Complete Works of Oscar Wilde. Оскар Уайльд

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.

      Ah! how delightful it would be to be with you and your husband in your own home! But my dear child how could I get to you? Miles of sea, miles of land, the purple of the mountains and the silver of the rivers divide us: you don’t know how poor I am: I have no money at all: I live, or am supposed to live, on a few francs a day: a bare remnant saved from a shipwreck. Like St Francis of Assisi I am wedded to poverty: but in my case the marriage is not a success; I hate the bride that has been given to me. I see no beauty in her hunger and her rags: I have not the soul of St Francis: my thirst is for the beauty of life: my desire for the joy. But it was dear of you to ask me, and do tell the king of men how touched and grateful I am by the invitation you and he have sent me.

      And, also sometimes, send me a line to tell me of the beauty you have found in life. I live now in echoes and have little music of my own. Your old friend

      OSCAR

      The Collins Complete Works of Oscar Wilde has remained unchanged since 1966 and as it has now been entirely reset, I felt it important to add what I believe to be the best of both his journalism and his lectures. They have hardly been seen at all since their appearance in the first collected works of 1908, brought out by Wilde’s literary executor, Robert Ross, and quite apart from the important role which they played in Wilde’s life, they contain some memorable passages which have been ‘lost’ for too long. Professor Kevin O’Brien of St Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia has very kindly allowed me to use the texts of ‘The Decorative Arts’ and ‘The House Beautiful’ which he reconstructed from existing manuscripts and contemporary newspaper reports.

      The other change which I felt was timely was to put his poems into chronological order. When they were first published in 1881, Wilde grouped them thematically. This sequence was followed in the edition of 1882 which was the last the author oversaw. In the 1908 edition Ross included 24 previously unpublished pieces as well as ‘Ravenna’ ‘The Sphinx’ and ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’ all of which had been published as separate volumes. By the following year two more unpublished poems, ‘Pan’ and ‘Désespoir’ had surfaced and were included in editions from then on. All these additional poems were simply tacked on to the end of Wilde’s original order. In the last Collins revision of 1966, for whatever reason, neither Wilde’s nor Ross’s order was respected, and since I have taken the liberty of including a number of poems discovered since then, it seemed sensible to present all the poetry in the order in which Wilde wrote it. For this, and for the new poems, I am indebted to Professor Bobby Fong of Hope College, Michigan, who most generously shared his research with me.

      A final word needs to be said about the introduction which my father wrote in 1966. At the time it struck exactly the right note. It was a good balance between broad literary assessment and biography and if it skimmed over the reasons for Wilde’s disgrace and imprisonment, it is understandable. Homosexuality in the United Kingdom was still a criminal offence (though legalised the following year) and, odd though it must sound today, it was an aspect of Oscar Wilde’s private life which still made some of his readers distinctly uneasy. It is a sobering thought that the same prosecution could have been brought at the time my father was writing.

      It appears, too, that my father made one or two slips of a historical nature in the family history and it would seem appropriate, in the light of later research, to correct them.

      The idea that Wilde’s family is descended from Colonel de Wilde is a pleasingly romantic one for which there is sadly no evidence. The furthest back that his paternal lineage can be traced is to a Dublin merchant, John Wilde, in the first half of the 18th century. The statement about King Oscar of Sweden is also incorrect. There is no record of Sir William operating on the King’s cataract, nor was he the inventor of that operation. He was, however, decorated by the Swedish government in 1862 with the order of the Northern Star.

      I hope that I show him no disrespect in pointing this out. If I do, let me offer him a suitable misquotation from our common ancestor: ‘Parents begin by loving their children. After a time they are exasperated by them. It is rarely impossible to forgive them.’

       INTRODUCTION TO THE 1966 EDITION by VYVYAN HOLLAND

      Oscar Wilde’s family is Dutch in origin. The first Wilde to settle in Ireland was a certain Colonel de Wilde, the son of an artist, examples of whose work hang in the Art Gallery at The Hague; he was a soldier of fortune who was granted lands in Connaught at the end of the seventeenth century for his services to King William III of England. He is said to have repented his adherence to the English king and to have become ‘more Irish than the Irish’. From that time the family were land agents and doctors.

      My father’s parents were both distinguished in their own way. Sir William Wilde was the foremost eye and ear specialist of his time, and a physician of international repute. He invented the operation for cataract and performed it on King Oscar of Sweden, for which he received the Order of the Polar Star. His mother, Lady Wilde, born Jane Francesca Elgee, was a staunch Irish Nationalist, who wrote fierce poems and articles in the Irish Nationalist newspaper The Nation, under the name of ‘Speranza’, a name she had adopted from her motto ‘Fidanza, Constanza, Speranza’ – Faith, Constancy, Hope. Lady Wilde had three children, William, Oscar and Isola, who died when she was ten, to Oscar’s lasting grief. Oscar Wilde was born on 16 October 1854, and was given the names Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde.

      His education began at Portora Royal School in Enniskillen, from which he obtained a scholarship to Trinity College, Dublin, where he won the Berkeley Gold Medal for Greek. From there he received a demyship to Magdalen College, Oxford. While at Oxford he came under the influence of John Ruskin and Walter Pater. Pater preached the love of Art for Art’s sake, and Oscar Wilde, going one step further, set out to idolise beauty for beauty’s sake and filled his rooms looking over the Cherwell with blue china and reproductions of paintings by Rossetti and Burne-Jones. Aestheticism was the key-note of his creed and he declared that beauty was the ideal after which everyone should strive.

      My father’s life at Oxford, one gathers from his letters, was a joyous one. He entered whole-heartedly into the undergraduate life of the University and distinguished himself by winning the Newdigate Prize for English verse and getting a double first in Classics. Upon this note he came to London in 1879 with the remains of a small patrimony and started to make his living by his pen. True to his doctrine of beauty he established himself as the ‘Apostle of Aestheticism’ and drew attention to himself by the eccentricity of his dress. It must be remembered that at this period the clothing of the British upper middle classes was rigidly conventional, and the sight of him in the evening in a velvet coat edged with braid, knee-breeches, black silk stockings, a soft loose shirt with a wide turn-down collar and a large flowing tie, was bound to arouse indignant curiosity.

      At the same time he was writing poems, and in 1880 he also wrote Vera, a rather immature play, which ran for one week in New York in 1883 and never reached the boards in London. In 1881 his collected poems were published, and in 1882, being short of money, he was persuaded to go on a lecture tour to America. This proved to be a brilliant success and he returned to England in 1883, covered, if not with glory, at least with considerable notoriety.

      On his return to Europe, he retired to Paris to finish another play, The Duchess of Padua, for the American actress Mary Anderson; but when she received the play, she СКАЧАТЬ