IN 1864, WHEN Wilde was nine years old, he was sent to Portora Royal boarding-school in Enniskillen, which is around a hundred miles north-west of Dublin. Wilde would later claim to have attended the institution for ‘about a year’, yet he was actually there for seven, returning home to Merrion Square only during the vacations. The year 1864 marks a definite, and perhaps a painful, rupture in his life, which had, by all accounts, hitherto been fairly idyllic.
Portora Royal, which was known as ‘The Eton of Ireland’, had a distinctly English ethos. It was one of the ‘Royal Schools of Ulster’, founded at the time of the British plantation of the seventeenth century, and it catered exclusively for the children of elite Anglo-Irish Protestants like the Wildes – most pupils being the sons of colonial officers, landed gentry or high-ranking professionals. Its aim was to mould competent and resilient young men capable of governing the country under the English Union, to instil in them a respect for authority through strict discipline, and to confer on them an awareness of their social and intellectual superiority.
The English Protestant ethos of Portora was reflected in the syllabus. History largely meant English history – a typical exam question being ‘Name the British possessions in Further (Eastern) India.’ Ecclesiastical history began after the Reformation, geography made scant reference to Ireland, and Gaelic found no place in the classroom. To judge by the evidence of a prize Wilde won at the school, it is also likely that the literature taught there was predominantly of the English variety. He was awarded a two-volume History of English Literature by G.L. Craik, who argues that ‘Irish language and literature [cannot] with propriety be included in a history of the English language’ because they exercised no influence upon it.1
Pupils were expected to know the Protestant King James Bible almost by heart, and Wilde mastered it better than most. He won a prize for Scripture studies at Portora, receiving, as his award, Joseph Butler’s theological book The Analogy of Religion. He must have disliked the volume intensely – twenty years later he would recall it when he drew up a list of books which he advised people ‘not to read’.2 Wilde probably resented having to learn the Holy Book parrot fashion – he later said that forcing the Bible on young children destroyed for them its charm and enchantment. His schoolboy labours would bear rich and abundant fruit, however, in his mature writings, which are saturated with stories, themes and phrases from the King James Bible. Wilde’s intimate acquaintance with that book was one of Portora’s most significant and enduring legacies to him.
Wilde also excelled in French. His copy of Voltaire’s Histoire de Charles XII, bears the autograph and date ‘Oscar Wilde September 2nd 1865’, which makes it the very first book known to have been in his possession. On page 171 the ten-year-old boy has written the words ‘Oscar 8 November 1865’, no doubt to mark his remarkable progress with the demanding French text.3
Wilde was far less adept at science, and he regarded both the subject and its master as faintly ridiculous. His spectacular incompetence at mathematics was the one glaring blemish on his school record. This probably tarnished his otherwise excellent academic reputation, because Portora’s headmaster regarded mathematics and Classics as the two most important subjects on the curriculum.4
Wilde redeemed himself with his performance in Classics. He was one of the finest classical students in the school, and would go on to become one of the most pre-eminent classicists of his generation in England and Ireland. It is likely that Wilde had a head start on his companions. His mother was widely read in the classics, the ‘Roman orators and the Greek tragedians’ being among her favourite authors.5 She was particularly fond of the works of Greek dramatist Aeschylus and the philosophical dialogues of Plato, which, according to her, constituted the ideal manual for those wishing to shine in intellectual conver sation. As these predilections were shared by her son, the chances are that she introduced these writers to him during his childhood. Wilde was probably familiar with some of the classical volumes contained in Sir William’s library, which included several titles from the ‘Oxford Classics’ series, along with a Greek Testament and Liddell and Scott’s folio-size Greek lexicon. The collection also boasted a copy of Lemprière’s Dictionary of Greek myths, which must have fascinated a boy steeped in Celtic mythology and folklore.
From an early age Wilde displayed a preference for Greek language and literature over Latin. This may have been due to the light and melodic nature of Greek, compared to the heavier, more precise, Latin language. Wilde spoke of the rich ‘music of vowelled Greek’6 and described the idiom of the most famous of all ancient Greek poets as a species of word-music, characterising Homer as ‘a true singer’, who builds ‘his song out of music’.7 Wilde also loved the luminous quality of the language, later likening his perusal of a Greek Testament, after years of reading the King James Bible, to ‘going into a garden of lilies out of some narrow and dark house’.8 Its vividness inspired in him visions of rich sensual beauty at Portora. ‘I seemed to see,’ he recalled, ‘the white figures throwing purple shadows on the sun-baked palæstra; bands of nude youths and maidens . . . moving across a background of deep blue as on the frieze of the Parthenon . . . [I] read Greek eagerly for love of it all, and the more I read the more I was enthralled.’9
Unlike Latin, Greek was, too, unencumbered with the baggage of cultural imperialism and the suppression of nationalist vernaculars. Under the Roman Empire culture and language had been monolithic and imposed from the capital, but in ancient Greece the cultures of a number of independent city-states had flourished. Wilde’s 1887 review of a volume called Greek Life and Thought suggests that this political consideration may have informed his predilection for Greek. In it, he strongly objects to the book’s virulent attacks on the ideal of the independent Greek city-state.
The real subject of the review is English rule in Ireland. Greek Life and Thought contains explicit and disdainful references to the Home Rule movement, which Speranza’s son supported wholeheartedly. Wilde champions the ‘political value of autonomy and the intellectual [and artistic] importance of a healthy national life’, condemning the coercive politics of ‘Bloody’ Arthur Balfour, England’s Chief Secretary to Ireland at the time.10
Aesthetic bliss and nationalist politics are unlikely, however, to have been uppermost in the minds of those who made Classics one of the cornerstones of Portora’s curriculum. It was hoped that, through the study of Greek and Latin, ‘all the intellectual faculties’ of the student would be ‘strengthened’. This aim manifested itself in a system of grammatical rote learning designed to sharpen the mind and discipline the memory. The pupil was taught, ‘through grind and repetition’,11 the bewildering mysteries of sentence structure, verbs and linguistic gender. It is hardly surprising that Latin or Greek grammar books inspired loathing in the students. Indeed there is something highly appropriate in the fact that, when disobedient schoolboys were caned, they traditionally bit on classical grammar books to help them endure the pain.12
Unlike many of his companions, Wilde probably enjoyed his grammar lessons. Surviving copies of his classics books – which contain copious and meticulous annotations concerning syntax and grammar – and his dazzling success in classical examinations, which focused on linguistic issues, suggest that he was, in his own words, a lover of the ‘small points’13 of language and literature. A contemporary remembered Wilde as ‘one of the very few students who could grasp the nuances of the various phases of the Greek Middle Voice and of the vagaries of Greek conditional clauses’.14
Having mastered the linguistic minutiae, Wilde was among the handful of boys capable of appreciating the aesthetic qualities of the classical texts. He was particularly accomplished in translation and original composition. ‘The flowing beauty of his oral translations in class, whether of Thucydides, Plato, or Virgil, was,’ one of his peers recalled, ‘a thing not easily to be forgotten.’ He ‘startled everyone’, too, ‘in the classical medal examination, by walking easily away from us all in the viva voce on [Aeschylus’s] Agamemnon’,15 in which the pupils were asked to translate various lines from the Greek tragedy.
Wilde’s real forte was Greek composition. The composition of first-rate original poems in classical Greek is extremely difficult; it is a skill that few classical scholars today command. The student was asked to perfect a wide variety of Greek poetic forms, and to imitate diverse literary styles. It was, in other words, principally a technical exercise with an emphasis on linguistic and stylistic competence, rather than on self-expression. Wilde’s gift for imitation, as well as his mastery of a vast repertoire of poetic forms, is evidenced by the verse he published in adulthood. In that poetry passionate themes and feelings, which may derive from his childhood immersion in Romantic verse, are often expressed with a restraint and technical precision acquired, in part, from his study of the classics.
Wilde’s peers remarked on his long flowing locks, and his inordinate love of beautiful clothes. His intense passion for elegant volumes also excited comment in the classrooms. ‘We noticed,’ one schoolboy recalled, ‘that he always liked to have editions of the classics that were of stately size with large print.’16 It was perhaps the first time that Wilde used books as props for the exhibition of his public persona.
There is conflicting evidence, however, regarding Wilde’s juvenile bibliophilia. Far from being exquisite editions issued for the delectation of a bibliomane, the classical volumes that have survived from his student years are all standard school and college editions published in cheap and unattractive small print formats.17
On the other hand, Wilde did spend a vast amount of money on books at Portora, where there was no real need to do so, as the boys had the use of a lending library. His book bill for 1871 came to £11 5s. 9d. – a huge sum considering the annual board and tuition fees were only £4518 and the price of most books no more than a few shillings. It is possible that he purchased, with this money, some of the beautiful ‘half bound vellum’19 editions of the classics that later stood on the shelves at Tite Street but which have not survived. On the balance of the evidence, it seems likely that the man who famously liked to have it both ways probably owned two sets of the classics at school – one for study, the other for aesthetic pleasure and public display.
Wilde was set apart from his fellows by the keen delight he took in some of his studies. ‘Understanding and knowledge,’ he recalled, ‘came to me through pleasure, as [they] always come . . .’20 A contemporary remarked on his ‘real love for intellectual things, especially if there was a breath of poetry in them’. It was always Wilde, too, he remembered, who interrupted a lesson to ask the master a philosophical question that would instigate ‘a disquisition on Realism and Nominalism and Conceptualism in which we were all asked questions and which proved most illuminating’.21
The other boys were equally impressed by Wilde’s vigorous and colourful imagination. He delighted them with fantastic stories and descriptions of ‘what I should have done had I been Alexander, or how I’d have played King in Athens, had I been Alcibiades’. In his performances he displayed an extraordinary facility for entering entirely into the world of books. ‘As early as I can remember,’ he said, ‘I used to identify myself with every distinguished character I read about . . . The life of books had begun to interest me more than real life’.22
As ‘real life’ meant regimented boarding-school life, Wilde’s comment is hardly surprising. The heaviness and solidity of a world where the importance of hierarchy, authority and discipline were either beaten into the boys or inculcated through various forms of propaganda must have appeared oppressive to one born, and brought up, for exceptions rather than rules. Portora was, in many ways, the converse of Merrion Square. It made little appeal to his poetic and oral sensibility, or to the Celtic, Nationalistic and ‘Catholic’ aspects of his identity. This may explain why Wilde rarely spoke of his time at the school, claiming instead to have been educated at home.
In 1867 Wilde had to face something far more terrible than tedium: on 23 February his little sister Isola, the ‘radiant angel’ and ‘idol’ of the family, died of an ‘effusion of the brain’.23 Wilde was given leave to visit her during her final illness. The doctor who attended the ten-year-old girl described young ‘Ossie’ as overwhelmed by an ‘inconsolable grief’ which would find expression in ‘long and frequent visits to his sister’s grave’.24
It is little wonder then that the young Wilde sought sanctuary in books. He remembered gorging himself on ‘English novels and poetry’ at Portora and ‘dreaming away too much time’ to master some of his schoolboy tasks. Unlike other pupils, who ‘studied the schoolbooks assiduously’, he elected to ‘read everything that pleased me’ – and it was very fortunate for Wilde that classical books happened to charm him.25 His instinct was already guided by the artistic pleasure principle; even at that early stage, he had no doubt that his instinct was true.
It would be misleading, however, to caricature Wilde as a typically Romantic schoolboy who retreated from the monotony, toughness and tragedy of life into an imaginary world of literature. His adolescent immersion in books is certainly not the equivalent of an occasion when, during a childhood holiday, he ran away from his family to hide in a cave. On the contrary, there was something ostentatiously public about Wilde’s bookishness at Portora – he made sure that his fellows knew of his intellectual precocity, and of his passion for literature. Books were sources of social power and distinction for Wilde, conferring on him a sense of uniqueness and superiority. This was confirmed publicly at examinations and prize-givings where he basked in the applause of the entire school.