Impressions of America, 1882

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Oscar Wilde

Impressions of America 1882



I fear I cannot picture America as altogether an Elysium—perhaps,

from the ordinary standpoint I know but little about the country.

I cannot give its latitude or longitude; I cannot compute the value

of its dry goods, and I have no very close acquaintance with its

politics. These are matters which may not interest you, and they

certainly are not interesting to me.



The first thing that struck me on landing in America was that

if the Americans are not the most well-dressed people in the

world, they are the most comfortably dressed. Men are seen there

with the dreadful chimney-pot hat, but there are very few hatless

men; men wear the shocking swallowtail coat, but few are to be

seen with no coat at all. There is an air of comfort in the

appearance of the people which is a marked contrast to that seen

in this country, where, too often, people are seen in close contact

with rags.



The next thing particularly noticeable is that everybody seems

in a hurry to catch a train. This is a state of things which is not

favourable to poetry or romance. Had Romeo or Juliet been in a

constant state of anxiety about trains, or had their minds been

agitated by the question of return-tickets, Shakespeare could not

have given us those lovely balcony scenes which are so full of

poetry and pathos.



America is the noisiest country that ever existed. One is

waked up in the morning, not by the singing of the nightingale,

but by the steam whistle. It is surprising that the sound practical

sense of the Americans does not reduce this intolerable noise. All

Art depends upon exquisite and delicate sensibility, and such

continual turmoil must ultimately be destructive of the musical

faculty.



There is not so much beauty to be found in American cities as

in Oxford, Cambridge, Salisbury or Winchester, where are lovely

relics of a beautiful age; but still there is a good deal of beauty to

be seen in them now and then, but only where the American has

not attempted to create it. Where the Americans have attempted

to produce beauty they have signally failed. A remarkable

characteristic of the Americans is the manner in which they have

applied science to modern life.



This is apparent in the most cursory stroll through New York.

In England an inventor is regarded almost as a crazy man, and in

too many instances invention ends in disappointment and

poverty. In America an inventor is honoured, help is

forthcoming, and the exercise of ingenuity, the application of

science to the work of man, is there the shortest road to wealth.

There is no country in the world where machinery is so lovely as

in America.



I have always wished to believe that the line of strength and

the line of beauty are one. That wish was realized when I

contemplated American machinery. It was not until I had seen

the water-works at Chicago that I realized the wonders of

machinery; the rise and fall of the steel rods, the symmetrical

motion of the great wheels is the most beautifully rhythmic thing

I have ever seen. One is impressed in America, but not

favourably impressed, by the inordinate size of everything. The

country seems to try to bully one into a belief in its power by its

impressive bigness.



It is in the colonies, and not in the mother country, that the old

life of the country really exists. If one wants to realize what

English Puritanism is—not at its worst (when it is very bad), but

at its best, and then it is not very good—I do not think one can

find much of it in England, but much can be found about Boston

and Massachusetts. We have got rid of it. America still preserves

it, to be, I hope, a short-lived curiosity.



San Francisco is a really beautiful city. China Town, peopled

by Chinese labourers, is the most artistic town I have ever come

across. The people—strange, melancholy Orientals, whom many

people would call common, and they are certainly very

poor—have determined that they will have nothing about them

that is not beautiful. In the Chinese restaurant, where these

navvies meet to have supper in the evening, I found them

drinking tea out of china cups as delicate as the petals of a roseleaf,

whereas at the gaudy hotels I was supplied with a delf cup

an inch and a half thick. When the Chinese bill was presented it

was made out on rice paper, the account being done in Indian ink

as fantastically as if an artist had been etching little birds on a

fan.



From Salt Lake City one travels over great plains of Colorado

and up the Rocky Mountains, on the top of which is Leadville,

the richest city in the world. It has also got the reputation of

being the roughest, and every man carries a revolver. I was told

that if I went there they would be sure to shoot me or my

travelling manager. I wrote and told them that nothing that they

could do to my travelling manager would intimidate me. They

are miriers—men working in metals, so I lectured them on the

Ethics of Art. I read them passages from the autobiography of

Benvenuto Cellini and they seemed much delighted. I was

reproved by my hearers for not having brought him with me. I

explained that he had been dead for some little time which

elicited the enquiry ‘Who shot him?* They afterwards took me

to a dancing saloon where I saw the only rational method of art

criticism I have ever come across. Over the piano was printed a

notice:

Please do not shoot the pianist.



He is doing his best.



The mortality among pianists in that place is marvellous.

Then they asked me to supper, and having accepted, I had to

descend a mine in a rickety bucket in which it was impossible to

be graceful. Having got into the heart of the mountain I had

supper, the first course being whisky, the second whisky and the

third whisky.



Among the more elderly inhabitants of the South I found a

melancholy tendency to date every event of importance by the

late war. ‘How beautiful the moon is tonight,* I once remarked

to a gentleman who was standing next to me. ‘Yes,* was his

reply, ‘but you should have seen it before the war.*



So infinitesimal did I find the knowledge of Art, west of the

Rocky Mountains, that an art patron—one who in his day had

been a miner—actually sued the railroad company for damages

because the plaster cast of Venus of Milo, which he had

imported from Paris, had been delivered minus the arms. And,

what is more surprising still, he gained his case and the damages.

Pennsylvania, with its rocky gorges and woodland scenery,

reminded me of Switzerland. The prairie reminded me of a piece

of blotting-paper.



The Spanish and French have left behind them memorials in

the beauty of their names. All the cities that have beautiful names

derive them from the Spanish or the French. The English people

give intensely ugly names to places. One place had such an ugly

name that I refused to lecture there. It was called Grigsville.

Supposing I had founded a school of Art there—fancy ‘Early

Grigsville*. Imagine a School of Art teaching ‘Grigsville

Renaissance*.



As for slang I did not hear much of it, though a young lady

who had changed her clothes after an afternoon dance did say

that ‘after the heel kick she had shifted her day goods*.

American youths are pale and precocious, or sallow and

supercilious, but American girls are pretty and charming— little

oases of pretty unreasonableness in a vast desert of practical

common-sense.



Every American girl is entitled to have twelve young men

devoted to her. They remain her slaves and she rules them with

charming nonchalance.



In going to America one learns that poverty is not a necessary

accompaniment to civilization. There at any rate is a country that

has no trappings, no pageants and no gorgeous ceremonies. I saw

only two processions—one was the Fire Brigade preceded by the

Police, the other was the Police preceded by the Fire Brigade.





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 photograph byPhyllis Galembo, Affianwan, Calabar South, Nigeria, 2005. Ilfochrome

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