Oscar Wilde, Morning Appeal (Article, 1882)
Full Text
Oscar Wilde.
Oscar Wilde, the high apostle of the aesthetic faith, appeared on Monday evening as a lecturer at one of the largest public halls of New York, and addressed the largest audience ever assembled therin. In fact, this young gentleman, who is Irish, but affects to be English, has created a furore both in public and private; and no Englishman since Charles Dickens made his first famous visit to America, has been received with such overwhelming favor. The fashionable world of the metropolis has thrown itself at his feet, and has given him honors far beyondd and accorded to such eminent men as Thackeray, Froude, Kingsley, Tyndall, Dean Stanley, or Dickens, after his first visit. What Oscar Wilde has done to have heaped upon him distinctions which were denied to the eminent Englishmen we have mentioned is not made apparent, either by what he has said or written. His poemss are of the weakly, sentimental, yearning, passionate sort, and often of so prurient a character as to make their exclusion from the hands of the young a necessity. As to his lecture of Monday night it simply escapes adolescent inanity, being a thin dilution of Swinburneism and a thinner one of Ruskinism. As a literary effort it is beneath criticism; as a scientific effort it is beneath contempt; as a whole it is feeble and limp to the last degree of so-called aestheticism. But it netted his manager a great deal of money. As the apostle of the latest English craze in dress and house decoration Oscar Wilde has created a good deal of ridicule at home; but coming here the votaries of fashion elevate him upon the highest pedestal of regard in their possession, which is not a pleasant thing to consider, for it suggests that lack of discrimination, dignity and self-respect which society owes to itself.--Exchange.
