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    Essays and Lectures
    Essays and Lectures
    Essays and Lectures
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    Essays and Lectures

    By Oscar Wilde

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    Dodo Collections brings you another classic from Oscar Wilde, ‘Essays and Lectures’.


    It is a collection of essays, lectures, reviews, letters, and aphorisms by Oscar Wilde.


    Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde (16 October 1854 – 30 November 1900) was an Irish author, playwright and poet. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of London's most popular playwrights in the early 1890s. He is remembered for his epigrams, his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, his plays, as well as the circumstances of his imprisonment and early death.


    At the height of his fame and success, while his masterpiece, The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), was still on stage in London, Wilde had the Marquess of Queensberry prosecuted for libel. The Marquess was the father of Wilde's lover, Lord Alfred Douglas. The charge carried a penalty of up to two years in prison. The trial unearthed evidence that caused Wilde to drop his charges and led to his own arrest and trial for gross indecency with other men. After two more trials he was convicted and imprisoned for two years' hard labour. In 1897, in prison, he wrote De Profundis, which was published in 1905, a long letter which discusses his spiritual journey through his trials, forming a dark counterpoint to his earlier philosophy of pleasure. Upon his release he left immediately for France, never to return to Ireland or Britain. There he wrote his last work, The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), a long poem commemorating the harsh rhythms of prison life. He died destitute in Paris at the age of 46.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDead Dodo Presents Oscar Wilde
    Release dateAug 21, 2015
    ISBN9781508023364
    Essays and Lectures
    Author

    Oscar Wilde

    When Mr. Hiram B. Otis, the American Minister, bought Canterville Chase, every one told him he was doing a very foolish thing, as there was no doubt at all that the place was haunted. Indeed, Lord Canterville himself, who was a man of the most punctilious honour, had felt it his duty to mention the fact to Mr. Otis when they came to discuss terms."We have not cared to live in the place ourselves," said Lord Canterville, "since my grandaunt, the Dowager Duchess of Bolton, was frightened into a fit, from which she never really recovered, by two skeleton hands being placed on her shoulders as she was dressing for dinner, and I feel bound to tell you, Mr. Otis, that the ghost has been seen by several living members of my family, as well as by the rector of the parish, the Rev. Augustus Dampier, who is a Fellow of King's College, Cambridge. After the unfortunate accident to the Duchess, none of our younger servants would stay with us, and Lady Canterville often got very little sleep at night, in consequence of the mysterious noises that came from the corridor and the library."

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      Essays and Lectures - Oscar Wilde

      FOOTNOTES

      PREFACE

      ………………

      WITH the exception of the _Poems in Prose_ this volume does not contain

      anything which the author ever contemplated reprinting. _The Rise of

      Historical Criticism_ is interesting to admirers of his work, however,

      because it shows the development of his style and the wide intellectual

      range distinguishing the least _borné_ of all the late Victorian writers,

      with the possible exception of Ruskin. It belongs to Wilde’s Oxford days

      when he was the unsuccessful competitor for the Chancellor’s English

      Essay Prize. Perhaps Magdalen, which has never forgiven herself for

      nurturing the author of _Ravenna_, may be felicitated on having escaped

      the further intolerable honour that she might have suffered by seeing

      crowned again with paltry academic parsley the most highly gifted of all

      her children in the last century.

      Of the lectures, I have only included those which exist, so far as I

      know, in manuscript; the reports of others in contemporary newspapers

      being untrustworthy. They were usually delivered from notes and were

      repeated at various towns in England and America. Here will be found the

      origin of Whistler’s charges of plagiarism against the author. How far

      they are justified the reader can decide for himself, Wilde always

      admitted that, relying on an old and intimate friendship, he asked the

      artist’s assistance on one occasion for a lecture he had failed to

      prepare in time. This I presume to be the Address delivered to the Art

      Students of the Royal Academy in 1883, as Whistler certainly reproduced

      some of it as his own in the ‘Ten o’clock’ lecture delivered

      subsequently, in 1885. To what extent an idea may be regarded as a

      perpetual gift, or whether it is ethically possible to retrieve an idea

      like an engagement ring, it is not for me to discuss. I would only point

      out once more that all the works by which Wilde is known throughout

      Europe were written after the two friends had quarrelled. That Wilde

      derived a great deal from the older man goes without saying, just as he

      derived so much in a greater degree from Pater, Ruskin, Arnold and

      Burne-Jones. Yet the tedious attempt to recognise in every jest of his

      some original by Whistler induces the criticism that it seems a pity the

      great painter did not get them off on the public before he was

      forestalled. Reluctance from an appeal to publicity was never a weakness

      in either of the men. Some of Wilde’s more frequently quoted sayings

      were made at the Old Bailey (though their provenance is often forgotten)

      or on his death-bed.

      As a matter of fact the genius of the two men was entirely different.

      Wilde was a humourist and a humanist before everything; and his wittiest

      jests have neither the relentlessness nor the keenness characterising

      those of the clever American artist. Again, Whistler could no more have

      obtained the Berkeley Gold Medal for Greek, nor have written _The

      Importance of Being Earnest_, and _The Soul of Man_, than Wilde, even if

      equipped as a painter, could have evinced that superb restraint

      characterising the portraits of ‘Miss Alexander,’ ‘Carlyle,’ and other

      masterpieces. Wilde, though it is not generally known, was something of

      a draughtsman in his youth.

      _Poems in Prose_ were to have been continued. They are the kind of

      stories which Wilde would tell at a dinner-table, being invented on the

      spur of the moment, or inspired by the chance observation of some one who

      managed to get the traditional word in edgeways; or they were developed

      from some phrase in a book Wilde might have read during the day. To

      those who remember hearing them from his lips there must always be a

      feeling of disappointment on reading them. He overloaded their ornament

      when he came to transcribe them, and some of his friends did not hesitate

      to make that criticism to him personally. Though he affected annoyance,

      I do not think it prevented him from writing the others, which

      unfortunately exist only in the memories of friends. Miss Aimée Lowther,

      however, has cleverly noted down some of them in a privately printed

      volume.

      ROBERT ROSS

      ………………

      THE RISE OF HISTORICAL CRITICISM

      ………………

      This Essay was written for the Chancellor’s English Essay Prize at Oxford

      in 1879, the subject being ‘Historical Criticism among the Ancients.’

      The prize was not awarded. To Professor J. W. Mackail thanks are due for

      revising the proofs.

      ………………

      I.

      HISTORICAL criticism nowhere occurs as an isolated fact in the

      civilisation or literature of any people. It is part of that complex

      working towards freedom which may be described as the revolt against

      authority. It is merely one facet of that speculative spirit of an

      innovation, which in the sphere of action produces democracy and

      revolution, and in that of thought is the parent of philosophy and

      physical science; and its importance as a factor of progress is based not

      so much on the results it attains, as on the tone of thought which it

      represents, and the method by which it works.

      Being thus the resultant of forces essentially revolutionary, it is not

      to be found in the ancient world among the material despotisms of Asia or

      the stationary civilisation of Egypt. The clay cylinders of Assyria and

      Babylon, the hieroglyphics of the pyramids, form not history but the

      material for history.

      The Chinese annals, ascending as they do to the barbarous forest life of

      the nation, are marked with a soberness of judgment, a freedom from

      invention, which is almost unparalleled in the writings of any people;

      but the protective spirit which is the characteristic of that people

      proved as fatal to their literature as to their commerce. Free criticism

      is as unknown as free trade. While as regards the Hindus, their acute,

      analytical and logical mind is directed rather to grammar, criticism and

      philosophy than to history or chronology. Indeed, in history their

      imagination seems to have run wild, legend and fact are so indissolubly

      mingled together that any attempt to separate them seems vain. If we

      except the identification of the Greek Sandracottus with the Indian

      Chandragupta, we have really no clue by which we can test the truth of

      their writings or examine their method of investigation.

      It is among the Hellenic branch of the Indo-Germanic race that history

      proper is to be found, as well as the spirit of historical criticism;

      among that wonderful offshoot of the primitive Aryans, whom we call by

      the name of Greeks and to whom, as has been well said, we owe all that

      moves in the world except the blind forces of nature.

      For, from the day when they left the chill table-lands of Tibet and

      journeyed, a nomad people, to Ægean shores, the characteristic of their

      nature has been the search for light, and the spirit of historical

      criticism is part of that wonderful Aufklärung or illumination of the

      intellect which seems to have burst on the Greek race like a great flood

      of light about the sixth century B.C.

      _L’esprit d’un siècle ne naît pas et ne meurt pas à jour fixe_, and the

      first critic is perhaps as difficult to discover as the first man. It is

      from democracy that the spirit of criticism borrows its intolerance of

      dogmatic authority, from physical science the alluring analogies of law

      and order, from philosophy the conception of an essential unity

      underlying the complex manifestations of phenomena. It appears first

      rather as a changed attitude of mind than as a principle of research, and

      its earliest influences are to be found in the sacred writings.

      For men begin to doubt in questions of religion first, and then in

      matters of more secular interest; and as regards the nature of the spirit

      of historical criticism itself in its ultimate development, it is not

      confined merely to the empirical method of ascertaining whether an event

      happened or not, but is concerned also with the investigation into the

      causes of events, the general relations which phenomena of life hold to

      one another, and in its ultimate development passes into the wider

      question of the philosophy of history.

      Now, while the workings of historical criticism in these two spheres of

      sacred and uninspired history are essentially manifestations of the same

      spirit, yet their methods are so different, the canons of evidence so

      entirely separate, and the motives in each case so unconnected, that it

      will be necessary for a clear estimation of the progress of Greek

      thought, that we should consider these two questions entirely apart from

      one another. I shall then in both cases take the succession of writers

      in their chronological order as representing the rational order—not that

      the succession of time is always the succession of ideas, or that

      dialectics moves ever in the straight line in which Hegel conceives its

      advance. In Greek thought, as elsewhere, there are periods of stagnation

      and apparent retrogression, yet their intellectual development, not

      merely in the question of historical criticism, but in their art, their

      poetry and their philosophy, seems so essentially normal, so free from

      all disturbing external influences, so peculiarly rational, that in

      following in the footsteps of time we shall really be progressing in the

      order sanctioned by reason.

      ………………

      II.

      AT an early period in their intellectual development the Greeks reached

      that critical point in the history of every civilised nation, when

      speculative invades the domain of revealed truth, when the spiritual

      ideas of the people can no longer be satisfied by the lower, material

      conceptions of their inspired writers, and when men find it impossible to

      pour the new wine of free thought into the old bottles of a narrow and a

      trammelling creed.

      From their Aryan ancestors they had received the fatal legacy of a

      mythology stained with immoral and monstrous stories which strove to hide

      the rational order of nature in a chaos of miracles, and to mar by

      imputed wickedness the perfection of God’s nature—a very shirt of Nessos

      in which the Heracles of rationalism barely escaped annihilation. Now

      while undoubtedly the speculations of Thales, and the alluring analogies

      of law and order afforded by physical science, were most important forces

      in encouraging the rise of the spirit of scepticism, yet it was on its

      ethical side that the Greek mythology was chiefly open to attack.

      It is difficult to shake the popular belief in miracles, but no man will

      admit sin and immorality as attributes of the Ideal he worships; so the

      first symptoms of a new order of thought are shown in the passionate

      outcries of Xenophanes and Heraclitos against the evil things said by

      Homer of the sons of God; and in the story told of Pythagoras, how that

      he saw tortured in Hell the ‘two founders of Greek theology,’ we can

      recognise the rise of the Aufklärung as clearly as we see the Reformation

      foreshadowed in the _Inferno_ of Dante.

      Any honest belief, then, in the plain truth of these stories soon

      succumbed before the destructive effects of the _a priori_ ethical

      criticism of this school; but the orthodox party, as is its custom, found

      immediately a convenient shelter under the ægis of the doctrine of

      metaphors and concealed meanings.

      To this allegorical school the tale of the fight around the walls of Troy

      was a mystery, behind which, as behind a veil, were hidden certain moral

      and physical truths. The contest between Athena and Ares was that

      eternal contest between rational thought and the brute force of

      ignorance; the arrows which rattled in the quiver of the ‘Far Darter’

      were no longer the instruments of vengeance shot from the golden bow of

      the child of God, but the common rays of the sun, which was itself

      nothing but a mere inert mass of burning metal.

      Modern investigation, with the ruthlessness of Philistine analysis, has

      ultimately brought Helen of Troy down to a symbol of the dawn. There

      were Philistines among the Greeks also who saw in the _ἄναξ ἀδρῶν_ a mere

      metaphor for atmospheric power.

      Now while this tendency to look for metaphors and hidden meanings must be

      ranked as one of the germs of historical criticism, yet it was

      essentially unscientific. Its inherent weakness is clearly pointed out

      by Plato, who showed that while this theory will no doubt explain many of

      the current legends, yet, if it is to be appealed to at all, it must be

      as a universal principle; a position he is by no means prepared to admit.

      Like many other great principles it suffered from its disciples, and

      furnished its own refutation when the web of Penelope was analysed into a

      metaphor of the rules of formal logic, the warp representing the

      premises, and the woof the conclusion.

      Rejecting, then, the allegorical interpretation of the sacred writings as

      an essentially dangerous method, proving either too much or too little,

      Plato himself returns to the earlier mode of attack, and re-writes

      history with a didactic purpose, laying down certain ethical canons of

      historical criticism. God is good; God is just; God is true; God is

      without the common passions of men. These are the tests to which we are

      to bring the stories of the Greek religion.

      ‘God predestines no men to ruin, nor sends destruction on innocent

      cities; He never walks the earth in strange disguise, nor has to mourn

      for the death of any well-beloved son. Away with the tears for Sarpedon,

      the lying dream sent to Agamemnon, and the story of the broken covenant!’

      (Plato, _Republic_, Book ii. 380; iii. 388, 391.)

      Similar ethical canons are applied to the accounts of the heroes of the

      days of old, and by the same _a priori_ principles Achilles is rescued

      from the charges of avarice and insolence in a passage which may be

      recited as the earliest instance of that ‘whitewashing of great men,’ as

      it has been called, which is so popular in our own day, when Catiline and

      Clodius are represented as honest and far-seeing politicians, when _eine

      edle und gute Natur_ is claimed for Tiberius, and Nero is rescued from

      his heritage of infamy as an accomplished _dilettante_ whose moral

      aberrations are more than excused by his exquisite artistic sense and

      charming tenor voice.

      But besides the allegorising principle of interpretation, and the ethical

      reconstruction of history, there was a third theory, which may be called

      the semi-historical, and which goes by the name of Euhemeros, though he

      was by no means the first to propound it.

      Appealing to a fictitious monument which he declared that he had

      discovered in the island of Panchaia, and which purported to be a column

      erected by Zeus, and detailing the incidents of his reign on earth, this

      shallow thinker attempted to show that the gods and heroes of ancient

      Greece were ‘mere ordinary mortals, whose achievements had been a good

      deal exaggerated and misrepresented,’ and that the proper canon of

      historical criticism as regards the treatment of myths was to rationalise

      the incredible, and to present the plausible residuum as actual truth.

      To him and his school, the centaurs, for instance, those mythical sons of

      the storm, strange links between the lives of men and animals, were

      merely some youths from the village of Nephele in Thessaly, distinguished

      for their sporting tastes; the ‘living harvest of panoplied knights,’

      which sprang so mystically from the dragon’s teeth, a body of mercenary

      troops supported by the profits on a successful speculation in ivory; and

      Actæon, an ordinary master of hounds, who, living before the days of

      subscription, was eaten out of house and home by the expenses of his

      kennel.

      Now, that under the glamour of myth and legend some substratum of

      historical fact

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