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Introduction by Merlin Holland
Table of Contents
Cover Page
Title Page
THE CONTRIBUTORS
INTRODUCTION TO THE 1994 EDITION by MERLIN HOLLAND
INTRODUCTION TO THE 1966 EDITION by VYVYAN HOLLAND
THE STORIES OF OSCAR WILDE
Introduction by OWEN DUDLEY EDWARDS
THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY
LORD ARTHUR SAVILE’S CRIME
THE CANTERVILLE GHOST
THE SPHINX WITHOUT A SECRET
THE MODEL MILLIONAIRE
THE YOUNG KING
THE BIRTHDAY OF THE INFANTA
THE FISHERMAN AND HIS SOUL
THE STAR-CHILD
THE HAPPY PRINCE
THE NIGHTINGALE AND THE ROSE
THE SELFISH GIANT
THE DEVOTED FRIEND
THE REMARKABLE ROCKET
THE PORTRAIT OF MR. W. H.
THE PLAYS
Introduction by TERENCE BROWN
THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST
LADY WINDERMERE’S FAN
A WOMAN OF NO IMPORTANCE
AN IDEAL HUSBAND
SALOMÉ
THE DUCHESS OF PADUA
VERA, or THE NIHILISTS
A FLORENTINE TRAGEDY
LA SAINTE COURTISANE or THE WOMAN COVERED WITH JEWELS
THE POEMS
Introduction by DECLAN KIBERD
POEMS EDITORIAL NOTE
YE SHALL BE GODS
CHORUS OF CLOUD MAIDENS
FROM SPRING DAYS TO WINTER
REQUIESCAT
SAN MINIATO
BY THE ARNO
ROME UNVISITED
LA BELLA DONNA DELLA MIA MENTE
CHANSON
UNTITLED
UNTITLED
THE DOLE OF THE KING’S DAUGHTER
LOVE SONG
TRISTITIAE
THE TRUE KNOWLEDGE
HEART’S YEARNINGS
THE LITTLE SHIP
ΘPHNΩIΔIA
LOTUS LAND
DÉSESPOIR
LOTUS LEAVES
UNTITLED
A FRAGMENT FROM THE AGAMEMNON OF AESCHYLOS
A VISION
SONNET ON APPROACHING ITALY
SONNET
IMPRESSION DE VOYAGE
THE THEATRE AT ARGOS
URBS SACRA AETERNA
THE GRAVE OF KEATS
SONNET
EASTER DAY
SONNET
ITALIA
VITA NUOVA
E TENEBRIS
QUANTUM MUTATA
TO MILTON
AVE MARIA GRATIA PLENA
WASTED DAYS
THE GRAVE OF SHELLEY
SANTA DECCA
THEORETIKOS
AMOR INTELLECTUALIS
AT VERONA
RAVENNA
MAGDALEN WALKS
THE BURDEN OF ITYS
THEOCRITUS
NOCTURNE
ENDYMION
CHARMIDES
BALLADE DE MARGUERITE
LA BELLE GABRIELLE
HUMANITAD
ATHANASIA
THE NEW HELEN
PANTHEA
PHÈDRE
QUEEN HENRIETTA MARIA
LOUIS NAPOLEON
MADONNA MIA
ROSES AND RUE
PORTIA
APOLOGIA
QUIA MULTUM AMAVI
SILENTIUM AMORIS
HER VOICE
MY VOICE
ΓΛYKYΠIKPOΣ EPΩΣ
THE GARDEN OF EROS
AVE IMPERATRIX
PAN
THE ARTIST’S DREAM OR SEN ARTYSTY
LIBERTATIS SACRA FAMES
SONNET TO LIBERTY
TAEDIUM VITAE
FABIEN DEI FRANCHI
SERENADE
CAMMA
IMPRESSION DU MATIN
IN THE GOLD ROOM
IMPRESSIONS
IMPRESSION
HÉLAS!
TO V.F.
TO M. B. J.
IMPRESSIONS
LE JARDIN DES TUILERIES
THE HARLOT’S HOUSE
FANTAISIES DÉCORATIVES
UNDER THE BALCONY
TO MY WIFE
ON THE SALE BY AUCTION OF KEATS’ LOVE LETTERS
THE NEW REMORSE
CANZONET
WITH A COPY OF ‘A HOUSE OF POMEGRANATES’
SYMPHONY IN YELLOW
LA DAME JAUNE
REMORSE
IN THE FOREST
THE SPHINX
THE BALLAD OF READING GAOL
POEMS IN PROSE
THE ARTIST
THE DOER OF GOOD
THE DISCIPLE
THE MASTER
THE HOUSE OF JUDGMENT
THE TEACHER OF WISDOM
ESSAYS, SELECTED JOURNALISM, LECTURES AND LETTERS
Introduction by MERLIN HOLLAND
THE HOUSE BEAUTIFUL
THE DECORATIVE ARTS
PERSONAL IMPRESSIONS OF AMERICA
MRS LANGTRY AS HESTER GRAZEBROOK
WOMAN’S DRESS
MR WHISTLER’S TEN O’CLOCK
DINNERS AND DISHES
HAMLET AT THE LYCEUM
OLIVIA AT THE LYCEUM
A HANDBOOK TO MARRIAGE
BALZAC IN ENGLISH
A RIDE THROUGH MOROCCO
THE AMERICAN INVASION
TWO BIOGRAPHIES OF KEATS
ARISTOTLE AT AFTERNOON TEA
MR MORRIS ON TAPESTRY
LONDON MODELS
DE PROFUNDIS
TWO LETTERS TO THE DAILY CHRONICLE
THE DECAY OF LYING
PEN, PENCIL AND POISON
THE CRITIC AS ARTIST
THE TRUTH OF MASKS
THE SOUL OF MAN UNDER SOCIALISM
THE RISE OF HISTORICAL CRITICISM
A FEW MAXIMS FOR THE INSTRUCTION OF THE OVER-EDUCATED
PHRASES AND PHILOSOPHIES FOR THE USE OF THE YOUNG
APPENDIX A: CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE
APPENDIX B: ORDER OF POEMS (1882)
APPENDIX C: LIST OF ORIGINAL DEDICATIONS IN WILDE’S PUBLISHED WORKS
APPENDIX D: INDEX OF FIRST LINES OF POEMS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Copyright
About the Publisher
THE CONTRIBUTORS
Owen Dudley Edwards, a Dubliner, was initially trained in historical research by Sir Rupert Hart-Davis, who was then editing The Letters of Oscar Wilde (1962). His own books include The Fireworks of Oscar Wilde (1989), and he has a biography of Oscar Wilde in preparation. He is now Reader in History at the University of Edinburgh, and is also a writer, broadcaster and theatre critic, whose first play will be staged at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 1994.
Terence Brown holds a personal chair in the School of English in Trinity College, Dublin. He is a Fellow of Trinity College and also a member of the Royal Irish Academy. He has written and edited many books. Among his publications are Louis MacNeice: Sceptical Vision (1975), Northern Voices: Poets from Ulster (1975), Ireland: a Social and Cultural History (1981, 2nd edition 1985), and Ireland’s Literature: Selected Essays (1986). He has recently published an edition of James Joyce’s Dubliners (1992), was a contributing editor of the Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (1992), and is currently at work on a book on Yeats. He has lectured on Anglo-Irish Literature in many parts of the world.
Declan Kiberd lectures in Anglo-Irish Literature at University College, Dublin. He is author of Synge and the Irish Language (1979, second edition 1993) and Men and Feminism in Modern Literature (1985). He edited the section on Wilde in the Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (1991) and has lectured on the author in more than fifteen countries. Among his other scholarly commentaries are The Students’ Annotated Ulysses (Penguin 1992) and Anglo-Irish Attitudes (Derry, 1984).
Merlin Holland, son of Vyvyan Holland and grandson of Oscar Wilde, writes, lectures and broadcasts regularly on all aspects of Wilde’s life and works. For twenty-five years he has been in the unique position, through having to administer the few remaining copyrights in Wilde’s writings (mostly letters and unpublished fragmentary manuscripts), of being in close touch with the latest academic research while presenting his grandfather to a wider general audience. He is the wine-correspondent of Country Life.
After Wilde’s conviction, his wife, Constance, and their sons were forced to change their name to Holland after being refused accommodation at a Swiss hotel. The family has never reverted to the name Wilde.
INTRODUCTION TO THE 1994 EDITION by MERLIN HOLLAND
At an international conference on Wilde in May 1993, a highly respected academic and specialist in Anglo-Irish literature put to his audience the question: ‘Is Oscar Wilde really a great writer?’ I suspect that his own mind had already been made up, for he added by way of a guideline, ‘Why do so many of those who study his works end up by calling him “Oscar” in a rather over-familiar fashion?’, as if an author worthy of serious study should make himself less accessible and behave with somewhat more decorum. It is a question which his critics have been asking repeatedly for a hundred years and for which there still seems to be no satisfactory answer.
Within days of his death the Pall Mall Gazette was saying ‘Mr Wilde’s gifts included supreme intellectual ability, but nothing he ever wrote had strength to endure.’ In 1910 Edmund Gosse wrote to Andre Gide: ‘Of course he was not a “great writer”…his works, taken without his life, present to a sane criticism, a mediocre figure.’ An Evening Standard article by Arnold Bennett in 1927 treats him as outmoded and his style as lacking in permanence but grudgingly concedes ‘Wilde, even if he was not a first rate writer, had given keen pleasure to simpletons such as my younger self; and he was a first rate figure.’ And as late as 1950, the Times Literary Supplement said rather condescendingly, ‘Apart from one perfect play, one memorable poem and De Profundis, Wilde left little with which, as literature, posterity need seriously concern itself.’
Yet forty-four years on, Oscar Wilde’s reputation stands higher than at any time since his theatrical triumphs of the 1890s. His works are never out of print and some of them have been rendered in to languages as diverse as Catalan and Arabic, Yiddish and Chinese. Scarcely a day passes when he is not quoted in the press or on the airwaves and the spring of 1993 saw the simultaneous West End revival of An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest—the very same plays which were delighting packed houses on the eve of his arrest nearly a century before.
This popularity in defiance of the critics is his ultimate, unanswerable paradox, thrown down like a challenge from beyond the grave. His readers love him as much for his weakness and his fallibility as they do for his wit, his satire and his fin de siècle daring, and they remain endlessly fascinated by his outrageous behaviour. The same public which crucified him for his lack of conformity and respect for Victorian values in 1895, today holds him up as a martyr for individuality. ‘I was a man.’ he says in De Profundis, ‘who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age. I treated Art as the supreme reality, and life as a mere mode of fiction: I awoke the imagination of my century so that it created myth and legend around me: I summed up all systems in a phrase, and all existence in an epigram.’ The unabashed arrogance of that when it was published in 1905, a mere five years after his death, must have been difficult to swallow, but today we are forced to see the truth of it. Wilde’s life and his work survive side by side, in a symbiotic relationship with each other, and despite all attempts by his critics to prise them apart and subject each to scrutiny, they remain more closely entwined than ever.
How could it be otherwise? The story of his life is, in a sense, the one great play he lived out and never wrote. It has all the elements of Greek theatre so familiar to him as a classical scholar: the hero apparently in control of his destiny; the hubris; the tragic flaw; and finally the nemesis. His end, though, was not a mercifully quick death but rather a Promethean torment. Five long years of suffering followed his downfall: prison, bankruptcy, disgrace and, the ultimate indignity for one of his generosity, poverty and having to borrow money from friends. Small wonder then that public opinion refuses to allow his life and his work to be separated. To some extent, however, it has created an imbalance which threatens to play into the hands of the critics. The great majority of books written about Wilde has concentrated on the man, and passed fleetingly over the works as being merely secondary expressions of his life as an art form, a problem for which he himself is partly to blame. He has left us with that enduring vision of Wilde as the supreme showman whom nobody, at his peril, should attempt to take seriously. ‘Art,’ as he said, ‘is the only serious thing in the world. And the artist is the only person who is never serious.’ Both were themes which dominated his life.
It is this apparent lack of seriousness on which the greater part of his popular reputation rests and anecdote has done little to change it. Two of the permanent hallmarks of Wildean humour, for example, were an affected indifference to hard work as well as the effortless ease of his own genius. Asked by the critic W. E. Henley how often he went into the office during his editorship of the Woman’s World, Oscar replied, ‘I used to go three times a week for an hour a day, but I have since struck off one of the days.’ And when George Alexander asked him to cut the ‘Gribsby’ scene from The Importance of Being Earnest (restored in the present edition) Wilde could not resist remarking, ‘Do you realise, Alec, this scene you feel is superfluous cost me terrible exhausting labour and heart-rending nerve-racking strain. I assure you on my honour that it must have taken fully five minutes to write.’
Even while he was still at Oxford, Wilde was at pains to cultivate this image of creative idleness. He would read the 19th century poets rather than studying the classical texts for his degree course, or at least that was the impression he liked to give. One of his contemporaries though, David Hunter-Blair, recalled many years later, ‘Of course Wilde worked hard for the high academic honours which he achieved at Oxford. He liked to pose as a dilettante trifling with his books; but I knew of the hours of assiduous reading often into the early hours of the morning. He read surreptitiously in his small and stuffy bedroom. Books lay in apparently hopeless confusion though he knew where to lay his hands on each in every corner.’
This is the Wilde most of us are accustomed to see, the Wilde who admitted to Andre Gide ‘J’ai mis tout mon génie dans ma vie, je n’ai mis que mon talent dans mes oeuvres.’ He persuaded us of its authenticity a hundred years ago and it is still the form in which the public wishes to enjoy his company—witty, nonconformist and faintly perfumed with decadence. Under-standably, they are not qualities which persuade those who inhabit the rarefied atmosphere of pure literary criticism to grant him first division status.
But in the last thirty years, parts of the academic world have started to reassess Oscar Wilde on their own terms, digging beneath the veneer of superficiality and revealing a very different character to the one we thought we knew. All the old magic remains but it is given an added dimension by seeing him occasionally without his mask. We begin to see that, far from lounging nonchalantly through life, very early on he showed a strong determination to succeed as a writer. Put him alongside any ambitious young journalist of the 1990s and compare their paths to success. A couple of youthful literary indiscretions, a period of probation as a critic and reviewer, the editorship of a national magazine and the succès de scandale of a first novel, and the whole liberally peppered with self-publicity—plus ça change. And if Wilde did not have the power of radio and television to rely on, at least he had the lecture hall and the theatre to reach his public direct.
From the moment he left Oxford he was hard at work promoting himself. He made it his business to be seen at any social gathering of importance and at first nights, and courted the friendship of actresses in the public eye – Ellen Terry, Lillie Langtry and Sarah Bernhardt. Then, with little more than a volume of self-published poems to his credit, he was offered a lecture tour in America by Richard D’Oyly Carte to coincide with his production of Patience. Naturally he seized the opportunity. But the programme, originally planned to last four months stretched to nearly a year and it was far from being just as a sedate lecture tour for the self-appointed ‘Professor of Aesthetics’, a young dandy in velvet knee-breeches, rising languidly at mid-day to parade himself across the country as a live ‘aesthete’ for the audiences of Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic opera. In reality detailed research has shown that he faced a punishing schedule of 140 lectures in 260 days from the East to the West coast and up into Canada without the help of air travel and fast trains. He also made sure that he met Walt Whitman, Henry Longfellow and Oliver Wendell Holmes; he arranged for Vera to be staged in New York the following year; and was commissioned to write The Duchess of Padua. He had taken the calculated risk of ridicule and turned it entirely to his advantage both financially and in terms of his reputation.
On his return to England Wilde added his ‘Personal Impressions of America’ to his repertoire and continued lecturing as a source of income until 1888. Indeed, from 1883 until early in 1885 it was almost his only source of income. He was acutely aware of this and tried on several occasions to have himself made an inspector of schools, as Matthew Arnold had done before him, but without success. In 1885 he even writes to an unidentified correspondent: ‘Believe me that it is impossible to live by literature. By journalism a man may make an income but rarely by pure literary work. I would strongly advise you to make some profession, such as that of a tutor, the basis and mainstay of your life, and to keep literature for your finest, rarest moments. Remember that London is full of young men working for literary success, and that you must carve your way to fame. Laurels don’t come for the asking.’ Shortly afterwards he took his own advice and his career in journalism lasted from 1885 until 1891. In addition to helping with the family finances it enabled him to publish most of the stories and essays contained in this volume and played a part in his literary development, the importance of which has been largely underestimated.
Other research is beginning to probe into the influence on his writing of Wilde’s Irish background, and his reading of other authors which was prodigious (at the sheriff’s sale of all his possessions after his arrest, nearly two thousand volumes were disposed of). The old arguments over whether his literary ‘borrowings’ are plagiarism or not, have been reopened and are being reassessed. Wilde as the lightweight author of society comedies, a few memorable poems and some fairy stories may eventually have to make extra room for Wilde as a hard-working professional writer, deeply interested by the issues of his day and carrying in his intellectual baggage something that we all too frequently overlook, a quite extraordinary classical and philosophical education. I realise that for most people the idea of Wilde as a scholar and thinker sits uncomfortably beside their view of him as wit and bon viveur, ‘the spendthrift of my own genius’ as he put it, but that is just another of the delicious paradoxes with which he has left us. His interest in social matters, in the power of the theatre to question and criticise as well as to entertain, his belief in the importance of women’s role in society and his own fragile position within it as an outsider, are all coming to light.
For anyone concerned that all this may destroy the lightness of touch with which they have come to associate Oscar Wilde, an antidote is to hand in the form of his letters. Two collections have been published in 1962 and 1985, and if they have helped to validate the view of him as a more profound writer, they have also added immeasurably to our knowledge of him as a man. Wonderfully fluent in style, when read aloud they must be the nearest we shall ever come to hearing that legendary conversation. I should like to have included some of them here but for reasons of space this was not possible. One, however, the publisher has allowed me and I offer it to you as a little bonne-bouche of what is to be found there. He wrote it to an old friend, Frances Forbes-Robertson, on her marriage in 1899, when he was living in Paris and at his poorest. It has humour, beauty and sadness.
My dear, sweet, beautiful Friend, Eric [her brother] has just sent me your charming letter and I am delighted to have a chance of sending you my congratulations on your marriage, and all the good wishes of one who has always loved and admired you. I met Eric quite by chance and he told me he had been over to the marriage. He was as picturesque and sweet as usual but more than usually vague. I was quite furious with him. He could not quite remember who it was you had married, or whether he was fair or dark, young or old, tall or small. He could not remember where you were married, or what you wore, or whether you looked more than usually beautiful. He said there were a great many people at the wedding but he could not remember their names. He remembered, however, Johnston [another brother] being present. He spoke of the whole thing as a sort of landscape in a morning mist. Your husband’s name he could not for the moment recall: but he said he thought he had it written down at home. He went dreamily away down the Boulevard followed by violent reproaches from me, but they were no more to him than the sound of fluting: he wore the sweet smile of those who are always looking for the moon at mid-day.
So, dear Frankie, you are married, and your husband is a king of men. That is as it should be; those who wed the daughters of the gods are kings, or become so.
I have nothing to offer you but one of my books, that absurd comedy The Importance of Being Earnest, but I send it to you in the hopes that it may live on your bookshelves and be allowed to look at you from time to time. The dress is pretty, it wears Japanese vellum and belongs to a limited family of nine and is not on speaking terms with the popular edition: it refuses to recognise the poor relations whose value is only seven and sixpence. Such as the pride of birth. It is a lesson.