Читать книгу Oscar Wilde: A Life in Letters - Оскар Уайльд, Merlin Holland, F. H. Cornish - Страница 43

[17 February 1881] Keats House, Tite Street

Dear Mrs Hunt, Thank you so much for your kind invitations but I am in the ‘lion’s den’ on both days. Sunday I dine to meet Mr Lowell, a poet, statesman, and an American in one! A sort of three-headed Cerberus of civilisation who barks when he is baited and is often mistaken for a Hon, at a distance.

And on Wednesday the 2nd I have a long-standing engagement to dine with Sir Charles Dilke, a lion who has clipped his radical claws and only roars through the medium of a quarterly review now – a harmless way of roaring. So I cannot come to you, which makes me very sad.

I ought, like Sir Boyle Roche’s bird, to be able to be in two places at once, but in that case I should always be at Tor Villas. I hope to see you all soon again. Very truly yours

OSCAR WILDE

In 1881 Wilde published his second book, a volume of poems, this time with a publisher. There were 750 copies printed which he cannily divided into three equal ‘editions’ between June and September in the hope that it would attract more attention. Despite a complimentary review from Oscar Browning and an encouraging letter from Arnold the notices were generally unfavourable – Punch’s reviewer describing it as ‘Swinburne and water’. The library of the Oxford Union even went so far as to request a copy and then reject it as being too derivative. It also ended the friendship with Miles, whose clergyman father read dangerous sensuality into the volume and urged his son to have nothing more to do with the author.