Oscar Wilde

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Literary San Antonio Oscar Wilde
IMAGE CREDIT: Oscariana Courtyard of Menger Hotel	In 1882, Oscar Wilde, like Charles Dickens before him, made a lecture tour of the United States, which has been elaborately recounted in Lloyd Lewis and Henry J. Smith's entertaining book, Oscar Wilde Discovers America (1882). During the month of June, he made his way to San Antonio via Galveston and Houston, and he stayed in the celebrated Menger Hotel, located immediately south of the Alamo, which was an important landmark on the historic Alamo Plaza. The hotel had already hosted Generals Robert E. Lee and U. S. Grant, as well as Sydney Lanier, not to mention other distinguished individuals who had or would reside there. This was also the same year that William Sydney Porter (O. Henry) came to Texas. Wilde's arrival by train was greeted by another Englishman (possibly bogus), H. Ryder-Taylor, who claimed an acquaintance with the literary celebrity and who would later have dealings with O. Henry in 1895. When Ryder-Taylor, working as a reporter for the Evening Light newspaper, went up to Wilde's room in the Menger, he found the author complaining about "a feeling of lassitude which he attributed to taking a bath at Galveston." Yet Wilde was preparing to lecture on his new theme, "the basic agreement between art and industry" (Lewis and Smith 364-65), a subject he must have considered especially appropriate for an American audience on the frontier edge of English speaking civilization.
Early photo of Turner Halle (DRT Library)	According to an article in the Evening Light, Wilde's lecture on June 22 at Turner Hall (a building subsequently demolished) was successful, although "many of Oscar Wilde's pet sentences were lost on account of his very poor delivery and the squeaking of the new boots of some of the thirsty ones going out for refreshments. One hour was too long between drinks" (Lewis and Smith 365). Perhaps the earnest nature of Wilde's aesthetic emphasis on the role of art in everyday life caused some of the less attentive frontier minds to wander, but he echoed Emerson's famous advice to Americans expressed in the earlier essay, "Self-Reliance." Joseph Gallegly summed up Wilde's comments succinctly: Wilde advised San Antonio listeners to encourage their young people to learn and practice art. They must not, he said, send to New York and pay heavily for goods which do not suit them and which do not satisfy their tastes. They should instead learn to weave their own carpets, design their own furniture and make their own pottery. (37)
Thomas Nast caricature of Oscar Wilde from Harper's Weekly (1882)	Notwithstanding the serious tone of his lecture, Wilde's audience must have been at least mildly amused at his diatribes against the cast iron stove, which, ironically, had been invented by the epitome of American practicality, Benjamin Franklin, whom Herman Melville had once described as "everything but a poet." According to Gallegly, Wilde singled out for attack "‘that monstrosity, the cast iron stove.' He said he could perhaps tolerate the stove, ‘if you would not decorate it.' The festooned base and the 'funeral urn' surmountings he found particularly objectionable" (37). Apparently, what Wilde was objecting to, perhaps somewhat facetiously, would be described today as "kitsch" instead of genuine artistic expression.
Façade of Mission San José, showing front doorway "Rose Window" on south side of the Mission	On the day following the lecture, Ryder-Taylor took Wilde on a sightseeing tour of San Antonio that logically included the Alamo and the San Jose mission. Concerning the former, Wilde pronounced it a noble structure and used the word "monstrous" in lamenting that it was not better preserved. The latter shrine impressed him with its magnificent facade, and he described the "door and window of the San Jose mission the finest he had seen in America" (Lewis and Smith 365). Of course, the window he was referring to was the famous Rose Window, located on the south side of the mission church, around which a variety of legends have circulated through the years, focusing principally on its supposed creator, Pedro Huizar. The appeal of these two and other San Antonio landmarks seems to have remained with Oscar Wilde, even after he left the city, for he commented to a New Orleans Picayune reporter a few days later: There are in Texas two spots which gave me infinite pleasure. These are Galveston and San Antonio. . . . It was in San Antonio, however, that I found more to please me. . . . Those old Spanish churches, with their picturesque remains and dome and their handsome carved stonework, standing amid the verdure and sunshine of a Texas prairie, gave me a thrill of strange pleasure. (Lewis and Smith 366)