"Have you ever learned how wonderful a thing pity is? For my part I
thank God every night, yes, on my knees I thank God for having taught it
to me. I went into prison with a heart of stone, thinking only of my own
pleasure; but now my heart is utterly broken--pity has entered into my
heart. I have learned now that pity is the greatest and the most
beautiful thing in the world. And that is why I cannot bear ill-will
towards those who caused my suffering and those who condemned me; no,
nor to anyone, because without them I should not have known all that.
Alfred Douglas writes me terrible letters. He says he does not
understand me, that he does not understand that I do not wish everyone
ill, and that everyone has been horrid to me. No, he does not understand
me. He cannot understand me any more. But I keep on telling him that in
every letter: we cannot follow the same road. He has his and it is
beautiful--I have mine. His is that of Alcibiades; mine is now that of
St. Francis of Assisi."

How much of this is sincere and how much merely imagined and stated in
order to incarnate the new ideal to perfection would be hard to say. The
truth is not so saintly simple as the christianised Oscar would have us
believe. The unpublished portions of "De Profundis" which were read out
in the Douglas-Ransome trial prove, what all his friends know, that
Oscar Wilde found it impossible to forgive or forget what seemed to him
personal ill-treatment. There are beautiful pages in "De Profundis,"
pages of sweetest Christlike resignation and charity and no doubt in a
certain mood Oscar was sincere in writing them. But there was another
mood in him, more vital and more enduring, if not so engaging, a mood in
which he saw himself as one betrayed and sacrificed and abandoned, and
then he attributed his ruin wholly to his friend and did not hesitate to
speak of him as the "Judas" whose shallow selfishness and imperious
ill-temper and unfulfilled promises of monetary help had driven a great