Complete Works of Oscar Wilde
Complete Works of Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde
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
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.
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.
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