The Fall of the House of Wilde (24 page)

Oscar's letters to his mother are more personal, telling her of his impressions of Venice, of ‘a great pink sunset' or that ‘every moment a black silent gondola would glide across this great stream of light and be lost in the darkness'. He tells her how women dress: ‘every woman, nearly, over thirty powdered the front of her hair; most wore veils but I see that bonnets are now made with very high crowns and two wreaths, one under the diadem and one round the crown', and of the uncommon exuberance of the Italians at the end of a performance of a new opera,
Dolores
. After Verona Oscar ran out of money and had to return home alone, while Mahaffy and Goulding headed for Genoa. As he put it to his mother, ‘As I have no money, I was obliged to leave them and feel very lonely.' He returned via Paris, where he hoped his parents had arranged for him to pick up £5. He wrote to Jane before he left, on 26 June 1875, ‘if there is no money in Paris for me I will not know what to do, but I feel sure there will be the genial £5'. And signed himself, ‘Yours ever Oscar O'F. Wilde'. To his father he was more demonstrative, signing himself, ‘Yours ever truly affectionately Oscar O'F. W. Wilde'.
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Jane's letters to Oscar in Oxford are playful and lavish in love, as in the following send-up of sentimental poetry:

O darling child!

Thy mother loves thee still

Her good heart throbs –

(Rhymes with throbs?)

Dobs, bobs, sobs – ?

Won't do – I better give up – turn to prose again! Alas.

Adoring and self-dramatising, she variously signed off as ‘Devotissima Madre', ‘La Madre affectionate', ‘La tua Madre', or ‘Thine lovingly de Coeur,' or sometimes ‘Your ever affectionate, J. W. F.'. In one letter she wanted Oscar to come up with ‘delicious lines with a glowing word & a classical allusion'.
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Oscar duly obliged. Being passionate readers made them companions in spirit. They were also united in their exalted sense of art.

Oscar had his first poem published in November 1875 in
Dublin University Magazine
, ‘A Chorus of Cloud Maidens'. Jane had helped Oscar as a child write down the sentences he invented. And now their both writing poetry reinforced the mutual bond. The second of his poems, ‘From Spring Days to Winter', again published in
Dublin University Magazine
, in January 1876, met with only mild approval from Jane: ‘It is not my style but it is light and pretty à la Alfred [Perceval] Graves but rather better.' As Oscar started to get published, she wanted to be more involved, and wrote to him at Oxford about ‘Graffiti d'Italia', a poem he had just written, to say, ‘Send me yours to read – I feel neglected when I only know it in print.'
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She spoke freely of the next poem he had published in
Dublin University Magazine
in March 1876, ‘San Miniato'. ‘The Magazine arrived last night – The poem looks and reads perfect – the evident spirit of a Poet Natural in it. I would only have left out “Shame” – Sin & repentance are highly poetical. “Shame” is not – Any other monosyllable would do that expressed moral weakness – Some lines are beautiful . . . When I study the poem I'll let you know my opinion.'
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She would not have Oscar a man wallowing in masochistic misery. The literary school of Baudelaire et al that indulged in ignominy would have been repugnant to a woman whose natural attachment was to Romantic heroic glory. Nevertheless, ‘shame' would become one of Oscar's poetic watchwords.

Evidently she wanted to exercise her critical acumen and whether Oscar sent her ‘Magdalen Walks', written in April 1878, for pruning or whether Jane offered her services unasked, we do not know. We do know she suggested substituting ‘Primavera' as a title, an alternative he accepted. She was fulsome in praise of his eye for imagery and a voice she thought naturally attuned to measured cadences. She detected in the poem a certain sadness weighing on his soul. ‘The concluding stanzas have the deep innate nameless sadness of the highly philosophical spirit – & the last two lines have a bold true thought bravely uttered . . . I recognise you at once in “the passionate dove” & “wounds the air”[.] There is Oscar! Deep, thoughtful, picture haunted, expressing the inexpressible by a strong sensuous image.'
¹⁰
Reading his poetry seemed to bring them closer.

Jane was delighted that among her circle Oscar was making his presence felt by brilliant scholarship and, now, poetry. She told him he was the talk of her ‘matinée', her Saturday-afternoon salon:

The whole of the matinée yesterday was a hymn to your poesie. Gosse was in ecstasy over the poem. Oliver Burke said it amazed him ‘so finished, so sweet, so earnest, so full of deep feeling' etc. etc. etc. Tremendous run on the Magazine [
Dublin University Magazine
]. Waller [John Francis, poet and Vice president of the Royal Irish Academy] is to get it

Stokes [Sir William] is to get it. . .

Durham Dunlop . . . Thinks you would make a distinguished name as poet – Still, as Mahaffy says, ‘This won't do.' All very well up to 25 book nonsense – ‘my love & nightingales'.
¹¹

Mahaffy's caution provided a healthy counterweight to Jane's gushing applause. Yet her praise instilled in Oscar a staunch self-belief – a self-possession and conviction that bravura would see him succeed.

Jane also helped Oscar to get his poems published. Apart from
Dublin University Magazine
, where the Wilde name needed no introduction, it was Jane's friend, the poet and critic, Aubrey de Vere, who recommended Oscar's religion-inflected poems to the editors of the
Irish Monthly
and the
Illustrated Monitor
, both Catholic magazines. And Jane introduced Oscar's work to the
Boston Pilot
, where the retitled ‘Primavera' appeared in the June issue of 1878, three months after her own altogether dissimilar poem, ‘Cry of the People'.

In essence, mother and son belonged to different poetic traditions. For Oscar, form was of overriding importance, considered an end in itself. For Jane, content and convictions were more important. In time Oscar would dress up in elegant attire to write, wearing, no doubt tongue-in-cheek, a cowl
à la Balzac
. Jane, we know, dressed down, in a peignoir. That luxury and contrasting functionality in dress symbolises their poetic sensibilities.

*

Poetry aside, William was ailing and expenses were rising. He was spending more and more time in Moytura, whether for health, research or preference. One consequence was a fall-off in income. He had had to support Willie in London and though Oscar had £95 from his scholarship, it evidently did not cover things like his trip to Italy. Jane, too, had been overseas, having visited Paris again in the autumn of 1875. William suggested letting Merrion Square furnished. Jane was indignant, as evidenced by a letter to Oscar, ‘Sir William to Moytura, Willie to Chambers, you in Oxford. I – Lord knows where.'
¹²
Nothing came of the suggestion.

Throughout the autumn of 1875 his health declined rapidly. Jane wrote to her friend Rosalie Olivecrona, ‘Sir William's health is much broken and I am in constant anxiety about him – he is low and languid – scarcely eats and seldom goes out – he complains of gout, but along with this, he seems fading before our eyes – and has grown so pale and wan and thin and low spirited.'
¹³
William found enough strength to travel to Moytura where he stayed for much of the winter, long enough for Jane to wonder in a letter to Oscar whether he would ever return to Dublin. At Moytura he continued to work on the memoir of Gabriel Beranger. He was battling against his own mortality and choosing to live very much alone.

He had enough strength to attend a board meeting at St Marks in Dublin on 7 February 1876. After that matters took a turn for the worse, and he hardly rose from his bed again. Jane sat by his side and listened to him ‘hoping and planning as usual for his beloved Moytura'. Death came quickly. ‘He grew weaker day by day,' Jane said, ‘no pain, thank God, no suffering – the last few days he was almost unconscious, quiet and still and at last passed away like one sleeping – gently and softly – no struggle – with his hand in mine and his two sons beside him.' He died at four o'clock in the afternoon on Wednesday 19 April 1876, aged sixty-one.

Jane took some relief from the fact that ‘his last days were unconscious', as she explained to their friend Major-General Sir Thomas Larcom, former under-secretary to the Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, in a letter written on 25 April: ‘he often pined for the strength that would enable him to finish many works left but not yet completed. I think the sentence of death would have been bitter to him. He was spared the knowledge and better so.' She added, ‘in any national work he took his part, and his labours were for humanity, for others not for him'.
¹⁴

With his aversion to eulogies and his ear for the clink of empty rhetoric, Sir William had requested a private funeral. That appeal, for whatever reason, was ignored, and the funeral served to fortify William's reputation as one of the most eminent of Victorian Irish men in the eyes of all who saw the cortège wind its way to Mount Jerome Cemetery. Crowds from all over the city, people of all classes, followed the hearse as it climbed uphill to the cemetery. A detachment of the Royal Irish Academy held the mace draped in black and rendered William the honours due a member. The cortège, reported the
Express
newspaper, was ‘one of the most imposing that had been witnessed in the city for a long time'. The funeral procession included the country's top dignitaries – the lord mayor, the lord chancellor, the lord president of the College of Physicians, the president of the Royal College of Surgeons, the president of the Royal Irish Academy, Sir Arthur Guinness, MP, even Isaac Butt, gathered to pay tribute to Sir William.

A grand oak coffin closed over Sir William's corpse, and was lowered into a vault large enough for his family to join him, except none would do so.

The Irish papers paid him eloquent compliments, commemorating the greatness of the man who by the age of twenty-eight was an honorary member of the Institut Afrique of Paris, a member of the Imperial Society of Physicians of Vienna, of the Geographical Society of Berlin, of the Natural History Society of Athens, and over a lifetime was honoured internationally for his contribution to medicine, science and Celtic history. The
Freeman's Journal
, having extolled this man of sterling character, of science and of intellect, regretted the loss of his constant hospitality at Merrion Square, ‘where literary, artistic, and medical re-unions found a congenial home and where men of letters from other lands were sure of a cordial welcome'. The
Dublin University Magazine
fully acknowledged Lady Jane Wilde's importance to her husband's life and that in Jane he had found a partner ‘with talents no less brilliant than his own'.
¹⁵
William's death was noted in the Swedish papers and, according to Jane, the obituaries were beautiful, capturing ‘perfectly his manner, & nature, & the character of his intellect'.
¹⁶
Samuel Ferguson eulogised him windily in an elegy that mourned the loss of a friend whose ‘kindness' knew no limits and whose dedication to the country's culture would live on in future generations. Except it didn't live on, as we shall see.

Jane was not coping well, as evidenced in a letter she wrote to Lotten on 15 May 1876.

[I] find now all life to me is discord, and every nerve thrills with a dissonance – and the future is ever so dark & uncertain! When the head of the house is taken, the whole edifice of one's life falls in ruins to the ground – I hate to go on living in Dublin – & if my eldest son Willie were married I would go and live abroad but at present I am as one tossed by tempests in a dark sea.
¹⁷

Jane unburdened her sadness in a poem, ‘Related Souls':

All my soul's unfulfilled aspiration –

Founts that flow from eternal streams –

Awoke to life, like a new creation,

In the paradise light of your glowing dreams.

As gold refined in a threefold fire,

As the Talith robe of the sainted dead,

Were the pure, high aims of our hearts' desire,

The words we uttered, the thoughts half said.

We spoke of the grave with a voice unmoved,

Of love that could die as a thing disproved,

And we poured the rich wine, and drank, at our pleasure,

Of the higher life, without stint or measure.
¹⁸

Here she celebrates the spiritual affinity they once enjoyed, having from the outset seen William as a spiritual guide who had helped her clarify her thoughts. His ideals she came to share, embracing them with her characteristic ardour, as though they were an alternative faith. With William dead, she lost her spiritual compass.

She took upon herself to edit and finish the memoir on the Huguenot artist and antiquary, Gabriel Beranger. Part of it was published in the October 1876 issue of the
Archaeological Journal
. She sent Lotten a copy and said ‘it made me so sad to write it'.
¹⁹

When the memoir was published as a book in 1880, Jane introduced the final part. She stopped short of implying that the frustrations attended by the Academy and the government on Sir William's efforts to complete the archive of Irish antiquities contributed to his ill-health. The tribute she paid to her husband made the book as much a commemorative monument to William as to Beranger. Acting as his impeccable custodian, she wrote:

There was probably no man of his generation more versed in our national literature, in all that concerned the land and its people, the arts, architecture, topography, statistics, and even the legends of the country; but, above all, in his favourite department, the descriptive illustration of Ireland, past and present, in historic and pre-historic times, he had justly gained a wide reputation as one of the most learned and accurate and at the same time one of the most popular writers of the age on Irish subjects.
²⁰