THE
OSCHOLARS LIBRARY
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Preface to the 1905 edition
of Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime
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Albert Savine |
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Born
on 29th April 1859 and a lawyer by training, Albert Savine early realised his
vocation as a man of letters. He
collaborated with the Midi Littéraire and the Feu Follet from 1883, before
setting up the Nouvelle Librairie Littéraire in 1886. After its failure ten years later, Savine
sold out to the Librairie Stock. It
was then that he turned to translating from English and Spanish. Thanks to him, Oscar Wilde, Robert Louis Stevenson,
Rudyard Kipling, and Arthur Conan Doyle took their place in Stock’s Bibliothèque
Cosmopolite. |
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Albert
Savine was the original translator into French of Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime, of The Portrait of Mr. W.H., and of The Harlot’s House. |
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We
publish here, in a translation by Tanya Touwen specially commissioned in
September 2010 for THE OSCHOLARS,
Savine’s preface for the first French edition of Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime, published by Stock in 1905. For the French text, please click here. |
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PREFACE |
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Lord Arthur Savile’s
Crime, here translated into French for the first
time is, of all the works by Oscar Wilde, the most curious. |
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When this short story appeared, in 1891, in the triumphant wake of
The Picture of Dorian Gray the
English critics were merely struck by its paradoxical character. Many magazines and journals classified the
work in this way; their opinions leant heavily on the ironical semblance of
the subtitle, applied to a planned murder: a study of duty. |
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A few notes, deliberately scattered about the text by Oscar Wilde,
were enough to mislead the judges further. |
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Following this, they searched for affinities with the inspirational
idea of the narrative. It was said that, clearly, Oscar Wilde had read Le Bonheur dans le Crime by Barbey
d’Aurevilly and had also borrowed something from A Rebours. |
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This is possible, but these reflections, although sensible, are
not important. |
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Today, certain facts have thrown light on the work and one can say
that The Crime of Lord Arthur Savile
is, of all Oscar Wilde’s writings, pathologically the most typical. |
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In this story the author inverts the notions of Good and Evil in
the brain of his hero not as a writer of paradoxes would, but as a genuinely
ill person. |
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The distinction is easy to make. |
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One might read the very curious novel by Georges Darien: Le Voleur, which consists of a long
and amusing paradox, and the difference between the two stories becomes
immediately clear. In the book by Darien, Georges Randal has chosen theft as
a profession: he studies to become a thief as one studies to become a banker,
doctor or lawyer and he has a thief’s outlook on everything. He fights
society with the weapons he has chosen and which Darien has honed logically
to accord with the mentality of his hero. Randal, who is not a monster, has
the exact sensibility of an outlaw. |
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Lord Arthur Savile is of a quite different order from Georges
Randal. Apart from the moment when his ideas derail and invert themselves,
his reasoning could not be more normal. |
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‘Now as
Lord Arthur looked at Sybil’s portrait’ wrote Wilde, ‘he was filled with a
terrible pity that is born out of love. He felt that to marry her, with the
doom of murder hanging over his head, would be a betrayal like that of Judas,
a sin worse than any the Borgia had ever dreamed of. |
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‘What
happiness could there be for them, when at any moment he might be called upon
to carry out the awful prophesy written in his hand? |
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‘The
marriage must be postponed at all costs... |
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‘Ardently
though he loved the girl, and the mere touch of her fingers, when they sat
together, made each nerve of his body thrill with exquisite joy, he
recognised none the less clearly where his duty lay, and was fully conscious
of the fact that he had no right to marry until he had committed the murder. |
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‘This
done, he could stand before the altar with Sybil Merton, and give his life
into the hands of the woman he loved without terror of wrongdoing. |
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‘This
done, he could take her to his arms knowing that she would never have to hang
her head in shame. |
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‘But done
it must be first; and the sooner the better for both.’ |
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By this strange reasoning the hero of Wilde commits therefore his
crime out of duty. However, by studying carefully the works which eminent
physicians have devoted to the case of the novelist, it becomes evident that
this story illustrates the most recent theories. |
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The other stories in this collection are, on the contrary, purely
literary fantasies, pages by that exquisite dilettante called Oscar Wilde.
They contain some of that characteristic irony which the critics across the
Channel called Wilde-isms. |
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The reader will now have a point of comparison, allowing him/her
to dismiss or accept the considerations outlined above. |
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© Tanya Touwen 2010 |
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