Shall I buzz like a bee, with my face thrust in
Thy choice, chaste chalice, or choose me a tin
Trumpet, or touchingly, tenderly play
On the weird bird-whistle, sweeter than sin,
That I bought for a halfpenny, yesterday?
Other parodies by "Oscuro Wildegoose" followed, and Wilde's poems are "slated" in the Bludyer vein under the heading "Swinburne and Water." A good deal of Wilde's verse was derivative—even tertiary deposit—and Punch made fair game of the Swinburnian echoes and phrases such as "argent body," "pulse of sin," and "kosmic soul." But his literary criticism is somewhat heavy-handed. He is much happier in "Oscuro Wildegoose's" burlesque sonnet lamenting the unenlightened Philistinism of Grahamstown, in South Africa, where the Town Council did not know what a dado was, and conjectured that it was an ecclesiastical term! Wilde's visit to America in 1882 let loose a cascade of ridicule beginning with a bogus interview, followed up by a cartoon "Ariadne in Naxos," representing (in the manner of W. B. Richmond) the grief of Æstheticism at the departure of her hierophant. When Wilde lectured at Boston sixty students appeared in white waistcoats and knee-breeches, with sun-flowers in their buttonholes, and Punch welcomed the attention as a reductio ad absurdum of Wilde's efforts to revolutionize costume. Later on occurred the episode—which caused Punch unfeigned delight—of a letter addressed to "Oscar Wilde, Poet, London," being returned as "Not known." But the craze was passing. Gilbert's Patience, produced in 1881, had been largely instrumental in reducing the pose of preciosity to its true proportions, and by the summer of 1883 we find Punch coupling "Oscar" and "Jumbo" (the elephant) together as overrated lions. From this point onward the campaign slackens. In some acid verses on the Zeit-Geist in the spring of 1884, which we quote later on, a would-be Juvenal denounces vulgarity as the dominant feature of the time; and in his list of nuisances and impostors no room is found for the æsthete. At the close of the same year, however, to judge by another set of pessimistic verses, he was still active if not exactly rampant:—
The "culture," too, of the æsthetes, with all its flaccid flams,
Its turgid affectations and its silly sickly shams,
Is but as dross of Brummagem compared with virgin gold,
When matched against the vigorous realities of old.