Читать книгу Oscar Wilde: A Life in Letters - Оскар Уайльд, Merlin Holland, F. H. Cornish - Страница 57

[15 February 1882] US

My dear George Curzon, Yes! You are on the black list, and, if my secretary does his work properly, every mail shall hurl at your young philosophic head the rage of the American eagle because I do not think trousers beautiful, the excitement of a sane strong people over the colour of my necktie, the fear of the eagle that I have come to cut his barbaric claws with the scissors of culture, the impotent rage of the ink-stained, the noble and glorious homage of the respectable – you shall know it all: it may serve you for marginal notes [about democracy].

Well, it’s really wonderful, my audiences are enormous. In Chicago I lectured last Monday to 2500 people! This is of course nothing to anyone who has spoken at the Union, but to me it was delightful – a great sympathetic electric people, who cheered and applauded and gave me a sense of serene power that even being abused by the Saturday Review never gave me.

I lecture four times a week, and the people are delightful and lionise one to a curious extent, but they follow me, and start schools of design when I visit their town. At Philadelphia the school is called after me and they really are beginning to love and know beautiful art and its meaning.

As for myself, I feel like Tancred or Lothair. I travel in such state, for in a free country one cannot live without slaves, and I have slaves – black, yellow and white. But you must write again. Your letter had a flavour of Attic salt. Yours (from Boeotia)

OSCAR WILDE

Renell Rodd, a friend of Wilde’s from Oxford days, had published a book of poems in 1881 entitled Songs of the South. Wilde, anxious as much to promote his own ideas as Rodd’s poetry, arranged for the volume to be produced in Philadephia by Stoddart, with an aesthetic envoi or preface of his own and an effusive dedication to himself: ‘To Oscar Wilde, “heart’s brother”, these few songs and many songs to come’. The book duly appeared in October as Rose Leaf and Apple Leaf, but Rodd was disturbed and upset by Wilde’s parading of their friendship, and a volume of poetry proved its undoing, as it had with Frank Miles the year before.