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The Influence of Oscar Wilde on W.B.
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t he i nf luenc e of o s c ar
w i l de on w.b. y eat s
‘‘An Echo of Someone Else’s Music’’
noreen doody
The Influence of Oscar Wilde on W.B. Yeats
Noreen Doody
The Influence of
Oscar Wilde on
W.B. Yeats
“An Echo of Someone Else’s Music”
Noreen Doody
Dublin City University
Dublin, Ireland
ISBN 978-3-319-89547-5 ISBN 978-3-319-89548-2 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89548-2
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Acknowledgements
Wilde and Yeats have been my companions now for many years—and have
never been dull company. Our first venture together was in my doctoral
thesis, which was where this book had its beginnings. Since then, the work
has been much expanded and greatly developed along its own lines to
become The Influence of Oscar Wilde on W.B. Yeats: “An Echo of Someone
Else’s Music”. During the process of writing this book, there have been
many who supported and encouraged me, and many who gave generously
of their wisdom and expertise, and others who brought good conversation
and fun to the enterprise. I would like to thank all of you, friends, stu-
dents, mentors and colleagues: Gerald Dawe, Terence Brown, Frank
McGuinness, Luke Smith, Eibhear Walshe, Brendan Kennelly, Darryl
Jones, Margaret Robson, Thomas Docherty, Nicholas Grene, Eiléan Ní
Chuilleanáin, John Scattergood, Frances Coghlan, Brenda Boyce, Nicky
Allen, Aaron Kelly, Sandrine Brisset, Ann Fallon, Cormac Lambe, Audrey
Baker, Alan English, James Kelly, Daire Keogh, Jonathan Williams,
Graham Price, Alan Graham, Stanley Van der Ziel, Joe Morris, Denis
O’Brien, Una Murray, J.D. Murphy, Imelda Dyas, Ronald Schuchard,
Alan Sinfield, Gillian Duffy, Andy Fitzsimons, James Heaney, Jarlath
Killeen, Emmanuel Vernadakis, Carle Bonafous-Murat, Wesley
Hutchinson, Orla NicAodha, Liam O’Dwyer, Mary Shine Thompson,
Martin Ward, Kevin Power, Nora Whyte, Richard Whyte, Brian Doody,
Danny Fagan, Lara Smith, Layla Fagan and Milo Smith.
I would like to thank my great friend, Declan Kiberd, for his encour-
agement and for the unfailing kindness that he has always shown to me. I
am grateful to him and to my friends and colleagues, Derek Hand and
v
vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
P.J. Mathews, for the bright conversation, radical ideas and witty sponta-
neity of many a collegial meeting. I also offer my sincere thanks to my
friends and colleagues in the School of English, Dublin City University,
Sharon Murphy, Julie Anne Stevens, Jim Shanahan, Eugene McNulty,
Marina Carr, Claire Keegan and Louise O’Callaghan for their support and
for making my time as Head of English a sheer pleasure.
To my friend Merlin Holland, I owe a particular debt of gratitude for
his kind consideration throughout the writing of this work and for the
many interesting and informative discussions about his grandfather, Oscar
Wilde. I am also grateful to the late Anne Yeats for the many conversations
that I had with her and for welcoming me into her home and her father’s
library. I am indebted to Margaret Byrne for her friendship that has been
a constant source of encouragement during the writing of this book.
I would like to extend my gratitude to the librarians and staff of the
National Library of Ireland, Dublin; the Berkeley Library and Early
Printed Books, Trinity College, Dublin; the Cregan Library, St Patrick’s
Campus, Dublin City University; the British Library, London; and the
National Archives, Kew, for all of their help and expertise. I would also like
to gratefully acknowledge the generosity of the College Research
Committee of the former St Patrick’s College, Dublin City University, and
Graduate Studies, Trinity College Dublin for the welcome award of
research bursaries.
My sincere thanks to Palgrave Macmillan for accepting this book for
publication and to my editors, Vicky Bates and Tomas René, to the art
designers, and Dhanalakshmi Jayavel and the production team at Palgrave
for bringing this book into its final and elegant form. Thank you to the
readers at Palgrave for their careful reading of my manuscript and very
helpful comments and suggestions.
I am deeply indebted to my daughters, Chloë, Justine, Aude, Chantal
and Léan, for their love, belief and constant support. I offer my gratitude
to them for the many ways in which they have helped with this publication
and for the very many ways in which they have always been there for me.
I dedicate this book to my daughters as a small token of my love, admira-
tion and respect for each of them.
Contents
Section I Influence and Identity 1
1 Introduction: “An Echo of Someone Else’s Music” 3
2 Establishing Influence 31
3 “A Provincial Like Myself”: Yeats, Wilde and the Politics

of Identity 63
Section II Mask and Image 107
4 Metaphysics and Masks (1908–1917) 109
5 The Idea Incarnate: Mask and Image (1915–1917) 135
vii
viii CONTENTS
Section III Salomé : Symbolism, Dance and Theories of Being 171
6 “Surface and Symbol”: Wilde’s Salomé, French

Symbolism and Yeats (1891–1906) 173
7 Yeats’s Creative Use of Wilde’s Salomé in his Revisions

of The Shadowy Waters, On Baile’s Strand and Deirdre 203
8 “Drama as Personal as a Lyric”: The Centrality of Wilde’s

Concepts of Dance, Desire and Image to Yeats’s
Developing Aesthetic (1916–1921) 241
9 “There Must Be Severed Heads”: Yeats’s Final

Transumption of Oscar Wilde (1923–1939) 279
10 Conclusion 309
References 313
Index 331
SECTION I
Influence and Identity

CHAPTER 1
Introduction: “An Echo of Someone Else’s

Music”
From their first meeting in London in 1888, Oscar Wilde’s personal image
fascinated W.B. Yeats, and was catalytic in setting the workings of influ-
ence in motion. As a young man, Yeats was timid and introverted but he
had aspirations to rise beyond what he saw as his limitations and develop a
public persona that was more outgoing and self-assured. He saw Oscar
Wilde as the embodiment of social ease, and admired his flair, fluency and
style, perceiving him to be an apposite image for emulation. Both writers
shared much in common: both were Dublin men from Ireland and, besides
their mutual engagement with literature, politics and philosophy, they
were very much interested in Irish politics and cultural concerns. Many of
their friends and acquaintances were familiar to both writers. At the time
of their first meeting, Wilde was a more established man of letters than his
countryman who was in the early stages of his literary career, and Yeats
recalls in Autobiographies the powerful impact made on him by the bril-
liance of Wilde’s intellect and the persuasive charm of his personality.1
Wilde became a constant presence in Yeats’s imagination throughout his
creative life; as Katharine Worth observes: “Yeats could not get free of
Wilde, and often seems to be drawn even against his will towards him.”2
This book offers a reading of the powerful literary relationship between
these two great writers, Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) and W.B. Yeats
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) in The Complete Works of Oscar
Wilde: Volume III, ed. Joseph Bristow, p. 183.
© The Author(s) 2018 3

N. Doody, The Influence of Oscar Wilde on W.B. Yeats,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89548-2_1
4 N. DOODY
(1865–1939). It asserts that Wilde was a major precursor of W.B. Yeats,

and shows how Wilde’s image and intellect set in train a powerful influ-
ence within Yeats’s creative imagination that remained active throughout
the poet’s life. The following chapters show that Wilde’s aesthetics are of
major importance to Yeats’s creative work and that they facilitate his imag-
inative exploration and expression of many of the metaphysical themes
that provide the basis for so much of his poetic and dramatic work.
Wilde’s influence on Yeats was an on-going creative process and his
ideas took some time to germinate within Yeats’s creative imagination; the
full impact of their influence does not become fully evident in Yeats’s work
until the early years of the twentieth century, and continues from that time
on into the subsequent creative years of his life. T.S. Eliot observes the
diverse patterns that the workings of influence might take, noting how it
“may overcome us suddenly, on first or after long acquaintance”.3
Although Wilde’s influence took time to percolate in Yeats’s creative con-
sciousness, glimmers of his ideas and aesthetic theories surface in Yeats’s
attitude, conversation and creative work from the very outset after his first
meeting with Wilde. For instance, in the early 1890s Yeats began to con-
struct a style for himself that reflected Wilde’s concept of self-invention,
initiating his life-long concern with the Wildean doctrine that “art shapes
life”.4 Also, Wilde’s declaration in the preface to The Picture of Dorian
Gray (1891)—“There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book.
Books are well written or badly written. That is all”—finds an echo in the
young Yeats’s proclamation on the superfluity of morals to art: “It is bad
morals not to obey to the utmost the law of ones [sic] art for good writing
is the way that art has of being moral & the only way”.5 Yeats again
expresses these views on morality and art in 1897, this time making use of
Wilde’s essay, “The Decay of Lying” (1891).6 Yet another work of Wilde’s
is evident in Yeats’s early story, “The Binding of the Hair” (1896), a short
work initially included in Yeats’s book, The Secret Rose. Virginia Hyde
writes that “the protagonist of the first story [‘The Binding of the Hair’],
Aodh, while apparently based on a legendary Irish figure, is also indebted,
as Yeats later states, to the beheaded John the Baptist in Oscar Wilde’s
Salomé.”7 The story itself is written in the highly decorative style of the
late-nineteenth century that Yeats professed to deplore in Wilde’s short
poems in prose (1894).8
Yeats’s creative sensibility was undoubtedly affected by Wilde in the
years of the 1890s but it is the year 1905 and those years closely following
it that coincide with the beginnings of the richest seam of influence within
INTRODUCTION: “AN ECHO OF SOMEONE ELSE’S MUSIC” 5
the Yeats/Wilde literary relationship. At that particular historical moment,

Wilde’s concepts were thoroughly awakened within the repository of
Yeats’s inner creative imagination by outward stimuli. In 1905, Yeats saw
for the first time a performance of Wilde’s symbolist play Salomé; the expe-
rience of seeing Salomé performed on stage was critical for Yeats and
immediately activated a strain of influence that would pervade and inform
his creative imagination throughout his life. Yeats found in Salomé images
of tremendous symbolic capability that he employs again and again in his
creative work. Although Yeats develops and intensifies each one of these
symbols, re-imagines and re-sets them within a new context, they retain
much of their primary denotation and ensure that Wilde’s thought inflects
Yeats’s creative lexicon. Not alone the symbols from this play—the kiss,
severed head, dancer, holy man—but also its underlying philosophy were
of acute importance to Yeats’s developing aesthetic.9
The year 1905 not only witnesses the first performance of Wilde’s sym-
bolist play in the British Isles and Ireland but it is also noteworthy as the
year that begins the reclamation of Wilde and his work by the world of arts
and the general public. Homosexual acts were illegal in Victorian times
and in a very public trial in 1895, Wilde had been sentenced to two years’
hard labour for what was then termed “gross indecencies” with other male
persons. The trial caused a major scandal and from his imprisonment in
1895 up until the year 1905, there had been few public performances of
Wilde’s plays on the English or Irish stage.10 Indeed, the productions of
Salomé in London in 1905 and 1906 were performed by private societies.
But now, in the early years of the twentieth century, the air was suddenly
alive with Wilde and this intense awareness brought Wilde into sharp focus
for Yeats, building on the consistent presence of Wilde in his mind
throughout the preceding years.11 In 1905 and the years immediately fol-
lowing, Wilde, who had died in 1900, became a renewed topic of public
interest largely through a number of publications and productions con-
cerning Wilde that became available during that time. Wilde’s friend and
literary executor, Robbie Ross, published an abridged version of De
Profundis (1905), the long prose letter Wilde had written in Reading Gaol
and addressed to his lover, Lord Alfred Douglas. This was also the year
that André Gide’s Oscar Wilde: A Study, edited and translated by Stuart
Mason, was published in English. Richard Strauss’s opera, Salomé, was
first performed in Dresden in 1905. Wilde’s former publisher, Arthur
Humphreys, brought out a second edition of his work on Wilde, Sebastian
Melmoth (the alias which Wilde adopted on his release from jail); in 1905,
6 N. DOODY
Robert H. Sherard published Oscar Wilde: The Story of an Unhappy

Friendship and in 1906 he produced the first major biography, The Life of
Oscar Wilde.12 Sherard, a close friend of Wilde’s, attended a meeting of the
Contemporary Club in Dublin on 23rd September 1905 at which
W.B. Yeats, J.B. Yeats and J.M. Synge were among the 23 members pres-
ent for the occasion.13 Dublin witnessed a revival of Wilde’s plays in 1907
when the Gaiety Theatre produced The Importance of Being Earnest and
Lady Windermere’s Fan. Wilde’s name, which had been much mentioned
in the prestigious daily national, The Irish Times, during the greater part of
his life, but had been absent from its pages since 1895, re-appeared in
1905 in a letter written to the paper by George Moore—thus heralding
the public reclamation of Wilde’s name in Ireland.
Yeats read Moore’s letter to the Irish Times in February 1905, com-
menting upon it to Lady Gregory.14 Yeats’s library contains a number of
books related to Wilde from this time period: De Profundis published in
1905; Humphreys’s Sebastian Melmoth (1904); Wilde’s The Rise of
Historical Criticism (1905), Wilde v Whistler, privately printed in 1906;
and the Bodley Head’s Salomé, 1906. Yeats was familiar with Wilde’s work
for many years, but the theoretical means towards a new direction in aes-
thetic formulation, which Ellmann notes Yeats gained from Wilde,
becomes very much in evidence from this time onwards.15
Prior to this period, much of Yeats’s creative work focussed on his con-
cern to establish a contemporary Irish literature in the English language
that reconnected with the strong Gaelic literary tradition that had existed
since ancient times in Ireland. The late 1890s saw the growth of his inter-
est in a symbolist aesthetic; in 1899 he published his book of poetry, The
Wind among the Reeds, hailed at the time as a significant work of symbolist
writing. Yeats embraced the notion that symbol is the strength that lies at
the heart of poetry and that far from being fixed in the representation of
one interpretation it has access to many different meanings.16 He assigns a
deep, mystical power to symbol that allows it access to transcendent
knowledge: “A symbol is indeed the only possible expression of some
invisible essence, a transparent lamp about a spiritual flame.”17 Marjorie
Howe notes that Yeats’s occult vision was one of the major strands around
which his early theory of symbolism was organized.18 In a short piece
entitled “Magic” written in 1901, Yeats elaborates on the magical quality
which he himself ascribes to symbol and of the power of symbol to reach
the vast reservoir of human memory or soul of the world. He enumerates
three doctrines: “1: That the borders of our mind [sic] are ever shifting,
and that many minds can flow into one another, as it were, and create or
reveal a single mind, a single energy. 2: That the borders of our memories
are as ever shifting, and that our memories are part of one great memory,
the memory of Nature herself. 3: That this great mind and great memory
can be evoked by symbols.”19 So, by the early-twentieth century Yeats had
reached a point in his imaginative exploration where Wilde’s aesthetics
became of increasing benefit to him. Wilde’s symbolist drama, Salomé, and
Yeats’s reading of Wilde’s prose works furthered his philosophical specula-
tions and played a major role in facilitating the exploration and expression
of his metaphysical thinking.
Yeats’s philosophical thinking is systematized by the poet in his treatise,
A Vision (1925 and 1937). Yeats worked on the 1925 version of the text
during the early 1920s and he then revised the text for the version pub-
lished in 1937. Although the 1937 version contains some of the actual
content and the same principle ideas as the 1925 publication, only two of
the five books from the 1925 publication appear in the 1937 A Vision. A
Vision represents a vast undertaking by Yeats; in it he sets out a philosophi-
cal system that accounts for history, the movement from one civilization
to another, human psychology and an explanation of existence. While
Yeats published his completed philosophical system in A Vision in 1937,
he had been continuously working at and developing the concepts within
it in other earlier works, such as his play, The Player Queen (1908–1917),
and his philosophical text, Per Amica Silentia Lunae (1917). The Player
Queen in its many drafts and published form explores image, mask and
theories of civilization. The short thesis in Per Amica Silentia Lunae is an
important precursor text of A Vision and is made up of three parts: the first
is an introductory poem, “Ego Dominus Tuus”, which synthesizes the
thoughts on anti-self and mask that are discussed in the other two parts of
the treatise: “Anima Hominis” and “Anima Mundi”. In these texts, Yeats
negotiates the process through which he eventually arrives at his final sys-
tem. The imaginative ideas found in the texts reflect the system in the
making, and they are of as much importance as the completed system itself
as published in A Vision in discussing Wilde’s contribution to Yeats’s cre-
ative imagination. As Helen Vendler notes: “Poetic thinking cannot, and
does not, obliterate or disavow the reflections it engages in en route to its
arrival at a ‘solution’.”20
Mask and image are two of the basic concepts with which Yeats works
in arriving at his final philosophical position, and Yeats is very much
indebted to Wilde’s concepts for both of these entities. Yeats’s develop-
8 N. DOODY
ment of image and mask derive substance and direction from his earliest
meetings with Wilde and his lifelong acquaintance with Wilde’s work.21
Yeats alters, experiments with and develops Wilde’s concepts and, finally,
integrates them within his creative work—sometimes they are greatly
changed but often they carry within them strong elements of their former
signification; always, they have facilitated the evolutionary process in
Yeats’s thinking. Yeats first seriously played with Wilde’s speculations on
mask in his early drafts of The Player Queen; by the later drafts of the play,
Yeats developed the Wildean mask into the antithetical Yeatsian mask.22
Yeats’s creative transition from one mask to the other was enabled by fur-
ther ideas that Yeats appropriated from Wilde and which appear in his
philosophical treatise, Per Amica Silentia Lunae, which Yeats wrote
between finishing the first drafts of his play, The Player Queen (1910), and
the completion of its final version (1917). In this interchange between the
two writers we witness a powerful creative process at work: Wilde’s
thought fuels Yeats’s imagination and not only offers him initial concepts
but also facilitates the investigation and transmutation of those concepts.
Yeats continues to evolve and develop the idea of Mask until it becomes an
essential component within his thinking in A Vision.23 Although this later
incarnation of mask becomes “at root a different concept”, it importantly
retains “enough of its former traits to give a sense of A Vision’s continuity
with Yeats’s previous thought”.24 The final achievement of Mask in Yeats’s
system is in its contribution to the concept of Unity of Being, a fundamen-
tal tenet of his philosophical system. Yeats writes: “all unity is from the
Mask”,25 and Rory Ryan sees this sense of coherence of self as the most
important function of the Mask for Yeats.26
The drive towards Unity of Being is one of the central concerns of A
Vision. Unity of Being is a crucial concept in Yeats’s creative work; it is a
state of perfect harmony and equilibrium between the body, spiritual
desire and the intellect. Yeats uses the term, Unity of Being, in a very spe-
cific way in A Vision but he also uses it in his creative works quite “broadly
and always with the sense of a harmonious tension that transcends itself”.27
Wilde not only contributes his thinking on mask to the complex workings
of Yeats’s speculations on Unity of Being but he also provides him with
the apposite image for this ideal of perfection, the image of the dancer.
Image is a powerful factor within the Wilde/Yeats scene of influence
and Yeats benefits as much from Wilde’s concrete images as he does from
his intellectual concepts. Wilde believes image to be a powerful disseminator
of influence and Yeats agrees with his perception.28 Wilde’s influence on
Yeats was often prompted by varied images that he perceived in Wilde

himself, such as the heroic image, and also by certain artistic images from
within Wilde’s work. Image, indeed, lies at the very heart of the Yeatsian
aesthetic; a few weeks before his death in 1939 Yeats writes: “Man can
embody truth but he cannot know it.”29 In other words, man is image; he
is the idea incarnate; and Yeats entrusts to image the communication of
poetic truth. It is the actual, concrete image—tree, big-house, dancing
girl—that engages the mind, and from these images, symbols and meta-
phors are created. As Stan Smith asserts: “For Yeats, the imagination is
quite literally an image-making power. That is, it thinks in concrete reali-
ties, not abstracts.”30 The visual image vigorously engaged Yeats’s imagi-
nation, giving rise to new creative ideas. Helen Vendler reflects, “But
images are not easily found – and Yeats’s habit of thinking in images
requires images to think with.”31 Yeats is indebted to Wilde for many of
these images “to think with”, including the dancer, the kiss and Salomé
herself that build in various ways through his work and become powerful
symbols within it.
Yeats’s theories are based on antithesis and one of the leading images
through which he expresses this concept is the twinned image of worldly
and religious power embodied in the images of Christ and Caesar, an
image which he first encounters in the work of Wilde and which echoes
ever after through Yeats’s work. Yeats restates Wilde’s concept in A Vision:
“Caesar and Christ always stand face to face in our imagination.”32 Yeats’s
interest in polarities and opposing states of being are evident in his early
preoccupation with William Blake, but as Richard Ellmann states, no one
so clearly articulated the antinomies for Yeats as Oscar Wilde.33 The images
of Christ and Caesar become for Yeats representative of two contradictory
and complementary states of world order: the primary and the antithetical
eras. In his complex and multilayered system set out in A Vision, Yeats
suggests how these opposing eras of civilization and religious time operate
simultaneously. The system shows how every 2,200 years or so one civili-
zation takes the place of the next. A secular, antithetical civilization begins
at the mid-point of a primary, religious era and continues until the mid-
point of the next, and so on every 2,200 years. One era rises as the other
declines and dies away. For Yeats, the antithetical Classical era had its gen-
esis at the mid-point of the Babylonian era; the inception of the primary
Christian era heralded the end of the Classical era, and we are about to
enter another antithetical phase—or, indeed, we may already have done so
and have already witnessed the end of the Christian era and be currently in
10 N. DOODY
the antithetical era of the anti-Christ—as Yeats describes it in his poem,

“The Second Coming”:
The darkness drops again but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Wilde’s influence is crucial to Yeats’s development of these powerful

theories of historical change and Unity of Being that lie at the centre of his
philosophical thinking.
While Wilde has been a major influence for Yeats, there have been many
other significant voices and figures that have affected the poet’s creativity.
Indeed, Yeats and influence has been subject to much critical scrutiny. His
debt to Romanticism is well documented;34 Yeats himself writes of his
creative debt to Shelley, saying that it was “he and not Blake, whom I had
studied more and with more approval, had shaped my life”.35 Similarly,
much has been written about the artistic effect on Yeats of Victorian writ-
ers, D. G. Rossetti, Walter Pater and William Morris among others, as well
as Modernist and Symbolist influences.36 The effect on Yeats of writers of
the English Renaissance, Edmund Spenser, Ben Jonson and John Donne,
has also been examined, and convincingly argued by Wayne Chapman.37
Along with these sources of influence, many critical texts have been
devoted to the influence of folklore, nationalism and the occult on
W.B. Yeats.38 These influences and many other factors and contexts will
have been part of the tapestry of thoughts and events that helped form the
poet, and Wilde’s influence on Yeats does not preclude them. However,
the strength of Wilde’s influence is such that it demands a major place
amid this confluence of literary influence. Indeed, given the central impor-
tance of Oscar Wilde to the creativity of W.B. Yeats, it is surprising that
greater critical attention has not been paid to this formative relationship.
While throughout the vast and prestigious scholarship on W.B. Yeats there
are many allusions to instances of Wilde’s influence,39 by and large, critical
attention to the Wilde/Yeats relationship has been under explored. When
it comes to attributing complex thought or philosophical principles to a
precursor of Yeats, Wilde’s name is rarely mentioned. Very often, when
Wilde is credited with influencing Yeats, little critical elaboration follows
from the assertion.40 Richard Ellmann’s observation in his essay, “The
Critic as Artist as Wilde”, on the propensity of critics to attribute to “more

ponderous names” certain critical positions of Wilde, remains largely in
place.41 Harold Bloom, himself much influenced by Wilde’s work,42 has
been guilty of illustrating Ellmann’s contention, denigrating Wilde to the
advantage of Walter Pater and Friedrich Nietzsche.43 The critical pioneers
in the area of the Wilde/Yeats relationship are Richard Ellmann and Frank
Kermode.44 Their speculations opened up the whole area of exploration
into the Wilde/Yeats relationship, and yet they confine themselves to par-
ticular observations and are happy to remain within the focus of their
specific critical investigation. Ellmann finds that Yeats owes much to
Wilde’s aesthetics, while Kermode emphasizes Yeats’s indebtedness to
Wilde for the image of the dancer. The metaphysical nature of Yeats’s debt
of influence to Wilde is seldom pursued, even by Richard Ellmann, that
most astute critic of the Wilde/Yeats relationship; Ellmann proposes that
Yeats learnt from Wilde’s concept of the imaginative nature of reality and
suggests the power of images to affect and direct life within this definition,
but goes no further.45 Terence Brown, in The Life of W.B. Yeats, acknowl-
edges the metaphysical aspect of Wilde’s influence on Yeats, stating that
Yeats perceived that Wilde “made the aesthetic a force for the spiritual
transformation of human consciousness”.46 However, no further discus-
sion of the topic follows. Some fine work has been carried out in recent
times in relation to the Wilde/Yeats literary relationship but critics have
mainly directed their attention to the historical narrative of these two writ-
ers or have focused on Wilde’s Salomé and Yeats’s later dance plays.47
Wilde’s influence on Yeats, however, is far more pervasive and fundamen-
tal than any critical enquiry so far suggests: Wilde’s contribution to Yeats’s
developing metaphysical doctrine is central to his impact on the poet, and
the imaginative understanding of life that Yeats arrives at and systematizes
in his philosophical writings is fundamentally important as the dynamic
underpinning his creative work.
The concept of literary influence, its usefulness and raison d’être have
been debated in various ways throughout literary history. More traditional
author-centred approaches that privilege biographical, historical and cul-
tural enquiry became suspect in the early to mid-twentieth century, partly
because of a fear that the critical appraisal of the text was being displaced
by the exaltation of the author. The Formalist approach to literary theory
that followed, focussing its analysis on the text in itself, posed the question
as to whether literary influence was either a viable or a valuable critical
pursuit.48 In more recent times, the very existence of literary influence has
12 N. DOODY
been called into question by theories favouring the notion of intertex-

tuality. However, Susan Stanford Friedman argues persuasively that
intertextuality interacts with influence in a more interdependent way
than proponents of the theory might be willing to concede. She writes:
“The discourse of intertextuality blends and clashes with the discourse
of influence.”49 Intertextuality, a term coined by critic Julia Kristeva,
argues that texts come into being by means of other texts—text creates
text. In such a literary scenario, the socio-historic circumstances of the
author are somewhat superfluous to the meaning of the text.50 Roland
Barthes, in line with Kristeva, writes of text: “Every text is an intertext;
other texts are present within it, to varying degrees, in forms that are
more or less recognizable … a new tissue of second hand citations. Bits
of codes, formulae, model rhythms, fragments of social discourse pass
into the text and are redistributed within it.”51 Barthes famously pro-
nounced the “Death of the Author” in 1967; Barthes eliminates the
author in order to fully concentrate his focus on the text itself. He
declares the impossibility of authorial intentions being delivered
through the text to a reader. Following this theory, the text not only
draws on many literary and cultural sources that impede the purpose of
a single mind, but it is read by many different readers who, far from
reading in the text the clear intentions, passions, emotions of the
author, decipher the text in accordance with their own literary knowl-
edge and expectations and particular set of cultural and life
experiences.52
In 1973, authors regain some agency in The Anxiety of Influence,
Harold Bloom’s first book in the ground-breaking series on his antitheti-
cal theory of the process of literary influence. Despite insisting that the
“meaning of a poem can only be another poem”,53 Bloom categorically
supports the centrality of the author. He maintains that “influence remains
subject-centred, a person-to-person relationship, not to be reduced to the
problematic of language”.54 Bloom’s ideas on influence build into a com-
pelling theory on how influence enables literary formation. Bloom’s the-
ory of influence describes how the later poet (or ephebe, in Bloom’s
terminology) experiences anxiety in relation to his fear that he will be
creatively disempowered by his precursor. So, he sets out to vanquish his
precursor and to usurp his sublime force, taking for himself all that he
most values in his precursor’s work. Bloom’s theory works through what
he describes as six revisionary ratios of interchangeable psychic defence
mechanisms, tropes and images.55 They describe how he sees the working
of the imagination in the creative process, as the later poet consciously and
unconsciously appropriates his precursor. Bloom’s revisionary ratios work
antithetically in pairs: in the first of these pairs, the later poet approves his
precursor’s work up to the point where he misreads him, swerves from the
text and rewrites it as he feels it ought to have been written. The third and
fourth ratios, Bloom explains as undoing the precursor’s sublime and
empowering the later poet at his expense, while in the fifth ratio, the later
poet truncates both his own and his precursor’s imaginings in a further
effort at individuation. Finally, the influenced writer establishes his own
counter sublime in developing a style which “captures and oddly retains
priority over their precursors”,56 so that time seems to be overturned and
the precursor appears to be imitating the later poet, a procedure that
Bloom describes as “transumption”. Bloom’s theory of influence is
detailed and cohesive, but it is also somewhat prescriptive.
There are many ways in which literary influence operates but, whatever
might be consigned to the patterns and workings of language, it is the
author who is central to the process of influence. Undoubtedly, texts draw
on other texts and contain uninvited fragments and concepts from other
texts, but literary influence is primarily concerned with the author and the
process of their creative consciousness. The individual author enters into a
pre-existing, ever-present literary tradition, and if, as Eliot suggests,57 this
circumstance limits the possibility of an original voice, yet it is still indi-
vidual authors who contribute to and perpetuate the tradition, and retain
the possibility of rendering something vital or extraordinary from the
material they find there.
Literary influence sheds light on a whole process of imaginative creativ-
ity; the passing on of influence questions the concept of an incommuni-
cable self; it demonstrates the dynamism of the precursor/later author
relationship in the acquisition, germination and creative conversion of
ideas. An important part of the legacy of a writer exists in the contribution
that their work makes to the formation of later writers; their ideas are
changed to various shapes and forms at each encounter with the creative
imaginations of subsequent writers. Literary influence allows the creative
conversation to continue; it gives artistic imagination the breadth of
infinity in which to expand and alter through many creative conscious-
nesses, along many diverse lines. Literary influence enables new cre-
ations—sometimes great, sometimes less so—depending on the material
available to and the imaginative ability of the later writer. Wilde illustrates
14 N. DOODY
this phenomenon in a story told by Robbie Ross: “Wilde complained to

me one day that someone in a well-known novel had stolen an idea of his.
I pleaded in defence of the culprit that Wilde himself was a fearless literary
thief. ‘My dear fellow,’ he said, with his usual drawling emphasis, ‘when I
see a monstrous tulip with four wonderful petals in someone else’s garden,
I am impelled to grow a monstrous tulip with five wonderful petals, but
that is no reason why someone should grow a tulip with only three pet-
als.’”58 Writing some years later in The Sacred Wood, T.S. Eliot concurs
with Wilde’s sentiment: “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad
poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something bet-
ter, or at least something different.”59
Harold Bloom, himself influenced by Nietzsche’s concept of the “will
to power”, concurs with the notion of literary theft and the model of
influence that he proposes is radically agonistic. Richard Ellmann, in his
book Eminent Domain, foreshadows Bloom’s position in his description
of literary influence:
Writers move upon other writers not as genial successors but as violent
expropriators, knocking down established boundaries to seize by the force
of youth, or of age, what they require. They do not borrow, they
override.60
Although Wilde might well have understood this necessity, remarking

once to William Rothenstein, “Dans la litterature il faut toujours tuer son
pere,”61 the passage of influence is not as uncomplicated a process or as
viciously acquisitive a procedure as either Bloom or Ellmann would have
it. In examining the relationship of Oscar Wilde and W.B. Yeats as precur-
sor and later poet, while there can be no doubt of the agonistic aspect of
the process of influence, there is also a divergent, benign strain of influ-
ence operating alongside it. This second strain within the influence proce-
dure, I will term irenic, as distinct and different from agonistic, after Mihai
Spariosu’s formulation of irenic as “thought, behaviour and pathos
grounded in the principle of peace”, which is “inaccessible to the power
principle”.62 Spariosu proposes this term as an alternative to the “might is
right” ethos underlying Western thought for centuries and Nietzsche’s
“will-to-power”, which he feels is all too often posed as the only possible
means of progress in much contemporary criticism, human behaviour and
ideas. While, according to Spariosu, the creation of an irenic mentality in
Western thought has far to go, nevertheless, a vital strain of the influence
procedure originates in this discourse of irenic possibility. Christopher

Ricks’s approach to influence as allusion, for example, might be seen as a
theory of irenic influence—Ricks sees the later poets as regarding their
precursors with gratitude and affection. Ricks deplores the violence in
Bloom’s theory of the anxiety of influence,63 and in contrast with Bloom’s
later poets who consciously and unconsciously overthrow their literary
forebears, later poets in Ricks’s theory consciously allude to their precur-
sors’ works with respect.64
An irenic process of influence denotes all non-aggressive, non-power-
centred theories; it encompasses influence brought about through the
expression of a ludic urge to refashion one’s precursor text to better reflect
the perceived greatness of the precursor, and it includes influence grounded
in concern or feelings of kinship. Yeats felt a keen affinity with Wilde
through their shared national background65 and their personal empathy,
and as a young man Yeats looked on Wilde as something of a hero. Many
of Wilde’s precepts became so familiar to Yeats that they grew into an
integral part of his own creative thought. Indeed, his familiarity with
Wilde’s ideas and his revisions of Wilde’s creative output gave him a some-
what familial concern for his precursor to the point of identification with
him.66 This concern may have stemmed from his need to repay and free
himself from a debt of influence or it may spring from the burden of care.
In an essay in his series on contemporary poetry for The Egoist, T.S. Eliot
comments on this type of sensitivity in relation to creative influence: “This
relation is a feeling of profound kinship, or rather of a peculiar personal
intimacy, with another, probably a dead author.”67 Such a feeling of iden-
tification implies that for Yeats, Wilde’s literary imaginings were legiti-
mately his for the taking, without the stricture of indebtedness or bad
conscience. Yeats’s friendship with Wilde is grounded in the intricacies of
a common community and cultural experience.68 He was always true to
their friendship: his response to the trials was to rally support for Wilde
from Irish men of letters; any denial of Wilde was literary, never personal.
When editing the Oxford Book of Modern Verse, Yeats had the opportunity
to publicly acknowledge the artistic importance of his precursor. Yeats
selected for publication Wilde’s “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” and pro-
ceeded to an implied criticism of it by editing and re-arranging its stanzas.
Yeats declared that he was ridding the poem of its “foreign feathers” and
so giving the world “a great or almost great poem”. Yeats steps into the
author’s shoes, as though it were hard for him to distinguish to whom
they belonged, self or precursor. Such was the familiarity he felt, he pro-
16 N. DOODY
fesses that what he has done to the poem is no more than “what he himself
[Oscar Wilde] would have done”.69 This statement combines agonistic
usurpation with the interested critique of an irenic apologist. Wilde, as
author, seems peripheral to Yeats’s creative restructuring of his work;
Yeats’s attempts to perfect his precursor implies, despite his conscious
intentions, his own creative superiority. Thus, although the aim might be
irenic, its consequence is Yeats’s empowerment. Although, unquestion-
ably, there is an irenic process of influence at work in this particular scene
of influence alongside an agonistic movement, influence whether irenic or
agonistic in its orientation always implies admiration and appropriation
either by the “kiss” or by the “sword”.70 Whatever the procedure, it seems
that the process of influence empowers the later poet and leaves the pre-
cursor vanquished or, at least somewhat diminished. Oscar Wilde depicts
influence as always weakening the precursor71 and Harold Bloom endorses
this position; Yeats’s contention in his final play, The Death of Cuchulain,
seems apposite: “There must be severed heads.”72
The line of critical investigation that relies on Yeats’s admiration and
concern for Wilde prompts possible Freudian family readings. There has
been a lot of excellent work done in the critical exploration of gender and
sexuality in the late-nineteenth century73 and such readings would
undoubtedly be of some relevance. Eibhear Walshe writes that “Yeats’s
reaction to Wilde’s disgrace was one of enlightened sympathy and sup-
port.”74 Elizabeth Cullingford maintains that Yeats “always sympathized
with homosexual men like Wilde” and, for the most part, he publicly dis-
seminated a wide and inclusive outlook on sexual practice, suggesting that
“individuals should cultivate the broadest kind of sympathies”.75 However,
Yeats seems to have been personally heterosexual while Wilde seems to
have been more homosexually orientated. Although much could possibly
be discerned about the complexities and fluidity of gender that would
contribute an interesting view of this relationship, such a contribution
does not form part of this current study of literary influence.
Influence proceeds at both a conscious and unconscious level—accord-
ing to Bloom the strength of a text is the text that it represses: “Where
repression is an unconsciously powerful forgetting in and by the psyche, a
poetic text does curious tricks, odd turnings that render the unconscious
only another trope as the poem both forgets to remember and remembers
to forget.”76 Yeats’s conscious interest in Wilde’s work extends to his com-
prehensive reading of Wilde’s texts and books related to Wilde both dur-
ing and after Wilde’s lifetime. He closely followed Wilde’s artistic
development and recognized the maturing of his art in his play, The
Importance of Being Earnest. Yeats acclaimed Wilde’s brilliance and credits
him with some of the concepts that would become so important in his
own creative consciousness, such as Wilde’s juxtapositioning of the images
of Christ and Caesar in his essay, “The Decay of Lying.”77 In 1907, Yeats
published a preface to The Happy Prince and Other Stories in which he
openly praised the profundity of Wilde’s thought and admired the intel-
lectual strength of his prose poem, “The Doer of Good”, naming it “one
of the best stories in the world”.78 Some years later Yeats experimented
with this poem of Wilde’s, converting it into a play, Calvary. Yeats pub-
licly documented his great admiration for Wilde’s poem and made no
attempt to disguise the artistic relation of Calvary to its source. Admission
of influence runs contrary to the Bloomian theory of anxiety of influence
that is in evidence throughout so much of the Wilde/Yeats literary rela-
tionship, and indicates the unmappable element of individual conscious-
ness at play within the parameters of influence. The diametrically opposed
positions of the agnostic and irenic process of influence are mediated by
Yeats’s individual consciousness, an entity that escapes the rigidity of any
one theory. Wilde proposes individualism as the dynamic of artistic cre-
ation79 and Yeats bears out this concept in his particular approach to the
influence of Oscar Wilde.80
This book is divided into three major sections that trace the develop-
ment of Wilde’s influence on Yeats. Section One, “Influence and Identity”,
focuses on the period 1888–1895. This section explores how socio-historic
elements contribute to the influential effect that Wilde had on Yeats, and
takes in their personal relationship, nationality and historical context as
factors affecting the scene of influence. Section Two, “Mask and Image”,
spans the years 1888–1917, and deals with the major contribution that
Wilde’s thinking on mask and image makes to Yeats’s development of
these vital components within his own aesthetic theories. The chapters in
this section trace and explore the process by which Wilde’s theories on
mask becomes Yeats’s antithetical mask, and suggest the ways in which
Wilde affected Yeats’s thinking on image, not alone through his ideas but
also by means of the image that Wilde presents of himself in his prison let-
ter, De Profundis. Central to an understanding of the progression of
Yeats’s reflections on mask and image are his manuscripts for The Player
Queen, and this section relies heavily on readings of this primary source
material. The final section, “Salomé: Symbolism, Dance and Theories of
Being”, is the largest section of the book and covers a substantial portion
18 N. DOODY
of Yeats’s creative years, 1891–1939. This section looks at symbolism and

concentrates on the immense influence that Wilde’s symbolist play
wrought on Yeats’s imaginative work and creative sensibility. It examines
how Yeats was attracted, both intellectually and imaginatively, by Wilde’s
thinking and the ways in which he converts Wilde’s ideas and concepts of
entities such as desire and perfection into essential components of his own
creative work. Yeats’s appropriation of Wilde’s images of dance and unity,
and his skilful use of them in structuring his complex philosophical system
of ideas, are also discussed in these chapters. The section shows that Yeats’s
readings of Wilde helped to further his metaphysical speculations and
strengthen his aesthetic.
This book demonstrates that Wilde’s influence in Yeats’s work is perva-
sive; it follows the process of influence from Yeats’s reception of Wilde’s
ideas and images, through to their appearance in Yeats’s manuscripts and
on to their conversion into Yeatsian models within his finished work. The
book combines close textual analysis with a socio-historical approach, and
looks at the evidence of Wilde’s influence in the different forms that it
takes within Yeats’s manuscripts and texts. The book takes account of the-
ories of influence, including Bloom’s theory on the anxiety of influence81
and more moderate, irenic approaches to influence, as well as the personal
and contextual factors that affect influence—where any of these are helpful
in elucidating the process and passage of influence within the literary rela-
tionship of these two writers. The content of the book is arranged in
mainly chronological order: beginning with a discussion of the relevance
of the social, political, cultural and historical background of the two writ-
ers and their personal relationship, it moves to an in-depth reading and
interpretation of primary and secondary sources—Yeats’s manuscripts,
typescripts, letters and the published work of both writers.
In this book, the substantial contribution that Wilde makes to Yeats’s
imaginative thinking is primarily illustrated by the use of Yeats’s drama,
but, of course, this very same imaginative thought goes into Yeats’s cre-
ation of poetry and there are examples of this shown within the text.
Wilde’s influence was an on-going process that spanned Yeats’s lifetime.
While most of Wilde’s texts are of interest in examining his influence on
Yeats, the texts of Wilde’s that are most influential include his play,
Salomé, the prose poem, “The Doer of Good”, his last prose work, De
Profundis, and the critical essays, “The Decay of Lying” and “The Critic
as Artist”. Wilde’s concepts provide Yeats with ideas that initiate theories
or sometimes add to thoughts that are already in development, and this
Wildean input is essential to the building of Yeats’s philosophical theses.

The final significance of Yeats’s philosophical precepts resides in Yeats’s
poetic and dramatic use of them, of which he writes: “I will never think
any thoughts but these, or some modification or extension of these; when
I write prose or verse they must be somewhere present though not it may
be in the words.”82
Notes
1. W.B. Yeats, The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats. Volume III: Autobiographies,
ed. William H. O’Donnell, Douglas N. Archibald, J. Fraser Cocks III,
Gretchen L. Schwenker (New York: Scribner, 1999), pp. 124; 223.
2. Worth, Katharine, The Irish Drama of Europe from Yeats to Beckett (New
York: Bloomsbury, 2014), p. 115.
3. T.S. Eliot, “Reflections on Contemporary Poetry” in The Egoist, VI (July,
1919), 39–40.
4. See also on this theme, Philip L. Marcus, Yeats and Artistic Power (New
York: New York University Press, 1992).
5. “The ethic of ‘good’ writing derives from the concluding paragraphs of
Walter Pater’s essay, ‘Style’, in Appreciations (1889), and echoes Wilde’s
observations in the preface of The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891): that ‘the
morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium’, and
that there ‘is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well
written or badly written. That is all.’” Note 5 in The Collected Letters of
W.B. Yeats Vol. II: 1896–1900, ed. Warwick Gould, John Kelly and Deirdre
Toomey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 209.
6. See Letter to Richard Ashe King, 5 August [1897] and Note 6, in The
Collected Letters of W.B. Yeats Vol. II: 1896–1900, ed. Warwick Gould, John
Kelly and Deirdre Toomey, p. 130. All references to the letters of W.B. Yeats
(1896–1907) are from the four published volumes of the Oxford University
Press series, The Collected Letters of W.B. Yeats. The letters from subsequent
years are from Allan Wade’s, The Letters of W.B. Yeats, ed. Allan Wade
(London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1954), or as otherwise specified.
7. Virginia Hyde, “W. B. Yeats’s Talismanic Book: The Secret Rose” in The
1890s: British Literature, Art, and Culture, ed. G. A. Cevasco (New York
and London: Garland Publishing Co., 1993), p. 539.
8. W.B Yeats, Autobiographies. The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats. Volume III,
ed. William H. O’Donnell, Douglas N. Archibald, J. Fraser Cocks III,
Gretchen L. Schwenker, p. 224.
9. Interestingly, John Paul Riquelme shows that Wilde’s play is similarly sig-
nificant for T.S. Eliot: “Salomé had a particularly intense effect on Eliot.”
20 N. DOODY
“T.S. Eliot’s Ambiviolences: Oscar Wilde as Masked Precursor” in The

Hopkins Review, Volume 5, Number 3, Summer (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2012), p. 354. https://doi.org/10.1353/thr.2012.0060.
10. Noreen Doody, “Performance and Place: Oscar Wilde and the Irish
National Interest” and Joseph Bristow, “Picturing his Exact Decadence:
the British Reception of Oscar Wilde” in The Reception of Oscar Wilde in
Europe, ed. Stefano Evangelista (London: Bloomsbury, 2015).
11. Unlike many of Wilde’s acquaintances, Yeats had been in no way deterred
from his high opinion of Wilde by the 1895 trials. At no time, neither in
the early years of their acquaintance nor through the years of public oblo-
quy, was Wilde far from Yeats’s thought: he read all of Wilde’s works, com-
mented upon him in private letters and referred to him in public interviews
and lectures.
12. Robert H. Sherrard, Oscar Wilde: the Story of an Unhappy Friendship
(London: Greening and Co. Ltd., 1905); The Life of Oscar Wilde (London:
T. Werner Laurie, 1906).
13. J. Kelly, A W.B. Yeats Chronology (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003),
p. 101.
14. Moore writes: “I have not forgotten Oscar Wilde’s plays – that delicious
comedy The Importance of Being Earnest, but however much I admire
them I cannot forget that their style is derived from that of the Restoration
comedy.” He then goes on to praise the originality of Synge. Yeats’s com-
ments to Lady Gregory are concerned with Synge (The Irish Times, 21
November 1905), p. 10.
15. Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (London: Penguin Books, 1988), p. 284.
16. W.B. Yeats, “The Philosophy of Shelley’s Poetry” in The Collected Works of
W.B. Yeats, Volume IV: Early Essays, ed. Richard Finneran and George
Bornstein (New York: Scribner, 2007), p. 66.
17. W.B. Yeats, “William Blake and the Imagination” in Early Essays. The
Collected Works of W.B. Yeats, Volume IV, ed. Richard Finneran and George
Bornstein, p. 88.
18. Marjorie Elizabeth Howes, Yeats’s Nations: Gender, Class, and Irishness
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 89.
19. W.B. Yeats, “Magic” in Early Essays. The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats,
Volume IV, ed. Richard Finneran and George Bornstein, p. 25.
20. Helen Vendler, Poets Thinking: Pope, Whitman, Dickinson, Yeats
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), pp. 107–108.
21. See also, Wit Pietrzak’s excellent discussion on mask in “Cutting the Irish
Agate” in which he acknowledges Wilde’s early influence on Yeats in rela-
tion to the mask. Wit Pietrzak, The Critical Thought of W. B. Yeats (London:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), pp. 79–116.
22. W.B. Yeats, The Player Queen, Ms. 8764, National Library of Ireland (Cited
in subsequent references as: N.L.I). “W.B. Yeats Papers: The Player Queen –
11 folders and some notebooks”. The manuscripts are labelled i–xi on
micro-film 7492.
23. For a searching exposition of Yeats’s dealings with mask, see Warwick
Gould, “The Mask before The Mask” in Yeats’s Mask: Yeats Annual No. 19.
Vol. 19. (Open Book Publishers, 2013). JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.
ctt5vjtxj.
24. Neil Mann, “The Mask of A Vision” in Yeats Annual No. 19. A Special
Edition, ed. Margaret Mills Harper and Warwick Gould, Open Book
Publishers, 2013, p. 167.
http://books.openedition.org/obp/1397.
25. W.B. Yeats, A Vision: The Revised 1937edition. The Collected Works of
W.B. Yeats Vol. XIV, ed. Catherine E. Paul and Margaret Mills Harper
(New York: Scribner, 2015), p. 61.
26. Rory Ryan, “The Is and the Ought, the Knower and the Known: An
Analysis of the Four Faculties in Yeats’s System” in W. B. Yeats’s “A Vision”:
Explications and Contexts, ed. Neil Mann, Matthew Gibson, and Claire
Nally (Clemson, SC: Clemson University Digital Press, 2012), p. 28.
27. Neil Mann, “The Thirteenth Cone”, note100, in W. B. Yeats’s “A Vision”:
Explications and Contexts, ed. Neil Mann, Matthew Gibson, and Claire
Nally, p.192.
28. W.B. Yeats, Autobiographies. The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats Vol. III, ed.
William H. O’Donnell and Douglas N. Archibald, p. 215. Oscar Wilde,
“The Decay of Lying” in The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: Volume IV:
Criticism: Historical Criticism, Intentions, The Soul of Man ed. Josephine
M. Guy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 91.
29. Letter “To Lady Elizabeth Pelham”, “Jan. 4, 1939”, The Letters of
W.B. Yeats, ed. Allan Wade, p. 922.
30. Stan Smith, W.B. Yeats: A Critical Introduction (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 1990), p. 63.
31. Helen Vendler, Poets Thinking: Pope, Whitman, Dickinson, Yeats, p. 93.
32. W.B. Yeats, A Vision: The Revised 1937edition. The Collected Works of
W.B. Yeats Vol. XIV. Eds., Catherine E. Paul and Margaret Mills Harper,
p. 178.
33. Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (London: Hamish Hamilton Ltd., 1985),
p. 286.
34. See: George Bornstein, “Yeats and Romanticism” in The Cambridge
Companion to W. B. Yeats, ed. Marjorie Elizabeth Howes, John Kelly
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 2006; George Bornstein, Yeats
and Shelley (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1970); Gibson, Matthew.
Yeats, Coleridge and the Romantic Sage (London: Macmillan Press, 2000).
22 N. DOODY
35. W.B. Yeats, “Prometheus Unbound” in The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats,
Vol. V: Later Essays, ed. William H. O’Donnell (New York: Scribners,
1994), p.122.
36. See: The Cambridge Companion to W. B. Yeats, ed. Marjorie Elizabeth
Howes, John Kelly; Elizabeth Loiseaux, Yeats and the Visual Arts (New
York: Syracuse University Press, 2003); David Holdeman, The Cambridge
Introduction to W.B. Yeats (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
37. Wayne Chapman, Yeats and the English Renaissance (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 1991).
38. See David Holdeman, The Cambridge Introduction to W.B. Yeats.
39. See A. Norman Jeffares and A.S. Knowland, A Commentary on the Collected
Plays of W.B. Yeats (London: Macmillan, 1975); Katharine Worth, Oscar
Wilde (London: Macmillan, 1983); Frank Kermode, The Romantic Image
(1957; rpt. London: Routledge, 2001); T.R. Henn, The Lonely Tower:
Studies in the Poetry of W.B. Yeats (London: Methuen, 1950); Michael
Steinman, Yeats’s Heroic Figures: Wilde, Parnell, Swift, Casement (New
York: SUNY, 1983); Sylvia Ellis, The Plays of W.B. Yeats: Yeats and the
Dancer (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995). Judit Nényei, Thought Outdanced:
The Motif of Dancing in Yeats and Joyce (Budapest: Akademiai Kiado, April
2003). John Paul Riquelme, “Shalom/Solomon/Salomé: Modernism and
Wilde’s Aesthetic Politics” (Centennial Review 39:3 (Fall 1995): 575–
610). McAteer, Michael, Yeats and European Drama (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2010).
40. See for example, David Holdeman’s sound critical assertion: “Yeats, whose
use of the mask metaphor owes much to Wilde.” However, no elaboration
of the insight follows. The Cambridge Introduction to W.B. Yeats, p. 54.
John Paul Riquelme states, “In playing down Wilde’s place in his develop-
ment as an artist while stealing from him, Yeats is applying torque and
perpetrating a double act of intellectual violence.” Riquelme’s focus is on
Eliot and Wilde so he does not pursue this topic further. “T. S. Eliot’s
Ambiviolences: Oscar Wilde as Masked Precursor” in The Hopkins Review,
p. 360. https://doi.org/10.1353/thr.2012.0060.
41. Richard Ellmann, “The Critic as Artist as Wilde” in Oscar Wild edited and
introduced by Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea house, 1983), p. 92.
42. Noreen Doody, “Precursor and Ephebe: Oscar Wilde, Harold Bloom and
the Theory of Poetry as Influence” in Barcelona English Language and
Literature Studies, eds., Mireia Aragay and Jacqueline Hurtley (Barcelona:
Universitat de Barcelona, 2000), pp. 25–31.
43. Bloom writes: “The guide in that dark region of the will is … Nietzsche …
where our ultimate gratitude to art in ‘the cult of the untrue’ falls short of
the magnificence of Oscar Wilde’s ‘Decay of Lying’”. However, despite
Wilde’s “magnificence”, Bloom allows greater intellectual weight to
Nietzsche; he repeats this pattern in respect of Wilde and Walter Pater.
Agon (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), pp. 31, 18.
44. Frank Kermode, Romantic Image (1957; rpt. 2001); Richard Ellmann,
Eminent Domain (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967). See also,
Oscar Wilde (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1987); Yeats: The Man and the
Masks (New York: 1948; rpt. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979); The
Identity of Yeats (London: Macmillan, 1954) and Four Dubliners (New
York: George Brazillier Inc., 1988).
George Yeats, according to her daughter, Anne Yeats, called Ellmann,
“the first of the seekers” (Personal communication).
45. Richard Ellmann, Eminent Domain, pp. 16–21.
46. Terence Brown, The Life of W.B. Yeats, p. 31.
47. R. Allen Cave, “Staging Salomé’s Dance in Wilde’s play and Strauss’s
Opera” in Refiguring Oscar Wilde’s Salome, ed. Michael Y. Bennett
(Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2011); Vicki Mahaffey, States of Desire: Wilde, Yeats,
Joyce, and the Irish Experiment; Katharine Worth, The Irish Drama of
Europe from Yeats to Beckett; Sylvia C. Ellis, The Plays of W.B. Yeats: Yeats
and the Dancer (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995). Gregory Dobbins,
Lazy Idle Schemers: Irish Modernism and the Cultural Politics of Idleness
(Field Day Files Book 6) Field Day, 2015 (Kindle edition).
48. See also Douglas N. Archibald, “Yeats’s Encounters: Observations on
Literary Influence and Literary History” in New Literary History, Vol. 1,
No. 3, History and Fiction (Spring, 1970), p. 443.
49. Susan Stanford Friedman. “Weavings: Intertextuality and the (Re)Birth of
the Author” in ed. Jay Clayton and Eric Rothstein, Influence and
Intertextuality in Literary History (Wisconsin; University of Wisconsin,
1992), p. 154.
50. Julia Kristeva, “Word, Dialog and Novel” in The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril
Moi (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), p. 37.
51. Roland Barthes, Entry for “Texte (théorie du)” in Encyclopédie Universalis.
Paris, 1973. http://www.universalis.fr/.
tout texte est un intertexte; d’autres textes sont présents en lui, à des
niveaux variables, sous des formes plus ou moins reconnaissables … un
tissu nouveau de citations révolues. Passent dans le texte, redistribués,
en lui des morceaux de codes, des formules, des modèles rythmiques,
des fragments de langages sociaux, etc.
52. Ibid., “L’intertexte est un champ général de formules anonymes, dont
l’origine est rarement repérable, de citations inconscientes ou automa-
tiques, données sans guillemets.”
53. Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1973), p. 95.
54. Harold Bloom, A Map of Misreading (New York: Oxford University Press,
1975), p. 77.
24 N. DOODY
55. Bloom has named these revisionary ratios which he sees as characterizing
poetic influence: Clinamen, Tessera, Kenosis, Daemonization, Askesis and
Aphophrades in The Anxiety of Influence.
56. Harold Bloom. Anxiety of Influence, p. 141.
57. Eliot, Thomas Stearns, “Tradition and the Individual Talent” in The Sacred
Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (London: Faber and Faber, 1997),
pp. 39–49.
58. Robbie Ross, “A Note on Salomé” in Salomé: A Tragedy in One Act
(London: John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1907), p. xviii.
In “The Critic as Artist”, Wilde suggests that a text under criticism acts
as a lift-off point for the critic into his own creative work. The critic, Wilde
proposes, in taking his inspiration from the text, stands in the same relation
to it as the artist does to his subject matter. Wilde’s stance on criticism can
be equally applied to literary influence in relation to the later poet’s
response to a precursor text (Oscar Wilde, “The Critic as Artist” in The
Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: Volume IV: Criticism: Historical Criticism,
Intentions, The Soul of Man, ed. Josephine M. Guy, pp. 153, 159).
59. Eliot, Thomas Stearns, The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism,
p. 105.
60. Richard Ellmann, Eminent Domain, p. 3.
61. Trans.: “In literature it is always necessary to kill one’s father”. William
Rothenstein, Men and Memories: Recollections of William Rothenstein,
1872–1900 (New York: Coward-McCann, Incorporated, 1935), p. 184.
62. Mihai Spariosu, A Wreath of Wild Olives: Play, Liminality, and the Study of
Literature (New York: State of University of New York Press, 1997),
p. 303. Spariosu believes that the irenic has yet to be established and put in
place as the actual working principle of human relations and suggests that
one way of doing this is through the liminal worlds created by literature.
Liminal worlds are contingent on the actual and the imaginary and provide
thresholds or passageways into alternative worlds. In these worlds ludic
possibilities and possibilities of being and doing exist.
63. Christopher Ricks, “A Theory of Poetry, and Poetry”. Review of Harold
Bloom’s, Poetry and Repression: Revisionism from Blake to Stevens, in
“Books”, New York Times, 14th March 1976. Bloom’s theories have been
questioned by other critics, notably for the exclusionary patriarchal style in
which he presents The Anxiety of Influence. Nevertheless, as observed by
J. Andrew Brown “While we can question Bloom’s choices of language
and allegory, we must continue to deal with their deeper theoretical impli-
cations.” The critical response of Gilbert and Gubar to Bloom’s theory of
influence was its revision into a more positive, feminist theory the “Anxiety
of Authorship”. In dealing with two male authors, however, Bloom’s the-
ory is a valuable tool of enquiry. J. Andrew Brown, “Feminine Anxiety of
Influence Revisited: Alfonsina Storni and Delmira Agustin”. Revista

Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos, Vol. 23, No. 2 (Invierno 1999),
p. 193. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, “Infection in the Sentence:
The Woman Writer and the Anxiety of Authorship” in The Mad Woman in
the Attic (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979).
64. Christopher Ricks. Allusion to the Poets (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002).
65. Gregory Dobbins finds that “Wilde epitomized [for Yeats] both the imagi-
native capacity of the Irish and their cultural distinctness”. Lazy Idle
Schemers: Irish Modernism and the Cultural Politics of Idleness, p. 34.
66. See W.B. Yeats, Autobiographies. The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats Vol. III,
ed. William H. O’Donnell and Douglas N. Archibald, for his early regard for
Wilde, particularly pp. 124–129, and ms. 30,356 N.L.I. See also Ellmann’s
The Identity of Yeats (1954; rpt. London: Macmillan, 1975), in which he
quotes Yeats’s account of his first meeting with James Joyce. Yeats recalls:
“But the next moment he spoke of a friend of mine [Oscar Wilde]”, p. 87.
67. T.S. Eliot: “Reflections on Contemporary Poetry” in The Egoist, VI (July,
1919), pp. 39–40.
68. See David M. Schneider, “The Nature of Kinship” in Man, Vol. 64. (Nov.–
Dec., 1964). Sylvia Junko Yanagisako, “Introduction” in “American
Kinship” in American Ethnologist, Vol. 5, No. 1. (Feb., 1978).
69. W.B. Yeats, “Introduction”, Oxford Book of Modern Verse (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1936), p. vii.
70. Yet each man kills the thing he loves,/By each let this be heard, …/The
coward does it with a kiss,/The brave man with a sword!” Oscar Wilde.
“The Ballad of Reading Gaol” in “Introduction”, Oxford Book of Modern
Verse, p. vii.
71. Oscar Wilde, The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: Volume III: The Picture of
Dorian Gray: The 1890 and 1891 Texts, ed. Joseph Bristow (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 20, 183.
72. W.B. Yeats, The Death of Cuchulain in The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats Vol
II: The Plays, ed. David R. Clark and Rosalind E. Clark (New York &
London: Palgrave, 2001; New York: Scribner, 2001), p. 546.
73. See Fabio Cleto. Effeminate England: Homoerotic Writing After 1885
(New York: Columbia, 1995). Linda Dowling. Hellenism and
Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1994). Steven Epstein. “Sexuality and Identity: The Contribution of
Object Relations Theory to a Constructionist Sociology” in Theory and
Society, Vol. 20, No. 6. (Dec., 1991). Alan Sinfield, The Wilde Century –
Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde and the Queer Moment (London: Cassell,
1994). Daniel Orrells, Classical Culture and Modern Masculinity (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2011).
74. Éibhear Walshe, Oscar’s Shadow: Wilde, Homosexuality and Modern Ireland
(Cork: Cork University Press, 2011), p. 26.
26 N. DOODY
75. Edwards, Jason, “The generation of the green carnation: sexual degenera-
tion, the representation of male homosexuality and the limits of Yeats’s
sympathy” in Modernist Sexualities, ed. Hugh Stevens and Caroline
Stephens (Manchester: Manchester University Press), 2000.
76. Harold Bloom, Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism, p. 226.
77. W.B. Yeats, Autobiographies. The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats Vol. III. ed.
William H. O’Donnell and Douglas N. Archibald, p. 215.
78. W.B. Yeats, “Introduction”, The Happy Prince and Other Fairy Tales. Vol.
III of The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (New York: A.R. Keller, 1907),
pp. ix–xvi. Rpt., “Wilde: The Happy Prince” in The Collected Works of
W.B. Yeats, Volume VI: Prefaces and Introductions, ed. William
H. O’Donnell (London: Macmillan, 1988), p. 150.
79. Oscar Wilde, “The Soul of Man Under Socialism” in The Complete Works
of Oscar Wilde: Volume IV: Criticism: Historical Criticism, Intentions, The
Soul of Man, ed. Josephine M. Guy, p. 250.
80. Bloom, despite the rigidity of his theory of influence, fully endorses the
autonomous and dynamic agency of individual consciousness in the critical
process when he states: “The only critical wisdom I know is that there is no
method except yourself.” Harold Bloom in Imre Salusinszky, Criticism in
Society: Interviews with Jacques Derrida, Northrop Frye, Harold Bloom,
Geoffrey Hartman, Frank Kermode, Edward Said, Barbara Johnson, Frank
Lentricchia and J. Hills Miller (London: Methuen, 1987), p. 67.
81. Harold Bloom, Anxiety of Influence (New York: Oxford University Press,
1973); A Map of Misreading (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975);
Poetry of Repression (New Haven (Conn.): Yale University Press, 1976);
Agon (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982). The
Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 2011).
82. W.B. Yeats, Introduction to A Vision in A Packet for Ezra Pound (Dundrum:
Cuala, 1929), p. 32.
References
Manuscripts
Yeats, W.B. “W.B. Yeats Papers: The Player Queen, − 11 folders and some note-
books.” N.L.I. Ms. 8764. Micro-film 7492: “i–xi”.
Articles
Brown, J. Andrew. “Feminine Anxiety of Influence Revisited: Alfonsina Storni and
Delmira Agustin”. Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos, Vol. 23, No. 2
(Invierno, 1999).
Eliot, T.S. “Reflections on Contemporary Poetry”. The Egoist, Vol. VI (July,

1919).
Epstein, Steven. “Sexuality and Identity: The Contribution of Object Relations
Theory to a Constructionist Sociology”. Theory and Society, Vol. 20, No. 6
(December, 1991).
Ricks, Christopher. “A Theory of Poetry, and Poetry.” Review of Harold Bloom’s,
Poetry and Repression: Revisionism from Blake to Stevens in “Books”, New York
Times (March 14, 1976).
Riquelme, John Paul. “T. S. Eliot’s Ambiviolences: Oscar Wilde as Masked
Precursor”. The Hopkins Review, Vol. 5, No. 3, Summer. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2012. https://doi.org/10.1353/thr.2012.0060
———. “Shalom/Solomon/Salomé: Modernism and Wilde’s Aesthetic Politics”.
Centennial Review, Vol. 39, No. 3 (Fall, 1995).
Schneider, David M. “The Nature of Kinship”. Man, Vol. 64 (November–
December 1964).
Yanagisako, Sylvia Junko. “Introduction (in American Kinship)”. American
Ethnologist, Vol. 5, No. 1 (February 1978).
Books
Bloom, Harold. Agon. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982.
———. The Anxiety of Influence. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973.
———. A Map of Misreading. New York: Oxford University Press, 1975.
———. Poetry and Repression: Revisionism from Blake to Stevens. New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1976.
———. The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life. Yale: Yale University
Press, 2012.
Bornstein, George. Yeats and Shelley. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1970.
Cevasco, G.A., ed. The 1890s: British Literature, Art, and Culture. New York and
London: Garland Publishing Co., 1993.
Chapman, Wayne. Yeats and the English Renaissance. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 1991.
Clayton, Jay and Eric Rothstein. Influence and Intertextuality in Literary History.
Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin, 1992.
Cleto, Fabio. Effeminate England: Homoerotic Writing After 1885. New York:
Columbia, 1995.
Dobbins, Gregory. Lazy Idle Schemers: Irish Modernism and the Cultural Politics of
Idleness. (Field Day Files Book 6) Derry: Field Day, 2015.
Dowling, Linda. Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford. New York:
Cornell University Press, 1994.
Eliot, Thomas Stearns. The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism. London:
Faber and Faber, 1997.
28 N. DOODY
Ellis, Sylvia. The Plays of W.B. Yeats: Yeats and the Dancer. Basingstoke: Macmillan,
1995.
Ellmann, Richard. Eminent Domain. New York: Oxford University Press, 1967.
———. The Identity of Yeats. 1954; rpt. London: Faber and Faber Ltd., 1975.
Evangelista, Stefano, ed. The Reception of Oscar Wilde in Europe. London:
Continuum, 2010.
Friedman, Susan Stanford. “Weavings: Intertextuality and the (Re)Birth of the
Author” in Influence and Intertextuality in Literary History, ed. Jay Clayton
and Eric Rothstein. Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin, 1992, p. 154.
Gibson, Matthew. Yeats, Coleridge and the Romantic Sage. London: Macmillan
Press, 2000.
Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Guber. The Madwoman in the Attic: 19th Century
Literature. New Haven (Conn.): Yale University Press, 1980.
Henn, T.R. The Lonely Tower: Studies in the Poetry of W.B. Yeats. London: Methuen,
1950.
Holdeman, David. The Cambridge Introduction to W.B. Yeats. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Howes, Marjorie Elizabeth. Yeats’s Nations: Gender, Class, and Irishness.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Howes, Marjorie Elizabeth and John Kelly, eds. The Cambridge Companion to
W. B. Yeats. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Jeffares, A. Norman and A.S. Knowland, A Commentary on the Collected Plays of
W.B. Yeats. London: Macmillan, 1975.
Kermode, Frank. The Romantic Image. 1957; rpt. London: Routledge, 2001.
McAteer, Michael. Yeats and European Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2010.
Nényei, Judit. Thought Outdanced: The Motif of Dancing in Yeats and Joyce.
Budapest: Akademiai Kiado, April 2003.
Orrells, Daniel. Classical Culture and Modern Masculinity. Oxford: Oxford
Pietrzak, Wit. The Critical Thought of W. B. Yeats. London: Palgrave Macmillan,
2017.
Ricks, Christopher. Allusion to the Poets. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Rothenstein, William. Men and Memories: Recollections of William Rothenstein,
1872–1900. New York: Coward-McCann, 1935.
Salusinszky, Imre. Criticism in Society: Interviews with Jacques Derrida, Northrop
Frye, Harold Bloom, Geoffrey Hartman, Frank Kermode, Edward Said, Barbara
Johnson, Frank Lentricchia and J. Hillis Miller. London: Methuen, 1987.
Sinfield, Alan. The Wilde Century – Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde and the Queer Moment.
London: Cassell, 1994.
Spariosu, Mihai. A Wreath of Wild Olives: Play, Liminality, and the Study of
Literature. New York: State of University of New York Press, 1997.
Steinman, Michael. Yeats’s Heroic Figures: Wilde, Parnell, Swift, Casement.

New York: State of University of New York Press, 1983.
Vendler, Helen. Poets Thinking: Pope, Whitman, Dickinson, Yeats. Harvard:
Harvard University Press, 2006.
Walshe, Eibhear. Oscar’s Shadow: Wilde, Homosexuality and Modern Ireland. Cork:
Cork University Press, 2012.
Wilde, Oscar. The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: Volume III: The Picture of Dorian
Gray: The 1890 and 1891 Texts, ed. Joseph Bristow. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2005.
———. The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: Volume IV: Criticism: Historical
Criticism, Intentions, The Soul of Man, ed. Josephine M. Guy. Oxford: Oxford
Worth, Katharine. Oscar Wilde. London: Macmillan, 1983.
Yeats, W.B. Autobiographies. Volume III: The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, ed.
William H. O’Donnell, Douglas N. Archibald, J. Fraser Cocks III, Gretchen
L. Schwenker. New York: Scribner, 1999.
———. The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats Vol II: The Plays, ed. David R. Clark and
Rosalind E. Clark. New York & London: Palgrave, 2001.
———. “Introduction”, The Happy Prince and Other Fairy Tales. Vol. III of The
Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (New York: A.R. Keller, 1907), pp. ix–xvi. Rpt.,
“Wilde: The Happy Prince” in The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats, Volume VI:
Prefaces and Introductions, ed. William H. O’Donnell. London: Macmillan,
1988.
———. Oxford Book of Modern Verse, 1892–1935, ed. W.B. Yeats. Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1936.
———. Introduction to A Vision in A Packet for Ezra Pound. Dundrum: Cuala,
1929.
CHAPTER 2
Establishing Influence
A Literary Friendship (1888–1895)

“My first meeting with Oscar Wilde was an astonishment”,1 W.B. Yeats
writes in his Autobiographies. Yeats goes on to describe how he was capti-
vated by the suave image of sophistication that Wilde presented and
enthralled by the “hard brilliance” of Wilde’s intellect.2 The occasion of
their first meeting was a literary gathering in September 1888 at the house
of the editor and poet, W.E. Henley3; Yeats was 23 years old at the time
and Wilde was 11 years his senior.
While this was the first face-to-face meeting between the two young
men, Yeats had been an admirer of Wilde’s since his teenage years. He had
seen Wilde in Dublin at the Gaiety Theatre on 22nd November 1883
where he heard him deliver a lecture on “The House Beautiful”. Wilde,
who lived in London at the time, was on a return visit to the city of his
birth to give two lectures, the one that Yeats would hear and another
based on his recent American tour, “Impressions of America”.4 The deter-
mination of the young 18-year-old Yeats to hear Wilde speak can be seen
by the heroic efforts that he made to get to the theatre that night. Not
only was he suffering from illness but his father, J.B. Yeats, had sent his
eldest son on a perplexing expedition that day that entailed an uncomfort-
able journey to the village of Celbridge, County Kildare and back again to
Dublin city. Yeats had found the travelling itself harrowing but the reason
for the journey was also extremely distressing to him. His father had sent
him to visit his uncle to seek help in paying butcher and chemist bills for
© The Author(s) 2018 31

N. Doody, The Influence of Oscar Wilde on W.B. Yeats,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89548-2_2
32 N. DOODY
the family who were in difficult financial circumstances at the time.

However, having discharged his duty to the necessities of practical life
Yeats made it to the theatre and happily switched his mind to the imagina-
tive and eloquent words of his hero, Oscar Wilde.
Already, at the beginnings of this relationship, the scene of influence
was set. Yeats’s boyhood admiration for the ideal that Wilde represented
and the sense of kinship that grew from this admiration, together with
their common cultural background, would prove powerful factors in the
embedding of influence. Yeats was very much affected by Wilde’s personal
image and this personal regard, along with Wilde’s aesthetic stance on
image, informs the development of Yeats’s thinking on this very central
area of his own aesthetics. Indeed, in the case of this literary relationship,
two of the main factors affecting the flow of influence were the particular
affinity between the two writers and Yeats’s susceptibility to the power of
image.
At their first meeting in London five years following his Gaiety Theatre
lecture, Wilde’s image had lost nothing of the magnetism that Yeats had
experienced in the Dublin theatre; Wilde’s intellect and wit, his urbanity
and consummate self-possession captivated the young man. In those late
days of the nineteenth century, W.B. Yeats, now living in London, was a
shy, rather timid young man who was acutely aware of his own lack of
poise and want of social skills. He was also conscious that these were skills
that were essential to him if he was to further his ambition of playing an
effective role in the public life of Ireland. In 1888 Oscar Wilde, elegant in
dress, unrivalled in conversation, was everything in manner and style to
which the young Yeats aspired. “I was abashed before him”, Yeats writes,
“as wit and man of the world alone”.5 The admiration he felt for Wilde
was met with generosity and consideration from his older countryman and
their friendship continued throughout the years of Yeats’s twenties
(1888–1895).
The historical moment of their meeting was crucial to the strength of
the influential relation that ensued. This was a particularly plastic stage in
Yeats’s development, a time of creative and personal turbulence. Yeats’s
family with whom he was living in London was in extreme financial diffi-
culties, his mother seriously ill and his relations with his father volatile and
strained. Yeats’s frustration with his situation was reflected in the type of
significance he attached to his creative work: he told his friend, Katharine
Tynan, how he took refuge from life in his literary work and described its
content as “a flight to fairyland”, “the cry of the heart against necessity”.6
ESTABLISHING INFLUENCE 33
Besides the conflict in his creative and family life, Yeats was also perplexed
by what he saw as his personal inadequacies: he was constantly struggling
against his extreme timidity and attempting to correct his lack of poise and
self-possession. The young man desperately desired to remake his image
and create a persona more in keeping with his concept of what a poet
should be. Wilde’s image polarized for Yeats his own want of form and
unsettled state of being and when Yeats comes to record in his autobiog-
raphy, A First Draft (1917), the significance of Wilde within his creative
life, he vividly recalls the image of assurance and intellectual agility that
Wilde presented in 1888 and the indelible impression that Wilde’s intel-
ligence and his “dominating self-possession” made upon him.7
Yeats became a regular visitor in the 1880s at the Wildes’s home in Tite
Street, Chelsea where Wilde lived with his wife, Constance, and their two
small boys, Cyril and Vyvyan. The two writers had many shared interests
and were not lacking in subjects of conversation. Literary, political and
cultural issues were topics on which they exchanged views, as was the sub-
ject of aesthetics. Magic was also an area of interest: Wilde once described
to Yeats an interesting formula he had found in a book of magic, telling
him: “If you carve a Cerberus upon an emerald, and put it in the oil of a
lamp and carry it into a room where your enemy is, two new heads will
come upon his shoulders and all three devour one another.”8 Both being
from Dublin, Yeats and Wilde knew many people in common and the
conversation, interspersed with Dublin wit and humour, would often turn
to the latest stories from home, mutual acquaintances and the political
situation in Ireland. Mutual acquaintances included the writer, George
Moore; revolutionary and former Sligo neighbour of Yeats, Constance
Markievicz, who on a trip from Dublin stayed some days in the Wilde’s
home; writer and business manager of the Lyceum Theatre, Bram Stoker—
husband to Wilde’s former Dublin girlfriend, the actress Florence
Balcombe. Yeats was quick to share Wilde’s literary quips with his young
friends and relayed to Katharine Tynan Wilde’s amusing remark concern-
ing the Scottish writer, William Sharpe alias Fiona MacLeod: “Have you
heard Oscar’s last good thing. He says Sharps [sic] motto should be Acutis
decensus averni (sharp is the descent into Hell). The phrase as you know
begins in the orthodox way Facilis (easy).”9 Views on art and the artist
were exchanged between the two writers, and issues of Irish literature and
culture discussed. Wilde and Yeats were knowledgeable on the subject of
the Irish literary tradition. They were conscious of the elevated position of
the poet in early times in Ireland as second only to the king, and the even-
34 N. DOODY
tual diminishment of this position by the historic oppression of England

so that poets became outcasts and wandering rebel bards.10 Wilde’s
interest in Irish literature had been encouraged by his parents’ scholar-
ship on the subject and Yeats recounts how Wilde “made me tell him
long Irish stories, and he would compare them and Homer”.11 Wilde
talked to Yeats about the celebrated Irish writer, Charles Maturin, who
wrote the gothic novel Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) and who was his
mother’s uncle.12 The views of both writers coincide on the importance
of the Celtic imagination to the literature of Europe. Wilde claims that
“all the great beauties of modern literature – we owe to [the Celtic
imagination] to begin with, the spirit of modern romance … the senti-
ment of modern thought”.13 Yeats agrees with Wilde’s sentiments in
his essay, “The Celtic Element in Literature”, written some years later
in 1897. Indeed, the topic of Celticism was of great interest to both
men. Wilde was well aware of the current debate on nationalism and
literature in Ireland that deeply concerned W.B. Yeats. As early as May
1877, Wilde’s name is listed among the Catholic students and Jesuit
staff in attendance at the Catholic University’s Literary and Historical
Society student meeting on the “Formation of an Irish National
Literature”.14
In a lecture that he delivered in 1882, Wilde acknowledges the cen-
trality of the poet to Ireland’s historical past and declares the subversive
power of the bard in encouraging passion and strength in a subjugated
people while also “hurl[ing] at the oppressor their indomitable scorn”.15
He goes further in his remarks and asserts that “the influence of Celtic
poetry was … the primary basis of Irish politics”.16 Yeats sees a similar
political agenda in Wilde’s own writings, and suggests in a review of
Wilde’s literary work in 1891 that this subversive scorn was exactly what
Wilde employed to revile the old enemy, “John Bull”.17 Indeed, the rel-
evance of the historical, political position of the poet in Irish society as
perceived by Wilde was not lost on these two Irish poets in relation to
their own position as colonized artists living in contemporary London,
and provided a rich topic for interested discussion. Neil Sammels
shrewdly observes that Wilde’s “Irishness embodied both the determin-
ing condition and the ultimate aim of his artistic endeavours: exile and
subversion”. Sammels goes on to place Wilde firmly within “the histori-
cal complexities and struggles of his time”.18
Wilde confided to Yeats that had he wanted it, he could have entered
politics and secured a safe seat in Parliament.19 The major political ques-
tion of the day, Home Rule for Ireland was the dominant topic of conver-
sation and political concern in Ireland and Britain of the 1890s and was of
particular interest to Yeats and Wilde. Wilde was a committed Home Rule
supporter and was friendly with many of the advocates for Home Rule in
the Irish Parliamentary Party whose leader, Charles Stewart Parnell, he
knew personally and greatly admired. Both Wilde and Yeats agreed that
many of the Irish politicians of the day were men of fine calibre, “excellent
talkers, genial and friendly men, with memories enriched by country
humour, much half sentimental, half practical philosophy” and “poetical
feeling”.20 Yeats was of the opinion that these men were out of the ordi-
nary and believed in their cause because it was one that so many in earlier
times had died for and for which they themselves had gone to jail. Yeats
recalls Wilde telling him, “I have just told Mahaffy that it is a party of men
of genius.”21
Indeed, Wilde was a member of The Eighty Club, a “Liberal political
organization founded for the promotion of Liberalism within the House
of Commons and among the British electorate”.22 He joined the Eighty
Club in 1887 and throughout the years that he and Yeats were most
friendly, 1888–1891, he was an active member in the political and social
events of the club. As Thomas Wright and Paul Kinsella point out, “by
joining [this club], Wilde publically declared his approval of the position
on Irish constitutional independence arrived at by the Liberal leader
William Gladstone in the winter of 1885/6”,23 and clearly demonstrated
his “obdurate support for Home Rule” for Ireland.24 As early as 1882,
Wilde had emphatically declared his position as a Home Ruler and his
understanding of the current state of Irish politics in a newspaper article in
the St. Louis Globe.25 His determination to hear Parnell speak on the
topic of “The Irish Question” at a dinner at the Eighty Club in the sum-
mer of his first meeting with Yeats (1888), demonstrates his continuing
commitment to this cause.26
Yeats, too was a keen supporter of Parnell, believing him to be a galva-
nizing force, a person whose image alone emanated immense power in
Ireland. Like Wilde, he also engaged in activities to support Home Rule,
which included attending social events aimed at raising funds for the
Home Rule enterprise. Yeats describes one such occasion at which he and
Wilde and his wife were present, and indicates also the sometimes
ambiguous nature of these events: “I was at a big ‘Home Rule’ party at a
Mrs. Hancok’s Saturday. … all these good English Home Rule people
how they do patronise Ireland and the Irish. As if we were some new sort
36 N. DOODY
of deserving poor for whom bazaars and such like should be got up. Yet
they are really in earnest on this Home Rule question I think.”27 In late
1888 and the Spring of 1889, Wilde attended several sessions of the
Parnell Commission, a commission that was set up to investigate charges
of condoning political violence made against Parnell and the Home Rule
party. Parnell was exonerated. Wilde’s interest in the case was such that he
acquired the 35-volume commission report for his library on its publica-
tion in February 1890.28 “Wilde also celebrated Parnell’s exoneration by
attending an Eighty Club dinner at Willis’s Rooms on the 8th of March
1889, organized partly in honour of ‘the Chief’.”29 Wilde’s brother, Willie
Wilde, had covered the case as a leader writer for The Daily Telegraph.
Parnell was the subject of a major public scandal in late 1890 when his
long- term relationship with Katharine O’Shea was made public in the
divorce proceedings taken out by her husband, Captain O’Shea. Tom
Wright and Paul Kinsella contend that Wilde’s words against English pub-
lic opinion in his political essay “The Soul of Man under Socialism”, pub-
lished in the February 1891 issue of the Liberal periodical The Fortnightly
Review, can only be read as “an indictment of Parnell’s oppressors”:
Attacking the ‘stupidity, hypocrisy and Philistinism’ that pervade English

culture, Wilde rails against English public opinion which, he says, exercises
a ‘tyranny’ over art, politics and ‘people’s private lives’ through the press.
Wilde singles out ‘the serious … journalists, who solemnly, as they are doing
at present, will drag before the eyes of the public some incident in the life of
a great statesman, of a man who is a leader of political thought as he is cre-
ator of political force, and invite the public to … exercise authority over the
matter … to dictate to the man upon all points, to dictate to his party, to
dictate to his country… The private lives of men and women should not be
told to the public. The public have nothing to do with them at all. In France
they manage these things better. There they do not allow the details of the
trials that take place in the divorce courts to be published for the amusement
or criticism of the public. All that the public are allowed to know is that the
divorce has taken place and was granted on petition of one or other or both
of the married parties concerned.’30
The timing of this essay, early 1891, and Wilde’s palpably, personal
anger does indeed indicate that he has the leader of the Irish Parliamentary
Party in mind when he wrote these words. Wilde’s impassioned response
to Parnell’s tragedy reflects his admiration for the man and for his political
magnitude that was met in equal measure by Yeats. Parnell was an emblem-
atic figure for Yeats, someone “who would preoccupy Yeats all his life and
whom he described as a ‘dark star’ presiding over the political conscious-

ness of his generation”.31 Wilde and Yeats were serious and enthusiastic
supporters of Parnell, and considered him a deeply able and remarkable
force in Irish politics. The leadership of their revered countryman, his rise
and his tragic fall, were shared topics of concern for both writers.
Besides their common interest in Irish politics and in Irish literature
generally, Wilde and Yeats were not indifferent to each other’s work. In
fact, Wilde encouraged Yeats in his literary endeavours, finding to the
young poet’s delight, much to admire in his early, long poem, The
Wanderings of Oisin (1889). Yeats was not so admiring of Wilde’s poetry
but respected its author too much to be openly critical of it, however, it
was the young Yeats’s opinion that Wilde’s book of criticism Intentions
(1891) was “a wonderful book” and that The Picture of Dorian Gray in
book form (1891) and Wilde’s A Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888)
proclaimed Wilde a serious man of letters.32 Wilde, for his part, wrote
three reviews of Yeats’s work in 1889 for the Pall Mall Gazette and for The
Woman’s World of which he was editor. Wilde was incisive in his remarks
on Yeats’s writings, helpfully pointing out particular faults in the younger
poet’s works and praising that which he considered worthwhile. Following
Wilde’s comments in the Pall Mall Gazette, Yeats replaced the word “pop-
ulace” with “race” in line 164 of part three of the poem, only restoring it
in 1912.33 Wilde’s reviews of Yeats’s, “The Wanderings of Oisin and Other
Poems”, were astute and insightful; Wilde declares the work “full of
promise” and forecasts that one day Yeats would “give us work of high
import”34 and comments on his “delicacy of poetic instinct and richness of
imaginative resource”. Indeed, Wilde goes so far as to say: “Now and
then, however, one comes across a volume that is so far above the average
that one can hardly resist the fascinating temptation of recklessly prophe-
sying a fine future for the author. Such a volume. Mr. Yeats’s ‘Wanderings
of Oisin’ certainly is.”35
Wilde took Yeats’s side against detracting critics in The Athenaeum
who found fault with Yeats’s edited book, Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish
Peasantry,36 advising him to counter them in public but the younger Yeats
never got around to taking Wilde’s advice, admitting that he was too
lazy.37 He was very pleased, however, with what he described as the “long
and friendly”38 review of his book that Wilde wrote for The Woman’s
World, in which Wilde writes that “Mr. Yeats has collected together the
most characteristic of our Irish folklore stories”.39 Wilde’s mother, the
writer and poet Jane Francesca Wilde, had contributed four stories to the
38 N. DOODY
collection and had been of great help to Yeats in the preparation of the
book. Yeats was well acquainted with Lady Wilde and was a regular
attendee at her “at homes” from the summer of 1888, and wrote a review
of her book, Ancient Cures, for The Scots Observer, in March 1890.40
Yeats felt relaxed and at home in Wilde’s family, even telling fairy stories
to the children, unfortunately his enthusiasm was so strong on one occa-
sion that he frightened Wilde’s small son, Cyril, in describing the fero-
ciousness of a large giant. Yeats writes of his memory of the “little velveteen
figure”41 fleeing in tears from the room while his father looked down in
disappointment at the storyteller. The young Yeats disliked his hero’s dis-
approval and describes how he once asked Wilde for literary gossip for
some newspaper job the impecunious young man hoped to secure. Wilde
met his request with curt words of refusal and let him know that such a
position was beneath contempt. Yeats incurred Wilde’s censure on another
visit to Tite Street when he sported a pair of fashionable unpolished leather
shoes, the shoes, which were sub-standard, glowed yellow rather than
looking like the unpolished leather that they simulated and were met with
a glance of silent distaste from the suave Wilde. However, Yeats’s gauche-
ness did not take away from him the security that he felt in his friendship
with Wilde nor did it weaken the feeling of kinship between them.
Yeats found in Wilde the tremendous kindness to which so many of his
friends and acquaintances have testified, among them author and critic
George Slythe Street who said of him: “This was a humane man, generous
to his friends, placable to his enemies.”42 The Scottish writer and politi-
cian, R.B. Cunninghame Graham, was yet another of Wilde’s associates to
endorse this view of him: “I most remember his great kindliness. It is the
greatest quality in man.”43 Alfred Douglas also admitted of Wilde: “He
was the kindest chap.”44 Poet, Katharine Tynan, was impressed too by this
quality of Wilde’s and speaking of her first meeting with him at his moth-
er’s house declared that “then and always I found him pleasant, kind and
interested”.45 Althea Gyles, the Irish artist, praised Wilde to Yeats, saying:
“He was so kind, nobody ever lived who was so kind.”46 Wilde’s
consideration meant a good deal to Yeats coming as it did in those early
years of his twenties, when unsure, awkward, uncomfortable in London
and harassed by family troubles, he first came upon Oscar Wilde. Yeats
recalled this period of his life some years later when first he heard of
Wilde’s court action: “I remember that I spoke that night of Wilde’s kind-
ness to myself.”47 Yeats was a young man who had great need of under-
standing—in his early twenties he often came away from literary meetings
and discussions suffering paroxysms of anxiety and embarrassment in rec-

ollecting the outspoken candour with which he had voiced his opinions
and remembers how, in contrast, he had never left Wilde’s company with
any sense of inadequacy, neither feeling “fool or dunce”.48 In Wilde’s
friendship Yeats grew in confidence and intellect. Yeats’s father, the artist
J.B. Yeats, had once perceptively observed that his son, being of a sensi-
tive, timid disposition, would only grow and develop by means of kind-
ness.49 Wilde, acknowledged wit, man of letters and proven intellectual
brilliance, encouraged Yeats’s personal and artistic growth, he accorded
the young man parity of esteem and related on equal terms to him.
Undoubtedly, Wilde’s generosity contributed to the quality of the friend-
ship between himself and Yeats and allowed the younger man the emo-
tional security in which his ideas and sense of self might flourish, knowing
he had the good opinion of someone whom he held in such high regard.
The warmth and ease of this relationship enabled optimum conditions in
which the seeds of influence might thrive.
In many ways, Yeats was no different than the many other young people
of his generation who looked on Wilde as something of a champion of
youth in his iconoclastic attitudes and his empathetic stance towards them.
The young Yeats delighted in Wilde’s latest bons mots and recalls with glee
how Wilde made fun of George Bernard Shaw whom Yeats and his young
friends viewed as something of a philistine, Yeats denoting him a “ notorious
hater of romance”.50 Yeats quotes Wilde: “Mr. Bernard Shaw has no ene-
mies but is intensely disliked by all his friends.”51 Wilde’s large personality,
joy of life and generous literary encouragement recommended him to
Yeats and his companions. The poet, Richard Le Gallienne, recalls that
Wilde “said things all we youngsters had been dimly feeling” and claimed
that his lasting memory of Wilde was not only of a brilliant talker but also
of an attentive listener. Le Gallienne was a member of The Rhymers Club,
founded by Yeats, T.W. Rolleston and Ernest Rhys in early 1890. This
group of literary minded people met regularly in “The Cheshire Cheese”
public house in Fleet Street and sometimes in private houses where Wilde
occasionally formed part of the company. Herbert Horne, an architect and
art scholar, who shared a house in Fitzroy Street with Rhymers, Lionel
Johnson, Selwyn Image and Arthur Mackmurdo, describes in a letter to
Ernest Rhys the effect that Wilde had on one of the club’s meetings that
he attended in the “Fitzroy Settlement”: “I asked the Rhymers here the
other evening: Oscar came in at the end, after the rhymes were all over,
and smiled like a Neronian Apollo upon us all. A kind of enthusiasm or
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"Civil? She treated them like the dirt under her feet. She laughed at
them to their noses. Elle faisait ses farces sur tout le monde. Ah! but
she had a droll of tongue. Quel esprit, quelle blague, quel chic! But it
was a festival to listen to her."
"Had she the air of a woman who had been a lady, and who had
dégringolé?"
"Pas le moins du monde. She was franchement canaille. Elle n'avait
pas dégringolé. She had rather risen in the world. Some little
grisette, perhaps; some little rat of the Opera—but jolie à croquer—
tall, proud, with an air of queen!"
"You often had a chat with her, I dare say, Monsieur Louis, as she
went in and out of the hotel?"
"Mais, oui. She would come into the bureau, to ask questions, to
order a carriage, and would stop to put on her gloves—she had no
femme de chambre—and though her clothes were handsome, she
was a slovenly dresser, and wore the same gown every day, which is
not the mark of a lady."
"In these casual conversations did you find out who she is, where
she lives, in London or elsewhere?"
"From her conversation I would say she lives nowhere—a nomad,
drifting about the world, drinking her bottle of champagne with her
dinner, crunching pralines all the afternoon, smoking nine or ten
cigarettes after every meal, and costing pas mal d'argent to the
person who has to pay for her caprices. She talked of London, she
talked of Rome, of Vienna—she knows every theatre and restaurant
in Paris, but not half a dozen sentences of French."
"A free lance," said Faunce. "Now for the name of this lady and
gentleman."
The name had escaped Monsieur Louis. He had to find the page in
his ledger.
"Mr. and Mrs. Randall, numbers 11 and 12, first floor, from February
7th to February 25th."
Randall! The name that Miss Rodney's Duchess had told her, and
which Lady Perivale had told Faunce.
"And the lady's Christian name? Can you remember that? You must
have heard her pseudo-husband call her by it."
Louis tapped his forehead smartly, as if he were knocking at the door
of memory.
"Tiens, tiens, tiens! I heard it often—it was some term of
endearment. Tiens! It was Pig!"
"Pig!—Pigs are for good luck. I wonder what kind of luck this one will
bring Colonel——Randall. And what did she call him? Another term
of endearment?"
"She called him sometimes Dick, but the most often Ranny. When
they were good friends, bien entendu. There were days when she
would not address him the word. Elle savait comment se faire valoir!"
"They generally do know that, when they spring from the gutter," said
Faunce.
He had learnt a good deal. Such a woman—with such beauty, dash,
devilry—ought to be traceable in London, Paris, or New York,
anywhere. He told himself that it might take him a long time to find
her—or time that would be long for him, an adept in rapid action—
but he felt very sure that he could find her, and that when he found
her he could mould her to his will.
There was only one thing, Faunce thought, that would make her
difficult—a genuine attachment to Rannock. If she really loved him,
as such women can love, it might be hard work to induce her to
betray him, even though no fatal consequences to him hung upon
her secrecy. He knew the dogged fidelity which worthless women
sometimes give to worthless men.
The hotel was almost empty, so after a prolonged siesta Mr. Faunce
dined with the manager in the restaurant, which they had to
themselves, while half a dozen tourists made a disconsolate little
group in the desolation of the spacious dining-room.
Faunce did not pursue the subject of the Randalls and their
behaviour during the social meal, for he knew that the manager's
mind having been set going in that direction he would talk about
them of his own accord, a surmise which proved correct, for M. Louis
talked of nothing else; but there were no vital facts elicited over the
bottle of Pommery which Mr. Faunce ordered.
"The lady was something of a slattern, you say?" said Faunce. "In
that case she would be likely to leave things—odd gloves, old letters,
trinkets—behind her. Now, in my work things are often of the last
importance. Trifles light as air, mon ami, are sign-posts and guiding
stars for the detective. You may remember Müller's hat—his
murdered victim's, with the crown cut down—thriftiness that cost the
German youth dear. I could recall innumerable instances. Now, did
not this lady leave some trifling trail, some litter of gloves, fans,
letters, which your gallantry would treasure as a souvenir?"
"If you come to that, her room was a pig-sty."
"To correspond with her pet name."
"But the hotel was full, and I set the chambermaids at work ten
minutes after the Randalls drove to the boat. We had people coming
into the rooms that afternoon."
"And you had neither leisure nor curiosity to seek for relics of the
lovely creature?"
Monsieur Louis shrugged his shoulders.
"Is my room on the same floor?"
"Mais oui."
"And I have the same chambermaid?"
"Yes. She is the oldest servant we have, and she stays in the hotel
all the summer; while most of our staff are in Switzerland."
This was enough for Faunce. He retired to his room early, after
smoking a couple of cigarettes under the palm trees in front of the
hotel, in the sultry hush of the summer night. The scene around him
was all very modern, all very French—a café-concert on the right, a
café-concert on the left—and it needed an occasional Arab stalking
by in a long white mantle to remind him that he was in Africa. He
meant to start on his return journey to London by the next boat. He
was not going to Corsica or Sardinia in search of new facts. He
trusted to his professional acumen to run the lady to ground in
London or Paris.
He shut the window against insect life, lighted his candles, and
seated himself at the table, with his writing-case open before him,
and then rang the dual summons which brings the hotel
chambermaid.
"Be so good as to get me some ink," he said.
The chambermaid, who was elderly and sour-visaged, told him that
ink was the waiter's business, not hers. He should have rung once,
not twice, for ink.
"Never mind the ink, Marie," he said, in French. "I want something
more valuable even than ink. I want information, and I think you can
give it to me. Do you remember Monsieur and Madame Randall, who
had rooms on this floor before Easter?"
Yes, she remembered them; but what then?
"When Madame Randall left she was in a hurry, was she not?"
"She was always in a hurry when she had to go anywhere—unless
she was sulky and would not budge. She would sit like a stone figure
if she had one of her tempers," the chambermaid answered, with
many contemptuous shrugs.
"She left hurriedly, and she left her room in a litter—left all sorts of
things behind her?" suggested Faunce, with an insinuating smile.
The chambermaid's sharp black eyes flashed angrily, and the
chambermaid tossed her head in scorn. And then she held out a
skinny forefinger almost under Faunce's nose.
"She has not left so much as that," she said, striking the finger on the
first joint with the corresponding finger of the other hand. "Not so
much as that!" and from her vehemence Faunce suspected that she
had reaped a harvest of small wares, soiled gloves and lace-
bordered handkerchiefs, silk stockings with ravelled heels.
"What a pity," he said in his quietest voice, "for I should have been
glad to have given you a couple of napoleons for any old letters or
other documents that you might have found among the rubbish when
you swept the rooms."
"For letters, they were all in the fireplace, torn to shreds," said the
chambermaid; "but there was something—something that I picked
up, and kept, in case the lady should come back, when I could return
it to her."
"There is always something," said Faunce. "Well, Marie, what is it?"
"A photograph."
"Of the lady?"
"No, Monsieur, of a young man—pas grand' chose. But if Monsieur
values the portrait at forty francs it is at his disposition, and I will
hazard the anger of Madame should she return and ask me for it."
"Pas de danger! She will not return. She belongs to the wandering
tribes, the people who never come back. Since the portrait is not of
the lady herself, and may be worth nothing to me, we will say twenty
francs, ma belle."
The chambermaid was inclined to haggle, but when Faunce
shrugged his shoulders, laid a twenty-franc piece upon the table, and
declined further argument, she pocketed the coin, and went to fetch
the photograph.
It was the least possible thing in the way of portraits, of the kind
called "midget," a full-length portrait of a young man, faded and dirty,
in a little morocco case that had once been red, but was soiled to
blackness.
"By Jove!" muttered Faunce, "I ought to know that face."
He told himself that he ought to know it, for it was a familiar face, a
face that spoke to him out of the long ago; but he could not place it in
the record of his professional experiences. He took the photo out of
the case, and looked at the back, where he found what he expected.
There is always something written upon that kind of photograph by
that kind of woman.
"San Remo,
"Poor old Tony. November 22th, '88."

The 22th, the uneducated penmanship sprawling over the little card,
alike indicated the style of the writer.
"Poor old Tony!" mused Faunce, slowly puffing his last cigarette, with
the midget stuck up in front of him, between the two candles. "Who
is Tony? A swell, by the cut of his clothes, and that—well, the good-
bred ones have an air of their own, an air that one can no more deny
than one can describe it. Poor old Tony! At San Remo—condemned
by the doctors. There's death in every line of the face and figure. A
consumptive, most likely. The last sentence has been passed on
you, poor beggar! Poor old Tony! And that woman was with you at
San Remo, the companion of a doomed man, dying by inches. And
she must have been in the flower of her beauty then, a splendid
creature. Was she very fond of you, I wonder, honestly, sincerely
attached to you? I think she was, for her hand trembled when she
wrote those words! Poor old Tony! And there is a smudge across the
date, that might indicate a tear. Well, if I fail in running her to earth in
London, I could trace some part of her past life at San Remo, and
get at her that way. But who was Tony? I'm positive I know the face.
Perhaps the reflex action of the brain will help me," concluded
Faunce.
The reflex action did nothing for Mr. Faunce, in the profound slumber
which followed upon the fatigue of a long journey. No suggestion as
to the original of the photograph had occurred to him when he put it
in his letter-case next morning. It was hours afterwards, when he
was lying in his berth in the steamer, "rocked in the cradle of the
deep," wakeful, but with his brain in an idle, unoccupied state, that
Tony's identity flashed upon him.
"Sir Hubert Withernsea," he said to himself, sitting up in his berth,
and clapping his hand upon his forehead. "That's the man! I
remember him about town ten years ago—a Yorkshire baronet with
large estates in the West Riding—a weak-kneed youth with a
passion for the Fancy, always heard of at prize-fights, and
entertaining fighting men, putting up money for private glove-fights; a
poor creature, born to be the prey of swindlers and loose women."
Faunce looked back to that period of ten years ago, which seemed
strangely remote, more by reason of the changes in ideas and
fashions, whim and folly, than by the lapse of time. He searched his
mind for the name of any one woman in particular with whom Sir
Hubert Withernsea had been associated, but here memory failed
him. He had never had business relations with the young man, and
though his ears were always open to the gossip of the town, he kept
no record of trivial things outside the affairs of his clients. One young
fool more or less travelling along the primrose path made no
impression upon him. But with the knowledge of this former episode
in the pseudo-Mrs. Randall's career, it ought to be easy for him to
find out all about her in London, that focus of the world's intelligence,
where he almost invariably searched for information before drawing
any foreign capital.
CHAPTER IX.
"What begins now?"
"Happiness
Such as the world contains not."
Faunce wrote to Lady Perivale on his arrival in town, and told her the
result of his journey briefly, and without detail. She might make her
mind easy. The woman who resembled her would be found. He was
on her track, and success was only a question of time.
Grace read the letter to Susan Rodney, who was dining with her that
evening. She had been in much better spirits of late, and Sue
rejoiced in the change, but did not suspect the cause. She had gone
to her own den at the back of her house when Grace left her, and
had not seen the carriage standing by the park gate, nor had the
interview in the park come to her knowledge. Her friend, who
confided most things to her, was reticent here. She attributed Lady
Perivale's cheerfulness to a blind faith in Faunce the detective.
The season was drawing towards its close. Lady Morningside's white
ball had been a success, all the prettiest people looking their
prettiest in white frocks, and the banks of gloxinias in the hall and
staircase and supper-rooms being a thing to rave about. The London
season was waning. The Homburg people and the Marienbad
people were going or gone. The yachting people were rushing about
buying stores, or smart clothes for Cowes. The shooting people were
beginning to talk about their grouse moors.
"Sue, we must positively go somewhere," Grace said. "Even you
must be able to take a holiday within an hour of London; and you
may be sure I shan't go far while I have this business on hand. You
will come with me, won't you, Sue? I am beginning to sicken of
solitude."
"I shall love to come, if you are near enough for me to run up to town
once or twice a week. I have three or four pig-headed pupils who
won't go away when I want them; but most of my suburbans are
packing their golf clubs for Sandwich, Cromer, or North Berwick."
"You will come! That's capital! I shall take a house on the river
between Windsor and Goring."
"Make it as near London as you can."
"If you are good it shall be below Windsor, even if the river is not so
pretty there as it is at Wargrave or Taplow. I want to be near London,
for Mr. Faunce's convenience. I hope he will have news to bring me.
I wrote to beg him to call to-morrow morning—I want to know what
discoveries he made in Algiers."
People who have twenty thousand a year, more or less, seldom have
to wait for things. Lady Perivale drove to a fashionable agent in
Mount Street next morning, and stated her wishes; and the
appearance of her victoria and servants, and the fact that she made
no mention of price, indicated that she was a client worth having.
The agent knew of a charming house on a lovely reach of the river
near Runnymede—gardens perfection, stables admirable, boat-
house spacious, and well provided with boats at the tenant's
disposal. Unluckily, he had let it the day before; but he hoped that
little difficulty might be got over. He would offer his client a villa
further up the river. He would write to Lady Perivale next morning.
The little difficulty was got over. The client, actual or fictitious, was
mollified, and Lady Perivale took the house for a month at two
hundred guineas, on the strength of a water-colour sketch. She sent
some of her servants to prepare for her coming, and she and Susan
Rodney were installed there at the end of the week.
The house and gardens were almost as pretty as they looked in
water-colour, though the river was not quite so blue, and the roses
were not quite so much like summer cabbages as the artist had
made them. There were a punt and a couple of good skiffs in the
boat-house; and Lady Perivale and her friend, who could both row,
spent half their days on the river, where Grace met some of those
quondam friends whom she had passed so often in the park; met
and passed them with unalterable disdain, though sometimes she
thought she saw a little look of regret, an almost appealing
expression in their faces, as if they were beginning to think they
might have been too hasty in their conclusions about her.
One friend she met on the river whom she did not pretend to scorn.
On the second Saturday afternoon a skiff flashed past her through
the July sunshine, and her eyes were quick to recognize the rower. It
was Arthur Haldane. She gave an involuntary cry of surprise, and he
turned his light craft, and brought it beside the roomy boat in which
she and Sue were sitting, with books and work, and the marron
poodle, as in a floating parlour.
"Are you staying near here, Lady Perivale?" he asked, when
greetings had been exchanged.
"We are living close by, Miss Rodney and I, at Runnymede Grange. I
hope you won't laugh at our rowing. Our idea of a boat is only a
movable summer-house. We dawdle up and down for an hour or
two, and then creep into a backwater, and talk, and work, and read,
all the afternoon, and one of the servants comes to us at five o'clock,
and makes tea on the bank with a gipsy kettle."
"You might ask him to one of our gipsy teas, Grace," suggested
Susan.
"With pleasure. Will you come this afternoon? We shall be in the little
creek—the first you come to after passing Runnymede Grange,
which you will know by the Italian terrace and sundial."
"I shall come and help your footman to boil the kettle."
He looked radiant. He had seen Lady Perivale's happy look when his
boat neared hers, and his heart danced for joy. All the restraint he
had set upon himself was flung to the winds. If she loved him, what
did anything matter? It was not the world's mistrust he dreaded, or
the world's contempt. His only fear had been that she should doubt
him, misread his motives, rank him with the fortune-hunters who had
pursued her.
"Are you staying near here?" asked Susan.
"I come up the river for a day or two now and then. There is a
cottage at Staines kept by a nice old spinster, whose rooms are the
pink of cleanliness, and who can cook a mutton chop. I keep a quire
or two of foolscap in her garden parlour, and go there sometimes to
do my work. Her garden goes down to the water, and there is a
roomy arbour of hops that I share with the caterpillars, a kind of
berceau, from which I can see the river and the boats going by,
through the leafy screen, while nobody can see me. It is the quietest
place I know of near London. The rackety people seldom come
below Maidenhead."
He spent the hours between tea-time and sunset with Grace and her
friend, in a summer idleness, while the poodle, who found himself
receiving less attention from his mistress than usual, roamed up and
down, scratching holes in the bank, and pretending to hunt rats
among the sedges, evidently oppressed with ennui. Of those three
friends there were two who knew not the lapse of time, and were
surprised to see the great golden disc sink below the rosy water
where the river curved westward, and the sombre shadows steal
over keep and battlements yonder where the Royal fortress barred
the evening sky.
"How short the days are getting," Grace said naively.
They two had found so much to talk about after having lived a year
without meeting. All the books they had read, all the plays they had
seen, the music they had heard—everything made a subject for
discussion; and then it was so sweet to be there, in the full
confidence of friendship, spell-bound in a present happiness, and in
vague dreams of the future, sure that nothing could ever again come
between them and their trust in each other.
"The days are shortening by a cock's step or so," said Sue, looking
up from an afternoon tea-cloth, which she was decorating with an
elaborate design in silk and gold thread, and which she had been
seen engaged upon for the last ten years.
It was known as "Sue's work." It went everywhere with her, and was
criticized and admired everywhere, and everybody knew that it would
never be finished.
"The days are shortening, no doubt," repeated Sue; "they must
begin, or we should never get to the long winter evenings, but I
haven't perceived any difference yet, and I don't think there's
anything odd in the sun going down at eight o'clock."
"Eight o'clock! Nonsense, Sue!" cried Lady Perivale, flinging down a
volume of "The Ring and the Book," which she had been nursing all
the afternoon.
"And as we are supposed to dine at eight, I think we ought to go
home and put on our tea-gowns," pursued Sue, sedately.
Can there be such happiness in life; bliss that annihilates thought
and time? Grace blushed crimson, ashamed of having been so
happy.
Mr. Haldane bade them good night at the bottom of the garden
steps, where his outrigger was waiting for him. It would have been so
easy to ask him to dinner, so easy to keep him till midnight, so easy
to prolong the sweetness of golden hours. But Grace was discreet.
They were not lovers, only friends. She wanted to spin to its finest
thread this season of sweet uncertainty, these exquisite hours on the
threshold of Paradise. And then Sue might think him a bore. Sue
was not overfond of masculine society. She liked to put her feet on a
chair after dinner, and she sometimes liked a cigarette.
"I never smoke before men," she told Grace. "They think we do it to
please, or to shock them."
CHAPTER X.
"True as steel, boys!
That knows all chases, and can watch all hours."
In the course of that summer afternoon's talk with Grace Perivale,
Arthur Haldane had explained the change in his plans since their
meeting in Regent's Park.
The business which would have taken him away from England for
some time had hung fire, and his journey was postponed indefinitely.
He did not tell her that his contemplated journey was solely in her
interests, that he had thought of going to America in quest of Colonel
Rannock, with the idea that he, the man with whose name Lady
Perivale's had been associated, should himself set her right before
that little world which had condemned her. He knew not by what
machinery that rehabilitation could be accomplished; but his first
impulse was to find the man whose acquaintance had brought this
trouble upon her.
Two days after that golden sunset in which he and Lady Perivale had
parted, with clasped hands that vowed life-long fidelity, while yet no
word had been spoken, Mr. Haldane called upon John Faunce at his
pied à terre in Essex Street.
He had written for an appointment on business connected with Lady
Perivale's case, and Faunce had replied asking him to call at his
rooms in Essex Street at ten o'clock next morning. An early hour,
which denoted the man whose every hour was valuable.
He found the house one of the oldest in the old-world street, next
door to a nest of prosperous solicitors, but itself of a somewhat
shabby and retiring aspect. The bell was answered by a bright-eyed
servant girl, clean and fresh looking, but with an accent that
suggested the Irish Town Limerick, rather than a London slum—a
much pleasanter accent to Haldane's ear.
To the inquiry if Mr. Faunce lived there, she answered with a note of
interrogation.
"Mr. Wh-hat?"
"Mr. Faunce."
"Yes, he does. Any message?"
"Is he at home?"
"I don't know. I'll go and see. Wh-hat name?"
A quick-eyed scrutiny of the visitor's spotless holland waistcoat, the
neat dark stripes of the straight-knee'd trousers falling in a graceful
curve over the irreproachable boots, and the sheen of a silk-faced
coat, had assured her of his respectability before she committed
herself even so far as that.
But when this well-groomed gentleman, who was far too quietly
dressed to be a member of the swell-mob, produced an immaculate
card out of a silver case, she grasped it and dashed up the steep
stairs.
"Will I tell 'um you want to see 'um?"
"Thanks."
"I shall!" and she vanished round the first landing.
She was back again and leaning over the same spot on the
bannister rail in half a minute.
"You're to be good enough to step up, if ye plaze, surr."
Mr. Faunce occupied the second floor, front and back, as sitting-
room and bedroom; the busy nature and uncertain hours of his
avocations during the last few years having made his rural retreat at
Putney impossible for him except in the chance intervals of his
serious work, or from Friday to Monday, when that work was slack. It
was not that he loved wife and home less, but that he loved duty
more.
He emerged from the bedroom as Haldane entered the sitting-room,
in the act of fixing a collar to his grey flannel shirt, and welcomed his
visitor cordially, with apologies for not being dressed. He had been
late overnight, and had been slower than usual at his toilet, as he
was suffering from a touch of rheumatism. His profession was
betrayed by a pair of regulation high-waisted trousers of a thick blue-
black material, over Blucher boots, which were also made to the
sealed pattern of the Force. But his costume was rounded off by a
pepper-and-salt Norfolk jacket of workman-like cut.
There was no paltry pride about Mr. Faunce. Although a man of
respectable parentage, good parts, and education, he was not in the
least ashamed of having been for many years a respected member
of the Police. In ordinary life he somewhat affected the get-up of a
country parson with sporting tastes; but here, in his own den, and
quite at his ease, he was nothing more or less than a retired police-
officer.
His rheumatism had taken him in the arm, he explained, or he would
have been at his table there writing up one of his cases.
"There is often as much in one of 'em as would make a three-volume
novel, Mr. Haldane;" and then, with a polite wave of the hand—"in
bulk," he added, disclaiming all literary pretentions, and at the same
time motioning his guest to a chair.
This laborious penwork was perhaps the most remarkable feature in
John Faunce's career. The hours of patient labour this supremely
patient man employed in noting down every detail and every word
concerning the case in hand, which may have come to the notice of
himself or any of his numerous temporary assistants, in and out of
the police-force, stamped him as the detective who is born, not
made, or, in other words, the worker who loves his work.
The room reflected the man's mind. It was a perfectly arranged
receptacle of a wonderful amount of precise information. It was like
the sitting-room of an exceptionally methodical student preparing for
a very stiff examination. The neat dwarf bookcase contained a
goodly number of standard books of reference, and a lesser number
of the most famous examples of modern fiction.
One corner of the room was occupied by a stack of japanned tin
boxes that recalled a solicitor's office; but these boxes had no
lettering upon them. A discreet little numeral was sufficient indication
of their contents for Faunce, who was incapable of forgetting a fact
once registered in the book of his mind.
"You must find papers accumulate rapidly in your work, Mr. Faunce,"
said Haldane.
"They would if I let them, sir; but I don't. When once a case is settled
or withdrawn from my hands, I return all letters and other papers that
may have reached me, and I burn my history of the case."
"You will have nothing left for your Reminiscences, then?"
"They are here, sir," the detective replied sharply, tapping his
massive brow; "and one day—well, sir, one day I may let the reading
world know that truth is stranger—and sometimes even more thrilling
—than fiction. But I must have consummate cheek to talk of fiction to
the author of 'Mary Deane.'"
Haldane started, half inclined to resent an impertinence; but a glance
at the man's fine head and brilliant eye reminded him that the
detective and the novelist might be upon the same intellectual plane,
or that in sheer brain power the man from Scotland Yard might be his
superior.
Faunce had seen the look, and smiled his quiet smile.
"It's one of the penalties of being famous, Mr. Haldane, that your
inferiors may venture to admire you. I have your book among my
favourites."
He pointed to the shelf, where Haldane saw the modest, dark-green
cloth back of his one novel, between "Esmond" and "The Woman in
White."
"And now to business, sir. And first allow me to say that I am glad to
see any friend of Lady Perivale's."
"Thank you, Mr. Faunce. You must not suppose that Lady Perivale
sent me here. She did not even know that I wanted to see you; and I
must ask you not to mention my visit. I heard of what you were doing
from a friend of Lady Perivale's, not from herself, and I am here to
consult you on a matter that only indirectly affects her case."
"Well, sir, I am at your service."
"I shall be perfectly frank with you, Mr. Faunce. I believe a gentleman
of your profession may be considered a kind of father confessor, that
anything I say in this office will be—strictly Masonic."
"That is so."
"Well, then, I may tell you in the first place that Lady Perivale is the
woman whom I admire and respect above all other women, and that
it is my highest ambition to win her for my wife."
"I think that is a very natural ambition, sir, in any gentleman who—
being free to choose—has the honour to know that lady," Faunce
replied, with a touch of enthusiasm.
"I know something of Colonel Rannock's antecedents, and have met
him in society, though he was never a friend of mine; and when I
heard the scandal about Lady Perivale, it occurred to me that the
best thing I could do, in her interest, was to find Rannock and call
upon him to clear her name."
"A difficult thing for him to do, sir, even if he were willing to do it."
"I thought the way might be found, if the man were made to feel that
it must be found. I have the worst possible opinion of Colonel
Rannock; but a man of that character has generally a weak joint in
his harness, and I thought I should be able to bring him to book."
"A very tough customer, I'm afraid, sir. A human armadillo."
"The first matter was to find him. He was said to be in the Rocky
Mountains, and I was prepared to go there after him; only such an
expedition seemed improbable at the time of year. I had heard of him
in chambers in the Albany; but on inquiry there I found he gave up
his chambers last March, sold lease and furniture, and that his
present address, if he had one in London, was unknown."
"Then I take it, sir, not having my professional experience, you were
baffled, and went no further."
"No; I wasn't beaten quite so easily. I think, Faunce, your profession
has a certain fascination for every man. It is the hunter's instinct,
common to mankind, from the Stone Age downwards. After a good
deal of trouble I found Rannock's late body-servant, a shrewd fellow,
now billiard-marker at the Sans-Souci Club; and from him I heard
that Rannock's destination was not the Rockies, but Klondyke. He
left London for New York by the American Line at the end of March,
taking the money he got for his lease and furniture, and he was to
join two other men—whose names his servant gave me—at San
Francisco, on their way to Vancouver. He was to write to his servant
about certain confidential matters as soon as he arrived in New York,
and was to send him money if he prospered in his gold-digging, for
certain special payments, and for wages in arrear. I had no interest
in knowing more of these transactions than the man chose to tell me;
but the one salient fact is that no communication of any kind has
reached the servant since his master left him, and the man feels
considerable anxiety on his account. He has written to an agent in
San Francisco, whose address Rannock had given him, and the
agent replied that no such person as Colonel Rannock had been at
his office or had communicated with him."
"Well, sir, Colonel Rannock changed his mind at the eleventh hour;
or he had a reason for pretending to go to one place and going to
another," said Faunce, quietly, looking up from a writing-pad on
which he had made two or three pencil-notes.
"That might be so. I cabled an inquiry to the agent, whose letter to
the valet was six weeks old, and I asked the whereabouts of the two
friends whose party Rannock was to join. The reply came this
morning. No news of Rannock; the other men started for Vancouver
on April 13th."
"Do you want me to pursue this inquiry further, Mr. Haldane?"
"Yes; I want to find Rannock. It may be a foolish idea on my part. But
Lady Perivale has been cruelly injured by the association of her
name with this man—possibly by no fault of his—possibly by some
devilish device to punish her for having slighted him."
"That hardly seems likely. They may have done such things in the
last century, sir, when duelling was in fashion, and when a fine
gentleman thought it no disgrace to wager a thousand pounds
against a lady's honour, and write his wager in the club books, if she
happened to offend him. But it doesn't seem likely nowadays."
"I want you to find this man," pursued Haldane, surprised, and a little
vexed, at Faunce's dilettante air.
He had not expected to find a detective who talked like an educated
man, and he began to doubt the criminal investigator's professional
skill, in spite of his tin boxes and reference books, and appearance
of mental power.
"In Lady Perivale's interest?"
"Certainly."
"Don't you think, sir, you'd better let me solve the problem on my own
lines? You are asking me to take up a tangled skein at the wrong
end. I am travelling steadily along my own road, and you want me to
go off at a tangent. I dare say I shall come to Colonel Rannock in
good time, working my own way."
"If that is so, I won't interfere," Haldane said, with a troubled look. "All
my anxiety is for Lady Perivale's rehabilitation, and every hour's
delay irritates me."
"You may safely leave the matter to me, sir. Festina lente. These
things can't be hurried. I shall give the case my utmost attention, and
as much time as I can spare, consistently with my duty to other
clients."
"You have other cases on your hands?"
Faunce smiled his grave, benign smile.
"Four years ago, when I retired from the C.I., I thought I was going to
settle down in a cottage at Putney, with my good little wife, and enjoy
my otium cum dignitate for the rest of my days," said Faunce,
confidentially, "but, to tell you the truth, Mr. Haldane, I found the
otium rather boring, and, one or two cases falling in my way,
fortuitously, I took up the old business in a new form, and devoted
myself to those curious cases which are of frequent occurrence in
the best-regulated families, cases requiring very delicate handling,
inexhaustible patience, and a highly-trained skill. Since then I have
had more work brought me than I could possibly undertake; and I
have been, so far, fortunate in giving my clients satisfaction. I hope I
shall satisfy Lady Perivale."
There was a firmness in Faunce's present tone that pleased
Haldane.
"At any rate, it was just as well that you should know the result of my
search for Rannock," he said, taking up his hat and stick.
"Certainly, sir. Any information bearing on the case is of value, and I
thank you for coming to me," answered Faunce, as he rose to escort
his visitor to the door.
He did not attach any significance to the fact that Colonel Rannock
had announced his intention of going to Klondyke, and had not gone
there. He might have twenty reasons for throwing his servant off the
scent; or he might have changed his mind. The new gold region is
too near the North Pole to be attractive to a man of luxurious habits,
accustomed to chambers in the Albany, and the run of half a dozen
rowdy country houses, where the company was mixed and the play
high.
Sport in Scotland and Ireland, sport in Norway, or even in Iceland,
might inure a man to a hard life, but it would not bring him within
measurable distance of the hazards and hardships in that white
world beyond Dawson City.
John Faunce, seated in front of his empty fireplace, listened
mechanically to a barrel-organ playing the "Washington Post," and
meditated upon Arthur Haldane's statement.
He had not been idle since his return to London, and had made
certain inquiries about Colonel Rannock among people who were
likely to know. He had interviewed a fashionable gunmaker with
whom Rannock had dealt for twenty years, and the secretary of a
club which he had frequented for about the same period. The man
was frankly Bohemian in his tastes, but had always kept a certain
footing in society, and, in his own phrase, had never been "bowled
out." He had been banished from no baccarat table, though he was
not untainted with a suspicion of occasionally tampering with his
stake. He played all the fashionable card games, and, like Dudley
Smooth, though he did not cheat, he always won. He had plenty of
followers among the callow youth who laughed at his jokes and
almost died of his cigars; but he had no friends of his own age and
station, and the great ladies of the land never admitted him within
their intimate circle, though they might send him a card once or twice
a year for a big party, out of friendly feeling for his mother—five-and-
twenty years a widow, and for the greater part of her life attached to
the Court.
Would such a man wheel a barrow and tramp the snow-bound
shores of the Yukon River? Unlikely as the thing seemed, Faunce
told himself that it was not impossible. Rannock had fought well in
the Indian hill-country, had never been a feather-bed soldier, and had
never affected the passing fashion of effeminacy. He had loved
music with that inborn love which is like an instinct, and had made
himself a fine player with very little trouble, considering the exacting
nature of the 'cello; but he had never put on dilettante airs, or
pretended that music was the only thing worth living for. He was as
much at home with men who painted pictures as with composers
and fiddlers. Versatility was the chief note in his character. The
Scotch University, the Army school, the mess-room, the continental
wanderings of later years, had made him an expert in most things

The Influence of Oscar Wilde On W B Yeats 1St Ed Edition Noreen Doody Full Chapter

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The Influence of Oscar Wilde on W.B.

Yeats 1st ed. Edition Noreen Doody

ISBN 978-3-319-89547-5 ISBN 978-3-319-89548-2 (eBook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018943804

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

Section I Influence and Identity 1

1 Introduction: “An Echo of Someone Else’s Music” 3

3 “A Provincial Like Myself”: Yeats, Wilde and the Politics

Section II Mask and Image 107

4 Metaphysics and Masks (1908–1917) 109

5 The Idea Incarnate: Mask and Image (1915–1917) 135

Section III Salomé : Symbolism, Dance and Theories of Being 171

6 “Surface and Symbol”: Wilde’s Salomé, French

7 Yeats’s Creative Use of Wilde’s Salomé in his Revisions

8 “Drama as Personal as a Lyric”: The Centrality of Wilde’s

9 “There Must Be Severed Heads”: Yeats’s Final

Influence and Identity

Introduction: “An Echo of Someone Else’s

© The Author(s) 2018 3

(1865–1939). It asserts that Wilde was a major precursor of W.B. Yeats,

the Yeats/Wilde literary relationship. At that particular historical moment,

Robert H. Sherard published Oscar Wilde: The Story of an Unhappy

Yeats was often prompted by varied images that he perceived in Wilde

the antithetical era of the anti-Christ—as Yeats describes it in his poem,

The darkness drops again but now I know

Wilde’s influence is crucial to Yeats’s development of these powerful

Critic as Artist as Wilde”, on the propensity of critics to attribute to “more

been called into question by theories favouring the notion of intertex-

this phenomenon in a story told by Robbie Ross: “Wilde complained to

Although Wilde might well have understood this necessity, remarking

procedure originates in this discourse of irenic possibility. Christopher

of Yeats’s creative years, 1891–1939. This section looks at symbolism and

Wildean input is essential to the building of Yeats’s philosophical theses.

“T.S. Eliot’s Ambiviolences: Oscar Wilde as Masked Precursor” in The

Influence Revisited: Alfonsina Storni and Delmira Agustin”. Revista

Eliot, T.S. “Reflections on Contemporary Poetry”. The Egoist, Vol. VI (July,

Steinman, Michael. Yeats’s Heroic Figures: Wilde, Parnell, Swift, Casement.

A Literary Friendship (1888–1895)

© The Author(s) 2018 31

the family who were in difficult financial circumstances at the time.

tual diminishment of this position by the historic oppression of England

Attacking the ‘stupidity, hypocrisy and Philistinism’ that pervade English

whom he described as a ‘dark star’ presiding over the political conscious-

and discussions suffering paroxysms of anxiety and embarrassment in rec-

"Poor old Tony. November 22th, '88."

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Section I Influence and Identity 1

1 Introduction: “An Echo of Someone Else’s Music” 3

3 “A Provincial Like Myself”: Yeats, Wilde and the Politics

Section II Mask and Image 107

4 Metaphysics and Masks (1908–1917) 109

5 The Idea Incarnate: Mask and Image (1915–1917) 135

Section III Salomé : Symbolism, Dance and Theories of Being 171

6 “Surface and Symbol”: Wilde’s Salomé, French

7 Yeats’s Creative Use of Wilde’s Salomé in his Revisions

8 “Drama as Personal as a Lyric”: The Centrality of Wilde’s

9 “There Must Be Severed Heads”: Yeats’s Final