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2. "Oscar Wilde," New York Evening Post
- University of Illinois Press
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January 1882 15 gentleman kindly retailed the conversation to the writer), “I am not exactly pleased with the Atlantic. It is not so majestic as I expected. I would like to see the ship’s bridge carried away!” 1. Joseph Emerson Worcester (1784–1865), an innovative American lexicographer, published A Dictionary of the English Language (1860). 2. Punch (1841–2002) was a British humor magazine famous for its cartoons. As part of Punch’s mockery of aestheticism, George du Maurier (1834–96) produced a series of cartoons caricaturing Wilde as the effete poet “Maudle.” In interview 4 Wilde identifies himself as the source for Maudle but claims that “Jellaby Postlethwaite”—who also resembles the poet—is a “combination or a conglomeration of the peculiarities of a number of [his] friends.” 3. The revolutionaries in the Young Ireland movement unsuccessfully agitated for Irish independence in 1848, soon spawning the Fenian movement. 4. “Speranza” (1826–96) was the pen name of Jane Francesca Agnes, Lady Wilde (née Elgee), an Irish poet and supporter of the nationalist movement and Oscar Wilde’s mother. 2. “Oscar Wilde,” New York Evening Post, 4 January 1882, 4; excerpted in “The Chief Yearner,” Boston Globe, 4 January 1882, 4 Mr. Oscar Wilde stood on the pier of the Williams and Guion steamship line at 11 o’clock this morning when a reporter of the Evening Post pushed through the crowd of admirers who surrounded him and asked the poet of the aesthetes what he understood by aestheticism. “I have defined it about two hundred times since last night,” answered Mr. Wilde, with a patient smile, “but I am here to diffuse beauty, and I have no objection to saying that—I say, porter, handle that box more carefully, will you?” This was said to a hotel porter who had seized Mr. Wilde’s luggage and was tossing it, box after box, up to the roof of the hotel stage, unmindful that the boxes might contain frail objects such as lilies and the like. While Mr. Wilde expostulated with the man, the reporter was able to get a good look at him: a tall, well-built, blue-eyed, beardless young man, six feet high at least with a large white, flat face surrounded by a sealskin cap many sizes too small for him; irregular and protruding teeth, light long hair flowing over the color of a sort of bottle-green dressing gown extending down to the feet; a manner in which ease and amusement contrasted strangely, with an embarrassed laugh used in lieu of punctuation. Such is Mr. Oscar Wilde at i-xii_1-196_Wild.indd 15 8/4/09 9:11:31 AM 16 January 1882 the first glance. Further study reveals the ends of a sky-blue necktie, a pair of patent-leather boots, and large hands. That Mr. Wilde had with very moderate success attempted something after the style of Raphael’s famous portrait of himself1 would occur to anyone who sees him with his sealskin cap on. “Aestheticism,” he continued, “is an attempt to color the commonplace, to make beauty stand out wherever it is. There is a subtle relation between beauty and everything—a correlation of one sensible beauty with another— that is not seen or felt, except by—by—well, by persons who have studied the matter.” “For instance,” asked the reporter, “where is the beauty in that striking grain elevator which is the chief object in New Jersey’s landscape across the river there?” Wilde looked across the river but said that he was too near-sighted to see the object in question; he would examine it some other day and make a note of it. “Beauty,” went on the poet, puffing vigorously at a cigarette and plunging both hands deep into the pockets of his dressing gown, “is nearer to most of us than we are aware. The material is all around us, but we want a systematic way of bringing it out. It may be subjective, don’t you know, or objective; but it is there, and the science of how to get at it is what I come to lecture about.” “Then you have found the key to pure beauty or such beauty as there may be in the lily or in Hoboken. Is that it?” “Something of the kind. It’s a wide field which has no limit, and all definitions are unsatisfactory. Some people might search and not find anything. But the search, if carried on...