Oscar Wilde

by Barbara Belford

  Wilde had an affinity for epigrams, aphorisms, and paradoxes—never inferior anecdotes—as the centerpieces of conversation. Merrion Square’s Saturday salons provided a stage and a captive audience for his mezzo-voiced dictums. Arrogantly, he started to transform himself into an objet d’art, eventually becoming a narcissistic artist who lived by his own laws. “Life imitates art far more than Art imitates life,” he said. Even when Wilde babbled nonsense, he commanded attention. Lady Wilde admired her son’s emerging personality and told George Moore’s father that Willie had a first-class brain but Oscar would turn out to be “something wonderful.”

  His hair was long and parted in the middle. He kept an unfinished landscape—probably a view from Moytura—on an easel in his college room at Number 18 Botany Bay and told visitors he “just put in a butterfly,” an allusion to Whistler’s signature. Later Wilde recast the phrase to describe his writing day: “In the morning, after hard work, I took a comma out of one sentence.… In the afternoon, I put it back again.”

  Undergraduate life bored him; he complained that his classmates’ “highest idea of humour was an obscene story.” The “coarse amours among barmaids and women of the streets” disgusted him; he avoided pubs, the pulse of student life, and seldom entertained in his rooms. He was frequently at Merrion Square because Willie was away in London studying law at the Middle Temple. In fact, there were few surprises at Trinity for someone who had grown up just outside its gates and met professors at his parents’ gatherings. “Come home with me,” he is said to have said to a college friend. “My mother and I have formed a society for the suppression of virtue.” Nothing so radical was going on at Merrion Square. Whatever erotic fantasies aroused Wilde, they were of an idealized or solipsistic nature.

  During his three years at Trinity, Wilde’s critical relationship was with his tutor John Pentland Mahaffy, who was fifteen years older, a ratio Wilde preferred when selecting young male companions. Mahaffy had entered Trinity at sixteen and remained there until 1914, when he was made provost at the age of seventy-five. No public school traditions clung to him. He had been educated abroad by tutors, lived in Greece, was a marksman and captain of the Trinity cricket eleven. A dedicated social climber, Mahaffy was the perfect mentor for a snob in training. Although married he lived a bachelor’s life, but he had no interest in same-sex relationships despite being the first classicist to publish details on Greek love.

  Intellectually, tutor and student were well-matched, and a still-growing Wilde soon stood eye to eye with the six-foot-three Mahaffy. It was Mahaffy who propelled Wilde from Dublin to Oxford and then on to London, who dragooned him to Greece and converted him to Hellenism, postponing his fascination with Roman Catholicism. Wilde called Mahaffy his “first and best teacher … the scholar who showed me how to love Greek things.” Mahaffy authenticated Wilde’s abilities when he needed approval, but it was an edgy relationship, and the two turned on each other when Wilde as a literary critic felt intellectually superior and Mahaffy as a moralist took Wilde’s disgrace as a personal affront.

  Mahaffy’s brilliance as a classicist was surpassed only by his gifts as a conversationalist. “There can be no doubt,” he wrote in The Principles of the Art of Conversation, “that of all the accomplishments prized in modern society that of being agreeable in conversation is the very first.” Wilde never disagreed on this point. “Until you heard Mahaffy talk,” one contemporary said, “you hadn’t realized how language could be used to charm and hypnotize.” Mahaffy was surely a model for Lord Henry, who mesmerizes Dorian Gray with his musical voice.

  When Mahaffy published Principles in 1887, many of his rules sounded like Wilde talking: avoid pedantry, know nothing accurately, conversation is not contradiction. “One should absorb the colour of life,” Lord Henry advises, “but one should never remember its details. Details are always vulgar.” To Arthur Conan Doyle, Wilde said, “Between me and life there is a mist of words always. I throw probability out of the window for the sake of a phrase and the chance of an epigram makes me desert truth.” Credited to Mahaffy are statements like “poets are born, not paid,” and “it is the spectator and not life that art mirrors,” which lacked Wilde’s talent for paradox and did not turn reality on end.

  Wilde believed there was no morality or immorality in lying. When he reviewed Mahaffy’s book for the Pall Mall Gazette, he praised the principle that a liar makes a better conversationalist than “the scrupulously truthful man, who weighs every statement, questions every fact, and corrects every inaccuracy.” The truth of lies was integral to Wilde’s philosophy of individualism, which he later wrote about in “The Decay of Lying,” where he proclaims that the “telling of beautiful untrue things is the proper aim of Art.” His wit developed as a defense against his own fears and what he—rightly or wrongly—perceived as the negative opinions of others. When he said that all people are good until they learn to talk, he implied that to talk is to lie. Onstage Wilde’s characters tell lies and exchange bored trivialities, revealing the beginnings of the modernist distrust of language.

  Such distrust was intrinsic to the Irish literary tradition. The Importance of Being Earnest and later John Millington Synge’s Playboy of the Western World are about the grand art of lying. One exposes a society that requires lying to function, and the other demonstrates how the power of a lie makes the man. The English were always “degrading the truth into facts,” and the Americans, Wilde said, referring to the myth of George Washington cutting down the cherry tree, have as a “national hero a man who, according to his own confession, was incapable of telling a lie.” Wilde frequently lied about himself. To advance his mythmaking, he encouraged his friends to lie also. As a result his life became a tangle of beautiful lies: it was exactly what he wanted—to be a mystery in plain sight.

  As a disciple, Wilde proofread Mahaffy’s Social Life in Greece from Homer to Menander and probably had more influence on the content than ever will be known. In the 1874 first edition, Mahaffy describes same-sex love as “that strange and to us revolting perversion, which reached its climax in later times, and actually centered upon beautiful boys all the romantic affections which we naturally feel between opposite sexes, and opposite sexes alone.” Such a description made clear what Plato’s Symposium, even in the ancient Greek, had not and what Benjamin Jowett had veiled in his translation of 1871.

  Mahaffy argued that same-sex love existed in early Greek society because men were more cultured than women, and as a consequence men could not find intellectual fulfillment in relationships with unsophisticated women. “We have as yet no Asphasia to advocate the higher education of women,” he wrote. “We have in many cities a tendency to seclude women, and prevent them from being companions to their lovers. Thus their natural place was invaded by those fair and stately youths, with their virgin looks, and maiden modesty, who fired Solon and Theognis, and Socrates and Epaminondas—in fact, almost every great Greek in their greatest days.”

  His reasoning was an excuse more than an explanation, and Mahaffy shied away from discussing homosexuality in terms of desire and need. He wanted not to incite but to correct an oversight and was surprised when so much negative reaction followed his publication. Out of cowardice and political exigency, he capitulated and dropped the unspeakable from the second edition, but he should have stood his ground. The acknowledgment to Wilde for “having made improvements and corrections all through the book” disappeared as well.

  As Wilde discovered when he electrified the Old Bailey with his powerful definition of the “love that dare not speak its name,” the sentimental side to Greek love was often misunderstood. Such a love, he said then, was the basis of Plato’s philosophy. “It is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest form of affection. There is nothing unnatural about it. It is intellectual, and it repeatedly exists between an elder and younger man, where the elder has intellect and the younger man has all the joy, hope, and glamour of life before him. That it should be so, the world does not understand. T
he world mocks at it and sometimes puts one in the pillory for it.” Despite his affinity for sentimental Greek love, and even though he may have experienced some schoolboy groping, Wilde was not yet committed to same-sex passion. He planned to marry and was enough of an Aesthete to want purity for himself as well as his wife.

  Christ was wilde’s ideal: a romantic artist and poet, a sexually ambiguous individualist and Aesthete much like himself. “Christ’s place is indeed with the poets,” he wrote in De Profundis. The Crucifixion, as an image and as subject matter of art, had “fascinated and dominated Art as no Greek god ever succeeded in doing.” The nearly nude Christ on the cross, often with an erection of the sinless generative organ, said by art historians to symbolize the Redemption, was for some the homoerotic icon of Catholicism. Anyone interested in Catholicism at this time read John Henry Newman’s powerful autobiography, Apologia pro Vita Sua, about his conversion in 1845. Newman’s life, the journey of one man searching for integrity and meaning, paralleled that of Wilde. Both approached Catholicism with great doubts.*

  To Wilde, Catholicism was a paradox: homophobic and homoerotic; medieval and modern; spiritual and sensual. It excited and exploited desire—then condemned it. Decadents and Uranians rushed into the Church of Rome. In France they included Joris-Karl Huysmans, author of À rebours (which Wilde would read on his honeymoon), Barbey d’Aurevilly, author of Les Diaboliques, and the poet Paul Verlaine, who underwent a conversion while in prison for shooting his lover, Arthur Rimbaud. In London, before they converted, Wilde met Lionel Johnson, John Gray, Aubrey Beardsley, and Marc-André Raffalovich. Catholicism was fashionable—particularly among homosexuals.† Wilde observed: “It is so easy to convert others. It is so difficult to convert oneself. To arrive at what one really believes, one must speak through lips different from one’s own. To know the truth one must imagine myriads of falsehoods.”

  Wilde struggled with his need for the Church of Rome but always avoided commitment at the critical moment. At times of emotional weakness, the urge was harder to renounce. His interest in changing faiths was no longer a secret at home when he casually mentioned that he met a priest and attended Mass. If he brought up the recent doctrine of papal infallibility at the dinner table, an argument followed. The issue agitated his parents, but it was time for adolescent rebellion and estrangement. Excelling in tautological debate, Wilde easily vanquished his father. Lady Wilde was more reticent, and with good reason.

  • • •

  TO UNDERSTAND THE role Catholicism played in Wilde’s life, it is necessary to go back five years after Isola’s birth to a time of friction—judging from his mother’s letters to Scotland—in his parents’ marriage. As a physician to the poor, Sir William saw mostly Catholic patients at St. Mark’s, and he was far from being prejudiced, but his two brothers were Church of Ireland ministers; he attended Sunday services and felt comfortable with his inherited religion. Caught up by the vogue in Catholicism and influenced by recent converts, the more contrary Lady Wilde talked about going over herself. Instead she had her sons privately baptized.

  The Reverend L. C. Prideaux Fox, chaplain of the Glencree Reformatory, located near a farmhouse the Wildes rented in Wicklow in 1862, when Oscar was eight, performed the baptisms; being private they were never registered. (Oscar’s baptism into the Church of Ireland at St. Mark’s Church, Pearse Street, Dublin, was registered on April 26, 1855.) That was the story Father Fox published in 1905, when he was eighty-five. Following the ceremony, he said Lady Wilde asked him to inform her husband. When he did, Sir William replied, “I don’t care what the boys are so long as they become as good as their mother.” A gentlemanly reaction but not the truth, as Oscar later discovered when his father steadfastly blocked his conversion, even controlling his choice beyond the grave.

  There remains a touch of myth about this story. But why would a priest fabricate details at such a late date? Was Lady Wilde indulging one of her whims? Or did she hatch a scheme to irritate her husband? The latter seems plausible, given the scenario of Father Fox being the messenger of bad news. Oscar was said to have a vague recollection of this second baptism, enough perhaps to make a point of it in Earnest.

  Wilde had little difficulty excelling at Trinity. He won the Berkeley Gold Medal for Greek,* the highest award for classics given that year, for a competitive exam on the Greek comic poets. His uncle Ralph had won the same medal a century earlier. He had two firsts: a composition prize for Greek verse and a Foundation Scholarship in classics. Lady Wilde sat down and invited the Merrion Square crowd “to cheer dear old Oscar on.” He needed motivation to endure one more year when he wished to be elsewhere. Sensing his disquiet, Mahaffy is said to have mockingly urged: “Run over to Oxford, my dear Oscar: you are not clever enough for us in Dublin.” He was more than ready to leave home, but he could not go without a scholarship and handily won one of two demyships in classics at Magdalen College, which paid ninety-five pounds annually for five years.

  The euphoria that follows a child’s intellectual achievement wafted through Merrion Square for months. Lady Wilde bragged how her genius Oscar would excel at Oxford as he had at Trinity. In her dreams, Willie was ready to launch a brilliant parliamentary career. Happily waving to Oscar as he departed on the Kingstown packet boat, Sir William was naively confident that all thoughts of Catholicism were left behind. But Oxford was a hazardous destination for anyone warned against Catholicism. There was Newman’s influence as well as that of other persuasive converts, such as Henry Edward Manning and Gerard Manley Hopkins.

  Wilde never looked back; it did not occur to him that this was his leave-taking from Ireland, although such a realization would not have disturbed him. Joyce made a myth out of his departure. Beckett made exile a necessity for his work. Wilde had an expatriate’s life thrust on him, and he rushed toward it.

  The “two great turning-points” of his life, he later said, occurred when his father sent him to Oxford and when society sent him to prison. It was a tidy way to package his survival as an outsider. Oxford was where he wrote the script for Oscar Wilde posing as an Englishman, where he became a stereotype inside a real person. Once in prison he discarded the masks and realized how he had become “the spendthrift” of his own genius, only to find himself trapped inside another stereotype with a new name: homosexual.

  When wilde entered Magdalen College in 1874, the day after his twentieth birthday, he was no longer the youngest boy but a youth. “We never get back our youth,” he said, that “pulse of joy that beats in us at twenty.” By the time he completed his education, he admitted, “It is a sad thing to think of, but there is no doubt that Genius lasts longer than Beauty. That accounts for the fact that we all take such pains to over-educate ourselves.” Strikingly tall but still socially awkward, Wilde had a nervous habit of rattling on about undigested theories on art and life. “I was the happiest man in the world when I entered Magdalen for the first time,” he said. “Oxford was paradise to me.” It was also a larger universe than Trinity.

  His pedigree, a “distinguished name” and “high social position,” meant less at Oxford than it had at Trinity. In De Profundis, Wilde even clutches at the aristocracy by referring to his lover Lord Alfred Douglas as “a young man of my own social rank and position.” Wilde tried to inflate his family background, but Sir William’s honorary title paled beside the hereditary titles of his classmates; his mother may have ranked “intellectually,” as he put it, “with Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and historically with Madame Roland,” but her poetic howls for freedom had not crossed the Irish Sea. An Irishman with an English surname born to deflate the English ego—that was his legacy. He signed the blue form required of all entering students as Oscar O’Fflahertie Wilde (with the affectation of the double-f Norman spelling) and became known for a while as Oscar O. Wilde.

  The first months were awkward, as they would be for any student transferring from Trinity. He had to prove himself all over again. Wilde was a person whose authority depended on t
he adoption of a manner or a mask; sometimes multiple personae were needed. The actor in him composed the drama day by day, and before he even realized it, he had invented a new Oscar. The secret was insincerity. “Is insincerity such a terrible thing?” Dorian asks. “I think not. It is merely a method by which we can multiply our personalities.” In the twenty-six years ahead, Wilde reinvented himself many times. Influenced by Pater, inspired by imagination and driven by braggadocio, he selected an aesthetic nature for Oxford.

  *Kottabos was started in 1869 by Robert Yelverton Tyrrell, professor of Latin, a rival eminence to John Pentland Mahaffy, professor of ancient history, considered one of the greatest classical scholars of his time. Mentioned by Aristophanes, kottabos was the name of a drinking game played by young men in ancient Greece, which consisted of throwing a portion of wine into a vessel in a special manner.

  *The girls were buried in Drumsnatt. The headstone bears a quotation from the Book of Samuel: “They were lovely and pleasant in their lives and in their death they were not divided.” Every year for twenty years an anonymous veiled woman in black visited the grave.

  *An Anglican vicar, Newman (1801–90) was an Oxford scholar and theologian who spent half his life as an Anglican and half as a Roman Catholic. He was the leading Anglican clergyman of his day, founder of the Oxford Movement, a program of renewal for the Church of England, and vicar of St. Mary’s Oxford. Following his conversion, he was ordained a priest and died a cardinal. Envious of his influence, one college dean changed the Sunday dinner hour to discourage undergraduate attendance at evensong.