+Ambrose Bierce + Bogus holiday,  In the early spring of 1882, all San Francisco was abuzz over the rarefied presence of London's reigning literary lion, Oscar Wilde, in town for a series of public lectures on the future of art in the philistine world. The flamboyant Wilde was then in the midst of a 105-city tour of darkest America, spreading his gospel of transcendent estheticism to a degraded people who could not even make a decent cup of tea. In a specially tailored black velvet dress coat, knee-length breeches, and sheer silk stockings, he was the walking embodiment of what he humbly termed "the science of the beautiful" and he inspired in his wake an army of limpid-eyed, flower-toting followers and a blizzard of favorable press clippings fit, he noted proudly, for a petit roi. Not all journalists, however, were such willing subjects, even in historically live-and-let-live San Francisco. One in particular was quite clearly not amused. Ambrose Bierce, editor of the aptly named weekly Wasp and Wilde's closest American counterpart in the near-lethal practice of aphorism and retort, noted the visit in his March 31 column."That sovereign of insufferables, Oscar Wilde," he groused to his readers, "has ensued with his opulence of twadle and his penury of sense. He has mounted his hind legs and blown crass vapidities through the bowel of his neck, to the capital edification of circumjacent fools and foolesses. The ineffable dunce has nothing to say and says it with a liberal embellishment of bad delivery, embroidering it with reasonless vulgarities of attitude, gesture and attire. There never was an impostor so hateful, a blockhead so stupid, a crank so variously and offensively daft. He makes me tired."

Wilde had unwittingly irritated Bierce from a continent away upon his arrival in New York, by calling satire an art form that was "as sterile as it is shameful, and as impotent as it is insolent." Bierce, who was neither sterile nor impotent, knew no shame, but he was nevertheless insolent enough to take offense at the new arrival's casual dig at his own preferred method of verbal warfare. "This gawky gowk," he wrote in Wasp, "has the divine effrontery to link his name with those of Swinburne, Rossetti and Morris--this dunghill he-hen would fly with eagles. This littlest and looniest of a brotherhood of simpletons, whom the wicked wits of London, haling him dazed from obscurity, have crowned and crucified as King of the Cranks, has accepted the distinction in stupid good faith and our foolish people take him at his world." Bierce's own crankiness was equally regal, and his literary eminence was at least as self-confirmed as Wilde's, but the foppish young Irishman was not alone in tiring him. Many things wearied Ambrose Bierce: preachers, politicians, doctors, lawyers, capitalists, socialists, jingoists, anarchists, immigrants, women, bohemians, and dogs. Indiana rhymester James Whitcomb Riley--a particular Biercian bete noire--was close to the point when he archly observed that "Bierce edits God."


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