Franny Moyle (6 page)

It was not just art and its colourful characters that Constance also found herself drawn to. The Aesthetic movement had generated a new level of appreciation for the decorative arts, and craft skills such as embroidery, enjoying heightened status and recognition, became recognized outlets for female talent in the 70s. In 1872 the Royal School of Art Needlework had been established to provide suitable work for gentlewomen. The leading Aesthetic artists of the day supplied designs for the attendees of the school to work. Above and beyond this institution, the arts-led interior design practice of Morris & Co. – where William Morris's own wife, Jane, and daughter May took an active role in supervising and commissioning the needlework – had given embroidery a new aspect. No longer a pastime where ladies produced their samplers in the drawing room, art needlework was now fashionable and for public consumption, considered a vital contribution to modern interiors.

Constance, embodying this moment, explored her own needlework skills. Her staunchly Christian aunt Carrie marshalled Constance's help in decorating the new high school for girls in Baker Street. This school was the philanthropic project of Mr and Mrs
Francis Holland. A notable clergyman, Holland raised money and bought the site at 6 Baker Street and erected a modest building that could be converted into warehouses should the school fail. The great and the good from the local Christian community dived in to decorate the plain whitewashed walls in the weeks before the school opened in October 1878.

Constance prepared a series of embroideries to run the length of the school's ‘Ambulatory'. She spent days working the words ‘Hearken unto me, O ye children, for blessed are all they that keep my ways. Hear instruction to be wise' on blue sham leather, carefully stitching each letter in a gothic script some five inches high in black, red and gold. Constance's love of art needlework never left her. Years later she presented Otho with a fire screen that she had ‘embroidered on blue Morris linen in pink and green silks' and mounted in a Liberty ash frame that was stained green.
⁶

For her efforts for the new girls' high school Aunt Carrie took Constance to meet the great Francis Holland himself, but Constance performed poorly, ‘simply shaking with fright' throughout the interview, despite the fact that Holland was charming and full of fun. ‘I do think I am the greatest donkey that ever lived I am so afraid of people,' she noted afterwards.
⁷

Eventually, however, distance from her mother and the benign effect of her grandfather's kindness allowed Constance to blossom. Slowly her sense of humour, her intelligence and her love of life began to surface, and her shyness began to recede. The girl who had found herself unable to speak in front of Francis Holland began to transform into a sharp, opinionated woman with a quirky sense of fun.

‘In a discussion she was surprisingly quick at detecting the flaw and weak point in any reasoning,' Otho recollected. ‘She could carry her own in an argument well, and always had the courage of her opinions,' along with a ‘quiet humour and a sense of the ridiculous'.
⁸

Constance's natural interest in the arts reflected that of her grandfather, who had a keen interest in painting and something of a
collection. Once Constance was out of her mother's reach, John Horatio's influence's in this sphere began to be felt. A year after her mother wed, she found herself on a tour of Wales with her grandfather, Aunt Emily and Otho, staying for a few days in the Royal Oak Hotel, Betws-y-Coed.
⁹

The small village of Betws had become an artists' colony in the mid-nineteenth century, with several eminent painters resident in the area and others flocking to capture the surrounding Conwy Valley. And when it wasn't painters, it was art enthusiasts, the fashion-conscious and intellectuals who were also holidaying there, hoping to soak up the painterly spirit that prevailed and perhaps secure a work of art too. Constance would have thumbed through the visitors' book at the Royal Oak and seen the sketches left there by the many artists who had stayed there before her, some of whom were the country's leading landscape painters.

Constance was fired up by the artists she encountered. She delighted in meeting the well-known landscape painter Frederick William Hulme, who was a regular visitor to the village, and while in Betws her grandfather bought a picture of Pont-y-Pair from another painter, named Stevens.

Constance flourished in this artistic atmosphere, and although her stay at the Royal Oak was relatively short, her newly emerging conversational skills managed to make an impression on another cultural tourist, Henry Fedden, a Bristol sugar merchant. He and Constance got along swimmingly.

I was so sorry to leave Betws, I had just begin to feel at home there, and I had made a friend whom I need not say I have been teased to any extent about, because he was, well, a he! Mr Fedden. He was married tho' and lives at Bishop Stoke about 4 miles from Clifton … He has asked them to let me come and stay with him & his wife, which of course I should like to do immensely.
¹⁰

Constance's desire to visit the Feddens in Bristol was granted a few weeks later. In October she found herself installed in their comfortable home in Stoke Bishop, just outside the city, and thus began what
would prove a very formative visit for her. The Feddens had a strong appetite for culture. They took Constance to concerts and soirées; they visited a loan exhibition; in the evenings Constance played the piano and Henry Fedden sang, and afterwards they would listen to his wife reading.

During her stay Constance was taken aboard the training ship
Formidable
, anchored in the Bristol Channel. This marvellous old fighting ship was Henry Fedden's philanthropic project. He, along with other Bristol businessmen, had leased it from the Admiralty and had turned it into a training vessel, not for privileged children but for street urchins. The
Formidable
could take up to 350 ‘lost boys' and train them up into seamen, who could then find useful employment on one of the many commercial vessels that passed through the city's port.

Mary Fedden was also an impressive character. She was involved in the Ladies' National Association, and from time to time the Feddens' home hosted this group's meetings, at which various speakers discussed how women might also provide constructive action in the war against poverty and injustice.
¹¹

This cultured, inspirational and mutually supportive couple presented for their young guest a model of an ideal, modern marriage that stood in stark contrast to the unhappy, selfish and separate lives her parents had lived together. What is more, the kind attention that Henry Fedden, in particular, had paid to her and the personal interest he had taken in her must have also persuaded Constance that, far from being unattractive and doomed to spinsterhood, romantic opportunities could one day be available to her.

In fact, by 1879 Constance had already had some luck in love. She was becoming close to Alec Shand, the brother of her friend Bessie. According to Otho, Constance was even briefly engaged to him,
¹²
although it seems that this was a fact kept between themselves, since her extant letters reflect nothing other than secrecy and some elaborate lying where Alec is concerned. ‘I am rather disturbed in mind about something,' a 21-year-old Constance wrote to Otho.

I got Tennyson's ‘Princess' in the Summer for Alec, who wanted a copy, and did not pay for it. They have unfortunately sent in the account to Aunt Emily in a bill of hers and fearing so the questioning I said I had got it for you. I suppose you will be angry but I do not think you will be asked about it. I will go with you and pay it the first day you're in town, and then you can say it is paid, if you are asked.
¹³

It seems that Alec returned Constance's token of affection with much of the same, sending Constance ‘a beautiful bound edition of Tennyson', which he left with Bessie to pass on. Spoilt for choice suddenly by men bearing gifts, Constance discovered that the devoted Henry Fedden had already given her that very edition, and so it was returned to Bessie with a request for Alec to find a different gift. The poetical works of Keats was presented instead.

But although by 1879 Constance was at last coming out of her shell and enjoying the attentions of men, she had not yet caught the eye of Oscar Wilde. For the moment his sights were trained elsewhere. While Constance had been getting on with her studies, Oscar had managed to secure a reputation at Oxford for being something of a poet and critic. In his final year he had won the Newdigate Prize for poetry with his poem ‘Ravenna' and had had poems and articles published, mainly in the university and Irish press.

Swept up by the Pre-Raphaelite legacy, just like Constance, Oscar was writing under the influence of the poets of that movement, Algernon Charles Swinburne and Rossetti. He saw an intense devotion to beauty in their work. And this cult of beauty was endorsed in the critical writings of Walter Pater, whose
Studies in the History of the Renaissance
had a formative influence on him. In the conclusion to these studies Pater essentially argued that in a world in flux, beauty provides a fixed, refined aesthetic that could supersede the transient world and, in so doing, offer the onlooker a form of higher experience.

Pater was a Fellow and tutor at Brasenose College whom Oscar met in the Michaelmas term of 1877. Pater's theories about the importance of beauty were expressed not only in his written work but also in his own domestic environment. Mary Ward, the wife
of
The Times
's art critic, Humphry Ward, lived opposite Pater in Oxford and described his ‘exquisite' house in her memoirs, where ‘the drawing room was decorated with a Morris paper; spindle legged tables and chairs; a sparing allowance of blue plates and pots, bought, I think in Holland … engravings if I remember right from Botticelli; a few mirrors, and very few flowers, chosen and arranged with “simple yet conscious art”.'
¹⁴

Oscar's own college rooms declared his similar allegiance to Aestheticism. He too looked to contemporary designers such as William Morris and furnished his rooms simply, incorporating antique blue china and beautiful art prints.

Aesthetic taste could extend to any field in which beauty, its object, could be applied. It didn't stop with fine art, literature or interiors. Floristry could have an Aesthetic aspect. Lilies and sunflowers were the Aesthetic flower of choice. Japanese or Chinese artefacts were admired. And, of course, fashion was Aestheticism's route into the mainstream.

Alongside the ‘ugly dresses' that Constance made up from her Liberty fabrics, some ladies took Aesthetic dress to new extremes. The actress Ellen Terry, associated with the movement through her relationship with the Aesthetic architect Edward Godwin, wore Japanese kimonos. Aesthetic men wore their hair long in the tradition of painters like Rossetti, and their dress seemed to incorporate anything from the long Middle Eastern robes that painters such as William Holman Hunt wore to the loose velvet jackets with which Swinburne became identified. But the dress adopted by the male aesthete was considered ‘effeminate' by the uninitiated. For his airs and graces Oscar was taunted by his college peers. One prank, with the aim of removing and breaking Oscar's furniture, ended in the pranksters themselves being thumped and thrown out by Oscar, single-handed. Another attempt to ‘duck' him in a college fountain also failed.

Oscar left Oxford at the end of 1878 with ambitions to become a poet and critic. With the Newdigate Prize under his belt and a double first to boot, he moved to London and installed himself in rooms in Salisbury Street, off the Strand, in the home of his friend the
painter Frank Miles. Miles had ‘a curious old-world house looking over the Thames … with antique staircases, twisting passages, broken down furniture and dim corners'.
¹⁵
But the well-connected, moneyed and charming young artist had already created there a nexus for the bohemian set, with everyone from the poetess Violet Fane, Ellen Terry and James McNeill Whistler to Rossetti, Swinburne and Morris dropping by. Oscar was the perfect addition.

London was a new exciting arena for the young graduate. When Oscar arrived, the metropolis was quite literally newly aglow. Electric lights were being tested in galleries, and for the first time the Embankment and Holborn Viaduct were illuminated at night. And the cultural scene was sparkling too. In almost every cultural arena there were exciting new developments.

The great actor of the moment, Henry Irving, having just opened a refurbished Lyceum Theatre under his own management, was performing his
tour-de-force
Hamlet opposite Ellen Terry's Ophelia; Lord Leighton, an Aesthetic painter of ‘effeminate subjects',
¹⁶
had just been elected as the president of the Royal Academy of Arts; and the whole nature of contemporary art was under scrutiny as Whistler went head to head with the great critic John Ruskin in a groundbreaking libel case. Ruskin had seen a series of paintings by Whistler entitled ‘Nocturnes' and ‘Symphonies', which today can been seen as the clear forerunner to abstraction. But for Ruskin, far from being a new, exciting development, Whistler's
Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket
represented the work of a ‘coxcomb' who was asking ‘two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face' – a criticism that Whistler considered worthy of court.

With the arts in a moment of change and debate, there were rich pickings for a budding young critic. But compared with the territories Oscar had vanquished before, London was vast. It must have dawned on him quickly that fulfilling his dreams of a literary career amid this noisy bustling city, where the competition was fierce, would be much harder than winning over editors of the university and Irish presses. Oscar understood that to rise above the noise of the
city he must shout loudest. He amplified the attitudes and activities that he had rehearsed in Oxford. Within months he managed to cast himself as not just a follower of the Aesthetic fashion but as its embodiment.