I found this at the thrift store today and it’s now my most prized possession, it’s so so beautiful and the lady I bought it from kept telling me about how beautiful “the nightingale and the rose” is. I can’t wait to read more of Oscar Wilde

I love his fairy tales and stories. I love Dorian Gray, and I love his playfulness when it comes to questions of morality.
It was therefore so sad to read his 'De Profundis'. Although written under extreme conditions, and therefore miraculously coherent, it revealed such a bitterness and moral disapproval on the part of the author. Did it diminish the magnitude of his genius? I'm not sure...

I FINALLY DID IT!!!
on the whole i loved the experience of being able to read all of Wilde's works.
I loved the majority o his works, but some i just couldn't't get into... i probably wasn't smart enough lmao
so yeah, took a while but i'm very glad i did this!

Oscar Wilde is as witty as he is poignantly ominous. His shrewd clever ability to construct such brilliant lines that carry such an enormous philosophical weight is flabbergasting.

In this collection of works, one gets to see various sides of Oscar Wilde, some written very early in his literary career, and some written very late. Often one is forced to stop and reflect, the aphorisms of Oscar will never run trite, as this collection makes for a sharp tool on any reader's bookshelf.

Brent McCulley

Must read for all lovers of recreational reading

Wilde narra de una forma muy bonita y única que me gusta mucho. Tiene un estilo muy particular y me encantan las metáforas que hace, son muy ingeniosas y bonitas no sé de que otra manera describirlas xd. Leía sus cuentos cuando era chica, lo que me trajo muchos recuerdos al leerlos ahora (sobre todo El principe feliz, ése era y sigue siendo mi favorito, me puse a llorar cuando lo leí ahora xd; debería ser obligación para toda la población leerlo). Y eso mismo lo encuentro muy bacan, que se disfruten siendo niñx, joven, adultx, pero teniendo siempre un significado y una manera de entenderlo distinta.

Wow - why had a not read Oscar Wilde before? He immediately jumped to the top of my list of favorite authors...and easily at that! I love how an author who wrote over 100 years ago can make me laugh out loud; I love that his jabs at Americans are still relevant. So far the Canterville Ghost is my favorite, and I am currently reading the Picture of Dorian Gray.

Maybe my favorite author

Sencillamente una delicia.

It’s true, in Wilde’s preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray, that thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art. In fact that’s pretty well a truism, isn’t it? since the art, if art, would in this case be of written language. We are being nudged into believing what we’re to read is art, that he’s an artist. The first time I read this novel I found it cold and repellent. That doesn’t mean it isn’t art. It might be all the greater an artefact to make for that effect.
How is it the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors? What does that mean anyway? The artist in his art is mirroring the spectator – of the art? the reader? or the artist, as a spectator, of life? Wouldn’t it have to be the former since the artist is making the mirror for the spectator to look at and see himself? That’s likely a shelving of responsibility from the artist to the reader, by likening the artefact to a mirror, a reflective surface, diverting attention from itself, its makeup, who made it and why he made it as it is or was, cold and repellent. Was I seeing myself or the artist himself in his artefact? or neither? This is a preface to a fiction which deals with the relationship of an artist to what he puts himself into and that of a spectator who sees himself in it.
How flame-like can laburnum be? I’ve struck a match to see. Honey-coloured the flame may be above the blue but nowhere near as yellow as laburnum which hangs down.
For goodness’ sake! I exclaim, incredulous at an affected character’s saying ‘I can believe anything provided that it is quite incredible.’ Really? Is that supposed to be wit? A paradox? That the basis of belief is unbelievability? Mind you I have heard somebody insist the resurrection is so unbelievable it has to be true. The Xian did affect to believe what he was saying; the character doesn’t.
His friend, a painter, is inspired by another character into putting love for him into his art. The witty one observes how useful passion is for publication. ‘Genius lasts longer than beauty.’ You use the love to make the art rather than waste it on the beloved. Never trust what a poet says about love. Poets don’t know. They’ve never finished that course. They’re running quite another. Venus may rule both love and art but under separate signs.
Beauty is not so superficial as thought is, says the would-be witty one. Really? Food for thought there. I remember noticing one in ten men on the tube gape at me. It couldn’t be at my clothes which, like theirs, were drab. It had to be my face. None acted further on its effect. I was with somebody I thought beautiful. Now, was my beauty less superficial than my thinking on it? I set no store by it. How superficial was that! since it’s also an aspect of soul and its goodness, that this novel explores.
Wit is an accomplishment in saying something from your perspective that others suddenly understand from theirs but once you’ve established wittiness you can, experimentally, say something that’s not funny and they’ll laugh anyway. Written wit is a greater accomplishment, even the greatest, because you’re laying a mine in one time for any reader’s eye at a future time to trip over and trigger an explosion in his brain that bursts out as an involuntary guffaw. Oh, the power, the power! ‘The only difference between a caprice and a life-long passion is that the caprice lasts a little longer’ evoked not a laugh but an ‘och’ and face averted in disgust at the failure of intended wit. I’ve since done my research; I looked up the dictionary. Incontrovertibly a life-long passion lasts the length of a life. If, as may be inferred, for somebody other than yourself, for your mother, till she dies or hers, for you, till she dies, if you’re lucky. A caprice is by definition an unaccountable change of mind or conduct, on a whim, a turn on a sixpence, in an instant. If I have a life-long passion for anything it’s for life itself and to make art of it. This book is about making art from life though you’d have to suspend you disbelief an artefact which isn’t life can do that.
The idea is brilliant, like Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and deftly worked out.
Aristotle defined man as a rational animal.
There are nice touches. A character smiles at missing where he was going from having been lost in thought. Without giving the content the author conveys the brio of an improvisation by a wit keen to fascinate one of his hearers. I’ve done that, working out why I was being witty and turning about to find the one I entranced following me upstairs.
It can also be a bit forced. A character excuses himself for being late because he had to haggle for hours over a piece of brocade simply for the author to get in ‘people know the price of everything and the value of nothing’ as a witticism bolted onto the character though it makes little sense in the context of him as a prospective buyer arguing to reduce the price of what he thought valuable.
It’s true women are always bothering us to do something for them, though that nothing is ever quite true is also true, but ...acting is so much more real than life? Please! The statement it is, however, is relevant since the actress Dorian loves can no longer take acting for real on loving him and acts badly. Unfortunately it’s for her acting he loves her. I was morally outraged at his ensuing behaviour, as I was supposed to be, though it did bring to mind my own with the girl from Millau I encouraged to come to London and on our meeting up there unceremoniously dumped. That was entirely different!
The actress has an uncouth brother who you know just exists to make an appearance later as nemesis.
The fear of god to us all? We no longer all fear god. How times have changed! It’s still possible to appreciate the exasperation in ‘women never know when the curtain has fallen. They always want a sixth act, and as soon as the play’ of love ‘is entirely over they propose to continue it!’ He was too clever and too cynical for Dorian to be really fond of him, Lord Harry. I’ll say! All that wit becomes quite wearisome, as his wife agrees by action if not words. You keep wanting to see the reality behind the mask. His clever tongue gets on one’s nerves. Looming over all is what you know of the author. There are moments, the narrator says, when the passion for sin, or’ - he excuses himself - ‘for what the world calls sin, so dominates a nature, that every fibre of the body ...seems to be instinct with fearful impulses. Men ...at such moments lose the freedom of their will. They move to their terrible end as automatons move. Choice is taken from them.’ Wilde is anticipating himself when, urged to flee by Robbie Ross, he would wait to be arrested. He quite rightly, artistically, doesn’t make explicit what Dorian’s corruption of young men might be, leaving that to our imaginations.
It wasn’t Nero who had the velarium stretched across the Colosseum which was built where his golden palace had been razed. Probably Domitian. Dorian Gray was looking on evil as a mode through which he could realise his conception of the beautiful. I had to laugh at his ‘Poor Basil!’ of the painter character, as if he’d nothing to do with the ‘horrible way’ he died.
‘Ten years’ marriage ‘with Monmouth must’ve been like eternity,’ isn’t witty but ‘with time thrown in’ is. There’s a nice indirectness about Dorian’s reaction to what Harry said being conveyed through another character’s dialogue but, while her teeth showing like white seeds in a scarlet fruit is supposed to be beautiful, I had the ugly impression of a smashed fruit, a water melon say, with its seeds thus revealed. The reappearance of nemesis is nicely disguised and dealt with. I was a bit disoriented by the upper class milieu depicted but the working classes weren’t yet educated enough to write fiction with a different setting though Hardy was doing pretty well.
There are nice throwaway lines like ‘Scotland Yard still insists that the man in the grey Ulster who left for Paris ...was poor Basil’ and ‘“What do you think has happened to Basil?” asked Dorian.’ And funny ones: ‘The man with whom my wife ran away played Chopin exquisitely’ and ‘I dare say he fell into the Seine off an omnibus and that the conductor hushed up the scandal.’
Dorian ‘had often told the girl whom he had lured to love him that he was poor and she had believed him. He had told her once that he was wicked and she had laughed.’ It was no laughing matter. The soul may keep receptivity but badness hurts it and makes for unhappiness. I’d say it was driving Dorian insane because how else explain a most satisfactory ending.

I remembered the chiromantist goes pale on reading Lord Arthur Savile’s hand, as well he might. The contemporary historical reference is to General Boulanger, the figurehead of a movement against the republican constitution of France, I used my prize for being dux in history sixty-two years ago to look up. Lord Arthur just wants to get the crime over with. He sends his club’s waiter out to research the means but has to dirty his own aristocratic hands with the work. His efforts are amateurish as befits a gentleman. He finally puts his hands to good use in a spontaneous action that nonetheless brings about the predetermined end.
Miss Fanny Davenport is another contemporary reference.
I found the charity from an old beggar at the end of The Model Millionaire oddly moving, because of the benevolence depicted though I hadn’t been affected by the initial charity. ‘Uh-huh, wishful thinking’ was all I had to say at the end of The Young King. It should be ‘one white petal of his rose’ and not ‘pearl’ in The Birthday of the Infanta who, heartless herself, declares ‘let those who come to play with me have no hearts’. In The Fisherman and his Soul, Wilde describes Syria as an island. One already knows what the nightingale has to do for a red rose. The narrator does say of the student he only knew things he read in books. The end of The Selfish Giant i greeted with an ironic ‘great!’ Of The Beloved Friend all I have to say is that Hans deserved death.

In The Importance of Being Earnest Lady Bracknell presciently remarks educating the working classes would probably lead to acts of violence in Grosvenor Square as. Cecily makes a contemporary reference to the great depression which started in the 1870s, Lady Bracknell to the prevalent nihilism. This play unexpectedly reads as well and wittily as it would be performed, at least as it was, on screen in its film version. It’s plotted with the precision of clockwork, like an Orton or Ayckbourn farce. It’s perfect.
Lady Windermere’s Fan has the Aristotelian unity of time. Its tone is more serious than the soufflé of Importance. Lady Windermere finds men’s flattery patronising. She’s being set up as a puritan for a fall, like Oedipus. Play is made of the fan, like Desdemona’s kerchief or Chekov’s guns. I’m guessing Mrs Erlynne’s her mother. I may be more familiar with this play than I think. I did have another complete Wilde. Grandma thought as indulgently of whores as Lady Plymdale of courtesans. I feel Wilde is talking of himself in the character of Lord Darlington when he says, ‘but there are moments when one has to choose between living one’s own life... or dragging out some false, shallow, degrading existence that the world in its hypocrisy demands.’ Lord Darlington’s ‘now or not at all’ reminds me of Jo’s to me, “it’s now or never, Johnny.” “In that case it’s never.” In Lady Windermere’s it’s, ‘Then, not at all.’ Lady Agatha’s the running gag, her line the same throughout, peaking when her mother asks did Mr Hopper definitely ask – and is assured he did, only to find out her daughter’s assented to going to Australia! Lady Windermere’s ‘what a pity that in life we only get our lessons when they are of no use to us’ is sapient. I find the conclusion of this play moving.
A Woman of No Importance also has a unity of time. It’s all persiflage but with an undercurrent. You might think the fancy Lord Illingworth takes to a young man homo in nature but this is a Wilde play so more likely to be that of a father. I feel the American’s criticism of English society expresses Wilde’s. Lady Hunstanton says, ‘I have a dim idea, dear Lord Illingworth, that you are always on the side of the sinners, and I know I always try to be on the side of the saints, but that is as far as I get. And after all, it may be merely the fancy of a drowning person.’ ‘Illingworth’ might be a play on ‘ill in worth’. The undercurrent surfaces in a confrontation between him and the woman of no importance. I’d’ve thought the look on her face would be anger and not sorrow. It’s dramatically good one doesn’t take her side. I’d think she was overdoing it anyway if I hadn’t just been reading in The Observer the effect being deprived of their child has on women. The difference between them and my mother, a generation earlier, was she was self-dependent. She didn’t think she was disgraced either by not being married since she chose not to marry my father she didn’t think good enough for me, so this play may still be relevant and not as melodramatic as I think it though how it’s resolved isn’t overly convincing. The woman of no importance is nicely sardonic, however, in quoting the man’s words back at him and does have the last dismissive word.
An Ideal Husband is gripping to read. Check Lord Radley. It has the unity of time as well as unity of action. There’s an allusion to Othello. In our day being under-secretary of state for foreign affairs at forty would not be considered such a brilliant success. The alternate use of the brooch was broached earlier. Sir Robert’s taking his wife’s missive to himself confirms Mrs Cheveley’s interpretation of its meaning. ‘A man’s life is of more value than a woman’s’ elicited an exclamation mark in the margin. I’ve found women to be pragmatic and doubt Lady Chiltern for all her youthful puritanism would’ve needed Lord Goring’s counsel to let her husband pursue political ambition. That’s a weakness in the play hard to get round since she repeats his opinion of the relative value of a man’s life. She has, however, learned her lesson otherwise. The play has quite a good ending though I have to doubt Lord Goring would prove any more ideal a husband than Sir Robert. The women though deserve no better. Mrs Cheveley’s much the best character, having the worst.
The translation of Salomé is by Bosie. Oh dear. All the main characters, except Herodias, are obsessed. She just wants Jokanaan to shut up and doesn’t notice when his insults are redirected onto Salomé. ‘Can a man tell what will come to pass?’ Yes. Salomé is motivated by rejection. ‘(Salomé dances the dance of the seven veils.)’ Strauss must’ve seized on that simple stage direction. Good. I had the idea she went on to be a married woman of thirty-five. I didn’t find the thirty-five but did that she was married twice and had three sons, according to Josephus. The bible doesn’t name her but says she asked her mother what she should ask for after the dance, and there’s no call to disbelieve it on that score. Wilde puts the want entirely down to her. He also conflates two Herods, the Great who did die with worms in his genitalia and Antipas who didn’t. The play not only has unity of place and of action but of – curtailed - time.
The eponymous duchess of Parma does give Guido a second glance to alert us to what follows. ‘Get hence tonight from Padua’ reminds me of Kiss Me Kate. Why does Guido have to wait till told to do the deed and in the event why doesn’t Moranzone do it himself? There are many dramatic switches and not all plausible on a reading. You’d have to see the play in performance to find out if it works. The language is a bit too flowery to convince and often prosaically limps. ‘Get hence, I say, out of my sight,’ seems a bit extreme from an erstwhile lover. ‘I will not kiss you/Until the blood grows dry upon this knife/And not even then.’ What? It’s in blank verse. ‘This way went he, the man who slew my lord,’ informs the duchess. Good for her. I did see it coming. That the poison ‘smells of poppies’ is a dead giveaway it’s opium and not immediately effective. It’s a five act tragedy.
The prologue to Vera, or the Nihilists is very good. There’s a contemporary reference to the French republic set up by 1875. That the people should have one neck is an allusion to Caligula’s ‘Would that the Roman people had but one.’ (I couldn’t check at home because my Suetonius hasn’t been returned.) Through the Czarevitch’s ‘from the sick and labouring womb of this unhappy land some revolution ...may rise up and slay you,’ Wilde is anticipating the Russian. I was astonished the Nihilists should so readily accept the Czar’s prime minister. Vera’s ‘The people are not yet fit for a republic in Russia’ has proved true. I was surprised by her father’s fate in a belated back-story. I anticipated whose blood would be on the dagger. There are sardonic lines, ‘You remind us wonderfully, Sire, of your Imperial father’ and just plain funny ones like Vera’s ‘I am a Nihilist! I cannot wear a crown.’ The outcome is basically unbelievable in retrospect as is the character of the Czarevitch. Could it work?
A Florentine Tragedy could if it had been finished and an actor go from believing another man is there for goods other than his wife to realising what the audience suspects from the start, the play’s poetry improving with the ironic realisation. We also know the outcome from Simone’s ‘Who filches from me something that is mine... perils his body in the theft.’ The larger political consequence that might take murderer and accessory with it is well indicated.
Last and least La Sainte Courtisane.

‘with a little rod/I did but touch the honey of romance’! ‘These christs that die upon the barricades/god knows I am with them, in some things.’ I like that ‘in some things’. ‘Down in some treacherous black ravine/clutching his flag, the dead boy lies’ is effective. ‘This England.../by ignorant demagogues is held in fee’ makes me wonder who he means. He has a sonnet on the massacre of the Bulgarians, 1876. He writes a lot of poetry, showing cleverness and versatility but it’s etiolated, mythopoeic rehash in the main. Itys I thought a swallow or nightingale but is a goldfinch. Charmides is a fictionalising of history, of a sailor who was enamoured of the statue of a Aphrodite and did the dirty, leaving a smear on her thigh. I like the euphemism, ‘Nor knew that three days since his eyes had looked on Proserpine.’ ‘Great Pan is dead and Mary’s son is king,’ no longer. ‘And here and there a passer-by/shows like a little restless midge’ is good, as is ‘I remember your hair... for it always ran riot’. The Sphinx is rather good, with some drive to the poetic conceit of his cat metamorphosing into it and having an affair with a long since defunct god she can yet resurrect. Then life stepped in and made Wilde a real poet with The Ballad of Reading Gaol.

Too much god for me in the Teacher of Wisdom and too much christ in De Profundis which is not as I remember it half a century ago when it read as if being written there and then, to Bosie, with recrimination and passion. It’s still good but could be to anybody. The moral law doesn’t apply to him. He’s being unjustly punished. He won’t say prison is the best thing that could’ve happened to him, but it was since The Ballad of Reading Gaol and De Profundis came out of it. He admires Christ’s megalomania. He doesn’t seem to know opera keeps the Greek chorus. [See johnbrucecairns@wordpress for rest]

His humour prevails still, to an extraordinary extent. He writes with an omniscient prescience, sprinkling his views in each texts. The cynical jabs at critics, pseudo-artists, and art was a whole. The imagery is simple, most often, though effective and vivid.

Last summer, I bought this 1,114 page book from a used bookstore in Gallway, Ireland for €6 (what a steal!). It was the second Oscar Wilde book I had bought that trip (along with an Oscar Wilde tea towel and calendar).

And, of course, now, during quarantine, is the perfect time to read it.

I wonder what Oscar Wilde would be doing during the pandemic. Okay I digress.

Now that I’m done it feels surreal (1,000 pages oh my god). But this book was great because I had had no idea about some of his shorter stories and poems and plays and found new favorites!

Here is a list of Oscar’s best, most well-known works:
- The Picture of Dorian Gray
- The Importance of Being Earnest
- Lady Windermere’s Fan
- A Woman of No Importance
- An Idea Husband
- The Ballad of Reading Goal
- De Profundis

Here’s a list of other works that I really liked:
- The Canterville Ghost
- Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime
- The Duchess of Padua
- The Happy Prince
- The poems Requiescat, At Verona, and Silentium Amoris
- The Portrait of Mr. W. H.

I’d highly recommend Oscar Wilde. I’m not even going to try to explain how much and why I love his work because as neither Critic nor Artist, I cannot do it justice.

Anyways, thank you Oscar, for all of the 1,114 pages of published writing I’ve read in the past 5 weeks. I loved it.