange – and interesting too, ‘with the air of an exquisite, a slim waist, and a gardenia in is buttonhole’ (one of his poems contained the arresting line, ‘Our lives are wired like our gardenias’).37

  Wilde also befriended John Ehret Dickinson, the art-loving scion of a wealthy paper-manufactur
ing family, who had inherited Abbot’s Hill, a mock-Gothic country house in Hertfordshire. Then there was W. Graham Robertson, a well-connected young painter, who lived with his socialite mother in Rutland Gate, and H. B. Irving, eldest son of the actor, on the verge of going up to Cambridge; Bernard Berenson, a recent Harvard graduate and budding Aesthete, who had come over to study at Oxford, and the garrulous, dandified Harry Melvill; there was Arthur Clifton, a young solicitor with an interest in Liberal politics who also composed verse, and the twenty-five-year-old illustrator Bernard Partridge.

  Wilde treated these young companions with a lordly flirtatiousness. ‘What do you allow your friends to call you?’ he asked Robertson, signing off one of his letters; ‘“W”? or “Graham”? I like my friends to call me – Oscar.’38 ‘What a charming time we had at Abbot’s Hill,’ he told ‘dear Harry’ Melvill, ‘I have not enjoyed myself so much for a long time, and I hope that we will see much more of each other, and be together often.’39 He over-praised their artistic efforts. Some lines by Raffalovich were compared to ‘Herrick after the French Revolution’.40 Clifton was commended on his ‘delicate ear for music’ in verse.41 And John Ehret Dickinson received a fulsome dedicatory inscription ‘in admiration of his incomparable art and incomparable personality’ – although it is not known that he actually created anything, and the only surviving trace of a personality is that he had a dachshund called ‘Oodles’ who figured prominently in his will.42