8

A Study in Green

‘What we have to do, what at any rate it is our duty to do, is to revive this old art of Lying.’

oscar wilde

In 1888 both Oscar and Constance, showing an impressive unanimity of purpose, brought out volumes of fairy stories. There Was Once by ‘Mrs Oscar Wilde’ was a gathering of retold tales (Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, etc.) recounted in both prose and verse, and illustrated throughout. Oscar’s book, his first published volume since the Poems of 1881, brought together five of his original fairy tales under the title The Happy Prince and Other Tales. It had been a long struggle to get the stories into print; repeated approaches to magazine editors had met without success. He had then contacted George Macmillan with the idea of bringing them out in book form, but the Macmillan’s reader, having looked them over, decided that, despite their ‘point and cleverness’, they were unlikely ‘to rush into marked popularity’.1 In frustration Wilde turned to David Nutt & Co., a smaller firm with a reputation for fine printing. They agreed to produce the book, although whether Wilde contributed to the production costs is not known.

While Constance’s book was aimed squarely at the nursery, Oscar’s tome proclaimed a decidedly different intention. Like Poems it was – as Oscar put it – very ‘daintily got up’, with illustrations from the prestigious pen of Walter Crane and ‘decorations’ by the young Impressionist George Jacomb-Hood. To appeal to the bibliophile a special edition of seventy-five copies was produced on hand-made paper, each copy signed by the author, and priced, steeply, at one guinea. The ‘ordinary’ edition was only slightly smaller in format and only slightly diminished in daintiness. It was published in a relatively modest first printing of 1,000 copies, priced at a still-substantial 5s. The book was dedicated to Carlos Blacker.2*

The Happy Prince and Other Tales appeared at the beginning of June and was well received, being widely noticed and generously reviewed.3 Perhaps it was Wilde’s choice of genre that had altered the critical perspective – and perhaps Wilde had guessed that this would be so.4 Perhaps, too, Wilde’s altered status played its part. He had changed from the bumptiously affected young Aesthete, who had so annoyed the critics at the beginning of the decade, into a seemly responsible public figure. Certainly none of the personal animus that greeted his Poems was evident in the press response: no cries of plagiarism, insincerity or affectation. He was frequently – and not unfavourably – compared to Hans Andersen. The World called the book ‘the prettiest child’s story-book we have had since Alice in Wonderland’.

There was general recognition that, although there was much for children to enjoy, the stories were likely to appeal rather more to adults, spiced as they were with ‘a piquant touch of contemporary satire’. Wilde’s recipe for friendship, given in ‘The Devoted Friend’, was much enjoyed: ‘A true friend always says unpleasant things, and does not mind giving pain. Indeed if he is a really true friend he prefers it, for he knows that then he is doing good.’5 The only doubt remained as to the pervading mood of the stories: the Spectator thought that beneath their ‘subtle sarcasm’ the defining ‘note’ was ‘melancholy’; but Robbie Ross’s brother, Alec, reviewing the book in the Saturday Review, suggested that, despite the spirit of ‘bitter satire’, the abiding mood was ‘a very pleasant sensation of the humorous’.6 Although one of the characters in the book remarks that ‘to tell a story with a moral is always a very dangerous thing to do’, it was noted approvingly that all the tales did seem to have ‘a moral’ even if it was never ‘obtrusively pointed’. One reviewer described the underlying message as being ‘that unselfishness is moral beauty, and that vain display is moral ugliness’.7

The book sold briskly, and Wilde was soon boasting of its ‘success’.8 He scattered presentation copies among friends and connections. Gladstone received one. So did Ruskin. Walter Pater wrote a gratifying thank-you note to say that he been ‘consoling’ himself with the ‘delightful’ book during an attack of gout. He praised some of the descriptions as ‘little poems in prose’ and hardly knew ‘whether to admire more the wise wit of “The [Remarkable] Rocket,” or the beauty and tenderness of “The Selfish Giant”’. Ellen Terry declared, ‘I think I love “The Nightingale & the Rose” the best’, and suggested that she might read it ‘some day to some nice people – or even not nice people, and make ’em nice.’ Wilde was delighted at this idea of a public recitation, but sadly nothing came of it.9 The librarian at Toynbee Hall, to whom Wilde had likewise sent a copy, also loved ‘The Nightingale and the Rose’ best. He thought that ‘every earnest man, woman and child (and that means all children)’ should ‘cry out a rich thanksgiving of delight’ to the author of such a tale: ‘To me it is nothing less than [a] miracle to feel the gorgeous flood-tide of human passion beneath the surface, and to see the delicate and steadfast simplicity of the language. You seem to have engaged with Human Love as the Eye with External Objects.’10 †

Within six months the first edition was sold out. And although a new (and slightly cheaper at 3s 6d) – edition failed to maintain the momentum, there was no doubt that The Happy Prince and Other Tales had been, in its way, a minor triumph: one of the notable books of the season.11

The success encouraged Wilde to continue writing fairy stories, deploying the genre to extend the possibilities of his prose, his social commentary – and his subversion of sexual norms. He now found periodicals ready to publish them. His next tale concerned ‘The Young King’ – an extreme Aesthete, who, on the verge of his coronation, is confronted by the great social and moral cost of the worldly luxury he so adores, and – turning from it – embraces a Christ-like simplicity that, to the astonishment of his courtiers, his subjects and his clergy, yields him a far greater, miraculous, splendour. Despite the tale’s emphatic spiritual and social message, Carlos Blacker seems to have disapproved of some elements in it – possibly the distinct homoerotic flavor of the young king’s Aestheticism. He is described as worshipping an image of Adonis and kissing a statue of Antinous.

Certainly when the story was published in the Lady’s Pictorial at the end of the year, Blacker wrote to the fervently Anglo-Catholic Duke of Newcastle, remarking: ‘Our friend Oscar was impenetrable yesterday to my attacks on what “you wot of” & laughed it all away. It has now been however arranged that all his manuscripts are in future to be submitted to me for approval, & I shall make a wholesome slaughter of his humours and tempers, when the occasion deserves it. He had no excuses to offer & disarmed me by his extreme hilarity, saying he had foreseen and anticipated my strictures.’12 Nevertheless, although one paper called the story a ‘weird and wild’ allegory, most commentators thought it possessed of both ‘charm’ and ‘an admirable moral’, besides being ‘exquisitely expressed’.13 Even Henley, it seems, was enthusiastic over its style. Claiming Flaubert as his master, Wilde told him ‘to learn how to write English prose I have studied the prose of France. I am charmed that you recognize it: that shows I have succeeded. I am also charmed that no one else does: that shows I have succeeded also.’14

The return to story writing and book production gave Wilde a new sense of his own literary worth. It also began to draw him away from Woman’s World and the chores of the editor’s office. With his growing roster of commitments – literary, journalistic, political, social and domestic – he had come to feel himself ‘overworked’. Something had to give. His three days a week at La Belle Sauvage soon dwindled to two. His assistant, Arthur Fish, became adept at telling ‘by [Wilde’s] footfalls along the corridor whether the day’s work would be met cheerfully or postponed to a more convenient period’. In the latter case Wilde ‘would sink with a sigh into his chair, carelessly glance at his letters, give a perfunctory look at the proofs or make-up, ask, “Is it necessary to settle anything to-day?” put on his hat with a sad “Good morning,” and depart again’. The hours gradually shortened: his arrival became later and his departure earlier, ‘until at times his visit was little more than a call’.

His ‘Literary Notes’ became cursory, then ceased altogether for seven months (between March and November 1888), before Wemyss Reid induced him to take them up again. Wilde’s early industry meant that he had more than enough articles on hand, and instead of the pleasures of commissioning, had to devote much of his time to rejecting work or explaining to contributors why their pieces had not yet appeared.15‡ And although it was nice to have an income, he came to consider that it was not nearly large enough: he took to writing verses and ‘rude remarks’ concerning it on the back of each month’s salary receipt form.16

He did, though, continue to enjoy the privileged position his job gave him with women. He developed an enthusiasm for the elegantly mondaine Bibidie Leonard. The daughter of an exiled Irish nationalist, she had been brought up in Paris before moving to London, and something of the dangerous glamour of the French capital still attached to her. She had achieved a reputation as both milliner and mistress to the fashionable. Wilde, who seems to have met her through his mother’s receptions, asked her to produce an article on the celebrated saloniste ‘Madame Adam’.17 The piece was never written, but Wilde became a frequent visitor to Leonard’s house on Regent’s Park – fascinated by her sophisticated allure, and the hold that she exerted over men. She became for him a model of the modern femme fatale. He claimed that she taught him more than any other woman: ‘She was not the least immoral,’ he explained to a friend. ‘Immoral women are rarely attractive. What made her quite irresistible was that she was unmoral.’18

Constance – who was conscious of the drawing-away of Wilde’s emotional and sexual interest, but misread its cause – became jealous at his fascination with Leonard. Wilde, it seems, was not entirely unhappy to break off the connection, perhaps finding it rather too demanding. He brought it to a definite end – although, to give suitable drama to the moment, he made the break with ‘three stanzas of passionate’ verse. Leonard, however, was not taken in. She suspected, probably correctly, that Wilde was re-using lines from an already written poem.19

Among Wilde’s other female protégées of the moment was the young American actress Elizabeth Robins, who was passing through London in the summer of 1888. Dark-eyed, beautiful and intense, she was already marked by tragedy: only the year before, her husband, a minor actor in the same Boston company, had committed suicide (by jumping into the Charles River in a full suit of stage armour), leaving her a widow at twenty-six. Wilde met her at a reception given by Lady Seton and encouraged her to think of staying in England and making a career on the London stage. ‘You should give a matinee,’ he suggested, as a first step. When, some weeks later, he learnt that she was on the verge of contracting to appear in a production of a ‘questionable’ play to be mounted by the ‘penniless adventurer’ Sir Randall Roberts, he advised her against the step.

Springing into action, he put Robins in touch with an agent. He insisted that she engage George Lewis as her solicitor, to look over any contracts (describing him as ‘Brilliant. Formidable. A man of the world… he knows all about us – and forgives us all’). And he secured for her an interview with Herbert Beerbohm Tree, who was then enjoying his first great success as an actor-manager. Robins always remembered Wilde’s energy and kindness. In her unpublished memoir, she wrote, ‘I could do nothing for him; he could and did do everything in his power for me.’ Her diaries of the time abound with notes of meetings, letters, practical suggestions, words of advice: one day concludes with the legend, ‘A blessed man is Oscar Wilde.’ In the end, Tree’s half-promise to give her work convinced Robins to cash in her return ticket and remain in England.20

The whole affair allowed Wilde to engage with the theatrical world that he still longed to enter. But it was also an act of practical kindness and imaginative sympathy. The record of his life is littered with similarly generous deeds, often unglamorous and unsung. He interested himself, for instance, in the ‘very poor friend’ of a clergyman acquaintance, helping her sell a valuable ‘Indian necklace’.21 He was generous with his advice and, despite his own lack of funds, was always ready to lend what he had.22 Although Wilde claimed to have no sympathy with sickness, Otho Lloyd was told that he had sat at the bedside of a friend who ‘was in the height of smallpox’.23 Bernard Berenson thought him ‘the kindest man imaginable’.24

When Mrs Sickert’s husband died unexpectedly she became almost ‘mad with grief’. But, though she shut herself up, Wilde sought her out and insisted on seeing her. Nellie Sickert recalled how he took both her hands and drew her – still crying – to a chair, beside which he set his own:

I left them alone. He stayed a long time, and before he went I heard my mother laughing. When he had gone she was a woman transformed. He had made her talk; had asked questions about my father’s last illness and allowed her to unburden her heart of those torturing memories. Gradually he had talked of my father, of his music, of the possibilities of a memorial exhibition of his pictures. Then, she didn’t know how, he had begun to tell her all sorts of things which he contrived to make interesting and amusing. ‘And then I laughed,’ she said, ‘I thought I should never laugh again.’25

In the autumn of 1888 Wilde was engaged in helping his own mother. The continuing unrest in rural Ireland meant that the rents of the Moytura estate were largely unpaid, and she was without an income. And although her books – Driftwood from Scandinavia (1884) and Ancient Legends, Mystic Charms and Superstitions of Ireland (1887) – and her occasional articles, brought in something, it was not enough. Willie, meanwhile, remained completely irresponsible; earning good money at the Telegraph, he spent it all on drink and late nights.§ To reduce their expenses they moved from Park Street to Chelsea, taking a house at 146 Oakley Street, just round the corner from Oscar and Constance. More, however, needed to be done.

To improve his mother’s position, Wilde revived the campaign to secure her a civil list pension, while at the same time also petitioning the Royal Literary Fund on her behalf for a one-off grant. His now impressive range of contacts – drawn from political and professional life – gave him a new assurance in dealing with officialdom. Both the applications proved successful: the RLF contributed £100; and (eventually, in May 1890) Lady Wilde was awarded a civil list pension of £70 a year. Her newfound enthusiasm for Queen Victoria perhaps helped tip the balance in her favour, expunging the memory of her insurrectionist battlecries of the 1840s.

All the while Wilde continued to add to his coterie of young male friends. He enjoyed the company of Jacomb-Hood (the decorator of The Happy Prince), even joining him and some of his fellow artists for a few days of Spartan summer fun in a cottage on Brownsea Island in Dorset. The time was spent sailing in small boats around Poole harbour. Wilde surprised his host by entering into the spirit of it all with enthusiasm, even joining ‘like a schoolboy in the early-morning plunge’ from the castle steps. His only plaint was the want of a cup of tea before getting up: ‘My dear Jacomb,’ he explained, ‘I positively cannot open my eyes without a cup of tea’ (Jacomb-Hood generously rose early each day to provide him with one). Nevertheless, after one night spent wading up to his waist in the sea with a seine net, he did declare, ‘Nature is so often very uncomfortable.’26

In London Wilde fostered his connection with the gauche but intelligent Yeats, whose Irish tales he had noticed so favourably. The Dublin-born poet was readily drawn in; he had known of the illustrious and eccentric Wilde family since childhood, and had first seen Oscar lecturing in Dublin in 1883. On the verge of bringing out his first book of poems, Yeats greatly valued the friendship, recalling how Wilde always ‘flattered the intellect’ of those he liked: how he encouraged Yeats to recount long Irish stories; how he suggested that he possessed ‘genius’ and compared his art to Homer; how he warned him against writing ‘literary gossip’ for the papers – it being ‘no job for a gentleman’.27

Another budding poet was the intriguingly named Richard Le Gallienne, who wrote from Liverpool enclosing a privately printed volume of his verse, and shortly afterwards followed the book south. Like Yeats he had first encountered Wilde on the lecture platform. As an impressionable seventeen-year-old in Birkenhead in 1883, Le Gallienne had heard Wilde give his ‘Impressions of America’, and almost from that moment had determined to escape from his destined career as an accountant and become a poet. He had begun to write verse under the influence of the Pre-Raphaelites. The ungrammatical ‘Le’ was added to his name, to make it more memorable and more artistic. He evolved a determinedly Aesthetic look, his long hair ‘fanning out’ – as Wilde remarked – ‘into a wonderful halo’. With his fine dark eyebrows and strongly chiselled features, Wilde thought he looked like Rossetti’s Angel Gabriel; Swinburne called him ‘Shelley with a chin’.28 He arrived in London in 1888 bent on fostering his connection with Wilde. He attended a Tite Street ‘at home’ and secured an invitation to dinner. Other meetings followed. Wilde inscribed a copy of Poems: ‘To Richard Le Gallienne, poet and lover, from Oscar Wilde. A Summer day in June ’88’. Le Gallienne sought to fix the moment too, composing a poem, ‘With Oscar Wilde: A Summer Day In June ’88’, which opened with the evocative couplet, ‘With Oscar Wilde, a summer day / Passed like a yearning kiss away.’ He sent Wilde a manuscript copy ‘as a love-token, and in secret memory of a summer day in June ’88’.29 And Wilde reciprocated by offering him the manuscript of one of his fairy stories.30 Yet, despite such heated exchanges, there is a strong suspicion that this was nothing more than poetical posturing by both parties. Le Gallienne delighted in playing the role of the impassioned poet, and so did Wilde. For all the ‘true-lover’ talk, it was several years before they got properly on to first-name terms. Wilde recognized that Le Gallienne, charming though he might be, was a provincial careerist anxious to secure a footing in literary London; and with typical generosity he did what he could to help him.

Less poetic but more emphatically sexual was his relationship with the twenty-year-old Fred Althaus, which began towards the end of 1888. The pace of Wilde’s clandestine affairs was quickening. The Greeks – according to J. A. Symonds – had counted homosexual desire as ‘a mania’, both ‘more exciting’ and ‘more absorbent of the whole nature’ than the love of women, and certainly Wilde was finding it so.31 Althaus was the son of the distinguished German professor at University College London. A small cache of surviving letters from him to Wilde charts the course of their brief affair.32 Wilde – it seems – swept the impressionable young man up, taking an interest in him, giving him concert tickets, exerting his charm. ‘I hardly know a greater pleasure than being in your society,’ Fred told him; ‘and I am very grateful to you for the kindly interest you seem to take in me.’33 They would meet at the receptions given by Ray Lankester, the eccentric, art-loving professor of zoology at University College, or else at the newly established Lyric Club, on Coventry Street, to which they both belonged. Althaus, conscious of his good looks, sent Wilde his photograph, ‘an enlarged one of the one taken in flannels with my German friend – but he of course is not in it’.34

Although Althaus had a job in the City, his interest seems to have been the theatre, or at least dressing up. He was described as ‘looking splendid’ – together with Harry Melvill – in some ‘Tableaux Vivants’ staged for charity by Mrs Bancroft; his performance in Jim the Penman, with the St Swithin’s Amateur Dramatics Club, however, was rated only ‘fairly good’.35 He and Wilde were soon arranging assignations and meetings out of town. ‘I have heard from Barnes [where the Lyric Club had an annexe] that I can have a room there for 2 nights or more,’ Althaus reported; he hoped ‘very much’ that Wilde would ‘run down some time or other’. Over the holidays he suggested that they could ‘perhaps go away together’ for a few days.36 If he was both vain and demanding, that seems to have been part of the attraction. He told Wilde of his hope that they could spend some summer days at the seaside, ‘in heavenly sunlight in which I adore basking thinking that it was perhaps generous enough to lend some of its beauty to its admirers’.37

As Wilde juggled the different elements of his double life, his work seemed to offer a commentary. Certainly the two projects on which he was engaged during the latter part of 1888 were both concerned, in their different ways, with deception. One was an unconventional biographical essay on the early nineteenth-century artist, critic and dandy Thomas Griffiths Wainewright (the friend of Charles Lamb and William Blake) who had forged bank drafts and murdered relations to pay his debts and support his lifestyle.

Wilde’s essay – a brilliant jeu d’esprit – cast Wainewright as a decadent avant le lettre: ‘Like Baudelaire he was extremely fond of cats’; he shared ‘with Gautier’ (and Swinburne) a fascination for ‘that “sweet marble monster”’ – the classical statue of the twin-sexed ‘Hermaphrodite’ in the Louvre; and his writings – touching on the Mona Lisa, the Italian Renaissance, the early French poets and the classical romance of Cupid and Psyche – seemed to anticipate the works of Walter Pater. He had, moreover, ‘that curious love of green, which in individuals is always the sign of a subtle artistic temperament, and in nations is said to denote a laxity, if not decadence of morals’. Aside from the legend that Baudelaire had once claimed to have green hair, this supposed association between the colour and ‘decadence’ seems to have been a cheerful invention of Wilde’s.38

Wainewright’s varied careers – artistic, social and criminal – were then sketched from a determinedly Aesthetic point of view. This game had, of course, been played before, most memorably by Thomas De Quincey in his 1827 essay, ‘On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts’, but Wilde brought his own brio to proceedings, blithely recording (among other atrocities) how, when a friend reproached Wainewright with the murder of his sister-in-law, ‘he shrugged his shoulders and said, “Yes; it was a dreadful thing to do, but she had very thick ankles.”’ Wilde went on:

It may be partly admitted that, if we set aside [Wainewright’s] achievement in the sphere of poison, what he has actually left to us hardly justifies his reputation. But then it is only the Philistine who seeks to estimate a personality by the vulgar test of production. This young dandy sought to be somebody, rather than to do something. He recognized that life itself is an art, and has its modes of style no less than the arts that seek to express it.

Wilde seems to have fixed upon Wainewright as a subject, having abandoned his plans for writing on that other artist-forger, Chatterton.39 Wainewright’s story had become part of Wilde’s repertoire of spoken tales; a London gossip columnist reported how, at ‘a social literary gathering’ towards the end of 1888, ‘Oscar Wilde gave such an interesting account’ of the poisoner ‘that some listeners lost their last train’. On that occasion Wilde was ‘urged to put his story on paper’ – and it is likely that he was already at work on his written essay, using the spoken performance to try out his ideas and test his effects. The article, entitled ‘Pen, Pencil and Poison’ (a phrase borrowed, with acknowledgement, from Swinburne), was finished by the end of the year, and accepted by Frank Harris for the Fortnightly Review.40

In tandem with this essay, Wilde was also composing a brilliantly playful ‘Dialogue’ on the nature of art for the Nineteenth Century. He called the piece ‘The Decay of Lying’. The ‘idea, title, treatment, mode, everything,’ Wilde later recalled, was ‘struck out’ over a delightful dinner with Robbie Ross in a modest Soho restaurant.41 Wilde had been wanting to write an overview of contemporary culture from an Aesthetic point of view for some time, but had perhaps been struggling to find the right form. His dinner with Ross suggested a solution, and suddenly brought his ideas into a new focus.42

A modern Socratic ‘dialogue’ – modelled on the example of Plato – would allow him to explore his ideas without having to come to anything so limiting as a conclusion, or to maintain anything so dull as consistency. Thought would take flight in conversation, winged with paradox, epigram, overstatement, humour and ambiguity. Talk – his own preferred mode of expression – could be honed and refined to become literature. And the whole would reflect, more closely than anything he had previously attempted, his own personality and his own voice. The result was a tour de force: he was able to achieve with the greatest success yet his vision of art as self-expression.43

Wilde created two cultured exquisites, calling them (like his sons) ‘Cyril’ and ‘Vivian’; and he set them in ‘the Library of a country house in Nottinghamshire’, another thinly veiled allusion to his having been at Clumber.44 Vivian is working on a paper – to be called ‘The Decay of Lying: A Protest’ – for the Retrospective Review, house journal of his club ‘The Tired Hedonists’ (‘we are supposed to wear faded roses in our button-holes when we meet, and to have a sort of cult of Domitian’.) He reads extracts from this essay to the sometimes sceptical and dismissive Cyril. Vivian’s article is concerned with the two great cultural debates of the day – the relationships between ‘Art and Nature’, and between ‘Realism and Romance’. And it adopts the most extreme views possible, extending the ideas of Baudelaire and Gautier, of Pater and Whistler, and of Huysmans’ des Esseintes, to their very limits.45

Vivian, in his ‘new Aesthetics’, sets art entirely above both nature and life: ‘All bad Art comes from returning to Life and Nature, and elevating them into ideals.’ Advancing the claims of the imagination and ‘romance’ above the tedious ‘realism’ of facts, he declares that ‘lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art’. He insists upon the absolute autonomy – and uselessness – of art: ‘Art never expresses anything but itself.’ It is really only concerned with it own perfection. But he does admit also art’s power, claiming that it is artists – through their personal vision and style – who fashion our understanding of the world. ‘No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.’ What we think of as the Middle Ages is the invention of medieval artists. The whole of Japan is the creation of Hokusai and his fellow ‘native painters’. ‘Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life.’ Wilde had been rehearsing these ideas over the previous months, in his conversation, his book reviews and his notes. Now he brought them all together with a scintillating energy.

He refined and re-used many of his critical aperçus: ‘There is such a thing as robbing a story of its reality by trying to make it too true, and [Mr Robert Louis Stevenson’s] The Black Arrow is so inartistic as not to contain a single anachronism to boast of, while the transformation of Dr. Jekyll reads dangerously like an experiment out of the Lancet.’ ‘Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty, and wastes upon mean motives and imperceptible “points of view” his neat literary style, his felicitous phrases, his swift and caustic satire.’ ‘M. Zola… is determined to show that, if he has not got genius, he can at least be dull. And how well he succeeds!’ ‘Ah! Meredith! Who can define him? His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning. As a writer he has mastered everything except language: as a novelist he can do everything, except tell a story: as an artist he is everything, except articulate.’

Whistler, also, was alluded to, if not by name. ‘There may have been fogs for centuries in London. I dare say there were. But no one saw them, and so we do not know anything about them. They did not exist till Art had invented them. Now, it must be admitted, fogs are carried to excess. They have become the mere mannerism of a clique, and the exaggerated realism of their method gives dull people bronchitis. Where the cultured catch an effect, the uncultured catch cold.’

Wilde seems to have been particularly – and understandably – pleased with the piece. He read aloud from the proofs to his guests after Christmas dinner. Yeats was at Tite Street that evening. Although he would later borrow from the dialogue’s ideas about the power of art to create meaning in the world, at that first hearing he was swept up by the language and the wit of the piece: they seemed both ‘an imitation and a record’ of Wilde’s ‘matchless talk’.46

Yeats was impressed too by the domestic scene that he encountered at Tite Street: the restrained Aesthetic decor; the unexpected white dining room, its table decorated with ‘a diamond-shaped red cloth’ upon which stood a terracotta statuette illumined by a red shaded ceiling-light; the ‘beautiful wife’; the two young children. There was also a kitten, a present from Robbie Ross. ‘It does not look white,’ Wilde reported in his thank-you letter, ‘indeed it looks a sort of tortoise-shell colour, or a grey barred with velvety dark browns, but as you said it was white I have given orders that it is always to be spoken of as the “white kitten.” The children are enchanted with it, and sit, one on each side of its basket, worshipping.’47

It was a charming scene. Indeed Yeats wondered if it was not almost ‘too perfect’. He came away from the evening thinking that the ‘perfect harmony of life’ that he had witnessed ‘suggested some deliberate artistic composition’. And perhaps he recalled too that the true aim of artistic composition was – according to Wilde’s new Aesthetic – ‘Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things.’48

* As with Poems Wilde persuaded Roberts Bros of Boston to produce a simultaneous American edition, offering them ‘the advance sheets and electros’ from the English publishers. He was dismayed, though, when they trimmed down the pages to produce a very much smaller book: ‘Why oh! why did you not keep my large margin,’ he lamented. ‘I assure you that there are subtle scientific relations between margin and style, and my stories read quite differently in your edition.’ Wilde to Thomas Niles, partner at Roberts Bros (Columbia).

† Wilde did have to endure some criticism from literal-minded ornithologists. A Mr J. R. Earl wrote to point out that Wilde’s description of the nightingale making her nest ‘in the holm-oak tree’ was inaccurate, as ‘the nightingale almost invariably builds her nest upon the ground’.

‡ OW did still engage with impressive thoroughness on many fronts. On 26 September 1889, he wrote to Charlotte Stopes (mother of the more famous Marie) returning her article on frozen meat: ‘With your contention that frozen meat ought to come into the scope of the Adulteration Act, I fully agree, and so I should think must everyone, but as to the prejudicial effects of the process of refrigeration on the flavour and nutritious properties of meat... I cannot help feeling that your views are somewhat exaggerated and should be glad if you could see your way to modify your expressions.’

§ A stalwart of numerous late-night establishments, such as the Fielding Club and the Spoofs, Willie was also a founder member of the Owl Club off St James’s Square. Asked to compose a poetic motto for the club, he dashed off the couplet: ‘We fly by night, and this resolve we make, / If the dawn must break, let the d-d thing break.’