Alyson J. Shaw, Northeastern University
In July 1893, fifteen-year-old Cissy Loftus made her debut at the Oxford Music Hall (Beerbohm, Letters to Reggie Turner 42). Beerbohm was one of Cissy's most ardent admirers, and for the next few months his letters were full of his infatuation with her. Beerbohm insisted that his love for the young star had purified him. "I have become good and am really happy at last," he wrote to his friend, Will Rothenstein (Beerbohm and Rothenstein 18). Under this romantic influence, the references to Wilde in Beerbohm's letters became more critical.
That Beerbohm was distancing himself from his mentor was evidenced by his 19 August 1893 letter to Turner, in which he wrote, "Apropos of my former self, Oscar was at the last night of the Haymarket [Theatre]....Nor have I ever seen Oscar so fatuous....Of course I would rather see Oscar free than sober, but still, suddenly meeting him after my simple and lovely little ways of life since the Lady Cecilia [Cissy] first looked out from her convent-window, I felt quite repelled" (Letters to Reggie Turner 53). Repellent or not, Beerbohm still admired Wilde's writing, as another passage from the same letter demonstrated. "I have just been reading Salome again," he wrote, "terribly corrupt but there is much that is beautiful in it, much lovely writing: I almost wonder Oscar doesn't dramatise it" (Letters to Reggie Turner 53). In this uneasy alliance between homage and parody, Beerbohm undermined his professed admiration with a flippant closing paradox.
Oscar Wilde: Comedy as Tragedy
By PETER ACKROYD
George Meredith once described Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde as ''a mixture of Apollo and a monster.''
And if Oscar Wilde was indeed a monstre sacre, he had all the right credentials. He was born in Dublin in 1854, the late child of an eccentric father and an equally eccentric mother, a nationalist poet who called herself Speranza; he went in easy stages to Trinity College, Dublin, and Magdalen College, Oxford, before arriving at his destined home in London. He was a poet but his youth was combined with cleverness, and he realized that self-publicity might count for more than mere achievement. If he did not walk down Piccadilly with a lily in his hand, as the parody of him in Gilbert & Sullivan's ''Patience'' suggested, he did at least create the atmosphere in which such a floral parade might have been thought likely to occur.
Wilde was an esthete only until he grew up, however, and it was in the late 1880's and 1890's that he began his serious work - his stories, his criticism, his one notorious novel and of course his plays. Yet even as he composed those dramas, which will last as long as the English language itself, he was beset by rumors about his private life that eventually transformed him into what he described as ''the pariah dog of the nineteenth century.'' It was a brilliant career: he went from poetry to prose, from prose to drama and then from drama to prison. He always did the unexpected so that, although he was not forgiven, he was certainly never forgotten.
But even before that fall which in some distant region of his consciousness he seems positively to have longed for, he was something of a puzzle to his contemporaries. To some he was a savior (literally so, since on occasion he seemed to possess the gift of healing), whereas to others he was perilously close to becoming an Antichrist. In appearance he was unmistakable - as one contemporary noted, he looked like a Roman emperor carved out of suet. But as soon as he opened his mouth, any unfavorable impression was dispelled - when he spoke, the delicately rounded sentences, the orotund expressions, the epigrammatic flashes of lightning, all worked together to render him a conversationalist unparalleled in his own country. Those who knew him best also remarked on the sheer buoyancy of his spirits. Certainly his letters are unique, filled as they are with an exuberant and exhilarating wit; as Borges has said, ''The fundamental spirit of his work is joy.''
The Antigonish Review on
85-86
Gary H. Paterson
Oscar and the Scarlet Woman
Oscar Wilde once commented, I look on all the different religions as colleges in a great university. Roman Catholicism is the greatest and most romantic of them."1 It was undoubtedly the it romance" of Catholicism which crept continually into his life and writings that held a life-long attraction for Wilde. The sensuous beauty of richly ornate vestments, the fragrance of incense, and the various rituals of the Church all figure prominently in Wilde's poems and fiction. He liked to speak of the "perfume of belief"2 and wore an oval amethyst on his third finger, vaguely resembling a bishop's ring. "We spend our days looking for the secret of life. Well, the secret of life is art,"3 he proclaimed on his American tour. Decidedly the attraction of Catholicism was artistic and, it would seem, part of the aesthetic pose.
Shortly after his release from prison, Wilde remarked to Reginald Turner, "The Catholic Church is for saints and sinners alone. For respectable people the Anglican Church will do."4 Again, the flippant tone suggests the poseur and yet, beneath all that, there lies another facet of Wilde's attraction to Catholicism: its essential isolation from the mainstream of English society. Again, the exotic, Italianate beauties of Catholicism, still a somewhat suspect minority religion in England, could not help but appeal to the socially alienated, decadent sensibility.