The nightingale is hoarse, and the loud lark
Has lost its music."
Wilde's weakness of grip on himself and his play is shown by the quite purposeless inclusion of cumbersome, would-be-Shakespearian comic relief:—
"Third Citizen. What think you of this young man who stuck the knife into the Duke?
Second Citizen. Why, that he is a well-behaved, and a well-meaning, and a well-favoured lad, and yet wicked in that he killed the Duke.
Third Citizen. 'Twas the first time he did it: maybe the law will not be hard on him, as he did not do it before."
That is a specimen very favourable to the play, which contains yet duller jokes. It is hard to believe that the same man who wrote them was also the author of Intentions and the inventor of Bunbury. But there is no need to linger over The Duchess of Padua, which, though it has moments of obscure power, Wilde did not, in later years, consider worthy of himself.
There is some doubt as to the date of composition of The Sphinx. A line and a half in it—
"I have hardly seen
Some twenty summers cast their green for Autumn's gaudy liveries"—
not only suggest extreme youth in the writer, but occur in Ravenna. Mr. Stuart Mason, in his admirable "Bibliography to the Poems of Oscar Wilde," says that "altogether some dozen passages of Ravenna are taken more or less verbatim from poems published before 1878, while no instance is found of lines in the Newdigate Prize Poem being repeated in poems admittedly of later date, and this," he thinks, "seems fairly strong proof that the lines in The Sphinx (if not the whole poem) antedate Ravenna." Mr. Ross says that Wilde told him the poem was written at the Hôtel Voltaire during an earlier visit in 1874. This statement, he thinks, was an example of the poetic license in which Wilde, like Shelley and other men of genius, was willing to indulge. Mr. Sherard says positively that Wilde wrote The Sphinx in 1883 at the Hôtel Voltaire. There seems to be no real reason why Wilde should not have borrowed from Ravenna on this, even if he did so on no other occasion. He was always ready to seem younger than he was, and always ready to use again a phrase that had pleased him, no matter where he had used it before. In The Duchess of Padua, about whose date there is no question, he even went so far as to use two lines from a sonnet that he had previously addressed to Ellen Terry, and published in Poems:—
"O hair of gold, O crimson lips, O face