ROBERT ROSS

May 25, 1908.

INTRODUCTION

The concluding volume of any collected edition is unavoidably fragmentary and desultory.  And if this particular volume is no exception to a general tendency, it presents points of view in the author’s literary career which may have escaped his greatest admirers and detractors.  The wide range of his knowledge and interests is more apparent than in some of his finished work.

What I believed to be only the fragment of an essay on Historical Criticism was already in the press, when accidentally I came across the remaining portions, in Wilde’s own handwriting; it is now complete 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 guard the buried spirit of progress.  When the dawn of the Greek spirit arose, the sepulchre was empty, the grave clothes laid aside.  Humanity had risen from the dead.’  It was only Wilde who could contrive a literary conceit of that description; but readers will observe with different feelings, according to their temperament, that he never followed up the particular trend of thought developed in the essay.  It is indeed more the work of the Berkeley Gold Medallist at Dublin, or the brilliant young Magdalen Demy than of the dramatist who was to write Salome.  The composition belongs to his 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.  Compared with the crude criticism on The Grosvenor Gallery (one of the earliest of Wilde’s published prose writings), Historical Criticism is singularly advanced and mature.  Apart from his mere scholarship Wilde developed his literary and dramatic talent slowly.  He told me that he was never regarded as a particularly precocious or clever youth.  Indeed many old family friends and contemporary journalists maintain sturdily that the talent of his elder brother William was much more remarkable.  In this opinion they are fortified, appropriately enough, by the late Clement Scott.  I record this interesting view because it symbolises the familiar phenomenon that those nearest the mountain cannot appreciate its height.