Oscar Wilde

by Barbara Belford

  In addition to Colonel W. F. Morse, who managed tours for Carte, Wilde had two secretaries, a Negro valet who was told to say, “Massa Wilde is too busy to recept today,” and a carriage with a Negro groom in livery. “In a free country one cannot live without a slave,” he wrote Norman Forbes-Robertson, describing his valet as “rather like a Christy minstrel, except that he knows no riddles.” One secretary answered letters, and the other sent off snippets of his brown hair to avid young ladies. Wilde said that this secretary “is rapidly becoming bald”; as for himself, he was behaving “as I always have behaved—‘dreadfully.’ ”

  Wilde’s plays employ valets and butlers as pivotal dandified characters to negotiate hapless men and women in and out of social crises. Earnest’s opening lines between Lane and Algernon are a paradigm of class satire: “Did you hear what I was playing, Lane?” asks Algy. “I didn’t think it was polite to listen, sir,” he replies. In An Ideal Husband, Lord Goring, described by Wilde as the “first well-dressed philosopher in the history of thought,” has a trivial conversation with his servant about his buttonhole that ends not in interior smirks but in loud laughter when Lord Goring remarks: “Extraordinary thing about the lower class in England—they are always losing their relations.” “Yes, my lord!” Phipps replies. “They are extremely fortunate in that respect.”

  Invitations to luncheons, dinners, and receptions arrived daily. His valet held calling cards on a silver salver while Wilde separated sycophants from deserving disciples. He told Betty Lewis, wife of his solicitor George Lewis, that he felt like the Prince of Wales. “I now understand why the Royal Boy is in good humour always; it is delightful to be petit roi.” Such euphoria may have masked a fear that his first lecture, still needing work, would go over badly.

  Napoleon Sarony photographed Wilde in twenty-seven different poses, with changes of clothes, hairstyle, and aesthetic attitude. These publicity photos, however, were not processed in time for the first lecture. (Wilde had the local artist James Edward Kelly sketch and then etch his portrait for use in advertising circulars.) In the history of nineteenth-century photography, Sarony was as famous as Mathew Brady was for Civil War coverage. Both competed as portraitists. Brady’s portraits of Abraham Lincoln, Walt Whitman, and Ulysses S. Grant sent a moral message, while Sarony preferred to be entertaining.

  By using a “posing machine,” Sarony manipulated and then immobilized the subject’s head, arms, and torso into the desired pose for the duration of the exposure. Some subjects viewed this as an instrument of torture, but without it Sarony could not have made dramatic poses appear natural. He inspired the look and left technicalities to an assistant, usually looking out the window while the pictures were taken. He paid celebrities to be photographed but recouped expenses by selling collectible postcards. Sarah Bernhardt received fifteen hundred dollars for the famous series of her on a “fainting couch.” Morse wanted Sarony’s prestige, so the fee was waived for Wilde.

  Like his namesake the Emperor Napoléon Bonaparte, Sarony was diminutive—only five feet tall; he sported a flamboyant handlebar mustache and wore a red fez to add inches to his height. His Union Square studio was as eccentric as its occupant, filled with Egyptian mummies, Japanese and medieval armor, Russian sleighs, bizarre idols, and, hanging from the ceiling, a stuffed crocodile. At sixty-one, he was, like Wilde, a shameless self-promoter.

  Sarony produced an impressive series revealing how “the lord of language,” as Wilde called himself, commanded many moods. In black cape and broad-brimmed hat tilted to one side, Wilde is seductive, vampiric even. In aesthetic dress, he is poetic but manly: legs encased in black stockings, his small feet in patent-leather slippers with bows—all in perfect proportion to his height. The face is a beautiful, contemplative oval. The lens registers the lustrous, wavy hair parted in the middle and curling behind the ears, and the heavy-lidded eyes that turn down at the corners, and how sometimes the right eye appears smaller than the left. But the star of the shoot was the massive overcoat. Enveloped in fur, Wilde resembles a Nordic deity in a carved armchair frozen in the thinking position, elbow on knee and hand on cheek. A favorite with collectors, this pose was the focus of a copyright action when a lithographic company made 85,000 prints of it. Sarony proved his case that photography was art.

  All twelve hundred seats at Chickering Hall were sold out at a dollar each, and standing room was full when Wilde arrived backstage on a cold, windy January 9 for his first lecture. He strode onstage with a circular black cloak thrown over one shoulder, walking slowly to model the knee breeches and black stockings worn with a lace-trimmed shirt under a dark purple coat lined in lavender satin. “Since you have heard Patience, which has been given for so many nights,” Wilde said, “you might listen to me for at least one evening.” That pragmatic opening brought a few laughs, and he reached for loftiness: “You must not judge our aestheticism by the satire of Mr. Gilbert any more than you can judge of the strength and splendor of the sun or sea by the dust that dances in the beam or the bubble that breaks upon the wave.” The audience understood a remark that the Pre-Raphaelites had three things on their side the “English public never forgives: Youth, power and enthusiasm.”

  But the themes of “the English Renaissance” were complicated by cultural references, and the talk lacked anecdote or wit. Wilde performed as a polymath, leaving people either baffled or bored. Applause was spontaneous and loud; at least he had dazzled with personality. The New York Times said he spoke in a “sepulchral voice”; subsequent lectures were deemed boring, monotonous, wearisome, toneless, and, on one evening, “a rhythmic chant in which every fourth syllable is accentuated.” Wilde never considered himself anything but a novice when it came to confronting row upon row of upturned faces.

  On arrival he outlined his priorities, putting playwright and poet ahead of lecturer. He said his play Vera was not performed in London because he could not cast it—a slight lie but an easier explanation than the relevant political and financial problems. “It must be produced with able actors. If a satisfactory cast can be obtained here it may be produced,” he told journalists, throwing down the gauntlet for an American actress to pick up.

  The original four-month tour expanded to ten months, ending after 140 lectures in 260 days in a hundred cities and towns coast to coast and into Canada. Audiences were mostly women and ranged from scattered heads to auditoriums of fifteen hundred. Wilde never gave Mark Twain much podium competition, but anyone who saw him recalled the experience as special. Back in London, America’s reception of the apostle of Aestheticism was closely followed. “Nobody is sanguine about his success,” The Times reported, “but nobody knows what he can do beyond writing poetry and posing as a leading figure in a limited circle.”

  So important was Wilde’s aesthetic dress that audiences complained if he wore evening clothes. His appearance changed from place to place. When he arrived on the Arizona, his face was “utterly devoid of color—like putty—eyes bright and quick—face oval, long chin—doesn’t look like a Du Maurier model—more like an athlete—instead of having a small, delicate hand to only caress a lily, his fingers are long and when doubled up would form a fist that would hit a hard knock.”

  In the New York World, his teeth were described as “large and regular, disproving a pleasing story which has gone the rounds of the English press that he has three tusks or protuberants far from agreeable to look at.” The Washington Post observed how the “upper half of his person resembled an English curate—his lower extremities an Italian brigand, his legs a general and remote resemblance to two sticks of licorice.”

  In Buffalo, New York, he wore “a short after-dinner jacket of fawn-colored velvet trimmed with silk braid of a shade lighter, and a vest of the same material.” And he proffered fashion hints. “The essence of good dressing is perfect congruity,” he said. “One must be careful not to be too premature, but I feel that at present velvet is the most beautiful dress for a man. As a rule I wear gray or brown velvet myself.”


  Admired but too often criticized, Wilde dreaded getting the morning papers. “I have been quite amused at the struggle each of the gentlemen has had to write what I did not say,” he said at one press conference. “If you survive yellow journalism, you need not be afraid of yellow fever.” A young reporter from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch learned that Wilde’s “reading of a good vigorous attack acts like a dish of caviar.” When asked about his private life, he replied, “I wished that I had one.”

  Then he so charmed a reporter from the Sacramento Daily Record-Union that he was hailed as “the poor man’s friend” and “the most misrepresented foreigner that ever visited our shores.” As a poor man’s friend he was indeed misrepresented; poverty, as Wilde points out in “The Soul of Man Under Socialism,” disturbed him only if he was forced to look at it. If he had been universally praised, he would have doubted himself. “I know that I am right, that I have a mission to perform,” he told a New York journalist. “I am indestructible!” In “The Critic as Artist,” Gilbert says, “Ah! Don’t say that you agree with me. When people agree with me I always feel that I must be wrong.”

  Presenting up to six lectures a week, Wilde was a goodwill ambassador for England as well as for himself. He visited museums and schools; he amusingly advised the elders of Griggsville, Kansas, to change the name of their town if they wanted him to lecture on aesthetics. He recast the first convoluted lecture into “The Decorative Arts” and for towns where he appeared twice added “The House Beautiful.” He advised the ladies to put down rush matting if they could not afford Persian rugs. Certain aspects of American decor, like secondhand furniture and “dreadful monstrosities called cast-iron stoves,” infuriated him. Pictures hung in hallways were atrocious, he said; “hang them where time can be had to look at them.”

  Halfway across the continent, he learned to personalize lectures. In Chicago he praised the aid given after the 1871 Great Fire, saying it “was noble and beautiful as the work of any troops of angels who ever clothed the naked.” Then he described the city’s first water tower as a “castellated monstrosity with pepper-boxes stuck all over it.” There were unappreciative murmurs; Wilde had insulted Chicago’s beloved landmark, built in 1867. Ignoring the restlessness, he forged on, “I am amazed that any people could so abuse Gothic art, and make a structure look, not like a water-tower, but like the tower of a medieval castle.”

  Wilde’s aesthetic theories were frustrating. Did he really prefer an ugly round tower to a decorative castle? That was a contradiction of Gautier’s axiom that if a thing becomes useful it ceases to be beautiful. As part of his aesthetic canon, Baudelaire believed in artifice, which improved on nature. The castle’s design was only a fanciful intrusion on the landscape; it made no moral, political, or social statement. The audience exited grumbling. “I didn’t expect to learn anything, and I haven’t!” said one. It was rough going making Aestheticism “the basis for a new civilization,” as Wilde wanted.

  In philadelphia, the publisher J. M. Stoddart, who first published Dorian Gray, arranged a visit to Camden, New Jersey, to meet Walt Whitman, “the Good Gray Poet,” whose image appeared on cigar boxes. Wilde first heard Whitman’s poetry of camaraderie and democracy read aloud by his parents. Years before there was a concept of sexual identity (according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term homosexuality entered the language in 1892), he was in accord with those poems in Leaves of Grass exalting grand affections for other men. Wilde greeted Whitman with the words “I have come to you as to one with whom I have been acquainted almost from the cradle.”

  They talked about Swinburne and Tennyson and the Aesthetic movement. “I can only say that you are young and ardent,” Whitman said of Wilde’s mission, “and the field is wide, and if you want my advice, go ahead.” Wilde said he preferred poets with “a charming style,” or “beauty of theme.” Whitman perceived him with wiser eyes. “Why, Oscar, it always seems to me that the fellow who makes a dead set at beauty by itself is in a bad way,” he said. “My idea is that beauty is a result, not an abstraction.” Wilde expanded on the comment. “Yes, I remember you have said, ‘All beauty comes from beautiful blood and a beautiful brain,’ and after all, I think so too.”

  They spoke for two hours. Wilde put his hand on the poet’s knee, and they drank homemade elderberry wine. Before departing, Wilde had to drink a large glass of milk punch (milk and whiskey), a mixture he never wanted to taste again. Whitman waved farewell from the porch. “Good-by, Oscar; God bless you.” Wilde boasted to journalists: “I admire him intensely—Dante Rossetti, Swinburne, William Morris and I often discuss him. There is something so Greek and sane about his poetry; it is so universal, so comprehensive. It has all the pantheism of Goethe and Schiller.” That Wilde had never discussed Whitman with these poets was superfluous to the image he wanted to project.

  Years later Whitman would recall Wilde as “a great big, splendid boy … so frank, and outspoken, and manly … a fine handsome youngster.” But he puzzled over his reputation: “I don’t see why such mocking things are written of him. He has the English society drawl, but his enunciation is better than I ever heard in a young Englishman or Irishman before.”

  On st. Patrick’s Day, the Irish Americans in St. Paul, Minnesota, welcomed Wilde as the son “of one of Ireland’s noblest daughters—of a daughter who in the troublous times of 1848 by the works of her pen and her noble example did much to keep the fire of patriotism burning brightly.” In a brief talk, Wilde predicted an artistic revival for an independent Ireland. The next month he told an audience in San Francisco: “I do not know anything more wonderful or more characteristic of the Celtic genius, than the quick artistic spirit in which we adapted ourselves to the English tongue,” he said. “The Saxon took our lands from us and left them desolate—we took their language and added new beauties to it.” Lady Wilde believed the Irish “gift of natural eloquence” to be a major factor in the success of Irish Americans, while her son saw the country as a place where deviancy could resolve its differences with society. Thoreau made a virtue of civil disobedience, and Whitman’s homosexuality was no obstacle to his success as a poet.

  Being a professional Irishman was a different—liberating and enjoyable—experience. As a reviewer of others’ opinions, Wilde had opposed the British occupation of Ireland, calling it “one of the great tragedies of modern Europe,” and had praised the Irish American. “To learn the secret of its own strength and of England’s weakness, the Celtic intellect has had to cross the Atlantic.… What captivity was to the Jews, exile has been to the Irish.” Speaking in an unguarded, patriotic voice in public was something he had thus far avoided as he chiseled an English profile. It was, however, the Irish Catholics, those outside the Protestant Ascendancy, who welcomed him here; he had grown up surrounded by the native Irish but never had reason to appreciate their accomplishments. A fourth lecture, “The Irish Poets of 1848,” saluted Charles Gavan Duffy, Thomas Davis, and, of course, his mother.

  When the tour reached Boston, the actor-playwright Dion Boucicault dropped by Wilde’s hotel. At breakfast, Wilde asked him to read Vera, but Boucicault was more concerned with the sideshow following Wilde around America. Boucicault had told the Boston Transcript that Wilde was “the easy victim of those who expose him to ridicule and to the censure of the thoughtful. Those who have known him as I have since he was a child at my knee know that beneath the fantastic envelope in which his managers are circulating him there is a noble, earnest, kind and lovable man.” Although shrewd in promoting himself, Wilde was not a man of business. “I do wish we could make him less Sybarite—less Epicurean,” Boucicault wrote to Mrs. George Lewis. He offered a loan of two thousand dollars for Wilde to continue the tour on his own. At sixty-one, Boucicault was a relic from a former theatrical age and a bit of an eccentric, but out of respect Wilde listened to his arguments, knowing he would make a greater muddle of the tour than Morse.

  At their next meeting, Boucicault read Vera but was not complim
entary: it needed major rewriting. The narrative spine, he told Wilde, was “good and dramatic,” but the “ribs and the limbs” did not proceed from the spinal column. The “action stops for dialogue,” he said, when the dialogue should be “the necessary outcome of the action exerting its influence on the characters.” Wilde bristled. Dialogue was his specialty, destined to be dominant in his plays. He nodded politely and forgot everything Boucicault said.

  On January 31, at the Boston Music Hall, Wilde took command of the tour. Sixty Harvard students booked seats and marched into the auditorium wearing knee breeches and black stockings, each waving a lily or a sunflower. Wilde knew in advance about the demonstration and entered not in knee breeches but in evening dress. “As I look about me,” he said with amusement, stressing each word, “I am impelled for the first time to breathe a fervent prayer, ‘Save me from my disciples.’ ” He raised his hands in a Christlike gesture that produced wild clapping and cheering.

  To engage the students, Wilde told them about the Ruskin road-building project and made his participation sound most industrious. He described Oxonians discarding their oars and cricket bats for picks, shovels, and wheelbarrows. It was inconsequential that the road sank into the marsh after two months. If these young men had the spirit to work for the sake of a noble ideal of life, Wilde said, then with them he could “create an artistic movement that might change, as it has changed, the face of England. So I sought them out—leader they would call me, but there was no leader, we were all searchers only.” Such sincerity—which he never cared for—and spontaneity made Wilde an instant celebrity. The Boston Transcript, which had ridiculed his costume and called him “the $-sthete,” now said he had “achieved a real triumph, and it was by right of conquest, for force of being a gentleman, in the truest sense of the word.”