IN 1888 WILDE invited his fellow Dubliner W.B. Yeats to Christmas dinner at Tite Street. Yeats was twenty-three at the time, and trying to establish himself as a poet and critic in London; Wilde was thirty-four, and a reviewer, poet and lecturer of some renown. The young poet was overwhelmed by the opulence of Wilde’s ‘House Beautiful’, and by his host’s conversation. ‘I never before heard,’ he said, ‘a man talking in perfect sentences, as if he had written them all overnight with labour and yet all spontaneous.’1
Not that Wilde monopolised the conversation. At one point, he asked Yeats to entertain his eldest son Cyril with an Irish fairy tale. Wilde believed that it was the sacred duty of a father to narrate stories to his children, and he knew that Yeats was a seanchaí of genius; on one occasion he even went so far as to compare his gift for storytelling to that of Homer. ‘Once upon a time,’ Yeats began, ‘there was a giant.’ Cyril was so frightened that he screamed and ran out of the room. Wilde looked grave and disapproving. Yeats had been guilty of lacking sensitivity to the tastes and temperament of his audience – an unpardonable sin in a seanchaí.2
After dinner, Wilde cast the young poet in the less demanding role of audience. We may imagine him leading Yeats out of the dining-room, through the hall into the library, and offering the young poet a comfortable chair and a drink. Wilde then proceeded to read out his dialogue ‘The Decay of Lying’, welcoming Yeats’s interruptions along the way. After he had uttered the phrase, apropos of Hamlet, ‘The world has become sad because a puppet was once melancholy’, Yeats halted him and asked ‘Why do you change “sad” to “melancholy”?’ ‘I wanted a full sound at the close,’ Wilde explained.3
In reciting the dialogue Wilde was returning it to its oral origins. He had conceived it over the course of a dinner with another friend.4 He was also mirroring the ‘Decay’ itself. In the dialogue a flamboyant writer called Vivian reads out the proofs of an article he is composing entitled ‘The Decay of Lying: A Protest’, to his slower-witted friend Cyril – Wilde mischievously named the characters after his two boys. Cyril, the ‘straight-man’ of the piece, interrupts Vivian’s recitation with questions and comments, just as Yeats did. To add to the pleasant confusion of life and art, the setting for the ‘Decay’ is also a library.
In both Wilde’s art and his biography, the library appears as a word-splashed, phrase-filled place. In the ‘Decay’ (and in the dialogue ‘The Critic as Artist’ which also has a library as its backdrop) the words of the interlocutors fly in and out of the multi-coloured volumes on the shelves, around the desks and the beautiful ornaments, just as they did in Wilde’s own book-lined room. In his library Wilde not only conducted scripted symposia in which he read from his own writings; he and his friends also enjoyed many extempore discussions of artistic and philosophical matters, during which they relished what Wilde called the ‘delightful wickedness’ of delectable words.5 These ‘Athenian’ conversations, some of which were committed to paper by Wilde’s friends, were very similar to the talk contained in his written dialogues.6
The library, along with the smoking room on the first floor, was the place where Wilde received visitors. When the young poet Theodore Wratislaw was ushered into the august presence there, Wilde could not resist showing off one of his very favourite volumes – a beribboned bible that had been rebound for him in morocco leather. For the occasion, he may have recycled his famous epigram on the Bible: ‘When I think of all the harm that book has done, I despair of ever writing anything to equal it.’ Wilde was not above repeating his aphorisms, especially when beautiful poets were present. He certainly seems to have played the great author that day, perhaps in a bid to seduce Wratislaw. With a wave of his hand he pointed to a pile of bills on his desk and declared insouciantly ‘I shall not open them.’7 Another fledgling poet who was granted an audience in Wilde’s library looked, according to Swinburne, like ‘Shelley with a chin’. Richard Le Gallienne, the unfortunate possessor of the jutting jaw, was asked, during their meeting, how old he was. ‘Twenty-three!’ Le Gallienne replied. ‘Twenty-three’ Wilde commented with a deep sigh. ‘It is a kind of genius to be twenty-three!’8
If the master was absent or dressing, his guest would be shown into the library by Wilde’s manservant, Arthur. After Wilde made his no doubt theatrical entrance they would enjoy together the best of conversation and the best of cigarettes. When their talk had finished, the visitor would be taken up to the first floor to meet Wilde’s wife and his two boys.
If Wilde’s guests became intimates, they were granted an almost permanent right of entry to the library, even when the master was writing. Alfred Douglas claimed that Wilde always liked to have him nearby when he worked. ‘Bosie’, as Wilde liked to address him, probably sat beside Wilde when he penned the social comedies A Woman of No Importance and The Importance of Being Earnest between 1893 and 1894. At the head of an early draft of another play, An Ideal Husband (1899), Wilde has written: ‘June 19. 93. Bosie Present’.9 As both Wilde and Douglas were restless and extremely garrulous creatures, it is impossible to imagine them being still or silent for long. Wilde may have talked away while he wrote, just as he sometimes conversed when he read. He probably recited to Douglas the funniest lines as he composed them, and invited his lover to make comments and suggestions.
To many Victorian authors, the library was ‘essentially a private retreat’10 – the typical ‘man of letters’ sat alone ‘quietly in his study’.11 We think of the famous painting of Dickens at his library desk, with only the children of his fancy for company, or of Anthony Trollope, who locked himself up in the silence of his library until he had composed his daily quota of words.
Thomas Carlyle abhorred disruptions. In the little study that had been constructed at the top of his Chelsea house the author was, in his own words, ‘lifted above the noise of the world, peremptory to let no mortal enter upon his privacy’.12 Interestingly, just like Carlyle, and perhaps in conscious imitation of him, Wilde had originally intended to use a small room on the top floor of the Tite Street house as his writer’s study. In eventually settling on the noisier, and more accessible, ground-floor library as his work place, Wilde was effectively renouncing the austere Victorian ideal of silent, solitary labour.
Our earlier characterisation of Wilde’s library as an aesthete’s temple of peace and as a gentleman’s hermitage, must, therefore, be qualified. Pater, who described his library as a ‘sort of cloistral refuge from a certain vulgarity in the actual world’,13 would have been most uncomfortable in the room. Wilde seemed to welcome interruptions from the world, at least when they came from friends. At the beginning of the ‘Decay’ Cyril suddenly enters the library to disrupt Vivian at his literary devotions. ‘My dear Vivian,’ he exclaims, ‘don’t coop yourself up all day . . . Let us . . . smoke and talk.’14 These were probably fond and familiar words for Wilde.