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To Reginald Harding

Wednesday [5 July 1876] Magdalen College, Oxford

My dear Kitten, I am very sorry to hear you did not meet the poor Bouncer Boy; see what comes of having rowdy friends fond of practical jokes. I had an awful pencil scrawl from him yesterday, written sitting on the rocks at Lundy. I hope nothing will happen to him.

I had a very pleasant time in Lincolnshire, but the weather was so hot we did nothing but play lawn tennis, as probably Bouncer will tell you when you see him next (I wrote a full account to him). I examined schools in geography and history, sang glees, ate strawberries and argued fiercely with my poor uncle, who revenged himself on Sunday by preaching on Rome in the morning, and on humility in the evening. Both very ‘nasty ones’ for me.

I ran up to town yesterday from Lincoln and brought Frank Miles a great basket of roses from the Rectory. I found him sketching the most lovely and dangerous woman in London – Lady Desart. She is very fascinating indeed.

I came down Monday night to read for viva voce, but yesterday morning at ten o’clock was woke up by the Clerk of the Schools, and found I was in already. I was rather afraid of being put on in Catullus, but got a delightful exam from a delightful man – not on the books at all but on Aeschylus versus Shakespeare, modern poetry and drama and every conceivable subject. I was up for about an hour and was quite sorry when it was over. In Divinity I was ploughed of course.

I am going down to Bingham with Frank Miles and R. Gower on Saturday for a week. They have the most beautiful modern church in England, and the finest lilies. I shall write and tell you about it.

Being utterly penniless I can’t go up to town till Friday. It is very slow here – now that Bouncer is gone. But tonight the Mods list comes out so I will have some excitement being congratulated – really I don’t care a bit (no one ever does now) and quite expect a Second after my Logic, though of course much the cleverest man in. (Such cheek!)

You will probably see the list on Thursday or Friday; if I get a Second mind you write and condole with me awfully, and if 1 get a First say it was only what you expected.

See the results of having nothing to do – ten pages of a letter! Yours ever

OSCAR F. O’F. WILLS WILDE

My address will be The Rectory, Bingham, Notts after Saturday. I hope you will write a line and tell me all extra news about Bouncer. PS no.2. The paper enclosed in Bouncer’s letter was not dirty.

To William Ward

[Postmark 10 July 1876] 4 Albert Street, London SW

My dear Boy, I know you will be glad to hear I have got my First all right. I came up from Lincolnshire to town on Monday and went down that night to Magdalen to read my Catullus, but while lying in bed on Tuesday morning with Swinburne (a copy of) was woke up by the Clerk of the Schools to know why I did not come up. I thought I was not in till Thursday. About one o’clock I nipped up and was ploughed immediately in Divinity and then got a delightful viva voce, first in the Odyssey, where we discussed epic poetry in general, dogs, and women. Then in Aeschylus where we talked of Shakespeare, Walt Whitman and the Poetics. He had a long discussion about my essay on Poetry in the Aristotle paper and altogether was delightful. Of course I knew I had got a First, so swaggered horribly.

The next day the B.C.s and myself were dining with Nicols in Christ Church and the list came out at seven, as we were walking up the High. I said I would not go up to the Schools, as I knew I had a First etc., and made them all very ill, absolutely. I did not know what I had got till the next morning at twelve o’clock, breakfasting at the Mitre, I read [it] in The Times. Altogether I swaggered horribly, but am really pleased with myself. My poor mother is in great delight and I was overwhelmed with telegrams on Thursday from everyone I know. My father would have been so pleased about it. I think God has dealt very hardly with us. It has robbed me of any real pleasure in my First, and I have not sufficient faith in Providence to believe it is all for the best – I know it is not. I feel an awful dread of going home to our old house, with everything filled with memories. I go down today for a week at Bingham with the Mileses. I have been staying here with Julia Tindal who is in great form. Yesterday I heard the Cardinal at the Pro-Cathedral preach a charity sermon. He is more fascinating than ever. I met MacCall and Williamson there who greeted me with much empressement. I feel an impostor and traitor to myself on these occasions and must do something decided.

Afterwards I went to the Zoo with Julia and the two Peytons – Tom is nearly all right. Young Stewy dined with us on Saturday. He said he was afraid he must have jarred you by his indecencies and was going to reform. Altogether I found out we were right in thinking that set a little jarred about our carelessness about them. Next term I shall look them up.

I hope you will see the Kitten. I got a very nice letter from him about Mods. Miss Puss has fallen in my estimation if she is fetched with Swan – who to men is irritable, but to women intolerable I think. Write soon to Bingham Rectory, Nottinghamshire. Ever yours OSCAR O’F. WI. WILDE

To Reginald Harding

[Circa 13 July 1876] Bingham Rectory, Notts

My dear Boy, Thousand thanks for your letter. Half the pleasure of getting a First is to receive such delightful congratulations. I am really a little pleased at getting it, though I swaggered horribly and pretended that I did not care a bit. In fact I would not go up to the Schools on Wednesday evening – said it was a bore – and actually did not know certainly till Thursday at twelve o’clock when I read it in The Times. The really pleasant part is that my mother is so pleased. I got a heap of telegrams on Thursday from Ireland with congratulations.

I went up to town on Friday and stayed with Julia Tindal; we had a very pleasant time together. Sunday we went to the Zoo with Algy and Tom Peyton. Tom is all right now; he had got paralysis of his face.

I came down here Monday and had no idea it was so lovely. A wonderful garden with such white lilies and rose walks; only that there are no serpents or apples it would be quite Paradise. The church is very fine indeed. Frank and his mother, a very good artist, have painted wonderful windows, and frescoed angels on the walls, and one of his sisters has carved the screen and altar. It is simply beautiful and everything done by themselves.

These horrid red marks are strawberries, which I am eating in basketfuls, during intervals of lawn tennis, at which I am awfully good.

There are four daughters, all very pretty indeed, one of them who is writing at the other side of the table quite lovely. My heart is torn in sunder with admiration for them all, and my health going, so I return to Ireland next week.

We are having a large garden party here today, and tomorrow one at the Duke of Rutland’s who is quite close.

I make myself as charming as ever and am much admired. Have had some good arguments with Dean Miles who was a great friend of Newman, Pusey and Manning at Oxford and a very advanced Anglican.

Write me a line soon like a good boy. Ever yours

OSCAR F. O’F. WILLS WILDE

I heard the Cardinal on Sunday preach a charity sermon at the Pro-Cathedral, Kensington. MacCall was there.

To William Ward

Wednesday [26 July 1876] 1 Merrion Square North, Dublin

My dear Boy, I confess not to be a worshipper at the Temple of Reason. I think man’s reason the most misleading and thwarting guide that the sun looks upon, except perhaps the reason of woman. Faith is, I think, a bright lantern for the feet, though of course an exotic plant in man’s mind, and requiring continual cultivation. My mother would probably agree with you. Except for the people, for whom she thinks dogma necessary, she rejects all forms of superstition and dogma, particularly any notion of priest and sacrament standing between her and God. She has a very strong faith in that aspect of God we call the Holy Ghost – the divine intelligence of which we on earth partake. Here she is very strong, though of course at times troubled by the discord and jarring of the world, when she takes a dip into pessimism.

Her last pessimist, Schopenhauer, says the whole human race ought on a given day, after a strong remonstrance firmly but respectfully urged on God, to walk into the sea and leave the world tenantless, but of course some skulking wretches would hide and be left behind to people the world again I am afraid.

I wonder you don’t see the beauty and necessity for the incarnation of God into man to help us to grasp at the skirts of the Infinite. The atonement is I admit hard to grasp. But I think since Christ the dead world has woke up from sleep. Since him we have lived. I think the greatest proof of the Incarnation aspect of Christianity is its whole career of noble men and thoughts and not the mere narration of unauthenticated histories.

I think you are bound to account (psychologically most especially) for S. Bernard and S. Augustine and S. Philip Neri – and even in our day for Liddon and Newman – as being good philosophers and good Christians. That reminds me of Mallock’s New Republic in Belgravia; it is decidedly clever – Jowett especially. If you have the key to all the actors please send it to me.

I send you this letter and a book together. I wonder which you will open first. It is Aurora Leigh, which I think you said you had not read. It is one of those books that, written straight from the heart – and from such a large heart too – never weary one: because they are sincere. We tire of art but not of nature after all our aesthetic training. I look upon it as much the greatest work in our literature.

I rank it with Hamlet and In Memoriam. So much do I love it that I hated the idea of sending it to you without marking a few passages I felt you would well appreciate – and I found myself marking the whole book. I am really very sorry: it is like being given a bouquet of plucked flowers instead of being allowed to look for them oneself. But I could not resist the temptation, as it did instead of writing to you about each passage.

The only fault is that she overstrains her metaphors till they snap, and although one does not like polished emotion, still she is inartistically rugged at times. As she says herself, she shows the mallet hand in carving cherrystones.

I hope you will have time to read it, for I don’t believe your dismal forebodings about Greats.

I wrote to Kitten for your address, and his letter and yours arrived simultaneously. His thoughts and ink rarely last beyond one sheet.

I ride sometimes after six, but don’t do much but bathe, and although always feeling slightly immortal when in the sea, feel 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.

I am now off to bed after reading a chapter of S. Thomas a Kempis. I think half-an-hour’s warping of the inner man daily is greatly conducive to holiness.

Pray remember me to your mother and sisters. Ever yours

OSCAR F. O’F. WILLS WILDE

Post Scriptum

You don’t deserve such a long letter, but I must tell you that I met Mr Rigaud (the gentleman who met with that sad accident in early youth) and his brother the General swaggering up Grafton Street here yesterday. I had a long talk with them and the General told me yarns by the dozen about the time he was quartered here ‘with the 16th Battalion, sir! Damme, sir! We were the best corps in the Regiment! Service gone to the dogs! Not a well drilled soldier in the country, sir!’

Sir William had built two properties in the west of Ireland, a small fishing lodge in 1853 at Illaunroe, near Leenane, and a comfortable country house at Moytura near Cong. Oscar is known to have spent time there as a boy helping his father record and catalogue Celtic antiquities, and now as a student used both as summer retreats for himself and for entertaining friends.

To Reginald Harding

Wednesday [?16 August 1876] Moytura House, Cong, Co. Mayo

Dear Kitten, Have you fallen into a well, or been mislaid anywhere that you never write to me? Or has one of your nine lives gone?

Frank Miles and I came down here last week, and have had a very royal time of it sailing. We are at the top of Lough Corrib, which if you refer to your geography you will find to be a lake thirty miles long, ten broad and situated in the most romantic scenery in Ireland. Frank has done some wonderful sunsets since he came down; he has given me some more of his drawings. Has your sister got the one he calls ‘My Little Lady’ – a little girl’s face with a lot of falling hair? If she has not got it I would like to send it to her in return for her autograph on the celebrated memorial.

Frank has never fired off a gun in his life (and says he doesn’t want to) but as our proper sporting season here does not begin till September I have not taught him anything. But on Friday we go into Connemara to a charming little fishing lodge we have in the mountains where I hope to make him land a salmon and kill a brace of grouse. I expect to have very good sport indeed this season. Write to me there if your claws have not been clipped. Illaunroe Lodge, Leenane, Co. Galway.

Best love to Puss. I hope he is reading hard. Ever yours

OSCAR F. O’F. WILLS WILDE

To William Ward

Wednesday [?6 September 1876] 1 Merrion Square North

My dear Bouncer, Note paper became such a scarcity in the West that I had to put off answering your letter till I came home.

I had a delightful time, and capital sport, especially the last week, which I spent shooting, and got fair bags.

I am afraid I shall not cross to England via Bristol, as I hear the boats are rather of the ‘Ancient Mariner’ type! but I may be down in Bristol with Frank Miles as I want to see S. Raphael’s and the pictures at Clevedon.

I would like very much to renew my friendship with your mother and sisters so shall write to you if I see any hope of going down.

I have given up my pilgrimage to Rome for the present: Ronald Gower and Frank Miles were coming: (we would have been a great Trinity) but at the last hour Ronald couldn’t get time, so I am staying in Dublin till the 20th, when I go down to Longford, and hope to have good sport.

I have heard from many people of your father’s liberality and noble spirit, so I know you will take interest in the report I send you of my father’s hospital, which he built when he was only twenty-nine and not a rich man. It is a great memorial of his name, and a movement is being set on foot to enlarge it and make it still greater.

I have got some charming letters lately from a great friend of my mother, Aubrey de Vere – a cultured poet (though sexless) and a convert to Catholicity. I must show you them; he is greatly interested in me and is going to get one of my poems into the Month. I have two this month out: one in the Dublin University Magazine, one in the Irish Monthly. Both are brief and Tennysonian.

I hope you are doing good work, but I suppose at home you are hardly allowed ‘to contemplate the abstract’ (whatever that means) undisturbed.

I am bothered with business and many things and find the world an [chaos] at present and a Tarpeian Rock for honest men.

I hope you will write when you have time. Ever yours

OSCAR F. O’F. WILLS WILDE

I like signing my name as if it was to some document of great importance as ‘Send two bags of gold by bearer’ or ‘Let the Duke be slain tomorrow and the Duchess await me at the hostelry’.

I send you one of Aubrey de Vere’s letters. I know you will be amused at them. Return it when you have committed it to memory.

In the Michaelmas term of 1876 both Ward and Hunter-Blair took their finals and went down. Wilde moved into Ward’s rooms overlooking the River Cherwell and continued to agonise over whether or not to become a Catholic. For the time being his mystical leanings had to be satisfied with the quasi-religious rituals and fancy dress of freemasonry. The following spring, though, he again went on a Classical tour with Mahaffy, this time to Greece, and came back via Rome where he met Ward and Hunter-Blair who had arranged a private audience with the Pope.

To William Ward

[Week ending 3 March 1877] [Oxford]

I have got rather keen on Masonry lately and believe in it awfully – in fact would be awfully sorry to have to give it up in case I secede from the Protestant Heresy. I now breakfast with Father Parkinson, go to St Aloysius, talk sentimental religion to Dunlop and altogether am caught in the fowler’s snare, in the wiles of the Scarlet Woman – I may go over in the vac. I have dreams of a visit to Newman, of the holy sacrament in a new Church, and of a quiet and peace afterwards in my soul. I need not say, though, that I shift with every breath of thought and am weaker and more self-deceiving than ever.

If I could hope that the Church would wake in me some earnestness and purity I would go over as a luxury, if for no better reasons. But I can hardly hope it would, and to go over to Rome would be to sacrifice and give up my two great gods ‘Money and Ambition’.

Still I get so wretched and low and troubled that in some desperate mood I will seek the shelter of a Church which simply enthrals me by its fascination.

I hope that now in the Sacred City you are wakened up from the Egyptian darkness that has blinded you. Do be touched by it, feel the awful fascination of the Church, its extreme beauty and sentiment, and let every part of your nature have play and room.

We have had our Sports and are now in the midst of Torpids and tomorrow the pigeons are shot. To escape I go up to town to see the Old Masters with the Kitten! who is very anxious to come. Dear little Puss is up, and looks wretched, but as pleasant and bright as ever. He is rather keen on going to Rome for Easter with me, but I don’t know if I can afford it, as I have been elected for the St Stephen’s [Club] and have to pay £42. I did not want to be elected for a year or so but David Plunket ran me in in three weeks some way rather to my annoyance.

I would give worlds to be in Rome with you and Dunskie. I know I would enjoy it awfully but I don’t know if I can manage it. You would be a safeguard against Dunskie’s attacks.

I am in for the ‘Ireland’ on Monday. God! how I have wasted my life up here! I look back on weeks and months of extravagance, trivial talk, utter vacancy of employment, with feelings so bitter that I have lost faith in myself. I am too ridiculously easily led astray. So I have idled and won’t get it and will be wretched in consequence. I feel that if I had read I would have done well up here but I have not.

I enjoy your rooms awfully. The inner room is filled with china, pictures, a portfolio and a piano – and a grey carpet with stained floor. The whole get-up is much admired and a little made fun of on Sunday evenings. They are more delightful than I ever expected – the sunshine, the cawing rooks and waving tree-branches and the breeze at the window are too charming.

I do nothing but write sonnets and scribble poetry – some of which I send you – though to send anything of mine to Rome is an awful impertinence, but you always took an interest in my attempts to ride Pegasus.

My greatest chum, except of course the Kitten, is Gussy who is charming though not educated well: however he is ‘psychological’ and we have long chats and walks. The rest of Tom’s set are capital good fellows but awful children. They talk nonsense and smut. I am quite as fond of the dear Kitten as ever but he has not enough power of character to be more than a pleasant affectionate boy. He never exerts my intellect or brain in any way. Between his mind and mine there is no intellectual friction to rouse me up to talk or think, as I used when with you – especially on those dear rides through the greenwood. I ride a good deal now and the last day rode an awful brute which by a skilful buckjump threw me on my head on Shotover. I escaped however unhurt and got home all safe.

The Dean comes sometimes and we talk theology, but I usually ride by myself, and have got such new trousers – quite the dog! I have written a very foolish letter; it reads very rambling and absurd, but it is so delightful writing to you that I just put down whatever comes into my head.

Your letters are charming and the one from Sicily came with a scent of olive-gardens, blue skies and orange trees, that was like reading Theocritus in this grey climate. Goodbye. Ever, dear boy, your affectionate friend

OSCAR WILDE

I have a vacant page.

I won’t write to you theology, but I only say that for you to feel the fascination of Rome would to me be the greatest of pleasures: I think it would settle me.

And really to go to Rome with the bugbear of formal logic on one’s mind is quite as bad as to have the ‘Protestant jumps’.

But I know you are keenly alive to beauty, and do try and see in the Church not man’s hand only but also a little of God’s.