Oscar Wilde Revisited

...They include, among other gems, a statement that "Public opinion exists only where there are no ideas," and a shattering observation: "The criminal classes are so close to us that even the policeman can see them...

...Times have changed...

...An article on Wilde and James that I published at the time in The University of Kansas City Review was the only one in America to protest Dupee's oversight...

...The letters that Wilde wrote to her between 187995, in the heyday of his wit, are therefore lost to posterity, as are all except one of his letters to Lily Langtry...

...Nobody would now dare to level these accusations at the editor of the Letters, Rupert HartDavis...

...64 of the HaldemanJulius Company of Girard, Kansas...

...That as a critic, and especially in his two dialogues and in The Soul of Man Under Socialism, Wilde belongs in the same class as Matthew Arnold...

...Wilde's letters are therefore all the more revealing as source material for the social historian, because they concern themselves so gleefully and unashamedly with the frivolities of daily life...

...Other serious Wilde studies might likewise be slightly revised in the light of new documentary evidence...

...Finally, that in De Profundis Wilde can be compared only with De Quincey (as author of The Confessions) or with Scott Fitzgerald (as author of The Crack-up) in all of English and American literature...

...They describe not only the horrors of prison life, but also give a perceptive understanding of what goes on in the minds of those on whom these horrors are inflicted, offering us a philosophy that is both practical and ideally humane for reforming age-old abuses...

...He had more wit and a wider range of interests, however, in literature as well as in life...

...Rupert Hart-Davis has contributed much to this fullness of the Wilde story as it is recorded here...

...That as a dramatist Wilde has proven to be a rare box-office classic and the first English writer of comedies of any distinction since Sheridan-in fact, Shaw's elder and master: Mrs...

...They are so far away from us that only the poet can understand them...

...Warren's Profession, for instance, might well have been written by the author of A Woman of No Importance, and a letter from Wilde to G. B. S. clearly shows that this occurred to both men...

...His excellent footnotes fill the gaps in the narrative that emerge from the surviving letters...

...Since 1947, when I published my own critical appraisal of Wilde's importance in the New Directions "Makers of Modern Literature" series, Wilde's reputation as a thinker and a writer has considerably improved in our more solemn avant-garde...

...It would be good, for instance, to have a new edition of Oscar Wilde in America, that excellent book by Lloyd Lewis and Justin Smith...

...But we already suffer from a surfeit of documents concerning the more solemn or virtuous aspects of English life in the last decades of the reign of Queen Victoria...

...Recently, in editing a volume of selected letters of the French painter Eug??ne Delacroix, I had occasion to observe that those he wrote to other celebrities, such as Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas or Charles Baudelaire, were among the least fascinating...

...Yet in his age Wilde had been one of the most perceptive of James' critics, and remains perhaps the greatest literary critic ever to have discussed the Jamesian fictional Poetics of the multiplicity of "points of view...

...This, it turns out, is a good thousand words longer than any version previously published in America, (except for the Philosophical Library's recent New York reprint of the same text, following its appearance a few months earlier in the original London edition of the Letters...

...No Wilde letters to Henry James have turned up, though there probably were some that might not be lacking in interest...

...That as the author of Salome, of the prose-poetry of the fairy tales, of The Sphynx and of a few later poems, Wilde remains in a class by himself...

...But we should be grateful to the many diligent, though often less distinguished, recipients of Wilde's letters who were careful enough to preserve those now published...

...When I wrote my own book on Wilde, I made some claims on his behalf which a few serious American critics rejected as absurd...

...Because in his life and in many of his writings Wilde so flagrantly neglected the importance of being earnest, he was no longer being taken very earnestly as a writer...

...But what were the claims that I made...

...Some of the letters Wilde wrote from prison and after his release, including the letter to Lord Alfred Douglas (now more generally known as De Profundis) and those to the editor of the Daily Chronicle on the treatment of children in prisons and the whole subject of prison reform, are now veritable classics...

...Less than 20 years ago, F. W. Dupee published a volume of critical opinions on the art of Henry James (The Question of Henry James) in which he neglected to include Wilde's early reviews and discussions of James as a novelist of great promise...

...Delacroix's correspondence with Chopin, for example, is of real interest mainly because it fails to deal either with music or with painting and limits itself to consulting the composer, who was a great dandy, on important matters like the choice of a bootmaker and the kind of footwear that one should wear on special occasions...

...Thus there is often a gratuitous or haphazard quality to volumes such as this one, a collection of 1,098 Oscar Wilde letters that happen to have survived the improvidence of many of their author's correspondents...

...Besides, a great man does not necessarily write his best letters to other great men...

...It neglects to report the preoccupations and utterances of such bores as cabinet ministers and members of Parliament or, as Marcel Proust did in so many of his letters, to offer us a reliable record of the ups and downs of the stock market...

...Only two of Wilde's letters to Bernard Shaw have survived...

...Charlotte Montefiore, for instance, destroyed all but one of her letters from Wilde, even though he had once proposed marriage to her and, being rejected, replied in a now missing note: "Charlotte, I am sorry about your decision...

...The present volume of Wilde's letters does contain, however, the full text of De Profundis...

...Wilde's six wonderfully witty and concise letters, or telegrams, to Whistler lead one to suspect that there must have been more, and to wish that these too had all been preserved...

...In a historical sense, this narrative gives us a somewhat "mauve" view of the world of Oscar Wilde...

...Some of them even went so far as to voice, in print, their suspicion that I must be a colleague of Wilde's in other respects to take him so seriously as a writer...

...He was as solitary a genius as Poe, indeed one who might fit more easily into certain traditions of 19th century French literature than any categories of our own...

...A new edition of H. Montgomery Hyde's The Trials of Oscar Wilde, once published in the "Notable British Trials" series, might also be necessary, with some corrections and amplifications in the footnotes and the other editorial sections...

...From all this Wilde would emerge as a greater writer, one whose trials and tribulations as a human being or a citizen would no longer shock, puzzle or even interest us, except insofar as they enriched him as a writer...

...Indeed, the Letters seems to have been taken far more seriously than it might have been 10 or 15 years ago...

...Again and again, as we read the excellent editorial footnotes of Rupert Hart-Davis, we realize that some of the Wilde letters no longer available may well have been among his best...

...In spite of our notorious AngloAmerican indifference to letters as one of the great genres of literature -who ever bothers to read, for instance, the letters of Coleridge or of Christopher Columbus?-is the publication of Wilde's letters now likely to lead to a substantial revaluation of his importance as a writer...

...It is, moreover, surprising that Wilde's published letters, probably representing only a third of all those that he actually wrote, should still tell us so fully the complex story of his life and reveal so richly the social and cultural background of his successes, his trials and his tragic end...

...Even Andr?© Gide deigned to save but two, and one of themcharacteristically enough-contains Wilde's inordinate praise of R?©flexions sur Quelques Points de l'Histoire et de la Morale, which Gide had just published...

...Yet the book excludes such popular classics as the once-famous Letters to Sarah Bernhardt, which a certain Sylvestre Dorian had edited and published in 1924 as Little Blue Book No...

...Reviewed by EDOUARD RODITI Author, "Oscar Wilde," "Dialogues on Art' Men of eminence and their friends no longer take the trouble to preserve their letters as carefully, and to circulate copies of them as widely, as did the more leisurely or posterity-conscious contemporaries of Pliny or Louis Guez de Balzac...

...of those he wrote to Edgar Saltus, only one...

...With your money and my brain, we could have gone far...

...Were I to write my book again, I would find little in these collected letters to correct my opinions of some 15 years ago, but much that I would now be free to quote in order to corroborate what I then felt or suspected...

...In an Appendix to the Letters, we also find some of Wilde's best aphorisms, A Few Maxims for the Instruction of the Over-educated, which he had published anonymously in the Saturday Review...

...This widely read pamphlet has indeed been proved to be no translation from French originals, as claimed, but a somewhat fraudulent compilation of Wilde's writings and of second-hand gossip about him...

...These had somehow escaped the attention of previous editors of his works...