The Fall of the House of Wilde (27 page)

Willie had a tendency to dash in and out of love – swooning and then recanting. Jane put her hope in one woman, then another. Each love affair unravelled and nudged her closer to despair over their knotted future. ‘Will he ever find the right woman[?],' Jane wondered in a letter to Oscar, late in 1876. ‘But just now he has no other means of salvation but through a good marriage. I'll let you know what he says after the meeting with Maud – It is quite a drama.' Jane was writing about the longest and most hopeful relationship he had at this time, with a certain Maud Thomas. But it failed to ripen into marriage, as Maud's mother put a stop to her daughter marrying Willie. Jane poured out her disappointment to Oscar. ‘And (as a secret) I must tell you, but don't allude it to Willie, that the whole affair is off between him and Maud Thomas. The mother won't consent – & she thinks it better to break off entirely & at once – So there is an end to my dreams – & now must face the inevitable. We could not keep up this house.'
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Marriage was the immediate way out of the Wildes' joint dire financial predicament.

To his mother, he had become ‘Poor Willie', incapable of weaving a future for himself without the aid of a woman. But did Willie really want to wrest himself free of a mother who loved him deeply and unconditionally? In his relationships with women, Willie perhaps sought a second childhood in which he would receive all the indulgence and emotional support he had been given by Jane. In a letter Willie wrote to one woman, Margaret Campbell, he said, ‘she [Jane] is my greatest friend on earth'. Margaret Campbell had recently visited Ireland and Willie was keen she come again soon. He sent her some poems he had published in the Trinity College magazine,
Kottabos.
He took pride in the poetry he wrote, bidding her to see him as ‘a poet'. It was the summer of 1877 and he went on to say he and Oscar were just off to ‘a little place of ours that lies in far Connemara among purple mountains – we shall be away a week in glorious solitude and I shall paint a sunset for you'. He wrote again from Illaunroe, their house on the lake in Connemara, commending the mountains, heather, lake, waterfalls and salmon fishing and ended, ‘I don't have any
World
paragraphs till I return to civilisation – send me some ideas.' Willie had started writing short pieces for the
World
, the London weekly society journal edited by Edmund Yates. ‘In last week's
World
,' he told Campbell, ‘I had just a few scraps.'
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Willie was not having much success at the Bar. He evidently preferred to see himself as a writer. In addition to the poetry published in
Kottabos
, he had two plays printed in Dublin,
French Polish
and
Evening Stream
. There was also talk of his standing for Parliament. With a touch of vanity, Jane told Oscar, ‘O'Leary [then MP for Drogheda] told us he knows Willie would be returned MP for many places by the mere love of Speranza's name & advised him to stand for next election on free liberal principles.'
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But Willie had started to tire of Ireland. He told Campbell of the many invitations he received but declined. ‘They are all so alike over here – same set, same talk, same ideas, same shallowness . . . Thank god there is a dream world in art and music one can fly to sometimes – out of worries . . . and this we can mould as we will.'
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Oscar, too, was in search of intellectual stimulus. By 1877, his letters from Oxford harp on the idea that though he entertained as much as ever, he lacked literary company of a high order. He wrote to Ward, ‘I have been doing my duty like a brick and keeping up the reputation of these rooms by breakfasts, lunches etc.: however I find it is rather a bore and that one gains nothing from the conversation of anyone.' At Trinity, Oscar had looked to older men, to Tyrrell and Mahaffy, for stimulus. Now at Oxford he turned to such intellectual luminaries as John Ruskin, who was Slade professor of fine art at Oxford at the time, and played a decisive role in Oscar's life at this juncture. More than a decade later, in May 1888, Oscar fondly recalled those days in a letter he wrote to Ruskin:

It was a great pleasure to meet you again: the dearest memories of my Oxford days are my walks and talks with you, and from you I learnt nothing but what was good. How else could it be? There is in you something of prophet, of priest, and of poet, and to you the gods gave eloquence such as they have given to none other, so that your message might come to us with the fire of passion, and the marvel of music, making the deaf to hear and the blind to see.
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When Oscar first met Ruskin in 1874, the older man was in his mid-fifties and already something of a legend. For Oscar, Ruskin was a household name who stood in the philosophical tradition of zealous Victorians, many of whom advocated the moral and social function of art.

Ruskin's life began in 1819 in London. Like Oscar, he was educated at home by his parents and by private tutors, who prescribed a curriculum tailored to their ambition to raise him for greatness. Ruskin's father never relinquished the hope that his son would one day become Poet Laureate, a not unreasonable aspiration, as Ruskin had won the Newdigate Prize for poetry in 1839. Until he attended school in Peckham at the age of fifteen, Ruskin's parents were his main companions. His mother encouraged him to commit large passages of the King James Bible to memory, and the language, imagery and evangelical pitch echoes through his writing, an influence he shared with Oscar, who once said of the Bible he knew backwards, ‘I know nothing in the whole world of art to compare with it.'
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Ruskin's parents nurtured in him a love of travel, and from the age of six he was travelling overseas, seeing new landscapes, architecture and paintings.
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Out of these travels came the five volumes of
Modern Painters
(1843–60), his most famous work, in which he coupled the artist's aesthetic with the moral order, seeing art as an index for society's well-being. Ruskin saw the artist as society's handmaiden, a responsible member of the community, contributing to it his talent and the tools of his trade. Art, for Ruskin, should not be the practice of an elite educated class but part of the social fabric, a need that became urgently relevant during the second half of the nineteenth century, when industrial capitalism swept across England like a virus.

Ruskin believed the artist's task was to awaken the perceiver's sensibility. He saw the universe as the physical manifestation of a divine presence, and thus aligned the awareness of beauty with that of God, believing that visual acuity heightened the moral and religious impulses of humankind. In the preface to volume I of
Modern Painters
, 1844, Ruskin endowed the artist with ‘the responsibility of the preacher', and although he makes liberal use of the word ‘moral', his meaning is not reducible to good and bad or right and wrong. For Ruskin, moral attitudes derived from feeling, from the ‘deep emotion' of the imagination, rather than the intellect. Ruskin held that the impressions made by beauty on the observer are neither sensual nor intellectual, but moral. By the early to mid-1880s, Ruskin's theory of the artist's responsibility and his censoring of the sensual in art came to serve Oscar ill in his creation of Dorian Gray, whose glorification of the sensual as an end in itself places him outside society. But a greener Oscar imbibed Ruskin's teachings. Certainly, when Oscar lectured to an American audience in 1882 on ‘The English Renaissance', it was Ruskin's ideas he promulgated. ‘Let it be for you to create an art that is made by the hands of the people for the joy of the people too, an art that will be an expression of the loveliness and the joy of life and nature.' This comes from the Ruskin who said, ‘The steel of Toledo and the silk of Genoa did give but strength to oppression and add lustre to pride . . . an art made by the people for the people as a joy for the maker and the user.'
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Always a marvellous lecturer, Ruskin discoursed on everything from education to social justice. But it was as Slade professor of fine art that Oscar first came under his influence. Oscar was assiduous in his attendance of Ruskin's 1874 lectures on art. He also signed up to Ruskin's public-service project, mending the Ferry Hinksey Road near Oxford. The scheme continued until 1875, and involved many students, including the economist Arnold Toynbee, a contemporary of Oscar's. Oscar described the project as ‘road making for the sake of a noble ideal of life'.
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It was his first experience of early-morning manual labour, but not his last.

Ruskin spent 1875 in Venice and when he returned in 1876 he invited Oscar to call. The two became companions. Oscar's need for an elder companion from whom to learn was accentuated perhaps by the death of his father that same year. William Wilde shared Ruskin's eclecticism, his zealous reforming impulse and his social conscience, though not his sexual suppression. Ruskin had suffered the pain of an awkward ménage à trois, in which his wife, Effie Gray, to whom he had been married for six years, left him for her lover, the artist John Everett Millais, and their marriage was annulled on grounds of non-consummation.

Among other leading thinkers of Oxford, none may have impressed Oscar more indelibly than Walter Pater. Although Oscar did not communicate with Pater until July 1877, the essayist became important for him after he read his compilation of essays,
Studies in the History of the Renaissance
, in 1873. The book, Oscar said, many years later, ‘has had such a strange influence over my life'.
¹⁴

Also the son of a surgeon, Pater had lost both parents by the age of fourteen. While attending the King's School, Canterbury, Pater first read Ruskin's
Modern Painters
and the book awoke his eye for the beauty of art. From Canterbury Pater proceeded in 1858 to Oxford, where the eminent classicist, Benjamin Jowett, took him under his wing. For personal and moral bearings, however, neither Ruskin nor Jowett could help Pater – quite the opposite. Pater had once cherished the idea of entering the Anglican Church, but at Oxford, he, like many of his generation, lost faith in Christian doctrine. On his own Pater was discovering Flaubert, Gautier, Baudelaire and Swinburne, familiarising himself with a sensuous literature subversive of the common constraints and instructive ideals upheld by the moral order.
¹⁵
Théophile Gautier's slogan ‘art for art's sake' was serving as a rallying call for an amoral and apolitical art; an art concerned with its own beauty. On this point Oscar could compare notes with Pater. Oscar, too, knew something of opposing tendencies pulling him on divergent paths, of Christianity and Paganism, of the Bible and Baudelaire, of Apollo and Dionysus. Pater helped to give Oscar access to that other side of himself, the non-Ruskin side, then straining for expression.

Pater's reflections in his famously controversial conclusion to
Studies in the History of the Renaissance
stayed with Oscar, who would become his most notable and radical exponent. According to Pater, the mind is a rapid whirlpool of perceptions, sensations, feelings and memories: a flux. A dynamic man achieves greater fulfilment when he learns to sharpen and heighten observation. Only then can he ‘get as many pulsations as possible into the given time'; ‘to burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy', Pater said, ‘is success in life'. The passive man, on the other hand, forms habits that congeal into conventions, leaving him too fettered to ‘catch at any exquisite passion', to make ‘any contribution to knowledge', or to experience ‘any stirring of the senses'. Self-development, in this view, means cultivating a ‘quickened, multiplied consciousness', ascending from habit-induced torpor to intellectual stimulation, allowing one to ‘be for ever testing new opinions, never acquiescing in a facile orthodoxy', exposing oneself with passion to the best of life, principally the beauty of art.
¹⁶

Pater saw the Renaissance not as a historical phenomenon but as a figure of speech for ‘any moment of intense feeling encountered in a world that scientific enquiry, rational thought, “analysis” itself have reduced to a state of enervation and entropy'.
¹⁷
A poem from the thirteenth century, for instance, may be emblematic of a renaissance, if it demonstrates ‘the Hellenic spirit', a spirit that heals the rupture of the body and mind that has pervaded mankind since Christianity.

The critics saw an endorsement of hedonism and amorality in
Studies in the History of the Renaissance
, and a philosophy of life guided by Satan: gripped by the wonders art and nature lavishes on us, it would be all too easy to become a slave to the senses. The book earned Pater the disapproval of many, including the Bishop of Oxford, and cost him his advancement at the university when his erstwhile mentor, Jowett, turned him down for a previously promised proctorship. Pater's sexuality also betrayed him. His focus on male beauty, friendship and love, either platonically or physically, earned him unwanted attention. When Pater was competing for the Oxford professorship of poetry, a satirical novel called
The New Republic
by W. H. Mallock, published in 1877, depicted Pater as an effete aesthete, and he withdrew his name from selection.

Oscar first communicated with Pater in July 1877. He had sent him an article he wrote on the Grosvenor Gallery, published in the July edition of
Dublin University Magazine.
Pater replied, and was full of praise for his article. Oscar wrote to tell William Ward, ‘I have . . . from Pater such sympathetic praise. I must send you his letter . . . but return it in registered letter by next post: don't forget.' Pater had thanked Oscar for his ‘excellent article' and continued, ‘it makes me much wish to make your acquaintance . . .'
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