The Fall of the House of Wilde (22 page)

Those who thought 1848 killed the revolutionary movement dead in Ireland were soon proved wrong. A new secret society was launched in 1858 with the old aim: ‘to make Ireland an independent democratic republic'.
¹⁴
The most prominent among the founders was James Stephens, a man who still remains something of a mystery. Born in Kilkenny in 1824, Stephens came from a comfortable background, trained as a civil engineer and worked for some time constructing the railway in the south of Ireland. Inspired by the
Nation
newspaper and the Young Ireland movement, he acted as aide-de-camp to William Smith O'Brien at Ballingarry. He escaped to France in 1848 and there associated with European revolutionaries.

Stephens's secret society remained mute until he founded a newspaper in 1863, the
Irish People
. But Stephens was largely a silent demagogue and, aside from a few written leaders, he left the running of the paper to O'Donovan Rossa, T. C. Luby, John O'Leary and the adroit preacher of conservative republicanism, Charles Kickham. As a novelist and poet, Kickham was not devoid of literary talent and his novel,
Knocknagow
, first published in 1873, has been in print ever since. In the novel he laments the loss of the old rural society. For Kickham the famine had marked a watershed in Irish social history because it had wiped out a paternalism that, if occasionally vicious, could also be benevolent, and had replaced it with the cash nexus. In his sentimental view the business-minded post-famine generation fouled the social order, and he spared neither Catholic nor Protestant in his scorn. Nor was Jane exempt from Kickham's barbs. As we saw, he had sneered in a review in the
Irish People
at Jane's poetry, deriding its style and content. A country led by Kickham and his like could not fail to rattle Jane.

The Fenians were persuaded that only a movement built out of American money and Irish-Americans stood any chance of surviving opposition from Britain. The end of the American Civil War in 1865 offered Stephens an opportunity to recruit hundreds of Irishmen who had returned to Ireland having fought in the war, were trained in the use of arms and were prepared to strike for Ireland. Stephens had, however, no clear-cut idea of how to launch the assault. More comfortable as dictator than leader, Stephens was arrogant, which made the situation worse. Having promised 1866 as the auspicious year, he allowed it to pass.

This hesitant demagogue finally made a move on the night of 5–6 March 1867, but the gods punished him with debilitating snow. Bands of disorganised, miserably armed men turned out across the country and made themselves easy prey for police and troops, who rounded them up at their leisure. Widespread arrests ensued, and the usual heavy sentences followed. Public opinion in Ireland, hitherto apathetic, if not hostile, towards the rising, tried to speak sense on the issue of punishment. The government was not wholly unresponsive and commuted death sentences, but stood firm on long imprisonments in harsh conditions. Those normally repelled by anarchism and revolution grew sympathetic and within two years of the insurrection a movement demanding amnesty for political prisoners had developed in Ireland. Neither for the first nor the last time, the government's heavy-handed response generated more support for the cause of republicanism than it would otherwise have enjoyed.

Meanwhile, the arrests brought the Fenian movement on to the agenda of mainstream British politics. The seizure of two Fenians in September 1867 in Manchester and their subsequent rescue left a policeman accidentally dead. After an unsatisfactory trial and dubious evidence, three men – Allen, Larkin and O'Brien – were executed. Dubbed the ‘Manchester Martyrs', they lived on as symbols of resurgent nationalism. Within months more fears were aroused when a gunpowder explosion at Clerkenwell prison killed innocent people in London. Clerkenwell gave second wind to the belief that a sinister rebel force was alive on mainland Britain, and British public opinion energetically called for repression. Some dissented from the calls for authoritarianism, knowing it would win support for the Fenians. The most conspicuous voice of reason was Gladstone, then leader of the Liberal opposition. Gladstone looked beyond the violence to its cause and thought the time had come to entice Ireland from the desperate paths it had taken by a sustained attempt at constructive reform. That was perhaps one of the most unexpected legacies of Fenianism.

Jane had told Lotten in 1866, before the rebellion, ‘The Fenian rebellion engages all our thoughts – but I am not a Fenian & I disapprove highly of their prospects – It is decidedly a democratic movement – & the gentry and aristocracy will suffer much from them. Their object is to form a republic – Heaven keep me from a Fenian Republic!'
¹⁵

Jane had every reason to cry to heaven for help to protect her from a Fenian republic. The Fenians' descendants were to be found in 1916 and the Irish Republican Brotherhood, commonly known as the IRA. Their populism was closely interwoven with nationalism of the type in which blind xenophobia and irrationalism grew to dangerous heights. In other words, all that is commonly associated with full-grown nationalism of the early twentieth century and the mobs that espoused it. This strand of thought went hand in hand, in Ireland certainly, with isolationism, provincialism, suspicion of everything metropolitan and socially sophisticated – hatred of
le beau monde
in all its forms – and an adoption of militarism and self-assertion. It would be an historical error to identify the ideology of Fenianism and its descendants with that of Young Ireland and its support for cultural nationalism. Their nationalism, the nationalism William and Jane supported, was about a respect for difference, against the classic Enlightenment belief that reality was ordered in terms of universal, timeless, objective laws.

All William's cultural writings turn on the idea that the variety of civilisations is, to a large degree, determined by differences of physical and geographical factors – referred to by the general term of ‘climate'. This notion was obvious to eighteenth-century philosophers like Montesquieu and Herder, as it was to others. Few embraced the cosmopolitanism of the time as thoroughly as the Wildes. They were truly at home among a variety of cultures, speaking their language, knowing their literature, their history and their culture, and wanting to discover more. The lengths they went to understand the character of a people, their ways of life, habits, wants and characteristics of land and sky, are evident in William's
Narrative of a Voyage
and Jane's
Driftwood from Scandinavia.
The notion of pluralism is at the heart of all their ideas: the belief not merely in the multiplicity, but in the incommensurability of the values of different cultures and societies, together with the implied corollary that the classic notion of an ideal man and an ideal society are intrinsically incoherent and meaningless. Likewise, Oscar would be careful to emphasise that he was Irish rather than English, not out of chauvinism, but out of a belief in cultural difference.

16

More Highs, More Blows

In August 1867 Jane took Willie and Oscar to Paris for three weeks to see the Universal Exposition. William did not join them. This disappointed Jane. She had thought ‘some change' would do them all good – they were still feeling unhinged after Isola's death. William's health may have been a factor. Equally, the crude materialism of the whole set-up associated with the Universal Exposition, not least of which was its militarism, may not have been to his liking. Certainly it was not to the liking of Jane, who saw these ‘vulgar things' as ‘not suited for minds of . . . high tone'. She still went, though she told Lotten she was going only ‘to amuse my sons during their vacation'.
¹

Jane and the boys were among more than six million people to visit Paris that year. Napoleon III had spent over a decade transforming the city, and the exposition was the apogee of this reorganisation. During the seven months of the exposition hardly a week passed without the emperor showing off the capital to some potentate – from the King of Prussia to the Prince of Wales. Displays of military pomp and muscle were staged for these crowned heads. In spite of Jane's initial reservations, she was impressed by the dazzle of it all. She told Lotten, ‘Paris is indeed a brilliant city & when I returned home poor Dublin looked like a little provincial town. But what hope or progress can be expected in a country that [lives by] the rules of another country. I believe that all progress is impossible without independence.' Lotten had told her about a ‘ladies' reading class' she was organising and Jane had praised her energy and commitment, saying she would love to attend. As for herself, she said, ‘I cannot get myself back into the writing mood.' She continued, ‘so nothing is left for me but the sorrows – the deep eternal sorrows – for ever & for ever like a sword through my heart . . .'
²
The loss of Isola was weighing heavily.

Willie left Portora in 1869 to read Classics at Trinity College, Dublin. Trinity occupies 40 acres in central Dublin. Created by Royal Charter in 1592, the university was established to solidify Protestant Reformation in Ireland. Most of the country's outstanding writers and politicians attended the university – including Jonathan Swift, former Dublin MP Henry Grattan (1746–1820), Oliver Goldsmith, George Berkeley, revolutionary leader Wolf Tone (1763–98) and Edmund Burke. Catholics were permitted to enter and take degrees in 1793, though when Willie attended, most of the students, at least 90 per cent, were still Protestants.

Willie was a prominent member of the university's Philosophical Society. One of the papers he read to the society was entitled ‘Aesthetic Morality', a topic then in vogue at Trinity, as evidenced by the society's records, as it was in mainland Britain. Jane took pleasure in his progress, she told Lotten on 3 April 1870. ‘The “little Willie” you made immortal is now a splendid young man in college who has just got honours in Classics. He is full of enthusiasm and ambition & brilliant promise . . . He gives us sunshine through our tears.'
³
Jane was immensely proud of Willie. In 1871 she told Rosalie Olivecrona, ‘My eldest son is doing well in College . . . He has a fine intellect – and also a fine physique – about six foot high with fine eyes and handsome dark hair.'
⁴

Oscar left Portora in 1871 and in October joined Willie at Trinity, also to read Classics. He was young: just turned seventeen when he started at university. He had performed splendidly at Portora. He won the Carpenter Prize for Greek Testament, a gold medal in Classics, and a Royal School scholarship to Trinity, one of two awarded by the school. This entitled him to rooms in Trinity and the ones he was allocated were in Botany Bay. Sir Edward Sullivan, who knew Oscar at Trinity, told Frank Harris apropos his rooms in Botany Bay: ‘on rare occasions when visitors were admitted, an unfinished landscape in oils was always on the easel, in a prominent place in his sitting room. He would invariably refer to it, telling one in his humorously unconvincing way that “he had just put in the butterfly”.' Was Oscar showing his knowledge of Whistler, who famously signed his work with a butterfly? Sullivan was not the only memoirist to observe that Oscar's ‘college life was mainly one of study; in addition to working for his Classics examinations, he devoured with voracity all the best English writers'. Sullivan goes on to say ‘he was an intense admirer of Swinburne and constantly reading his poems', but ‘he never entertained any pronounced views on social, religious or political questions while in College; he seemed to be altogether devoted to literary matters'. He remembered Oscar as ‘always a very vivacious and welcome guest at any house he cared to visit'.

Oscar did not develop close friendships with other students. According to his biographer, Frank Harris, Oscar said the students ‘were worse even than the boys at Portora . . . they thought nothing but cricket and football . . . Tyrrell and Mahaffy [his tutors] represent to me whatever was good in Trinity . . . I got my love of the Greek ideal and my intimate knowledge of the language at Trinity from Mahaffy and Tyrrell; they were Trinity to me; Mahaffy was especially valuable to me at that time.'
⁵

Oscar would have known Reverend John Pentland Mahaffy as a guest of his parents at Merrion Square. Sixteen years older than Oscar, Mahaffy was professor of ancient history. He was a well-rounded scholar, and turned out works on the ancient world, philosophers Kant and Descartes, as well as volumes on trout fishing and the art of conversation. In one of his slimmest volumes,
The Decay of Preaching
(1882), Mahaffy took the convenient line that intelligence rather than piety makes an inspiring preacher. In the same volume, he supported the art of rhetoric. Mahaffy dismissed the notion of rhetoric as artificial and non-rhetoric as natural, claiming that the voice of art, not nature, comes from the heart. Oscar would in time make profitable use of this notion in his essays on aesthetics. Oscar said Mahaffy ‘took deliberately the artistic standpoint towards everything, which was coming more and more to be my standpoint. He was a delightful talker, too, a really great talker in a certain way – an artist in vivid words and eloquent pauses.'
⁶

Mahaffy was one of the few scholars to raise the topic of homosexual practice in ancient Greece. In
Social Life in Greece
, published in 1874, he spoke of the intellectual and erotic bond between an older man and a younger boy as more fruitful and perfect than that between man and woman. The contemporary ‘dogmatic' ‘social prejudices' against such practice, Mahaffy attributed to the Victorian habit of fetishising family life. As to the argument that homosexual love was ‘unnatural', Mahaffy thought ‘the Greeks would answer probably, that all civilisation was unnatural . . . and that many of the best features in all gentle life were best because they were unnatural'. Besides, the Greeks would probably have found the nature and structure of nineteenth-century relationships ‘sentimental' and ‘unnatural', according to Mahaffy.
⁷
Mahaffy paid tribute to Oscar and to another pupil, H. B. Leech, in the preface to
Social Life in Greece
, for having ‘made improvements and corrections all through the book'. The authorities frowned on Mahaffy's discussion of homosexuality and the second edition omitted the topic, and the tribute to his students.