The Fall of the House of Wilde (23 page)

Oscar also developed a spiritual kinship with Robert Y. Tyrrell, ten years older than Oscar, who had been made professor of Latin at twenty-one. Not quite as diversely erudite as Mahaffy, Tyrrell was reputedly a better scholar with his brain firmly fixed on Latin and Greek rather than on the art of Greek and Roman life. Tyrrell shared Oscar's interest in literature and founded and edited a magazine called
Kottabos
, which published poems by both Willie and Oscar.

Willie won a gold medal for ethics and graduated in 1873, leaving Trinity to study law at the Middle Temple in London. Meanwhile, once again Oscar was outshining his peers. In June of his second year he sat an examination for one of ten foundation scholarships. He was successful. For this he received £20 per annum and had certain privileges.

Meanwhile, William had had to face another tragedy. In 1871 his two illegitimate daughters, Emily and Mary, aged twenty-four and twenty-two respectively, were burnt to death. The two young women were at a party in Drumaconnnor House, a manor house not too far from Monaghan, and were among the few guests left dancing when Emily's crinoline dress caught a flame from the open fire. Mary tried to save her sister, but her dress also went up in flames. The host swathed his coat about the girls, and rolled them in the snow, but they were too badly burnt and were beyond saving.

Mary suffered for nine days before dying. Emily lasted a bit longer, dying on 21 November. They were buried in St Molua's Church of Ireland graveyard, Drumsnat, with the following inscription.

In memory of two loving and loved sisters, Emily Wilde, aged 24, and Mary Wilde, aged 22, who lost their lives by accident in this parish, November 10
^th
, 1871. They were lovely and pleasant in their lives and in death they were not divided. II Samuel 1 v 23.

William watched their coffins descend into the pit in bleak Monaghan November weather. The artist John B. Yeats, writing of the incident to his son, correctly observed, ‘there is a tragedy all the more intense, because it had to be buried in silence. It was not allowed to give sorrow words.'
⁸
Even the inquiry into the women's death showed the request to have been made in the name of ‘Wylie' in place of ‘Wilde'. But their death did not pass unmarked by William. He erected in the rose garden in Moytura a small square stone carved with laurel leaves, bearing the inscription ‘In Memoriam'. This private memorial to his daughters, no doubt to Isola as well, still survives today. Did William share his grief with Jane? With his brother, Ralph Wilde, who had reared them? With the girls' mother? Their mother was still alive. The sexton of the church spoke of a woman dressed in black and veiled, who came annually from Dublin to visit the grave. Like many a nineteenth-century woman, she had to conceal her feelings.

A photo of William from the time, published in
Dublin University Magazine
, shows him morose and distant. His once large unconventional Victorian family was now sadly depleted. He reduced his medical activities further, with the consequent decline in income. In 1872 he took out a mortgage on Merrion Square. He spent more and more time doing unpaid work, principally finishing part IV of the catalogue for the Royal Irish Academy. He went more often to Moytura and stayed longer than hitherto. He was engaged with three works –
A History of Irish Medicine
, a
Memoir of Gabriel Beranger
, the eighteenth-century artist and antiquarian, and what was posthumously called
Ancient Legends
.

In 1873 William received the Cunningham Gold Medal from the Royal Irish Academy, their highest distinction. William had earlier refused the award on the basis that he felt it had been bestowed in bad grace. Was his acceptance a sign that he had dispelled the bitter memories of past interactions? If Jane's musings on the Royal Irish Academy, in her introduction to the posthumously published
Memoir of Gabriel Beranger
, are reflective of William's feelings, then he remained bitter over their decision to stop funding the catalogue. The medal was a memento, a private reward, but the publication of a completed catalogue of antiquities would have been for the benefit of the country, which was where his priorities lay.

As for Jane, she had ‘a people's edition' of her collected poems published by Cameron and Ferguson in Glasgow in 1870. The book included a self-portrait, which, she told Lotten, ‘has not the faintest resemblance to me'. In the same letter, she urged Lotten to read Emerson's last volume of essays
Society and Solitude
, saying, ‘He is one of the noble prophets whose words give life.' She also had praise for Longfellow's translation of Dante. She asked Lotten to give her an account ‘of all that is in Sweden for Women's Rights'.
⁹
She had been reading Lotten's magazine,
Strid
, advocating women's rights and thought it would be good to translate parts for publication in English.

In June 1874 John Stuart Blackie, Scottish scholar and professor of Greek at Edinburgh University, spent a month in Ireland, and wrote to his wife saying ‘he was beginning to plash about in the wide ocean of Dublin's big-wigs'. One of those was William Wilde. William played host and guide, taking Professor Blackie to visit the country's archaeological treasures around Drogheda. Blackie wrote of William as a man full of curiosity and sparkle. He found William good-humoured and sociable, fiercely intelligent and steeped in knowledge. He described him as like ‘a restless, keen-eyed old gentleman, like a Skye-terrier, snuffing and poking about, who has all the district of the Boyne written in the volumes of his brain'. Some days later Blackie had dinner with Sir William, along with various ‘Dublin intellectualities', and sat next to Lady Wilde. They spoke of Blackie's translations of Aeschylus, published in 1850, and Jane showered them with praise, as was her wont. Blackie felt somewhat awed by her presence. ‘The presence of amplitude,' he told his wife, ‘always impresses me strongly with a certain feeling of awe, which was not absent on the present occasion.' He also said, ‘they say she is one of those women who love the male as a kindred animal, in whose likeness they should have been created, but failed through a mistake of Nature'.
¹⁰

Jane was no stranger to male admiration. The previous year Sir William Rowan Hamilton's biographer, R. P. Graves, wrote to ask if he could quote from the correspondence she and Hamilton had exchanged, saying he could understand her feelings of delicacy about ‘giving publicity to such missives of a cordial friendship'.
¹¹
Jane selected what he could use.

William was once again championing public causes – this time to commemorate dead historians. He campaigned in 1874 to have a memorial erected to the sixteenth-century ecclesiastical scholars known as the Four Masters. These scholars were revived after years of quiescence by a translation into English of their work, entitled
The Annals of the Four Masters
, by John O'Donovan. Once again, William faced a committee who did not share his respect for scholarship. This time it was the Dublin Corporation. They questioned the credentials of the scholars, whose merit to William was beyond dispute. John Gilbert, who had supported William as he compiled the Royal Irish Academy's catalogue, was rallied to support the cause, and after much wrangling, the memorial was erected. Though not in the prime site of the lawn of Leinster House, where William thought it should be placed, but in north Dublin, in the grounds opposite the Mater Hospital, in Eccles Street. It was a half-won battle.
¹²

In June 1874, after three years in Trinity, Mahaffy suggested Oscar sit for the Magdalen College, Oxford, Classics examination. Magdalen were offering two scholarships, worth £95 each year, for five years' study. Oscar came out top. This meant he would transfer from Trinity to Oxford in October 1874. Before he left Trinity, Oscar was awarded the Berkeley Gold Medal for Greek, the university's highest award for Classics scholarship. The family made much of Oscar's academic achievements, and William invited some friends to Moytura to celebrate. The old stalwart Gilbert was one: ‘We are having a few old friends upon Moytura on Thursday, and also to cheer dear old Oscar on having obtained the Berkeley Gold Medal last week with great honour. You were always a favourite of his, and he hopes you will come.'
¹³
William's uncle, the Reverend Ralph Wilde, we recall, had achieved the same distinction, and now Oscar added lustre to the Wilde name.

Jane saw Oscar and Willie gradually moving away, and rather than pine she was restless to partake in the broadening of their vistas. For instance, she spent a month with Willie and Oscar in London before all three travelled together to Paris in July.

The most memorable visit they made in London was to the Carlyle home in Chelsea, which had become a pilgrimage for radicals like Jane remembering his early work on the French Revolution. For Oscar, Carlyle was a paradox, ‘a Rabelaisian moralist', as he put it.
¹⁴
Jane had reviewed Carlyle's work, and on one occasion, he had sent her a copy of Tennyson's poems. On this visit he presented her with another book, and wrote four lines from Goethe, translated by himself:

Who never ate his bread in sorrow,

Who never spent the midnight hours,

Weeping and wailing for the morrow,

He knows you not, ye heavenly powers.
¹⁵

At sadder moments later in life, Jane often quoted these lines to Oscar. They failed to mean anything to him until he, too, had tasted sorrow.

17

Transience and Poetry

William was vice president of the anthropological section of the British Association, and in this capacity he delivered the opening lecture at their annual meeting in Belfast in August 1874. He spoke on the topic of origins, an issue that held the attention of many Victorians, and William was no exception. He spoke broadly, moving from the findings he had made on his travels in the Near East to the research he had done in more recent years in Ireland. At a time when European countries were out-shouting each other in approval of racial purity or in assuming racial superiority, William advocated racial hybridity. Racial cross-breeding, he argued, aided the advancement of society. Small countries such as Ireland, he said, would profit from a greater diversity of races fusing together, enriching thoughts and sentiments. Never one to foul himself in the cant of bigotry and xenophobia, or to toe the party line, it was characteristic of William to resist the sway of contemporary thought. Equally audacious was his statement that Ireland had been conquered not by Henry II but by the Great Famine, made worse by the laissez-faire economic policy of the British government.
¹
William's public career had begun at a British Association meeting thirty-five years earlier when he challenged Sir Charles Lyell, enough, we recall, for Lyell to amend his seminal book,
The Principles of Geology.
When others mellowed or turned conservative with age, William remained liberal.

In the winter of 1874, William suffered another setback. Asthma and bronchitis had always been a problem, but the attacks became more severe. He recovered enough to travel with Jane to Oxford. A friend of Oscar's, David Hunter-Blair, spoke of William's ‘exceptional mental powers' and said Jane was ‘not less remarkable in a quite different way'. Willie had come down from London, and Hunter-Blair was introduced to all three. He remembered them ‘as an interesting and delightful family circle, into which [he] felt it an honour and a pleasure to be admitted'.
²

Willie was called to the Irish Bar in March 1875, and Jane spelled out her hopes for him in a letter to Lotten on 6 May: ‘Our eldest son, the “little Willie,” has been called to the Bar and is now a Barrister at Law ready to spring forth like another Perseus to combat evil – His ambition is to enter parliament – & this hope of his I think may be realised – There is the fitting arena for talent, eloquence & the power that comes of high culture & great mental training – I think I told you that he got the gold medal in Ethics & Logic & won the medal for oratory and composition.' Willie did indeed cut a magisterial figure, being tall and angular, with dark bushy hair. He possessed, in Jane's words, ‘a grand physique, is about 6 feet high & is in every sense now suited to shine in society & in life'.
³

William kept up his ‘Athenian' dinners, and Jane still kept an open house for Dublin society on Saturdays. She told Lotten in the same letter, ‘I have been very well and had my Saturday receptions all winter from 1 to 6 ½ o'clock – They were crowded from 100 to 200 every Saturday. Music, Recitation, both French & English piano, guitars, flute, glees, quartets, etc – These passed the time – & my Saturday conversations were extremely popular . . . They went on from December to May & have now ended – as I intend going to Bray for a little . . .'
⁴
Jane was almost fifty-three and William sixty. Neither suffered from the malaise that often afflicts those growing old – a love of recalling life more than living it.

In the summer of 1875 Oscar went to Italy with Mahaffy and William Goulding, the son of a wealthy businessman. He visited most of the main centres of art – Florence, Bologna, Venice, Verona, Padua, Milan – but not Rome. Oscar's letters to his parents are interesting for the way he matches his style to suit the style of the recipient. Those to his father are scholarly and formal; those to his mother, humorous and informative, but without the meticulous detail he provides his father. In writing to his father of the Medici burial chambers in San Lorenzo, Florence, he leaves nothing unsaid. ‘Six great sarcophagi of granite and porphyry stand in six niches: on top of each of them a cushion of inlaid mosaic bearing a gold crown,' or in the Etruscan Museum, he writes of ‘a big tomb, transplanted from Arezzo; cyclopean stonework, doorway with sloping jambs and oblong lintel, roof slightly conical'. Addressing his father's interest in rituals, he writes of passing a ‘wonderful funeral', ‘a long procession of monks bearing torches, all in white and wearing a long linen veil over their faces – only their eyes can be seen. They . . . looked like those awful monks you see in pictures of the inquisition.'
⁵
His letter runs for many pages, and includes four illustrations of objects seen. In its ability to paint visual pictures, and to depict objects with surgical precision, Oscar's style of writing shows a remarkable resemblance to Sir William's, evidenced in
The Catalogue of Antiquities
and his
Narrative of a Voyage.