Summary
Wilde begins in March 1885 in the Pall Mall Gazette with Dinners and Dishes, a cookery book he likes for being brief and free of eloquence, and within days is writing for the Dramatic Review about Shakespeare's stage. In Shakespeare on Scenery he reads the plays themselves, the chorus of Henry V and the Dream, to show Shakespeare protesting at a bare stage; a noble play nobly mounted, he argues, gives double pleasure, and the real loser in modern staging is the scene-painter, crowded out by the carpenter. At the Lyceum he calls Irving a great actor for uniting personality with perfection, finds Ellen Terry's Ophelia the harder part, and insists that the First Player should act badly, since the part is Shakespeare's satire on ranting actors.
The theatre notices of 1885 and 1886 cover undergraduate Henry IV and Twelfth Night at Oxford, an open-air As You Like It at Coombe, Wills's Olivia, where he argues that originality lies in treatment and not in subject, and the Shelley Society's Cenci, which he honours but thinks complete as a book. Alongside them run the book reviews. He mocks Atherton Furlong's poems on a town pump, answers Raffalovich's defence of 'tuberose' by forbidding Philology to dig up Parnassus, sets out fourteen of George Saintsbury's sentences as specimens of slipshod prose, and in To Read or Not to Read proposes that the most important class of books is the one not to be read at all.
In the longer pieces of 1886 his positions come into focus. The Letters of a Great Woman quotes George Sand's advice to Flaubert that form is the effect, not the aim. Balzac in English calls the Comédie Humaine the greatest monument of the century's literature, the work of a man who joined the artistic temperament to the scientific spirit and whose characters reduce living friends to shadows, then takes Routledge's translators apart for turning a French proverb into 'Good advice is an egg in the hand'. In the first Poets' Corner, a volume by two tramps, printed in every colour, leads him to announce that art has reached the criminal classes, while H. C. Irwin is praised for studying Matthew Arnold without stealing from him.
Through 1886 and 1887 the Pall Mall Gazette sends him Homer and the lives of the poets. Lord Carnarvon's Odyssey is scholarly but not quite Homer; William Morris's first volume is the most satisfying English version, one that teaches Nausicaa to speak the language of Perdita. Walter Scott's shilling 'Great Writers' series, with its lives of Longfellow, Coleridge and Rossetti, he finds trivial and full of misprints, complaining that we now vulgarise our great men instead of canonising them, and in Two Biographies of Keats he prefers Colvin to William Michael Rossetti. Harry Quilter's art maxims and John Collier's manual of oil painting receive deadpan praise that works as demolition. Real admiration goes to Joseph Skipsey, who taught himself to write with chalk on a trapdoor, to Dostoieffski's Injury and Insult, and to Pater's Imaginary Portraits.
From November 1887 Wilde also writes 'Literary and Other Notes' for The Woman's World. These long monthly columns range over memoirs, anthologies, novels and lives of women: the Margravine of Baireuth, Madame Ristori's battles with the Italian censors, Michael Field's Canute the Great, Emily Pfeiffer's Women and Work. He argues that acting is itself a form of criticism, calls fashion a form of ugliness so intolerable that it has to be altered every six months, condemns the fifteen-inch corset, wants dressmaking treated as a fine art, and sums up George Meredith as a writer who has mastered everything except language. In the Pall Mall Gazette at the same time he accuses Mahaffy of turning Greek history into a party pamphlet, then enjoys Mahaffy's book on conversation as the nearest thing to meeting Aristotle at an afternoon tea, wishing only that its author wrote as he talks.
In 1888 and 1889 the Poets' Corner round-ups multiply and the verdicts sharpen: one poet should beware of originality, another's verse contains a simile committing suicide, and the worst work is always done with the best intentions. The Woman's World column, headed 'Some Literary Notes' from January 1889, welcomes Yeats's Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry and then his Wanderings of Oisin, and A Fascinating Book traces how Europe's decorative arts revive through contact with the East. In the Pall Mall Gazette Wilde finds that prison has made Wilfrid Blunt a real poet, argues that even in rejecting art Walt Whitman is an artist whose value lies in prophecy rather than performance, mocks Wyke Bayliss, Whistler's successor, for wanting the House of Commons to choose subjects for historic pictures, and praises Morris's House of the Wolfings as pure art. Froude's Irish novel he calls a Blue-book and a record of the incapacity of a Teutonic to rule a Celtic people.
The last pieces are among the most considered. Swinburne, in June 1889, is a great poet whose limitation is the lack of any sense of limit: Language is his master, and for the soul we must go elsewhere. Three New Poets prophesies a fine future for Yeats. In the Speaker in 1890 Wilde reviews Herbert Giles's Chuang Tzu with mock alarm, setting out the sage's creed of Inaction against government, philanthropy, education and the worship of success, and concludes that the book should be read but not talked about at dinner-parties. His notice of Pater's Appreciations opens with Pater asking him at Oxford why he did not write prose, finds the essay on Wordsworth the finest, and ranks Pater with Newman for the union of personality with perfection, the phrase he had used of Irving five years before. The volume closes in May 1890 with Primavera, poems by four Oxford friends.
Chapter by chapter
SummaryWilde reviews Dinners and Dishes by 'Wanderer' and recommends it to everyone, because it is brief, unillustrated and free of eloquence. He agrees that macaroni must never be served with sugar, welcomes the chapters on risotto and salads, and joins the author in attacking the British cook for her ignorance of herbs and her bread poultices. He urges the well travelled author to study American food at Delmonico's, and ends on the many ways of cooking a potato and an egg.
Wilde welcomes Melchior, a blank verse poem of more than five thousand lines by W. G. Wills, dedicated to Robert Browning. He retells its story of a German musician who takes a rescued girl for St. Cecily, goes mad, kills her, and recovers his reason only to lose the visions of the artist. He admires its use of heredity and its drawing of character, faults some accidental rhymes and too many short lines, and hails it as a true poem.
Wilde asks what Shakespeare would make of the lavish settings of Irving and Wilson Barrett, and answers from the plays themselves: the chorus of Henry V and the Dream show a manager protesting at a bare stage. He grants that Shakespeare's descriptions, such as Cleopatra's barge, outlast any canvas, but argues that fine scenery doubles the pleasure of a noble play. The real loser, he says, is the scene-painter, crowded out by carpenters and built properties.
Wilde reviews four books of verse. He mocks Atherton Furlong's vellum-bound Echoes of Memory, with its poems on a town pump and a door knocker, and hopes Furlong will write poetry some day. He praises E. W. Bowling's satirical Sagittulæ, finds Mark André Raffalovich's Tuberose and Meadowsweet strange and subtle though he mispronounces 'tuberose', and credits the anonymous Sturm und Drang for following Tennyson. Raffalovich's reply, defending his three syllables with Shelley, is printed after the review.
Wilde answers Raffalovich's letter with one of his own, signed as the critic who had to read four volumes of modern poetry. Distressed to learn that 'tuberose' comes from a 'lumpy flower', he proposes two derivations for every word, one for the poet and one for the scientist, and forbids Philology to dig up Parnassus. He ends by echoing Raffalovich's closing words exactly, quoting Shelley to prove the word has only two syllables.
Wilde reviews Henry Irving's return to the Lyceum as Hamlet, with Ellen Terry as Ophelia. He calls Irving a great actor for uniting personality with perfection, and argues that Ophelia is the harder part, which Terry plays with infinite pathos. He praises Mr. Alexander's Laertes, admits he cannot tell Rosencrantz from Guildenstern, and complains that the First Player acts far too well: as Shakespeare's satire on ranting actors, the part should be played badly.
Wilde reviews Edna Lyall's In the Golden Days, set two centuries back, and Katherine S. Macquoid's Louisa. He scolds Lyall's preface for fearing the label 'historical novel', citing Esmond and Romola as popular successes, but finds the book charming, with an exquisite Puritan heroine and a well drawn Charles II. Louisa, the story of an English girl married to an Italian nobleman, is interesting, though Italy is overdone and he asks for more Piccadilly and less Perugia.
Wilde reviews the Oxford undergraduates' Henry IV in the Town Hall, opening with a lyrical tribute to Oxford as the place where life and art are one. He argues that Shakespeare wrote to be acted, praises the archaeologically accurate costumes, Mr. Mackinnon's Prince Hal, Mr. Coleridge's Falstaff and above all Mr. Bourchier's Hotspur, and proposes that the University grant degrees for good acting, with D.C.L.s for the three leads.
Wilde reviews E. M. Edmonds's anthology of nineteenth-century Greek poetry in English, Greek Lays, Idylls, Legends. He hears in it the spirit of Tyrtæus and Theocritus, prefers the rustic idylls of George Drosinês to the war ballads of Rhigas and Valaôritês, and admires a legend of the building of St. Sophia and Kostês Palamas's ballad on an old woman buried in the dress of a Pallikar. Despite a few weak lines, he finds the translations felicitous.
Wilde reviews W. G. Wills's Olivia, a stage version of Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield, at the Lyceum. He argues that an artist's originality lies in treatment, not subject, and calls the play exquisite. Ellen Terry's Olivia and Henry Irving's Dr. Primrose win high praise, though Irving misses the old man's powerlessness at the close of the second act. Mr. Terriss's rake is so charming that nobody cares for the virtuous Mr. Burchell, which Wilde welcomes.
Wilde reviews the Pastoral Players' open-air As You Like It at Coombe, staged by Lady Archibald Campbell and Mr. Godwin. He argues that comedy suits the open air where tragedy would not, and describes the real forest, the foresters trooping through the fern and the blue mist that gave distance. He praises Hermann Vezin's Jaques and Lady Archibald Campbell's dreamy Orlando, faults Touchstone's glaring motley and Rosalind's crude white, and thanks them for a delightful afternoon.
Wilde recommends How to be Happy though Married, by 'a Graduate in the University of Matrimony', as one of the best of wedding presents. He enjoys its countless authorities and stories, from Dr. Johnson and Archbishop Whately to muddled bridegrooms at the altar, and agrees with this champion of married life that the higher education of women has made intellectual sympathy possible and that men must give up their old tyranny. He calls the author the Baedeker of bliss.
Wilde reviews A Cardinal Sin, the last novel of Hugh Conway, in which an MP shoots a man carrying a marriage certificate that threatens his estate, is acquitted, and is later blackmailed when the certificate turns up in a fir tree. Wilde mocks its stage rustics and its 'agony and asterisks', admires the murderer's unselfishness in giving up a death-bed repentance, and judges it a crude melodrama written in a slipshod style.
Writing to the Pall Mall Gazette amid its debate on the best hundred books, Wilde divides books into three classes: books to read, books to re-read, and books not to read at all, which he calls the most important. Among the last he lists Thomson's Seasons, Paley's Evidences and all books that try to prove anything, and proposes a list of the worst hundred. He then claims places for the Greek Anthology and Poe, and Baudelaire in place of Keble.
Wilde reviews Twelfth Night, chosen by the University Dramatic Society to open the new theatre at Oxford. He praises Mr. Bourchier's graceful clown, Mr. Letchmere Stuart's Sir Andrew and Mr. Clark's clever Malvolio, a part whose treatment he finds needlessly harsh, and advises young actors to study a great artist's method but never copy his manner. Mrs. Bewicke's Viola is too boisterous. He hopes the University will one day have a theatre of its own.
Wilde reviews the Letters of George Sand, translated by Raphael Ledos de Beaufort and spanning sixty years. He admires a woman at the heart of every noble movement of her day, who wrote to Louis Napoleon, Mazzini and Flaubert and felt every one's misfortunes except her own. He quotes her against art for art's sake and her advice to Flaubert that form is the effect, not the aim, and concludes that art without personality is impossible, though its aim is to please.
Wilde reviews four volumes of verse. George Francis Armstrong's Stories of Wicklow sings of Ireland's scenery rather than its politics, and is so decorous that an elderly maiden lady could read it without an emotion. John A. Goodchild's Somnia Medici echoes Browning's defects, and H. E. Keene writes fifteen-line sonnets. W. G. Hole's Procris and Other Poems is crude and amateurish except for its title poem, which has the true poetic ring and real promise.
Wilde reviews five novels. Tighe Hopkins's 'Twixt Love and Duty is pleasantly written but its plot comes to nothing; A. Gallenga's Jenny Jennet is a tale without a murder but not without a miracle; Mrs. Lovett Cameron's A Life's Mistake is a very familiar tale; and Edward Oliver Pleydell-Bouverie's J. S.; or, Trivialities inspires a mock formula for titles. Pen Oliver's All But has an intolerable title but a charming story and admirable sketches of village life.
Wilde reviews Gaston Boissier's Nouvelles Promenades Archéologiques, an exception to the rule that antiquarian books are dull. He follows Boissier's case for the site of Horace's country house above the Licenza and endorses his defence of Horace against the charge of servility: before printing and copyright, patrons did the work of publishers, and every poet longs for a Mæcenas. The essay on Virgil's Italy shows how faithful the poet's landscapes were.
Wilde regrets that the street ballad is dead in England and wonders whether William Toynbee's translations from Béranger might begin a new school. Béranger wrote to be sung, preferring the Pont Neuf to Parnassus, and his simple muse wears English dress with ease. Wilde faults a few renderings, such as 'rapiers' rhymed with 'forefathers' and 'that blade immaculate' for 'un sabre innocent', but praises Les Champs, Rosette and above all The Court Suit.
Wilde reviews the Countess Evelyn Martinengo Césaresco's Essays in the Study of Folk-Songs, delighted by a book that treats folklore as literature rather than mythology. The folk-tale, he says, is the father of all fiction and the folk-song the mother of all poetry. He finds fervent sincerity and beauty in the collection, from the Corsican voceri to a love-song of Provence that Herrick might have envied, and quotes lullabies from Corsica and Roumania that Blake might have written.
Wilde reviews the Shelley Society's production of The Cenci at the Grand Theatre, Islington, which he calls an era in the literary history of the century. Quoting Shelley's preface at length, he shows that the poet understood drama as disinterested presentation, teaching by example and not precept. He praises Hermann Vezin's Cenci, Alma Murray and Leonard Outram, yet concludes that the play is a complete work of art as read and gains nothing from the stage.
Wilde reviews Mr. Godwin's staging of Helena in Troas in the arena of a circus, which gives the chorus a true orchestra and makes it the most perfect Greek performance yet seen in England. He describes the set and costumes, praises Hermann Vezin's Priam and Beerbohm Tree's Paris, and regrets Hecuba's false emphasis and Œnone's realistic shriek. The verse has weak lines, but the whole has unity and harmony, and he wishes the theatre could be permanent.
Wilde reviews six novels. He finds Sir Thomas Lauder's The Wolfe of Badenoch, a romance popular sixty years before, buried in archaic words, and says a novel needs life, not learning. G. M. Robins's Keep My Secret is a clever holiday book, Mrs. Chetwynd's Mrs. Dorriman prattling and pleasing, and Amelia Barr's A Daughter of Fife an artistic union of romance and realism. He ends by begging English novelists to talk less and think more.
Wilde praises the Comédie Humaine as the greatest monument of the century's literature: Balzac unites the artistic temperament with the scientific spirit, and his characters make living friends seem shadows. He defends him against the charge of immorality. Then he turns on Routledge's new translation, listing blunders such as 'Good advice is an egg in the hand' and 'his heart was a callus in the direction of a lease', and concludes that the edition will not do.
Wilde reviews G. Manville Fenn's The Master of the Ceremonies, crowded with an elopement, a bigamous marriage, a duel, a suicide and a murder worthy of Gaboriau. He admires its padded dandy hero, forced into heroism against his will, but regrets that Drury Lane has turned a possible soul's tragedy into melodrama, and deplores a spelled-out cough. Emile Bauche's A Statesman's Love, a heroine's own story in three volumes, is false and over-emphasised but shows promise.
Wilde reviews John Addington Symonds's Ben Jonson in Andrew Lang's English Worthies series. He agrees that Jonson belongs with the giants rather than the gods, a realist of vast learning, but rejects the claim that his characters are mere puppets: they are types, true to nature. He corrects slips about Dryden, Davenant and blank verse, and mocks the similes likening dramatists to buildings. The book is worth reading, but Symonds writes poetical prose, never the prose of a poet.
Wilde reviews Low Down, by Two Tramps, a book printed in every type and colour, and declares that art has at last reached the criminal classes. He finds their verse harsh, their idol G. R. Sims, and their plagiarism worse than poultry-snatching, though The Return of Spring has nice touches. H. C. Irwin's Rhymes and Renderings, by contrast, studies Matthew Arnold without stealing from him, and its sonnets and Indian scenes are excellent.
Wilde reviews Hugh Stutfield's El Magreb, an account of a twelve-hundred-mile ride through Morocco to Fez and Wazan. He enjoys the traveller's tall stories, from coinage so heavy that change needs a donkey to the Shereef whose champagne turns to milk, and takes seriously Stutfield's tragic picture of a fallen civilisation and his case for exchanging Gibraltar for Ceuta. He recommends it to the lazy reader, who can make the ride from his armchair.
Wilde reviews The Children of the Poets, an anthology edited by Eric S. Robertson, and finds a charming idea badly carried out. He lists the poems left out, from Marvell and Blake to Poe's Annabel Lee, and calls the absence of Herrick the gravest omission of all. He mocks two misprints that ruin Bret Harte's Dickens in Camp and the provincial judgments of the preface. His verdict: an industrious compilation, but not an anthology.
Wilde surveys five novels. Astray, written by four authors in letters and diaries, is 'tedious from the noblest motives'. He tells Rhoda Broughton, author of Betty's Visions, to leave ghosts alone and return to Philistia. He praises Mrs. Alfred Hunt's That Other Person, all but its title, and finds A Child of the Revolution a noble story in a monotonous style. Ernst Eckstein's Aphrodite, a tale of ancient Greece, deserves many readers and a better binding.
Wilde opens with a joke about statesmen who take to Homer when they cannot make up their minds, then reviews the Earl of Carnarvon's blank-verse translation of the first twelve books of the Odyssey. Blank verse gives Homer's meaning but misses his music, and Carnarvon pads single Greek words into whole lines. The Cyclops story is weak, but Calypso's garden, Nausicaa and Circe are well done. His verdict: scholarly, careful and pleasing, though not quite Homer.
Wilde reviews the last two volumes of John Addington Symonds's Renaissance in Italy, on the Catholic Reaction. He finds Symonds more of a true historian than before, and his style more sober, though still prone to rhetoric about Jesuits and the Inquisition. He praises the chapters on Bruno, Sarpi, Tasso and Marino, corrects a point about the first opera, and congratulates Symonds on a great monument of literary labour, if not the work of a great historian.
Wilde demolishes Harry Quilter's book of art maxims with mock praise. He quotes Quilter's eating similes, such as 'Beauty is in some way like jam', his crude verdicts on Holbein, Reynolds and Leighton, and his appeal to the British householder to tear down Persian hangings. Quilter misquotes the poets and misspells painters' names. The book is amusing, Wilde concludes, but its vulgarity leaves it a curiosity: Quilter has failed even to become the Tupper of painting.
Wilde reviews Roden Noel's Essays on Poetry and Poets, earnest and eloquent but lacking discrimination. He likes the essay on the poetic interpretation of nature but protests at Noel modernising Chatterton's archaisms and destroying his music. Noel tells us more about his own feelings than about the works, praises poets for qualities they lack, and calls opponents names. The book, Wilde decides, is a record of a man of letters' moods, a sentimental journey through literature.
Wilde reviews John Collier's A Manual of Oil Painting with sustained irony. He summarises Collier's view of painting as copying patterns of colour: begin with crockery, use a plumb-line, hire costumes and photographs for history, consult the sitter's relations on the portrait. Collier thinks nature can be copied exactly, because at a panorama he could hardly tell painted cannons from real ones. Wilde's parting line: the value of common sense in art has never been so clearly shown.
Wilde praises Joseph Skipsey's Carols from the Coal-Fields, retelling how the Northumbrian miner went into the pits at seven and taught himself to write with chalk on a trapdoor. He hears Blake and Burns in the verse and calls poetry Skipsey's passion, not his profession. F. B. Doveton's verse is stale phraseology fit for an advertising agent, and J. Ashby-Sterry's The Lazy Minstrel makes him the Poet of Petticoats, though sometimes dainty.
Wilde reviews Days of the Year, a calendar of daily extracts from Alfred Austin's poems. Austin beats the usual dull anniversaries, he allows, though the compiler repeats quotations and misprints them. Most of his fire goes on William Sharp's introduction, an advertisement rather than a criticism, which claims Shakespearean magic for Austin and misquotes him. Austin, Wilde says, is no Olympian, and all the puffing in Paternoster Row cannot set him on Parnassus.
Wilde opens with a schoolboy's rule that 'violets blue' is poetry, then works through eight volumes. Elise Cooper's awkward inversions hide a lovely lyric, April. Dawson Burns's Oliver Cromwell reads like a sixth-form prize poem, and K. E. V.'s saints add a horror to martyrdom. He rearranges a passage of John Thomas Barker's verse as prose and asks for a prose second edition. J. M. W. Schwartz's tragedy Nivalis, though verbose, shows real dramatic power.
Wilde attacks the first volumes of Walter Scott's shilling 'Great Writers' series, starting with the publisher's own puff and a string of misprints. Eric S. Robertson's Longfellow overpraises pretty poems and offers absurd criticism of Excelsior. Hall Caine's Coleridge records the facts and the walking tours but nothing of the poet's soul. The only admirable feature, he concludes, is Mr. Anderson's bibliography at the end of each volume.
Wilde finds Frank T. Marzials's Life of Charles Dickens a great improvement on its predecessors in the series: bright, well built and close to the man. He asks why Dickens caricatured his parents for the public, and doubts the claim that Dickens was a supreme master of pathos. Dickens, he argues, could only caricature, never satirise, and his serious characters are fashion plates. He declines to prophesy whether Dickens will still be read.
Wilde reviews six books. Ernst von Wildenbruch's The Master of Tanagra is a pretty picture of Greek life. Paul Stapfer's Molière et Shakespeare ranks Molière beside Shakespeare and forgets that the English love Shakespeare as a poet. Annals of the Life of Shakespeare is dull and misquotes Jonson. He praises the Canterbury selection of Allan Ramsay and its preface, tolerates Dante for Beginners, and finds Miss Phillimore's Studies in Italian Literature worth reading despite its remarks on Greek drama.
Wilde protests at the vulgarising of Rossetti in Joseph Knight's life for the 'Great Writers' series. Knight's book is modest but trivial, full of anecdotes about a zebu and a dog called Dizzy, and riddled with misquotations and ignored punctuation. A true artist reveals himself in his work, Wilde argues, and he names Theodore Watts as the one man fit to write Rossetti's life. Only Mr. Anderson's bibliography earns praise.
Wilde welcomes the first volume of William Morris's Odyssey as the most satisfying English translation, above Chapman, Pope, Cowper and Butcher and Lang. Morris is a true story-singer with the Greek joy in craft and detail. His rushing metre sometimes trades majesty for speed and feels more Norse than Greek, but it is never literary and always alive. It is a poet's version of a poet, one that teaches Nausicaa to speak the language of Perdita.
Wilde compares Tourgenieff, Tolstoi and Dostoieffski, then praises Dostoieffski's Injury and Insult as highly as Crime and Punishment. Natasha is a figure of Greek tragedy, Aleosha a charming boy who does evil without thinking it, and Vania a portrait of the author. He enjoys the satire of W. M. Hardinge's The Willow Garth, admires Rosa Mulholland's Irish novel Marcella Grace for its reserve, and dismisses the shilling novels as very dear at the price.
Wilde condemns the anonymous Miss Bayle's Romance for putting the Prince of Wales and the Queen into a vulgar society story. He likes Mrs. Perks's From Heather Hills, a Scottish girl's London season, though one tragic episode has no artistic purpose. He passes lightly over A Heart on Fire, A Bag of Diamonds, The Great Hesper and A Day after the Fair, and finds 'Mr. Winter's' That Imp clever, begging him not to become the garrison hack of literature.
Wilde reviews another batch of verse. Glenessa's Eden drama belongs to comedy, and he advises the poet to give up the muse. He is kinder to Mr. Pierce's chess poems, notes Clifford Harrison's dreadful rhymes and self-regarding sadness, and finds Aeonial splendid but meaningless. James Ross's Seymour's Inheritance contains a simile committing suicide, and E. H. Brodie's sea lyrics are spirited, though his Workman's Song is worse than Schopenhauer at his worst.
Wilde reviews Walter Pater's Imaginary Portraits, philosophic studies given a sensuous setting. He finds the Watteau portrait too fanciful but calls Sebastian Van Storck, the young Dutch philosopher who dies saving a child, Pater's subtlest study. Denys l'Auxerrois is a medieval return of Dionysus, and Duke Carl of Rosenmold a German forerunner of the Enlightenment. Pater is an intellectual impressionist, his prose ascetic and at times laborious, yet he is 'our greatest artist in prose'.
Wilde defends the historical novel against the realists: distance of time makes things larger and more vivid. He retells the plot of Stephen Coleridge's Demetrius, in which Alexis, raised in a Polish household, is hailed as the lost son of Ivan the Terrible, takes Moscow and is crowned, only to learn he is not the true heir. The narrative is clear and dignified, but the dialogue lapses into bad blank verse. A really good historical novel, he concludes.
Wilde praises E. Werner's Her Son, translated by Christina Tyrrell, a clash between two grandsons, the stern Michael and the charming, treacherous Raoul, told through action rather than analysis. J. Sale Lloyd's Scamp rests on a stock misunderstanding and endless tea-table chatter. Sophie Veitch's James Hepburn, about a Free Church minister falsely accused, is a strong story of real life. Tiff is tedious, though it does not deserve its sham crocodile binding.
Wilde compares Sidney Colvin's Keats with William Michael Rossetti's Life of John Keats. Colvin tells the story pleasantly, if he smooths Keats into a model of virtue. Rossetti's book is a failure: it separates the man from the poet, spares no painful detail and misreads the Ode to a Nightingale, even worrying about Endymion's digestion. Wilde explains what Keats meant by the immortal bird and ends that Colvin makes 'a tolerable Statius'.
Wilde reviews Professor John Veitch's The Feeling for Nature in Scottish Poetry, glad that a Scot values Dunbar, Henryson and Lyndsay. He disputes Veitch's account of early man's pleasure in nature: the first myths tell of terror, and it is to cities that we owe the love of the country. He praises the survey from Montgomerie to Scott, but objects to the space given to Christopher North and Professor Shairp. The book is, on the whole, delightful.
Wilde opens his first Woman's World column with the Princess Christian's translation of the Memoirs of Wilhelmine, Margravine of Baireuth, delighting in her satire of a tyrannical father and a boorish court. He praises Mrs. William Sharp's anthology Women's Voices but lists the poets she leaves out, and admires Margaret L. Woods's A Village Tragedy. He then argues that working women dress sensibly and fashion is ugliness, and mourns Mrs. Craik and Lady Brassey.
Wilde attacks J. P. Mahaffy's Greek Life and Thought: from the Age of Alexander to the Roman Conquest for turning history into a Unionist pamphlet, treating Greece as 'Tipperary writ large' and regretting that Demosthenes was not put to death. He notes that the facts force Mahaffy into a late recantation. The chapters on colleges, philosophy and art are pleasant, but the moralising over the new comedy and the cheap modern comparisons show a writer lacking moderation, style and charm.
Wilde welcomes the second volume of William Morris's Odyssey as a true classic among English translations, more faithful than any other verse version. He repeats that Morris is sometimes more Norse than Greek and that the metre lacks Homer's stateliness, but defends the archaic words against critics, arguing that Homer's language was never simple. He quotes Odysseus's speech about the olive-tree bed and finds in the last twelve books the dramatic construction that later passed into Greek drama.
Wilde finds Sir Charles Bowen's version of the Eclogues and the first six books of the Aeneid not the work of a poet but charming, joining a scholar's learning to a man of letters' grace. He sets it against Dryden, too robust, Conington, a jingling ballad, and Morris, more Homer than Virgil. He explains Bowen's shortened hexameter, quotes the death of Daphnis and the lament for Marcellus, and judges the metre better suited to the epic than to the pastorals.
Wilde teases Lady Bellairs's Gossips with Girls and Maidens, defending 'wild flights of the imagination', and praises Constance Naden's A Modern Apostle. Phyllis Browne's lives of Mrs. Somerville and Mary Carpenter give him a mathematician who made marmalade and a reformer who overrated elementary education. He admires Ismay's Children for its Irish types, condemns the fifteen-inch corset, explains why he illustrates fashion, and notes Mrs. Craik's last article, the Lycée Racine and Miss Story's scholarship.
Wilde reviews J. P. Mahaffy's The Principles of the Art of Conversation with amused approval, calling it the nearest thing to meeting Aristotle at an afternoon tea. He enjoys its warnings against catchwords, excessive modesty, simplicity and the scrupulously truthful man, and its praise of tact and gossip, while protesting that no one should ask about pure mathematics at dinner. His complaint is the arid style: if Mahaffy wrote as he talks, the book would be far pleasanter.
Wilde welcomes Margaret Stokes's handbook Early Christian Art in Ireland for its illustrations, though he finds the style heavy. He describes the processional cross of Cong, made for King Turlough O'Connor, and the Ardagh chalice and Tara brooch, both found by chance. He doubts that a revived native Irish school can express the modern spirit, mocks the idea of a Celtic dining-room with a dado of Oghams, and points goldsmiths instead to the ancient torques and brooches.
Wilde praises Madame Ristori's Etudes et Souvenirs, answering the author of Obiter Dicta that acting is itself a form of criticism, and retells her battles with Italian censors. He finds Browning's influence in E. R. Chapman's The New Purgatory, surveys the English novel with a famous portrait of George Meredith, and admires Hithersea Mere, Margery Merton's Girlhood and Emily Pfeiffer's Women and Work. He recalls Defoe's scheme for women's colleges and argues that dressmaking should be a fine art.
Wilde defends little poets as interesting before making fun of seven of them. He finds the Rev. Frederick Langbridge harmless, George Dalziel's war poems fit for Daily Telegraph leaders, and Professor Harald Williams's attack on art for art's sake baffling. Alexander Buchan's Joseph and His Brethren fails its own rules for poetic speech, God's Garden turns Nature into a mirror for vice, Cyrus Thornton has a pleasant Tennysonian ring, and Mrs. Dobell rhymes about quack-snubbing.
Wilde calls Michael Field's Canute the Great a remarkable work of art, a tragedy of the survivor, and prefers The Cup of Water, drawn from Rossetti's note-book. He praises Frances Martin's Life of Elizabeth Gilbert, the blind woman who founded workshops for the blind, and Louise Chandler Moulton on good gowns. Warring Angels prompts his lament that we have made Truth, not Beauty, the aim of art. He discusses Bella Duffy's Madame de Staël, Evelyn's Mrs. Godolphin and lady shopkeepers.
Wilde calls J. C. Heywood's Salome a triumph of conscientious industry, warns William Griffiths against originality, and finds Francis Prevost's Fires of Green Wood full of thefts from both Brownings. John Cameron Grant, 'England's Empire Poet', is fit only for Tory tea-parties, and W. Evans's Caesar Borgia is tedious. Of two Vizetelly satires he prefers The Excellent Mystery, and he dubs the author of The Chronicle of Mites, a cheese-epic, the Gorgon-Zola of literature.
Wilde reviews W. J. Stillman's On the Track of Ulysses, whose key essay argues that the so-called Venus of Melos is really the Victory Without Wings from the little temple of Nike Apteros at Athens. He sets out Stillman's evidence: the likeness to the temple's reliefs, the Roman niche, the shield resting on the knee. Wilde praises the artistic instinct behind the theory, which archaeologists too often ignore, and calls the essay the most important and delightful in the book.
Wilde's Woman's World column opens with long extracts from the Memoirs of an Arabian Princess by Emily Ruete of Oman and Zanzibar, praising her account of strong Eastern women and her case that foreigners misjudge the harem. He admires Mrs. Oliphant's Makers of Venice, Mabel Robinson's The Plan of Campaign and Harriet Waters Preston's A Year in Eden, notes The Englishwoman's Year-Book and Rachel and Other Poems, and ends with May Morris's embroidery and new classes for women.
Wilde finds real power in Alfred Hayes's David Westren, a Job-like story in Tennysonian blank verse, though its hero ends as a mild Unitarian preaching platitudes. Rennell Rodd's The Unknown Madonna charms when it avoids metaphysics. James Ross's The Wind is dreadful, Isaac Sharp's Saul of Tarsus has dignity, and George Mackenzie's Highland Daydreams is kindly and old-fashioned. Charles Nash's versified Gospels prompt the remark that the worst work is always done with the best intentions.
Wilde calls M. Caro's Life of George Sand the biography of a very great man by a very ladylike writer. Caro treats Sand as a teller of pretty stories, dismisses her social ideals as antediluvian and ignores her writing on art and artists, which Wilde says invented an art literature for France. He mocks Caro's prudishness about her life, then lists the howlers in Gustave Masson's translation, which he finds astoundingly careless.
Wilde finds Ian Hamilton's Ballad of Hadji clever but uneven, and tells him to prune. Charles Catty's The Secret of Content is heavy and dull. John Todhunter's The Banshee throws away rhyme, which gives architecture as well as melody to song, though his small closing poems are charming. Wilde enjoys the preface to Thomas Bower Peacock's Poems of the Plains, mocks Alexander Skene Smith's metrical Psalms, and warmly recommends the posthumous poems of George Morine.
Wilde praises Alan Cole's translation of Ernest Lefebure's Embroidery and Lace as both history and handbook. He traces the English tradition of opus Anglicanum, argues that nearly every European revival of decorative art has come from the East, through Byzantium, the Saracens and the Crusades, and lingers over lost marvels of embroidery. On lace he follows its growth from linen work to the points of Louis XIV's reign, and ends endorsing Lefebure's defence of handmade lace against machines.
Wilde welcomes E. Nesbit's Lays and Legends, whose verse turns from science to Socialism and the cry of revolution, though he prefers her gentler poems for their eye for Nature and sense of colour. David Skaats Foster writes Salem tales in the metre of Hiawatha, and John Renton Denning overdoes his Keats. Joseph McKim, Mrs. Horace Dobell and James Kelly get brief verdicts, and Wilde suggests Clarence Walworth's title Andiatorocte be returned to the Indians.
Wilde finds great power but no perfected poems in W. E. Henley's unrhymed hospital pieces, prefers his rondels and ballades, and praises the sane personality behind the book. He disputes William Sharp's preface calling for simplicity and a revival of the ballad, and finds his Scots dialect poems mere pastiche. A. Mary F. Robinson is a true artist when she stays in her garden and fails with great themes. The collected poems of Mrs. Craik are pleasant, old-fashioned reading.
Wilde argues that writers of poetical prose are rarely good poets, since poetry needs more self-restraint than prose. Sir Edwin Arnold's With Sa'di in the Garden, a night of talk on love beside the Taj Mahal, has fine descriptions and translations, but Arnold is a poetical writer, not a poet. Wilde condemns his habit of stuffing the verse with Indian words, calling it local discoloration and an act of treason against English literature.
Wilde reviews Australian Poets, 1788-1888, edited by Douglas B. W. Sladen, and calls it a herbarium rather than an anthology. He regrets that Gordon, through whom Australia 'found her first fine utterance in song', is barely represented, and finds most of the rest provincial echoes of Poe and Swinburne. Henry Clarence Kendall, with his poems on the Austral months and Beyond Kerguelen, is the real exception. Sladen's rewriting of a damaged poem in his own words amuses him. His verdict: a book of historical interest, but almost unreadable.
Wilde's Woman's World column opens with Mrs. Ross's Three Generations of English Women, the memoirs and letters of Mrs. John Taylor, Sarah Austin and Lady Duff Gordon, which he quotes at length, from Bentham and Carlyle to Heine and Sydney Smith, and calls one of the books of the season. He praises Lady Lindsay's one-volume novel Caroline and cheers the decline of the three-volume novel. Among Christmas books he singles out Walter Crane's Flora's Feast, then argues that illustration should decorate the page, not merely picture it.
Wilde reviews In Vinculis, the sonnets Wilfrid Scawen Blunt wrote in Galway Gaol, some on the fly-leaves of his prayer-book. Where The Love Sonnets of Proteus were affected and petulant, prison has given Blunt sincerity, grief, scorn and passion, and Wilde quotes several sonnets in full. He also admires The Canon of Aughrim, on the tragic life of the Irish peasant. His verdict turns on Mr. Balfour: by sending Blunt to gaol he has made a clever rhymer into an earnest poet.
Wilde reviews November Boughs, Walt Whitman's last book, and lets Whitman explain himself through its opening essay, A Backward Glance O'er Travel'd Roads: his reading of Homer and the Bible out of doors, the influence of Poe and the Civil War, and his refusal to have the lines on sex cut. Wilde argues that even in rejecting art Whitman is a deliberate artist. His verdict is generous: the value of the work lies in its prophecy, not its performance.
Wilde reviews The Enchanted Island by Wyke Bayliss, new President of the Royal Society of British Artists, measuring him throughout against his predecessor Whistler. Bayliss writes better prose than Whistler but is tedious, his sonnets are bad and his call to paint Nature as she really is is old-fashioned. Wilde mocks his plan for the House of Commons to choose subjects for historic pictures, since a great event is not necessarily a pictorial one. The verdict: a pleasant writer to whom art is a sealed book.
Wilde's Woman's World column praises W. B. Yeats's Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry, retelling its trooping and solitary fairies, banshees, ghosts and Tír-na-n-Og, and quoting Yeats's tribute to Lady Wilde's Ancient Legends. He admires Violet Fane's crowded novel Helen Davenant, finds Anna Kingsford's Dreams and Dream-Stories a little disappointing and mocks modern mysticism. Amy Levy's The Romance of a Shop is bright but for its needless tragedy, and Margaret Lee's Faithful and Unfaithful is powerful but not very pleasing.
Wilde welcomes John Martin Crawford's translation of the Kalevala, the Finnish epic, which he ranks beside Homer, the Niebelunge and the Mahabharata. He retells from Crawford's preface how Topelius, bedridden, and Lönnrot, travelling by sledge and canoe, gathered the songs from the people. He describes the pagan gods of air, water and forest, notes the metre Longfellow borrowed for Hiawatha, and quotes Ilmarinen's eagle and Wainamoinen's boat-building. The poem is less an epic than a collection of folk-songs, but one of the world's great poems.
Wilde reviews Pen and Ink, essays by Brander Matthews, who praises his own book in its preface. He enjoys the pieces on Poker, Euchre, old jokes and bad French, and retells their anecdotes. On literature he finds Matthews dull and without critical faculty, above all in ranking Frederick Locker's society verse beside the poetry of Austin Dobson, whose Lines to a Greek Girl he sets beside Thyrsis. His verdict: Matthews should keep to journalism, where he can 'write funny.'
Wilde's Woman's World column finds E. Nesbit's Leaves of Life graceful, at its best on love and nature, and greets W. B. Yeats's first book, The Wanderings of Oisin, as fragmentary but full of Celtic romantic promise. He enjoys Lady Munster's Dorinda, whose kleptomaniac heroine is a well-born Becky Sharp, and regrets that novelists now prefer doing good to portraying manners. Mrs. Walford's Four Biographies from 'Blackwood' wins praise for its Hannah More, and Mabel Wotton's Word Portraits of Famous Writers is a delightful book to glance at.
Wilde reviews William Morris's A Tale of the House of the Wolfings, a saga in blended prose and verse about the Wolfings' struggle against the Roman legions advancing into Northern Germany. He defends its deliberately archaic style: when the result is beautiful, the method is justified. He outlines Thiodolf's choice of death over a magic hauberk that would save him and ruin his people, and quotes passages of prose and verse. His verdict is warm: a work of pure art, far from the ignoble fiction and facts of the day.
Wilde reviews the Poems of Adam Lindsay Gordon and rejects the claim that through him Australia found her first fine utterance in song, a line from the Australian Poets review of December 1888. Gordon, he argues, remained thoroughly English, steeped in Swinburne and Browning, and the Australians loved chiefly his horse-racing poems. Emigration stunted him. Wilde quotes Marcus Clarke's preface on the weird Australian bush as material still waiting for its singer. The verdict: Gordon wrote imperfectly in Australia what he might have made perfect in England.
Wilde opens a batch of new verse with Mr. Justice Denman's The Story of the Kings of Rome in Verse, doggerel history written for a boy called Jack, and pities the child. He finds E. Cooper Willis's Tales and Legends spirited, the South African poets collected by A. Wilmot behind the age, and Louis Tylor's Chess unreadable. Lord Henry Somerset's Songs of Adieu draw his sharpest line: the poet has nothing to say and says it.
Wilde reviews Professor Knight's Wordsworthiana and relishes Mr. Rawnsley's paper of Westmoreland memories, in which dalesmen recall Wordsworth as an ugly-faced skater with a terrible deep voice and 'a great critic of trees'. He praises Lady Dilke's Art in the Modern State for its French clarity and its account of Colbert joining art to industry. Bret Harte's Cressy he calls one of its author's finest works, and he also notices E. M. Edmonds's Mary Myles, Richard Day's Poems and Ella Curtis's crowded A Game of Chance.
Wilde calls J. A. Froude's The Two Chiefs of Dunboy the latest Blue-book on Ireland, a heavy novel of the eighteenth century that arrives too late, since the Irish-American has changed everything. He attacks Froude's faith in 'resolute government' and his hero Colonel Goring, a 'Police at any price' man, and quotes a string of the book's aphorisms on the Irish. His verdict: dull, useless as a Tory remedy, but a record of the incapacity of a Teutonic to rule a Celtic people.
Wilde praises Caroline Fitz Gerald's Venetia Victrix, a Browning-like study of a Venetian seaman who sells his soul to save his city, and uses it to defend the obscurity of modern poetry: action takes place in the sunlight, but the soul works in the dark. He summarises David Ritchie's Darwinism and Politics on women and the State, credits Alan Cole with re-creating Irish lace-making through the convents and schools of art at Cork, and commends the Pundita Ramabai's The High-Caste Hindu Woman.
Wilde calls Ouida the last of the romantics and reads Guilderoy as a study of the peerage from a poetical point of view: 'No expense has been spared in gilding.' He sketches the plot of a weak lord, his shy bride and the Duchess of Soriá, enjoys Lady Sunbury, and quotes Ouida's political views on the House of Lords, which he declines to call ideas, and her aphorisms on love. His verdict: rarely true, never dull, a book to be read.
Wilde reviews An Author's Love, invented replies from the unknown woman of Mérimée's Lettres à une Inconnue, and admires the forgery as a fine, delicate piece of fiction that completes a real romance; to be put into fiction, he says, is a tribute to one's reality. He quotes her letters on love, friendship by post and meeting Disraeli. He then praises Graham R. Tomson's The Bird-Bride, defends dialect ballads for their dramatic unity, and calls her an artistic worker who treats language as a fine material.
Wilde recommends reading novels backwards and begins Stuart Cumberland's The Vasty Deep with its last page, where Brown the medium dies in a madhouse. He retells the plot with mock solemnity: a dead alderman, an exposed seance, a shipwreck in Newfoundland, the Micmac maiden La-ki-wa and a rival hurled out of a window. The exposure of mediums' tricks he thinks needless, the padding about Newfoundland intolerable, and the author too fond of low comedy.
Wilde wonders whether Alfred Austin has turned Socialist, mocking the utopia of Two Visions in Love's Widowhood, with its 'coarse suspicion of marriage' and its log-rolling poet, though he likes Austin's flower poems. W. J. Linton's Poems and Translations he finds clear and graceful. Héloïse Durant's Dante is lumbering, A. P. Graves's Father O'Flynn the work of a stage Irishman, and the anonymous author of The Judgment of the City has every sincerity except the artist's.
Wilde surveys Swinburne's career and reviews Poems and Ballads, Third Series. He calls him a great poet whose chief limitation is a lack of any sense of limit: language is his master, his imagery keeps to fire and the sea, and poems like the one on the Armada are an empty oratorical tour de force. He praises the Border ballads, The Weary Wedding and The Witch-Mother among them, and ends that for song's sake we must love Swinburne, but for the soul we must go elsewhere.
Wilde reviews three first books of verse. W. B. Yeats's The Wanderings of Oisin, uneven and sometimes crude, shows nobility of subject and the true poetic spirit, and tempts him to prophesy a fine future. Caroline Fitz Gerald's Venetia Victrix is better than its Browning-like aim and worth reading. Richard Le Gallienne's Volumes in Folio is dainty, bookish and derivative of Keats, but Wilde trusts he will pass to larger themes.
Wilde reviews Herbert Giles's translation of Chuang Tzu with mock alarm, calling it the most caustic criticism of modern life he has met. He sets out the sage's creed of Inaction: government, philanthropy, education and the worship of success all do harm, and the perfect man does nothing but gaze at the universe. He enjoys Chuang Tzu as a humorous story-teller and ends that the book is dangerous and premature, to be read but not talked about at dinner-parties.
Wilde recalls Walter Pater asking him at Oxford why he did not write prose, and reviews Appreciations with an Essay on Style. The essay on Style is the most interesting and least successful, the long later sentences come to have the charm of elaborate music, and the essay on Wordsworth is the finest, catching the poet's real secret. Wilde ranks Pater with Newman for the union of personality with perfection: he has no rival and has escaped disciples.
Wilde welcomes Primavera, poems by four Oxford friends. He gives most attention to Manmohan Ghose, born in India and schooled in England, whose songs show the influence of Keats and Matthew Arnold and who ought some day to make a name. Stephen Phillips's Orestes is dignified and Miltonic, Arthur Cripps is melodious at times, and Laurence Binyon, the Newdigate winner, echoes Shakespeare's sonnets. It is a pleasant little book, fit for undergraduates to read in lecture hours.