Читать книгу Oscar Wilde: A Life in Letters - Оскар Уайльд, Merlin Holland, F. H. Cornish - Страница 17

Wednesday [?6 September 1876] 1 Merrion Square North

My dear Bouncer, Note paper became such a scarcity in the West that I had to put off answering your letter till I came home.

I had a delightful time, and capital sport, especially the last week, which I spent shooting, and got fair bags.

I am afraid I shall not cross to England via Bristol, as I hear the boats are rather of the ‘Ancient Mariner’ type! but I may be down in Bristol with Frank Miles as I want to see S. Raphael’s and the pictures at Clevedon.

I would like very much to renew my friendship with your mother and sisters so shall write to you if I see any hope of going down.

I have given up my pilgrimage to Rome for the present: Ronald Gower and Frank Miles were coming: (we would have been a great Trinity) but at the last hour Ronald couldn’t get time, so I am staying in Dublin till the 20th, when I go down to Longford, and hope to have good sport.

I have heard from many people of your father’s liberality and noble spirit, so I know you will take interest in the report I send you of my father’s hospital, which he built when he was only twenty-nine and not a rich man. It is a great memorial of his name, and a movement is being set on foot to enlarge it and make it still greater.

I have got some charming letters lately from a great friend of my mother, Aubrey de Vere – a cultured poet (though sexless) and a convert to Catholicity. I must show you them; he is greatly interested in me and is going to get one of my poems into the Month. I have two this month out: one in the Dublin University Magazine, one in the Irish Monthly. Both are brief and Tennysonian.

I hope you are doing good work, but I suppose at home you are hardly allowed ‘to contemplate the abstract’ (whatever that means) undisturbed.

I am bothered with business and many things and find the world an [chaos] at present and a Tarpeian Rock for honest men.

I hope you will write when you have time. Ever yours

OSCAR F. O’F. WILLS WILDE

I like signing my name as if it was to some document of great importance as ‘Send two bags of gold by bearer’ or ‘Let the Duke be slain tomorrow and the Duchess await me at the hostelry’.

I send you one of Aubrey de Vere’s letters. I know you will be amused at them. Return it when you have committed it to memory.

In the Michaelmas term of 1876 both Ward and Hunter-Blair took their finals and went down. Wilde moved into Ward’s rooms overlooking the River Cherwell and continued to agonise over whether or not to become a Catholic. For the time being his mystical leanings had to be satisfied with the quasi-religious rituals and fancy dress of freemasonry. The following spring, though, he again went on a Classical tour with Mahaffy, this time to Greece, and came back via Rome where he met Ward and Hunter-Blair who had arranged a private audience with the Pope.