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.