* The queen wrote on the request, passed on by her private secretary: ‘Really what will people not say and invent. Never could the Queen in her whole life write one line of poetry serious or comic or make a Rhyme even. This is therefore all invention and a myth.’
8
A Study in Green
‘What we have to do, what at any rate it is our duty to do, is to revive this old art of Lying.’
oscar wilde
In 1888 both Oscar and Constance, showing an impressive unanimity of purpose, brought out volumes of fairy stories. There Was Once by ‘Mrs Oscar Wilde’ was a gathering of retold tales (Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, etc.) recounted in both prose and verse, and illustrated throughout. Oscar’s book, his first published volume since the Poems of 1881, brought together five of his original fairy tales under the title The Happy Prince and Other Tales. It had been a long struggle to get the stories into print; repeated approaches to magazine editors had met without success. He had then contacted George Macmillan with the idea of bringing them out in book form, but the Macmillan’s reader, having looked them over, decided that, despite their ‘point and cleverness’, they were unlikely ‘to rush into marked popularity’.1 In frustration Wilde turned to David Nutt & Co., a smaller firm with a reputation for fine printing. They agreed to produce the book, although whether Wilde contributed to the production costs is not known.
While Constance’s book was aimed squarely at the nursery, Oscar’s tome proclaimed a decidedly different intention. Like Poems it was – as Oscar put it – very ‘daintily got up’, with illustrations from the prestigious pen of Walter Crane and ‘decorations’ by the young Impressionist George Jacomb-Hood. To appeal to the bibliophile a special edition of seventy-five copies was produced on hand-made paper, each copy signed by the author, and priced, steeply, at one guinea. The ‘ordinary’ edition was only slightly smaller in format and only slightly diminished in daintiness. It was published in a relatively modest first printing of 1,000 copies, priced at a still-substantial 5s. The book was dedicated to Carlos Blacker.2*
The Happy Prince and Other Tales appeared at the beginning of June and was well received, being widely noticed and generously reviewed.3 Perhaps it was Wilde’s choice of genre that had altered the critical perspective – and perhaps Wilde had guessed that this would be so.4 Perhaps, too, Wilde’s altered status played its part. He had changed from the bumptiously affected young Aesthete, who had so annoyed the critics at the beginning of the decade, into a seemly responsible public figure. Certainly none of the personal animus that greeted his Poems was evident in the press response: no cries of plagiarism, insincerity or affectation. He was frequently – and not unfavourably – compared to Hans Andersen. The World called the book ‘the prettiest child’s story-book we have had since Alice in Wonderland’.
There was general recognition that, although there was much for children to enjoy, the stories were likely to appeal rather more to adults, spiced as they were with ‘a piquant touch of contemporary satire’. Wilde’s recipe for friendship, given in ‘The Devoted Friend’, was much enjoyed: ‘A true friend always says unpleasant things, and does not mind giving pain. Indeed if he is a really true friend he prefers it, for he knows that then he is doing good.’5 The only doubt remained as to the pervading mood of the stories: the Spectator thought that beneath their ‘subtle sarcasm’ the defining ‘note’ was ‘melancholy’; but Robbie Ross’s brother, Alec, reviewing the book in the Saturday Review, suggested that, despite the spirit of ‘bitter satire’, the abiding mood was ‘a very pleasant sensation of the humorous’.6 Although one of the characters in the book remarks that ‘to tell a story with a moral is always a very dangerous thing to do’, it was noted approvingly that all the tales did seem to have ‘a moral’ even if it was never ‘obtrusively pointed’. One reviewer described the underlying message as being ‘that unselfishness is moral beauty, and that vain display is moral ugliness’.7
The book sold briskly, and Wilde was soon boasting of its ‘success’.8 He scattered presentation copies among friends and connections. Gladstone received one. So did Ruskin. Walter Pater wrote a gratifying thank-you note to say that he been ‘consoling’ himself with the ‘delightful’ book during an attack of gout. He praised some of the descriptions as ‘little poems in prose’ and hardly knew ‘whether to admire more the wise wit of “The [Remarkable] Rocket,” or the beauty and tenderness of “The Selfish Giant”’. Ellen Terry declared, ‘I think I love “The Nightingale & the Rose” the best’, and suggested that she might read it ‘some day to some nice people – or even not nice people, and make ’em nice.’ Wilde was delighted at this idea of a public recitation, but sadly nothing came of it.9 The librarian at Toynbee Hall, to whom Wilde had likewise sent a copy, also loved ‘The Nightingale and the Rose’ best. He thought that ‘every earnest man, woman and child (and that means all children)’ should ‘cry out a rich thanksgiving of delight’ to the author of such a tale: ‘To me it is nothing less than [a] miracle to feel the gorgeous flood-tide of human passion beneath the surface, and to see the delicate and steadfast simplicity of the language. You seem to have engaged with Human Love as the Eye with External Objects.’10 †
Within six months the first edition was sold out. And although a new (and slightly cheaper at 3s 6d) – edition failed to maintain the momentum, there was no doubt that The Happy Prince and Other Tales had been, in its way, a minor triumph: one of the notable books of the season.11
The success encouraged Wilde to continue writing fairy stories, deploying the genre to extend the possibilities of his prose, his social commentary – and his subversion of sexual norms. He now found periodicals ready to publish them. His next tale concerned ‘The Young King’ – an extreme Aesthete, who, on the verge of his coronation, is confronted by the great social and moral cost of the worldly luxury he so adores, and – turning from it – embraces a Christ-like simplicity that, to the astonishment of his courtiers, his subjects and his clergy, yields him a far greater, miraculous, splendour. Despite the tale’s emphatic spiritual and social message, Carlos Blacker seems to have disapproved of some elements in it – possibly the distinct homoerotic flavor of the young king’s Aestheticism. He is described as worshipping an image of Adonis and kissing a statue of Antinous.
Certainly when the story was published in the Lady’s Pictorial at the end of the year, Blacker wrote to the fervently Anglo-Catholic Duke of Newcastle, remarking: ‘Our friend Oscar was impenetrable yesterday to my attacks on what “you wot of” & laughed it all away. It has now been however arranged that all his manuscripts are in future to be submitted to me for approval, & I shall make a wholesome slaughter of his humours and tempers, when the occasion deserves it. He had no excuses to offer & disarmed me by his extreme hilarity, saying he had foreseen and anticipated my strictures.’12 Nevertheless, although one paper called the story a ‘weird and wild’ allegory, most commentators thought it possessed of both ‘charm’ and ‘an admirable moral’, besides being ‘exquisitely expressed’.13 Even Henley, it seems, was enthusiastic over its style. Claiming Flaubert as his master, Wilde told him ‘to learn how to write English prose I have studied the prose of France. I am charmed that you recognize it: that shows I have succeeded. I am also charmed that no one else does: that shows I have succeeded also.’14
The return to story writing and book production gave Wilde a new sense of his own literary worth. It also began to draw him away from Woman’s World and the chores of the editor’s office. With his growing roster of commitments – literary, journalistic, political, social and domestic – he had come to feel himself ‘overworked’. Something had to give. His three days a week at La Belle Sauvage soon dwindled to two. His assistant, Arthur Fish, became adept at telling ‘by [Wilde’s] footfalls along the corridor whether the day’s work would be met cheerfully or postponed to a more convenient period’. In the latter case Wilde ‘would sink with a sigh into his chair, carelessly glance at his letters, give a perfunctory lo
ok at the proofs or make-up, ask, “Is it necessary to settle anything to-day?” put on his hat with a sad “Good morning,” and depart again’. The hours gradually shortened: his arrival became later and his departure earlier, ‘until at times his visit was little more than a call’.
His ‘Literary Notes’ became cursory, then ceased altogether for seven months (between March and November 1888), before Wemyss Reid induced him to take them up again. Wilde’s early industry meant that he had more than enough articles on hand, and instead of the pleasures of commissioning, had to devote much of his time to rejecting work or explaining to contributors why their pieces had not yet appeared.15‡ And although it was nice to have an income, he came to consider that it was not nearly large enough: he took to writing verses and ‘rude remarks’ concerning it on the back of each month’s salary receipt form.16
He did, though, continue to enjoy the privileged position his job gave him with women. He developed an enthusiasm for the elegantly mondaine Bibidie Leonard. The daughter of an exiled Irish nationalist, she had been brought up in Paris before moving to London, and something of the dangerous glamour of the French capital still attached to her. She had achieved a reputation as both milliner and mistress to the fashionable. Wilde, who seems to have met her through his mother’s receptions, asked her to produce an article on the celebrated saloniste ‘Madame Adam’.17 The piece was never written, but Wilde became a frequent visitor to Leonard’s house on Regent’s Park – fascinated by her sophisticated allure, and the hold that she exerted over men. She became for him a model of the modern femme fatale. He claimed that she taught him more than any other woman: ‘She was not the least immoral,’ he explained to a friend. ‘Immoral women are rarely attractive. What made her quite irresistible was that she was unmoral.’18
Constance – who was conscious of the drawing-away of Wilde’s emotional and sexual interest, but misread its cause – became jealous at his fascination with Leonard. Wilde, it seems, was not entirely unhappy to break off the connection, perhaps finding it rather too demanding. He brought it to a definite end – although, to give suitable drama to the moment, he made the break with ‘three stanzas of passionate’ verse. Leonard, however, was not taken in. She suspected, probably correctly, that Wilde was re-using lines from an already written poem.19
Among Wilde’s other female protégées of the moment was the young American actress Elizabeth Robins, who was passing through London in the summer of 1888. Dark-eyed, beautiful and intense, she was already marked by tragedy: only the year before, her husband, a minor actor in the same Boston company, had committed suicide (by jumping into the Charles River in a full suit of stage armour), leaving her a widow at twenty-six. Wilde met her at a reception given by Lady Seton and encouraged her to think of staying in England and making a career on the London stage. ‘You should give a matinee,’ he suggested, as a first step. When, some weeks later, he learnt that she was on the verge of contracting to appear in a production of a ‘questionable’ play to be mounted by the ‘penniless adventurer’ Sir Randall Roberts, he advised her against the step.
Springing into action, he put Robins in touch with an agent. He insisted that she engage George Lewis as her solicitor, to look over any contracts (describing him as ‘Brilliant. Formidable. A man of the world… he knows all about us – and forgives us all’). And he secured for her an interview with Herbert Beerbohm Tree, who was then enjoying his first great success as an actor-manager. Robins always remembered Wilde’s energy and kindness. In her unpublished memoir, she wrote, ‘I could do nothing for him; he could and did do everything in his power for me.’ Her diaries of the time abound with notes of meetings, letters, practical suggestions, words of advice: one day concludes with the legend, ‘A blessed man is Oscar Wilde.’ In the end, Tree’s half-promise to give her work convinced Robins to cash in her return ticket and remain in England.20
The whole affair allowed Wilde to engage with the theatrical world that he still longed to enter. But it was also an act of practical kindness and imaginative sympathy. The record of his life is littered with similarly generous deeds, often unglamorous and unsung. He interested himself, for instance, in the ‘very poor friend’ of a clergyman acquaintance, helping her sell a valuable ‘Indian necklace’.21 He was generous with his advice and, despite his own lack of funds, was always ready to lend what he had.22 Although Wilde claimed to have no sympathy with sickness, Otho Lloyd was told that he had sat at the bedside of a friend who ‘was in the height of smallpox’.23 Bernard Berenson thought him ‘the kindest man imaginable’.24
When Mrs Sickert’s husband died unexpectedly she became almost ‘mad with grief’. But, though she shut herself up, Wilde sought her out and insisted on seeing her. Nellie Sickert recalled how he took both her hands and drew her – still crying – to a chair, beside which he set his own:
I left them alone. He stayed a long time, and before he went I heard my mother laughing. When he had gone she was a woman transformed. He had made her talk; had asked questions about my father’s last illness and allowed her to unburden her heart of those torturing memories. Gradually he had talked of my father, of his music, of the possibilities of a memorial exhibition of his pictures. Then, she didn’t know how, he had begun to tell her all sorts of things which he contrived to make interesting and amusing. ‘And then I laughed,’ she said, ‘I thought I should never laugh again.’25
In the autumn of 1888 Wilde was engaged in helping his own mother. The continuing unrest in rural Ireland meant that the rents of the Moytura estate were largely unpaid, and she was without an income. And although her books – Driftwood from Scandinavia (1884) and Ancient Legends, Mystic Charms and Superstitions of Ireland (1887) – and her occasional articles, brought in something, it was not enough. Willie, meanwhile, remained completely irresponsible; earning good money at the Telegraph, he spent it all on drink and late nights.§ To reduce their expenses they moved from Park Street to Chelsea, taking a house at 146 Oakley Street, just round the corner from Oscar and Constance. More, however, needed to be done.
To improve his mother’s position, Wilde revived the campaign to secure her a civil list pension, while at the same time also petitioning the Royal Literary Fund on her behalf for a one-off grant. His now impressive range of contacts – drawn from political and professional life – gave him a new assurance in dealing with officialdom. Both the applications proved successful: the RLF contributed £100; and (eventually, in May 1890) Lady Wilde was awarded a civil list pension of £70 a year. Her newfound enthusiasm for Queen Victoria perhaps helped tip the balance in her favour, expunging the memory of her insurrectionist battlecries of the 1840s.
All the while Wilde continued to add to his coterie of young male friends. He enjoyed the company of Jacomb-Hood (the decorator of The Happy Prince), even joining him and some of his fellow artists for a few days of Spartan summer fun in a cottage on Brownsea Island in Dorset. The time was spent sailing in small boats around Poole harbour. Wilde surprised his host by entering into the spirit of it all with enthusiasm, even joining ‘like a schoolboy in the early-morning plunge’ from the castle steps. His only plaint was the want of a cup of tea before getting up: ‘My dear Jacomb,’ he explained, ‘I positively cannot open my eyes without a cup of tea’ (Jacomb-Hood generously rose early each day to provide him with one). Nevertheless, after one night spent wading up to his waist in the sea with a seine net, he did declare, ‘Nature is so often very uncomfortable.’26
In London Wilde fostered his connection with the gauche but intelligent Yeats, whose Irish tales he had noticed so favourably. The Dublin-born poet was readily drawn in; he had known of the illustrious and eccentric Wilde family since childhood, and had first seen Oscar lecturing in Dublin in 1883. On the verge of bringing out his first book of poems, Yeats greatly valued the friendship, recalling how Wilde always ‘flattered the intellect’ of those he liked: how he encouraged Yeats to recount long Irish stories; how he suggested that he possessed ‘genius’ and compare
d his art to Homer; how he warned him against writing ‘literary gossip’ for the papers – it being ‘no job for a gentleman’.27
Another budding poet was the intriguingly named Richard Le Gallienne, who wrote from Liverpool enclosing a privately printed volume of his verse, and shortly afterwards followed the book south. Like Yeats he had first encountered Wilde on the lecture platform. As an impressionable seventeen-year-old in Birkenhead in 1883, Le Gallienne had heard Wilde give his ‘Impressions of America’, and almost from that moment had determined to escape from his destined career as an accountant and become a poet. He had begun to write verse under the influence of the Pre-Raphaelites. The ungrammatical ‘Le’ was added to his name, to make it more memorable and more artistic. He evolved a determinedly Aesthetic look, his long hair ‘fanning out’ – as Wilde remarked – ‘into a wonderful halo’. With his fine dark eyebrows and strongly chiselled features, Wilde thought he looked like Rossetti’s Angel Gabriel; Swinburne called him ‘Shelley with a chin’.28 He arrived in London in 1888 bent on fostering his connection with Wilde. He attended a Tite Street ‘at home’ and secured an invitation to dinner. Other meetings followed. Wilde inscribed a copy of Poems: ‘To Richard Le Gallienne, poet and lover, from Oscar Wilde. A Summer day in June ’88’. Le Gallienne sought to fix the moment too, composing a poem, ‘With Oscar Wilde: A Summer Day In June ’88’, which opened with the evocative couplet, ‘With Oscar Wilde, a summer day / Passed like a yearning kiss away.’ He sent Wilde a manuscript copy ‘as a love-token, and in secret memory of a summer day in June ’88’.29 And Wilde reciprocated by offering him the manuscript of one of his fairy stories.30 Yet, despite such heated exchanges, there is a strong suspicion that this was nothing more than poetical posturing by both parties. Le Gallienne delighted in playing the role of the impassioned poet, and so did Wilde. For all the ‘true-lover’ talk, it was several years before they got properly on to first-name terms. Wilde recognized that Le Gallienne, charming though he might be, was a provincial careerist anxious to secure a footing in literary London; and with typical generosity he did what he could to help him.
Oscar Page 49