22. ‘Mirror of perfect friendship’

WILDE’S COPY OF Players of the Period, Arthur Goddard’s survey of contemporary actors, is inscribed by Goddard ‘To Oscar Wilde’. After these words Wilde has written ‘who gave it to his friend Dorian Jesmond on Oct 4. 91’.1 Similarly, Wilde’s copy of Meredith’s novel One of Our Conquerors contains the inscription ‘Offered to Maud Beerbohm-Tree. By Oscar Wilde. Edinburgh. October 1892’.²

Wilde liberally distributed books among his friends. Often he presented them with beautiful volumes on principle, the principle being that ‘If one gives away a book, it should be a charming book – so charming, that one regrets having given it.’³ To Wilde, books were the perfect symbols and seals of friendship. Many of his inscriptions include phrases such as ‘with many pleasant memories of friendship’⁴ or ‘in memory of an old and noble friendship’.⁵*

It was as ‘a memento of friendship’⁷ that Wilde gave a copy of Matthew Arnold’s Selected Poems to his friend ‘Miss Nellie’ (Helena Sickert), inscribing it ‘from her friend Oscar Wilde October 2 1879’.⁸ Miss Nellie, who would become famous as a writer and lecturer on women’s liberation, was fifteen at the time, and she looked up to Wilde as a mentor. He delighted her with his jokes and fantastic tales, ‘pouring out’ for her pleasure ‘stories and descriptions whose extravagance piled up and up till they toppled over in a wave of laughter’.9 He also encouraged Miss Nellie’s early adventures in literature: Selected Poems was the very first volume of verse she owned.

Wilde marked nine of his favourite poems in the book by placing bright blue silk threads at the page where they commenced.* By identifying these verses, Wilde ensured that he would be present, in Miss Nellie’s mind, when she perused the volume. Likewise, when he later sent her a copy of his own Poems he guaranteed that he would be in her thoughts, as she turned the pages, by asking her to guess his favourite piece in the collection.¹¹

 

Wilde’s alliance with Robert Ross was eminently bookish. When they first met in 1886, Ross was a sixteen-year-old with, in Wilde’s phrase, ‘the face of Puck and the heart of an angel’. He was ‘charming, and as clever as can be, with excellent taste’.¹² They fell for each other, and Ross became, or so he later claimed, the first man to ‘seduce’ Wilde. Prior to that date Wilde had, according to Ross, formed alliances with men that had been platonic rather than physical in nature. A recent biography attempts to discredit the idea that Wilde was quite so virginal,¹³ and it is perhaps unlikely, given the prevalence of homosexual activity at Oxford. Wilde’s friendship with Ross was, however, probably his first long and emotionally significant homosexual relationship; it may also represent his earliest attempt at following the paiderastic model.

The affair ushered in an entirely new phase of Wilde’s writing career, during which young Robbie, as Wilde liked to call him, seems to have acted as his muse, as well as his general assistant and intellectual sparring partner.14 Wilde had, before 1886, gained some renown with his poems, reviews and lectures, but he was by no means a famous author; with Ross’s help, that was set to change. Over the next four years Wilde discovered his brilliant and distinctive genius, penning works which, for the first time, express the full force of his iridescent humour and agile ‘Oxford temper’, and which ostentatiously display his elegant handling of language.

Robbie Ross in his early twenties.

‘The Decay of Lying’ was born out of a dinner with Robbie – ‘Idea, title, treatment, mode, everything.’¹⁵ ‘The Portrait of Mr W.H.’, too, was ‘half’ Ross’s, and ‘would not have been written’ without him.¹⁶ Later on, Robbie would supply Wilde, for inclusion in one of his social comedies, some epigrams that he had taken down from his conversation.17 He would also offer Wilde countless judicious suggestions on early manuscript drafts of his works.¹⁸

To judge by Wilde’s letters to his young acolyte, their talk would often have consisted of amusing book chat. ‘Rossetti’s letters are dreadful,’ he writes in one, ‘Obviously forgeries by his brother.’ ‘[Huysmans’s] En Route is most over-rated,’ he comments in another ‘It is sheer journalism. It never makes one hear a note of the music it describes.’¹⁹ It is highly appropriate then that some of Wilde’s book gifts to Ross bear allusive literary inscriptions.

One of the first books Ross received was the copy of The Happy Prince which is inscribed to ‘R. Tristram Ross’.²⁰ In other books Wilde presented to his disciple he refers to him as ‘R.T. Ross’. Ross’s middle name was Baldwin, so this is another example of Wilde’s bestowing a nickname on a friend. We can only suppose Tristram to be a reference to the star-crossed Arthurian knight who loved the Lady Isolde with such tragic consequences (Baldwin was the name of another of Arthur’s men).

Wilde may also have been alluding to modern adaptations of the Tristram legend by Arnold and Swinburne, ‘Tristram and Iseult’ and Tristram of Lyonesse.²¹ In these poems Tristram is forced to choose between two Isoldes, one of whom represents physical passion, the other a pure and selfless love. This would chime with Wilde’s frequent jokes about the austerer side of Robbie’s nature (he was a devout Catholic), which was often at war with his sensual urges.*

Another inscription to Ross is equally literary and esoteric. ‘To the mirror of perfect friendship: Robbie’,23 Wilde wrote in his copy of Earnest. This phrase directly echoes Socrates’ celebration of paiderastic love in the Phaedrus.²⁴ And what better way of commemorating a relationship that, in so many respects, approximated closely to the Platonic model? Like a pair of bookends, the copies of The Happy Prince (1888) and Earnest (1899) that Wilde presented to Ross stand at the beginning and the end of an acquaintance filled with books and book talk.

 

It was equally fitting that two other great loves in Wilde’s life should be memorialised by book gifts. Wilde’s wife Constance was extremely well read. Cultural and intellectual sympathy played a significant role in their courtship and marriage. Wilde wooed her by talking divinely about literature and art and by asking her opinion of his writings; he showered book gifts on Constance, too, adorning her copy of Poems with the marvellous phrase ‘To a poem from a poet’, and dating it 6 July 1883.²⁵

After their marriage, the couple read works of German literature together in the original. It is likely that Constance helped her husband through the masterpieces of Italian literature, for which she had a passionate interest. She kept copies of Dante, Petrarch and Tasso, Italian poets of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, in her bedroom on the top floor of Tite Street. There she arranged them in her beautiful Chippendale bookcases or put them among her favourite volumes on the carved book-rest right next to her bed. Her copy of Keats’s poems would certainly have stood there; it was the golden book of her life, accompanying her on her travels and lying beside her when she died.²⁶

To the right of Constance’s bedroom door a special bookcase was set aside for her copies of her husband’s works. It also held the first editions Wilde gave their two sons.* This lover’s library included Constance’s copy of Wilde’s Poems, as well as a Happy Prince inscribed ‘To Constance with her husband’s love’ on 25 July 1888.²⁷ Her copy of Dorian Gray, which bore the words ‘Constance from Oscar with his love. May 91’,²⁸ would have been there also.

Inscription in Robbie Ross’s copy of Earnest. The ‘little play’ was dedicated to Ross.

A short while after that date, in a copy of Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime and Other Stories (1891), his collection of society tales, Wilde wrote ‘Constance from Oscar, July. ’91’. As was his custom, Wilde appears to have drawn the recipient’s attention to certain passages in the text by marking them in pencil. In the tale from which the collection takes its name, a line appears in the margin next to the following sentences: ‘Actors are so fortunate. They can choose whether they will appear in tragedy or comedy . . . But in real life it is different. Most men and women are forced to perform parts for which they have no qualifications.’29

This makes poignant reading. It seems to express a terrible truth about the Wildes’ marriage. Constance was eminently qualified for the role of writer’s companion (she assisted Wilde ably both as a sympathetic critic and hostess) but fortune had assigned her an additional part for which few nineteenth-century women would have been adequately prepared – the doting wife of a man attracted to other men. After the first three or four years of their marriage that passion began to dominate Wilde’s sexual and sentimental life, and there was probably little room left in them for Constance. His affair with Robbie Ross may have sounded the death knell for their romance, which had been genuine and passionate before 1886. Wilde’s inscriptions suggest that he retained thereafter a deep affection for Constance, but she would cease to be the person in whose absence he felt ‘incom plete’.³⁰ While Wilde’s homosexual urges were paramount in the demise of their relationship, his upbringing by a spectacularly bohemian mother, and his intense devotion to art – next to which all other loves in his life were ‘as marsh-water to red wine’³¹ – hardly suited him to the role of dutiful husband. ‘I [was] really very fond of my wife,’ Wilde confessed later, ‘[but] bored to death with married life.’³²

Wilde’s veneration for his mother also found expression in book gifts. In 1879 Speranza had followed her younger son to London, settling in Oakley Street, Chelsea with Willie, Wilde’s older brother. She set herself up as an authoress and society hostess. Her son shone brightly in her legendary salons, talking, in his adoring mother’s words, ‘like Plato, divinely’.³³ These took place on Wednesday and Saturday afternoons, behind drawn curtains and under dim lighting. In the gloom Speranza hoped that no one would see the furrows on her face or the disorder of her rooms.34

On his frequent visits to Oakley Street, Wilde brought his mother book offerings (he would often bring money as well, paying her bills whenever he was in funds). He presented Speranza with a copy of Erechtheus, Swinburne’s pastiche of Greek tragedy, writing in it ‘J.F.W. [Jane Francesca Wilde, Speranza’s full name] very affectionately from Oscar’.³⁵ Wilde was even more demonstrative when he inscribed her copies of his own works. In Intentions he wrote: ‘From your affectionate son the author, with his love’. The inscription in his second social comedy A Woman of No Importance (1894) reads, ‘To my dear mother: with my love’.³⁶ Speranza always commented on her son’s mature writings, just as she had criticised his youthful efforts. The prose of his fairy tales was, she declared, superior to Pater’s: ‘I used to hope you would equal [him],’ she wrote after perusing the collection A House of Pomegranates: ‘now I think you are far beyond and above Pater.’³⁷

 

Some Wildean inscriptions contain amusing nonsense. Several employ the curious phrase ‘To——, in admiration and astonishment’.³⁸ In the copy of The Sphinx he gave to the artist William Rothenstein, Wilde wrote ‘ . . . from his friend and admirer the author. In June: a June of rain and roses. Time: Sometime B.C.’³⁹ Another inscription, scrawled in the French poet Louis Fabulet’s copy of The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), was written in a more poetical vein: ‘In remembrance of a charming evening when the wine was red, and the moon was silver’.⁴⁰ Some of Wilde’s inscriptions were indeed so poetical that they were eventually published as poems in their own right. The translator of Persian poetry, Justin McCarthy, was presented with a copy of The Happy Prince containing the following lines, which later appeared in an anthology of verse.41

Inscription in Speranza’s copy of A Woman of No Importance.

Go – little Book,

To him who – on a lute with horns of pearl –

Sang of the wonder of the Golden Girl –

And bid him look

Into thy pages – Haply it may be

That he may find some comeliness in thee.⁴²

Other inscriptions were acts of homage to Wilde’s literary masters. In a copy of his Poems he wrote ‘From the author to Mathew Arnold in affectionate admiration’,43 unfortunately misspelling Arnold’s Christian name. He sent the same volume to Swinburne, Morris and the poet Robert Browning, thus declaring, at once, both his discipleship and his genius. He was also soliciting entry into their select literary fellowship. His eventual admittance into their circle is attested by the inscribed volumes Morris and Swinburne presented to Wilde in their turn, along with those he received from the French bards Victor Hugo, Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Verlaine, and the American poet Whitman.⁴⁴

Some of the books presented to Wilde bear interesting inscriptions. In a volume of verse from the 1890s Scotch poet John Davidson he is extravagantly hailed as ‘King Oscar’.⁴⁵ In another inscription, Marcel Schwob addressed Wilde with almost equal reverence, as ‘The Prince with the splendid mask’.⁴⁶

The most famous inscription written to Wilde adorns his copy of Rennell Rodd’s verse collection, Songs of the South. Rodd, an aesthetic poet from Balliol College, and Wilde’s close friend, presented the book to Wilde soon after its publication in 1880. The inscription includes a poem in Italian and it has always been assumed that it was composed by Rodd himself. It is, however, a quotation from ‘Postuma’, a poem by the nineteenth-century Italian poet Lorenzo Stecchetti.⁴⁷ In light of Wilde’s later life, the lines, translated by Richard Ellmann, make very curious reading indeed:

At thy martyrdom the greedy and cruel

Crowd to which thou speakest will assemble;

All will come to see thee on thy cross,

And not one will have pity on thee.⁴⁸

 

* Like many Victorians, Wilde also referred to his favourite volumes as his ‘friends’. He coupled friends and books, too, when he spoke of his metaphorical ‘ livre d’or[golden book] – my little book where I write the names of my friends’.⁶

* Wilde selected, for Miss Nellie’s delectation, famous poems such as ‘The Scholar-Gipsy’, ‘Sohrab and Rustum’, ‘Shakespeare’, ‘Dover Beach’ and ‘Lines Written in Kensington Gardens’, along with ‘To a Friend’, ‘To a Republican Friend, 1848’, ‘To a Gipsy Child by the Sea-shore’, ‘The Forsaken Merman’, ‘Immortality’, ‘The Good Shepherd with the Kid’ and ‘Rugby Chapel’.¹⁰

* Wilde encapsulated Ross’s deeply divided self in another nickname he conferred on his friend – ‘Saint Robert of Phillimore’ (Upper Phillimore Gardens, Kensington, being the street where Ross lived). St Robert of Phillimore, according to Wilde, was no beacon of piety, but a ‘saint known in Hagiographia for his extraordinary power, not in resisting, but in supplying temptations to others. This he did in the solitude of great cities, to which he retired at the comparatively early age of eight.’ This is probably an allusion to Ross’s seduction of Wilde.²²

* Wilde loved presenting books to his sons, lavishing on them copies of Rudyard Kipling’s children’s stories, Stevenson’s tales of adventure and the science fiction of Jules Verne.