Читать книгу Oscar Wilde: A Life in Letters - Оскар Уайльд, Merlin Holland, F. H. Cornish - Страница 28

[?September 1878] Illaunroe Lodge, Connemara

Dear Father Russell, Thanks for the magazine. With regard to the Newdigate, if you look in the Oxford Calendar you will find the whole account of it. The subject is given out at the June Encaenia and is the same for all. There is besides the a prize of twenty guineas. It was originally limited to fifty lines, and the subject used to be necessarily taken from some classical subject, either Greek or Latin, and generally a work of art. The metre is heroic couplets, but as you have seen perhaps from my poem, of late years laxity is allowed from the horrid Popeian jingle of regular heroics, and now the subject may be taken from any country or time and there is no limit to the length. I rather think it is very much older than 1841. There is a picture of the Founder hanging in the dining hall of University College, Oxford, which as well as I remember is very old. Besides I have an idea that Ruskin and Dean Stanley got it. You might by looking at the Oxford Calendar get all information and make your article the locus classicus for the History of the Newdigate Prize.

There was a strange coincidence about my getting it. On the 31st of March 1877 (long before the subject was given out) I entered Ravenna on my way to Greece, and on 31st March 1878 I had to hand my poem in. It is quite the blue ribbon of the Varsity and my college presented me with a marble bust of the ‘young Augustus’ which had been bequeathed by an old Fellow of Magdalen, Dr Daubeny, to the first undergraduate who should get the Newdigate.

I am resting here in the mountains – great peace and quiet everywhere – and hope to send you a sonnet as the result. Believe me, very truly yours

OSCAR WILDE

Because Dublin held little in the way of a future for the newly self-styled ‘Professor of Aesthetics’, he bade farewell to his home town and the woman he once described as ‘an exquisitely pretty girl…with the most perfectly beautiful face I ever saw and not a sixpence of money’. To his chagrin Florrie Balcombe had accepted a proposal of marriage from Bram Stoker, who had just been appointed Henry Irving’s manager at the Lyceum Theatre and would later become known as the author of Dracula.