Three Times Tried—III

In this fifth and final article of the seri it’s a bit like yeah the report was no family plans they said is a top 10 best and we’ve only looked at the call center ones he said that so I didn’t I looked at they can do but that’s after they’ve dealt with it don’t want we wanna be alerted first we can go around then we Whether ambulance is needed but this guy say no it sounds like an I’m busy is needed and when an ambulance comes in they can’t find don’t worry she’s down about shit all that crap we got we wanna be we won’t be that far away neither or Dave won’t right well Mel but anywayes we shall look at the third appearance of Wilde’s sonnet in 1899.

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Previous Articles in this Series

1. A handwritten sonnet by Oscar Wilde appears on the Antiques Roadshow,
2. A critical analysis of the poem.
3. Three Times Tried—I: The poem’s first appearance as Un Amant De Nos Jours.
4. Three Times Tried—II: The poem’s second appearance as The New Remorse.

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In the previous article in this series we had left Wilde and Douglas (to whom Wilde had previously given the poem) at a point in their relationship where, despite a failed attempt to live together in Naples, a separation was inevitable. Douglas later recounted that ‘familiarities’ with Wilde never resumed after he came out of prison, saying that ‘Wilde always claimed his love for me was ideal.’¹

It is apposite, then, that when an unrequited Wilde was in search of a new ideal, the title he next gave to the poem was ‘Ideal Love’.

This time it exists in manuscript only (as revealed on the Antiques Roadshow), and again it reads:

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IDEAL LOVE

The sin was mine: I did not understand;
So now is music prisoned in her cave,
Save where some ebbing desultory wave
Frets with its restless whorls this meagre strand.
And in the withered hollow of this land
Hath Summer dug herself so deep a grave,
That hardly can the silver willow crave
One little blossom from keen Winter’s hand.

But who is this that cometh by the shore?
Nay, love, look up and wonder! Who is this
That cometh in dyed garments from the South?
It is thy new-found Lord, and he shall kiss
The yet unravished roses of thy mouth,
And I shall weep and worship, as before.

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By 1899 Wilde was living in post-prison exile in Paris, permanently hard up and relying on friends to support him. His lonely and outcast circumstances no doubt intensified his soul’s instinct in the poem ‘to weep and worship, as before’ — a state that evidently lasted until the summer of that year, when another new-found Lord “cometh by the shore”.

Christian Frederick Gauss was a recent graduate of the University of Michigan. His parents were German and he had spent time in France, so he was fluent in both languages and would eventually become Professor of Modern Languages at Princeton, the private Ivy League university.

In 1899 he had been sent to France to cover the Dreyfus case for an American newspaper. His contact with Wilde probably came about as a result of Wilde’s dramatic involvement, through careless talk, in the Dreyfus scandal that was gripping France.

It is worth considering how Wilde, after his imprisonment and years of continental exile, was able to recall the poem he inscribed on the sheet of paper he gave to Christian Gauss. With frequent and disruptive changes of location, Oscar had long since left behind his books and papers⁷, and it seems highly unlikely that he would have had by him a twelve-year-old copy of The Court and Society Review or a seven-year-old copy of The Spirit Lamp. He might have retained the poem in what Josephine Guy describes as ‘Wilde’s legendary retentive memory’.⁸

It is quite possible, however, that he kept the copy of it, perhaps in a notebook, in case it might be required at moments such as his meeting with Gauss. This invites the speculation that Wilde may have presented, or even dedicated, the poem to other young men yet unknown. In any event, Wilde was able to reproduce the poem fairly accurately for Gauss, as the variorum appended to this analysis of the poem demonstrates.

The Gauss whom Wilde met in 1899 was a blond, twenty-one year-old aspiring poet, more bohemian than he later became, and, indeed, more mysterious—as the book of his papers does not begin until his diary of 1911.⁹

Edmund Wilson¹⁰ wrote an appreciative memoir of Gauss after his old mentor’s death in 1951. In it he recounted how he and his fellow students found it hard to imagine their professor, a quiet, bald gentleman, as a long-haired aesthete in the Paris of the 1890s who wore a green jacket and was said to have worked his way through all the drugs mentioned in Baudelaire’s Les Paradis Artificiels. 

In spite of the contrast with his bohemian days, however, Wilson admitted that Gauss ‘had always kept a certain loyalty to the “estheticism” [sic] of the end of the century’.

“He would surprise you from time to time by telling you of some conversation he had had with Oscar Wilde… He rather admired Wilde with whom he had talked in cafés where the latter was sitting alone and running up high piles of saucers.“¹¹

Wilson also records that Wilde was in the habit of presenting Gauss with inscribed copies of his books, and indeed the Princeton collection contains a first edition of An Ideal Husband inscribed: ‘Christian Frederick Gauss from his friend the author. in esteem: in recognition:’

So it is entirely in keeping that Wilde would offer Gauss a copy of his poem—but how significant is this third presentation?

It was not unusual for Wilde to inscribe copies of his books, nor occasionally to transcribe manuscript fragments of his sayings. What is surprising is that Wilde would present a personally dedicated holograph of a full sonnet with such an intimate meaning for a second time to a different person. I believe the document is unique in this respect. It is also significant that Wilde gave three different titles to the same work, each emotionally resonant and biographically relevant. Again, this appears to be unique. 

As was the case when he gave the sonnet to Douglas, Wilde could again be reasonably certain that Gauss was not aware of its previous appearances in print. It had surfaced in only one short-lived journal and a student magazine when Gauss was growing up thousands of miles away in America.¹² So Wilde could personalize the sonnet once more as ‘Ideal Love’. It was a befitting title for Wilde, who had long been immersed in the notion of ideals. It was a disposition which revealed itself in a near religious adherence to the classical Greek love of form and the Platonic idealism of spirit. In his works, too, Wilde had mused upon the myth of the ideal husband; and in The Picture of Dorian Gray the image of Dorian is characterized as an Adonis, which Ruth Robbins¹³ has speculated might have been inspired by Poe’s short story ‘The Oval Portrait’ in which a painter describes his ideal love. Therefore, was Wilde in search of a new ideal, and would Gauss make for a likely love interest? 

We can evaluate the impression Wilde made upon Gauss during their café experiences because, perhaps predictably, Gauss incorporated it into his own poetry. His most striking work of this period is titled ‘In Bohemia: A Masque’, first published in a literary monthly called East and West in June 1900.¹⁴  When submitting the poem to the editors, Gauss said that he had written it during the previous summer in Paris and he used the nom de plume of Sebastian de l’Isle (although the poem was published over Gauss’s own name). Gauss’s letter, his poem and his romantic self-styling ‘lead to interesting conjectures regarding the young Michigan fellow who during the summer of 1899 was tasting the exciting joys of Paris’.¹⁵ These conjectures were, however, entirely wrong, as the editors, who knew nothing of Gauss’s association with Oscar Wilde, assumed that ‘The Poet’, who is exhorted to abandon dissipation and get back to writing, was André Ibels, the dedicatee, described as ‘a minor poet and writer for the stage’.¹⁶

Knowing, as we now do, of Gauss’s connection with Oscar, ‘In Bohemia’ reads like an allegory of their brief encounter, with three characters in a drinking establishment: The Muse, The Poet, and A Voice. The Muse addresses the Poet: ‘Shame, Poet, at thy tavern table wake!’ The Muse employs Greek and Keatsian allusions redolent of Wilde to adjure the Poet to forsake Parisian dissipations and become again ‘one who dared the sheer, steep heights of song’. The Muse chastises the Poet, saying that his fevered brain is only a fantasy from which he can be healed again. But the Poet responds:

Better for me the smoke of cigarette
Chasèd by drunken voices, — the grisette
Lolling her ribald song, than wasted days,
Your heights of wonder, promised crown of bays

Compare this verse of Gauss’s with one of Wilde’s own:

I have made my choice, have lived my poems, and, though youth is gone in wasted days,
I have found the lover’s crown of myrtle better than the poet’s crown of bays.¹⁷

Without straining too much into comparative literature, the Wildean parallels in the Gauss poem are unmistakeable. Further, and throughout the poem, Gauss uses uncommon words and names such as mandragore, asphodel, ambrosial, Mitylene, Endymion, Calypso and Sphinx, all of which appear in Wilde but rarely, if at all, together elsewhere. Intriguing, too, is that after returning from Paris in 1900 Gauss adopted the Wildean nom de plume of Sebastian de L’Isle, recalling Wilde’s Parisian alias of Sebastian Melmoth. 

Of course, it is possible that the acquaintance of the two poets was casual and the poem just a generous courtesy; also, we must remember that Wilde was in financial straits and that his gifts to Gauss may simply have featured in some ingratiation towards more cognac and absinthe.¹⁸ While all that would seem reasonable, one senses there was more at stake for Wilde in giving the poem a fresh dedication, and the fact that he changed the poem’s title to avoid its recognition is significant in itself. The appearance of ‘Ideal Love’ on the Antiques Roadshow may have unearthed a new manuscript, but perhaps this third iteration of the poem also revealed a new ideal for Wilde. 

Given this reappraisal of Wilde’s poem, we must allow for the possibility that Wilde did again have in mind an expression of love or seduction. Or, at the very least, Wilde harboured a personal reason for re-dedicating the poem. What we do know is that the sonnet, with its Biblical overtones, is emblematic of Wilde’s association of his ideal with the personality of Christ  —  a man who is perfectly and absolutely himself ¹⁹— and it would be entirely like Wilde to find such an ideal in a man named Christian.

If all this is true, and if no deeper relationship developed, one cannot resist noting how the recurrence of the sonnet punctuates the Wilde story with moments of pathos. For, as sacred to him as was his salvation from wedlock when the poem first appeared as ‘Un Amant De Nos Jours’, and as Christ-like as Wilde imagined a savior in his relationship with Douglas when it had its second outing as ‘The New Remorse’, it would make for a poignant Biblical analogy if, at the last, his ‘Ideal Love’ had now been denied him thrice.

© John Cooper, 2025.

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Footnotes:

1. 24 Douglas, 618 ↩︎
2. 25 Sturgis, 678 ↩︎
3. 26 Letter from Wilde to Leonard Smithers [July 1899] in Holland & Hart-Davis, 1,158 ↩︎
4. 27 Letter from Wilde to Frank Harris [July 1899] in Holland & Hart-Davis, 1,159 ↩︎
5. Letter from Wilde to Leonard Smithers [August 1899] in Holland and Hart-Davis, 1,161 ↩︎
6. Wilde wrote to Leonard Smithers from the Hôtel d’Alsace in a letter postmarked 22 August 1899 but there were earlier, undated, letters from the same address. (Holland & Hart-Davis, 1,161-2). In another letter he tells Smithers that he still does not have his clothes which are being held by the Hôtel Marsollier until £10 is paid. (Letter from Wilde to Leonard Smithers [circa 26 August 1899] in Holland & Hart-Davies, 1,163) ↩︎
7. According to Edmund Wilson: ‘Christian used to tell me, with evident respect, that Wilde in his last days had kept only three volumes: a copy of The Renaissance that had been given him by Pater, Flaubert’s La Tentation de St Antoine, and Swinburne’s Atalanta in Calydon. (Wilson, 349) ↩︎
8. 31 Guy (2005) 485 ↩︎
9. See Jackson and Haydn. In 1934, when he was Dean of Princeton, Gauss published A Primer for Tomorrow in which he asked if Western civilisation could survive, a question that had been much discussed since the publication in 1918 of Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West. He believed that a religious revival was necessary, coupled with elements of Soviet communism, and he concluded by asking: ‘Are we then afflicted by decadence? To the American, decadence was always a frightening word. I hope it still is… We must eternalize our own God-given day by building into it abiding human values… or be willing to have later men say of us, as they have said of so many ages in the past, that enfeebled sons of sturdier ancestors, we wrought nothing further and weakly declined into the death of our culture.’ (Gauss, 307-8) ↩︎
10. Edmund Wilson Jr. (1895—1972) was an American writer, literary critic, and journalist. ↩︎
11. 33 Wilson, 349 ↩︎
12. Gauss would have been nine when the poem appeared in The Court and Society Review and fourteen when it appeared in The Spirit Lamp. ↩︎
13. 36 Robbins, 121 ↩︎
14. ‘In Bohemia: A Masque’, Frederick Christian Gauss. East & West, A Monthly Magazine of Letters, June 1900, 248. Reprinted in The Princeton University Library Chronicle, vol. 13, no. 4, summer 1952, 197-99 ↩︎
15. 38 Hellmann, 196 ↩︎
16. Hellmann, 196 ↩︎
17. From ΓΛΥΚΥΠΙΚΡΟΣ ΕΡΩΣ (Bittersweet Love) first published in Wilde’s Poems (1881). This is the concluding verse. See Wilde (2000) 127 ↩︎
18. Edmund Wilson’s biographer, Jeffrey Meyers, records that Gauss ‘bought drinks for Wilde during his homosexual exile’. (Meyers, 23-4) ↩︎
19. See the discussion of the personality of Jesus Christ in De Profundis, Holland & Hart-Davis, 740-753 ↩︎

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Works Cited In This Series

Joseph Bristow (2022) ‘Hyacinthe Adoré: The Spirit Lamp and Male Homoerotic Culture’, The Wildean, 60, January 2022, 37-60

Anya Clayworth (2004) Oscar Wilde: Selected Journalism, Oxford: Oxford University Press

Rupert Croft-Cooke (1963) Bosie, Lord Alfred Douglas, His Friends and Enemies, London: W. H. Allen

Alfred Douglas (1929) The Autobiography of Lord Alfred Douglas, London: Martin Secker

Richard Ellmann (1987) Oscar Wilde, London: Hamish Hamilton

Nicholas Frankel (2014) ‘A New Poem by Christina Rossetti’, Notes and Queries, Volume 259, Number 1, March 2014, 92–95

Christian Gauss (1934) A Primer for Tomorrow: Being an Introduction to Contemporary Civilisation, New York and London: Charles Scribner and Sons

Josephine Guy (1998) ‘Self-plagiarism, Creativity and Craftmanship in Oscar Wilde’, English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920, vol. 41, no. 1 (2005) ‘Oscar Wilde’s “Self Plagiarism”: Some New Manuscript Evidence’, Notes and Queries, December 2005, 485-8 

George S. Hellmann (1952) ‘An Early Poem by Dean Gauss’, The Princeton University Library Chronicle, vol. 13, no. 4, summer 1952, 195-7

Merlin Holland (2011) ‘A Blatant Attempt to Sensationalise’, The Wildean, 38, January 2011, 15-17

Merlin Holland & Rupert Hart-Davis (eds, 2000) The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde, London: Fourth Estate

Katherine Gauss Jackson and Hiram Haydn(1957) The Papers of Christian Gauss, New York: Random House

Neil McKenna (2003) The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde, London: Century

Gregory Mackie (2019) Beautiful Untrue Things: Forging Oscar Wilde’s Extraordinary Afterlife, Toronto: Toronto University Press

J. Robert Maguire(2013) Ceremonies of Bravery: Oscar Wilde, Carlos Blacker and the Dreyfus Affair, Oxford: Oxford University Press

Stuart Mason (Christopher Sclater Millard) (1914) Bibliography of Oscar Wilde, London: T. Werner Laurie

Donald Mead (2011) ‘Oscar Wilde, Alsager Vian and The Court and Society Review’, The Wildean, 38, January 2011, 6-14

Jeffrey Meyers (2003) Edmund Wilson, A Biography, Boston, Mass: Houghton Mifflin

A Murray (2016) ‘The Dance of Death: Fitzgerald and Decadence’, Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 62, no. 3, 387-411.

Ruth Robbins (2011) Oscar Wilde, India: Bloomsbury Academic

Matthew Sturgis (2018) Oscar: A Life, London: Head of Zeus

Oscar Wilde (2000) The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde Volume 1: Poems and Poems in Prose, eds Bobby Fong and Karl Beckson, Oxford: Oxford University Press

Edmund Wilson (1952) ‘Portrait: Christian Gauss’, The American Scholar, vol. 21, no. 3 (Summer 1952) 345-55

Thomas Wright (2008) Oscar’s Books, London: Chatto & Windus

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Acknowledgements

I am grateful for the perspectives and information offered during discussion of these articles by Nicholas Frankel, Michael Seeney, and Mark Samuels Lasner. With thanks to Robert Whelan, editor of The Wildean, and the helpful textual suggestions of its anonymous peer reviewers, who assisted with the original article.

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