The Fall of the House of Wilde (28 page)

20

Openings and Closings

Oscar managed to get invited to the event of the London season: the opening on 19 May 1877 of the Grosvenor Gallery on New Bond Street by Sir Coutts Lindsay and his wife, Blanche. At the time the cult of beauty was in vogue. Though the Aesthetic Movement, as it came to be called, was a confusion of styles and a cacophony of conflicting theories, one idea held it together – to make beauty the guiding principle of life and art. Bred into the bones of an enlightened vanguard was a staunch need to replace the ugliness and vulgar utilitarianism of the time with a new ideal of beauty. Opposed to both the principles of established art, represented by the Royal Academy, and to social convention, the adherents of the movement sought to live artistically, to fashion art free from blind submission to dogma, and from Victorian notions of propriety and morality. Art that offered sensual delight without stories and sermons, theirs was to be ‘art for art's sake' – an art self-consciously obsessed with itself and its appearance.

But the crowd that lined up behind the dictum of beauty – writers, painters and designers – were unified only in their opposition to any censorship of the imagination. This heterogeneous group deliberately never shared a vision of the beautiful, nor did they espouse a creed in an age when ‘isms' proliferated. Neither was it a ‘movement', in the sense of a cohesive set of principles and a membership. Walter Hamilton's
The Aesthetic Movement in England
, published in 1882, was the first study to clarify Aestheticism's intellectual foundations and its artistic manifestations, as he understood them, making a plausible case to show the connections between the poetry, art, architecture and interior decor of the time. But Hamilton was careful to emphasise that the cast of characters were shifting and diverse spirits, with artists as varied in style as Whistler and Edward Burne-Jones. Two of what would become the loudest exponents, arguably Oscar and Whistler, disagreed on whether or not the art of an age was the outcome of a collective spirit. As Oscar would put it in 1885, ‘I differ entirely from Mr Whistler. An artist is not an isolated fact, he is the resultant of a certain milieu and a certain entourage . . .'
¹
Herder's idea that every age has a unique character manifest in all its cultural expressions made perfect sense to Oscar.

The cult of Aestheticism had its first stirrings in 1848 with the founding of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Though the Brotherhood lasted only five years, its style was absorbed by late nineteenth-century art and design. Inspired by Ruskin, the Pre-Raphaelites sought what one critic called ‘a Keatsian ardour for the minutiae of organic nature'.
²
Their paintings unnervingly avoid pictorial focus; they work against an eye seeking out a form or shape, and force it to look over the whole canvas of infinitesimal detail. The specifics of flora and fauna are so thickly encrusted on the surface that it is but a short step from the Pre-Raphaelite enthusiasm for nature to the artificial bejewelled surface of a Byzantine mosaic. Thus their landscapes have an unnatural immobility, their sunlit vistas look dead, and their figures frozen. Indeed, Rossetti, the most talented of the artists, had difficulty painting landscape from nature and often had to retreat indoors, where he would reconstruct it cocooned in his black-velvet-draped chamber.

Rossetti's paintings concentrate on a single subject, a woman of somnambulistic dreaminess. The Rossetti woman, with her unfastened hair and loose medieval gown, bespeaks a freedom unfamiliar to the Victorian world of tightly nipped, corseted maidens and matrons. Remote in her private world, the self-absorbed Rossetti woman has the cruel perfection of solipsistic beauty. Rossetti ritually memorialised the face of Elizabeth Siddal, a consumptive who died of a laudanum overdose soon after he married her. But, according to William Holman Hunt, Siddal did not look at all like a Rossetti painting. Rossetti was painting an archetype, a femme fatale, which became prevalent in art in the late decades of the century.

Rossetti's art is consistent in its depiction of female omnipotence – lest we forget, it was Rossetti who championed
Sidonia the Sorceress
, the German novel Jane Wilde translated in 1849. Decadent art, as it developed in Paris and spread to London, responded to the moral overestimation of woman in nineteenth-century culture: the Pre-Raphaelites depicted woman as the enforcers of a violent, primitive, sadistic nature, as the plethora of sphinxes and Salomés from Baudelaire to Flaubert through to Moreau indicate. Even Whistler's famous painting of a woman assumed to be his mother,
Arrangement in Grey and Black
, 1872, does not escape the vampiric archetype. Chilly and half-dead, she sits sphinx-like, staring into the distance.

Whistler towered above his contemporaries. By the time Oscar met the former West Point cadet in the spring of 1877 at the Grosvenor, Whistler had become an energetic polemicist of art for art's sake, and of his own genius. His unapologetic self-assertion and his quirkiness impressed Oscar. With ‘his tall hat and wand', Whistler looked every inch the artist. Long-legged, thin and dark, with a sharp eye and a ‘sly smile', he might have smiled more widely than usual when he met Oscar, for in time no one more than Oscar would proclaim Whistler's genius.
³
Not that Whistler needed Oscar to tell the world of his genius. He used his own inimitable wit to do so.

Whistler avoided the stifling atmosphere of the Royal Academy and staged his own exhibitions in interiors explicitly designed to complement the work. Responding to the growing trend for sympathetic spaces to display art, the Lindsays commissioned the architect William Thomas Sams to design a gallery on New Bond Street. The new building housed a 100ft-long gallery lit by skylights from above, allowing the works to be presented spaciously, compared with the Royal Academy at Burlington House, where as many as 1,500 works were often exhibited at any one time. Behind the Grosvenor's remarkable neo-Palladian façade were conspicuously opulent rooms, lavish ‘scarlet damask' walls and ‘luxurious velvet couches', as described by Oscar in his review of their opening exhibition.
⁴
The Grosvenor had more the aura of an exclusive private club than a public gallery. To exhibit at the Grosvenor was by invitation only. That the Lindsays succeeded in enticing the taciturn George Frederic Watts, the self-obsessed Whistler and the eminent Edward Burne-Jones to exhibit together augured well for the new venue, which from the outset shaped London's cultural life.

The Grosvenor became a social destination. The Prince and Princess of Wales, the aristocracy, the fashionable and in the words of one observer, ‘artists and intellectuals' attended the Sunday-afternoon receptions. The favouring of portraiture – featuring a cast of contemporary personalities, artists, patrons and muses, for the most part – instigated a cult: that of celebrity. Nor did Lady Lindsay deny herself a place in the hall of fame. The opening exhibition featured a portrait of her in a silk dress of olive green, the colour of the moment, painted by Watts, and placed prominently at the entrance to the East Gallery.

The then-unknown undergraduate, Oscar Wilde, also had ambitions to be included in the hall of fame. To cut a dash at this most suave of exhibition openings, Oscar arrived done up as an arch-aesthete. He made an ostentatious appearance in a coat designed to shimmer from bronze to red, depending upon the reflection of the light, and with the back of the garment resembling that of a cello. His costume evoked the ‘melody of colour' and the ‘symphony of form', taking the jargon of Aestheticism to the extreme of burlesque. The inspiration for the design of the coat came to him in a dream, and he had it made up by a tailor according to his design.
⁵
Dress was but one of his strategies for getting noticed. He also dubbed himself an art critic, and proceeded to ad-lib freely in the role.

Oscar's
Dublin University Magazine
review guides the reader through the gallery, where he pays close attention to the works of Watts, Burne-Jones and Whistler; indeed, the artists that drew most critical coverage. In addition he favoured two paintings by Spencer Stanhope,
Eve Tempted
and
Love and the Maiden
. The beauty of the body of the young boy in
Love and the Maiden
, with his ‘brown curls', ‘delicately sensuous' face and ‘bared limbs', reminded Oscar of those seen in Greece, ‘where boys can still be found as beautiful as the Charmides of Plato'. Where other reviewers drew a curtain over homoerotic scenes, Oscar was not prepared to impose upon himself any constraint, and indulged in an excursus on images engraved on his memory, from the Hellenic tradition celebrating the beauty of adolescent boys, where sacred ecstasy takes on an erotic aura. One such was St Sebastian in Guido's painting of the same name at Genoa; another desirable boy was Perugino's Greek Ganymede, painted in his native town, ‘but the painter who most shows the influence of this type is Correggio, whose lily-bearer in the Cathedral at Parma, and whose wide eyed, open-mouthed St John in the “Incoronata Madonna” of St Giovanni Evangelista, are the examples in art of the bloom and vitality and radiance of this adolescent beauty'. Not at all disconcerted by the reactions he would elicit, Oscar showed himself an audacious critic, happy to show off his impious character.

In style and content, Oscar's Grosvenor review is indebted to Pater's
Studies in the History of the Renaissance
. Pater does not write metaphorically, in terms of ‘it is as though'; he writes as if stating the actual case, putting forward what he calls ‘
vraie vérité'
, an idea of underlying truths more powerful than discoverable facts. In Pater's prose poem reflecting on the
Mona Lisa
, for instance, he takes a novel approach to Leonardo. He speaks of Leonardo's paintings as offering occult secrets to those prepared to become his initiates. Pater sees Leonardo as a ‘sorcerer' or ‘magician', ‘possessed of curious secrets and a hidden knowledge, living in a world of which he alone possessed the key'. His art is like ‘a strange variation of the alchemist's dream'.
⁶

Oscar's debt to Pater is most obvious in his passage on Burne-Jones's
The Beguiling of Merlin
. Oscar proceeds with ‘
vraie vérité'
, builds up tributaries of clauses, and he sees Vivien, the woman with whom Merlin is infatuated, as a ‘sorceress'. ‘Vivien, a tall, lithe woman, beautiful and subtle to look on, like a snake, stands in front of him, reading the fatal spell from the enchanted book, mocking the utter helplessness of him whom once her lying tongue had called “Her lord and liege . . .”' The painting is also ‘full of magic'. For Oscar to invoke the occult and primitive, as Pater had done with the
Mona Lisa
, was fashionably avant-garde. Gautier, Baudelaire and Swinburne all created prowling, promiscuous vampires, cruel nature goddesses, who enslave their male victims. It was even more fashionable to blur the gender distinctions in what was later described as ‘the era of the Androgyne'.
⁷
More interesting is that in Pater's evocation of the
Mona Lisa
as a vampiric sorceress we find the paradigm of Oscar's long poem ‘The Sphinx
'
and of
Salomé
, both yet unborn.

Throughout the review Oscar invokes Pater's authority in order to fortify his opinions. Pater's exquisite prose, his long sentences with their errant, serpentine and languorous grace, enact the movement they evaluate and open the reader to a new kind of sensation and thought.

Pater's cultic code of connoisseurship lured the imagination away from action into a refinement of consciousness. Impressionism, the form of appreciation he first advocated in the preface to
Studies in the History of the Renaissance
, originates from the effects of an object of art on an individual consciousness. As such, the criticism Pater promotes is a radical alternative to that of the most authoritative cultural critics of the mid-nineteenth century, John Ruskin and Matthew Arnold. Both men – Ruskin as the Slade professor of fine art from 1870 and Arnold as Oxford professor of poetry from 1857, their differences aside – upheld the moral vocation of art and employed a prophetic voice. Their assertive masculinism did not suit Pater, who uses his preface to make clear his opposition, though he mentions neither by name. Pater's insistence that ‘beauty, like all other qualities presented to human experience, is relative', and that abstract, fleshless definitions of it are consequently ‘useless', is a rejection of Ruskin's principles.
⁸
In making the impression core to a redefinition of beauty, and locating it in the sensations it elicits from the individual rather than its moral consequences for the collective, Pater struck a blow at nineteenth-century criticism. Kenneth Clark said in 1961 of Pater's prose that his ‘slow-moving sentences produced an unconscious revolution in the minds of thousands of young men'.
⁹

In locating aesthetics in the pulsations of an eroticised body, Pater incited the ire of the moral majority. The Bishop of Oxford, John Fielder Mackarness, for instance, used one of his sermons in 1875 to express his fear that Pater's book would have a detrimental effect on the young. Immorality accounted for only part of the outrage. Mackarness seemed to envisage a dystopian future of spiritually enfeebled, effete young men, refining their artistic consciousness above masculine action – threatening the future of the Empire. Oscar would embrace Paterism with the zeal of a catechumen.

However, Pater's mantra, ‘all art constantly aspires toward the condition of music', meant little to Oscar in 1877. He had not yet grasped that the musicality of colour was the keynote to Whistler's paintings. Not yet ready to take this leap of imaginative freedom, Oscar could find nothing intelligent to say about Whistler's ‘colour symphonies', his
Nocturne in Blue and Silver
and
Nocturne in Black and Gold
. He resorted to ridicule, and said they were worth looking at ‘for something less than a quarter of a minute'. A more sympathetic critic might have been prepared to enter into the spirit of Whistler's paintings that go to some length to block any conventional narrative interpretation. Whistler's paintings don't stop in the negative mode but offer the viewer the opportunity to replace narrative or intellectual meaning with sensuous beauty. They were the epitome of Aesthetic works in their search for ways of delighting the senses, if possible beyond the visual to involve other senses, most especially music. The sensual delight in musical sound is implied in his titles:
Harmony in Amber and Black
,
Arrangement in Brown
. Through this simple device Whistler clarifies, at a stroke, the aspiration of art for art, to make the visual equivalent to the musical.