The Fall of the House of Wilde (26 page)

Oscar found it difficult to ferret out his thoughts. He often breakfasted with a Father Parkinson, the superior at St Aloysius, attended mass regularly, and rarely missed sermons delivered by the ‘fascinating' Manning, even if it meant travelling from Oxford to London to hear the cardinal, as he did in July 1876. Manning supported the doctrine of papal infallibility, as defined by the Vatican Council of 1869–70. Of all the mysteries that fill Church history, few match the bid for power made in papal infallibility – with the Church representing itself as the repository of all truth. Pius IX's
Syllabus of Errors
(1864) declared war on secular Europe by denouncing the separation of Church and State, claiming for the Church control of culture and science, and insisting that the pontiff neither could nor should make any concession to progress, liberalism and modern civilisation.

Oscar admitted to being muddled and mutable in his desires – ‘caught in a fowler's snare', as he put it in March 1877 to William Ward:

I have dreams of a visit to Newman, of the holy sacrament in a new Church, and of a quiet and peace afterwards in my soul. I need not say, though, that I shift with every breath of thought and am weaker and more self-deceiving than ever. If I could hope that the Church would wake in me some earnestness and purity I would go over as a luxury, if for no better reasons. But I can hardly hope it would, and to go over to Rome would be to sacrifice and give up my two great gods, ‘Money and Ambition.' Still I get so wretched and low and troubled that in some desperate mood I will seek the shelter of a Church which simply enthralls me by its fascination.
¹⁵

What bothered him most of all was the logic of his reluctance. His inability to throw aside reason and lose himself in transcendence was, in his mind, typically Protestant.

Hunter-Blair took action on Oscar's behalf. He gambled £2 in Monte Carlo on the fate of Oscar's soul, and having won £60, must have thought God was on his side.
¹⁶
Hunter-Blair presented the vacillating and impoverished Oscar with the funds to travel to Rome. Oscar moderated his acceptance by arranging to travel first to Greece in the company of his former tutor from Trinity, Mahaffy, and to take in Rome on the return. Not that this decision pleased Oscar either. He felt ‘awfully ashamed', and admonished himself for being such ‘a changeable fellow'.
¹⁷

In April 1877 Oscar joined Mahaffy and his two students, Goulding and George Macmillan of the publishing family. Their itinerary took them from Genoa to Ravenna, then on to Greece. In late April Oscar finally made it to Rome, joining Hunter-Blair and Ward at the Hotel d'Inghilterra, where he stayed for ten days. But Oscar found other distractions in Rome. He spent much time with Julia Constance Fletcher, a novelist with whom he rode on the Campagna, and who found Oscar fascinating enough to include him in
Mirage
, published the same year, in 1877. Fletcher's Claude Davenant ‘wore his hair long, thrown back, and clustering about his neck like the hair of a medieval saint. He spoke with rapidity, in a low voice, with peculiarly distinct enunciation; he spoke like a man who has made a study of expression.' Davenant advised the heroine to expand one's emotional being and amplify one's sensations.
¹⁸
Never to squander the opportunities for psychic elevation and sensual enlargement was the maxim Oscar learnt from Pater's
Studies in the History of the Renaissance
, 1873, which he had recently read, and urged Fletcher to do likewise.

Hunter-Blair arranged for Oscar to have an audience with the Pope, Pius IX. According to Hunter-Blair, ‘I am sure that my companion remembered to his dying day, the gracious words of the venerable Pope as he placed hands of benediction on his head, and expressed the hope and wish that he would soon follow his
condiscipulus
into the City of God.'
¹⁹
Whether Oscar was spiritually moved is difficult to say. He was, much to the disappointment of Hunter-Blair, more moved at the grave of Keats. Oscar prostrated himself at the graveside of the poet who once declared that beauty is truth. In the poem the occasion inspired, ‘The Grave of Keats', Oscar turns the poet into a beautiful boy, ‘Fair as Sebastian, and as early slain.' Oscar bestows divinity and celebrity upon this ‘Fair' boy, ‘Thy name was writ in water – it shall stand: / And tears like mine will keep thy memory green . . .'
²⁰
Epiphany is secularised and personality ritualised. Keats is made an icon of worship. With the demons of ambition and money wagging their tongues, Protestant practicality triumphed, and Oscar did not convert. That is not to say that Rome and Catholicism were a closed chapter; far from it, as we will see.

Oscar arrived back late at Oxford, and having missed the first month, he was fined £47.10 (half his demyship – or scholarship – for the year) and rusticated – that is, sent home for the rest of term. Oscar returned to Merrion Square and from there he wrote, in May 1877, to an Oxford friend, Reginald Harding. ‘My mother was of course awfully astonished to hear my news and very disgusted with the wretched stupidity of our college dons, while Mahaffy is
raging
! He looks on it almost as an insult to himself.' He added, ‘all my friends here refuse to believe my story, and my brother who is down at Moytura at present writes me a letter marked “
Private
” to ask “what it
really
is all about and
why
have I been rusticated . . .”' Oscar said he was heading to the west of Ireland to fish, and finished his letter by telling Harding to ‘get
Aurora Leigh
by Mrs Browning and read it carefully'.
²¹
Elizabeth Barrett Browning was a great favourite of Jane's.

Jane was contributing regularly to
Dublin University Magazine.
‘In the Midnight' had been published in the January 1877 issue, and speaks of how William used to read to her, ‘Read till the warm tears fall my Love, / With thy voice so soft and low . . .' Jane sent it along with another poem to Lotten saying, ‘I grow more deeply miserable every day . . . I cannot begin now a new life – and all the old lines are broken and blotted – at times a feeling of ennui and despair comes over me that I could kill myself.'
²²

On 16 June 1877 Oscar wrote to Harding, ‘I am very much down in spirits and depressed. A cousin of ours to whom we were all very much attached has just died – quite suddenly from some chill caught riding. I dined with him on Saturday and he was dead on Wednesday.' Oscar was referring to Dr Henry Wilson, William's son. He died of pneumonia on 13 June 1877, aged thirty-nine. Oscar continued, ‘My brother and I were always supposed to be his heirs but his will was an unpleasant surprise, like most wills. He leaves my Father's hospital (St Mark's Ophthalmic Hospital) about £8,000, my brother £2,000, and me £100 on condition of my being a Protestant. He was, poor fellow, bigotedly intolerant of Catholics and seeing me “on the brink” struck me out of his will.'
²³
Bigotry aside, the
Freeman's Journal
of 15 June 1877 spoke of Wilson ‘as thoroughly and genuinely popular a man as our city has known for many a day'.

The £2,000 allowed Willie and Jane to remain in Merrion Square. On 4 October 1877 Oscar signed an agreement for the sale of the four Esplanade Terrace houses in Bray, but the agreement was a mess and by the time the mortgage and lawsuit was settled, there was little left. Almost every day brought financial embarrassments. A debt of £600 appeared, another of £76. ‘Fancy this [the £600],' Jane wrote to Oscar in 1877 (many of the letters are undated), ‘and the £76 in addition – It is all a horrid dream.'
²⁴
It did not help, then, to receive a letter from Oscar complaining about their change in fortune, claiming it marred his ability to do further study, and seeing himself now bound to live the life of a grocer. Jane wrote the following reply:

I should be sorry that you have to seek a menial situation & give up your chance of a fellowship, but I do not see that [?] your state is one that demands pity or commiseration. From May last (just five months) you have received in cash for your own private personal expenses £145 & the rents of Bray, & the sale of your furniture may bring you over the year till spring when you can sell your houses for £3000, £2000 of which will give you £200 a year for ten years – a very ample provision to my thinking – I wish I could have £200 a year for ten years – Of course, like all of us, you will have to live on your ready money but £2000 is a splendid sum to have in hand & with your college income in addition I do not think you will need to enter a shop or beg for bread. I am very glad indeed you are so well off.
²⁵

The vision of Oscar claiming he would have to ‘enter a shop or beg for bread' was an untimely complaint, given Jane's own bleak outlook. She wrote a bitter note to him in November 1876 comparing their different fortunes.

I am sorry to say the family affairs grow more dilapidated every day – Were I young like you I would take a pupil to read with. Youth can earn, age cannot – But I suppose the consolation of religion and philosophy will be sufficient. At least they cost nothing – J.F.W.
²⁶

She was fifty-seven, with nothing to support her but a kind of permanent fear. The word ‘wretched' was never far from her lips, and nothing was more ‘wretched' than the financially sterile Moytura.

19

Dabbling with Options and Ideas

Jane's energies were taken up with sorting out financial affairs. Unexpected debts kept appearing and Jane thought they could hold out no longer. She wrote to Oscar in an undated letter. ‘I think we must give up this house otherwise how is Willie to live . . . We could not keep up this house & two female servants, fire, gas – food, rent – etc. and a mortgage – under £500 a year – and nothing is to be had from wretched Moytura.' She added, ‘I am in a very distracted state of mind,' and in an addendum wrote:

If I am to be left in mean pauperism & uncertain chances I see nothing for it but to take prussic acid & so get rid of the whole trouble all at once – for I could not undertake a wretched struggle for daily bread, mean and contemptible like poor [Maginn] and Mrs Goldsmith. Which I see is my probable future fate –

So dies

Speranza

Goodbye

Now I must go to do my work in the house.
¹

(William Maginn, a periodical writer, ended up in a debtors' prison, and Jane had once sent a cheque to help Mrs Goldsmith, the great-niece of Oliver Goldsmith.)

In another undated letter, probably in 1877, she wrote, ‘I have been busy & worried & cross with a thousand small matters, & I live the spiritual life no more.' Willie, on the other hand, devoted his energies to spending liberally. He drank, caroused and ran up tailors' bills. ‘Willie in finest Belfast linen . . . £2 – fine Belfast linen!' Jane wrote to Oscar, adding ‘he is a bother'.
²

One way out of their mess was for Willie to marry a wealthy heiress. However, he needed to find a woman with deep pockets to keep him in the life to which he was becoming accustomed. Willie kept Jane abreast of the events of his unsuccessful campaigns to win the favours of women. She, in turn, sighed for a woman to sort him out, to bolster their finances, and thus allow them to continue living in Merrion Square. This symmetrical entanglement reinforced their mutual dependence. One moment Willie was in love, the next moment he was not, and Jane's expectations rose and fell in unison. ‘Of course he must eventually marry Katy,' Jane had confided to Oscar back in January 1876. By February, it was Lady Westmeath with whom he ‘sat down [in a corner] and loved deeply before the night was over'. Typical were comments like the one in August 1876 that Willie had made a ‘fool' of himself with a woman named Jenkins, leaving Jane to sort out his mess. ‘[Willie] wishes to avoid meeting the Jenkins & I now have to settle the whole affair & end it forever – at which Willie expresses himself pleased and content & acknowledges he was a fool.'
³

He loved; he loved not. Willie could fascinate, but it did not last. Certainly that was the case with Ethel Smyth. Willie met Ethel Smyth during her visits to Ireland in 1875 and 1876. They played tennis and talked poetry and philosophy, but it was Willie's piano playing she found appealing, particularly the irreverence with which he altered the endings of Chopin's preludes. Born in 1858 to a French mother and a major-general in the English army, Ethel Smyth went in 1877 to study music at Leipzig. There she met Clara Schumann and Tchaikovsky, and fell under the sway of Brahms, who showed little enthusiasm for her music. Nevertheless, Smyth possessed enough self-belief not to be discouraged, and found her voice in a Brahmsian idiom. In 1890, she made her debut in England with her
Serenade in D
at Crystal Palace, and when her opera,
Der Wald
, was performed in 1903 at New York's Metropolitan, it became the first staged opera to have been written by a woman.

It was probably her rebellious spirit that made her desirable to Willie. Ethel Smyth displayed, by all accounts, the same fiery reflexes as Jane. Most famously, in 1910, she was so struck by Emmeline Pankhurst's oratory that she pledged herself to the Suffrage movement, paying for her commitment two years later with a prison sentence. Anyhow, the union between Ethel and Willie was serious enough to be consecrated by a ring. Ethel remembered how, on the train from Holyhead, ‘he seized my hand and began an impassioned declaration . . . and before the train steamed into Euston I was engaged to a man I was no more in love with than I was with the engine driver!' She broke off the engagement after three weeks, admitting it was ‘probably to his secret relief'.
⁴
He kindly let her keep the engagement ring.