Oscar Wilde
Miscellanies
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Table of contents
INTRODUCTION
THE TOMB OF KEATS
THE GROSVENOR GALLERY, 1877
THE GROSVENOR GALLERY 1879
L’ENVOI
MRS. LANGTRY AS HESTER GRAZEBROOK
WOMAN’S DRESS
MORE RADICAL IDEAS UPON DRESS REFORM
MR. WHISTLER’S TEN O’CLOCK
THE RELATION OF DRESS TO ART: A NOTE IN BLACK AND WHITE ON MR. WHISTLER’S LECTURE
KEATS’S SONNET ON BLUE
THE AMERICAN INVASION
SERMONS IN STONES AT BLOOMSBURY: THE NEW SCULPTURE ROOM AT THE BRITISH MUSEUM
THE UNITY OF THE ARTS: A LECTURE AND A FIVE O’CLOCK
ART AT WILLIS’S ROOMS
MR. MORRIS ON TAPESTRY
SCULPTURE AT THE ARTS AND CRAFTS
PRINTING AND PRINTERS
THE BEAUTIES OF BOOKBINDING
THE CLOSE OF THE ARTS AND CRAFTS
ENGLISH POETESSES
LONDON MODELS
LETTER TO JOAQUIN MILLER
NOTES ON WHISTLER
REPLY TO WHISTLER
LETTERS ON DORIAN GRAY
AN ANGLO-INDIAN’S COMPLAINT
A HOUSE OF POMEGRANATES
PUPPETS AND ACTORS
LADY WINDERMERE’S FAN: AN EXPLANATION
SALOMÉ
THE THIRTEEN CLUB
THE ETHICS OF JOURNALISM
THE GREEN CARNATION
PHRASES AND PHILOSOPHIES FOR THE USE OF THE YOUNG
THE RISE OF HISTORICAL CRITICISM
LA SAINTE COURTISANE; OR, THE WOMAN COVERED WITH JEWELS
THE ENGLISH RENAISSANCE OF ART
HOUSE DECORATION
ART AND THE HANDICRAFTSMAN
LECTURE TO ART STUDENTS
Footnotes.
INTRODUCTION
The
concluding volume of any collected edition is unavoidably fragmentary
and desultory. And if this particular volume is no exception to
a general tendency, it presents points of view in the author’s
literary career which may have escaped his greatest admirers and
detractors. The wide range of his knowledge and interests is
more apparent than in some of his finished work.What
I believed to be only the fragment of an essay on
Historical Criticism
was already in the press, when accidentally I came across the
remaining portions, in Wilde’s own handwriting; it is now complete
though unhappily divided in this edition.
{0a}
Any doubt as to its authenticity, quite apart from the calligraphy,
would vanish on reading such a characteristic passage as the
following:—‘ . . . For, it was in vain that the middle ages
strove to guard the buried spirit of progress. When the dawn of
the Greek spirit arose, the sepulchre was empty, the grave clothes
laid aside. Humanity had risen from the dead.’ It was
only Wilde who could contrive a literary conceit of that description;
but readers will observe with different feelings, according to their
temperament, that he never followed up the particular trend of
thought developed in the essay. It is indeed more the work of
the Berkeley Gold Medallist at Dublin, or the brilliant young
Magdalen Demy than of the dramatist who was to write
Salomé. The
composition belongs to his Oxford days when he was the unsuccessful
competitor for the Chancellor’s English Essay Prize. Perhaps
Magdalen, which has never forgiven herself for nurturing the author
of Ravenna,
may be felicitated on having escaped the further intolerable honour
that she might have suffered by seeing crowned again with paltry
academic parsley the most highly gifted of all her children in the
last century. Compared with the crude criticism on
The Grosvenor Gallery
(one of the earliest of Wilde’s published prose writings),
Historical Criticism
is singularly advanced and mature. Apart from his mere
scholarship Wilde developed his literary and dramatic talent slowly.
He told me that he was never regarded as a particularly precocious or
clever youth. Indeed many old family friends and contemporary
journalists maintain sturdily that the talent of his elder brother
William was much more remarkable. In this opinion they are
fortified, appropriately enough, by the late Clement Scott. I
record this interesting view because it symbolises the familiar
phenomenon that those nearest the mountain cannot appreciate its
height.The
exiguous fragment of
La Sainte Courtisane
is the next unpublished work of importance. At the time of
Wilde’s trial the nearly completed drama was entrusted to Mrs.
Leverson, who in 1897 went to Paris on purpose to restore it to the
author. Wilde immediately left the manuscript in a cab. A
few days later he laughingly informed me of the loss, and added that
a cab was a very proper place for it. I have explained
elsewhere that he looked on his plays with disdain in his last years,
though he was always full of schemes for writing others. All my
attempts to recover the lost work failed. The passages here
reprinted are from some odd leaves of a first draft. The play
is of course not unlike
Salome, though it
was written in English. It expanded Wilde’s favourite theory
that when you convert some one to an idea, you lose your faith in it;
the same motive runs through
Mr. W. H.
Honorius the hermit, so far as I recollect the story, falls in love
with the courtesan who has come to tempt him, and he reveals to her
the secret of the Love of God. She immediately becomes a
Christian, and is murdered by robbers; Honorius the hermit goes back
to Alexandria to pursue a life of pleasure. Two other similar
plays Wilde invented in prison,
Ahab and Isabel and
Pharaoh; he would
never write them down, though often importuned to do so.
Pharaoh was
intensely dramatic and perhaps more original than any of the group.
None of these works must be confused with the manuscripts stolen from
16 Tite Street in 1895—namely the enlarged version of
Mr. W. H., the
completed form of A
Florentine Tragedy,
and The Duchess of
Padua (which
existing in a prompt copy was of less importance than the others);
nor with The
Cardinal of Arragon,
the manuscript of which I never saw. I scarcely think it ever
existed, though Wilde used to recite proposed passages for it.In
regard to printing the lectures I have felt some diffidence: the
majority of them were delivered from notes, and the same lectures
were repeated in different towns in England and America. The
reports of them in the papers are never trustworthy; they are often
grotesque travesties, like the reports of after-dinner speeches in
the London press of today. I have included only those lectures
of which I possess or could obtain manuscript.The
aim of this edition has been completeness; and it is complete so far
as human effort can make it; but besides the lost manuscripts there
must be buried in the contemporary press many anonymous reviews which
I have failed to identify. The remaining contents of this book
do not call for further comment, other than a reminder that Wilde
would hardly have consented to their republication. But owing
to the number of anonymous works wrongly attributed to him, chiefly
in America, and spurious works published in his name, I found it
necessary to violate the laws of friendship by rejecting nothing I
knew to be authentic. It will be seen on reference to the
letters on The
Ethics of Journalism
that Wilde’s name appearing at the end of poems and articles was
not always a proof of authenticity even in his lifetime.Of
the few letters Wilde wrote to the press, those addressed to Whistler
I have included with greater misgiving than anything else in this
volume. They do not seem to me more amusing than those to which
they were the intended rejoinders. But the dates are
significant. Wilde was at one time always accused of
plagiarising his ideas and his epigrams from Whistler, especially
those with which he decorated his lectures, the accusation being
brought by Whistler himself and his various disciples. It
should be noted that all the works by which Wilde is known throughout
Europe were written
after the two
friends quarrelled. That Wilde derived a great deal from the
older man goes without saying, just as he derived much in a greater
degree from Pater, Ruskin, Arnold and Burne-Jones. Yet the
tedious attempt to recognise in every jest of his some original by
Whistler induces the criticism that it seems a pity the great painter
did not get them off on the public before he was forestalled.
Reluctance from an appeal to publicity was never a weakness in either
of the men. Some of Wilde’s more frequently quoted sayings
were made at the Old Bailey (though their provenance is often
forgotten) or on his death-bed.As
a matter of fact, the genius of the two men was entirely different.
Wilde was a humourist and a humanist before everything; and his
wittiest jests have neither the relentlessness nor the keenness
characterising those of the clever American artist. Again,
Whistler could no more have obtained the Berkeley Gold Medal for
Greek, nor have written
The Importance of Being Earnest,
nor The Soul of Man,
than Wilde, even if equipped as a painter, could ever have evinced
that superb restraint distinguishing the portraits of ‘Miss
Alexander,’ ‘Carlyle,’ and other masterpieces. Wilde,
though it is not generally known, was something of a draughtsman in
his youth. I possess several of his drawings.A
complete bibliography including all the foreign translations and
American piracies would make a book of itself much larger than the
present one. In order that Wilde collectors (and there are
many, I believe) may know the authorised editions and authentic
writings from the spurious, Mr. Stuart Mason, whose work on this
edition I have already acknowledged, has supplied a list which
contains every
genuine and
authorised English
edition. This of course does not preclude the chance that some
of the American editions are authorised, and that some of Wilde’s
genuine works even are included in the pirated editions.I
am indebted to the Editors and Proprietors of the
Queen for leave to
reproduce the article on ‘English Poetesses’; to the Editor and
Proprietors of the
Sunday Times for
the article entitled ‘Art at Willis’s Rooms’; and to Mr.
William Waldorf Astor for those from the
Pall Mall Gazette.
THE TOMB OF KEATS
(Irish
Monthly, July
1877.)As
one enters Rome from the Via Ostiensis by the Porta San Paolo, the
first object that meets the eye is a marble pyramid which stands
close at hand on the left.There
are many Egyptian obelisks in Rome—tall, snakelike spires of red
sandstone, mottled with strange writings, which remind us of the
pillars of flame which led the children of Israel through the desert
away from the land of the Pharaohs; but more wonderful than these to
look upon is this gaunt, wedge-shaped pyramid standing here in this
Italian city, unshattered amid the ruins and wrecks of time, looking
older than the Eternal City itself, like terrible impassiveness
turned to stone. And so in the Middle Ages men supposed this to
be the sepulchre of Remus, who was slain by his own brother at the
founding of the city, so ancient and mysterious it appears; but we
have now, perhaps unfortunately, more accurate information about it,
and know that it is the tomb of one Caius Cestius, a Roman gentleman
of small note, who died about 30 B.C.Yet
though we cannot care much for the dead man who lies in lonely state
beneath it, and who is only known to the world through his sepulchre,
still this pyramid will be ever dear to the eyes of all
English-speaking people, because at evening its shadows fall on the
tomb of one who walks with Spenser, and Shakespeare, and Byron, and
Shelley, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning in the great procession of
the sweet singers of England.For
at its foot there is a green, sunny slope, known as the Old
Protestant Cemetery, and on this a common-looking grave, which bears
the following inscription:This
grave contains all that was mortal of a young English poet, who on
his deathbed, in the bitterness of his heart, desired these words to
be engraven on his tombstone: HERE LIES ONE WHOSE NAME WAS WRIT IN
WATER. February 24, 1821.And
the name of the young English poet is John Keats.Lord
Houghton calls this cemetery ‘one of the most beautiful spots on
which the eye and heart of man can rest,’ and Shelley speaks of it
as making one ‘in love with death, to think that one should be
buried in so sweet a place’; and indeed when I saw the violets and
the daisies and the poppies that overgrow the tomb, I remembered how
the dead poet had once told his friend that he thought the ‘intensest
pleasure he had received in life was in watching the growth of
flowers,’ and how another time, after lying a while quite still, he
murmured in some strange prescience of early death, ‘I feel the
flowers growing over me.’But
this time-worn stone and these wildflowers are but poor memorials
{3} of
one so great as Keats; most of all, too, in this city of Rome, which
pays such honour to her dead; where popes, and emperors, and saints,
and cardinals lie hidden in ‘porphyry wombs,’ or couched in baths
of jasper and chalcedony and malachite, ablaze with precious stones
and metals, and tended with continual service. For very noble
is the site, and worthy of a noble monument; behind looms the grey
pyramid, symbol of the world’s age, and filled with memories of the
sphinx, and the lotus leaf, and the glories of old Nile; in front is
the Monte Testaccio, built, it is said, with the broken fragments of
the vessels in which all the nations of the East and the West brought
their tribute to Rome; and a little distance off, along the slope of
the hill under the Aurelian wall, some tall gaunt cypresses rise,
like burnt-out funeral torches, to mark the spot where Shelley’s
heart (that ‘heart of hearts’!) lies in the earth; and, above
all, the soil on which we tread is very Rome!As
I stood beside the mean grave of this divine boy, I thought of him as
of a Priest of Beauty slain before his time; and the vision of
Guido’s St. Sebastian came before my eyes as I saw him at Genoa, a
lovely brown boy, with crisp, clustering hair and red lips, bound by
his evil enemies to a tree, and though pierced by arrows, raising his
eyes with divine, impassioned gaze towards the Eternal Beauty of the
opening heavens. And thus my thoughts shaped themselves to
rhyme:HEU
MISERANDE PUERRid
of the world’s injustice and its pain,
He rests at last beneath God’s veil of blue;
Taken from life while life and love were newThe
youngest of the martyrs here is lain,Fair
as Sebastian and as foully slain.
No cypress shades his grave, nor funeral yew,
But red-lipped daisies, violets drenched with dew,And
sleepy poppies, catch the evening rain.O
proudest heart that broke for misery!
O saddest poet that the world hath seen!
O sweetest singer of the English land!
Thy name was writ in water on the sand,
But our tears shall keep thy memory green,And
make it flourish like a Basil-tree.Borne,
1877.Note.—A
later version of this sonnet, under the title of ‘The Grave of
Keats,’ is given in the
Poems, page 157.
THE GROSVENOR GALLERY, 1877
(Dublin
University Magazine,
July 1877.)That
‘Art is long and life is short’ is a truth which every one feels,
or ought to feel; yet surely those who were in London last May, and
had in one week the opportunities of hearing Rubenstein play the
Sonata Impassionata, of seeing Wagner conduct the Spinning-Wheel
Chorus from the
Flying Dutchman,
and of studying art at the Grosvenor Gallery, have very little to
complain of as regards human existence and art-pleasures.Descriptions
of music are generally, perhaps, more or less failures, for music is
a matter of individual feeling, and the beauties and lessons that one
draws from hearing lovely sounds are mainly personal, and depend to a
large extent on one’s own state of mind and culture. So
leaving Rubenstein and Wagner to be celebrated by Franz Hüffer, or
Mr. Haweis, or any other of our picturesque writers on music, I will
describe some of the pictures now being shown in the Grosvenor
Gallery.The
origin of this Gallery is as follows: About a year ago the idea
occurred to Sir Coutts Lindsay of building a public gallery, in
which, untrammelled by the difficulties or meannesses of ‘Hanging
Committees,’ he could exhibit to the lovers of art the works of
certain great living artists side by side: a gallery in which the
student would not have to struggle through an endless monotony of
mediocre works in order to reach what was worth looking at; one in
which the people of England could have the opportunity of judging of
the merits of at least one great master of painting, whose pictures
had been kept from public exhibition by the jealousy and ignorance of
rival artists. Accordingly, last May, in New Bond Street, the
Grosvenor Gallery was opened to the public.
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
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