THE ‘GOLDEN BOOK’ of Wilde’s early childhood was not really a book at all. The boy grew up surrounded by the traditional Irish folk tales his parents told him, the bulk of which were not published until long after his infancy.
In the nineteenth century, Ireland possessed one of the richest oral cultures in the world. The ancient Bardic schools, in which Irish poets were taught the elaborate art of Gaelic oral poetry, had been forcibly closed by the British plantation settlers of the seventeenth century, as part of the suppression of the culture of the native Catholic popu lation that had accompanied their appropriation of its land. Yet the indigenous culture, and the spirit of the Bards, endured in the per form ances of traditional peasant story-tellers known as seanchaí who specialised in popular folk tales, which they narrated in Gaelic or English.
Wilde’s parents, and many members of their Merrion Square circle, were fascinated by Ireland’s native oral tradition.1 Their interest is noteworthy because they belonged to the Anglo-Irish elite, which had, in many instances, ancestral links with the British settlers and strong cultural ties with England. Educated, English speaking, and almost exclusively Protestant, the Anglo-Irish comprised the overwhelming majority of Ireland’s urban middle and upper class, and formed its professional and governing establishment. They ruled the country under the English Union, which had annexed Ireland to the United Kingdom in 1801.
The Wildes’ interest in Ireland’s Catholic peasant culture was a corollary of their Nationalism. Notwithstanding their Anglo-Irish background, both of Wilde’s parents were passionately committed to the Nationalist cause, which campaigned for the abolition of the English Union. Speranza, who had been brought up a Protestant and who had English blood, vehemently denounced the Union in the fiery words of her verse. She also took the exceptional step of having her children baptised twice – first as Protestants, then as Catholics. Her son’s famous penchant for enjoying the best of both worlds, and for entertaining opposite, and often contradictory, positions, was thus fixed at a very early date.
Wilde’s father, Sir William Wilde, was the finest eye and ear surgeon of his generation, a keen amateur archaeologist and a leading Irish antiquarian. He was also one of the country’s first folklorists. He collected tales from the peasants who came to him for medical treatment, sometimes accepting a story as payment for his services. Many of these tales were recounted in English, but some were narrated in Gaelic, a language in which he was fluent. Sir William garnered hundreds of traditional yarns on his frequent tours of the West of Ireland, from the renowned seanchaí of the region and from the labourers who worked on the estate he owned at Moytura, on the shores of Lough Corrib. During family holidays there, young Oscar often listened to the peasants’ tales in the company of his father. The stories entranced father and son, taking them back, according to one of their neighbours, ‘to the dawn of time, which in Ireland began the day before yesterday’.2
Sir William committed many of the tales he heard to paper, and published a small selection of them in magazines and in the volume Irish Popular Superstitions (1852). Speranza wrote a favourable review of one of his magazine pieces, and it may have been her article that first brought the couple together. Sir William wanted to publish as many of the stories as he could because he believed that print would preserve Ireland’s oral culture, whose existence was seriously threatened by the depopulation caused by the Great Famine of 1845– 49. At his untimely death in 1876, at the age of sixty-two, Sir William’s monumental labour of love remained unfinished. Speranza completed his work, editing and revising the remainder of the transcribed tales, perhaps with the help of her son, for publication, in two books, in the 1880s and 1890s.3 The adult Wilde owned and cherished both volumes. He penned an anonymous notice of one of them in which he described Speranza as an ‘Irishwoman telling Irish stories, impelled by . . . tradition . . . and with a nursery knowledge at first hand of all characteristic moods of the Irish imagination’.4
Wilde’s father, aged around fifty, dressed in the regalia
of the Chevalier of the Swedish North Star.
The folk stories published by the Wildes comprise a teeming, grotesque and luridly coloured world. The chief protagonists are the little people, or the fairies, who are mischievous or malevolent, according to their mood or race. Sometimes they are content simply to upset a milk churn, but woe betide the farmer who takes away their dancing ground, because their retribution is swift and lethal. They take a devilish delight in stealing the most beautiful newborn babes and substituting them with demons. The only means of discovering if a child is a fairy changeling is the terrible trial by fire, in which the baby is thrown on to the flames. In one of the Wildes’ stories a child is hurled into a fire, where it turns into a black cat, then flies up the chimney with a terrifying scream.
It is a typically gruesome and bizarre episode from tales which articulate the very real fear of the fairies then still prevalent among the Irish peasantry and shared perhaps even by high-class Dubliners such as the Wildes.5 The tales record the fate of many children who have been carried off by the little people. They are usually whisked away to fairy palaces of pearl and gold, ‘where they live in splendour and luxury, with music and song and dancing and laughter and all the joyous things, as befits the gods of the earth’. If the fairies are of the Sidhe race they transport their child captives to Tír na nOg, where they pass their lives in pleasure until Judgment Day, when they are annihilated.6
The folk tales Wilde imbibed as a child form an autonomous fairyland, making little concession to the ‘primary’ or everyday world. They eschew ordinary rationale for the weird logic of dreams. Like inventions of the unconscious they are fragmentary, and move swiftly from horror to comedy; they also contain episodes of extreme violence and thinly veiled eroticism. Powerful human desires and impulses are personified in a cast of exemplary and mythical beings including witches, leprechauns, banshees, saints and talking animals. This is, in other words, a literature concerned with the inner land scape of man’s fears and desires. Its realism does not lie in its accurate representation of the external world but in its articulation and excitement of intense feelings and sensations. Wilde’s mother later expressed this idea when she congratulated her son on one of his own fairy stories: ‘no matter’, she said, ‘how strange and fantastic the incidents, yet the pathos, the human pathos is always real’.7
Wilde later objected to works of conventional realism in part because they made little appeal, or reference, to man’s inner world. They offered instead an objective picture of nature, uncoloured by the unconscious or the imagination, which only addressed the reader’s reason. He praised, instead, those artists (and writers) who see the world ‘not merely [with] actual and physical vision, but with that nobler vision of the soul which is as far wider in spiritual scope as it is far more splendid in artistic purpose’.8
Wilde believed that the external world became more significant and familiar when viewed in a ‘mythopoetic’ rather than an objective fashion.9 Nature, he claimed, is brought to life, and becomes identifiable to us, through the stories we tell about it: thus the Greeks, in their myths, ‘peopled the grove and hillside with beautiful and fantastic forms’, in order ‘to make Nature one with humanity’.10
The folk tales that cradled Wilde performed precisely this function. Some of the legends in his parents’ anthologies inspired the place-names of modern Ireland; they include stories in which the deeds of the little people leave indelible marks on the Irish landscape, such as the hollows that are still known in Ireland as ‘fairy glens’. Most of the tales are attached to a particular place: it is as though they have grown up, irresistibly, from their native soil. Wilde loved the legends associated with the area around Lough Corrib, near Cong, in County Mayo, where his family had their country home. As a boy he was told that Finvara, the King of the Fairies, held his court at the Lough; he heard too, that weird female figures, carrying flames in their hands and thought to be the genii loci, haunted the summits of the rocks.11 Sir William decided to have the Wildes’ holiday home built at Moytura because of a tale connected with the place. The house marks the site of the legendary Battle of Magh-Tura fought between the Fir Bolg and the Tuatha-De-Danann tribes. At that bloody clash, at which the sworn enemies contended for lordship over all Ireland, the giant magician Balor was slain when a stone was hurled into his evil eye.
Sir William saw the conflict literally written in the landscape. An inspired amateur archaeologist, he was able to identify the land’s characteristics with the help of an ancient manuscript account of the conflict. On one occasion, wandering over the hills near their home with a copy of the manuscript in his hand, he suddenly stopped and ordered his labourers to dig. Buried beneath the earth they found a square chamber made of flagstones, with a small ornamented urn inside containing human bones, which Sir William believed to be those of a heroic Fir Bolg youth.
Wilde often assisted his father on his archaeological digs, so it is possible the boy witnessed this remarkable act of divination.12 He certainly knew of the discovery, as he would later describe Moytura as ‘a beautiful place which stood upon the scene of the greatest battle in the Irish legends . . . where the ground was full of memories, and crammed with ancient monuments’.13
An account of the find is given in Sir William’s engaging book Lough Corrib: Its Shores and Islands (1867), Wilde’s copy of which has survived. ‘To Oscar,’ reads Sir William’s inscription, ‘on his birthday. With the author’s love. 16 Oct, 1867.’14 It is a rare and beautiful memento of their relationship, and of the time they spent walking and talking their way across the hills and fields of the West of Ireland.
On their rambles, Sir William mapped the land with so many legends, songs and poems that, in the imagination of his boy, the scene and the songs became one. When he fished in Lough Corrib, young Oscar, who was a keen angler, would try to lure the great melancholy carp that lay on its bed by singing them a Gaelic song he had learned from his father, Athá mé in mu codladh, agus ná dúishe mé (I am asleep, do not wake me.)15 Poetry and nature were married in Wilde’s mind and, from a tender age, he believed that words might exercise a supernatural power over the material world.
Wilde adored the scenery of the ‘delightful, heathery, mountainous, lake-filled region’16 of the West no doubt in part because it was so deeply interfused with poetry and myths. Given his bookish vision of the world, it is likely that he saw it directly as a legendary and poetic landscape: ‘This wild mountainous country,’ he said, finding in it an echo of his own name, ‘is in every way magnificent and makes me years younger than actual history records.’17 The idea that the West of Ireland magically preserves one’s youth suggests that it may have been coupled in Wilde’s mind with Tír na nOg, which is apt because the area was believed to be haunted by fairies of the Sidhe race, whose home was the country of the young.
In the stories published by the Wildes, the Celts are portrayed as childlike, sentimental and superstitious; they are ‘a nation of poets’ to whom the presence of God and the invisible powers are ever near. They love ‘splendour, grace of movement, music and pleasure’ and adore beauty above all things. They are protean, airy, generous and sensitive, and contemptuous of logic and common sense.18
Wilde accepted, and indeed exemplified, this idea of the Celtic identity. In the first journalistic profile written about him he describes himself as ‘the offspring of a fervid and emotional race’ to whom ‘the intangible delights of the beautiful are the realities of life’.19 Throughout his writings he celebrates the creativity, quick artistic sense and poetic genius of the Celtic race which, he claims, always ‘leads in Art’.20
There was a political edge to Wilde’s encomia to the Celtic nature. Like his parents, he was, in his own words, a ‘recalcitrant patriot’ who openly criticised England’s control over his country and supported Charles Stewart Parnell’s Home Rule campaign for Irish autonomy; he even joked, on one occasion, that his answer to the ‘Irish Question’ was that the Irish should govern England. His praise of the Celt was often coupled with caustic criticism of Anglo-Saxons. He followed his mother in characterising that race as philistine, rapacious, insensitive to beauty, and suffering from a fatal want of imagination.
The folk tales that nurtured the young Wilde often illustrate political issues. They make explicit reference to events such as the ‘troublous times of’98’ when the English quashed a Nationalist rebellion, as well as to the Great Famine of the 1840s. Stories concerning that tragedy, which many believed to have been the English government’s responsibility, seem to have made a strong impression on the boy: ‘How tragic,’ he said years later, ‘stories of the Irish Famine are! My father . . . used to tell me marvellous tales about it.’21
Like the profusion of poems dedicated to Ossianic lore in the nineteenth century, folk tales (in their published form) were part of the Gaelic cultural revival which celebrated, and also attempted to forge, a strong national Irish identity. This identity would, it was hoped, be capacious enough to appeal to both the Catholic peasantry and to Anglo-Irish Protestants such as the Wildes. The tales and the Ossianic poems certainly succeeded in shaping Wilde’s own cultural identity: ‘French by sympathy, I am Irish by race,’ he proudly declared in adulthood; ‘and the English,’ he added, ‘have condemned me to speak the language of Shakespeare’.22
The folk tales and Ossianic legends formed the landscape of Wilde’s adult imagination. He spoke fondly ‘of the beauty and glamour of the old Celtic legends’,23 and retold Irish folk tales at dinner parties in Paris and London.24 During these performances Wilde imitated, in an alien urban context, the seanchaí he had encountered as a boy in the West of Ireland.
When he picked up his pen too, Wilde drew on the reservoir of images, scenes and phrases he had absorbed in his infancy. His own fairy tales, with their talking animals, ghosts, mermaids and spells, transport us back to the world of Celtic Faëry.25 His novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) also draws on the legends of Tír na nOg, and is saturated with motifs and echoes from Celtic mythology.26 That story fulfils two prophecies his parents made in their anthologies. Speranza hoped that some of the tales would one day inspire a work of genius in a writer of the stature of Goethe; Sir William looked forward to a time ‘When we have a novelist . . . possessing the power of fusing ancient legend with the drama of modern life’. ‘Then, and only then,’ he said, ‘will Irish history be known and appreciated.’27
What was true of Wilde’s art was also true of his life. Fairyland serves as the perfect metaphor for the marvellous worlds of burnished gold he sought to inhabit in his daily existence as well as to create in his books. ‘My father,’ as Wilde’s son Vyvyan put it, ‘lived in a world of his own; an artificial world . . . in which the only things that really mattered were art and beauty.’28 It is indeed tempting to think of Wilde as one of the eternally young, lured away one evening from his bed at Merrion Square by the grace and beauty of a Sidhe fairy and magically conveyed to Tír na nOg, the land from which his heroic Ossianic namesake hailed.