The Fall of the House of Wilde (46 page)

In ‘Pen, Pencil, and Poison', published earlier, in January 1889 in the
Fortnightly Review
, Oscar played with the idea of ‘an intense personality being created out of sin'.
¹⁴
Morality was a big issue for Oscar. That the concepts Christianity uses to analyse moral experience, especially sin and conscience, are entirely imaginary and psychologically pernicious, is, among much else, the satiric subject matter of
The Picture of Dorian Gray
. Convinced of his own sinfulness and plagued by bad conscience, Dorian believes himself evil and his fate damned before he actually commits a crime. Just as insidious for Oscar was the psychological damage done to the believer from the Christian moral insistence on absolute conformity to a single standard of human behaviour. He contends that one size does not fit all where morality is concerned, and that some of the best and strongest individuals are least capable of living according to the mould. What is termed ‘sin' is relative, owing more to the values of the time. As Oscar says, ‘If we lived long enough to see the results of our actions', the meaning of good and evil may alter, and possibly ‘transform our sins into elements of a new civilisation, more marvellous and splendid than any that has gone before' – an ironic reflection, given his own circumstances as a homosexual in the moral climate of the time. Without sin, according to Oscar, ‘The world would stagnate, or grow old, or become colourless. By its curiosity Sin increases the experience of the race. Through its intensified assertion of individualism it saves us from the monotony of type.' Nevertheless, Christians are urged to abandon their individual characters. Oscar regards Christian morality as the motivation for attitudes that are self-denigrating, vindictive towards others, escapist and anti-life. ‘As for the virtues! What are the virtues?' he asks in ‘The Critic as Artist', and continues thus:

Nature, as M. Renan tells us, cares little about chastity . . . Charity, as even those of whose religion it makes a formal part have been compelled to acknowledge, creates a multitude of evils. The mere existence of conscience, that faculty of which people prate so much nowadays, and are so ignorantly proud, is a sign of our imperfect development. It must be merged in instinct before we become fine. Self-denial is simply a method by which man arrests his progress, and self-sacrifice a survival of the mutilation of the savage, part of that old worship of pain which is so terrible a factor in the history of the world . . . Virtues! Who knows what the virtues are? Not you. Not I. Not any one. It is well for our vanity that we slay the criminal, for if we suffered him to live he might show us what we had gained by his crime.
¹⁵

Rejecting passion and natural instinct, Christian morality says ‘no' to life. Oscar's antidote to asceticism, we recall, is New Hedonism. This is most fully developed in
The Picture of Dorian Gray
, where Lord Henry proposes New Hedonism as a kind of ethical admonition to live one's life as if one genuinely believed that the world was, as Nietzsche entitled his book, beyond good and evil. New Hedonism is Oscar's debonair corrective to the morbidity of Christianity – an existential remedy he deliberately flags up as superficial and momentary.

Oscar's making morality relative, a question of ‘opinion', constitutes a retreat from tradition. The whole history of morality from the Ten Commandments to Kant's ‘categorical imperative' stresses the absolute and universal nature of morality. Whatever one ought to do, anyone else ought to do as well. But that argument assumes all moral agents are the same. It has been argued since ancient times that those who rule and those who take the greatest risks on behalf of society – whether or not that is a personal or conscious goal – must sometimes ignore the moral inhibitions binding on ordinary citizens. And since the nineteenth century at least, artists and intellectuals have often argued that they must remain above ordinary values if they are to be creative, culminating in the romantic cult of genius, a notion to which Oscar subscribed. As Oscar puts it, ‘The longer one studies life and literature, the more strongly one feels that behind everything that is wonderful stands the individual, and that it is not the moment that makes the man, but the man who creates the age.'
¹⁶
No doubt he would have preferred the great to the good man.

It is not implausible to suggest that Oscar's writings were a rage against a need to conceal his homosexuality. Thus the relation between author and text is not so much a matter of self-projection, of straightforward self-expression, but of antagonism and dialectics – that his argument is against himself and against the moralistic world view that produced him. New Hedonism, using this interpretation, is the ultimate self-irony; if only he could accept this attitude to life, and embrace the lightness of being it advocates, and not find himself plagued by bad conscience and guilt. Did he not say, with regard to
The Picture of Dorian Gray
, ‘it contains much of me in it . . . Dorian [is] what I would like to be . . . in other ages, perhaps'?
¹⁷
He also said, ‘humanity will always love Rousseau for having confessed his sins, not to a priest, but to the world'. His urge to confess, to betray himself, is a constant theme of his work, as we will see when we discuss his plays.
¹⁸

Oscar's was the first generation to face the fact that ‘God is dead', as Nietzsche put it. ‘It is enough that our fathers believed,' Oscar wrote. ‘They have exhausted the faith faculty of the species. Their legacy to us is the scepticism of which they were afraid.' ‘The nineteenth century,' he went on to say, ‘is a turning point in history, simply on account of the work of two men, Darwin and Renan, the one the critic of the Book of Nature, the other the critic of the books of God. Not to recognise this is to miss the meaning of one of the most important eras in the progress of the world.'
¹⁹
Having got over the search for consolation he had sought during his Oxford years, Oscar saw the death of God as a new beginning.

Oscar's love affair with Roman Catholicism had faded since Oxford but not his love of Roman ritual, and the sensuous mysticism it fostered. For him, it seems, to adhere to religion was to adhere to myth. The historical criticism could not be rescinded – the less so since Christianity itself had adopted it, thus promoting its own dissolution. He mocked the inertia of theologians and vicars who seemed unwilling to move beyond scepticism. As he put it:

Ours is certainly the dullest and most prosaic century possible . . . As for the Church, I cannot conceive anything better for the culture of a country than the presence in it of a body of men whose duty it is to believe in the supernatural, to perform daily miracles, and to keep alive that mythopoeic faculty which is so essential for the imagination. But in the English Church a man succeeds, not through his capacity for belief, but through his capacity for disbelief. Ours is the only Church where the sceptic stands at the altar, and where St Thomas is regarded as the ideal apostle . . . it is sufficient for some shallow uneducated passman out of either University to get up in his pulpit and express his doubts about Noah's ark, or Balaam's ass, or Jonah and the whale, for half of London to flock to hear him, and to sit open-mouthed in rapt admiration at his superb intellect. The growth of common sense in the English Church is a thing very much to be regretted. It is really a degrading concession to a low form of realism. It is silly, too. It springs from an entire ignorance of psychology. Man can believe the impossible, but man can never believe the improbable . . . What we have to do, what at any rate it is our duty to do, is to revive this old art of Lying.
²⁰

This, by any reckoning, is vintage Oscar Wilde, confronting the scepticism of the age with wit and play, affirming without consolation the death of God.

That at least is the familiar Oscar. The unfamiliar Oscar wonders what happens to morality in an age without God. Grounding value becomes problematic. We could become uncontrollable, as we are unknown to ourselves – he tells us – and we misunderstand ourselves. There is a will within over which we have precious little control.

It has shown us that we are never less free than when we try to act. It has hemmed us round with the nets of the hunter, and written upon the wall the prophecy of our doom. We may not watch it, for it is within us. We may not see it, save in a mirror that mirrors the soul. It is Nemesis without her mask . . . in the sphere of practical and external life it has robbed energy of its freedom and activity of its choice, in the subjective sphere, where the soul is at work, it comes to us, this terrible shadow, with . . . complex multiform gifts of thoughts that are at variance with each other, and passions that are at war against themselves. And so it is not our own life that we live, but the lives of the dead, and the soul that dwells within us is no single spiritual entity, making us personal and individual, created for our service . . . It is something that has dwelt in fearful places . . . It is sick with many maladies, and has memories of curious sins. It is wiser than we are and its wisdom is bitter.
²¹

This picture of Schopenhauer's ‘will' or of the unconscious, this ‘concentrated race-experience', of which science had made him aware, takes away our freedom to act. We are caught in the net of fate, living out the sins of the fathers. This, we will see, is prophetic of his life to come . . .

*

Willie, too, seemed to have lost the freedom to act. He had been declared bankrupt in August 1888. Early-morning drinking before work was not unusual, judging by Jane's letters, nor were lengthy binges, with him disappearing for days, his whereabouts unknown – Oscar coined the term ‘alcoholiday' to describe them. By the late 1880s certainly, if not before, Willie's drinking had become a problem for himself and for others. He became abusive and violent. Henry Irving spoke of a habit he had developed during performances of shouting instructions to the actors from his box. He told of another incident in 1890, at the opening of
Ravenswood
at the Lyceum, where Willie got into a brawl at the interval with an American man, ‘both parties fighting a running engagement as they left the theatre'.
²²

Jane's correspondence in the early 1890s shows her thoroughly deflated. Not only did Willie's drinking concern her, she herself lived just one step away from destitution, as her letters to Oscar make clear. On 11 January 1891, she wrote: ‘My dear Oscar. I am much in trouble – overwhelmed with threatening letters for rent & taxes and nothing to meet them except my quarter's pension – Mr Smyly has sent nothing [in rent from Moytura]. I therefore reluctantly ask your aid for the sum of £10 to help me over the difficulties, & I should be ever grateful. Ever devotissima La Madre.' Moytura had yielded next to nothing in rent. (One surprise payment of £20 was made in 1892.) Jane lived with the constant dread of court summons. ‘I am submerged with claims,' she wrote in August 1891, this time for £2 10 shillings owing on repairs for water pipes. She had no money to pay the £9 due to the Inland Revenue in October 1891. ‘They have threatened proceedings & arrest, unless paid before the 28 Oct. so no time to lose . . . Pray help me in this matter,' she wrote to Oscar, who did help, as ever. Jane had stopped believing she might be rescued from the prison of living from hand-to-mouth. All she could do was keep her mind alive inside it and take pleasure in Oscar's creative success. In July 1890 she praised his ‘profound & masterly essay on Criticism – The passage on Ruskin is heavenly & the eloquence altogether is his mode!'
²³

32

High Life, Low Life and Little Literary Life

Then, all of a sudden, it looked as if things might change. The providential benefactor Jane had dreamed of for Willie appeared in the form of an American woman, Mrs Frank Leslie. Mrs Leslie had invited Willie in July 1890 to deliver three lectures in America. Little is known of this engagement other than he sailed and returned as planned after three months, with talk of a repeat visit. Mrs Leslie was a formidable, intelligent and beautiful woman. A blend of eighteenth-century
grande dame
and twentieth-century business executive, Mrs Leslie impressed people as much for her diamonds and elaborate costumes as for her business acumen. The four-times married Mrs Leslie stage-managed her profile like a Hollywood star. Even her death in 1914 brought surprises. Her bequest of $2 million to the women's suffrage movement sent ripples across America. Obituaries sang her praises. Joaquin Miller, known to Oscar and many others as the ‘poet of the sierras', declared ‘the history of Mrs Frank Leslie is the history of illustrated journalism, nay, more, it is the history of all that is best and bravest in the last two decades of our literature'. This ‘Venus for beauty and . . . Minerva for wisdom', as she was described, wore a blue stocking on one leg and a scarlet stocking on the other.
¹

Born in New Orleans in the 1830s, she pulled off the impossible feat of remaining in her thirties for many decades. When pushed to disclose a date of birth later in life, she chose 1851, a year that would have made her not quite three at her first marriage, and a few months over six at the time of her second. Her real date of birth was 5 June 1836. Caring no more about accuracy than about forenames, she shed her birth name, Miriam Florence Follin, and took on the name of her third husband, Frank Leslie, a man who was hailed as ‘the pioneer and founder of illustrated journalism in America'.
²

A shady past added to the allure of Mrs Frank Leslie, the daughter of a cotton, tobacco and hide dealer, Charles Follin. Her father never married her mother, Susan Danforth, though the couple set up house together, a scandal that caused tongues to wag. Some said her mother was a Negro slave, others whispered something about her running a house of ill repute in New York. In fact Susan Danforth was the daughter of a revolutionary soldier. The rumours added spice to her life and Mrs Leslie did nothing to still them. Meanwhile, she took to books with gusto and, with the aid of her father, schooled herself to be at ease in French, Spanish, Italian and German.