Miscellanies

Transcribed from the 1908 edition by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
Since these volumes are sure of a place in your marvellous library I trust that with your unrivalled knowledge of the various editions of Wilde you may not detect any grievous error whether of taste or type , of omission or commission. But should you do so you must blame the editor , and not those who so patiently assisted him , the proof readers , the printers , or the publishers. Some day , however , I look forward to your bibliography of the author , in which you will be at liberty to criticise my capacity for anything except regard and friendship for yourself .— Sincerely yours,
ROBERT ROSS
May 25, 1908.
The concluding volume of any collected edition is unavoidably fragmentary and desultory. And if this particular volume is no exception to a general tendency, it presents points of view in the author’s literary career which may have escaped his greatest admirers and detractors. The wide range of his knowledge and interests is more apparent than in some of his finished work.
The exiguous fragment of La Sainte Courtisane is the next unpublished work of importance. At the time of Wilde’s trial the nearly completed drama was entrusted to Mrs. Leverson, who in 1897 went to Paris on purpose to restore it to the author. Wilde immediately left the manuscript in a cab. A few days later he laughingly informed me of the loss, and added that a cab was a very proper place for it. I have explained elsewhere that he looked on his plays with disdain in his last years, though he was always full of schemes for writing others. All my attempts to recover the lost work failed. The passages here reprinted are from some odd leaves of a first draft. The play is of course not unlike Salome , though it was written in English. It expanded Wilde’s favourite theory that when you convert some one to an idea, you lose your faith in it; the same motive runs through Mr. W. H . Honorius the hermit, so far as I recollect the story, falls in love with the courtesan who has come to tempt him, and he reveals to her the secret of the Love of God. She immediately becomes a Christian, and is murdered by robbers; Honorius the hermit goes back to Alexandria to pursue a life of pleasure. Two other similar plays Wilde invented in prison, Ahab and Isabel and Pharaoh ; he would never write them down, though often importuned to do so. Pharaoh was intensely dramatic and perhaps more original than any of the group. None of these works must be confused with the manuscripts stolen from 16 Tite Street in 1895—namely the enlarged version of Mr. W. H ., the completed form of A Florentine Tragedy , and The Duchess of Padua (which existing in a prompt copy was of less importance than the others); nor with The Cardinal of Arragon , the manuscript of which I never saw. I scarcely think it ever existed, though Wilde used to recite proposed passages for it.