Wilde really came close to the divine
Master; "the image of the Man of Sorrows," he says, "has fascinated and
dominated art as no Greek god succeeded in doing."... And again:

"Out of the carpenter's shop at Nazareth had come a personality
infinitely greater than any made by myth and legend, and one, strangely
enough, destined to reveal to the world the mystical meaning of wine and
the real beauties of the lilies of the field as none, either on
Cithaeron or Enna, has ever done. The song of Isaiah, 'He is despised
and rejected of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief: and we
hid as it were our faces from him,' had seemed to him to prefigure
himself, and in him the prophecy was fulfilled."

In this spirit Oscar made up his mind that he would write about "Christ
as the precursor of the romantic movement in life" and about "The
artistic life considered in its relation to conduct."

By bitter suffering he had been brought to see that the moment of
repentance is the moment of absolution and self-realisation, that tears
can wash out even blood. In "The Ballad of Reading Gaol" he wrote:

And with tears of blood he cleansed the hand,
The hand that held the steel:
For only blood can wipe out blood,
And only tears can heal:
And the crimson stain that was of Cain
Became Christ's snow-white seal.

This is the highest height Oscar Wilde ever reached, and alas! he only
trod the summit for a moment. But as he says himself: "One has perhaps
to go to prison to understand that. And, if so, it may be worth while
going to prison." He was by nature a pagan who for a few months became a
Christian, but to live as a lover of Jesus was impossible to this
"Greek born out of due time," and he never even dreamed of a reconciling
synthesis....

The arrest of his development makes him a better representative of his
time: he was an artistic expression of the best English mind: a Pagan
and Epicurean, his rule of conduct was a selfish Individualism:--"Am I
my brother's keeper?" This attitude must entail a dreadful Nemesis, for
it condemns one Briton in every four to a pauper's grave. The result
will convince the most hardened that such selfishness is not a creed by
which human beings can live in society.

* * * * *

This summer of 1897 was the harvest time in Oscar Wilde's Life; and his
golden Indian summer. We owe it "De Profundis," the best pages of prose
he ever wrote,