Oscar Wilde: A Life in Letters
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Oscar Wilde: A Life in Letters
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I hope we will see you again in Ireland: I have very pleasant memories of some delightful evenings passed in your society. Believe me yours truly
OSCAR WILDE
Oscar turned the spare time on his hands to good account. Apart from writing to Lord Houghton about Keats (which gained him a valuable letter of introduction when he went to America four years later) he penned his first piece of art criticism on the Grosvenor Gallery and had it published by the Dublin University Magazine. If the pleasure he took in this was somewhat soured by the death that summer of his ‘cousin’, Henry Wilson (actually one of Sir William’s three illegitimate children), it was later increased by the notice which Walter Pater took of the copy of the review which Wilde had calculatingly sent him.
To Keningale Cook
[May-June 1877] 1 Merrion Square North
I return proof. What I meant by two proofs was one with your marginal corrections for my guide, the other plain, but of course both from the same type. Naturally, one of the great sorrows of youthful artists is that they always ‘expurgate’ bits of their articles, the very bits that they think best. However, I am glad to get the article published in your July number before the Gallery closes. Please have all my corrections attended to. Some of them are merely ‘style’ corrections, which, for an Oxford man, must be always attended to. As regards the additions, they are absolutely necessary, and as I intend to take up the critic’s life, I would not wish the article published without them. I would sooner pay for the proof and publish elsewhere.
(I) I and Lord Ronald Gower and Mr Ruskin, and all artists of my acquaintance, hold that Alma-Tadema’s drawing of men and women is disgraceful. I could not let an article signed with my name state he was a powerful drawer.
(2) I always say I and not ‘we’. We belongs to the days of anonymous articles, not to signed articles like mine. To say ‘we have seen at Argos’ either implies that I am a Royal Personage, or that the whole staff of the DUM visited Argos. And I always say clearly what I know to be true, such as that the revival of culture is due to Mr Ruskin, or that Mr Richmond has not read Aeschylus’s Choephoroe. To say ‘perhaps’ spoils the remark.
(3) I have been obliged to explain what I mean by imaginative colour, and what Mr Pater means by it. We mean thought expressed by colour such as the sleep of Merlin being implied and expressed in the colour. I do not mean odd, unnatural colouring. I mean ‘thought in colour’.
(4) I think Mr Legros’s landscape very smudgy and the worst French style. I cannot say it is bold or original – and I wish my full remarks on Mr Whistler to be put in (as per margin). I know he will take them in good part, and besides they are really clever and amusing. I am sorry you left out my quotation from Pater at the end. However, I shall be glad to get a second proof before you go to press with my corrections. I am afraid you would find my account of our ride through Greece too enthusiastic and too full of metaphor for the DUM.
When I receive the second proof I am going to have small notes of the article appearing in DUM by me sent to the Oxford booksellers. I know it would have a good sale there and also here if properly advertised, but for the past year the articles have been so terribly dull in the DUM that people require to be told beforehand what they are to get for 2/6.
I hope we will come to terms about this article – and others. Believe me I am most anxious to continue my father’s connection with the DUM which, I am sure, under your brilliant guidance will regain its lost laurels. Yours truly
OSCAR WILDE
To Reginald Harding
[Circa 16 June 1877] 1 Merrion Square North
My dear Kitten, Many thanks for your delightful letter. I am glad you are in the midst of beautiful scenery and Aurora Leigh.
I am very much down in spirits and depressed. A cousin of ours to whom we were all very much attached has just died – quite suddenly from some chill caught riding. I dined with him on Saturday and he was dead on Wednesday. My brother and I were always supposed to be his heirs but his will was an unpleasant surprise, like most wills. He leaves my father’s hospital about £8000, my brother £2000, and me £100 on condition of my being a Protestant!
He was, poor fellow, bigotedly intolerant of the Catholics and seeing me ‘on the brink’ struck me out of his will. It is a terrible disappointment to me; you see I suffer a good deal from my Romish leanings, in pocket and mind.
My father had given him a share in my fishing lodge in Connemara, which of course ought to have reverted to me on his death; well, even this I lose ‘if I become a Roman Catholic for five years’ which is very infamous.
Fancy a man going before ‘God and the Eternal Silences’ with his wretched Protestant prejudices and bigotry clinging still to him.
However, I won’t bore you with myself any more. The world seems too much out of joint for me to set it right.
I send you a little notice of Keats’s grave I have just written which may interest you. I visited it with Bouncer and Dunskie.
If you would care to see my views on the Grosvenor Gallery send for the enclosed, and write soon to me. Ever yours
OSCAR WILDE
I heard from little Bouncer from Constantinople lately: he said he was coming home. Love to Puss.
To William Ward
[Postmark 19 July 1877] 1 Merrion Square North
Dear old Boy, I hear you are back: did you get my telegram at the Lord Warden? Do write and tell me about the Turks. I like their attitude towards life very much, though it seems strange that the descendants of the wild Arabs should be the Sybarites of our day.
I sent you two mags, to Frenchay: one with a memoir of Keats, the other religious.
Do you remember our delightful visit to Keats’s grave, and Dunskie’s disgust. Poor Dunskie: I know he looks on me as a renegade; still I have suffered very much for my Roman fever in mind and pocket and happiness.
I am going down to Connemara for a month or more next week to try and read. I have not opened a book yet, I have been so bothered with business and other matters. I shall be quite alone. Will you come? I will give you fishing and scenery – and bring your books – and some notebooks for me. I am in despair about ‘Greats’.
It is roughing it, you know, but you will have
(I) bed
(2) table and chair
(3) knife and fork
(4) fishing
(5) scenery – sunsets – bathing – heather – mountains – lakes
(6) whisky and salmon to eat. Write and say when you can come, and also send me please immediately the name and address of Miss Fletcher whom I rode with at Rome, and of her stepfather. I have never sent her some articles of Pater’s I promised her.
I want you to read my article on the Grosvenor Gallery in the Dublin University Magazine of July – my first art-essay.
I have had such delightful letters from many of the painters, and from Pater such sympathetic praise. I must send you his letter: or rather do so, but return it in registered letter by next post: don’t forget. Ever yours OSCAR After all I can’t trust my letter from Pater to the mercies of the postman, but I send you a copy:
Dear Mr Wilde, Accept my best thanks for the magazine and your letter. Your excellent article on the Grosvenor Gallery I read with very great pleasure: it makes me much wish to make your acquaintance, and I hope you will give me an early call on your return to Oxford.
I should much like to talk over some of the points with you, though on the whole I think your criticisms very just, and they are certainly very pleasantly expressed. The article shows that you possess some beautiful, and, for your age, quite exceptionally cultivated tastes: and a considerable knowledge too of many beautiful things. I hope you will write a great deal in time to come. Very truly yours
WALTER PATER
You won’t think me snobbish for sending you this? After all, it is something to be honestly proud of.
O. F. W.
To William Ward
[August 1877] Illaunroe Lodge, Lough Fee, Connemara
My dear Bouncer, So very glad to hear from you at last: I was afraid that you were still seedy.
I need not say how disappointed I was that you could not come and see this part of the world. I have two fellows staying with me, Dick Trench and Jack Barrow, who took a lodge near here for July and came to stay with me about three weeks ago. They are both capital fellows, indeed Dick Trench is I think my oldest friend, but I don’t do any reading someway and pass my evenings in ‘Pool, Ecarte and Potheen Punch’. I wish you had come; one requires sympathy to read.
I am however in the midst of two articles, one on Greece, the other on Art, which keep me thinking if not writing. But of Greats work I have done nothing. After all there are more profitable studies, I suppose, than the Greats course: still I would like a good Class awfully and want you to lend me your notes on Philosophy: I know your style, and really it would be a very great advantage for me to have them – Ethics, Politics (Republic) and general Philosophy. Can you do this for me? If you could send them to me in Dublin? Or at least to Oxford next term? And also give me advice – a thing I can’t stand from my elders because it’s like preaching, but I think I would like some from you ‘who have passed through the fire’.