The Fall of the House of Wilde (44 page)

No longer able to afford the rent on Park Street, Jane and Willie had moved to 146 Oakley Street, Chelsea, in October 1888. This letter to Constance, written the day after she moved, indicates just how little she had.

We arrived here yesterday and I have no end of work and expense to get it in order and I have no money except this cheque which will you kindly cash for me as soon as possible, all in gold. But now can you lend me one sovereign for present expenses – that makes three I have borrowed from you, which please deduct from the £10 cheque. If possible send me the £1 now by Mrs Faithful, as I have nothing in hand.
²⁰

She often had to turn to Oscar for help. This letter, written in December 1888, thanking him for allowing her to settle her outstanding bills – ‘I have paid Miss Mynous the £50 – and Dent £90 – so I am at peace, thanks to you' – is by no means unique.
²¹
Correspondence suggests that Willie drained rather than added to her resources.

Reminding Gladstone in the application of the ‘state of Ireland' would have touched a sore point, for the Irish Question had stripped him of power. His Home Rule Bill of 1886, providing for an Irish parliament but limited to local affairs, split his own Liberal Party, and brought down the government. Indeed, so modest were the proposals that it requires a stretch of the imagination to understand the tumult they caused at the time. One understandable objection was that there were two Irelands, and therefore it would be treacherous for the imperial Parliament to place the government of Ulster loyalists at the mercy of an Irish parliament. A further objection was the fear that Irish self-government would lead to total separation and set a precedent for the disintegration of Empire. A reasonable fear, given that Parnell had recently said as much in a public speech. As he famously put it: ‘No man has the right to set a boundary to the onward march of a nation. No man has a right to say: “Thus far shalt thou go and no further.”' But in Parliament he had unequivocally given his pledge to accept the bill as a final settlement. Not surprisingly, his opponents, principal among them the Liberal Joseph Chamberlain, mistrusted Parnell.

Added to these doubts about Parnell's integrity was the widely held view that the Irish were incapable of ruling themselves, an opinion held by the opponents of Home Rule, according to the great Anglo-Irish historian of the nineteenth century and former provost of Trinity College, F. S. L. Lyons. There was, he wrote in
Ireland Since the Famine
, ‘a deep chasm between the Anglo-Saxonists, who argued that the Irish character made the Irish unfit for self-government, and the environmentalists, who believed in the potential equality of mankind and contended that historical circumstances had made the Irish what they were'.
²²
Cartoons of the Irish as half-simian reflected the popular prejudices, reinforced by the Irish living in Britain, typically working in low-paid employment, living in squalor, and often drunk and rowdy. The image was reinforced by reports of agrarian warfare in Ireland, with boycotts and stabbings. There were, of course, reformers who sympathised with the Irish cause and thought they could be lifted out of their backwardness, their illiteracy, and freed from their subservience to the priests. Either way, the Irish were deemed unready for self-government, and the Home Rule Bill was defeated by the Tories and defecting Liberals. Gladstone resigned and the general election returned a Conservative and Liberal Unionist majority in Parliament.

A new government brought no hope of land reform. On the contrary, it brought a new Coercion Bill, which made it illegal for Irish tenants to resist eviction however high the rents. The bill raised tempers and November 1887 saw protesters in favour of Home Rule march on Trafalgar Square. The march was prompted by the recent imprisonment of the editor of
United Ireland
, William O'Brien, for campaigning on behalf of Irish tenants against their forced eviction by landowners. The protest turned into a riot, with more than 200 casualties and two fatalities. Dubbed ‘Bloody Sunday', the disturbances irrupted into a city still indulging in patriotic celebrations over Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee, which had fallen a few months earlier, on 21 June 1887. Jane attended parliamentary debates. She had any number of Irish MPs ready to arrange a seat for her in the Ladies' Gallery. There was John O'Connor, a loyal Parnellite, or I. P. Gill. Others, the poet J. D. Sullivan, for example, urged her to join private discussions and debates on the Irish Question.

If the defeat of the 1886 Home Rule Bill had killed what hope she once had for the country, it marked the beginning of the end of Parnell. In March 1887, he became the object of humiliation when political intrigue convinced
The Times
to brand Parnell as a criminal sympathiser. Articles on ‘Parnellism and crime' were published in
The Times
as the new Coercion Bill for Ireland was making its way through Parliament. The most damning accusation appeared in a letter purporting to have been written by Parnell back in March 1882, in which he allegedly expressed his regret for having to denounce the Phoenix Park murders. Parnell declared the letter a forgery, and requested that a select committee of the House of Commons investigate the whole issue. His request was refused. Instead, the government set up a special commission to investigate the charges made by
The Times
against Parnell and his party and their involvement in the land war, thus putting the whole nationalist movement on trial. Willie and Oscar both attended in support of their fellow Anglo-Irishman, with Willie reporting for the
Daily Telegraph
in articles that memoirists deem his best journalism.

Though forgery was not now the object of the commission's inquiry, the truth nevertheless emerged when a Dublin journalist, Richard Pigott, caved in under examination in the witness box, admitted to having forged the letters, fled England, and shot himself in Madrid. The outcome had all the melodrama that often fascinated Oscar, whose taste was always for slippery subjects like the forger of ‘medieval' poetry, Thomas Chatterton (1752–70), who also committed suicide, or the murderer, artist and Aesthete Thomas Griffiths Wainewright (1794–1847), about whom he would write in ‘Pen, Pencil, and Poison', published January 1889. Parnell was exonerated, only to face trial again in 1890 for his private life with Katharine O'Shea, his mistress for the previous decade. This time Gladstone jumped ship and warned the scandal-prone Parnell that if he did not go, his own Liberal Party would become ‘almost a nullity'. The fall of Parnell and his subsequent death in 1891 marked a defining moment in Irish politics. For Jane, certainly, the Anglo-Irish Parnell was the man who would have kept the Fenians at bay and taken the country in the right direction.

30

The Picture of Dorian Gray
 : A ‘tale with a moral'

Jane, as ever, was unstinting in bestowing praise. On 23 December 1888, she wrote to Oscar, ‘I am so glad you have struck oil in Literature. I know of no writer at once so strong & so beautiful – except Ruskin.'
¹
Ruskin was always Jane's benchmark for the best in literature. In May 1888 Oscar had published his first collection of fairy tales,
The Happy Prince and other Tales.
They received widespread praise, including a letter from Pater, dated 11 June 1888, saying he found them ‘delightful', and added, ‘I hardly know whether to admire more the wise wit of “The Wonderful [Remarkable] Rocket”, or the beauty and tenderness of “The Selfish Giant”: the latter is certainly perfect in its kind. Your genuine “little poems in prose” . . . are gems, and the whole, too brief, book abounds with delicate touches and pure English.'
²

Then in 1889, Joseph Marshall Stoddart, working for Lippincott & Co., an American publisher, approached Oscar for a story. Stoddart invited Oscar and Arthur Conan Doyle for dinner and commissioned each of them to write a story for
Lippincott's Monthly Magazine
. Thus began
The Picture of Dorian Gray
, started by Oscar in January 1890 and finished for publication in the July edition of the magazine. After negotiations with the London publisher, Ward, Lock & Co., Oscar revised and extended the magazine version, included a preface, and it was published as a book in April 1891.

The Picture of Dorian Gray
turned out to be something quite unique in literature: a satire on the absurdity of the Judaeo-Christian notions of sin and conscience that ends by affirming their power. The novel's main premise is Dorian's repudiation of the Christian inner world for the pagan outer world. Dorian detaches himself from his soul and projects it onto his portrait. Without a soul, Dorian proceeds to live as if the world were beyond good and evil. But the portrait containing his soul becomes demonic. It haunts him. He conceals it behind a screen, he locks it in the attic, and in desperation stabs it with a knife, but the knife ends up in his heart. Dorian dies a heap of matter, identifiable only by his rings. Oscar thus farcically defends the power of moral values to haunt the sinner. Dorian Gray is illustrative of Pascal's statement: ‘Without the Christian faith . . . you, no less than nature and history, will become for yourselves
un monstre et un chaos
.'
³

Oscar was a traditional European writer; like countless European writers before him, he expressed his views of the world in non-realistic parables. But, a rare thing among writers, he was capable of expressing and thinking two different things at the same time. This ambiguity confused critics. Worse, the tone of cool moral detachment and exotic insolence of the story offended them. Many critics took exception to what they saw as a glamorisation of evil. Fewer were those who believed that
The Picture of Dorian Gray
gave literature a tremendous step forward precisely because human nature can be, has shown itself to be, monstrous.

Aesthetics are higher than ethics, so Oscar said. For Oscar, art was an absurd mosaic of incidents and accidents in which something unfolds. One cannot know what that something is, or to what it is leading, and it is therefore impermissible for art to claim anything as presumptuous as a moral purpose. The artist's will matters little in a work of art. That is why, as Oscar said, ‘When a work of art is finished . . . it may deliver a message far other than that which was put into its lips to say.'
⁴
To paraphrase Jean Cocteau, the artist is like a prison from which works of art escape. Writing
The Picture of Dorian Gray
, Oscar unleashed the sleeping demon within him.

The novel opens with a scene of adoration. The painter, Basil Hallward, and Lord Henry Wotton look up at a ‘full-length portrait of a young man of extraordinary personal beauty', ‘a young Adonis, who looks as if he was made out of ivory and rose leaves' – Dorian Gray.
⁵
This worshipping a work of art, this idolising of pagan beauty increases as the novel progresses. Dorian has been unaware of his beauty until Lord Henry infects him with vanity. Lord Henry wants to subdue Dorian to his will, and sees himself as a vivisectionist working on Dorian's personality. He wants Dorian to test his new theory of hedonism – his solution for those hemmed in by moral taboos and the Christian notion of sin and bad conscience. Conventional morality Lord Henry dismisses with exquisite idleness. To hunt continually for the release of new sensations, to intensify one's personality, to be intoxicated with life, is what Lord Henry, in the guise of Milton's Satan, suggests for Dorian.

A New Hedonism that was to recreate life, and to save it from that harsh uncomely puritanism that is having . . . its curious revival. It was to have its service of the intellect, certainly; yet it was never to accept any theory or system that would involve the sacrifice of any mode of passionate experience. Its aim, indeed, was to be experience itself, and not the fruits of experience, sweet or bitter as they might be. Of the asceticism that deadens the senses, as of the vulgar profligacy that dulls them, it was to know nothing. But it was to teach man to concentrate himself upon the moments of a life that is itself but a moment.

Growing relish at exercising power over Dorian kindles Lord Henry, who takes sexual pleasure in deflowering Dorian. It was, Lord Henry says, ‘Like playing upon an exquisite violin. He [Dorian] answered to every touch and thrill of the bow.'
⁶
This is teaching as erotic transaction, straight from Greek antiquity.

Basil, too, adores Dorian, having been bewitched by his face, and tells Lord Henry of his first sighting:

I suddenly became conscious that someone was looking at me. I turned half-way round, and saw Dorian Gray for the first time. When our eyes met, I felt I was growing pale. A curious sensation of terror came over me. I knew I had come face to face with someone whose mere personality was so fascinating that, if I allowed it do so, it would absorb my whole nature, my whole soul, my very art itself.

But Dorian's credulous acceptance of Lord Henry's New Hedonism maddens Basil. He urges Dorian to repent his sins. ‘Pray, Dorian, pray,' Basil urges. ‘Lead us not into temptation. Forgive us our sins. Wash away our iniquities,' after which Dorian stabs Basil.
⁷
Dorian dismembers him and dissolves him in acid as casually as he takes breakfast. Immediately after murdering Basil, Dorian ‘dressed himself with even more than usual care, giving a good deal of attention to the choice of his necktie and scarf-pin, and changing his rings more than once'.
⁸
Tragedy and comedy become a double act, exchanging their masks so effectively that an effort to distinguish one from the other would at best be a pedantic exercise. Dorian is enclosed in a hall of mirrors, deaf and blind to the world outside – which is why he is so appalling. Most characters demand our empathy – ‘love me' or ‘hate me' – Oscar's don't: they simply declare themselves. Especially Dorian, who takes his beauty as a sign of divine election.