Transcribed from the 1908 Methuen and Co. edition ,email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
To Mrs. CAREW
The apparently endless difficulties against which I have contended,and am contending, in the management of Oscar Wilde’s literaryand dramatic property have brought me many valued friends; but onlyone friendship which seemed as endless; one friend’s kindnesswhich seemed to annul the disappointments of eight years. Thatis why I venture to place your name on this volume with the assuranceof the author himself who bequeathed to me his works and something ofhis indiscretion.
ROBERT ROSS
May 12th, 1908.
The editor of writings by any author not long deceased is censuredsooner or later for his errors of omission or commission. I havedecided to err on the side of commission and to include in the uniformedition of Wilde’s works everything that could be identified asgenuine. Wilde’s literary reputation has survived so muchthat I think it proof against any exhumation of articles which he orhis admirers would have preferred to forget. As a matter of fact,I believe this volume will prove of unusual interest; some of the reviewsare curiously prophetic; some are, of course, biassed by prejudice hostileor friendly; others are conceived in the author’s wittiest andhappiest vein; only a few are colourless. And if, according toLord Beaconsfield, the verdict of a continental nation may be regardedas that of posterity, Wilde is a much greater force in our literaturethan even friendly contemporaries ever supposed he would become.
It should be remembered, however, that at the time when most of thesereviews were written Wilde had published scarcely any of the works bywhich his name has become famous in Europe, though the protagonist ofthe æsthetic movement was a well-known figure in Paris and London. Later he was recognised—it would be truer to say he was ignored—asa young man who had never fulfilled the high promise of a distinguisheduniversity career although his volume of Poems had reached itsfifth edition, an unusual event in those days. He had alienateda great many of his Oxford contemporaries by his extravagant mannerof dress and his methods of courting publicity. The great menof the previous generation, Wilde’s intellectual peers, with whomhe was in artistic sympathy, looked on him askance. Ruskin wasdisappointed with his former pupil, and Pater did not hesitate to expressdisapprobation to private friends; while he accepted incense from adisciple, he distrusted the thurifer.
From a large private correspondence in my possession I gather thatit was, oddly enough, in political and social centres that Wilde’samazing powers were rightly appreciated and where he was welcomed asthe most brilliant of living talkers. Before he had publishedanything except his Poems, the literary dovecots regarded himwith dislike, and when he began to publish essays and fairy stories,the attitude was not changed; it was merely emphasised in the publicpress. His first dramatic success at the St. James’s Theatregave Wilde, of course, a different position, and the dislike becamequalified with envy. Some of the younger men indeed were dazzled,but with few exceptions their appreciation was expressed in an unfortunatemanner. It is a consolation or a misfortune that the wrong kindof people are too often correct in their prognostications of the future;the far-seeing are also the foolish.
From these reviews which illustrate the middle period of Wilde’smeteoric career, between the æsthetic period and the productionof Lady Windermere’s Fan, we learn his opinion ofthe contemporaries who thought little enough of him. That he revisedmany of these opinions, notably those that are harsh,