The Fall of the House of Wilde (37 page)

Did Oscar drift into marriage? Or was he marrying for money? If so, he could have hitched himself to a bride with deeper pockets than Constance's. Perhaps he was marrying to please Jane – lest we forget, she had written to him in December 1882 saying she would love to have Constance as a daughter-in-law, and we know how swayed he could be by his mother. Or maybe he wanted a more stable life. The novelty of living out of a suitcase, going from hotel to hotel lecturing up and down the country, had paled, to say the least. These and other reasons may have been factors. In any event, his marrying confounded public perceptions, which may also have been his intention. Ever conscious of his public image, it may have been that this marriage was a way of gaining distance from the image of Oscar Wilde portrayed in
Patience
, as the ridiculous, effete Aesthete in knee breeches.

What is indisputable is that he saw Constance as a physical adornment. On 16 December 1883, he wrote to Lillie Langtry telling her of his impending marriage to ‘a beautiful girl called Constance Lloyd, a grave, slight, violet-eyed little Artemis, with great coils of heavy brown hair which make her flower-like head droop like a blossom, and wonderful ivory hands which draw music from the piano so sweet that the birds stop singing to listen to her'. And he added, ‘I am so anxious for you to know and like her.'
³²
Waxing lyrical, visualising Constance as a painting that brings sweet music to his ears, as an assault on the senses, was only to be expected from Oscar, who believed, where words are concerned, that one could not be too extravagantly poetic.

The few letters to survive from Constance to Oscar speak of a woman whose passion was weighed down by protestations of unworthiness. Another woman possessing Constance's beauty – say, a Lillie Langtry – would not have doubted her allure to the same extent. Had Constance been a proud woman, she would not have described herself as ‘a poor gift': ‘Every day that I see you, every moment that you are with me I worship you more, my whole life is yours to do as you will with it, such a poor gift to offer up to you, but yet all I have and so you will not despise it.'
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The countless messages Constance received from friends and family expressing astonishment and incredulity that she should be marrying Oscar Wilde cannot have soothed her anxieties.

Oscar had made a wide breach in Constance's existence. Separations tore her apart. ‘I am so sorry I was so silly: you take all my strength away, I have no power to do anything but just love you when you are with me, & I cannot fight against my dread of you going away,' and, ‘I will hold you fast with chains of love & devotion so that you shall never leave me, or love anyone as long as I can love and comfort.'
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Her worshipping of Oscar was the last thing a self-lover like him needed. Given that Oscar was leading a duller, paler existence organised around lectures, the romantic interludes would have helped him through the quotidian day-to-day life, much like the arias of a dry recitativo. And emotional distance no doubt would have made it easier to conjure up poetic images of Constance from a Midlands post office than dealing with a clinging woman wanting him to give up his freedom. Time would show that his impulse was always to push off when clasped too tight.

In no time the beautiful Constance became the object of public attention. It started with the official announcement of their engagement in mid-December in society magazines. Oscar's new chic gentlemanly attire, his choice of Constance – all sweet and innocent – as bride bemused a public that knew Oscar as the effete Aesthete. ‘Bunthorne is to get his bride', announced the
Liverpool Daily Post.
The wedding was initially planned for April 1884, then delayed until 29 May. The press speculated over the details of this celebrity event, and the dress itself generated reams of newsprint. To satisfy public curiosity, the wedding dress went on show in March, and was described as ‘saffron hued, the colour the Greek maidens wore on their wedding day'. One of Jane's friends, Anna Kingsford, wrote to her, ‘I hear the bridal robe is on view somewhere and I should greatly like to see it.'
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Jane's reaction to the marriage had been one of cautious pleasure. ‘I am intensely pleased,' she wrote in November 1883 to Oscar. ‘But one feels very anxious: so much yet – all the finery & the protocolling – It always seems so hard for two lovers to get married. But I hope all will end well.' Did she think the Lloyds would object to her son marrying Constance? The news of his younger brother going to the altar made Willie feel ‘so old – quite shelved by “the young people”', as Jane put it to Oscar.
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But to Oscar, whom he often addressed as ‘my dear old Boy', he concealed his melancholy with effusive congratulations. ‘This is indeed good news, brave news, wise news and altogether charming.' There is no sign of sibling jealousy in Willie, who added, ‘I do indeed congratulate you from the bottom of my heart. She is lovely and loveable and all that is sweet and right and she is a lady.' Referring to Oscar and his future wife as ‘Alcibiades and Lady Constance' shows a delicately masked irony, given Alcibiades' homosexual tastes.
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Otho had come across Willie and Oscar and was quite taken aback to see their inordinate mutual affection. ‘Willie and Oscar were like two boys together, full of chaff and fun; they are very affectionate brothers.'
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As for Jane, all joy had been stamped out of her life. London had become a ‘hateful' place for her. The playfulness that had once marked her correspondence with Oscar was gone, and one senses a spirit of infinite hopelessness. To Oscar she wrote, ‘I am only stupid – & sick & dull & weary. Amen.'
³⁹
After a long break she wrote to Rosalie Olivecrona to tell her of Oscar's engagement. She acknowledged that her life had ‘many troubles and anxieties', that she found living in London expensive and had no income from rents in Ireland.
⁴⁰
She also wrote on 25 February 1884 to Lotten and was just as despondent. ‘Life seems sad as years go on – & my life was bent and broken when Sir William died.' Even so, she wanted ‘any literary news', ‘how the woman's question is going on', and promised herself to ‘try and work up [her] Swedish again'.
⁴¹
At the time she was contributing articles to magazines such as the
Court & Society Review
and
Lady's Pictorial
 – ‘to make money!', as she put it. For a woman who was used to writing a dozen or so pages on the life works of Calderón and others for
Dublin University Magazine
, and was at her best reviewing Tennyson or Carlyle, resorting to these magazines to survive was lowering.

Willie's life made her despair; a despair made all the more ineradicable by the lack of a solution. ‘As to Willie I give up on him – His debts are now about £2000.' She had preceded this by saying, ‘the creditors are dreadful'. This was written in 1883. Willie often had to flee London to escape creditors – on a number of occasions he went to Moytura. Gone was the well-decorated future she had envisaged for him; she now saw a man ‘low & depressed'.
⁴²
One of the stories Willie wrote for
World
, on 24 October 1883, probably reflected his state of mind. ‘The Witless Thing' was the story about a once ‘buoyant' Lord Grayton, who attends dances at asylums, cherishes carnal fantasies over a woman, and whose requited love leaves him feeling ‘morbid' as he thinks of his ‘lonely life'. The woman he ‘idealised and idolised' turns out to be as ‘loveless as she was lovely'. Setting the dance in an asylum speaks volumes for Willie's state of mind. Perhaps Jane recognised Willie in this sad outburst, for she cut out the story and pasted it into a scrapbook she kept on the family's behalf.
⁴³

The drifting and rootless existence that had become the Wildes' since they left Ireland strengthened her wish for Oscar to pursue ‘a settled life'. ‘I want you to take a small house on Green Street . . . & begin a settled life at once. Literature & lectures & Parliament – Receptions 5 o'clock for the world – & small dinners of genius & culture at 8 o'clock. Charming this life.' So wrote Jane to Oscar on 29 November 1883, remembering the pattern of life she and Sir William had created together. ‘Begin it at once – Take warning by Willie.'
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Jane knew what few others saw and what time would show – that her sons were not dissimilar in temperament.

Jane had long nurtured ambitions that either or both her sons would go into Parliament. Willie, we know, had the opportunity but showed no real enthusiasm. Oscar too gave it some thought. He told the
Lady's World
on 19 January 1884 that he was still unclear what career he would pursue: whether he would go into Parliament, go on the stage, or marry – which were exactly the ideas Jane had suggested to him when he was in America. Any career where he could hear an audience applauding him would have been appealing. He would, however, probably have buckled under political party discipline. And though he was most genuinely himself in the world of impersonators, there is reason to suppose that he would have found it, as an actor, difficult to be part of an ensemble. But to include marriage as a career option to pursue, as Oscar did in
Lady's World
, is strange.

Little is known about the wedding other than that it was a discreet occasion limited to family and a few friends, who were permitted to join the church ceremony by special pass. The guests invited were not celebrities; only the great artist and critic Whistler was a household name, and he could not attend. Nor was it a wedding for lords and ladies. The few guests invited included Oscar's friends, George Lewis and his wife, and the actress Mrs Bernard-Beere. Willie acted as Oscar's best man and Constance was led to the altar by her uncle Hemphill, as John Horatio was too ill to attend, though ‘he blossomed out into fresh life', as Oscar put it to Sherard, ‘after he had joined our hands and given us his parting blessing'.
⁴⁵
Many converged outside St James's Church, Sussex Gardens, Paddington, but all eyes were fixed on the bride who wore a ‘rich creamy satin dress . . . of delicate cowslip tint', though others saw it as ‘ivory satin', but all agreed it was simplicity itself. Gone were the accustomed bustle and the straitjacketed arms. Constance wore her skirt straight with a long train, a low-cut bodice with a Medici collar, and sleeves as puffed as a Pre-Raphaelite damsel's. But it was her veil that caught public attention, being made of Indian silk gauze embroidered with pearls. And around her waist she wore a silver girdle, a gift from Oscar. The groom ‘appeared in the ordinary and commonplace frock coat of the period'.
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Without apparent anguish, Oscar pledged himself to the world of convention. He honoured the bourgeois in himself, seeming every inch the Victorian husband. Had he looked at himself in the mirror he might have been tempted to laugh out loud. Then again, he had not lost his sense of irony, for the wedding ring he bestowed on Constance's finger was not the customary sealed gold band, but one sliced in half, opening to form two interlocking rings.

26

‘The Crushes'

Though 116 Park Street was by all accounts down at heel, certainly in comparison to the splendour of Merrion Square, it did not stop Jane from entertaining. When exactly Jane started her at-homes is unclear, but definitely by 1882, when Oscar was in America, they were in full swing. Once again she gathered a diverse crowd of artists and literati otherwise unlikely to cross paths. On Saturdays between four o'clock and seven o'clock, many Americans who were stopping in London met with established and aspiring Irish writers. Those who came included the American authors Oliver Wendell Holmes and Francis Bret Harte, the latter best remembered for his accounts of pioneering life in California, and the clergyman Henry Ward Beecher, an advocate of women's suffrage, foe of slavery and the subject of one of the most notorious adultery trials in nineteenth-century America. Literature was well represented with the English-born novelist, Frances Hodgson Burnett, author of
The Secret Garden
, and Marie Corelli, then one of the most widely read novelists. Eleanor Marx came, so did the socialist and struggling Irish writer, George Bernard Shaw. Other Irish writers who turned up included George Moore, Katharine Tynan and W. B. Yeats, who was a great favourite of the Wilde family. The poet Robert Browning also came often.

These were not sumptuous gatherings where diamonds dripped from the necks of ladies. On the contrary, the presence of many concerned with the life of the mind was Jane's measure of success. The at-homes drew the classless world of artists, the world in which she felt at home, giving force to the
Irish Times
portrait of Lady Wilde as a woman who opened her doors wider for those who respected intellect rather than class. Shaw, for instance, was invited when he was living impecuniously in London. ‘Morbidly self-conscious', as his biographer, Michael Holroyd, described him, Shaw dreaded making this step into a society where he expected to feel ill at ease among Dublin's elite; they were, for him, the Wildes of Merrion Square. To equip himself for the ordeal, according to Holroyd, Shaw sought out from the catalogue of the British Museum volumes on polite behaviour, poring over
Manners and Tone of Good Society
, and learning to avoid sipping the contents of the finger bowl.
¹
Though Shaw described these gatherings as ‘desperate affairs', he accredited Jane's good nature and kindness, especially as he was then an impoverished nonentity. ‘Lady Wilde was nice to me in London during the desperate days between my arrival in 1876 and my first earning of an income by my pen in 1885.' He also spoke of an occasion when he dined with Jane and a former tragedy queen called Miss Glynn, when the conversation ran from Schopenhauer (Jane's pet subject) to the oratorical style of Gladstone.
²
What may have mattered the most to Jane was the open fellowship she enjoyed among several of the younger generation, with Yeats in particular. From their first meeting in 1888 they developed a deep bond of mutual admiration that went beyond their shared literary passion for the Celtic esoteric and the artistic revival. Yeats appreciated Jane – perhaps he saw her as an older version of his muse, Maud Gonne – as he had a predilection for fiery, reckless women.