Franny Moyle Read Online Free Page B

and friend the painter James McNeill Whistler. In 1877 Whistler had had the architect du jour Edward Godwin design ‘The White House’ in Tite Street for him. Here ebonized and gilt furniture stood amid Japanese cabinets and oriental carpets. But the house was sold just two years later, when Whistler went bankrupt.
    In 1879 Miles commissioned the same architect to remodel 1 Tite Street into another temple of Aestheticism. Designing a studio at the very top of the house, Godwin created light airy interiors that, painted white, would display Miles’s collection of exotic flowers and plants. A huge inglenook in the studio framed bespoke furniture, and throughout the house was indulged in exquisite detail such as doorand furniture handles in the form of swan’s heads and glassware specifically blown by the famous Arts and Crafts glass manufacturers Powell & Sons of Whitefriars.
    In 1880 Miles and Wilde were installed in Keats House, where their indulgence of things beautiful continued. Ironically Oscar’s sets of rooms included items he bought from the sale of the bankrupt Whistler’s effects, notably a painting of Sarah Bernhardt.
    But more was going on in Chelsea than tea, painting and poetry. Canon Miles’s concern over Oscar’s verse may well have been heightened by wider worries over the moral well-being of his son. With a reputation for being both a ladies’ man, and also for keeping the company of known homosexuals, Miles was living a sexually liberal life. Within a decade he would be dead from syphilis. Although Miles’s father did not accuse Oscar of similar misdemeanours, he warned him that his poetry might suggest otherwise. It was an early lesson in the power of appearances that Oscar would have done well to remember.
    â€˜If we seem to advise a separation for a time it is not because we do not believe you in character to be very different to what you suggest in your poetry,’ Canon Miles explained, ‘but it is because you do not see the risk we see in a published poem which makes all who read it say to themselves, “this is outside the pale of poetry”, it is licentious and may do great harm to any soul who reads it.’ 6 Oscar duly packed his bags and left Keats House, moving temporarily into rooms close to his mother and Willie, in Charles Street in Mayfair.
    The moral laxity that those such as Canon Miles saw as part and parcel of the Aesthetic proposition was either of no concern to Constance or, far more likely, beyond her sightline. Leading a sheltered life in Lancaster Gate, Constance saw only the creative, artistic aspect of the bohemian set. She had not yet had the opportunity to comprehend that what went with this was a set of lifestyles that were just as challenging to the social protocols of the day. Although Constance understood adultery and violence, she had no direct experience of the new sexual liberties that were being explored by many of those whose art fascinated her.
    On 18 November 1881 a letter from her stepfather, Mr Swinburne-King, arrived, and in it Constance discovered a poem teasing her about her infatuation with Oscar. Swinburne-King had penned what he termed a ‘sonnet’ entitled ‘The Lily to the Sunflower’ for his stepdaughter’s amusement:
    One hour with thee, O Wilde,
    Would joy this longing Childe
    But she, tho’ twenty-four
    To hear thy lips out-pour
    From depths of heart-born lore –
    What ecstasy she’d score: –
    To dream, Ah me,
    E’en I might be
    For age & evermore
    O Wilde with Thee!
    2.
    Nor cease thy madding dream
    My Soul, until I scream –
    Not longer meek & milde: –
    By hopes deferement riled,
    By throbbing love beguiled
    And torturing passions piled
    I dream, ah me
    So this to be
    For age and ever Wilde
    O Wilde with Thee!
    Constance, highly amused, penned her own poem by way of reply:
    Lyrics from the Childe to her Kinge
    Oh, do though gently singe
    To me, oh!