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,