29 August 1900

 

I had heard of America, unfortunately, before it had heard of me.  Helen Modjeska once told me that, when she was playing the part of a consumptive in a more than usually exotic Western town, the audience sent round bottles of patent medicine after the performance.  I knew at once that it was my duty to visit a people who had so much faith in the powers of art.  One is always being told that they are a young nation, but they remain young only because they are rediscovered annually by Europeans.  Even English novelists go there now to lecture; unfortunately, most of them come back.

      When I was asked by D'Oyly Carte to go myself, in order to boost his production of Patience, I agreed readily.  I needed the money; Sir William's estate was in ruins and, in moments of anxiety, I saw myself as a beggar in the street; only those with great ambitions know what great fears drive them forward.  The opera was a burlesque merely, which satisfied a modern audience's taste for laughing at what it does not understand, but one of its characters, Bunthorne, was said to bear some resemblance to myself: that was of course why I had been asked to accompany the tour.  But I was determined to rise to the occasion which offered itself to me, and assert the values of art and the imagination.  If I was forced to travel as a missionary among cannibals, at least I would insist on devouring them.

      When I saw New York from the deck of the steamship, I was repelled.  It resembled a vast Swan and Edgar's, which seemed to be engaged in a perpetual sale.  I came down upon the shore and was at once surrounded by a crowd of journalists.  'Here he is!' they shouted.  'Buffalo Bill!'  I felt quite faint with anticipation, although I discovered that in New York anticipation can be indefinitely prolonged.  I learned, on closer inspection, that it suffers from what Lombroso would call a disease of the spirit - an absence of imagination contracted from too close a proximity to horsehair sofas and cast-iron stoves.  But, if New York showed America at it most primitive, I found its real civilisation in the wilderness: the mining towns of the West and the small communities couched in the great plains of the interior mark quite a new phase in the development of contemporary life.  Free of hypocrisy and the affection of European values, they will become the engines of the modern period.  I have always admired artlessness in others, and the Americans are fashioning a philosophy out of it which will rival Locke for its method and Rousseau for its self-confidence.

      I travelled from lecture hall to lecture hall, and discovered in the process the secret of being a public performer: I talked to myself and the audience overheard me.  I spoke of the House Beautiful and American domestic life was altered overnight; I described the Aesthetic Movement in Dress and the next day Attic creatures were seen in the streets.  The women worshipped me and the men talked about me.  I was compared to George Eliot, although in what respect I am not sure.  The Americans are without traditions of any kind, and they treat with proper deference anyone who tells them where to go and what to do.  The men would dig into a charnel pit if someone had informed them that gold was buried there, and the women would applaud them for their courage.  But I offered them Ruskin and blue-and-white china instead; they accepted them with gratitude, and repaid me with strange green notes.  I became a commercial proposition.  My success came as a revelation to me: I discovered that I could earn considerable sums of money simply by being myself.  But I became aware also of a peculiar but now to me familiar phenomenon: as soon as I had expressed my philosophy, I ceased to adhere to it.  Once I had given perfect form to my ideas and attitudes, they became wearisome to me.  When people believed in me, I ceased to believe in myself.

      I can recall quite clearly the journey from Omaha to San Francisco which I made with the opera troupe; God had created the world in less time than it took us to travel across America.  We travelled in a train so slow that young men in the third-class carriages fired their revolvers at the small creatures who dwell on the prairies.  I do not know if they were people or animals: perhaps they themselves were not entirely sure.  During the journey I read French novels - the great advantage of really contemporary fiction is that one finds oneself mirrored on every page - but I slept in the heat of the afternoon: it is strange, is it not, how once I enjoyed sleep?

      I woke one afternoon and left my compartment to purchase a sandwich, a fanciful lead-coloured thing, only to find John Howson, who played Bunthorne, that absurd caricature of myself, standing upon the observation platform dressed in a costume similar to my own and reciting one of my poems.  We had stopped at a little station and the credulous population assumed at once that Howson was Wilde.  I felt quite revolted.

      'Howson!' I said when he had returned to our carriage.  'Do you remember me?  I am Oscar Wilde.  Do you recall, also, that we are travelling together?  Or did you imagine that I had fallen off somewhere, and you were required to remedy the deficiency?'

      'I'm sorry, Oscar, I couldn't resist it.  When a chap is asleep, and another chap wants to have a bit of fun, it's forgivable, ain't it?'

      'Howson, my dear boy.  You are an actor.  I understand actors.  I do not have the slightest objection to your forgetting who you are, but it is not wise to adopt the personality of someone who is sitting on the same train.'  I emphasised the last words by hitting his knee with Mademoiselle de Maupin.

      'Oh really, Oscar, you are not better than me.  At least I know when I am acting.'

      'I am not an actor.  I am myself.'

      'Oh, yes, tell all.'

      'That is all you need to know.'

      'You came here as part of the troupe, Oscar, and hard luck if I steal the best scenes.'

      'At least my lines are my own.'

      'Excuse me, but they are not.  I see you copying them from those books of yours, and rehearsing them when you sit on the you-know-what.'

      'I don't have the faintest idea what you are talking about.  At least I never strut around in borrowed finery and pretend that I am someone other than myself.'

      'Nonsense.  You have never been yourself.'

      At this critical juncture, an official of the railway entered the carriage.  'Which of you is Mr Oscar Wilde?' he said.

      'He is,' we both replied at once.

      'I have a note from a lady to give to Mr Wilde.'

      'Oh, let him have it,' I replied.  I dislike 'notes', they are always so loud.

      'I say, Wilde, here is a lady who wants to meet us - I mean, meet you - when we reach San Francisco.  Shall I reply?'

      'Tell her that I am otherwise engaged.'

      'Oh, be a sport, Oscar.  Why not let me go in your place?'

      'You have gone so far already, Howson, that I can hardly stop you.'

      And so it was that the American newspapers were full of my activities as a ladies' man: it was Howson.  And, when he was discovered by journalists in a New York gambling den, he again used my name.  As a result, reports that I frequented such places even reached England.  I never cared to contradict them: who was I to stand in the path of my destiny?  I felt like Adah Menken, doomed to lead the life which others imagined for me.  But just as my philosophy had ceased to interest me as soon as it was formulated into a set of principles so, when I saw myself being imitated, I realised at once what an incubus my aesthetic personality might become if I were to be trapped within it.  Imitation changes, not the impersonator, but the impersonated.

      And, indeed, in that country where all the modern miracles will occur, my personality did develop.  In America I acquired a certain ease and freedom of manner which were denied to me in England.  For the first time my work was taken seriously: where before I had been an object of scorn or gossip, known principally as a companion of the famous, now I was hailed as an artist.  I was interviewed continually, and my poetry was published in the better newspapers at a guinea a line.  When I had made that discovery, when I realised that it was in my art that others might recognise me, I felt quite free.  The sensation, when it is at last woken in a young man, resembles that of being propelled by a vast gale - forward, but without any ostensible goal; like a ship as it leaves harbour, slowly the cries and the greetings from the shore die away, and one is at last silently travelling amid the immensity of the sea and the sky.  It is then, and only then, that one can impart form to the imagination and life to the fluttering wings of the spirit.

      When I met Whitman, therefore, I came to him not as a disciple but as an equal - the only situation in which true artists can ever meet.  I visited the wide, bright attic in Philadelphia where he sat like an American patriarch; behind him I could see the tall white sails of ships upon the Delaware but they were pleasantly obscured by the smoke which issued from the factory chimneys.  Our conversation was affable and easy.  Whitman had never travelled to Europe, so he had retained his perfect manners - but he had shrewdness, also, the shrewdness which saw the writer even then coming to birth within me.  I told him that I had come to lecture to his countrymen on the Beautiful.

      'It seems to me, Oscar,' he said, 'that the beautiful is not an abstraction to make a gallop for, but really an effect of what you produce.'

      'But surely the Beautiful is also an ideal?'

      He had a curious giggle in his voice, as though he had swallowed a genie which was quite content to stay where it was.  'Ideals are hobgoblins,' he replied.  'If you search for them, they lead you astray and into the swamp.  If you let them come to you, they will be true companions.'

      I realise only now the truth of what he said to me then: the search for Beauty has had terrible consequences for me.  In my days of fame I hunted for it in every guise and, in my eagerness to grasp it, I quite mistook its nature.  And so Beauty turned from me and left me in the shadows, in the second circle of Hell where I may meet Dido and Semiramis face to face.

      That is all I have to say about America: now it is time for luncheon.