The Fall of the House of Wilde (54 page)

And now there is before me but public disgrace, ruin, terrible shame, the mockery of the world, a lonely dishonoured life, a lonely dishonoured death, it may be, some day.
⁶

Writing this may have been therapeutic. It was certainly prophetic. In any event, Sir Robert is saved from a public scandal over his past, thanks to the machinations of his loyal friend, the dandy, Lord Goring, who intercepts Mrs Cheveley's letter of incrimination.

Oscar uses the dandy to hold a mirror up to society. The point of the Wildean dandy is to stand apart from society and observe it – its clichés, contradictions and the masks it wears. The dandy stands between stage and audience, orientating the public's moral perception from inside the play, unsettling spectators with his paradoxes, distancing them from their moral expectations with urbane witticisms that reduce the social order to predictable duplicity. Oscar filtered his cynical intelligence through the dandy, who distils it in stylish paradoxes, minted to be taken home and quoted.

But the dandy is no social revolutionary. Nothing would stir the Wildean dandy to change the society that conditions his existence and provides the platform for his exceptional nature. He limits his attack to language; twisting or upturning an idea or opinion, the dandy invalidates society's norms, but cannot abandon society for fear of losing the audience he needs to achieve his mark of distinction. This simultaneous disaffirmation and dependence on society gives rise to a tension. The dandy's whole point seems to centre on being
there
in society and
not there
emotionally. Thus does the dandy acquire a kind of negative freedom. The problem comes when the difference between society and its values becomes too extreme for the dandy, as with Dorian Gray and, at this point, with Oscar himself.

What Oscar the playwright did to arrange a happy marriage for his characters, Oscar the husband conspicuously failed to do for Constance. He had been resisting Douglas's pleas for a rapprochement. He left his letters from Egypt unanswered. Douglas persisted, persuading friends and even his mother to intervene. Then Douglas turned to Constance, who out of sheer goodness pleaded with Oscar not to be unkind. Oscar telegrammed Douglas in March 1994, ‘Time heals every wound but for many months to come I will neither write to you or see you.'
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Douglas took this as a sign of a possible reconciliation. He left at once for Paris and from there sent letters and telegrams, saying he had travelled thus far and would not be held accountable for his actions if Oscar did not respond. Oscar went to Paris to meet him. There Douglas played the ‘gentle and penitent child' and Oscar yielded. ‘When I arrived in Paris,' Oscar later wrote to Douglas, ‘your tears, breaking out again and again all through the evening . . . at dinner first at Voisin's, at supper at Paillard's afterwards, the unfeigned joy you evinced at seeing me, holding my hand whenever you could, as though you were a gentle and penitent child, so simple and sincere at that moment: made me consent to renew our friendship.'
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Meanwhile Oscar left Constance without a word. She had been trying very hard to recreate their lives, looking for a new home where they might move together, as the lease on Tite Street was shortly to terminate. Georgina came to her aid and offered her house in Cheyne Walk, where they could take out a lease, but they couldn't come up with the money. ‘Oscar is making nothing,' she told Georgina. She added, ‘I don't know where Oscar is; I have not had a line from him since he went to Paris.' Oscar returned to London and avoided Tite Street. ‘Oscar is in London again, but I know nothing about his doings and he does not write!' Constance informed Georgina. Tite Street once again became a lonely place and Constance fled to Torquay, from where she revealed her unhappiness in a letter to Georgina. ‘I am storm driven, but it is the storms of my heart that drive me more than the world's storms. . .'
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Jane, too, was at a low ebb. She had been expecting a remittance from Moytura but nothing came. She had received ‘a threatening notice from the House Rates' and wrote to Oscar on 17 February 1894 asking for a loan of £10, promising to repay it. Things were no better on 29 March, and she wrote to Oscar to say, ‘I am in dreadful financial difficulties & have literally not a shilling in the world, & I am obliged to borrow from Mrs. Faithful [her maid].' Her other request was for Oscar to write to Willie. ‘I think, to please me, you might write the 8 words I asked – “I regret the words – Let us be friends.”' She added, ‘There need be no intimacy between you, but at least social civility.' Oscar met Jane's first request, and sent her £20, but he did not write to Willie. This sum, however, was not going to solve Jane's difficulties, and on 30 March 1894, she wrote again to Oscar, ‘I am plunged in utter ruin, for I owe two quarters rent already.'
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The only thing lightening her spirits was the positive reception of her translation of
Sidonia the Sorceress
by William Morris's Kelmscott Press. She told Oscar, ‘Theodore Watts [poet and critic] spoke in high praise of “the marvellous translation,”' and asked Oscar to watch out for further comment.
¹¹

Since Oscar returned from Paris, he and Douglas were once again inseparable. They abounded in their recovered love and grew careless of the censoring public eye. The Marquess of Queensberry saw them together everywhere. Once he passed them riding in a carriage and claimed to have seen Oscar stroke Douglas. But their paths crossed most frequently at the Café Royal. Threats ensued. The Marquess would stop Douglas's allowance unless he gave up his ‘loathsome and disgusting relationship' with that man Wilde, whose wife, he alleged, was planning to divorce him. There was no truth to that allegation, but the rumour probably reflects what society was saying.

But the real danger crystallised on 30 June 1894 when the Marquess called at Tite Street, together with one of his henchmen. With characteristic self-assurance, Oscar asked if he had come to apologise for making false statements about his marriage. Far from having an apology on his mind, the Marquess reminded Oscar that he and Douglas had been thrown out of the Savoy Hotel for filthy behaviour. ‘That is a lie,' Oscar replied. The Marquess accused Oscar of having taken furnished rooms for his son in Piccadilly. Oscar denied it. ‘I hear you were thoroughly well blackmailed for a disgusting letter you wrote to my son.' Oscar protested. ‘The letter was a beautiful letter, and I never write except for publication.' Oscar confronted him directly. ‘Do you seriously accuse your son and me of improper conduct?' To which the Marquess retorted, ‘I do not say you are at it, but you look it, and you pose it, which is just as bad. If I catch you and my son together in any public restaurant, I will thrash you.' Oscar countered. ‘I do not know what the Queensberry rules are, but the Oscar Wilde rule is to shoot at first sight.' He threatened Queensberry with the police unless he left his house instantly. Oscar then marshalled the intruders out of his house and, pointing to Queensberry, said to Arthur, the butler, ‘This is the Marquess of Queensberry, the most infamous brute in London. You are never to allow him to enter my house again.'
¹²

That the Marquess meant what he said Oscar did not doubt, and he turned to the solicitor, George Lewis, who, together with his wife, had given him emotional support throughout his American trip. He asked if Lewis could put a gagging order on the ‘brute', only to find Lewis had already been engaged by the Marquess to fight divorce proceedings taken by his wife. Oscar wrote later, ‘When I was deprived of [Lewis's] advice and help and regard, I was deprived of the one great safeguard of my life.'
¹³
Whether history would have taken a different turn had Lewis been on board, we cannot know. What we do know is that Oscar was truly bothered by Queensberry's threats. The following month, he wrote to Douglas. ‘Your father on the rampage again – been to the Café Royal to enquire for us, with threats, etc. I think now it would have been better for me to have him bound over to keep the peace, but what a scandal! Still, it is intolerable to be dogged by a maniac.'
¹⁴
Seldom did his correspondence at this time sound a confident note. Oscar left London in August 1894 for Worthing and did not return until November.

37

Letting Rip

Oscar joined Constance, who was staying with the boys in Worthing. To add to his unease over Queensberry's harassment, he had ‘not a penny', and was ‘overdrawn £41 at the bank'.
¹
The unfailingly supportive Constance tried to put the family back on the path of solvency. She came up with an idea to compile from published works a collection of Oscar's aphorisms and epigrams, thinking perhaps along the lines of Rochefoucauld's
Maxims
. She managed to persuade Oscar, who had hitherto been reluctant, and lined up Hatchard's in Piccadilly to undertake publication of a volume that would bear the title
Oscariana.
Constance had turned to Hatchard's on account of Arthur Humphreys, the general manager, whom she knew personally. Working together on
Oscariana
, she and Humphreys drew close; close enough for Constance to tell Humphreys he was ‘an ideal husband'. ‘I feel as though I must write you one line to emphatically repeat my remark that you are an ideal husband, indeed I think you are not far short of being an ideal man!' She admitted to Humphreys she was ‘a hero-worshipper down to the tips of her fingers', and wrote ‘somewhere near the head of my list I now put you!' These two spirits put aside the dos and don'ts of etiquette and stood together in sharing disappointment over their respective marriages. ‘I stepped past the limits perhaps of good taste in the wish to be your friend,' Constance confessed, but she believed Humphreys was a ‘good' man, and, in her words, ‘it is rarely that I come across a man that has that written in his face'.
²

Over the summer months of 1894, Constance and Humphreys tiptoed their way to intimacy. After years of a loveless marriage to a feckless husband, Constance formed a relationship with Humphreys that gave her an emotional anchorage and contentment, judging by this letter she wrote to ‘My darling Arthur'.

I am going to write you a line while you are smoking your cigarette to tell you how much I love you, and how dear and delightful you have been to me today. I have been happy, and I do love you dear Arthur. Nothing in my life has ever made me so happy as this love of yours to me has done, and I trust you, and will trust you through everything. You have been a great dear all the time quite perfect to me, and dear to the children, and nice to Oscar too, and I so love you, and I love you just because you are, and because you have come into my life to fill it with love and make it rich.
³

That August Humphreys joined the family for a few days at Worthing and how this ménage à trois got along, one can only conjecture. What we know for sure is that Oscar considered it fruitful enough material for a drama, the outline of which he sketched for George Alexander, calling it, temporarily at least,
Constance.
The scenario involves a man of ‘fashion and rank' who marries a ‘simple sweet country girl', soon becomes bored, and to amuse himself throws a party for the ‘fashionable
fin-de-siècle
'. The husband zealously implores his wife ‘not to be prudish', and arranges for a certain Gerald Lancing to flirt with her. The wife and Gerald fall in love, and take off together, leaving the husband repentant and bereft. Oscar has the wife utter the dictum that the individual who makes his life a sacrifice for others ends up smaller for it. ‘All this self-sacrifice is wrong, we are meant to live. That is the meaning of life.' Thus does this transformed ‘good' woman take off, high-kicking against the submissive ‘Angel in the House' Victorian ideal of ‘self-sacrifice'.
⁴
To write this sketch, Oscar had only to look into his own heart. The husband is what he thinks he is; and the fleeing wife, shunning ‘self-sacrifice', is what he might like Constance to be, but more importantly, it is what he would like to do himself – to flee from Douglas – but can't. Rarely do Oscar's drawing-room plays tell ‘beautiful untruths', which is what he thought art should do; more often they tell the truth of his own dilemmas and contradictions. Whatever George Alexander thought of this skeleton, the play did not materialise. What did emerge from Worthing was
The Importance of Being Earnest
.

Douglas joined Oscar and his family in August and stamped out the live embers of joy Constance had begun to feel. Whether it was the irreverence Oscar and Douglas cultivated in their show of blatant disdain for discretion, or the capriciousness Douglas's presence encouraged in Oscar, or for whatever other reason, Constance did not hide her irritation. Oscar and Douglas held nothing back; on the contrary, they flaunted their union. They courted danger on the beach, where together they hung out with boys. There was Alphonso Conway, a newspaper boy Oscar picked up on the beach, befriended, and for whom he bought a suit. There were others – Stephen and Percy. There was a local concert given by the mayor, which Oscar and Douglas, rather than Constance, were invited to patronise, and their names, used to draw a crowd, were ‘placarded all over the town'.
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This letting rip with discretion in his personal life made its way into
The Importance of Being Earnest
, where the degenerate Algernon is reckless enough to be threatened with Holloway Prison. Humour was Oscar's answer to the danger he was courting.

Earnestness was a watchword for Victorians. Samuel Butler invoked the name ‘Ernest' in his well-known semi-autobiographical novel,
The Way of All Flesh
, where he confronted Victorian hypocrisy. There Theobald Pontifex baptises his son Ernest because ‘the word “earnest” was just beginning to come into fashion, and he thought the possession of such a name might, like his having been baptised in the water from the Jordan, have a permanent effect on his character, and influence him for good during the more critical periods of his life'.
⁶
Written between 1873 and 1884, Butler's book was not published until after his death in 1903, largely because of the controversial nature of the material. Even so, for the audience in 1895 the topicality of Oscar's skit on earnestness and fashion would have been readily understood. Thomas Carlyle spoke for many Victorians when he declared in
Past and Present
(1843) ‘the time for levity, insincerity, and idle babble and play-acting, in all kinds is gone by; it is a serious, grave time'.
⁷
Back in the 1840s, Jane had teased her Scottish friend, Hilson, suggesting he had imbibed too much of Carlyle's earnestness. In Oscar's play, ‘Ernest' is deemed the appropriate label in an ‘age of ideals'.
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