Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions by Frank Harris
page 48 of 272 (17%)
page 48 of 272 (17%)
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"Then they knew you as a great talker even at Oxford?" I asked in some surprise. "Frank," he cried reprovingly, laughing at the same time delightfully, "I was a great talker at school. I did nothing at Trinity but talk, my reading was done at odd hours. I was the best talker ever seen in Oxford." "And did you find any teacher there like Mahaffy?" I asked, "any professor with a touch of the poet?" He came to seriousness at once. "There were two or three teachers, Frank," he replied, "greater than Mahaffy; teachers of the world as well as of Oxford. There was Ruskin for instance, who appealed to me intensely--a wonderful man and a most wonderful writer. A sort of exquisite romantic flower; like a violet filling the whole air with the ineffable perfume of belief. Ruskin has always seemed to me the Plato of England--a Prophet of the Good and True and Beautiful, who saw as Plato saw that the three are one perfect flower. But it was his prose I loved, and not his piety. His sympathy with the poor bored me: the road he wanted us to build was tiresome. I could see nothing in poverty that appealed to me, nothing; I shrank away from it as from a degradation of the spirit; but his prose was lyrical and rose on broad wings into the blue. He was a great poet and teacher, Frank, and therefore of course a most preposterous professor; he bored you to death when he taught, but was an inspiration when he sang. |
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