His defiant individualism, his refusal to accept the limiting constraints of society, his sexual heresies, his political radicalism, his commitment to style, and his canny engagement with what is now called “celebrity culture” all conspire to make him ever more approachable, more exciting, and more relevant.

it should also be noted that his approach was that of a literary critic rather than a historian. Wilde’s life is seen largely through the prism of his work. Of course, in examining the life of a writer, there are real virtues in such an approach—but it has its limits, too.

Wilde, of course, adopted poses and created myths about himself, and there is always a fruitful tension to be explored between these masks and the truths that stand behind them. But there are moments in the pages of Ellmann when our hero seems almost to be parading through his life as the Oscar Wilde of later legend.

the unflappable, epigrammatic Aesthete—is so compelling that it is hard not to be seduced by it.

(the Fynns of Ballymagibbon in County Mayo were renowned for their wide estates, their ancient name, their connection to the O’Flaherties, and their mental instability).

There was one minor insurrection in Tipperary (“ the Battle of the Widow McCormack’s Cabbage Patch”), in the course of which two “rebels” were shot.

the unfolding drama of Wilde family life.

To unsympathetic viewers the case confirmed that “Sir William Wilde was a pithecoid [ape-like] person of extraordinary sensuality and cowardice [for avoiding the witness box] and that his wife was a highfalutin’ pretentious creature whose pride was as extravagant as her reputation founded on second-rate verse-making.”

he accepted his mother’s whole vision of the world: grand, extravagant, and bright with possibility. He accepted (and always retained) her vision of herself as “one of the great figures of the world” and her vision of himself as “something wonderful.”

Every aspect of school life, though, offered scope for the same sort of calculated individualism.

above all, he talked—fluently, amusingly, interestingly, and well. He

his real gift was for comedy. He had a way with exaggeration that could transform even the most mundane occurrence into a vision of romance guyed by humor.

He developed, too, a relish for the recondite, and a penchant for the extravagant.

On every page conventions were overthrown, taboos ignored, and certainties undermined.

fascination with past ages, a weary yet exquisite sensibility, and a relish for sensual detail.

Oscar shared his mother’s gift for dramatic overstatement, as well as her delight in shocking bourgeois sensibilities.

At Trinity he also developed his trope of treating trivial matters with mock gravity or exaggerated force.

There was a sense of anxious inquiry abroad, a search for new modes of thought and understanding. To many commentators it seemed that advances in science and textual criticism had undermined not only the literal truths of the Bible but also the religious and moral certainties that underpinned life and regulated conduct. In the face of Darwin and German philology, the sea of faith was receding.

Following Gautier’s lead, Pater ignored the moral and social claims of art and beauty proclaimed by Ruskin and suggested instead a purely sensory, indeed sensual, engagement with the world. Confronted with the state of flux revealed by modern science, he abandoned the search for certainties and absolutes, for overarching systems of belief, and retreated to the line of his own consciousness. Embracing the spirit of relativism, he suggested that man should simply concern himself with his own fleeting sensations and impressions. For want of any other possible goal, he should devote himself to experiencing the greatest number of the finest sensations with the highest degree of discrimination:

To a devotee of Swinburne, such as Wilde, this endorsement of the beauties of pain, strangeness, and decay was both comprehensible and beguiling.

Punch ran a decorator’s guide to the Aesthetic fad by its in-house expert, “Mr Fernando F. Eminate.” He explained: “It’s a wide term, but I think I may say that the outcome of aestheticism is a mixture of antique quaintness, dingy and washed out colour, and oddity combined with discomfort.” Among his specific recommendations were “sage green” and “dull yellow” color schemes; “rugs in the most dull and neutral tones” over bare boards or matting; curtains “with grotesque patterns”; wallpapers “of sombre or sickly ground” and “spidery” design; a recess filled with “delft and blue china”; and—for pictures—either “E. B[ urne]. Jones, or an occasional nocturne of Whistler’s.”

The fact that Katakolo was an unlovely little port and the surrounding landscape unexceptional could be ignored. Wilde (like his companions) was not just arriving upon an actual shore but returning to a land of the imagination.

The review, when it appeared in July 1877, was a mixture of lush description, discerning praise, and lofty qualification. Almost every sentence subtly proclaimed the author’s own connections, accomplishments, and allegiances: Millais’s portraits of the daughters of the Duke of Westminster were endorsed as “very good likenesses,” while his portrait of Lord Ronald Gower “will be easily recognized,” though it is not in the same class as the artist’s picture of Ruskin, “which is in Oxford” (not on public display, but at the home of Sir Henry Acland).

“When a young man says, not in polished banter but in sober earnestness, that he finds it difficult to live up to the level of his blue china, there has crept into the cloistered shades a form of heathenism which it is our bounden duty to fight against and to crush out if possible.”

Wilde arrived in the capital as an enthusiast, and one whose enthusiasms were both unforced and contagious. He was, at this stage of his career, “really ingenuous.” Those who met him recalled him as “invariably smiling, eager, full of life and the joy of living and, above all, given to unmeasured praise of whatever and whoever pleased him.” This “gift of enthusiastic admiration” was, in the society of those days, something both “unexpected and delightful.”

Wilde recognized an opportunity. He not merely encouraged the idea of a link but insisted upon it. Ignoring the lack of physical resemblance, he claimed that he was, in fact, the model for Postlethwaite. By taking the generalized ridicule of du Maurier’s caricature and accepting it as a personal tribute, Wilde was seeking to draw a bright, clear beam of attention to himself. Punch had a wide circulation and a deep influence. If Wilde could become identified in the public mind with Postlethwaite, he might assume Postlethwaite’s position as Aestheticism’s exemplary poet—perhaps even its exemplary figure. The position, after all, was vacant. By 1880 the acknowledged figureheads of the Aesthetic movement were still the old, established Pre-Raphaelite coterie of Rossetti, Swinburne, Morris, and Burne-Jones, with the additions of Godwin and their onetime friend Whistler. For a press that increasingly desired to frame issues in terms of personalities, this was proving a drawback. Almost all these figures had withdrawn from public view or become respectable. With the exception of Whistler, none of them now even evinced any notable “eccentricity of costume or manner.” Rossetti was a virtual recluse. Swinburne had retired to Putney. Morris was taken up by business and politics. Burne-Jones, though his art was regularly lampooned, shied away from all personal publicity. Godwin was too busy. The press needed a new face, a new personality—a living embodiment of Aestheticism. By projecting himself as the model for Postlethwaite, Wilde might claim that role.

Whistler, back in London from Venice toward the end of the year, and encountering Wilde and du Maurier together at an exhibition, asked, “I say, which one of you two invented the other, eh?” The remark was calculated primarily as an insult to du Maurier (a contemporary and onetime friend of Whistler’s), but it did also reflect the growing congruity in the popular imagination between the Aesthetic Postlethwaite and the Aesthetic Wilde.

And during the course of 1880, as Postlethwaite became more like Wilde, Wilde became more like Postlethwaite. With remarkable “clearsightedness” he set about projecting “the character.” He amplified his persona. His mannerisms became more flamboyant, his postures more languishing, his talk more studiedly affected. Perhaps he even used the key Aesthetic terms (as recorded in Punch): “consummate,” “utter,” “supreme,” “too-too.” Certainly he developed his gift for shocking conventional expectations, treating serious things lightly and frivolous things gravely. But he did even more than this. Stepping well beyond Postlethwaite’s role as a poet (a role that, after all, he had barely achieved himself), Wilde sought to become the very essence of Aestheticism—“ to embody,” as one friend put it, “in the eye of his fellow men a conception of life founded on the worship of beauty.” His own life, he seemed to declare, was “a work of art.” It was a vision for which he found an increasingly receptive audience.

The story that he paraded down Piccadilly with a lily in his hand—although it may have carried some memory of his floral gifts for Lillie Langtry—was essentially an invention. But as he remarked with mock pride, “Anyone could have done that.” He had achieved “the great and difficult thing” of making the “world believe that [he] had done it.” The world—encouraged by Punch and Postlethwaite—was growing eager to believe. But although such stories spread Wilde’s fame, it was not always clear whether the audience was being invited to laugh with Wilde for his wit or laugh at him in his folly.

One commentator considered that Wilde was now “more talked about and paragraphed than any other male individual not being a murderer or a statesman.”* 3

Wilde’s great celebrity—and the way in which it had been achieved—produced huge resentment. In the literary world there might be few who considered him a fool, but there were many who thought him a buffoon. They found his self-advertising vulgar and his affectations absurd. They resented, too, that he had been able to attract such attention without having actually produced any substantial work. Fastidious spirits such as Pater considered “the whole panorama” of Wilde’s fledgling career “utterly distasteful.”

“Whistler taught him that men of genius stand apart and are laws unto themselves; showed him too that all qualities—singularity of appearance, wit, rudeness even, count doubly in a democracy.”

When he too eagerly approved Whistler’s rebuke to the Times’s art critic about the limits of press criticism, with the aside “I wish I had said that,” Whistler shot back: “You will, Oscar, you will.”

Intrigued by Wilde’s rising fame, the prince asked his friend Christopher Sykes to give a dinner to bring them together, fixing his request with the mot “I do not know Mr Wilde, and not to know Mr Wilde is not to be known.”

he was largely at the mercy of critics, journalists, and fellow writers who resented his fame, his “vulgar” self-promotion, and his social success. Punch led the attack. Having trailed the book with the ditty “Aesthete of Aesthetes! What’s in a name? The poet is Wilde, But his poetry’s tame,” they confirmed the verdict in a review that condemned the work as a volume of poetic “echoes,” or “Swinburne and Water.”

The self-important poet and literary critic Edmund Clarence Stedman declined to meet Wilde, despite receiving two letters of introduction (much to his annoyance, several newspapers incorrectly listed him as having accompanied his wife to the reception given for Wilde at the Crolys’). Stedman had been set against Wilde and his Poems by a letter from his friend Edmund Gosse dismissing the “atrocious book” as “a malodorous parasitic growth” bumped into a third edition by the author’s “aristocratic friends.” And Stedman was not inclined to relent. In his estimation Wilde was a “humbug”—albeit a clever one—and it was merely New York’s wealthy “Philistine” element that, from a mixture of “snobbery and idiocy,” was “making a fool of itself” over him. He considered that the “genuine” writers and poets were keeping out of his way—and he did his best to encourage them to continue doing so. The high-minded Emma Lazarus (whose 1883 sonnet “The New Colossus” would provide the lines inscribed on the base of the Statue of Liberty) held off from meeting Wilde because—despite her admiration for his “genuine imagination and talent”—she so disliked his “bare faced courting of vulgar notoriety.”

Sarah Bernhardt had whetted his appetite, telling him—as he informed one reporter—that “there were two things in America worth seeing—one was Clara Morris’s acting, and the other was some dreadful method of killing pigs in Chicago. She advised me to go and see both.”

Wilde was wary: an article was only paid for once, but a lecture could be delivered many times.

It was perhaps in Washington that he was asked pointedly by one woman whether he had come to America “to amuse” them. At his reply that he had come “rather to instruct,” she had remarked, “If that is your purpose, let me recommend that you wear your hair shorter and your trousers longer.”

Clover, the wife of Henry Adams, boasted that she had “escaped his acquaintance.” She had told Henry James, who was also over from London and visiting Washington, “not to bring his friend Oscar Wilde [to her home] when he comes,” adding, “I must keep out thieves and noodles”—although whether she considered Wilde a thief for borrowing the ideas of Ruskin, Morris, and others or a “noodle” (a fool) for parading about in knee breeches is unclear.

James was diligent, diffident, and discreet, while Wilde was effusive, effeminate, and attention-seeking.

“As I look about me, I am impelled for the first time to breathe a fervent prayer, ‘Save me from my disciples.’

It was told that when he was asked by one Washington hostess, “Where is your lily?,” Wilde had replied, “At home, madam, where you left your good manners.”

“I regard all caricature and satire as absolutely beneath notice,”

connotations of foolishness, derived from a “conundrum” then making the rounds: “Who was the first Aesthete?” “Balaam’s ass, because the Lord made him to( o) utter.” In the Old Testament Book of Numbers, the story is told of how Balaam’s ass is given the power of speech so that he can explain to the irate Balaam that he—the ass—has stopped in his tracks because there is an angel barring the way.

“Politics is a practical science. An unsuccessful revolution is merely treason; a successful one is a great era in the history of a country.”

Ambrose Bierce, in The Wasp (March 31, 1882), reported rather less favorably on the occasion, with three paragraphs of vituperation that began: “That sovereign of insufferables, Oscar Wilde, has ensued with his opulence of twaddle and his penury of sense. He has mounted his hind legs and blown crass vapidities through the bowel of his neck, to the capital edification of circumjacent fools and foolesses, fooling with their foolers. He has tossed off the top of his head and uttered himself in copious overflows of ghastly bosh. The insufferable dunce has nothing to say and says it—says it with a liberal embellishment of bad delivery, embroidering it with reasonless vulgarities of attitude, gesture and attire. There never was an impostor so hateful, a blockhead so stupid, a crank so variously and offensively daft.”

Bourget, with whom Wilde discoursed over the Left Bank café tables, had just published his Essais de psychologie contemporain, in which he identified Baudelaire as the dominant influence on the rising generation of Parisian poets and writers. He could lay out for Wilde the details of this new artistic tendency. A movement was becoming apparent, inspired by the dark tones and corrupted forms of Les Fleurs du mal, as well as by Gautier’s celebrated introduction to the 1868 edition of the book (the only edition then in print). In his notice Gautier had described Baudelaire’s poetic idiom as “the style of decadence”—“ a style that is ingenious, complicated, learned, full of shades of meaning and research, always pushing further the limits of language”—a style perfectly adapted for expressing the shifting moods, overly subtle sensations, and “singular hallucinations” of the modern spirit.

For the febrile Baudelaire-obsessed young poets who gathered at Le Chat Noir to drink absinthe and discuss their work, these were compelling ideas. “Decadence” became their rallying call and their ideal. They adopted its distinctive taints of pessimism and nervous hypersensitivity, its stylistic complexity, and its fascination with depravity. They celebrated it in the novels of the Goncourts, and found it, too, in the poetry and person of Paul Verlaine. The thirty-nine-year-old Verlaine—balding, satyr-faced, alcoholic, and homosexual—had recently returned to Paris after more than a decade of self-imposed exile to find that his three early volumes of Baudelarian verse, published in the 1860s, were rather less well remembered than his violent and doomed affair with the young Arthur Rimbaud. He was eagerly taken up by the young “Decadents.” They encouraged his writing and published his poems.

Wilde was distressed by the shabbiness of Verlaine’s broken-down appearance, while the brilliant flow of his own talk was wasted on the childlike French poet. Verlaine, for his part, was irritated that Wilde failed to offer around his expensive-looking cigarettes.

Wilde] is grown enormously fat,” she confided to her diary, “with a huge face and tight curls all over his head—not at all the aesthetic he used to look.” She was no more impressed by his new manner: “He was very amusing and talked cleverly, but it was all monologue and not conversation…. He is vulgar, I think, and lolls about in, I suppose, poetic attitudes with crumpled shirt cuffs turned back over coat sleeves!”

“What you, as painters, have to paint,” he told his young listeners, “is not things as they are but things as they seem to be; not things as they are but things as they are not.”

the lecture was generally very well received. One characteristic review hailed it as “very ‘Oscar Wildish’… paradoxical, audacious, epigrammatic, abounding in good stories well told, in picturesque descriptions, often humorously nonsensical, [and] with plenty of original information.” Wilde, though, had retained the ability to polarize opinion. Some sections of the press insisted on casting the occasion in a negative light. The most hostile review, however, came from a perhaps unexpected quarter: Labouchère’s Truth printed a long spite-filled leader titled “Exit Oscar.” After describing Wilde’s “lecturing to empty benches at the height of the season” as a most “pathetic instance of collapse,” it launched into a withering account of his career as an “Epicene youth” and “effeminate phrase-maker” at Oxford, as “the temporary jest in London drawing rooms, the butt of American lecture halls, and a failure in Bohemian Paris.” The “fiasco” of the Prince’s Hall, it declared, must mark an end: “The joke is played out; the soap bubble of prismatic hues blown from a clay pipe has burst.”

In London, though, Wilde was coming to be regarded essentially as a society figure: an amusing “sayer of smart things.” Although it was allowed that he was distinct, interesting, and “essentially modern,” his approaching marriage and new dandified look seemed to suggest that he had given up the extravagances of his youth “and accepted life.” This, at least, was the verdict when that May he appeared elegantly caricatured by “Ape” (Carlo Pellegrini) in Vanity Fair’s prestigious “Men of the Day” series.

As Wilde explained to a friend, the surest way to fame and reputation was through self-advertisement: “Every time I see my name is mentioned in the paper, I write at once to admit that I am the Messiah.” Requesting “an opportunity to indulge that most charming of all pleasures, the pleasure of answering one’s critics,” he sent a long letter to the paper, admitting that he was indeed the Messiah of dress reform, and reaffirming all his principal views.

Over the next five years he contributed sprightly critiques of epic poems, Irish legends, etiquette manuals, verse anthologies, handbooks on oil painting, historical biographies, collected letters, popular novels, and more besides. The pieces were usually generous and always droll—ideas were sported with and phrases turned.

“The only point of interest presented by the book is the problem of how it ever came to be written.”

Frustrated by his inability to write anything beyond reviews, Wilde had come to believe that “leisure and freedom from sordid care” were necessary if he was to create “pure literary work” of real worth. He hoped that a regular job might offer such freedom. As he explained to one young correspondent, if only he could “make some profession… the basis and mainstay of [his] life,” he would then be able “to keep literature for [his] finest, rarest moments.” He needed a proper job, or so he thought. Shackled to the round of reviewing—and his ever-dwindling series of lectures—fine moments seemed rare indeed, and “pure literary work” a dream.

Stories flowed from him: fantastical, historical, romantic, macabre, biblical—always alive with paradoxical humor, and often touched by unexpected profundity. These performances, according to one rapt listener, were “so natural” that Wilde seemed to be speaking almost for his own benefit, yet so graceful that his audience had “the flattering illusion” that they had indeed merited the “expense of imagination and energy.”

She possessed—as Mrs. Jeune remarked—“ an insatiable love of notoriety” and a desire to know “everyone worth knowing.” And despite her short, square figure, her eccentric dress sense, and a voice like “a carving knife,” she had achieved the status of a “Lionne” in London society, carried along by a mixture of romantic affectation and brazen self-assertion. “Now that George Elliot [sic] is gone,” she is supposed to have declared, “there is no one else [but me] who can write English.”

He had changed from the bumptiously affected young Aesthete, who had so annoyed the critics at the beginning of the decade, into a seemly responsible public figure.

As he explained to a female writer friend, “fiction—not truth,” was his preferred mode; “I could never have any dealings with truth. If truth were to come in to me, to my room he would say to me, ‘You are too wilful.’ And I should say to him, ‘You are too obvious.’ And I should throw him out the window.”

Wilde’s vision of himself as one of the thinkers of his age. He had, as he later declared, “made art a philosophy, and philosophy an art,” had “summed up all systems in a phrase, and all existence in an epigram.”

“Being natural is simply a pose, and the most irritating pose I know.”—“ I can believe anything provided it is incredible.”—“ A man can’t be too careful in his choice of his enemies. I have not got one who is a fool.”—“ It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances.”—“ The only difference between a caprice and a lifelong passion is that the caprice lasts a little longer.”—“ Sin is the only colour-element left in modern life.”—“ Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.”—“ There are only five women in London worth talking to, and two of these can’t be admitted into decent society.”—“ A cigarette is the type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied.”—“ Lord Henry was always late on principle, his principle being that punctuality is the thief of time.”—“ I never approve, or disapprove, of anything now. It is an absurd attitude to take towards life.”

Mr. Oscar Wilde has again been writing stuff that were better unwritten; and while “The Picture of Dorian Gray”… is ingenious, interesting, full of cleverness, and plainly the work of a man of letters, it is false art, for its interest is medico-legal; it is false to human nature—for its hero is a devil; it is false to morality—for it is not made sufficiently clear that the writer does not prefer a course of unnatural iniquity to a life of cleanliness, health and sanity.

Wilde professed to be delighted with the press attacks, on the grounds that because the English public “takes no interest in a work of art until it is told that the work in question is immoral,” such reviews would “largely increase the sale of the magazine.” He only regretted that, having been paid outright for the piece, he would not be benefiting from this.

although it had proved necessary for “the dramatic development of the story” to “surround Dorian Gray with an atmosphere of moral corruption,” he had deliberately left the details to the imagination of each reader: “Each man sees his own sin in Dorian Gray.”* 2

The extraordinary interest and attention generated by the tale may have given Wilde a greatly enhanced literary standing, but it also hastened the insidious process of undermining his personal reputation.

“There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all”; “It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors”; “When critics disagree the artist is in accord with himself”; and “All art is quite useless.”

Wilde’s “great gift is perfect assurance—truly brazen when he is talking nonsense. For when he is quite tired out he trusts to his deliberate manner of slow enunciation to carry off perfectly commonplace remarks.

In his play Wilde also offered a daringly blithe dissection of fashionable society’s established rules and manifest hypocrisies—its readiness to compromise its supposed moral code when confronted with money and power—

Encountering Graham Robertson (another of his invitees) on the eve of the premiere, he instructed him to go to a certain fashionable florist and order “a green carnation” for the buttonhole on the following night. The carnations were ingeniously colored by having their stems placed in a solution of blue-green aniline dye. “I want a good many men to wear them tomorrow,” Wilde explained. “It will annoy the public.” To Robertson’s query, “But why annoy the public?,” he replied, “It likes to be annoyed.”

Wilde had the huge pleasure of witnessing the amusement and the amazement. His witticisms were laughed at. Almost every scene was greeted with “enthusiastic applause”—and from all parts of the house. Henry James noted that the “pit and the gallery” felt pleased with themselves at being “clever enough” to “catch on” to at least some of the ingenious and daring mots, while their belief that the dialogue faithfully represented “the talk of the grand monde” made them feel “privileged and modern.”

The “best lines” were repeated “all over town”: “I can resist everything except temptation”; “In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it”; “Scandal is gossip made tedious by morality”; “A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing”; “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”

The actor Arthur Roberts, who had recently coined the term “spoof,” recalled that Wilde and Beerbohm Tree once took him to supper at the Carlton Grill to quiz him about the phenomenon. When Roberts had explained that “spoofing” was “the knack of persuading people that something wildly improbable is gospel truth,” Wilde remarked, “I am afraid, my dear Roberts, that some of us have been playing ‘spoof’ all our lives without knowing the name of the game.” (Alan Hyman, The Gaiety Years [1975].)

Another transatlantic visitor that summer was Mrs. Frank Leslie, who arrived with the unfortunate Willie. Before leaving New York she had informed her friends, “I’m taking Willie over, but I’ll not bring Willie back.” The marriage had proved a disaster. Willie refused to work. In his view there was far too much work being done in America already: “What New York needs,” he declared, “is a leisure class, and I am determined to introduce one.” He refused to go to the office. Dividing his days between the luxurious Gerlach and the convivial Lotos Club, he spent his time—and his wife’s money—on drink and idleness. He would entertain his fellow club members with “simply killing” imitations of Oscar, striking Aesthetic attitudes, and extemporizing parodies of Aesthetic verse in a “fat, potato-choked sort of voice.” His wife very soon wearied of settling his bar bills, enduring his boorishness, and urging him to work. Willie had, in her estimate, “more laziness to the square inch than any man of his size in Christendom.” She ruefully came to the conclusion that he was no use to her “by day or night,” and would have to be got rid of.

Wilde, already drawn to Douglas’s youthful loveliness and ancient name, was now snared by all his traits of character: his aristocratic contempt for convention, his “pagan” guilt-free enjoyment of sex, his extraordinary disregard for consequences, his willingness to depend upon others. If he was selfish, spoiled, vain, intemperate, needy, and demanding, that only added to his attractiveness. Lust, as ever, was mixed with idealism.

Douglas matched his devotion. “I was fascinated by Wilde,” he later told Frank Harris, “adored him and was ‘crazy’ about him.” All Wilde’s gifts for inspiring youthful adulation came into play. Douglas acknowledged how Wilde “quickened” him, transporting him “out of this tedious world into a fairy land of fancy, conceit, paradox and beauty by the power of his golden speech.”

Sarah Bernhardt was in town. Wilde met her at Henry Irving’s. According to reports, she asked whether he (now the author of a West End hit) might write a play for her; he replied in jest that with Salomé he had already done so.

It was the first of many such assignations—and many such cigarette cases (“ I have a great fancy for giving cigarette cases,” Wilde later admitted). It marked, too, a shift in Wilde’s relationship with Bosie. Their mutual infatuation continued, colored by poems and passionate letters and occasional sex, but it was now fired by a shared and predatory enthusiasm for sex with others—“ the eternal quest for beauty,” as Douglas termed it. Wilde became a regular visitor at the all-male tea parties that Alfred Taylor hosted at his flat above an empty baker’s shop in Little College Street, Westminster.

“Tired of being on the heights I deliberately went to the depths in the search for new sensations. What the paradox was to me in the sphere of thought, perversity became to me in the sphere of passion.”

“It was like feasting with panthers; the danger was half the excitement.”

“I shall always regard you as the best critic of my plays.” “But,” Tree said, “I have never criticized your plays.” “That’s why,” Oscar answered complacently.

Beardsley’s illustrations were proving scarcely less contentious. Ever subversive, he had smuggled lewd details into many of the pictures. There were phallic candlesticks and garments distorted by obvious erections. Wilde complained that “dear Aubrey’s designs are like the naughty scribbles that a precocious schoolboy makes on the margins of his copy books.” In a couple of instances the too-conspicuous genitalia of the male characters had to be edited out, to ensure that the book could be displayed openly in bookshops.

Certainly the dialogue was shot through with Wilde’s effervescent humor: the absurdities of social convention and social hypocrisy (particularly society’s readiness to compromise its moral certainties in the face of great wealth or great power) are gleefully skewered in the exchanges between Lady Markby and Lady Basildon and in the cynical aperçus of Mrs. Cheveley, while Lord Goring keeps up a scintillating firework display of inspired nonsense. “I love talking about nothing,” he informs his exasperated father. “It is the only thing I know anything about.”

“London is very dangerous,” Wilde complained; “writters come out at night and writ one, the roaring of creditors towards dawn is frightful, and solicitors are getting rabies and biting people.”

Wilde was uncomfortably aware that the project had been unbalanced—if not hijacked—by Beardsley’s extraordinary illustrations. It was a point made by many of the critics. To Ricketts Wilde might admit, “I admire, [but] I do not like Aubrey’s illustrations. They are too Japanese, while my play is Byzantine.” And privately he might even confess to loathing them. To the public, though, he projected an informed enthusiasm. Taking Beardsley to see The Second Mrs. Tanqueray, he wrote a note to Mrs. Patrick Campbell, who was playing the title role, asking whether he could bring the artist round to her dressing room so that he might lay a copy of the deluxe edition of Salome at her feet. “His drawings,” Wilde declared, “are quite wonderful.”

At one lunch he declared that when Beardsley was present, he would henceforth only drink absinthe: “Absinthe is to all other drinks what Aubrey’s drawings are to other pictures; it stands alone; it is like nothing else; it shimmers like southern twilight in opalescent colouring; it has about it the seduction of strange sins… It is just like your drawings, Aubrey; it gets on one’s nerves and is cruel.”

Do you seriously accuse your son and me of sodomy?”—he countered, “I don’t say you are it, but you look it, and you pose as it, which is just as bad.”

His rage throughout the interview was alarming, Wilde later recalled, his small hands waving in the air “in an epileptic fury” as he uttered “every foul word his mind could think of” before screaming, “If I catch you and my son together in any public restaurant, I will thrash you!” It was a loathsome spectacle and a frightening one. Wilde claimed to have replied, “I don’t know what the Queensberry Rules are, but the Oscar Wilde rule is to shoot at sight,” before demanding that Queensberry leave his house, and instructing the servant (his startled young “butler”) that the marquess was never to be admitted again. In Queensberry’s estimation, though, Wilde had “plainly shown the white feather.”

a glorious inverted world of Wilde’s invention—a parallel universe in which the emotional lives of the characters were entirely dominated by trivializing aesthetic considerations and unexpected intellectual concerns. Both Gwendolen and Cecily feel that they can only marry a man with the name of Ernest—a name that, for them, produces “vibrations.” Gwendolen’s formidable mother, Lady Brancaster, in her obsession with the outward forms of social propriety, is delighted to learn that Jack is a smoker, considering it an occupation (“ There are far too many idle men in London as it is”). But, by the same token, she has no sympathy with the notion that he is an orphan (“ To lose one parent might be considered a misfortune; to lose two looks like carelessness”). At every juncture expectations are confounded and orders reversed. Paradox—Wilde’s distinctive rhetorical device—becomes the accepted currency of discourse.

The play, in its tone, its language, its structure, and its incidents, may have been a riot of fun, but it also operated as a rebuke to and satire upon the whole tenor of Victorian society, with its self-consciously earnest (if often compromised) pretensions to social decorum and moral conformity. The renaming of Jack’s imaginary brother as Ernest even allowed for the play to be called The Importance of Being Earnest—though this new title was kept a closely guarded secret.

During their absence there had appeared, anonymously, a book entitled The Green Carnation. Published by Heinemann, it was creating a sensation with its thinly veiled and very funny depiction of Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas as the epigrammatic Esmé Amarinth and his gilt-haired disciple Lord Reggie Hastings, a young man who “worshipped the abnormal with all the passion of his impure and subtle youth.”

“The Green Carnation ruined Oscar Wilde’s character with the general public,” Frank Harris recalled. “On all sides [it] was referred to as confirming the worst suspicions.” Certainly it “inflamed” the Marquess of Queensberry.

Success, however, did not make him humble; it made him insufferable.

“Humility,” he explained to the same interviewer, “is for the hypocrite, modesty for the incompetent. Assertion is at once the duty and the privilege of the artist.”

“I have a duty to myself to amuse myself frightfully.” But it was not happiness he sought: “Above all not happiness. Pleasure! You must always aim at the most tragic.”

Wilde, reiterating a favored line, had then confided “the great tragedy” of his life: “I have put my genius into my life, I have only put my talent into my works.”

The “Love that dare not speak its name” in this century is such a great affection of an elder for a younger man as there was between David and Jonathan, such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy, and such as you find in the sonnets of Michelangelo and Shakespeare. It is that deep, spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect. It dictates and pervades great works of art like those of Shakespeare and Michelangelo, and those two letters of mine, such as they are. It is in this century misunderstood, so much misunderstood that it may be described as the “Love that dare not speak its name,” and on account of it I am placed where I am now. It is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest form of affection. There is nothing unnatural about it. It is intellectual, and it repeatedly exists between an elder and a younger man, when the elder man has intellect, and the younger man has all the joy, hope and glamour of life before him. That it should be so the world does not understand. The world mocks at it and sometimes puts one in the pillory for it.