A famous writer, publisher, and celebrity quiz-show panelist once wrote that the well-publicized feud between Oscar Wilde and James McNeill Whistler was somewhat synthetic. It was like the "feud" between Jack Benny and Fred Allen who were friends and colleagues behind the scenes but in their shows tossed many and pointed barbs at the other.¹

That Oscar and Jimmy's fracas was craftily qualified might have been true early on. At first they got on well enough particularly when in his role as art critic Oscar wrote favorably about Whistler's paintings. But as time went on the barbs became less joking and more prickly.

The truth is that even in the earlier years of their acquaintance, the jokes could get a bit testy. The writer Douglas Sladen was at a reception where Oscar and Jimmy showed up. From internal evidence, the meeting was probably in 1884.² The conversation was excerpted in a modern biography but was edited so the disdain between the men wasn't particularly evident.

 "Jimmy, this time last year, when I was in New York, all we men were carrying fans. It should be done here."

 [No reply from Whistler.]

 "I hear that you went over to the Salon by Dieppe, Jimmy. Were you economising?"

 "Don't be foolish. I went to paint."

 "How many pictures did you paint?"

 "How many hours did it take?"

 "You went, not I. No gentleman ever goes by the Dieppe route."

 "I do, often," said Mrs. Jopling. "It takes five hours."

 "How many minutes are there in an hour, Oscar?"

 "I am not quite sure, but I think it's about sixty. I am not a mathematician."

 "Then I must have painted three hundred."

Actually this passage was a compilation of two sources. One was Whistler Stories written by Donald Seitz and published in 1913. There we read:

Whistler and Wilde were to be the lions at a literary reception. Unfortunately, the lions came too early, when the few previous arrivals were altogether too insignificant to be introduced to them. So they had to talk to each other.
  It was on a very warm Sunday afternoon in the season, and Whistler, by the by, was wearing a white 'duck' waistcoat and trousers, and a fabulously long frock-coat, made, I think, of black alpaca, and carrying a brass-tipped stick about four feet long in his right hand, and a wonderful new paint-box, of which he was proud, under his left arm.
  Neither of the lions took any notice of what the other said. Finally, Wilde, who had spent the previous summer in America, began: 'Jimmy, this time last year, when I was in New York, all we men were carrying fans. It should be done here.'
  Instead of replying, Whistler observed that he had just returned from Paris, and that he always came by the Dieppe route, because it gave you so much longer for painting sea effects. Whether Oscar thought he was going to have an opportunity of scoring or what, he was tempted to break through the contempt with which he had treated Whistler's other remarks.
 'And how many did you paint in four hours, Jimmy?' he asked, with his most magnificent air of patronage.
 'I'm not sure,' said the irrepressible Jimmy, quite gravely, 'but I think four or five hundred.

And the other source was Douglas's own book which was also published in 1913. What he actually wrote was:

I remember Whistler the painter and Oscar Wilde being the first two people to arrive at a reception at Mrs. Jopling's house in Beaufort Street, where I had been lunching. They were intensely annoyed at having only the Joplings and myself as audience; it was no good showing off before us, since we knew all about them. They were quite distant to each other, and more distant to us. But as the time wore on, and nobody came, Wilde had time to think of something effective to say - he never spoke, if he could help it, unless he thought he could be effective.

"I hear that you went over to the Salon³ by Dieppe, Jimmy," he sneered, "were you economising?"

"Don't be foolish," said Whistler. "I went to paint."

"How many pictures did you paint?" asked the æsthete, with crushing superiority.

Whistler did not appear to hear his question.

"How many hours did it take?" he asked.

"You went, not I," said Oscar. "No gentleman ever goes by the Dieppe route."

"I do, often," said our charming hostess, who had this great house in Chelsea, with an acre or two of garden: "it takes five hours."

"How many minutes are there in an hour, Oscar?" drawled Whistler.

"I am not quite sure, but I think it's about sixty. I am not a mathematician."

"Then I must have painted three hundred," said the unabashed Whistler.

Donald also gave us a first hand account of what was Oscar and Jimmy's most famous quip:

 It was at this at-home later on that Whistler made his often-quoted mot - not for the first time, I believe. A pretty woman said something clever, and Wilde, who could be a courtier, gallantly remarked that he wished he had said it.
 "Never mind, Oscar," said Whistler, who owed him one for the gibe about the Dieppe route. "You will have said it."

The usual telling is that after someone made a particularly witty remark, the exchange was:

 "I wish I had said that," said Oscar.
 "You will, Oscar," said Jimmy. "You will."

Usually the more pithy sounding quotes are suspect. But here it seems that the most common telling may actually be the most accurate. In this case a contemporary source of the quote is from 1886 when both men were hale and well and it was reported by Jimmy's friend William Chase:

 Whistler had been notably witty during the evening and finally made a bon mot more than usually pointed and happy that convulsed his listeners.
 Wilde, who was present, approved Mr. Whistler's brightness, and wondered why he had not thought of the witticism himself. "You will," promptly replied Whistler, "you will."

Oscar's 1882 lecture tour in America was literally from sea to shining sea. And far from seeing the country as being filled with rustics, there was a lot about America he liked even if it differed from British traditions. When he lectured at the University of Nebraska he seemed to approve of a college where both men and women attended and went to the same lectures. But certainly one of his most unusual stops was at Leadville, Colorado, where he found the miners quite congenial.

But it is his account of the lecture at Leadville that gives us an indication of how even at that early date he liked tweaking Whistler's nose - and also that you shouldn't take Oscar's own stories too literally:

I described to them the pictures of Botticelli, and the name, which seemed to them like a new drink, roused them from their dreams, but when I told them in my boyish eloquence of the 'secret of Botticelli' the strong men wept like children.
 Their sympathy touched me and I approached modern art and had almost won them over to a real reverence for what is beautiful when unluckily I described one of Jimmy Whistler's 'nocturnes in blue and gold'.⁴ Then they leaped to their feet and in their grand simple way swore that such things should not be.
 Some of the younger ones pulled their revolvers out and left hurriedly to see if Jimmy was 'prowling about the saloons' or 'wrastling a hash' at any eating shop. Had he been there I fear he would have been killed, their feeling was so bitter. Their enthusiasm satisfied me and I ended my lecture there.

But as time went on, the two men's banter became more acrimonious. As isn't uncommon with artists, Jimmy questioned what qualifications a non-painter like Oscar had to render judgement on a picture's merit. One of the most famous exchanges was in 1886 when James wrote a rather dismissive letter to the Committee of the National Art Exhibition which had been reviewed by Oscar:

What has Oscar in common with Art? except that he dines at our tables and picks from our platters the plums for the pudding he peddles in the provinces.

Oscar - the amiable, irresponsible, esurient Oscar - with no more sense of a picture than of the fit of a coat, has the courage of the opinions ... of others!

To which Oscar replied:

Alas, this is very sad! With our James vulgarity begins at home, and should be allowed to stay there.

Which prompted Jimmy's reply:

A poor thing, Oscar! - but for once, I suppose "your own."

One irony is that even though the feud of Oscar and Jimmy was so famous that Jimmy included it in his book The Gentle Art of Making Enemies, Jimmy has not been a character in any of the films about Oscar Wilde. He is noticeably absent not just in the two 1960's pictures, Oscar Wilde and The Trials of Oscar Wilde, but also in the 1997 film Wilde where Stephen Fry, Jude Law, and Tom Wilkinson star as Oscar, Lord Alfred Douglas, and the Marquess of Queensberry.

Tom, Stephen, and Jude
(Click on the image to zoom in)

Fortunately, Jimmy is a character in the famous Monty Python "Oscar Wilde Sketch" where Graham Chapman plays Oscar and John Cleese is Jimmy.

Of course, in the sketch, Oscar and Jimmy have their famous exchange. They are at a reception where the Prince of Wales, Edward VII (played by Terry Jones), is present. Edward congratulates Oscar on his new play and says all of London is talking about it.

"Your Highness, there is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about," says Oscar, "and that is not being talked about." The whole room of Oscar's hangers-on breaks into extended laughter.

"Very witty," says Edward, "Very witty."

"There is only one thing in the world worse than being witty," interjects Jimmy, "and that is not being witty."

"I wish I had said that," says Oscar.

"You will, Oscar, you will," says Jimmy. Again everyone breaks up into laughter.

Oscar then says, "Your Highness, have you met James McNeill Whistler?"

"Yes, we've played squash together," says Edward.

"There is only one thing worse than playing squash together," says Oscar, "and that is playing it by yourself."

No one laughs.

"I wish I hadn't said that," added Oscar.

"But you did, Oscar," says Jimmy, "you did."

Oscar was always being accused of his works being too "derivative", sort of like the humor of "Mr. Television" Milton Berle, who was humorously labeled as the "Thief of Bad Gags".⁵ In 1881 when the librarian of the Oxford Union asked for a signed copy of Poems, Oscar gladly complied. But the gift had to be approved by the Union. When the motion was made, one of the students rose to object.

It is not that these poems are thin, and they are thin. It is not that they are immoral, and they are immoral. It is not that they are this or that, and they are this or that. It is that they are for the most part not by their putative father at all, but by a number of better-known and more deservedly reputed authors.

They are in fact by William Shakespeare, by Philip Sidney, by John Donne, by Lord Byron, by William Morris, by Algernon Swinburne, and by sixty more, whose works have furnished the list of passages which I hold in my hand at this moment. The Union Library already contains better and fuller editions of all these poets.

The volume which we are offered is theirs, not Mr Wilde's: and I move that it be not accepted.

Although the librarian tried to shrug the objection off as mere bantering, other students insisted there had to be a vote. So for the first and only time the Oxford Union voted not to accept an author's signed presentation copy. When the librarian returned the volume and informed Oscar about the vote, he replied more in sorrow and with a touch of irritation:

Pray assure the committee of the Oxford Union that, while regretting that they had not ascertained the feeling of the Society with regard to my art, I quite acquit them of any intention to be discourteous towards me, and that I readily accept an apology so sincerely offered.

My chief regret indeed being that there should still be at Oxford such a large number of young men who are ready to accept their own ignorance as an index, and their own conceit as a criterion of any imaginative and beautiful work. I must also, for the sake of the good fame and position of the Oxford Union, express a hope that no other poet or writer of England will ever be subjected to what I feel sure you as well as myself are conscious of, the coarse impertinence of having a work officially rejected which has been no less officially sought for.

We see that Oscar had a way of attracting disdain even from formidable opponents. When he was lecturing in America, the famous war correspondent Archibald Forbes was also giving a series of talks on his own adventures. The two men met and evidently were friendly enough at first. Oscar was planning to attend a lecture of Archibald's in Baltimore but on the train ride there was some disagreement. Oscar stayed on the train and continued to Washington and didn't attend the lecture.

Afterwards with Archibald's dander up, he began to take public snipes at Oscar. In a lecture he might say things like:

I glanced down at my clothes, which I had not changed for a fortnight, and in which I had ridden 150 miles. Now I wish it understood that I am a follower, an humble follower, of the aesthetic ecstasy, but I did not look much like an art object then. I did not have my dogskin knee breeches with me, nor my velvet coat, and my black silk stockings were full of holes. Neither was the wild, barren waste of Bulgaria congenial to the growth of sunflowers and lilies.

Oscar apparently felt that such jibes had the potential to hurt the impact of his own lectures. So he wrote Archibald making his feelings known about being included, if indirectly, in Archibald's talks:

Dear Mr Forbes, I felt quite sure that your remarks on me had been misrepresented. I must however say that your remarks about me in your lecture may be regarded as giving some natural ground for the report. I feel bound to say quite frankly to you that I do not consider them to be either in good taste or appropriate to your subject.

I have something to say to the American people, something that I know will be the beginning of a great movement here, and all foolish ridicule does a great deal of harm to the cause of art and refinement and civilisation here.

I do not think that your lecture will lose in brilliancy or interest by expunging the passage, which is, as you say yourself, poor fooling enough.

You have to speak of the life of action, I of the life of art. Our subjects are quite distinct and should be kept so.

Believe me, yours truly,

     Oscar Wilde

But Archibald was not in a compromising mood:

Dear Mr Wilde, It has a tendency to create confusion when a man does not read important letters addressed to himself, and there is yet greater risk of this when he essays to reply to them on a summary given him apparently without a due realisation of their personal significance to him.

I accept your disclamation of the remarks in connection with me which your letter states to have been put into your mouth without warrant.

But it was not of these remarks which my letter complained. What that letter protested against was

First: the claim set up by you in your letter of Friday last, that I should trim a lecture of mine to suit your sensitiveness to an inoffensive effort at humour; and

Secondly and chiefly — with the knowledge I have, and which you know I have, of the utterly mercenary aim of your visit to America, the possibility of my accepting your pretensions put forward in the same letter as follows: 'I have something to say to the American people, something that I know will be the beginning of a great movement; and all foolish ridicule does a great deal of harm to the cause of art, refinement and civilisation here.'

It is no affair of mine to whom else you may choose to advance these pretensions; but I must utterly decline to allow you to address them to me, for the reasons given at length in my letter which you have not thought proper to read.

Your letter of Monday, with its irrelevant expressions of cordiality, cannot affect the situation. What I have to ask is that you withdraw, as obviously offensive to me, the whole of your letter of Friday, and that you do so categorically, and in so many words, with the exception of the first sentence of it.

As it is irksome to me that the matter should hang over, I must demand that you send me a letter containing the withdrawal specified, by Sunday next. In the event of my non-receipt thereof, I beg to intimate to you that I will print the whole correspondence in a New York paper of Monday morning.

I am faithfully yours,

     Archibald Forbes

Things were clearly getting out of hand. Finally a friend of both Oscar and Archibald, the distinguished lawyer George Lewis, sent Archibald a telegram:

Like a good fellow don't attack Wilde. I ask this personal favour to me.

Both lectures series then continued with success.

Lecture tours in the 19th Century were one of the most popular forms of entertainment. That was, of course, before the availability of amplified sound systems. Although Oscar was reported to be a witty conversationalist at receptions and the dinner parties, there is no way to tell how well he spoke in a large auditorium. But if Oscar's own letters are to be believed, he often lectured to packed houses and to high applause and if so he must have had an effective speaking voice.

There is debate on whether we have a recording of Oscar Wilde. There is a recording of two stanzas of The Ballad of Reading Gaol where the speaker seemingly identified himself as "Oscar Wilde". The recording is on a lacquer disk supposedly copied from a wax cylinder that was originally recorded when Oscar visited the Edison Pavilion at the Paris Exhibition (World's Fair) in 1900.

The disk was discovered in the 1960's by the writer, Wilde scholar, and Unionist MP Ulster, Harford Montgomery Hyde. At that time Oscar's son, Vyvyan Holland⁶, was still alive and said that the voice was indeed his dad's. Vyvyan, though, last saw his dad 70 years before, and some scholars think the time lapse was too long for his memory to be accurate. On the other hand, Vyvyan was eight years old and so could have remembered his dad's voice. But confounding the issue is that Vyvyan later changed his mind and said the voice wasn't his father's.

Further confustication arises in that there seems to be more than one of the "original" recordings in digital circulation although they differ in clarity and quality and the voice. But two engineers at the British Library analyzed the disk found by Montgomery and they said the repetition of surface noise is not what you expect with an Edison cylinder from 1900 and which would rotate at 120 revolutions per minute (rpm). Instead the noise is compatible with that from a 78 rpm disk and the earliest standardized 78 rpm recordings were produced by Victor, not Edison, and in 1901 when Oscar was no longer alive.

The analysis would seem to settle the question. But you still have to wonder. One scholar compared the actual sound and manner of speaking of the recorded "Oscar" to the voice of Oscar's son, Vyvyan, that was recorded during an interview. There are certainly similarities in both the tone and manners of the voices. In general, though, most people still seem to doubt the recording really is Oscar.

Oscar Wilde remains one of the Victorian Era writers who has immediate name recognition. He has even been mentioned in the questions asked on a popular television quiz program. On the 500th airing of a post-Millennium incarnation of the show, the host asked what word did Oscar and his friends invent in 1882 by combining the two words "duds" and "attitude".

And the answer?

Dude.

Alas, Oscar's crafting of this now ubiquitous mode of address seems to be a "spook" etymology. But it is true that the word suddenly shows up and began proliferating the news stories in 1883. However, it's meaning was a bit at variance with the modern definition and there's no attribution to Oscar as we see in a newspaper report:

The Dude

A new word has been coined. It is d-u-d-e or d-o-o-d. The spelling does not seem to be distinctly settled yet, but custom will soon regulate it. Just where the word came from nobody knows, but it has sprung into popularity within the last two weeks, so that now everybody is using it.
 It means a masher, and yet it means something more than a masher. For instance, a masher may be young or old, he may mash by virtue of his politeness, of his accomplishments, of his wealth, beauty, eyes, nose or fame; he may be a man of mature years, an old man, a young man, or a boy.
 In speaking of mashers one is never sure exactly what sort of a man is meant. There is a class of mashers in New York who will now have a definite place in the language of the town as dudes.
 A dude cannot be old; he must be young, and to be properly termed a dude he should be one of a certain class who affect the metropolitan theaters. The dude is from 19 to 28 years of age, wears trousers of extreme tightness, is hollow-chested, effeminate in his ways, apes the English, and distinguishes himself among his fellow-men as a lover of actresses. The badge of his office is the paper cigarette, and his bell crown English opera hat is his chiefest joy.
 They are seen in large numbers at the theaters, where they form one of the most interesting features of the evening entertainments. They are offensive because they blow cigarette-smoke in ladies' faces, and monopolize the bar between the acts. As a rule they are rich men's sons, and very proud of the unlimited cash at they [sic] command.
 They call all actresses by their first names, and affect extreme familiarity with all things pertaining to the stage; but in reality they know very little personally of the men and women of the dramatic profession. Still the dude always poses as a particular favorite of the reigning theatrical celebrity. They are a harmless lot of men in one way, for they are too shallow pated and weak to accomplish any harm, but they are sometimes offensive.
 No dude is a real dude who does not talk to a fellow dude in a loud voice during the play; also, no dude who respects himself ever takes a lady to the theater. They run in pairs and compare notes between the acts. The most eminent dude in New York is the son of a Wall Street broker of considerable wealth. This dude is the pet apostle of the order.
 He has been in more scrapes with actresses than any other man in town, and his name has been muddled up with half a dozen dirty scandals. Recently he married a girl who was singing here in an English opera troupe while his intellect was somewhat muddled through cigarette smoke or something of that sort, and her father had to pay her some thousands of dollars to get her to agree to a separation from the prospective young millionaire. It was accomplished after some difficulty, and she left the English opera troupe, went to England, and the last time I heard of her she had married a wealthy barrister in Manchester.
 The steamer had scarcely left the dock when the dude became involved in another row, which resulted in his father sending him off to California under the care of a friendly lawyer for a six weeks' [sic] trip. The old man would give anything to have his son show a little more discretion in the matter of public scandal, but he cannot give him advice with much grace, because the father himself was in his younger days a wonder of the most malignant type. So, whenever he charges his son, the son looks at him and smiles softly and asks him about the days of yore. The word dude is a valuable addition to the slang of the day.

So the earliest reports don't mention Oscar as the coiner. It wasn't until August 16, 1885, when there was a story in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle that there we read Oscar's name in association.

Everybody has expressed a desire to define the dude, and yet there can be no better definition than this that he is one who should be fined for appearing on the street in men's clothes. He is a result of Oscar Wilde, and is as much the furniture of nature and art as is the slim necked stork worded in a blue tidy with his hind leg sticking out into the azure atmosphere like the voluptuous hump on a camel. The dude is a group upon the face of nature like a wart on the nose of a Venus de Medicine [sic]⁸. He is like a distorted, modern patent rocker. We set down on the rocker, and we sit down on the dude.

Note that the article gives rather disparaging characterizations of the dude and says "He is a result of Oscar Wilde." That is, the type of person who is a "dude" is a follower of Oscar Wilde and the Aesthetic Movement. It does not say that Oscar coined the word although it seems that it was such wording that confused the writers of the quiz program.

Of course, from the articles we can picture a conversation between Oscar and Jimmy. If someone had told them that they were being credited with coming up with the new word, they might have had the following exchange.

 "'Dude'," Oscar would say. "I wish I had coined that!"

 "Oh, you will, Oscar," Jimmy would reply. "You will!"

References and Further Reading

Oscar Wilde, Richard Ellman, Knopf, 1988.

Additions and Corrections to Richard Ellmann's Oscar Wilde, Horst Schroeder, Braunschweig, 1989, 2002.

Oscar Wilde: A Biography, H. Montgomery Hyde, Farrar Straus Giroux, 1975.

Twenty Years of My Life, Douglas Sladen, Constable and Company Ltd., 1915.

The Gentle Art of Making Enemies, James McNeill Whistler, Heinemann, 1890.

"'I Wish I Had Said That.' 'You Will, Oscar, You Will'", Quote Investigator, September 5, 2013.

The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde, Oscar Wilde, Rupert Hart-Davis (editor), Merlin Holland (editor), Henry Holt Publishers, 2000.

Whistler Stories, Don Seitz, Harper & Brothers, 1913.

Shake Well Before Using, Bennett Cerf, Simon and Schuster, 1948.

"Neo-Victorian Versions of Oscar Wilde’s ‘Voice’", Neo-Victorian Studies, Volume 4, Issue 1, 2011, p. 1-21.

"Wilde Recording 'A Fake'", BBC, November 29, 2000.

"What Did Oscar Wilde's Voice Sound Like?", A. O'Farrell, Video Presentation.

"Record Speeds", AES-Media.

"The Development of the Dude", The Nation, Volume 36, Number 923, 1883, p. 206-207.

"The 'Dude'", The Wood River [Idaho] Times, March 31, 1883.

"Dude", Oxford English Dictionary, Volume III, 1897.

"The Dude", Bill Nye, Brooklyn Eagle, August 16, 1885, p. 6.

"Fred Allen and his Friendly Feud with Jack Benny", Old Time Radio Shows.

Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation, Joseph Ellis, Knopf, 2000.

"Information, Please: An Inquiry by Rev. Samuel A. Eliot", The Proceedings of the Cambridge Historical Society, Volume 25, 1938-1939, p. 112 - 121.