12/3/ · The Project Gutenberg eBook, Essays and Lectures, by Oscar Wilde, Edited by Robert Ross This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at blogger.com Title Oscar Wilde’s the Importance of being Earnest. Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest takes place in the Victorian Era and follows Jack Worthing, a man who creates a fake identity named Earnest in order to escape his home life and win the heart of Gwendolyn Fairfax, an aristocrat from London Free【 Essay on Oscar Wilde 】- use this essays as a template to follow while writing your own paper. More than essay samples Get a % Unique paper from best writers
Essays and Lectures, by Oscar Wilde
iv First Published in Book Form Limited Edition on Handmade Paper and Japanese Vellum. 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, oscar wilde essays, with the possible exception of Ruskin.
Perhaps Magdalen, which has never forgiven herself for nurturing the author of Ravennamay oscar wilde essays felicitated oscar wilde essays 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 p. x from notes and were repeated oscar wilde essays various towns in England and America. 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, oscar wilde essays, 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 oscar wilde essays not get them off on the public oscar wilde essays p.
xi he was forestalled. Reluctance from an appeal to publicity was never a weakness in either of the men. 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. 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 oscar wilde essays the moment, or inspired by the chance observation of some one who managed to get the traditional word in edgeways; or they were p.
xii 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 oscar wilde essays 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, oscar wilde essays, has cleverly noted down some of them in a privately printed volume. To Professor J.
Mackail thanks are due for revising the proofs. Historical criticism nowhere occurs as an isolated fact in the civilisation or literature of any people, oscar wilde essays. It is part of that complex working towards freedom which may be described as the revolt against authority. It is merely one facet of that speculative spirit of an innovation, which in the sphere of action produces democracy and revolution, and in that of thought is the parent of philosophy and physical science; and its importance as a factor of progress is based not so much oscar wilde essays the results it attains, as on the tone of thought which it represents, and the method by which it works.
Being thus the resultant of forces essentially revolutionary, it is not to be found in the ancient world among the material despotisms of Asia or the stationary civilisation of Egypt.
The clay cylinders of Assyria and Babylon, the hieroglyphics of oscar wilde essays pyramids, form not history but the material for history. The Chinese annals, ascending as they oscar wilde essays to the barbarous forest life of the oscar wilde essays, are marked with a soberness of judgment, a freedom from invention, which is almost unparalleled in the writings oscar wilde essays any people; but the protective spirit which is the characteristic of that people proved as fatal to their literature as to their commerce, oscar wilde essays.
Free criticism is as unknown as free trade. While as regards the Hindus, their acute, analytical and logical mind is directed rather to grammar, criticism and philosophy than to history or chronology. Indeed, in history their imagination seems to have run wild, legend and fact are so indissolubly mingled together that any attempt to separate them seems vain.
If we except the identification of the Greek Sandracottus with the Indian Chandragupta, we oscar wilde essays really no clue by which we can test the truth of their writings or examine their method of investigation.
It is among the Hellenic branch of the Indo-Germanic race that history proper oscar wilde essays to be found, as well as the spirit of historical criticism; among that wonderful offshoot of the primitive Aryans, whom we call by the name of Greeks and to whom, as has been well said, oscar wilde essays, we owe all that moves in the world except the blind forces of nature.
For, from the day when they left the chill table-lands of Tibet and journeyed, a nomad people, to Ægean shores, the characteristic of their nature has been the search for light, and the spirit of historical criticism is part of that wonderful Aufklärung or illumination of the intellect which seems to have burst on the Greek race like a great flood of light about the sixth century B.
It is from democracy that the spirit of criticism borrows its intolerance of dogmatic oscar wilde essays, from physical science the alluring analogies of law and order, from philosophy the conception of an essential unity underlying the complex manifestations of phenomena.
It appears first rather as a changed attitude of mind than as a principle of research, and its earliest influences are to be found in the sacred writings, oscar wilde essays. For men begin to doubt in questions of religion first, and then in matters of more secular interest; and as regards the nature of the spirit of historical criticism itself in its ultimate development, it is not confined merely to the empirical method of ascertaining whether an event happened or not, but is concerned also with the investigation into the causes of events, the general relations which phenomena of life hold to one another, and in its ultimate development passes into the wider question of the philosophy of history.
Now, while the workings of historical criticism in these two spheres of sacred and uninspired history are essentially manifestations of the same spirit, yet their methods are so different, oscar wilde essays, the canons of evidence so entirely separate, and the motives in each case so unconnected, that it will be necessary for a clear estimation of oscar wilde essays progress of Greek thought, that we should consider these two questions entirely apart from one another.
I shall then in both cases take the succession of writers in their chronological order as representing the rational order—not that the succession of time is always the succession of ideas, or that dialectics moves ever in the straight line in which Hegel conceives its advance, oscar wilde essays.
In Greek thought, as elsewhere, there are periods of stagnation and apparent retrogression, yet their intellectual development, oscar wilde essays, not merely in the question of historical criticism, but in their art, their poetry and their philosophy, seems so essentially normal, so free from all disturbing external influences, so peculiarly rational, that in following in the footsteps of time we shall really be progressing in the order sanctioned by reason.
At an early period in their intellectual development the Greeks reached that critical point in the history of every civilised nation, when speculative invades the domain of revealed truth, when the spiritual ideas of the people can no longer be satisfied by the lower, material conceptions of their inspired writers, and when men find it impossible to pour the new wine of free thought into the old bottles of a narrow and a trammelling creed.
Now while undoubtedly the speculations of Thales, oscar wilde essays, and the alluring analogies of law and order afforded by physical science, were most important forces in encouraging the rise of the spirit of scepticism, yet it was on its ethical side that the Greek mythology was chiefly open to attack.
Any honest belief, then, oscar wilde essays, in the plain truth of these stories soon succumbed before the destructive effects of the a priori ethical criticism of this school; but the orthodox party, as is its custom, found immediately a convenient shelter under the ægis of the doctrine of metaphors and concealed meanings. To this allegorical school the tale of the fight around the walls of Troy was a mystery, behind which, as behind a veil, oscar wilde essays, were hidden certain moral and physical truths.
Modern investigation, with the ruthlessness of Philistine analysis, has ultimately brought Helen of Troy down to a symbol of the dawn. Now while this tendency to look for metaphors and hidden meanings must be ranked as one of the germs of historical criticism, yet it was essentially unscientific. Its inherent weakness is clearly pointed out by Plato, who showed that while this theory will no doubt explain many of the current legends, yet, if it is to be appealed to at all, it must be as a universal principle; a position he is by no means prepared to admit.
Like many other great principles it suffered from its disciples, and furnished its own refutation when the web of Penelope was analysed into a metaphor of the rules of formal logic, the warp representing the premises, and the woof the conclusion. Rejecting, then, oscar wilde essays, the allegorical interpretation of the sacred writings as an essentially dangerous method, proving either too much or too little, oscar wilde essays, Plato himself returns to the earlier mode of attack, oscar wilde essays re-writes history with a didactic purpose, laying down certain ethical canons of historical criticism.
God is good; God is just; God is true; God is without the common passions of men. These are the tests to which we are to bring the stories of the Greek religion. Away with the tears for Sarpedon, the lying dream sent to Agamemnon, and the story of the broken oscar wilde essays But besides the allegorising principle of interpretation, and the ethical reconstruction of history, there was a third theory, which may be called the semi-historical, and which goes by the name of Euhemeros, though he was by no means the first to propound it, oscar wilde essays.
Now, that under the glamour of myth and legend some substratum of historical fact may lie, is a proposition rendered extremely oscar wilde essays by the modern investigations into the workings of the mythopœic spirit in post-Christian times. Charlemagne and Roland, oscar wilde essays, St. Francis and William Tell, are none the less real personages because their histories are filled with much that is fictitious and incredible, but in all cases what is essentially necessary is some external corroboration, such as is afforded by the mention of Roland and Roncesvalles in the chronicles of England, or in the sphere of Greek legend by the excavations of Hissarlik, oscar wilde essays.
But to rob a mythical narrative of its kernel of supernatural elements, and to present the dry husk thus obtained as historical fact, is, oscar wilde essays, as has been well said, oscar wilde essays, to mistake entirely the true method of investigation and to identify plausibility with truth, oscar wilde essays. This Euhemeristic theory was welcomed as an essentially philosophical and critical method by the unscientific Romans, to whom it was introduced by the poet Ennius, oscar wilde essays, that pioneer of cosmopolitan Hellenicism, and it continued to characterise the tone of ancient thought on the question of the treatment of mythology till the rise of Christianity, when it was turned by such writers as Augustine and Minucius Felix into a formidable weapon of attack on Paganism.
It was then abandoned by all those oscar wilde essays still bent the knee to Athena or to Zeus, and a general return, aided by the philosophic mystics of Alexandria, oscar wilde essays, to the allegorising principle of interpretation took place, as the only means of saving the deities of Olympus from the Titan assaults of the new Galilean God.
In what vain defence, the statue of Mary set in the heart of the Pantheon can best tell us. Religions, however, may be absorbed, but they never are disproved, and the stories of the Greek mythology, oscar wilde essays, spiritualised by the purifying influence of Christianity, reappear in many of the southern parts of Europe in our own day. The old fable that the Greek gods took service with the new religion under assumed names has more truth in it than the many care to discover.
Having oscar wilde essays traced the progress of historical criticism in the special treatment of myth and legend, I shall proceed to investigate the form in which the same spirit manifested itself as regards what one may term secular history and secular historians.
The field traversed will be found to be in some respects the same, but the mental attitude, the spirit, the motive of investigation are all changed. There were heroes before the son of Atreus and historians before Herodotus, yet the latter is rightly hailed as the father of history, for in him we discover not merely the empirical connection of cause and effect, but that constant reference to Laws, which is the characteristic of the historian proper.
For oscar wilde essays history must be essentially universal; not in the sense of comprising all the synchronous events of the past time, but through the universality of the principles employed. And the great conceptions which unify the work of Herodotus are such as even modern thought has not yet rejected.
He is essentially the type of supernatural historian; his eyes are ever strained to discern the Spirit of God moving over the face of the waters of life; he is more concerned with final than with efficient causes. Yet we can discern in him the rise of that historic sense which is the rational antecedent of the science of historical criticism, oscar wilde essays, the φυσικὸν κριτήριονto use the words of a Greek writer, as opposed to that which comes either τέχνη or διδαχῇ.
He has passed through the valley of faith and has caught a glimpse of the sunlit heights of Reason; but like all those who, while accepting the supernatural, yet attempt to apply the canons of rationalism, he oscar wilde essays essentially inconsistent.
For the better apprehension of the character of this historic sense in Herodotus it will be necessary to examine at some length the various forms of criticism in which it manifests itself.
Such fabulous stories as that of the Phoenix, of the goat-footed men, of the headless beings with eyes in their breasts, of the men who slept six months in the year τοῦτο οὐκ ἐνδέχομαι ηὴν ἀρχήνof the wer-wolf of the Neuri, and the like, are entirely rejected by him as being opposed to the ordinary experience of life, and to those natural laws whose universal influence the early Greek physical philosophers had already made known to the world of thought.
The supernatural origin of the Scythian nation, from the union of Hercules and the monstrous Echidna, is set aside by him for the more probable account that they were a nomad tribe driven by the Massagetæ from Asia; and he appeals to the local names of their country as proof of the fact that the Kimmerians were the original possessors.
But in the case of Herodotus it will be more instructive to pass on from points like these to those questions of general probability, the true apprehension of which depends rather on a certain quality of mind than on any possibility of formulated rules, questions which form no unimportant part of scientific history; for it must be remembered always that the canons of historical criticism are essentially different from those of judicial evidence, for they cannot, oscar wilde essays, like the latter, be made plain to every ordinary mind, but appeal to a certain historical faculty founded on oscar wilde essays experience of life.
Besides, the rules for the reception of evidence in courts of oscar wilde essays are purely stationary, while the science of historical probability is essentially progressive, and changes with the advancing spirit of each age. Now, of all the speculative canons of historical criticism, none is more important than that which rests on psychological probability.
Arguing from his knowledge of human nature, Herodotus rejects the presence of Helen within the walls of Troy. Had she been there, he says, oscar wilde essays, Priam and his kinsmen would never have been so mad φρενοβλαβεῖς as not to give her up, when they and their children and their city were in such peril ii.
Similarly he does not believe that the Alcmæonidæ family, a family who had always been the haters of tyranny μισοτύραννοιand to whom, even more than to Harmodios and Aristogeiton, Athens owed its liberty, would ever have been so treacherous as to hold up a shield after the battle of Marathon as a signal for the Persian host to fall on oscar wilde essays city.
Elsewhere he argues from more general considerations of probability; a Greek courtesan like Rhodopis would hardly have been rich enough to build a pyramid, oscar wilde essays, and, besides, on chronological grounds the story is impossible ii, oscar wilde essays. In another passage ii. There is, of course, something a little trivial in some of the instances I have quoted; but in a writer like Herodotus, who stands on the borderland between faith and rationalism, one likes to note even the most minute instances of the rise of the critical and sceptical spirit of inquiry.
How really strange, at base, it was with him may, I think, oscar wilde essays, be shown by a reference to those passages where he applies rationalistic tests to matters connected with religion. He nowhere, indeed, grapples with the moral and scientific difficulties of the Greek Bible; and where he rejects as incredible the marvellous achievements of Hercules in Egypt, he does so on the express grounds that he had not yet been received among the gods, and so was still subject to the ordinary conditions of mortal life ἔτι ἄνθρωπον ἐόντα.
Even within these limits, however, his religious conscience seems to have been troubled at such daring rationalism, and the passage ii. Similarly he seems more inclined to believe that the great storm at the beginning of the Persian War ceased from ordinary atmospheric causes, and not in consequence of the incantations of the Magians. So much then for the rationalistic spirit of historical criticism, as far as it appears explicitly in the works of this great and philosophic writer; but for an adequate appreciation of his position we must also note how conscious he was of the value of documentary evidence, oscar wilde essays, of the use of inscriptions, of the importance of the poets as throwing light on manners and customs as well as on historical incidents, oscar wilde essays.
While, however, we can discern in Herodotus the rise of an historic sense, we must not blind ourselves to the large amount of instances where he receives supernatural influences as part of the ordinary forces of life.
Compared to Thucydides, who succeeded him in the development of history, he appears almost like a mediæval writer matched with a modern rationalist. For, oscar wilde essays, contemporary though they were, between these two authors there is an infinite chasm of thought. The essential difference of their methods may be best illustrated from those passages where they treat of the same subject.
The execution of the Spartan heralds, Nicolaos and Aneristos, during the Peloponnesian War is regarded by Herodotus as one of the most supernatural instances of the workings of nemesis and the wrath of an outraged hero; while the lengthened siege and ultimate fall of Troy was brought about by the avenging hand of God desiring to manifest unto men the mighty penalties which always follow upon mighty sins.
But Thucydides either sees not, or desires not to see, in either of these events the finger of Providence, or the punishment of wicked doers. Now, it is to be observed that in this oscar wilde essays passage, as well as elsewhere, Oscar wilde essays is in no sense of the word a sceptic as regards his attitude towards the truth of these ancient legends. Agamemnon and Atreus, Theseus and Eurystheus, even Oscar wilde essays, about whom Herodotus has some doubts, oscar wilde essays, are to him as real personages as Alcibiades or Gylippus.
The points in his historical criticism of the past are, first, his rejection of all extra-natural interference, and, secondly, the attributing to these ancient heroes the motives and modes of thought of his own day.
Essays and Lectures by Oscar Wilde - Read Online - The Literature Page
Oscar Wilde: Essays and Lectures Table of Contents. Essays and Lectures (Essays, , pages) This title is not on Your Bookshelf. [Add to Shelf] (0 / 10 books on shelf) THE RISE OF HISTORICAL CRITICISM 1. CHAPTER I 2. CHAPTER II 3. CHAPTER III 4. CHAPTER IV THE ENGLISH RENAISSANCE OF ART Oscar Wilde Essay Words | 4 Pages. Oscar Wilde was one of the most prominent Irish born playwrights. He was a major player in the aesthetic movement, which was based on art for art’s sake. Wilde was also a novelist, playwright, poet, and critic. He was born Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wilson Wilde on October 16, , in Dublin, Ireland Essays and Lectures Art and the Handicraftsman» An essay on art - There is no opposition to beauty except ugliness: all things are either De Profundis» A very long, intensely emotional letter written from prison at Reading Gaol to Lord Alfred Douglas – House Decoration» A lecture on house
No comments:
Post a Comment