Oscar

by Sturgis, Matthew;

  Over the course of 1882 his image – derived without permission, usually from the Sarony photographs – was more widely used on popular, mass-produced ‘trade cards’ than anybody else’s. The name ‘Oscar Wilde’ was considered to lend distinction to a product. He was co-opted into promoting everything from cigars to kitchen stoves. Wilde’s portrait was even used on a trade card for ‘Mme Marie Fontaine’s Bosom Beautifier’ – a product that would ‘in every instance, where the instructions are faithfully followed, enlarge and beautify the bosom, in both old and young ladies, [and where] the bosoms have become soft and flaccid, from whatever cause, its use will restore them, rendering them firm and hard’.85

  Supported by this rising tide of publicity, the D’Oyly Carte office had been busy. Such was the interest in Wilde that Morse had been able to arrange a substantial lecture tour of the mid-west, fixed upon the major urban centres – Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Minneapolis and St Paul – but taking in many smaller towns as well. With twenty-seven dates in just six weeks, it was scheduled to run until the third week of March. After that there was demand from several cities in Canada, and requests for return visits to Philadelphia, Boston and New York. Wilde envisaged continuing into April, before returning to Europe in time for Paris Salons.86

  * The ploy proved a great success. Wilde received back a generous letter from Swinburne, detailing his admiration for Whitman – which Wilde duly transcribed, sending one copy to the American poet and another to the press. The exchange also prompted Swinburne to send Wilde an inscribed copy of one of his own books, a belated return for the presentation copy of Wilde’s Poems.

  † Jokes about Barnum promoting Wilde as a novelty became commonplace, particularly when – later in the year – Barnum brought over from London zoo a huge, and elderly, elephant called ‘Jumbo’. One syndicated paragraph ran: ‘It is reported that Barnum has made an offer to Oscar Wilde for the latter to sit on top of Jumbo and ride in the street processions. If, says an American paper, instead of Wilde sitting on the elephant, Jumbo were to sit on Wilde, the result would be more satisfactory to the people, and it wouldn’t hurt Jumbo much.’

  ‡ Wilde’s ‘double first’ – mentioned in Morse’s publicity materials – had been misunderstood by some American commentators to comprise first-class degrees in classics and mathematics. The all-but innumerate Wilde would have relished the confusion – almost as much as being compared to Alcibiades and Petrarch.

  § The term ‘Ass-thete,’ aside from its connotations of foolishness, derived from a ‘conundrum’ then going the rounds: ‘Who was the first Aesthete?’ ‘Balaam’s ass, because the Lord made him to(o) utter.’ In the Old Testament Book of Numbers, the story is told of how Balaam’s ass is given the power of speech, so he can explain to the irate Balaam, that he – the ass – has stopped in his tracks because there is an angel barring the way.

  3

  This Wide Great World

  ‘Oh, some things he says are real sweet, but for the most part I only get an idea of a smattering of something or other; but I know it’s about art.’

  female audience-member

  Wilde was excited by the challenge ahead, and by the opportunities it offered. He began also to conjure up visions of wealth. Dion Boucicault, whom he had seen in Boston, had urged him to ‘throw over Carte’, and arrange the tour himself, even offering to bankroll the venture, as this would provide far greater profits, and free Wilde from the circus-like aspects of Carte’s promotion. But – as Boucicault explained to Mrs Lewis – Wilde was ‘not a practical man of business’ and the idea frightened him.1 He preferred to continue with the existing arrangement. He nevertheless remained optimistic about his prospects, declaring that he hoped to return to England with £1,000.2

  It was a wishful forecast, based, as it was, on a projected three months’ lecturing, but it was encouraged by Wilde’s shaky grasp of finance. He boasted – publicly and privately – that he had ‘got’ £200 (or $1,000) from his lecture in Boston. And Morse’s accounts do indeed show receipts of $1,000 for the Boston talk. But from this amount were deducted $144.52 of business expenses and $89.15 of personal expenses, leaving a profit of $846.33. This sum was then divided 50/50 between the Carte Agency and Wilde. So Wilde actually ‘got’ $423.16 (around £84 10s). It was still a substantial amount, but towns the size of Boston were few.3

  The topic of Wilde’s earnings was one that greatly engaged the press both in the US and in Britain. His own public overestimation of the lecture receipts, together with wildly exaggerated press projections (suggesting that he might net anything between £3,500 and £15,000) combined to breed resentment. Jibes were many. ‘Oscar Wilde’, it was claimed, ‘was the first to discover that there are greenbacks to sunflowers.’4 He responded with satire: ‘I am extremely impressed by the entire disregard of Americans for money-making,’ he told one reporter, causing the man to drop his pencil in surprise. ‘They think it a strange and awful thing that I should want to make a few dollars by lecturing. Why, money-making is necessary for art. Money builds cities and makes them healthful. Money buys art and furnishes it an incentive. Is it strange that I should want to make money?’5

  Wilde did recognize that the business and personal expenses of the project were rather ‘heavy’: first-class rail-travel; hotel accommodation for himself, his servant and his manager; meals in restaurants. But he loved the luxury of it all: sitting down to a light supper of oysters, flanked by three ‘coloured waiters… to hand him his wine, and attend to his other wants’; having a suite of rooms at each hotel; settling into his Pullman seat on the train. These were new and delightful experiences.6 ‘I have a sort of triumphal progress,’ he told Mrs Lewis, ‘live like a young sybarite, travel like a young god.’7 For the first time in his life he was actually earning money. He had always spent freely, and his new situation only encouraged him to spend more freely still. At every stop on his tour – beside the business and personal expenses incurred by Morse, Wilde also ran up substantial private expenses of his own (as they appear in Morse’s account book): for wine, cigarettes, carriages, messengers, ‘refreshments’, newspapers, stamps, laundry, books, gloves and other ‘sundries’ – expenses that were then deducted from his share of the profits.

  He made constant modifications and improvements to his dress, all in the direction of greater extravagance. He had no intention of wearing his trousers longer (or cutting his hair shorter): his public expected him to look as he did in the Sarony photographs. If some people regarded it as vulgar advertisement, Wilde knew that it was effective for that very reason. Before the end of February he had ordered – from a theatrical costumier, rather than a conventional tailor – two splendid new velvet coats, tight fitting but with ‘large flowered sleeves and little ruffs of cambric coming up from under the collar’. They would, he predicted, ‘excite a great sensation’.8 Later he would usher in ‘a new departure in evening dress – black velvet with lace’.9

  Boucicault wished he could make his young friend, ‘less Sybarite – less Epicurean’, urging Wilde to save his money and invest it in ‘six-per-cent bonds’. But, as he reported ruefully to Mrs Lewis: ‘He thinks I take “a painful view of life”.’10 Wilde did, in fact, show some signs of fiscal responsibility. With almost his first earnings he repaid his debt to Levy, and also sent the first of several cheques to his mother.11

  Wilde set off on his mid-western adventure on 6 February. He travelled with ‘two large tin trunks of the Saratoga pattern’, his valet and a dedicated tour manager, the twenty-five-year-old J. Sydney Vale.12 * Although he was still advertised as lecturing on ‘The English Renaissance’, he had been mapping out his new talk, evolved along the more practical lines suggested by Robert Davis. It came to be titled the ‘Decorative Arts’, and drew heavily on the ideas – and, indeed, the words – of Ruskin and Morris.13 Although the ‘English Renaissance’ lecture had touched on the subject, its tenor had been largely abstract and descriptive; this new talk would be more concrete and presc
riptive. It gave to Wilde’s performance an additional sense of purpose. He was now a man on a mission not just to inform but to reform. He asserted the need for artistic handicraft in a machine age, for design to draw upon natural forms, for form to follow function. He stressed the benefits that accrued to society from good design, and the social conditions that were needed to support it.

  He told the citizens of Utica (in the state of New York) – his first stop – that:

  Great movements must originate with the workmen… We should have in our houses things that gave pleasure to the men who made them. The good in art is not what we directly learn from it but what we indirectly become through it. All the arts are fine arts and all the arts are decorative arts. By separating the handicraftsman from the artist you ruin both. Labor without art is merely barbarism. Decoration is the form of expression of the joy the handicraftsman has in his work. Design is the study and result of cumulative habit and observation. I believe in the elevation and education of the poorer classes. I want to see the homes of the humble beautiful.14

  These were ideas that he developed and elaborated in his lectures at Rochester and Buffalo (both also in New York state) as he made his way towards Chicago; although at Rochester the crowd, dominated by sunflower-waving students from the local college, had been so rowdy that a large part of his talk was not heard; an incident that provoked an almost national outcry.15

  After his lecture in Buffalo (a successful experiment with a matinee) Wilde visited Niagara Falls. Recalling the stir achieved by his ‘disappointment’ with the Atlantic, he affected a not dissimilar stance towards the mighty cataract. ‘When I first saw Niagara Falls,’ he told the Buffalo Express, ‘I was disappointed in the outline. The design, it seemed to me, was wanting in grandeur and variety of line’; he did though allow the ‘changing loveliness’ of the colours, and went on to confess: ‘It was not till I stood underneath the falls at Table Rock that I realized the majestic splendor and strength of the physical forces of nature here… It seems to me a sort of embodiment of pantheism. I thought of what Leonardo da Vinci said once, that “the two most beautiful things in the world are a woman’s smile and the motion of mighty water”.’16 The only drawback was that, to take the view from Table Rock, it was necessary to don ‘a yellow oil-skin, which is as ugly as a mackintosh’.17 Wilde’s position as ‘a disappointed man’ once more echoed noisily through the press.18†

  About Chicago – or, rather, about Chicagoans – Wilde was almost unreservedly enthusiastic. He was welcomed by some of the great magnates of the thriving commercial city, America’s food-processing capital. The city itself had been almost entirely rebuilt following the Great Fire of 1871, and Wilde was impressed by the new, wide, clean streets, even if, as he remarked, ‘it is a little sad to think of all the millions of money spent on buildings and so little architecture’.19

  Although the local press hailed him with good deal of satirical banter, the public turned out in force to hear his lecture – and to see his person. Some 2,500 people packed into the Central Music Hall. Wilde’s talk on the ‘Decorative Arts’ was evolving; he delivered it from notes, with a certain amount of fluent improvisation, and frequent local allusions. The effect was winning. Wilde was delighted to find the audience listening with real interest and appreciation; surprised too, given the hostile ‘tone of the press’ beforehand.20 His hearers thrilled with patriotic pride on learning that ‘the grandest art of the world has always been the art of republics’. They took note that ‘you can make as good a design out of an American turkey as a Japanese out of his native stork’, and that ‘no machine-made ornaments should be tolerated. They are all bad, worthless, ugly.’ They enjoyed his comment that ‘people should not mistake the means of civilization for the end. The steam engine and the telephone depend entirely for their value on the use to which they are put.’21 And they were enthused by his belief that – as shown by the Italian Renaissance – the spirit of commerce could be an ally of great art.22

  They were the best audience he had yet encountered. Wilde described them to George Curzon as ‘delightful – a great sympathetic electric people, who cheered and applauded and gave me a sense of serene power that even being abused by the Saturday Review never gave me’.23 Wilde had, though, stirred up one small outburst of dissent during his lecture. With his gift for provocation he had dared to denigrate the city’s famous 154-ft mock-medieval Water Tower (one of very few structures to survive the Great Fire). Having praised the ‘simple, grand, and natural’ workings of its massive pumping engine he surprised his audience by condemning the tower’s exterior as ‘a castellated monstrosity with pepper boxes stuck all over it’ – an amazing ‘abuse’ of ‘Gothic art’. The remark prompted a few angry murmurings at the time, and many press inquisitions afterwards.24 It also ensured that Wilde would always be remembered in Chicago.

  Some criticisms the people of Chicago were prepared to accept. Wilde rebuked them for failing to recognize the rare ‘artistic merit’ of a young Chicago-born (and Paris-trained) sculptor, John Donoghue, who was struggling to make a living in the city. Donoghue had secured Wilde’s interest by presenting him with a small painted bronze bas-relief of a seated girl, illustrating Wilde’s poem ‘Requiescat’; the gift led to a studio visit, at which Wilde had been greatly impressed by the artist’s beautifully modelled statuette of ‘the young Sophocles’, by his Celtic blood and by his bohemian poverty. Wilde’s eloquent advocacy soon led to a flow of commissions from the chastened Chicagoans.

  Using Chicago as his base, Wilde then set off on a succession of three great looping trips across the central states. Having left behind the sophisticated metropolitan centres of the eastern seaboard, he began to get a sense of the continent’s scale and variety. ‘America’, he told more than one reporter, ‘is not a country; it is a world.’25 During his first twelve-day itinerary – which ran from Fort Wayne via Detroit, Cleveland, Louisville, Indianapolis, Cincinnati, St Louis and Springfield before returning to Chicago – he enjoyed (by his own estimation) two more ‘great successes’: at Cincinnati and St Louis.26

  Cincinnati was unlovely in itself. Wilde even remarked to one reporter, ‘I wonder no criminal has ever pleaded the ugliness of your city as an excuse for his crimes.’ But it was filled with cultural institutions and art lovers. Wilde was impressed by the School of Design, if not by a ‘No Smoking’ sign displayed there – ‘Great heaven,’ he exclaimed, ‘they speak of smoking as if it were a crime. I wonder they do not caution the students not to murder each other on the landings.’ He called on art collectors. He toured the Art Museum. And he visited the Rookwood Pottery, a co-operative craft venture established only two years previously.

  An audience concerned with artistic production was eager to listen to Wilde’s ideas. And although in his lecture (a sell-out matinee at the Grand Opera House) he mentioned that one of the designs he saw on a Rookwood vase had been ‘done by someone who, I should say, had only five minutes to catch a train’, he also had words of praise. And he endeared himself to the Cincinnatians with his remark, ‘I cannot express the delight it gives me that I stopped in your city and see the love you have for the beautiful art of decoration.’27

  For his talk at St Louis Wilde had to contend with the poor acoustics of the hall and a small ‘rowdy’ element in the audience. He nevertheless felt that a real connection had been made with the substantial art-loving section of the community.28 He had special praise for the city’s ‘School and Museum of Fine Arts’, pronouncing it ‘the finest museum of its kind in the world.’ He admitted that it did ‘not contain very much’ but all it did contain was ‘excellently and brilliantly chosen, [so that] nothing in it could possibly lead a young student astray’.29

  At Louisville, in northern Kentucky, Wilde enjoyed a success of a different kind. Following his well-attended lecture at the Masonic Temple, he was approached by a sweet gentle-mannered middle-aged woman called Mrs Emma Speed. She was, she explained, the niece of John Keats (her father was th
e poet’s younger brother, George, who had emigrated to the States and prospered). Touched by Wilde’s reference to Keats in his lecture, she invited him to her home to look over some of her relics of the poet. The following day Wilde spent several rapt hours pouring with ‘tender reverence’ over these literary treasures: letters from Keats to his brother in America, ‘torn yellow leaves’ of manuscript, a little edition of Dante in which Keats had made notes on Milton’s Paradise Lost. The visit was a propitious one: Mrs Speed recognized Wilde as one ‘consecrated to the Spirit of Beauty’. And not long afterwards she sent him the manuscript of Keats’s sonnet beginning, ‘Blue! ’Tis the life of Heaven…’, in the hope that he – unlike Keats – might ‘never know “the World’s injustice and his pain”’.30

  Wilde was overwhelmed to have this link with his hero – ‘half enamoured of the paper’ that had touched the poet’s hand, ‘and the ink that did his bidding, and… the sweet comeliness of his character’. ‘What you have given me’, he wrote back, ‘is more golden than gold, more precious than any treasure this great country could yield me… It is a sonnet I have loved always, and indeed who but the supreme and perfect artist could have got from a mere colour a motive so full of marvel.’ 31