Oscar Wilde

by Richard Ellmann

  We must imagine Henry James revolted by Wilde’s knee breeches, contemptuous of the self-advertising and pointless nomadism, and nervous about the sensuality. He informed Mrs Adams that she was right. ‘ “Hosscar” Wilde is a fatuous fool, tenth-rate cad,’ ‘an unclean beast.’ The images are so steamy as to suggest that James saw in Wilde a threat. For the tolerance of deviation, or ignorance of it, were alike in jeopardy because of Wilde’s flouting and flaunting. James’s homosexuality was latent, Wilde’s patent. It was as if James, foreseeing scandal, separated himself from this menace in motley. Mrs Adams knew what he meant, and spoke of Wilde’s sex as ‘undecided.’14 Some eight years later James would briefly relent and even join in sponsoring Wilde (unsuccessfully) for the Savile Club, but he always insisted that he was not one of Wilde’s friends. (He was more generous to Robert Ross.) He recalled their Washington conversation more benignly in The Tragic Muse, where the aesthete Gabriel Nash is always on his way ‘somewhere else,’ and confides, ‘I rove, drift, float.’ For his part, Wilde had no idea of the hostility he had aroused in James. He remarked in Louisville on 21 February that he had met a Daisy Miller, and ‘the sight of her has increased my admiration for Henry James a thousand fold.’15

  Yet his abrasive encounters and his battle with the press gave him a new confidence. They could attack him, but they could not take their eyes off him. Derision was a form of tribute and, if it went on long enough, could not fail to be so interpreted. He could, moreover, appeal, over the heads of the journalists, to the people. This he did.

  New England: A Latter-Day Pilgrim

  To be either a Puritan, a prig or a preacher is a bad thing. To be all three at once reminds me of the worst excesses of the French Revolution.

  Whatever Henry James thought or Mrs Henry Adams said, they could not spoil Wilde’s reception in Washington. He entranced Frances Hodgson Burnett, later the author of Little Lord Fauntleroy, by telling her that Ruskin considered her a true artist and read everything she wrote. In return she presented him to other writers. W. H. Hurlbert, editor of the New York World and by now Wilde’s friend as well as Sam Ward’s, introduced him to political society as well. James G. Blaine and Senators Thomas F. Bayard and George H. Pendleton were all three hospitable. Wilde’s remarks were widely quoted. Before he left he urged Washington to display more sculpture. ‘I think you have taken quite enough motives from war,’ he said; ‘you don’t want any more bronze generals on horseback, I dare say. Suppose you try the motives that peace will give you now.’16 (Henry James liked the phrase about ‘bronze generals’ and took it over.) Then he was off, by way of Albany, to Boston, to see American culture at its best.

  Letters of introduction to Charles Eliot Norton and Oliver Wendell Holmes, as well as to Sam Ward’s sister Julia Ward Howe, led to dinner parties and other receptions. Mrs Howe invited him more than once, and a reply from Wilde to one such invitation compliments and charms her:

  My dear Mrs Howe: I shall be with you at seven o’clock, but there is no such thing as dining with you ‘en famille’—when you are present, the air is cosmopolitan and the room seems to be full of brilliant people; you are one of those rare persons who give one the sense of creating history as they live.

  No, ‘en famille’ is impossible—but to dine with you one of the great privileges. Most truly yours,

  OSCAR WILDE17

  He amused her at one gathering by saying that the words ‘vermilion’ and ‘balcony’ were pronounced too prosaically, and should have more emphasis on the r of the one and the c of the other.

  Wilde was eager to see Longfellow, with whom his mother had occasionally corresponded, and who was quoted by the Boston Evening Traveller for 30 January as having said, ‘Well, Mr Wilde has written some good verses, he cannot be an ignorant man.’ Wilde knew that Sam Ward had brought Lord Ronald Gower to meet Longfellow, and came armed with a recommendation from Ward. At first there was reluctance, because the poet was in failing health, but Wilde persisted and was at last invited to breakfast. He arrived in a blinding snowstorm and left in a hurricane, as he said later, ‘quite the right conditions for a visit to a poet.’ He was moved by the sight of the old poet. Longfellow told him laughingly of going to England and being invited to Windsor. The Queen said some kind things to him, and Longfellow replied that he was surprised to find himself so well known in England. ‘Oh, I assure you, Mr Longfellow,’ said the Queen, ‘you are very well known. All my servants read you.’ ‘Sometimes,’ said Longfellow, ‘I will wake up in the night and wonder if it was a deliberate slight.’ Wilde, in telling the story to Vincent O’Sullivan, said, ‘It was the rebuke of Majesty to the vanity of the poet.’ Another vestige of their conversation is Wilde’s question ‘How do you like Browning?’ and Longfellow’s answer: ‘I like him well, what I can understand of him.’ Wilde, doing his best to be agreeable, exclaimed, ‘Capital!,’ and promised to repeat this putative epigram. His enthusiasm had its limits. ‘A fine old man,’ he said. ‘Longfellow was himself a beautiful poem, more beautiful than anything he ever wrote.’ He would say to Chris Healy later, ‘Longfellow is a great poet only for those who never read poetry.’18 Longfellow was to die in March, two months later, and Emerson in April. When Wilde returned to Boston for a second lecture on 2 June, he memorialized them in the peroration of his lecture:

  And, lastly, let us remember that art is the one thing which Death cannot harm. The little house at Concord may be desolate, but the wisdom of New England’s Plato is not silenced nor the brilliancy of that Attic genius dimmed; the lips of Longfellow are still musical for us though his dust be turning into the flowers which he loved.

  His Boston and Cambridge activities were crowded together. He had lunch with another distinguished Bostonian, the orator Wendell Phillips, who talked of lecture tours and remarked that anyone could move a large audience but speaking to nearly empty benches was a different matter, a truth Wilde was to confirm as his own audiences became more attenuated. Besides the Brahmins whom he met, there were two Irishmen with whom he felt more at home: Dion Boucicault, as an old friend, received Wilde kindly, and his presence helped with aggressive interviewers. Boucicault’s outrage at the treatment meted out to Wilde by the American press was a comfort, as was his offer, which Wilde did not take up, of a couple of thousand pounds to make him independent of Carte and Morse.19 The other Irishman was the poet, wit, and rebel John Boyle O’Reilly, now part owner of the Boston Pilot, and always passionately interested in visitors from his native land. With O’Reilly, Wilde pressed another aim, to arrange American publication of his mother’s poems: ‘I think my mother’s work should make a great success here,’ he wrote to O’Reilly, ‘it is so unlike the work of her degenerate artist son. I know you think I am thrilled by nothing but a dado. You are quite wrong but I shan’t argue.’20 He went with O’Reilly on 28 January to see Oedipus Tyrannus at the Globe Theatre.

  On the night of 31 January, when Wilde was to speak in the Music Hall in Boston, snow fell again. The house was full nonetheless. (Julia Ward Howe was among the audience.) Full, that is, except for the first two rows, which remained mysteriously empty until just before the speaker was to appear. Then suddenly down the center aisle came sixty Harvard students, dressed in the high aesthetic line with breeches, dinner jackets, Whistler locks of white hair, hats like Bunthorne’s, each bearing, in a stained-glass attitude, a sunflower. Their leader lounged, limp and listless and vacant-eyed, to a seat. There was great merriment as the stage door opened to admit the lecturer.

  But Wilde was able to mock his mockers. Tipped off in advance, he had donned conventional dinner jacket and trousers, and hinted at iconoclasm only in the unusually wide cravat, which reached nearly to his shoulders on either side. Arriving late, he had to climb some stairs at the back of the stage, so that the audience first caught sight of his upper torso, and then to their dismay saw that his legs were trousered in the usual manner.21 Wilde had also written a new opening paragraph. He began evenly, ‘As a college man, I g
reet you. I am very glad to address an audience in Boston, the only city in America which has influenced thought in Europe, and which has given to Europe a new and great school of philosophy.’ He then glanced as if by chance at the fantastic semicircle in front, and said with a smile, ‘I see about me certain signs of an aesthetic movement. I see certain young men, who are no doubt sincere, but I can assure them that they are no more than caricatures. As I look around me, I am impelled for the first time to breathe a fervent prayer, “Save me from my disciples.” But rather let me, as Wordsworth says, “turn me from those bold, bad men.” ’ By this time his audience was almost won. The students tried to recover their advantage by applauding heartily every time he drank from a glass of water, but this was small revenge.

  Wilde proceeded imperturbably with his standard lecture. Only near the end did he once again take notice of the students as he described how he and his Oxford contemporaries had worked under Ruskin in North Hinksey. ‘These charming young men might be inclined to follow our example; the work would be good for them, though I do not believe they could build so good a road.’ He had visited Harvard that day, he said, ‘and I beg to assure the students before me that there is more to the movement of aestheticism than kneebreeches and sunflowers.’ He had particularly liked the gymnasium, and urged them to combine athletics and aesthetics by placing a statue of a Greek athlete in that building. (In fact, he presented a plaster cast of the Hermes of Praxiteles to them ‘by way of casting coals of fire on the Harvard students,’ as Robert Ross said. When Ross was in Cambridge in 1892, the cast was still there. It has since vanished.)22 At this point, Wilde commented later, ‘the young men lapsed into acquiescence at last. I could sympathize with them, because I thought to myself that when I was in my first year at Oxford I would have been apt to do the same. But as they put their head in the lion’s mouth, I thought they deserved a little bite.’ It was one of the great moments of his tour, certified as a triumph by no less an authority than the Boston Evening Transcript on 2 February.

  Wilde’s attitude of connoisseurship towards life and the aromatic manner of his expression, rather than his doctrine, prevented his slipping easily into American hearts. His invocations of beauty managed to sound faintly subversive, faintly unhealthy. His tour was a series of more or less successful confrontations in which his flagrant and unconventional charm was pitted against conventional maleness and resultant suspicion. His costume polarized opposition. Sometimes he thought of giving it up, but the obvious disappointment of his audiences made him don it again. The attacks on him were sometimes gratuitous, like that of Ambrose Bierce in an article of 31 March. But the first that found its target was an earlier one, on 4 February, by T. W. Higginson in the Women’s Journal. Higginson was a highly respected bore. He had much to answer for in literary terms, since he had judged unworthy of publication the strange poems showed him by an unknown Amherst woman; only after Emily Dickinson’s death would he penitently help edit them. Higginson took the occasion of Wilde’s visit to denounce both him and Whitman, as if the end of the alphabet needed pruning. Colonel of a black regiment in the Civil War, Higginson accused Whitman of pretending to military experience when he had been only a hospital nurse. As a former Unitarian minister, he was even more indignant with Wilde’s Charmides for undressing Athena’s bronze statue. ‘Nudities do not suggest the sacred whiteness of an antique statue,’ he said with some inaccuracy, since Greek statues were painted, ‘but rather the forcible unveiling of some injured innocence.’ With military and clerical ferocity, Higginson berated Wilde for writing prurient poems instead of helping to work out the Irish problem in his own country. Higginson was especially agitated because his Newport neighbor Julia Ward Howe, whom he all but named, had entertained this pornographic poet in her home.

  Higginson was made to taste the grapes of Mrs Howe’s wrath. She wrote a letter to the Boston Evening Transcript on 16 February, denying the colonel’s right to decide who should be received socially. Judges as eminent as Higginson had admired Wilde’s poems. Wilde was willing to learn as well as teach. ‘To cut off even an offensive member of society from its best influences and most humanizing resources is scarcely Christian in any sense.’ She received Wilde’s thanks for her ‘noble and beautiful’ letter.23 Higginson was silenced, but the Pall Mall Gazette on 18 March ironically endorsed Mrs Howe’s courage in trying to improve Wilde. For the moment he was paying in America for the heterosexual overtones in his poems, as later, in England, he would pay for the homosexual overtones in his prose.

  A comparably painful incident occurred on 7 February, three days after Higginson’s article had appeared, in the city of Rochester. There the Rochester students, trying to outdo their Harvard counterparts, drowned out Wilde’s words with hoots and hisses. Wilde folded his arms and gazed calmly at his tormentors until the din abated, then resumed. Halfway through the lecture, by prearrangement, an old black man, in formal dress and one white kid glove to parody Wilde’s attire, danced down the center aisle carrying an immense bunch of flowers and sat in a front seat. The police tried to quiet the guffawing crowd but only made matters worse, and many of the audience had left before the lecturer could desperately finish.24

  Yet this wound also brought its balm. The poet Joaquin Miller, whom Wilde had dined with in New York on 5 February, wrote a letter to him on the 9th expressing shame at the behavior of ‘those ruffians at Rochester.’ The letter was published next day by Hurlbert in the New York World and Wilde replied to Miller in a letter of 28 February which the World printed on 3 March. It was a fiery answer to all his enemies, especially Higginson: ‘Who, after all, that I should write of him, is this scribbling animalcule in grand old Massachusetts who scrawls and screams so glibly about what he cannot understand?… Who are those scribes who, passing with purposeless alacrity from the police news to the Parthenon, and from crime to criticism, sway with such serene incapacity the office which they so lately swept?’ Insouciant as he appeared, and innocent as he felt, Wilde was increasingly conscious of the malice released against him. ‘What a tempest and tornado you live in!’ his mother wrote to him on 19 February. He was undaunted. ‘I have no complaints to make,’ he complained to one journalist. ‘They have certainly treated me outrageously, but I am not the one who is injured, it is the public. By such ridiculous attacks the people are taught to mock where they should reverence.’ If the press’s opposition was uncomfortable, its approval would have been much worse. ‘Had I been treated differently by the newspapers in England and in this country, had I been commended and endorsed, for the first time in my life I should have doubted myself and my mission.’ Then, more grandly, ‘What possible difference can it make to me what the New York Herald says? You go and look at the statue of the Venus de Milo and you know that it is an exquisitely beautiful creation. Would it change your opinion in the least if all the newspapers in the land should pronounce it a wretched caricature? Not at all. I know that I am right, that I have a mission to perform. I am indestructible!’25 (As the Duke remarks in The Duchess of Padua, ‘popularity / Is the one insult I have never suffered.’) He appealed to a famous precedent: ‘Shelley was driven out of England but he wrote equally well in Italy.’ To be treated like Keats and Shelley was not too bad, but he was surprised that a British visitor should be treated so much worse in America than Americans in England.

  Dealing with the press was not all hard work. Arriving at his hotel in Boston, he found a card from a reporter said to represent a string of Western newspapers, asking urgently for an interview. Wilde donned a dressing gown for the interview. In came a very young gentleman, ‘or rather a boy, and as I saw him I judged that he was nearly sixteen. I asked him if he had been to school. He said he had left school some time since. He asked my advice as to his course in journalism. I asked him if he knew French. He said no. I advised him to learn French, and counselled him a little as to what books to read. In fact I interviewed him. At last I gave him an orange and then sent him away. What he did with the oran
ge I don’t know; he seemed pleased to get it.’26

  Beautifying America

  As to modern newspapers with their dreary records of politics, police-courts and personalities, I have long ago ceased to care what they write about me—my time being all given up to the Gods and the Greeks.27

  From Boston, Wilde proceeded to New Haven and then, with intermediate stops, to Chicago. He was accompanied by a business manager, J. S. Vail, and by a black valet, W. M. Traquair, to take care of his wardrobe. State by state he worked his way patiently through the Middle West to Nebraska, from where at the end of March he went to California for a two-week tour at a reputed fee of $5000. Then he returned in crisscross fashion through Kansas, Iowa, and Colorado to New Jersey and, as his first tour came to an end on 12 May, to Virginia. He had planned to lecture only until April, but his fame had encouraged more bookings. For a time he talked of returning to London, and then, in July, of proceeding to Japan. He broached to Whistler the possibility of their visiting and writing a book together about Japan, but silence was Whistler’s only response. A young painter Wilde met in Des Moines, named Spencer Blake, was abruptly invited instead and as abruptly agreed to accompany him as private secretary, following which they would go to Australia, back to London, and then back to America in the autumn of 1883.28 This plan fell through. Wilde could have financed the expedition by writing articles about Japanese art, and in Australia by lecturing, but no one offered him a series of regular bookings like Carte’s in the United States. Colonel Morse proposed that he make a second tour of America following his lecture in Charlottesville, and Wilde deferred, without as yet quite abandoning, the voyage to the Far East.