"Apree Bervevar: Levens." By Oscar Wilde. (Beaumont Press. 2s.)
One has felt in reading Wilde's "De Profoundis'" that there are times when a pose ceases tobe an affectation and becomes a demonstration of courage. What that long essay not infrequently displayed these brief, almost. trivial letters also show—that, however degraded Wilde was, he never lost a certain note of pluck, quite distinguishable from impudence, and exemplifying that dignity which courage always possesses. There is impudence in the letters as well, and a_heart-breaking frivolity and carelessness, and very rarely a plain note of genuine agony, as in the complaint: "TI do think you make wonderfully little allowance for a man like myself—now ruined, broken-hearted, and thoroughly unhappy."
All the letters are addressed to Robert Ross,_and they cover the period from Wilde's departure from Berneval to Naples till after the publication of "The Ballad of Reading Gaol.'' The one recurrent note of the letters is poverty: sometimes one thinks that Wilde spoke so frequently of his penury in order to keep his mind from more terrible things.
The letters about the Ballad are full of details which will interest the student of literary form. Wilde was not a great artist, but in the Ballad, working on_ the mode] left by Coleridge and Hood. he reached a very high level of craftsmanship and a more genuine effect than is common in his verse. No one will be. surprised that Wilde was very conscious of the effect the Ballad was to make: it was his attempt, as he put it, "'to out-Kipling Henley, and its great popular success was as natural as it was deserved. There is not much in the letters which throws any new light on their author's character: "I was a problem for which there was no solution" is a sentence which displays his determined effort to be isolated in aisgrace as he was isolated in suees. There are a few of those character istic sayings which made Wilde's plays so popular: 'I want to take an apportment with two rooms—one for writing, one for insomnia (both, in fact, for insomnia)'"'; there are a few notes on celebrities. He meets Whistler and writes: "How old and weird he looks—like Meg Merriiees
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.