Franny Moyle (28 page)

For her initiation Constance put on a black tunic and red shoes, allowed herself to be blindfolded and had a cord wound round her waist three times. She was then led into a room, temporarily converted into a ‘temple'. Here members wearing the yet more theatrical dress of the offices of the Order were standing in deeply symbolic arrangement, along with banners and props replete with magical symbolism.

Constance and the Comtesse held hands throughout the bizarre performance that ensued. The Comtesse was blasé and noted that the ‘theatrical ceremony … would have been amusing had it not been taken so seriously'. Constance, however, more impressionable than her colleague, was so nervous that she shook throughout. Her hands were like blocks of ice and ‘her beautiful eyes were full of tears'.
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The two women, kneeling before the Hierophant, a senior officer who, sitting on a throne, was dressed in scarlet and carried a banner, placed their left hands in his, and recited a lengthy obligation to the Order. It included an undertaking to complete secrecy. Constance would have had to acknowledge that, should she betray the Order, she would be expelled ‘as a wilfully perjured wretch, void of all moral worth, and unfit for the society of all upright and true persons' and submit herself ‘to a deadly and hostile current of will set in motion by the chiefs of the Order, by which I should fall slain or paralysed without visible weapon, as if blasted by the Lightning Flash!' At the moment at which this last terrible oath was uttered the Hiereus, another officer dressed in black, would have pressed a sword into the nape of Constance's neck.

After this strange ordeal, blindfolds were removed and more
mundane paperwork sorted out. Constance paid a ios admission fee, and then a further 2s for her annual membership. She bought a ‘sash' to wear at Order gatherings, at a cost of 2s, and then paid a further 7s for necessary texts associated with the society: a copy of the rituals she would have to learn and the pamphlet written by Westcott entitled
The Historic Lecture for Neophytes
, which provided some history for the Order and contained an account of its structure and teachings.

The Golden Dawn was structured around three key stages through which members had to pass. The first of these was the society's Outer Order, which comprised an initiate or Neophyte grade, followed by four other grades of achievement. To move between grades members were required to study and pass examinations that tested their knowledge of ancient languages such as Hebrew, the key rituals of their grade and the fundamental theories on which the Order's beliefs were based. After study and passing crucial examinations the Neophyte could move to the Zelator grade and then through the Theoricus and Practicus grades to the highest rank of Philosophus.

Once one had achieved the status of a Philosophus, one could be initiated into the Second Order, where there were three further Grades of Adeptship. Adepts were sufficiently authoritative to be able to tutor Outer Order members and establish temples. The third and highest Order of the Golden Dawn had three further grades: Magister Templi, Magus and Ipsissimus. These grades were, however, reserved for beings that existed on the astral plane, not on mundane earth.

The Comtesse's account of her and Constance's introduction to the Order was written some twenty years after the event and to some extent may have been influenced by hindsight. Nevertheless Anna Brémont's recollections are intriguing. Studying with her, the Comtesse got to know Constance well:

I learned to read in that clear mirror her noble beautiful character and discern her secret unrest and sadness, her weakness and patience under
the process of disillusionment through which she was passing. I divined that she was not serious in the pursuit of occult knowledge, that she had an ulterior object in becoming a member, and that her end was to use the curious lore for some purpose other than that intended by the Order, and that her frank, truthful spirit chafed under the deception she was practising.
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The implication is that Constance had become an initiate of the Golden Dawn as part of a research project for her husband. Brémont quite clearly accuses Constance of reporting ‘the ceremony and all its details to her husband' and of ‘giving away the lore so laboriously and enthusiastically acquired by the members'. She also notes that the disaster that would be visited on Constance and Oscar in the next decade was attributed by many members of the Order ‘to the breaking of her pledged word'.

It seems hard to conceive that Constance would put in so many hours of study at a time when she was furiously busy with her politics, was writing stories, managing the
Rational Dress Gazette
and had a young family to care for, just for the sake of Oscar's inquisitiveness. Over the course of the next twelve months Constance, studious as ever, acquired a working knowledge of Hebrew, became familiar with alchemical and kabbalistic symbols, grasped astrology and divination, learned the mysteries of the Tarot, studied the significance of the rituals performed by the Golden Dawn (as well as memorizing the rituals themselves) and passed a series of exams to prove it. By November 1889 she had passed through all the grades of the Outer Order of the Golden Dawn and had attained the status of Philosophus.

It seems more likely that Constance, growing disenchanted with the conventional church, explored Theosophy, and its extension into the Golden Dawn, as a genuine alternative to conventional religious practice. It does seem credible, however, that, despite the terrible oaths she had sworn, Constance revealed the Order's secrets to her husband.

To get a sense of the kinds of events Constance may have
recounted to Oscar, it's worth turning to Yeats. He tells how Mathers once gave him a cardboard symbol which, when he pressed it to his forehead and closed his eyes, conjured extraordinary images in his mind, images that he could not control. He saw ‘a desert and black Titan raising himself by his two hands from the middle of a heap of ancient ruins'. Mathers explained to Yeats that he ‘had seen a being of the order of Salamanders because he had shown me their symbol, but it was not necessary even to show the symbol, it would have been sufficient that he imagined it'.
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Yeats went on to link this vivid dream-like world into which he had been plunged by Mathers' magic to the imaginary world created by artists. He enjoyed the idea that the potency of some artists' imaginations was so great that they themselves were like wizards.

‘I had found when a boy in Dublin on a table in the Royal Irish Academy a pamphlet on Japanese art,' Yeats recalled, ‘and read there of an animal painter so remarkable that horses he had painted upon a temple wall had slipped down after dark and trampled their neighbour's fields of rice. Somebody had come into the temple in the early morning, had been startled by a shower of water drops, had looked up and seen painted horses still wet from the dew-covered fields, but not “trembling into stillness”.'

It's not hard to see how such a proposition – that inanimate things might be imbued with life by powerful, imaginative magicians – might appeal to both the author of ‘Was It a Dream?' and her husband, who in the autumn of 1889 began to write his novel
The Picture of Dorian Gray
. The idea that this story, of a painting that develops a life of its own, growing older as its evil owner preserves his youth, may have derived specifically from conversations with Constance about the Order seems highly likely.

But Constance's romance with the Golden Dawn was short-lived. Having achieved the highest rank in the Outer Order just a year after joining, she decided not to seek entrance into the Second Order. The membership list of the Golden Dawn notes that by November 1889 her subscription was ‘in abeyance with the sympathy of the chiefs'.
That she withdrew from the Order at the moment that Oscar began to write
Dorian Gray
remains an intriguing coincidence.

After leaving the Order, Constance did not drop her interest in Spiritualism. She commuted it. Within a couple of years she would join the Society for Psychical Research, having met one of the founders, Frederic Myers, at Babbacombe Cliff. She and Myers quickly became friendly, corresponding and seeing one another regularly. It seems likely it would have been he who encouraged Constance to join his society as an associate in 1892. By 1894 she was a full member and was promoting the society to her friends.
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That Constance believed in an afterlife is unquestionable. That her great friend Lady Mount-Temple was hoping to provide proof of an afterlife in an experiment with Myers is also indicated. Georgina, who since the death of her husband was expecting her own demise at any time, had given Myers some specific words or phrases that, if received after her death by a medium, would indicate her continuing spiritual existence. Later, in 1892, Constance would refer to his plan. ‘Mrs Duncan wrote to me the other day to pray that you might not be taken away from us, and I answered that I could not pray this … How could I pray for longer life and more crosses, when I look forward to radiancy and joy on that lovely face … Have you sent your words to Mr Myers that you promised to him; I hope you will, so that we may have some sign of you given to us.'
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Later on, Constance also became a subscriber to
Borderland
, a publication that had been launched by the pioneering journalist and former editor of the
Pall Mall Gazette
William Thomas Stead, which featured tales of ghosts and other-worldly phenomena. Constance adored this publication and would pass it on with relish to her friends.

If Oscar had been inspired by his wife's occult studies in writing
Dorian Gray
, such moments of creative cohesion between husband and wife must have been relished by Constance, because in many respects her marriage was once again encountering problems. Although in the summer of 1887 she had assured Otho that she and
Oscar were ‘very happy together now', within a year she must have sensed that she and Oscar were in fact growing apart again. The glue that the launch of
The Woman's World
had provided, binding them socially and aligning their careers, was beginning to thin. Oscar was quickly bored with his role as an editor, and by the summer of 1889 he had given up the helm of the periodical.

On the surface they were fine. Yeats, who joined the Wildes on Christmas Day in 1888, described Oscar's life in Tite Street as a ‘perfect harmony … with his beautiful wife and two young children'. And yet Yeats, with terrific perception, added that his home life ‘suggested some deliberate artistic composition'.
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Oscar and Constance most certainly presented themselves to their friends and their public as a loving, committed and essentially conventional family. Oscar, like many middle- and upper-class Victorians, clearly felt a moral obligation to his wife and family, although he may well have considered extramarital sex an indulgence that married men traditionally enjoyed and which wives and society more generally were expected to tolerate. Constance, meanwhile, despite her stance as a New Woman, saw loyalty to her husband, a trait embodied by Queen Victoria herself, as a primary virtue and duty of womanhood.

‘To-day the Bowles were speaking of married life,' she wrote to her friend Juliet Latour Temple, the adopted daughter of Lady Mount-Temple,

and of the relations between husband and wife and of the absolute importance of affirming the good in one's husband, of affirming in fact that which one has fallen in love with, and which must exist and does exist, if one has married for love, and I don't believe that anyone can be happy unless they do marry for love. I hope you will fall in love with some delightful man, and marry him and be very happy in loving him, and leading him upward. This is the woman's work ‘par excellence!'
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Juliet had told Constance that she was about to read
The Kreutzer Sonata
, a highly controversial novella by Tolstoy about married life.
It is the story of a husband's carnal lust for his wife, a lust that ultimately leads not only to a great number of children but also to the man murdering his wife out of jealousy when she has an affair. The novella argues that the sentiment men and women mistake for ‘love' is in fact nothing more than basic sexual attraction.

‘You told me that you were going to read the “Kreutzer Sonata”,' Constance wrote. ‘Please don't imagine that all men and women are like that. I think and hope that very few are, and that very few lives are so absolutely sordid as these.'

For Constance, in contrast to Tolstoy, love within marriage could be based on something other than sex. At a moment when this element of her own relationship had waned, the perfect harmony Yeats perceived in the Wilde household stemmed from Constance's continuing admiration for the poet and freethinker who had so impressed her as a younger woman.

In return for such loyalty and love, Oscar fiercely guarded Constance and his family. His determination to protect her in public life is evidenced by an odd incident that happened in 1889. A journalist and writer called Herbert Vivian published a memoir titled
Reminiscences of a Short Life
, which was then serialized in the
Sun
. Vivian claimed that Oscar had encouraged him to write these memoirs and was to all intents and purposes the ‘fairy-godfather of the work'. But to Oscar and Constance's horror, on reading the memoir they discovered that some very personal details of Oscar's family life had been included in it.

Vivian recounted that Oscar had revealed he plastered the nursery walls in Tite Street ‘with texts about early rising and sluggishness, and so forth, and I tell them that when they grow up, they must take their father as a warning, and occasionally have breakfast earlier than two in the afternoon'.

‘The story of Cyril's altruism is also well imagined,' Vivian went on. ‘That youth, not a lustrum old, bewildered his family one morning by announcing that he did not mean to say his prayers any more. It was pointed out to him that he must pray to God to make him good, but he demurred … after a prolonged altercation, the young
philosopher offered a compromise, and said that he wouldn't mind praying to God make baby good.'
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