the sake of argument, a position somewhere between the two and examine the Constant–
Wilde friendship, what does the evidence suggest? We know that the older Wilde was set
apart and above his other Edinburgh friends in Constant’s esteem—Wilde’s nickname, on
account of his enormous erudition, was ‘Doctor John’; that Constant’s admiration lasted
many years, and in 1810 or 1811, when he was writing Ma Vie, it still smacked of hero
worship; that until mid-adolescence Constant had, to our knowledge, no close male friend
outside his family. (As we have seen, he lamented the fact that this was precisely what
had been missing from his life in Erlangen.) We know that Wilde—probably several
years older than Constant—was, in 1783–5, well on the way to living like a ‘wayward
Poet’ with a ‘dissipated style of life’. He lived as a Classical scholar, amid the examples
of the male friendships of Antiquity. Most important, he regrets, in his pen-portrait, that
Constant will not allow his feelings the upper hand in a friendship—undoubtedly their
own—and keeps them in check. What are we then to conclude on the basis of
probabilities? If there was a homoerotic element in the friendship—as some have seen in
the cases of Montaigne and Lawrence, of course—the same law operated in this
relationship as in Constant’s relationships with women: a fluctuation between extremes
of submission and aggression (‘your advocate, your accuser’), between dependence and
the panic of claustrophobia—above all an imperative need not to be tied. Is the vision in
Ma Vie of Wilde’s total degradation, chained up in a dungeon on a bed of straw, an
expression of a hidden aggression towards him as strong as Constant’s continuing
affection? For there is in fact no evidence of Wilde’s having sunk so low and there may
be an element of exaggeration in Constant’s supposition. The authoritative History of the
Speculative Society, published only five years after Wilde’s death, merely says:
‘Confirmed derangement of mind caused him to spend the last thirty years of his life in
retirement.’^54 Whom are we to believe? Was Constant perhaps misinformed, or are we? If
he was wrongly informed, the idea of strength confined in a dungeon remained a
powerful and disturbing one in his imagination, and recurs in one of the the most striking
images of Adolphe: ‘I thought I was hearing the powerful arms of an athlete being
admired, an athlete who lay weighed down in chains at the bottom of a dungeon.’^55
Perhaps Constant needed an image of Wilde plunging down the edge of a precipice he
himself could have fallen from. Or perhaps there was still a subconscious envy of
Wilde’s powers which must for long have excited great intellectual competitiveness in
Constant.
We are able, then, to glean an adequate and convincing picture of Constant’s friend
from the material now available. There is still more that can be deduced from the Minute
Book of the Speculative Society, however, on Wilde’s political views. And they were
certainly at odds with those of Constant in several areas, which would account in some
measure for the violent swings in Constant’s behaviour towards him. Wilde tended
towards political conservatism, a cautiousness befitting the son of a merchant, while
Baron Constant could indulge in the luxury of radicalism. Wilde voted against Irish
parliamentary reform and Irish independence, against the limitation of the peerage, and
would not have favoured the execution of Charles I. In general he appears to have been
on the conservative side of liberalism, and Constant on the reformist, but his portrait of
Constant generously pays tribute to the ardour with which his friend held to his
convictions.
The charms of friendship 57