Oscar Wilde Read online

  Always finding opportunities to explore the artist’s complex relationship to art and reality, Wilde introduced in Dorian Gray the actress Sibyl Vane, who loses her power to imagine when she falls in love with Dorian. “As a rule, people who act lead the most commonplace lives,” Dorian tells Basil after he learns of Sibyl’s suicide. “They are good husbands, or faithful wives, or something tedious. How different Sibyl was. She lived her finest tragedy. She was always a heroine.” Dorian justifies his shabby treatment of her by saying, “It is not good for one’s morals to see bad acting.”

  Sharing a box on November 28, 1879, for The Merchant of Venice, John Ruskin and Wilde watched Irving’s controversial Shylock. The actor did not wear the red cap required for Jews by Venetian law, and he portrayed Shylock as an intellectual, with gray hair and a pale countenance, replacing the shuffling usurer with a heroic saint. After the performance, Wilde and Ruskin parted, for Wilde was invited to a ball celebrating the wedding of Millais’s daughter. “How odd it is,” Wilde remarked of the evening: he had attended a play set in Venice with the author of Stones of Venice and a gala where the bride was the daughter of Ruskin’s former wife. There was also Ruskin’s resignation, almost to the day, as Slade Professor at Oxford. “I cannot hold a Chair from which I have no power of expressing judgment without being taxed for it by British law,” he had said, referring to his humiliation at Whistler’s libel trial.

  One day in 1879, at the home of the artist William Bell Scott, Wilde met a seventeen-year-old Pre-Raphaelite beauty maturely dressed in a plain terra-cotta dress with a black fichu flung around her neck. Her name was Violet Hunt, and she was the daughter of Alfred William Hunt, a respected watercolorist, and Margaret Raine Hunt, a successful novelist of the three-decker period, whose best-known book, Thornicroft’s Model, is about a Rossetti-type aesthetic painter. Hunt chattered on about her mother, telling Wilde that Swinburne’s favorite book was Lady Wilde’s translation of Sidonia the Sorceress. Margaret Hunt was also a translator: her 1884 version of Grimm’s Household Tales was the edition on which the later Grimm’s Fairy Tales was based. “Do you know, I am almost beginning to be afraid of your mother,” Wilde said. “I shall not dare to ask her to let me call,” he went on, boldly adding, “Beautiful women like you hold the fortunes of the world in your hands to make or mar. We will rule the world—you and I—you with your looks and I with my wits.” Hunt recalled how Wilde “always talked less in italics than in Capitals.”

  A flirtatious Hunt (“out of Botticelli by Burne-Jones” was Ellen Terry’s description) told her diary she had fallen “a little in love” when she and Wilde sat and talked on the window seat, where “there was hardly room for the slip of a girl that I was and the lusty big fellow with the wide, white face, the shapely red mouth and the long lock of straight peasant-like black hair that fell across his fine forehead.” Descriptions of Wilde as a romantic youth do not get any better.

  As dowryless as Florence Balcombe but more seductive, Hunt made any man she was with the center of attention and gloriously vain. Her father, a Newdigate winner from Corpus Christi College, was on the fringes of the Pre-Raphaelites. Ruskin thought him the most promising landscape painter exhibiting, even though he had failed—not for lack of talent but for want of political maneuvering—to be elected to the Royal Academy. Jealous that Ruskin was godfather to her eldest sister, Venice, Hunt waited for a felicitous time to offer herself as his bride.

  That time arrived following the annulment of Ruskin’s marriage, when he fell in love with ten-year-old Rose La Touche but promised to wait until she was eighteen (and he was forty-seven) to propose. Her parents refused this offer, but Ruskin continued to press his suit. When Rose died at the age of twenty-seven, he sank into prolonged melancholia; then thirteen-year-old Violet impetuously announced she would marry him. Margaret Hunt should have discouraged such folly, but she was too ambitious for her husband not to tell Ruskin of the offer, which included another waiting period.

  But Ruskin was fatigued with forbearance. “I really think Violets must be nicer than roses after all—Another three years to wait—though! What a weary life I have of it.” He said he did not like grand faces in women, “but infinitely delicate & soft ones—for instance, Violet and Venice as I can fancy them at eighteen—And the older I grow—the younger I like faces to be—so foolish am I. I don’t think I can possibly care for anybody more than eighteen—unless I’ve known them before.”

  Later Hunt was prepared to marry Wilde. She was enchanted when he called her “the sweetest Violet in England.” Until his American lecture tour, he visited Tor Villa on Sundays to see her and talk with her father, whom he teased about his “wonderful radicalism.” These visits, she said, procured her “an enviable notoriety.” Her memoirs claim that she “as nearly as possible escaped the honour of being Mrs. Wilde.” Her diary records, “I believe that Oscar was really in love with me—for the moment and perhaps more than a moment.”

  In an unpublished version of “My Oscar (a Germ of a Book),” she gives a more accurate story, noting that “all the proposal that got through to me was a single white Eucharist lily without a stalk, reposing on cotton wool in a box, ridiculed by my younger sisters.” In her autobiographical novel, Their Lives (1916), Philip Wynyard (Wilde) wants to marry Christina (Violet) but hesitates because her parents have no money. Finally Christina’s father settles the problem by announcing that he “would never give [his] daughter to him.”

  Although there were opportunities to wed, Hunt preferred a capricious life as the mistress of married literary men such as H. G. Wells and Ford Madox Hueffer (later Ford). Long after her beauty faded and deep wrinkles lined the once stunning eyes, she still talked about Wilde’s proposal. Wilde’s women remembered him fondly in their old age. Florence Stoker kept his view from Moytura on her wall until she died at seventy-eight, a lonely widow nearly blind. “Oscar’s little water-colour creates much envy in the breasts of the Oscar cult,” she told visitors.

  *From 1871 to 1884, Ruskin published monthly booklets under the title Fors Clavigera: Letters to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain, which were intended to provide cultural sustenance for British workers. He tried to put himself on the workers’ level by using terms like “Cockney impudence.” He asked why a man’s hard-earned wages should pay for art that does not reflect reality.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Aesthetes and Dandies

  A man who can dominate a London dinner-table can dominate the world. The future belongs to the dandy. It is the exquisites who are going to rule.

  —A WOMAN OF NO IMPORTANCE

  It took planning, not to mention funds, to become known in London. Wilde spread his credit around West End restaurants but found that the theatre provided the best visibility, with whispers of “There goes Oscar Wilde!” echoing through the stalls. Seen at the Lyceum’s Othello, the ubiquitous Oscar amused everyone, leaning languidly from one box, greeting friends in the stalls, and reappearing in yet another box. During the interval, he was seen with his arm around Bram Stoker’s shoulder. Later he kissed Florence Stoker’s hand on the staircase. It gave him great pleasure to see Florrie in the audience.

  Wilde knew nothing about writing a play except that he wanted to say something rather than sell anything. In the eighties, serious theatre was controlled by the actor-manager Henry Irving, whose parts—other than Shakespearean—were written for him. William Gorman Wills wrote Vanderdecken to satisfy his whim to be the Flying Dutchman but received no royalties. Beyond commissions were the imported Parisian boulevard dramas, plays such as Frou-Frou, La Dame aux camélias, and Le Demi-Monde, and British-produced woman-with-a-past melodramas, which tended to be more sympathetic than their French counterparts. Piles of unsolicited plays gathered dust in the offices of every actor-manager. Few were ever produced.

  A new playwright often began by adapting the plays of Alexandre Dumas fils or Victorien Sardou, authors of the so-called well-made play, which depended on intrigue and contrive
d devices to create suspense. With his disdain for artifice, Shaw dubbed Sardou’s work “Sardoodledom.” Wilde skipped over such apprenticeships and went directly to borrowing techniques, including the famous handbag device in Earnest, to drive his plots.

  It was an unexciting time for new plays, a transition period before Ibsen’s dramas of social realism and Shaw’s social criticism. Arthur Wing Pinero and Henry Arthur Jones were the prominent dramatists. Outspoken but not didactic, Pinero was more interested in motive and psychology than in ideas. The Second Mrs. Tanqueray (1893) and The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith (1895) depict women battling with the stricter moral code, while Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession takes on the evils of prostitution, and Wilde’s A Woman of No Importance turns issues of illegitimacy into a social comedy.

  Born into an affluent family of Portuguese Jewish descent, Pinero had to wait nine years until his father, an Islington solicitor, died to become an actor in the Lyceum company. Irving singled him out to play Claudius in a provincial tour of Hamlet and produced some of his early one-act plays. In 1881, with the success of The Money Spinner at the St. James’s Theatre, he gave up acting and for fifty-seven years averaged a play a year. Unlike Wilde, Pinero disliked self-publicity and seldom took a curtain call on first nights.

  Diligent but uninspired, Jones lacked the style of Pinero, the dialogue of Wilde, and the satiric edge of Shaw, but he loved the drama. He grew up a farmer’s son in Wales and at eighteen saw his first play, an evergreen melodrama called Leah, which was so affecting that he decided to write imitations of other plays.* To that end, he worked by day in a draper’s shop and in the evening saw the same plays over and over. His first production in 1879, A Clerical Error, was followed three years later with the success of The Silver King (written with Henry Herman), but it was a decade until he had a hit with The Middleman.

  Wilde called Pinero “a stage carpenter” with the writing style of “a grocer’s assistant” who produced characters made of dough; he also said he had three rules for writing plays: the first was not to write like Jones and the second and third rules were the same. Even so, Pinero and Jones were the popular dramatists whose plays Wilde saw, so it was inevitable that he borrowed here and there.

  Through his family Wilde was known to the Irish playwrights Dion Boucicault and W. G. Wills. The author of The Corsican Brothers and The Colleen Bawn, Boucicault worked primarily in America. In 1860 he returned to Dublin a national hero and was entertained at Merrion Square when Wilde was six years old. Boucicault’s caricature of the horsey outdoorswoman Lady Gay Spanker in London Assurance appealed to Wilde, as did Forbidden Fruit, whose dual-identity plot resembles that of Earnest. Boucicault wrote good-humored badinage (“Love ends in matrimony, wine in soda water”), but it was thin banter compared with Wilde’s.

  Although he and his father shared Wills’s family name, Wilde did not pursue the connection with the aging dramatist.* He probably thought him pathetic: a playwright who wanted to be a painter, supporting himself by writing showcases for Irving. When Ellen Terry appeared as Queen Henrietta Maria in Wills’s play Charles I in June 1879, Wilde dashed off a sonnet during the third act. Terry said the lines “In the lone tent, waiting for victory, / She stands with eyes marred by the mists of pain, / Like some wan lily overdrenched with rain” conveyed exactly what she tried to portray in the second act. Wilde christened her “Our Lady of the Lyceum,” giving her a Madonna’s halo.

  There was another epiphany for Wilde when Irving opened Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s new play, The Cup, on January 3, 1881. To conceal a thin plot, Irving ordered spectacular sets, including a full-scale Temple of Artemis and a crowd scene with one hundred vestal virgins. One of them was Florence Stoker. Beside himself at the coincidence of Terry and his Florrie sharing the same stage, Wilde sent Terry two crowns of flowers. “Will you accept one of them,” he wrote, “whichever you think will suit you best. The other—don’t think me treacherous, Nellie—but the other please give to Florrie from yourself.” Romantically he added, “I should like to think that she was wearing something of mine the first night she comes on the stage, that anything of mine should touch her. Of course if you think—but you won’t think she will suspect. How could she? She thinks I never loved her, thinks I forget. My God how could I!” Terry went along with the subterfuge. She knew that the Stokers entertained Wilde and that his huffing and puffing was only a love of secrecy and intrigue.

  Wilde sat down and wrote his first play, Vera; or, The Nihilists. Chekhov’s first play, Ivanov, written when he was twenty-seven, had the voice that would write The Seagull and subsequent plays. But the voice that would write The Importance of Being Earnest needed more training. An anachronistic political drama set in Moscow in the late eighteenth century, when there were no nihilists, Vera had a plot based on an incident in 1878, when Vera Zasoulich attempted to assassinate the St. Petersburg police chief for imprisoning her nihilist lover. Championing individualism and sexual freedom, the Nihilists were exotic news in the 1880s. A play about the Irish troubles would not have been wise, but republican feelings could be served with a play about a similar political movement.

  Wilde changed the locale to Moscow, called his heroine Sabouroff, and made the old czar the target. The revolutionary Vera is torn by loyalty to the cause and her love for the czarevich, who promises constitutional reform. There is a bizarre moment when Vera arrives at a secret meeting of revolutionaries wearing a vermilion ball gown underneath a black cloak. It was Lady Wilde center stage. When Vera’s lover becomes the new czar and the next victim, she kills herself, pretending that her bloody dagger was used on her lover. “I have saved Russia,” she exclaims and dies—for love. Wilde said he wanted to express “that Titan cry of the peoples for liberty,” but it was passion, not politics, that interested him. Nihilist Russia was merely the fervent background for a romantic drama. The play suggested support for the monarchy, but the theme favored revolutionary ideas. It was a risky venture to get produced.

  Royally dressed in dark red leather with gold-embossed lettering, Vera was presented to Wilde’s favorite actresses, who he hoped would beg for the leading role. A copyright performance was set for the morning of December 17, 1881, at the Adelphi Theatre with Mrs. Bernard Beere. She was not a Bernhardt, a Terry, or a Modjeska, but Wilde was optimistic; he was convinced that he had written something wonderful.

  Unfortunately, there was another Russian revolutionary named Vera, the leader of the terrorist organization People’s Will. Vera Figner had overseen seven failed attempts to assassinate Czar Alexander II. The eighth succeeded when he died of injuries after a bomb hidden in an Easter cake was tossed into his sleigh as it headed for the Winter Palace on March 13, 1881. The Russian incident—although eight months old—together with the fact that the Prince of Wales, Lillie Langtry’s lover, was married to the sister of the new czarina, made the political content a convenient excuse for Wilde when he postponed the performance; a more probable cause was his inability to raise enough money for the reading.

  Wilde needed recognition, and, like so many poets of his generation, he decided to self-publish a volume of sixty-one poems (mostly sonnets)—thirty of which had previously appeared in magazines. He proposed a skillful marketing strategy: there would be five editions of 250 copies each, issued within a year, with the fifth appearing in 1882. Three American editions were similarly issued in 1881. What a popular poet, he hoped people would say. And only twenty-six years old!

  An epigraph planned—but later discarded—for the title page announced in French what Wilde was too embarrassed to say in English: Mes premiers vers sont d’un enfant, mes seconds d’un adolescent (“My first verses are those of a child, my second those of an adolescent”). An accurate assessment. Once Wilde entered Oxford, classical, pagan, and religious themes supplanted the sensual and flowery.

  As always, he sent copies to Gladstone, Swinburne, Symonds, Arnold, and Robert Browning. He wrote Arnold that he had “only now, too late perhaps, found out how all a
rt requires solitude as its companion.” Of course, Wilde loathed solitude, but he hoped an image of himself as St. Jerome writing in a cell might impress the virtuoso prophet. Arnold replied that he had not read the poems but on the basis of the titles assumed that Wilde had “found out the force of what Byron so insisted on that one must shake off London life before one can do one’s best work.” Arnold was misled by the Hellenic references; still, if Wilde had returned to Greece, he might have, like Byron, entered a new phase as a poet. Instead, in the drawing rooms of America, London, and Paris, he invented a man who became famous for just being himself.

  The critics savaged Poems. Punch called it “Swinburne and water.” His work labeled unoriginal and immoral, Wilde’s only maneuver—popular at the time—was to ask a friend for a laudatory review. Oscar Browning at Cambridge rose to the occasion, writing in the Academy that “England is enriched with a new poet,” noting Wilde’s “fresh, vigorous mind” and his “command of varied and musical language.” It was praise worthy of Wilde himself.

  What hurt most were accusations of insincerity; insincerity was essential to Wilde’s art of multiple masks. And how unfair of the critics to accuse him of unoriginality. They obviously did not understand that if he sounded like Swinburne, he had only improved on one work of art to create a new one. Had not Swinburne stolen from Keats? Did not Brahms use a theme from Beethoven’s Ninth for his first symphony? “I live in terror of not being misunderstood,” he said. The British were indeed Philistines. “I am but too conscious of the fact that we are born in an age when only the dull are treated seriously,” he would complain in “The Critic as Artist.”