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March 1882 109 the recently deceased Lord Byron, vanishes at the end of the third act. However, their union produces no daughter—euphonic or otherwise. 3. Théodore Rousseau (1812–67), French painter of the Barbizon school. 4. Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1823–1911), American author, abolitionist, and pastor. 5. Charles E. Locke, senior partner with J. Charles Davis in the theatrical agency of Locke and Davis, was responsible for bringing Wilde to San Francisco. 30. “Lo! The Aesthete,” San Francisco Chronicle, 27 March 1882, 3 The 8 o’clock ferryboat to Oakland yesterday morning carried a committee of reception, self-appointed, to meet Oscar Wilde, the apostle of aestheticism. The committee consisted of Manager Locke, several Bohemian Club men1 and the usual flock of reporters that gathers on the railroad approaches to the city when some hapless celebrity is to be waylaid and ruthlessly rifled of his ideas of California. The committee having evidently had little more than forty winks of sleep, showed on its countenance the aesthetic pallor which bespeaks a true appreciation of utter beauty and a too joyous sympathy with poetic sentiment. Manager Locke, as the uncommissioned chairman of the committee, hastened to show that the aestheticism of his party was not merely skin deep by dashing instinctively for the lunch counter, where the too exquisitely utter cooking range was imbuing a plate of fried sausage with the exalted spirit of culinary art. The lofty example of the managerial aesthete, proudly poised on a stool as high and dangerous as a Norman charger and wielding half a yard of steel with the vigor of a thirteenth-century Crusader, was instantly followed by the committee, and the range flowed and flamed in the intensity of its industrial zeal until the sun-kissed citizen in front of it looked like a spot on a harvest moon. Before the refreshed aesthetes laid down their napkins and readjusted their sunflowers, the ferryboat had touched the Oakland side and been made fast. This is especially worthy of note, as it is the first instance on record where anything but a collector was made fast by touching at Oakland. As the committee filed out to the train for Port Costa an opportunity was given to note the aesthetic beauties of their attire. Manager Locke, who had evidently been studying a cut of a medieval saint, had donned a dark-blue coat and a bright yellow necktie, which contrasted so violently with the unsubdued hue of his mustache that he looked like Julian Rix’s sensational i-xii_1-196_Wild.indd 109 8/4/09 9:11:50 AM 110 March 1882 picture of the “Redwoods on Fire.”2 Each of the Bohemian Club men sported a large breastpin, on which a one-legged silver stork gazed pensively on a bronze frog, as if deliberating whether to go hungry or risk the terrors of strangulation and dyspepsia. The reporter of a morning journal which caters to the aesthetic aspirations of Jessie and Natoma streets3 and keeps the police department and the aristocracy of Minna Street mutually intimate,4 boasted that in humble recognition of the coming aesthete he had shaved off his mustache. On careful examination this was found to be a fact. The other journalists who found themselves attached to the tail of the committee of reception had contented themselves with the most ordinary attempts at aesthetic adornment, and by their sameness of color helped to distract public attention from the party and save it from a suspicion that it was the advance guard of a milliner’s picnic or the board of trustees of the Oakland cockpit. The run to Port Costa was pleasant and rapid. Flying over the broad fields, green as the imagination of an aesthetic poet, and whirling along the pebbly shores of the bay, with its sparkling waters, blue as the theatrical managers who have not dug into the bonanza of aestheticism, the committee of reception met the overland train and Oscar Wilde at 10 a.m. Marcus Mayer,5 formerly of the Democratic party of San Francisco and now the agent of the divine Patti, conveyed to the committee from the fore platform of the train the pleasant news that the poet had breakfasted. “He was presented with a magnificent bouquet of sunflowers and camellias by Mr. Woodson at Sacramento,” said the cheerful agent, unconscious of the intimation which the remark conveyed. The medieval splendor of manager Locke’s attire gained him an immediate audience with the poet...

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