FROM THE MEMOIRS of his Oxford contemporaries, Wilde emerges as the fully formed character we know and love. He swaggers through their pages, supremely self-assured in manner, intellectually intrepid and precocious, with his striking dandified dress and towering physique, scattering epigrams and poems in his wake. Temperamentally romantic and mercurial, he is irreverent towards all forms of authority; he is also possessed of an irrepressible energy. That energy manifested itself in flamboyant speeches and an addiction to nonsense and fun. ‘How brilliant and radiant he could be,’ one of his peers remembered. ‘How playful and charming! . . . how he revelled in inconsistency!’1
Wilde struck his English peers as utterly other. ‘There was,’ one said, ‘something foreign to us, and inconsequential, in his modes of thought, just as there was a suspicion of a brogue in his pronunciation, and an unfamiliar turn in his phrasing.’2 So far as his brogue was concerned, Wilde seems to have conformed, gradually replacing it with an English drawl, no doubt because of the unwelcome attention it attracted: ‘My Irish accent,’ he later remarked, ‘was one of the many things I forgot at Oxford.’3 Yet in other respects Wilde relished his outsider status. He charmed his new companions with Irish wit and munificent hospitality, shocked them with Nationalist political views that evinced a ‘strong feeling against England’,4 and dazzled them with virtuoso displays of linguistic and mental dexterity that they regarded as characteristically Celtic.5
Wilde’s effervescent manner was, too, an expression of his joy at being at Oxford. He called the city ‘the most beautiful thing in England’; ‘nowhere else,’ he maintained, ‘are life and art so exquisitely blended, so perfectly made one.’6 The surface of life was so lovely there that even ‘the food, the wine, the cigarettes’ were invested with the charm and suggestiveness of ‘artistic symbols’;7 it required no imaginative effort at all on his part to transform it into ‘the capital of Romance’. The physical city encompassed by Broad Street and Christ Church meadows and the invisible city adumbrated by Oxford’s poets over the centuries were, in his mind, one and the same place. Wilde was in his element.
Oxford, Wilde believed, sharpened a student’s sensitivity to literary beauty. It certainly seems to have had that effect on him as he returned to the exquisite lyrics and odes of the Romantic poets he had worshipped in his youth. The city, he said, made ‘the earth lovely to all who dream with Keats’, and opened ‘high heaven to all who soar with Shelley’.8 It is no coincidence that much of Wilde’s own poetry dates from his Oxford days of ‘lyrical ardour and . . . studious sonnet writing’.9 He lived and breathed poetry at Magdalen, often ‘spouting yards of verse’, at student parties, ‘either his own, or that of other poets whom he favoured, and spouting it uncommonly well’.10
Poetry gushed out of Wilde during rambles with his friends, around Magdalen’s bird-haunted Addison’s Walk, or further afield to Iffley or Sandford Lock, when he would recite verse from memory or read it out from a book.11 He also enjoyed reading in the more comfortable setting of his rooms, which were in Chaplain’s Quad in his first year, in Cloisters in his second and third, and in the sumptuous three-room set on the Kitchen Staircase in his last.
Wilde loved to curl up with a book in bed. In one letter he mischievously described himself as ‘lying in bed . . . with Swinburne (a copy of)’;12 in another, he mentioned The Imitation of Christ, the pious manual for Christian living penned by the fifteenth-century German monk Thomas à Kempis. Wilde read the book before going to sleep on the principle that ‘half-an-hour’s warping of the inner man daily is greatly conducive to holiness’.13 In the list of contents in his copy, it is rather amusing to find a little cross next to the chapters ‘Of inordinate affections’ and ‘Of resisting temptations’; curiously, the chapter ‘Of talking too much’ is unmarked.14
‘[Wilde] liked to pose as a dilettante trifling with his books,’ a friend remembered, ‘but I knew of his hours of assiduous and laborious reading, often into the small hours of the morning . . . in his small and stuffy bedroom, where books lay in apparently hopeless confusion . . . in every corner . . . though he knew where to lay his hand on each.’15 This evokes the confusion and disorder typical of most undergraduate bedrooms, and is reminiscent of the bookish chaos that reigned in the drawing-rooms at Merrion Square.
The cigarettes Wilde chain-smoked were doubtless responsible for the stuffiness, although the room in question – probably Wilde’s bedroom on the Kitchen Staircase – had a window opposite the bed, which gave a view of Magdalen bridge and the River Cherwell. We can imagine Wilde perched on the little seat in front of it, looking up from his copy of Swinburne or Keats whenever he was disturbed by the noise of the traffic flowing over, or under, the bridge, or by the sound of footsteps on the creaking winding wooden staircase outside his door. He would have been distracted too by the aromas of cooking that wafted up from the kitchens right below his window.
Although he loved reading in his rooms, Wilde sometimes left them to read elsewhere. He visited Magdalen’s luminous library, with its mahogany shelves, its pungent perfume of venerable volumes and its superb views of the cloisters and New Buildings’s lawns. It was inaccessible to most undergraduates, but Wilde was permitted to use it on account of the scholarship he had won after his brilliant performance in the entrance examinations.
An undergraduate’s room at Magdalen in the late nineteenth century.
Years later he recalled a visit he made to the library during his first term for the purpose of checking a reference. A book he was reading cited some lines from Dante’s Inferno, which concerned the terrible punishment meted out to those who are ‘wilfully melancholy’. Wilde was incred ulous when he read it – surely the Florentine poet, who was usually so full of pity, could not have been so severe on such a venial sin – so he decided to verify the quotation. Leaving his rooms he sauntered around Magdalen’s cloisters with his distinctive elephantine gait, his footsteps echoing as he went, until he reached the library on the north-west side. Having climbed the steep stone stairs, he entered the long room, located a copy of the Divina commedia and took it down from the shelves. He turned to the relevant passage to find that the citation had indeed been correct. Yet the whole idea still seemed ‘quite fantastic’ to him.16
It is unlikely that Wilde lingered long in Magdalen’s valley of the shadow of books. He acquired his own copies of many of the volumes he read as an undergraduate from Oxford’s numerous book shops. On one spending spree he bought a large batch of Cardinal Newman’s works.17 Wilde adored the ‘simple’ yet ‘subtle’ writings of England’s most famous convert to Roman Catholicism, and was himself almost beguiled by the allure of Rome during his student years.18
Although he had been baptised a second time as a Catholic, during his youth Wilde had dutifully professed the Protestant faith of his Anglo-Irish forebears. At Oxford, however, he irritated his Anglican peers intensely by talking endless ‘nonsense regarding Rome’ and by adorning his rooms with ‘photographs of the Pope’.19 This may have been a corollary of Wilde’s need to assert his Celtic identity in an alien, and sometimes hostile, English environment. He stopped short of conversion, however, when the staunchly Protestant members of his father’s family threatened to cut him off with a shilling: ‘to go over to Rome,’ he reflected ruefully, ‘would be to . . . give up my two great gods “Money and Ambition”.’20
At Oxford Wilde took the Honours School course of Latin and Greek languages and literature. Officially called Literae Humaniores it was commonly known as ‘Greats’. To this day, Oxonians refer to Greats as an endurance test because of the course’s exacting demands.* One of Wilde’s Oxford book bills bears witness to the arduous requirements of Greats. The invoice, from Thomas Shrimpton’s bookshop situated on ‘the High’, was made out to ‘WILD [sic] ESQ. Mag. Coll’.21 Wilde’s acquisitions not only included set texts such as a modern edition of Thucydides, but also several secondary commentaries such as George Grote’s Plato and the other Companions of Socrates. The Greats student was obliged to work his way through mountains of such scholarly criticism and to acquire an in-depth knowledge of academic debates.
In addition, the Shrimpton’s bill lists a ‘Hints to [Examination] Answers’ guide, which Wilde purchased before his Finals exam in 1878.† Handbooks such as this offered undergraduates strategies for answering essay questions and advised them on how to successfully ‘cram’ in the run up to their examinations. Wilde dedicated the weeks preceding an exam to intense study – he speaks of setting aside ‘six weeks’ for a course of focused ‘reading’ prior to Finals.22
Wilde’s borrowings from the Bodleian Library support the notion that he was a confirmed crammer;23 given his determination to hide his industriousness from his friends, he was probably also a secret one. The Bodleian, the core of which is the famous seventeenth-century rectangular building in Catte Street, is the University’s central library; its vast collections include a copy of virtually every book published in Britain since 1600. Wilde took out a number of periodicals containing reviews of books that were either set texts on his syllabus or recommended as essential reading by student guides to exams. Although it seems unlikely, it is not entirely impossible that he read some of these articles instead of the texts themselves.* He also found the time for more personal reading, borrowing a volume of the London Review that included an appraisal of Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry,25 a book by the Wildes’ family friend, William Carleton. Wilde probably wanted to relieve the tedium and anxiety of revision by flying away for a while with the fairies.
One of the reasons why Wilde ‘crammed’ so furiously before Finals was that examinations had, according to some, become the be-all and end-all of Oxford intellectual life. From around 1850, dons started to prepare tutorials according to the requirements of the examinations, rather than with the idea of bestowing on their pupils an all-round culture. This, at any rate, was the view of Cardinal Newman, who denounced these developments, along with the gradual specialisation of scholarship at Oxford, in his book The Idea of a University. Newman urged Oxford to adopt instead the ideal of ‘Liberal education’, which he defined as a ‘process of training, by which the intellect, instead of being formed or sacrificed to some particular purpose, some specific trade or profession, or study or science, is disciplined for its own sake, for the perception of its own proper object, and for its own highest culture’.26
Wilde was passionately committed to Newman’s ideal. He was utterly contemptuous of ‘testable’ knowledge, dismissing examinations as futile exercises in which ‘the foolish ask questions that the wise cannot answer’.27 He criticised English schools for cramming young minds ‘with a load of unconnected facts’ in order to pass such tests. For Wilde, education meant the cultivation of a pupil’s general culture, the awakening of their critical intellect and arousal of their aesthetic sensibility. ‘We teach people how to remem ber, we never teach them how to grow. It has never occurred to us to try and develop in the mind a more subtle quality of apprehension and discernment.’ That was why, ‘considered as an instrument of thought, the English mind is coarse and undeveloped’.28
And yet the rot that was insidiously eating away at English education had not, Wilde believed, reached the Oxford Greats course. In his view, it still engendered and rewarded the sort of broad intellectual culture Newman extolled. It begot what Wilde would later define as ‘the Oxford temper’ – a mind which could play ‘grace fully with ideas’ rather than arrive at ‘violence of opinion merely’.29 It has been suggested that Wilde was actually defining the ‘Oscar’ rather than the ‘Oxford’ temper. Yet the spectacular array of authors, and intellectual dis ciplines, encompassed by Greats, and its emphasis on creating a dialogue between the past and the present à la Mahaffy, suggests that Wilde’s praise was not exaggerated.30 Greats remained, he declared, the ‘only fine school at Oxford . . . where one can be, simultaneously, brilliant and unreasonable, speculative and well-informed, creative as well as critical, and write with all the passion of youth about the truths which belong to the august serenity of old age’.31
Greats men were still encouraged to exhibit audacious intellectual dexterity. For the oral section of the ‘Mods’ test Wilde took in 1876 he was given ‘a delightful exam . . . not on the books [i.e. the set texts] at all but on . . . modern poetry and drama and every conceivable subject . . . epic poetry in general, dogs, and women . . . Whitman and the Poetics. . . I was up for about an hour and was quite sorry when it was over.’32 Wilde’s performance must have been a wonderful illustration of the nimble and opalescent ‘Oxford temper’ in action.
Wilde achieved a first at ‘Mods’, and then again in his Finals examination of 1878. He was one of the very few Magdalen students in the entire nineteenth century to pull off a double first, and his papers in both exams were regarded as the most brilliant of their year in the whole university.
Wilde later took immense delight in parading his classical scholarship. ‘I cannot imagine,’ he wrote to a newspaper which had levelled the accusation of pretentiousness against Dorian Gray, ‘how a casual reference to Suetonius and Petronius Arbiter can be construed into evidence of a desire to impress . . . by an assumption of superior knowledge. I should fancy that the most ordinary of scholars is perfectly well acquainted with the Lives of the Caesars and with the Satyricon. The Lives of the Caesars, at any rate, forms part of the curriculum at Oxford for those who take the Honour School of Literae Humaniores; and as for the Satyricon, it is popular even among passmen, though I suppose they have to read it in translations.’33
Wilde ostentatiously, and rather snobbishly, spent the cultural capital he had accrued at Oxford here and on many other occasions.34 The classical allusions that striate his works flaunt the honorary membership of the English upper-class elite that he had secured at the university through his intellectual and social efforts. Countless English aristocrats studied Greats at Oxford, or had, at least, acquired enough classical knowledge at their schools to confound and unnerve their social inferiors – one of the primary aims of a private education.
And yet, even as Wilde flashes his upper-class credentials, it is noteworthy that his pride is more intellectual than social. As a brilliant Honours student, he is careful to distinguish himself from ‘passmen’ (i.e. ‘Commoners’ who did not take an Honours degree), many of whom were rather dim ex-public-school boys who struggled to read classical literature in the original languages. On other occasions, Wilde extended his contempt to men, like the English aristocrat George Curzon, who toiled away arduously at Oxford only to come out with second-class degrees in Greats.35 If Wilde was proud of being part of an elite English social club, he was even more conceited about being intellectually superior to his fellow members.*
* A glance at the Finals examination paper Wilde sat in the Trinity term of 1878 confirms this notion. To score well in the translation section the undergraduate had to know, virtually by heart, a number of works by Aristotle, Plato, Cicero, Xenophon, and the Greek and Roman historians Thucydides and Sallust. In answering the Ancient History essay questions, he had to display an intimate acquaintance with social, political, military and economic developments in the classical world. For the essays in the Logic, Political Economy and Moral Philosophy sections, he needed to be familiar with the works of the British philosophers Francis Bacon, John Locke and David Hume, and the ideas of the eighteenth-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant.
† Wilde may well have bought a similar book in the lead up to the Moderations examination that he sat in 1876. All Honours School students at Oxford were set a ‘Mods’ exam roughly half-way through their course so that the dons could monitor their progress.
* In the periodicals issued to Wilde there were, for example, articles on works by the Utilitarian English philosophers John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham that had a bearing on questions in the Logic, Political Economy, and Moral Philosophy sections of Wilde’s Finals exam.24
* Wilde’s condescending attitude to obtuse Oxonians is also displayed in his unfinished play ‘A Wife’s Tragedy’. A character, who is a representative Oxford ‘Passman’, is introduced as ‘one of those . . . philistines . . . the noisy boy of the college . . . who never got through an examination . . . cared for nothing but cricket . . . [and afterwards] went out to India’.36
Wilde’s criticism of George Curzon is especially interesting because he represented another recognisable Oxford type – the aristocratic undergraduate who sees his time at the University as a prelude to a political career. Curzon, who made countless speeches at the Oxford Union, the breeding ground of many an English politician, may well have chosen to study Greats because it was thought to be the ideal preparation for a career in the colonies (like the Oxonian in ‘A Wife’s Tragedy’, Curzon eventually ‘went out to India’, becoming Viceroy there during Wilde’s lifetime). Greats was believed to equip young men for life in England’s far-flung empire by instilling in them exactly the sort of manly and martial virtues required to face life among the insubordinate natives. Benjamin Jowett, the Balliol don who designed the Greats course, used his influence to ensure that Classics questions appeared on the entrance exams for the Colonial and Home Offices. Wilde’s disparagement of these two Oxford types emphasises his otherness.37