Transcribed from the 1908 edition , email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
Since these volumes are sure of a place in your marvellous libraryI trust that with your unrivalled knowledge of the various editionsof Wilde you may not detect any grievous error whether of taste or type,of omission or commission. But should you do so you must blamethe editor, and not those who so patiently assisted him,the proof readers, the printers, or the publishers. Some day, however, I look forward to your bibliographyof the author, in which you will be at liberty to criticise mycapacity for anything except regard and friendship for yourself.—Sincerelyyours,
ROBERT ROSS
May 25, 1908.
The concluding volume of any collected edition is unavoidably fragmentaryand desultory. And if this particular volume is no exception toa general tendency, it presents points of view in the author’sliterary career which may have escaped his greatest admirers and detractors. The wide range of his knowledge and interests is more apparent thanin some of his finished work.
What I believed to be only the fragment of an essay on HistoricalCriticism was already in the press, when accidentally I came acrossthe remaining portions, in Wilde’s own handwriting; it is nowcomplete though unhappily divided in this edition. {0a} Any doubt as to its authenticity, quite apart from the calligraphy,would vanish on reading such a characteristic passage as the following:—‘. . . For, it was in vain that the middle ages strove to guardthe buried spirit of progress. When the dawn of the Greek spiritarose, the sepulchre was empty, the grave clothes laid aside. Humanity had risen from the dead.’ It was only Wilde whocould contrive a literary conceit of that description; but readers willobserve with different feelings, according to their temperament, thathe never followed up the particular trend of thought developed in theessay. It is indeed more the work of the Berkeley Gold Medallistat Dublin, or the brilliant young Magdalen Demy than of the dramatistwho was to write Salomé. The composition belongsto his Oxford days when he was the unsuccessful competitor for the Chancellor’sEnglish Essay Prize. Perhaps Magdalen, which has never forgivenherself for nurturing the author of Ravenna, may be felicitatedon having escaped the further intolerable honour that she might havesuffered by seeing crowned again with paltry academic parsley the mosthighly gifted of all her children in the last century. Comparedwith the crude criticism on The Grosvenor Gallery (one of theearliest of Wilde’s published prose writings), Historical Criticismis singularly advanced and mature. Apart from his mere scholarshipWilde developed his literary and dramatic talent slowly. He toldme that he was never regarded as a particularly precocious or cleveryouth. Indeed many old family friends and contemporary journalistsmaintain sturdily that the talent of his elder brother William was muchmore remarkable. In this opinion they are fortified, appropriatelyenough, by the late Clement Scott. I record this interesting viewbecause it symbolises the familiar phenomenon that those nearest themountain cannot appreciate its height.
The exiguous fragment of La Sainte Courtisane is the nextunpublished work of importance. At the time of Wilde’s trialthe nearly completed drama was entrusted to Mrs. Leverson, who in 1897went to Paris on purpose to restore it to the author. Wilde immediatelyleft the manuscript in a cab. A few days later he laughingly informed