Dear Mr Wilde,
I am sincerely interested and gratified by your account of Walt Whitman and the assurance of his kindly and friendly feeling towards me: and I thank you, no less sincerely, for your kindness in sending me word of it.
As sincerely as I can say, that I shall be freshly obliged to you if you will—should occasion arise—assure him in my name, that I have by no manner of means either forgotten him or relaxed my admiration of his noblest work—such parts, above all, of his writings, as treat of the noblest subjects, material and spiritual, with which poetry can deal. I have always thought it, and I believe it will hereafter be generally thought, his highest and surely most enviable distinction that he never speaks so well as when he speaks of great matters—liberty, for instance, and death. This of course does not imply that I do—rather it implies that I do not—agree with all his theories or admire all his work in anything like equal measure—a form of admiration which I should by no means desire for myself and am as little prepared to bestow on another: considering it a form of scarcely indirect insult.31
Wilde copied out Swinburne’s letter, omitting only a few words that slightly lowered its effect, and sent it on to ‘My dear dear Walt’ on 1 March. He promised to see Whitman again, and did so early in May. This time Stoddart was not present, and the two could talk more freely. Their conversation has not survived, but their parting has. Wilde would later tell George Ives, a proselytizer for sexual deviation in the nineties, that Whitman had made no effort to conceal his homosexuality from him, as he would do with John Addington Symonds. ‘The kiss of Walt Whitman,’ Wilde said, ‘is still on my lips.’32 He would expand upon this theme a little later when signing John Boyle O’Reilly’s autograph book in Boston. Under an inscription by Whitman, Wilde wrote of him, ‘The spirit who living blamelessly but dared to kiss the smitten mouth of his own century.’ (He was quoting lines he had applied to Wordsworth in his poem ‘Humanitad.’)33
Now that Swinburne, Wilde, and Whitman had all testified to their mutual respect, they felt compelled to reconsider. Swinburne in particular soon denounced Whitman, whom he had once so highly praised, for formless rant. For good measure, he derided ‘the cult of the calamus, as expounded by Mr. John Addington Symonds to his fellow-calamites.’ Swinburne preferred the whip to the yawp. Whitman dissociated himself from Wilde’s movement in November Boughs (1888): ‘No one will get at my verses who insists upon viewing them as a literary performance … or as aiming mainly towards art and aestheticism.’ When Wilde reviewed this book, recognizing that this sentence was aimed at him, he suggested that the value of Whitman’s verse lay ‘in its prophecy not in its performance.… As a man he is the precursor of a fresh type. He is a factor in the heroic and spiritual evolution of the human being. If Poetry has passed him by, Philosophy will take note of him.’ Some of the rapture had cooled. Whitman took account of the slight ambivalence when he said to his disciples of Wilde’s allegiance, ‘He has never been a flarer, but he has been a steady light.’34
* Lajos Kossuth, the Hungarian revolutionary who lived in England from 1851 to 1859, wore a Polish cap, and Mr Mantalini, husband of a milliner in Dickens’s Nicholas Nickleby, wore a gorgeous morning gown.
† Ever since the libel suit against Ruskin, in which Burne-Jones had testified on Ruskin’s side, Whistler had always said that Burne-Jones knew nothing about painting.
‡ In De Profundis Wilde would testify to ‘a strange longing for the great simple primeval things, such as the Sea, to me no less of a mother than the Earth.’13
§ See Appendix B for Helen Potter’s indication of his speech patterns.
CHAPTER VII
Indoctrinating America
Every man of ambition has to fight his century with its own weapons. What this century worships is wealth. The God of this century is wealth. To succeed one must have wealth. At all costs one must have wealth.
Aestheticism Defined, and Imperiled
The meeting with Whitman was a reminder to Wilde that he had so far skirted the problem of defining his principles. Another reminder came from Rennell Rodd in England, who had read with amusement of his friend’s exploits in New York and Camden:
Well, you seem to be having amazing fun over there. We all feel a little jealous. And then your statements are amazing, of course, but you mustn’t assert yourself so positively. When you come back, you see you’ve no one to contradict you! Which is bad for you! We were surprised to read, that Mr Wilde declined to eat, on hearing the ladies were upstairs [at Robert Stewart Davis’s house on 16 January 1882]. It was never so known in Israel.
I saw yr Mother the other day, and we jubilated over you. Also Mrs Bigelow writes of you. But to speak seriatim, as she might say. I wish I could have been with you when you went to see Walt Whitman. It must have been charming. When he said, ‘You must be thirsty Oscar’—why I wld have drunk beer—even.
Jimmy and I are just off to try and detect a forgery of a picture of his, by of course you know who. Here he is so no more
Yrs ever
RENNELL
Why dont you tell them more of Jimmy and I say mention Me! (This plaintively) Mention us all.
Irving has sent you a note which he is immensely pleased with1
The idea of mentioning Rennell Rodd had been in Wilde’s mind for some time. He had brought with him Rodd’s book Songs of the South, and promised to try to find an American publisher for it. Being much with Stoddart in Philadelphia, Wilde proposed that he publish Rodd’s poems with an introduction by Wilde. Stoddart attached more importance to the introduction than to the verse, as did Wilde, who thought it a good chance to express the principles of the aesthetic school. He had sketched out some thoughts during his ocean crossing, and in February wrote them down and sent them to Stoddart. The book, renamed by Wilde Rose Leaf and Apple Leaf, was announced for October 1882. In gratitude Rodd said he would dedicate it to Wilde.
Stoddart’s cordiality was characteristic of Wilde’s reception by Philadelphia, which proved to be as warm as New York’s. But, unknown to Wilde, his troubles were about to begin. He was staying at the Aldine, the same hotel as another lecturer managed by D’Oyly Carte. This was Archibald Forbes, a self-assured Scot who as a journalist had covered several wars and liked to reveal the courage he had displayed on front after front. He carried himself like a soldier, wore a bristling mustache, and had married the daughter of the Quartermaster General of the United States Army. Oxford did not overawe him, since he had lectured there on 13 March 1878. Accustomed to sporting all his medals on the lecture platform, Forbes found Wilde’s knee breeches at Chickering Hall particularly repellent, and was not pleased by the attention bestowed upon his rival by the press. He wrote maliciously to a woman friend, ‘Oscar Wilde is here.… He wears knee breeches, but alas no lily. He lectures here tonight. He can’t lecture worth a cent, but he draws the crowds wonderfully and he fools them all to the top of their bent, which is quite clever.’2 According to a Forbes fancy, Wilde had received an offer for £200 a week from P. T. Barnum, who had just bought Jumbo the African elephant from the London Zoo, to lead Jumbo about, carrying a lily in one hand and a sunflower in the other. (Barnum did have enough interest in Wilde to occupy a front seat at Wilde’s second New York lecture in May.) Not so fancifully, Forbes described Wilde’s indignation at a barber who had come to cut his hair and had failed to bring curling tongs.
Nursing his resentment, Forbes traveled on the same train as Wilde from Philadelphia to Baltimore. Colonel Morse’s plan was for Wilde to attend Forbes’s lecture, ‘The Inner Life of a War Correspondent,’ after which they would go to a reception at the house of Charles Carroll, always identified as a descendant of Carroll of Carrollton. But on the train Forbes stung Wilde with stupid jokes about the commercializing of aestheticism, provoked perhaps by some bragging about Wilde’s receipts. Wilde took offense and, instead of stopping at Baltimore, went on to Washington. Carroll of Carrollton was offended in turn, and Morse wired to Wilde to go back to B
altimore. Wilde refused, and settled into his Washington hotel. Forbes took out his anger in his lecture by inserting a new passage contrasting his clothing, when he was summoned after a 150-mile ride into the presence of the Czar, with Wilde’s. ‘Now I wish it understood that I am a follower—a very humble follower—of the aesthetic ecstasy, but I did not look much like an art object then. I did not have my dogskin knee breeches with me nor my velvet coat, and my black silk stockings were full of holes. Neither was the wild, barren waste of Russia calculated to produce sunflowers and lilies.’ This vulgarity was printed verbatim by the newspaper at Forbes’s request. Wilde realized that he had given his adversary the headlines and needlessly offended Baltimore society. To make matters worse, he, or his business manager, was said in a newspaper article to have responded to an invitation from the Wednesday Club in Baltimore by asking a $300 fee because the reception was not in a private house. (Wilde said this had been done by an incompetent man provided by Colonel Morse.) Avarice did not advance the aesthetic cause.
Wilde maneuvered to extricate himself. His first effort was disingenuous and made matters worse. On 21 January he told the Washington Post that he had never intended to be present at Forbes’s lecture: ‘Our views are wide apart. If it amuses him to caricature me in the manner which he did last night, well and good. It may serve a purpose, and judging from the fact, as stated, that his audience came to see me, it is answering one very good purpose. It is advertising Mr. Forbes at my expense.’ It was Forbes’s turn to be enraged. He wrote to Wilde claiming that he had heard from Wilde’s own lips that his tour was purely mercenary. (Matthew Arnold would commit the same indiscretion to a reporter when D’Oyly Carte brought him over to lecture the following year.) Wilde had belittled his motives once too often. Forbes’s own purpose was possibly higher.
Wilde recognized that he must try to compose their differences, and wrote a mollifying letter. Unfortunately, he had done little more than glance at what Forbes had written to him, and Forbes, suspecting Wilde’s contempt, threatened to publish their correspondence in the press if Wilde failed to make a proper apology. The dispute was jeopardizing Wilde’s entire tour. ‘The whole tide of feeling is turned,’ he wrote in alarm to Carte on 24 or 25 January. In this difficulty he had the clever idea of appealing to his solicitor, George Lewis, in London, knowing that Lewis was solicitor and friend to Forbes as well. Lewis obliged him by cabling to Forbes, ‘Like a good fellow don’t attack Wilde. I ask this personal favour to me.’3 Forbes ceased his public pronouncements, but a series of anonymous cables to the London Daily News were so scurrilous as to convince Wilde they emanated from Forbes. On 2 February 1882 one such cable said of his Boston lecture, ‘After he had spoken for fifteen minutes, many went out. Whenever he paused to drink water the audience broke into uproarious applause lasting several minutes. This occurred so often that Mr Wilde paused, and glared upon the audience until silence was restored. His impressions of Boston are said to be unpleasant.’ And on 2 March a cable stated that at the Century Association in New York, ‘Many members of the club refused to be presented to him at all.… One veteran member … went about saying, “Where is she? Have you seen her? Well, why not say ‘she’? I understand she’s a Charlotte-Ann!” ’ Combining the accusation of effeminacy with charlatanism probably justified the suspicion that Forbes was behind these jeers; in an autobiography published several years later, he was still belligerent. Now that Forbes was ostensibly keeping silent, Wilde was able to return to Baltimore and make amends; he was pleased to see Mrs if not Mr Carroll of Carrollton in his audience, and attended, without fee, a reception at the Wednesday Club. But he wrote to Carte, ‘Another such fiasco as the Baltimore business and I think I would stop lecturing.’4
The attack by Forbes was partly responsible for a subtle shift in the attitude of the press. Reporters had come to Wilde at first with what appeared to be friendly eagerness, which he reciprocated, only to read waspish reconstructions of his remarks. His courteous attempts to respond to their often mindless questions left many openings. Wilde had reason to remember Ruskin’s warning to him about journalists, ‘Everything will be said about you. They will spare nothing.’5 For a time, Wilde complained, he saw nothing of America but newspapers. One of the worst was the New York Tribune, whose editor-in-chief, Whitelaw Reid, ignored Wilde’s letters of introduction from George Lewis and Edmund Yates, and allowed his writers to keep up a year-long attack on Wilde as ‘a penny Ruskin’ and a pretentious fraud. The Washington Post was another enemy: a drawing on its front page of Wilde holding a sunflower was juxtaposed with one of a ‘citizen of Borneo’ holding a coconut. Colonel Morse unwisely, and without consulting Wilde, wrote to protest against the ‘gratuitous malice,’ and the newspaper replied with a smirking editorial claiming that the comparison was just. Some Chicago papers then announced that the whole affair was a publicity stunt, and that Wilde had corrected proofs of the attack and passed the caricature before it was published. Nastiness could not go much further. If a few newspapers took his side, the greater number did not fail to perceive that better copy lay in making him look foolish. The New York Times courteously quoted his rejoinder, ‘If you survive yellow journalism, you need not be afraid of yellow fever.’6 He would later get his own back with the splendid comment ‘In old days men had the rack; now they have the Press.’7 But even now he quoted Gautier in a visiting book: ‘Avis aux critiques: C’est un grand avantage de n’avoir rien fait, mais il ne faut pas en abuser.* Oscar Wilde March 20 ’82.’
The English reaction to his trip was equally harsh. A message from Whistler, Rodd, and others on 4 February was funny yet wounding, since Wilde in America was proclaiming Whistler’s greatness and Rodd’s excellence:
Oscar! We of Tite Street and Beaufort Gardens joy in your triumphs, and delight in your success, but—we think that, with the exception of your epigrams, you talk like Sidney Colvin† in the Provinces, and that, with the exception of your knee-breeches, you dress like ’Arry Quilter.
Signed J. McNeill Whistler, Janey Campbell, Mat Eiden, Rennell Rodd
New York papers please copy.8
Lady Wilde could of course be depended upon to see things in a favorable light. She wrote to her son on 23 January, ‘Your letter and all the papers were delightful. Since then people have been sending me extracts, and I think your reception seems a triumph. Especially when God Save the Queen was played for you [on 12 January]!’ But even she added, ‘Mahaffy writes to me, “Oscar should have consulted me—great mistake.” ’ Swinburne wrote to Clarence Stedman, who was determinedly hostile to Wilde in New York, ‘The only time I ever saw Mr Oscar Wilde was in a crush at our acquaintance Lord Houghton’s. I thought he seemed a harmless young nobody, and had no notion he was the sort of man to play the mountebank as he seems to have been doing. A letter which he wrote to me lately about Walt Whitman was quite a modest, gentlemanlike, reasonable affair, without any flourish or affectation of any kind.…’9
Then there was Bodley. Nastier than Swinburne’s contempt was a long article in The New York Times on 21 January 1882 which, though anonymous, could only have been written by this old friend of Wilde at Oxford.‡ Its tone was surprisingly unpleasant. In it Bodley described uncharitably some ineptitude on Wilde’s part as a freshman, his encounters with the proctors, his delight in Freemasonry, and his dalliance with Rome. He denied that Wilde did any digging with Ruskin, his wardrobe being too fine for that. His aestheticism was represented as a belated development, and Bodley made light of Wilde’s success in the Newdigate. Wilde had lost a chance for a fellowship because he assumed ‘a guise which sturdier minds still look upon as epicene,’ a compromising word to use of an old friend. His poems, Bodley said, were derivative. Unfriendly rivalry carried Bodley to his conclusion: ‘he has considerable ability, and he has seen fit to use it in obtaining a cheap notoriety; he is good-hearted, has been amusing, and probably retains some sense of humor. Will American society encourage him in the line he has taken, which can only lead to o
ne end, or will it teach him not unkindly a needed lesson and bid him return home to ponder it in growing wiser?’ There was no doubt that Wilde’s friends were put out by his reported behavior in America, but Bodley’s attack must still have come as a surprise to Wilde and prepared him to say later, ‘It is always Judas who writes the biography.’
This swelling disfavor was also aroused in Wilde’s second momentous meeting, which took place in Washington. It was the exact contrary of his encounter with America’s principal poet. As yet he knew only slightly the novelist Henry James, who had been visiting in Washington for a month. They were both guests at a reception at the house of Judge Edward G. Loring, where Wilde appeared in knee breeches and with a large yellow silk handkerchief. General McClellan was there, and Senator Hale, and other dignitaries. Although James wrote that no one had paid any attention to Wilde, Loring’s daughter reported to a friend that Henry James was ‘so boring,’ and Wilde ‘so amusing.’ James was, however, unexpectedly pleased when Wilde told a reporter that ‘no living Englishman can be compared to Howells and James as novelists.’11§ James had just published Portrait of a Lady and Washington Square. He had already mentioned Wilde to Mrs Henry Adams, but she refused to receive James’s ‘friend’ on the grounds that he was ‘a noodle.’12 Out of politeness and curiosity James resolved to call on Wilde at his hotel and thank him.
It was not a successful visit. James remarked, ‘I am very nostalgic for London.’ Wilde could not resist putting him down. ‘Really?’ he said, no doubt in his most cultivated Oxford accent. ‘You care for places? The world is my home.’13 He felt himself to be a citizen of the world. He was accustomed to say, when asked his plans, ‘I don’t know. I never make plans, but go whither my feelings prompt.’ To James, master of the international theme, this was offensive. James winced. He had his own view, as an American living abroad, of floating citizens of the world. To this expert in deracination no quality more impugned the value of aestheticism than its rootlessness. By the end of the interview James was raging. Wilde offended him by saying, among other preciosities, ‘I am going to Bossston; there I have a letter to the dearest friend of my dearest friend—Charles Norton from Burne-Jones.’ James knew both men well, too well to enjoy this playful name-dropping.
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