Oscar Wilde Read online

  This insult led to the libel action Whistler v. Ruskin, heard on November 25, 1878, in Westminster Hall. By taking the acknowledged arbiter of British taste to court, Whistler sought to determine the nature of art and individual aesthetics. Ruskin claimed he wrote the truth, putting the onus on Whistler to prove that this truth was also a lie. Wilde, like anybody else who bothered to open a newspaper, read about the confrontation and was pleased to see his philosophy of the truth in lies argued before the Court of Exchequer.

  Whistler and Wilde were yet to meet, but Wilde knew a bit about the dandy artist who would befriend him and then attack him, claiming that Wilde had borrowed artistic theories for his own use. He knew that Whistler had spent his childhood in St. Petersburg and, following expulsion from West Point, had lived as a bohemian in Paris. Whistler arrived in London in 1859 at age twenty-five to blitz the Royal Academy and by 1872 had painted the famous portraits of the little white girl and his mother.

  Resplendent in a double-breasted suit of navy blue serge, Whistler jousted with the attorney general, finally admitting that his painting had taken but two days to complete. “The labor of two days, then,” he was asked, “is that for which you ask two hundred guineas?” “No,” Whistler triumphantly replied, “I ask it for the knowledge of a lifetime.” The jury found that, although there was a technical libel, Ruskin had published fair criticism. Whistler received a farthing in damages, giving him the same symbolic victory as Mary Travers’s in Lady Wilde’s libel trial.

  Whistler was wearing the farthing on his watch chain when he and Wilde formally met in 1879. The meeting took place at Frank Miles’s studio, on the top floor of a dark, haunting three-story building at 13 Salisbury Street, off the Strand. One poseur greeted the other, and the competition began. When Wilde came down from Oxford and took the floor below the studio, he appraised his new address and christened it Thames House for its best feature: a river view. A penchant for naming friends now extended to homes.

  The first artist known for being known, Whistler was an outsider who became a celebrity without reinventing himself—as Wilde did—as an Englishman. Wilde discarded his Irish brogue, but Whistler amplified his brusque Yankee accent. Whistler entertained with American breakfasts of pancakes and maple syrup; Wilde preferred the egg-and-sausage-laden buffets of Oxford. In his white suits and lavender hat, Whistler had a sense of style as pretentious as anything Wilde ever fabricated. In an age of mass journalism, he realized as Wilde would that there was no bad publicity. Ellen Terry called them the most remarkable men she had ever known. “There was something about both of them,” she said, “more instantaneously individual and audacious than it is possible to describe.”

  Wilde admitted to being an artist and, if pressed on what he did, then a poet. When Oxford’s Aestheticism became too transparent, he withdrew into his mythic self, a Celtic phenomenon known as a shape-shifter, one with the ability to become anything: a wave, an animal, another person. His favorite legendary warrior was Cuchulain, who inflated himself to gigantic proportions and turned different colors to frighten the enemy. In the process of swelling himself up, Wilde did not set boundaries, finding it impossible to embrace egotism and ambition at the same time. The instinct to see life as a humorous tragedy was too strong and the addiction to his own conversation too irresistible. “I hate people who talk about themselves, as you do, when one wants to talk about oneself, as I do,” complains the rocket in Wilde’s fable on vanity, “The Remarkable Rocket.” After nearly a year in London, Wilde was disappointed with his progress; he wrote Harding that he had not “set the world quite on fire as yet.”

  Neither had he published any poetry since Oxford. The paper on his writing table went dusty from disuse; he thought and talked more than he wrote and was easily distracted by the stairs creaking as visitors climbed past his sitting room to the studio. Miles’s reputation as a quick-sketch artist drew an eclectic audience, including Prince Leopold, Walter Sickert and Whistler, Ellen Terry and Sarah Bernhardt. Opening the door was Sally, a violet seller and occasional model rescued from the streets to serve tea and entertain with her Cockney accent (a calculated ambience that blurred class differences). No matter that the furniture was rickety, the cutlery mismatched, the wine cheap, and the sausage dry, the visitors were the atmosphere. Lord Henry’s wife tells Dorian: “You must come. I can’t afford orchids, but I spare no expense in foreigners. They make one’s rooms look so picturesque.”

  The Comédie-Française seldom left Paris, but the theatre had to close for repairs and a six-week London season was scheduled at the Gaiety Theatre in the summer of 1879. Wilde and the actor Norman Forbes-Robertson planned a welcome at Folkstone when Sarah Bernhardt—not yet an international star but an actress with a shameless reputation—arrived on the Le Havre ferry. Wilde threw an armful of lilies at her feet, shouting: “Hip, hip, hurrah! and a cheer for Sarah Bernhardt!”

  Bernhardt feared the British as an “alien public,” but when they applauded her entrance in Phèdre, she said to herself: “Yes, yes—you’ll see—I shall give you my blood, my life, my soul.” For the first time, Wilde said, he “realised the sweetness of the music of Racine.” He christened her “the Divine Sarah.” Enthusiasm bubbled over into a sonnet that concluded:

  For thou wert weary of the sunless day,

  The heavy fields of scentless asphodel,

  The loveless lips with which men kiss in Hell.

  Wilde asked his brother to intercede and have the sonnet printed in The World, and nine days later Wilde read his first published work since arriving in London.

  Wilde installed himself as the actress’s unofficial secretary, arriving backstage with flowers and a subdued fondness. “Most men who are civil to actresses and render them services have an ulterior motive,” Bernhardt said. “It is not so with Oscar Wilde. He was a devoted attendant, and did much to make things pleasant and easy for me in London, but he never appeared to pay court.” Bernhardt thought men wanted her only as a woman; Wilde wanted her as the star of his first but yet unwritten play and dreamed of casting her as Queen Elizabeth I, wearing “monstrous dresses covered with peacocks and pearls!”

  Lillie Langtry was twenty-three when Wilde met her in 1877 at Miles’s studio. A Pre-Raphaelite beauty with a graceful neck, straight nose, pale skin, full breasts, broad hips, and golden brown hair loosely knotted at the nape of her neck, she was, Wilde thought, “the loveliest woman in Europe.” There was an immediate rapport between them. Langtry recalled his “great eager eyes” and a face “so colourless that a few pale freckles of good size were oddly conspicuous,” and she remarked on “a well-shaped mouth, with somewhat coarse lips and greenish-hued teeth.”

  Physically, there was little except Wilde’s eyes and voice to delight her. What she admired most was his showmanship, which she adapted to serve her own needs. “She is more than a mystery—she is a mood” was an apt description, which he used in A Woman of No Importance. Langtry was the first woman to arouse Wilde’s passionate nature, and he was constantly at her side: they attended lectures on Greek art; he taught her Latin; they fussed over her limited wardrobe.

  Emilie Charlotte Le Breton was the only daughter of the dean of Jersey, who (in common with Wilde’s father) was answerable for more than one illegitimate child. At twenty-one she married the thirty-year-old Irish widower Edward Langtry, a yachtsman with shipping interests in Belfast, who soon was bankrupt. In mourning for her brother until she could afford a new gown, Mrs. Langtry, as she was called in society, made herself the center of any group in a severe black dress brightened only by lace collar and cuffs.

  Artists noticed her at one of Lady Sebright’s parties in the spring of 1876. Millais painted her as an ingenuous country girl in a portrait called The Jersey Lily. Whistler and Frederick Leighton had her sit for them. “Lillie Langtry happens to be, quite simply,” said Millais, “the most beautiful woman on earth.” Edward John Poynter posed her in a Grecian-style yellow gown, and when Wilde admired the portrait, she in
sisted he keep it to replace the unfinished landscape on the ubiquitous easel. Frank Miles made hundreds of India-ink sketches that he sold as originals or reproduced as postcards. The camera and printing press had created a new audience for cheap reproductions, and Langtry’s picture sold everywhere.

  Wilde christened her “the Lily,” and she scrawled her name on the white wall in his sitting room when she was known only for being beautiful. The Salisbury Street coterie delighted in descriptions of parties she attended where there were “striped awnings, linkmen with flaring torches; powdered footmen; soaring marble staircases; tiaras, smiling hostesses; azaleas in gilt baskets; white waistcoats, violins, elbows sawing the air, names on pasteboard cards, quails in aspic, macédoine, strawberries and cream.”

  When she became the favorite of the Prince of Wales, the future Edward VII, Wilde saw less of his Lily. She moved with her husband to 17 Norfolk Street, off Park Lane, where Whistler painted a baroque sky on the drawing-room ceiling and gilded palm-leaf fans on the plum-colored walls and put floating water lilies in flat blue-glass bowls. During a country house weekend with the prince, she wrote to ask Wilde’s advice on what to wear to the fancy-dress ball. After she failed to reach him, she told him she had designed “a soft black Greek Dress with a fringe of silver crescents and stars and diamond ones in my hair and on my neck and called it Queen of the Night.” Wilde thought the jewels detracted from the dress’s classical lines.

  Wilde pledged to dedicate a sonnet to the Lily. According to his mythologizing, he slept in her doorway for inspiration—a cold, uncomfortable, and undignified night. Hardly a poet’s place. Still, he convinced others he did and made the point that “there is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.” “The New Helen,” published in The World shortly after the sonnet to Bernhardt, was inscribed “To Helen, formerly of Troy, now of London.” One verse recalls unrequited love:

  The lotus-leaves which heal the wounds of Death

  Lie in thy hand: O, be thou kind to me,

  While yet I know the summer of my days;

  For hardly can my tremulous lips draw breath

  To fill the silver trumpet with thy praise,

  So bowed am I before thy mystery;

  So bowed and broken on Love’s terrible wheel,

  That I have lost all hope and heart to sing,

  Yet care I not what ruin time may bring

  If in thy temple thou wilt let me kneel.

  “Roses and Rue,” written after Wilde’s marriage, was dedicated “To L.L.”:

  “You have only wasted your life”—

  (Ah! there was the knife!)

  Those were the words you said,

  As you turned your head.

  I had wasted my boyhood, true,

  But it was for you.

  You had poets enough on the shelf,

  I gave you myself!

  Another actress he hoped would star in his unwritten play was Helen Modjeska, who made her London debut in 1880 at the advanced age of thirty-six. She thought it improper to go to tea with such a youth, so they met in her dressing room at the Royal Court Theatre. “What has he done, this young man,” Modjeska finally asked a colleague in her Polish accent, “that one meets him everywhere? Oh yes he talks well, but what has he done? He has written nothing, he does not sing or paint or act—he does nothing but talk. I do not understand.”

  Wilde answers similar criticism of his alter ego Lord Goring in An Ideal Husband. “How can you say such a thing?” asks Mabel Chiltern. “Why, he rides in the Row at ten o’clock in the morning, goes to the Opera three times a week, changes his clothes at least five times a day, and dines out every night of the season. You don’t call that leading an idle life, do you?”

  Modjeska had left Warsaw and a promising career in 1876 to learn English and perform in America, working toward her goal of acting Shakespeare in London, an ambition she fulfilled as Juliet to Forbes-Robertson’s Romeo. During her run at the Royal Court, Wilde saw her open in La Dame aux camélias and then in Adrienne Lecouvreur and Maria Stuart, a success that prompted Henry James to say that the principal ornament of the English stage was a Polish actress in a German play.

  To give the restless young man with the armfuls of flowers a meaningful task, Modjeska asked him to translate a poem she had written called “Sen Artysty.” Polish was not one of Wilde’s languages, although he may have told Madame differently, but a dictionary and a sense of style were all he needed to ready “The Artist’s Dream” for publication in The Green Room, a theatre magazine. A translation credit impressed him but provided no money for his creditors. His career as a poet was too needful of muses to prosper.

  Merrion Square was sold in 1879 to pay Sir William’s debts, and with it went any likelihood that Lady Wilde and Willie would remain in Dublin. Willie had failed to establish a reputation as a barrister or to attract a wealthy wife; he also failed, before his brother, as a playwright with two dramas—French Polish and Evening Stream—published but never performed. Bored with Ireland and the Irish, he told Margaret Campbell: “They are all so alike over here—same set, same talk, same ideas, same shallowness.… Society’s almost as deep—well—as a frozen rink—i.e., six inches.”

  He earned drinking money by filing social briefs to The World, the London weekly that published his brother’s sonnets. A typical entry described what Campbell wore to a soiree at the Royal Irish Academy: “a charming ‘dull gold’ dress (combined with a coiffure peculiarly artistic and aesthetic) that many heads turned round to look at. I am afraid I cannot quite describe the colour; but I fancy (it is a pretty antiquarian council) that it must resemble the sheen of some gold vase or bracelet just flashed into the sunlight by Dr. Schliemann from the darkness of one of his Mycenae tombs.”

  Reluctant to sever ties with Ireland, Wilde ignored his mother’s letter asking him to find a suite of rooms in Salisbury Street, near Number 13, if possible. Willie finally found lodgings at One Ovington Square in Rensington, off the Brompton Road, a suitable distance away. The bailiffs arrived at Merrion Square and took possession. Lady Wilde sat in the foyer and watched the commotion as if in a trance. On May 7 she left Ireland forever. Wilde returned only twice, and then only to lecture.

  At fifty-eight, Lady Wilde was still a fighter, impatient to publish and compete with her sons as she had with her husband. By any measure she was the most prolific and wrote for a range of specialized publications: the estimable Pall Mall Gazette, known for its serious literary and political coverage; the Queen, a weekly for women; and the Burlington Magazine, which appealed to the upper classes; as well as the St. James Magazine, Tinsley’s, and Lady’s Pictorial. By 1881 she could afford a move to 116 Park Street off Grosvenor Square, where she reestablished her salon. Willie still lived under the maternal roof.

  In Dublin she had no rival as a hostess, as she boasted to her Scottish friend: “Beauty is the grand characteristic of the Dublin Belles, so in that department I leave them undisturbed in possession of their domain and am content with undisputed sovereignty in mine.” In London it was a crowded field, with many elegant ladies vying for important names. Known as a welcoming stop for arriving Irish artists, including Shaw and Yeats, Park Street was always crowded on Saturdays, airless and dark. Enthroned behind the tea table, Lady Wilde resembled a female Buddha. Eventually, her son Oscar was the major attraction.

  A Member of St. Stephen’s Club on the Victoria Embankment, Wilde knew London’s West End haunts from his Oxford days. A perfect evening—if he had enough shillings or if someone else was paying—was a stall seat at the theatre and supper afterward at the Café Royal. As a theatregoer, he planted himself firmly in the front of the house: boxes, stalls, and dress circle—in that order. While growing up in Dublin, Wilde had received his theatrical education in the pit at the Theatre Royal or the Queen’s, venues that attracted touring stars such as Barry Sullivan, Dion Boucicault, and Geneviève Ward. As an aspiring playwright, he saw the au
dience as an extension of the play—an inspired audience made a successful play.

  Wilde’s favorite actor was Henry Irving, who ruled the Lyceum Theatre in the Strand along with his former Trinity classmate Bram Stoker, who as manager greeted first-night patrons at the top of the gilded double staircase. Irving had played Dublin many times before he became Britain’s leading actor in 1878, revealing a power to make the viewer see the character, not the actor. Irving’s receptive temperament, Wilde said in “The Soul of Man Under Socialism,” came from achieving “his own perfection as an artist” and from refusing to give the public what it wanted.

  Destined to be the first actor knighted, Irving was, in Wilde’s words, a “vivid personality.” It was said that only William Gladstone and Cardinal Manning attracted as much attention in public. Caricaturists ridiculed the actor’s walk, drawing him with bent knees and back or a dragging leg like that of the Aesthete in Iolanthe. Irving was always self-conscious about his walk; onstage he moved with a springing motion almost like dancing. Playing with the vocabulary of Aestheticism, Wilde described Irving’s legs as “limpid and utter. Both are delicately intellectual, but his left leg is a poem.” A sonnet lauding his classical roles has this memorable last line: “Thou trumpet set for Shakespeare’s lips to blow!”

  Irving was touched by Wilde’s “childish love of the romantic candlelit theatre” that he had created. When Oxford inaugurated its first drama society in 1885 with a performance of Henry IV, Wilde noted in the Dramatic Review what Irving had always wanted for the acting community: academic recognition. “Why should not degrees be granted for good acting?” he asked. “Are they not given to those who misunderstand Plato and who mistranslate Aristotle? And should the artist be passed over? No.” On his way to a knighthood, Irving entertained on a lavish scale. Wilde was often present at the intimate (usually men only) dinners in the Beefsteak Room, tucked away backstage. On the occasion of the hundredth night of The Merchant of Venice, the Lyceum stage was struck and transformed into a flowering pavilion of scarlet and white. Wilde was there and read a sonnet to Ellen Terry as Portia.