Oscar

by Sturgis, Matthew;

  22 Edward Burne-Jones to OW, [1880] (Morgan Library), re. Burne-Jones’s desire to give ‘Mlle Sara Bernhardt’ a picture ‘as homage and remembrance of an interview I had long looked for’ and ending ‘thank you for having helped me to such an opportunity’; Edward Burne-Jones to OW, [1880] (Austin), re. a visit to 35 Grosvenor Place, with ‘Mr Bastien Lepage’; Bastien-Lepage and Sarah Bernhardt had been entertained at a supper party at the Lyceum, hosted by Henry Irving and Ellen Terry, on 3 July 1880. It seems very possible that OW was also present at the dinner. Certainly he acted as interpreter between Bastien-Lepage and Irving when the artist worked on a portrait of the actor following the dinner. Shepard, ed., Pen Pictures of Modern Authors, 211, quoting ‘An English Aesthete’ from the Boston Herald.

  23 DNB, ‘Sir George Lewis’.

  24 New York Tribune, 23 October 1881, 5; Eve Adam, ed., Mrs J. Comyns Carr’s Reminiscences (1926), 84. PMG, 20 August 1880, ‘Some Recent Verse’: ‘The world was never so full of poets – especially minor poets – as now.’

  25 ‘Postlethwaite’ appeared in Punch during 1880 in ‘Mutual Admiration Society’, 14 February 1880; ‘The Mutual Admirationists’, 22 May 1880; ‘A Love-Agony’, 5 June 1880; ‘Affiliating An Aesthete’, 19 June 1880; ‘An Aesthetic Midday Meal’, and ‘Fleur des Alpes; or, Postlethwaite’s Last Love’, 25 December 1880.

  26 ‘Distinguished Esthetes’, Argus (Melbourne), 27 August 1881.

  27 Henri de Régnier, Les Annales Politiques et Littéraires, in Mikhail, 465.

  28 ‘The Theories of A Poet’, New York Tribune, 8 January 1882, in Hofer & Scharnhorst, 20. In this interview OW, or the journalist, confuses Postlethwaite (the poet) and Maudle (the painter), whether deliberately or accidentally it is impossible to say. T. Martin Wood, George Du Maurier: The Satirist of the Victorians (1913) 20–1; Shepard, ed., Pen Pictures of Modern Authors, 212, quoting ‘An English Aesthete’ from the Boston Herald.

  29 Certainly the idea – following its appearance in Punch – became rapidly identified with Wilde: see Providence Journal, July 1881 (reprinted Intentions, April 2012). A London Cuckoo (1881) interview with WCKW asks ‘Is your brother really so fond of lilies… as Mr Du Maurier represents him to be?’

  30 ‘The Six-Mark Tea-Pot’, Punch, 30 October 1880. The Hampshire Advertiser, 8 January 1881, described OW as ‘reputed to be the original of many of Du Maurier’s aesthetic young men in Punch’ and ‘the central figure of that now well-known satire which makes him suggest to an aesthetic maiden that they should “live up to their blue china”’. Shepard, ed., Pen Pictures of Modern Authors, 212, quoting ‘An English Aesthete’ from the Boston Herald, also mentions that OW was behind Du Maurier’s 15 January 1881 drawing of Postlethwaite, ‘supplemented by the caption that he never bathed, because he disliked seeing himself foreshortened in the water’.

  31 J. M. Whistler, The Gentle Art of Making Enemies (1890), 241; J. and E. J. Pennell, The Life of James McNeil Whistler (1911); Julian Hawthorne, Shapes that Pass (1928), 158, sets the scene for this encounter at a Grosvenor Gallery reception, but Whistler’s own account (not contradicted by Du Maurier), placing it at the Fine Art Society exhibition of ‘Venice Etchings’ in December 1880, is to be preferred. Although OW became generally recognized as ‘the original of Postelthwaite’, some commentators, confusing Du Maurier’s two artistic creations, would mistakenly refer to him as model for ‘Maudle’; and indeed perhaps the closest ‘likeness’ between one of Du Maurier’s drawings and OW’s actual appearance was the portrayal of Maudle in ‘Maudle on the Choice of Profession’ (Punch, 12 February 1881).

  32 Langtry, The Days I Knew, 87–8; Harris, 38. The relationship between OW and Postlethwaite was well summed up in the Leeds Mercury, 5 January 1882: ‘It may be that the curious personal resemblance which exists between Mr. Oscar Wilde and the immortal but unrecognised “Mr Postelthwaite” of Punch is the real reason of his [OW’s] sudden leap into fame. But if that be so, many of us would like information upon one material point; that is, as to whether “Postelthwaite” is a representative of Wilde, or Wilde merely an imitator of “Postlethwaite”.’

  33 Henri de Régnier, Les Annales Politiques et Littéraires, in Mikhail, 465.

  34 De Régnier, Les Annales Politiques et Littéraires, in Mikhail, 465.

  35 William Mackay, Bohemian Days in Fleet Street (1913), 16; The earliest version of this remark (that I have found) is in Life, 24 July 1880, 586: ‘Two of the [Aesthetic] School were discussing the appearance of an eminent actor, one admired, the other did not. Said the non-admirer, “you can’t admire his legs;” to which the admirer replied, “yes, I think they are very poetic legs. I am not sure which is the most poetic. I think the left leg is thinner.’ Shepard, ed., Pen Pictures of Modern Authors, 211, quoting ‘An English Aesthete’ from the Boston Herald, has OW as ‘the author of the now well-known line, “Don’t you think that Irving’s left leg is very expressive?” and, perhaps, even the reply, “Yes, and his left leg is so much more expressive than the right.”’ Richard Le Gallienne, gives the mot – which ‘amused all London’ – as ‘One [of Irving’s legs] is a poem and the other is a symphony.’ The Writings of Oscar Wilde (1907), vol. 15, Richard Le Gallienne, ‘His Life – a Critical Estimate of his Writings’, 54; William King Richardson to Dudley Lincoln, 6 March 1881, Balliol College, Oxford (Houghton), ‘He [OW] it is who, when asked what he thought of Irving’s legs, answered “Both are consummate, but I think the right is the purer poem”.’

  36 Walford, Memories of Victorian London, 148–9.

  37 Bucks Co. Gazette (Pennsylvania), 13 October 1881, 1.

  38 Augustus Hare, The Story of My Life (1900), 5:386.

  39 Pearson, 50.

  40 W. B. Maxwell, Time Gathered (1937), 96.

  41 ‘Postlethwaite from a new point of view’, World, 16 February 1881, 7–8.

  42 Los Angeles Herald, 20 December 1882. Christine (aka Cristina) Nilsson (1843–1921) had her final London seasons in 1880 and 1881. OW achieved the same effect with Mrs J. E. Panton (a poet and sometime contributor to the World); she recalled that ‘when I met [OW] in a London drawing-room he came up and talked to me in his most affected style; but I soon showed him I did not care for either symphonies or neurotics, and when I mentioned casually he was casting pearls before swine and wasting jewels many others would be glad of, he gave a good humoured laugh and talked delightfully until retrieved by his mother’. Leaves from a Life (1908), 287.

  43 ‘The Poet’s Day’, Punch, 4 Feb 1882; ‘Mr Oscar Wilde’s Poems’, World, 3 August 1881, 17.

  44 C. G. Leland to OW, 4 October 1879 (Austin).

  45 Langtry, The Days I Knew, 87–8.

  46 New York Telegram, 13 January 1882, in Ellmann, 101; Morning Post, 4 June 1880; Rodd, Social and Diplomatic Memories, 10. Neither OW’s involvement in the production, nor even his attendance of the performance on 3 June 1880, is specifically confirmed by the press reports. The actors did thank ‘Mr Burne-Jones, Professor Richmond… and others’; and the newspapers reported the audience was made up of ‘the elite of the University’ including ‘many of its most distinguished scholars’ (Jackson’s Oxford Journal, 5 June 1880); the Daily News, 5 June 1880, mentioned the presence of ‘Mr Newton and Robert Browning’ among ‘the large audience’. OW and/or WCKW may have been responsible for the arch paragraph on the play that appeared in the World, 9 June 1880, expressing surprise at the improper nature of the piece, with its discussion of ‘the frank amours of the Trojan priestess [Cassandra] and the Argive queen [Clytemnestra]’ but suggesting that nobody minded because it was in Greek. ‘Agamemnon’s death cry was amusingly tragic; and the final triumph of vice in the closing scene was received with as much enthusiasm as the more ordinary triumph of virtue in a London theatre.’

  47 The London performances took place on 16, 17, 18 December 1880; CL, 103–4. Sadly Madame Modjeska was unable to attend the tea party, as her husband was unwell and she felt that it would be unwise – even for ‘an old woman’ like he
rself (she was forty) to ‘pay visits to young men’ unaccompanied. see H. Modjeska to OW, ‘Saturday’ [1880] (Austin).

  48 Devon Cox, The Street of Wonderful Possibilities (2015), 61–5.

  49 CL, 94; the homage to Keats may also have been a play upon the fact that a Miss Elizabeth Skeats had lived in a house nearby in the early years of the century. Perhaps too there was a nod to Sir Percy Shelley (son of the poet) who lived literally round the corner on the newly formed Chelsea Embankment.

  50 Jacomb-Hood, With Brush and Pencil, 115; Fane, Chit Chat, 103.

  51 CL, 99.

  52 ‘Oscar Wilde’, Biograph and Review; OET VI, 21–3.

  53 World, 25 August 1880; E. Yates to OW, 11 August 1880, in Mason, 232.

  54 John Sloan, Oscar Wilde (2009), 101–2; George E. Woodberry to C. Eliot Norton, in Ellmann, 192.

  55 CL, 95.

  56 Shepard, ed., Pen Pictures of Modern Authors, 213, quoting ‘An English Aesthete’ from the Boston Herald; Sherard, Life, 165.

  57 World, 10 November 1880, 15.

  58 Mason, 168–70; ‘Our London Correspondence’, Liverpool Mercury, 25 September 1880; the parody was the first published work of Julia Frankau – or Julia Davis, as she was then. Her brother, James, was the founder and editor of PAN. The poem secured Julia the interest of Edmund Yates. Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, 10 October 1880, mentions the October issue of Kensington ‘is principally remarkable for a sonnet by Oscar Wilde’. But that issue of the magazine is untraced.

  59 ‘Oscar Wilde’, Biograph and Review, 130–5.

  60 ‘Slate and Puff’, Fact, 21 August 1880, 8–9.

  Chapter 3: Up to Snuff

  1 CL, 98.

  2 Francis Miriam Reed, ed., Oscar Wilde’s ‘Vera; or, The Nihilist’, Studies in British Literature, Vol. 4 (1989), xvii–xxvi; in an interview in the New York World, 12 August 1883, OW claimed he had begun Vera in 1876, but this seems most unlikely. Quoted in R. B. Glaenzer, ed., Decorative Art in America: A Lecture by Oscar Wilde (1906), 195.

  3 OW, Vera; or, The Nihilists (1880), 19, 16. These page references are to the rare 1880 edition, A Drama in Four Acts, printed by Ranken & Co., Printers, Drury House, St Mary-le-Strand, W.C. London. The copy inscribed to ‘Miss Genevieve Ward from her sincere friend and admirer, the author. Sept 1880’ is in the Eccles Collection at the BL.

  4 OW, Vera; or, The Nihilists, 17, 16.

  5 OW, Vera; or, The Nihilists, 19, 17.

  6 CL, 98: having deprecated the literary worth of the play to E. F. S. Pigott, OW confessed ‘I think the second act is good writing.’

  7 ‘Experience is the name we give to our mistakes’ – for example – would make a re-appearance in LWF (1892).

  8 CL, 204.

  9 H. Irving to OW (Austin); D. Boucicault to OW (Clark), G. Ward to OW (Clark); CL, 96, 98, 99.

  10 Jopling, in Mikhail, 204. Jopling mistakenly suggests that the play OW was hoping to interest Modjeska in was Salomé.

  11 G. Ward to OW (Clark); D. Boucicault to OW (Clark).

  12 CL, 101; World, 16 June 1880, 12, paragraph on Rodd’s reading of his Newdigate poem, described him as ‘a youthful disciple of Mr Oscar Wilde’.

  13 CL, 101. That OW and Rodd visited Chartres is suggested by OW’s references to Chartres in ‘Envoi’ and ‘The English Renaissance’, and Rodd’s poem on Chartres.

  14 OW, ‘Envoi’.

  15 CL, 101.

  16 Era, 28 November 1880; Where’s the Cat? was adapted from the German by James Albery.

  17 Shepard, ed., Pen Pictures of Modern Authors, 213, quoting ‘An English Aesthete’ from the Boston Herald. Era, 28 November 1880. Morning Post, 22 November 1880 concurred: ‘Mr. Beerbohm Tree… made up as a ludicrous caricature of a well-known “society poet” is highly comic.’

  18 Shepard, ed., Pen Pictures of Modern Authors, 213; Harper’s Weekly, 23 July 1881, 491, reported that ‘All who saw the character in the play exclaimed “Oscar Wilde!”’

  19 Ellen Terry to OW, 18 February 1881 (Austin), inviting OW to share her box for ‘The Cat next Thursday’; it seems likely, though, that he would also have seen it earlier in its run (see paragraph from Life in n.20 immediately below). Ellmann, 128, says OW thought the play ‘poor’, but gives no reference.

  20 Life, 25 December 1880, 1037.

  21 World, 2 November 1881, 11; Shepard, ed., Pen Pictures of Modern Authors, 212: the hostile, and only partially informed, author of the Boston Herald article quoted suggests that OW must have ‘objected’ to Tree’s performance, and claims that he did write ‘an indignant letter, in which he protested against [Tree’s] having taken advantage of “the accident” of their acquaintance’. His account, however, is highly suspect.

  22 World, 27 April, 1881, 12. ‘DISTINGUISHED AESTHETES’, Argus (Melbourne), 27 August 1881. Although OW wrote to George Grossmith hoping to get a ‘three-guinea box’ for the opening night (CL, 109), press reports indicate that he was seated in the stalls.

  23 Era, 30 April 1881, noted the spectacle of ‘Postlethwaite [i.e. Wilde] grinning at his counterfeit presentment [i.e. Bunthorne] in the opera’. Freeman’s Journal, 25 April 1881, reported, ‘One of the most interesting features of the performance on Saturday night was the fact that it was listened to throughout with stolid earnestness by the gentleman who is generally supposed to have supplied Du Maurier with his character of Postlethwaite, and also by several others of the best known disciples [of] Æstheticism.’

  24 CL, 109; ‘Mr Oscar Wilde’s Poems’, World, 3 August 1881, 15: ‘He treated the [satirical] attacks upon him with the cheeriest good humour; he never replied to them.’

  25 Anne Anderson, ‘The Colonel: Shams, Charlatans and Oscar Wilde’, Wildean, 25 (2004), 34–53; F. C. Burnand, The Colonel, at www.xix-e.pierre-mateau.com/ed/colonel.html.

  26 Era, 30 April 1881; Ian C. Bradley, ed., The Complete Annotated Gilbert and Sullivan (2016), 360; ‘Interview with a Theatrical Manageress’ (Helen Lenoir), South Australian Weekly Chronicle (Adelaide), 8 August 1885; Walter Hamilton, The Aesthetic Movement, 63; Millard to W. A. Clark, 9 October 1922 (Clark); the part of Grosvenor was played by Rutland Barrington.

  27 Shepard, ed., Pen Pictures of Modern Authors, 213.

  28 Illustrated London News, 18 June 1881, 598.

  29 ‘An Interview with Oscar Wilde’s Brother’, New Zealand Herald, 8 April 1882, 2, reprinting an article from The London Cuckoo (1881).

  30 Punch, 21 May 1881, 229.

  31 For a full list of Punch satires on OW see Mikhail, 227–9.

  32 ‘Punch’s Fancy Portraits No. 37: “O.W.”’, Punch, 25 Jun 1881, 298.

  33 ‘The High Priest of Aesthetic Art, Postlethwaite’, Bristol Mercury and Daily Post, 14 May 1881

  34 World, 7 December 1881, 11. Although OW was flattered by the request, Frith privately confessed that his reason for including ‘the well-known apostle of the beautiful’ and his ‘eager worshippers’ in the picture was a desire to ‘hit the folly of listening to self-elected critics’ in matters of art.

  35 William King Richardson to ‘Dudley [Lincoln]’, 17 April 1881 (Houghton); the photo alluded to has not been traced, but for others of this date see Holland, The Wilde Album, 54, 77, 94–5.

  36 ‘Our London Letter’, Sheffield & Rotherham Independent, 1 December 1881.

  37 Frank Benson, My Memories (1939), 138.

  38 V. O’Sullivan to A. J. A. Symons, 8 June 1931 (Clark).

  39 ‘The Science of the Beautiful’, New York World, 8 January 1882, in Hofer & Scharnhorst, 23.

  40 ‘Postlethwaite from a new point of view’, World, 16 February 1881, 7–8; Edmund Yates to OW, 28 February 1881 (Houghton), reproduced in Mason, 234.

  41 Verily Anderson, The Last of the Eccentrics: Life of Rosslyn Bruce (1972), 45; ‘A Jackdaw’s Flight’, Leeds Mercury, 22 July 1882.

  42 London Cuckoo (1881).

  43 W. B. Maxwell, Time Gathered (1937), 95.

  44 Ellmann, 221.

  45 ‘Unknown Wives of Well-Known Men: Mrs
Oscar Wilde’, Ladies Home Journal (Philadelphia), October 1892, reprinted in Intentions, 42 (2006), 21–5; Moyle, 45–7, 33.

  46 Moyle, 17.

  47 CMW to Otho Lloyd, 7 June 1881, quoted in Moyle, 46.

  48 CMW to Otho Lloyd, 10 June 1881, quoted in Moyle, 46.

  49 Moyle, 54–5.

  50 Hake and Compton-Rickett, The Life and Letters of Theodore Watts-Dunton, 1:172–4, gives an account of OW’s first appearance at one of Whistler’s breakfasts, when Whistler professed not to know who he was. Watts-Dunton, who was also present, suggested, ‘You have met him at some “outside” dinner where the “etchings” were being bought, and he jumped down your throat… and you gave him a general invitation to come to your breakfasts, and he has at once taken you at your word.’ Whistler agreed that that was exactly what had happened. Nevertheless, within a few weeks OW had made a ‘conquest’ of him.

  51 Pennell and Pennell, The Life of James McNeill Whistler, 212, 224; Rodd, Social and Diplomatic Memories, 16; CL, 148 n.1.

  52 William Rothenstein, Since Fifty (1939), 76.

  53 CL, 154.

  54 ‘Aesthetic: An Interesting Interview with Oscar Wilde’, Dayton Daily Democrat, 3 May 1882, 4, quoted in Hofer & Scharnhorst, 145.

  55 Pennell and Pennell, The Life of James McNeill Whistler, 336; William Rothenstein, Men and Memories I (1931), 114; E. R. and J. Pennell, The Whistler Journal (1921), 34, quoted in Ellmann, 126.

  56 World, 2 March 1881, 15; OW, when re-issuing the poem in book form, corrected the title to ‘Impression du Matin’.