16. ‘The falser is the truer’

SOME TIME IN the 1880s Wilde made the acquaintance of Alfred Nutt, head of the London publishing house and bookshop David Nutt, which had been established by his father. Nutt, then in his thirties, was highly influential in the Celtic revival movement and a renowned folklorist, becoming president of the Folk-Lore Society in the 1890s. These twin intellectual passions may explain why he was drawn to Wilde’s fairy tales, which resound with so many folkloristic and Celtic echoes. Nutt published five of them in the 1888 collection The Happy Prince and Other Tales, a volume written, in Wilde’s words, ‘partly for children, and partly for those who have kept the childlike faculties of wonder and joy’.1

In the year of the volume’s publication, Wilde became one of Nutt’s regular clients. An invoice made out to Wilde from David Nutt’s details seventy or so purchases he made between 1888 and 1895.* Nutt specialised in foreign books, keeping a plentiful stock of continental language titles, and English translations of world literature. Wilde acquired from him some of the volumes of French fiction that comprised around a quarter of his library – easily the best-represented genre in his collection.

Between 1889 and 1890 Wilde bought Balzac’s tale, L’Enfant maudit [The Cursed Child] and Flaubert’s Correspondence, along with numerous copies of the latter’s Trois Contes[Three Tales] which he presumably presented to friends. Flaubert was the ‘sinless master’ from whom Wilde learned how to write fictional prose; like Keats, he was also a sort of imaginary literary friend for Wilde, who often passed favourable comment on his writings. ‘Flaubert has just told me,’ Wilde would announce to an acquaintance, ‘that he was lost in admiration when I recited him [my] wonderful lines.’3 Wilde preferred the more fantastic and experimental titles in Flaubert’s oeuvre to his fictional surveys of nineteenth-century society. While Madame Bovary was of course a work of genius, nothing in the whole world was as beautiful as Salammbô, Flaubert’s vast novel set in ancient Carthage.⁴ Wilde was especially fond of the proto-surrealistic masterpiece, La Tentation de Saint-Antoine [The Temptation of Saint Anthony], and at one time considered translating that ‘amazing book’. He consulted Nutt as to the viability of the venture, but, alas, nothing came of it.⁵

Wilde purchased works by the great nineteenth-century French intellectual Ernest Renan. That author’s Life of Jesus, in which Christ is depicted as an entirely human, but utterly mesmerising, personality, was a golden book of Wilde’s youth; in age, he called it ‘that gracious fifth Gospel, the Gospel according to Saint Thomas’. He picked up L’Avenir de la science [The Future of Science], another of Renan’s books, from Nutt in 1890. In it, Renan argues that science can teach us far less about human psychology, or how to live contented and ethical lives, than art or religion. It was a view that must have appealed to Wilde who strongly objected to science’s attempts ‘to make the material include the spiritual’, and who found it ridiculous that scientists endeavoured to trace the origin of an ‘emotion’ to ‘a secretion of sugar’.⁶

Nutt’s invoice charts Wilde’s adventures in other European literatures. He bought Fioretti di S. Francesco [The Little Flowers of St Francis], a medieval collection of colourful anecdotes concerning the saint’s life and miracles, as well as Dante’s three-volume Opere minore[Minor Works], which includes the Convito, an arcane treatise on philosophy written in poetry and prose. It is possible that Wilde toiled his way through these demanding medieval Italian texts, but it is more likely that they were bought for his wife Constance, who was far more proficient in Italian than he was. His linguistic competence would probably have been up to the challenge of Gabriele d’Annunzio’s novel Episcopo, which he bought on 22 February 1895. This first-person narrative of a modest clerk who murders his wife’s lover is written in simple colloquial Italian. The purchase is intriguing because scholars have often compared Wilde to his contemporary D’Annunzio, Italy’s most famous, but also famously humourless, aesthete.

Purchases of Tolstoy’s Polikúshka, and The Pursuit of Happiness offer us a sample of Wilde’s taste in Russian literature. He adored the epic ‘grandeur’ of Tolstoy’s fiction: he can ‘crowd’, Wilde commented, ‘without over-crowding, the great canvas on which he works’.7 Wilde read both Tolstoy novels in French translation. He may have done so because English versions were unavailable, but it is just as likely to have been a matter of preference. Wilde certainly chose the French version of Turgenev’s novel The Virgin Soil over the widely available English translation. He bought that particular volume not from Nutt but from Franz Thimm’s, another bookshop specialising in foreign titles, which he frequented.⁸

To Wilde, Turgenev was ‘by far the finest artist . . . of the three great Russian novelists of our time . . . He has that spirit of exquisite selection, that delicate choice of detail, which is the essence of style [and] his work is entirely free from any personal intention’; these qualities placed him above Tolstoy and Dostoevsky in Wilde’s pantheon. Not that Wilde was unimpressed by the latter: Dostoevsky was, in his view, a genius for the ‘fierce intensity of passion and concentration of impulse’ of his fiction and for his ‘power of dealing with the deepest mysteries of psychology and the most hidden springs of life’.9

Wilde travelled to realms far further afield than Europe. The Nutt invoice suggests that his book collection was as cosmopolitan as the furniture in his library. He adored ‘Oriental’ poets, such as Omar Khayyám, for their ability to blend ‘philosophy and sensuousness . . . simple parable or fable and obscure mystic utterance’. Wilde especially loved to read ‘wise Omar’ in Fitzgerald’s poetical translation but also enjoyed the ‘strange purple and fresh amethyst’ of Justin McCarthy’s 1889 prose version.¹⁰ In November 1894 he purchased an anthology of Persian poetry called Flowers from a Persian Garden, which had been done into English prose by W.A. Clouston. In the same month he also bought E. Arnold’s Indian Poetry, which contains an English rendition of an Indian version of the Old Testament ‘Song of Songs’.

Like many of his contemporaries, Wilde was profoundly fascinated by all things Japanese. He possessed Sir Rutherford Alcock’s large illustrated volume Art and Art Industries in Japan, a survey of the history of Japanese art, as well as a number of novels set in Japan, such as Edward Greey’s The Wonderful City of Tokio. These titles may attest to the seriousness of Wilde’s youthful intention to lecture in the land of the rising sun. He had dreamed of drinking ‘amber tea out of a blue cup’ there, while gazing ‘at a landscape without perspective’.¹¹

 

Wilde retained the energy and inquisitiveness of an undergraduate throughout his life by continuing his Oxford studies into adulthood. He owned George Lacy’s Liberty and Law, which sets out to refute various economists of the laissez-faire school; it is exactly the sort of volume he had pored over at college in the later 1870s. The same could be said of his copies of the Origin of Species, Darwin’s famous statement of the theory of evolution, and First Principles, in which Herbert Spencer argued that individualism should be the basis of both ethics and a free society. Both books significantly influenced Wilde’s intellec tual outlook; for him Darwin was the greatest nineteenth-century ‘critic of the book of nature’.12

Wilde’s abiding fascination with the classics is evinced by the presence of a scholarly edition of Aristotle’s Poetics on his shelves.¹³ He regarded this seminal definition of Greek tragedy as a ‘perfect little work of aesthetic criticism’,¹⁴ perhaps because Aristotle is careful to distinguish literature from life: ‘Poetry is not,’ as Wilde’s edition summarised the Greek philosopher’s position, ‘a metrical version of medicine, physics or history. It must be judged by its own laws, its own fundamental standards.’¹⁵

Wilde seems to have adopted Socrates’ motto ‘the unexamined life is not worth living’; as an adult, he continued to wrestle with the philosophical questions that had absorbed him during his youth. One Socratic question that occupied him was: what is the best state for man to live under? His library attests to a profound interest in politics, which will come as no surprise to anyone who has read his essay ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism’. Wilde adumbrates a socialist, or rather anarchist, utopia of the future in which poverty will be eradicated by the abolition of private property and a redistribution of wealth, and all ugly and useful chores will be carried out by machines. The working classes, no longer alienated by the capitalist system, will be free to develop their personalities by exploring art and literature and thus realise the perfection that lies dormant within them.

Wilde’s preoccupation with politics and social issues is evidenced by his copies of the early plays of his acquaintance George Bernard Shaw.¹⁶ His fellow Dubliner presented capitalist English society, and its bastion and dominant class, the bourgeoisie, as rapacious, cruel and morally rotten. Wilde admired Shaw’s incisive mind: ‘England is the land of intellectual fogs,’ he told his ‘Celtic’ brother, ‘but you have done much to clear the air.’17 Somewhat surprisingly, he also praised Shaw’s ‘superb confidence in the dramatic value of the mere facts of life’ and the ‘horrible flesh and blood’ of his dramatic creatures.¹⁸ Yet despite Wilde’s high regard for Shaw’s works, they were never on intimate terms. Wilde described Shaw as ‘an excellent man: he has no enemies; and none of his friends like him’.¹⁹

Wilde owned several novels dealing with the ‘condition of England’ question, such as Israel Zangwill’s Children of the Ghetto, a graphic evocation of poverty set in the blind alleys of Spitalfields.²⁰ He also possessed non-fictional surveys of social deprivation such as General William Booth’s In Darkest England and the Way Out. The founder of the Salvation Army gives an account of London poverty along with its possible remedies, one of which is mass emigration to the colonies. Wilde may well have read the volume during the composition of ‘The Soul of Man’.²¹

Wilde was a committed supporter of the Irish ‘Home Rule’ campaign which was spearheaded by the Irish parliamentary leader Charles Stewart Parnell. In his library there was a set of reports of the proceedings of the 1888–89 Parnell Commission, which cleared the MP of the charge of advocating violence;²² Wilde had attended the proceedings. He was also present at a dinner of ‘The Eighty Club’ on 8 May 1888 at which Parnell made an eloquent appeal for Irish autonomy. According to the published copy of the speech which stood on Wilde’s shelves, Parnell sat down to ‘loud and prolonged cheers, the audience all rising to their feet and waving their napkins over their heads’.²³ Wilde was interested in other aspects of the ‘Irish Question’. He owned a pamphlet entitled The Land League, which contains a powerful oration by Michael Davitt, founder and leader of the Land League movement. Davitt, with whom Wilde corresponded, promotes pacific political agitation for Irish tenant rights and peasant ownership of the land.24

 

Wilde’s early fascination with Celtic myths and legends endured. In his childhood he had learned ‘to gaze with wondering eyes into “the younger day” and to find the path “to the shores of old Romance”’.²⁵ Irish folk stories and Ossianic legends had pointed the way. In adulthood, he re-traced his steps to those shores using, as his guide, The Vision of MacConglinne.²⁶ The medieval ‘Irish wonder tale’, which Wilde read in a parallel Gaelic-English text edition, tells the colourful story of MacConglinne, a wandering Bard who suffers terrible injustices at the hands of a vindictive clergy. Through the abundant resources of his own wit, and the intervention of an angel, he vanquishes his enemies and is restored to his place at the right hand of his king.

Nutt, who was an amateur of Celtic literature, may well have recommended MacConglinne to his customer. It is almost certain that Nutt sent Wilde a copy of the engaging scholarly volume Studies of the Legend of the Holy Grail,²⁷ which he himself had written. Wilde received it on 28 July 1888, just after its publication. The Holy Grail posits the theory that the Arthurian legends derive from ancient oral Celtic poetry. In its pages, Nutt draws many fascinating parallels between the two traditions, describing, for example, Tír na nÓg as the ‘Irish Avalon’.

Wilde is likely to have been intrigued by Nutt’s thesis because he was a lover of Arthurian literature. In the celebrated legends, tales of romance con cerning Launcelot’s love for Queen Guinevere are blended with stories of chivalry featuring the Knights of King Arthur’s Round Table. Wilde probably first encountered them in childhood. His father and mother were evidently enamoured of Arthurian literature, bestowing on their daughter the name ‘Isola’, which is Gaelic for Isolde.

In 1889 Wilde purchased from Nutt a massive scholarly edition of Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur, the most famous version of the legends.28 This hefty and expensive book is certainly not for the Arthurian novice or for the faint-hearted, as it reproduces the tortuous archaic English text of William Caxton’s 1485 edition. ‘Nowe turne we unto Sir Tristram’ reads a typical line, ‘that whanne he was come home and wyste la bele Isoud was gone.’ It requires genuine passion, along with an abundant store of patience, to wade through over 500 pages of this prose. The experience does not seem to have dampened Wilde’s enthusiasm, however, as he would re-read Malory’s book a decade later.

Wilde was deeply versed in the mythology, folk tales and early epics of a number of cultures. He regarded them as fascinating works of literature, which the modern fiction writer might turn to, with profit, for inspiration. Indeed ‘most of the good stories of our time’ were, he believed, ‘really folklore, myth survivals, echoes of the past’.²⁹ His library contained an autographed copy of D.G. Brinton’s The Myths of the New World,³⁰ a book on the symbolism and mythology of the native Americans. He also owned an English edition of the Kalevala, a collection of traditional folk songs and ballads from Finland, which he reviewed in 1889. It was, he thought, animated with a ‘wonderful passion for nature’, and he delighted in its vivid representation of a world where ‘in everything, visible and invisible, there is . . . a divine presence’.³¹ Here speaks the man who was brought up in Tír na nOg.

Wilde praised those who attempted to revive ‘the spirit of old romance’, by breathing new life into ancient folklore.³² He loved Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, that remarkable modern contribution to the great cathedral of Arthurian literature, and he owned an inscribed copy of William Morris’s The Roots of the Mountain, a prose romance set in central Europe before the Roman conquest. Wilde delighted in another book by the indefatigable poet, painter, designer and publisher, which shared the same flavour and historical context. He enthusiastically described Morris’s prose and verse, A Tale of the House of the Wolfings and All the Kindreds of the Mark, as a ‘return by a self-conscious effort to the conditions of an earlier and a fresher age . . . a kind of Saga . . . [or] folk-epic . . . nobly imaginative in its method and purely artistic in its aim’.33

 

Wilde lauded Morris’s Tale of the House of the Wolfings as a wonderful corrective to the realistic trend of much nineteenth-century fiction. ‘In days of uncouth realism and unimaginative imitation,’ it was, he said, ‘a high pleasure to welcome work of this kind’.³⁴ Wilde’s fondness for epic poems and folk tales must be seen in this context. These ancient works, along with nineteenth-century pastiches, are informed by a vision of the world in which man is not yet alienated from nature, or from the inner world of his hopes, dreams and fears. It is a passionate vision, deeply infused with the colours of the imagination and the emotions, and expressed in a consciously artificial style that aims at beauty rather than an accurate transcription of the ‘primary’ world. Such writings are, of course, the diametric opposite of Victorian realist fiction, which attempted to render ‘reality’ with scientific precision and objectivity, often at the expense of beautiful form.

Wilde’s loathing of realism was philosophical in origin. Along with anti-empiricist philosophers such as Kant, he believed that objectivity was an illusion. ‘People,’ as one of his characters puts it, ‘only discover in [nature] what they bring to her.’³⁵ Wilde’s attitude was also political. He detested realism, as Pater perceptively pointed out, because he associated it with ‘the bourgeois, our middle-class’.³⁶ In Wilde’s view, realistic novels, while purporting to be objective and ‘documentary’, actually confirmed and propagated the values of that class.

Wilde’s antipathy to realism was of a piece with his belief that literature should shake up the reader’s vision of the world. ‘Art,’ as he put it in ‘The Soul of Man’, ‘is a disturbing and disintegrating force. Therein lies its immense value.’37 It is also a corollary of his conviction that deliberately artificial works of art, which appeal to the reader’s unconscious and emotions as well as to their reason, achieve a greater resonance and therefore a greater ‘realism’ than naturalistic productions: ‘how much truer,’ in his words, ‘Imagination is than Observation.’³⁸

Consequently a work such as the Iliad, with its beauty, internal coherence and emotional and intellectual scope, strikes a far deeper chord in readers than any factual account of military deeds. That is why Wilde claimed that ‘Achilles is even now more actual and real than Wellington’.³⁹ By the same token, Wilde thought his idiosyncratic dramatic versions of historical tales, such as his play Salomé, were truer than the more ‘accurate’ accounts of historians. Their scientific studies offered ‘the truth of a Professor’, but Wilde preferred ‘the other truth, my own, which is that of a dream. Between two truths, the falser is the truer.’⁴⁰*

 

* The invoice is among Wilde’s bankruptcy papers at the Public Record Office. Nutt was one of the creditors who demanded payment soon after Wilde’s arrest.²

* ‘The Decay of Lying’ is Wilde’s anti-realist manifesto. In the dialogue he pours scorn on naturalistic writers such as Émile Zola, and praises authors such as William Thackeray for colouring their fiction with the imagination, and casting it in a beautiful and artificial form. Wilde also criticises ‘non-fiction writers who place far too great an emphasis on ‘facts’, holding up, as an ideal, authors who, in contrast, keep facts ‘in their proper subordinate position, or else entirely’ exclude them ‘on the general ground of dullness’. He gives particular praise to ‘the works of Herodotus, who, in spite of the shallow and ungenerous attempt of modern sciolists to verify his history, may justly be called the “Father of Lies” . . . the published speeches of Cicero and the biographies of Suetonius; . . . Tacitus at his best; . . . Pliny’s Natural History; . . . Hanno’s Periplus; . . . all the early chronicles; . . . the Lives of the Saints; . . . Froissart; . . . Sir Thomas Malory; . . . Marco Polo; . . . Olaus Magnus and Aldrovandus and Conrad Lycosthenes; . . . Benvenuto Cellini; . . . Casanova; . . . Defoe’s History of the Plague Year; . . . Boswell’s Life of Johnson; . . . Napoleon’s dispatches; and . . . the works of our own Carlyle’.⁴¹ This catalogue is enumerated by Vivian, the protagonist of the dialogue, but it is almost certain that the author is speaking through him. Wilde nominated some of these titles when he compiled his list of ‘Books to Read’ for the Pall Mall Gazette (see Appendix I, pp. 317–8).