Oscar

by Sturgis, Matthew;

  That meeting was rapidly followed up with others, at Park Street and chez Lloyd. There was even a joint outing to the ‘Fisheries Exhibition’, with Wilde in ebullient form. Constance, dining with an aunt that evening, remarked, ‘How delightful it is to see you, Aunt Carrie, after spending three hours and a half with a clever man.’9 Lady Wilde encouraged the growing intimacy, writing to ‘Dear Constance’ to confirm her attendance at a subsequent Saturday salon (‘I like my rooms to be decorated’); although she was occasionally vexed at the way Oscar ignored other guests to talk to decorative Miss Lloyd. When not talking to her, it was noted, his eyes followed her about the room.10

  ‘If the man were anyone else but Oscar Wilde,’ Otho remarked, ‘one might conclude that he was in love with her.’ There was little doubt that this was the way things were tending. But, with the special obtuseness of a brother, Otho failed to read the signs. ‘I don’t believe that he means anything; that is his way with all girls whom he finds interesting; and Constance told me afterwards that they had not agreed upon a single subject.’11

  Although Wilde liked to claim that one of the things that had made him fall in love with Constance was that ‘she scarcely ever speaks, [so] I am always wondering what her thoughts are like’ – in fact she was forthright in her opinions, even if they were delivered in a low, grave voice. She was not impressed by Wilde’s current Paris-inspired ideas, telling him, ‘I am afraid you and I disagree in our opinion on art; for I hold that there is no perfect art without perfect morality, whilst you say they are distinct and separable things.’12 But if they disagreed about the aims of art, they shared a sense of its great importance. Constance, like Oscar, had an intense ‘delight in things artistic and beautiful’. That delight, together with her ‘keen sense of form and colour’, found expression in many aspects of her life, from her dress sense to the beautiful embroideries that she created.13

  Wilde was particularly keen to discuss art just then. He had agreed to give a talk on the subject to the students’ club of the Royal Academy Schools, where Norman Forbes-Robertson’s younger brother, Eric, was secretary. It was to be an informal, undergraduate occasion and Wilde seems to have prepared for it by re-reading Pater and listening to Whistler.14

  On the evening of 30 June he gave an ‘audience of young brushes’ (as one newspaper called them) his stimulating vision for ‘Modern Art Training’: ‘What makes an artist and what does the artist make, what are the relations of the artist to his surroundings, what is the education an artist should get, and what is the quality of a good work of art.’ The vision he elaborated was one of art created for art’s sake.

  ‘What you, as painters, have to paint,’ he told his young listeners, ‘is not things as they are but things as they seem to be; not things as they are but things as they are not.’ ‘The sign of a Philistine age’, he told them, ‘is the cry of immorality against art.’ Cultural nationalism was exploded with the line, ‘English art is a meaningless expression. One might just as well talk of English mathematics.’ Specialisms of subject matter were decried (‘all such divisions as animal painters, landscape painters, and painters of Scotch cattle in an English mist, painters of English cattle in a Scotch mist, racehorse painters, bull-terrier painters’) along with ‘all archaeological pictures that make you say, “How curious,” all sentimental pictures that make you say, “How interesting,” all pictures that do not immediately give you such artistic joy as to make you say, “How beautiful”’. Whistler was roundly declared ‘the greatest artist of the day… a master of all time’.

  Wilde launched himself into extemporized passages of Ruskinian word-painting when talking of how ‘to the real artist nothing is beautiful or ugly in itself’, since any scene or object might be transformed by the artist’s vision and the effects of light:

  Even Gower Street, one of the most monotonously dull and colourless of formal London thoroughfares has periods when it is actually beautiful. I remember coming home from a party and passing through it when day was breaking when its aspect was most charming and I was forcibly struck by this fact. In the softening obscurity of the morning mist which had filled it with golden and purple hues, softening its outlines, and giving variety to its shadows, with the sunrays piercing it in long golden shafts, the roofs were shining like molten silver, and the vermilion pillar-[box] shone like a gem. It was a scene of almost fairy-like beauty.

  He concluded with the Paterian assertion, ‘A picture has no meaning but its beauty, no message but its joy. That is the first truth about art that you must never lose sight of. A picture is a purely decorative thing.’15

  The talk, with its mix of epigram and humour, was hugely enjoyed by the students, even if the press noted that its ‘brilliantly eccentric philosophy’ was ‘very heterodox from an Academic standpoint’.16 It served also as both a preparation and an advertisement for a public lecture that Wilde was scheduled to deliver the following week.

  On his return from Paris, Wilde had been delighted to discover that Colonel Morse, his American tour manager, had recently relocated to London. At an interview in Morse’s offices, they discussed Wilde’s idea for a lecture tour of Britain. It was decided that, to test the market, there should be an initial one-off London lecture, and not on art, but on his ‘Personal Impressions of America’. The talk was scheduled for Thursday 10 July at half past eight in the evening, at Prince’s Hall, Piccadilly. Wilde worked to put all the conditions for success in place, rehearsing his material and his performance. Having been consistently criticized in America for his poor vocal delivery, he consulted Hermann Vezin about his diction, telling the actor, ‘I want you to help me. I want a natural style, with a touch of affectation.’ ‘Well,’ answered Vezin, ‘and haven’t you got that, Oscar?’17

  Tickets for the event were expensive, at half a guinea. But even so the prospect of seeing Oscar Wilde in his first appearance upon a British lecture platform ensured a large crowd, close to the hall’s 600-seat capacity. The audience was accounted ‘very fashionable and decidedly aesthetic, especially in the female portion of it’. Whistler was conspicuous, jumping about ‘like a cricket’ as he ‘put himself in evidence all over the hall’.18 There was slight disappointment, in some sections of the crowd, when Wilde strode on to the platform – about twenty minutes late – not sporting Aesthetic knee-breeches, a velvet coat or long hair. Instead he was dressed in conventional evening attire, although the trousers were very tight, the shirtcuffs very long, and the buttonhole very fine. With his new curled hairstyle he was thought to look ‘perfectly like the Prince Regent’.19

  Wilde was now a completely assured performer, relaxed and spontaneous; referring to notes but not reading them. Indeed his talk seemed less like a lecture and more ‘a sort of subtle philosophical all-round chat, sometimes extravagantly coloured, sometimes fanciful, vague in structure, and full of a strong personal interest and an undercurrent of Irish fun’.20 He recounted his experiences in New York and Chicago, among the Chinese of San Francisco and the Mormons of Salt Lake City. He repeated the old stories about the miners of Leadville and the old jokes about the disappointments of Niagara. He praised the beauty of American machinery and the intellectual power of American women. He lamented the tediousness of the landscape (‘it seemed as if nature, alarmed at the extent of the country, gave up in despair, the job of decorating’) and the national indifference to pomp and ceremony (‘I saw only two processions during my whole visit, one was the Fire Brigade preceded by the Police, and the other was the Police preceded by the Fire Brigade’). He described American girls as the ‘prettiest despots in the world… little oases of pretty unreasonableness in a vast desert of practical common sense’ – and American men as being entirely given to business: ‘Idleness is not with them, as it is with us, one of the fine arts.’

  The laughs were constant: at his description of the ordinary American railway car, offering ‘as much privacy as if one sat in an arm-chair in the centre of Piccadilly’; at the little boy trying to sell him
a bag of peanuts with the line ‘You might buy some… I never sold peanuts to a poet yet’; at his refusal to lecture on the ‘Beautiful’ at a town called Griggsville because the ‘name was so ugly’ and ‘the inhabitants would not change it’.21 His views on American democracy were listened to with interest, and the occasional burst of applause. But even the sympathetic World considered that the talk was ‘a little too long’. After almost two hours – and with the time approaching eleven o’clock – people began to leave. Wilde, quickly grasping the situation, hastened to his stirring conclusion: that America is ‘a country which can teach us the beauty of the word “Freedom” and the value of the thing “Liberty”’.

  Notwithstanding this slightly hurried end, the lecture was generally very well received. One characteristic review hailed it as ‘very “Oscar Wildish”… paradoxical, audacious, epigrammatic, abounding in good stories well told, in picturesque descriptions, often humorously nonsensical, [and] with plenty of original information’.22 Wilde, though, had retained the ability to polarize opinion. Some sections of the press insisted on casting the occasion in a negative light.23 The most hostile review, however, came from a perhaps unexpected quarter: Labouchère’s Truth printed a long spite-filled leader titled ‘Exit Oscar’. After describing Wilde’s ‘lecturing to empty benches at the height of the season’ as a most ‘pathetic instance of collapse’, it launched into a withering account of his career as an ‘Epicene youth’ and ‘effeminate phrase-maker’ at Oxford, as ‘the temporary jest in London drawing rooms, the butt of American lecture halls, and a failure in Bohemian Paris’. The ‘fiasco’ of the Prince’s Hall, it declared, must mark an end: ‘The joke is played out; the soap bubble of prismatic hues blown from a clay pipe has burst.’24

  Whether this attack by the previously supportive Labouchère was simply a manifestation of the new journalism’s appetite for building people up only to knock them down, or reflected some rift between Mrs Labouchère and Wilde occasioned by Lillie Langtry’s behaviour in America, is unknown. The article was certainly an annoyance to Wilde, although as he remarked, if it took Labouchère three columns to prove that he was forgotten, ‘then there is no difference between fame and obscurity’.25

  And, indeed, the general consensus prevailed that Wilde’s lecture had been a success. It led – as Morse had predicted – to requests from across the country. The colonel was heartened by the initial response to a ‘prospectus’ he sent out to ‘the Institutions’, telling Wilde he could ‘foresee a good season’s work, and fair prices’ – from 10 to 25 guineas per night. A handful of talks was hastily arranged for later that month, while it was planned to build up a full schedule for an autumn/winter season, after Wilde had returned from assisting at the imminent premiere of Vera in America.26

  At the start of August Wilde headed north to Liverpool. There he met Lillie Langtry, just returned from her own triumphant – and very lucrative – American tour. Wilde presented her with a bouquet of roses. He must have hoped that some of her theatrical success would adhere to him. The following day he embarked on the SS Britannic for New York.27

  The crossing was a pleasant one. Among the passengers was a group of Oxford contemporaries, including Gussie Creswell and St John Brodrick. Brodrick, writing to George Curzon, described how Wilde had been ‘the life and soul of the voyage. He has showered good stories and bons mots, paradoxes and epigrams upon me all the way, while he certainly has a never failing bonhomie which makes him roar with laughter at his own absurd theories and strange conceits… I don’t know that I have ever laughed so much as with and at him all through the voyage.’ In more serious mode, Wilde also gave a reading of his poem ‘Ave Imperatrix’ at the shipboard concert in aid of the Liverpool Orphans’ Asylum.28

  Arriving in New York on 11 August, Wilde was greeted by the inevitable interviewers when he checked in to the Brunswick Hotel. They were intrigued by his new, reformed, appearance – something ‘like a rational being’ as one termed it. His hair had undergone a further revision on the voyage over: no longer curled, it was now short, straight, thinned out and – as the American press termed it – ‘banged’ on his forehead. The velvet breeches, it was noted, had been replaced with ‘regulation trousers’; and even the presence of ‘a Byron collar, scarf, and diamond pin’ could not quite dispel the prevailing effect of conventionality.29

  Wilde at once set about pushing his play, which was set to open at the Union Square Theatre on 20 August. He exploded the notion that he had carried with him from England the actual scenery for the piece – ‘“corn field” and all’. He had, though, he admitted, brought ‘some designs for the scenery and costumes’ and some vermilion silk for Miss Prescott’s dress. He claimed that he had been unable to mount the play in England because ‘it touched on political subjects’; but since ‘Americans are without prejudices’ he had hopes of a fair reception in the States. Looking forwards, he mentioned that he had recently completed The Duchess of Padua – and had great expectations for its future production. He regretted that he would only be staying in America ‘a few weeks’ because of his lecture commitments in England, but he hoped to visit Newport, and to see Henry Ward Beecher again at Peekskill.30

  Wilde was anxious to ‘superintend’ the rehearsals for Vera. He recognized that changes might still have to be made. ‘A good play is hardly ever finished,’ he told the New York World. ‘It must be fitted to the stage. It is not enough to make music; one must make music that the instruments can play.’ Prescott had assembled a very serviceable collection of ‘instruments’: the imposing George C. Boniface as the Czar; Edward Lamb, a popular comic, as Prince Paul; and the dashing Jamaican-born Lewis Morrison as the romantic Czarevitch.31

  Perzel (Marie Prescott’s husband) claimed to have spent almost $10,000 on costumes and scenery, the greatest extravagance being the yellow-silk-lined council chamber for the second act.32 Nor had promotion been neglected. The city ‘was lithographed from one end to the other’ with garish representations of ‘the O’Wilde countenance’, and images of Miss Prescott ‘flying away’ in an eight-horse sleigh while firing a Winchester repeating rifle.33 Expensive typographical advertisements appeared in the papers; the play’s title was now given as ‘Vera – or the Nihilist’ singular.34 A long letter from Wilde to Prescott, in which he expressed his exalted vision for the piece, and the ‘pride and pleasure’ he had in her taking on the title role, was published in the New York World. Tickets were selling ‘at a premium’.35 Everything seemed set fair. That week was ‘uncommonly cool’ for mid-August New York, perfect for theatre-going. Many of Wilde’s fashionable friends were returning to town for the show.36

  But on the day of the opening the weather turned. The temperature soared to ‘95 degrees in the shade’, and stayed there. It was into a sweltering theatre that the ‘vast audience’ crowded on the evening of Monday 20 August. Despite the stifling heat things began well. The opening prologue, in which Vera, working in her father’s humble inn, sees her brother being led off in chains to the Siberian salt mines, and resolves to become a Nihilist, was accounted ‘strong’, with its touches of humour and its ‘thrilling climax’. Wilde, seeing his work upon the stage for the first time, experienced some feelings of unease. There was a considerable ‘gulf’ between the characters as he had conceived them and as they appeared in the performances of Prescott and her company.37 The audience, however, did not seem to share his disquiet. At the end of the first act (set in the den of the Nihilists) there were cries of ‘Author!’. After the second act (with Prince Paul spouting epigrams in the yellow silk council chamber) the cries were renewed, and Wilde came on stage to bow his thanks. The audience remained ‘critical, but favourably disposed’ until the fourth (and final) act. The staging of the passionate climax – in which Vera, arrayed in the ‘flaming vermilion gown’ stabs herself having declared her love for Alexis – was considered ‘more than indelicate… and called forth the murmurings of the entire house’. Hisses were heard. But even so the incident seeme
d isolated. At the curtain Wilde came forward again, and ‘made a speech which was well received’. He was able to leave the theatre that night feeling the play had been, overall, a success. Others, too, endorsed the sentiment.38

  Among the notes of laudation he received was one from Lillie Langtry’s sometime lover, Freddie Gebhard, who had come down from Newport for the show. ‘My dear Oscar – Let me congratulate you on the great success of your play. I liked it so much that I cabled immediately over to our dear Lillie.’39 This generous praise, however, arrived together with the morning papers. The press was not so kind: ‘The play is unreal, long-winded, and wearisome’ (New York Times); ‘A foolish highly-peppered story of love, intrigue, and politics… little better than fizzle’ (New York Tribune); ‘long-drawn, dramatic rot, a series of disconnected essays and sickening rant, with a coarse and common kind of cleverness’ (New York Herald); ‘The play is absurd in plot, incongruous in costumes and scenery and utterly meaningless in its verbiage’ (New York Sun).40

  This was an appalling blow, and a fatal one. It was of no matter that the New York World thought that – despite the faults of the last act – ‘the play opened well… and its distinctive merits are on the side of success’; or that the character of Prince Paul received a good deal of qualified approbation.41 There was palpable hostility in the press chorus, and – as it seemed to Wilde – injustice too. The audience had enjoyed the play. The New York critics, however, were renowned for having ‘no middle ground’; they would either praise a play ‘up to the skies, or damn it to the bottomless pit of oblivion.’ Vera had fallen on the wrong side of that divide. Rumours circulated that some critics had received orders from their proprietors to damn the play ‘no matter what’. But the Boston Pilot thought it was the fault of Miss Prescott’s ‘inferior’ acting; Mrs Frank Leslie blamed the vermilion dress.42