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___________ |
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Vol. III |
No. 12 |
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issue no 31: November/December 2006 |
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Revised for removal from www.irishdiaspora.net
to www.oscholars.com
January 2010 |
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‘AND I, MAY
I SAY NOTHING?’ |
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A monthly page of essays, articles and authors’
responses to reviews. This month we
are fortunate to have an important article by James Gregory on
Constance Wilde, an introduction to a paper by Dr Emmanuel Vernadakis
(University of Angers) and an article by Brendan McWilliams originally
written for The Irish Times.
Here too we publish a note from Christopher S. Nassaar
(American University, Beirut), slightly amended from an original published on
one of the ‘Yahoo’ Oscar Wilde discussion sites. |
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We also print a correction to Maxwell Siegel’s
article in our last issue. |
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To the Table of Contents |
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James Gregory: Lady Mount
Temple and Her Friendship with Constance Wilde. |
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Brendan McWilliams: The Weather
and Oscar Wilde. |
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Christopher S. Nassaar:
On Recreating Oscar. |
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Maxwell E. Siegel: On
Losing Both One’s Parents, A Correction. |
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Emmanuel Vernadakis:
Oscar Wilde and Tennessee Williams. |
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1.
Lady Mount Temple and her Friendship with
Constance Wilde
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Dr James Gregory |
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Introduction |
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I do so wish I could
always live with you and look after you.[1] |
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So wrote Constance Wilde to her distant cousin Georgina
Cowper-Temple, Lady Mount Temple, in a letter in November 1892 in which she
called Georgina, a lady of seventy years (and thirty-six years her senior), a
‘big child’.[2] The step-daughter-in-law
of Lord Palmerston, and a friend of such major Victorian cultural figures as
John Ruskin, Dante Gabriele Rossetti and Christina Rossetti and George
MacDonald, Georgina had become renowned for her private kindness and
sympathy, and her public philanthropy.
She became a public figure through her support for sanitary knowledge
for women, for her anti-vivisection and vegetarianism, all causes which had
also been embraced by her husband the Whig statesman and philanthropist Lord
Mount Temple. But William Francis
Cowper-Temple, the ‘angel’ of her life, died in 1888, and Georgina’s
widowhood was to be one of increasing invalidism, and a mounting sense of
sorrows. Yet in the final decade of
her life, she continued to provide comfort and inspiration to many
people. Among those she gave comfort
to, was Constance Wilde, a woman who desperately needed a maternal
figure. Although the importance of
Lady Mount Temple in the drama of Oscar Wilde’s life has been recognised (as
her presence in the recent film Wilde
suggested) the relationship between Constance Wilde and Georgina
Cowper-Temple has not been the subject of any detailed study.[3] This research note draws
on the hundreds of letters Constance wrote to Georgina over the period
1890-1898 which have survived, in order to recreate, at least partially, this
relationship. A full picture of the
relationship would need to study the letters, ‘sweet’ and ‘dear’ as Constance
described them, which Georgina wrote (or had written for her, for she was
increasingly infirm). Unfortunately,
none appear to be available.
Nevertheless, the echoes of Georgina’s letters in Constance’s reply,
and the allusions to personal circumstances, are an important source for
Georgina’s own life in this period, when she became unable to keep the diary
which she had kept for decades. |
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I |
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The relationship began during 1889, a year after the death
of Lord Mount Temple, when Constance, who had been married to Oscar Wilde
since May 1884, saw Georgina and and was captivated by her (and ‘loved you’,
she said), but as she recalled ‘could not speak to you – what a holy day in
my life’.[4] How they met is unclear,
though Constance’s friends included from about the same period as she became
acquainted with Georgina, the dowager Lady Sandhurst (who died in 1892),
another philanthropic woman who believed in magnetism and the medical power
massage and who had befriended the Mount Temples in the 1880s. In 1889 Georgina invited Constance to stay
at Babbacombe Cliff (sometimes spelt ‘Babbacombecliff’), her pre-Raphaelite
haven perched on the cliff at Babbacombe near Torquay.[5] |
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From that point, they became close friends, visiting each
other, corresponding and sharing, amongst other things, a taste for philanthropy,
an interest in the works of Dante Aligheri, mysticism and the occult.[6] They attended Sunday
church services in London together, met at Georgina’s house at 9 Cheyne Walk
in Chelsea (near to the Wildes’ own home at 16 Tite Street, so that in 1891
Constance could tell Georgina that she passed her house everyday[7]), viewed Edward Burne
Jones’ paintings together and attended lectures by the unitarian minister
(and noted economist and medievalist) Philip H. Wicksteed on Dante, and talks by a Mr and
Mrs Bowles on Christian Science. Constance
sent William Vernon’s book Readings on the Purgatorio of Dante, and helped arrange extracts and translations
when Georgina became interested in creating copies of Dante’s Paradiso, Convito, and other works.[8] She fetched books for her
from 9 Cheyne Walk, knitted her gloves, sent her photographs of her sons, a
signed copy of Oscar Wilde’s second collection of fairytales, A House
of Pomegranates, and pictures by George Frederick Watts (who sketched a
portrait of Georgina with Constance Wilde in attendance[9]) and others. She chatted to Georgina about the symbolism
of Ibsen’s plays.[10] Georgina’s gifts to her
young friend included an Italian Bible (Bibbia),
and Confessions of St Augustine.[11] |
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Oscar Wilde was to complain that his wife had no
understanding of his art, as one of his latest biographers has stated, ‘there
is scarce evidence of her being especially well attuned to Oscar’s writings’.[12] What Georgina would have
gathered from Constance was an inaccurate sense of Oscar’s writings. When Constance mentioned his latest work,
for instance, she quoted some suitably religious aphorisms from the play to
be known as Lady Windermere’s Fan (in which, incidentally, there was a
character called Mrs Cowper-Cowper), such as ‘religion is so near to
us that we sometimes do not see its beauty’.[13] We do not know what
Georgina thought of Oscar Wilde when she actually met him, as her surviving
diaries end in 1890, and in that year, when visits from Wilde are noted, such
as 16 June and (shortly after her return from an attempt to recuperate her
adopted daughter Juliet in Geneva) 26 October, she recorded no comments on
her feelings about her friend’s famous husband, though she noted that she was
reading the recently published ‘Dorian Grey’ [sic] on
30 June, and reading his articles at Babbacombe in July.[14] She also visited
Constance, then unwell, on Christmas Day.[15] |
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To what extent Georgina’s impression of Wilde’s work
may have been distorted as a result of Constance is unclear, but she would
have gained a clear insight, from the correspondence, into the desperately lonely
life that Constance led. For
Constance, meeting Georgina gave her an enduring sense of hope, so she told
her in August 1892. This was probably
the year when she started to realise the truth about her marriage, and a
month after her husband had gone to a German spa town with Lord Alfred
Douglas, ‘Bosie’, ostensibly to recover his health.[16] We lack the letters from
the early years of their relationship, if indeed there were any. But from 1891 a steady stream came from
Constance, mostly dated, and penned in her neat hand. |
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Alice Oliphant, the first wife of the extraordinary
Laurence Oliphant (novelist and journalist, diplomat, and mystic) had called
Georgina her ‘Mother-in-God’, ‘Motherling’ and signed herself in her letters
as ‘Your very own child’.[17] Constance Wilde was to
echo this, calling Georgina her ‘darling mother’, ‘santissima madre’, ‘madre
dolorossa’, ‘mothery’ and ‘darling Ani’, and signing herself in her frequent
letters as ‘Bambina’ and ‘Bindweed Bambina’.[18] These letters came almost
daily, for Constance could ‘not bear that a bit of me should not be with you
every morning’.[19] Letter writing became ‘my
island of refuge too for a few minutes in each day’.[20] In her letters she
chatted about her family life: telling Georgina about Oscar’s work and how
her sons were, finding comfort in sharing her life and thoughts.[21] She was quite explicit in
her letters about the comfort she drew from her relationship with Georgina in
contrast to the icy relationship with her own mother, Adelaide, who had
remarried in 1878 (and who was to survive her daughter). |
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Darling, if you saw how she writes, you would not
wonder that I turn to you for love, and claim a mother’s love, because I need
it so desperately. Every new
exhibition of how little love I can get from my other mother hurts me, though
I think I am quite used to it![22] |
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She was quite close to ‘Speranza’, Lady Wilde, but it was
Georgina who appears to have been her surrogate mother.[23] |
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Oscar Wilde’s absences from Tite Street made her long for
Georgina’s company: ‘I can’t live in the quiet by myself, and I am much more
dependent than I was on fellowship and sympathy’.[24] If only she had Oscar or
Georgina with her, she told her in November 1891, London would be bearable.[25] In another letter she
told Georgina that she loved her ‘beyond any earthly thing’.[26] She imagined Georgina at
breakfast times (‘I feel as if that hour belonged to me’[27]) and when she was in
church. Georgina, in her eyes, was
‘entirely lovable’ and it is clear that she dearly wished Georgina to
reassure her that she was loved: ‘You are a perfect Mother and should have
many children- but no other babies, darling!’[28] She admitted to Georgina
that she had chosen to idolize her, Georgina becoming for her the perfection
of beauty and love, the nearest she had found to God’s idea of womanly
perfection, and she feared that her own cross would be to lose her. Constance was afraid that Georgina found
her attentions tiresome.[29] Georgina, Constance told
her in one letter, kept her ‘outside your life in London, and I never can
find out how to help you in the very least’.[30] On one occasion after
having expressed doubts about Georgina reading her letters she wrote
contritely to be allowed into the ‘nursery’ again.[31] She admitted that her
fault was jealousy, and in several letters she expressed her fears that
Georgina’s friends and relations hated her, men like Georgina’s brother
Augustus Tollemache (who had always doted on his sister) or the son of her
close friend Georgina Sumner, the stockbroker Frank Sumner (a somewhat
untrustworthy character suspected by Augustus of having designs on Georgina’s
money).[32] |
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Their relationship was founded on a shared interest in
religion (the poet Richard le Gallienne was to describe Constance as
‘evangelically religious’[33]). They both read Thomas à Kempis, the
recently discovered apocryphal ‘Gospel of St Peter’ and studied Dante in the
original Italian. The Italian poet’s
work was studied for its ‘moral lessons to help us in our little struggles’
(as Georgina’s friend Emelia Gurney was to demonstrate in her published study
of Dante in 1897).[34] When Georgina appeared to
Constance a saintly or otherworldly character, this was in fact far from
being an unusual response to her. As
Constance told her in early 1891, Lady Arabella Romilly thought her ‘like
what the dwellers in the other world must have’.[35] Constance attended
services with her in London, and also wrote Sunday services for her to read
when she was immobile. Georgina
enthralled her young friend with her recollections of the utopian activity of
Laurence and Alice Oliphant and their erstwhile prophet the American Thomas
Lake Harris. Constance told her that
she would have joined such a community, but accepted Georgina’s argument that
domestic virtues were the best.[36] Constance identified a
shared taste for the romantic too.[37] The relationship was also
deepened by their own unhappiness: Georgina’s bereavement and Constance’s
loneliness. |
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Constance loved to be in Georgina’s company, but ‘always
take the opposite side in an argument with you’, so she told Georgina,
because ‘you are always delightful when you are roused’ (a playfulness which
gives the lie to the idea that Constance was humourless).[38] A month later, Constance
refers to another argument, hoping it made Georgina sleep well: |
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You should always argue: you look so lovely when you
get excited, and I feel flattered at your condescending to fight with me! You
always get the best of it and I feel very small at the end of the argument.[39] |
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It was not surprising that the nickname that Georgina used
for Constance, which seems to have delighted her, was ‘Lady Cantankerary’
(presumably after Pinero’s play of 1893, the Second Mrs Tanqueray).[40] |
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Probably she sensed from Georgina, or from friends such as
Frank Sumner, that there was unquiet about the Wildes’ married life. She wrote defensively to Georgina in late
January 1891: |
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Lest Mr Sumner imagine that I am neglecting Oscar, he
is dining out! And in self-defence I must deny that I ever neglect him, or
put him anywhere but first in my life-duties.
Oscar has, I am sure, told you what he feels that you have been to me
in my life, and he would not be a true husband if he were not grateful to
you, and anxious that I should give you now what I can, that can be of even
small interest to your dear sorrow-laden heart. Surely you do not think I neglect either my
husband or children? … If I had a mother who cared for me (an earth-mother) I
should most certainly go and see her every day, and why therefore should I
not come and see my spiritual mother?[41] |
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In Easter 1891 Constance was with Georgina at Babbacombe,
and able to feel nearer to her at church than when Georgina had other company
at 9 Cheyne Walk.[42] She frequently almost
begged Georgina to let her come to her at Babbacombe and read to her and
listen to her.[43] She longed for Georgina’s
‘nursing arms’.[44] Georgina explained to
Constance in person something of the life of the utopian Oliphants: ‘Perhaps
you are right, and simple domestic virtues are the best,’ Constance told her.[45] The three weeks which she
was allowed to spend with
Georgina in the ‘blessed gabled house’ at Babbacombe in 1891, perfect weeks
when Georgina promised to love and spoil her, and (having been a longstanding
advocate of medical massage) had even rubbed Constance’s neck for rheumatism,
were thereafter frequently returned to in her letters to Georgina. Constance preferred to have Georgina’s
company to herself, telling her friend that she hated gay visitors and
expeditions.[46] She pined for Georgina’s
company especially whilst Oscar was away in Paris, telling her friend that
‘London is unnatural without you’.[47] Oscar wasn’t coming back,
she told Georgina in mid-November, for he was writing a one act play in
French ‘and enjoys Paris and French people who are very kind to him’.[48] Almost a week later she
promised to send Georgina a signed copy of The House of Pomegranates,
and asked her if she could promote the book as a Christmas gift amongst her
friends, ‘poor Oscar’s books never seem to sell properly!’[49] |
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Missing Georgina’s company, letters continued to be an
important way of keeping in touch with her ‘darling friend with the ethereal
eyes and the ear of Michel Angelo’.[50] ‘Hearts live by being
wounded’, she quoted from Oscar’s play A Woman of No Importance, in
August 1892, telling Georgina that this would be graven on her tomb when she
died.[51] She was delighted at
witnessing Georgina’s acquaintance with the artist George Frederick Watts
(whose portrait of Georgina was in his gallery of modern worthies): |
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I think it is the most touchingly beautiful thing that
ever happened, and what I shall remember to the end - that sacrifice of love
from him to you and from you to him.
You don’t know what it has been to sit by and see you both giving
reverential homage from soul to soul.[52] |
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And: |
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If ever you are together long enough, Mr Watts is
going to paint you, and I prophecy that it will be his most beautiful
work. God keep you both safe for this
consummation of a life-time’s work in the cause of beauty and goodness. He said that you always presented to him
the impression of a ‘perfume’ …[53] |
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In the absence of Georgina’s company Constance also had the
comfort of photographs, as well as her own portrait of the ‘Mothery’ which
she commissioned from Henriette Corkran, and which was made to look ‘mystical
and dreamful’.[54] She also treasured a ring
and a daisy brooch which Georgina gave her. |
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The two women planned to renew their uplifting reading
together in late 1892, reading the Bible, Plato and Browning in the morning
and Ruskin and novels in the afternoon and evening.[55] But when Constance met
Georgina in Babbacombe in September it proved to be a cause for worry, for
Constance was told that ‘I depressed and worried you’.[56] She assured Georgina as
she returned to London that she was happy.
Then in October 1892 Georgina had a serious accident when she fell,
after attending a lecture on Plato with Constance.[57] The next month Georgina
let Babbacombe to Constance for three months and Constance brought her sons
to Torquay to improve their health.[58] Oscar Wilde wrote to
Georgina to thank her for letting them stay at a place which Constance ‘so
much loves, and where so much love has been given to her’.[59] But she found the place
sad without Georgina, and avoided the sacred space of the ‘Wonderland’, a
room notable for its pictures reproduced from Blake, Burne-Jones and others,
until the 7th December when Oscar, who joined her, wanted her to
be there, ‘so I am going to sit here once a week to please him!’ Medical
experts had advised Oscar to avoid London life for his health. Oscar, she told Georgina, ‘is so enchanted
with the house, and wants to live here always’ and a few days later, she
wrote that he ‘loves this place more than ever’.[60] Oscar and the children
enjoyed feeding the pigeons and other birds, and Oscar also enjoyed exploring
Torquay. Constance, although she could
hardly afford it, hired a piano, and arranged the texts in the ‘Convito’ book. She sent letters of comfort to a depressed
Georgina in London, who was troubled by Juliet’s illnesses.[61] |
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On the 10th December 1892 Constance told
Georgina, |
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Oscar had yesterday such a beautiful letter from the
brother of a young man who has died lately in Australia, beautiful to me I
mean because it is so full of this boy’s love for Oscar. I will write a copy of it and send
you. I should like you to see how good
Oscar’s influence is on young men …[62] |
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A few days later Constance wrote: |
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I am afraid that Oscar is breaking the tenth
commandment here every day, and he is quite angry with me for not taking the
cottage, but you so snubbed me about it that I thought you must have some
personal objection to me as a tenant, or perhaps thought that I would not pay
my rent, or had some private reason that I knew nothing of!!![63] |
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The next day she asked Georgina: |
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Why do you haunt me so at night that I cannot sleep,
and when I do sleep have dreadful dreams about you, either that you are ill,
or that you are angry with me, or- worse than all- that you take no notice of
me?[64] |
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Georgina was irritated by her young friend’s attentions
when Constance telegraphed in anxiety to inquire about her in January 1893.[65] |
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Going over to Paris to see her husband briefly, Constance
learned that Oscar wanted to stay at Babbacombe again, until March, ‘and
write his play for Mr Hare, and I know that you would like him to do this’.[66] Georgina gave her
permission, for Oscar Wilde stayed at Babbacombe Cliff until March 1893,
looking after his sons but also entertaining his lover Bosie and Bosie’s
tutor, the scholar Campbell Dodgson (subsequently Keeper of Prints and
Drawings at the British Museum). Oscar
was working on a play, the future A
Woman of No Importance. The
dissonance between the decadent life Wilde was living there with Bosie, and
the high-mindedness of Babbacombe and its absent hostess needs no stressing![67] |
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Whilst this was happening Constance was in Italy on a
holiday with an aunt. From Italy she
sent frequent letters back to Georgina in London, and she wrote a diary and
took photographs with her Kodak so that she could tell her friend about her
holiday. Constance enjoyed Italy but
was troubled by neuralgia of the back.
She sent her sympathies to Georgina (whose photograph was always with
her), anxious about the state of her sister-in-law’s health and then
commiserating when Marguerite Tollemache died.[68] They sent flowers to each
other. When she returned she visited
Georgina in London, and kept her informed about her daily life: attending
talks by William Morris, the services at Philip Wicksteed’s chapel, meetings
of theosophists, the lectures of the reformer Miss Henrietta Frances Lord’s
‘Bond of Union’, and the literary critic John Churton Collins. Then in August, Georgina learnt from
Constance that her husband was ‘so cold to me and so nice to others’ at
Grossmith’s (the actor) at Goring on Thames.[69] His butler knew more
about his plans than she did, she told Georgina; ‘Darling, what am I to do? I
ought not to trouble you, but I must ask, and you need not answer!’ Kind
words came back to her from Georgina.[70] In September she was
briefly at Babbacombe with Georgina, attempting to work on the books
(cataloguing them), and evidently telling Georgina something about her
troubles, ‘I cannot say, my small troubles’.[71] She was delighted that
Georgina – increasingly immobilised – came up to her room to wish her good
morning. |
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She sent a letter at the start of October telling Georgina
that Oscar was so much better ‘in every way’.[72] The solution appeared to
be for him to have a couple of rooms of his own in London where he could
write, which would bring him home so much more.[73] If her husband’s problems
were seemingly being addressed, Lady Wilde was ill, and in Constance’s
opinion, acquiescing in ‘such dreadful things’ by Willie, Oscar’s
brother. With her oldest son Cyril,
Constance stayed briefly with a friend of Georgina’s in October, the
homoeopathist and medium, Eliza Wagstaff, in Leighton Buzzard, Bedfordshire.[74] Letters came daily from
Fryth in Northumberland to Babbacombe when the Wildes stayed there in
November. |
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Georgina was confiding in Constance about her fears about
her adopted daughter Juliet – probably about her health, but possibly about
Juliet’s unsuitable engagement – and her young friend told her not to harm
herself or her adopted daughter by her anxiety.[75] Constance was also keen
to find out about a new acquaintance of Georgina’s, the Catholic priest
Father Kenelm Vaughan, the brother of Cardinal Vaughan, for she was herself
attracted to Catholicism. But she told
Georgina that Oscar, though he was surprising his wife by revealing that he
went to benediction at the Brompton Oratory (which Georgina and she had
visited in late May 1890[76]), thought it would be
‘ruin to the boys if I became a “Cat”.
No Catholic boy is allowed to go to Eton or to take a scholarship at
the University’. This was by now a
rare occasion when Oscar was talking to her: |
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Remember that I can never broach these subjects to him
myself and it may be years before he speaks to me again like this, but I
shall not forget that he these moods, and last evening he said a great deal
to me. [77] |
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A day later, visiting the Burnes-Joneses, who agreed to
look after Vyvyan, she was struck by the beauty of their family life, ‘There
I am going off again into dreams of what might be, wrong and foolish of me’.[78] |
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In October 1893 Oscar returned from a quick trip to Calais,
without seeing Constance, and, so she told Georgina, ‘all my old misery over
again and another fiasco – my own fault this time, I am afraid’.[79] Constance wanted to visit
Babbacombe again, to finish her work on the books, and also to allay her
fears that Georgina was ‘always angry with me’, something she was feeling in
her dreams, so she told Georgina.[80] This appeal to Georgina,
and the clear allusions to marital unhappiness, must have touched
Georgina. Georgina invited Constance
to stay in November 1893 and she sent pathetic letters of joy, and a worried
note after hearing from Juliet about Georgina braving the North East wind.[81] |
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On All Saints Day in 1893 Constance was suggesting making
it a ‘Tennysonian winter’.[82] Constance seems to have
stayed in Juliet’s old room at 9 Cheyne Walk in early January, something
Juliet was pleased about: ‘I am so delighted you were pleased with Con: I
thought you must be. She is such a
fascinating person’.[83] |
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Sending her one note playfully signed Constanza
Cantankerary, Constance observed, ‘Oscar thinks that a very wicked name for
me, and he laughed immensely over it!’[84] She spent a few ‘sweet
minutes’ with her Mothery before travelling with Vivian to Torre Mount in
Torquay, where, bored by the absence of intellectual and uplifting thoughts,
she sent a typically impassioned note: ‘I loved you this morning and you were
sweet to me my beloved linking me to your heart nearer than ever … Never
forget that I love you intensely’.[85] She felt terribly lonely,
missing Cyril, mother and husband: ‘I hear nothing from Oscar and don’t know
whether he is in London or Paris’, and poignantly described Dean Stanley’s
marriage – she was reading his life
– as an ideal.[86] |
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Finances were tight, with Oscar making nothing, not letting
her know where he was or writing, and school fees to pay, so she had to
refuse Georgina’s offer of her London home, which Lady Mount Temple needed to
lease because her own finances were straitened.[87] Her friend dreaded
Georgina’s departure from London, which would make her own loneliness even
more dreadful.[88] She longed as ‘always’ to
keep Easter with her mothery, and was worried from hearing through the artist
Henriette Corkran, that Georgina remained ill.[89] Back in London, she
shared Georgina’s joy that Juliet was to be married, passing on to her the
good wishes of the Wattses to her (‘the moment must be so trying’), and told
her that ‘Oscar seems in better spirits and has finished the play, so I hope
to find him bright and well’.[90] She resumed her evening
visits to Cheyne Walk, and her regular correspondence then flowed to Georgina
at Babbacombe in July, as she worked on completing her Oscariana. This work continued to occupy her as she
stayed in The Haven, No.5 Worthing, renting the house of a Miss Lord, perhaps
their mutual acquaintance Henrietta Frances Lord (born 1849), a pioneer
translator of Ibsen, proponent of Froebel’s educational methods and Christian
Science, who was trying to recuperate in Matlock from her rheumatic
gout. Oscar was there too, writing the
Importance of Being Earnest (‘Oscar has written a play here, she told
Georgina, 25 August, ‘so I love this place now!’).[91] |
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Georgina asked Constance to find out if a print of a
William Blake picture had been left at Cheyne Walk, forgetting that her
friend was in Worthing most of the time, where she tried to occupy herself by
reading Middlemarch (from Lord’s library) and romances such as Anthony Hope’s
Prisoner of Zenda. ‘Lord Alfred
Douglas is staying with Oscar’, she noted.
Absence of news of Georgina led Constance to fear that her prophecy
that her friend had ‘passed completely out of my life’ was true.[92] There followed a quick
reply from her Mothery, prompting her to write ‘you shall not feel
excommunicated!’ and delighting her through her sad letter, with the thought
that her dull scrawls really were valued.[93] |
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Constance visited Georgina at Babbacombe in late September,
and returned from her paradise (having spent her time losing things) to visit
the weakening Lady Wilde, meet mutual friends such as Emily Gurney, Lord
Mount Temple’s American sister-in-law Jessie Cowper, and the artist Emily
Ford (sister of the feminist and socialist Isbaella Ford), and to screw up
courage to visit Georgina’s relatives, the Tollemaches.[94] Wordsworth and socialism
were, she told Georgina, her ‘present hobbies’ (she was attending the
Christian Social Union), but she was also full of Christian Science.[95] She told Georgina of the
death of Lord Drumlanrig, Lord Alfred Douglas’s brother, he [Bosie] ‘broke
down at Paddington yesterday, and Mr Ross told me that there was a terrible
scene there’ (Drumlanrig was the private secretary to the prime minister Lord
Rosebery, and had died in a shooting accident, but it may well have been a
suicide to protect Rosebery, for there has been speculation that they were
lovers).[96] |
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Probably in relation to the evolving scandal (with Oscar
Wilde staying in Paris to avoid the Marquess of Queensberry), Constance wrote
to Georgina in November 1894: ‘I am very distraught and worried and no one
can help me. I can only pray to help
from God’, and ended by asking Georgina to destroy the letter.[97] Constance hoped to stay
with Georgina at Babbacombe in December 1894.
Oscar’s play was coming out in the new year and she wished, so she
told her friend, that he would then go to Tangier for his health as he had
been very ill (he went with Bosie), so that she hoped she could also stay
with her ‘Mothery’ in the new year.[98] As Lady Wilde remained in
ill health too, and had not left her room for months, Georgina even extended
an invitation to her to come to Babbacombe through Constance.[99] |
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Georgina’s portrait by Watts, which Constance liked so much,
was photographed by Frederick Hollyer and sent by Georgina as a Christmas
gift to Constance in 1894. She was
ecstatic and Oscar thought it ‘beautiful as I do’.[100] Following an accident at
16 Tite Street when she fell down the stairs and damaged her back Constance’s
health was poor: electric treatment proved unsuccessful, and she found it
difficult to walk. But she had her
lectures and services to attend still: the Christian Socialist Union branch
at Chelsea and the friendship she developed with one of the ‘fashionable’
Canon Richard Eyton’s curates, Reverend Lilley (Georgina sent the curate a
gift of money through Constance).
Oscar’s new play (An Ideal Husband), she told Georgina, 5
January 1895, was ‘the most tremendous success … the most beautiful play that
he has written’.[101] A week later she sent
news of Lilley’s wedding, and Lady Wilde’s improving health. |
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II |
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This was the last letter that Constance wrote to Georgina
before 12 June 1895 to survive in the Broadlands archive, and now housed at
the University of Southampton. Between
those dates Constance’s married life was destroyed. In February 1895 Constance Wilde was at the
gabled haven of Babbacombe, where she celebrated the birthday of Georgina’s
old, and now mentally incapacitated friend, John Ruskin.[102] But her continuing back
pain meant she was in poor health. The
next time she was in Babbacombe it provided her with a haven from scandal
after her husband’s arrest, the contents of 16 Tite Street being sold by
auction at the end of April (Babbacombe was to provide a haven during the
trials, and after Oscar had been sentenced in 1897. Georgina even offered her home to Oscar as
a place of refuge between his trials).
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In April 1895 Georgina’s old friend the American Quakeress
Hannah Smith wrote to Georgina and urged her to be sympathetic to Constance
Wilde in the ‘terrible affair of her husband’s … I cannot help hoping that
thee will let her go to thee for a little while when you can.’ Hannah hoped
that Georgina would encourage Constance to divorce and return to her maiden
name for the sake of her boys.[103] In that month Constance stayed at
Babbacombe.[104] The next letter to
survive in the Broadlands Records was written in June 1895. Writing from The Grange, the home of Mrs
Frederick Roller at Clapham Common, Constance told Georgina about the need to
divorce Oscar in order to ensure her sons would have an inheritance, and of
her plans to go to Switzerland.[105] |
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She wrote to Georgina from Switzerland, sad letters which
touched on her immobility, her loneliness, the adoption of ‘Holland’ as her
new surname. Sweet letters from her
darling Mothery made her long to be in Babbacombe.[106] The horror of visiting
Oscar in prison in September was ‘more awful than anything I have ever been
through, and worse even for him I suppose’, she told Georgina. The meeting had been conducted across the
barrier of grating and passage, and she told Georgina she could not go
through the experience again, or at least, not without the face to face
meeting that had been denied.[107] |
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The editor of More
Letters of Oscar Wilde writes of Georgina being ‘unfailingly kind to her
and her children’. This was true. Vyvyan Holland recalled Babbacombe as a
place of happiness, and visited it on several occasions in later life, such
was the attraction the memory of the ‘very tall and stately lady’ and her
house was for him.[108] But Georgina must have
been horrified by the scandal.[109] Her association with
Constance was a brave gesture since personally, as Georgina wrote to Juliet:
‘I do not think there could be a greater trial with such disgusting shame …
one cannot bear even to allude to it.
Can one touch pitch and not be defiled? You are quite right in keeping
aloof – so would I if I did not feel called upon to shelter her’.[110] Though she dreaded
meeting Constance and Cyril, she hoped though that ‘Bab’ would be an ‘ark of
refuge’ (waterproofed with the ‘pitch’, as Noah’s ark was) to the wounded
Dove.[111] She even had a message to
pass on to Oscar when he was in prison, through Constance.[112] |
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Georgina continued to correspond with Constance in 1896,
sending her photographs, books and gifts for her boys at Christmas, and
sending her news about Ruskin.
Constance wrote to her frequently, desperately unhappy and lonely,
recalling the time in Chelsea when she could see Georgina or pass her house
every day, and looking forward to being at Babbacombe again. The medical treatment in Italy proved
unsuccessful but she hoped to return to England in the spring, and see
Georgina, as well as pay another ‘pilgrimage to that dreary prison’
(Wandsworth, Oscar Wilde was to be transferred to Reading in November).[113] Oscar, Georgina learnt
from her, was ‘longing to be friends with me again but on the other hand he
is seeing again the friends that brought upon him all this disgrace and I
should indeed be a fool if I put myself into the clutches of them all. God help me if there is a God’.[114] She tried to view her
unhappiness as a purifying experience, and to draw comfort from her brother,
boys and Georgina, ‘a real Mother full of sympathy’. Though her hand was very feeble Georgina
sent her friend messages at Christmas, as Constance was operated on at the
‘Clinica del Professore Bossi’ in Genoa.[115] |
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She told Georgina about the revived plans to divorce Oscar
in order to safeguard her little money for Vyvyan and Cyril, with fears that
‘Mr Wilde … wants my wretched money’.[116] She still hoped to return
to England and visit Babbacombe in February 1896, when she recalled their
joint celebration of Ruskin’s birthday.
Shortly afterwards she intended
to visit Oscar in Reading Gaol to break the news of Lady Wilde’s death
(feeling it would be worse for him to ‘hear it from unsympathetic lips’), but
could find no one to look after the boys and allow her to fly to Georgina and
be ‘at peace’ in Torquay.[117] She wrote about the
upsetting of plans which forced her to take the boys to Germany in April
1896, her resolution to learn the horrible German language, and her nights of
desperation when only the thought of her sons saved her from ‘anything too
desperate … Life does seem awful’.[118] |
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The comfort she derived from writing to Georgina, and the
photograph she had with her always, was something, but she had an unbearable
longing to be at Babbacombe, not having seen Georgina for over a year (‘Poor
Lady Cantankerary! She is in a bad way without her beautiful friend to shew
her the ways of Love’[119]). What desperation she must have brought
Georgina, feeling the loss of close friends such as her sister-in-law, the
mystically-inclined Marguerite Tollemache, and longing to be reunited with
William her husband when she read the following: |
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You once said to me that Love with you was synonymous
with anguish but indeed Tennyson was right, although I used not to think so,
when he said, “ ‘Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved”,
and to have one’s love crushed and maimed is almost as if one had never loved
at all, and I am utterly cold now and care not much for anything or anybody
excepting of course for my boys … [120] |
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Georgina sent her Christmas presents but could not write,
and Constance asked her to communicate her news through Miss Fawcett, her
nurse. For over ten months (during
which time Constance may have glimpsed Oscar once, secretly, in prison,
before his release, which took place 18 May 1897) there is a hiatus in the
surviving correspondence, until two letters in Constance’s weakening hand
came. In the first she wrote to Juliet
Deschamps, who was at Babbacombe following the death of her husband
(Constance did not know this was why Juliet was ‘homeless’, and was afraid
that Monsieur Eugene Deschamps, an unsuccessful stockbroker in Paris had been
behaving badly) about Oscar’s return to Lord Alfred Douglas in October 1897:
‘Mine [i.e., her husband] has gone back to Naples to live near Lord A, and
says it is my fault as I did not let him see his children’.[121] In December she sent a
typed letter of thanks for Christmas books to Georgina. |
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Constance did not survive her ‘mothery’, as she had often
dreaded, dying in Genoa on the 7 April 1898, after an operation (again by
Bossi) on her spine, which an aunt and medical expert in England had strongly
advised against. Georgina received the
news shortly afterwards from Otho Holland-Lloyd, Constance’s brother, who had
arrived at Genoa too late, and from her old friend Lady Simon (wife of the
surgeon Sir John Simon).[122] How much ‘true charm and
pleasure you brought into Constance’s life, as well as spiritual help’, Otho
Holland-Lloyd told her.[123] Constance’s ‘Mothery’ was
to live for another three years. |
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III |
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The letters of Constance Wilde to Georgina Lady Mount
Temple, which must originally have been many hundreds, given the almost daily
letters she wrote to her, are a neglected source in the history of the
Wildes. The relationship between the
two women may only be glimpsed incompletely, for we lack most of the letters
Georgina wrote to Constance, though given her increasing frailty it is
unlikely that they were as many letters from her as those written by
Constance. But they still provide a
glimpse of the magnetic personality of Lady Mount Temple, attracting the
devotion of Constance and her acquaintances, even in her old age.[124] As her brother told
Georgina after Constance’s death, she had been the most spiritually near of
all her friends.[125] Constance herself said to
Georgina that she would never have another friend like her.[126] The relationship with
Constance echoed Georgina’s friendships with Emelia Gurney (a fellow patron
of reform, and Dante enthusiast) and Hannah Whittall Smith, who were able to
develop intimate friendships sustained by frequent correspondence. Georgina was a supremely loveable
character, whose temperament was interpreted by her devoted friends as
something akin to saintliness, although, as Constance noted, she hated the
idea of saints. Such admirers found in
Georgina a sympathetic ear, an engaging personality which, with its share of
the Tollemache temper, did not lack fire, and a heart which was always
prepared to carry out little or large acts of kindness. Constance gave Georgina a connection with
metropolitan moral reform and religious investigation when she was no longer
able to participate herself, and also gave another link to friends such as
G.F. Watts. Both were lonely women, although in
Georgina’s case it was the loneliness of widowhood rather than the actual
absence of friends and families, for Constance was one of many who gave her
companionship in her final years.[127] |
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Dr James Gregory, |
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Department of Languages and
European Studies, The University of Bradford, |
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November 2006 |
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Acknowledgments |
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I am most grateful to Merlin Holland, the
Executor of the Estate of Constance Holland, and the Trustees of the
Broadlands Papers, Broadlands Records, for their permission to make
quotations from the correspondence of Constance Wilde to Georgina Cowper-Temple
in this article. I am also grateful to Mr Holland for his comments and advice
on earlier drafts. |
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·
James Gregory has taught Modern British
and European History at the Universities of Durham and Southampton, and is
currently Lecturer at the University of Bradford (Department of Languages and
European Studies). His doctoral research was on the British vegetarian
movement, and a book, 'Of Victorians and Vegetarians', is to be published in
February 2007 by I.B. Tauris. He has published articles and biographical
studies on this topic. His recent research has focused on 'eccentricity' in
nineteenth-century British culture, with several monographs published on the
place of the 'eccentric' or 'character'. His ongoing research on Victorian
moral and social reform is organised around a study of the public careers and
private lives of William Cowper-Temple - Lord Mount Temple - and his second
wife Georgina. |
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[The Notes are to be found at the very end of this section] |
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2. Brendan McWilliams: Oscar Wilde and the
Weather
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[Editor’s
Note. Mr McWilliams writes a
regular column called ‘Weather Eye’ in The Irish Times. The article ‘Oscar Wilde and the Weather’
appeared on the anniversary of Wilde’s birthday, 16th October 2006, in a
version slightly cut from Mr McWilliams’ original. We are very pleased that, thanks to our
Associate Editor for Ireland, Dr
Maureen O’Connor, Mr McWilliams has given us permission to publish the
original text. This we do, just as
received.] |
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"WEATHER
EYE" FOR MONDAY, OCTOBER 16th 2006 |
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EDITORIAL
NOTES: [I]=Begin Italics; [EI]=End Italics |
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No.
5626 - THE WEATHER AND OSCAR WILDE |
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"Pray don't talk about the weather, Mr. Worthing," implores
Gwendolen in [I]The Importance of Being Earnest [EI]. "Whenever people
talk to me about the weather, I always feel quite certain that they mean
something else. And that makes me so nervous." |
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Today is the 152nd anniversary of the birth of the exquisitely talented and
magnificently named Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde on October 16th
1854. Celebrated for his barbed and clever wit, Oscar Wilde was perhaps the
most successful playwright of his day and one of the most colourful characters
of late Victorian London. But he suffered, as we know, a tragic downfall
culminating in a two-year period of imprisonment, and he spent his final days
in the inelegant Hotel d'Alsace in Paris. He died there in November, 1900. |
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Gwendolen's entreaty is one of only a few reference to weather in the plays
of Oscar Wilde, and this is scarcely surprising since the weather intrudes
little into the genteel drawing-rooms of the privileged classes he portrayed
on stage. When he does attempt a more robust approach to meteorology, as, for
example, at the beginning of Act III of [I]The Duchess of Padua [EI], it
never quite comes off; here Guido treats us to what might be a poor parody of
Lear's storm, or an inept alternative to Shakespeare's night before the Ides
in [I]Julius Caesar: |
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The wind is rising: how my ladder shook! |
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I thought that every gust would break the cords! |
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Christ! What a
night: |
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Great thunder in the heavens, and wild lightnings |
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Striking from pinnacle to pinnacle |
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Across the city, till the dim houses seem |
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To shudder and to shake as each new glare |
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Dashes adown the
street. [EI] |
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But Wilde, strangely enough, handles the weather very sensitively in his
children's stories. This is particularly so in [I]The Selfish Giant [EI],
based almost entirely on a weather theme, in which the eponymous anti-hero is
annoyed at happy children enjoying themselves in his beautiful garden. He
banishes them, but with disastrous consequences some months later: |
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"Then the Spring came, and all over the country there were little
blossoms and little birds. Only in the garden of the Selfish Giant was it
still winter. The birds did not care to sing in it, and the trees forgot to
blossom. The only people who were pleased were the Snow and the Frost, and
they invited the North Wind to stay with them, and he came. He was wrapped in
furs, and he roared all day about the garden, blowing down the chimney-pots.
And Hail came, and every day for three hours he rattled on the roof of the
castle till he broke the slates." |
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This unfortunate change of climate continues until the Giant lets the happy
children back into his garden; then winter disappears, and summer returns to
last forever. It is a simple tale - but beautifully told. |
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ENDS |
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3. Emmanuel Vernadakis: Oscar Wilde, Tennessee
Williams and the Palimpsest of the Courtesan
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[Editor’s
Note: This is the introduction to a paper read at the Colloquium ‘La
reprise en littérature’ at the Université Lumière Lyon 2, 13th &
14th October. It is expected that the
full text of Dr Vernadakis’ paper will be published in the Proceedings of the
Colloquium.] |
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According to the Grand Dictionnaire
universelle Larousse du XIXe siècle, a courtesan is a woman who ‘sets a
reserve price on her favours but whose distinction and good manners make her
stand out from the others.’ The term
derives from the Italian cortegiana, an educated young woman hired by
the Senate to entertain the (male) Venetian nobility with her skills, both
intellectual and physical. From the Renaissance on, the courtesan came to be
a standard character in literature. |
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In the present paper I examine a string of
courtesans from the works of Oscar Wilde and Tennessee Williams. These are
Wilde’s Salomé and Myrrhina and Williams’s Alma. Salomé is the title character in a drama
published in 1893 (wriiten in French in 1891) and Myrrhina, the protagonist
of La Sainte Courtisane or The Woman Covered With Jewels, a 1894 fragment.
Alma, whose story Williams wrote three times over, is the heroine of the ‘The
Yellow Bird’ (1947), Summer and Smoke (1947), and The Eccentricities of a Nightingale (1971).
The aim of the paper is to look into the structure of the courtesan who is
emblematic for rewriting in the above
works, and into their structures, all five being ‘reprises’. Salomé is
a rewriting of a Biblical section, La Sainte Courtisane a rewriting of
Anatole France’s novel Thaïs,
‘The Yellow Bird,’ of La Sainte Courtisane, Summer and Smoke of
‘The Yellow Bird,’ and the Eccentricities of a Nightingale of Summer
and Smoke. |
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For the full abstract, click here. |
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3. Christopher S. Nassaar: On Recreating
Oscar.
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The opinion has been expressed that it is very
irritating to tamper with perfection and that great literary works should
remained untouched by future generations. In many cases this is probably
true, but Oscar--I would like to suggest--is an exception. A couple of years
ago, it occurred to me that much of Oscar's wit from elsewhere can be woven
into the dialogue of The Importance of Being Earnest, and that the
result would be a delightful lark. At first the idea of doing this frightened
me, but I soon gathered enough courage and actually went ahead with the
project. The result was a short novel almost twice the length of the original
play, and full of Wildean wit not found in the original. Since Oscar often borrowed wit from his
earlier works, I felt I had a distinguished precedent. |
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The novel has not been out for long and not too
many people have read it yet, but it can be accessed at the following
weblink: |
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http://www.woodfieldpublishing.com/index.html?target=p188.html&product=P188&lang=en-uk |
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[Editor’s Note:
The above link takes one to the publishing details and publisher’s
note. The book has been reviewed for THE OSCHOLARS by Emmanuel Vernadakis
and we are also pleased to say that we have been given permission by Professor
Nassaar to republish one of the chapters on our website: click here.] |
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4. Maxwell E. Siegel: On Losing Both One's
Parents: Carelessness or Tampering?
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Mr Siegel asks us to make the following
point about his article that appeared under this title in our last issue and
also in The Wildean. |
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Specifically,
I implied that the line about ‘putting postage stamps with the baby’ was in
Wilde's original four-act ‘Importance.’ It wasn't, but shows up in the
earliest known version of the three-act – the text filed with the Lord
Chancellor. Apparently, while Wilde was cutting for Alexander, he was
also adding – which is probably why Alexander finally sent him away.
The ‘postage stamp’ line was then cut before performance. So The
Wildean text differs slightly from The Oscholars. I discovered an error in it before The Wildean printed it, and Don Mead
(the editor) made the change. |
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We apologise to Mr Siegel for having published
his article with the slip uncorrected. |
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Return to the Table of Contents |
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