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Some Unpublished Wilde Letters Ian Small University of Birmingham THE DEPARTMENT OF SPECIAL COLLECTIONS at Syracuse University Library has four letters by Oscar Wilde.1 Three are unpublished ; one has not been published in its entirety and has hitherto only been known from an unauthoritative transcription. The recipients of three of the letters are identified: Lawrence Alma-Tadema, James Knowles and Frank Harris. The recipient of the fourth is unknown. The first and most interesting is a long letter to the painter Lawrence Alma-Tadema. The date is uncertain, but there are good reasons to believe that it is either late 1880 or early 1881. The first reason is the address. After his return from his American tour, Wilde usually gave his address as "16 Tite Street" rather than (as here) "Keats House, Tite Street." The second reason is the subject of the letter. Around this time Wilde was deeply interested in Greek culture and, despite being relatively unknown, was attempting to establish himself publicly as an authority on it. The subject of his essay for the Chancellor's Prize at Oxford in 1879 had been "Historical Criticism in Antiquity," and in the same year he was in correspondence with George Macmillan over the possibility of translating Herodotus and Euripides.2 In late 1880 and early 1881 Alma-Tadema was working on his picture Sappho and Alcaeus (opus CCXXIII, 1881). By this time he had achieved considerable fame (and earned a great deal of money) for his meticulous rendering of classical subjects; indeed Alma-Tadema's desire for absolute historical accuracy led him to undertake detailed research for many of his works. It seems likely that he had asked Wilde's advice over the accurate rendering of the Greek names which appear in Sappho and Alcaeus. Wilde's letter refers to a prior meeting and suggests that there was some 58 SMALL : WILDE LETTERS form of social acquaintance between the two men. Indeed, Vern Swanson , Alma-Tadema's cataloguer, mentions that Alma-Tadema met Wilde at about this time, but this letter apart there is no evidence of any friendship or correspondence between the two men. However, Wilde's friendly disposition towards Alma-Tadema (and interest in his work) is borne out by a favourable mention, probably of Alma-Tadema's The Women ofAmphissa (opus CCLXXVIII, 1887), in an anonymous notice in the Court and Society Review in 1887: Take, for instance, the Tadema (No. 31). Here is all the archaeological detail so dear to this industrious painter; all the cups of polished metal, the strangely embroidered robes, and the richly veined marbles, that exemplify so clearly the "rights of properties" in art; and the one thing that was wanting in Mr Tadema's work has been added, the passionate interest in human life, and the power to portray it.3 Sappho and Alcaeus depicts a marble exhedra set beside a deep-blue sea on the island of Lesbos in which Sappho and some companions listen to the poet Alcaeus of Mitylene playing a kithara. Inscribed in Greek on the backs and the bases of the seats in the exhedra are the names of the members of Sappho's sisterhood. The legible names are as follows: [Mnasi]dika[,] Gongyla of Colophonf,] Atthis Errina of Telos[,] Gyriannos[,] Anactoria of Miletos It appears that Alma-Tadema took Wilde's advice over the spelling of these names, but rejected Wilde's suggestion to include some lines of Sappho's poetry in order to "strike that literary note." Alma-Tadema may also have rejected (or perhaps misunderstood) Wilde's advice about the significance of Greek orthography and the relationship between the Aeolic and the Attic dialects. In expounding the difference between the Aeolic dialect (that associated with Lesbos, and therefore with Sappho and Alcaeus) and other Greek dialects, Wilde was merely reiterating what would have been routinely taught at Oxford. So Evelyn Abbott (a pupil of Benjamin Jowett at Balliol) and E. D. Mansfield in their influential Primer of Greek Grammar: Accidence authoritatively stated that: There are three principal dialects of Greek:— (1.) Aeolic, divided into Asian or Lesbian Aeolic (Sappho, 611 B.C., Alcaeus, 606 B.C.) and Boeotian Aeolic (Pindar, in parts...

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