1

The Last First Nights

‘The truth is rarely pure and never simple.’

oscar wilde

‘Remember to what a point your Puritanism in England has brought you,’ declares the dangerous Mrs Cheveley in Act 1 of An Ideal Husband:

In old days nobody pretended to be a bit better than his neighbours. In fact, to be a bit better than one’s neighbour was considered excessively vulgar and middle-class. Nowadays, with our modern mania for morality, every one has to pose as a paragon of purity, incorruptibility, and all the other seven deadly virtues – and what is the result? You all go over like ninepins – one after the other. Not a year passes in England without somebody disappearing. Scandals used to lend charm, or at least interest, to a man – now they crush him.

The speech was just one of the jewels of sparkling perspicacity that glittered on the play’s opening night. Wilde’s anxieties about the piece proved unfounded. It was welcomed enthusiastically, bar a few growls from ‘the pittites’. To most in the crowded theatre it seemed to display ‘a distinct advance in dramatic power’. There was much laughter, real enjoyment and real engagement. Wilde, ‘faultlessly groomed’ and dressed in the ‘last note of fashion’ was conspicuous in a stage box, surrounded by a flattering crowed of ‘most distinguished persons’ whose praise he received with a ‘semi-royal graciousness’. Called before the curtain, he gave his now expected turn of insouciant self-assertion (or ‘studied insolence’), declaring – ‘I have enjoyed myself very much.’1*

The reviewers might still carp at Wilde’s supposedly formulaic witticisms and second-hand plot devices but their ungenerous comments were neatly skewered by Bernard Shaw in the Saturday Review: ‘As far as I can ascertain,’ he wrote, ‘I am the only person in London who cannot sit down and write an Oscar Wilde play at will. The fact that his plays, though apparently lucrative, remain unique under these circumstances, says much for the self-denial of our scribes. In a certain sense Mr. Wilde is to me our only thorough playwright. He plays with everything: with wit, with philosophy, with drama, with actor and audience, with the whole theatre.’2

Wilde had achieved an almost unprecedented feat: his first three plays ‘all successes’.3 If this was a rare attainment, it was also a great relief. He would be earning money again, and in large amounts. Success, however, did not make him humble; it made him insufferable. Taxed as to whether he considered An Ideal Husband his best play, he replied that ‘only mediocrities improve’; his three comedies, he suggested, ‘form a perfect cycle, and in their delicate sphere complete both life and art’. ‘Humility,’ he explained to the same interviewer, ‘is for the hypocrite, modesty for the incompetent. Assertion is at once the duty and the privilege of the artist.’4 Not everyone was impressed by the pose. Arthur Conan Doyle thought Wilde must have become ‘mad’ when the playwright solemnly urged him to see his new play with the line, ‘Ah, you must go. It is wonderful. It is genius!’5

In a series of statements to the press Wilde re-affirmed his current views on the relative positions of the playwright, the public and the critic. ‘I write to please myself,’ he explained. The critics ‘have always propounded the degrading dogma that the duty of the dramatist is to please the public’, but the ‘aim of the artist is no more to give pleasure than to give pain. The aim of art is to be art.’ Such ‘art’ should be an expression of the artist’s personality. ‘We shall never have a real drama in England until it is recognized that a play is as personal and individual a form of self-expression as a poem or a picture.’ ‘The public makes a success when it realizes that a play is a work of art.’ As a result it was the artist who was ‘the munificent patron of the public’, rather than the other way round. ‘I am very fond of the public,’ Wilde declared; ‘and, personally, I always patronize them very much.’6

He pointed out that the critics had missed the ‘entire psychology’ of the piece: ‘the difference in the way in which a man loves a woman from that in which a woman loves a man’. Lady Chiltern, he suggested, displays a female ‘weakness’ in making an ‘ideal’ of her husband, while Sir Robert displays his masculine shortcoming by not daring to ‘show his imperfections to the thing he loves’. When quizzed about the so-called ‘double standard’ of the contemporary moral code, Wilde asserted that it was ‘indeed a burning shame that there should be one law for men and another law for women’, before adding ‘I think that there should be no law for anybody.’7

Constance was not at the first night. Over the Christmas holidays she had suffered a health crisis, perhaps exacerbated by a fall downstairs. Her ailment remained a mystery, but she found it difficult to walk. To aid her recuperation she went down to Babbacombe to stay with Lady Mount Temple. Oscar was left – installed at the Hotel Albemarle – to enjoy his success, along with Douglas and his other friends.8 There was a lessening of anxiety, since the Marquess of Queensberry was away from London, arranging the sale of his Scottish estates.

Amid the pleasures of the moment there was also a fresh professional excitement. Henry James’s play Guy Domville was failing badly at St James’s Theatre, leaving George Alexander in dire and unexpected need of a replacement piece. Not having anything immediately to hand, he approached Wilde about the possibility of putting on The Importance of Being Earnest. The play (which Alexander had initially turned down) was scheduled for production by Charles Hawtrey at the Criterion later in the year. Nevertheless Wilde, ready to help his first producer, and perhaps also keen to see the production date of the piece brought forward, asked Hawtrey whether he might consider surrendering the rights to Alexander. Hawtrey (almost certainly encouraged by the promise of first refusal of Wilde’s next piece) generously agreed to the arrangement – asking neither a premium from Alexander, nor a return of Wilde’s advance.9

The play had to go into rehearsal almost at once. But, as with Lady Windermere’s Fan, Alexander was not convinced by Wilde’s structuring of the drama. It seemed too long and too diffuse; four-act farces were almost unknown. Alexander proposed the radical solution of combining Acts 2 and 3, and cutting completely the episode in which a solicitor called Grigsby arrives to arrest ‘Ernest Worthing’ for debts that he has run up at the Savoy.10 Wilde acquiesced. According to one account, when Alexander told him the Grigsby scene made the play twenty minutes too long, he replied, ‘You may be right, my dear Alec. I can only tell you that it took just five minutes to compose.’11

The play’s reduced running time encouraged Wilde to propose The Florentine Tragedy as a curtain-raiser. Alexander was open to the idea, but Wilde – away from Tite Street and his study – failed to produce the manuscript.12 He attended some of the rehearsals for The Importance of Being Earnest and, although his presence sometimes created tensions, and Alexander was even reported to have once ordered him out of a rehearsal, he remained anxious to assist.13 He would write the occasional extra line on request, for example when it was found that there was not enough time for an actor ‘to get across the stage’ or someone ‘wanted a better exit’.14

Douglas, however, was – as always – impatient for pleasure. The palmist Mrs Robinson had predicted that he and Wilde would make a trip together in January, and he was eager to fulfil the prophecy. He insisted on being taken on a trip to Algeria, and they departed on the 15th.15 The escape from an English winter into the light, lassitude and sexual licence of North Africa was delightful. ‘There is great beauty here,’ Wilde reported to Ross. ‘The Kabyle boys are quite lovely.’ Even the beggars, he noted, had ‘profiles, so the problem of poverty is easily solved’. Wilde and Douglas took to smoking hashish: ‘It is quite exquisite: three puffs of smoke and then peace and love.’16

During their second week, in the beautiful walled city of Blidah, 30 miles south of Algiers, they again ran into André Gide. At Gide’s inquiry as to what he was doing so far from London, Wilde replied, ‘I am running away from art. I want to worship only the sun. Have you noticed how the sun despises all thought, makes it retreat, take refuge in the shadows. Once thought lived in Egypt; the sun conquered Egypt. It lived for long in Greece; the sun conquered Greece. Then Italy, and then France. Today all thought is pushed back to Norway and Russia, where the sun never comes. The sun is jealous of art.’ The brilliance of this flight was only slightly undercut by the fact that the weather was deteriorating, and rain – if not snow – was forecast.

For all Wilde’s friendliness, there appeared to Gide a new coarseness in his manner – ‘less softness in his look… something raucous in his laughter, and a wild madness in his joy. He seemed at the same time more sure of pleasing and less ambitious to succeed in doing so.’ He was becoming reckless, hardened and conceited. When they met up again in Algiers soon afterwards, Wilde announced, ‘I have a duty to myself to amuse myself frightfully.’ But it was not happiness he sought: ‘Above all not happiness. Pleasure! You must always aim at the most tragic.’ Wilde was on his own. There had been another terrible row with Bosie, who had stormed off in pursuit of a beautiful ‘sugar-lipped’ fourteen-year-old, with whom he planned to ‘elope’ to Biskra.

Gide found himself swept up in Wilde’s wake, and they spent several happy days together. Gide recalled how, as they walked the streets, Wilde would be followed by a throng of young ‘ragamuffins’; he chatted with each one; he regarded them with joy and tossed his money to them haphazardly. ‘I hope,’ he remarked, ‘to have quite demoralized the city.’17

Certainly he succeeded in ‘demoralizing’ Gide, or – rather – in liberating him. Wilde perceived that his young friend was in a state of tortured sexual confusion, unable to acknowledge or embrace his own homosexual yearnings. On one of their evenings in the old quarter, Wilde arranged for the choked and nervous young Frenchman to spend a night of sexual passion with a beautiful dark-eyed flute player whom he had been admiring in one of the cafés. It marked the great climacteric of Gide’s life. Gide recalled how, at dawn the following morning, he had run through the empty streets of Algiers, overcome by a joyful lightness of body and spirit. Nevertheless, despite this great event, Gide remained perturbed by Wilde; by the recklessness with which he treated both his own life and his own art. ‘Wilde!’ he wrote to his mother, ‘What more tragic life is there than his! If only he were more careful – if he were capable of being careful – he would be a genius, a great genius.’ Never having seen any of Wilde’s plays, Gide was prepared to accept the writer’s self-deprecatory verdict upon them: ‘Oh, but [they] are not at all good; and I don’t put any stock in them… although if you only knew the amusement they give!’18 Wilde – reiterating a favoured line – had then confided, ‘the great tragedy’ of his life: ‘I have put my genius into my life, I have only put my talent into my works.’19

Wilde’s life, though, seemed to be veering close to the precipice. His flaunting of his homosexual liaisons made him an increasingly compromising companion. Gide confessed that, should they meet in London or Paris, he would not be able to acknowledge him. ‘If Wilde’s plays in London did not run for three hundred performances,’ Gide suggested, ‘and if the Prince of Wales did not attend his first nights, he would be in prison, and Lord Douglas as well.’20

For all the ‘bold joy’ of Wilde’s pose, there lurked beneath it – as Gide noted – a strain of ‘dark anxiety’. Indeed Wilde confessed something of his fears about Queensberry’s campaign against him. When asked about the risks involved in returning to London, he replied, ‘One should never know that… my friends advise prudence. Prudence! But can I have any? That would be going backwards. I must go as far as possible… I can not go further. Something must happen… something else.’21

Wilde left Algiers on 31 January, and returned alone to London. With Constance still down at Babbacombe, he took rooms at the luxurious but ‘loathsome’ Hotel Avondale on Piccadilly. He was unable to return to his preferred Albermarle, as his bill there remained unpaid. The Importance of Being Earnest was set to open on 14 February.

If the public were excited at the prospect, so too was the Marquess of Queensberry. He was now back in London, and more determined than ever to bring matters to a head. Wilde’s new play seemed to offer a perfect opportunity. Fortunately Lady Queensberry learnt of his plans to cause a disruption on the opening night, and passed the information on to Wilde. The whole Douglas family was united in deploring the marquess’s campaign of harassment; not out of any concern for Wilde, but because they saw it as damaging to Bosie. Even Percy Douglas concurred, having been convinced by his younger brother that there were no grounds for the marquess’s suspicions.22

Prompted by Wilde, George Alexander wrote to the marquess cancelling the ticket that he had acquired for the opening night.23 Even so, Wilde remained anxious. He alerted the police to the possibilities of an incident.

There was an increased presence outside the theatre on the evening of the premiere. Inside the theatre, though, as the fashionable crowd thronged the foyers, glad to have escaped the swirling snowstorm outside, Wilde remained unsure of what the marquess was planning, and whether or not he would succeed. He strove to bury his anxieties beneath the glitter of the occasion. Bosie remained in Algeria, but Constance (though still in poor health) had returned from Babbacombe to attend the opening.24

The play took from the first. ‘What brings you up to town?’ ‘Oh, pleasure, pleasure. What else should bring one anywhere?’ As Irene Vanbrugh, the young actress playing Gwendolen, recalled, the performance ‘went with a delightful ripple of laughter from start to finish’.25 Ada Leverson (there, in a box, with Aubrey and Mabel Beardsley) thought the auditorium suffused with a ‘strange almost hysterical joy’ as the inspired ‘nonsense’ of the play unfolded. Alexander’s deft editorial interventions ensured that the pace never let up. To a friend who had suggested that a farce should be like a mosaic, Wilde had countered, ‘No, it must be like a pistol shot.’ And there was no doubt that Wilde’s ‘trivial comedy for serious people’ had hit the target. The author was ‘loudly cheered’ when he was called before the curtain to take his bow. He declined, though, to make a speech.26

It was clear, even before the near-unanimous clamour of press approbation, that, in his procession of theatrical successes, this marked a new high.† The play was considered both delightfully ‘modern’ and quintessentially Wilde. Well might he boast (as he did later) that he had taken ‘the drama, the most objective form known to art, and made it as personal a mode of expression as the lyric or the sonnet’.27 Although, even in the euphoria of the first-night triumph, he did obliquely acknowledge Alexander’s contribution to the piece, remarking, ‘My dear Aleck, it was charming, quite charming. And, do you know, from time to time I was reminded of a play I once wrote myself called The Importance of Being Earnest.’28

But, despite the thrill of success, Wilde did not join Ada Leverson and her party for supper at Willis’s, as was expected. He had been perturbed at news of Queensberry’s antics. The ‘Scarlet Marquess’, he discovered, had arrived, together with a prizefighter bearing ‘a grotesque bouquet of vegetables’. Unable to gain entry to the theatre, he had ‘prowled about for three hours’, then – leaving his ‘bouquet’ for Wilde at the box office – had departed ‘chattering like a monstrous ape’.29

If Wilde felt hounded by Queensberry, he also felt that the marquess had perhaps over-reached himself with this latest pantomime. His threatening behaviour had been witnessed by many of the staff at the St James’s. The bunch of vegetables remained at the box office. There was the memory, too, of the marquess’s disruption of Tennyson’s play thirteen years earlier, to suggest what he was capable of. Wilde had regretted in the past not going to the law to restrain Queensberry. Here, it appeared, was something to act upon. The following day, having consulted with Percy Douglas, he instructed Humphreys to investigate the possibility of prosecuting the marquess ‘for his threats and insulting conduct’.

Bosie returned from Algiers soon after, delighted to learn of the plan. He wanted, as he said (repeatedly), to see his father ‘in the dock’.30 He stayed with Wilde at the Avondale, happy to share in the luxuries of the place, and to abuse them too. When Wilde remonstrated with him for bringing a young rent boy to stay in his room, he flew into a rage and moved – together with the boy – to another hotel; as ever, Wilde was obliged to pay the bill.31

With two money-making plays now running in the West End (and a successful revival of Lady Windermere’s Fan just opened at Camberwell’s Metropole Theatre), Wilde wanted to be able to enjoy himself. London, however, seemed over-full of cares. Queensberry remained a constant threat. Bosie’s behaviour was tiring. Creditors, alive to rumours of his new prosperity, were clamouring for payment; within days of the opening of Earnest Wilde had been served with writs for £400.32 He planned to escape to Paris, where Sarah Bernhardt had – very excitingly – revived her scheme for a production of Salomé.33 But even here Wilde was thwarted. His bill at the Avondale was now £148; he did not yet have the money to pay it, and the management would not let him remove his luggage until the account was settled.34

This frustration was followed by another. On 28 February Humphreys wrote to say that the firm would be unable to prosecute Queensberry for his threatening antics at the St James’s Theatre, as neither George Alexander nor the theatre staff were prepared to give witness statements. They were anxious to stay out of the conflict. The ‘only consolation’ Humphreys could offer was that ‘such a persistent persecutor as Lord Queensberry will probably give you another opportunity sooner or later of seeking the protection of the Law’ – at which moment the firm would be delighted to assist in bringing him to justice.35 It seemed a rather bleak comfort.

* In the audience that night was Henry James. Sick with nerves, he had come as a means of avoiding having to witness the first night of his own play – Guy Domville – which was opening that evening at the St James’s Theatre, under the direction of George Alexander. James subsequently wrote to his brother, William: ‘I sat through [An Ideal Husband] and saw it played with every appearance (so far as the crowded house was an appearance) of complete success... The thing seemed to me so helpless, so crude, so bad, so clumsy, feeble and vulgar, that as I walked away across St James’s Square to learn my own fate, the prosperity of what I had seen seemed to me to constitute a dreadful presumption of the shipwreck of Guy Domville... “How can my piece do anything with a public with whom that is a success?”’ His presumption proved only too correct. His play was not a success. And, when called before the curtain at the end, James was greeted by a volley of boos from some sections of the audience.

† Among the few negative assessments of the piece was one by Bernard Shaw in the Saturday Review. Ever the contrarian, Shaw claimed to find the play ‘heartless’.