Oscar Wilde: a Critical Study

This volume was published in 1912.

Excerpts from the book's Introduction:

It is too easy to talk glibly of the choice
between life and literature. No choice can be
made between them. The whole is greater
than its part, and literature is at once the child
and the stimulus of life, inseparable from it.
But, beside art, life has other activities, all of
which aspire to the self-consciousness that art
makes possible. The artist himself, for all his
gift of tongues, is not blinded by the descending
light to the plastic qualities of the existence
that fires his words and is itself intensified by
his speech. He, too, moves in walled town or
on the green earth, and has a little time in
which to build two memories, one for his
fellows, and another, a secret diary, to carry
with him when he dies. In his life, his books
or pictures or brave harmonies of music are but
moments, notes of colour in a composition vital
to himself. And when we speak so carelessly
of a choice between life and literature, we do
not mean a choice. We only compare the
vividness of a man's whole life, as we perceive
it, with that of those portions of it that he spent
in books. Sometimes we wonder which is more
alive.
.............................................................

It is characteristic of great men that, born
out of their time, they should come to represent
it. Victor Hugo, in 1830, was a young man
irreverently trying to overturn established tradi-
tion. He had to pack a theatre with his friends
to save his play from being hissed. Now, look-
ing back on that time, his enemies seem to have
faded away, tired ghosts, and he to be alone
upon the stage laying about him on backs of
air. So far was the Elizabethan age from
a true appreciation of Shakespeare that Webster
could patronise him with praise of " his happy
and copious industry." Shakespeare was a busy
little dramatist, working away on the fringe of
the great light cast by the effulgent majesty of
Elizabeth. To-day Shakespeare divides with his
queen the honour of naming the years they
lived in. The nineties, the early nineties when
Wilde's talent was in full fruition, seem now,
at least in literature, to be coloured by the per-
sonality of Wilde and the movement foolishly
called Decadent. But in the nineties, when
Wilde was writing, he had a very few silent
friends and a very great number of vociferous
enemies. His books were laughed at, his poetry
parodied, his person not kindly caricatured, and,
even when his plays won popular applause, this
hostility against him was only smothered, not
choked. His disaster ungagged it, and few men
have been sent to perdition with a louder cry
of hounds behind them.

About the Author:
Children's author Arthur Ransome was born in Leeds, England on January 18, 1884. As a child, he spent many vacations sailing, camping, and exploring the countryside in England's Lake Country. He studied chemistry for one year at Yorkshire College before dropping out to become a writer. He worked for a London publisher and then for the Manchester Guardian newspaper. He wrote his first book, Bohemia in London, in 1907 and went to study folklore in Russia in 1913. In 1916, he published Old Peter's Russian Tales, a collection of 21 folktales. During World War I, he became a reporter for the Daily News and covered the war on the Eastern Front. While in Russia, he also covered the Russian Revolution in 1917. He eventually settled in England's Lake District with his second wife. In 1929, he wrote Swallows and Amazons, which was the first book in his well-know Swallows and Amazons series about children who sail and explore the lakes and mountains of England. He drew inspiration for the books from his own childhood memories. In 1936, he won the Carnegie Medal for children's literature for Pigeon Post. He died on June 3, 1967.