where he had a brilliant career, where he took a first-class both in classical moderation and in literature, and also won the Newdigate Prize for English verse for a poem on “Ravenna”. Even before he left the University in 1878 Wilde had become known as one of the most affected of the professors of the aesthetic movement, which advanced the new concept of “Art for Art’s Sake”.
Wilde was a man of great originality and power of mind. He quickly became a prominent personality in literary and social circles, but the period of his true achievement did not begin until he published “The Happy Prince and other tales” in 1888. In these fairy tales and fables, Wilde found a literary form well suited to his talents. There nine stories all together (originally published in two volumes – “ The Happy Prince” – 1888 and “A House of Pomegranates” – 1891) – five in the first volume and four in the second. These stories review and uneasy blend of the moral and the fantastic.
Wilde’s only novel “The Picture of Dorian Gray” (1890), attracted much attention, and his sayings past from mouth to mouth as those of one of the professed wits of the age. This novel is about a youth, whose features, year after year, retain the same youthful appearance of innocent beauty, while the shame of his hideous vices become mirrored, year after year, on the features of his portrait. This novel covers the whole range of human experience and imagination.
The career of Oscar Wilde was brief, but, from its beginnings, success smiled on him and he quickly achieved a triumph. Some of his works, his verse, his essays – “Intentions”, his fairy tales, his poems in prose “The House of Pomegranates”, “The Picture of Dorian Gray”, had affirmed that he was a pure artist and a great writer, for certain of his pages are as beautiful as the most beautiful in English prose. But these works were only amusements for him, and versatile mind, so brilliant, so delicately ironic, so paradoxical, found a medium of expression, which perfectly suited his uncommon gifts; it was the theatre.
The theatre played the very important role in Wilde’s life. English drama was reborn near the end of the Victorian age. From the late 1700-s to the late 1800-s, almost no important dramas were produced in England. But by 1900-s a number of playwrights have revived the English theatre both with witty comedies and with realistic dramas about social problems of the time.
Many critics said that Wilde was perhaps less then a mature poet, but a good critic, and a splendid playwright. Oscar Wilde held particularly to his reputation as a dramatist, and this with some reasons. At the time successes, William Archer, the influential and enlightened critic, had placed him apart and above other contemporary authors; and Wilde believed himself to be unquestionably the equal of Ibsen, the famous Norwegian dramatist. When Wilde turned to the theatre, he concerned himself with a social class, which had not yet been presented on stage. Arthur Pinero, the glittering English dramatist, had achieved notoriety with place drawn from middle-class life and a large number of others were producing popular dramas.
With the perfect sense of the theatre, Oscar Wilde took his characters from high society; he set his elegant marionettes in motion with such mastery that his comedies can be regarded as the wittiest that have been written in a very long time.
When his career was so sadly and so tragically interrupted, Oscar Wilde had given the theatre his real works of art.
Wilde’s first dramatic works appeared in the beginning of the eighties. His early tragedies “Vera; or the Nihilists” (1880) and “The Duchess of Padua” (1883), imitative and artistically weak, had no stable success on the stage. Then there were published his brilliant novel “The Picture of Dorian Gray” and the critical essays “The Intentions”. In these books there were reflected the basic principles of Wilde’s aesthetics.
Oscar Wilde denied the traditional criterions of the bourgeois ethics. He thought that the only moral value was the ideal of beauty in nature and in person. However, he said that beauty was not the reflection of realistic life in the people’s minds, but contrary, it was just the product of artist’s imagination. That is why he confirmed that art was existing independent of the life and was developing according to its own laws. He was known as a poet of graceful diction.
Oscar Wilde has contributed his most important works to the theatre: “Lady Windermere’s Fan” (1892), “A Woman of No Importance” (1893), “An Ideal Husband” (1895), “The Importance of Being Earnest” (1895) and “Salome” (1893).
Of the first four which had a success without precedent, it must be said that they are constructed with extraordinary skill; they are interesting for their settings, pathetic without evoking tears, witty to the point of