Oscar Read online

  * Oscar’s understanding of the case – as he later described it – was that his mother had behaved with ‘extraordinary’ nobility throughout the proceedings, giving her testimony with a ‘perfect serenity’ devoid of all ‘common womanly jealousy’ that convinced the jury that her father must be ‘guiltless’ of any improper association. It had been hoped that, following the trial, Miss Travers would ‘emigrate to some near relative in a distant colony’. But she remained in Dublin, and that June (1865), sued Saunders’s News-Letter for suggesting that she had ‘concocted’ her ‘infamous story’ about Sir William Wilde. On this occasion, though she was again defended by Isaac Butt, the jury found against her, leaving her to pay costs. It was her last legal adventure, and the last time she annoyed the Wildes. She seems to have remained in Ireland, dying in 1919, aged eighty-three, in a home for decayed gentlewomen at Normanstown, Co. Meath.

  † When Lady Wilde had published her collected verses – Poems by Speranza – at the end of 1864, it was dedicated to ‘My Sons, Willie and Oscar Wilde’ with the epigraph: ‘I made them indeed, / Speak plain the word COUNTRY. I taught them, no doubt, / That a country’s a thing men should die for at need!’

  ‡ One of these survives – the earliest of Wilde’s extant poems – a ditty addressed to a Miss ffrench, whom he appears to have met at the Galway Ball.

  Does my Angelina Fancy

  That her Edwin is untrue [?]

  Does she think that he’s forgetful

  Prone the “Galway Ball” to rue [?]

  Canto the 2nd

  Maiden let that foolish fancy

  Leave thy loving, trusting heart

  Never shall thy image, never!

  From this mind of mine depart

  Here endeth ye 2nd Canto the Poet being too sorrowful to go on.

  Never shall this fateful passion

  Leave this love inspired breast[.]

  Write then but a line to cheer me

  Write, if, but to give me rest[.]

  No fair jewels can I give thee

  No bright diamonds from the mine

  Love’s my offering, pure, unsullied

  To a heart alas! Not mine[.]

  Here the poet’s tears / Were so frequent as /

  To stop his writing any more.’

  Another purported schoolboy rhyme, concerned Wilde’s dislike for cricket. It began:

  Never more will I play

  With the soaring and gay

  But cruel in its fall –

  The mean old cricket ball.

  3

  Foundation Scholarship

  ‘He seemed to be able to master everything he tackled.’

  horace wilkins

  Wilde matriculated at Trinity College Dublin on 10 October 1871, six days before his seventeenth birthday. In the three-day entrance examination, which took place immediately afterwards, he secured the second-highest marks of the forty-four candidates, excelling in Greek and history, and limping through the compulsory maths paper (Purser was ranked first overall).1 Wilde followed up this success in the subsequent ‘exam for royal school exhibitions’, by gaining one of Portora’s ‘royal scholarships’, together with Purser and Robert McDowell. The names of all three were duly inscribed on the honours board back at Portora.2

  Although Trinity marked a new era for Wilde, the college was, in many ways, a return to familiar ground. He had been born almost within its precincts, and had grown up close to its gates. Its leading lights frequented his parents’ home. His father, though not an alumnus, had been awarded an honorary degree, and interested himself in the life of the place.3 His brother, entering his third year, was a notable figure on the campus. Familiarity, however, is not perhaps what a freshman most wants at the outset of his university career.

  Wilde’s great hopes for his time at Trinity suffered a succession of blows. Lodging at home in Merrion Square, surrounded by art and books and adult conversation, the undergraduate life of the college registered as coarse and unsympathetic. His hopes of discovering kindred spirits were rapidly disappointed. The camaraderie of the small classical sixth form was lost. He pronounced the prevailing atmosphere ‘barbaric’: like school but ‘with coarseness superadded’.4 Of the thousand-plus undergraduates at Trinity, the vast majority seemed ‘simply awful’, ‘even worse than the boys at Portora’: they thought of ‘nothing but cricket and football, running and jumping; and they varied these intellectual exercises with bouts of fighting and drinking’. The other new element in the equation, Oscar noted, was sex. Those students who ‘had any souls… diverted them with coarse amours among barmaids and the women of the streets’.5 Willie seems to have entered enthusiastically into this aspect of university life; he even delivered a memorable speech, at one of the college debating societies, in defence of prostitution.6* Oscar was not interested. A natural fastidiousness – ‘a peculiar refinement of nature’ – began to make itself apparent. Contemporaries noted his aversion to the ‘suggestive story’, and, indeed, to all gross and crude expression. He quickly gained the reputation among his peers of being ‘one of the purest minded men that could be met with’.7 Sex would come to him, like so much else, first through literature.

  To his new college-mates his most conspicuous traits were his size and his clumsiness. The spurt of growth that had occurred at the end of his Portora days had continued, leaving him struggling to catch up with his new self. He was remembered as an ‘ungainly, overgrown, moping, awkward lad’ who was ‘continually knocking things over… and at whom everybody laughed’.8

  In the face of all this, work offered a refuge, and also the chance of distinction. His triumph in the entrance exams was soon followed by other awards.9 Wilde’s Portora training carried him a long way, but he also found himself challenged by his new academic environment. He had been fortunate in his timing. The classics at Trinity were undergoing a revival – coming even to match the university’s established reputation as a centre of mathematical excellence. At the forefront of this renaissance were two young dons of undeniable energy and brilliance, Robert Yelverton Tyrrell and John Pentland Mahaffy. Wilde was swept into their orbit. They exerted a huge influence upon his development, they extended his horizons, and dominated his appreciation of university life. The two men – as Wilde came to say – ‘were Trinity to me’.10

  Tyrrell and Mahaffy – both Irishmen and Trinity graduates – were very different characters, and very different classicists. Tyrrell, in the year of Wilde’s matriculation, had, at the impressively young age of twenty-seven, been made professor of Latin. Although a punctilious scholar – who knew what he knew ‘perfectly’ – his knowledge was concentrated within a limited range.11 He ‘did not affect to know or care much about’ archaeology, anthropology, history or philosophy: it was literature that engaged him – and, despite his Latin professorship, Greek literature at that.12

  He wore his learning lightly. His lectures were inspirational: ‘stimulating joint examinations’ of a subject, rather than magisterial pronouncements.13 On occasion he might enter the lecture hall carrying an obviously uncut copy of the book upon which he was supposed to discourse, before leading his listeners into unexpected ‘realms of poetry and imagination’.14 Critical suggestions were ‘lightly thrown off’, while from his excellent memory he would quote apt parallels from authors both ancient and modern.15 The Times obituarist would hail his ‘scintillating wit’, and suggested that if ‘no teacher was ever less systematic; none succeeded so well in inspiring his pupils with his love of classical poetry’.16 He delighted, particularly, in the beauties of form. Indeed in all things he was an arch-stylist: a ‘model of disciplined elegance’ not just in writing, but also in conversation and in dress.17 Yet there was also something engagingly approachable and ‘bohemian’ in his make- up.18 Still a bachelor during Wilde’s time at Trinity, he was very popular with the students, and ‘eminently happy’ in his ‘less formal relations’ with them.19

  The Rev. John Pentland Mahaffy, newly appointed professor
of ancient history, was a rather more daunting figure. He, too, was still a young man, only five years older than Tyrrell, but – over six feet tall, ‘stalwart’, bewhiskered, and sporting a clerical collar – he had an air of imposing dignity.20 It was an air that he cultivated. Although always aware of his own prowess, his occasionally supercilious manner was tempered by a bracing sense of humour, and undercut by an inability to enunciate the letter ‘R’.

  He had taken holy orders soon after winning his fellowship in 1864, but he was – as he liked to say – not a clergyman ‘in any offensive sense of the word’. Indeed there were those who doubted he was even a believer. He loved the world and he loved his place in it. Country house parties, convivial dinners, formal banquets: these were his favoured settings. He was ‘happiest among his fellow men and women, provided they had done something or were personages of interest’. And, though his detractors might say that he was most interested in the titled, if not the royal, in fact his sympathies were wide. He certainly did know numerous peers and several princes, but he claimed, too, never to have travelled on a train without discovering something of interest in his fellow passengers.

  As a classicist, Mahaffy offered a different outlook. It was said that while Tyrrell was interested in Greek and Latin, Mahaffy was interested in the Greeks and Romans (or, as he would have called them, the ‘Gweeks and Wo-mans’). Greek history – social and cultural as much as political – was his particular study. He had, as Wilde remarked, ‘saturated himself in Greek thought and Greek feeling’. Unlike some of his library-bound colleagues, though, he was ready to look beyond the literary sources, embracing ethnology, anthropology and the new discoveries of archaeology. He evolved – and passed on – challenging revisionist views: asserting, for instance, the artistic superiority of Euripides over the (earlier and then more generally acclaimed) Sophocles, and the cultural superiority of Plato’s fourth-century bc Athens to the famed Athens of Pericles in the century before. He (like Matthew Arnold and others) had a profound sense of the ‘modernity’ of the Greeks, and a belief that the nineteenth century could learn much from the Hellenic past.21

  His lectures – unlike those of Professor Tyrrell – may have been delivered ‘loftily to a silent class’, but they were no less stimulating for that. He possessed ‘that quality which marks the true teacher – the power of communicating the power of enthusiasm’.22 He was respected by most of the students, feared by some – and lampooned by a few. He was not allowed to forget his remark, ‘take me all round, I am the best man in Trinity College’. But if he was conceited, it was admitted that he did have plenty to be conceited about.

  Wilde was attracted to both men, and they in their turn responded to his eager interest and energy. Wilde considered Tyrrell not only wonderfully ‘crammed with knowledge’ but also ‘intensely sympathetic’; and he always recalled the young tutor’s great kindness during those difficult early days of college life.23 Of Mahaffy, Wilde was less in awe than many of his contemporaries. He had the advantage of knowing ‘the General’ already. Mahaffy was often a guest at 1 Merrion Square. And it was doubtless this sense of an existing connection that prompted Oscar – like his brother Willie – to choose Mahaffy as his college ‘tutor’ at the time of his matriculation.24 Mahaffy, for his part, was impressed by his young pupil’s accomplishments: as he later remarked, Oscar’s ‘aptitude for, and keen delight in, Hellenic studies attracted me towards him. He was one of the few students I knew who could write a really good Greek composition. In Greek you have to diagnose the substance that underlies the form of the English you are transposing. And again, Wilde was one of the few students who could grasp the nuances of the various phases of the Greek Middle Voice and of the vagaries of Greek conditional clauses.’25

  Mahaffy and Tyrrell, in their different ways, stimulated Wilde’s intellect and his imagination. From Tyrrell Wilde gained a more ‘intimate knowledge of the [Greek] language’ and from Mahaffy a deeper ‘love of the Greek thought and feeling’.26 He adopted many of Mahaffy’s critical positions (favouring Euripides above Sophocles, for instance) – and came to flatter him as ‘my first and best teacher… the scholar who showed me how to love Greek things’.27

  Both tutors also encouraged Wilde to talk, and to talk well. Talk was highly prized at Trinity, as it was in Dublin generally. It was considered not only a vital social accomplishment, but the measure by which a man might be judged.28 Tyrrell, with his distinctive ‘piping voice’, was a fine talker himself: droll, self-deprecatory, ironical, generous in his praise of others. Though accounted witty, he was always controlled, stuck to topics he knew well and was not, essentially, ‘imaginative’.29 Mahaffy, however, was a phenomenon. He loved conversation; he had made a study of it, and would write a book about it. The distinctive elements of his own talk were exuberance, fluency, breadth of reference, imagination and a tendency to overstatement. Always more interested in ideas than style, he would be ‘boastful, provocative, versatile, and bold to tread in areas where he was not an expert’.30 It was in many ways a dazzling performance. One listener considered that ‘until you heard Mahaffy talk, you hadn’t realised how language could be used to charm and hypnotize’.31

  Among Mahaffy’s most celebrated witticisms were the observations ‘in Ireland the inevitable never happens, and the unexpected constantly occurs’, and ‘never tell a story because it is true: tell it because it is a good story’.32 Examples of Tyrrell’s wit are harder to recover, although when asked – apropos some archiepiscopal banquet – if it were true that he had ‘got drunk at the Archbishop’s dinner-table’, he is said to have replied, ‘Oh no, I took the obvious precaution of coming drunk’.33 Of Browning’s translation of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon he remarked that he found ‘the Greek most useful in understanding it’, while he criticized Matthew Arnold for ‘preaching the doctrine of “Avoid Excess” excessively’.34

  Wilde was impressed by the example of both men. He noted their use of paradox and their subversion of expectation. He enjoyed Tyrrell’s facetious use of biblical allusion (Tyrrell complained of one embittered classical don that ‘had he been at the Wedding Feast at Cana, he would have soured the wine – thereby weakening our faith’). Mahaffy, though, he found utterly compelling; ‘a really great talker in a certain way – an artist in vivid words and eloquent pauses’.35 And admiration encouraged emulation. Wilde always claimed that at Trinity he ‘did nothing… but talk’.36 And, in the absence of congenial classmates, it was with Tyrrell and Mahaffy that much of that talking was done.37 He proved an apt pupil. The beginning that he had made at Portora was built upon. Certainly Tyrrell remembered him as ‘a most brilliant talker’, though he noted an occasional affectation of ‘superciliousness’ from ‘trying to imitate Mahaffy’.38 Mahaffy, accepting such emulation as his due, found Wilde a ‘delightful’ conversationalist, especially ‘on matters of scholarship’: his views ‘always so fresh and unconventional’,39 his approach ‘all verve and joie de vivre’.40

  Neither of Wilde’s Trinity mentors believed in a narrow academic focus, and their example encouraged pupils to look beyond the set curriculum. During his first terms Wilde regularly attended lectures on philosophy and English literature.41 The world of ‘the Phil’ (the Philosophical, or junior debating society), however, failed to engage him. Although he was elected during his first term (a notable distinction) and attended some meetings, he ‘hardly ever took any part in their discussions’. He did not seem to hold ‘any pronounced views on social, religious or political questions’.42 Besides, Willie, who was on the council – and through whose influence Oscar doubtless secured his early election – was perhaps too prominent there to encourage competition.43

  Both Tyrrell and Mahaffy had a strong belief in the virtues of sport, extolling the classical ideal of a healthy mind in a healthy body. Tyrrell played tennis and racquets, and hockey; Mahaffy – a brilliant shot, an expert angler and a keen admirer of the landed classes – considered country pursuits among the ‘cardinal virtues’, ci
ting the example of the ancient Macedonians to support his view.44 His other sporting passion – and one that he shared with Tyrrell – was cricket. Mahaffy had captained the Trinity XI as an undergraduate, and continued to play as a don. Wilde, for his part, could never rise to more than a spectator’s interest in the game, but he did play the newly popular ‘lawn tennis’ with real enthusiasm.45 He also greatly enjoyed shooting and fishing, but they were diversions for the holidays in the far west, at Illaunroe and Moytura.

  In Dublin he buried himself in books, just as he had done at school. Away from work, he devoted himself to ‘the best English writers’. He continued to read Poe and Whitman, and he made a great new discovery: Swinburne.46 At the beginning of the 1870s the thirty-something-year-old Algernon Swinburne was a daring and divisive figure: admired by the few, excoriated by the many. He had achieved a first, modest, success some five years earlier with his published drama in classical Greek form, Atalanta in Calydon. But he had followed this up with an electrifying first collection, Poems and Ballads (1866). Lyrics such as ‘Dolores’ (‘our Lady of Pain’), ‘Hermaphroditus’, ‘Faustine’, ‘Anactoria’ (spoken in the voice of the Greek poet Sappho), ‘Laus Veneris’ (the lament of Tannhauser, trapped forever with Venus in her suffocating mountain layer), ‘Itylus’ (the song of Aedon, legendary queen of Thebes, who accidentally killed her own daughter, and was transformed into a nightingale) and ‘Hymn to Proserpine’ (ruing the victory of Christianity over the pagan gods in such resonant couplets as ‘Thou has conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has grown grey from thy breath; / We have drunken of things Lethean, and fed on the fullness of death’) conjured up vivid worlds – Hellenic and Medieval – peopled with femmes fatales and hommes damnés, and coloured with the burning hues of thwarted love and transgressive lust. On every page conventions were overthrown, taboos ignored and certainties undermined. The pagan and the republican were exalted above the Christian and the royal, and sexual pleasure was linked inextricably to sensual pain.