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