Franny Moyle (9 page)

Since the days of ‘tea and beauties' in Salisbury Street, Oscar and Frank had moved into ‘Keats House', a property in that bohemian part of Chelsea, Tite Street, where Oscar would one day live with Constance. They were following the footsteps of their hero and friend the painter James McNeill Whistler. In 1877 Whistler had had the architect
du jour
Edward Godwin design ‘The White House' in Tite Street for him. Here ebonized and gilt furniture stood amid Japanese cabinets and oriental carpets. But the house was sold just two years later, when Whistler went bankrupt.

In 1879 Miles commissioned the same architect to remodel 1 Tite Street into another temple of Aestheticism. Designing a studio at the very top of the house, Godwin created light airy interiors that, painted white, would display Miles's collection of exotic flowers and plants. A huge inglenook in the studio framed bespoke furniture, and throughout the house was indulged in exquisite detail such as door
and furniture handles in the form of swan's heads and glassware specifically blown by the famous Arts and Crafts glass manufacturers Powell & Sons of Whitefriars.

In 1880 Miles and Wilde were installed in Keats House, where their indulgence of things beautiful continued. Ironically Oscar's sets of rooms included items he bought from the sale of the bankrupt Whistler's effects, notably a painting of Sarah Bernhardt.

But more was going on in Chelsea than tea, painting and poetry. Canon Miles's concern over Oscar's verse may well have been heightened by wider worries over the moral well-being of his son. With a reputation for being both a ladies' man, and also for keeping the company of known homosexuals, Miles was living a sexually liberal life. Within a decade he would be dead from syphilis. Although Miles's father did not accuse Oscar of similar misdemeanours, he warned him that his poetry might suggest otherwise. It was an early lesson in the power of appearances that Oscar would have done well to remember.

‘If we seem to advise a separation for a time it is not because we do not believe you in character to be very different to what you suggest in your poetry,' Canon Miles explained, ‘but it is because you do not see the risk we see in a published poem which makes all who read it say to themselves, “this is outside the pale of poetry”, it is licentious and may do great harm to any soul who reads it.'
⁶
Oscar duly packed his bags and left Keats House, moving temporarily into rooms close to his mother and Willie, in Charles Street in Mayfair.

The moral laxity that those such as Canon Miles saw as part and parcel of the Aesthetic proposition was either of no concern to Constance or, far more likely, beyond her sightline. Leading a sheltered life in Lancaster Gate, Constance saw only the creative, artistic aspect of the bohemian set. She had not yet had the opportunity to comprehend that what went with this was a set of lifestyles that were just as challenging to the social protocols of the day. Although Constance understood adultery and violence, she had no direct experience of the new sexual liberties that were being explored by many of those whose art fascinated her.

On 18 November 1881 a letter from her stepfather, Mr Swinburne-King, arrived, and in it Constance discovered a poem teasing her about her infatuation with Oscar. Swinburne-King had penned what he termed a ‘sonnet' entitled ‘The Lily to the Sunflower' for his stepdaughter's amusement:

One hour with thee, O Wilde,

Would joy this longing Childe

But she, tho' twenty-four

To hear thy lips out-pour

From depths of heart-born lore –

What ecstasy she'd score: –

To dream, Ah me,

E'en I might be

For age & evermore

O Wilde with Thee!

2.

Nor cease thy madding dream

My Soul, until I scream –

Not longer meek & milde: –

By hopes deferement riled,

By throbbing love beguiled

And torturing passions piled

I dream, ah me

So this to be

For age and ever Wilde

O Wilde with Thee!

Constance, highly amused, penned her own poem by way of reply:

Lyrics from the Childe to her Kinge

Oh, do though gently singe

To me, oh! Swinburne Kinge

Of him I love

With a passion Wilde;

Until the very welin singe

And all the bare-armed trees above

Do sigh as at an utter thinge

Moved by the sorrows of thy weary childe

Oh, could I be beguiled

With Terra-Cotta tiled

Or sunflowers gold

Or a lily white

The smell of verdant cabbage liked

Or sight of peacock feathers bold

And yet the thoughts of something wilde

Sootheth my aching spirit always quite.
⁷

A week after receiving her sonnet from Mr Swinburne-King, Constance and her mother were yet again at home with Lady Wilde. Willie Wilde had finally secured a staff job on the
Daily Telegraph
, and so he and Speranza had moved from Ovington Square to a house in Park Street in Mayfair. A better address for a salon, perhaps, but a more expensive one. Lady Wilde's stretched finances could only accommodate the smallest house in the area, with the tiniest rooms, a fact not lost on Constance.

‘We had such a joke yesterday,' Constance told Otho.

I went out with Mama to call on Lady Wilde having quite forgotten her address and in the pouring rain. I made Mama go down in a hansom to Number 70 … to find out then that it was shut up, so we went into all the shops on both sides of the way until at last at a bakers I reluctantly found the number and we went in and found Lady W all alone in her glory in such wee rooms that Mama and I puzzled internally how she'd got into them. No one had appeared though L.W. made us stay in to see Willie whom she was expecting. I heard all about Oscar. He is bringing out a drama which I see is advertised today in the Observer.
Vera or The Nihilists
, which is to be acted at the Adelphi on the afternoon of the 17th of December and Lady Wilde has said I must go because Oscar would expect me to go. I suppose she is trying to carouse audience. However I tried to make Mr King and Mama promise to go and Mama is quite willing.
⁸

Vera, or The Nihilists
was Oscar's first foray into drama. It tells the tale of a Russian female assassin who falls in love with one of her fellow nihilists, Alexis, only to discover he is in fact the heir to the Russian throne. When Alexis does in fact become Tsar, Vera is sent to kill him. But she cannot kill the man she loves, a man who is determined to use his birthright to bring democratic change to Russia. With her fellow assassins ready to follow in her steps and assassinate Alexis themselves unless Vera throws a bloodied dagger out of a window as a sign of the success of her mission, Vera chooses to sacrifice herself and throw a knife covered in her own blood to her colleagues.

The performance to which Constance was invited never took place. It was cancelled. A real-life Tsar had been assassinated in March and diplomatic pressures were afoot, possibly from the Russian Embassy. Meanwhile, preparations for Oscar's American lecture tour suddenly became all-consuming. Oscar had engaged George Lewis to act as his solicitor and negotiate his contract for the tour, and had been writing to important figures who might provide letters of introduction to opinion-formers on the other side of the Atlantic. On Christmas Eve, Oscar boarded the
Arizona
and set off on his adventure.

In Oscar's absence Constance continued to embrace the attributes of Aestheticism. It has often been suggested that she was a person whose adoption of Aestheticism was purely part of her enthralment to Oscar. But Constance was quite her own person. Oscar's appeal to her reflected her own predispositions.

Although an invitation to lunch at the club most associated with London's bohemian crowd, the particularly female-friendly Albemarle, felt like a step too far for Constance (‘Mademoiselle Arbau and I went to the Temple Church on Sunday and did not get home to lunch until 2.30. Mr Short took us into the Hall and into his rooms. He was most anxious to take us to the Albemarle Club to lunch, but we were afraid to go'
⁹
), nevertheless Constance was making inroads elsewhere.

She began a collection of blue and white china, which was
de rigueur
for anyone pretending to Aesthetic credentials. She also
continued to explore her own artistic talents, and now it was to ceramics that she turned.

If not before, certainly by, early 1882 Constance was taking pottery classes, probably either at the pottery studio at the South Kensington Museum or at the Minton art pottery studio in Kensington Gore. Both locations were close to the Royal Albert Hall, a place that Constance found herself passing regularly as she trudged from Lancaster Gate, across Hyde Park and into South Kensington. Her correspondence mentions her tendency to bump into friends there, including on one occasion Oscar, whom she saw there ‘for about a second' one day.
¹⁰

‘Had two lessons in terracotta painting and I'm at present in a hopeless state of despair over it,' Constance reported in March 1882, ‘but I'm going to have a private lesson on Friday. There's no use in joining a class unless you know something about it first, and I of course have been working all wrong.'
¹¹

In the late 1870s female amateur potters working in these South Kensington studios made their contribution to what became known as the Arts and Crafts movement, a revival of craft skills that went hand in hand with the so-called Aesthetic movement. By 1878 these potteries had established a commercial outlet via Howell & James, in Regent Street, and that year they staged an exhibition that ‘contained upwards of one thousand original works, mostly by ladies, and was frequented during its two months duration by nearly 10,000 visitors'.
¹²

A year after the first mention of ceramics in her letters, Constance was working towards a contribution for another similar show and had high ambitions. ‘I want to paint two plates for the Amateur Exhibition on the 21st in Regent Street and to sell them, if possible for 30 shillings a piece,' she revealed in a letter. ‘They cost me 10 shillings without paint, but I'm afraid I cannot do them well enough and then they will not accept them.'
¹³

Constance's plates were essays in ‘barboline' painting, a technique, as she herself explained, of ‘painting under glaze on pottery with a thin kind of clay called slip mixed with the colours to make them
opaque like oil. Consequently it can be painted boldly, unlike the ordinary enamel china painting, and is fired and glazed afterwards. You paint it on the bisque ware.'
¹⁴

It is also evident that Constance was working away at her fine art skills. She had enrolled in the St John's Wood School of Art, based in Elm Tree Road, not far from Lord's cricket ground. Founded in 1878, this was an art school where women could study those drawing skills and take the life classes that would, among other things, prepare them for entry into the Royal Academy Schools – an institution that had admitted its first female student in 1860.

Art classes were becoming increasingly popular in the 1880s. For those young women like Constance who instinctively felt the need to do something with their lives, periodicals such as
The Girl's Own Paper
explained the potential appeal of what might lead to a career, if not as an artist, then most certainly as a tutor.

Between true artistic geniuses and those destined to be viewers of works of art rather than creators of art was ‘a powerful and energetic middle class', explained the paper, ‘who … are yet gifted with a vein of talent, more or less generous, which would well repay cultivation, and which would fill the lives of those who possess it with healthy interests and sufficiently lucrative employment'.
¹⁵

The St John's Wood School, under the tutelage of a Mr Calderon, cost its pupils 15 guineas a year or 10 guineas for two terms. Girls had to buy their own equipment, but models were supplied. Apart from full-time tuition, the school offered part-time and evening classes, and it's likely that Constance, with all her other activities, opted for the latter. One convention of the school was the expectation that students should join the St John's Wood Sketch Club and enter their work for regular viewings where invited practitioners and celebrities came to judge the pupils' work.

In August 1882, while Oscar was introducing residents of the state of New York to the joys of the artistic movement in England, Constance was planning her contributions for the sketch club exhibition. She was on holiday at Delgaty Castle in Aberdeenshire. The imposing sixteenth-century castle, with its white-harled five-storey
tower, had come into the ownership of the local Ainslie family, who were resident there that summer in their latest incarnation as Mr and Mrs Grant-Duff-Ainslie. Amid the magnificent setting of the imposing castle and its sumptuous grounds, the house party comprised a Mr Huxley, a Miss Michelle, Mrs Ainslie's cousin Mr Morgan and his family, a Colonel Forbes and the main Ainslie clan, which included sixteen-year-old Douglas.

On arrival Constance realized that Delgaty provided plenty of opportunity for sketching and immediately dispatched instructions to Otho in Lancaster Gate to send her ‘my spectacles which are lying somewhere in my room in a case … Next is a small sketch book, thickish paper about 10 inches by 6 which I shall be awfully obliged if you can get to me … Also a medium sized, rather large camel's hair brush, a good one. I am very anxious to try and take some sketches here, though I expect not to succeed.'
¹⁶

Constance quickly discovered that any ambition to make a series of sketches for the St John's Sketch Club would be hard to realize. She was having far too much fun. There were billiards, tennis and chess tournaments, punctuated by picnics and outings. She was even being taught how to shoot. And of course, there were those mystical activities in the evenings that she so adored. She was mesmerized one night by one member of the group and ‘upset Mrs Ainslie dreadfully. She thought I was awfully ill!' In fact, Constance revealed that she had ‘never enjoyed myself so much anywhere' as during that wonderful summer in Scotland.