Urganch state university the department of roman-german philology theme: oscar wilde and his works

1.1 His childhood, wife and children.
He had the misfortune or perhaps the fortune to have been born and to have lived in the stiff-necked, prejudiced and etiquette-ridden years of the Victorian Age. A great deal of Wilde’s character was directly attributable to his origin, and his career cannot be properly appraised without a brief outline of his ancestry.Sir William Wilde, Oscar’s father, became one of the most aural surgeons and oculists of his day. He has been called ‘the father of modern otology’. William Wilde was also an eminent archaeologist and wrote about a dozen books on Irish folklore, legend and tradition. Jane Francesca Wilde wrote inflammatory political articles and poems under the pseudonym of Speranza. After her marriage her political enthusiasms and activities waned, and she settled down to domestic life. The Wildes had three children, two boys and a girl. The eldest, William Wills Wilde was born in 1853. One year later Oscar was born. His birth was somewhat of a disappointment to Jane, who had been quite certain the child was going to be the girl she longed for. It is worthy of note that in those days when boys were dressed in skirts long after they could walk, she kept the child in such clothes until the beginning of her third pregnancy in 1857. She got a girl, who was christened Isola Francesca and from the day of her birth she was idolised by the whole family. She died after a short illness at the age of ten. Many years later Oscar wrote the poem Requiescat in her memory.When Oscar Wilde was ten years old and his brother twelve, they were both sent to Portora Royal School at Enniskillen. In spite of the difference in their ages the boys seem to have been in the same class. Whereas William was popular at school, Oscar was quite the reverse. He had little in common with his school-fellows as he disliked games and fighting and took more interest in flowers and sunsets. He discovered the dangerous and delightful distinction of being different from others. His main interests in scholarship were poetry and the classics, particularly Greek, for which he had an inordinate passion.In October 1871, when he was just seventeen, he won an entrance scholarship to Trinity College in Dublin, which is the Protestant University of Ireland. There he remained for three years, and it was there that he fell under the spell of Professor Mahaffy, who was fascinated by Greek culture, and exercised a very considerable influence on Oscar’s later life. Oscar Wilde undoubtedly learned a great deal of the art of conversation from Mahaffy.
He concluded his brilliant career at Trinity by winning a scholarship for Magdalen College in Oxford, and in October 1874 he went up to the University, where John Ruskin, Walter Pater and Cardinal Newman were to exert much influence on this twenty-year-old undergraduate. In the summer of 1875 Oscar Wilde made an extensive tour of northern Italy. It is to this visit that is owed the earliest known of Wildes poems. This Italian tour made a great impression on him and also increased his interest in the Roman Catholic Church, by putting into such close touch with so many buildings a nd works of art that had been inspired by it.In 1876 Wilde began seriously to write poetry and in this and the following two years he had a number of poems published, mostly in Oxford and in Irish magazines. This culminated in his competing, in his last year at Oxford, for the Newdigate Prize Poem, the chief prize for poetry at the university.
Wilde moved from London in 1879 and set about establishing himself as the leader and model of the aesthetic movement. His brother had found a niche in journalism and he helped him in his early struggles, introducing him to editors, who published his poems.⁶
The Wildes had three children, two sons and a daughter. The first son was born in 1852, a year after the marriage, and was christened after his father William Charles Kingsbury Wills. The second son was born two years later, in 1854 and the names given to him seem to reveal the Nationalist sympathies and pride of his mother. He was christened Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde but he appears to have suffered from the pompous string only in extreme youth. At school he concealed the "Fingal," as a young man he found it advisable to omit the "O'Flahertie". In childhood and early boyhood Oscar was not considered as quick or engaging or handsome as his brother Willie. Both boys had the benefit of the best schooling of the time. They were sent as boarders to the Portora School at Enniskillen, one of the four Royal schools of Ireland. Oscar went to Portora in 1864 at the age of nine, a couple of years after his brother. He remained at the school for seven years and left it on winning an Exhibition for Trinity College, Dublin, when he was just seventeen. The facts hitherto collected and published about Oscar as a schoolboy are sadly meagre and insignificant. Fortunately for my readers I have received from Sir Edward Sullivan, who was a contemporary of Oscar both at school and college, an exceedingly vivid and interesting pen-picture of the lad, one of those astounding masterpieces of portraiture only to be produced by the plastic sympathies of boyhood and the intimate intercourse of years lived in common. It is love alone which in later life can achieve such a miracle of representment. I am very glad to be allowed to publish this realistic miniature, in the very words of the author.’’I first met Oscar Wilde in the early part of 1868 at Portora Royal School. He was thirteen or fourteen years of age. His long straight fair hair was a striking feature of his appearance. He was then, as he remained for some years after, extremely boyish in nature, very mobile, almost restless when out of the schoolroom. Yet he took no part in the school games at any time. Now and then he would be seen in one of the school boats on Loch Erne yet he was a poor hand at an oar’’.’’Even as a schoolboy he was an excellent talker: his descriptive power being far above the average, and his humorous exaggerations of school occurrences always highly amusing’’.
"A favourite place for the boys to sit and gossip in the late afternoon in winter time was round a stove which stood in ‘The Stone Hall’. Here Oscar was at his best although his brother Willie was perhaps in those days even better than he was at telling a story. "Oscar would frequently vary the entertainment by giving us extremely quaint illustrations of holy people in stained-glass attitudes: his power of twisting his limbs into weird contortions being very great. (I am told that Sir William Wilde, his father, possessed the same power.) It must not be thought, however, that there was any suggestion of irreverence in the exhibition."At one of these gatherings, about the year 1870, I remember a discussion taking place about an ecclesiastical prosecution that made a considerable stir at the time. Oscar was present, and full of the mysterious nature of the Court of Arches he told us there was nothing he would like better in after life than to be the hero and to go down to posterity as the defendant in such a case as 'Regina versus Wilde!'
"At school he was almost always called 'Oscar'-but he had a nick-name 'Grey-crow' which the boys would call him when they wished to annoy him and which he resented greatly. It was derived in some mysterious way from the name of an island in the Upper Loch Erne within easy reach of the school by boat.
"It was some little time before he left Portora that the boys got to know of his full name, Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde. Just at the close of his school career he won the 'Carpenter' Greek Testament Prize-and on presentation day was called up to the dais by Dr. Steele by all his names-much to Oscar's annoyance for a great deal of schoolboy chaff followed."He was always generous, kindly, good-tempered. I remember he and myself were on one occasion mounted as opposing jockeys on the backs of two bigger boys in what we called a 'tournament,' held in one of the class-rooms. Oscar and his horse were thrown, and the result was a broken arm for Wilde. Knowing that it was an accident, he did not let it make any difference in our friendship. "He had, I think, no very special chums while at school. I was perhaps as friendly with him all through as anybody, though his junior in class by a year....
"Willie Wilde was never very familiar with him, treating him always, in those days, as a younger brother."When in the head class together, we with two other boys were in the town of Enniskillen one afternoon, and formed part of an audience who were listening to a street orator. One of us, for the fun of the thing, got near the speaker and with a stick knocked his hat off and then ran for home followed by the other three. Several of the listeners, resenting the impertinence, gave chase, and Oscar in his hurry collided with an aged cripple and threw him down- a fact which was duly reported to the boys when we got safely back. Oscar was afterwards heard telling how he found his way barred by an angry giant with whom he fought through many rounds and whom he eventually left for dead in the road after accomplishing prodigies of valour on his redoubtable opponent. Romantic imagination was strong in him even in those schoolboy days but there was always something in his telling of such a tale to suggest that he felt his hearers were not really being taken in; it was merely the romancing indulged in so humorously by the two principal male characters in 'The Importance of Being Earnest.'
The most important event in Oscar's early life happened while he was still an undergraduate at Oxford his father Sir William Wilde died in 1876, leaving to his wife Lady Wilde nearly all he possessed some £7,000, the interest of which was barely enough to keep her in genteel poverty. The sum is so small that one is constrained to believe the report that Sir William Wilde in his later years kept practically open house—"lashins of whisky and a good larder," and was besides notorious for his gallantries. Oscar's small portion, a little money and a small house with some land, came to him in the nick of time he used the cash partly to pay some debts at Oxford, partly to defray the expenses of a trip to Greece. It was natural that Oscar Wilde, with his eager sponge-like receptivity, should receive the best academic education of his time, and should better that by travel. We all get something like the education we desire and Oscar Wilde, it always seemed to me, was over-educated, had learned, that is too much from books and not enough from life and had thought too little for himself but my readers will be able to judge of this for themselves. In 1877 he accompanied Professor Mahaffy on a long tour through Greece. The pleasure and profit Oscar got from the trip were so great that he failed to return to Oxford on the date fixed. The Dons fined him forty-five pounds for the breach of discipline; but they returned the money to him in the following year when he won First Honours in "Greats" and the Newdigate prize. This visit to Greece when he was twenty-three confirmed the view of life which he had already formed and I have indicated sufficiently perhaps in that talk with Pater already recorded. But no one will understand Oscar Wilde who for a moment loses sight of the fact that he was a pagan born as Gautier says, "One for whom the visible world alone exists," endowed with all the Greek sensuousness and love of plastic beauty a pagan, like Nietzsche and Gautier, wholly out of sympathy with Christianity, Confraternity of the faithless who cannot believe, to whom a sense of sin and repentance are symptoms of weakness and disease. Oscar used often to say that the chief pleasure he had in visiting Rome was to find the Greek gods and the heroes and heroines of Greek story throned in the Vatican. He preferred Niobe to the Mater Dolorosa and Helen to both the worship of sorrow must give place, he declared, to the worship of the beautiful. From 1884 on I met Oscar Wilde continually, now at the theatre, now in some society drawing room most often I think, at Mrs. Jeune's (afterwards Lady St. Helier). His appearance was not in his favour there was something oily and fat about him that repelled me. Naturally being British-born and young I tried to give my repugnance a moral foundation fleshly indulgence and laziness, I said to myself, were written all over him. The snatches of his monologues which I caught from time to time seemed to me to consist chiefly of epigrams almost mechanically constructed of proverbs and familiar sayings turned upside down. Two of Balzac's characters, it will be remembered, practised this form of humour. The desire to astonish and dazzle, the love of the uncommon for its own sake, was so evident that I shrugged my shoulders and avoided him. One evening, however, at Mrs. Jeune's, I got to know him better. At the very door Mrs. Jeune came up to me:
"Have you ever met Mr. Oscar Wilde? You ought to know him, he is so delightfully clever, so brilliant!"
I went with her and was formally introduced to him. He shook hands in a limp way I disliked his hands were flabby, greasy his skin looked bilious and dirty. He wore a great green scarab ring on one finger. He was over-dressed rather than well-dressed; his clothes fitted him too tightly he was too stout. He had a trick which I noticed even then, which grew on him later, of pulling his jowl with his right hand as he spoke, and his jowl was already fat and pouchy. His appearance filled me with distaste. I lay stress on this physical repulsion, because I think most people felt it, and in itself, it is a tribute to the fascination of the man that he should have overcome the first impression so completely and so quickly. I don't remember what we talked about, but I noticed almost immediately that his grey eyes were finely expressive in turn vivacious, laughing, sympathetic always beautiful. The carven mouth, too, with its heavy, chiselled, purple-tinged lips, had a certain attraction and significance in spite of a black front tooth which shocked one when he laughed. He was over six feet in height and both broad and thick-set he looked like a Roman Emperor of the decadence.⁷