“One can exist without art, but one cannot live without it,” the flamboyant author wrote in 1882, the year he embarked on a grand lecture tour of America.

Having ventured into the Wild West in his pantaloons and velvets to discuss art and aesthetics, he scribbled the previously unseen words in ink on a scrap of paper, apparently for an adoring autograph-hunter of the day.

Despite his dismissal of California as “like Italy, but without the art”, Wilde charmed his way across the US.

He visited the salons of Manhattan, the opera house in Chicago and on one notable occasion, the bottom of a silver mine in Leadville, Colorado, delighting audiences with his views on art.

On being told of the aphorism’s discovery, Merlin Holland, Wilde’s grandson, said: “It sounds like the sort of thing that he would write when people would say to him ‘please write something funny in my book’.”

John Stokes, Professor of Modern British Literature at King’s College London, said that the aphorism reflected how Wilde could give a special touch to words that he often borrowed from other authors.

Professor Stokes recalled the words of Charles Baudelaire, who wrote that any healthy man can go without food for two days — but not without poetry. He said: “Anything to do with Wilde is of interest, however slight.”

Mark Turner, head of the English Department at King’s College London with whom Professor Stokes is co-editing Wilde’s complete journalism for Oxford University Press, said: “In editing Wilde’s journalism, we’ve discovered a lot of his aphorisms have their roots in other places. He takes something and slightly changes its meaning. He brings lots of things together and comes up with incredibly pithy things. He cuts and pastes a lot.”

The aphorism is being offered for £6,000 by Adrian Harrington Rare Books in London at the Chelsea Book Fair, which opened yesterday.

Mr Harrington said: “Wilde was travelling in the Wild West. He wasn’t exactly dressed like a rough cowboy. He was dressed in pantaloons and velvets, lecturing Americans on aesthetics. He was following in the steps of Dickens who had done two hugely successful American tours. America was at that time sorting out its Wild West image, taming the country and getting it under control. It was about to enter the modern world as a superpower. They were interested in anything from Europe, and Britain especially, that was giving them guidance on how Europeans were thinking.”

On the evening of February 13, 1882, Wilde delivered a lecture on “the decorative arts” at the Chicago Central Music Hall. The aphorism, dated February 14, reads like a summary of the lecture, which dealt with the importance of art as the basis of a new civilisation.

Mr Harrington bought the aphorism a month ago in Pennsylvania. It had been in an autograph album. The top of the piece of paper has a brief pencil explanatory note, presumably by the recipient: “The celebrated lecturer on aesthetics and ‘Apostle of Art’. From London.”

It is one of two Wilde discoveries which Mr Harrington is selling. He also has an inscribed copy of the historical tragedy, The Duchess of Padua. Wilde privately printed twenty, but only six are known to have survived.

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