Oscar Wilde

by Richard Ellmann

  How to link them was a question. In presenting himself as a spokesman for aestheticism, Wilde was assuming a greater than customary responsibility. Up to now he had espoused attitudes rather than theories, and encouraged a cult rather than a movement. Like Polybius, he would now have to bring system to what was unsystematized. The Pre-Raphaelites were not of much help; they had never been good at formulating general principles, and in 1882, their locks grizzled and their youth over, they were even less likely to do so. Still, Wilde was enthusiastic for them all, and he began to think out a lecture which would endorse them and overlook their divergences. He planned to write the lecture on the S.S. Arizona, on which he embarked on 24 December 1881. But by the time the ship docked on 2 January, he did not have it ready. The enterprise had become more ambitious: he must not only formulate the movement of which he was supposedly the leading exponent, but also, like Dorian Gray, ‘gather up the scarlet threads of life, and … weave them into a pattern.’10

  Poet and Press

  HESTER (smiling): We have the largest country in the world, Lady Caroline. They used to tell me at school that some of our states are as big as France and England put together.

  LADY CAROLINE: Ah! You must find it very draughty, I should fancy.

  The Arizona docked in New York harbor on the evening of 2 January 1882. It was too late to clear quarantine until the following morning. The press, avid to see Wilde, could not wait. Enterprising reporters ‘came out of the sea,’ as Wilde picturesquely noted, their pens still wet with brine. In fact, they chartered a launch to bring them aboard. Wilde was in the captain’s cabin and emerged to greet them clad in the great green coat that hung down almost to his feet. It was subjected to close inspection: the collar and cuffs were trimmed with seal or otter, and so was the material for the round cap, variously described as a smoking cap or a turban. Beneath the coat could be discerned a shirt with a wide Lord Byron collar, and a sky-blue necktie, vaguely reminiscent of the costume of a modern mariner. He wore patent-leather shoes on his small feet.

  Wilde had been thinking of ‘the cloud of misrepresentation that must have preceded’ him,11 but he was not prepared for the reporters: there were so many, and they would ask anything. Nor were the reporters prepared for him. Rather than the Bunthorne they expected, a man arrived who was taller than they were, with broad shoulders and long arms and hands that looked capable of being doubled into fists. He might be lionized but not buffaloed. A chastened New York Evening Post reported merely that he had ‘a large, white, flat face.’ On his finger was a great seal ring bearing a Greek classical profile. The same hand held a lighted cigarette, which he appeared not to inhale. His voice astonished the representative of the New York Tribune by being anything but feminine—burly, rather. Another thought Wilde spoke in hexameters; the New York World heard him accenting every fourth syllable or so in a kind of singsong: ‘I came from England because I thought America was the best place to see.’12 Singsong or syncopation, it was distinctive.

  What had he thought of the crossing? Wilde did not anticipate that his every word would be quoted, usually in distorted form, and merely observed that it had been uninteresting. The reporters were bent upon finding a headline, and they besieged other passengers until one told them that Wilde had remarked during the voyage, ‘I am not exactly pleased with the Atlantic. It is not so majestic as I expected. The sea seems tame to me. The roaring ocean does not roar.’ These wry comments from the poet who had written of the ‘unvintageable sea’‡ were propelled into large type—‘Mr. Wilde Disappointed with the Atlantic’—and promptly cabled to England. The Pall Mall Gazette printed a poem, ‘The Disappointed Deep,’ and a letter printed in Labouchere’s Truth began, ‘I am disappointed in Mr Wilde,’ and was signed ‘THE ATLANTIC OCEAN.’ Admittedly it was better copy than what Wilde had actually said, which was that on his ship from Athens to Naples in 1877 he had experienced a cyclone which was ‘the grandest sight I ever saw,’ and made him long for another storm that might ‘sweep the bridge from off the ship.’ Playfulness in transatlantic passengers was something new to journalistic experience, and they expressed their confusion by attempting to outdo Punch and Patience.

  Their launch had outstayed its time, but the reporters hung on to ask Wilde about his cultural mission. What was this aestheticism he had crossed the sea to promulgate? Wilde laughed, disconcerting them again, for Bunthorne had no sense of humor. Then he braved them by saying, ‘Aestheticism is a search after the signs of the beautiful. It is the science of the beautiful through which men seek the correlation of the arts. It is, to speak more exactly, the search after the secret of life.’ (He would divulge in his lecture what the secret of life was.) One reporter, more knowledgeable perhaps than the rest, challenged Wilde: was it not true that the movement (the existence of which he allowed) had fostered only idiosyncratic responses rather than a correct and consistent taste for the beautiful? Wilde replied politely, ‘Well, you might say that it has. But then all movements develop characteristics in the individuals taking part in them. Really a movement that did not do so would be of little worth.’ So far he had come through this trial fairly well.

  The next day the reporters were back as the passengers disembarked. Wilde declined to define aestheticism again, but did not shirk the challenge: ‘I am here to diffuse beauty, and I have no objection to saying that.’ He interrupted this cloudy utterance himself: ‘I say, porter, handle that box more carefully, will you?’ It contained his American wardrobe and copies of his Poems intended as presents. The beautiful, he went on, might well appear in the commonplace. Puffing a cigarette, both hands deep in the pockets of a green dressing gown, he said, ‘Beauty is nearer to most of us than we are aware. The material is all around us but we want a systematic way of bringing it out.’ A reporter pointed to a large grain elevator on the Jersey side of the river and asked, ‘Could that have aesthetic value?’ Wilde glanced across but with new caution replied that he was too nearsighted to see the object in question. ‘Might beauty then be in both the lily and Hoboken?’ persisted the reporter. ‘Something of the kind,’ Wilde agreed, ‘it’s a wide field which has no limit, and all definitions are unsatisfactory. Some people might search and not find anything. But the search, if carried on according to right laws, would constitute aestheticism. They would find happiness in striving, even in despair of ever finding what they sought. The renaissance of beauty is not to be hoped for without strife internal and external.’ ‘Where then is this movement to end?’ ‘There is no end to it; it will go on forever, just as it had no beginning. I have used the word renaissance to show that it is no new thing with me. It has always existed. As time goes on the men and the forms of expression may change, but the principle will remain. Man is hungry for beauty.… There is a void; nature will fill it. The ridicule which aesthetes have been subjected to is the only way of blind unhappy souls who cannot find the way to beauty.’

  The beauty to be diffused was not contraband. On being obliged to pass through customs, Wilde said, or was reputed to have said (no contemporary account records it), in response to the customs officer’s question ‘Have you anything to declare?,’ ‘I have nothing to declare except my genius.’ He may well have said it, for after a day in the harbor he could see the importance of having an epigram at the ready. Again the English press felt obliged to take note of him. The overwrought Pall Mall Gazette published not only two ‘Idylls of the Dado,’ on 4 and 9 January, but on the latter date a leader entitled ‘A Postscript to Bunthorne,’ saying that du Maurier had invented the aesthetes, and ‘an ingenious young gentleman from Ireland’ had amused himself by posing as the typical aesthete, so that now he is ‘the hero of the hour’ and ‘his sayings are telegraphed all over the world’ to be printed in ‘the gravest journals.’ The Gazette was gravely indignant.

  Now began a series of entertainments. Wilde was treated, as he could brag with justification in letters home, as a petit roi. The Brevoort being full, Morse put him up at the Grand, at 31st Stree
t and Broadway. His whereabouts were to be secret so he could finish writing his lecture. But Wilde made no difficulties about accepting the round of luncheons, afternoon receptions, dinners, and evening receptions that were offered him. New York newspapers somewhat restrained their derision for the moment because of the obvious pleasure he was giving to a series of distinguished hosts and hostesses. The first party was from three to six o’clock on 5 January at the house of Mr and Mrs A. A. Hayes, Jr., at 112 East 29th Street. Hayes, a travel writer, and his wife were already aesthetically attuned, with rooms done gracefully in a Japanese style. Wilde made his entrance wearing a tightly buttoned Prince Albert coat, and holding in his hand a pair of light kid gloves. He wore, as on the ship, a broad collar with a light-blue scarf encircling it. His hair was long but not excessively so. Soon he was posed in the opening between two large parlors, a gigantic Japanese umbrella behind him, its long handle protecting him on the left and a partition dividing the parlors on the right. Daylight was shut out by heavy dark curtains, and in the Caravaggesque gaslight, Wilde, expatiating, looked (a reporter wrote) ‘like a heathen idol.’ The decor perhaps put him in mind of Whistler and his Japanese effects, for he assured the company that Whistler was ‘the first painter in England, only it will take England 300 years to find it out.’14

  The reception over, Wilde accompanied Mr and Mrs Hayes and nine other guests to the Standard Theatre, where Patience was being played. They arrived some minutes after the curtain had risen, just as Lady Jane was about to inform Patience what love is. At first Wilde kept to the back of the box, out of sight, but self-effacement was not his way, and eventually he moved forward. When J. H. Ryley came on stage as Bunthorne, the whole audience turned and stared at Wilde. Bunthorne, having been made up as Whistler in England, was made up as Wilde in America. Wilde now smiled at one of his women companions and commented patronizingly, ‘This is one of the compliments that mediocrity pays to those who are not mediocre.’ (In The Duchess of Padua, he would write more flatly, ‘The most eccentric thing a man can do / Is to have brains, then the crowd mocks at him.…’) The party was invited backstage after the first act, and when the opera was over fifty people waited outside to catch a glimpse of Wilde. But he had already been shown to a side exit so as to escape unobserved.

  There were some writers, such as Clarence Stedman, who made a point of not accepting invitations to parties that Wilde might attend. Stedman had been warned off Wilde by Edmund Gosse, who had informed him shortly before that Wilde’s volume of poems was ‘a curious toadstool, a malodorous parasitic growth,’ parlayed into a third edition by the author’s aristocratic friends. At his first meeting with Wilde not long before, when Wilde expressed pleasure at the encounter, Gosse said, ‘I was afraid you’d be disappointed.’ ‘Oh no,’ Wilde replied, ‘I am never disappointed in literary men. I think they are perfectly charming. It is their works I find so disappointing.’15 As an indirect result of that slight, Stedman in turn wrote to Thomas Bailey Aldrich, the editor of The Atlantic Monthly, ‘This Philistine town is making a fool of itself over Oscar Wilde.… He has brought hundreds of letters of introduction.’16 Two of these letters had been to Stedman himself, from James Russell Lowell and George Lewis. Aldrich would avoid Wilde similarly in Boston. John Burroughs, the naturalist, received Wilde but had his reservations, summing him up as ‘a splendid talker, and a handsome man, but a voluptuary. As he walked from you, there was something in the motion of his hips and back that was disagreeable.’17

  The social side of Wilde’s tour was initially triumphal. He had a letter of introduction from Lord Houghton to ‘Uncle’ Sam Ward, who was Julia Ward Howe’s brother and the uncle of the novelist F. Marion Crawford. Ward, sixty-eight years old, was a lobbyist, a man of the world, and a great lubricator of the wheels of society. He took up Wilde enthusiastically, addressing him in letters as ‘My dear Charmides,’ and brought him to meet General Grant in Long Branch. Wilde, for his part, quoted some of Ward’s own poems, and so convinced Ward that in aesthetic matters the young man ‘knew his business.’ He departed from his habit of dining out by entertaining Wilde at a sumptuous dinner in his own flat at 84 Clinton Place. Lilies of the valley occupied the center of the table, and two calla lilies tied with a red ribbon were placed directly in front of Wilde’s plate. Guests wore lilies of the valley in their buttonholes. To make matters worse, Ward had written a song called ‘The Valley Lily,’ which another guest, Stephen Masset, had set to music and now sang. Wilde politely called for an encore. The press was duly informed and announced, ‘It was the unanimous verdict that Mr Wilde was the best raconteur since Lord Houghton’s time. He talked glibly and knowingly of Sir William Harcourt, Gladstone, and the leaders of the opposing political factions in England and on the continent.’ Most of the guests stayed on very late to listen. Ward was delighted and, indomitable poetaster, wrote for Wilde a poem which began,

  ‘Father, what is the aesthetic?’

  Asked a child.

  Puzzled, he said, ‘Ask the hermetic

  Oscar Wilde.’

  ‘Oscar, what is the aesthetic?’

  Asked the girl.

  ‘ ’Tis,’ beamed Oscar, ‘this pathetic

  Suppliant curl.’

  Labouchere obligingly published it in Truth. Ward also sent a copy to Longfellow. He recommended Wilde to his sister Julia Ward Howe by writing, ‘I think him a sincere fellow with sweetness and dignity of manner and character, and forgive him his fantastic penchants which he will outgrow.’ To Wilde he offered another poem:

  Go it, Oscar! You are young,

  Owning a conviction,

  To which you have wisely clung—

  Beauty is no fiction!

  Wilde presented him with his Poems, inscribed, ‘L’art pour l’art, et mes poèmes pour mon oncle. Sam Ward from Oscar Wilde, affectionately.’ Wilde recognized that he strained Ward’s loyalty, and strolled into Ward’s room one day to sigh to him and Marion Crawford, ‘Where will it all end? Half the world does not believe in God, and the other half does not believe in me.’ Only towards the end of a year of frequent meetings did Ward show the slightest disaffection: ‘It irks me to go about as the courier of an elephant. I don’t want to be eternally in the papers as his dry nurse.’18 Still, the friendship held.

  While merrymaking was pursued more assiduously than speechwriting, Wilde did not lose sight of his goal, that a New York actress should stage Vera. From what he had heard, the likeliest prospects were Mary Anderson and Clara Morris. Two days after his ship docked, he went to see Mary Anderson in Romeo and Juliet. His comments afterwards were polite only: The New York Times quoted him on 6 January, ‘She is a very beautiful woman, but there are traditions about dress in Shakespearean performances that detract much from the pleasure I think of witnessing those plays. Miss Anderson did excellently well, however, but I should prefer to see her in other plays than those of Shakespeare. Why, Modjeska delighted London audiences until she made her appearance as Juliet. Then she seemed to lose her hold upon her audiences, and they were never satisfied with her after that, no matter what she undertook.’ For the moment he put Mary Anderson aside in favor of Clara Morris, but, as if to share his favors, accompanied Clara Morris and her husband on 14 January to see Mary Anderson in Pygmalion and Galatea at the Booth Theatre.

  Miss Morris was known for her intensity. Wilde and she were guests at a reception for Louisa May Alcott at the house of D. G. Croly, 172 East 38th Street, on 8 January. Catching sight of her in the anteroom, Wilde at once took her hand in both of his. ‘I have heard much of you from Sarah Bernhardt,’ he said; ‘Sarah told me, “Elle a du tempérament; c’est assez dire.” ’ Miss Morris was unwon by this halfhearted compliment from her eminent rival, but at subsequent meetings with Wilde she came to like him. On 11 January she and Wilde were among a few guests for luncheon at Kate Field’s Cooperative Dress Association, and this time he persuaded her to let him leave his play for her to read. She would not decide about it for some weeks; but the ver
y next afternoon he saw her act for the first time as Mercy Merrick in The New Magdalen at the Union Square Theatre, and did not stint his praise either backstage or to a reporter afterwards. He was quoted as having said, ‘Miss Morris is the greatest actress I ever saw, if it be fair to form an opinion of her from her rendition of this one role. We have no such powerfully intense actress in England. She is a great artist, in my sense of the word, because all she does, all she says, in the manner of the doing and of the saying constantly evoke the imagination to supplement it. That is what I mean by art. She would be a wonderful actress in London. I don’t think however that a play as worn as The New Magdalen would be the proper work in which to present her. She is a veritable genius.’

  In the wake of this tribute, Clara Morris read Vera carefully. In early February, however, she decided it was not for her. Wilde did not quite give her up. He decided to let D’Oyly Carte try to arrange a production, and urged him to make a further effort with Clara Morris; ‘I am however quite aware how difficile she is,’ he wrote Carte on 16 March. Failing her, he proposed Rose Coghlan, an English actress who played mostly in the United States. Carte complained that Vera would be obscure to Americans knowing nothing of Russia, and Wilde promptly composed a prologue to alleviate the difficulty. Several further letters urged Carte on, but to no avail. Clara Morris was booked for another play. Though thwarted for the moment, Wilde decided to protect the play by having it copyrighted in the United States, and continued to look about for an actress.

  The main thing, however, was his lecture. He finally wrote it out and had it typed. ‘If I am not a success on Monday I shall be wretched,’ he wrote to Mrs George Lewis in London. By the time he appeared on the stage of Chickering Hall on 9 January, a week after his arrival, he could hardly fail. Tickets were sold out, even for standing room, and the receipts were $1211. Colonel Morse introduced Wilde with a sentence or two, and the speaker then opened his manuscript, which he carried in an expensive morocco case. His audience could now take stock of his attire, which was not at all what he had been wearing to the receptions, and was far more daring than anything in the lecture. (‘The costume of the nineteenth century is detestable,’ says Lord Henry Wotton in Dorian Gray. ‘It is so sombre, so depressing.’) Its most conspicuous feature was knee breeches, which showed off his well-turned legs and feet. Some thought they recognized this as court dress, and probably no one knew that it was the costume of the Apollo Lodge at Oxford, to which Wilde belonged. His stockings were also noted. ‘Strange,’ he said later, ‘that a pair of silk stockings should so upset a nation.’19 Helen Potter, later to impersonate Wilde in public performances, scrutinized him with professional concentration: