Essays and Lectures (eBook)
213 Seiten
Dead Dodo Presents Oscar Wilde (Verlag)
978-1-5080-2336-4 (ISBN)
Dodo Collections brings you another classic from Oscar Wilde, 'Essays and Lectures'.It is a collection of essays, lectures, reviews, letters, and aphorisms by Oscar Wilde.Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde (16 October 1854 - 30 November 1900) was an Irish author, playwright and poet. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of London's most popular playwrights in the early 1890s. He is remembered for his epigrams, his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, his plays, as well as the circumstances of his imprisonment and early death.At the height of his fame and success, while his masterpiece, The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), was still on stage in London, Wilde had the Marquess of Queensberry prosecuted for libel. The Marquess was the father of Wilde's lover, Lord Alfred Douglas. The charge carried a penalty of up to two years in prison. The trial unearthed evidence that caused Wilde to drop his charges and led to his own arrest and trial for gross indecency with other men. After two more trials he was convicted and imprisoned for two years' hard labour. In 1897, in prison, he wrote De Profundis, which was published in 1905, a long letter which discusses his spiritual journey through his trials, forming a dark counterpoint to his earlier philosophy of pleasure. Upon his release he left immediately for France, never to return to Ireland or Britain. There he wrote his last work, The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), a long poem commemorating the harsh rhythms of prison life. He died destitute in Paris at the age of 46.
THE ENGLISH RENAISSANCE OF ART
‘The English Renaissance of Art’ was delivered as a lecture for the first
time in the Chickering Hall, New York, on January 9, 1882. A portion of
it was reported in the _New York Tribune_ on the following day and in
other American papers subsequently. Since then this portion has been
reprinted, more or less accurately, from time to time, in unauthorised
editions.
There are in existence no less than four copies of the lecture, the
earliest of which is entirely in the author’s handwriting. The others
are type-written and contain many corrections and additions made by the
author in manuscript. These have all been collated and the text here
given contains, as nearly as possible, the lecture in the original form
as delivered by the author during his tour in the United States.
AMONG the many debts which we owe to the supreme æsthetic faculty of
Goethe is that he was the first to teach us to define beauty in terms the
most concrete possible, to realise it, I mean, always in its special
manifestations. So, in the lecture which I have the honour to deliver
before you, I will not try to give you any abstract definition of
beauty—any such universal formula for it as was sought for by the
philosophy of the eighteenth century—still less to communicate to you
that which in its essence is incommunicable, the virtue by which a
particular picture or poem affects us with a unique and special joy; but
rather to point out to you the general ideas which characterise the great
English Renaissance of Art in this century, to discover their source, as
far as that is possible, and to estimate their future as far as that is
possible.
I call it our English Renaissance because it is indeed a sort of new
birth of the spirit of man, like the great Italian Renaissance of the
fifteenth century, in its desire for a more gracious and comely way of
life, its passion for physical beauty, its exclusive attention to form,
its seeking for new subjects for poetry, new forms of art, new
intellectual and imaginative enjoyments: and I call it our romantic
movement because it is our most recent expression of beauty.
It has been described as a mere revival of Greek modes of thought, and
again as a mere revival of mediæval feeling. Rather I would say that to
these forms of the human spirit it has added whatever of artistic value
the intricacy and complexity and experience of modern life can give:
taking from the one its clearness of vision and its sustained calm, from
the other its variety of expression and the mystery of its vision. For
what, as Goethe said, is the study of the ancients but a return to the
real world (for that is what they did); and what, said Mazzini, is
mediævalism but individuality?
It is really from the union of Hellenism, in its breadth, its sanity of
purpose, its calm possession of beauty, with the adventive, the
intensified individualism, the passionate colour of the romantic spirit,
that springs the art of the nineteenth century in England, as from the
marriage of Faust and Helen of Troy sprang the beautiful boy Euphorion.
Such expressions as ‘classical’ and ‘romantic’ are, it is true, often apt
to become the mere catchwords of schools. We must always remember that
art has only one sentence to utter: there is for her only one high law,
the law of form or harmony—yet between the classical and romantic spirit
we may say that there lies this difference at least, that the one deals
with the type and the other with the exception. In the work produced
under the modern romantic spirit it is no longer the permanent, the
essential truths of life that are treated of; it is the momentary
situation of the one, the momentary aspect of the other that art seeks to
render. In sculpture, which is the type of one spirit, the subject
predominates over the situation; in painting, which is the type of the
other, the situation predominates over the subject.
There are two spirits, then: the Hellenic spirit and the spirit of
romance may be taken as forming the essential elements of our conscious
intellectual tradition, of our permanent standard of taste. As regards
their origin, in art as in politics there is but one origin for all
revolutions, a desire on the part of man for a nobler form of life, for a
freer method and opportunity of expression. Yet, I think that in
estimating the sensuous and intellectual spirit which presides over our
English Renaissance, any attempt to isolate it in any way from in the
progress and movement and social life of the age that has produced it
would be to rob it of its true vitality, possibly to mistake its true
meaning. And in disengaging from the pursuits and passions of this
crowded modern world those passions and pursuits which have to do with
art and the love of art, we must take into account many great events of
history which seem to be the most opposed to any such artistic feeling.
Alien then from any wild, political passion, or from the harsh voice of a
rude people in revolt, as our English Renaissance must seem, in its
passionate cult of pure beauty, its flawless devotion to form, its
exclusive and sensitive nature, it is to the French Revolution that we
must look for the most primary factor of its production, the first
condition of its birth: that great Revolution of which we are all the
children though the voices of some of us be often loud against it; that
Revolution to which at a time when even such spirits as Coleridge and
Wordsworth lost heart in England, noble messages of love blown across
seas came from your young Republic.
It is true that our modern sense of the continuity of history has shown
us that neither in politics nor in nature are there revolutions ever but
evolutions only, and that the prelude to that wild storm which swept over
France in 1789 and made every king in Europe tremble for his throne, was
first sounded in literature years before the Bastille fell and the Palace
was taken. The way for those red scenes by Seine and Loire was paved by
that critical spirit of Germany and England which accustomed men to bring
all things to the test of reason or utility or both, while the discontent
of the people in the streets of Paris was the echo that followed the life
of Emile and of Werther. For Rousseau, by silent lake and mountain, had
called humanity back to the golden age that still lies before us and
preached a return to nature, in passionate eloquence whose music still
lingers about our keen northern air. And Goethe and Scott had brought
romance back again from the prison she had lain in for so many
centuries—and what is romance but humanity?
Yet in the womb of the Revolution itself, and in the storm and terror of
that wild time, tendencies were hidden away that the artistic Renaissance
bent to her own service when the time came—a scientific tendency first,
which has borne in our own day a brood of somewhat noisy Titans, yet in
the sphere of poetry has not been unproductive of good. I do not mean
merely in its adding to enthusiasm that intellectual basis which in its
strength, or that more obvious influence about which Wordsworth was
thinking when he said very nobly that poetry was merely the impassioned
expression in the face of science, and that when science would put on a
form of flesh and blood the poet would lend his divine spirit to aid the
transfiguration. Nor do I dwell much on the great cosmical emotion and
deep pantheism of science to which Shelley has given its first and
Swinburne its latest glory of song, but rather on its influence on the
artistic spirit in preserving that close observation and the sense of
limitation as well as of clearness of vision which are the
characteristics of the real artist.
The great and golden rule of art as well as of life, wrote William Blake,
is that the more distinct, sharp and defined the boundary line, the more
perfect is the work of art; and the less keen and sharp the greater is
the evidence of weak imitation, plagiarism and bungling. ‘Great
inventors in all ages knew this—Michael Angelo and Albert Durer are known
by this and by this alone’; and another time he wrote, with all the
simple directness of nineteenth-century prose, ‘to generalise is to be an
idiot.’
And this love of definite conception, this...
Erscheint lt. Verlag | 21.8.2015 |
---|---|
Reihe/Serie | Oscar Wilde Collection | Oscar Wilde Collection |
Sprache | englisch |
Themenwelt | Literatur ► Anthologien |
Literatur ► Romane / Erzählungen | |
Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft | |
Schlagworte | Aphorisms • British • Classic • classics • Collection • English • Essays • Kindle • Lectures • Letters • Oscar • Reviews • Victorian • Wilde |
ISBN-10 | 1-5080-2336-0 / 1508023360 |
ISBN-13 | 978-1-5080-2336-4 / 9781508023364 |
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