6

L’Amour de l’Impossible

‘Let us live like Spartans, but let us talk like Athenians.’

oscar wilde

As Wilde reached his thirties, he began, increasingly, to look backwards. Youth, both the fact and the idea of it, took on for him a sort of magic. He sought it out, and made much of it. His work for the Dramatic Review took him back to Oxford. He reported on two student productions: Henry IV, Part I (with a prologue written by his friend Curzon) in May 1885 and Twelfth Night in February the following year. And though he greatly enjoyed the performances – saying so at length in his articles – he enjoyed even more being among undergraduates. It was six years since he had left the university, a span that sharpened the contrast between the pressing adult cares of his London life, and the infectious irresponsibility and optimism of studenthood. ‘Young Oxonians are very delightful,’ he enthused to Violet Fane, ‘so Greek, and graceful and uneducated. They have profiles but no philosophy.’1 He exerted himself to charm them. At a dinner following the performance of Henry IV he delivered an ‘amazing speech’.2 When he returned for Twelfth Night the actors treated him as their honoured guest.3

Wilde also received, in November 1885, an invitation to attend a performance of Aeschylus’ Eumenides at Cambridge. It came from Harry Marillier, the ‘bright, enthusiastic’ blue-coat boy whom Wilde had befriended at Salisbury Street during his early days in London; he was now a classical scholar at Peterhouse, Cambridge. Wilde was delighted to be in touch again with his young artistically inclined friend. They met briefly in London a few days later, and talked of poetry and pictures: ‘Are you all Wordsworthians still at Cambridge,’ Wilde had wanted to know, ‘or do you love Keats, and Poe, and Baudelaire… what moods and modulations of art affect you most?’ The encounter had, for Wilde, been full of ‘keen curiosity, wonder, delight’ – terminated too soon by the demands of his travel schedule.

‘Harry,’ he wrote from the Station Hotel, Newcastle on Tyne (where he had to lecture), ‘why did you let me catch my train? I would have liked to have gone to the National Gallery with you, and looked at Velázquez’s pale evil King, at Titian’s Bacchus… and at that strange heaven of Angelico’s.’ Their hour together had, nevertheless, been ‘intensely dramatic and intensely psychological’ – rather like Browning. He looked forward to further meetings, and further talk: ‘I have never learned anything except from people younger than myself, and you are infinitely young.’4

Although Wilde was unable to attend a performance of the Eumenides, he and Constance went up to Cambridge in the week beforehand, and passed a happy time with Marillier and his friends – and also with Oscar Browning.* ‘Does it all seem a dream, Harry?’ Wilde wrote afterwards. ‘To me it is, in a fashion, a memory of music. I remember bright young faces, and grey misty quadrangles, Greek forms passing through Gothic cloisters, life playing among ruins and, what I love best in the world, Poetry and Paradox dancing together.’5

It was Wilde who led the dance. At a breakfast party in the rooms of Marillier’s friend J. H. Badley, Wilde rhapsodized over the œufs à l’aurore, declaring that the dish looked like ‘the standard of the Emperor of Japan’. He tried to lure his young host away from a conventional reverence for Shelley (‘merely a boy’s poet’) to a proper admiration of the less-regarded Keats (‘the greatest of them’). And when Badley excused himself for being a non-smoker with the observation that he was ‘missing thereby what was, no doubt, good in moderation’, Wilde rejoined, ‘Ah Badley, nothing is good in moderation. You cannot know the good in anything till you have torn the heart out of it by excess.’6

On one evening Marillier invited a crowd of friends to his rooms to meet Wilde. The occasion nearly came to grief when – before the guests arrived, and with the room empty – a Chinese lantern caught fire and ignited the wooden panel above the mantelpiece; Marillier returned just in time to douse the flames. ‘You are careless about playing with fire, Harry,’ Wilde remarked, with a note of archness. Wilde talked ‘brilliantly’ that evening. Pressed for a story, he chose the fairy-tale form that he had first experimented with in America, and since toyed with in Paris. But, if previously he had conceived his stories as being for children, he now pitched the narrative for a more knowing adult audience.

Tempering pathos with the occasional touch of satire, he sketched out the touching tale of little bird who falls in love with the richly adorned statue of ‘The Happy Prince’. From their vantage point, on a column, high above the town, they witness the travails of the poor and oppressed, and seek to relieve them by distributing pieces of the gold- and jewel-bedecked statue among the needy. Such charity costs the statue its splendour and the bird his life, as he misses the chance to fly south for the winter. Both are thrown on the rubbish heap. But when an angel is sent to fetch the two most valuable things in the city, he returns to heaven with the dead bird and the statue’s leaden heart. If the story affected the listeners, it affected Wilde more. After the party disbanded, still feeling ‘full of inspiration’, he sat up through the night elaborating the tale and setting it down on paper.7

He was pleased with the result, and intrigued by its possibilities. The literary fairy tale was, after all, a rich Victorian tradition. Ruskin had done much to establish the genre with his 1841 story The King of the Golden River.8 And many others, from Dickens and Thackeray to Andrew Lang and Mrs Molesworth, had followed his example, weaving apparently simple tales that, while touching the childish imagination, also reached beyond it. The old conventions, in time, had begun to be subverted and parodied. Lewis Carroll’s Alice books were perhaps the most conspicuous instance of such playfulness, although Wilde had a particular admiration for the ingenious fables of the American Frank Stockton. And as a rival to Stockton’s ‘Floating Prince’ he could now set his own ‘Happy Prince’.9

The next morning half a dozen excited undergraduates escorted the Wildes to the railway station. As they clustered round the carriage window Oscar kept up a stream of epigrams, timed to culminate with the train’s departure. But the start proved to be a false one. The train backed into the station again, drawing Wilde’s carriage alongside where the students were still standing. He knew better, though, than to revive the moment. He closed the window, and buried himself in his papers – the first draft of his fairy story among them.10

Wilde found Harry Marillier an oddly quickening presence. There were further meetings. Wilde visited the Marillier family home at Hampton. Marillier dined with the Wildes at Tite Street – a charmed occasion, at which Constance’s young friend Douglas Ainslie was also present: they drank ‘yellow wine’ in green glasses to the memory of Keats, and Oscar wove fairy tales about the people who lived in Constance’s beautiful moonstone jewellery.11 There were letters too, continuing the dance of poetry and paradox. Wilde wrote from Glasgow – ‘region of snow and horrible notepaper’ – distilling a vision of the artistic life:

You too have the love of things impossible – εθως των αδυνατων – l’amour de l’impossible (how do men term it?). Some day you will find, even as I have found, that there is no such thing as a romantic experience; there are romantic memories, and there is the desire for romance – that is all. Our most fiery moments of ecstasy are merely shadows of what somewhere else we have felt, or of what we long some day to feel. So at least it seems to me. And, strangely enough, what comes of all this is a curious mixture of ardour and of indifference. I myself would sacrifice everything for a new experience, and I know there is no such thing as a new experience at all. I think I would more readily die for what I do not believe in than for what I hold to be true. I would go to the stake for a sensation and be a sceptic to the last! Only one thing remains infinitely fascinating to me, the mystery of moods. To be master of these moods is exquisite, to be mastered by them more exquisite still. Sometimes I think that the artistic life is a long and lovely suicide, and am not sorry that it is so.

And much of this I fancy you yourself have felt: much also remains for you to feel. There is an unknown land full of strange flowers and subtle perfumes, a land of which it is a joy of all joys to dream, a land where all things are perfect and poisonous.

He then ended, with deliberate bathos, ‘I have been reading Walter Scott for the last week: you too should read him, for there is nothing of all this in him.’12

With its elegantly poised paradoxes – reality and dream, ardour and indifference, martyrdom and scepticism, life and death, perfection and poison – this was a vision coloured by the wearied sensualism and the calculated inversions of Huysmans’ des Esseintes. The letter’s single French phrase, however, did not derive from À Rebours. ‘L’amour de l’impossible’ was the title of an 1882 sonnet sequence by John Addington Symonds, charting the agonies of a tortured artistic soul, seeking an ever-elusive happiness in the ‘mysteries of life’ and in ‘human affections’. One of the sonnets presented the ‘artist’ – happily married, ‘strong and wise,’ rocking ‘the cradle where his firstborn lies’ – being suddenly carried off by the bat-winged ‘Chimaera’: while his thoughts and senses rebel, he swoons, ‘desiring things impossible’.13

Although Symonds publicly claimed that the sonnets were not autobiographical, privately he confided that the poems expressed his own desire for sexual relations with other men, and that the ‘Chimaera’ was the image of this forbidden but all-consuming lust – the desire for ‘things impossible’.14 And it seems more than likely that Wilde had divined, or learnt, this fact: that ‘l’amour de l’impossible’ had become for him a coded phrase with a specific sexual meaning, not simply an expression of abstract yearning for fulfilment. His translating of the phrase into Greek might seem an attempt to connect it with the traditions of ancient Greek pederasty that had intrigued him since his student days. The subject of homosexual passion was certainly returning to the forefront of his mind. In his contemplation of À Rebours it was the passage about des Esseintes’ relationship with the strange young man that came to fascinate him most.15

As so often in Wilde’s life, a development in one direction stimulated a simultaneous and almost exactly contrary impulse. Happily married, apparently ‘strong and wise’ enough to consider a career as a school inspector, rocking ‘the cradle where his first born [lay]’, and with his wife already expecting another child, Wilde was suddenly carried away by that same ‘amour de l’impossible’ which found its expression in an emotional and sexual yearning for young men. He later described it as being ‘like a madness’ which falls ‘on many who think they live securely and out of reach of harm’ making them ‘sicken suddenly with the poison of unlimited desire’, and leads them on to ‘the infinite pursuit of what they may not obtain’.16

And it seems that he could not obtain Harry Marillier. Although the ‘infinitely young’, wonderfully sympathetic and very attractive Marillier provided both a focus and a stimulus for these feelings, there is no evidence that he either recognized or reciprocated them. Throughout their association he maintained a certain detachment, addressing Oscar as ‘Mr Wilde’. In June 1886 Wilde gave tentative expression to his desire in a letter to his young friend: ‘There is at least this beautiful mystery in life, that at the moment it feels most complete it finds some secret sacred niche in its shrine empty and waiting. Then comes a time of exquisite expectancy.’17 If this was an invitation, Marillier did not accept it. The letter is the last surviving one of their correspondence; there were no further meetings. For Wilde the moment of ‘exquisite expectancy’ was prolonged; the niche remained empty.18

Nevertheless, amid his various social cares and journalistic duties, Wilde took time to seek out the company of other artistically inclined young men. He was drawn into the idealistic world of the ‘Century Guild’, a group established in a house on Fitzroy Street by a trio of fervent Ruskin-ites: Arthur Mackmurdo, Selwyn Image and the twenty-two-year-old Herbert Horne. Dedicated to promoting a socially engaged vision of the arts and crafts, they had founded a small quarterly magazine, to which Wilde contributed an article about Keats.19 Horne had poetic ambitions, and Wilde encouraged them. ‘Your poems are most charming,’ he declared. ‘You combine very perfectly simplicity and strangeness.’20

Horne also shared Wilde’s enthusiasm for the doomed Romantic poet Thomas Chatterton. And together they collaborated on a scheme to preserve and commemorate his birthplace – a little schoolhouse at Pile Street, Bristol.21 In conjunction with this campaign Wilde planned to write an article on Chatterton for the Hobby Horse. The essay never appeared, but Wilde did deliver a lecture on the poet at the Birkbeck Literary and Scientific Institution, in London. Despite a night of ‘dreadful’ weather, Wilde to his amazement found 800 people in the hall, ‘and they seemed really interested in the marvellous Boy’.22

Wilde characterized Chatterton as ‘the father of the Romantic movement in literature’, the precursor of Blake, Coleridge and Keats, of Tennyson, Morris and Rossetti.23 Wilde, too, perhaps hoped to claim him as a parent, seeking in his life and work intimations of his own ideas about art and its relation to both morality and realism. Chatterton’s brief career was certainly suggestive. He had been a literary forger. The main body of his work (completed before he took his own life at the age of just seventeen) consisted of poems that he claimed had been written by a fifteenth-century Bristol monk. It was a deception that, when revealed, had increased his romantic appeal and confused his critical standing. ‘Was he’, Wilde asked towards the end of his lecture, ‘a mere forger with literary powers or a great artist? The latter is the right view. Chatterton may not have had the moral conscience which is Truth to fact but he had the artistic conscience which is truth to Beauty. He had the artist’s yearning to represent and if perfect representation seems to him to demand forgery he needs must forge. Still this forgery came from the desire of artistic self-effacement. He was the pure artist – that is to say his aim was not to reveal himself but to give pleasure.’ Chatterton – Wilde claimed – saw that ‘the realm of the imagination differed from the realm of fact’ and understood that ‘it is the ideal, not the realistic artist who expresses his age’.24

Chatterton, though, was not the only ‘marvellous Boy’ occupying Wilde’s thoughts. It was during 1886 that Wilde came to know the seventeen-year-old Robert (Robbie or Bobbie) Ross. Small, bright and snub-nosed, he had the look and the liveliness of Puck. Exactly how he met Wilde remains unclear, though there were many currents in London life that might have drawn them together.25 Ross was the youngest child of prominent Canadian parents. His father, a lawyer and politician, had died when he was barely two, prompting the family to move back to Europe. Ross had been brought up – and privately educated – in England, and on the continent, developing precocious interests in art and literature. He lived with his mother and two sisters at Kensington, studying at a nearby crammer in preparation for going to Cambridge. Wilde found him ‘charming and as clever as can be, with excellent taste and sound knowledge’ too.26

Ross’s precocity, however, extended beyond taste and knowledge to sex. He had come to an early and untroubled acceptance of his homosexual nature; at seventeen he was both experienced and curious. And, early in their friendship, he seduced Wilde.27 Wilde later formulated the theory ‘that it [is] always the young who seduce the old’.28 But he also suggested that ‘no one had any real influence on anyone else… Influence depends almost entirely on the ground over which it is exercised.’ 29 And in his own case the ground had been well prepared. His intellectual fascination with sexual inversion had been long, fuelled by his work with Mahaffy, his study of Plato, his reading of Symonds and Pater, of Burton’s Arabian Nights and the novels of the French Decadents. And as the conventional constraints of married life had tightened around him, the subject seems to have assumed a new piquancy and an even greater attraction.

His sexual interest in Constance was waning, and perhaps hers in him too. She was pregnant throughout much of the year, giving birth to a second son, christened Vyvyan, on 3 November 1886.30 And he later admitted to a certain physical revulsion at his heavily pregnant wife.31 If Wilde was slow to recognize that his own emotional and physical needs lay with men rather than women, he had become gradually aware of ‘an impending fate’ hanging over his sexual nature.32 The exquisite expectancy that he had felt in his friendship with Harry Marillier had been a presage of what was to come. With Robbie Ross it finally found fulfilment.†

That first encounter came as a revelation to Wilde – of pleasure, excitement and liberation. It opened up new vistas of sexual activity and self-fulfilment. Wilde had always chosen to ‘stand apart’ – and now he stood apart in the matters of sex and passion. He described the ‘joy, the delirium’ that marked the discovering of his ‘originality’ and ‘independence’.33 And although to most Victorians, sex (of whatever description) was considered as something that people did – an individual act – rather than as the expression of a person’s ‘sexuality’, there is no doubt that Wilde’s new experiences gave him, in his own eyes, an enhanced and altered status.34 It changed his relationship to the world around him, and to himself. Henceforth his actions would demand secrecy, and the elaboration of a double life. He was not only betraying Constance, he was breaking the law. The timing of Ross’s seduction could scarcely have been more charged with significance. Although penetrative sex between men had been a felony in English secular law since the time of the Tudors, it was only in 1885 that all sexual contact between men became criminalized.‡ In that year, with the Criminal Law Amendment bill going through parliament to increase the age of sexual consent for women from thirteen to sixteen, and to suppress the worst excesses of female prostitution, Henry Labouchère proposed an ‘amendment’ to label any sexual act between males as ‘gross indecency’ and to make it illegal. His proposal, heard in a nearly empty House, was – after minimal debate – voted into law. Wilde, ever resistant to the conventions of society, could now count himself a criminal and an outlaw.

He could also count himself the heir to that rich – but largely hidden – tradition, running from Plato and the Greeks to Michelangelo and the great figures of the Renaissance, about which he had read. He was keen to embrace both its creative and its sexual possibilities. As he explained to one interested friend:

Plato, like all the Greeks, recognized two kinds of Love, sensual love, which delights in women – such love is intellectually sterile, for women are receptive only, they take everything, and give nothing, save in the way of nature. The Intellectual loves or romantic friendships of the Hellenes, which surprise us today, they considered spiritually fruitful, a stimulus to thought and virtue – I mean virtue as it was understood by the ancients and the Renaissance, not virtue in the English sense, which is only caution and hypocrisy.35

There was now a new colouring and a new urgency to Wilde’s interest in young men. Relations could encompass both the intellectual and the sexual, though the line between the two might remain unfixed. He came to know the twenty-two-year-old Marc-André Raffalovich, son of a Russian banker from Paris, who held self-consciously artistic and theatrical gatherings at his elegant flat in Albert Hall Mansions. Wilde had generously praised Tuberose and Meadowsweet, Raffalovich’s ‘remarkable little volume’ of ‘strange and beautiful poems,’ in the Pall Mall Gazette.36 And although Raffalovich himself was anything but beautiful, he was strange – and interesting too, ‘with the air of an exquisite, a slim waist, and a gardenia in is buttonhole’ (one of his poems contained the arresting line, ‘Our lives are wired like our gardenias’).37

Wilde also befriended John Ehret Dickinson, the art-loving scion of a wealthy paper-manufacturing family, who had inherited Abbot’s Hill, a mock-Gothic country house in Hertfordshire. Then there was W. Graham Robertson, a well-connected young painter, who lived with his socialite mother in Rutland Gate, and H. B. Irving, eldest son of the actor, on the verge of going up to Cambridge; Bernard Berenson, a recent Harvard graduate and budding Aesthete, who had come over to study at Oxford, and the garrulous, dandified Harry Melvill; there was Arthur Clifton, a young solicitor with an interest in Liberal politics who also composed verse, and the twenty-five-year-old illustrator Bernard Partridge.

Wilde treated these young companions with a lordly flirtatiousness. ‘What do you allow your friends to call you?’ he asked Robertson, signing off one of his letters; ‘“W”? or “Graham”? I like my friends to call me – Oscar.’38 ‘What a charming time we had at Abbot’s Hill,’ he told ‘dear Harry’ Melvill, ‘I have not enjoyed myself so much for a long time, and I hope that we will see much more of each other, and be together often.’39 He over-praised their artistic efforts. Some lines by Raffalovich were compared to ‘Herrick after the French Revolution’.40 Clifton was commended on his ‘delicate ear for music’ in verse.41 And John Ehret Dickinson received a fulsome dedicatory inscription ‘in admiration of his incomparable art and incomparable personality’ – although it is not known that he actually created anything, and the only surviving trace of a personality is that he had a dachshund called ‘Oodles’ who figured prominently in his will.42

But if there was a strong erotic current in all these friendships, it is uncertain how many of them actually resulted in sexual relations. The wonderfully good-looking Bernard Berenson, in later life, boasted that Wilde had made a pass at him; but he had resisted, drawing the retort that he must be ‘completely without feeling’ and ‘made of stone’.43 The rebuff, however, did nothing to break his growing friendship with Wilde. Harry Melvill, it seems, was more compliant. Wilde would later refer to having ‘had’ him.44 W. Graham Robertson claimed that Wilde ‘never once revealed’ any sexual interest in him, and supposed he had been ‘protected’ by his own rather fastidious ‘purity’ of character.45

‘Dear Sandy’ Raffalovich was less pure and less protected. He was fascinated by the subject of same-sex desire. Several of his poems touched on it; he had even published an ode to ‘Piers Gaveston’, the lover of Edward II. ‘You could give me a new thrill,’ Wilde told him. ‘You have the right measure of romance and cynicism.’ The thrill was more likely to have been intellectual than physical; for, although Raffalovich’s sexual instincts were directed towards men, he seems to have sublimated them into spiritual yearning and intellectual curiosity.46 His eagerness for knowledge was stimulating. Certainly Wilde relished their long talks about ‘the more dangerous affections’. (The nomenclature – and the classification – of same-sex desire remained unfixed and debated: ‘inversion’, ‘uranisim’, ‘unisexualité’, and ‘Greek love’ were some of the terms employed by its devotees. ‘Sodomy’ was preferred by its detractors. J. A. Symonds, in his privately printed pamphlet of 1883, A Problem of Greek Ethics, had called it ‘homosexual passion’.) No topics were taboo. Wilde gave over several happy hours to describing the bizarre details of Monsieur Venus, a determinedly decadent French novel in which a bored noblewoman (Raoul de Vénérande) seduces and corrupts a young man; having schemed to have him killed in a duel, she then continues her predatory sexual relationship with his embalmed and partly mechanized corpse. Incest was touched on. But it was to des Esseintes’ relationship with the mysterious young man who had picked him up in the street that Wilde returned most often.47

All these friendships contributed, in their different ways, to Wilde’s growing engagement with homosexual desire and homosexual sex. But they found their place within the framework of his domestic life. The young men were invited to Tite Street and introduced to Constance; some became her friends. Robbie Ross came to stay with the Wildes for two months in 1887 (while his mother was travelling), and although the arrangement almost certainly allowed for more sex with Oscar, it also initiated a happy and enduring friendship with Constance.48

For Wilde family life still retained many attractions. The physical side of the relationship with Constance certainly altered and may have terminated, but he continued, for the moment, to share with his wife all the old interests, affections, ambitions and anxieties. Indeed the enduring strength and happiness of the Wildes’ marriage was brought into sharper focus during the summer of 1887 when Constance’s brother, Otho, deserted his own young wife and two small children, and ran off with another woman.49 The Wildes’ own boys stood large in Oscar’s thoughts, and he was distraught when Vyvyan fell dangerously ill.50

Beyond the family circle Wilde’s social life was still dominated by the broader currents of fashionable London existence: private views and first nights, receptions and dinner parties, if not dances (as Wilde confessed to Graham Robertson, ‘I am not sure whether we are too old or too young, but [my wife and I] never tread any measures now’).51 Sundays would always see him in Mrs Jeune’s crowded drawing room. ‘There are’, he declared, ‘three inevitables: death, quarter-day and Mrs Jeune’s parties’.52 He and Constance began to hold receptions of their own. The first, a crowded party on the afternoon of 1 July 1886, gathered a notably ‘modern’ company of actors, writers and relatives.53 And from this developed the tradition of regular Tite Street ‘at homes’ on the first and third Thursday of each month (later changed to Wednesday).54

It was a stage on which Wilde loved to tread. His eloquence, honed by four years of lecturing, had grown even more assured. His wit – and his sense of joy – were undimmed; his pose as distinctive as ever. One contemporary has left a vivid sketch of his physical manner:

When standing and talking – [he] bent the head forward condescendingly to his listener (a trick inherited from his mother), was easily audible in any drawing-room through the buzz of conversation and filled and permeated a room with his presence… Attitude when seated and talking – Leant forward from his waist towards his listener; fixed his eyes full upon him; made much play with his right arm and hand, moving the arm freely from the shoulder, and letting the large hand with its full and fleshy palm move freely on the wrist. When he made a point… would throw himself back in the chair and look at his auditor as much as to say: ‘What can you find to say to that?’55

The overall effect was that ‘he might have stepped out of the Seventeenth Century or ‘an aristocratic “salon” of the reign of Louis Quinze’.56

Conscious of his own gifts, Wilde was always ready to give place to others. He never monopolized the conversation. As another friend put it, he simply ‘took the ball of talk wherever it happened to be at the moment and played with it so humorously that everyone was soon smiling delightedly… No subject came amiss to him; he saw everything from a humorous angle and dazzled one now with word wit, now with the very stuff of merriment.’57 His laugh provided the punctuation: ‘He would wait to see if you had caught his point, and suddenly burst into a peal of laughter of exquisite enjoyment at his own witticism or joke.’58

The young American author Edgar Saltus was rather disconcerted by the ‘serenity’ with which Wilde ‘waded’ in wit.59 But most simply enjoyed it, carried along by the ‘impressive levity’ that was perhaps Wilde’s great quality as a talker.60 He retained all his old social tact and positive outlook, preferring to praise rather than to disparage. Dislike and disapproval were only ever hinted at.61 He undercut his own brilliance with frequent notes of self-deprecation. Mary Costelloe, the young woman with whom Bernard Berenson was in love, recounted how Wilde, having met her ‘five nights in succession’, announced, ‘Now you have exhausted my repertory. I had only five subjects of conversation prepared and have run out. I shall have to give you one of the former ones. Which would you like?’ (they settled on ‘evolution’).62 But these were private performances, and the more private the jollier. Friends noted that, in his own home, his sense of humour (as distinct from his wit) became even more ebullient and contagious.63

In the public landscape Wilde’s wit counted for less. It was generally noted that Oscar’s star had been sinking gradually lower ‘on the horizon since he cut his hair and became “Benedick the married man”’.64 He seemed to have transformed, by degrees, into a complacent ‘bourgeois’. His dress was now conventional – if always slightly too smart. He had grown plump. His new sexual interests remained unknown and unguessed. And although he might, occasionally, be mentioned in the press, the comments were fleeting.§ As Edgar Saltus noted, ‘He had been caricatured: the caricatures had ceased. People had turned to look: they looked no longer.’ He was ‘not only forgiven – but forgotten’.65 In the five years since his return from America he had produced nothing of note and – despite a steady trickle of articles – seemed given over to ‘the dolce far niente’.66

Although Wilde, beneath the plush exterior, retained his artistic ambitions, they vied with social ones. And on that score, at least, there were some gratifying marks of advance. He was seeing a great deal of his old friend Carlos Blacker, and through him had come to know ‘Linny’, the young Duke of Newcastle, as well as the duke’s spendthrift younger brother, Lord Francis Hope. This connection secured the Wildes an occasional invitation to the ducal home at Clumber in Nottinghamshire.67 For Oscar the visits marked an exciting new peak in his social climbing. They enormously gratified his romantic snobbery. Indeed the very name ‘Clumber’ seems to have had an actual magic for him. He introduced it whenever possible into his correspondence and his conversation, as confirmation of his new standing.68

Being among titled people stimulated Wilde’s creative energies: he strove ‘to surpass himself’ in such company. After one of his visits to Clumber he missed his train, and was brought back to the house to wait for the next one. Having exhausted himself in his efforts to impress, he was, in his own recollection, an ‘extinct volcano’: he could no longer talk at all, he was ‘played out’, his powers of performance over.69 There was, though, a virtue in all his chatter. It was through conversation that Wilde formed his ideas and mapped out his plans. ‘Everything came to him in the excitement of talk,’ recalled a contemporary; ‘epigrams, paradoxes and stories.’70 And it was storytelling that was playing an increasingly large part in his discourse.

From the time of his Cambridge visit to Harry Marillier he was, it seems almost constantly spinning tales. Towards the end of any social occasion, when the company shrank or the talk became general, he might make a start. Stories flowed from him: fantastical, historical, romantic, macabre, biblical – always alive with paradoxical humour, and often touched by unexpected profundity. These performances, according to one rapt listener, were ‘so natural’ that Wilde seemed to be speaking almost for his own benefit, yet so graceful that his audience had ‘the flattering illusion’ that they had indeed merited the ‘expense of imagination and energy’.71 No story, moreover, was ever fixed. Its details would be endlessly elaborated and refined, guyed with alternative endings, new jokes, and different emotional moods.

Having made a start with ‘The Happy Prince’, he had, though, been slow to commit himself again to paper, or to investigate the possibilities of print. His mother had been urging him towards fiction for some time. ‘Suppose you lay the plot of your story… on the Isle of Wight,’ she had suggested. ‘Begin: the first sentence is everything.’72 And gradually he came to accept the wisdom of her words. A short story, after all, might count as part of the ‘more lasting work’ that he so wanted to produce. And, in a market where almost every periodical regularly published short fiction, a story would be far easier to sell than a play. But, even so, he proceeded with caution. As a first step he sought to bolster his own position through association. Just as his first published poem had been a translation, so was his first published fiction – a short story by Turgenev, done from the French. He sent it to his old friend George Macmillan who, although initially doubtful of its appeal, did find a place for it in the May 1886 number of Macmillan’s Magazine. It was a very modest debut, since Wilde was not even credited as the translator.73

Nevertheless it was something. And seeking to capitalize upon the achievement he sent off ‘The Happy Prince’ to another Macmillan periodical, the English Illustrated Magazine. The editor, Joe Comyns Carr, seems to have encouraged his hopes, and even commissioned from him a further piece – a humorous non-fiction essay on artists’ models. Wilde delivered the article promptly. But then a dismaying silence fell. Both manuscripts were left languishing in the editor’s drawer.74 Wilde, though, clearly believed that there should be a market for his fairy stories. He wrote up another one – ‘The Selfish Giant’ – which he showed to Laura Troubridge, in the hope that she might provide illustrations for it. But if he thought that pictures would be an additional inducement to a magazine editor, the ploy was not successful.75

Wilde finally achieved his breakthrough as a fiction writer not in a Macmillan-backed periodical, and not with a fairy tale. ‘The Canterville Ghost’, a humorous story of the supernatural, was published – with illustrations – in two numbers of the Court and Society Review at the beginning of 1887. The paper was a sympathetic one, a sophisticated (and short-lived) weekly that, under its editor Charles Gray Robertson and his young Balliol-educated assistant, Alsager Vian, covered such important topics as French ‘Décadence’, contemporary opera, Godwin’s theatrical productions, and ‘ladies of the aristocracy’. Not only Oscar but also Constance and Lady Wilde were mentioned regularly in its social columns.76 Robertson was delighted to add Wilde to his list of contributors.

Wilde’s ghost story comically inverted the established tropes of the genre. The unfortunate ghost is terrorized by the boisterously philistine and materialist American family that takes a lease on the old English country house that is his home – before, in a romantically sentimental conclusion, he achieves a blessed release through the kindness of the family’s teenage daughter. The American element in the story allowed Wilde to reuse and refine some of his transatlantic witticisms, such as the English having ‘really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language’. He even had the Ghost respond to a suggestion that he would not like America ‘because we have no ruins and no curiosities’, with the exclamation, ‘No ruins! No curiosities! You have your navy and your manners.’¶Although the Ghost might have not liked America, Wilde suspected that America would like the Ghost. He dispatched a copy of the typescript to Whitelaw Reid, editor of the New York Tribune, and the paper published the ‘brilliant Anglo-American story’ in their Sunday edition.77

Wilde hoped that the Court and Society Review would follow up the success of ‘The Canterville Ghost’ by publishing ‘a short fairy tale’ (perhaps ‘The Selfish Giant’).78 But it seems that they wanted something more adult, more contemporary, more amusing, and perhaps more mysterious too. So Wilde set about writing up another of the stories he had been rehearsing over the previous months: the tale of the amiable young Lord Arthur Savile, who is told by a palmist that he is ineluctably fated to kill someone – and sets about trying fulfil his doom in the least offensive manner possible. In one brisk version Wilde recounted how Lord Arthur ‘sent some poison by post to an uncle who had been ill for a long time, whose murder would be an act of humanity, and from whose will he expected to benefit. But what is one person’s poison is another’s cure, and a fortnight later his uncle gave a dinner party to celebrate his return to health.’ Other well-meaning attempts are similarly foiled. Then: ‘One night [Lord Arthur] was walking along the Thames Embankment in despair, and wondering whether suicide would count as murder, when he saw someone leaning over the parapet. No one was in sight, and the river was in flood. It was a heaven-sent-opportunity, the answer to his prayer. Leaning down quickly, he seized the unknown’s legs; there was a splash in the dark swirling waters, and peace descended upon Lord Arthur. His duty done, he slept well.’ Only on the following afternoon did he see in the paper a notice headed, ‘Well-known Palmist drowned – Suicide of Mr. Ransom.’ Lord Arthur sent to the funeral a wreath inscribed with the words, ‘In Gratitude’.

Wilde spun numerous variations of the story, elaborating it with ‘exquisite humour and fancy’. And although he might sometimes try to convince his listeners that he would not be publishing the tale – ‘it’s such a bore writing these things out’ – no one was deceived.79 ‘Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime’ was duly published in the Court and Society Review, in three parts, in May 1887 (again with illustrations by the young artist F. H. Townsend). Although those who had heard the story might claim that Wilde’s extemporized oral renditions had been far superior, there was still much to enjoy in the well-turned prose and crystallized wit of the print version. Lady Wilde wrote enthusiastically, calling the story ‘most brilliant and attractive’. She thought the ‘mystery’ of the plot ‘thrilling’, and went on: ‘All your epigrammatic style tells in this kind of work. You could be the Disraeli of fiction if you choose. And all your social knowledge comes in so well, especially your women.’80

Her verdict was very just. The story, even more than its predecessor, sounded a distinct and personal note – in the romantic glamour of its aristocratic settings (it opens at ‘Lady Windermere’s last reception before Easter’), in the romantic unreality of its emotions, the playful absurdity of its plot, and the profligate scattering of its paradox. Wilde’s own voice was clearly heard in such epigrams as: ‘He had that rarest of all things, common sense’; ‘Not being a genius, he had no enemies’; ‘She had that inordinate passion for pleasure that is the secret of remaining young’; and ‘Nothing looks so like innocence as an indiscretion’.

Wilde continued his happy connection with the Court and Society Review until shortly before its demise the following year, contributing occasional unsigned essays and reviews – and even a sonnet, just to remind the public that he was still a poet.81 But his next two short stories were published in the World, which offered a higher profile and a wider readership. ‘Lady Alroy’ and ‘The Model Millionaire’ kept up the neat inversions, worldly comic tone and epigrammatic sparkle of the earlier pieces – while the second story (about a millionaire who poses for artists dressed as a beggar) also allowed him to redeploy some of the observations from his article about models that was still languishing in the manuscript chest at the English Illustrated Magazine.

It was pleasing to see his name regularly in print again. Bowered in his vermilion study, he could feel like a writer. Expanding into the role, he started to map out ‘a story connected with Shakespeare’s sonnets’, as well as continuing to push his fairy tales.82 Although he failed to find takers for them, he wrote up several more: ‘The Nightingale and the Rose’ (a poetical tale of love and self-sacrifice); ‘The Devoted Friend’ (a brutally comic story of exploitation); and ‘The Remarkable Rocket’, in which the supremely self-important firework of the title perhaps satirized the delusional vanity of Whistler. ‘You should be thinking about others,’ the Rocket informs a humble fire-cracker, at one moment, ‘In fact you should be thinking about me. I am always thinking about myself, and I expect everybody else to do the same. That is what is called sympathy. It is a beautiful virtue, and I possess it in high degree.’

Not that any single interpretation of a story was ever allowed to hold sway. Wilde explained to one would-be expounder that he liked ‘to fancy that there may be many meanings’ in each tale: ‘I did not start with an idea and clothe it in form, but began with a form and strove to make it beautiful enough to have many secrets, and many answers.’83 Wilde called the stories ‘studies in prose, put for Romance’s sake into a fanciful form’. And if they were meant ‘partly for children’ they were intended more ‘for those who have kept the childlike faculties of wonder and joy, and who find in simplicity a subtle strangeness’84 (he would sometimes describe the stories as being ‘for Children from Eight to Eighty’).85 He read some of them to Theodore Watts, who was ‘charmed’ but suggested that they might be even better done in verse. Wilde, though, remained true to his conception of them as ‘prose-cameos’.86 They only wanted a publisher.

For all his activity, Wilde was still earning very little with his pen. Short stories, even when published, were scarcely more remunerative than book reviews. Financial worries continued to beset him. Interest payments on the money borrowed from Constance’s marriage settlement and from Otho were not met.87 When, in the rooms of Lord Francis Hope, the talk turned to finance, and it was reported that ‘Money [was] very tight’ in the City just then, Wilde cut in, ‘Ah yes; and of a tightness that has been felt even in Tite Street.’ Wilde claimed he had passed the morning ‘at the British Museum looking at a gold-piece in a case’. To the young American author Edgar Saltus he cheerfully confided that the only thing he could now afford to pay was compliments.88 In an effort at retrenchment there was even a plan to let Tite Street, the ‘House Beautiful’ upon which Constance and he had expended so much time, taste and money. But no tenant could be found, so they were obliged to live on there ‘rather too extravagantly’, as Constance put it, in the hope that ‘after next year we shall be able to get on’.89 And on this score there were some unexpected grounds for optimism.

* Wilde and Marillier lunched with Oscar Browning on one afternoon. Coming away, Wilde remarked, ‘OB is a genial soul, but it is a revolting sight to watch him eat.’ The next time Marillier saw ‘OB’, Browning commented, ‘Your friend Oscar is very witty, but it is a pity he is such an ugly feeder.’

† Exactly what was involved in that first homosexual encounter remains, not surprisingly, unknown. An account of another of Ross’s seductions (of a younger boy rather than an older man) describes him inviting the boy into his bedroom, putting him on the bed, and placing his penis between the boy’s thighs. Such ‘intercurial sex’ was the preferred mode of gratification in Greek paederastia and Victorian public schools. Sherard, however, who later took an enthusiastic – but highly speculative – interest in Ross’s sex life, claimed that the most popular sexual activity among those in ‘the Rossian orbit’ was fellatio – or, as he neologistically termed it ‘buccal onanism’.

‡ ‘The detestable and abominable Vice of Buggery’ – or sodomy, as it was also called – was not specifically defined in the ‘Buggery Act’ of 1533, although through the courts it came to mean not only penetrative anal sex between men, but also anal sex between a man and a woman, or any sort of penetrative sex between a person and an animal. It was a capital offence – and remained one even after the old act was replaced by the Offences Against the Person Act of 1828. The death penalty was not always enacted, but occasional executions in England for ‘buggery’ (almost invariably anal sex between men) continued up until 1835. In 1861 the revised Offences Against the Person Act abolished the death penalty for buggery, replacing it with penal servitude for anything between ten years and life. It remained a felony in England and Wales until 1967.

§ Constance attracted rather more attention when, on 17 May 1886, she appeared as a non-speaking handmaiden wearing a sea-green gown edged with gold in a determinedly Aesthetic – or ‘Neo-Hellenic’ – matinee production of Helena in Troas, written by John Todhunter and mounted by Godwin. Herbert Beerbohm Tree played Paris, and Hermann Vezin Priam.

¶ Wilde’s decision to write a ghost story may have been, in part, an hommage to Godwin, who had died on 6 October 1886. According to the artist George Percy Jacomb-Hood, Godwin, during his last years, was cheerfully obsessed with ‘ghost-lore’, and would visit houses that had the reputation of being haunted, in the hope of seeing ‘or even, by exceptional good luck, catching one’.