Читать книгу Oscar Wilde: A Life in Letters - Оскар Уайльд, Merlin Holland, F. H. Cornish - Страница 80

[Postmark 17 May 1883] 8 Mount Street, Grosvenor Square, London

Dear Robert, Your letter was as loveable as yourself, and this is my first moment after channel-crossings, train-catchings, and my natural rage at the charges for extra luggage from Paris, for sitting down to tell you what pleasure it gave me, and what memories of moonlit meanderings, and sunset strolls, the mere sight of your handwriting brought.

As for the dedication of your poems, I accept it: how could I refuse a gift so musical in its beauty, and fashioned by one whom I love so much as I love you?

To me the mirror of perfect friendship can never be dulled by any treachery, however mean, or disloyalty, however base. Individuals come and go like shadows but the ideal remains untarnished always: the ideal of lives linked together not by affection merely, or the pleasantness of companionship, but by the capacity of being stirred by the same noble things in art and song. For we might bow before the same marble goddess, and with hymns not dissimilar fill the reeds of her flutes: the gold of the night-time, and the silver of the dawn, should pass into perfection for us: and from each string that is touched by the fingers of the player, from each bird that is rapturous in brake or covert, from each hill-flower that blossoms on the hill, we might draw into our hearts the same sense of beauty, and in the House of Beauty meet and join hands.

That is what I think true friendship should be, like that men could make their lives: but friendship is a fire where what is not flawless shrinks into grey ashes, and where what is imperfect is not purified but consumed. There may be much about which we may differ, you and I, more perhaps than we fancy, but in our desire for beauty in all things we are one, and one in our search for that little city of gold where the flute-player never wearies, and the spring never fades, and the oracle is not silent, that little city which is the house of art, and where, with all the music of the spheres, and the laughter of the gods, Art waits for her worshippers. For we at least have not gone out into the desert to seek a reed shaken by the wind, or a dweller in kings’ houses, but to a land of sweet waters, and to the well of life; for the nightingale has sung to both of us, and the moon been glad of us, and not to Pallas, or to Hera, have we given the prize, but to her who from the marble of the quarry and the stone of the mine can give us pillared Parthenon and glyptic gem, to her who is the spirit of Beauty, and who has come forth from her hollow hill into the chill evening of this old world, and walks among us visible.

That is, I think, what we are seeking, and that you should seek it with me, you who are yourself so dear to me, gives me faith in our futures, confidence in our love.

OSCAR