The Fall of the House of Wilde (16 page)

In 1862 the King of Sweden awarded William Wilde the Order of the North Star. It is an honorary award, and as Jane suspected, it was thanks to a recommendation from Baron von Kraemer. William earned further renown with the publication of parts II and III of
The Catalogue of Irish Antiquities
in 1860 and 1862 respectively, which one reviewer pronounced to be ‘the only scientifically catalogued Museum of Antiquities in the British Isles'. And when a copy was presented to the Royal Institute of British Architects, Mr Digby Wyatt held it up as ‘one of the most important contributions ever yet made to the complete illustration of the early art and ethnography of Ireland'.
¹²

Then the Academy cut off funding. It changed its priorities and wanted to give more prominence to the library. The fourth part of the catalogue, on silver, iron and ecclesiastical artefacts, plus the index, remained in manuscript. As William put it, ‘had I known the amount of physical and mental labour I was to go through when I undertook the Catalogue, I would not have considered it just to myself to have done it; for I may fairly say, it has been done at the risk of my life'.
¹³

Nevertheless, a new chapter of primitive history had been written. Parts I, II and III of the catalogue were a landmark in Celtic history. It has been quoted in every serious work on Irish archaeology. International scholars and experts came to visit and study at the museum. Even Napoleon III took note, and sent a ‘special commissioner' to inspect the gold specimens, as Ireland was thought to possess the best collection of gold Celtic ornaments in Europe. When the Prince of Wales was in Ireland in 1861, William conducted him over the museum of the Academy, and was pleasantly surprised at his interest and knowledge of Celtic history.
¹⁴
Sven Nilsson (1787–1883), a Swedish zoologist and archaeologist, director of the Naturhistoriska Riksmuseet, wrote some years later, in 1866, to John Gilbert of his respect for William's scholarship, while questioning whether the high esteem Petrie enjoyed was merited.

Stockholm, 28 Feb. 1866: But although it was the duty of the panegyrist to advance the subject as much as possible, I wonder if Mr Petrie has really been such a great archaeologist, and if he has really made all that much progress in the archeology of Ireland. I doubt it. As for me, I know one true and impartial archaeologist in Ireland, and you know him too, his name is William Wilde. In his book titled ‘Beauties of the Boyne' I learned a lot of valuable information; because its author has seen other parts of the world, he knows how to make ingenious comparisons with what he has seen. He does not want to sweep away popular traditions, but examines them with wisdom, with profitable results for science.
¹⁵

William needed men with broader horizons to appreciate his achievements, and those men were not to be found in the Academy. Jane said, it was ‘the apathy [of the Academy] that deeply pained and grieved him . . . A large section took no interest whatever in national antiquities.'
¹⁶

11

Open House

The Wilde home was a meeting place. Even Christmas dinner was a public affair – spent on one occasion with Dr Rudolf Thomas Siegfried, professor of Sanskrit at Trinity, or on another occasion with Dr Anders Retzius. Then there were William's Saturday dinners, which were something of an institution. As Jane described them to Lotten, ‘Ten or twelve clever and learned men . . . dine at 6 ½ o' – & part at 11 – & discuss all the current topics & literature & science of the day.'
¹
No women are mentioned. Nor is any reference made to children other than Willie and Oscar. These circumstances were brought out in a biographical sketch to which Oscar contributed. ‘Mr Wilde was constantly with his father and mother, always among grown up persons . . . He considers that the best of his education in boyhood was obtained from this association with his father and mother and their remarkable friends.'
²

And there was Jane's salon. Jane held Saturday receptions between 1 and 6.30 p.m. She drew an eclectic mix. It was a meeting place for the old and young, Protestant and Catholic, new and established, left and right, local and foreign. By the mid-1860s there were often as many as a hundred people. Coffee and wine were laid out on a table in the corridor and ‘everything', as Jane put it, was ‘
sans gêne
' (without bother).
³
These occasions showed to great advantage the charm of Jane's person and the agreeableness of her intellectual culture, which she wore lightly, judging by the commentary in the
Irish Times
, 11 March 1878:

No. 1 Merrion Square North was known as the house where a guest met all the Dublin celebrities in literature, art and the drama, as well as any stray literary waif who might be either sojourning or passing through the city. The affable and courteous hostess was Lady Wilde . . . the charm in the society to be met in Lady Wilde's salons was that it was wholly devoid of that species of snobbism generally so fatal to social gatherings in Ireland. Talent was always considered by Speranza a sufficient recommendation to her hospitality. We can with justice say that . . . Lady Wilde's literary reunions were as brilliant as any that were ever held in the early part of this century in Kildare Street [by Lady Morgan].

At Merrion Square boundaries disappeared, and on any given Saturday the returned deportee, John Mitchel, who had lost none of his ‘impassioned manner', might have been greeted by the astronomer and mathematician, Sir William Rowan Hamilton, or the artist-cum-socialist, Henry O'Neill, who advocated land reform, might have tried to persuade the classicist, the Reverend John Pentland Mahaffy, of the ethics of equality; or the painter, John Butler Yeats, may have listened to Lady Ferguson speak of the beauty of Aran, while under a cloud of smoke William might have chatted to Whitley Stokes or his close friend Dr Rudolf Thomas Siegfried about some esoteric detail. All these lines crossed under candlelight – Jane's declared preference. ‘Veiled light is indispensable to conversation,' she said; ‘no one could be fascinating with a gas furnace over the head . . . not even the wittiest.'
⁴
A bust of Charles Maturin, prominently placed on a lintel, presided over all.

Assembling people unlikely to meet under any other roof, Jane, in whose own character the wry patrician mingled with the effusive mother, displayed a genius for conciliation. As one attendee said of Jane, ‘she had the
art de faire un salon
. If anyone was discovered sitting in a corner, Lady Wilde was sure to bring up someone to be introduced, and she never failed to speak a few happy words which made the stranger feel at home. She generally prefaced her introductions with some remarks such as “Mr A, who has written a delightful poem”, or “Mr B, who is on the staff of the Snapdragon”, or “Miss C, whose novel everyone is talking about”.' Jane flattered people's egos in ways they wanted to hear.

Local authors and musicians often performed their work. One report had it that: ‘Dr Tisdall read his best pieces there. Mademoiselle Gayard played Panini, and there was talk, such talk as one does not often hear.'
⁵
There was ‘music, Recitation, both French and English piano, guitars, flute, glees, quartets etc.'
⁶
Jane thought nothing of opening the doors to promote causes she held dear. When Millicent Fawcett came over to Dublin to speak on women's rights in 1870, she was invited to talk at Merrion Square and ‘explain what female liberty means: souls in bondage', as Jane put it in a letter to Lotten.
⁷

Most memoirists comment upon Jane's talk: how infectious it was – ‘like fireworks – brilliant, whimsical and flashy' – or that in her company ‘everyone talked their best'.
⁸
One said ‘no one seemed to care about eating or drinking', since people came to converse and in this Jane excelled, being ‘remarkably original, sometimes daring and always interesting'.
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Jane could talk high and low when one or other suited her; she could be mind-bogglingly erudite or flagrantly frivolous, depending on the moment; her early letters are testimony enough.

Jane was remembered as ‘stately', her influence resonant and her ideas Roman. But most remember her courtesy. She had come to view human relations as sacred. The former Jane who had been severe towards others, women of her rank especially, had grown into a woman whose thoughtfulness and charm won many hearts. She thought nothing of showering someone with praise, of giving a good account of them to some bigwig, relishing the thought that her benediction might nudge things in the right direction for the person concerned. Perhaps she hoped that contacts made under her roof and her auspices would endure in the minds of others, almost as mementos – all part of her warfare against the ephemerality of social relations.

Jane made the salon the vehicle for her boundless social energy. She knew the history of the famous salons, and modelled hers to suit the milieu. Those Saturdays were her serial boulevard dramas, the melodramatic plotted plays in vogue in Paris, a way of escaping the obscurity of motherhood. She spoke, herself, of finding, in the onus they placed on the participant, a satisfaction more stimulating and rewarding than art. Certainly, the atmosphere of the salon was at variance with that which reigned in society's institutions. French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78) had gone some way toward entrenching the idea of the drawing room as a zone of equality between men and women. Of the eighteenth-century salon he commented, ‘every woman at Paris gathers in her apartment a harem of men more womanish than she'.
¹⁰
The ease with which one could slide from one gender to the other was the salon's ultimate statement on the hollowness of such clear division. For such French salonists as Juliette Récamier, the drawing room provided a liberal sanctuary, an escape from the gender hierarchy of formal institutions. But one should not wear one's heart on one's sleeve: there was little room for feelings in this counterfeit world. True glory went not to those who promoted their sincerity, or to those who wore their erudition heavily, but to those who transformed emotions and learning into style and wit. The salon, as Jane observed, was for those who turned nature into culture. It was in the skin of the salonist that Oscar would write his West End dramas.

A portrait painted by Bernard Mulrenin, and exhibited at the Royal Hibernian Academy in 1864, immortalised Jane as distinguished and insouciant. People spoke of her freedom of manner, her passionate talk, her mixture of virility and feminine touches, her self-deprecating laugh. But Jane herself felt like ‘a passing shadow' in the lives of others, ‘a last year's cloud to be forgotten the minute it has passed from sight'. As she put it, ‘I never forget love or hate, joy or sorrow, I never taste the Lotus but I have no faith in the love or memory of others – there is nothing sadder than a sense of spiritual isolation – nothing. . .'
¹¹
She disguised it well.

Jane loved to dress up, and ‘create a sensation', as she had confessed to Rowan Hamilton. She went to considerable lengths to create verisimilitude, and tended to favour characters who rage through life, only to end defeated. For instance, for ‘a grand Bal costumé', in April 1863, she dressed as ‘Zenobia, Queen of Palmyra'. Zenobia was famous for her revolt against the Roman Empire and conquering Egypt, over which she ruled until taken hostage by the Roman emperor Aurelian. No doubt Jane hoped to stoke up memories of her role in 1848, and remind her cohorts of the part she played in the failed insurrection against the British Empire. In any event, smirking at her own buffoonery, and delighting in the attention she attracted, gave her one of those transcendent highs, as she admitted to Lotten.
¹²
Impersonation and performance was how she expressed herself.

To read Jane on clothes is to forget the bluestocking. For the most part she donned Victorian garb, though she added a wealth of lace in bright green (her favourite colour), magenta or periwinkle blue, and made herself a riot of colour and flounce. She shunned the ubiquitous black and the fashionable ringlets whose chocolate-box prettiness would have marred her nonchalant free-spirited persona, and wore her hair smoothly pulled back or loose. She dressed to be noticed and practised the art of coquetry as deftly as the art of wit. ‘I wore pink and silver and talked pearls and rubies,' she once said of herself, laughing at how she liked to ‘drag people down to [her] level'.
¹³

Jane looked back wistfully to coquetry's heyday in the court of Louis XIV and regretted living in such ordinary times. She considered it axiomatic that beauty and ugliness reside not in people but in style; style being a way of acting and seeing things. She thought that one should cultivate the artifice of self-presentation, and that personal adornment was a natural expression one should not suppress. She saw tattoos, paint, feathers, beads, veils, flowers and jewels as ‘beautifiers', signalling a natural instinct to attract attention.
¹⁴
For Jane, those who used clothing and ornament were more in tune with themselves than the homogeneous dress of ‘civilised' man.

In the first of the few surviving letters written to his mother as a young boy, Oscar chides her for confusing his underwear with that of Willie: ‘the flannel shirts you sent in the hamper are both Willie's, mine are one quite scarlet and the other lilac'.
¹⁵
Clothes and colour, even in underwear, were Oscar's way of defending his individuality. Far from being a second skin, dressing for mother and son was an expression of difference.

In 1862 William built four houses in Bray, a seaside town south of Dublin. The intention was to lease three at £120 a year, and the fourth they furnished for themselves. Jane told Lotten on 22 April 1863, ‘they are very handsome houses planned and built entirely by Dr Wilde – I wish that I could receive you there some sunny day in June when the mountains sea & sky are radiant with light and beauty'. Jane was writing from Bray, where she was now spending quite some time, together with the boys and their Swiss governess. She said, ‘Dr Wilde comes down when he can.' The children were often ill and the air in Bray was better than in Dublin. They had planned the previous summer to visit the International Exhibition in London and to travel to Normandy, where William wanted to study the antiquities. But Jane had to stay in Ireland; as she told Lotten, ‘my eldest son has been delicate all the summer & that prevented me from leaving home. So I passed the season in Bray.' Jane was very attached to the children and loath to leave them. She told Lotten ‘when one has children it is very difficult to make travel arrangements – & now that mine are growing up I dislike still more leaving them – My sweet boy [Willie] is now nearly eleven – very clever & very high spirited & tho he obeys me will scarcely obey a governess – I feel it would be a risk to leave him.' Governesses came and went – English, German and Swiss. In 1864, they did manage to travel – Jane and William spent a week in Berlin, where ‘the museum was unequalled'.
¹⁶
They also attended the opera.