SO YOUNG WILDE often put his schoolbooks to one side, and turned instead to poetry and English fiction.1 He would have read on his rambles around Portora’s extensive and beautiful grounds, which encompassed copses of oak trees and a large lake, and in his dormitory before lights out. Although there was nothing exceptional about his schoolboy penchant for English novels, his taste was eccentric enough to inspire comment. His peers were surprised to hear him speak disparagingly of Dickens, the most popular novelist of the day. While Wilde admired the author’s humour and his gift for caricature he loathed Dickens’s moralising.2
Wilde’s fellow pupils remarked on his veneration of the novels of Benjamin Disraeli, so it must have been a fairly unusual literary passion at Portora. The accepted wisdom on the works of the flamboyant Tory politician, who was Prime Minister for a few months in 1868, while Wilde was still at school, was that they were ‘caviare to the general’ reading public because of their ‘pretentiousness, affectation, false English’ and charlatanism.3 True to form, Wilde’s mother begged to differ, ranking Disraeli way above George Eliot and recommending him, along with Plato, as the ideal guide for those who wished to talk brilliantly in society.
Speranza literally passed her passion on to her youngest son by lending him several Disraeli novels.4 Wilde was ravished by the books, declaring them infinitely superior to anything produced by Dickens. As this is one of the Wildean literary judgements with which posterity has not concurred, it might be regarded as another example of his ‘infallible bad taste’. But if it is ‘bad’ taste then it is surely something to be celebrated, because it derives from Wilde’s idiosyncratic personality and his lack of conventional artistic ‘decorum’.
There is something wonderfully trashy about Disraeli’s novels. They are full of melodramatic scenes featuring beautiful young men and older, highly idealised, society women – as though Jane Austen has been rewritten in the style of Mills and Boon. Young Wilde must have giggled and wept his way through them. Victorian readers delighted in Disraeli’s sentimentality, and read him for his brilliant evocations of English high society.5 He presents a burnished world of fine wine, delicate food, clever conversation and people with long titles. Disraeli’s novels are love letters to a society from which, as a non-university-educated Jew, he was excluded, at least until he had conquered Westminster. Yet if Disraeli is a terrible snob, he is also a haughty spectator, often diluting his sycophantic praise with heavy irony. It was a pose that must have intrigued Wilde.
Wilde imitates Disraeli throughout his writings, perfecting the novelist’s aphoristic manner and frequently mimicking such delicious Disraelian nonsense as ‘I rather like bad wine. One gets so bored with good wine.’ Wilde became proficient, too, in echoing the very movement and music of Disraeli’s prose. Speranza recognised the similarities between their writings. After congratulating Wilde on the ‘epigrammatic style’ of one of his short stories, and on his brilliant depiction of society women, she remarked, ‘you could be another D’Israeli of fiction if you choose’.6 She evidently hoped Wilde would model himself on Disraeli in other ways, urging him to embark on a career in parliament and encouraging him to create a sensation in high society.
Wilde used Disraeli’s novels as manuals for success in society – his social triumphs made him feel, he said, like ‘Tancred and Lothair’,7 two ‘fashionable and brilliant young dandies’ from Disraeli’s fiction.8 It is possible that he consulted the Prime Minister’s novels to a similar end at Portora where, like Vivian Grey and Coningsby, two other Disraelian heroes, Wilde strove to impress his schoolboy peers with his intelligence, his fantastic stories, his dandi fied clothes and his and ‘distant’ manner.9
The most unconventional aspect of Wilde’s adolescent taste was perhaps his love of French fiction. Wilde would always rate it far higher than its English equivalent, and even claimed the French had ‘brought the art of fiction to a point beyond which human genius cannot go’.10 French literature was synonymous, at least in middle-class Victorian England, with decadence and depravity; besides, much of it was probably beyond the linguistic resources of the average school boy. The young Wilde, however, professed himself ‘particularly fond of French writings’ which seemed to him to be, ‘pervaded by an enthu siasm having some kinship with that peculiar to the Irish’.11
In stark contrast to middle-class English households, continental culture was regarded as neither immoral nor exotic at No. 1 Merrion Square. Intellectual celebrities from mainland Europe frequently dined with the Wildes; they also employed French and German governesses who taught the children their respective languages. Wilde probably became competent, rather than proficient, in German, and, as a boy, he ‘cared little for German literature, excepting only Heine and Goethe’.12
Sir William’s library contained numerous volumes in French and German; Wilde’s mother owned countless continental works too, which were imported for her by Dublin book dealers. She translated a number of works from German, French and Italian, including Dumas’s novel The Glacier Land and several poems by Dante and Goethe. She was also proficient in several Scandinavian languages, and well versed in the literature of the region.
With his lofty disdain for the vulgar facts of geography, young Wilde probably thought that his Dublin home was fairly close to the continent. That impression must have been heightened by a childhood holiday in France. It was on this excursion that Wilde ‘began to realise in some measure what he was’, finding ‘himself for the first time in a wholly congenial environment’, where ‘exquisite beauty’ was everywhere. Along with Greek literature, the literature of France became the ‘passion of his [early] artistic life’.13 Wilde would remain an ardent Francophile for the rest of his days. He conferred on the race the status of honorary Celts, and praised their intellectual sophistication and their keen sensitivity to art and to the beautiful surface of life.
Wilde’s love of French culture was intensified and perhaps even prompted by his reading. Three novels, which were written at the beginning of the nineteenth century by two acknowledged masters of imaginative realism, impressed him particularly – Balzac’s Lost Illusions and A Harlot High and Low (whose hero is Lucien de Rubempré), and Stendhal’s Scarlet and Black, which featured Julien Sorel. Wilde would nominate the pair as the ‘two favourite characters’ of his boyhood.14
Julien Sorel is a ‘slim and shapely’ boy, bent on achieving success in society. Through a passionate love of books this son of a provincial miller impresses the local gentry, who further his career. His reading teaches him how to divest himself of every trace of his lower-class provin ciality and to comport himself correctly in the high-class Parisian circles to which he is introduced. He also imbibes from books the revolutionary Enlightenment philosophy that sets him firmly against the aristocratic world.
Julien successfully fashions himself as a young dandified nobleman. The opportunity of marrying into a patrician family then presents itself. On the eve of his triumph, however, he commits the unpardonable social solecism of seducing the daughter of his noble Parisian employer. His tragic flaw is not lust, but satanic pride combined with a visceral class hatred. At the end of the book Julien is placed on trial for attempting to murder his previous aristocratic mistress. As a peasant, whose ‘only crime’ is to have ‘risen in revolt against the lowliness of his station’, he expects no mercy from the bourgeois jury, and is not disappointed when he is sentenced to death.
Lost Illusions, and its sequel A Harlot High and Low, form part of Balzac’s multi-volumed Comédie Humaine, a kaleidoscopic portrait of early nineteenth-century French society. The hero of the novels, Lucien de Rubempré, is the son of a plebeian father and an aristocratic mother who has fallen on hard times. He makes it his life’s mission to restore the family fortune. A course of impassioned adolescent reading liberates his mind and inspires in him the desire to become a renowned poet; he travels to Paris with only a manuscript collection of his verse in his pocket.
It is the old, old story of an impoverished young writer coming to a capital city in search of fame and riches; a tale of sink or swim, which ends with the hero going down. Lucien, who lacks the requisite social graces, and a thick enough skin, eventually admits defeat and returns to the provinces, where, after a time, he resolves to commit suicide. It is at this moment that he encounters his Mephistopheles. Vautrin, a.k.a. Jacques Collin, is a Napoleon of crime, who seduces Lucien with a vision of worldly success. At this point Lost Illusions ends. A Harlot High and Low takes up the story of Lucien’s rise to prominence in Paris through nefarious means, and charts the spectacular downfall that follows his, and Vautrin’s, exposure. The pair are eventually imprisoned and, in his cell, Lucien takes his own life.
Balzac’s novels offered the young Wilde further guides to how to get ahead in literary and aristocratic society, and valuable tips on how to mould a marvellous personality from books. Wilde took Lucien as an exemplar, even going so far as to model his French on the poet’s conversation. Years later Wilde would claim that ‘The nineteenth century, as we know it, is largely an invention of Balzac. Our Lucien de Rubemprés . . . made their first appearance on the stage of the Comédie Humaine. We are merely carrying out, with footnotes and unnecessary additions, the whim or fancy or creative vision of a great novelist.’15 He may well have been speaking from personal experience.
The schoolboys who surrounded Wilde must have paled in comparison with the dashing Lucien. ‘After reading the Comédie Humaine,’ as he put it later, ‘one begins to believe that the only real people are the people who never existed . . . A steady course of Balzac reduces our living friends to shadows, and acquaintances to the shadows of shades. Who would care to go out to an evening party to meet Tomkins, the friend of one’s boyhood, when one can sit at home with Lucien de Rubempré?’16 So real, indeed, did Lucien appear to the young Wilde that he wept ‘tears of blood’ when he read of the poet’s tragic demise in prison. ‘I was never,’ he recalled in adulthood, ‘so affected by any book . . . [It was] one of the greatest tragedies of my life . . . It haunts me in my moments of pleasure. I remember it when I laugh.’17