What is a cynic, a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing?
Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination. True friends stab you in the front.
Just three of the countless epigrams of Oscar Wilde, this great writ of the English language needs no introduction.
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.
He spent four years studying it, modelling college, Oxford. They're the friends he made and the influence of two tutors.
Walter, Peter and John Ruskin remained with him for the rest of his brief life.
With me to discuss the life of the man who could resist everything except temptation are Davis Rivera,
a master's student in film Ascetics of Pembroke College. Janik Lombard, a detail in classical, Indian religion and language, also at Pembroke College.
And Colin Meloy, a master's student in French literature, also from Pembroke College.
Thank you very much for joining me, Davis. Perhaps we could start with Wild's early life.
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,
who were both born in Dublin, as you said, and his birth name was Oscar Finger of Flattery.
Well, while his mother was a famous poet and also was very outspoken in her politics, and Wild and his brother Willie,
from a very early age, looked at her with admiration and also, ah, what would you say?
That she was a literary role model that Wilde aspired to?
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,
along with her kids and the Greeks as a inspiration rather than as a, you know, maternal figure.
But his father was also a very influential man in intellectual society.
He was a surgeon. Icona, you said earlier they had a bit of a sibling rivalry with his his brother.
Yeah. So his brother went to Trinity College before him and then was the Trinity College.
Dublin. The Trinity College. Dublin, yeah. Yeah. So obviously they were there together and there was a bit of a sibling rivalry.
There is an aphorism which Wilde says, I should have written that down.
Where am I going to find it? We have various books open on the table before.
Yes. And in his later years or when you know, when he was at Oxford or slightly after after Oxford,
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.
That familial connexion between the two astonishing thing I didn't realise before I started reading for
the show is how successful a classicist Wilde was as a student because he he goes up to Trinity College,
Dublin to read classics in 1871.
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.
He was very much enamoured with the Greek pantheon as well.
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
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,
because there was always a happy pagan element within his works and that has kind of taken from these classical works.
So he sees himself as maybe it's taking it too far is some sort of latter day Greek philosopher.
King almost became a mystic, even to an extent, you could argue,
because he felt like that modernity is essentially an empty period of history in the sense that
he felt that the technological society in which we live is in a way brutalising and it's devoid,
is devoid of a deeper meaning. And he was looking for deeper meaning and beauty, and that was mediated for him through the classics.
I was also at an inspirational teacher of classics, Genetical Methoxy,
who encouraged him to to apply for the scholarship at Oxford, which he then went on to get.
And they also travelled through Italy together.
And there, of course, this is one of the main places where you want to go when you are interested in classics.
So if I seem to recall reading somewhere that he so they travel.
He travelled with Matadi during his time, a maudlin and he had to rusticate for some because he arrived back late from this trip.
Yeah, he did. With a friend as well.
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.
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.
I think his is household in Dublin with.
Open to a lot of intellectuals of the period, so his family were acquainted with Yates,
for instance, the influential poet, and as a child he was exposed to to many ideas,
contemporary ideas that a normal child wouldn't have been exposed to due to the controversy that his mother inspired with her poetry.
So the nationalistic poetry that she oh, she was sort of an early Irish nationalist.
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. And a very powerful figure.
I think there's a connexion between wild saying somebody like Orson Welles,
who was exposed as a child, who had a powerful mother, was exposed to these ideas very early on.
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.
And Wilde learnt very early on that to tell a good story was perhaps more important than to tell the truth.
For instance, this great literary mind that we see later in his life, it didn't necessarily come from nowhere.
It came from this sort of absolute intellectual media that he's grown up with from a very you know,
I suppose he would want people to think that it came from nowhere then that's a big part of his personality as amnesty.
He is supposedly supposed to put on the air of being self-made without the influence of his mother.
He cultured his own myth quite successfully. He did.
He did. He later said that, you know, in my opinion, a man should create his own myth, which I agree with.
And he won the top classic's prise at at Trinity Trinity Foundation scholarship and the Berkeley Gold Medal.
And as a on the encouragement and after he takes up this demis, ship it a very strange day.
I'm a mother myself, and I've no nowhere else that has this particular term, right.
Yeah. And yeah. And for someone who was this is sort of jumping ahead a bit.
But, you know, someone who spoke for the future, who was never, you know, very interested in the present,
you know, he is either, you know, harkening back to the greats or thinking about, you know, a future readership.
The contemporary or the modern voice of his generation would probably have been Matthew Arnold, who, while he was a model,
you know, wild one, the Newdegate poetry prise the grand prise of poetry, which Matthew Arnold also won when he was at Oxford.
And when reaching out to share this news with Matthew Arnold.
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.
Yeah. To get some kind of validation from from the respected establishment figure.
They're looking both ways. He wants to be his own individual standalone genius, but also wanting to write.
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.
He matriculated the day after his 20th birthday in nineteen seventy four, 1870, for 1870.
And this is still around. So his cancer will go on.
But he hid this fact as you as Davis was saying before he lied about his age, right?
Yeah. A big part of his life lying about his age. In fact, an ideal husband.
He introduces Lord Goring saying he's thirty four but always lies about his age, which why I would do even under oath,
you know, on trial, lied about his age, saying he was two years younger, though even of an advanced age.
Those two years meant a lot to him and comfortable in his own skin.
Is that funny? Yeah, which is a shame because, you know, though, the damage led to, you know,
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.
If he hadn't matriculated to Oxford, he would have been a man of his age.
He wouldn't have had to lie because he lost those three years and that, you know,
set the course for the rest of his life, you know, wearing this mask of a younger man.
Yeah. But it also meant that he was constantly bending and playing with the truth, which is a theme running through.
And that got him sort of licence to do that. So I think in a way, it was not necessarily a completely negative thing.
No, no, no. There's also this phrase from phrases and philosophies for the use of the young,
where he says that the first duty in life is to be as artificial as possible.
And I just kind of reflected in this, playing around with his age, with his whole identity and putting on different masks.
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.
Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. I was looking ahead rather than a general or, you know, the generational voice that was fading at the time.
Right. Right, right. Well, so we can come back to talk a lot more about his time at Oxford, but.
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,
modelled himself after a previous generation of French writers that we mentioned Stendahl and also talking about Baudelaire.
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I'm still a developer for sure.
So there's a movement in France which happens towards the end of the 19th century,
greatly influenced by Bertalan Wild kind of jumps onto this and brings it to England in English.
Literature is seen more as a movement of aesthetics is kind of aestheticism is what it's labelled as.
Decadence is is more of a French phenomenon.
The pivotal book in the decadent movement is a book by a chap called Wiesenthal's Alba, which appears in the picture Dorian Grey.
It is the little yellow book that Dorian Poison Dorian, and this was seen as the turning point in the French decadent period.
It was also an extension of naturalism that came through so that in fact, it took naturalism.
Arguably, decadence takes naturalism as far as it can possibly go.
Wild was also in and around Paris at the time of the symbolist poet.
So he attended Malama held every Tuesday.
Tuesday he had a meeting of poets and friends and they discussed poetry and read their poetry to one another.
Oscar Wilde attended a couple of these sessions, so he really was in and amongst the French intellectuals of the time,
along with other people like Whistler, who also had a memorable evening with Pru's, too.
I believe he had a memorable evening with Marcel.
Yeah, it's a bit anecdotal, but what happened was first invited him to dinner and when that evening was slightly late,
returning back to his house and when he got to his house, he said, where is the Englishman here?
And his servant said, yes, but he took one look in the dining room and then went to the bathroom is still not returned.
And then Wilde comes out the bathroom. Miss Proost and are you OK?
Is everything OK? And Wilde says, Yes, yes.
But I thought you were. We were dining alone. And then I saw your parents.
I really couldn't bear it.
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.
How do we receive this to come from boiled or from or from?
From. And I think it is.
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.
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.
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?
This is definitely fantastic. What is says about this beautiful set of blue China that he got for himself, for his mortal in ruins.
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.
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.
Yeah. There was no thing I just wanted to mention as far as the connexion between Wilde and French literature is concerned,
I think that through this wonderful book,
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.
They are very influential, especially on Oscar Wilde, Salome as well, and his depiction of Salome as an Oriental beauty,
as an Oriental queen that is also a temptress and a seductive person, I think.
And so he was very much influenced by this depiction of the Orient as the other, so to speak.
The other that is at the same time the opposite of both sexual fantasy, but also of violence.
In the same sense, the combined combines the two. And I think that's one of the main tropes also in literature.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And also just being a bowler briefly as well.
Both Wiesenthal's and Wild's take from Bowdler this idea that nature is a terrible force,
the force of nature is aggressive and needs to be fought against.
So the whole premise of resource available is that the the protagonist is doing everything he can to fight nature and eventually,
inevitably, nature wins out and he loses.
So in some ways, the paraphrase Baudelaire's argument written on modernity.
And his idea where he pits artifice against nature and he argues that everything that bad about
men comes from nature and the only everything good and virtue comes from artifice and art.
And Oscar Wilde is picking up on these themes in his development as a writer.
And one more thing is gutsier to feel good. In his preface to his book, Mademoiselle Written in the 50s in the 1950s,
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.
This art for us, it really isn't a new idea in the wild.
It's something that he is very much taken from the French literary developments of the late 19th century.
We'll come back to all of this, particularly Shalabi we should talk more about.
But I think it's time to get back.
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.
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,
his friend non-involvement, one of Balliol who and his of his time at Oxford.
We know most of it based on his diary that he kept as a student,
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.
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
and they were actually at Modlin and they were his neighbours and they met right away.
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.
When you read Bordelaise Diary are modelled after their host evenings of debauchery or after a while it would entertain guests.
They would usually end up with the three of them talking to one another and formulate
these ideas which were diametrically opposed to what was going on during the parties.
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
favourite students in the sense that he doesn't necessarily always do his work on time is not,
in fact, a term coming from Italy. But he eventually gets the first.
I think he says the bad boy done good or something.
Well, he had he had an advantage over most of the other students in his class,
and that is college because of his excellent preparation at Putera and also Trinity College, Dublin.
And he could treat his tutors at Oxford with a certain amount of conceit in his arrogance,
because not only were they not the ones who would eventually give him marks at the end of his second and fourth year,
but chances are knew more than them, even though he could on the years of someone who didn't study at all.
Yeah, and he did say that he wouldn't apply to be a crystal done right afterwards,
but he actually did apply to be a fellow and was rejected because of his controversial behaviour.
He did. And one of the many nights that I've previously mentioned,
he made the comment that he would soar above donorship by saying, I'll be a poet, a writer, a dramatist.
Somehow or other I'll be famous or if not famous, notorious.
He feels he has a sort of higher calling then. Sure. Yeah.
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.
Janik, I don't know if you could tell us about there are two teachers that do influence him quite a lot.
There's Peter. And of course, how does he come across then?
What does he get from them?
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,
because Peter, as a historian of the Renaissance and wrote a very influential book which also influenced Oscar Wilde,
and he said that the book had a very strange influence on his life.
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.
We'll talk about all this later. But he's a very different man.
Writing this isn't a very different position, both socially, economically, and he's not living in great poverty and in need.
And so and he is, of course, his famous depiction of San Sebastian as well in that.
Massive influence in this Christian martyr who became kind of the same of the homosexuals throughout history,
and it is this combination of those scepticism, of self-sacrifice,
of overcoming and also of beauty that is gained through pain that massively impacted on Oscar Wilde and
is one of the major themes of his literature and also this perception of the world in his later life.
So, so, so from Peter, you feel well developed, his his sense of himself as as a martyr, almost in the Christian tradition.
But it was definitely, you know, I assume that he kind of saw himself in a similar light already in earlier stage,
but it kind of confirmed that or gave it a stronger impetus.
And Ruskin got a risk involved as part of Ruskin's group railway line builders,
young students that risking got together for this kind of reform in local society.
Riskin was much more the if you had if you had two people sitting on each shoulder,
Ruskin would be the angel and Peter would be the devil in that line.
So risking very, hugely influential art critic associated with the traffic lights famous across England were just really thrilled to meet him.
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.
And there's there's a lot of scandal surrounding Ruskin on his marriage affair precisely because he was too clean-Cut almost.
Whereas Peter, in the final pages of the Renaissance, talks about living life with a gem like Flame, which has become very famous.
So I think wild balances, these two influential figures in his life whilst Oxford and then maybe edges towards Peter towards the end.
I'm not sure what you think about that, David, sitting there toward the end.
Yeah, yeah. I think definitely. Well, I don't. Hmm.
That's interesting because, you know, when you think of Peter,
you think of the aesthetic influence that he had on Wilde, whereas with Ruskin, it's more of an ethical approach.
Yes. Yeah. Yeah. It'd be interesting to kind of analyse that through the lens of what Nietzsche written in the birth of tragedy,
like the precision between Apollo, the God of beauty, of stuffing's, of everything that is light and clear.
There's Dionysus, the God of dissolution.
And you could argue that Ruskin was more of the Apollonian, a political influence on Wilde, whereas Peter kind of functioned as dynamicists.
He was the the principle of dissolution in the sense of of ecstasy.
You could argue, I would say that Oscar Wilde was always like kind of torn between these two principles.
Of course, it might be difficult to apply Newton's categories to to his life, of course.
But now there are certain parallels, if you like. Yes.
And also there was as far as Peter was concerned, it was also some homosexual tension, some suggestion of homosexual tendencies,
some of the students, some of the dinners he held in his quarters, whereas Reskin was quite the opposite.
In fact, some people think that Ruskin was asexual and and there was a court case about the annulment
of Ruskin's marriage and an annulment on the grounds of the fact that it wasn't consummated,
in fact. So you really did have two opposite strands, hair pulling on on Wild and his ideas about beauty as well.
And so he leaves Oxford. He graduates Mark.
He set himself up in London, but he also takes this maybe skipping ahead a few years.
Take this lecture tour of America where lost nearly a year, I think.
Yes. A lecture tour of America that, you know, again,
probably influenced by Peter's socialist leanings or like he felt it necessary to ingratiate
himself into the working classes and to go and to visit unconventional places that,
you know, your average I don't actually consider while an academic, but you know,
someone who is giving lectures, you know, for for the young and for, you know,
the educated classes, you know, so he would go to places like Louisiana and,
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.
He makes a lot of money. He also made a lot of money. Yeah, because he needs it.
Because he's living very extravagantly. Right? Yes, he's right.
And yet and when people would ask him later what he has been up to, people from friends, from colleges and whatnot,
and that that was his stock response was, you know, well, lecturing and getting rich, which is exactly what he was doing.
And he calls himself a professor. Is that a professor? Was that. I'm sure I am, yeah.
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.
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,
and there have been many dandies again in Paris for a long time when Wilde comes to
takes it up and infuses his life with the idea that the surface is very important,
as he says, in the presence of Dorian Grey, who is surface and symbol.
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.
Then, you know, I developed a great affection for that was a great affection for the formalwear of the
dinners and dining nightly at the I mentioned the day this is happening in the early 80s.
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.
But, you know, Dorian Grey published An Ideal Husband, important to me as well,
because it was all his what makes a great work, the work that survives best is all worth it.
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.
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.
That's more I say, surprisingly, and wants to come in about his his marriage to two children as well.
I think it is Constance Lloyd and with his children, Cyril and Vivien.
Yeah. And Constance has commented and, you know, and I think loved him till the bitter end.
And, you know, some have said that, you know, his homosexuality might have been his first homosexual experience was after his marriage, in fact.
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.
Yeah. Think you were saying about this that as well.
I guess in the 19th century, many people wouldn't necessarily need to identify themselves as a sexually active sexual.
I mean, of course, homosexuality, as we understand it these days,
is very was very much frowned upon these days, but is illegal, is illegal, was illegal, in fact.
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,
which is very much one of the main topics in the picture of Dorian Grey as well.
So there's there's there's life on the surface.
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.
And that is very much part of his of his notion of aesthetics as well, that there's two layers to everything there is.
On the one hand, there's the surface and on the other hand,
there is the what is frowned upon by both society and what can only be understood by the genius.
Yeah, I. How were his family affected by the whole scandal that later they had to change their name.
They moved to Europe and changed their name and face as as far as we know as well.
He was a very loving father. So to be separated from his children for two years must have been horrific.
Many of his short stories that he wrote, The Happy Prince, for instance, he would read to his children to that great delight.
It must have been a really terrible time to be separated from his family that he didn't consider.
And he also lost his mother at the same time. Right. Right.
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.
And it's one of the things he managed to in life as well,
how badly his mother's passing away affected him and how it made his situation and was in prison even worse.
And so that is definitely a huge influence on that as well.
So you mentioned Lord Alfred Douglas, who is the major figure in the final 10 years of Wilde's life.
How did they meet? And they became lovers. Introduced by Robert Ross in London, Lord Alfred Douglas was an undergrad at Maudlin.
Wilde said, I went to modelling myself. I can often see some time and they struck up.
They fell in love, really for a while. Douglas embodied everything that was Greek.
He said he was like a beautiful Greek boy. He was also the son of the Marquis of Queensbury who invented the Queensbury rules.
The rules of boxing. Yes. Yeah. And it turned out to be quite an aggressive man.
And because of what's the most dangerous one and the cause of what they are doing.
Yeah. And so they really had a whirlwind love affair that had been written about it ever since.
Well, what sort of time? Are we talking about 1993, 1994, in 1894?
I mean, or written to he's now become a genuine, successful playwright in London?
Yeah, yeah. I mean, the biggest fan has been very successful. Shalabi has at least been performed in Paris, although, you know, well,
it wasn't a England can go and tell us why that challenge wasn't performed in England.
It was banned by Lord Chamberlain, even though Wilde was able, which is a big ambition of his,
to get Sarah Bernard to portray Solomon, which is a famous actress.
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.
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,
I think. Yes, Jane St. John the Baptist being of particular interest of Wilde's dating back
all the way to Oxford when he was first proposition to as a possible Mason,
he often joked about St. John the Baptist, as might have counted against him in the long run.
But but yeah. So, so Shalabi not being performed in England aside, he's now a successful playwright that he meets Alfred Douglas.
But the reality is it doesn't get any work done.
He complains that way whenever he's with Bozie, he doesn't get any decent work done and leads into this double life.
But you are talking about Queensberry finds out or there's rooma is a calling card.
Yeah. Yeah. Calling him a sodomite. Yeah. Spelled wrong some demidov.
Yeah. I wonder what would have Brankov with world more the accusation of spelling.
Well he was when he was at Oxford, he made a point of pointing out, you know,
he got low marks on a paper and he said, let me point out that this person spelled Physick rather than physics.
He said clearly, you know, uncultivated philistine to not include the.
Yes.
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.
And lots of other things you can say, he seemed have a knack of working people up possibly the wrong way,
which is something that he acquired at Oxford.
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.
He had the Irish accent. He was very naive. Apparently he was you know, he embarrassed himself fairly often.
His first night in formal hall. He was seated next to an athlete and his third year.
And, you know, he was he was speaking well. And then he thought, OK, well, I've ingratiated myself here.
Now's the time to present my card to this person not knowing that this type of thing was not done.
So he decided rather than continue to embarrass himself, he would rise above, you know, the his fellow students, which of course, he did.
We're running short of time, so we should fast forward to the disaster.
So he's left his calling card. There's a sort of series of court cases back in front.
Oh, well, there were two trials. It was Queensborough, his trial and Wild's trial.
Queensberry was acquitted and then, while was wild, was arrested very shortly after in the same month over that same span of time,
his world sued Queensberry for wild countersued, which was which was actually the cause of his downfall.
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.
This countersued while riding high after the success of of a woman of no importance and an ideal husband, et cetera.
And also, you know, he had written the importance of being earnest, which premiered a week before the caucuses, did a phenomenal success.
And yeah. So he countersued probably. I don't know what he was expecting exactly, but yeah,
then the trial happened and he treated it as if it were a salon or as if he were entertaining Robbie Ross and Whisler,
et cetera, not getting a real sense of the seriousness of what was going on.
Yeah. And so he gets sentenced to two years hard labour.
Unsurprisingly, this deeply, deeply affected Janik, you know, about his writing at this time?
Well, he experienced the whole imprisonment as something very humiliating, of course, and something very limiting as well, because he was not able to.
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.
So he in comparison to other prisoners at the time, he did enjoy a couple of privileges and took advantage of that.
And that's where he started to, to reflect on his own imprisonment as well from from various perspectives.
So on the one hand, he was, of course, very much still the same a citizen.
And therefore, he he saw the whole thing as some sort of challenge and as a spiritual test,
even as one of the first things he mentions in the latter De Profundis, which is,
you know, his reflection of his time in prison beyond being just a love letter,
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,
just like Jesus was able to do that.
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.
But at the same time, they were often rejected by the people who like society, doesn't understand the prophetic words.
And that's because he ahead of his time, ahead of his time, in a way, and also beyond.
And it's just like, you know, nobody is able to comprehend fully what he's what he's on about.
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.
And Salame is not to be seen, is hidden in a system.
And you can only his voice. And so he compares himself to to to a prophet, so to speak.
And he kind of uses the image of Christ of Christ as an artist, which was, I guess,
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.
In fact, Christ is not the saviour in the religious sense, but in the artistic sense.
And he considers Christ to be a creative genius who uses nice words and is spoken to in those words.
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,
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,
but we can redeem themselves through the very act of art.
And so this was a love letter. So he's gone back to see. Exactly.
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.
On the other hand, he also wants to reconcile with him.
And he says that I have made many mistakes in my life, but all these mistakes were due to to my temper.
They were due to my nature. And I can't change this.
This is the tragic flaw in my personality and I can't do anything against it, which is just back to Bodleian.
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,
of course, a very classical idea. So it's at the same time was admitting that he has committed mistakes.
This is a mistake. At same time, he tries to redeem himself for saying that it's not my fault.
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.
And it's a recurring theme. Would you say, in Profundis, he's drawing together all the volatile,
disparate themes of his life, the classical education, the religious upbringing in Ireland,
plus obviously his incredibly flamboyant existence and language all coming together in the and there's loads of references and
cross references to his previous works and all of the intellectual artistic influences that impacted on him in his earlier life.
And it reads as very at times, as a very shallow matter, because it seems to be very superficial.
And he seems to be lauding himself above everyone else all the time whilst complaining about his own suffering.
And he uses, you know, a painter and he uses his previous relations with with men and women.
They are like employed by him as a means of just making him stand out from everyone else.
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.
In fact, we're nearly out of time.
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.
Yeah. And thankfully, are there Profundis, I think it should be pointed out, was not wasn't published until after he died.
And a heavily edited form by Robbie Ross.
Yeah, he knew. And like you mentioned there, the sort of covered egotism.
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,
and sexual persona needed some time, you know, because considering the circumstances regarding his death, how do we think he died?
He did. He died in nineteen hundreds. Right. Nineteen hundred.
Either cerebral meningitis or, you know, if we're going by his most celebrated historian, you know, biographer Richard Ellman's book.
It was syphilis that he contracted. There's no way of knowing what the truth is.
He died in Paris in poverty in a hotel in Addison.
Yeah, and certainly not in England. Still in disgrace from his time.
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.
Yeah. But fortunately, his work lives on as to his aphorisms.
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.
And they have to clean it and recover it quite frequently because of the number of people that writes quite famous.
People kiss the front of the Sphinx with lipstick. All his aphorisms are plastered over and over this sphinx.
The one the one thing I would say is inspired. I think part of his appeal lies in his humanity, actually.
I think although he did see himself as maybe prophetic ahead of his time, somebody who was very cultured, undoubtedly he was.
I mean, he got a double first Oxford. He was justified.
But I think and he he was somebody who was very human and was aware of the flaws of humanity, of his own humanity.
And the one thing that he maintained in a theme that runs throughout his work is the need for hope, really.
And that's what I get from a lot of his work, is that he really believes in the need for hope.
And that's a very human thing. That's from redemption, even to an extent.
That's something that he never lost,
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,
that's the key distinction between the two, is that while it was full of hope,
he was a genuinely good person, thanks in part to his teachers from Speranza to Pader to Robbie Ross.
And, you know, his you could read his aphorisms and there there's there's never a cutting edge.
Whereas with Whisler, he meant to argue, you know, there's poison and there's malicious intent.
Do you have any closing remarks you'd like to make? And I think it's really interesting to look at.
Oscar was influenced, especially in German literature, in the early 20th century as well.
And there's one poet I really admire a lot. His name is Stefan.
Geauga is a bit controversial because he used concept that were partly misused by the Nazis later, as happened to many other authors.
And Stefan Georg is very similar, but also quite different to Oscar Wilde in many senses.
But it kind of tells you a lot about how influential Oscar Wilde was and how he was used by later writers.
And Stefan Gilgo, he was also a homosexual and he was very much open about it because he also believed in
the old classical Greek ideals of of of masculinity and used its artistic idea of love.
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.
And I think that's an important lesson. We can we can also all take from Oscar Wilde.
That beauty doesn't have to to serve any purpose except for being beautiful and being aesthetic, being being pleasant.
And that's something that tends to be forgotten a lot, I think,
in our world these days where everything has to serve either an economic purpose or it needs to to bring you further in life.
We tend to forget that there's other things that that could be valuable and that cannot be measured.
And I think there's a famous quote, which you mentioned the very beginning,
that there's people who know the price of everything but the value of nothing.
And I think that's one of the main lessons we can take from schools. Thank you very much.
It's been a fascinating race through an incredible life. Next week, we'll be discussing the prime number theorem.
Thank you.