3

Suggestive Things

‘An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.’

oscar wilde

During the first days of 1891, Wilde made a nostalgic visit to his former rooms in Charles Street for a small literary gathering hosted by Robert Sherard, who was over on a visit from Paris. Among the company was Sherard’s old New College contemporary, the dashing and irascible John Barlas. Wilde was interested to meet him.

Barlas was both a poet and radical socialist. A sometime member of the Social Democratic Federation and a contributor to William Morris’s Commonweal, he had been badly beaten by the police during the ‘Bloody Sunday’ disturbance of 1887. At Sherard’s party he had proclaimed his radical credentials by turning up with ‘a weird young female, whom he introduced as his sister-soul and Muse’. To assert her own commitment to the revolutionary cause she wore – as she confided to the company – red flannel ‘under things’. Despite the fact that Sherard considered her ‘hardly a person to bring to a “respectable” house’, Wilde treated her with great courtesy. But not enough for the ever-quarrelsome Barlas.

When the party broke up at the end of the afternoon, Wilde, Barlas and the ‘Muse’, together with Sherard and another poet (Barlas’s friend and fellow Scot, John Davidson) all left the house together. Walking through Grosvenor Square, Barlas suddenly hailed a hansom cab, bundled his lady friend into it, and then, turning on the others, rebuked them all – and Wilde in particular – for their ‘want of respect to his sister soul’. It appears he thought that Wilde should have offered his arm to the lady when they left the house. The dramatic exit was rather spoiled when the cab driver, on hearing that Barlas lived in a Lambeth slum district, hesitated to accept the fare. Wilde stepped forward and good-humouredly reassured the cabman (‘who knew him by sight, and addressed him as “my lord”’) that all would be well.*

The incident amused, rather than offended, Wilde; and after a contrite Barlas apologized, a friendship developed between the two men. Wilde introduced him to John Gray and others of his circle.1 Although Wilde appreciated Barlas’s lush Swinburnian verse, his political views intrigued him more. Recent months had been taxing ones for Wilde’s political allegiances. In November 1890, Parnell had found the details of his unconventional private life gleefully exposed, and picked over, in the British press, when the husband of Kitty O’Shea, his long-time mistress, finally sued his wife for divorce. The Unionist papers seized the opportunity to drag Parnell’s name through the mud. In the face of much prudish public indignation, the Liberals threatened to break their ties with the Irish Parliamentary Party, while Parnell’s refusal to stand down as leader split his own party into Parnellite and anti-Parnellite factions. In the welter of press-fuelled prurience and political infighting the hopes of achieving Irish Home Rule seemed, suddenly, to evaporate. It was a bitter moment.

Nevertheless, at the same time that Wilde’s confidence in the ability of the British parliamentary system to deliver radical change was being frayed, his broader political ideas were taking on new colour. Towards the end of 1890 he had been approached by Archibald Grove, the editor of the recently established New Review, who hoped he might write a ‘reply’ to a forthcoming article on ‘Socialism and Literature’. Grove wanted ‘about 3500 words, from the point of view of individualism’.2 Wilde did not take up the offer, deciding instead to write his own essay on the subject and place it with Frank Harris at the Fortnightly Review.

As Robbie Ross recalled it, Wilde wrote ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism’ ‘in three consecutive mornings’ in the library of the Ross family home at 85 Onslow Square, early in the New Year.3 ‘Socialism’ was, of course, a topic that had interested Wilde for some time. His encounters with the witty and contrarian Shaw had both broadened his understanding and encouraged him to think that it was a subject on which he might write;4 while his new friendship with Barlas – who was steeped in the writings of Proudhon, and tended more towards ‘anarchism’ in his views – offered a slightly different, and perhaps even more alluring, perspective.5

Abandoning his favourite dialogue form – though retaining much of its open-ended epigrammatic character – Wilde laid out a captivating and highly personal vision of socialism. He proclaimed the need to replace ‘private property’ with ‘public wealth’ – so that man might be freed from the tedious cares of ownership, and co-operation might supersede competition as the driving force of society. But he saw this only as a first step on the road towards the development of Individualism. ‘The true perfection of man’, he asserted, ‘lies not in what man has, but in what man is.’ In this Wilde was veering to the anarchist end of the socialist spectrum.

In support of his theory he held up the example of Jesus – not perhaps the divine figure of Christian orthodoxy, but the extraordinary human being, and great apostle of individualism, derived partly from Wilde’s imagination and partly from Ernest Renan’s determinedly secular 1861 book, La Vie de Jésus (Renan’s volume was added to Wilde’s select library of ‘golden books’; he dubbed it ‘the gospel according to St Thomas’).6 The message of Wilde’s Jesus was ‘Be thyself… You have a wonderful personality. Develop it… Don’t imagine that your perfection lies in accumulating or possessing external things. Your perfection is inside yourself.’

In assisting towards this goal of self-development Wilde proclaimed the redundancy of all forms of government, and all conventional moralities. All authority was considered degrading: ‘It degrades those who exercise it, and degrades those over whom it is exercised.’ A society constituted on the lines he proposed would be a haven for all, but particularly for artists (and for Oscar Wilde), since ‘art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known’.

Some of the large ideas adumbrated in the essay were given specific and topical point. In the wake of Parnell’s fall, Wilde incorporated a damning indictment of the prurient intrusiveness of the British press, which would seek to ‘drag before the eyes of the public some incident in the private life of a great statesman… and invite the public to discuss the incident’. ‘In old days,’ Wilde remarked, ‘men had the rack. Now they have the press.’ It was scarcely an improvement. And taking a swipe at the critics who had condemned ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’ as ‘morbid’, Wilde declared, ‘What is morbidity but a mood of emotion or a mode of thought that one cannot express? The public are all morbid, because the public can never find expression for anything. The artist is never morbid. He expresses everything. He stands outside his subject.’

The essay appeared in the February issue of the Fortnightly Review. If, as one critic suggested, it had been written ‘to startle and excite comment’, it succeeded well. Press opinion might be divided, but there was considerable private enthusiasm for the piece. The young Roger Fry admired it greatly. The writer Grant Allen thanked Wilde for penning such a ‘noble and beautiful essay’. And Barlas, writing to John Gray, hailed it as ‘the most perfect revolutionary essay the world has yet seen, not only as a work of art, but for knowledge and insight’.7 He had already saluted Wilde – and Gray – as fellow anarchists: ‘All artists are so unconsciously from birth,’ he had suggested.8 And he was delighted to find his insight confirmed.

To give the text a visual – as well as a literary – distinction, Wilde had insisted on having many of his more apothegmatic statements set in italics: ‘There is only one class in the community that thinks more about money than the rich, and that is the poor.’ ‘Art should never try to make itself popular. The public should try to make itself artistic’, etc. And this conceit provoked almost as much as the political views expressed. At a fashionable lunch party the Liberal MP Herbert Asquith suggested to Wilde, with a slight edge of malice, that ‘The man who uses italics is like the man who raises his voice in conversation and talks loudly in order make himself heard.’ Wilde, however refused to rise to the bait. ‘How delightful of you, Mr Asquith, to have noticed that!’ he replied with smiling good humour. ‘The brilliant phrase, like good wine, needs no bush. But just as the orator marks his good things by a dramatic pause, or by raising or lowering his voice, or by gesture, so the writer marks his epigrams with italics, setting the little gem, so to speak, like a jeweller – an excusable love of one’s art, not all mere vanity, I like to think.’9

The stir caused in London by the essay was more than matched by exciting news from across the Atlantic. Wilde received a cable from Lawrence Barrett to say that Guido Ferranti (as The Duchess of Padua had been renamed) had opened at the Broadway Theatre in New York to very favourable reviews, and was running ‘to crowded houses’. Although Wilde’s authorship had been kept off the playbills, it had been divined by the critic from the New York Tribune, and Barrett suggested that Wilde should cable the American press acknowledging that he was indeed the author, and expressing his thanks to the public for their reception of his play.10

Barrett had cut the piece down substantially; it now ran to just three hours. And, despite being fifty-three, he brought his customary vigour to the role of the youthful Guido; in the part of the Duchess, his regular leading lady, Minna Gale – for all her ‘metallic infelicity of voice’ and ‘crudity of gesture’ – was acclaimed, at least by some, as having achieved a new ‘height of tragic power’. Wilde’s ‘blank verse’ was hailed as ‘scholarly and poetical’ and, sometimes, ‘full of the fire of eloquence’.11Although most of the reviewers qualified their praise – noting the play’s literary debts, logical inconsistencies, tendency to ‘melodrama’, ‘morbid’ details and general ‘improbability’ – the consensus was favourable enough. Audiences were not discouraged from coming.

At least one press report suggested that Wilde had been taken by surprise at the play’s production. Certainly there had been no suggestion that he travel to America for the opening night. His arrival would, in any case, have compromised the secret of his authorship. He was, nevertheless, delighted with the play’s success (the ‘immense success’ as he termed it). He composed a paragraph about the production for the Daily Telegraph, and wrote promptly to Henry Irving, urging him to look again at the piece (‘you are the one artist in England who can produce poetic blank-verse drama’). Irving, however, again demurred. Nor was the actor-manager Charles Cartwright, whom Wilde also approached, ready to take on the project.12† In New York the play ran for a creditable three weeks (until 14 February) at which point Barrett replaced it with another piece that he wished to try out. There was, though, a stated plan to revive it for the company’s summer tour.13

The production of the Duchess reminded Wilde of his other theatrical commitment. He had hesitated to make a start on his play for George Alexander, and then found the task intractable. ‘I can’t get a grip on the play yet,’ he confessed. ‘The fact is I worked at it when I was not in the mood for work, and must first forget it, and then go back quite fresh to it.’14 Not knowing when the mood might strike him, he offered – uncharacteristically – to repay Alexander the £50 advance, and terminate their agreement. To his alarm Alexander accepted the suggestion, leaving Wilde to backtrack, and explain that, actually, he was ‘in a great mess about money’ and would not have any until the Duchess had been on its tour.15

Wilde’s immediate literary concern, though, was to put the finishing touches to the book version of Dorian Gray, adding six new chapters, enriching the melodrama of the plot, sharpening the social satire, polishing the text and amending some of the more contentiously homoerotic passages. A reference to Basil and Dorian walking back from the club ‘arm in arm’ was cut, along with another to Lord Henry placing his hand on Basil’s shoulder. He also excised the gushing commentary given by Lady Brandon as she introduced her party guests to one another: ‘Sir Humpty Dumpty – you know – Afghan Frontier – Russian intrigues: very successful man – wife killed by an elephant – quite inconsolable – wants to marry a beautiful American widow – everybody does nowadays.’ It was, perhaps, too obviously a caricature of his own mother at one of her receptions. Lady Wilde had certainly thought that the story needed ‘some alterations’.16

Among the passages added was a fuller account of the ‘New Hedonism’, Sir Henry’s seductive theory of pleasure (‘the only thing worth having a theory about’). According to his estimate, ‘Pleasure is Nature’s test, her sign of approval. When we are happy we are always good, but when we are good we are not always happy… To be good is to be in harmony with one’s self… Discord it to be forced to be in harmony with others. One’s own life – that is the important thing… Individualism has really the higher aim… no civilized man ever regrets a pleasure, and no uncivilized man ever knows what a pleasure is.’17 It was a theory that Wilde was prepared to live by.

The editor at Ward, Lock & Co., a young writer called Coulson Kernahan, strove to keep Wilde within bounds. The task was taxing. When he criticized Wilde’s line ‘the sky was an inverted cup of blue metal’ as an ineffective piece of ‘Wardour Street artificiality’ (on the grounds that the sky was soft not hard), Wilde interrupted, ‘No! No!... Not Wardour Street – delete the “W”, if you like, and say that with the “ardour” of the artist, and with my eyes all upon the picture, I have taken a brushful of colour from the wrong corner of my palette, for there is something in what you say of my use of the words “cup” and “metal”. But such a phrase as “Wardour Street” which I always associate with the painted harlots one sees parading there, makes me shudder.’‡ Kernahan thought he had managed to persuade Wilde to cut the ‘Devil’s doctrine’ – as he termed it – of Lord Henry’s advocacy of ‘sin’ as an element of self-fulfilment. But Wilde subsequently changed his mind, insisting the passage be reinstated. ‘After all,’ he claimed, ‘it is merely Luther’s “Pecca Fortiter” [Sin Boldly] put dramatically into the lips of a character.’18

The physical aspects of the book were, of course, addressed with care. Ricketts produced a series of small gold ‘butterfly’ designs to dot the cover, as well as a hand-lettered title page. As with Wilde’s two previous publications it was decided to issue the title in two versions – a standard one (priced at 6s) and a ‘de luxe’ signed large-paper edition, limited to fifty copies, numbered and signed by the author, and priced at a guinea.

As a further refinement, Wilde composed a collection of twenty-three aphorisms about art and morality, to serve as a preface and to forestall the most obvious lines of critical attack. Among his assertions were: ‘There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.’ ‘It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.’ ‘When critics disagree the artist is in accord with himself.’ And ‘All art is quite useless.’ Frank Harris, seeing the epigrams in the manuscript, begged to be allowed to publish them first in the Fortnightly Review. Wilde consented – and in what may have been a cheerful rebuke to the critics who had assailed the typography of ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism’ he insisted they all be printed in italics.

For all the work to be done on the book there was still time for socializing. Wilde continued to see much of Dorian’s namesake John Gray. They were together at a Rhymers’ Club gathering chez Horne at the end of January, and a week later were both at the Vale.19 Their constant companionship led some to suppose that there must be a sexual dimension to their relations. Rumours began to form. Barlas ‘hinted, rather vaguely’ to his friend Frank Liebich, of an ‘(alleged) intimacy’ between the two. But Wilde himself, though he was surely attracted to Gray, and may have tried to seduce him, always characterized their friendship as a purely intellectual and artistic one; and Frank Harris supports the claim.20

Where Wilde’s sexual interests lay just then is unknown, though a letter to the young actor Roland Atwood gives a flavour of the camp flirtatiousness that he sought out and enjoyed: ‘I send you your necktie, in which I know you will look Greek and gracious. I don’t think it is too dark for you… Has Gerald Gurney forgiven me yet for talking to no one but you that afternoon? I suppose not. But who else was there to talk to?’21 The rate of his sexual encounters was, it seems, increasing. And although he lost none of his power to charm and inspire the young, he came to exercise it with a certain cynicism. He became – as he later recognized – ‘reckless of young lives’. He would take a up a young man ‘love him “passionately”’ for a while, then ‘grow bored’ and cease even to notice him.22

Although Harris recognized that Gray ‘of course found extraordinary stimulus in Oscar’s talk’, the stimulation was mutual. There was a keen ‘intellectual sympathy’ between the two men, and Gray’s up-to-date knowledge of contemporary French culture made him specially interesting to Wilde. On a visit to Paris the previous year, Gray had sought out the avant-garde critic Félix Fénéon, and was corresponding with him. He had developed an understanding of how the established decadence espoused by many young French writers was now shading into a newly designated symbolism that sought to achieve its vague and allusive effects not by describing a thing directly but rather the effect that it produced. At the Rhymers’ Club evening in Fitzroy Street, Gray read what Dowson described as, ‘some very beautiful & obscure versicles in the latest manner of French Symbolism’; and he brought with him to the Vale the young Symbolist-inspired French artist Lucien Pissarro (son of the Impressionist painter Camille).23 Such encounters seem to have ignited Wilde’s interest. He introduced modish references to ‘the symbol’ among his aphorisms prefacing Dorian Gray: ‘All art is at once surface and symbol.’ ‘Those who read the symbol do so at their peril.’

And with the editorial work on his book almost complete, he took himself off towards the end of February for a brief holiday in Paris. He had not spent time in the French capital since his honeymoon almost seven years before. Then he had been a young man with few achievements to his name, beyond charm, self-belief, a supposed intimacy with Swinburne, a slim volume of poems and an American lecture tour. Now he returned as a figure of some standing, and with the beginnings of a real connection to the French literary scene. One of his fairy stories had already appeared in French, and he had hopes that his two dialogues and The Picture of Dorian Gray might be translated too.24

The writer whom Wilde was most concerned to meet while in Paris was Stéphane Mallarmé, the acclaimed leader of the new Symbolist school, the author of L’après-midi d’un faune, and a man who – in Wilde’s newly formed estimate – had taken French prose and poetry and made them into a single thing.25 Mallarmé held a regular Tuesday evening gathering for writers and artists at his flat in the rue de Rome. Wilde attended the ‘mardi’ on 24 February.

He accounted it a ‘really unforgettable’ occasion. At the end of the evening Mallarmé presented him with a copy of his translation of Les Poèmes d’Edgar Poe inscribed ‘A Oscar Wilde, en souvenir d’un premier soir’. And the following day Sherard asked Mallarmé to join him, Wilde and the poet Jean Moréas for lunch that Thursday (it was Moréas who had defined the Symbolist movement in a manifesto of 1886). There was some doubt as to whether the ‘Cher et très-honoré Maître’ would be turning up at the Café Riche, since his answer to Sherard’s invitation was – like everything he wrote – worded in such an ‘intricate and obscure manner’ as to leave its meaning uncertain. But he did come, and a ‘very cordial’ time was had. In Sherard’s recollection, Wilde succeeded in ‘amazing’ the two French poets.26

Although Wilde had intended to stay only a week in Paris, a sudden bout of illness, and the many diversions of the city, kept him there until the middle of March. He wrote to his five-and-a-half-year-old son, Cyril, hoping that he was ‘taking great care of dear Mamma’, and promising to bring back some chocolates. His extended visit allowed him to attend another Mallarmé mardi, and to broaden his acquaintance among the members of the Symbolist school. At Sunday lunch chez Jacques-Emile Blanche, he was introduced to Mallarmé’s disciple Henri de Régnier; the twenty-six-year-old Régnier ranked Wilde as the first intelligent Englishman he had met (Wilde reported to John Gray that Régnier was ‘bien gentile’).27 Carlos Blacker was in town, together with his beautiful mistress, ‘la belle Kate’, and Wilde brought Régnier to dine with them one evening at the Maison Dorée.28

Accompanied by Blacker and Sherard, Wilde called on Emile Zola. The great Realist received the celebrated Aesthete graciously, claiming he was honoured by the visit. He talked of his current work, La Débâcle, describing his trawls through mounds of documents about the Franco-Prussian War, and visits to the battlefield at Sedan. Wilde – despite having disparaged Zola’s ‘unimaginative realism’ – affected to agree with this research-based approach to novel writing, recalling that in writing Dorian Gray he himself had ‘studied long lists of jewellery’ and pored over the catalogues of horticultural firms: ‘You cannot,’ he told Zola, ‘draw a novel from your brain as spider draws its web out of its belly.’29§

While in Paris Wilde was looking over the proofs of Dorian Gray. Back in London, Coulson Kernahan was startled to receive a telegram from his author: ‘Terrible blunder in book. Coming back specially. Stop all proofs.’ Wilde followed soon after, arriving in a hansom cab and a state of theatrical panic. ‘It is not too late? For heaven’s sake tell me it is not too late?’ he affected to gasp. The cause of all this drama was that he had noticed the picture framer in his novel was named ‘Ashton’: ‘Ashton’, he declared in anguished tones, ‘is a gentleman’s name. And I’ve given it – God forgive me – to a tradesman! It must be changed to Hubbard. Hubbard positively smells of the tradesman!’ As Kernahan remarked, having ‘successfully worked off this wheeze on me’, Wilde became his smiling self again.30

The book finally appeared in April. The storm of interest and controversy that had greeted the periodical publication the year before was not repeated. The 250 copies of the handsome large-paper, one-guinea, edition de luxe found a market among dedicated bibliophiles, but the modest 1,000-book run of the ordinary 6s edition failed to sell out. The six new chapters were not enough to convince people that this was an entirely new work on which they should spend six times more than they had spent on Lippincott’s Magazine. Wilde like to claim that in offering him a £125 (against royalties of 10 per cent) Ward, Lock & Co. had taken advantage of his naivety. But – given the poor sales – it was a very good deal for him.31

Reviews were scant. The most gratifying notice did not appear until November: Walter Pater, relieved at the excision of certain passages from the magazine version, felt able to pen some words of generous, though qualified, praise in the Bookman. While taking care to point out that ‘Lord Henry Wotton’ and ‘Dorian Gray’ had failed to grasp the ‘moral’ element in true ‘Epicureanism’ (as laid out by him in his novel, Marius), he saluted ‘the skill, the real subtlety of art, the ease and fluidity withal’ of Wilde’s telling of an ‘excellent story’.32

The appearance of Wilde’s novel was followed swiftly by the publication, at the beginning of May, of his collected essays by Osgood & McIlvaine. Wilde had gathered together his two dialogues, ‘Pen, Pencil and Poison’ and his essay on Shakespearean costume under the title Intentions. All the pieces had been revised, and slightly expanded from their original forms. Nevertheless the last essay, with its plea for ‘archaeological’ accuracy in theatrical representations, sat rather awkwardly amid the calls to imagination and ‘lying’ in the other pieces – and Wilde felt obliged to tag it with an insouciant closing paragraph remarking, ‘Not that I agree with everything I have said in this essay. There is much with which I disagree.’

If the re-appearance of Wilde’s novel in a new guise produced a slightly underwhelming effect, the repackaging of his ‘essays’ was more enthusiastically received. Separated from the immediacy of topical journalistic debate, their distinctiveness, their originality and their brilliance became even more apparent. Frank Harris thought that ‘Plato might have been proud to sign [several of the] pages’.33 In Pater’s view, Wilde was carrying on, ‘more perhaps than any other writer, the brilliant critical work of Matthew Arnold’.34 It was never going to be a popular a success, but it was admired and welcomed by the ‘elect’. And the appearance, later that summer, of Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime and Other Stories served usefully to keep Wilde’s literary star in the ascendant.

* Wilde had developed a penchant for taking hansom cabs that had become almost a dependency. Generous with his tips and his patronage (he would hail a cab for even the shortest trip, and often keep them on while he made calls and visits) he was revered among the drivers as ‘the best rider in Chelsea’.

† Wilde also wrote to the New York Herald (15 February 1891) correcting their ‘interesting and inaccurate’ article on his reasons for keeping his authorship a secret: ‘When a work is anonymous, the public and the journalists can to a certain degree develop that temperament of receptivity to which alone are artistic effects revealed. When the author’s name is affixed they are distracted by a desire to praise or to censure, according as they have principles or prejudices. This is bad for them.’

‡ Wardour Street, in Soho, was – during the late nineteenth century – a centre for the manufacture and sale of cheap over-ornate reproduction furniture. As a result it became a byword for tawdriness and a term of critical abuse.

§ Wilde appears to have given a rather more accurate account of their different approaches to research to another friend, explaining, ‘whenever that man [Zola] writes a book he always takes his subjects directly from life. If he is going to write about dreadful people living in hovels he goes and lives in a hovel himself for months in case he shouldn’t be accurate. It is strange. Take me for example. I have conceived the idea for the most exquisite tale that was ever written. The period is the eighteenth century. It would require a morning’s reading in the British Museum. Therefore it will never be written.’