Oscar Wilde, His Life and Confessions Volume I Part 4

"'When do you go, Oscar?'

"'Early,' I replied thoughtlessly, or rather full of my own thoughts, 'early to-morrow morning, I believe; the usual train.'

"In the morning just as I was starting for the station, having said 'goodbye' to everyone, he came up to me very pale and strangely quiet.

"'I'm coming with you to the station, Oscar,' he said; 'the Doctor gave me permission, when I told him what friends we had been.'

"'I'm glad,' I cried, my conscience p.r.i.c.king me that I had not thought of asking for his company. 'I'm very glad. My last hours at school will always be a.s.sociated with you.'

"He just glanced up at me, and the glance surprised me; it was like a dog looks at one. But my own hopes soon took possession of me again, and I can only remember being vaguely surprised by the appeal in his regard.

"When I was settled in my seat in the train, he did not say 'goodbye'

and go, and leave me to my dreams; but brought me papers and things and hung about.

"The guard came and said:

"'Now, sir, if you are going.'

"I liked the 'Sir.' To my surprise my friend jumped into the carriage and said:

"'All right, guard, I'm not going, but I shall slip out as soon as you whistle.'

"The guard touched his cap and went. I said something, I don't know what; I was a little embarra.s.sed.

"'You will write to me, Oscar, won't you, and tell me about everything?'

"'Oh, yes,' I replied, 'as soon as I get settled down, you know. There will be such a lot to do at first, and I am wild to see everything. I wonder how the professors will treat me. I do hope they will not be fools or prigs; what a pity it is that all professors are not poets....' And so I went on merrily, when suddenly the whistle sounded and a moment afterwards the train began to move.

"'You must go now,' I said to him.

"'Yes,' he replied, in a queer m.u.f.fled voice, while standing with his hand on the door of the carriage. Suddenly he turned to me and cried:

"'Oh, Oscar,' and before I knew what he was doing he had caught my face in his hot hands, and kissed me on the lips. The next moment he had slipped out of the door and was gone....

"I sat there all shaken. Suddenly I became aware of cold, sticky drops trickling down my face--his tears. They affected me strangely. As I wiped them off I said to myself in amaze:

"'This is love: this is what he meant--love.'...

"I was trembling all over. For a long while I sat, unable to think, all shaken with wonder and remorse."

CHAPTER III

Oscar Wilde did well at school, but he did still better at college, where the compet.i.tion was more severe. He entered Trinity on October 19th, 1871, just three days after his seventeenth birthday. Sir Edward Sullivan writes me that when Oscar matriculated at Trinity he was already "a thoroughly good cla.s.sical scholar of a brilliant type," and he goes on to give an invaluable snap-shot of him at this time; a likeness, in fact, the chief features of which grew more and more characteristic as the years went on.

"He had rooms in College at the north side of one of the older squares, known as Botany Bay. These rooms were exceedingly grimy and ill-kept. He never entertained there. On the rare occasions when visitors were admitted, an unfinished landscape in oils was always on the easel, in a prominent place in his sitting room. He would invariably refer to it, telling one in his humorously unconvincing way that 'he had just put in the b.u.t.terfly.' Those of us who had seen his work in the drawing cla.s.s presided over by 'Bully' Wakeman at Portora were not likely to be deceived in the matter....

"His college life was mainly one of study; in addition to working for his cla.s.sical examinations, he devoured with voracity all the best English writers.

"He was an intense admirer of Swinburne and constantly reading his poems; John Addington Symond's works too, on the Greek authors, were perpetually in his hands. He never entertained any p.r.o.nounced views on social, religious or political questions while in College; he seemed to be altogether devoted to literary matters.

"He mixed freely at the same time in Dublin society functions of all kinds, and was always a very vivacious and welcome guest at any house he cared to visit. All through his Dublin University days he was one of the purest minded men that could be met with.

"He was not a card player, but would on occasions join in a game of limited loo at some man's rooms. He was also an extremely moderate drinker. He became a member of the junior debating society, the Philosophical, but hardly ever took any part in their discussions.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Dr. Sir William Wilde]

"He read for the Berkeley medal (which he afterwards gained) with an excellent, but at the same time broken-down, cla.s.sical scholar, John Townsend Mills, and, besides instruction, he contrived to get a good deal of amus.e.m.e.nt out of his readings with his quaint teacher. He told me for instance that on one occasion he expressed his sympathy for Mills on seeing him come into his rooms wearing a tall hat completely covered in c.r.a.pe. Mills, however, replied, with a smile, that no one was dead--it was only the evil condition of his hat that had made him a.s.sume so mournful a disguise. I have often thought that the incident was still fresh in Oscar Wilde's mind when he introduced John Worthing in 'The Importance of Being Earnest,' in mourning for his fict.i.tious brother....

"Shortly before he started on his first trip to Italy, he came into my rooms in a very striking pair of trousers. I made some chaffing remark on them, but he begged me in the most serious style of which he was so excellent a master not to jest about them.

"'They are my Trasimene trousers, and I mean to wear them there.'"

Already his humour was beginning to strike all his acquaintances, and what Sir Edward Sullivan here calls his "puremindedness," or what I should rather call his peculiar refinement of nature. No one ever heard Oscar Wilde tell a suggestive story; indeed he always shrank from any gross or crude expression; even his mouth was vowed always to pure beauty.

The Trinity Don whom I have already quoted about Oscar's school-days sends me a rather severe critical judgment of him as a student. There is some truth in it, however, for in part at least it was borne out and corroborated by Oscar's later achievement. It must be borne in mind that the Don was one of his compet.i.tors at Trinity, and a successful one; Oscar's mind could not limit itself to college tasks and prescribed books.

"When Oscar came to college he did excellently during the first year; he was top of his cla.s.s in cla.s.sics; but he did not do so well in the long examinations for a cla.s.sical scholarship in his second year. He was placed fifth, which was considered very good, but he was plainly not, the man for the [Greek: dolichos] (or long struggle), though first-rate for a short examination."

Oscar himself only completed these spirit-photographs by what he told me of his life at Trinity.

"It was the fascination of Greek letters, and the delight I took in Greek life and thought," he said to me once, "which made me a scholar.

I got my love of the Greek ideal and my intimate knowledge of the language at Trinity from Mahaffy and Tyrrell; they were Trinity to me; Mahaffy was especially valuable to me at that time. Though not so good a scholar as Tyrrell, he had been in Greece, had lived there and saturated himself with Greek thought and Greek feeling. Besides he took deliberately the artistic standpoint towards everything, which was coming more and more to be my standpoint. He was a delightful talker, too, a really great talker in a certain way--an artist in vivid words and eloquent pauses. Tyrrell, too, was very kind to me--intensely sympathetic and crammed with knowledge. If he had known less he would have been a poet. Learning is a sad handicap, Frank, an appalling handicap," and he laughed irresistibly.

"What were the students like in Dublin?" I asked. "Did you make friends with any of them?"

"They were worse even than the boys at Portora," he replied; "they thought of nothing but cricket and football, running and jumping; and they varied these intellectual exercises with bouts of fighting and drinking. If they had any souls they diverted them with coa.r.s.e _amours_ among barmaids and the women of the streets; they were simply awful. s.e.xual vice is even coa.r.s.er and more loathsome in Ireland than it is in England:--

"'Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.'

"When I tried to talk they broke into my thought with stupid gibes and jokes. Their highest idea of humour was an obscene story. No, no, Tyrrell and Mahaffy represent to me whatever was good in Trinity."

In 1874 Oscar Wilde won the gold medal for Greek. The subject of the year was "The Fragments of the Greek Comic Poets, as edited by Meineke." In this year, too, he won a cla.s.sical scholarship--a demyship of the annual value of 95, which was tenable for five years, which enabled him to go to Oxford without throwing an undue strain on his father's means.

He noticed with delight that his success was announced in the _Oxford University Gazette_ of July 11th, 1874. He entered Magdalen College, Oxford, on October 17th, a day after his twentieth birthday.

Just as he had been more successful at Trinity than at school, so he was destined to be far more successful and win a far greater reputation at Oxford than in Dublin.

He had the advantage of going to Oxford a little later than most men, at twenty instead of eighteen, and thus was enabled to win high honours with comparative ease, while leading a life of cultured enjoyment.

He was placed in the first cla.s.s in "Moderations" in 1876 and had even then managed to make himself talked about in the life of the place.

The Trinity Don whom I have already quoted, after admitting that there was not a breath against his character either at school or Trinity, goes on to write that "at Trinity he did not strike us as a very exceptional person," and yet there must have been some sharp eyes at Trinity, for our Don adds with surprising divination:

"I fancy his rapid development took place after he went to Oxford, where he was able to specialize more; in fact where he could study what he most affected. It is, I feel sure, from his Oxford life more than from his life in Ireland that one would be able to trace the good and bad features by which he afterwards attracted the attention of the world."