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.

Another of Wilde's pronouncements on Catholicism is better understood when placed in its context. When, to the horror of the papal Chamberlain of Honour, Hartwell de la Garde Grissell, he was publicly blessed by the Pope, Wilde vented his anger at the disapproval of "the withered eunuch of the Vatican Latrines" as follows: "It is a curious, and therefore natural thing, but I cannot stand Christians because they are never Catholics, and I cannot stand Catholics because they are never Christians. Otherwise I am ht one with the Indivisible Church. 5

It is often difficult to know how seriously to take this conversationalist who regaled his audience with every verbal extravagance; yet, from the frequency and length of time over which references to Catholicism were made, it is certain that he was deeply moved by the "awful fascination" and "extreme beauty and sentiment"6 of the Roman Catholic Church.

According to his latest biographer, Oscar Wilde was received twice into the Church.7 The first baptism, a private affair arranged by his mother, took place when Wilde was four or five years of age8; the second was the dramatic death-bed scene of 29 November 1900. In fact, Wilde disregarded the first baptism, since he spent much of his time at Oxford deliberating upon possible conversion to Rome. As to his deathbed baptism ("Catholicism is the only religion to die in,"9 he insisted), no one will ever know for certain if he were actually conscious when the sacrament wa-, administered and if, had he lived, he would have continued to be a devout Catholic. The fact remains, nevertheless, that Wilde was drawn to Catholicism from his early years at Oxford to his last wasted days in France and Italy.

The effect of all this in his writings is considerable. Wilde borrowed freely from Catholic ritual to portray, in picturesquely aesthetic imagery, the themes of victim, sacrifice, and individualism. An understanding of his concept of the Incarnation is necessary to appreciate fully the themes of the short stories, De Profundis, and The Soul of Man Under Socialism. While these views are scarcely orthodox, they do shed light on his personality and artistic theories. The Roman Church also provided him with the means to express the personal and aesthetic tensions between Hellenism and Hebraism and his own artistic fusion of the two. In order to provide a balanced assessment, this examination of the role of Catholicism in the life and works of Oscar Wilde will be placed in the context of the lives and works of such other Catholic converts of the English decadence as Ernest Dowson, Lionel Johnson, Aubrey Beardsley, John Gray, and Frederick Rolfe.

Oxford in the 1870s offered the undergraduate diverse currents of thought, and Oscar Wilde fell under the spell of most of them. The embers of the Oxford Movement were still glowing: memories of Newman's apostasy were reinforced with his return to Oxford after an absence of thirty-two years to receive an honorary fellowship.10 Wilde went eagerly to hear Cardinal Manning preach in July 1876 and his personal reaction was that "I feel an imposter and traitor to myself on these occasions and must do something decided."11 His friend, David Hunter Blair, himself a notable Catholic convert, prodded Wilde constantly in these years, but was unable to do more than to lead him to an abyss of indecision. In March 1877, Wilde could write enthusiastically to William Ward:

I now breakfast with Father Parkinson, 
go to St. Aloysius, talk sentimental religion 
to Dunlop and altogether am caught ... 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.12

In fact, these remarks are immediately preceded by a statement that he has become "rather keen on Masonry lately."13 (He had been received into the Apollo Lodge in February 1875.) One of the attractions of Masonry for Wilde was the costume with its knee breeches and black hose, which he would later take to America as part of his aesthetic attire.14 Could it be that Wilde wanted to enjoy the exotic richness of the priestly vestment (one thinks of the dazzling description in The Picture of Dorian Gray, partially quoted below) without having to make the necessary religious commitment?

Ten years later, Lionel Johnson was to make a similar shift from Buddhism to Browning and to Newman for sources of inspiration.15 As well, both Johnson and Wilde came under the spell of Walter Pater, but in markedly different ways. Pater's book, Studies in the Histoty of the Renaissance, was published in 1873 and grasped Wilde's attention almost immediately. Burning with a "hard, gemlike flame" became his life-long concern, and much of Pater's interest in ritual and the pictorial quality of Catholicism was eagerly assimilated by his discipline. Wilde, characteristically, seems not to have concerned himself with that aspect of Pater's religiosity that held meaning for Johnson and later for Aubrey Beardsley in both life and art - acesis.

A test of Wilde's commitment to Catholicism came in 1877 when he went to Greece with his tutor, Rev. John Pentland Mahaffy, who was anxious to stifle Wilde's Romish leanings. 16 The trip included a visit to Rome on the way and Wilde rhapsodized in anticipation to Reginald Harding:

This is an era in my life, a crisis.  I wish I 
could look into the seeds of time and see what 
is coming.  I shall not forget you in Rome, and
will burn a candle for you at the Shrine of 
Our Lady.17

This was followed by a postcard dated 2 April 1877, ivhich opens with the stark exclamation, "I never went to Rome at all!"18 Persuaded by Mahaffy to continue on to Greece immediately, Wilde, nevertheless, made good his promise to visit Rome on the way home - a visit which included, under the management of Hunter Blair, an audience with Pope Pius IX.

On the more practical side, Wilde's principal reason for not converting to Catholicism during his Oxford years was his father's threat to cut him off financially. The episode became bitterly ironical when Sir William Wilde died leaving his family a disastrously disappointing legacy.19 To William Ward he wrote, "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'."20

There were two occasions on which Wilde did show an aggressive interest in becoming Catholic. The first was in 1878, when he applied to Rev. Sebastien Bowden for a private interview. It would seem that his motivation at this time was based on fear and shame, since he had just previously contracted syphilis.21 Although Father Bowden encouraged him to join the Church, Wilde again refused, sending instead a large bouquet of lilies to Brompton Oratory.22 The second application followed his release from prison. 23 The scene was poignantly remembered by Ada Leverson:

He talked on lightly for some time, then 
wrote a letter, and sent it in a cab to a 
Roman Catholic Retreat, asking if he might 
retire there for six months.... The man 
returned with the letter.  We all looked 
away while Oscar read it.  They replied that 
they could not accept him in the Retreat at 
his impulse of the moment.  It must be thought
over for at least a year.  In fact they 
refused him.
  Then he broke down and sobbed bitterly.24

This snub, coming at a time when Wilde was vulnerable, both physically and mentally, might well account for the mood of cynicism which pervades many of his remarks about Catholicism in the final years. Whether or not he would have been accepted had he made a personal application is a matter of speculation. Wilde's situation was similar in some ways to that of Frederick Rolfe ("Baron Corvo") a few years previously. Rolfe, who, unlike Wilde, had been received into the Church in 1886 "at 24 hours' notice,"25 was later discharged from St. Mary's College, Oscott, where he had been previously accepted as a student for the priesthood. He was also expelled from the seminary of Scots College in Rome in 1890, a little more than six months after his arrival there. These two deeply felt blows, accounting for Rolfe's disenchantment with mankind in general and clerics in particular, correspond closely with Wilde's later moments of cynicism and flippancy.26

The years of exile, 1897-1900, saw Wilde hovering between the cloister and the café more often, it seems, toward the café. Upon arrival in France, however, he did become friendly with the curé at the local church in Berneval and he recorded his visits to Mass and Benediction to his Catholic friends with the utmost relish.27 A letter to Robert Ross written injune 1897 reveals quite candidly the state of Wilde's mind and his attitude toward Catholicism at the time:

I visited M. le Cure today ... he  showed me
over the church: tomorrow I sit in the choir
by his special invitation.  He showed me all
his vestments: tomorrow he really will be 
charming in his red.28

The closest that Wilde came to conversion at this stage was undoubtedly around 13 June 1897, but still, for reasons he assigned to his unworthiness, the final step was never taken. As he wrote to Ross, "Have just seen a premiére communion, very sweet, and flowerlike with children. The curé's hopes are at their highest. Sed non cum dignus."29

Wilde went to Rome in Passion Week of 1900. There he was more than ever before impressed by the outward splendour of the Easter celebrations. Particularly, he was struck by the figure of the Pope whom he thought was wonderful "as he was carried past me on his throne, not of flesh and blood, but a white soul robed in white, and an artist as well as a saint -"30 It would seem that Wilde's attraction to the Papacy was a form of hero-worship, the same kind of admiration that he felt toward royalty. Having been delighted with Alfred Douglas's claim to the aristocracy, or any person who could claim aristocratic connexions (including himself, as he persistently maintained), Wilde, in being drawn toward the ancient institution of the Church, with all its pageantry and tradition, was quite naturally impressed by the successor of St. Peter and Vicar of Christ.

At this time, Wilde liked to assume the pose of a not-altogetherpenitent Tannhäuser making his pilgrimage to Rome. Made voguish in Aubrey Beardsley's Under the Hill, the Tannhiiuser figure had become a persistent image of the decadent-turnedpenitent. There are comical references to Wilde-as-Tannhiiuser in two letters to Robert Ross written during Easter 1900:

I ... hope to be in Rome in about ten days.  
It will be delightful to be together again, 
and this time I really must become a Catholic, 
though I fear that if I went before the Holy 
Father with a blossoming rod it would turn at 
once into an umbrella or something dreadful of
that kind.  It is absurd to say that the age of
miracles is past.  It has not yet begun.31

In the Vatican, while expressing his enthusiasm for the Easter Papal blessings, Wilde admitted that his "walking-stick. showed signs of budding; would have budded indeed, only at the door of the chapel it was taken from me by the Knave of Spades. This strange prohibition is, of course, in honour of Tannhäuser."32

Of Wilde's death-bed conversion, much has been written and little needs to be said.33 The priest who administered the sacrament, Father Dunne, stated, "Indeed I was fully satisfied that he understood me when told that I was about to receive him into the Catholic Church and give him the Last Sacraments."34 Lord Alfred Douglas, who was not present at Wilde's death, was naturally infuriated "by the R. Catholic tomfoolery" and loathed "the whole idea of his 'being received' on his death-bed à la Aubrey Beardsley. It was so utterly unlike him."35 (Only eleven years later, Douglas himself would be converted to Rome.) Perhaps Richard Ellman best sums up Wilde's situation: "The application of sacred oils to his hands and feet may have been a ritualized pardon for his omissions or commissions, or may have been like putting a green carnation in his buttonhole."36

Oscar Wilde's study of Catholic dogma was certainly no match for the rigorous and intellectual researches undertaken by Lionel Johnson; rather, like John Gray, his friend André Raffalovich and, to a certain extent, Ernest Dowson, Wilde's appreciation of Catholicism was aesthetic and emotional. There are, nevertheless, certain aspects of religion, such as the Immaculate Conception and the Incarnation, about which he did have definite opinions and which had their influence upon his writings.

Wilde's interest in the Blessed Virgin can be seen in the number of sonnets addressed to her written in the 1870s. Like Lord Alfred Douglas who, when he became Catholic, had little difficulty believing in miracles, Wilde could easily accept the dogma of the Immaculate Conception. Writing to William Ward in 1876, he stated his position:

I never knew how near the English Church was
to joining with Rome.  Before the promulgation
of the Immaculate Conception Pusey and Liddon 
and others were working hard for an Eironicon 
and union with Rome but now they look to the 
Greek Church.  But I think it is a mere dream,
and very strange that they should be so 
anxious to believe the Blessed Virgin conceived
in sin.37

From the early days at Oxford, Wilde was fascinated by the figure of Christ. Under the influence of Browning, perhaps, in such poems as "Saul" - like Lionel Johnson a decade later in his Winchester Letters - Wilde stressed the need for belief in the Incarnation. He wrote to William Ward:

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
word 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.38

The image of Christ became a source of fascination for Wilde, especially as he pictured himself as a kind of Christ-figure, enduring the hostility of society and - before 1895, at least - not suffering the supreme penalty. He is like the young man discovered by Joseph of Arimathea in one of Wilde's parables, "The Master," who says that he too has wrought miracles, has changed water into wine, healed the sick and raised the dead, yet he has not been crucified.

In the De Profundis letter, Christ becomes linked to the personality of the artist: Christ, he said, "realised in the entire sphere of human relations that imaginative sympathy which in the sphere of Art is the sole secret of creation."39 And: "Christ's place indeed is with the poets . . . There is still something to me almost incredible in the idea of a young Galilean peasant imagining that he could bear on his own shoulders the burden of the entire world."40

In addition to Christ's being the greatest human artist, Wilde, in De Profundis and The Soul of Man Under Socialism, cast Him as the supreme Individualist. Wilde felt that Christ's interest in the individual's soul stemmed from His desire that each person should achieve his potential as a human being. One only realizes one's soul, says Wilde, "by getting rid of all alien passions, all acquired culture, and all external possessions be they good or evil."41

Finally, Christ for Wilde was the quintessential Lover. "He saw that'love was that lost secret of the world for which the wise men had been looking, and that it was only chrough love that one could approach either the heart of the leper or the feet of God."" Christianity, Wilde felt, was a religion of love and it has managed to link love with the outward acts of religion: "Love is a sacrament that should be taken kneeling, and Domine non sum dignus shd. be on the lips and in the hearts of those who receive it."43

It can easily be seen that Wilde's Catholicism was both romantic and aesthetic. It lacked the firm intellectual bite of Lionel johnson's faith; moreover, it did not appear to be a means of rising above sin through renunciation and repentance, a quality that characterized johnson's wrestling with the Dark Angel or Aubrey Beardsley's agonies and repeated references to attending mass and confession in the Last Letters.44 For Wilde, the Catholic Church was not so much an avenue to salvation through triumph over sin as another means of incorporating sensuous beauty and romance into life and art.

Wilde's Catholic poetry was written for the most part between the year 1876 and 1879 and was collected for the first time in Poems, 1881. The poetry is addressed or refers primarily to Christ, the Blessed Virgin, or the Pope. More appropriate to Wilde's temperament, also, is the conscious attempt to fuse the pagan and Christian traditions in a recognition of the beauties of the former and a dutiful attraction to the latter.

In "E Tenebris,"45I Wilde prays in characteristically lush aesthetic diction that Christ will make good his salvation. In the closing lines, he promises the crucifix that he shall behold "The feet of brass, the robe more white than flame,/The wounded hands, the weary human face" (11. 13-14). Here, Wilde's fascination with Christ stems from His humanity and the treatment warrants comparison with John Gray's poem, "A Crucifix."46>

While Christ in "E Tenebris" is seen as a Saviour with both human and divine qualities, He is insolently chided for being merely a man, and a dead man at that, in the sonnet, "On the Massacre of the Christians in Bulgaria":47 "Come down, 0 son of Man! and show thy might,/Lest Mahomet be crowned instead of Thee!" (11. 13-14).

A typically aesthetic approach to the terrors of the Second Coming is clear in the sonnet, "On Hearing the Dies Irae Sung in the Sistine Chapel."48 Trying to obliterate all traces of the horror to come, suggested by the Dies Irae, Wilde hopes for a calmer, more beautiful coming of Christ, which has been suggested to him by the natural beauty of "sad olive groves," "the silver-breasted dove" (1. 2), "the empurpled vines" 1. 5), and a bird at evening flying to its nest" (1. 6).

The poems addressed to Mary are mainly of a conventional nature; the familiar epithets of the Litany of the Blessed Virgin Mary and variations upon them are worked and reworked. In "San Miniato,"49 for example, Mary is addressed as "Mother of Christ; 0 mystic wife!;; (1. 10) and "O crowned by God with love and flame;/O crowned by Christ the Holy One!" (11. 13 -14). She is praised for an outward beauty especially in "Madonna Mia"50 and her features are analysed in a studied, literary manner that clearly resembles the word-paintings of the Pre-Raphaelites: "A lily-girl, not made for this world's pain,/With brown, soft hair close braided by her ears,/And longing eyes half veiled by slumberous tears . . . " (11. 1-3). The pictorial aspects of the poem conclude, not surprisingly, with the image of Dante and Beatrice seeing "The Seventh Crystal, and the Stair of Gold" (1. 14).

Wilde's early poetry also develops several aspects of the papacy. In the " Sonnet on Approaching Italy,"51 for example, the "imprisonment of the Vatican" is bemoaned as follows: "But when I knew that far away at Rome/In evil bonds a second Peter lay,/l wept to see the land so very fair" (11. 12-14). One of the most repeated images of Wilde's poetry about the papacy is that of the Pope being carried through the streets on his chair. More than any other aspect of the liturgy of the Vatican, this seemed to have appealed to him especially. Perhaps, like Frederick Rolfe, he saw himself as the gorgeously clad Pope, revered by the cheering multitude, and carried aloft on the sturdy shoulders of the Swiss Guard. In "Rome Unvisited,"52 he describes this scene as follows:

When, bright with purple and with gold,
  Come priest and holy Cardinal,
  And bome above the heads of all
The gentle Shepherd of the Fold (II. 33-36).53

One of the most persistent themes in Wilde's early poetry is the juxtaposition, by comparison and contrast, of paganism and Christianity. This is abundantly apparent in the sonnet, "Written in Holy Week at Genoa."54 Wilde describes the luxuriant orchards of oranges, the "startled bird" (1. 4), and "the curved waves that streaked the sapphire bay" (1. 7). The poet is awakened from his reverie by the "young boy-priest" (1. 9), urging those passing by to strew flowers upon the grave of Christ. The "dear Hellenic hours" (1. 12) have almost overwhelmed the poet's thoughts of the slain Christ. The purely sensuous delight in Nature is much more immediate than "The Cross, the Grown, the Soldiers and the Spear" (1. 14): these, he says, are merely a memory (1. 13).

Wilde often combined pagan and Christian images in poems of a strong Hellenic bias. In "The Garden of Eros,"55 for example, he speaks of "fox-gloves with their nodding chalices" (I. 57) and, more specifically, "Time's palsied fingers count in vain his rosary of suns" (1. 252). In "The New Helen,"56 Wilde uses the following invocation, partly drawn from the Litany of the Blessed Virgin, to describe Helen of Troy: "Lily of love, pure and inviolate:/ Tower of ivory: red rose of fire:/Thou hast come down our darkness to illumine" (11. 91-93).

In "Santa Decca,"57 Wilde goes so far as to hope for a return of the ancient gods, even though "no longer do we bring/To greyeyed Pallas crowns of olive leaves" (11. 1-2). Perhaps, he muses "in this sea-tranced isle" (1. 9), there might yet be some longforgotten deity, "hidden in the asphodel" (1. 11).

Imagery of paganism and Christianity have so often been fused, from Dante and Milton to Keats and Swinburne, but here, in a manner that owes much to the latter, Wilde attempts successfully to "paganise" Christianity, to distil all the beauty out of it, leaving a residue of Hebraism in the Arnoldian sense forever buried. Unlike the Swinburne of Dolores or the Beardsley of Under the Hill, Wilde does not set out to pervert Christianity; rather, his treatment is primarily aesthetic: he truly wants to find the Beauty of Catholicism.

In A House of Pomegranates, Wilde incorporates aspects of Catholic ritual into several stories with exotic effects. The young fisherman who gave up his soul for the love of a mermaid in "The Fisherman and His Soul," is cursed by the priest: "The love of the body is vile ... and vile and evil are the pagan things God suffers to wander through His world."58 Yet, after the fisherman and the mermaid have died, the priest who has continually railed against earthly love undergoes a strange experience as he offers benediction: "And when the third year was over ... the Priest went up to the chapel, that he might show to the people the wounds of the Lord, and speak to them about the wrath of God."59 He discovers strange flowers on the altar and is troubled by their presence: "And he speaks not of the wrath of God, but of the God whose name is Love. And why he so spake, he knew not."60 Love and beauty have triumphed. The priest, leading a procession of monks and musicians, candle bearers and swingers of censers, goes to the sea and blesses "all the wild things that are in it."61 Wilde converts the conscience-ridden priest to an appreciation of a sensuousmystical love and the discovery of beauty.

The Christ-figure is also prominent in these stories. In "The Young King," the hero is converted, after surrendering himself to the workship of beauty, to a life of love for his fellow men and a desire to live like the poor. The peasantry, misunderstanding his motivation, wish the king to be as they feel a king should be wealthy and powerful. "Surely we will slay him," they declare, "for he is unworthy to rule over us."62 At this point, the young King undergoes a transfiguration in which he becomes divine, Christ-like and still human: "And lo! through the painted windows came the sunlight streaming upon him, and the sunbeams wove round him a tissued robe that was fairer than the robe that had been fashioned for his pleasure. The dead staff blossomed, and bare lilies that were whiter than pearls. . . . He stood there in a king's raiment, and the Glory of God filled the place, and the saints in their carven niches seemed to move."63 The function of the trappings of Catholicism in this story is to link the Christ-like man with Christ himself. It was a step further that Wilde took in The Soul of Man Under Socialism to suggest that Christ was the quintessential artist.

Wilde's jewelled and decadent prose describes the sensuous attraction to Catholicism in The Picture of Dorian Gray. After a lengthy and detailed account of Dorian's collection of vestments, an imitation of Des Esseintes in Huysmans' A Rebours, the following, rather cryptic, statement'is made: "In the mystic offices to which such things were put, there was something that quickened his imaginatign."64 In The Picture of Dorian Gray, the Catholic Church acts only as a means of stimulating beauty and exotic sensations in true Paterian fashion.

Written first in French and translated into English by Lord Alfred Douglas, Wilde's Saloné, like The Picture of Dorian Gray, was also inspired by Huysmans. Des Esseintes' ruminations on the two works by Gustave Moreau - one a picture of Salomé, the other a water-colour called "The Apparition" depicting the scene after the murder of John the Baptist - are reflected in Wilde's stylized speeches. The continually recurring image of the moon, at first clouded, then naked and seeking covering, becomes symbolic of the guilty soul once the pose has been abandoned and the mask torn away. In the confrontation of pagan and Christian, we have no attempt at reconciliation as in the sonnet, "Written in Holy Week at Genoa," but rather, a struggle ending in the destruction of both. The religious distortion of Salomé is- mingled with sexual perversion after the manner of the French decadence; Barbey D'Aurevilly's Diaboliques come to mind.

Catholicism in Wilde's life and writings may best be described as "aesthetic" in the 1870s and 1880s and "decadent" in the 1890s. The sensuous appreciation of beauty evoked in the early poems gives way to the self-conscious and stylized art of The Picture of Dorian Gray and Salomé. The tensions of body and soul, Hebraism and Hellenism, renunciation and indulgence, however, were never quite reconciled and it is characteristic of Oscar Wilde that, while he was wallowing in debauchery in the years following his release from prison, he could produce his most moral, most Christian and, indeed, his best poem, The Ballad of Reading Gaol.

Notes

1. Richard Ellman, Oscar Wilde (New York: Knopf, 1988), p. 528.

2. Ellman, p. 54.

3. EUman, p. 166.

4. Ellman, p. 583.

5. Rupert Hart-Davis, ed., The Letters of Oscar Wilde (London: Hart-Davis, 1963), p. 831; hereafter Letters.

6. Letters, p. 31.

7. Ellman, pp. 19-20, 583-84.

8. Stuart Mason disagrees: he states that Wilde was baptized in 1862 or 1863 when he was eight or nine years old (Bibliography of Oscar Wilde [London: T. Wemer, Laurie, 1914], p. 118).

9. Quoted in Ellman, p. 583.

10. Ellman, p. 92. Wilde's admiration for Newman was life-long: in 1877, he refers to Newman as "that divine man"; in 1890, he wrote to Wilfrid Meynell, "In what a fine 'temper' Newman always wrote! the temper of the scholar. But how subtle was his simple mind!" (Letters, pp. 33, 274).

11. Letters, p. 16.

12. Letters, p. 31.

13. Letters, p. 30.

14. Ellman, P. 164.

15. See my article, "The Religious Thought of Lionel Johnson," TAR, No. 13 (Spring 1973), pp. 95-109.

16. Mahaffy intended "to make an honest pagan" out of Wilde (Hesketh Pearson, The Life of Oscar Wilde [London: Methuen, 195 1 1, p. 38).

17. Letters, p. 34.

18. Letters, p. 34.

19. See Ellman, p. 63.

20. Letters, p. 31.

21. See Ellman, pp. 92-93 and Letters, p. 523 n. 1.

22. Ellman, p. 94.

23. Among the books Wilde requested in prison were Newman's The Grammar of Assent, the Apologia pro Vita Sua, and Two Essays on Miracles (Letters, p. 399, no. 4). He also asked Robert Ross to get him the mystical books in Huysmans' En Route, together with "a good life of St. Francis of Assisi" (Letters, p. 522).

24. Quoted in Letters, pp. 563-64.

25. Quoted in Cecil Woolf and Brocard Sewell, eds., New Quests for Corvo (Lon- don: Icon Books, 1961), p. 13.

26. The pertinent passages in Hadrian the Seventh and The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole are quoted in Woolf, pp. 19-20, 22-24.

27. For example: "I made my pilgrimage. The interior of the chapel is of course a modem horror, but there is a black image of Notre Dame de Liesse. The chapel is as tiny as an undergraduate's room at Oxford. I hope to get the curé to celebrate Mass in it soon. As a rule the service is only held there in July-August: but I want to see a Mass quite close" (Letters, p. 585).

28. Letters, p. 598; note Wilde's persistent fascination with religious vestments and the quotation from The Picture of Dorian Gray, below.

29. Letters, p. 606.

30. Letters, P. 821.

31. Letters, P. 819; for the repeated reference to the Pope's staff blossoming, see Wagner's Tannhäuser, Act III.

32. Letters, p. 821.

34. Letters, p. 857.

35. Quoted in Rupert Croft-Cooke, Bosie: Lord Alfred Douglas, His Friends and Enemies (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1964), p. 189.

36. Ellman, p. 584.

37. Letters, p. 18.

38. Letters, p. 20.

39. Letters, p. 476.

40. Letters, p. 478.

41. Letters, p. 479.

42. Letters, p. 479.

43. Letters, p. 484.

44. Johnson's poem, "The Dark Angel" summarizes his preoccupation, See Ian Fletcher, ed., Complete Poems of Lionel johnson (London: Unicom Press, 1953), pp. 65-66. The following comment by Beardsley is representative: "L'Abbé V., vicaire de S. Thomas d'Aquin, will hear my confession on Easter Sunday afternoon" and "My first confession to - has made me regret more than ever the loss of Père Henry's kindness & beautiful advice" (John Gray, ed., Last Letters of Aubrey Beardsley [London: Longmans, 1904], pp. 85, 12 1).

45. Oscar Wilde, Works "Authorised Ross Edition" (Boston: John Luce, 1907), IX, 70; hereafter Works.

46. John Gray, Silverpoints (London: Elkin Mathews and John Lane, 1983), P. xxiii. See my article, "Spiritual Decadence? Some Religious Poetry of John Gray," TAR, No. 39 (Autumn 1979), pp. 90-92.

47. Works, IX, 34.

48. Works, IX, 68.

49. Works, IX, 59.

50. Works, IX, 72. Ellman notes that the poem, a poetic reaction to a pastel, originally began "A fair slim boy not made for this world's pain (Ellman, P. 61).

51. Works, IX, 58.

52. Works, IX, 63-66.

53. Note also "The Burden of Itys" (Works, pp. 79-98, 11. 14-24).

54. Works, IX, 62.

55. Works, IX, 41.

56. Works, IX, 73.

57. Works, IX, 166.

58. Works, X, 74.

59. Works, X, 127.

60. Works, X, 128.

61. Works, X, 129.

62. Works, X, 26.

63. Works, X, 26-27. Note the figure of the blossoming dead branch reminiscent of the Tannhäuser legend.

64. The Picture of Dorian Gray (New York: Dell, 1969 [1891]), ch. xi, P. 143. As a statement of beauty in the artifice of the Church, the passage is worth quoting in part:

He had a special passion, also for ecclesiastical vestments, as indeed he had for everything connected with the service of the Church. In the long cedar chests that lined the west gallery of his house he had stored away many rare and beautiful specimens of what is really the raiment of the Bride of Christ, who must wear purple and jewels and fine linen that she may hide the pallid, macerated body that is wom by the suffering that she seeks for, and wounded by self-inflicted pain (The Picture of Dorian Gray, ch. xi, p. 142).

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The Antigonish Review is a quarterly literary journal published by St. Francis Xavier University. The Review features poetry, fiction, reviews and critical articles from all parts of Canada, the US and overseas, using original graphics to enliven the format.

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