21 August 1900

 

In 1871 I entered Trinity College, Dublin.  I was, I believe, seventeen but already I felt like an eagle who has been forced to find rest among sparrows.  It was an extension of school merely, in which discontent at my position was piled upon the aimlessness and weariness which I always suffer when I am not surrounded by laughter and by brightly coloured companions.  Even as a boy, I had passed it with a shudder.  It seemed to me then to resemble some prison, although I was to discover later that the comparison was not an exact one.

      My tutor there, Mahaffy, spoke to me of Greek things, but not without a few delicate elisions.  'Read Plato for his conversation,' he would announce to me.  'Read Peacock for his philosophy, if you must, but read Plato in order to discover how to turn speech into drama and conversation into an art.'  And so at night I would read the Phaedo in a loud voice.  I translated Aristophanes and made him sound like Swinburne.  I read Swinburne, and thought it farcical.  I did not care then for many of the authors whom we were compelled to study.  Virgil's chilly, sententious verses and the absurd lucubrations of Ovid bored me; I detested the braggadocio of Cicero and the earnest dullness of Caesar.  I turned instead to the sonorous African Latin of Apuleius and to the dry, hard little sentences of Tertullian writing and preaching when Elogabolus was at work.  But I cared above all for Petronius, whose Satyricon woke in me an appreciation of new sensations.  I did not wish to experience them: it was enough to know that they existed.

      Dublin seemed to me to be even more decayed and helpless.  My mother was drinking, and attempted to hide the fact by retiring to her room in the early afternoon.  Sir William was making himself ill with overwork and refused to acknowledge the extent of my mother's weakness.  He wanted me to remain at Trinity, and eventually take up a position there - I would even now have been lecturing on the Eumenides, instead of being pursued by them - but I declined absolutely.  I pitied Sir William, as one pities those for whom life has become a snare, but I had no intention of inviting a fate similar to his own.

      And so you can imagine my joy when, after three years, I was awarded the demyship and journeyed to Oxford.  It came as a revelation to me: the journey was from the medieval pieties of my native soil to the open thought of Hellenism.  It was my own renaissance.  In those unfamiliar surroundings I felt immediately at ease.  Touched by the light of that university I came to life although, at first, it was of a fitful and halting kind.  I was eager for friendship then, rather than learning, and in my early months I found it where I could.  They were decent, good chaps at Magdalen and with certain of them I would laugh and talk late into the night.

      'And what do you want to do, Oscar?' one of them might say.

      'To do?  I don't want to do anything.  I want to be everything.'

      'You do talk rot sometimes.'

      'Actually, I would like to be Pope.'

      'But you pretend to be so wicked, Oscar.'

      'Then I would excommunicate myself at once.'

      'No, you will become a schoolmaster.  I see it in your face.'

      'My face is my most deceptive feature.  My fate, dear boy, is written on my hand.'

      'That is why it is so limp, I suppose.'

      And yet sometimes in these happy hours the flat meadows around Magdalen inspired in me feelings of the deepest melancholy, as if my first ambitious hopes might themselves spread out and disappear into the damp landscape which surrounded me.  I had what Ruskin called 'the restlessness of the dreaming mind'; he considered it a virtue, but then I was bewildered by it.

      I was, I believe now, treading that treacherous path which every artist must take before he reaches his own kingdom.  I had no ideals and no opinions, I was tired of the learning that I could too quickly master, desirous of fame and yet unsure how to claim it, desiring love also and yet frightened to find it - since, in truth, I did not know in what shadows it might be hiding.  I worked hard, although I concealed the fact from my contemporaries, because it seemed then that through work only could I assert the powers of personality which I knew existed in me.  But I knew too many theories to believe in one absolutely - I disbelieved in everything, including myself.  I was ambition, but to no particular end.

      For it was my fate to attain the self-consciousness of an artist at a time when values of all kind had been thrown into doubt.  I was later to believe that I might find art and the values of art in the creation of my own personality and that, like Zeus and Athene all at once, I might emerge more powerful from my own head.  But at Oxford I was of an age when, with no guiding instinct of my own except ambition, I sought for authority where I could.

      The Roman Church in those years entranced me with the poetry of its ritual and the power of its liturgy.  I would read Thomas à Kempis and, dazzled by his sonorous low tone, would imagine myself an anchorite dwelling in silence and in prayer.  The Church seemed to be a supreme example of the triumph of aesthetics over morality, evoking strange rituals and sorrowful renunciations.  I felt a secret pleasure in renouncing my own sins - especially those which I had not committed.

      But the Roman faith could not satisfy me.  I believed that, just as certain extraordinary chemicals can only be discerned when they are bathed in a particular solution, if I were immersed in the atmosphere of fine thoughts and fine words I, too, might stand revealed.  And I sought for all those who might assist me, whose personalities were so powerful that in their presence I might acquire an especial note of my own.

      It was to John Ruskin that I went first, ready like the sinner of Decapolis to touch his robe and feel the power enter into me.  I had searched for his books in Dublin and found in them a strength of conviction which, in my own incapacity, touched me deeply, and I remember my awe on seeing him enter the lecture theatre for the first time.  He entered bearing a plate - a breakfast plate, I believe - and, without waiting for us to settle, began to speak of the pink roses drawn upon it and the band of green traced around its edge.  He asked us, as an impanelled jury, to decide upon the question of the plate.  Was it well done, as the expression of a virtuous craftsman, or was it badly done, the product of a vicious one?  He held it up and no-one spoke: indeed, his too felicitous expressions seemed to derive from some distant epoch, and there were those who laughed secretly.  But then he continued as if he had asked no question at all.  He talked about his striding through London - yes, striding was the word and how well it suited the image I had formed of him - and his disgust at the friezes and brackets which mutilated the exterior fronts of grocers and hosiers.  He wished to tear them off, he said, and, as he spoke, he snatched at the air.

      After his lecture, he asked for help with building his road to Ferry Hinskey, and I volunteered at once.  It was not out of a desire to enter into physical labour of any sort - one should only engage in those activities where one can become pre-eminent - but simply in order that I might meet him.  I knew that, if I could spend some hours with him, I could fortify my own character by imitation.  The road itself was not a success: I believe it stopped somewhere in the middle of a field.  Indeed, I learned so much about the body of man under socialism that afterwards I cared only to write about the soul.

      Ruskin would give tea in his rooms to those of us who worked on the unfortunate project.  We would sit in a circle and listen merely - one had only to agree, and one became a pupil.  There was, I believe, something of the bully in him and he could give the most intellectual inquiry an air of menace.  There was no general conversation.  On one occasion he stared at me in the middle of one of his more iridescent monologues - 'And tell us, Mr Wilde, your opinion of domestic implements.'  I described at some length the customary kitchen tools of Galway - I have always believed, in moments of uncertainty, in saying the first thing that occurs to me, hoping that it will have the enchantment of all first things - and he seemed to be pleased with my answer.  'The Celts,' he said, 'protect their land with beauty.'  I thought that a wonderful sentence, and I believe I used it on later occasions.

      Ruskin was a familiar sight in Oxford, walking with his blue frock-coat and blue cravat in even the most uncertain weather, half-frowning and half-pleased when he was recognized by those whom he passed.  He had a theatrical aspect to his character which enlivened the dramatic vein within my own temperament.  Sometimes he would allow me to walk with him, and talk of Gothic things - I was the Mrs Siddons to his Irving.  I must pause - Agnes has called me to the telephone.  She is so frightened of the instrument that, judging by her tone, I might be going to the scaffold.

      'Our, Monsieur Melmoth qui parle.  Oh it's you, my dear.'  I knew at once that the terrible hissing sound was not that of the telephone: it was merely Charles Ricketts, who for some reason always giggles when he hears my voice.  'Well, Charles, I am waiting.'

      'Can you hear me, Oscar?'

      'Of course I can hear you.'  I intensely dislike the telephone.  It is suitable only for really intimate conversations.'

      'I am giving a party, Oscar.'

      'Oui.'

      'Just for a few old flames.'

      'Well, you will have to hire the Albert Hall then, dear.'

      'Oh don't, Oscar, you are frightful.'

      'Mais oui.'  More giggles.

      'Actually, I was thinking of using the upstairs room in the Café Julien.  You like it there, don't you?'

      'I like it there immensely.  I shall wear my tiara, deuxième classe.'

      'You will come, won't you, Oscar?  Everyone is dying to meet you.'

      'So am I.'

      'Well, that's settled then.  How are you, dear Oscar?'

      'I am perfectly well, my dear, thank you.  At the moment I am writing a most imaginative account of my youth.'

      'I shall send him an invitation also.'

      'That is most kind of you, Charles.  He loves crowds.'

      'And Oscar -'

      'Yes?'

      'Do take care of yourself.'

      'A bientôt, dear.'