Roy Morris, Jr.
Declaring His Genius: Oscar Wilde in North America
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013
Oscar Wilde arrived in America in January 1882 as a young man of 27. Over the course of the next eleven months he would travel 15,000 miles across the country, delivering a total of 140 lectures primarily on the English Renaissance, the Pre-Raphaelites, and the decorative arts. He encountered a motley cast of characters throughout his travels, ranging from politicians, reporters, and prominent literary figures to miners and cowboys out West. It was in the West that he found the audience most receptive to his ideas.
His lecture tour recalls the lyceum movement that flourished in the early nineteenth century, which entailed the establishment of hundreds of organizations across the country that sponsored public educational programs and provided venues for traveling lecturers and entertainers. Morris’s book chronicles each leg of Wilde’s tour in detail. The usual sequence of events that unfolded in each city upon his arrival lends itself to repetition, but the subject matter is interesting enough that the book remains engaging. It also benefits from the inclusion of a handful of Wilde’s characteristic witticisms (e.g., upon visiting Cincinnati he remarked: “I wonder no criminal has ever pleaded the ugliness of your city as an excuse for his crimes!”).
By 1882 Wilde had not yet distinguished himself as a playwright and poet (he had written only one play, almost never performed today, and a short poetry collection) but was already a figurehead of the Aesthetic Movement on account of his colorful personality and skill in self-promotion. He set off for America at the request of the English impresario Richard D’Oyly Carte, who had produced Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience and wanted to promote the play in America by showcasing Wilde as a real-life Bunthorne who would familiarize Americans with aestheticism, which the play was meant to satirize. Wilde embraced the role and used it to his advantage. His flamboyant persona attracted the attention of Americans of all stripes, and his lectures regularly drew large crowds.
Wilde grew to be a polarizing figure who was both admired and reviled. As his fame increased he was invited to many social events, where his witty repartees made him a popular guest. Conversely he was often ridiculed in the press: the Chicago Tribune deemed him “a twittering sparrow come to fill his maw with insects” and the Washington Post printed a drawing of him beside a primitive-looking character, “Mr. Wild of Borneo,” suggesting that he represented a decline in human evolution (also inviting comparison to the “Wild Men of Borneo,” a pair of mentally retarded midgets who featured in P. T. Barnum’s freak shows). In Boston he was mocked by Harvard students and criticized by Henry James, who called him a “fatuous fool.” Wilde thrived on the controversy.
Overall he was greeted with the greatest enthusiasm not in the universities or salons of the Eastern cities, but in the West. Wilde likewise preferred the West to the East:
I am especially delighted with the West, it is so new and fresh, and the people are so generous and free from prejudice. In the older cities in the East, the people are enveloped in a perfect mist of prejudice, quite unlimited; they have imported so many Old World ideas, absurdities, and affectations, that they have lost all sincerity and naturalness.
The “prejudice” he mentions likely refers to ideas about class and social conventions. His criticism of such prejudices did not prevent him from disparaging Chinese art and tapping into anti-Chinese sentiment in San Francisco (though Chinatown intrigued him): “Don’t borrow any Chinese art, for you have no need of it any more than you have need of Chinese labor.” Wilde was popular in San Francisco and described it as his favorite American city.
Interestingly he also sympathized with Southerners, comparing their attempt to secede from the Union to Ireland’s struggle for independence. On his tour he encountered the Confederate general P. G. T. Beauregard, who showed him the sites of New Orleans, and Jefferson Davis himself, whom Wilde called “a man of the keenest intellect.”
But most interesting is Wilde’s encounter with silver miners in Leadville, Colorado. Leadville was notable for being one of the world’s largest silver camps as well as for being the hometown of John Baker “Texas Jack” Omohundro, a famous cowboy and friend of Buffalo Bill, and the outlaw Doc Holliday, who took part in the gunfight at the O.K. Corral. The town was the site of regular gunfights and Wilde brushed up on his shooting skills before arriving.
His first appearance in Leadville was at an opera house, where he lectured on Renaissance art to a fascinated audience. The author relates an anecdote: “After Wilde invoked the name of Renaissance goldsmith Benvenuto Cellini, the miners wanted to know why Wilde hadn’t brought him along. When Wilde said that, regrettably, Cellini was dead, they wanted to know who had shot him.” Wilde was then taken to the depths of a silver mine, where he drank whiskey with the miners, who pronounced him “a bully boy with no glass eye” and gave him tips on silver mining.
Wilde’s persona as an effete dandy seems incompatible with the image of manly frontiersmen, but it is perhaps not surprising that his ideas resonated with the miners.
In spite of his foppish appearance, Wilde was described as a man of a vigorous, hearty temperament who possessed a firm handshake and readily engaged in fistfights when challenged. Physically he was described as being six foot three, though thin, with broad shoulders and strong arms. He was an avid drinker and could outdrink most. (He also held realistic views regarding differences between the sexes that would be considered politically incorrect today.)
Moreover Wilde’s worldview was fundamentally anti-bourgeois. His devotion to beauty transcended economic and moral concerns. This led him to criticize the modern, capitalist conception of work, which he believed was inherently antithetical to the creative process. He believed that “a man’s work should be a joy to him” and that one should subordinate himself not to “work” but to higher ideals.
Wilde stated that the intent of his lecture tour in America was “to make art not a luxury for the rich but, as it should be, the most splendid of all the chords through which the spirit of any nation manifests its power.” His idea of a political utopia entailed liberating the working class from their slavery to machinery, which would grant them the opportunity to create art and reach their fullest potential. This was an era in which workers in both America and Britain endured terrible conditions, working long hours and receiving little pay. Thus Wilde was an egalitarian, though his beliefs bore scant resemblance to the leveling force of modern progressivism, as he believed that ultimately one should aspire to attain higher levels of being (the idea that absolute ideals, such as beauty, exist and that one should strive toward them runs counter to egalitarian relativism). The political system he envisioned was one that would enable each individual to pursue self-actualization, thereby ennobling the soul.
Wilde believed that this could be accomplished through future advances in technology:
Under proper conditions machinery will serve man . . . The fact is, that civilisation requires slaves. The Greeks were quite right there. Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible. Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralising. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends.[1]
The author notes that Wilde “sounds a little like Marx” in his essay on socialism (“The Soul of Man under Socialism”), but it would be more accurate to compare Wilde’s idea of socialism to the philosophy of Social Credit (apart from their very different approaches to private property) in that the Social Credit movement advocated the advancement of technology toward a similar end and proposed the idea of a “National Dividend” that would lend people the freedom to pursue artistic, intellectual, and spiritual endeavors.
Wilde’s views can be compared to those of William Morris, an English poet, painter, and textile designer associated with the Pre-Raphaelites (who in turn heavily influenced the Aesthetic Movement). Inspired by the workers’ guilds of the Middle Ages, Morris sought to restore dignity to work by promoting hand-craftsmanship and raising it to the level of art. Thus he came to reject the joint forces of modernity and capitalism.
The rugged individualism of the Wild West represented a similar rejection of bourgeois values. In the West, men were masters of their own fate. The notion of economic security was subordinated to the ideals of courage, adventurousness, and honor. Therefore the spirit of the frontier shared the same fundamental instinct as Wilde’s aestheticism. This also occurred to Wilde when he saw a sign in Leadville that read “Don’t shoot the pianist; he is doing his best” and was struck by the fact that in the Wild West, poor piano playing could be grounds for being shot. He declared that this was, in his words, “the only rational method of art criticism I have ever come across.”
Morris’s account of Wilde’s lecture tour in America also recalls an era in which artists and intellectuals engaged with the public on a much broader scale and assumed a level of public responsibility that one rarely finds among artists and intellectuals today. The tradition of the public intellectual remained a staple of American cultural life until it began to fizzle out by the latter half of the twentieth century. There are a number of reasons for this, from the increasing hyperspecialization of academia to the rapid growth of the Internet. But it can also be traced back to the contempt that most modern American intellectuals have for the majority of Americans. There is no bond that exists between them and the people because they entirely lack empathy for the common man. By contrast, Wilde was a populist: he hoped that “the masses [would] come to be the creators in art.” Modern leftists claim Wilde as one of their own but it is clear that were he alive today, his staunch populism and simultaneous aesthetic elitism (and his wit) would set him apart from the rest and perhaps would even render him a fellow traveler of the Right.
Note
1. Oscar Wilde, “The Soul of Man under Socialism,” 1891.
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Europa als dritte Kraft
Dies geschah mithilfe der deutschen Edition seines Werkes The Alternative, das auch in anderen Sprachen erhältlich war und sogar das Lob General Francos in Spanien gefunden hatte. Mosley pflegte Umgang mit der Familie Otto Skorzenys, des Mussolini-Befreiers und vertrat die Auffassung, die internationalen Formationen der Waffen SS gegen Ende des Krieges hätten seine Idee eines gesamteuropäischen, antikommunistischen Nationalismus vorweggenommen. Persönlich reiste Mosley nach Spanien, Portugal, Italien sowie nach Südamerika, stets unter dem wachsamen Auge des britischen Geheimdienstes MI6.
Mosley wie Evola konnten über die Verbrechen des Faschismus und seiner extremen Ableitung des Nationalsozialismus schwerlich hinwegsehen. Oswald Mosley verfiel in dieser Frage in eine dunkle Erlösungs-Mystik, die er sowohl bei Nietzsche fand, als auch seiner Lektüre von Goethes Faust zu verdanken hatte. Das Böse sei für den faustischen Menschen, zu dessen Gattung die Deutschen nun einmal gehörten, die unvermeidliche Finsternis auf dem langen Weg zum Licht. Ganz gleich, ob man sich zu solcherlei esoterischen Spekulationen hingezogen fühlt oder nicht, beide Autoren kamen nicht umhin, die Verbrechen anzuerkennen, sie aber zugleich vom Ur-Faschismus zu trennen. Nur so glaubten sie, den lähmenden Schuldkomplex überwinden zu können. Denn an die Mobilisierungs-Energie dieses frühen Faschismus sollten auch zukünftige Generationen wieder andocken dürfen.
Today is the birthday of Henry Williamson (Dec. 1, 1895 – Aug. 13, 1977)—ruralist author, war historian, journalist, farmer, and visionary of British fascism.
Blackshirt sympathies are really a side-note with Williamson, as they are with Yeats, Belloc, and Wyndham Lewis. If he is largely forgotten today, this is not because he went to Nuremberg rallies (nobody forgets the Mitfords, after all), but rather because of the peculiar nature of his output. Apart from his war memoirs, most of his writing consists of highly detailed close observation, with little direct commentary on the world at large. (The newspaper column at the end of this article is a good example of Williamson’s work. Taken in large doses, such detail tends to become tedious.)
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The Iraqi nation grew increasingly wealthy, as oil revenues rose from $500 million in 1972 to over $26 billion in 1980, an increase of almost 50 times in nominal terms.
In the last stages of the campaign we had the tragic assassination of Jo Cox MP. The Remain camp cynically seized on this to boost their campaign. Anyone who voted Leave was a ‘hater’ and the language they had used to criticise immigration and the political class had led to a ‘climate of fear’ which in turn led to her death. Her two children were taken to Parliament to hear MPs pay tributes, and also to a big rally in London’s Trafalgar Square. This attempt to manipulate our emotions also failed. In fact many I know were disgusted by the shameful attempts to use the tragedy to boost a Remain vote. They were also angry at the way that their views were being falsely categorised and denigrated. If anything it made them more likely to vote Leave. I even had some friends who had voted Remain by post earlier, saying that they would have switched to Leave because of the disrespect tht had been shown, had they been given the chance! The ‘love versus hate’ theme has caused a lot of bitterness, anger, and division within our nation. Many Remain supporters are dismayed because it seems as if ‘hate’ has won. That’s one consequence of making the argument seem like a battle between good and evil – something the smug, condescending Left likes to do.
Pat Harrington
Phillips explique que depuis le discours d’Enoch Powell en 1968 qui valut à celui-ci sa mise à l’écart de la politique, tout le monde a retenu la leçon : « Adopter toutes les stratégies possibles pour ne pas parler de race, d’ethnicité (et plus tard de religion et de foi), sauf de manière anodine et plate. »
For a long time, Morris was considered the unofficial leader of the "Movement of Arts and Crafts". His main aim was the convergence of aesthetics and work, overcoming the industrialized impersonal production of the industrial age, that leads to the depersonalization of producer as well as the consumer of such goods, the transformation of work in the aesthetic and even (as it was in pre-Modern age) sacralized process. Morris was familiar with the works of Karl Marx, but he offered to solve problem of alienation, identified by socialist philosopher, by returning to manual labor and re-sacralization of production.
Vooreerst is het belangrijk om op te merken dat sommigen een schijnbare paradox vaststellen bij Burkes gedachtegoed. Zo was hij enerzijds een fervente criticus van het Britse koloniale bestuur in Indië en ondersteunde hij de Amerikaanse revolutionairen in hun onafhankelijkheidsstrijd, anderzijds was hij een fervente tegenstander van de Franse revolutionairen. De meeste auteurs wijzen echter op de continuïteit die men in deze attitudes aantreft, vooral wanneer men nauwgezet de Reflections on the revolution in France (1790) erop naleest. In dit werk, waarvoor hij zo bekend (of berucht) is geworden als vader van het moderne politieke conservatisme, maakt hij een duidelijk onderscheid tussen de traditie van de (Engelse) Glorious Revolution (1688) (en die hij ook terugvond bij de Amerikaanse revolutie) en de Franse revolutionairen van 1789 en nadien. 
The volume at hand, Standardbearers, seems to have been assembled in the late 1990s to help forge a new middle-way Rightism. It was the early Tony Blair years. The Conservatives were in the wilderness, in thrall to Political Correctness, and the respectable Right had lost its way. Tony Blair had a way of dismissing his opponents’ arguments by describing them as “the past.” As Antony Flew describes in the Foreword:
Thomas Edward Lawrence était farouchement hostile à la parution de son vivant des mémoires et comptes-rendus de ses aventures et opérations militaires conduites en Arabie entre 1916 et 1918. Il fit imprimer, en 1922, une édition privée qui circula dans un cercle très restreint. Lawrence estimait que certains passages des Sept Piliers étaient trop personnels, voire compromettants. Il ne souhaitait pas non plus embarrasser ses supérieurs hiérarchiques de la Royal Air Force : l’ancien colonel, héros de guerre de notoriété internationale, était alors devenu à sa demande un simple subalterne engagé sous un pseudonyme.
