Pen, Pencil, And Poison : A Study

By Wilde, Oscar

Book Id: WPLBN0000673324
Format Type: PDF eBook:
File Size: 0.1 MB
Reproduction Date: 2007

Title:	Pen, Pencil, And Poison : A Study
Author:	Wilde, Oscar
Volume:
Language:	English
Subject:	Fiction, Literature, Poetry
Collections:	Poetry Collection, The Victorian Prose Archive Collection
Historic Publication Date:
Publisher:	The Victorian Prose Archive


Citation APA MLA Chicago Wilde, B. O., & Alfred J. Drak, E. B. (n.d.). Pen, Pencil, And Poison : A Study. Retrieved from http://self.gutenberg.org/

Description
Victorian Literature

Excerpt
Excerpts: IT has constantly been made a subject of reproach against artists and men of letters that they are lacking in wholeness and completeness of nature. As a rule this must necessarily be so. That very concentration of vision and intensity of purpose which is the characteristic of the artistic temperament is in itself a mode of limitation. To those who are preoccupied with the beauty of form nothing else seems of much importance. Yet there are many exceptions to this rule. Rubens served as ambassador, and Goethe as state councilor, and Milton as Latin secretary to Cromwell. Sophocles held civic office in his own city; the humorists, essayists, and novelists of modern America seem to desire nothing better than to become the diplomatic representatives of their country; and Charles Lamb?s friend, Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, the subject of this brief memoir, though of an extremely artistic temperament, followed many masters other than art, being not merely a poet and a painter, an art-critic, an antiquarian, and a writer of prose, an amateur of beautiful things, and a dilettante of things delightful, but also a forger of no mean or ordinary capabilities, and as a subtle and secret poisoner almost without rival in this or any age...