Who may this be?
This young man clad unusually with loose locks, languorous,
glidingly toward me advancing,
Toward the ceiling of my chamber his orbic and expressive eyeballs
uprolling,
and so on, to which Narcissus replies,
O clarion, from whose brazen throat,
Strange sounds across the seas are blown,
Where England, girt as with a moat,
A strong sea-lion sits alone!
Of the lectures which he delivered in America only one has been
preserved, namely that on the English Renaissance. This was his first
lecture, and it was delivered in New York on January 9th, 1882.
According to a contemporary account in the “New York Herald” a
distinguished and crowded audience assembled in Chickering Hall that
evening to listen to one who “was well worth seeing, his short breeches
and silk stockings showing to even better advantage upon the stage than
in the gilded drawing-rooms, where the young Apostle has heretofore been
seen in New York.”[2]
On leaving the States in the “fall” of the year Wilde proceeded to
Canada and thence to Nova Scotia, arriving in Halifax in the second week
of October. Of his visit there we have no record except an amusing
interview described in a local paper a few days later. He was dressed in
a velvet jacket with an ordinary linen collar and neck tie and he wore
trousers. “Mr. Wilde,” the interviewer states, “was communicative and
genial; he said he found Canada pleasant, but in answer to a question as
to whether European or American women were the more beautiful, he
dexterously evaded his querist.”
As regards poetry he expressed his opinion that Poe was the greatest
American poet, and that Walt Whitman, if not a poet, was a man who
sounded a strong note, perhaps neither prose nor poetry, but something
of his own that was “grand, original and unique.”
During his tour in America Wilde “happened to find” himself (as he has
himself described it), in Louisville, Kentucky. The subject he had
selected to speak on was the Mission of Art in the Nineteenth Century.
In the course of his lecture he had occasion to quote Keats’ Sonnet on
Blue “as an example of the poet’s delicate sense of colour-harmonies.”
After the lecture there came round to see him “a lady of middle age,
with a sweet gentle manner and most musical voice,” who introduced
herself as Mrs. Speed, the daughter of George Keats, and she invited the
lecturer to come and examine the Keats manuscripts in her possession.
Some months afterwards when lecturing in California he received a letter
from this lady asking him to accept the original manuscript of the
sonnet which he had quoted.
Mention must be made of Wilde’s first play, a drama in blank verse
entitled “Vera, or the Nihilists.” It had been arranged that, before his
departure for America, this play should be performed at the Adelphi
Theatre, London, with Mrs. Bernard Beere as the heroine, on Saturday,
December 17th, 1881, but a few weeks before the date fixed for the first
performance, the author decided to postpone the production “owing to the
state of political feeling in England.”
On his return to England in 1883 Wilde started on a lecturing tour, the
first being to the Art Students of the Royal Academy at their Club in
Golden Square on June 30th. Ten days later he spoke at Prince’s Hall on
his “Personal Impressions of America,” and on subsequent occasions at
Margate, Ramsgate and Southampton. On Monday, July 30th he lectured at
Southport and on the following Thursday he went to Liverpool to welcome
Mrs. Langtry on her return from America, and the same afternoon he left
on his second visit to the States in order to superintend the rehearsals
of “Vera,” which it had been arranged to produce at the Union Square
Theatre, New York, on August 20th following. The piece was not a
success--it was, indeed, the only failure Wilde had. However, his next
play, which he called his “Opus Secundum,” also a blank verse tragedy,
had a successful run in America in 1891. This was “The Duchess of
Padua,” played by Lawrence Barrett, under the title of “Guido Ferranti.”
This has not been seen in England, nor is it even possible for Wilde’s
admirers to read this early offspring of his pen, for only twenty copies
were printed for acting purposes in America and of these but one is
known to be in existence, in this country at least.
An authorised German translation was made by Max Meyerfeld and the first
performance took place at the German Theatre in Hamburg about a year
ago. An English version is advertised from a piratical publisher in
Paris but it is only a translation from the German back into English.
Towards the end of September 1883 Oscar Wilde returned to England and
immediately began “an all round lecturing tour,” his first visit being
to Wandsworth Town Hall on Monday, September 24th, when he delivered to
an enthusiastic audience a lecture on his “Impressions of America,”
which is contained in the following pages. He was dressed, a London
paper of the time states, “in ordinary evening costume, and carried an
orange-coloured silk handkerchief in his breast. He spoke with great
fluency, in a voice now and then singularly musical, and only once or
twice made a scarcely perceptible reference to notes.” The lecture was
under the auspices of a local Literary Society, and the principle
residents of the district turned out “en masse.” The Chairman, the Rev.
John Park, in introducing the lecturer, said there were two reasons why
he was glad to welcome him, and he thought his own feelings would be
shared by the audience. They must all plead guilty to a feeling of
curiosity, he hoped a laudable one, to see and hear Mr. Wilde for his
own sake, and they were also glad to hear about America--a country which
many might regard as a kind of Elysium.
On March 5th in the following year Wilde lectured at the Crystal Palace
on his American experiences, and on April 26th he “preached his Gospel
in the East-end,” when it is recorded that his audience was not only
delighted with his humour, but was “surprised at the excellent good
sense he talked.” His subject was a plea in favour of “art for schools,”
and many of his remarks about the English system of elementary
education--with its insistence on “the population of places that no one
ever wants to go to,” and its “familiarity with the lives of persons who
probably never existed”--were said to be quite worthy of Ruskin. A
contemporary account adds that Wilde “showed himself a pupil of Mr.
Ruskin’s, too, in insisting on the importance of every child being
taught some handicraft, and in looking forward to the time when a boy
would rather look at a bird or even draw it than throw “his customary
stone!”
The British “gamin” has not made much progress in this respect during
the last twenty years!
His lectures on “Dress,” with the newspaper correspondence which they
evoked, including some of Oscar Wilde’s replies in his most
characteristic vein, must be reserved for a future volume.