Themes
Beauty in useful things
Wilde's warmest praise goes to what Americans did not intend as art. Their cities show beauty 'only where the American has not attempted to create it', and 'There is no country in the world where machinery is so lovely as in America.' At the Chicago water-works he finds 'the line of strength and the line of beauty' united in the rise and fall of steel rods. The poor Chinese of San Francisco, drinking from cups 'as delicate as the petals of a rose-leaf', make the same point from the other side.
Noise, haste and size
Against these beauties Wilde sets the qualities he thinks hostile to art. Everyone is in a hurry to catch a train, which would have spoiled the balcony scenes of Romeo and Juliet; the country is so loud that he fears the din will destroy the musical faculty; and its 'impressive bigness' seems designed to bully the visitor. Niagara, the great national sight, is the chief disappointment, seen from far away or else only in an ugly yellow oil-skin.
Art among the miners
The Leadville episode is the comic centre of the lecture. Warned that he will be shot, Wilde lectures the miners on the Ethics of Art and reads them Cellini, and they are delighted, asking only 'Who shot him'? He calls the saloon notice asking customers not to shoot the pianist 'the only rational method of art criticism I have ever come across' and finds them 'very charming and not at all rough.' The episode lets him laugh at himself as an aesthete while showing a rough audience responding to art.
Handicraft and education
Near the end Wilde turns from anecdote to a serious point. American education is practical, and he approves: 'we must give a child a mind before we can instruct the mind.' Children have 'a natural antipathy to books', and 'handicraft should be the basis of education'. Boys and girls taught to make things with their hands, he argues, would be less inclined to destroy. The lecture closes on the political education of a country that gives every man a vote at twenty-one.