He closed with Morse’s offer‖ and on 13 May was in central and eastern Canada; a month later he came down to the American South, beginning with Memphis and covering most of the Southern states. Then he went north and in mid-July was still lecturing, even though the customary lecture season was well over, in watering places in Rhode Island, New York, and New Jersey. The tour persisted, though at a retarded pace, well into August. In late September he was off on a third round, for three weeks, to a few spots in New England and eastern Canada, his last lecture being on 13 October in St. John, New Brunswick. Then he returned to New York and stopped lecturing.
His lecture schedule was a heavy one, as indicated in the table on the following pages.
WILDE’S ITINERARY, 9 January–13 October 1882
(Places where he stopped but did not lecture are in brackets)
I. From 9 January to 12 May 1882
9 January 1882 Chickering Hall, New York City, ‘The English Renaissance’
17 Horticultural Hall, Philadelphia
23 Lincoln Hall, Washington, D.C.
25 Lincoln Hall, Baltimore
27 Albany Music Hall
31 Boston Music Hall
1 February Peck’s Opera House, New Haven
2 Hartford Opera House
3 Brooklyn Academy of Music
6 City Opera House, Utica
7 Opera House, Rochester
8 Academy of Music, Buffalo
9 [Niagara] (Prospect House in Ontario)
13 Central Music Hall, Chicago
16 Old Academy, Fort Wayne, Indiana
17 Music Hall, Detroit
18 Case Hall, Cleveland
[Cincinnati]
20 Columbus
21 Masonic Temple, Louisville
22 English’s Opera House, Indianapolis
23 Opera House, Cincinnati
25 Mercantile Library Hall, St. Louis
27 Opera House, Springfield, Illinois
1 March Dubuque, Iowa
2 Rockford, Illinois
3 Aurora, Illinois
4 Racine, Wisconsin
5 Grand Opera House, Milwaukee
6 Joliet
7 Jacksonville, Illinois
8 Decatur, Illinois
9 Peoria, Illinois
10 Bloomington, Illinois
11 Chicago Central Music Hall
15 Academy of Music, Minneapolis
16 Opera House, St. Paul
17 Opera House, St. Paul (St Patrick’s Day speech)
[New York]
20 Academy of Music, Sioux City, Iowa
21 Boyd’s Opera House, Omaha
27 Platt’s Hall, San Francisco
28 Oakland Light Cavalry Armory, Oakland, California
29 Platt’s Hall, San Francisco
30 San Jose, California
31 Sacramento, California
1 April Platt’s Hall, San Francisco
3 California Hall, San Jose
4 Mozart Hall, Stockton
5 Platt’s Hall, San Francisco
10 Leavenworth Opera House, Kansas
11 Salt Lake Theatre, Salt Lake City, Utah
12 Opera House, Denver
13 Tabor Grand Opera House, Leadville, Colorado
14 Colorado Springs, Colorado
15 Denver
17 Coates Opera House, Kansas City, Missouri
18 Tootle’s Opera House, St. Joseph, Missouri
19 [Leavenworth, Kansas]
20 Opera House, Topeka, Kansas
21 Liberty Hall, Lawrence, Kansas
22 Corinthian Hall, Atchison, Kansas
24 Lincoln, Nebraska
25 Fremont, Iowa
26 Des Moines, Iowa
27 Iowa City
28 Cedar Rapids, Iowa
29 Rock Island, Iowa
2 May Dayton, Ohio
3 Comstock Opera House, Columbus, Ohio
4 Harrisburg, Pennsylvania
8 Freehold
9 Newark
10 [Philadelphia]
11 Wallack’s Theatre, New York
12 Lee Avenue Baptist Church, Williamsburg, Virginia
II. From 13 May to 26 August 1882
15 May Queen’s Hall, Montreal
16 Grand Opera House, Ottawa
18 Music Hall, Quebec
20 Queen’s Hall, Montreal
22 Opera House, Kingston, Ontario
23 City Hall Auditorium, Belleville, Ontario
25 Grand Opera House, Toronto, Ontario
26 Stratford Opera House, Brantford, Ontario
27 Pavilion of the Horticultural Gardens, Toronto
29 City Hall Auditorium, Woodstock, Ontario
30 Grand Opera House, Hamilton, Ontario
31 Wesleyan Ladies’ College, Hamilton
2 June Globe Theatre, Boston New York
11 Grand Opera House, Cincinnati
12 Leubrie’s Theatre, Memphis
14 [Vicksburg]
16 Grand Opera House, New Orleans
17 Fort Worth, Texas
19 Pavilion, Galveston
20 or 21 Turner Opera Hall, San Antonio
23 Gray’s Opera House, Houston, Texas
26 Spanish Fort, Louisiana
New Orleans
27 [Beauvoir (visit to Jefferson Davis)]
28 Frascati Amusement Park, Mobile, Alabama
29 McDonald’s Opera House, Montgomery, Alabama
30 Columbus, Georgia
3 July Rolston Hall, Macon, Georgia
4 De Give’s Opera House, Atlanta
5 Savannah Theatre, Savannah
6 Augusta, Georgia
7 Academy, Charleston, South Carolina
8 Wilmington, Delaware
10 Van Wyck’s Academy of Music, Norfolk, Virginia
11 Richmond Theatre, Richmond, Virginia
14 Opera House, Vicksburg
15 Casino, Newport, Rhode Island
17 [New York]
28 Long Branch
29 [At Peekskill with Henry Ward Beecher]
2 August Babylon, Long Island
5 Long Beach
7 Long Beach Hotel, Long Beach
9 Gould Hall, Ballston Spa, New York
10 Congress Hall Ballroom, Saratoga, New York
11 Pavilion Hotel, Sharon Springs
12 Cooper House, Cooperstown, New York
14 Spring House, Richfield Springs
15 Hotel Kaaterskill, in Catskill Mountains
16 Long Beach Hotel, Long Beach
17 Mountain House, Cornwall
18 Tremper House, Catskills
19 Grand Hotel, Catskills
21 Octagon House, Seabright, New Jersey
22 West End Hotel, Long Branch
23 Palisades Mountain House, Spring Lake
24 Coleman House, Asbury Park
25 Atlantic City
26 Hotel Stockton, Cape May
III. From 26 September to 13 October 1882
25 or 26 September Low’s Grand Opera House, Providence, Rhode Island
28 Music Hall, Pawtucket, Rhode Island
29 North Attleboro, Massachusetts
3 October Bangor, Maine
4 City Hall Auditorium, Fredericton, New Brunswick
5 Mechanics’ Institute, St. John, New Brunswick
6 Academy of Music, Amherst, Nova Scotia
7 YMCA, Truro, Nova Scotia
9 Academy of Music, Halifax, Nova Scotia
10 Academy of Music, Halifax
11 Market Hall, Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island
12 Ruddick’s Hall, Moncton, New Brunswick
13 Mechanics’ Institute, St. John, New Brunswick
14 October–27 December [New York (Fifth Avenue Hotel, the Brunswick, the Windsor, and 48 W. 11th Street)]
It had been an extraordinary journey. If America did not bend the knee to its conqueror, half the United States and half of Canada had been lectured to, and the unlectured halves had been obliged to take notice. News of his appearances continued to oc
cupy the British press as well, so that his mother could write him on 18 September, ‘You are still the talk of London—the cabmen ask me if I am anything to Oscar Wilde—the milkman has bought your picture! and in fact nothing seems celebrated in London but you. I think you will be mobbed when you come back by eager crowds and will be obliged to shelter in cabs.’ In America his poems received the compliment of being pirated and sold at 10 cents a copy. Popular songs were published with such titles as ‘Oscar Wilde Forget-Me-Not Waltzes,’ ‘The Flippity Flop Young Man,’ and ‘Oscar Dear!’ Young women posed with sunflowers as hats or sang ‘Twenty lovesick maidens we’ as he approached. The humorist Eugene Field got himself up as Wilde. Lily in hand, gazing languidly at a book, he drove through Denver on 15 April in an open carriage. Wilde, on being informed, only commented, ‘What a splendid advertisement for my lecture.’29 His opinion was constantly sought in connection with plans for new art schools and galleries, and young artists looked up to him, as he could not help boasting to Mrs Lewis, as a god.a Wilde grew more defiant and solemn about his mission. On being asked in Omaha on 23 March about his plans for future work, he laughed, lit a cigarette, threw himself back in his chair, and replied precisely: ‘Well, I’m a very ambitious young man. I want to do everything in the world. I cannot conceive of anything that I do not want to do. I want to write a great deal more poetry. I want to study painting more than I’ve been able to. I want to write a great many more plays, and I want to make this artistic movement the basis for a new civilization.’30
It was as if he had taken to heart the advice he was quoted as having given in Boston, ‘The supreme object of life is to live. Few people live. It is true life only to realize one’s own perfection, to make one’s every dream a reality. Even this is possible.’ Wilde was playing in a mild version the roles of both Lord Henry Wotton and Dorian Gray, seducer and seduced.
At first Colonel Morse spaced the lectures well apart, but after the first few cities he arranged a series of one-night stands, with few intervals. On learning that matinees were agreeable to Wilde, Morse added some of these. Wilde protested mildly at giving six lectures a week, then accustomed himself to it. Though sometimes unpunctual, he was conscientious in fulfilling his engagements, and once, in Saratoga, chartered a special locomotive so as to reach Richfield Springs on time. The famous preacher Henry Ward Beecher, his reputation clouded by being named corespondent in a divorce case, was summering near New York, and Wilde paid him a visit.b
By 15 June the total receipts of his tour were $18,215.69. After expenses of $7005.06 were deducted, Wilde received a half-share of the $11,210.63 that remained.31 It was a substantial sum. There were moments during these lucrative travels when America whizzed past his train with bewildering rapidity, so that one of his letters to Stoddart is headed ‘Somewhere and sometime—I am not sure where or when.’ But he gave no sign of confusion to the relentless interviewers, and in each town he usually managed not only to lecture but also to visit the art gallery and art school, and to meet the local worthies at receptions and dinners. That Wilde was as delightful a visitor as America would ever have, never became common knowledge, but he impressed thousands of persons. For instance, a letter from a young man named Babb to his mother (preserved because Babb’s son James later became director of the Yale University Library) told of a visit by Wilde to Illinois College in Jacksonville: ‘He has a splendid diction and his descriptive powers are worthy of the highest praise. His sentences are mellifluous and sparkle with occasional gems of beauty. Munroe Browning and I had the pleasure of calling upon him at the Dunlop House. He is very cordial—extended us his hand both on entering and departing his room. His conversation is very pleasant—easy, beautiful, and entertaining. He said that if he were a young man in this country the West would have great charms for him.’32 The impact of such a personality on the young must have been appreciable, even if not measurable. For the rest of his life people would come up to Wilde to say they had heard him lecture.
Early in his travels Wilde discovered that he would need another lecture besides ‘The English Renaissance.’ Eastern newspapers had shown no scruple about filling their columns with his remarks, almost verbatim, and since these were copied by other papers, Wilde’s audiences were well primed with his views before he uttered them. His Philadelphia friend Robert S. Davis was perhaps the first to encourage Wilde to take up a second subject; on 20 January he rather officiously outlined how a lecture on ‘Modern Aestheticism Applied to Real Life’ might deal, successively, with the home, the costume, and the recognition of merit in art products. Wilde was attentive, but not immediately persuaded. He persisted with ‘The English Renaissance’ until his arrival in Chicago in February. There he had eventually to speak twice, and when he learned from the report in the Buffalo Courier that the Chicago papers already had ‘The English Renaissance’ in type, he hastily put together two new lectures, which he gave from that time on. One, delivered on his second visit, in March, became known as ‘The House Beautiful’ (a dreadful phrase perpetuated by Pater). The other, first given on 13 February, was ‘The Decorative Arts.’ Both these lectures differed from the first, since instead of being historical, they offered practical applications of aesthetic doctrine.
‘The Decorative Arts’ was more closely tied to ‘The English Renaissance,’ drawing heavily upon Ruskin and Morris for its examples. Wilde described the recent rise of handicrafts in England, and the advantage of having work made by delighted craftsmen rather than by unfeeling machines. He moved fluently from point to point, not worrying much about organization, trusting to what quickly became dependable patter. Modern dress was ignoble, as could be seen in sculptures: ‘To see the statues of our departed statesmen in marble frock coats and bronze, double-breasted waistcoats adds a new horror to death.’ There must be schools of art, and these must be in more immediate relation with trade and manufacturing than now. Art should portray the men who cover the world with a network of iron and the sea with ships. Beside each art school should be a museum, like the South Kensington Museum in London, where artists and craftsmen could come to see excellent work in their fields. Bad art is worse than no art: ‘I have seen [in the Philadelphia School of Design] young ladies painting moonlights upon dinner plates and sunsets on soup plates.’ The subjects for art need not be searched far afield: ‘The most graceful thing I ever beheld was a miner in a Colorado silver mine driving a new shaft with a hammer; at any moment he might have been transformed into marble or bronze and become noble in art forever.’ Modern jewelry is vulgar because the individual craftsman is ignored; modern wallpaper is so bad that a boy brought up under its influence could allege it as a justification for turning to a life of crime. Heavy crockery cups should be abjured in favor of the tiny porcelain ones from which he had seen Chinese navvies drinking. Finally, education must be changed: children should not be drilled in ‘that calendar of infamy, European history,’ but should learn in a workshop how art might offer a new history of the world, with a promise of the brotherhood of man, of peace rather than war, of praise of God’s handicraftsmanship, of new imagination and new beauty.
‘The House Beautiful’ was even more prescriptive. Wilde metaphorically walked through the house, commenting on the mistakes he had observed. The entrance hall should not be papered, since it was too close to the outdoors; wainscoting was better. It should not be carpeted but tiled. Secondary colors should be used on walls and ceilings of rooms. Large gas chandeliers should be replaced by side brackets. Windows must be small to avoid glaring light. Ugly heating stoves must give way to Dutch porcelain stoves. No artificial flowers. Blown glass rather than cut glass. Queen Anne furniture. He passed on to the house’s inhabitants and the subject of dress. Women should eschew furbelows and corsets, and emulate the drapery on Greek statuary. As for men, the only well-dressed men he had seen in America were the Colorado miners with wide-brimmed hats and long cloaks. Knee breeches like his were more sensible than trousers. After such instructions, Wilde passed on to
the relation of art to morals. Instead of saying there was none, he argued that art had a spiritual ministry; it could raise and sanctify everything it touched; and popular disapproval should not impede its progress.
This was not altogether foolery; most of it was unexceptionable. Wilde increasingly depended upon disseminating his personality rather than his principles. He became adroit at incorporating refreshing responses to local features. In Chicago he complained that the newly built water tower was ‘a castellated monstrosity, with pepper box turrets and absurd portcullises,’ but he appeased Chicagoans a little by acknowledging that ‘the mighty symmetrical, harmonious wheel’ inside the tower came up to the highest aesthetic standards. While objecting to machine-made articles, he allowed that machinery could in some ways free people for better use of time. But, as he said in Omaha, ‘The evil that machinery is doing is not merely in the consequences of its work, but in the fact that it makes men themselves machines also. Whereas we wish them to be artists, that is to say men.’ ‘If ever America produces a great musician,’ he said, ‘let him write a machinery symphony.’ Then he added, in less Delphic mode, ‘But first they must abolish the steam whistle.’33 Asked to comment on the scenery of San Francisco, he said it was ‘Italy without its art.’ He praised the House of the Seven Gables in Salem, and occasional buildings elsewhere; he complimented Charles Pratt in Baltimore for contributing $1 million to a public library. In New Orleans he talked of his uncle, Dr J. K. Elgee, once active in Confederate politics in Rapides parish there. The Hudson River on the way to Albany received his approval. Niagara Falls aroused more acid comment: ‘Niagara will survive any criticism of mine,’ he allowed. ‘I must say, however, that it is the first disappointment in the married life of many Americans who spend their honeymoon there.’ His particular complaint was against its monotonous outline of ‘endless water falling the wrong way.’34 But when he took the trip under the falls, he grew respectful: ‘I do not think I ever realized so strongly the splendour and beauty of the mere physical forms of nature as I did when I stood by the Table Rock. A wonderful thing is the calm directly underneath the falls, the rapids not showing themselves for a long distance under the river.’ He was finding in the falls the passionless contemplation he sometimes attributed to art. ‘Another thing that interested me very much,’ he said, ‘was the curious repetition of the same forms, of the same design almost, in the shape of the falling water. It gave me a sense of how completely what seems to us the wildest liberty of nature is restrained by governing laws.’ He edged over into grandiloquence when he was invited to write in the Prospect House private album at Niagara, and said: ‘The roar of these waters is like the roar when the mighty wave of democracy breaks on the shores where kings lie couched at ease.’35 He commented ironically on this view in Vera when the Czarevich says, ‘far off I hear the mighty wave Democracy break on these cursed shores,’ only to have Prince Paul reply, ‘In that case you and I must learn to swim.’
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