WHEN WE TRY TO envisage Wilde’s early experiences of literature we should not primarily think of him curled up in bed with his head in a book – an image familiar to us from the childhoods of Dickens or Proust. Instead, we must picture that almost unimaginable thing: an Oscar Wilde who sits in silence and listens to others. He is listening to his parents’ voices, the one powerful and rotund, the other excitable, shrill and volatile, as they narrate traditional tales or recite verse. In his childhood, Wilde did not encounter literature exclusively, or perhaps even chiefly, in printed form – it was poured into the portals of his ears.
The set of brilliant Anglo-Irish intellectuals who regularly congregated at the Wildes’ house at No. 1 Merrion Square evidently believed that the Celtic soul best expressed itself in the sociable and physical medium of ‘living speech’. Rhymers such as the Catholic convert Aubrey de Vere would often recite their verses at the Wildes’ receptions; members of the coterie also put on some of Shakespeare’s plays. The intellectual discussions Wilde heard at his parents’ dinner table were, too, a crucial part of his oral literary upbringing. He is described as having ‘at eight years old, heard every subject demolished at his father’s dinner table, where were to be found not only the brilliant geniuses of Ireland, but also the celebrities of Europe and America’. It was here ‘that the best of his early education was obtained’.1
This description of the dinner table arguments at Merrion Square calls to mind the Greek symposium evoked by Plato. It is quite possible that the debates were modelled on classical lines, because Speranza referred to them as ‘Athenian converse with the best minds’.2 Over the course of the discussion, anecdotes and stories were told, to illustrate a point or simply to entertain, Sir William being renowned as one of the finest storytellers in Dublin. Aphorisms would often illuminate the discourse – Speranza held that epigrams were far more effective than rational arguments. Books were constantly referred to and précised; quotations were cited, or perhaps made up. The debates were a wonderful example of the happy marriage of the oral and the written literary traditions, a union of which Wilde would be the brilliant child.*
The young Wilde was brought up by his mother to regard poetry as the apotheosis of oral literature. In a preface to one of her own volumes of verse, Speranza encourages the reader to recite the poems aloud.4 Her delight in declaiming poetry is well documented. On one occasion, during one of the Wildes’ intermittent periods of financial embarrassment, the bailiffs called at Merrion Square. Loftily ignoring them, Speranza lay down on the sofa with a copy of the plays of the Greek tragedian Aeschylus, from which she proceeded to recite passages with ‘exalted enthusiasm’.5
In a letter Speranza describes the way Wilde’s brother’s ‘pretty graceful head’ would rest on her shoulder while she read ‘ “The Lady Clare” to him from Tennyson or . . . [Longfellow’s] “Hiawatha”, two favourites of his’.6 This may surely also stand as an emblem of young Oscar’s experi ence. Willie Wilde was only three years old when Speranza wrote her letter, a remarkably early age at which to acquire a personal, and indeed discerning, taste in literature. Oscar must have been intro duced to verse at an equally tender age; indeed, there may be some truth in his later claim to have been acquainted with the work of Walt Whitman ‘almost from the cradle’.7
The experience of hearing his mother recite verse taught Wilde that poetry is primarily an oral art. In adulthood he recited from memory poets such as Shakespeare and Charles Baudelaire in the company of his friends; he also gave public performances of his own verse. Wilde learned that a poem’s sound should be savoured above all of its other qualities – an idea perhaps inculcated by a steady infant diet of Longfellow and Tennyson. In later life, he lingered lovingly over musical words such as ‘amber’ and ‘narcissus’, even licking his lips with bliss as he pronounced them. He thrilled to melodious poetic phrases, declaring Tennyson’s line ‘Now lies the Earth all Danaë to the stars’ to be poetry at its most perfect. He also derived intense pleasure from beautiful examples of alliteration, evincing a particular fondness for the seventeenth-century poet Andrew Marvell’s line ‘Like golden lamps in a green night’.
Wilde absorbed from his mother the idea that poetry is essentially a form of word music: instead of attempting to convey a message or trying to represent the ‘real’ world, verse should offer listeners intense sensual pleasure through its melody. When he later recited his own verse Wilde ‘chanted’ it in his ‘melodious Irish voice’.8 ‘Chant’ was a word Speranza used to describe her own recitations, so perhaps Wilde deliberately imitated his mother in his public performances.9 He would employ the same musical term in his famous definition of the poet as a singer who builds ‘his song out of music, repeating each line over and over again to himself till he has caught the secret of its melody, chaunting in the darkness the words that are winged with light’.10
For Wilde, poetry was a potent form of magic, and the poet a sort of magus. ‘Words!’ he wrote, ‘Mere words! How terrible they were! . . . what a subtle magic there was in them! They seemed to be able to give a plastic form to formless things . . . Was there anything so real as words?’11 Poetical words, he believed, give form to inchoate feelings; indeed with ‘their mystical power over the soul’, they often create ‘the feeling from which [they] should have sprung’.12
Wilde’s idea of poetry as a species of magical word music may have been derived from the Irish Bards. His parents regaled him with stories of that ancient order, many of which are included in their anthologies of folklore. According to these yarns, Bards recited poetry from memory, or gave extempore recitals comprised of stock motifs, to the accompaniment of a golden harp. Their gift derived from the magical Bardic potion or from the fairies, whose delicate and captivating music was said to enter their souls as they lay sleeping. This is eminently appropriate, for the Bards often ‘swayed the hearts of their hearers as they chose, to love or war, joy or sadness, as if by magic influence, or lulled them into the sweet calm of sleep’.13 Bards also commanded the power of prophecy and the power of the curse.
The Bards generally resided at the courts of kings, where their supernatural powers and the enchantment of their song secured them a status second only to that of their regal lords. They were allowed, as a special privilege, to wear clothes of four colours, ‘a state of things’, Wilde commented, ‘which I would wish to see revived for the benefit of modern poets’.14 This aside suggests, in its witty way, that the Bards were not merely historical curiosities for him, but the archetypal ancestors of modern rhymers. When Wilde remarks, in ‘The Decay of Lying’, that the imaginative ‘liar’ will one day ‘lead’ society, we may read this as a veiled prophecy that the Bards will regain their prominent place in the world, in the modern guise of the ‘liar’ or storyteller.15 Wilde himself would later charm and ‘lead’ London society by the performances of his stories he gave at dinner parties. Both here and in his essentially oral method of composition he may have been consciously assuming the mantle of the Bards. That is certainly how it appeared to his friends, one of whom said that Wilde had ‘inherited the soul of some far away bard who invented his chants as he sang them’.16
* In later life, Wilde would become a master of the oral arts. He was widely acknowledged as one of the greatest storytellers of his, or perhaps any, age.3 In his critical writings, he argued that the true test of literature was the spoken word, and urged writers to ‘return to the voice’. And this is precisely what he did himself. Not only did he excel, as an author, in ‘oral’ forms such as the dialogue and the drama, but virtually all of his works began life as stories he told to friends. His writings contain a conspicuous oral residue, too, with their stock characters, formulas and elaborate repetitions. This is why we are often compelled to read them aloud.