Oscar Wilde: A Life in Letters

We are having a large garden party here today, and tomorrow one at the Duke of Rutland’s who is quite close.

I make myself as charming as ever and am much admired. Have had some good arguments with Dean Miles who was a great friend of Newman, Pusey and Manning at Oxford and a very advanced Anglican.

Write me a line soon like a good boy. Ever yours

OSCAR F. O’F. WILLS WILDE

I heard the Cardinal on Sunday preach a charity sermon at the Pro-Cathedral, Kensington. MacCall was there.

To William Ward

Wednesday [26 July 1876] 1 Merrion Square North, Dublin

My dear Boy, I confess not to be a worshipper at the Temple of Reason. I think man’s reason the most misleading and thwarting guide that the sun looks upon, except perhaps the reason of woman. Faith is, I think, a bright lantern for the feet, though of course an exotic plant in man’s mind, and requiring continual cultivation. My mother would probably agree with you. Except for the people, for whom she thinks dogma necessary, she rejects all forms of superstition and dogma, particularly any notion of priest and sacrament standing between her and God. She has a very strong faith in that aspect of God we call the Holy Ghost – the divine intelligence of which we on earth partake. Here she is very strong, though of course at times troubled by the discord and jarring of the world, when she takes a dip into pessimism.

Her last pessimist, Schopenhauer, says the whole human race ought on a given day, after a strong remonstrance firmly but respectfully urged on God, to walk into the sea and leave the world tenantless, but of course some skulking wretches would hide and be left behind to people the world again I am afraid.

I wonder you don’t see the beauty and necessity for the incarnation of God into man to help us to grasp at the skirts of the Infinite. The atonement is I admit hard to grasp. But I think since Christ the dead world has woke up from sleep. Since him we have lived. I think the greatest proof of the Incarnation aspect of Christianity is its whole career of noble men and thoughts and not the mere narration of unauthenticated histories.

I think you are bound to account (psychologically most especially) for S. Bernard and S. Augustine and S. Philip Neri – and even in our day for Liddon and Newman – as being good philosophers and good Christians. That reminds me of Mallock’s New Republic in Belgravia; it is decidedly clever – Jowett especially. If you have the key to all the actors please send it to me.

I send you this letter and a book together. I wonder which you will open first. It is Aurora Leigh, which I think you said you had not read. It is one of those books that, written straight from the heart – and from such a large heart too – never weary one: because they are sincere. We tire of art but not of nature after all our aesthetic training. I look upon it as much the greatest work in our literature.

I rank it with Hamlet and In Memoriam. So much do I love it that I hated the idea of sending it to you without marking a few passages I felt you would well appreciate – and I found myself marking the whole book. I am really very sorry: it is like being given a bouquet of plucked flowers instead of being allowed to look for them oneself. But I could not resist the temptation, as it did instead of writing to you about each passage.

The only fault is that she overstrains her metaphors till they snap, and although one does not like polished emotion, still she is inartistically rugged at times. As she says herself, she shows the mallet hand in carving cherrystones.

I hope you will have time to read it, for I don’t believe your dismal forebodings about Greats.

I wrote to Kitten for your address, and his letter and yours arrived simultaneously. His thoughts and ink rarely last beyond one sheet.

I ride sometimes after six, but don’t do much but bathe, and although always feeling slightly immortal when in the sea, feel sometimes slightly heretical when good Roman Catholic boys enter the water with little amulets and crosses round their necks and arms that the good S. Christopher may hold them up.

I am now off to bed after reading a chapter of S. Thomas a Kempis. I think half-an-hour’s warping of the inner man daily is greatly conducive to holiness.

Pray remember me to your mother and sisters. Ever yours

OSCAR F. O’F. WILLS WILDE

Post Scriptum

You don’t deserve such a long letter, but I must tell you that I met Mr Rigaud (the gentleman who met with that sad accident in early youth) and his brother the General swaggering up Grafton Street here yesterday. I had a long talk with them and the General told me yarns by the dozen about the time he was quartered here ‘with the 16th Battalion, sir! Damme, sir! We were the best corps in the Regiment! Service gone to the dogs! Not a well drilled soldier in the country, sir!’

Sir William had built two properties in the west of Ireland, a small fishing lodge in 1853 at Illaunroe, near Leenane, and a comfortable country house at Moytura near Cong. Oscar is known to have spent time there as a boy helping his father record and catalogue Celtic antiquities, and now as a student used both as summer retreats for himself and for entertaining friends.

To Reginald Harding

Wednesday [?16 August 1876] Moytura House, Cong, Co. Mayo

Dear Kitten, Have you fallen into a well, or been mislaid anywhere that you never write to me? Or has one of your nine lives gone?

Frank Miles and I came down here last week, and have had a very royal time of it sailing. We are at the top of Lough Corrib, which if you refer to your geography you will find to be a lake thirty miles long, ten broad and situated in the most romantic scenery in Ireland. Frank has done some wonderful sunsets since he came down; he has given me some more of his drawings. Has your sister got the one he calls ‘My Little Lady’ – a little girl’s face with a lot of falling hair? If she has not got it I would like to send it to her in return for her autograph on the celebrated memorial.

Frank has never fired off a gun in his life (and says he doesn’t want to) but as our proper sporting season here does not begin till September I have not taught him anything. But on Friday we go into Connemara to a charming little fishing lodge we have in the mountains where I hope to make him land a salmon and kill a brace of grouse. I expect to have very good sport indeed this season. Write to me there if your claws have not been clipped. Illaunroe Lodge, Leenane, Co. Galway.

Best love to Puss. I hope he is reading hard. Ever yours

OSCAR F. O’F. WILLS WILDE

To William Ward

Wednesday [?6 September 1876] 1 Merrion Square North

My dear Bouncer, Note paper became such a scarcity in the West that I had to put off answering your letter till I came home.

I had a delightful time, and capital sport, especially the last week, which I spent shooting, and got fair bags.

I am afraid I shall not cross to England via Bristol, as I hear the boats are rather of the ‘Ancient Mariner’ type! but I may be down in Bristol with Frank Miles as I want to see S. Raphael’s and the pictures at Clevedon.

I would like very much to renew my friendship with your mother and sisters so shall write to you if I see any hope of going down.

I have given up my pilgrimage to Rome for the present: Ronald Gower and Frank Miles were coming: (we would have been a great Trinity) but at the last hour Ronald couldn’t get time, so I am staying in Dublin till the 20th, when I go down to Longford, and hope to have good sport.

I have heard from many people of your father’s liberality and noble spirit, so I know you will take interest in the report I send you of my father’s hospital, which he built when he was only twenty-nine and not a rich man. It is a great memorial of his name, and a movement is being set on foot to enlarge it and make it still greater.

I have got some charming letters lately from a great friend of my mother, Aubrey de Vere – a cultured poet (though sexless) and a convert to Catholicity. I must show you them; he is greatly interested in me and is going to get one of my poems into the Month. I have two this month out: one in the Dublin University Magazine, one in the Irish Monthly. Both are brief and Tennysonian.

I hope you are doing good work, but I suppose at home you are hardly allowed ‘to contemplate the abstract’ (whatever that means) undisturbed.

I am bothered with business and many things and find the world an

[chaos] at present and a Tarpeian Rock for honest men.

I hope you will write when you have time. Ever yours

OSCAR F. O’F. WILLS WILDE

I like signing my name as if it was to some document of great importance as ‘Send two bags of gold by bearer’ or ‘Let the Duke be slain tomorrow and the Duchess await me at the hostelry’.

I send you one of Aubrey de Vere’s letters. I know you will be amused at them. Return it when you have committed it to memory.

In the Michaelmas term of 1876 both Ward and Hunter-Blair took their finals and went down. Wilde moved into Ward’s rooms overlooking the River Cherwell and continued to agonise over whether or not to become a Catholic. For the time being his mystical leanings had to be satisfied with the quasi-religious rituals and fancy dress of freemasonry. The following spring, though, he again went on a Classical tour with Mahaffy, this time to Greece, and came back via Rome where he met Ward and Hunter-Blair who had arranged a private audience with the Pope.

To William Ward

[Week ending 3 March 1877] [Oxford]

I have got rather keen on Masonry lately and believe in it awfully – in fact would be awfully sorry to have to give it up in case I secede from the Protestant Heresy. I now breakfast with Father Parkinson, go to St Aloysius, talk sentimental religion to Dunlop and altogether am caught in the fowler’s snare, in the wiles of the Scarlet Woman – I may go over in the vac. 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.