In Boston he scored a triumph of character. Fifty or sixty Harvard students came to his lecture dressed to caricature him in "swallow tail coats, knee breeches, flowing wigs and green ties. They all wore large lilies in their buttonholes and each man carried a huge sunflower as he limped along." That evening Oscar appeared in ordinary dress and went on with his lecture as if he had not noticed the rudeness. The chief Boston paper gave him due credit:
"Everyone who witnessed the scene on Tuesday evening must feel about it very much as we do, and those who came to scoff, if they did not exactly remain to pray, at least left the Music Hall with feelings of cordial liking, and, perhaps to their own surprise, of respect for Oscar Wilde." (By way of heaping coals of fire on the students' heads Oscar presented a cast of the Hermes (then recently unearthed) to the University of Harvard.)
As he travelled west to Louisville and Omaha his popularity dwined and dwindled.
Still he persevered and after leaving the States visited Canada, reaching
Halifax in the autumn.
One incident must find a place here. On September 6 he sent L80 to Lady Wilde. I have been told that this was merely a return of money she had advanced; but there can be no doubt that Oscar, unlike his brother Willie, helped his mother again and again most generously, though Willie was always her favourite.
Oscar returned to England in April, 1883, and lectured to the Art Students at their club in Golden Square. This at once brought about a break with Whistler who accused him of plagiarism:—"Picking from our platters the plums for the puddings he peddles in the provinces."
If one compares this lecture with Oscar's on "The English Renaissance of Art," delivered in New York only a year before, and with Whistler's well-known opinions, it is impossible not to admit that the charge was justified. Such phrases as "artists are not to copy beauty but to create it . . . . a picture is a purely decorative thing," proclaim their author.
The long newspaper wrangle between the two was brought to a head in 1885, when Whistler gave his famous "Ten o'clock" discourse on Art. This lecture was infinitely better than any of Oscar Wilde's. Twenty odd years older than Wilde, Whistler was a master of all his resources: he was not only witty, but he had new views on art and original ideas. As a great artist he knew that "there never was an artistic period. There never was an Art-loving nation." Again and again he reached pure beauty of expression. The masterly persiflage, too, filled me with admiration and I declared that the lecture ranked with the best ever heard in London with Coleridge's on Shakespeare and Carlyle's on Heroes. To my astonishment Oscar would not admit the superlative quality of Whistler's talk; he thought the message paradoxical and the ridicule of the professors too bitter. "Whistler's like a wasp," he cried, "and carries about with him a poisoned sting." Oscar's kindly sweet nature revolted against the disdainful aggressiveness of Whistler's attitude. Besides, in essence, Whistler's lecture was an attack on the academic theory taught in the universities, and defended naturally by a young scholar like Oscar Wilde. Whistler's view that the artist was sporadic, a happy chance, a "sport," in fact, was a new view, and Oscar had not yet reached this level; he reviewed the master in the "Pall Mall Gazette", a review remarkable for one of the earliest gleams of that genial humour which later became his most characteristic gift: "Whistler," he said, "is indeed one of the very greatest masters of painting in my opinion. And I may add that in this opinion Mr. Whistler himself entirely concurs."
Whistler retorted in "The World" and Oscar replied, but Whistler had the best of the argument. . . . . "Oscar—the amiable, irresponsible, esurient Oscar—with no more sense of a picture than of the fit of a coat, has the courage of the opinions . . . . of others!"
It should be noted here that one of the bitterest of tongues could not help doing homage to Oscar Wilde's "amiability": Whistler even preferred to call him "amiable and irresponsible" rather than give his plagiarism a harsher attribute.
Oscar Wilde learned almost all he knew of art (confer Appendix: "Criticisms by Robert Ross.") and of controversy from Whistler, but he was never more than a pupil in either field; for controversy in especial he was poorly equipped: he had neither the courage, nor the contempt, nor the joy in conflict of his great exemplar.