Читать книгу Oscar Wilde: A Life in Letters - Оскар Уайльд, Merlin Holland, F. H. Cornish - Страница 19

2 April 1877 Hotel St George, Corfu

My dear Mr Bramley, My old tutor Mr Mahaffy, Fellow of Trinity College Dublin, met me on my way to Rome and insisted on my going with him to Mykenae and Athens. The chance of seeing such great places – and in such good company – was too great for me and I find myself now in Corfu. I am afraid I will not be able to be back at the beginning of term. I hope you will not mind if I miss ten days at the beginning: seeing Greece is really a great education for anyone and will I think benefit me greatly, and Mr Mahaffy is such a clever man that it is quite as good as going to lectures to be in his society.

We came first to Genoa, which is a beautiful marble city of palaces over the sea, and then to Ravenna which is extremely interesting on account of the old Christian churches in it of enormous age and the magnificent mosaics of the fourth century. These mosaics were very remarkable as they contained two figures of the Madonna enthroned and receiving adoration; they completely upset the ordinary Protestant idea that the worship of the Virgin did not come in till late in the history of the Church.

I read the book you kindly lent me with much interest; the Roman Catholics certainly do seem to confuse together Catholic doctrines which we may all hold and the supremacy of the Pope which we need not hold.

I hope your health has been good this Easter. We expect to be in Athens by the 17th and I will post back to Oxford immediately. Yours very truly

OSCAR WILDE

The Easter term at Oxford started on 4 April and Wilde must have arrived back at least three weeks late. The Rev. Bramley (Dean of Arts at Magdalen, and responsible for internal college discipline) and the other Fellows decided that Wilde’s cavalier behaviour was intolerable, fined him half his annual scholarship and rusticated him for the rest of the academic year. As he later remarked to his friend Charles Ricketts, ‘I was sent down from Oxford for being the first undergraduate to visit Olympia.’ Turning adversity to advantage, he immediately had himself invited to the opening of the new Grosvenor Gallery, and networked his way around artistic and literary London.