A House of Pomegranates and a story of The Nightingale and The Rose (Illustrated)
Proofed and corrected from the original edition for enjoyable reading. (Worth every penny spent!)
***
"A HOUSE OF POMEGRANATES" was done almost exactly at the middle point of Wilde's career as an author, and in the days, co-incidentally, of his soundest and least perturbed celebrity. His poems, his posturings and his high services to W. S. Gilbert and to Punch were beginning to recede; ahead of him were "Salomé," the four West End comedies, and catastrophe. Relatively placid waters surrounded him, shining in the sun. He had been married, and had got over it. There was a pleasant jingle of gold, or, at all events, of silver in his pocket. The foremost reviews of the day were open to him. He was not only a popular success, a figure in the public eye; he was, more importantly, beginning to get the attention of men of sense, to be taken with growing seriousness, to, feel firm ground under him. And in age he was thirty-six, with the gas of youth oozed out and the stiffening of the climacteric not yet set in.
So situated, pleasantly becalmed between two storms, he wrote "A House of Pomegranates," and into it, I have always believed, he put the most accurate and, on the whole, the most ingratiating revelation of his essential ideas that was ever to get upon paper. And without, of course, stating them at all— not a hint of exposition, of persuasion, of pedagogy is in the book. But that is precisely what gives them, there, their clarity and validity; they are not spoken for, they speak for themselves—and this is always the way a man sets forth the faith that is in him most honestly and most illuminatingly, not by arguing for it like some tin-pot evangelist, but by exhibiting it like an artist. Here we have the authentic Wilde, the Wilde who explains and dignifies all the lesser and more self-conscious Wildes. He is simply one who stands ecstatic before a vision of prodigious and almost intolerable beauty, a man haunted by ineffable magnificences of color, light, mass and line, a rapt and garrulous drunkard of the eye. He is one who apprehended loveliness in the world, not as sound, not as idea, not as order, not as syllogism, above all, not as law, but as picture pure and simple —as an ocular image leaping with life, gorgeous in its variety, infinite in its significances. And in the face of that enchanting picture, standing spellbound before its eloquent and narcotic forms, responding with all senses to its charming and intricate details, he appears before us as the type of all that the men of his race and time were not—as a rebel almost colossal in the profound artlessness of his denial. What he denied was the whole moral order of the world—the fundamental assumption of the Anglo-Saxon peoples. What he set up was a theory of the world as purely aesthetic spectacle, superb in its beauty, sufficiently its own cause and motive, ordered only by its own inner laws, and as innocent of all ethical import and utility as the precession of the equinoxes.
In this denial, of course, there was a challenge, and in that challenge was Wilde's undoing. To see him merely as a commonplace and ignoble misdemeanant, taken accidentally in some secret swinishness and condemned to a routine doom for that swinishness alone, is to accept a view of him that is impossibly journalistic and idiotic. He stood in the dock charged with a good deal more than private viciousness, and the punishment he got was a good deal more than private viciousness ever provokes, even from agents of the law who seek acquittal of themselves in their flogging of the criminal. What he was intrinsically accused of, and what he was so barbarously punished for, was a flouting of the premises upon which the whole civilization of his time was standing—a blasphemous attempt upon the gods that all docile and well-disposed men believed in, even in the midst of disservice—an heretical preaching of predicates and valuations that threatened to make a new generation see the world in a new way, to the unendurable confusion of the old one. In brief, his true trial was in the character of a heretic, and the case before the actual jury was no more than a symbol of a quite medieval summoning of the secular arm. What the secular arm thought of it I have often wondered—so astoundingly vast a hub-bub over an affair of everyday! Surely fish of precisely the same spots were coming into the net constantly, and in the sea of London there were many more, and some much larger to the eye. But Wilde, in truth, was the largest of them all. He had been marked for a long while, and delicately pursued. Lines had been cast for him; watchers had waited; there was a sort of affrighted and unspoken vow to dispose of him. And so, when he was hauled in at last, it was a good deal more than the mere taking of another spotted fish.
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***
"A HOUSE OF POMEGRANATES" was done almost exactly at the middle point of Wilde's career as an author, and in the days, co-incidentally, of his soundest and least perturbed celebrity. His poems, his posturings and his high services to W. S. Gilbert and to Punch were beginning to recede; ahead of him were "Salomé," the four West End comedies, and catastrophe. Relatively placid waters surrounded him, shining in the sun. He had been married, and had got over it. There was a pleasant jingle of gold, or, at all events, of silver in his pocket. The foremost reviews of the day were open to him. He was not only a popular success, a figure in the public eye; he was, more importantly, beginning to get the attention of men of sense, to be taken with growing seriousness, to, feel firm ground under him. And in age he was thirty-six, with the gas of youth oozed out and the stiffening of the climacteric not yet set in.
So situated, pleasantly becalmed between two storms, he wrote "A House of Pomegranates," and into it, I have always believed, he put the most accurate and, on the whole, the most ingratiating revelation of his essential ideas that was ever to get upon paper. And without, of course, stating them at all— not a hint of exposition, of persuasion, of pedagogy is in the book. But that is precisely what gives them, there, their clarity and validity; they are not spoken for, they speak for themselves—and this is always the way a man sets forth the faith that is in him most honestly and most illuminatingly, not by arguing for it like some tin-pot evangelist, but by exhibiting it like an artist. Here we have the authentic Wilde, the Wilde who explains and dignifies all the lesser and more self-conscious Wildes. He is simply one who stands ecstatic before a vision of prodigious and almost intolerable beauty, a man haunted by ineffable magnificences of color, light, mass and line, a rapt and garrulous drunkard of the eye. He is one who apprehended loveliness in the world, not as sound, not as idea, not as order, not as syllogism, above all, not as law, but as picture pure and simple —as an ocular image leaping with life, gorgeous in its variety, infinite in its significances. And in the face of that enchanting picture, standing spellbound before its eloquent and narcotic forms, responding with all senses to its charming and intricate details, he appears before us as the type of all that the men of his race and time were not—as a rebel almost colossal in the profound artlessness of his denial. What he denied was the whole moral order of the world—the fundamental assumption of the Anglo-Saxon peoples. What he set up was a theory of the world as purely aesthetic spectacle, superb in its beauty, sufficiently its own cause and motive, ordered only by its own inner laws, and as innocent of all ethical import and utility as the precession of the equinoxes.
In this denial, of course, there was a challenge, and in that challenge was Wilde's undoing. To see him merely as a commonplace and ignoble misdemeanant, taken accidentally in some secret swinishness and condemned to a routine doom for that swinishness alone, is to accept a view of him that is impossibly journalistic and idiotic. He stood in the dock charged with a good deal more than private viciousness, and the punishment he got was a good deal more than private viciousness ever provokes, even from agents of the law who seek acquittal of themselves in their flogging of the criminal. What he was intrinsically accused of, and what he was so barbarously punished for, was a flouting of the premises upon which the whole civilization of his time was standing—a blasphemous attempt upon the gods that all docile and well-disposed men believed in, even in the midst of disservice—an heretical preaching of predicates and valuations that threatened to make a new generation see the world in a new way, to the unendurable confusion of the old one. In brief, his true trial was in the character of a heretic, and the case before the actual jury was no more than a symbol of a quite medieval summoning of the secular arm. What the secular arm thought of it I have often wondered—so astoundingly vast a hub-bub over an affair of everyday! Surely fish of precisely the same spots were coming into the net constantly, and in the sea of London there were many more, and some much larger to the eye. But Wilde, in truth, was the largest of them all. He had been marked for a long while, and delicately pursued. Lines had been cast for him; watchers had waited; there was a sort of affrighted and unspoken vow to dispose of him. And so, when he was hauled in at last, it was a good deal more than the mere taking of another spotted fish.
A House of Pomegranates and a story of The Nightingale and The Rose (Illustrated)
Proofed and corrected from the original edition for enjoyable reading. (Worth every penny spent!)
***
"A HOUSE OF POMEGRANATES" was done almost exactly at the middle point of Wilde's career as an author, and in the days, co-incidentally, of his soundest and least perturbed celebrity. His poems, his posturings and his high services to W. S. Gilbert and to Punch were beginning to recede; ahead of him were "Salomé," the four West End comedies, and catastrophe. Relatively placid waters surrounded him, shining in the sun. He had been married, and had got over it. There was a pleasant jingle of gold, or, at all events, of silver in his pocket. The foremost reviews of the day were open to him. He was not only a popular success, a figure in the public eye; he was, more importantly, beginning to get the attention of men of sense, to be taken with growing seriousness, to, feel firm ground under him. And in age he was thirty-six, with the gas of youth oozed out and the stiffening of the climacteric not yet set in.
So situated, pleasantly becalmed between two storms, he wrote "A House of Pomegranates," and into it, I have always believed, he put the most accurate and, on the whole, the most ingratiating revelation of his essential ideas that was ever to get upon paper. And without, of course, stating them at all— not a hint of exposition, of persuasion, of pedagogy is in the book. But that is precisely what gives them, there, their clarity and validity; they are not spoken for, they speak for themselves—and this is always the way a man sets forth the faith that is in him most honestly and most illuminatingly, not by arguing for it like some tin-pot evangelist, but by exhibiting it like an artist. Here we have the authentic Wilde, the Wilde who explains and dignifies all the lesser and more self-conscious Wildes. He is simply one who stands ecstatic before a vision of prodigious and almost intolerable beauty, a man haunted by ineffable magnificences of color, light, mass and line, a rapt and garrulous drunkard of the eye. He is one who apprehended loveliness in the world, not as sound, not as idea, not as order, not as syllogism, above all, not as law, but as picture pure and simple —as an ocular image leaping with life, gorgeous in its variety, infinite in its significances. And in the face of that enchanting picture, standing spellbound before its eloquent and narcotic forms, responding with all senses to its charming and intricate details, he appears before us as the type of all that the men of his race and time were not—as a rebel almost colossal in the profound artlessness of his denial. What he denied was the whole moral order of the world—the fundamental assumption of the Anglo-Saxon peoples. What he set up was a theory of the world as purely aesthetic spectacle, superb in its beauty, sufficiently its own cause and motive, ordered only by its own inner laws, and as innocent of all ethical import and utility as the precession of the equinoxes.
In this denial, of course, there was a challenge, and in that challenge was Wilde's undoing. To see him merely as a commonplace and ignoble misdemeanant, taken accidentally in some secret swinishness and condemned to a routine doom for that swinishness alone, is to accept a view of him that is impossibly journalistic and idiotic. He stood in the dock charged with a good deal more than private viciousness, and the punishment he got was a good deal more than private viciousness ever provokes, even from agents of the law who seek acquittal of themselves in their flogging of the criminal. What he was intrinsically accused of, and what he was so barbarously punished for, was a flouting of the premises upon which the whole civilization of his time was standing—a blasphemous attempt upon the gods that all docile and well-disposed men believed in, even in the midst of disservice—an heretical preaching of predicates and valuations that threatened to make a new generation see the world in a new way, to the unendurable confusion of the old one. In brief, his true trial was in the character of a heretic, and the case before the actual jury was no more than a symbol of a quite medieval summoning of the secular arm. What the secular arm thought of it I have often wondered—so astoundingly vast a hub-bub over an affair of everyday! Surely fish of precisely the same spots were coming into the net constantly, and in the sea of London there were many more, and some much larger to the eye. But Wilde, in truth, was the largest of them all. He had been marked for a long while, and delicately pursued. Lines had been cast for him; watchers had waited; there was a sort of affrighted and unspoken vow to dispose of him. And so, when he was hauled in at last, it was a good deal more than the mere taking of another spotted fish.
***
"A HOUSE OF POMEGRANATES" was done almost exactly at the middle point of Wilde's career as an author, and in the days, co-incidentally, of his soundest and least perturbed celebrity. His poems, his posturings and his high services to W. S. Gilbert and to Punch were beginning to recede; ahead of him were "Salomé," the four West End comedies, and catastrophe. Relatively placid waters surrounded him, shining in the sun. He had been married, and had got over it. There was a pleasant jingle of gold, or, at all events, of silver in his pocket. The foremost reviews of the day were open to him. He was not only a popular success, a figure in the public eye; he was, more importantly, beginning to get the attention of men of sense, to be taken with growing seriousness, to, feel firm ground under him. And in age he was thirty-six, with the gas of youth oozed out and the stiffening of the climacteric not yet set in.
So situated, pleasantly becalmed between two storms, he wrote "A House of Pomegranates," and into it, I have always believed, he put the most accurate and, on the whole, the most ingratiating revelation of his essential ideas that was ever to get upon paper. And without, of course, stating them at all— not a hint of exposition, of persuasion, of pedagogy is in the book. But that is precisely what gives them, there, their clarity and validity; they are not spoken for, they speak for themselves—and this is always the way a man sets forth the faith that is in him most honestly and most illuminatingly, not by arguing for it like some tin-pot evangelist, but by exhibiting it like an artist. Here we have the authentic Wilde, the Wilde who explains and dignifies all the lesser and more self-conscious Wildes. He is simply one who stands ecstatic before a vision of prodigious and almost intolerable beauty, a man haunted by ineffable magnificences of color, light, mass and line, a rapt and garrulous drunkard of the eye. He is one who apprehended loveliness in the world, not as sound, not as idea, not as order, not as syllogism, above all, not as law, but as picture pure and simple —as an ocular image leaping with life, gorgeous in its variety, infinite in its significances. And in the face of that enchanting picture, standing spellbound before its eloquent and narcotic forms, responding with all senses to its charming and intricate details, he appears before us as the type of all that the men of his race and time were not—as a rebel almost colossal in the profound artlessness of his denial. What he denied was the whole moral order of the world—the fundamental assumption of the Anglo-Saxon peoples. What he set up was a theory of the world as purely aesthetic spectacle, superb in its beauty, sufficiently its own cause and motive, ordered only by its own inner laws, and as innocent of all ethical import and utility as the precession of the equinoxes.
In this denial, of course, there was a challenge, and in that challenge was Wilde's undoing. To see him merely as a commonplace and ignoble misdemeanant, taken accidentally in some secret swinishness and condemned to a routine doom for that swinishness alone, is to accept a view of him that is impossibly journalistic and idiotic. He stood in the dock charged with a good deal more than private viciousness, and the punishment he got was a good deal more than private viciousness ever provokes, even from agents of the law who seek acquittal of themselves in their flogging of the criminal. What he was intrinsically accused of, and what he was so barbarously punished for, was a flouting of the premises upon which the whole civilization of his time was standing—a blasphemous attempt upon the gods that all docile and well-disposed men believed in, even in the midst of disservice—an heretical preaching of predicates and valuations that threatened to make a new generation see the world in a new way, to the unendurable confusion of the old one. In brief, his true trial was in the character of a heretic, and the case before the actual jury was no more than a symbol of a quite medieval summoning of the secular arm. What the secular arm thought of it I have often wondered—so astoundingly vast a hub-bub over an affair of everyday! Surely fish of precisely the same spots were coming into the net constantly, and in the sea of London there were many more, and some much larger to the eye. But Wilde, in truth, was the largest of them all. He had been marked for a long while, and delicately pursued. Lines had been cast for him; watchers had waited; there was a sort of affrighted and unspoken vow to dispose of him. And so, when he was hauled in at last, it was a good deal more than the mere taking of another spotted fish.
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A House of Pomegranates and a story of The Nightingale and The Rose (Illustrated)
A House of Pomegranates and a story of The Nightingale and The Rose (Illustrated)
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Product Details
| BN ID: | 2940013502215 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | OGB |
| Publication date: | 11/20/2011 |
| Series: | BEN KUTCHER'S Illustrated Edition , #1 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| File size: | 1 MB |
| Age Range: | 9 - 12 Years |
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