DECADENCE, CHRISTIANITY, AND OSCAR WILDE'S CONVERSION TO CATHOLICISM
Introduction: The Long Road to Rome
Oscar Wilde died in 1900, as he had predicted he would. “Somehow I don’t think I shall survive to see the new century,” he told his friend Robert Ross. “If another century began and I was still alive, it would really be more than the English could stand.” According to W. B. Yeats, the Decadent movement came to an end that same year: “In 1900, everybody got down off his stilts; henceforth nobody drank absinthe with his black coffee; nobody went mad; nobody committed suicide; nobody joined the Catholic church; or if they did, I have forgotten.”
Including Roman Catholicism in a list with madness, suicide, and absinthe is accurate in the context of the Decadent movement. Many of the prominent figures of the “Yellow Nineties” were converts, including Aubrey Beardsley, Ernest Dowson, Lionel Johnson, John Gray, and Marc-André Raffalovich. Francis Thompson had been baptized into the Catholic faith as a child. Philippe Jullian has remarked that Catholicism “exerted a considerable influence on the best English poets” of the fin-de-siècle, and the historian Brocard Sewell notes in his study of Gray and Raffalovich that “decadent” converts to the Church were so numerous and so prone to scandalous behavior that the Pope was careful to assign decadents who took holy orders to parishes outside of England in order to protect Catholicism’s reputation in Britain.
Wilde came close to joining the Catholic Church during his time at Oxford. His letters to William Ward, a fellow student and a Protestant, exhort Ward to allow himself to “feel the awful fascination of the Church, its extreme beauty and sentiment.” “Do try to see in the Church not man’s hand only,” Wilde wrote, “but also a little of God’s.” In another letter to Ward, Wilde confessed to being “caught in the fowler’s snare, in the wiles of the Scarlet Woman — I may go over in the vac.”
Wilde did not go over in the vac, and would have faced negative consequences if he had. His college friend David Hunter-Blair was himself a devout Catholic and would have been delighted to see Wilde join the Church, but for the most part Wilde’s friends and teachers were Protestants who considered conversion to Rome something of a scandal. The last legal penalties on Roman Catholics had been removed before Wilde was born, but anti-Catholic sentiment survived, as can be seen in the British public’s reaction to Pope Pius IX’s decision to reinstate Catholic hierarchy in Britain and appoint the first archbishop of Westminster since the Reformation. As Patrick Allitt puts it, “Anti-Catholic sermons rang from Anglican pulpits, Queen Victoria said her throne was under attack, and the Prime Minister, Lord John Russell, fanned the flames by denouncing the ‘papal aggression.’” The promulgation of the doctrine of papal infallibility in 1870 worsened matters. One of Wilde’s cousins all but struck Wilde out of his will for even considering conversion to the Roman Catholic Church — Wilde’s father received £8000, his brother £2000, and Wilde himself only £100, and that on the condition that he remained a Protestant. Wilde would also have been forced to abandon his involvement with the Freemasons, an organization he had joined in 1875 and which, according to a letter in 1877, he was “rather keen on.”
Not all of the obstacles were external. Wilde himself had considerable doubts, as can be seen in his hesitation to accept an invitation to meet with Cardinal John Henry Newman: “I am awfully keen for an interview . . . [but] perhaps my courage will fail, as I could hardly resist Newman I am afraid.” He declined the invitation.
A priest at a chapel near Oxford where Wilde often visited Mass offered Hunter-Blair an explanation of why his friend Oscar’s fascination with Catholicism did not result in a conversion:
The first six months of Wilde’s sentence were the most difficult, and, as he told André Gide later, he often thought of suicide. In July 1896 he was granted to permission to keep writing materials in his cell and given access to a larger library of books, which improved his health and spirits. Included on the list of books requested by Wilde were a biography of St. Francis and the works of Dante, as well as the novel En Route by J.-K. Huysmans, which tells the story of a French aesthete who is inspired by the beauty of the Church to abandon decadence and enter a Trappist monastery. On the day of his release from prison, Wilde sent a messenger to a group of London Jesuits with a request for permission to go on a six-month retreat with them. While waiting for the messenger to return with an answer, Wilde explained to the gathered company that be believed the religions of the world to be like the colleges of a university, with Roman Catholicism “the greatest and most romantic of them.” When the Jesuits sent back a note denying Wilde permission to go on a contemplative retreat, according to Ada Leverson’s account Wilde “broke down and sobbed bitterly.”
Oscar Wilde contracted cerebral meningitis in Paris three years after his release from prison and died on the afternoon of November 30, 1900. The night before, Robert Ross had called Father Cuthbert Dunne to Wilde’s bedside and helped him administer the sacraments of baptism and extreme unction. Wilde was barely able to speak at the time, although Father Dunne later insisted, “from the signs he gave as well as from his attempted words, I was satisfied as to his full consent.”
It is possible to attribute Wilde’s deathbed conversion entirely to Ross’s efforts rather than Wilde’s own, but the history of their friendship complicates this interpretation. Far from goading Wilde into conversion, Ross had in the two years before Wilde’s death discouraged him from taking such a step. As he wrote to Adela Schuster in December 1900:
A study of Oscar Wilde’s conversion to Catholicism runs the danger of being as ambiguous and obscure as Wilde’s relationship with the Roman Church. His story cannot be made to fit conventional conversion narratives. His life did not follow the pattern of sincere faith followed by sincere repentance, as did John Gray’s, nor that of openly dueling allegiances to flesh and spirit, as did Francis Thompson’s. Neither can Wilde’s Catholicism be rehabilitated by overstating the agreement between Catholic philosophy and his own. There are similarities – an affinity for ritual, skepticism toward reason, and indifference to efficiency – but the most pious critic could not make an orthodox Christian of the man who wrote Salomé. However, the preponderance of Catholic converts among Decadent writers suggests a connection between aestheticism and Catholicism.
To the extent that Decadence disregards certain facts of human life and nature, it cannot be sustained for a lifetime. To the extent that Catholicism fulfills the ideals of the Decadent movement while avoiding its missteps, it makes sense that Decadent writers turned to it in their maturity. Joseph Pearce’s declaration that “the way of decadence was only the way of the Cross” is too simple, but but a study of Oscar Wilde may reveal Catholicism to be Aestheticism’s culmination.
Intentions: "The Decay of Lying" and "The Critic as Artist"
Wilde ends “The Truth of Masks” by admitting that he does not “agree with everything that I have said in this essay. There is much with which I entirely disagree.” He implicitly protects the judgments of “The Critic as Artist” and “The Decay of Lying” with the same disclaimer by presenting them in dialogue form. Every conclusion about Wilde’s own beliefs drawn from Intentions is a matter of inference, although the book’s many consistencies may serve as a guide.
One thing than can be inferred from “The Critic as Artist” is that its author regards most of his fellow Englishmen with a degree of contempt. They are the masses who will forgive “everything except genius,” the public which “always feels perfectly at ease when mediocrity is talking to it.” Wilde speaks of “the elect,” and means it. Unfortunately for prospective hagiographers, he disdains their religion and their morality as much as their taste. “To be good, according to the vulgar standard of goodness,” Gilbert explains, “merely requires a certain amount of sordid terror, a certain lack of imaginative thought, and a certain low passion for middle-class respectability.” Gilbert also offers the epigram that would haunt Wilde during his libel suit: “All art is immoral.”
To wring crypto-Catholicism from such an avowedly anti-moralistic text would be to hazard blasphemy. However, the philosophies of Gilbert and Vivian share a crucial weakness which, taken with the rest of their beliefs, makes clear how reasonable it would be to think of them as eventual catechumens. They both prefer art to life. They both speak for whole paragraphs about art’s superiority and life’s vulgarity. Life, from their “artistic point of view,” is a failure. Vivian in “The Decay of Lying” attacks literary realism with special zeal. He considers it better for life to imitate art than the reverse because too great a fidelity to accuracy will leave an author nothing to discuss but curates, match-girls, and coster-mongers, “their dreary vices, and their drearier virtues.” The goal of the artist is to light a path of escape from the “depressing and humiliating reality” of human nature which reveals all men to be equally dull.
Wilde humiliates reality even further when he has Gilbert say that the critic, who is yet another degree removed from action, is even more of a true individualist than the artist. The interpreter of Hamlet is subject to more restrictions than the poet fitting his thoughts to the form of a sonnet, which for Gilbert makes criticism stand in “the same relation to creative work that creative work does to the visible world of form and colour, or the unseen world of passion and thought.”
Neither of Wilde’s glib mouthpieces confronts the obvious truth that life cannot be ignored. Its catastrophes may “happen in the wrong way and to the wrong people,” but they do happen. Art may serve as a distraction from life, and may even be ruled its superior, but it can never replace it. This raises the question of whether the advantages of the contemplative and artistic life can be translated to reality and thereby avoid the tragic consequences of solipsism. It turns out that the application of Gilbert and Vivian’s epigrams to life rather than art looks surprisingly like some exotic strain of high-church Catholic orthodoxy.
The Church affirms Wilde’s paradox that a man cultivates his individuality by imitating something other than himself. Wilde cites Goethe’s aesthetic maxim that “it is by working within limits that the master reveals himself,” but he might as easily have quoted the Gospel of Matthew: “Take my yoke upon you and learn of me…and ye shall find rest unto your souls, for my yoke is sweet and my burden is light.” The limitations imposed by Christ on the human soul are no more limiting than the constraints imposed by poetic form on the master poet. In fact, both are liberating. The paradox of an authenticity achieved through self-limitation is a translation into aesthetic terms of the moral paradox of liberty through slavery. Wilde himself admits that the imitation of the character Jesus Christ qualifies as an example of life imitating art.
The similarities between imitation of Christ as a moral figure and imitation of art as an aesthetic ideal can be recognized by any moralist, religious or secular, but to render Wilde’s praise of the critical temperament applicable to life requires a more distinctly Christian perspective. “People sometimes say that actors give us their own Hamlets, and not Shakespeare’s,” Gilbert says, but “there is no such thing as Shakespeare’s Hamlet” apart from an actor’s singular interpretation. “When Rubinstein plays to us the Sonata Appassionata of Beethoven, he gives us not merely Beethoven, but also himself, and so gives us Beethoven absolutely.” The similarity between this idea and Matthew 10:19 is partial but significant: “But when they deliver you up, take no thought how or what ye shall speak: for it shall be given you in that same hour what ye shall speak.” Far more essential to a Christian interpretation of Intentions is the theology of God’s ownership of each human life. Man is not his own Creator, nor is he even the author of his own life story. Lucifer’s claim that he was self-begotten was a grievous sin, and it was God who hardened Pharaoh’s heart, not Pharaoh. His eye is on the sparrow, and He has promised to care for men as diligently as he cares for the lilies of the field. Divine Providence is the author of human lives, and yet each man is his own life’s interpreter, or, to use Wilde’s language, its critic.
Wilde, it seems, shared in the fate of mankind, which had by his own admission not yet satisfied “the desire to know the connection between Beauty and Truth.” His confidence in his ability to fashion his own life with exquisite design could not exist long in a world where fate “has hemmed us round with the nets of the hunter,” nor could his indifference to the objective world survive the suffering and sorrow to be found in prison. However, the theology of aesthetics that he puts forward in Intentions suggests, though does not fulfill, the Christian sentiments that would offer him a solution to the problem of evil.
A Woman of No Importance
Despite his insistence that there can be no such thing as a moral or immoral book, the moral content of Wilde’s own work should not be ignored. When Sir Edward Clarke asked Wilde to endorse his summary of The Picture of Dorian Gray for the purposes of the Queensberry libel trial, in which it was Clarke’s purpose to prove that the book was not an example of sodomitic and corruptive influence, Wilde was careful to point out to the courtroom that Clarke had made one important omission:
Wilde’s correction to his own counsel suggests that Wilde believed, in spite of his own antinomianism, that any interpretation of Dorian Gray that neglects the book’s moral content is necessarily incomplete.
The moral content of A Woman of No Importance is apparent without any exegesis from the dock. It indicts the English upper class for treating adulterers and adulteresses differently, for adhering so strictly to God’s laws about infidelity at the expense of his commandment to love thy neighbor, and for their thoroughgoing philistinism in the face of Lord Illingworth’s incisive wit. Mrs. Arbuthnot was cast out of respectable society for having a child outside of marriage, but Lord Henry Weston, whom the American Puritan Hester Worsley describes as “ a man with a hideous smile and a hideous past,” is a man without whom no dinner-party is complete. “What of those whose ruin is due to him?” asks Hester. “They are outcasts. They are nameless. If you met them in the street you would turn your head away.”
Her first suggestion for a fairer system is that both man and woman should be punished and “both go forth into the desert to love or loathe each other there,” but she amends this when she discovers that Mrs. Arbuthnot, who is the mother of her beloved Gerald Arbuthnot as well as the most moral of the women she meets at Lady Hunstanton’s country house, is a fallen woman. “I was wrong,” she admits. “God’s law is only love.”
It would be strange to assume that Hester Worsley’s moral thinking is coincident with the dramatist’s. That her impassioned speech on justice is followed by an anticlimactic request from Lady Caroline that Hester pass the cotton just behind her, as long as she is standing up, confirms this. Her speeches condemning English unfairness to women seem to have been written in earnest, but her final decision to leave England for the classless country of America does not sound like the man who said of Lord Illingworth, “If you can bear the truth, he is MYSELF.” It is Wilde’s double Lord Illingworth who completes A Woman of No Importance’s moral vision. For example, his statement “My dear Rachel, intellectual generalities are always interesting, but generalities in morals mean absolutely nothing.” This is a more Wildean refutation of the English system of ostracizing adulteresses regardless of the circumstances of their adultery than Hester’s. The other characters regard Lord Illingworth as immoral, and justly so, but this only makes it more remarkable when he offers a moral aphorism that is so plausible.
In fact, his behavior raises the question of whether morality or immorality is more humane. Lady Caroline takes class very seriously, whereas Lord Illingworth calls the Peerage “the best thing in fiction the English have ever done.” Lady Caroline’s classism is tempered by morality and compassion. Because his is not, Lord Illingworth is free to be unserious about it, and therefore more merciful. Wilde is not simply interested in portraying Lord Illingworth as the most entertaining figure in the play, but also in making clear that the man who does not take anything seriously is not subject to the puritanical and bourgeois injustices that his aphorisms ridicule. His indifference makes him less unkind than his supposed moral betters.
Wilde’s claim that Lord Illingworth was modeled after himself is an echo of a claim he made about The Picture of Dorian Gray in a letter to Ralph Payne in 1894: “Basil Hallward is what I think I am: Lord Henry what the world thinks me.” This is not the only similarity between the two characters: Wilde reused several of Lord Henry Wotton’s lines in scenes between Lord Illingworth and Mrs. Allonby. Ada Leverson made light of this economy in her one page satire “An Afternoon Tea”: “The two men, exactly alike, who are smoking gold-tipped cigarettes?… Those are Lord Illingworth and Lord Henry Wotton. They always say exactly the same thing.”
Significantly, these two dialogues involve not two men, as in “The Decay of Lying,” but a man and a woman. They also take gender as a topic for discussion. The first act of A Woman of No Importance may be taken as the more mature version, although Camille Paglia has pointed out that the Duchess of Monmouth’s claim that she has disarmed Lord Henry Wotton “of your shield, Harry: not of your spear” has some bearing on the place of gender in the Wildean parlor.
The genders of the two wits are vital to their conversation’s structure and content. Mrs. Allonby’s wit reveals itself in long and inventive speeches when she is in strictly female company, but, in an expression of her feminine subordination to the leadership of men, most of her best jokes with Lord Illingworth are in immediate response to lines of his. The joke that “the Book of Life begins with a man and a woman in a garden” and “ends with Revelations” depends upon the speakers’ sexes. Lord Illingworth likens his exchanges with Mrs. Allonby to a romance, which makes their discussion of wit’s place within a love affair especially relevant:
Wilde connects his belief in complementary roles for men and women to religion by explaining the difference between the sexes in terms of worship. Men can be comedians because laughter is the proper occupation of the object of worship; women cannot because their place is to revere and not to be revered. If this is the relationship between worship and humor, then God, as an object of worship, has access to a kind of comedy that mankind does not. In the same way that De Profundis put forward the idea of Christ as mankind’s storyteller, A Woman of No Importance suggests that God might fruitfully be understood as a comedian, which would carry some of the same advantages that come with a storyteller God. “The world has always laughed at its own tragedies,” Lord Illingworth claims, “that being the only way in which it has been able to bear them.” In Reading Gaol Wilde encountered a tragedy that he could not turn into a bearable joke. If Wilde had a commitment to finding the humor in every situation, as his lifelong flippancy suggests, then his success at this task demands not an expert humorist but a divine one. If God can laugh where Wilde could not, then the task left to Wilde is not comedy but worship.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
A review of The Picture of Dorian Gray published by the St. James Gazette suggested that a book so offensive to morality deserved only to be “chucked into the fire.” In Wilde’s reply, published two days later, he criticized this attack: “The poor public, hearing, from an authority so high as your own, that this is a wicked book that should be coerced and suppressed by a Tory Government, will, no doubt, rush to read it. But, alas! they will find that it is a story with a moral.” However, the end of Wilde’s letter to the editors calls the story’s moral “an artistic error.” This tension between Christian morality, which calls excessive love of beauty a sin, and aestheticism, which calls morality an artistic error, stands at the center of the novel.
The two principles are personified by Lord Henry Wotton and Basil Hallward. Wilde’s comment that “Basil Hallward is what I think I am: Lord Henry what the world thinks me” suggests that in the conflict between corruption and conscience his ultimate loyalty lay with the latter. Basil Hallward’s conscience is not merely moral but particularly Christian, as can be seen, for instance, in his reaction when Dorian reveals his own disfigured portrait:
I have argued that Wilde understood God’s relationship to creation as being like an artist’s relationship to his art. Basil Hallward’s relationship to Dorian Gray’s portrait illuminates this comparison, in particular the inability of either God or the artist to exercise control over their creations. Not only is a work of art completely independent of its creator’s commands, it is even free to disregard its creator’s intentions and the plans for which the creator designed it. Basil Hallward could not have realized that the portrait he painted would gain the magical ability to prevent Dorian Gray from aging. In much the same way, Wilde believed, God did not realize what he was creating when he made Oscar Wilde.
De Profundis
De Profundis contains several explicit renunciations — of Lord Alfred Douglas, of shallowness, of pleasure for pleasure’s sake — but its most interesting revelations are those it does not put so plainly. A close reading shows that many of the decadent beliefs that had obstructed Wilde’s path to Christian faith no longer existed by the time of his release from prison.
Wilde’s flippancy was one of his most enduring traits, and one of the most problematic. Friends like Robert Ross, who had entered the Roman Church himself some years before, hesitated to recommend Wilde for catechesis because they feared that he was not in earnest. “I wish you were not so hard to poor heretics,” complained Wilde to Ross in a letter, “and would admit that even for the sheep who has no shepherd there is a Stella Maris to guide it home.”
De Profundis shows no sign of Wilde’s usual cultivated insincerity. In fact, for the work of a dramatist renowned for his comedy it contains very few jokes at all. This may be attributable to Wilde’s cross-examination by Edward Carson, during which he was confronted with the danger of persistent public levity about serious matters. When Carson asked Wilde if iced champagne was a favorite drink of his, Wilde answered, “Yes, strongly against my doctor’s orders.” Carson, who was growing impatient with his witness’s jokes, responded, “Never mind the doctor’s orders.” In his closing remarks, however, Carson used Wilde’s wit against him, reminding his audience that iced champagne is something “which Mr. Wilde indulges in, contrary to the directions of his doctor.” Another joke that produced the same effect, if more immediately, was Wilde’s notorious answer that he did not kiss Walter Grainger because “he was a peculiarly plain boy.” If the material consequence of Wilde’s suit against Queensberry was his imprisonment, the more lasting literary consequence was that he was cast “from a sort of eternity of fame to a sort of eternity of infamy” – a consequence in part attributable to the popular perception that Wilde was impertinent to the court and the law and not deserving of public sympathy. No wonder, then, that the author did not put the levity of his epigrams into De Profundis.
The same uncharacteristic seriousness can be found in the recurring themes of De Profundis, including the most prominent of these, which is pain. Sorrow is a motif in De Profundis, “the supreme emotion of which man is capable,” “the most sensitive of all things,” “my new world.” It replaces exquisite poses with the “intense…extraordinary reality” of the suffering man. Wilde gropes for a word to describe what he has received at the hands of his suffering, and decides that it can only be described as “revelation.”
None of these lessons is particularly Christian. Moral atheists acknowledge that suffering often jars men into empathy, that the more a man loves the more he will suffer and sometimes vice versa, and that selfish indifference to the suffering of one’s neighbors is made more difficult by the unavoidable reality of one’s own pain. Some will even recognize that suffering on the part of the perpetrator is necessary to balance the injustice of a crime. However, Wilde does not understand suffering simply as a pragmatic means of learning a valuable lesson, nor as the mechanism by which the geometric scales of justice are restored. He is careful to note that is suffering is unjust, and he is adamant that he cannot return to a life of pleasure despite having already learned the lessons which sorrow had to teach him. To understand the importance of injustice and permanence to Wilde’s struggle to comprehend his own suffering, something more than secular logic is necessary.
“I know not whether Laws be right/Or whether Laws be wrong,” Wilde says in “The Ballad of Reading Gaol.” In De Profundis he seems more sure that his imprisonment is unjust, but the message of both prison pieces is that the question of justice is irrelevant to prisoners. It is known that Wilde had access to the Bible during his imprisonment, but it is not clear whether or not he ever came across this passage:
Among its many consolations, Christianity gives the soul in pain a language in which to talk about sorrow and its fruits. Wilde certainly uses Christian terms in his own narrative. He quotes Dante’s saying that “sorrow re-marries us to God,” and claims that “[w]here there is sorrow there is holy ground.” But even beyond its advantages for the suffering soul wishing to express his predicament, Christianity has attractions for the suffering aesthete in particular. For one thing, the pettiest tragedy becomes grand when its participants realize that, more than a woman’s hand in marriage or a business deal or a £700 legal debt, the salvation or damnation of a human soul is at stake. If modernity killed tragedy in literature by making it mean and common, then Catholicism can save tragedy for real life by giving it the “purple pall and mask of noble sorrow” that Wilde declares would make tragedy bearable. It replaces the grotesquerie of the modern with that of the medieval and trades modernity’s pathetic broken-hearted clown for Catholicism's demons and saints.
For Wilde, “what is dumb is dead.” Tragic circumstances become a proper tragedy only when they are expressed, and so the desire to put his tragedy into a narrative overwhelmed him. After all, it is remarkable that he would write a letter to Douglas in the first place, since Wilde seemed to believe, at least at the time De Profundis was written, that any further communication between them could only be poisonous. Still, Wilde felt compelled to make Douglas understand the gravity of what he had done, and the stubborn refusal of Lord Alfred Douglas to do so is an example of a larger problem: Wilde’s pain is essentially inexpressible to any man except himself. “The martyr in his ‘shirt of flame’ may be looking on the face of God,” he writes, “but to him who is piling the faggots or loosening the logs for the blast the whole scene is no more than the slaying of an ox is to the butcher.”
Where Wilde finds Douglas unwilling and himself helpless, the figure of Christ provides him with an ideal narrator and an ideal audience. No human man could possibly have the experience, the compassion, and the artistic genius to express the pain that hard labor wreaked on a man of privilege and the humiliation that the philistine public heaped upon a man of genius. Christ, being divine, “took the entire world of the inarticulate, the voiceless world of pain, as his kingdom, and made of himself its external mouthpiece.” Christ is unique in this way, even among gods, and so Wilde must either give up the desire for his life to fit a grand and comprehensible genre or accept Christ as his “external mouthpiece.”
Ironically, Douglas was faced with a similar need for a better narrator than himself when he tried in later years to dispel the rumors of impropriety that surrounded his relationship with Wilde. He imagined that he could enlist medical evidence as proof that he had never engaged in sodomy: “If I had ever allowed anyone (either Wilde or any other single person) to treat me in that way, surely a medical examination would reveal the fact.” When the medical profession proved to have no such expertise, Douglas experienced for himself the futility of possessing a truth he could not tell convincingly.
Wilde’s ability to read his own fate as tragic rather than simply unfortunate is more than vanity and an affinity for aesthetics. The genre of tragedy, in his understanding, is transformative. To give continuity to a chronicle of misfortunes is to establish some connection between instances of wickedness and suffering, and between suffering and redemption. By placing sin and contrition within a single story, the two events are connected and the latter redeems the former. Wilde puts it this way: “Christ, had he been asked, would have said — I feel quite certain about this — that the moment the prodigal son fell on his knees and wept, he made his having wasted his substance with harlots, his swineherding and hungering for the husks they ate, beautiful and holy moments in his life.” It is not quite the sacrament of the Host, but this notion of redemption through tragedy made possible by Christ’s narration places Christ as the mediator between mankind and salvation, which is in its own way eucharistic.
In his earlier writing, Wilde had expressed skepticism that life’s tragedies could ever possess the transformative or even the descriptive significance of art’s tragedies:
De Profundis suggests a reversal of this position. Douglas used an overly precious pseudonym to communicate with an imprisoned Wilde, and, according to Wilde, “your seemingly casual choice of a feigned name was, and will remain, symbolic. It reveals you.” Even non-artists have the ability to live with symbolic meaning: “I have said of myself that I was one who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age. There is not a single wretched man in this wretched place along with me who does not stand in symbolic relation to the very secret of life.” Belief in a meaningful connection between symbolism and reality, as well as the admission that such symbolism is within the reach of such ordinary men as might be found in Reading Prison, enabled Wilde to accept Christianity’s offer of a redemption through tragedy that he might earlier have thought impossible.
The Scarlet Man: Homosexuality and Catholicism
To assert the importance of gender in Wilde's comedies introduces the question of what role homosexuality played in Wilde’s conversion to Catholicism. The Catholic Church of the twenty-first century has been a vocal opponent of any extension of the sacrament of marriage to include same-sex couples, but the relationship between Rome and homosexuality in Victorian England was very different. This polemic by Charles Kingsley is directed at Catholics, but the charges he makes of “maundering die-away effeminacy” could as easily have been directed at the London’s homosexuals:
The Catholic Church also provided an outlet for men to express homoerotic sentiments at a time when homosexual acts were prohibited by British law. The monastic tradition, for which the Church of England has no equivalent, was an especially fruitful one for men interested in discovering positive depictions of erotic love between men. Raffalovich, speaking of such Catholic writers as St. Aelred of Rivaulx, writes in Uranism and Unisexuality: “The literature of today dares only in such moments of sensual and sentimental defiance what the poets of divine love have cooed about and moaned over with delight.” Raffalovich was himself a gay Catholic who in 1899 became a Dominican Tertiary.
Though the Catholic Church would continue to insist on the sinfulness of sodomy throughout the Victorian era, Wilde did not consider the Church’s position to be a significant obstacle to his conversion. His letters from Italy in the years following his conversion casually narrate stories of the homosexual relationships he had there, and Wilde considered the belief that “Messalina was better than Sporus” to have more to do with bourgeois conventions than the moral content of homosexuality. He resisted the argument that leading a virtuous life would necessarily involve giving up his love for men: “To have altered my life would have been to have admitted that Uranian love is ignoble. I hold it to be noble – more noble than other forms.”
The Catholic Church continues to prohibit sodomy in its catechism, but, in the religious culture of England in the 1890’s, the Church was noticeably more hospitable to gay men than the Anglican alternative. For Wilde, his homosexuality may have done more to push him towards the Catholic option than to drive him away from it.
Wilde the Hellenist
The previous pages have pointed out Catholic themes in Wilde’s pre- and post-prison work, but why, if his life and work were so animated by such concerns, did he never made the leap of conversion until his final days? Wilde’s biography affords many excuses: he came very near in his Oxford days but was discouraged by social pressures and the attraction of freemasonry; he intended to go on retreat with Jesuit priests following his release from prison but was denied permission; while in Italy, he asked Robert Ross to take steps to arrange his conversion, and Ross, doubting Wilde’s sincerity, balked at assisting him. Still, the fact that Wilde’s fascination with Christ and Christianity never materialized in a formal conversion may be taken to indicate some deficiency is his faith.
Yet Wilde faced a greater obstacle to sincere faith than cagey Jesuits and skeptical friends. He had developed a particular attachment to Hellenism, as many Oxonians of his generation had, and the philosophy of Greece, as Victorian culture understood it, stood in Wilde’s mind as a pagan alternative to Roman Catholicism. Prior to studying at Oxford, Wilde studied classics at Trinity College, Dublin, even taking the Berkeley Gold Medal for Greek. “The Soul of Man under Socialism” calls Christ an Individualist, but the essay ends with the pronouncement, “The new Individualism is the new Hellenism.” This story appears in a letter to Lord Alfred Douglas written in 1894:
To understand Wilde’s relationship to Hellenism, it is necessary to understand the flowering of Greek scholarship that took place in the years immediately before Wilde’s arrival at Oxford in 1874, and in particular the tensions between the Hellenistic movement and Christianity. Four decades separate J. S. Mill’s 1834 estimate that ten years’ worth of Oxford honors graduates had not produced more than six men who had ever read Plato at all and Charles Alan Fyffe’s estimate that more than half of those pursuing honors degrees at Oxford had passed an examination on Plato’s Republic. During those four decades, Benjamin Jowett had introduced his lectures on the Republic, and the book was then placed alongside Aristotle’s Ethics on the list of required texts. Jowett went so far as to refer to Plato’s dialogues as “the greatest uninspired writing.”
Enthusiasm for Hellenism was especially great among Decadent writers. Walter Pater, whose Studies in the History of the Renaissance Yeats called “the very flower of decadence,” promoted the recreation of Hellenic culture in Victorian England: “The Hellenic manner is the blossom of the Hellenic spirit and culture, that spirit and culture depend on certain conditions, and those conditions are peculiar to a certain age. Reproduce those conditions, attain the actual root, and blossoms may again be produced of a triumphant colour.”
This interest in Greece aroused some suspicion in those who did not share it. Some of this concern related to the perception that Greek philosophy might be not a supplement to Christianity but a rival to it. H. H. Almond, speculating on Jowett’s religion, concluded that he “was a Platonist all over,” and, like many, was skeptical about the possibility of being both a “Platonist all over” and an orthodox Anglican. A satire of Jowett appearing in The New Republic showed a Dr. Jenkinson preaching a sermon on the Psalms that mentions very little Scripture and instead quotes Plato and Aristotle and eventually refines Christian doctrine into a mild form of Platonic idealism. Dr. Jenkinson’s call for the Apostle’s Creed at the end of his sermon is the piece’s punchline. Jowett himself was always conscientious about placing Christianity above Plato in his writing, but the lengths to which Christian Hellenists went in order to make Plato’s philosophy more compatible with Christianity indicate a certain amount of anxiety on their part about pagan philosophy’s relationship to Christian revelation. Some were less cautious than Jowett: Gerard Manley Hopkins’s journal records an evening during which he heard “Pater talking two hours against Xtianity.”
A Victorian man who displayed an interest in Hellenism was liable to other imputations than religious heterodoxy. At Oxford especially, Greek studies served as a kind of code for homosexual interest. Linda Dowling’s Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford explains in detail the way in which homosexual men capitalized on the revival of interest in Hellenism. Once Jowett had elevated Plato’s reputation and made study of the dialogues a curriculum requirement, homosexual men could “not be denied the means of developing out of this same Hellenism a homosexual counterdiscourse able to justify male love in ideal or transcendental terms.” Hellenism’s influence on Victorian homosexual culture was not limited to the universities. The term Uranist, which was coined in the 1860’s to refer to “sexual inverts” and subsequently became popular with Victorian homosexuals, derives from Greek mythology; the title of The Importance of Being Earnest is a pun on this term. Gay right activist George Ives, whose one hundred and twenty-two volume diary describes his relationships with Wilde and Douglas, among very many other things, named the secret society he founded to support the repeal of Britain’s sodomy laws the Order of Chaeronea, named after the battle of Chaeronea (338 BC) in which homosexual soldiers of the Theban Band were killed. Ives even added 338 years to the dates on his correspondence in order to count the years of the modern era from the date of the battle.
Wilde took these academic, pagan, and homosexual Hellenisms and developed his own idea of the Greek spirit, much as he created distinctly Wildean Christs in “The Soul of Man Under Socialism” and De Profundis. A comprehensive description of Wildean Hellenism will not be attempted here, but three themes are particularly important: Hellenism’s egalitarianism, its sexual purity, and its emphasis on physical beauty over any other kind of beauty. These themes have been chosen for their influence on Wilde’s thought, and because his letters suggest that, by the end of his life, he had renounced all three.
Writers prior to Wilde had noticed homosexuality’s potential for social leveling. John Addington Symonds explained the idea in a letter to Edward Carpenter in 1893: “The blending of Social Strata in masculine love seems to me one of its most pronounced, and socially hopeful features. Where it appears, it abolishes class distinctions.” Carpenter himself later observed something similar, writing that “it is noticeable how often Uranians of good position and breeding are drawn to rougher types, as of manual workers, and frequently very permanent alliances grow up in this way, which although not publicly acknowledged have a decided influence on social institutions.” Wilde’s involvement with George Ives gave him considerable exposure to Symonds and Carpenter’s idea of Uranism’s leveling effect, and there is evidence that he endorsed it. Ives’s diary quotes Wilde as saying on several occasions that “Love is the only democratic thing.”
It is strange that Wilde should have embraced this democratic spirit considering the snobbishness of his public persona — indeed, the snobbishness of having a public persona — but, aside from his relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas, Wilde also had homosexual relationships with men like Charles Parker, Alfonso Conway, and Alfred Wood, who were, respectively, a valet, a newspaperboy, and an unemployed clerk. Geoffrey Wheatcroft tartly defends the coexistence of these seemingly contradictory beliefs:
Having provoked Wilde into making implausible statements like “I don’t think twopence for social position” and “I recognise no social distinctions at all of any kind,” Carson was free to ridicule these unlikely claims in his closing statement. He first reminds the jury of Wilde’s elitism regarding his art, and his indifference to the literary opinions of any but the “artistic.”
If Wilde’s claims of egalitarianism struck the courtroom audience as improbable, his insistence that the love between himself and Douglas was purely spiritual struck the public as almost inconceivable. Wilde was willing to confirm Carson’s inference that “the love that dare not speak its name” to which Douglas’s poem “The Two Loves” refers is a love that exists between two men, but he was careful to distinguish it from “sodomitical” love. When asked by Carson why “the intense devotion and affection and admiration that an artist can feel for a wonderful and beautiful mind” (Wilde’s words) should have any need for concealment, Wilde responded that “there are people in the world who cannot understand [it].”
Victorian thinkers prior to Wilde also considered Uranian love closer to the Platonic ideal described in the Symposium than to sodomy, and Wilde was not the only one to defend its nobility on these grounds. Symonds, who credited Plato’s dialogues with his own Uranian awakening, took from Platonic philosophy not only its endorsement of erotic love between men but also the idea that love in its highest form transcends the physical. He called the identification of male love with sodomy a “vulgar error.” Marc-André Raffalovich distinguished between unisexuals who engage in sodomy and those who are “sensual without being debauched,” meaning those who did not. It was this distinction between the baseness of the carnal and the purity of the spiritual that allowed Wilde to think he might describe in glowing terms one man’s “extravagant adoration” of another and yet deny that the reference was “sodomitical.”
This commitment to chastity proved unworkable. Symonds abandoned the Platonic ideal in his work and his life, publishing essays that questioned whether the cerebral aspect of homosexuality was as ideal as Plato proposed as well as taking numerous working-class male lovers in England and Italy. Wilde, too, indulged in physical relationships with men, despite his claims to the contrary during Carson’s cross-examination. Jenkyns describes Wilde’s capitulation to physicality not as instance of the flesh falling short of philosophical ideals but as a dangerous rationalization:
When Wilde argued in his 1894 letter that the phrase “the Lord’s favorite” should not be used to describe a “gracious Greek boy,” he grounded the boy’s unfitness for Hebraic phrases in his physical beauty. In his own interpretation of the Greek tradition of paederastia, Wilde kept the traditional tenet that the elder man should possess intelligence but placed a greater emphasis on the beauty of the younger man than on his capacity for intellectual development. When, during Carson’s cross-examination, Wilde claimed Shakespeare as an example of a poet who had had such a pederastic relationship, he spoke of the object of Shakespeare’s affection as “a wonderful and beautiful person,” more notable in his ability to inspire poetry than his ability to write or appreciate it. This interpretation of Greek love allowed Wilde to extend the label “Platonic” to his relationships with men of no literary talent, such as Charles Parker and Alfonso Conway.
Wilde wrote that “Beauty is a form of Genius — is higher, indeed, than Genius, as it needs no explanation.” He believed that he was justified in loving men like Parker and Conway, who had little besides their physical beauty to recommend them, and a man like Alfred Douglas, whose good looks accompanied selfishness, shallowness, and a cruel temper. In his mind, it was the same love that Michaelangelo, Shakespeare, and Plato had felt. However, the intellectual asymmetry inherent in Wilde’s idea of paederastia grew to grate on him. Just as he eventually ceased to demand that his lovers be able to read and write, Wilde also stopped insisting that his friends have handsome profiles, and instead chose his closest friends for their goodwill, as in the case of Robert Ross, or their poetic ability, as in the case of Ernest Dowson. Devotion to physical beauty for its own sake became another Hellenic idea discarded.
These strains of Hellenism in Wilde’s thought were eroded by circumstances: Wilde thought he was an eminently democratic man, and he was ridiculed for believing so; he thought he could love men without committing sexual acts with them, and he was wrong; he thought he could safely devote himself to a person of great physical beauty but dubious moral character, and it destroyed him. Wilde accepted these developments, and acknowledged that the diminishing importance of Hellenism in his thought brought him nearer to the Catholic Church. He wrote to Ross in 1897:
Conclusion
Wilde’s participation in the English tradition of Catholic decadents, dandies and wits began long before his baptism. The Decadent philosophy Wilde espoused during his literary career led him towards Rome with its successes as well as its failures, making his conversion both a fulfillment and a necessary repudiation of Decadence. He insisted in De Profundis that a moment of contrition could transform the character of past sins; his final acceptance of Roman Catholicism can be seen as having the same kind of transformative effect on the Catholic elements of his life.
Introduction: The Long Road to Rome
Oscar Wilde died in 1900, as he had predicted he would. “Somehow I don’t think I shall survive to see the new century,” he told his friend Robert Ross. “If another century began and I was still alive, it would really be more than the English could stand.” According to W. B. Yeats, the Decadent movement came to an end that same year: “In 1900, everybody got down off his stilts; henceforth nobody drank absinthe with his black coffee; nobody went mad; nobody committed suicide; nobody joined the Catholic church; or if they did, I have forgotten.”
Including Roman Catholicism in a list with madness, suicide, and absinthe is accurate in the context of the Decadent movement. Many of the prominent figures of the “Yellow Nineties” were converts, including Aubrey Beardsley, Ernest Dowson, Lionel Johnson, John Gray, and Marc-André Raffalovich. Francis Thompson had been baptized into the Catholic faith as a child. Philippe Jullian has remarked that Catholicism “exerted a considerable influence on the best English poets” of the fin-de-siècle, and the historian Brocard Sewell notes in his study of Gray and Raffalovich that “decadent” converts to the Church were so numerous and so prone to scandalous behavior that the Pope was careful to assign decadents who took holy orders to parishes outside of England in order to protect Catholicism’s reputation in Britain.
Wilde came close to joining the Catholic Church during his time at Oxford. His letters to William Ward, a fellow student and a Protestant, exhort Ward to allow himself to “feel the awful fascination of the Church, its extreme beauty and sentiment.” “Do try to see in the Church not man’s hand only,” Wilde wrote, “but also a little of God’s.” In another letter to Ward, Wilde confessed to being “caught in the fowler’s snare, in the wiles of the Scarlet Woman — I may go over in the vac.”
Wilde did not go over in the vac, and would have faced negative consequences if he had. His college friend David Hunter-Blair was himself a devout Catholic and would have been delighted to see Wilde join the Church, but for the most part Wilde’s friends and teachers were Protestants who considered conversion to Rome something of a scandal. The last legal penalties on Roman Catholics had been removed before Wilde was born, but anti-Catholic sentiment survived, as can be seen in the British public’s reaction to Pope Pius IX’s decision to reinstate Catholic hierarchy in Britain and appoint the first archbishop of Westminster since the Reformation. As Patrick Allitt puts it, “Anti-Catholic sermons rang from Anglican pulpits, Queen Victoria said her throne was under attack, and the Prime Minister, Lord John Russell, fanned the flames by denouncing the ‘papal aggression.’” The promulgation of the doctrine of papal infallibility in 1870 worsened matters. One of Wilde’s cousins all but struck Wilde out of his will for even considering conversion to the Roman Catholic Church — Wilde’s father received £8000, his brother £2000, and Wilde himself only £100, and that on the condition that he remained a Protestant. Wilde would also have been forced to abandon his involvement with the Freemasons, an organization he had joined in 1875 and which, according to a letter in 1877, he was “rather keen on.”
Not all of the obstacles were external. Wilde himself had considerable doubts, as can be seen in his hesitation to accept an invitation to meet with Cardinal John Henry Newman: “I am awfully keen for an interview . . . [but] perhaps my courage will fail, as I could hardly resist Newman I am afraid.” He declined the invitation.
A priest at a chapel near Oxford where Wilde often visited Mass offered Hunter-Blair an explanation of why his friend Oscar’s fascination with Catholicism did not result in a conversion:
Behind his superficial veneer of vanity and foolish talk there is, I am convinced, something deeper and more sincere, including a genuine attraction towards Catholic belief and practice. But the time has not come. The finger of God has not yet touched him. There will come some day, I am convinced, a crisis in his life when he will turn to the Ark of Peter as his only refuge. Till then we can only pray.The crisis that would eventually drive Wilde to “turn to the Ark of Peter” came in May 1895 when he was convicted for “acts of gross indecency” — in other words, sodomy — and sentenced to two years of hard labor, but Wilde had begun to reconsider Catholicism even before this crisis. He told Alfred Douglas in 1894 that if that their libel case against Douglas’s father Lord Queensberry succeeded they “must both be received into the dear Catholic Church,” to which Douglas responded that, if the case failed, “we certainly won’t be received anywhere else.”
The first six months of Wilde’s sentence were the most difficult, and, as he told André Gide later, he often thought of suicide. In July 1896 he was granted to permission to keep writing materials in his cell and given access to a larger library of books, which improved his health and spirits. Included on the list of books requested by Wilde were a biography of St. Francis and the works of Dante, as well as the novel En Route by J.-K. Huysmans, which tells the story of a French aesthete who is inspired by the beauty of the Church to abandon decadence and enter a Trappist monastery. On the day of his release from prison, Wilde sent a messenger to a group of London Jesuits with a request for permission to go on a six-month retreat with them. While waiting for the messenger to return with an answer, Wilde explained to the gathered company that be believed the religions of the world to be like the colleges of a university, with Roman Catholicism “the greatest and most romantic of them.” When the Jesuits sent back a note denying Wilde permission to go on a contemplative retreat, according to Ada Leverson’s account Wilde “broke down and sobbed bitterly.”
Oscar Wilde contracted cerebral meningitis in Paris three years after his release from prison and died on the afternoon of November 30, 1900. The night before, Robert Ross had called Father Cuthbert Dunne to Wilde’s bedside and helped him administer the sacraments of baptism and extreme unction. Wilde was barely able to speak at the time, although Father Dunne later insisted, “from the signs he gave as well as from his attempted words, I was satisfied as to his full consent.”
It is possible to attribute Wilde’s deathbed conversion entirely to Ross’s efforts rather than Wilde’s own, but the history of their friendship complicates this interpretation. Far from goading Wilde into conversion, Ross had in the two years before Wilde’s death discouraged him from taking such a step. As he wrote to Adela Schuster in December 1900:
Being Catholic myself, I really rather dreaded a relapse, and having known so many people under the influence of sudden impulse, aesthetic or other emotion become converts, then cause grave scandal by lapsing, that I told him I should never attempt his conversion until I thought he was serious. . . Furthermore I did not know any priest in Rome sufficiently well to prepare for a rather grave intellectual conflict. It would have been no use getting an amiable and foolish man who would have treated him like an ordinary person and entirely ignored the strange paradoxical genius which he would have to overcome or convince. Mr Wilde was equipped moreover for controversy, being deeply read in Catholic philosophy especially of recent years.In spite of Ross’s reluctance, Wilde’s intention to enter the Catholic faith did not disappear. He told the Daily Chronicle in the summer before his death, “Much of my moral obliquity is due to the fact that my father would not allow me to become a Catholic. The artistic side of the Church would have cured my degeneracies. I intend to be received before long.”
A study of Oscar Wilde’s conversion to Catholicism runs the danger of being as ambiguous and obscure as Wilde’s relationship with the Roman Church. His story cannot be made to fit conventional conversion narratives. His life did not follow the pattern of sincere faith followed by sincere repentance, as did John Gray’s, nor that of openly dueling allegiances to flesh and spirit, as did Francis Thompson’s. Neither can Wilde’s Catholicism be rehabilitated by overstating the agreement between Catholic philosophy and his own. There are similarities – an affinity for ritual, skepticism toward reason, and indifference to efficiency – but the most pious critic could not make an orthodox Christian of the man who wrote Salomé. However, the preponderance of Catholic converts among Decadent writers suggests a connection between aestheticism and Catholicism.
To the extent that Decadence disregards certain facts of human life and nature, it cannot be sustained for a lifetime. To the extent that Catholicism fulfills the ideals of the Decadent movement while avoiding its missteps, it makes sense that Decadent writers turned to it in their maturity. Joseph Pearce’s declaration that “the way of decadence was only the way of the Cross” is too simple, but but a study of Oscar Wilde may reveal Catholicism to be Aestheticism’s culmination.
Intentions: "The Decay of Lying" and "The Critic as Artist"
Wilde ends “The Truth of Masks” by admitting that he does not “agree with everything that I have said in this essay. There is much with which I entirely disagree.” He implicitly protects the judgments of “The Critic as Artist” and “The Decay of Lying” with the same disclaimer by presenting them in dialogue form. Every conclusion about Wilde’s own beliefs drawn from Intentions is a matter of inference, although the book’s many consistencies may serve as a guide.
One thing than can be inferred from “The Critic as Artist” is that its author regards most of his fellow Englishmen with a degree of contempt. They are the masses who will forgive “everything except genius,” the public which “always feels perfectly at ease when mediocrity is talking to it.” Wilde speaks of “the elect,” and means it. Unfortunately for prospective hagiographers, he disdains their religion and their morality as much as their taste. “To be good, according to the vulgar standard of goodness,” Gilbert explains, “merely requires a certain amount of sordid terror, a certain lack of imaginative thought, and a certain low passion for middle-class respectability.” Gilbert also offers the epigram that would haunt Wilde during his libel suit: “All art is immoral.”
To wring crypto-Catholicism from such an avowedly anti-moralistic text would be to hazard blasphemy. However, the philosophies of Gilbert and Vivian share a crucial weakness which, taken with the rest of their beliefs, makes clear how reasonable it would be to think of them as eventual catechumens. They both prefer art to life. They both speak for whole paragraphs about art’s superiority and life’s vulgarity. Life, from their “artistic point of view,” is a failure. Vivian in “The Decay of Lying” attacks literary realism with special zeal. He considers it better for life to imitate art than the reverse because too great a fidelity to accuracy will leave an author nothing to discuss but curates, match-girls, and coster-mongers, “their dreary vices, and their drearier virtues.” The goal of the artist is to light a path of escape from the “depressing and humiliating reality” of human nature which reveals all men to be equally dull.
Wilde humiliates reality even further when he has Gilbert say that the critic, who is yet another degree removed from action, is even more of a true individualist than the artist. The interpreter of Hamlet is subject to more restrictions than the poet fitting his thoughts to the form of a sonnet, which for Gilbert makes criticism stand in “the same relation to creative work that creative work does to the visible world of form and colour, or the unseen world of passion and thought.”
Neither of Wilde’s glib mouthpieces confronts the obvious truth that life cannot be ignored. Its catastrophes may “happen in the wrong way and to the wrong people,” but they do happen. Art may serve as a distraction from life, and may even be ruled its superior, but it can never replace it. This raises the question of whether the advantages of the contemplative and artistic life can be translated to reality and thereby avoid the tragic consequences of solipsism. It turns out that the application of Gilbert and Vivian’s epigrams to life rather than art looks surprisingly like some exotic strain of high-church Catholic orthodoxy.
The Church affirms Wilde’s paradox that a man cultivates his individuality by imitating something other than himself. Wilde cites Goethe’s aesthetic maxim that “it is by working within limits that the master reveals himself,” but he might as easily have quoted the Gospel of Matthew: “Take my yoke upon you and learn of me…and ye shall find rest unto your souls, for my yoke is sweet and my burden is light.” The limitations imposed by Christ on the human soul are no more limiting than the constraints imposed by poetic form on the master poet. In fact, both are liberating. The paradox of an authenticity achieved through self-limitation is a translation into aesthetic terms of the moral paradox of liberty through slavery. Wilde himself admits that the imitation of the character Jesus Christ qualifies as an example of life imitating art.
The similarities between imitation of Christ as a moral figure and imitation of art as an aesthetic ideal can be recognized by any moralist, religious or secular, but to render Wilde’s praise of the critical temperament applicable to life requires a more distinctly Christian perspective. “People sometimes say that actors give us their own Hamlets, and not Shakespeare’s,” Gilbert says, but “there is no such thing as Shakespeare’s Hamlet” apart from an actor’s singular interpretation. “When Rubinstein plays to us the Sonata Appassionata of Beethoven, he gives us not merely Beethoven, but also himself, and so gives us Beethoven absolutely.” The similarity between this idea and Matthew 10:19 is partial but significant: “But when they deliver you up, take no thought how or what ye shall speak: for it shall be given you in that same hour what ye shall speak.” Far more essential to a Christian interpretation of Intentions is the theology of God’s ownership of each human life. Man is not his own Creator, nor is he even the author of his own life story. Lucifer’s claim that he was self-begotten was a grievous sin, and it was God who hardened Pharaoh’s heart, not Pharaoh. His eye is on the sparrow, and He has promised to care for men as diligently as he cares for the lilies of the field. Divine Providence is the author of human lives, and yet each man is his own life’s interpreter, or, to use Wilde’s language, its critic.
Wilde, it seems, shared in the fate of mankind, which had by his own admission not yet satisfied “the desire to know the connection between Beauty and Truth.” His confidence in his ability to fashion his own life with exquisite design could not exist long in a world where fate “has hemmed us round with the nets of the hunter,” nor could his indifference to the objective world survive the suffering and sorrow to be found in prison. However, the theology of aesthetics that he puts forward in Intentions suggests, though does not fulfill, the Christian sentiments that would offer him a solution to the problem of evil.
A Woman of No Importance
Despite his insistence that there can be no such thing as a moral or immoral book, the moral content of Wilde’s own work should not be ignored. When Sir Edward Clarke asked Wilde to endorse his summary of The Picture of Dorian Gray for the purposes of the Queensberry libel trial, in which it was Clarke’s purpose to prove that the book was not an example of sodomitic and corruptive influence, Wilde was careful to point out to the courtroom that Clarke had made one important omission:
That the picture as is stated in the last chapter…became to him conscience; and in the last chapter the reason he destroys it is that he says, ‘This picture mars my pleasure in life. It is conscience to me; I shall kil it; I shall get rid of this visible emblem of conscience,’ and by trying to kill his own soul the man directly dies. That is the only small addition I wish to make.
Wilde’s correction to his own counsel suggests that Wilde believed, in spite of his own antinomianism, that any interpretation of Dorian Gray that neglects the book’s moral content is necessarily incomplete.
The moral content of A Woman of No Importance is apparent without any exegesis from the dock. It indicts the English upper class for treating adulterers and adulteresses differently, for adhering so strictly to God’s laws about infidelity at the expense of his commandment to love thy neighbor, and for their thoroughgoing philistinism in the face of Lord Illingworth’s incisive wit. Mrs. Arbuthnot was cast out of respectable society for having a child outside of marriage, but Lord Henry Weston, whom the American Puritan Hester Worsley describes as “ a man with a hideous smile and a hideous past,” is a man without whom no dinner-party is complete. “What of those whose ruin is due to him?” asks Hester. “They are outcasts. They are nameless. If you met them in the street you would turn your head away.”
Her first suggestion for a fairer system is that both man and woman should be punished and “both go forth into the desert to love or loathe each other there,” but she amends this when she discovers that Mrs. Arbuthnot, who is the mother of her beloved Gerald Arbuthnot as well as the most moral of the women she meets at Lady Hunstanton’s country house, is a fallen woman. “I was wrong,” she admits. “God’s law is only love.”
It would be strange to assume that Hester Worsley’s moral thinking is coincident with the dramatist’s. That her impassioned speech on justice is followed by an anticlimactic request from Lady Caroline that Hester pass the cotton just behind her, as long as she is standing up, confirms this. Her speeches condemning English unfairness to women seem to have been written in earnest, but her final decision to leave England for the classless country of America does not sound like the man who said of Lord Illingworth, “If you can bear the truth, he is MYSELF.” It is Wilde’s double Lord Illingworth who completes A Woman of No Importance’s moral vision. For example, his statement “My dear Rachel, intellectual generalities are always interesting, but generalities in morals mean absolutely nothing.” This is a more Wildean refutation of the English system of ostracizing adulteresses regardless of the circumstances of their adultery than Hester’s. The other characters regard Lord Illingworth as immoral, and justly so, but this only makes it more remarkable when he offers a moral aphorism that is so plausible.
In fact, his behavior raises the question of whether morality or immorality is more humane. Lady Caroline takes class very seriously, whereas Lord Illingworth calls the Peerage “the best thing in fiction the English have ever done.” Lady Caroline’s classism is tempered by morality and compassion. Because his is not, Lord Illingworth is free to be unserious about it, and therefore more merciful. Wilde is not simply interested in portraying Lord Illingworth as the most entertaining figure in the play, but also in making clear that the man who does not take anything seriously is not subject to the puritanical and bourgeois injustices that his aphorisms ridicule. His indifference makes him less unkind than his supposed moral betters.
Wilde’s claim that Lord Illingworth was modeled after himself is an echo of a claim he made about The Picture of Dorian Gray in a letter to Ralph Payne in 1894: “Basil Hallward is what I think I am: Lord Henry what the world thinks me.” This is not the only similarity between the two characters: Wilde reused several of Lord Henry Wotton’s lines in scenes between Lord Illingworth and Mrs. Allonby. Ada Leverson made light of this economy in her one page satire “An Afternoon Tea”: “The two men, exactly alike, who are smoking gold-tipped cigarettes?… Those are Lord Illingworth and Lord Henry Wotton. They always say exactly the same thing.”
Significantly, these two dialogues involve not two men, as in “The Decay of Lying,” but a man and a woman. They also take gender as a topic for discussion. The first act of A Woman of No Importance may be taken as the more mature version, although Camille Paglia has pointed out that the Duchess of Monmouth’s claim that she has disarmed Lord Henry Wotton “of your shield, Harry: not of your spear” has some bearing on the place of gender in the Wildean parlor.
The genders of the two wits are vital to their conversation’s structure and content. Mrs. Allonby’s wit reveals itself in long and inventive speeches when she is in strictly female company, but, in an expression of her feminine subordination to the leadership of men, most of her best jokes with Lord Illingworth are in immediate response to lines of his. The joke that “the Book of Life begins with a man and a woman in a garden” and “ends with Revelations” depends upon the speakers’ sexes. Lord Illingworth likens his exchanges with Mrs. Allonby to a romance, which makes their discussion of wit’s place within a love affair especially relevant:
MRS. ALLONBY: Twenty years of romance! Is there such a thing?Illingworth’s claim that a sense of humor in the woman spoils a romance is only superficially undermined by his fondness for Mrs. Allonby. He continues to be more interested, at least romantically, in Hester Worsley. Illingworth obviously does not dislike having Mrs. Allonby as a sparring partner, but his caution against comedy in women can be taken seriously as a statement about complementarity, something both Mrs. Allonby and Lord Illingworth believe should exist between the sexes. Mrs. Allonby’s very clear idea of the Ideal Man depends upon it, as does Lord Illingworth’s advice to Gerald that “no man has any real success in this world unless he has got women to back him.” Women are not meant for success in the way that men are, according to Lord Illingworth, but no man can achieve success without women.
LORD ILLINGWORTH: Not in our day. Women have become too brilliant. Nothing spoils a romance so much as a sense of humour in the woman.
MRS ALLONBY: Or the want of it in the man.
LORD ILLINGWORTH: You are quite right. In a Temple everyone should be serious, except the thing that is worshipped.
MRS. ALLONBY: And that should be man?
LORD ILLINGWORTH: Women kneel so gracefully; men don’t.
Wilde connects his belief in complementary roles for men and women to religion by explaining the difference between the sexes in terms of worship. Men can be comedians because laughter is the proper occupation of the object of worship; women cannot because their place is to revere and not to be revered. If this is the relationship between worship and humor, then God, as an object of worship, has access to a kind of comedy that mankind does not. In the same way that De Profundis put forward the idea of Christ as mankind’s storyteller, A Woman of No Importance suggests that God might fruitfully be understood as a comedian, which would carry some of the same advantages that come with a storyteller God. “The world has always laughed at its own tragedies,” Lord Illingworth claims, “that being the only way in which it has been able to bear them.” In Reading Gaol Wilde encountered a tragedy that he could not turn into a bearable joke. If Wilde had a commitment to finding the humor in every situation, as his lifelong flippancy suggests, then his success at this task demands not an expert humorist but a divine one. If God can laugh where Wilde could not, then the task left to Wilde is not comedy but worship.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
A review of The Picture of Dorian Gray published by the St. James Gazette suggested that a book so offensive to morality deserved only to be “chucked into the fire.” In Wilde’s reply, published two days later, he criticized this attack: “The poor public, hearing, from an authority so high as your own, that this is a wicked book that should be coerced and suppressed by a Tory Government, will, no doubt, rush to read it. But, alas! they will find that it is a story with a moral.” However, the end of Wilde’s letter to the editors calls the story’s moral “an artistic error.” This tension between Christian morality, which calls excessive love of beauty a sin, and aestheticism, which calls morality an artistic error, stands at the center of the novel.
The two principles are personified by Lord Henry Wotton and Basil Hallward. Wilde’s comment that “Basil Hallward is what I think I am: Lord Henry what the world thinks me” suggests that in the conflict between corruption and conscience his ultimate loyalty lay with the latter. Basil Hallward’s conscience is not merely moral but particularly Christian, as can be seen, for instance, in his reaction when Dorian reveals his own disfigured portrait:
“Pray, Dorian, pray,” he murmured. “What is it that one was taught to say in one’s boyhood? ‘Lead us not into temptation. Forgive us our sins. Wash away our iniquities.’ Let us say that together. The prayer of your pride has been answered. The prayer of your repentance will be answered also.”Wilde was contemptuous of the bourgeois Anglican idea of ethics, but he found something to admire in the Christian doctrine of redemption. Immediately following the above passage, Basil quotes the book of Isaiah: “Though your sins be as scarlet, yet I will make them as white as snow.”
I have argued that Wilde understood God’s relationship to creation as being like an artist’s relationship to his art. Basil Hallward’s relationship to Dorian Gray’s portrait illuminates this comparison, in particular the inability of either God or the artist to exercise control over their creations. Not only is a work of art completely independent of its creator’s commands, it is even free to disregard its creator’s intentions and the plans for which the creator designed it. Basil Hallward could not have realized that the portrait he painted would gain the magical ability to prevent Dorian Gray from aging. In much the same way, Wilde believed, God did not realize what he was creating when he made Oscar Wilde.
De Profundis
De Profundis contains several explicit renunciations — of Lord Alfred Douglas, of shallowness, of pleasure for pleasure’s sake — but its most interesting revelations are those it does not put so plainly. A close reading shows that many of the decadent beliefs that had obstructed Wilde’s path to Christian faith no longer existed by the time of his release from prison.
Wilde’s flippancy was one of his most enduring traits, and one of the most problematic. Friends like Robert Ross, who had entered the Roman Church himself some years before, hesitated to recommend Wilde for catechesis because they feared that he was not in earnest. “I wish you were not so hard to poor heretics,” complained Wilde to Ross in a letter, “and would admit that even for the sheep who has no shepherd there is a Stella Maris to guide it home.”
De Profundis shows no sign of Wilde’s usual cultivated insincerity. In fact, for the work of a dramatist renowned for his comedy it contains very few jokes at all. This may be attributable to Wilde’s cross-examination by Edward Carson, during which he was confronted with the danger of persistent public levity about serious matters. When Carson asked Wilde if iced champagne was a favorite drink of his, Wilde answered, “Yes, strongly against my doctor’s orders.” Carson, who was growing impatient with his witness’s jokes, responded, “Never mind the doctor’s orders.” In his closing remarks, however, Carson used Wilde’s wit against him, reminding his audience that iced champagne is something “which Mr. Wilde indulges in, contrary to the directions of his doctor.” Another joke that produced the same effect, if more immediately, was Wilde’s notorious answer that he did not kiss Walter Grainger because “he was a peculiarly plain boy.” If the material consequence of Wilde’s suit against Queensberry was his imprisonment, the more lasting literary consequence was that he was cast “from a sort of eternity of fame to a sort of eternity of infamy” – a consequence in part attributable to the popular perception that Wilde was impertinent to the court and the law and not deserving of public sympathy. No wonder, then, that the author did not put the levity of his epigrams into De Profundis.
The same uncharacteristic seriousness can be found in the recurring themes of De Profundis, including the most prominent of these, which is pain. Sorrow is a motif in De Profundis, “the supreme emotion of which man is capable,” “the most sensitive of all things,” “my new world.” It replaces exquisite poses with the “intense…extraordinary reality” of the suffering man. Wilde gropes for a word to describe what he has received at the hands of his suffering, and decides that it can only be described as “revelation.”
None of these lessons is particularly Christian. Moral atheists acknowledge that suffering often jars men into empathy, that the more a man loves the more he will suffer and sometimes vice versa, and that selfish indifference to the suffering of one’s neighbors is made more difficult by the unavoidable reality of one’s own pain. Some will even recognize that suffering on the part of the perpetrator is necessary to balance the injustice of a crime. However, Wilde does not understand suffering simply as a pragmatic means of learning a valuable lesson, nor as the mechanism by which the geometric scales of justice are restored. He is careful to note that is suffering is unjust, and he is adamant that he cannot return to a life of pleasure despite having already learned the lessons which sorrow had to teach him. To understand the importance of injustice and permanence to Wilde’s struggle to comprehend his own suffering, something more than secular logic is necessary.
“I know not whether Laws be right/Or whether Laws be wrong,” Wilde says in “The Ballad of Reading Gaol.” In De Profundis he seems more sure that his imprisonment is unjust, but the message of both prison pieces is that the question of justice is irrelevant to prisoners. It is known that Wilde had access to the Bible during his imprisonment, but it is not clear whether or not he ever came across this passage:
Servants, be subject to your masters with all fear; not only to the good and gentle, but also to the froward. For this is thankworthy, if a man for conscience toward God endure grief, suffering wrongfully. For what glory is it, if, when ye be buffeted for your faults, ye shall take it patiently? But if, when ye do well, and suffer for it, ye take it patiently, this is acceptable with God. For even hereunto were ye called: because Christ also suffered for us, leaving an example, that ye should follow his steps.Wilde and the New Testament acknowledge that suffering can serve as punishment for a crime, but both agree that this is not the most important role that suffering plays in the world. Sorrow’s effect on the contrite soul is poetic, not mathematical. “Water can cleanse, and fire purify,” Wilde says. “Nature, whose sweet rains fall on unjust and just alike, will…with bitter herbs make me whole.” It is suffering itself, not its proportion to desert, that carries spiritual advantages.
Among its many consolations, Christianity gives the soul in pain a language in which to talk about sorrow and its fruits. Wilde certainly uses Christian terms in his own narrative. He quotes Dante’s saying that “sorrow re-marries us to God,” and claims that “[w]here there is sorrow there is holy ground.” But even beyond its advantages for the suffering soul wishing to express his predicament, Christianity has attractions for the suffering aesthete in particular. For one thing, the pettiest tragedy becomes grand when its participants realize that, more than a woman’s hand in marriage or a business deal or a £700 legal debt, the salvation or damnation of a human soul is at stake. If modernity killed tragedy in literature by making it mean and common, then Catholicism can save tragedy for real life by giving it the “purple pall and mask of noble sorrow” that Wilde declares would make tragedy bearable. It replaces the grotesquerie of the modern with that of the medieval and trades modernity’s pathetic broken-hearted clown for Catholicism's demons and saints.
For Wilde, “what is dumb is dead.” Tragic circumstances become a proper tragedy only when they are expressed, and so the desire to put his tragedy into a narrative overwhelmed him. After all, it is remarkable that he would write a letter to Douglas in the first place, since Wilde seemed to believe, at least at the time De Profundis was written, that any further communication between them could only be poisonous. Still, Wilde felt compelled to make Douglas understand the gravity of what he had done, and the stubborn refusal of Lord Alfred Douglas to do so is an example of a larger problem: Wilde’s pain is essentially inexpressible to any man except himself. “The martyr in his ‘shirt of flame’ may be looking on the face of God,” he writes, “but to him who is piling the faggots or loosening the logs for the blast the whole scene is no more than the slaying of an ox is to the butcher.”
Where Wilde finds Douglas unwilling and himself helpless, the figure of Christ provides him with an ideal narrator and an ideal audience. No human man could possibly have the experience, the compassion, and the artistic genius to express the pain that hard labor wreaked on a man of privilege and the humiliation that the philistine public heaped upon a man of genius. Christ, being divine, “took the entire world of the inarticulate, the voiceless world of pain, as his kingdom, and made of himself its external mouthpiece.” Christ is unique in this way, even among gods, and so Wilde must either give up the desire for his life to fit a grand and comprehensible genre or accept Christ as his “external mouthpiece.”
Ironically, Douglas was faced with a similar need for a better narrator than himself when he tried in later years to dispel the rumors of impropriety that surrounded his relationship with Wilde. He imagined that he could enlist medical evidence as proof that he had never engaged in sodomy: “If I had ever allowed anyone (either Wilde or any other single person) to treat me in that way, surely a medical examination would reveal the fact.” When the medical profession proved to have no such expertise, Douglas experienced for himself the futility of possessing a truth he could not tell convincingly.
Wilde’s ability to read his own fate as tragic rather than simply unfortunate is more than vanity and an affinity for aesthetics. The genre of tragedy, in his understanding, is transformative. To give continuity to a chronicle of misfortunes is to establish some connection between instances of wickedness and suffering, and between suffering and redemption. By placing sin and contrition within a single story, the two events are connected and the latter redeems the former. Wilde puts it this way: “Christ, had he been asked, would have said — I feel quite certain about this — that the moment the prodigal son fell on his knees and wept, he made his having wasted his substance with harlots, his swineherding and hungering for the husks they ate, beautiful and holy moments in his life.” It is not quite the sacrament of the Host, but this notion of redemption through tragedy made possible by Christ’s narration places Christ as the mediator between mankind and salvation, which is in its own way eucharistic.
In his earlier writing, Wilde had expressed skepticism that life’s tragedies could ever possess the transformative or even the descriptive significance of art’s tragedies:
The evil faces of the Roman emperors look out at us from the foul porphyry and spotted jasper in which the realistic artists of the day delighted to work and we fancy that in those cruel lips and heavy sensual jaws we can find the secret of the ruin of the Empire. But it was not so. The vices of Tiberius could not destroy that supreme civilization, any more than the virtues of the Antonines could save it. It fell for other, for less interesting reasons.Under the reasoning expressed here in Intentions, it is possible for an artist to create a symbolic representation of his age, as the sculptors who animated the busts of emperors with a spirit of decay did, but the symbol of an age does not necessarily give a master clue to its history. The vices of Tiberius express the spirit of a decadent empire, but ultimately Rome fell for other, less interesting reasons.
De Profundis suggests a reversal of this position. Douglas used an overly precious pseudonym to communicate with an imprisoned Wilde, and, according to Wilde, “your seemingly casual choice of a feigned name was, and will remain, symbolic. It reveals you.” Even non-artists have the ability to live with symbolic meaning: “I have said of myself that I was one who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age. There is not a single wretched man in this wretched place along with me who does not stand in symbolic relation to the very secret of life.” Belief in a meaningful connection between symbolism and reality, as well as the admission that such symbolism is within the reach of such ordinary men as might be found in Reading Prison, enabled Wilde to accept Christianity’s offer of a redemption through tragedy that he might earlier have thought impossible.
The Scarlet Man: Homosexuality and Catholicism
To assert the importance of gender in Wilde's comedies introduces the question of what role homosexuality played in Wilde’s conversion to Catholicism. The Catholic Church of the twenty-first century has been a vocal opponent of any extension of the sacrament of marriage to include same-sex couples, but the relationship between Rome and homosexuality in Victorian England was very different. This polemic by Charles Kingsley is directed at Catholics, but the charges he makes of “maundering die-away effeminacy” could as easily have been directed at the London’s homosexuals:
. . . there is an element of foppery—even in dress and manner; a fastidious, maundering die-away effeminacy, which is mistaken for purity and refinement; and I confess myself unable to cope with it, so alluring is it to the minds of an effeminate and luxurious aristocracy.The Catholic doctrine of clerical celibacy was especially disturbing to Anglicans, who suspected that alienation from family life inhibited a man’s ability to be a “muscular Christian.” According to Frederick Roden in Same-Sex Desire in Victorian Religious Culture, “in Protestant culture, the sole arena for erotic passion is heterosexual marriage.” Insofar as Catholic priests in England claimed to be masculine but refused to play any of Anglicanism’s designated masculine roles, they were “queer” in the sense of challenging Victorian culture’s understanding of acceptable sexual identity.
The Catholic Church also provided an outlet for men to express homoerotic sentiments at a time when homosexual acts were prohibited by British law. The monastic tradition, for which the Church of England has no equivalent, was an especially fruitful one for men interested in discovering positive depictions of erotic love between men. Raffalovich, speaking of such Catholic writers as St. Aelred of Rivaulx, writes in Uranism and Unisexuality: “The literature of today dares only in such moments of sensual and sentimental defiance what the poets of divine love have cooed about and moaned over with delight.” Raffalovich was himself a gay Catholic who in 1899 became a Dominican Tertiary.
Though the Catholic Church would continue to insist on the sinfulness of sodomy throughout the Victorian era, Wilde did not consider the Church’s position to be a significant obstacle to his conversion. His letters from Italy in the years following his conversion casually narrate stories of the homosexual relationships he had there, and Wilde considered the belief that “Messalina was better than Sporus” to have more to do with bourgeois conventions than the moral content of homosexuality. He resisted the argument that leading a virtuous life would necessarily involve giving up his love for men: “To have altered my life would have been to have admitted that Uranian love is ignoble. I hold it to be noble – more noble than other forms.”
The Catholic Church continues to prohibit sodomy in its catechism, but, in the religious culture of England in the 1890’s, the Church was noticeably more hospitable to gay men than the Anglican alternative. For Wilde, his homosexuality may have done more to push him towards the Catholic option than to drive him away from it.
Wilde the Hellenist
The previous pages have pointed out Catholic themes in Wilde’s pre- and post-prison work, but why, if his life and work were so animated by such concerns, did he never made the leap of conversion until his final days? Wilde’s biography affords many excuses: he came very near in his Oxford days but was discouraged by social pressures and the attraction of freemasonry; he intended to go on retreat with Jesuit priests following his release from prison but was denied permission; while in Italy, he asked Robert Ross to take steps to arrange his conversion, and Ross, doubting Wilde’s sincerity, balked at assisting him. Still, the fact that Wilde’s fascination with Christ and Christianity never materialized in a formal conversion may be taken to indicate some deficiency is his faith.
Yet Wilde faced a greater obstacle to sincere faith than cagey Jesuits and skeptical friends. He had developed a particular attachment to Hellenism, as many Oxonians of his generation had, and the philosophy of Greece, as Victorian culture understood it, stood in Wilde’s mind as a pagan alternative to Roman Catholicism. Prior to studying at Oxford, Wilde studied classics at Trinity College, Dublin, even taking the Berkeley Gold Medal for Greek. “The Soul of Man under Socialism” calls Christ an Individualist, but the essay ends with the pronouncement, “The new Individualism is the new Hellenism.” This story appears in a letter to Lord Alfred Douglas written in 1894:
Percy left the day after you did. He spoke much of you. Alfonso is still in favour. He is my only companion, along with Stephen. Alfonso always alludes to you as ‘the Lord,’ which however gives you, I think, a Biblical Hebraic dignity that gracious Greek boys should not have. He also says, from time to time, ‘Percy was the Lord’s favourite,’ which makes me think of Percy as the infant Samuel — an innacurate reminiscence, as Percy was Hellenic.One is either biblical or Hellenic, and Wilde disapproves of attributing the “Hebraic dignity” of one to the physical beauty that properly belongs to the other. Any attempt to be both Christian and Greek is “the pathological tragedy of the hybrid, the Pagan-Catholic,” a phrase that appears in a letter to Robert Ross. Wilde meant it to apply to Ross.
To understand Wilde’s relationship to Hellenism, it is necessary to understand the flowering of Greek scholarship that took place in the years immediately before Wilde’s arrival at Oxford in 1874, and in particular the tensions between the Hellenistic movement and Christianity. Four decades separate J. S. Mill’s 1834 estimate that ten years’ worth of Oxford honors graduates had not produced more than six men who had ever read Plato at all and Charles Alan Fyffe’s estimate that more than half of those pursuing honors degrees at Oxford had passed an examination on Plato’s Republic. During those four decades, Benjamin Jowett had introduced his lectures on the Republic, and the book was then placed alongside Aristotle’s Ethics on the list of required texts. Jowett went so far as to refer to Plato’s dialogues as “the greatest uninspired writing.”
Enthusiasm for Hellenism was especially great among Decadent writers. Walter Pater, whose Studies in the History of the Renaissance Yeats called “the very flower of decadence,” promoted the recreation of Hellenic culture in Victorian England: “The Hellenic manner is the blossom of the Hellenic spirit and culture, that spirit and culture depend on certain conditions, and those conditions are peculiar to a certain age. Reproduce those conditions, attain the actual root, and blossoms may again be produced of a triumphant colour.”
This interest in Greece aroused some suspicion in those who did not share it. Some of this concern related to the perception that Greek philosophy might be not a supplement to Christianity but a rival to it. H. H. Almond, speculating on Jowett’s religion, concluded that he “was a Platonist all over,” and, like many, was skeptical about the possibility of being both a “Platonist all over” and an orthodox Anglican. A satire of Jowett appearing in The New Republic showed a Dr. Jenkinson preaching a sermon on the Psalms that mentions very little Scripture and instead quotes Plato and Aristotle and eventually refines Christian doctrine into a mild form of Platonic idealism. Dr. Jenkinson’s call for the Apostle’s Creed at the end of his sermon is the piece’s punchline. Jowett himself was always conscientious about placing Christianity above Plato in his writing, but the lengths to which Christian Hellenists went in order to make Plato’s philosophy more compatible with Christianity indicate a certain amount of anxiety on their part about pagan philosophy’s relationship to Christian revelation. Some were less cautious than Jowett: Gerard Manley Hopkins’s journal records an evening during which he heard “Pater talking two hours against Xtianity.”
A Victorian man who displayed an interest in Hellenism was liable to other imputations than religious heterodoxy. At Oxford especially, Greek studies served as a kind of code for homosexual interest. Linda Dowling’s Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford explains in detail the way in which homosexual men capitalized on the revival of interest in Hellenism. Once Jowett had elevated Plato’s reputation and made study of the dialogues a curriculum requirement, homosexual men could “not be denied the means of developing out of this same Hellenism a homosexual counterdiscourse able to justify male love in ideal or transcendental terms.” Hellenism’s influence on Victorian homosexual culture was not limited to the universities. The term Uranist, which was coined in the 1860’s to refer to “sexual inverts” and subsequently became popular with Victorian homosexuals, derives from Greek mythology; the title of The Importance of Being Earnest is a pun on this term. Gay right activist George Ives, whose one hundred and twenty-two volume diary describes his relationships with Wilde and Douglas, among very many other things, named the secret society he founded to support the repeal of Britain’s sodomy laws the Order of Chaeronea, named after the battle of Chaeronea (338 BC) in which homosexual soldiers of the Theban Band were killed. Ives even added 338 years to the dates on his correspondence in order to count the years of the modern era from the date of the battle.
Wilde took these academic, pagan, and homosexual Hellenisms and developed his own idea of the Greek spirit, much as he created distinctly Wildean Christs in “The Soul of Man Under Socialism” and De Profundis. A comprehensive description of Wildean Hellenism will not be attempted here, but three themes are particularly important: Hellenism’s egalitarianism, its sexual purity, and its emphasis on physical beauty over any other kind of beauty. These themes have been chosen for their influence on Wilde’s thought, and because his letters suggest that, by the end of his life, he had renounced all three.
Writers prior to Wilde had noticed homosexuality’s potential for social leveling. John Addington Symonds explained the idea in a letter to Edward Carpenter in 1893: “The blending of Social Strata in masculine love seems to me one of its most pronounced, and socially hopeful features. Where it appears, it abolishes class distinctions.” Carpenter himself later observed something similar, writing that “it is noticeable how often Uranians of good position and breeding are drawn to rougher types, as of manual workers, and frequently very permanent alliances grow up in this way, which although not publicly acknowledged have a decided influence on social institutions.” Wilde’s involvement with George Ives gave him considerable exposure to Symonds and Carpenter’s idea of Uranism’s leveling effect, and there is evidence that he endorsed it. Ives’s diary quotes Wilde as saying on several occasions that “Love is the only democratic thing.”
It is strange that Wilde should have embraced this democratic spirit considering the snobbishness of his public persona — indeed, the snobbishness of having a public persona — but, aside from his relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas, Wilde also had homosexual relationships with men like Charles Parker, Alfonso Conway, and Alfred Wood, who were, respectively, a valet, a newspaperboy, and an unemployed clerk. Geoffrey Wheatcroft tartly defends the coexistence of these seemingly contradictory beliefs:
Owen Dudley Edwards is a considerable authority on the popular literature of the period, and usefully traces Wilde’s influence on later writers . . . before telling us that “Wilde has, idiotically, been called a snob.” There might be statements made about him more idiotic than that, but it isn’t easy to imagine them. In his letters and in his work Wilde’s snobbery is as transparent as it is harmless. It’s true that he combined this with an intermittent affectation of radicalism, but if Dudley Edwards thinks that it’s impossible to be both a self-proclaimed leftist liberal and a crashing snob, he should get out more often.Edward Carson was not so willing to allow Wilde his egalitarianism. In his cross-examination during the Queensberry libel trial, he made a point of mentioning that Alfonso Conway “sold papers on the pier,” referred to Edward Shelley as “this boy selling the books,” and even asked Wilde whether he knew that Shelley “had from fifteen to twenty shillings a week.” When Carson questioned Wilde about Charles Parker, who was in Carson’s description “a gentleman’s servant out of employment,” he was more explicit about his incredulity that Wilde could have had any wholesome reason for befriending a man of low social position: “What I would like to ask you is this. What was there in common between you and this young man of this class?”
Having provoked Wilde into making implausible statements like “I don’t think twopence for social position” and “I recognise no social distinctions at all of any kind,” Carson was free to ridicule these unlikely claims in his closing statement. He first reminds the jury of Wilde’s elitism regarding his art, and his indifference to the literary opinions of any but the “artistic.”
Gentlement, of the jury, contrast that with the position he takes up as regards these lads. He picks up with Charlie Parker, who was a gentleman’s servant and whose brother was a gentleman’s servant. He picks up with young Conway, who sold papers on the pier in Worthing and he picks up wth Scarfe, who I think also was a gentleman’s servant; and when you come to confront him wth these curious associates of a man of high art, his case is no longer that he is dealing in regions of art, which no one can understand but himself and the artistic, but his case is that he has such a magnanimous, such a noble, such a democratic soul that he draws no social distinctions.The transcript records that the audience reacted to the idea that Wilde had a democratic soul with laughter.
If Wilde’s claims of egalitarianism struck the courtroom audience as improbable, his insistence that the love between himself and Douglas was purely spiritual struck the public as almost inconceivable. Wilde was willing to confirm Carson’s inference that “the love that dare not speak its name” to which Douglas’s poem “The Two Loves” refers is a love that exists between two men, but he was careful to distinguish it from “sodomitical” love. When asked by Carson why “the intense devotion and affection and admiration that an artist can feel for a wonderful and beautiful mind” (Wilde’s words) should have any need for concealment, Wilde responded that “there are people in the world who cannot understand [it].”
Victorian thinkers prior to Wilde also considered Uranian love closer to the Platonic ideal described in the Symposium than to sodomy, and Wilde was not the only one to defend its nobility on these grounds. Symonds, who credited Plato’s dialogues with his own Uranian awakening, took from Platonic philosophy not only its endorsement of erotic love between men but also the idea that love in its highest form transcends the physical. He called the identification of male love with sodomy a “vulgar error.” Marc-André Raffalovich distinguished between unisexuals who engage in sodomy and those who are “sensual without being debauched,” meaning those who did not. It was this distinction between the baseness of the carnal and the purity of the spiritual that allowed Wilde to think he might describe in glowing terms one man’s “extravagant adoration” of another and yet deny that the reference was “sodomitical.”
This commitment to chastity proved unworkable. Symonds abandoned the Platonic ideal in his work and his life, publishing essays that questioned whether the cerebral aspect of homosexuality was as ideal as Plato proposed as well as taking numerous working-class male lovers in England and Italy. Wilde, too, indulged in physical relationships with men, despite his claims to the contrary during Carson’s cross-examination. Jenkyns describes Wilde’s capitulation to physicality not as instance of the flesh falling short of philosophical ideals but as a dangerous rationalization:
Indeed, Wilde and Douglas both indulged the illusion that a knowledge of antiquity had contributed to their downfall: the vulgarians in the jury-box, inadequately informed about Greek morality, had crudely misinterpreted the purity of their writings. If anything, the reverse was true: they were self-deceived by their dabblings in Plato. In The Critic as Artist Wilde recalled Arnold’s remark that there was no Higginbottom by the Ilissus; he might have reflected that there was no Charles Parker, no Alfred Wood. He persuaded himself, or so he claimed, that these wretched youths were the modern equivalents of Lysis and Charmides. A little Plato is a dangerous thing.Whatever he may have said in his own defense during his trials, Wilde certainly admitted the physical nature of his homosexual relationships when he included his indictment of Douglas in De Profundis. His lament that Douglas drew Wilde to the worldly pleasures of food and wine — an “illiterate millionare would have suited him better” — was not quite an open confession that his attraction to Douglas had been primarily sexual, but it certainly was an admission that, though Wilde was a cultivated man, he was as susceptible to the snares of physical satisfaction as the rest of mankind. In the years after his release from prison, Wilde abandoned any pretense of infusing his sexual relationship with intellectual significance, indulging in relations with “very pretty Italian boys” and “beautiful young actors.” He was involved briefly with two young fishermen in the French Riviera and found them “both quite perfect, except that they can read and write.” The illusion that his interest in young men was in any way Hellenic had dissolved.
When Wilde argued in his 1894 letter that the phrase “the Lord’s favorite” should not be used to describe a “gracious Greek boy,” he grounded the boy’s unfitness for Hebraic phrases in his physical beauty. In his own interpretation of the Greek tradition of paederastia, Wilde kept the traditional tenet that the elder man should possess intelligence but placed a greater emphasis on the beauty of the younger man than on his capacity for intellectual development. When, during Carson’s cross-examination, Wilde claimed Shakespeare as an example of a poet who had had such a pederastic relationship, he spoke of the object of Shakespeare’s affection as “a wonderful and beautiful person,” more notable in his ability to inspire poetry than his ability to write or appreciate it. This interpretation of Greek love allowed Wilde to extend the label “Platonic” to his relationships with men of no literary talent, such as Charles Parker and Alfonso Conway.
Wilde wrote that “Beauty is a form of Genius — is higher, indeed, than Genius, as it needs no explanation.” He believed that he was justified in loving men like Parker and Conway, who had little besides their physical beauty to recommend them, and a man like Alfred Douglas, whose good looks accompanied selfishness, shallowness, and a cruel temper. In his mind, it was the same love that Michaelangelo, Shakespeare, and Plato had felt. However, the intellectual asymmetry inherent in Wilde’s idea of paederastia grew to grate on him. Just as he eventually ceased to demand that his lovers be able to read and write, Wilde also stopped insisting that his friends have handsome profiles, and instead chose his closest friends for their goodwill, as in the case of Robert Ross, or their poetic ability, as in the case of Ernest Dowson. Devotion to physical beauty for its own sake became another Hellenic idea discarded.
These strains of Hellenism in Wilde’s thought were eroded by circumstances: Wilde thought he was an eminently democratic man, and he was ridiculed for believing so; he thought he could love men without committing sexual acts with them, and he was wrong; he thought he could safely devote himself to a person of great physical beauty but dubious moral character, and it destroyed him. Wilde accepted these developments, and acknowledged that the diminishing importance of Hellenism in his thought brought him nearer to the Catholic Church. He wrote to Ross in 1897:
Yesterday I attended Mass at ten o’clock and afterwards bathed. So I went into the water without being a Pagan. The consequence was that I was not tempted by either Sirens, or Mermaidens, or any of the green-haired following of Glaucus. I really think that this is a remarkable thing. In my pagan days the sea was always full of tritons blowng conches, and other unpleasant things. Now it is quite different.Contrast this with an 1876 letter in which Wilde admitted feeling “slightly immoral when in the sea . . . 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.” Clearly, the tension between Hellenism and Catholicism was present even then. Perhaps the actor Kyrle Bellew was right when he said to Wilde, rather boldly, “I am a Catholic – you would have been one too had you been spared Greece.”
Conclusion
Wilde’s participation in the English tradition of Catholic decadents, dandies and wits began long before his baptism. The Decadent philosophy Wilde espoused during his literary career led him towards Rome with its successes as well as its failures, making his conversion both a fulfillment and a necessary repudiation of Decadence. He insisted in De Profundis that a moment of contrition could transform the character of past sins; his final acceptance of Roman Catholicism can be seen as having the same kind of transformative effect on the Catholic elements of his life.
