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Ernest Bendz in his monograph on The Influence of Pater and Matthew Arnold in the Prose-Writings of Oscar Wilde has established this fact with curious erudition and completeness. Still, the lecturer was a fine figure of a man: his knee-breeches and silk stockings set all the women talking, and he spoke with suave authority.
We saw at the outset that he himself said of his Discourses in America that they, of all his prose-writings, were the writings by which he would most wish to be remembered. Many of his disciples would say that Essays in Criticism was his most important work in prose. Some people would give the crown to Literature and Dogma.
This, he told the present writer, was the book by which, of all his prose-writings, he most desired to be remembered. It was a curious and memorable choice. Another point of great importance in his prosewriting is this; if he had never written prose the world would never have known him as a humorist. And that would have been an intellectual loss not easily estimated.
The fact, already stated, that in the last years of his life, Arnold declared that his Discourses in America was the book by which, of all his prose-writings, he most wished to be remembered, gives to whatever he enounced in those Discourses a special authority, a peculiar weight, for his disciples; and nowhere is his testimony on behalf of Virtue and Right Conduct more earnestly delivered.
These flittings are of no great interest in themselves; he never got far until his famous expedition to London in the summer of 1855. But now it is time to take a glance at the writings of the period. In the introduction I announced my intention of dealing with Wagner's prose-writings only in so far as they reveal anything of value concerning the artist.
Ernest Bendz in his monograph on "The Influence of Pater and Matthew Arnold in the Prose-Writings of Oscar Wilde" has established this fact with curious erudition and completeness. Still, the lecturer was a fine figure of a man: his knee-breeches and silk stockings set all the women talking, and he spoke with suave authority.
Thoreau went to Walden; Carlyle to Craigenputtock; Brahms at any rate retired from public musical life. They worked out their own salvation. Wagner felt he must do the same; as we know, he did the same: hence many of those terrible volumes of prose-writings. His mental condition is indicated in another few sentences from the letter quoted above
"It has been more in demand," the author told us in 1883, "than any other of my prose-writings." Respect is due to what a great master thought of his own work, and to what his best-qualified disciples think of it. But after all we uphold the right of private judgment, and the present writer is strongly of opinion that Culture and Anarchy is Arnold's most important work in prose.
As there are parts of Milton's prose-writings that would be even now as discomposing and irritating to an orthodox Briton as to an orthodox Spaniard or Russian, a genuine British reader might be expected perhaps to tend to those parts by preference.
There is hardly one of her prose-writings at this time in which they are not the principal personages, and in which their "august father" does not appear as a sort of Jupiter Tonans, or Deus ex Machina. As one evidence how Wellesley haunted her imagination, I copy out a few of the titles to her papers in the various magazines. "Liffey Castle," a Tale by Lord C. Wellesley.
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