No, Oscar Wilde did not say "Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery that mediocrity can pay to greatness"

Another day, another debunking!

I've seen this quote flying around social media for some time.

Everyone loves finding out that a famous quote has a twist and that the author isn't anonymous. It's the perfect piece of clickbait!

But the thing is… this quote is bunkum.

The easiest way to tell is to stick it into a search engine. You'll find lots of people confidently claiming it is by Wilde - but no actual sources. Try it now. Surely at some point someone would have pointed to the scene in a play, or some private correspondence, or a passage from a book, wouldn't they? But there's nothing. Just a lot of unsourced claims.

Wilde isn't an obscure writer. All of his work has been digitised and is easily searchable. As far as I can tell, this "quote" doesn't appear anywhere.

So who did say it? And who attributed it to Oscar Wilde?

The phrase "imitation is the sincerest form of flattery" has a long history. In its modern form, it can be attributed to Charles Caleb Colton who published it in a book of aphorisms in 1820. That's 34 years before Oscar Wilde was born.

But what about "that mediocrity can pay to greatness"? The earliest example of that 2nd half comes from 1893, in "Notices of the proceedings at the meetings of the members of the Royal Institution of Great Britain with abstracts of the discourses - Volume XIV". That was published in 1896.

Here it is in the essay "The Imaginative Faculty" by Sir Herbert Beerbohm.

Admittedly, that was published during Wilde's life. And, in 1892, Beerbohn produced and stared in Wilde's A Woman of No Importance. Nevertheless, the phrase isn't found in that play - nor in any of his earlier works that I can see.

In 1898, the phrase was also used by "Abbott" when memorialising the racist and misogynist hate-preacher "Brann":

It pops up again in 1918 with Georg Brandes writing "A great writer has said: Detraction ts the only tribute, which mediocrity can pay to the great.".

The combining of the two phrases doesn't seem to appear online or in archived works until - as far as I can see - October 2nd 2012.

Using Twitter's date-based search I found a now-defunct lifestyle magazine with the full quote - albeit unattributed. A few days later, someone quotes a now-private account which attributes it to Wilde.

A year or so earlier, in 2011, a Juventus Football fan posted this proto-version of the phrase:

The Origin?

But, perhaps there is a little truth in the quote.

In 1882, Oscar Wilde gave a lecture - "The English Renaissance of Art" - in New York City. During which, he said:

Satire, always as sterile as it is shameful and as impotent as it is insolent, paid them that usual homage which mediocrity pays to genius

Which can be seen (in very low fidelity) in the New York Tribune, January 10th 1882:

A few months later, he signed an autograph with the slightly more pithy:

Satire is the homage which mediocrity pays to genius.

Sadly, it does not appear to have been an original bon mote.

Going back even further

A year before, in 1881, the Michigan Medical News published a column saying:

Perhaps Wilde was unlikely to be reading medical journals. But there are earlier publications

In 1872, a list of sayings was attributed to the American judge Frederick Grimke:

Even earlier is this entry from The Dublin Magazine from 1842:

That's a good decade before Oscar Wilde was born. It is possible that, as he was born and grew up in Dublin, the phrase was in common parlance then.

So what have we learned?

Everyone loves a cool quote. And people feel smart when they are told a "hidden truth" behind it. It's the same thing that lights up the brains of conspiracy theorists; there's a second meaning which the world doesn't know but has been revealed to you.

But this, it turns out, is not by Oscar Wilde. Both halves of the quote pre-dates him by several decades. The quote that Wilde did give is about satire, rather than imitation. And even that wasn't original.

But the Internet is a machine which mercilessly mingles quotes until a new meme was born.

"I have said to you to speak the truth is a painful thing. To be forced to tell lies is much worse."