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What is a cynic, a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing?

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Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination. True friends stab you in the front.

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Just three of the countless epigrams of Oscar Wilde, this great writ of the English language needs no introduction.

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I'm sure a quarter of controversy for his whole life and ultimately a tragic martyr in his own eyes, at least as a young man.

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He spent four years studying it, modelling college, Oxford. They're the friends he made and the influence of two tutors.

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Walter, Peter and John Ruskin remained with him for the rest of his brief life.

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With me to discuss the life of the man who could resist everything except temptation are Davis Rivera,

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a master's student in film Ascetics of Pembroke College. Janik Lombard, a detail in classical, Indian religion and language, also at Pembroke College.

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And Colin Meloy, a master's student in French literature, also from Pembroke College.

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Thank you very much for joining me, Davis. Perhaps we could start with Wild's early life.

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He was born in 1854 in Dublin. What environment did he grew up in while he is the son of Lady Speranza Wild and his father,

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who were both born in Dublin, as you said, and his birth name was Oscar Finger of Flattery.

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Well, while his mother was a famous poet and also was very outspoken in her politics, and Wild and his brother Willie,

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from a very early age, looked at her with admiration and also, ah, what would you say?

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That she was a literary role model that Wilde aspired to?

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She was she was a literary role model. And even when he as late as when he was at Oxford, he looked at her, you know,

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along with her kids and the Greeks as a inspiration rather than as a, you know, maternal figure.

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But his father was also a very influential man in intellectual society.

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He was a surgeon. Icona, you said earlier they had a bit of a sibling rivalry with his his brother.

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Yeah. So his brother went to Trinity College before him and then was the Trinity College.

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Dublin. The Trinity College. Dublin, yeah. Yeah. So obviously they were there together and there was a bit of a sibling rivalry.

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There is an aphorism which Wilde says, I should have written that down.

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Where am I going to find it? We have various books open on the table before.

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Yes. And in his later years or when you know, when he was at Oxford or slightly after after Oxford,

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he I felt I think he felt a lot of shame about Willie and apparently paid him to grow a beard so that people wouldn't make the connexion.

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That familial connexion between the two astonishing thing I didn't realise before I started reading for

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the show is how successful a classicist Wilde was as a student because he he goes up to Trinity College,

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Dublin to read classics in 1871.

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Yeah, Oscar Wilde fell in love with the classics from an early age onwards, and he kind of left in the ancient Greek world, so to speak.

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He was very much enamoured with the Greek pantheon as well.

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So he kind of fancies himself already as a young man to be walking and some Arcadian landscape surrounded by the Greek gods and kind of reflect

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his later works and his his perception of beauty and of aesthetics as well in the way he relates to Christianity and religion as such,

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because there was always a happy pagan element within his works and that has kind of taken from these classical works.

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So he sees himself as maybe it's taking it too far is some sort of latter day Greek philosopher.

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King almost became a mystic, even to an extent, you could argue,

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because he felt like that modernity is essentially an empty period of history in the sense that

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he felt that the technological society in which we live is in a way brutalising and it's devoid,

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is devoid of a deeper meaning. And he was looking for deeper meaning and beauty, and that was mediated for him through the classics.

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I was also at an inspirational teacher of classics, Genetical Methoxy,

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who encouraged him to to apply for the scholarship at Oxford, which he then went on to get.

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And they also travelled through Italy together.

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And there, of course, this is one of the main places where you want to go when you are interested in classics.

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So if I seem to recall reading somewhere that he so they travel.

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He travelled with Matadi during his time, a maudlin and he had to rusticate for some because he arrived back late from this trip.

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Yeah, he did. With a friend as well.

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And then here I think he ended up charming, you know, one of the the people over modlin into, you know, not having to pay a fine for his lateness.

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Yeah, but we're getting slightly ahead of ourselves now. So it's anything before his time, Triniti that we feel we should to touch on.

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I think his is household in Dublin with.

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Open to a lot of intellectuals of the period, so his family were acquainted with Yates,

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for instance, the influential poet, and as a child he was exposed to to many ideas,

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contemporary ideas that a normal child wouldn't have been exposed to due to the controversy that his mother inspired with her poetry.

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So the nationalistic poetry that she oh, she was sort of an early Irish nationalist.

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Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. And a very powerful figure.

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I think there's a connexion between wild saying somebody like Orson Welles,

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who was exposed as a child, who had a powerful mother, was exposed to these ideas very early on.

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And in order to stay in the room as a child full of adults who are bouncing ideas of one another, you have to hold your own to a certain extent.

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And Wilde learnt very early on that to tell a good story was perhaps more important than to tell the truth.

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For instance, this great literary mind that we see later in his life, it didn't necessarily come from nowhere.

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It came from this sort of absolute intellectual media that he's grown up with from a very you know,

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I suppose he would want people to think that it came from nowhere then that's a big part of his personality as amnesty.

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He is supposedly supposed to put on the air of being self-made without the influence of his mother.

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He cultured his own myth quite successfully. He did.

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He did. He later said that, you know, in my opinion, a man should create his own myth, which I agree with.

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And he won the top classic's prise at at Trinity Trinity Foundation scholarship and the Berkeley Gold Medal.

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And as a on the encouragement and after he takes up this demis, ship it a very strange day.

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I'm a mother myself, and I've no nowhere else that has this particular term, right.

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Yeah. And yeah. And for someone who was this is sort of jumping ahead a bit.

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But, you know, someone who spoke for the future, who was never, you know, very interested in the present,

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you know, he is either, you know, harkening back to the greats or thinking about, you know, a future readership.

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The contemporary or the modern voice of his generation would probably have been Matthew Arnold, who, while he was a model,

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you know, wild one, the Newdegate poetry prise the grand prise of poetry, which Matthew Arnold also won when he was at Oxford.

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And when reaching out to share this news with Matthew Arnold.

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You know, one wouldn't expect someone like Wilde to want the respect of of Arnold, but that did seem to be important to him.

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Yeah. To get some kind of validation from from the respected establishment figure.

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They're looking both ways. He wants to be his own individual standalone genius, but also wanting to write.

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He's a little older than he reads, greets the undergraduates, great school some more, and it's a little older than the other students.

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He matriculated the day after his 20th birthday in nineteen seventy four, 1870, for 1870.

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And this is still around. So his cancer will go on.

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But he hid this fact as you as Davis was saying before he lied about his age, right?

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Yeah. A big part of his life lying about his age. In fact, an ideal husband.

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He introduces Lord Goring saying he's thirty four but always lies about his age, which why I would do even under oath,

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you know, on trial, lied about his age, saying he was two years younger, though even of an advanced age.

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Those two years meant a lot to him and comfortable in his own skin.

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Is that funny? Yeah, which is a shame because, you know, though, the damage led to, you know,

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or his time at Oxford is vastly influential and he wouldn't be arguably would maybe not made it as far as he eventually did.

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If he hadn't matriculated to Oxford, he would have been a man of his age.

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He wouldn't have had to lie because he lost those three years and that, you know,

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set the course for the rest of his life, you know, wearing this mask of a younger man.

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Yeah. But it also meant that he was constantly bending and playing with the truth, which is a theme running through.

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And that got him sort of licence to do that. So I think in a way, it was not necessarily a completely negative thing.

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No, no, no. There's also this phrase from phrases and philosophies for the use of the young,

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where he says that the first duty in life is to be as artificial as possible.

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And I just kind of reflected in this, playing around with his age, with his whole identity and putting on different masks.

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And you I was going to say and, you know, just being in French literature, I think that has a lot to do with Stendhal, who also got to start with.

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Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. I was looking ahead rather than a general or, you know, the generational voice that was fading at the time.

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Right. Right, right. Well, so we can come back to talk a lot more about his time at Oxford, but.

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I feel that we'll just take that link up because a few years later, he's spending a lot of time in Paris and is greatly influenced,

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modelled himself after a previous generation of French writers that we mentioned Stendahl and also talking about Baudelaire.

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Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I'm still a developer for sure.

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So there's a movement in France which happens towards the end of the 19th century,

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greatly influenced by Bertalan Wild kind of jumps onto this and brings it to England in English.

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Literature is seen more as a movement of aesthetics is kind of aestheticism is what it's labelled as.

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Decadence is is more of a French phenomenon.

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The pivotal book in the decadent movement is a book by a chap called Wiesenthal's Alba, which appears in the picture Dorian Grey.

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It is the little yellow book that Dorian Poison Dorian, and this was seen as the turning point in the French decadent period.

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It was also an extension of naturalism that came through so that in fact, it took naturalism.

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Arguably, decadence takes naturalism as far as it can possibly go.

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Wild was also in and around Paris at the time of the symbolist poet.

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So he attended Malama held every Tuesday.

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Tuesday he had a meeting of poets and friends and they discussed poetry and read their poetry to one another.

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Oscar Wilde attended a couple of these sessions, so he really was in and amongst the French intellectuals of the time,

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along with other people like Whistler, who also had a memorable evening with Pru's, too.

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I believe he had a memorable evening with Marcel.

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Yeah, it's a bit anecdotal, but what happened was first invited him to dinner and when that evening was slightly late,

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returning back to his house and when he got to his house, he said, where is the Englishman here?

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And his servant said, yes, but he took one look in the dining room and then went to the bathroom is still not returned.

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And then Wilde comes out the bathroom. Miss Proost and are you OK?

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Is everything OK? And Wilde says, Yes, yes.

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But I thought you were. We were dining alone. And then I saw your parents.

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I really couldn't bear it.

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And apparently afterwards when he left, they told him that while had said that the decor was terribly ugly, which is part of the reason why he left.

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How do we receive this to come from boiled or from or from?

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From. And I think it is.

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Yeah. Yeah. So for our listeners that we have, in fact, two copies open on the table of Richard Ellman's biography of Oscar Wilde from the late 1980s.

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Sure. Of the prise one. Yeah, but that's that's the beauty, you know, that's the core of Wilde's life is all anecdotal, sort of his chief quote.

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And all of my was, you know, how every every morning he'd wake up and say, I don't know, how can I live up to my blue China?

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This is definitely fantastic. What is says about this beautiful set of blue China that he got for himself, for his mortal in ruins.

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So, yeah, he felt so inadequate. And if you look at his bill for just the amount of goblets and cups and chalices that he bought, it's extraordinary.

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I don't know where he kept it all. We've all been in his quarters and it's not it's not that big.

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Yeah. There was no thing I just wanted to mention as far as the connexion between Wilde and French literature is concerned,

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I think that through this wonderful book,

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he discovered the paintings of Gustav from the war or he developed some sort of affection for them and the symbolist paintings of Q7 war.

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They are very influential, especially on Oscar Wilde, Salome as well, and his depiction of Salome as an Oriental beauty,

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as an Oriental queen that is also a temptress and a seductive person, I think.

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And so he was very much influenced by this depiction of the Orient as the other, so to speak.

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The other that is at the same time the opposite of both sexual fantasy, but also of violence.

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In the same sense, the combined combines the two. And I think that's one of the main tropes also in literature.

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Yeah, yeah, yeah. And also just being a bowler briefly as well.

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Both Wiesenthal's and Wild's take from Bowdler this idea that nature is a terrible force,

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the force of nature is aggressive and needs to be fought against.

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So the whole premise of resource available is that the the protagonist is doing everything he can to fight nature and eventually,

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inevitably, nature wins out and he loses.

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So in some ways, the paraphrase Baudelaire's argument written on modernity.

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And his idea where he pits artifice against nature and he argues that everything that bad about

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men comes from nature and the only everything good and virtue comes from artifice and art.

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And Oscar Wilde is picking up on these themes in his development as a writer.

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And one more thing is gutsier to feel good. In his preface to his book, Mademoiselle Written in the 50s in the 1950s,

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the whole preface is about this idea that art should not be useful and which the preface of Dorian Grey then takes up much later again in the 90s.

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This art for us, it really isn't a new idea in the wild.

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It's something that he is very much taken from the French literary developments of the late 19th century.

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We'll come back to all of this, particularly Shalabi we should talk more about.

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But I think it's time to get back.

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Rewind about 15 years back to his time at Oxford, which, as I think I said, introduction was just being a very influential time of his life.

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So he met several of his great lifelong friends. There's a man called Ross Robbie Ross, yet his first love affair with Jesse Bobbly,

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his friend non-involvement, one of Balliol who and his of his time at Oxford.

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We know most of it based on his diary that he kept as a student,

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which has little to nothing to do with his studies or what he was reading at the time and more to do with their social life.

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He was that he was a really great friend. There was also William Wilsford Ward and Hunter Blair where I would say we would close

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and they were actually at Modlin and they were his neighbours and they met right away.

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And I think a lot of what later inspired the decay of lying, or at least the way that he situates the characters in the way and the decay of lying.

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When you read Bordelaise Diary are modelled after their host evenings of debauchery or after a while it would entertain guests.

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They would usually end up with the three of them talking to one another and formulate

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these ideas which were diametrically opposed to what was going on during the parties.

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Yeah, I get the sense from some I talk to you in reading the notes that he's he's not one of his tutors

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favourite students in the sense that he doesn't necessarily always do his work on time is not,

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in fact, a term coming from Italy. But he eventually gets the first.

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I think he says the bad boy done good or something.

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Well, he had he had an advantage over most of the other students in his class,

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and that is college because of his excellent preparation at Putera and also Trinity College, Dublin.

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And he could treat his tutors at Oxford with a certain amount of conceit in his arrogance,

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because not only were they not the ones who would eventually give him marks at the end of his second and fourth year,

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but chances are knew more than them, even though he could on the years of someone who didn't study at all.

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Yeah, and he did say that he wouldn't apply to be a crystal done right afterwards,

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but he actually did apply to be a fellow and was rejected because of his controversial behaviour.

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He did. And one of the many nights that I've previously mentioned,

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he made the comment that he would soar above donorship by saying, I'll be a poet, a writer, a dramatist.

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Somehow or other I'll be famous or if not famous, notorious.

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He feels he has a sort of higher calling then. Sure. Yeah.

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Than a mere Oxford. Even though he did brag about a lunch that he had at All Souls with the fellow which Lady Speranza took with great pride.

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Janik, I don't know if you could tell us about there are two teachers that do influence him quite a lot.

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There's Peter. And of course, how does he come across then?

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What does he get from them?

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Well, I want to focus on Peter because he had a massive influence on Oscar Wilde later later works and especially his homosexuality as well,

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because Peter, as a historian of the Renaissance and wrote a very influential book which also influenced Oscar Wilde,

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and he said that the book had a very strange influence on his life.

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He sat in the Profundis Deeper Fund is the thing he writes like a year or two before his his death, after his jail time.

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We'll talk about all this later. But he's a very different man.

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Writing this isn't a very different position, both socially, economically, and he's not living in great poverty and in need.

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And so and he is, of course, his famous depiction of San Sebastian as well in that.

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Massive influence in this Christian martyr who became kind of the same of the homosexuals throughout history,

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and it is this combination of those scepticism, of self-sacrifice,

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of overcoming and also of beauty that is gained through pain that massively impacted on Oscar Wilde and

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is one of the major themes of his literature and also this perception of the world in his later life.

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So, so, so from Peter, you feel well developed, his his sense of himself as as a martyr, almost in the Christian tradition.

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But it was definitely, you know, I assume that he kind of saw himself in a similar light already in earlier stage,

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but it kind of confirmed that or gave it a stronger impetus.

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And Ruskin got a risk involved as part of Ruskin's group railway line builders,

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young students that risking got together for this kind of reform in local society.

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Riskin was much more the if you had if you had two people sitting on each shoulder,

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Ruskin would be the angel and Peter would be the devil in that line.

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So risking very, hugely influential art critic associated with the traffic lights famous across England were just really thrilled to meet him.

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I think Peter offered the sort of darker side. Maybe Peter offered a juicy side to life than risking could offer him as much more clean cut.

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And there's there's a lot of scandal surrounding Ruskin on his marriage affair precisely because he was too clean-Cut almost.

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Whereas Peter, in the final pages of the Renaissance, talks about living life with a gem like Flame, which has become very famous.

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So I think wild balances, these two influential figures in his life whilst Oxford and then maybe edges towards Peter towards the end.

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I'm not sure what you think about that, David, sitting there toward the end.

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Yeah, yeah. I think definitely. Well, I don't. Hmm.

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That's interesting because, you know, when you think of Peter,

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you think of the aesthetic influence that he had on Wilde, whereas with Ruskin, it's more of an ethical approach.

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Yes. Yeah. Yeah. It'd be interesting to kind of analyse that through the lens of what Nietzsche written in the birth of tragedy,

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like the precision between Apollo, the God of beauty, of stuffing's, of everything that is light and clear.

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There's Dionysus, the God of dissolution.

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And you could argue that Ruskin was more of the Apollonian, a political influence on Wilde, whereas Peter kind of functioned as dynamicists.

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He was the the principle of dissolution in the sense of of ecstasy.

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You could argue, I would say that Oscar Wilde was always like kind of torn between these two principles.

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Of course, it might be difficult to apply Newton's categories to to his life, of course.

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But now there are certain parallels, if you like. Yes.

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And also there was as far as Peter was concerned, it was also some homosexual tension, some suggestion of homosexual tendencies,

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some of the students, some of the dinners he held in his quarters, whereas Reskin was quite the opposite.

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In fact, some people think that Ruskin was asexual and and there was a court case about the annulment

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of Ruskin's marriage and an annulment on the grounds of the fact that it wasn't consummated,

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in fact. So you really did have two opposite strands, hair pulling on on Wild and his ideas about beauty as well.

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And so he leaves Oxford. He graduates Mark.

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He set himself up in London, but he also takes this maybe skipping ahead a few years.

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Take this lecture tour of America where lost nearly a year, I think.

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Yes. A lecture tour of America that, you know, again,

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probably influenced by Peter's socialist leanings or like he felt it necessary to ingratiate

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himself into the working classes and to go and to visit unconventional places that,

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you know, your average I don't actually consider while an academic, but you know,

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someone who is giving lectures, you know, for for the young and for, you know,

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the educated classes, you know, so he would go to places like Louisiana and,

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you know, want to go aboard this ship and, you know, down into the, you know, the gallows and see, you know, get his hands dirty, so to speak.

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He makes a lot of money. He also made a lot of money. Yeah, because he needs it.

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Because he's living very extravagantly. Right? Yes, he's right.

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And yet and when people would ask him later what he has been up to, people from friends, from colleges and whatnot,

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and that that was his stock response was, you know, well, lecturing and getting rich, which is exactly what he was doing.

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And he calls himself a professor. Is that a professor? Was that. I'm sure I am, yeah.

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Butler talks of the dandy and he describes the figure of the dandy and this idea that what is on the surface represents what's inside.

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It's. There's a spiritual element to the way that people dressed in the way that people represent themselves and wild takes these ideas,

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and there have been many dandies again in Paris for a long time when Wilde comes to

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takes it up and infuses his life with the idea that the surface is very important,

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as he says, in the presence of Dorian Grey, who is surface and symbol.

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And I believe actually when he toured America, his dress was part of the contract he was, which is something that he learnt that Oxford formal wear.

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Then, you know, I developed a great affection for that was a great affection for the formalwear of the

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dinners and dining nightly at the I mentioned the day this is happening in the early 80s.

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It's kind of 1881 to the right at all, which is fairly impressive considering that at that time all that had been published were the poems and there.

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But, you know, Dorian Grey published An Ideal Husband, important to me as well,

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because it was all his what makes a great work, the work that survives best is all worth it.

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In the final decade of his life, in 1890 onwards, I guess a bit of this poem, Ravana was the one right, which was written at Oxford.

250
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But yes, it's it's really 1880. He's got a huge reputation that continue to expand his living in Paris, in London, but he also gets married.

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That's more I say, surprisingly, and wants to come in about his his marriage to two children as well.

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I think it is Constance Lloyd and with his children, Cyril and Vivien.

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Yeah. And Constance has commented and, you know, and I think loved him till the bitter end.

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And, you know, some have said that, you know, his homosexuality might have been his first homosexual experience was after his marriage, in fact.

255
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So when he did get married, he was might have considered I think he maybe thought beyond the boundaries of sexuality, given his great education.

256
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Yeah. Think you were saying about this that as well.

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I guess in the 19th century, many people wouldn't necessarily need to identify themselves as a sexually active sexual.

258
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I mean, of course, homosexuality, as we understand it these days,

259
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is very was very much frowned upon these days, but is illegal, is illegal, was illegal, in fact.

260
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And it led to his imprisonment as well. Yeah. Gross indecency. So that kind of plays, again into this whole idea of leading a double life,

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which is very much one of the main topics in the picture of Dorian Grey as well.

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So there's there's there's life on the surface.

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And he says that surfaces are very important, but there's also the light underneath what is said and what goes on behind the scene.

264
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And that is very much part of his of his notion of aesthetics as well, that there's two layers to everything there is.

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On the one hand, there's the surface and on the other hand,

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there is the what is frowned upon by both society and what can only be understood by the genius.

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Yeah, I. How were his family affected by the whole scandal that later they had to change their name.

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They moved to Europe and changed their name and face as as far as we know as well.

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He was a very loving father. So to be separated from his children for two years must have been horrific.

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Many of his short stories that he wrote, The Happy Prince, for instance, he would read to his children to that great delight.

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It must have been a really terrible time to be separated from his family that he didn't consider.

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And he also lost his mother at the same time. Right. Right.

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And you could argue that the Profundis, which is this love letter he wrote to Lord Alfred Douglas, is partly triggered by the death of his mother.

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And it's one of the things he managed to in life as well,

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how badly his mother's passing away affected him and how it made his situation and was in prison even worse.

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And so that is definitely a huge influence on that as well.

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So you mentioned Lord Alfred Douglas, who is the major figure in the final 10 years of Wilde's life.

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How did they meet? And they became lovers. Introduced by Robert Ross in London, Lord Alfred Douglas was an undergrad at Maudlin.

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Wilde said, I went to modelling myself. I can often see some time and they struck up.

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They fell in love, really for a while. Douglas embodied everything that was Greek.

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He said he was like a beautiful Greek boy. He was also the son of the Marquis of Queensbury who invented the Queensbury rules.

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The rules of boxing. Yes. Yeah. And it turned out to be quite an aggressive man.

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And because of what's the most dangerous one and the cause of what they are doing.

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Yeah. And so they really had a whirlwind love affair that had been written about it ever since.

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Well, what sort of time? Are we talking about 1993, 1994, in 1894?

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I mean, or written to he's now become a genuine, successful playwright in London?

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Yeah, yeah. I mean, the biggest fan has been very successful. Shalabi has at least been performed in Paris, although, you know, well,

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it wasn't a England can go and tell us why that challenge wasn't performed in England.

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It was banned by Lord Chamberlain, even though Wilde was able, which is a big ambition of his,

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to get Sarah Bernard to portray Solomon, which is a famous actress.

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She was a very famous actress of her time and who had turned down previous offers to appear in his play, as does the Duchess of Padua.

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I think Mary Anderson also declined as far as it not being allowed to be performed in England based on the representation of religious figures,

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I think. Yes, Jane St. John the Baptist being of particular interest of Wilde's dating back

294
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all the way to Oxford when he was first proposition to as a possible Mason,

295
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he often joked about St. John the Baptist, as might have counted against him in the long run.

296
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But but yeah. So, so Shalabi not being performed in England aside, he's now a successful playwright that he meets Alfred Douglas.

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But the reality is it doesn't get any work done.

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He complains that way whenever he's with Bozie, he doesn't get any decent work done and leads into this double life.

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But you are talking about Queensberry finds out or there's rooma is a calling card.

300
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Yeah. Yeah. Calling him a sodomite. Yeah. Spelled wrong some demidov.

301
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Yeah. I wonder what would have Brankov with world more the accusation of spelling.

302
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Well he was when he was at Oxford, he made a point of pointing out, you know,

303
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he got low marks on a paper and he said, let me point out that this person spelled Physick rather than physics.

304
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He said clearly, you know, uncultivated philistine to not include the.

305
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Yes.

306
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I mean, between the various stories you said, I mean, no one can see how well might not have necessarily ingratiated himself with people in power.

307
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And lots of other things you can say, he seemed have a knack of working people up possibly the wrong way,

308
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which is something that he acquired at Oxford.

309
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I mean, because from all you know, judging from different accounts, it seems like he came here, though well-educated, because of poor and Trinity.

310
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He had the Irish accent. He was very naive. Apparently he was you know, he embarrassed himself fairly often.

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His first night in formal hall. He was seated next to an athlete and his third year.

312
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And, you know, he was he was speaking well. And then he thought, OK, well, I've ingratiated myself here.

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Now's the time to present my card to this person not knowing that this type of thing was not done.

314
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So he decided rather than continue to embarrass himself, he would rise above, you know, the his fellow students, which of course, he did.

315
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We're running short of time, so we should fast forward to the disaster.

316
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So he's left his calling card. There's a sort of series of court cases back in front.

317
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Oh, well, there were two trials. It was Queensborough, his trial and Wild's trial.

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Queensberry was acquitted and then, while was wild, was arrested very shortly after in the same month over that same span of time,

319
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his world sued Queensberry for wild countersued, which was which was actually the cause of his downfall.

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If he had not done that, he and, you know, obviously, as as Conor mentioned, you know, it was love and loss of pride prompted this.

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This countersued while riding high after the success of of a woman of no importance and an ideal husband, et cetera.

322
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And also, you know, he had written the importance of being earnest, which premiered a week before the caucuses, did a phenomenal success.

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And yeah. So he countersued probably. I don't know what he was expecting exactly, but yeah,

324
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then the trial happened and he treated it as if it were a salon or as if he were entertaining Robbie Ross and Whisler,

325
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et cetera, not getting a real sense of the seriousness of what was going on.

326
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Yeah. And so he gets sentenced to two years hard labour.

327
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Unsurprisingly, this deeply, deeply affected Janik, you know, about his writing at this time?

328
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Well, he experienced the whole imprisonment as something very humiliating, of course, and something very limiting as well, because he was not able to.

329
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Enjoy the privilege you used to enjoy, and he very much diminished in that sense, but also he was able to to read and to write in prison.

330
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So he in comparison to other prisoners at the time, he did enjoy a couple of privileges and took advantage of that.

331
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And that's where he started to, to reflect on his own imprisonment as well from from various perspectives.

332
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So on the one hand, he was, of course, very much still the same a citizen.

333
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And therefore, he he saw the whole thing as some sort of challenge and as a spiritual test,

334
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even as one of the first things he mentions in the latter De Profundis, which is,

335
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you know, his reflection of his time in prison beyond being just a love letter,

336
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is that he sees the pain he experienced everyday and humiliation as some sort of spiritual test that will make him able to rise above everyone else,

337
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just like Jesus was able to do that.

338
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And he, in fact, compares himself to Christ and saw the martyrs as well, and also to the Hebrew prophets, which were deemed to admonish the people.

339
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But at the same time, they were often rejected by the people who like society, doesn't understand the prophetic words.

340
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And that's because he ahead of his time, ahead of his time, in a way, and also beyond.

341
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And it's just like, you know, nobody is able to comprehend fully what he's what he's on about.

342
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And hence also that kind of plays into, again, the whole idea of the double life and that is hidden from the public, just like the prophet.

343
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And Salame is not to be seen, is hidden in a system.

344
00:36:32,380 --> 00:36:38,860
And you can only his voice. And so he compares himself to to to a prophet, so to speak.

345
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And he kind of uses the image of Christ of Christ as an artist, which was, I guess,

346
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very similar to the one employed by William Blake as a creative genius, as a divine human being who is not only saving offer for a while.

347
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In fact, Christ is not the saviour in the religious sense, but in the artistic sense.

348
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And he considers Christ to be a creative genius who uses nice words and is spoken to in those words.

349
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And that's kind of how I was, of course, depicted himself as well. And he also mentioned the fact that through this creative act,

350
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he was able to establish a religion of of the faithless and a religion of people who don't need to believe in some supernatural deity,

351
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but we can redeem themselves through the very act of art.

352
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And so this was a love letter. So he's gone back to see. Exactly.

353
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So he wanted to reconcile himself with one hand. He he, of course, complains to to see about his situation in prison at the time.

354
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On the other hand, he also wants to reconcile with him.

355
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And he says that I have made many mistakes in my life, but all these mistakes were due to to my temper.

356
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They were due to my nature. And I can't change this.

357
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This is the tragic flaw in my personality and I can't do anything against it, which is just back to Bodleian.

358
00:38:00,970 --> 00:38:09,070
But as a dear, that's that nature is essentially pitted against the artifice and also back to the classics and the whole notion of a radical thought,

359
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of course, a very classical idea. So it's at the same time was admitting that he has committed mistakes.

360
00:38:15,790 --> 00:38:20,890
This is a mistake. At same time, he tries to redeem himself for saying that it's not my fault.

361
00:38:20,890 --> 00:38:28,360
It's just the way I am. This is my nature. This is my fate almost. Yeah. And fate is a very important concept in Salome and also in the profundis.

362
00:38:28,360 --> 00:38:35,230
And it's a recurring theme. Would you say, in Profundis, he's drawing together all the volatile,

363
00:38:35,230 --> 00:38:40,660
disparate themes of his life, the classical education, the religious upbringing in Ireland,

364
00:38:40,660 --> 00:38:50,050
plus obviously his incredibly flamboyant existence and language all coming together in the and there's loads of references and

365
00:38:50,050 --> 00:38:57,640
cross references to his previous works and all of the intellectual artistic influences that impacted on him in his earlier life.

366
00:38:57,640 --> 00:39:04,120
And it reads as very at times, as a very shallow matter, because it seems to be very superficial.

367
00:39:04,120 --> 00:39:10,450
And he seems to be lauding himself above everyone else all the time whilst complaining about his own suffering.

368
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And he uses, you know, a painter and he uses his previous relations with with men and women.

369
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They are like employed by him as a means of just making him stand out from everyone else.

370
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Again, as the as as a as a person who's highly cultured and who is also highly into two aesthetics again and above everyone else.

371
00:39:30,880 --> 00:39:32,620
In fact, we're nearly out of time.

372
00:39:32,620 --> 00:39:41,470
So we must come to his death and a very ignominious end for someone who lived as richly as he had done for much of his life.

373
00:39:41,470 --> 00:39:48,460
Yeah. And thankfully, are there Profundis, I think it should be pointed out, was not wasn't published until after he died.

374
00:39:48,460 --> 00:39:53,080
And a heavily edited form by Robbie Ross.

375
00:39:53,080 --> 00:39:59,040
Yeah, he knew. And like you mentioned there, the sort of covered egotism.

376
00:39:59,040 --> 00:40:07,170
Of the work, you know, disguised as altruism, you know, we're sort of like falls in line with the side and Freud has pointed out, you know,

377
00:40:07,170 --> 00:40:16,020
and sexual persona needed some time, you know, because considering the circumstances regarding his death, how do we think he died?

378
00:40:16,020 --> 00:40:19,830
He did. He died in nineteen hundreds. Right. Nineteen hundred.

379
00:40:19,830 --> 00:40:30,540
Either cerebral meningitis or, you know, if we're going by his most celebrated historian, you know, biographer Richard Ellman's book.

380
00:40:30,540 --> 00:40:37,670
It was syphilis that he contracted. There's no way of knowing what the truth is.

381
00:40:37,670 --> 00:40:42,660
He died in Paris in poverty in a hotel in Addison.

382
00:40:42,660 --> 00:40:48,180
Yeah, and certainly not in England. Still in disgrace from his time.

383
00:40:48,180 --> 00:40:58,060
Yes. And a broken man and his stories of him begging for money of people that he knew, which he never would have done in the past, actually.

384
00:40:58,060 --> 00:41:02,460
Yeah. But fortunately, his work lives on as to his aphorisms.

385
00:41:02,460 --> 00:41:13,650
And his grave now is visited by many, many people who wear his various in the palace and cemetery in Paris, sphinx of his grave.

386
00:41:13,650 --> 00:41:21,810
And they have to clean it and recover it quite frequently because of the number of people that writes quite famous.

387
00:41:21,810 --> 00:41:30,870
People kiss the front of the Sphinx with lipstick. All his aphorisms are plastered over and over this sphinx.

388
00:41:30,870 --> 00:41:36,780
The one the one thing I would say is inspired. I think part of his appeal lies in his humanity, actually.

389
00:41:36,780 --> 00:41:44,100
I think although he did see himself as maybe prophetic ahead of his time, somebody who was very cultured, undoubtedly he was.

390
00:41:44,100 --> 00:41:47,520
I mean, he got a double first Oxford. He was justified.

391
00:41:47,520 --> 00:41:57,690
But I think and he he was somebody who was very human and was aware of the flaws of humanity, of his own humanity.

392
00:41:57,690 --> 00:42:04,920
And the one thing that he maintained in a theme that runs throughout his work is the need for hope, really.

393
00:42:04,920 --> 00:42:11,050
And that's what I get from a lot of his work, is that he really believes in the need for hope.

394
00:42:11,050 --> 00:42:14,910
And that's a very human thing. That's from redemption, even to an extent.

395
00:42:14,910 --> 00:42:17,430
That's something that he never lost,

396
00:42:17,430 --> 00:42:26,100
that I feel like when people make the comparison of the great widths of their age being wild and Wessler in the English speaking countries,

397
00:42:26,100 --> 00:42:30,210
that's the key distinction between the two, is that while it was full of hope,

398
00:42:30,210 --> 00:42:39,660
he was a genuinely good person, thanks in part to his teachers from Speranza to Pader to Robbie Ross.

399
00:42:39,660 --> 00:42:46,890
And, you know, his you could read his aphorisms and there there's there's never a cutting edge.

400
00:42:46,890 --> 00:42:54,360
Whereas with Whisler, he meant to argue, you know, there's poison and there's malicious intent.

401
00:42:54,360 --> 00:42:58,680
Do you have any closing remarks you'd like to make? And I think it's really interesting to look at.

402
00:42:58,680 --> 00:43:02,310
Oscar was influenced, especially in German literature, in the early 20th century as well.

403
00:43:02,310 --> 00:43:04,740
And there's one poet I really admire a lot. His name is Stefan.

404
00:43:04,740 --> 00:43:11,160
Geauga is a bit controversial because he used concept that were partly misused by the Nazis later, as happened to many other authors.

405
00:43:11,160 --> 00:43:15,390
And Stefan Georg is very similar, but also quite different to Oscar Wilde in many senses.

406
00:43:15,390 --> 00:43:21,360
But it kind of tells you a lot about how influential Oscar Wilde was and how he was used by later writers.

407
00:43:21,360 --> 00:43:26,730
And Stefan Gilgo, he was also a homosexual and he was very much open about it because he also believed in

408
00:43:26,730 --> 00:43:35,130
the old classical Greek ideals of of of masculinity and used its artistic idea of love.

409
00:43:35,130 --> 00:43:41,190
Palak very much in his poetry as well. So it is a beauty which is in itself beautiful, and it doesn't need to serve any purpose.

410
00:43:41,190 --> 00:43:44,190
And I think that's an important lesson. We can we can also all take from Oscar Wilde.

411
00:43:44,190 --> 00:43:52,170
That beauty doesn't have to to serve any purpose except for being beautiful and being aesthetic, being being pleasant.

412
00:43:52,170 --> 00:43:54,930
And that's something that tends to be forgotten a lot, I think,

413
00:43:54,930 --> 00:44:03,570
in our world these days where everything has to serve either an economic purpose or it needs to to bring you further in life.

414
00:44:03,570 --> 00:44:08,220
We tend to forget that there's other things that that could be valuable and that cannot be measured.

415
00:44:08,220 --> 00:44:11,610
And I think there's a famous quote, which you mentioned the very beginning,

416
00:44:11,610 --> 00:44:15,120
that there's people who know the price of everything but the value of nothing.

417
00:44:15,120 --> 00:44:19,680
And I think that's one of the main lessons we can take from schools. Thank you very much.

418
00:44:19,680 --> 00:44:26,640
It's been a fascinating race through an incredible life. Next week, we'll be discussing the prime number theorem.

419
00:44:26,640 --> 00:44:28,867
Thank you.