lean and empty. Well, people
must make their own choice and go their own way. The world is
wide, and Nature has at least this in common with Heaven, that it
has many mansions.

The feverish passion for fair things which obsessed Oscar Wilde and
carried him so far is not for all the sons of men; nor even, in every
hour of their lives, for those who most ardently answer to it. That
feverishness burns itself out; that smouldering fire turns to cold
ashes. Life flows on, though Salome, daughter of Herodias, lies
crushed under the piled-up shields, and though in all the prisons of
the world "the damned grotesques make arabesques, like the wind
upon the sand."

Life flows on, and the quips and merry jests of Oscar Wilde, his
artful artlessness, his insolence, his self-pity, his loyalty and
fickleness, his sensuality and tenderness, only fill after all a small
space in the heart's chamber of those who read him and stare at his
plays and let him go.

But there are a few for whom the tragic wantonness of that strange
countenance, with the heavy eyelids and pouting mouth, means
something not easily forgotten, not easily put by.

To have seen Oscar Wilde and talked with him gives to such persons
a strange significance, an almost religious value. One looks long at
them, as if to catch some far-off reflection from the wit of the dead
man. They do not seem to us quite like the rest. They have seen
Oscar Wilde, and "They know what they have seen." For when all
has been said against him that can be said it remains that Oscar
Wilde, for good and for evil, in innocence and in excess, in
orthodoxy and in rebellion, is a "symbolic figure."

It is indeed easy enough, when one is under the spell of the golden
gaiety of his wit, to forget the essential and irresistible truth of so
many of his utterances.

That profound association between the "Sorrow that endureth
forever" and the "Pleasure that abideth for a moment," which he
symbolises under the parable of the Image of Bronze, has its place
throughout all his work.

It is a mistake to regard De Profundis as a recantation. It is a
fulfilment, a completion, a rounding off. Like a black and a scarlet
thread running through the whole tapestry of his tragic story are the
two parallel "motifs," the passion of the beauty which leads to
destruction and the passion of the beauty which leads to life.

It matters little whether he was or was not received into the Church
before he died. In