“There is less in this than meets the eye.”

On January 4, 1922, the New York Times published a review of the dramatic play Aglavaine and Selysette by the paper’s witty critic Alexander Woollcott.

Woollcott had attended the premiere of the play at the Maxine Elliott Theatre in New York City the day before, on the afternoon of January 3rd.

His review wasn’t glowing.

Aglavaine and Selysette was written in French by the Belgian playwright and poet Maurice Maeterlinck in 1896.

The plot involves a high society love triangle. The language of the play is rather twee.

It was the kind of thing some high society types or eggheads might like. But not Woollcott.

He was one of the iconoclastic, opinionated writers and celebrities who were members of the “Algonquin Round Table.”

In fact he was one of the founding members, along with other legendary wits like columnist Franklin Pierce Adams, humorist and actor Robert Benchley and writer Dorothy Parker.

So, it’s not surprising that Woollcott’s aimed some zingers at the performance of the Maeterlinck’s play.

One of the lines in his review quickly became a famous quip that’s included in many books of quotations. He wrote:

“...the matinee was best summed up by the beautiful lady in the back row, who said: ‘There is less in this than meets the eye.’”

Woollcott was dissembling a bit by making it seem like he didn’t know the identity of “the beautiful lady.” He’d brought her to the play himself and she was sitting right next to him. She was the then little-known, 19-year-old actress Tallulah Bankhead.

It seems likely that Woollcott didn’t name Tallulah in the review to protect her against possible backlash from high society theatre patrons and producers. But he apparently did tell his Algonquin Club friends, who loved snarky gibes. One way or the other, word got around that Tallulah was the beautiful quipster.

Woollcott confirmed that publicly in a book he published later the same year, Shouts and Murmurs: Echoes of a Thousand and One First Nights.

In that book, he called the line one of the most memorable bon mots to appear in his reviews and said:

“[It] was whispered in my ear by a comely young actress named Tallulah Bankhead, who was sitting incredulous before a deliberate and intentional revival of Maeterlinck’s ‘Aglavaine and Selysette,’ a monstrous piece of perfumed posturing, meaning exactly nothing. Two gifted young actresses and a considerable bit of scenery were involved, and much pretentious rumbling of voice and wafting of gesture had gone into the enterprise. Miss Bankhead, fearful, apparently, lest she be struck dead for impiety, became desperate enough to whisper, ‘There is less in this than meets the eye.’”

In her own autobiography, Tallulah, published in 1952, Bankhead recalled it this way:

“It was through Alex Woollcott that I won my first citation as a wit...At the end of the first act I turned to my escort to say, ‘There’s less in this than meets the eye.’ I wasn’t aware that I’d said anything devastating, but the next morning the comment was repeated in Woollcott’s review in the Times...This gave me considerable prestige among those jesters who took such delight in ridicule of their peers, even their betters.”

By “those jesters” she meant the Algonquin Round Table, of which she became an occasional member.

However, as the term she chose for them suggests, she was not entirely a fan of the sometimes vicious humor those jesters were known for.

Nor, ultimately, was she a fan of Woollcott, who died nine years before Bankhead’s autobiography was published.

In that book she wrote:

“Since this is supposed to be a frank and open review of my life it is only fair to say that most of the wisecracks I have mothered have been accidental quips. So long as I have dragged Alexander Woollcott into this saga I may as well voice my opinion of him. It isn’t high. He was vindictive, shockingly petty in a feminine fashion, given to excesses when expressing his preferences or his prejudices.”

Of course, Tallulah, who died in 1968, became notorious for her own excesses, involving wild parties, multiple affairs, marijuana and cocaine.

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“I have nothing to declare except my genius” – the famous Oscar Wilde quip that he probably didn’t say…

On January 3, 1882, the Irish poet and playwright Oscar Wilde disembarked from the ship that brought him from England to New York.

It was the beginning of what would be a high-profile, 11-month-long speaking tour of America and Canada.

As noted by the definitive website about that tour, Oscar Wilde in America, the ship arrived in port the night before but was held in quarantine until the next morning.

That’s apparently why the date some sources attach to a famous quotation attributed to Wilde is January 2, 1882.

In point of fact it was the morning of January 3rd when Wilde left the ship and went to the New York Customs House, where government agents asked their standard question: Do you have anything to declare?

Wilde supposedly answered: “I have nothing to declare except my genius.”

This quip is cited by thousands of books of quotations and websites. Indeed, it’s one of the best known of Wilde’s many witty quotes.

However, unlike those that come from Wilde’s plays and other writings, it’s not a line that can be verified as something he actually said.

In the new book Declaring His Genius: Oscar Wilde in North America, historian Roy Morris, Jr. notes:

“No one actually heard him say it, but it sounded like something Wilde would have said, and by the time literary biographer Arthur Ransome quoted it first in his 1912 study of the author, the quip already had passed into legend.”

Arthur Ransome himself didn’t put the famed wisecrack in quotation marks in his book, Oscar Wilde, a Critical Study. He simply alluded to it, writing that one of the famous things Wilde did in America was “to tell the Customs Officials that he had nothing to declare but his genius.”

The first known appearance of the witticism as an actual quote, with quotation marks, is in the biography Oscar Wilde, His Life and Confessions by Frank Harris, published in 1916.

That’s the source cited by most books of quotations that actually provide a source, instead of simply listing the quote as “attributed.”

Harris wrote in his book about Wilde:

“His phrase to the Revenue officers on landing: ‘I have nothing to declare except my genius,’ turned the limelight full upon him and excited comment and discussion all over the country.”

However, there’s no known reference to the legendary quote in any of the many newspaper articles written about Wilde during his North American tour.

Thus, the claim that it played a key role in focusing attention on Wilde during the tour seems to have been made up by Harris.

And, it appears likely that the quote itself was made up after Wilde died in 1900.

The most in-depth source of information on this question is probably the Oscar Wilde in America website. It’s maintained by John Cooper, an amazingly knowledgeable Wilde aficionado from England who now lives in the US.

On his web page about the quote, Cooper notes that Ransome and Harris both wrote their biographies of Wilde more than a decade after his death.

There is no known record of the quote in anything written while Wilde was still alive.

Based on his extensive research, Cooper classifies “I have nothing to declare except my genius” as a “dubious quotation.”

His Oscar Wilde in America site also provides the background on a number of verified quotations that Wilde made during his North American tour and, later, about Americans.

Many are quite funny.

But none are quite as famous as Wilde’s alleged declaration of his genius — about which the one certain thing is that it is linked to his arrival at the Customs House in New York in January of 1882.

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