Читать книгу Oscar Wilde: A Life in Letters - Оскар Уайльд, Merlin Holland, F. H. Cornish - Страница 48

[Postmark 22 July 1881] Keats House, Tite Street

Dear Miss Violet Hunt, I thank you very much for your kind letter, and am infinitely delighted that you have thought my poems beautiful. In an age like this when Slander, and Ridicule, and Envy walk quite unashamed among us, and when any attempt to produce serious beautiful work is greeted with a very tornado of lies and evil-speaking, it is a wonderful joy, a wonderful spur for ambition and work, to receive any such encouragement and appreciation as your letter brought me, and I thank you for it again and again.

The poem I like best is ‘The Burden of Itys’ and next to that ‘The Garden of Eros’. They are the most lyrical, and I would sooner have any power or quality of ‘song’ writing than be the greatest sonnet writer since Petrarch.

I go to the Thames this afternoon with Mr Burne-Jones but will hope to see you when I return.

You have made me very happy. Believe me ever sincerely yours

OSCAR WILDE

When both her sons moved to London in 1879, Lady Wilde came to join them and was living in somewhat reduced circumstances, her London tea parties being a pale imitation of her famous Saturday conversazioni in Dublin. Although not yet able to help her financially, Oscar seemed to realise that his mother’s mantle had fallen on his shoulders and attempted to puff her to the editor of the Nineteenth Century.