Читать книгу Oscar Wilde: A Life in Letters - Оскар Уайльд, Merlin Holland, F. H. Cornish - Страница 31

“We live in an age of inordinate personal ambition and I am determined that the world shall understand me.’

After Wilde’s academic triumphs in the summer 0/1878, Magdalen renewed his Demy ship for a further (fifth) year. He was obliged to keep an extra Oxford term in order to pass the Divinity exam, which he had failed two years earlier, and found lodgings for that period at 71 High Street. On 22 November he satisfied the examiners in the Rudiments of Religion and on 28 November took his degree as Bachelor of Arts. It is not known how much of 1879 he spent in Oxford, but like other graduates of the time he seems to have been unable to make the final break with his Alma Mater for a while and made periodic visits to see undergraduate friends still in residence. From the first letter below it is clear that he was already looking for accommodation in London by the end of 1878, and planning to develop his aesthetic tastes and to charm Society with his conversation. However, in his application for a reader’s ticket to the British Museum in February he is unsure whether to give his Oxford college or London address, and George Macmillan’s reply to his letter of 22 March is addressed to Wilde at Oxford. By the time he came to review the opening of the 1879 Grosvenor Gallery exhibition in May, his feet seem to have been firmly planted in the metropolis. At first he appears to have been reluctant to put aside his classical background. He joined the newly founded Hellenic Society, becoming a member of the Council, suggested translations from the Greek to Macmillan (with whom he had travelled to Greece in 1877), applied for an archaeological studentship at Athens and even considered becoming an Inspector of Schoob.