The second visitor of note that season, Mrs. Brown-Potter, had married the nephew of Bishop Henry Codman Potter, her maiden name having been Cora Urquhart. She was born at New Orleans, where she made a reputation at private gatherings by reciting popular poems like “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” But one of her recitations contained a reference to an unmarried mother and shocked President Cleveland’s sister at a Washington party. She went on the stage and became famous for her beauty, offending her rivals by permitting her name to be used for advertising a cold cream, in which respect she was a pioneer. Leaving her husband and daughter, she decided to capture London, and succeeded in capturing the Prince of Wales.{18} But her stage notoriety was due to her beauty, not her acting. Wilde dealt with the situation as politely as possible, and went on to discuss the effect on English society of the American incursion:
With regard to Mrs. Brown-Potter, as acting is no longer considered absolutely essential for success on the English stage, there is really no reason why the pretty bright-eyed lady who charmed us all last June by her merry laugh and her nonchalant ways, should not—to borrow an expression from her native language—make a big boom and paint the town red. We sincerely hope she will; for, on the whole, the American invasion has done English society a great deal of good. American women are bright, clever, and wonderfully cosmopolitan. Their patriotic feelings are limited to an admiration for Niagara and a regret for the Elevated Railway; and, unlike the men, they never bore us with Bunker’s Hill. They take their dresses from Paris and their manners from Piccadilly, and wear both charmingly. They have a quaint pertness, a delightful conceit, a native self-assertion. They insist on being paid compliments and have almost succeeded in making Englishmen eloquent. For our aristocracy they have an ardent admiration; they adore titles and are a permanent blow to Republican principles. In the art of amusing men they are adepts, both by nature and education, and can actually tell a story without forgetting the point—an accomplishment that is extremely rare among the women of other countries. It is true that they lack repose and their voices are somewhat harsh and strident when they land first at Liverpool; but after a time one gets to love these pretty whirlwinds in petticoats that sweep so recklessly through society and are so agitating to all duchesses who have daughters. There is something fascinating in their funny, exaggerated gestures and their petulant way of tossing the head. Their eyes have no magic nor mystery in them, but they challenge us for combat; and when we engage we are always worsted. Their lips seem made for laughter and yet they never grimace. As for their voices, they soon get them into tune. Some of them have been known to acquire a fashionable drawl in two seasons; and after they have been presented to Royalty they all roll their R’s as vigorously as a young equerry or an old lady-in-waiting. Still, they never really lose their accent; it keeps peeping out here and there, and when they chatter together they are like a bevy of peacocks. Nothing is more amusing than to watch two American girls greeting each other in a drawing-room or in the Row. They are like children with their shrill staccato cries of wonder, their odd little exclamations. Their conversation sounds like a series of exploding crackers; they are exquisitely incoherent and use a sort of primitive, emotional language. After five minutes they are left beautifully breathless and look at each other half in amusement and half in affection. If a stolid young Englishman is fortunate enough to be introduced to them, he is amazed at their extraordinary vivacity, their electric quickness of repartee, their inexhaustible store of curious catchwords. He never really understands them, for their thoughts flutter about with the sweet irresponsibility of butterflies; but he is pleased and amused and feels as if he were in an aviary.
On the whole, American girls have a wonderful charm and, perhaps, the chief secret of their charm is that they never talk seriously except about amusements. They have, however, one grave fault—their mothers. Dreary as were those old Pilgrim Fathers who left our shores more than two centuries ago to found a New England beyond seas, the Pilgrim Mothers who have returned to us in the nineteenth century are drearier still. Here and there, of course, there are exceptions, but as a class they are either dull, dowdy or dyspeptic. It is only fair to the rising generation of America to state that they are not to blame for this. Indeed, they spare no pains at all to bring up their parents properly and to give them a suitable, if somewhat late, education. From its earliest years every American child spends most of its time in correcting the faults of its father and mother; and no one who has had the opportunity of watching an American family on the deck of an Atlantic steamer, or in the refined seclusion of a New York boarding house, can fail to have been struck by this characteristic of their civilisation. In America the young are always ready to give to those who are older than themselves the full benefits of their inexperience. A boy of only eleven or twelve years of age will firmly but kindly point out to his father his defects of manner or temper; will never weary of warning him against extravagance, idleness, late hours, unpunctuality, and the other temptations to which the aged are so particularly exposed; and sometimes, should he fancy that he is monopolising too much of the conversation at dinner, will remind him, across the table, of the new child’s adage, “Parents should be seen, not heard.” Nor does any mistaken idea of kindness prevent the little American girl from censuring her mother whenever it is necessary. Often, indeed, feeling that a rebuke conveyed in the presence of others is more truly efficacious than one merely whispered in the quiet of the nursery, she will call the attention of perfect strangers to her mother’s general untidiness, her want of intellectual Boston conversation, immoderate love of iced water and green corn, stinginess in the matter of candy, ignorance of the usages of the best Baltimore society, bodily ailments and the like. In fact, it may be truly said that no American child is ever blind to the deficiencies of its parents, no matter how much it may love them.
Yet, somehow, this educational system has not been so successful as it deserved. In many cases, no doubt, the material with which the children had to deal was crude and incapable of real development; but the fact remains that the American mother is a tedious person. The American father is better, for he is never seen in London. He passes his life entirely in Wall Street and communicates with his family once a month by means of a telegram in cipher. The mother, however, is always with us, and, lacking the quick imitative faculty of the younger generation, remains uninteresting and provincial to the last. In spite of her, however, the American girl is always welcome. She brightens our dull dinner parties for us and makes life go pleasantly by for a season. In the race for coronets she often carries off the prize; but, once she has gained the victory, she is generous and forgives her English rivals everything, even their beauty.
Warned by the example of her mother that American women do not grow old gracefully, she tries not to grow old at all and often succeeds. She has exquisite feet and hands, is always bien chaussée et bien gantée, and can talk brilliantly upon any subject, provided that she knows nothing about it.
Her sense of humour keeps her from the tragedy of a grande passion, and, as there is neither romance nor humility in her love, she makes an excellent wife. What her ultimate influence on English life will be it is difficult to estimate at present; but there can be no doubt that, of all the factors that have contributed to the social revolution of London, there are few more important, and none more delightful, than the American Invasion.
CHAPTER 10—A Misunderstanding
Miriam Leslie and William Wilde
One of the clever women Oscar Wilde met, both in the States and in London, acted in a manner that surprised him, although he had observed that an American woman would sometimes marry an Englishman not on account of a title, nor because she had fallen in love with him, but simply because she found him amusing or thought he might be useful. What Oscar could not understand was that a particularly clever woman, Mrs. Frank Leslie, should want to marry his bohemian brother Willie.
The early life of the lady was shrouded in myster
y. According to herself, she was the child of aristocratic Huguenot parents, one of whose forebears had been made a baron by Louis IX, and she had been born at New Orleans in 1851. According to her third husband’s descendants, who contested her will, she was a Negro slave’s illegitimate daughter, whose mother had kept a New York brothel and whose birth had taken place in 1836. Under these circumstances it is not surprising to learn that she died at different ages, sixty-three in the first press announcements, eighty-six when the obituarists had thought it over. Her putative parents were named Follin; she later added an “e” and knew herself as Miriam Florence Folline. During a half-starved unhappy childhood she picked up from her father a knowledge of French, Spanish and Italian, and when her mother kept a boarding-house in New York she quickly made the acquaintance of the inmates, one of whom, a clerk in a jewelry store named David Charles Peacock, she married in 1854, at the age of three if her natal year, officially given by herself at a much later date, is to be trusted. It seems to have been a forced marriage following a seduction, though who seduced whom is a matter for surmise. Within two years the marriage was annulled, and by a series of circumstances which need not detain us Miriam Folline appeared on the stage at Albany with Lola Montez. The engagement lasted a week, and none of the critics considered her acting worthy of notice, though her soulful eyes, bronze-gold hair, attractive smile and graceful movements attracted an anonymous congressman, through whom she may have become acquainted with the notable archaeologist E. G. Squier, to whom she was married in 1858. Squier was a leading authority on aboriginal monuments, about which he wrote scholarly works. She helped him in his labors and he helped her in various translations and articles.
During the Civil War they took a lodger named Frank Leslie into their house, and Squier was soon offered an editorial job by Leslie, who had arrived in America from England some years before and had worked his way up to the proprietorship of the New York Journal, later publishing Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, which concentrated on murder, arson and prize-fights, subjects which the reading public found much to their taste. Squier became extremely useful to Leslie as an editor and a writer on travel, while Mrs. Squier was soon engaged to run The Lady’s Magazine and to become an arbiter of fashion. With a quick eye for what would appeal to her readers, she got a serial story out of M. E. Braddon, whose novel Lady Audley’s Secret was the literary sensation of 1862. She then edited Frank Leslie’s Chimney Corner, which was the sort of thing Dickens tried to do in Master Humphrey’s Clock, a family magazine which included something for everyone, from ghost stories and crimes to moral tales and prophylactics. It aimed to be “a welcome messenger of instruction and amusement to the young and old, in the family and by the fireside—that altar around which cluster our holiest and most cherished recollections.”{19} Where Charles Dickens had failed, Miriam Squier succeeded, and the sale of Chimney Corner was prodigious. Her next triumph was another fashion publication called Frank Leslie’s Lady’s Journal, which started a profitable career in 1871.
A trip to Paris by Leslie, Squier and his wife was accompanied by some scandal, and it soon became clear that the newspaper proprietor’s interest had shifted from the mental labor of his editress to her bodily attraction. The archaeologist was the stumbling block, but they took this in their stride. On their return to New York a big dinner was given in a questionable house of entertainment, Squier was plied with drink, a lady attended to his comfort, they were found together in a compromising position, and all ended happily with a divorce. Frank Leslie married Miriam in July 1874, and, to quote an appraisement on his death six years later, “his love for her was poetical, and her devotion to him always perfect.”
Business prospered, and the Leslies were soon the center of a cosmopolitan social circle. They entertained sumptuously in their Fifth Avenue house. Senators, generals, governors, wits, poets, painters, and an occasional emperor were to be seen at their dinners. They bought an estate at Saratoga called “Interlaken” and dispensed lavish hospitality to eminent folk. They traveled across the continent in the utmost luxury, and recounted the journey in their papers with illustrated articles. Miriam Leslie wrote a book about it, and her taunts at the expense of the city of Nevada resulted in a spiteful reply by a local paper in which the “crime and licentiousness” of the female slanderer’s life were exposed to view.
But the Leslie business prospered too well and threw the directors off their balance. Increasing the number of periodicals issued by the firm, Leslie became a publisher of books. A series of Standard Works came out under his name, and though the standard was not high it went a little above the heads of a public nurtured on crime stories. Having expanded at too great a rate, the business contracted with proportionate speed, with the result that it was taken over by a nominee of the creditors, though Leslie himself was given the job of general manager, his salary augmented by a percentage on profits. Within two years the situation had almost been retrieved, and the son of Leslie’s former wife decided to benefit from his sire’s prestige by attaching the name “Frank Leslie Jr.” to a rival firm. The father brought an action against the son to prevent the use of his name, a disagreeable form of publicity.
In January 1880 Frank Leslie died of cancer of the throat, and his widow made all sorts of depressing resolutions to exhibit her affliction and commemorate the departed. But she intended also to keep his memory green by recreating his achievement, and being a woman of remarkable will power she assumed the control of all his undertakings. She raised money on her jewelry to pay off creditors, and within a year she was solvent. Her name was changed to “Frank Leslie” on application to the necessary authority, and thenceforth she was known as such. In 1881 she brought off a sensational feat. President Garfield was shot by a disappointed Chicago lawyer, and died after two months of national anxiety. Every incident of the crime and its sequel was described and illustrated in a Leslie newspaper, and the latest number was in the press when the President’s death was announced. Mrs. Leslie promptly withdrew a part of the paper from the printer and had a fresh edition prepared, including a new set of engravings, within forty-eight hours, an unprecedented performance. Her reputation was made, her future income assured.
She now set about improving the printing, appearance, woodcuts and contents of her papers, and substituted efficiency for luxury in her personal life. She rose early, enjoyed or endured a cold bath, did physical exercises, turned up at the office at 9 A.M. arrayed in black silk, and ruled her staff of about 400 with the energy and firmness of a dictator. She read all the manuscripts and supervised every department. She reduced the number of her publications and improved the rest. She wrote articles, corrected those by other authors, and started a weekly salon at which the well-known personalities in literature, painting and journalism were to be seen, herself the most striking figure in the gatherings. Such widely divergent poets as Ella Wheeler Wilcox and Joaquin Miller were constant attendants. The latter, falling back on Shakespeare for inspiration, called her his “bright particular star” and wrote: “I know of no one in history so remarkable, so glorious as this strangely beautiful and inspired little Creole.”
Mrs. Leslie had many male followers, and no doubt made quite a few conquests. For a while she was engaged to be married to the handsome Marquis de Lenville, who may have been the son of an aristocrat or of a hairdresser but managed to double the parts of poet and painter. The engagement fell through, and several other affairs did not develop along conventional lines. The title of Mrs. Leslie’s book Are Men Gay Deceivers? suggests either that she had been deceived or that her admirers had been lured into matrimony with other women against their wills. Not only in America did she gain admiration. During her trips to Europe she collected material for lectures on “The Royal Leaders of Society,” which included stories of kings and queens accumulated by personal knowledge in her own account, gleaned from their valets, maids or dressmakers in the opinion of others. At least she went to luncheon with the Prince and Princess of Wales,
received photographs from Lord Ronald Gower, and attended the curious receptions at the house of Lady Wilde, mother of Oscar and Willie. A certain baroness introduced her to Parisian society, but it appears that she was only endured in that milieu on account of a legacy she had promised the baroness. In short, the size of her bank balance was of greater value in the eyes of society than the style of her conversation. All the same everyone agreed that she had a good figure which set off her clothes to perfection.
In Lady Wilde’s dimly lit rooms she may have passed for her official age, in which case she was only one year older than Oscar’s brother Willie. In any event Willie was not looking for youth and beauty but for ease and comfort, and since his breezy conversation and genial personality seemed to find favor in her eyes he followed up the impression he had made by proposing marriage. The proposal appealed to her, possibly because youthful admirers were dropping away, or because her fourth marriage would cause considerable publicity, or because Willie’s training as a journalist would be useful in her business. Whatever the combination of causes, she liked the tall hirsute softly spoken fellow, who amused her; and on October 4, 1891, in the Church of the Strangers, New York, she married William C. Kingsbury Wilde.
Unlike his younger brother, Willie as a boy had entered into the conventional life of his school, playing games and using his fists. But like his brother he had won a reputation for telling funny stories. He was destined for the bar and was duly called thereto, but he preferred a different kind of bar and in a certain respect followed his father’s footsteps too studiously to make life easy at home. One day a letter arrived from a pregnant girl who laid the responsibility on him. Having the same name as his son, Sir William Wilde opened the letter by mistake and passed it on to his firstborn with the words: “Here is a most disgraceful letter.” After reading it gravely, Willie said: “Well, sir, what are you going to do about it?” Finding the business of a barrister when in action rather too much like hard work, he left Dublin with his mother and lived with her in London both before and after his marriage. He had inherited about £4,000 from his father, but this soon vanished, and he took up journalism as a free lance. The editor of the World liked his racy gossip paragraphs, in which incidentally he sometimes puffed brother Oscar, and enjoyed his vivacity.
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