Discovering America
‘Great success here; nothing like it since Dickens, they tell me. I am torn in bits by Society. Immense receptions, wonderful dinners, crowds wait for my carriage. I wave a gloved hand and an ivory cane and they cheer.’
The great break for which Wilde had been waiting came in about October 1881. Earlier that year, in April, Richard D’Oyly Carte had produced Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience at the Opera Comique, London. The opera satirised the contemporary ‘aesthetic’ movement, and the character of Bunthorne, the Fleshly Poet, though perhaps intended for Rossetti, was generally taken as a caricature of Wilde. Patience opened in New York on 22 September and Colonel W. F. Morse, Carte’s American representative, thought that a tour by Wilde himself lecturing on aesthetics, might provide useful publicity, since the American public had not experienced the butt of the satire first-hand. After some last-minute negotiations in London it was agreed that he would receive one-third of the net receipts from the tour once expenses had been deducted. He was accordingly booked to give a series of lectures, sailed on the Arizona on 24 December 1881 and landed at New York on 2 January 1882, where he was reported to have said to the examining customs official (though there is sadly no hard evidence for the anecdote), ‘I have nothing to declare but my genius.’
His first lecture, at the Chickering Hall, New York on 9 January, was on ‘The English Renaissance’ but it was too lengthy and theoretical for many in his audience and the press was critical of his lacklustre delivery. He immediately set about shortening it and within a month it had become ‘The Decorative Arts’ with a much wider popular appeal. He added a second lecture to his repertoire, “The House Beautiful’, for cities in which he had more than one engagement. He also prepared a lecture on ‘Irish Poets and Poetry of the Nineteenth Century’, which he gave in April in San Francisco, accepting with good grace the introductory label of ‘Speranza’s Boy’, bestowed on him by the expatriate Irish, whose memories of Jane’s role in the famine years were still warm.
To Norman Forbes-Robertson
[15 January 1882] New York
My dear Norman, I have been to call on Ian and his wife. She is so pretty and sweet and simple, like a little fair-haired Madonna, with a baby who already shows a great dramatic power and behaved during my visit (I stayed about an hour, breaking fifty-four engagements) like Macbeth, Hamlet, King John, and all the remarkable characters in Shakespeare. They seem very happy, and she is very loving to Ian, and unaffected.
I go to Philadelphia tomorrow. Great success here; nothing like it since Dickens, they tell me. I am torn in bits by Society. Immense receptions, wonderful dinners, crowds wait for my carriage. I wave a gloved hand and an ivory cane and they cheer. Girls very lovely, men simple and intellectual. Rooms are hung with white lilies for me everywhere. I have ‘Boy’ at intervals, also two secretaries, one to write my autograph and answer the hundreds of letters that come begging for it. Another, whose hair is brown, to send locks of his own hair to the young ladies who write asking for mine; he is rapidly becoming bald. Also a black servant, who is my slave – in a free country one cannot live without a slave – rather like a Christy minstrel, except that he knows no riddles. Also a carriage and a black tiger who is like a little monkey. I give sittings to artists, and generally behave as I always have behaved – ‘dreadfully’. Love to your mother and Forby and all of them. Ever your affectionate friend.
OSCAR
Initially Wilde’s tour was not without its incidents. Another lecturer, Archibald Forbes, a war correspondent whose tour was also managed by D’Oyly Carte, crossed swords with Wilde in a train while they were both travelling to lecture in Baltimore. Forbes’s disparaging remarks about aestheticism apparently needled Wilde who responded by staying on the train and going straight on to Washington. The dispute became public in the newspapers and threatened to jeopardise Wilde’s entire tour.
To Archibald Forbes
[20 January 1882] Arlington Hotel, Washington
Dear Mr Forbes, I felt quite sure that your remarks on me had been misrepresented. I must however say that your remarks about me in your lecture may be regarded as giving some natural ground for the report. I feel bound to say quite frankly to you that I do not consider them to be either in good taste or appropriate to your subject.
I have something to say to the American people, something that I know will be the beginning of a great movement here, and all foolish ridicule does a great deal of harm to the cause of art and refinement and civilisation here.
I do not think that your lecture will lose in brilliancy or interest by expunging the passage, which is, as you say yourself, poor fooling enough.
You have to speak of the life of action, I of the life of art. Our subjects are quite distinct and should be kept so. Believe me, yours truly
OSCAR WILDE
To Richard D’Oyly Carte
[?24 or 25 January 1882] Washington
My dear Carte, Another such fiasco as the Baltimore business and I think I would stop lecturing. The little wretched clerk or office boy you sent to me in Col. Morse’s place is a fool and an idiot. Do let us be quite frank with one another. I must have, according to our agreement, Morse or some responsible experienced man always with me. This is for your advantage as well as for mine. I will not go about with a young office boy, who has not even the civility to come and see what I want. He was here for five minutes yesterday, went away promising to return at eleven o’clock a.m. and I have not seen him since. I had nine reporters, seven or eight telegrams, eighteen letters to answer, and this young scoundrel amusing himself about the town. I must never be left again, and please do not expose me to the really brutal attacks of the papers. The whole tide of feeling is turnedby Morse’s stupidity.
I know you have been ill, and that it has not been your doing but we must be very careful for the future. Very sincerely yours
OSCAR WILDE
To Archibald Forbes
[Circa 29 January 1882] Boston
Dear Mr Forbes, I cannot tell you how surprised and grieved I am to think that there should have been anything in my first letter to you which seemed to you discourteous or wrong.
Believe me, I had intended to answer you in the same frank spirit in which you had written to me. Any such expressions however unintentional I most willingly retract.
As regards my motive for coming to America, I should be very disappointed if when I left for Europe I had not influenced in however slight a way the growing spirit of art in this country, very disappointed if I had not out of the many who listen to me made one person love beautiful things a little more, and very disappointed if in return for the dreadfully hard work of lecturing – hard to me who am inexperienced – I did not earn enough money to give myself an autumn at Venice, a winter at Rome, and a spring at Athens; but all these things are perhaps dreams.
Letter-writing seems to lead to grave misunderstandings. I wish I could have seen you personally: standing face to face, and man to man, I might have said what I wished to say more clearly and more simply. I remain yours truly o.
WILDE
Forbes was not alone in his mockery of what he saw as Wilde’s namby-pamby aesthetics. The students at Harvard and Rochester, where he went in early February, attempted to disrupt his lectures and newspaper columnists questioned his sincerity of purpose, hinting that his motives were purely financial. The poet Joaquin Miller and the anti-slavery campaigner Julia Ward Howe both came to his defence in print, and Wilde consoled himself with recounting his American adventures to friends back home, among them the solicitor George Lewis and his wife.
To George Lewis
[9 February 1882] Prospect House, Niagara Falls, Canada Side
My dear Mr Lewis, Things are going on very well, and you were very kind about answering my telegrams. Carte blundered in leaving me without a manager, and Forbes through the most foolish and mad jealousy tried to lure me into a newspaper correspondence. His attack on me, entirely unprovoked, was one of the most filthy and scurrilous things I ever read – so much so that Boucicault and Hurlbert of the World both entreated me to publish it, as it would have brought people over to my side, but I thought it wiser to avoid the garbage of a dirty-water-throwing in public. It was merely on Forbes’s part that the whole thing began, I really declining always to enter into any disquisition. I will show you his letter – it was infamous. He has been a dreadful failure this year and thought he would lure me on to a public quarrel.
I am hard at work, and I think making money, but the expenses seem very heavy. I hope to go back with £1000: if I do it will be delightful.
Your friend Whitelaw Reid, to whom I brought two letters of introduction, has not been very civil – in fact has not helped me in any way at all. I am sorry I brought him any letters, and the New York Herald is most bitter. I wonder could you do anything for it? Pray remember me to Mrs Lewis, and with many thanks, yours most affectionately
OSCAR WILDE
To the Hon. George Curzon
[15 February 1882] US
My dear George Curzon, Yes! You are on the black list, and, if my secretary does his work properly, every mail shall hurl at your young philosophic head the rage of the American eagle because I do not think trousers beautiful, the excitement of a sane strong people over the colour of my necktie, the fear of the eagle that I have come to cut his barbaric claws with the scissors of culture, the impotent rage of the ink-stained, the noble and glorious homage of the respectable – you shall know it all: it may serve you for marginal notes 
[about democracy].
Well, it’s really wonderful, my audiences are enormous. In Chicago I lectured last Monday to 2500 people! This is of course nothing to anyone who has spoken at the Union, but to me it was 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.
I lecture four times a week, and the people are delightful and lionise one to a curious extent, but they follow me, and start schools of design when I visit their town. At Philadelphia the school is called after me and they really are beginning to love and know beautiful art and its meaning.
As for myself, I feel like Tancred or Lothair. I travel in such state, for in a free country one cannot live without slaves, and I have slaves – black, yellow and white. But you must write again. Your letter had a flavour of Attic salt. Yours (from Boeotia)
OSCAR WILDE
Renell Rodd, a friend of Wilde’s from Oxford days, had published a book of poems in 1881 entitled Songs of the South. Wilde, anxious as much to promote his own ideas as Rodd’s poetry, arranged for the volume to be produced in Philadephia by Stoddart, with an aesthetic envoi or preface of his own and an effusive dedication to himself: ‘To Oscar Wilde, “heart’s brother”, these few songs and many songs to come’. The book duly appeared in October as Rose Leaf and Apple Leaf, but Rodd was disturbed and upset by Wilde’s parading of their friendship, and a volume of poetry proved its undoing, as it had with Frank Miles the year before.
To J. M. Stoddart
[?19 February 1882] Cincinnati
Dear Mr Stoddart, I send you the volume of poems and the preface. The preface you will see is most important, signifying my new departure from Mr Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites, and marks an era in the aesthetic movement. Please send proofs to New York: they will forward them to me as I race from town to town. I also wish to ask Mr Davis a favour. I should like to be able to send Mr Rodd some money: if Mr Davis will advance £25 on the whole half-profits that fall to Mr Rodd and myself it would be to this young poet a great encouragement, and would give him good hope of success. If Mr Davis would do this he would be encouraging a young fellow of, as you know, great poetical promise: by sending me the whole draft I could forward it to Rennell Rodd – his £25. As for your paper it is charming. I would undertake to be your art-correspondent for London and Paris – two articles a month – and in the summer letters from Italy on art.
You will think this over. Ever yours
OSCAR WILDE
Post Scriptum
Yes: The Daisy will be the title, and Other Poems. You can print the little poem on the daisy first. As regards the binding, have it a bound book – not in loose sheets like Tiffany’s monstrosity. Send me your ideas of a cover. Lathrop could do a delightful thing for you.
Look at dedication.
To J. M. Stoddart
[Postmark 24 February 1882] Cincinnati
Dear Mr Stoddart, This is the type I like. I have not received proofs yet: please let me have them soon or I will be in California, with an Indian to disturb me at every comma and a grizzly at every semi-colon.
OSCAR WILDE
To Colonel W. F. Morse
[?26 February 1882] St Louis, Missouri
Dear Colonel Morse, Will you kindly go to a good costumier (theatrical) for me and get them to make (you will not mention my name) two coats, to wear at matinees and perhaps in evening. They should be beautiful; tight velvet doublet, with large flowered sleeves and little ruffs of cambric coming up from under collar. I send you design and measurements. They should be ready at Chicago on Saturday for matinee there – at any rate the black one. Any good costumier would know what I want – sort of Francis I dress: only knee-breeches instead of long hose. Also get me two pair of grey silk stockings to suit grey mouse-coloured velvet. The sleeves are to be flowered – if not velvet then plush – stamped with large pattern. They will excite a great sensation. I leave the matter to you. They were dreadfully disappointed at Cincinnati at my not wearing knee-breeches. Truly yours
OSCAR WILDE
To Mrs George Lewis
Tuesday, 28 February [1882] Grand Pacific Hotel, Chicago
Dear Mrs Lewis, I send you a line to say that since Chicago I have had two great successes: Cincinnati where I have been invited to lecture a second time – this time to the workmen, on the handicraftsman – and St Louis. Tomorrow I start to lecture eleven consecutive nights at eleven different cities, and return here on Saturday week for a second lecture. I go to Canada then, and also return to New England to lecture. Of course I have much to bear – I have always had that – but still as regards my practical influence I have succeeded beyond my wildest hope. In every city they start schools of decorative art after my visit, and set on foot public museums, getting my advice about the choice of objects and the nature of the building. And the artists treat me like a young god. But of this I suppose little reaches England. My play will probably come out, but this is not settled, and I will be back about May I hope.
Pray remember me most affectionately to Mr Lewis, and believe me very truly yours
OSCAR WILDE
To Walt Whitman
[Postmark 1 March 1882] Chicago
My dear dear Walt, Swinburne has just written to me to say as follows:
‘I am sincerely interested and gratified by your account of Walt Whitman and the assurance of his kindly and friendly feeling towards me: and I thank you, no less sincerely, for your kindness in sending me word of it. As sincerely can I say, what I shall be freshly obliged to you if you will [– should occasion arise –] assure him of in my name, that I have by no manner of means [either ‘forgotten him’ or] relaxed my admiration of his noblest work – such parts, above all, of his writings, as treat of the noblest subjects, material and spiritual, with which poetry can deal. I have always thought it, and I believe it will hereafter be generally thought, his highest and surely most enviable distinction that he never speaks so well as when he speaks of great matters – liberty, for instance, and death. This of course does not imply that I do – rather it implies that I do not – agree with all his theories or admire all his work in anything like equal measure – a form of admiration which I should by no means desire for myself and am as little prepared to bestow on another: considering it a form of scarcely indirect insult.’
There! You see how you remain in our hearts, and how simply and grandly Swinburne speaks of you, knowing you to be simple and grand yourself.
Will you in return send me for Swinburne a copy of your Essay on Poetry – the pamphlet – with your name and his on it: it would please him so much.
Before I leave America I must see you again. There is no one in this wide great world of America whom I love and honour so much.
With warm affection, and honourable admiration
OSCAR WILDE
To Mrs George Lewis
[Early March 1882] Griggsville, Illinois
Dear Mrs Lewis, I am sorry to say that an art-movement has begun at Griggsville, for I feel it will not last long and that Colvin will be lecturing about it. At present the style here is Griggsville rococo, and there are also traces of ‘archaic Griggsville’, but in a few days the Griggsville Renaissance will blossom: it will have an exquisite bloom for a week, and then (Colvin’s fourth lecture) become ‘debased Griggsville’, and the Griggsville Decadence. I seem to hear the Slade Professor, or dear Newton, on it. As for myself I promise you never, never to lecture in England, not even at dinner.
The Giottos of Griggsville are waiting in a deputation below, so I must stop. With kind remembrances to Mr Lewis, and remembrances to Katie, yours sincerely
OSCAR WILDE
Wilde’s revolutionary drama Vera had been scheduled for production in London shortly before he left, but partly for political reasons—the American President and the Russian Czar had been assassinated in 1881—and partly through lack of funds, it was cancelled. Once across the Atlantic, though, he felt its republican sentiments would have greater appeal in America where it was eventually produced to savage criticism in August 1883.
To Richard D’Oyly Carte
16 March 1882 Metropolitan Hotel, St Paul, Minnesota
Dear Mr Carte, I have received your letter about the play. I agree to place it entirely in your hands for production on the terms of my receiving half-profits, and a guarantee of £200 paid down to me on occasion of its production, said £200 to be deducted from my share of subsequent profits if any. This I think you will acknowledge is fair. Of course for my absolute work, the play, I must have absolute certainty of some small kind.
As regards the cast: I am sure you see yourself how well the part will suit Clara Morris: I am however quite aware how difficile she is, and what practical dangers may attend the perilling of it on her. If you, exercising right and careful judgment, find it impossible to depend on her—then, while the present excitement lasts, let us go to Rose Coghlan, and Wallack’s Theatre—they have a good company—and if Miss Morris cannot be really retained I am willing to leave it in your hands for Rose Coghlan. In case of producing it here, I will rely on you to secure a copyright for England also by some simultaneous performance. This however you can manage naturally without any advice of mine.
Please let me know your acceptance of my terms, and your decision of the cast by wire, as soon as possible. Yours very truly
OSCAR WILDE
Prologue follows soon: have been so tired—too tired to write.
By the middle of March, Wilde had completed the New England leg of his tour and was deep into the Mid-West on his way to California. Sidney Colvin was the Slade Professor of Fine Arts at Cambridge and Robert Kerr a teetotal Scottish judge sitting in the City of London. The reason for Wilde’s apparent dislike of them both can only be conjectured.
To Mrs George Lewis
[Circa 20 March 1882] Sioux City
Dear Mrs Lewis, I am sure you will be interested to hear that I have met Indians. They are really in appearance very like Colvin, when he is wearing his professorial robes: the likeness is quite curious, and revived pleasant literary reminiscences. Their conversation was most interesting as long as it was unintelligible, but when interpreted to me reminded me strangely and vividly of the conversation of Mr Commissioner Kerr.
I don’t know where I am: somewhere in the middle of coyotes and cañons: one is a ‘ravine’ and the other a ‘fox’, I don’t know which, but I think they change about. I have met miners: they are big-booted, red-shirted, yellow-bearded and delightful ruffians. One of them asked me if I was not ‘running an art-mill’, and on my pointing to my numerous retinue, said he ‘guessed I hadn’t need to wash my own pans’, and his ‘pardner’ remarked that ‘I hadn’t need to sell clams neither, I could toot my own horn’. I secretly believe they read up Bret Harte privately; they were certainly almost as real as his miners, and quite as pleasant. With my usual passion for personality I entertained them, and had a delightful time, though on my making some mention of early Florentine art they unanimously declared they could neither ‘trump or follow it’.
Weary of being asked by gloomy reporters ‘which was the most beautiful colour’ and what is the meaning of the word ‘aesthetic’, on my last Chicago interview I turned the conversation on three of my heroes, Whistler, Labou-chere, and Irving, and on the adored and adorable Lily. 1 send you them all.
I hope you are all well. Pray remember me to your husband, and to the Grange when you visit there next.
Colvin in a blanket has just passed the window: he is decked out with feathers, and wants me to buy bead slippers; it is really most odd, and undoubtedly Colvin, I could hardly be mistaken.
Give my love to Katie please!!! and believe me, most sincerely and truly yours
OSCAR WILDE
In a lecture at Louisville, Kentucky on 21 February, Wilde had quoted Keats’s ‘Sonnet on Blue’. By sheer coincidence, the poet’s niece was sitting in the audience. She so enjoyed Wilde’s lecture that she invited him home to see her uncle’s papers and three weeks later sent him the manuscript of the sonnet itself.
To Emma Speed
21 March 1882 [Omaha, Nebraska]
What you have given me is more golden than gold, more precious than any treasure this great country could yield me, though the land be a network of railways, and each city a harbour for the galleys of the world.
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: and now I am half enamoured of the paper that touched his hand, and the ink that did his bidding, grown fond of the sweet comeliness of his charactery, for since my boyhood I have loved none better than your marvellous kinsman, that godlike boy, the real Adonis of our age, who knew the silver-footed messages of the moon, and the secret of the morning, who heard in Hyperion’s vale the large utterance of the early gods, and from the beechen plot the light-winged Dryad, who saw Madeline at the painted window, and Lamia in the house at Corinth, and Endymion ankle-deep in lilies of the vale, who drubbed the butcher’s boy for being a bully, and drank confusion to Newton for having analysed the rainbow. In my heaven he walks eternally with Shakespeare and the Greeks, and it may be that some day he will lift
his hymenaeal curls from out his amber gleaming wine, With ambrosial lips will kiss my forehead, clasp the hand of noble love in mine.
Again I thank you for this dear memory of the man I love, and thank you also for the sweet and gracious words in which you give it to me: it were strange in truth if one in whose veins flows the same blood as quickened into song that young priest of beauty, were not with me in this great renaissance of art which Keats indeed would have so much loved, and of which he, above all others, is the seed.
Let me send you my sonnet on Keats’s grave, which you quote with such courteous compliment in your note, and if you would let it lie near his own papers it may keep some green of youth caught from those withered leaves in whose faded lines eternal summer dwells.
I hope that some day I may visit you again at St Louis, and see the little Milton and the other treasures once more: strange, you call your house ‘dingy and old’, ah, dear Madam, fancy has long ago made it a palace for me, and I see it transfigured through the golden mists of joy. With deep respect, believe me, most truly yours
OSCAR WILDE
To Norman Forbes-Robertson
27 March 1882 San Francisco
My dear Norman, Here from the uttermost end of the great world I send you love and greeting, and thanks for your letters which delight me very much. But, dear boy, your hair will lose its gold and your cheek its roses if you insist on being such a chivalrous defender of this much abused young man. It is so brave and good of you! Of course I will win: I have not the slightest intention of failing for a moment, and my tour here is triumphal. I was four days in the train: at first grey, gaunt desolate plains, as colourless as waste land by the sea, with now and then scampering herds of bright red antelopes, and heavy shambling buffaloes, rather like Joe Knight in manner and appearance, and screaming vultures like gnats high up in the air, then up the Sierra Nevadas, the snow-capped mountains shining like shields of polished silver in that vault of blue flame we call the sky, and deep cañons full of pine trees, and so for four days, and at last from the chill winter of the mountains down into eternal summer here, groves of orange trees in fruit and flower, green fields, and purple hills, a very Italy, without its art.
There were 4000 people waiting at the ‘depot’ to see me, open carriage, four horses, an audience at my lecture of the most cultivated people in ‘Frisco, charming folk. I lecture again here tonight, also twice next week; as you see I am really appreciated—by the cultured classes. The railway have offered me a special train and private car to go down the coast to Los Angeles, a sort of Naples here, and I am feted and entertained to my heart’s content. I lecture here in California for three weeks, then to Kansas; after that I am not decided.
These wretched lying telegrams in the Daily News are sent by Archibald Forbes, who has been a fiasco in his lecturing this season and is jealous of me. He is a coward and a fool. No telegram can kill or mar a man with anything in him. The women here are beautiful. Tonight I am escorted by the Mayor of the city through the Chinese quarter, to their theatre and joss houses and rooms, which will be most interesting. They have ‘houses’ and ‘persons’.
Pray remember me to all at home, also to that splendid fellow Millais and his stately and beautiful wife.
Love to Johnston. Ever yours
OSCAR WILDE
(My new signature—specially for California)
To Mrs Bernard Beere
[17 April 1882] Kansas City, Missouri
My dear Bernie, I have lectured to the Mormons. The Opera House at Salt Lake is an enormous affair about the size of Covent Garden, and holds with ease fourteen families. They sit like this and are very, very ugly. The President, a nice old man, sat with five wives in the stage box. I visited him in the afternoon and saw a charming daughter of his.
I have also lectured at Leadville, the great mining city in the Rocky Mountains. We took a whole day to get up to it on a narrow-gauge railway 14,000 feet in height. My audience was entirely miners; their make-up excellent, red shirts and blond beards, the whole of the first three rows being filled with McKee Rankins of every colour and dimension. I spoke to them of the early Florentines, and they slept as though no crime had ever stained the ravines of their mountain home. I described to them the pictures of Botticelli, and the name, which seemed to them like a new drink, roused them from their dreams, but when I told them in my boyish eloquence of the ‘secret of Botticelli’ the strong men wept like children. Their sympathy touched me and I approached modern art and had almost won them over to a real reverence for what is beautiful when unluckily I described one of Jimmy Whistler’s ‘nocturnes in blue and gold’. Then they leaped to their feet and in their grand simple way swore that such things should not be. Some of the younger ones pulled their revolvers out and left hurriedly to see if Jimmy was ‘prowling about the saloons’ or ‘wrastling a hash’ at any eating shop. Had he been there I fear he would have been killed, their feeling was so bitter. Their enthusiasm satisfied me and I ended my lecture there. Then I found the Governor of the State waiting in a bullock wagon to bring me down the great silver-mine of the world, the Matchless. So off we drove, the miners carrying torches before us till we came to the shaft and were shot down in buckets (I of course true to my principle being graceful even in a bucket) and down in the great gallery of the mine, the walls and ceilings glittering with metal ore, was spread a banquet for us.
The amazement of the miners when they saw that art and appetite could go hand in hand knew no bounds; when I lit a long cigar they cheered till the silver fell in dust from the roof on our plates; and when I quaffed a cocktail without flinching, they unanimously pronounced me in their grand simple way ‘a bully boy with no glass eye’—artless and spontaneous praise which touched me more than the pompous panegyrics of literary critics ever did or could. Then I had to open a new vein, or lode, which with a silver drill I brilliantly performed, amidst unanimous applause. The silver drill was presented to me and the lode named ‘The Oscar’. I had hoped that in their simple grand way they would have offered me shares in ‘The Oscar’, but in their artless untutored fashion they did not. Only the silver drill remains as a memory of my night at Leadville.
I have had a delightful time all through California and Colorado and am now returning home, twice as affected as ever, my dear Bernie. Please remember me to dear Dot, to Reggie and all our mutual friends including Monty Morris, who won’t write to me or even criticise me. Goodbye. Your sincere friend
OSCAR WILDE
Your letter was charming. Write to New York, 1267 Broadway.
Helena, aged eighteen, was the young sister of the painter Walter Sickert. Wilde had known the family for some time and had presented her with her first volume of poetry, Matthew Arnold’s poems, three years before. There is an uncanny presaging of Wilde’s own fate in his visit to the prison; on the other side of the bars fourteen years later he too would read Dante to console himself.
To Helena Sickert
25 April 1882 Fremont, Nebraska
My dear Miss Nellie, Since I wrote to you I have been to wonderful places, to Colorado which is like the Tyrol a little, and has great cañons of red sandstone, and pine trees, and the tops of the mountains all snowcovered, and up a narrow-gauge railway did I rush to the top of a mountain 15,000 feet high, to the great mining city of the west called Leadville, and lectured the miners on the old workers in metal—Cellini and others. All I told them about Cellini and how he cast his Perseus interested them very much, and they were a most courteous audience; typical too—large blond-bearded, yellow-haired men in red shirts, with the beautiful clear complexions of people who work in silver-mines.
After my lecture I went down a silver-mine, about a mile outside the little settlement, the miners carrying torches before me as it was night. After being dressed in miner’s dress I was hurled in a bucket down into the heart of the earth, long galleries of silver-ore, the miners all at work, looking so picturesque in the dim light as they swung the hammers and cleft the stone, beautiful motives for etching everywhere, and for Walter’s impressionist sketches. I stayed all night there nearly, the men being most interesting to talk to, and was brought off down the mountain by a special train at 4.30 in the morning.
From there I went to Kansas where I lectured a week. At St Joseph the great desperado of Kansas, Jesse James, had just been killed by one of his followers, and the whole town was mourning over him and buying relics of his house. His door-knocker and dust-bin went for fabulous prices, two speculators absolutely came to pistol-shots as to who was to have his hearth-brush, the unsuccessful one being, however, consoled by being allowed to purchase the water-butt for the income of an English bishop, while his sole work of art, a chromo-lithograph of the most dreadful kind, of course was sold at a price which in Europe only a Mantegna or an undoubted Titian can command!
Last night I lectured at Lincoln, Nebraska, and in the morning gave an address to the undergraduates of the State University there: charming audience—young men and women all together in the same college, attending lectures and the like, and many young admirers and followers among them. They drove me out to see the great prison afterwards! Poor sad types of humanity in hideous striped dresses making bricks in the sun, and all mean-looking, which consoled me, for I should hate to see a criminal with a noble face. Little whitewashed cells, so tragically tidy, but with books in them. In one I found a translation of Dante, and a Shelley. Strange and beautiful it seemed to me that the sorrow of a single Florentine in exile should, hundreds of years afterwards, lighten the sorrow of some common prisoner in a modern gaol, and one murderer with melancholy eyes—to be hung they told me in three weeks—spending that interval in reading novels, a bad preparation for facing either God or Nothing. So every day I see something curious and new, and now think of going to Japan and wish Walter would come or could come with me.
Pray give my love to everybody at home, and believe me your affectionate friend
OSCAR WILDE
Perhaps the most important aspect of Wilde’s American tour was that he found a voice of his own. After his synthetic utterances in the first month with their often verbatim borrowings from Ruskin, Morris and Pater, and their lukewarm reception by the press, Wilde soon realised that what interested the New World were his views on art education and what they should be doing about their own arts and crafts. The lectures changed accordingly with Wilde even becoming involved in the practical application of his theories. This enthusiasm was to reflect itself in much of his writing until the end of the decade. Leland had spent ten years in England and on his return to Philadelphia in 1881 founded the Industrial Art School.
To Charles Godfrey Leland
[Circa 15 May 1882] [Montreal]
My dear Mr Leland, Your letter was very very welcome to me, and indeed I do think that as regards that part of my lecture in which I spoke of the necessity of art as the factor of a child’s education, and how all knowledge comes in doing something not in thinking about it, and how a lad who learns any simple art learns honesty, and truth-telling, and simplicity, in the most practical school of simple morals in the world, the school of art, learns too to love nature more when he sees how no flower by the wayside is too lowly, no little blade of grass too common but some great designer has seen it and loved it and made noble use of it in decoration, learns too to be kind to animals and all living things, that most difficult of all lessons to teach a child (for I feel that when he sees how lovely the little leaping squirrel is on the beaten brass, or the bird arrested in marble flight on the carven stone, he will never be cruel to them again), learns too to wonder and worship at God’s works more, the carving round a Gothic cathedral with all its marvels of the animal and vegetable world always seeming to me a Te Deum in God’s honour, quite as beautiful and far more lasting than that chanted Te Deum of the choir which dies in music at evensong—well, I felt my audience was with me there both in Philadelphia and in New York. When I showed them the brass work and the pretty bowl of wood with its bright arabesque at New York they applauded to the echo, and I have received so many letters about it and so many congratulations that your school will be known and honoured everywhere, and you yourself recognised and honoured as one of the great pioneers and leaders of the art of the future. If you come across the Tribune of last Friday you will see an account of my lecture, though badly reported.
For your kind words of confidence accept my thanks. I feel that I am gaining ground and better understood every day. Yes: I shall win, for the great principles are on our side, the gods are with us! Best regards to Mrs Leland. Very truly yours OSCAR WILDE
To Julia Ward Howe
6 July [1882] Augusta, Georgia
My dear Mrs Howe, My present plan is to arrive in New York from Richmond on Wednesday evening, and to leave that night for Newport, being with you Thursday morning and staying, if you will have me, till Saturday. I have an enormous trunk and a valet, but they need not trouble you. I can send them to the hotel. With what incumbrances one travels! It is not in the right harmony of things that I should have a hat-box, a secretary, a dressing-case, a trunk, a portmanteau, and a valet always following me. I daily expect a thunderbolt, but the gods are asleep, though perhaps I had better not talk about them or they will hear me and wake. But what would Thoreau have said to my hat-box! Or Emerson to the size of my trunk, which is Cyclopean! But I can’t travel without Balzac and Gautier, and they take up so much room: and as long as I can enjoy talking nonsense to flowers and children I am not afraid of the depraved luxury of a hat-box.
I write to you from the beautiful, passionate, ruined South, the land of magnolias and music, of roses and romance: picturesque too in her failure to keep pace with your keen northern pushing intellect; living chiefly on credit, and on the memory of some crushing defeats. And I have been to Texas, right to the heart of it, and stayed with Jeff Davis at his plantation (how fascinating all failures are!) and seen Savannah, and the Georgia forests, and bathed in the Gulf of Mexico, and engaged in Voodoo rites with the Negroes, and am dreadfully tired and longing for an idle day which we will have at Newport.
Pray remember me to Miss Howe, and believe me very truly yours
OSCAR WILDE
Would you send a line to me at 1267 Broadway to say if it is all right.
The lecture tour, which was only planned to last until April, was extended to the middle of May when Col. Morse offered him a further two months in the Southern States and Canada. Wilde accepted and by the middle of July was glad of a two-week break (not three as it turned out) in Rhode Island and New York. The visit to Japan never took place because Morse arranged a further tour of New England in August, and Canada again in October. Wilde had met Donoghue when in Chicago and his championing of the young sculptor publicly in America made Donoghue’s career.
To Charles Eliot Norton
[Circa 15 July 1882] Ocean House, Newport [Rhode Island]
Dear Mr Norton, I send you the young Greek: a photograph of him: I hope you will admire him. I think it is very strong and right, the statue: and the slight asceticism of it is to me very delightful. The young sculptor’s name is John Donoghue: pure Celt is he: and his address is Reaper Block, Chicago: any word of interest from you would be very cheering to him. I feel sure he could do any one of your young athletes, and what an era in art that would be to have the sculptor back in the palaestra, and of much service too to those who separate athletics from culture, and forget the right ideal of the beautiful and healthy mind in a beautiful and healthy body. I can see no better way of getting rid of the mediaeval discord between soul and body than by sculpture. Phidias is the best answer to Thomas à Kempis, but I wish you could see the statue itself, and not the sun’s libel on it.
When I had the privilege of dining with you you spoke to me, if I remember right, of Professor Morse, the Japanese traveller. As I am going to Japan myself it would be of great service to me to get any instructions or letters from him which would enable me to see their method of studying art, their schools of design and the like. I hardly like to ask you to do this for me, knowing how busy your days are, but I am so anxious to see the artistic side of Japanese life that I have ventured to trespass on your courtesy. I have just returned from the South and have a three-weeks holiday now before Japan, and so find it not unpleasant to be in this little island where idleness ranks among the virtues. I suppose you are still among your beautiful trees. How rich you are to have a Rossetti and a chestnut tree. If I happen to be in Boston pray allow me to call on you, and believe me yours truly OSCAR WILDE
Wilde used the little free time that he had to work on the scenario of a new play, The Duchess of Padua, a blank verse tragedy set in mediaeval Italy. Despite what he always said later about never having written a play for a particular actress, he appears to have approached his leading actress in early September in order to persuade the director Steele Mackaye and the producer Lawrence Barrett to take it on. Hamilton Griffin, Anderson’s stepfather and manager, finally agreed terms with Wilde in late November, $1000 down and $4000 on acceptance of the play to be delivered by p March 1883.
To Mary Anderson
[September 1882] 1267 Broadway, New York
Dear Miss Anderson, I am very anxious to learn what decision you have come to as regards the production of my play. It is in our power to procure all the conditions of success by the beauty of costume, the dignity of scenery, the perfection of detail and dramatic order, without which, in England at any rate, you could not get your right position as an artist.
I will merely remind you of the complete fiasco made by Edwin Booth this summer in London merely through the inartistic style of the stage management, and the mediocre company. If you desire, as I feel that you at any rate do, to create an era in the history of American dramatic art, and to take your assured rank among the great artists of our time, here is the opportunity: and remember we live in an age when without art there is really no true success, financial or otherwise.
That I can create for you a part which will give your genius every scope, your passion every outlet, and your beauty every power, I am well assured. The bare, meagre outline I have given you is but a faint shadow of what Bianca Duchess of Padua will be.
Mr Lawrence Barrett has made me a very large offer for the play, but I feel that it is for you to create the part and I have told him that the acceptance of the play rests at present with you.
Mr Steele Mackaye has written to me estimating the cost of production at 10,000 dollars: you will appear in a more gorgeous frame than any woman of our day. This price I do not consider at all excessive, as, for your production of it in London, the properties, dresses, etc. will of course be available.
I will hope to hear from you soon on the matter. Mr Barrett is a good manager and actor, but for my Duchess I need you.
However there it lies. Think seriously and long about it. Perhaps for both of us it may mean the climacteric of our lives. OSCAR WILDE
To Steele Mackaye
[Postmark 11 October 1882] Halifax, Nova Scotia
My dear Steele, Mary Anderson has written to me, accepting you as director and supreme autocrat (I think that over the ‘supers’ you should have the power of life and death: we will have no serious dramatic art until we hang a super), offering to take Booth’s Theatre for October, and to get a good young actor for the hero, and indeed she seems most willing to do everything requisite for our success. She is simple and nice, and the Griffin must have his claws clipped.
I will see of course that in our contract you shall be named as the man under whose direction the play shall walk the stage. I will be back in a fortnight; and we will settle matters about The Duchess and about Vera. Any and all of your suggestions will be most valuable. I am glad you like it and if we can get Miss Mather it will be a great thing.
Pray go over the play carefully, and note on the blank interleaf your changes, so that over the walnuts and the wine at some little Brunswick dinner we may settle everything.
I long to get back to real literary work, for though my audiences are really most appreciative 1 cannot write while flying from one railway to another and from the cast-iron stove of one hotel to its twin horror in the next.
I will be at the Vendome Hotel, Boston, on Sunday next. Send me a line there to say how things are going with you.
Remember me to Frank Pierrson, and believe me, very truly yours
OSCAR WILDE