Lord Arthur Savile's Crime, The Portrait of Mr. W.H.

by Oscar Wilde

Excerpt from Das Bildnis des Mr. W. H., Lord Arthur Saviles Verbrechen Dr. Hans Bethge sagt in der Rheinisch - West fälische n Zeitu ng (essen) darüber Ein nicht minder erlesenes Buch von noch ungleich stärkerer litera riecher Bedeutung ist das Hauptwerk des Engländers Oscar Wilde, sein Roman "das Bildnis des Dorian Gray. Oscar Wilde, der Vielgeschmähte und trotzdem die hervorragendste Gestalt auf dem englischen Parnass seit mindestens einem Dezennium, zeigt sich hier als eine Künstlernatur par excellence. Er entrollt das Leben eines jungen englischen Dandy und verfilcht mystische Elemente in seinen fein gegliederten Roman, die ihn besonders anziehend machen. Mehr als einmal wird man an Huysmans erinnert, beson ders an A rebours, nur dass Wilde unendlich mannigfaltiger und in der Komposition geschlossener ist. Grausige Mo mente tauchen auf, und mitunter meint man in der Welt Th. A. Hoffmanns oder E. A. Poes zu sein. Immer wieder aber wird man durch subtil beobachtete Bilder und (ie schehnisse der Wirklichkeit überrascht, und man liest einen Dialog, wie er lebendiger kaum geschrieben worden ist. Wildes Roman sei allen Freunden einer ästhetisch verfeinerten Literatur auf das wärmste empfohlen. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Library Binding

Published January 1, 1954

About the author

Oscar Fingal O'Fflahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish poet and playwright. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of the most popular playwrights in London in the early 1890s. He is best remembered for his epigrams and plays, his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, and his criminal conviction for gross indecency for homosexual acts.
Wilde's parents were Anglo-Irish intellectuals in Dublin. In his youth, Wilde learned to speak fluent French and German. At university, he read Greats; he demonstrated himself to be an exceptional classicist, first at Trinity College Dublin, then at Magdalen College, Oxford. He became associated with the emerging philosophy of aestheticism, led by two of his tutors, Walter Pater and John Ruskin. After university, Wilde moved to London into fashionable cultural and social circles.
Wilde tried his hand at various literary activities: he wrote a play, published a book of poems, lectured in the United States and Canada on "The English Renaissance" in art and interior decoration, and then returned to London where he lectured on his American travels and wrote reviews for various periodicals. Known for his biting wit, flamboyant dress and glittering conversational skill, Wilde became one of the best-known personalities of his day. At the turn of the 1890s, he refined his ideas about the supremacy of art in a series of dialogues and essays, and incorporated themes of decadence, duplicity, and beauty into what would be his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). Wilde returned to drama, writing Salome (1891) in French while in Paris, but it was refused a licence for England due to an absolute prohibition on the portrayal of Biblical subjects on the English stage. Undiscouraged, Wilde produced four society comedies in the early 1890s, which made him one of the most successful playwrights of late-Victorian London.
At the height of his fame and success, while An Ideal Husband (1895) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) were still being performed in London, Wilde issued a civil writ against John Sholto Douglas, the 9th Marquess of Queensberry for criminal libel. The Marquess was the father of Wilde's lover, Lord Alfred Douglas. The libel hearings unearthed evidence that caused Wilde to drop his charges and led to his own arrest and criminal prosecution for gross indecency with other males. The jury was unable to reach a verdict and so a retrial was ordered. In the second trial Wilde was convicted and sentenced to two years' hard labour, the maximum penalty, and was jailed from 1895 to 1897. During his last year in prison he wrote De Profundis (published posthumously in abridged form in 1905), a long letter that discusses his spiritual journey through his trials and is a dark counterpoint to his earlier philosophy of pleasure. On the day of his release, he caught the overnight steamer to France, never to return to Britain or Ireland. In France and Italy, he wrote his last work, The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), a long poem commemorating the harsh rhythms of prison life.