Читать книгу Oscar Wilde: A Life in Letters - Оскар Уайльд, Merlin Holland, F. H. Cornish - Страница 26

[August 1877] Illaunroe Lodge, Lough Fee, Connemara

My dear Bouncer, So very glad to hear from you at last: I was afraid that you were still seedy.

I need not say how disappointed I was that you could not come and see this part of the world. I have two fellows staying with me, Dick Trench and Jack Barrow, who took a lodge near here for July and came to stay with me about three weeks ago. They are both capital fellows, indeed Dick Trench is I think my oldest friend, but I don’t do any reading someway and pass my evenings in ‘Pool, Ecarte and Potheen Punch’. I wish you had come; one requires sympathy to read.

I am however in the midst of two articles, one on Greece, the other on Art, which keep me thinking if not writing. But of Greats work I have done nothing. After all there are more profitable studies, I suppose, than the Greats course: still I would like a good Class awfully and want you to lend me your notes on Philosophy: I know your style, and really it would be a very great advantage for me to have them – Ethics, Politics (Republic) and general Philosophy. Can you do this for me? If you could send them to me in Dublin? Or at least to Oxford next term? And also give me advice – a thing I can’t stand from my elders because it’s like preaching, but I think I would like some from you ‘who have passed through the fire’.

The weather is fair but not good for fishing. I have only got one salmon but our ‘bag’ yesterday of ‘twelve white trout and twenty brown’ was not bad. I have also had capital hare-shooting, but mountain-climbing is not my forte.

I heard, by the same post which brought me your letter, from Miss Fletcher, who is still in the Tyrol. She sends her best wishes to you of course, and writes as cleverly as she talks: I am much attracted by her in every way.

Please give my very best wishes to your sister on her approaching marriage. I remember Mr St John’s window very well, and will hope to have the pleasure of knowing him some day. He must be a very cultured artist. Will the wedding be soon? What form you will be in! Ever yours

OSCAR WILDE

I am going to Longford on Friday to shoot. Write to me Clonfin House, Granard, Co. Longford.

Few letters survive from his last year at Oxford, if indeed many were written, since Oscar was, as he put it, ‘reading hard for a Fourth in Greats’. In the end his Finals papers were judged overall to be the best of his year and he had achieved the coveted distinction of a ‘Double First’ in Mods and Greats. And if that was not enough, he was also awarded the Newdigate poetry prize. He left Oxford in a blaze of academic glory.