Oscar Wilde:

From: brilliance to infamy

by Gwen Herat

Part 2

Oscar Wilde's first friendship was with a man called Robert Sherard whom he met in Paris in 1883. It was going to be a major landmark in the playwright's life. It was based on a deep feeling kindled by romantic attachment and certainly nothing beyond that. Sherard was a completely normal person and Wilde developed a friendship with him later.

After many months the close friendship that the two men had for each other waned when Wilde met a young woman with whom he fell in love and married her. On his part, Sherard was upset and was never the same again. However, he remained loyal and steadfast to the end as a friend to be depended to the end in case of trouble and need. Yet, he was hurt that Wilde had pushed him into the second place in his affection.

Came the day when Wilde announced his intention to marry his girlfriend. He woke Sherard one morning to give the news as was expected by him. Sherard felt as if he were hit with a hammer; ‘I am very sorry to hear about it’, he said sullenly and returned to sleep and never heard what Wilde said, ‘What a brute you are, Robert.’ Thus ended Robert's role as Wilde's favourite friend.

Sherard

The friend who played such a short but significant role in Wilde's life and suffered a terrible mental setback was dejected and disappointed. He withdrew himself to seclusion later in life but found a heart-breaking moment when he stood by Wilde at the Old Bailey dock when everyone, his so-called friends from the upper class, writers and nobility had deserted him in his time of shame and trial.

His heart went out to Wilde seeing him forlorn and hanging his head in shame, reduced to infamy from brilliance. Later, Sherard said, ‘I had gone down with him, my best years had been lost'.

He had befriended Wilde when he was only 22 years of age with literary ambition at Oxford along with Wilde and never pursued the degree he was after but went off to France and lived in Paris with the bohemians as was the style of the upper class but quickly changed to living in a cottage by himself in the remote area of Plassy because he was a puritan even at that tender age.

Sherard was the grandson of Wordsworth and he was not able to meet the literary intellectualism of Wilde and his plush living in Paris though he had all the means to do so, gave up all his ambition of book writing and went over to Wordsworth country to enjoy the spring. Thereafter, he lived in a cottage in Westmoreland among daffodils and violets while Wilde languished in poverty in later years.

Marriage

Wilde was a happily married man with two children. He was 30 years of age when he walked down the aisle of the church of St. James's in Paddington to make Constance Lloyd his wife on May 29, 1884. He was deeply in love with her to the contrary to what many thought he was marrying for wealth.

The affectionate husband, the fond father, Oscar Wilde was in a new role. Once Wilde stopped at a flower stall where he chose the loveliest blossoms to send with a message of love to the bride he had dumped.

Constance understood but loved him unto death though they lived far apart. The beautiful and charming bride of five summers earlier was heartbroken as to what happened to the man she adored and cared for, the man who wrote beautiful verses to her all the time.

‘I can write no stately poem

As a prelude to my lay

From a poet to a poem

I would dare to say,

....If thee fallen petals

one to you seem fair

Love will waft it till it settles

In your hair.

....And when wind and winter harden

All the loveless land,

It will whisper of the garden

You will understand.’

Fond husband

It did not matter how cruel he sounded. The fond husband, the proud father, the advocate of matrimony, an unusual facet of Oscar Wilde which was destined to end no sooner it started.

It is exaggeration to say that Wilde was a man of faith or of religious leaning but according to his poems, there were times when he was troubled he needed to be with God and was disturbed by his faithlessness.

‘Will I know my soul in Hell must lie

If I this night before God's throne should stand’

His father, Sir William Wilde rejoiced that his son went away from Oxford longing for the vision. He knew the corrupting influence of Catholic Ireland but then Oxford had faltered in Protestant orthodoxy. His friends, Manning and Newman had gone over to Rome.

It appeared that Wilde too was keen in joining them if not for his father. Another friend, David Hunter Blair surrended all his wealth and position to become a Benedictine monk and Abbot.

Much disturbed by not knowing what to do about his faith, he told Blair that had he turned a Catholic, his father would have cast him off and would do the same at any time no matter how it would have affected him. When Wilde was overtaken by sexual sinning in later life, he confessed that had he taken up Roman Catholicism, he would have been a happier man devoid of sins.

Friend

Wilde accompanied a friend to various Catholic gatherings. They went to hear Manning, raised that year to the purple and preached at St. Aloysius. The outward visible sign of what Roman Catholicism could make a man must have impressed Wilde.

A Cardinal would have found his place among the great figures of Rome of the Renaissance. How far Wilde pursued this imagination no one knows.

To be continued