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April 1882 123 1. Hippolyte Taine (1828–1893), French literary critic and historian. 2. Alexander Pope (1688–1744) was an English poet of the neoclassical, or Augustan, period who wrote highly refined verse, often of a didactic or satirical nature. 3. J. M. W. Turner (1775?–1851), eminent English Romantic landscape painter. 4. Wilde refers to George William Curtis’s comments in the “Editor’s Easy Chair,” Harper’s Monthly 64 (Apr. 1882): 790. 5. The complete quotation: “Arising out of eternal reason, one and perfect, whatever is beautiful rests on the foundation of the necessary. Nothing is arbitrary, nothing is insulated in beauty. It depends forever on the necessary and the useful.” 6. These lines, then very famous, are from “Beauty,” by the American poet Sarah Josepha Hale (1788–1879). 7. The Boston publishing house Robert Brothers brought out an authorized American edition of Wilde’s poems in 1881. 8. James Rennell Rodd (1858–1941), English diplomat, politician, scholar, and poet. 9. These lines are from the conclusion to Wilde’s lecture “The English Renaissance.” 32. Mary Watson, “Oscar Wilde at Home,” San Francisco Examiner, 9 April 1882, 1 The English language is popularly supposed to be a vehicle of expression that was perfected long ago. It is intended not to conceal but to express thought, and only persons who labor after originality, like Robert Browning,1 for instance , give themselves the trouble to twist its words into new meanings. Yet, strange to say, there are two words in the English language which of late are employed as frequently as any other two that could be named, if we make due exception of “charming” and “awful,” and they are “aesthetic” and “utter ,” about the signification of which there seem to be no general agreement; yet all concede that they apply to an unknown quantity in artistic niceness, and at once the more complex form of intensified aestheticism in the shape of “utter” presents itself. The most agreeable and perhaps the most effective solution of the much-used word outside of dictionarial definition would be to get the meaning from the fountainhead, that is, from the apostolic source of aestheticism, Oscar Wilde himself. I saw the lion in his lair, saw him stirred up, poetically speaking, and an interesting process it was. It took place at the Palace Hotel,2 where the young poet resided during his stay here. Without further preliminaries I will endeavor to picture Oscar Wilde’s at-home manner and how he exists in so unaesthetic a caravansary as the Palace Hotel. Fortunately, there was plenty of time to get a good look at the room and peer about without transgressing any social rules, for when I arrived, as per i-xii_1-196_Wild.indd 123 8/4/09 9:11:53 AM 124 April 1882 appointment, there was no one but his servant at home, and the opportunity was afforded to get an uninterrupted few moments and jot down whatever there was remarkable. Between the fear of not seeing everything and of his sudden arrival, I could only get cursory glimpses of all the peculiarities the room offered, and had little time to think of what I was to ask him when he did make his appearance. At any rate, all the questions that I had in my mind in reference to Mr. Wilde flew from me when he entered a few moments after I did. His lazy manner and my hard effort to explain in a depressed sort of way, occasioned by my feeling of strangeness, soon made matters rather one-sided. He talked, and talked well, and soon I regained my ordinary frame of mind, but with still a misgiving as to how to broach my subject; but his action in throwing off his circular cloak, the quick and well-rehearsed movement of the servant, who reached the center of the room just at the right moment to catch the outside wraps of the poet, and his subsequent position on the sofa, partaking rather of an easy posture, half reclining, half sitting, set me quite at ease; and the poet, whom I had expected to lead me in the empyrean ways of poetic fancy, for which I was half prepared, made me believe so utterly in the mere commonplace that I felt a sense of disappointment, for it is so awful to believe in a man’s superiority and then find him out. The rooms were of the usual hotel order, with the walls...

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