READING WAS AN extremely sensual experience for Wilde. He hoped that readers would feel a shudder at the denouement of his play Salomé, in which John the Baptist is beheaded: ‘it is’, he said, ‘only the shudder that counts.’1 He delighted in the ‘frisson’2 books afforded him, and enjoyed works which stirred ‘the blood while one reads like the sound of a trumpet . . . producing a physical as well as a spiritual delight, [that] exults the senses no less than the soul’.3
The look of a book could inspire rapture in Wilde: he wept tears of ecstatic joy at the sight of one particularly beautiful cover4 and his writings contain several eulogies to exquisitely decorated antiquarian books.5 He was a great connoisseur of contemporary book illustration, having a particular fondness for the designs of Charles Ricketts and Aubrey Beardsley. Wilde praised Beardsley, whose illustrations to the English edition of Salome (1894) have attained iconic status, as a master of ‘fantastic grace, and the charm of the unreal’.6
Beautiful volumes doubtless appealed to Wilde’s sense of touch. It is easy to imagine him stroking a spine and smoothing his fingers over hand-made paper, or across a cover of rich uneven material, to savour the pleasant sensation. Like À Rebours’s Des Esseintes, who was titillated by books fastened with black and pink cords, Wilde may even have derived an erotic pleasure from handling certain volumes. He found a volume of verse ‘cased in creamy vellum and tied with ribbons of yellow silk’ so alluring that he called it a ‘Circe of a . . . binding’, a reference to the seductive sorceress of Homer’s Odyssey.7
Wilde’s sensitive nose must have been charmed by the fragrant scent of newly cut pages or by the maturer, oaky smell of the older tomes on his bookshelves. We are, after all, speaking of a man who was an amateur of perfumes, and who, in Dorian Gray, described reading as an intense olfactory experience. ‘The heavy odour of incense,’ he wrote of Dorian’s favourite novel, ‘seemed to cling about its pages and to trouble the brain.’
That line is followed with a paean to the novel’s style, which makes an irresistible appeal to Dorian’s sense of hearing. ‘The mere cadence of the sentences, the subtle monotony of their music . . . produced in the mind of the lad . . . a malady of dreaming’.8 Wilde is probably referring to silent reading here; the effect of reading aloud was equally intense for Dorian. He is described ‘leaning back with half-closed eyes . . . saying over and over’ two lines from a volume of Gautier’s verse that lies open before him, and luxuriating in the images they evoke.9 Wilde often read poetry aloud in the company of friends, and it is highly probable that he recited verse when he was alone. The delight he took in savouring the sound of his favourite words is well documented; besides, he could hardly have memorised so much poetry had he not read it aloud, repeating the lines to himself until he had caught the secret of their cadence.
Wilde regarded books as ‘talking books’ rather than as silent objects. When referring to them he often used metaphors relating to conversation: ‘as Renan tells us’ he writes, or ‘as Mommsen says’. He describes books as ‘speaking’ to the reader, or even chattering away amongst themselves on the bookshelves. The limited Japanese vellum edition of Earnest was rather particular about who it conversed with: ‘it is not,’ Wilde commented, ‘on speaking terms with the popular edition: it refuses to recognise [its] poor relation . . . Such is the pride of birth.’10
If Wilde was unable to hear a distinct authorial voice when he read a book, he was disappointed. He censured his old master Mahaffy for not writing as well as he talked.11 He complained, too, that ‘since the introduction of printing . . . there has been a tendency . . . to appeal more and more to the eye and less and less to the ear’ – the ‘sense’ which literature ‘should seek to please, and by whose canons of pleasure it should abide always’. He advocated a return to Greek literary values: ‘the test’ for Greeks, he says, ‘was always the spoken word in its musical and metrical relations. The voice was the medium, and the ear the critic.’12
Even Wilde’s sense of taste demanded satisfaction from books. He frequently employed gastro-literary metaphors: Balzac’s fictions were as rich and heavy as truffles,13 while many English novels were utterly ‘indigestible’ on account of the excessive amount of padding they contained. ‘“The proof of the padding”,’ as he put it, ‘“is in the eating,” and certainly English fiction has been very heavy – heavy with the best intentions.’14 Wilde also put his metaphors where his mouth was by actually eating books. He habitually tore off the top corner of a page as he read it, then rolled the paper up into a ball and put it in his mouth.15 Surviving copies of his books confirm that he was the most voracious of bookworms. The publisher’s catalogue at the end of his copy of Aristotle’s Ethics has been ripped to shreds, apparently by a ravenous reader. On page 333 of the copy of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh he purchased for a friend, the top corner has been torn away. Wilde perused the book before presenting it to his acquaintance and, as it was a gift, he must have struggled to contain himself; after over three hundred pages, however, hunger evidently got the better of him.16
Wilde’s imaginative and intellectual response to a book may have been so intense that reading made him peckish. In the middle of some of his undergraduate notes he has drawn a doodle of a large and delicious looking brioche.17 Equally evocative is the jam stain clearly visible on page 30 of his copy of W.H. Mallock’s The New Republic18 – vivid testimony to the fact that Wilde gorged himself on books and food simultaneously. Sometimes he also drank while reading: one of his books is stained with purple wine.19 Once again, this gives a literal inflection to a Wildean metaphor for reading: ‘I have been turning over the leaves,’ Wilde said of one book, ‘tasting as one tastes wine.’20
In dining on his books Wilde was perhaps consciously imitating St John of the biblical Book of Revelation, who famously ate a scroll given to him by an angel in order to fully absorb God’s word. This idea chimes nicely with Wilde’s belief that books must become a vital part of the reader’s existential experience. He was convinced, too, that reading was as essential as eating, if not more so: ‘A man can live for three days without bread,’ he would say, translating Baudelaire’s famous maxim, ‘but no man can live for one day without poetry.’21
Books made a powerful appeal to Wilde’s aesthetic ‘sixth sense’.22 Occasionally described as a sort of aggregate of the five physical senses, the ‘aesthetic’ sense was more often distinguished from them. It was also, in Wilde’s view, ‘separate from the reason and of nobler import’, and ‘separate from the soul and of equal value’.23 Those endowed with a refined aesthetic sense instinctively appreciate the form, beauty and harmony of works of art. As the ‘off-spring of a fervid and emotional race’, Wilde was, he claimed, the natural heir to the Celtic ‘ardour for art’ and beauty.24 And, indeed, beauty was always to him the wonder of wonders. No one, it was said, adored it so intensely; one friend remarked that Wilde ‘looked so deeply at the Light of Beauty that he saw only that; it dazzled and blinded him.’25 ‘There is not a single colour hidden away in the chalice of a flower,’ Wilde claimed, ‘or the curve of a shell, to which, by some subtle sympathy with the very soul of things, my nature does not answer. Like Gautier I have always been one of those pour qui le monde visible existe[for whom the visible world exists].’26
The ‘aesthetic experience’ was sometimes peaceful for Wilde. ‘The harmony that resides in the delicate proportions of lines and masses,’ he wrote apropos of a beautiful painting, ‘becomes mirrored in the mind. The repetitions of pattern give us rest.’27 More often he characterises it as a species of ravishment. A ‘cry of pleasure’ breaks from the lips of Wilde’s ‘Young King’ when he comes into contact with artistic beauty.28 Such artistic rapture was, Wilde thought, ‘the most sensuous and most intellectual pleasure in the whole world’.29 The experience of ‘beauty, mere beauty’ could fill his eyes with tears. When he narrated his fairy tale ‘The Selfish Giant’ to his two young boys Wilde wept. On being asked why, he told his sons that really beautiful things always made him cry.30 He found the following lines from Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ overwhelmingly poignant, too, no doubt on account of their harmonious euphony and assonance:
What little town by river or sea shore,
Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,
Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn?31
Yet beauty could inspire joyous laughter as well as tears: he was so thrilled by lovely words such as ‘vermilion’ and ‘marjoram’ that he giggled with pleasure when he uttered them.
Wilde had such an acute horror of ugliness that he could not bear to remain long in a room that was unattractively furnished or in the company of the unbeautiful. He would abandon a novel if he came across a line that offended his sensibility. He abhorred the phrase ‘the Birds were singing on every twig and on every twig-let’, which he read in a novel written by an acquaintance. ‘When an artist,’ he said, ‘comes on a sentence like that . . . it is impossible for him to go on reading.’32 His reaction was the same whenever he encountered the word ‘magenta’ in a book.*
Other elements of Wilde’s reading experience were more cerebral. Pater believed that art and literature engender a ‘quickened multiplied consciousness’; Kant remarked on the pleasurable ‘free-play’ of the understanding they inspire. Keats spoke of ‘negative capability’ – a state of mind in which unfamiliar, multiple, and sometimes even conflicting ideas and viewpoints could be entertained simultaneously. Wilde the reader must often have enjoyed this blessed mental state. The true critic will, he said, ‘ever be curious’ of ‘fresh points of view . . . For what is mind but motion in the intellectual sphere?’36 And what, we might ask, is better for setting the mind in motion than reading? He spoke enthusiastically, too, of the inestimable joy of seeing issues from every angle or ‘in the round’.37
Wilde also thought that books could smash into a million pieces the unified and monolithic ego of the reader – which he believed to be an illusion – setting free their authentic protean selves. Drawing on Darwin’s principle of heredity – the idea that genetic characteristics are passed down from one generation to another – Wilde argued that each individual carried within them the accumulated experience of the entire human race. Far from being a ‘single spiritual entity . . . personal and individual,’38 man was ‘a being with myriad lives and myriad sensations, a complex multiform creature that bore within itself strange legacies of thought and passion’.39 Consequently, ‘no form of thought is alien’ to man, ‘no emotional impulse obscure’.40
That is why, according to Wilde, when we read King Lear’s wild and whirling speeches, or Juliet’s nocturnal soliloquies, we become the characters – their experience is there, buried deep within us. We can effortlessly ‘see the dawn through Shelley’s eyes’ and feel ‘the weak rage and noble sorrows of [Hamlet] the Dane’. ‘Do you think,’ Wilde asked, ‘that it is imagination that enables us to live these countless lives? Yes, it is . . . and the imagination is the result of heredity. It is simply concentrated race-experience.’41
This idea throws an interesting light on the eclectic character of Wilde’s book collection. Its heterogeneity attests, perhaps, to Wilde’s desire to fully explore his ancient Darwinian soul and to express all the myriad sides of his protean personality. The library was a stage on which he acted out his various fantasies, and experienced again his ‘previous lives’. In the room, no particular life, and no single aspect of Wilde’s personality, would have been privileged; everything was equally important and everything was equally true.
While reading, Wilde would have been in constant motion, lifting objects to his mouth, such as food, paper, pens, drinks and cigarettes. According to his friend, the author and caricaturist Max Beerbohm, Wilde had ‘the vitality of twenty men’.42 We can imagine him hastily turning the pages of the volume in front of him and rapidly scribbling lines in his notebooks as he did so. And, when the tension and restlessness became acute, Wilde would have risen from his chair or divan and paced around his library. He must have frequently walked across to the bookshelves to check a reference, or over to the fire to dispose of a half-smoked cigarette.
This image of intense energy contrasts strongly with the impression of indolence Wilde tried to convey.43 When he received guests in the library he would ‘throw himself on a sofa’, rather like his own creations, Lord Henry Wotton and Dorian Gray, who hurl themselves on library furniture with such alarming regularity throughout Wilde’s novel.
Yet despite his languid pose, Wilde generally got into a book, as one friend put it, and then out of it, quicker than anyone alive.44 He was an inveterate dipper, declaring that it was ‘perfectly easy in half an hour, to say whether a book is worth anything . . . Ten minutes are really sufficient, if one has the instinct for form. One tastes it, and that is quite enough – more than enough, I should imagine.’45 Wilde could grasp the narrative architecture of a novel almost at a glance. It was perhaps, in part, with this purpose in mind that he habitually turned to the back of a work of fiction to ‘begin at the end’.46 Reading the last page first was, too, ‘the only way to stimulate the curiosity that books, with their regular openings, always fail to rouse. Have you ever overheard a conversation in the street,’ he said to a journalist, ‘caught the . . . end of it, and wished you might know more? If you overhear your books in that way, you will go back to the first chapter.’47 When Wilde started with the denouement he also felt ‘on pleasant terms of equality with the author’,48 and gained the ideal vantage point for judging their skill in working out a story.
Wilde was one of the speediest of speed-readers. ‘He turned the pages [of a novel] fast to begin with,’ a friend remembered, ‘then faster and faster, and a little slower towards the end of the book. But he could not have been more than three minutes.’49 It is hard to believe that Wilde literally took three minutes to peruse an entire volume, but others confirm this report, and embellish it with the astonishing detail that he often chattered away on other subjects while he read.50 Wilde claimed that he could read both of the open pages of a book simultaneously. Recent experiments with speed-readers seem to refute this assertion, but only a fool would side with modern science against Oscar Wilde. Although the gift of lightning speed-reading is uncommon, Wilde was certainly not unique. The Victorian historian Macaulay could take in an entire page at a glance; the Romantic Lake poet Robert Southey needed only a matter of minutes to find ‘everything in a book it was likely he would ever want’.51
Southey’s phrase reveals one of the secrets of speed-reading: knowing exactly what you are looking for before you open a book. Nothing could contrast more sharply with the practice of passive readers who meet a volume on its own terms. Such readers enter a book entirely, in both an imaginative and an emotional sense; they carefully consider all of its arguments, and from every point of view. Wilde was the antithesis of this.
Wilde’s friends often put his speed-reading to the test. One acquaintance remembered him spending only a few minutes with a novel before closing it with a smile. He then proceeded to answer questions on the book without a single error. ‘“Can you tell us, Oscar”,’ he was asked, ‘“where Wilfred fell from the clouds?” “He dropped in on his uncle and aunt at Cheltenham”,’52 came the instant reply. Wilde’s answers also demonstrated his ability to memorise excerpts from the dialogue verbatim, and to recall, in some detail, many of the characters and scenes. He had first performed this party trick at Portora school, where, ‘for a wager’, he would ‘read a three-volume novel in half an hour so closely as to be able to give an accurate résumé of the plot’ or, ‘by one hour’s reading, . . . to give a fair narrative of the incidental scenes and the most pertinent dialogue’.53
Wilde’s memory became as legendary as his speed-reading. Among friends, he would spout reams of verse; at the Sheldonian Theatre, he recited from memory all 330 lines of his poem Ravenna, when it earned for him Oxford University’s prestigious Newdigate Prize. Even more astoundingly, Wilde knew a great deal of prose by heart. He regurgitated passages of Carlyle’s The French Revolution, and declaimed line after line from the novels of Meredith. One friend described him reeling off sentences from Flaubert which seemed to ‘unfold just like jewel-studded brocades’.54 This facility was doubtless nurtured by his upbringing in a distinctly oral literary culture, which encouraged the development of powerful memories among its members.
Wilde’s gift for aural recollection was complemented by a potent photographic memory. On one occasion, an acquaintance quoted a line from Pater in his company but was at a loss to recall its source. ‘It is in Appreciations,’ Wilde informed them without a moment’s hesitation, ‘in the essay on “Style”, page 7 – left-hand side, – at the bottom.’55
* Sometimes Wilde looked beyond the ecstatic moment of aesthetic bliss and tried to gauge the long-term effects of the experience. He believed that a discerning critical and artistic ‘taste’ would be formed by frequent exposure to beautiful things. At times, he even favoured the Platonic notion that constant contact with beauty would lead a person to instinctively shun ugliness and evil (words that were often synonymous in the Wilde lexicon). Yet the moral degradation of Dorian Gray, who tries in vain to make himself ‘perfect through the worship of beauty’, flatly contradicts this view.33
Nevertheless, Wilde subscribed wholeheartedly to Aristotle’s idea that the artistic experience might purify the reader and initiate them ‘into noble feelings of which he might else have known nothing’.34 Initiation, as opposed to direct moral instruction, accurately captures Wilde’s conception of art’s enduring effect. ‘The good we get from art,’ he said, ‘is not what we learn from it; it is what we become through it. Its real influence will be giving the mind that enthusiasm which is the secret of Hellenism, accustoming it to demand from art all that art can do in rearranging the facts of common life for us’, and teaching us ‘to love the things of the imagination for their own sake’.35