Oscar Wilde, Art and Morality: A Defence of "The Picture of Dorian Gray". Various

Чтение книги онлайн.

      Published by Good Press, 2019

       [email protected]

      EAN 4057664637956

Table of Contents

       ART AND MORALITY

       A STUDY IN PUPPYDOM.

       MR. WILDE'S BAD CASE.

       MR. OSCAR WILDE AGAIN.

       MR. OSCAR WILDE'S DEFENCE.

       LETTER FROM "A LONDON EDITOR."

       MR. OSCAR WILDE'S DEFENCE.

       "THE LAST WORD."

       "THE DAILY CHRONICLE" ON "DORIAN GRAY."

       OSCAR WILDE'S REPLY.

       "DORIAN GRAY."

       " THE SCOTS OBSERVER'S" REVIEW.

       OSCAR WILDE'S REPLIES.

       PROFUSE AND PERFERVID.

       " THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY."

       A Spiritualistic Review.

       By "NIZIDA."

       PUNCH on "DORIAN GRAY."

       OUR BOOKING OFFICE.

       A REVULSION FROM REALISM.

       By ANNE H. WHARTON.

       THE ROMANCE OF THE IMPOSSIBLE.

       By JULIAN HAWTHORNE. [31]

       WALTER PATER ON "DORIAN GRAY."

       THE MORALITY OF "DORIAN GRAY."

       MR. ROBERT BUCHANAN ON PAGAN VICIOUSNESS.

       COMPARATIVE TABLE OF CHAPTERS IN THE FIRST TWO EDITIONS OF 'THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY'.

       PASSAGES WHICH APPEAR IN THE 1890 EDITION ONLY.

       BIBLIOGRAPHY.

      On the whole, an artist in England gains something by being attacked. His individuality is intensified. He becomes more completely himself. Of course, the attacks are very gross, very impertinent, and very contemptible. But then no artist expects grace from the vulgar mind, or style from the suburban intellect.

ART AND MORALITY

       Table of Contents

      "Why do you always write poetry? Why do you not write prose? Prose is so much more difficult."

These were the words of Walter Pater to Oscar Wilde on the occasion of their first meeting during the latter's undergraduate days at Oxford.[1] Those were "days of lyrical ardours and of studious sonnet-writing," wrote Wilde, in reviewing one of Pater's books some years later,[2] "days when one loved the exquisite intricacy and musical repetitions of the ballade, and the vilanelle with its linked long-drawn echoes and its curious completeness; days when one solemnly sought to discover the proper temper in which a triolet should be written; delightful days, in which, I am glad to say, there was far more rhyme than reason."

      Oscar Wilde was never a voluminous writer—"writing bores me so," he once said to André Gide—and at the time of which he speaks he had published little except some occasional verses in his University magazines. Then, in 1881, came his volume of collected poems, followed at intervals during the next nine or ten years by a collection of fairy stories and some essays in the leading reviews.

      "I did not quite understand what Mr. Pater meant," he continues, "and it was not till I had carefully studied his beautiful and suggestive essays on the Renaissance that I fully realised what a wonderful self-conscious art the art of English prose-writing really is, or may be made to be."

      It has been suggested that it was his late apprenticeship to an art that requires life-long study which rendered Wilde's prose so insincere, resembling more the conscious artifice of the modern French school than the restrained, yet jewelled style of Pater, whom he claimed as his master in prose.

      It was not till 1890 that he published his first and only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, with its strangeness of colour and its passionate suggestion flickering like lightning through СКАЧАТЬ