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THE SOUL OF MAN UNDER
SOCIALISM |
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J.C. Powys |
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Added August 2008 |
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John Cowper Powys (1872–1963) is probably
the best remembered of his distinguished family. This English-born Welsh novelist and
essayist, educated at Sherborne and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, lived
in the United States for thirty years (1904-1934) before returning first to
England and then to Wales. In 1923 he
published A Sailor and a Homosexual:
Essays on Joseph Conrad & Oscar Wilde, as No. 453 in the Little Blue
Book series, and in the same year an introduction to the Doubleday Page
edition of The Soul of Man under
Socialism. This was republished in
facsimile as Journeyman Chapbook 14 in London in 1988. We now reproduce the introduction with the
kind permission of Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson, representing the Powys
Estate (the copyright holders). Our
thanks to Mr Sinclair-Stevenson, and also to Frank Kibblewhite of the Powys
Society for his help. We direct
readers to the Society’s informative and very full website, http://www.powys-society.org/index.htm.
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The
Introduction reads as follows: |
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In “The Soul of Man under Socialism,” Oscar Wilde,
like the child in the story of the king with the invisible robe, has the
audacity to blurt out the evident truth–“but he has nothing on!” To the eyes of this “enfant terrible” of
wicked-innocent candour, our industrial system betrays its essential
nakedness. |
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Wilde’s sophistications, affectations, and
paradoxes seem what they seem because our commercialised life has grown so
monstrously ungracious. It is we who
are morbid, unhealthy, and artificial.
It is we who have “found out inventions” to murder the sweet sun and
hid the moon in an artesian well!
Wilde’s vivid sensitiveness to pleasure and to pain, to beauty and to
hideousness, is the naïve, direct, sincere, and natural state of unperverted
humanity. And this and nothing less
than this is what he means by the ideal individualism that is to be the
reward of communistic socialism. |
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What the book really represents is a psychological
phenomenon of the gravest importance in the history of humanity–nothing less
than the going over, to the camp of the disinherited, of the children of the
richest inheritance! |
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J.C. Powys |
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