like, he stumbled over the miracles and came to grief. Claus Sluter's head of
Jesus in the museum of Dijon is a finer portrait, and so is the imaginative
picture of Fra Angelico. It seemed to me possible to do a sketch from the
Gospels themselves which should show the growth of the soul of Jesus and so
impose itself as a true portrait.

Oscar's interest in the theme was different; he put himself frankly in the
place of his model, and appeared to enjoy the jarring antinomy which resulted.
One or two of his stories were surprising in ironical suggestion; surprising
too because they showed his convinced paganism. Here is one which reveals his
exact position:

"When Joseph of Arimathea came down in the evening from Mount Calvary where
Jesus had died he saw on a white stone a young man seated weeping. And Joseph
went near him and said, 'I understand how great thy grief must be, for certainly
that Man was a just Man.' But the young man made answer, 'Oh, it is not for that
I am weeping. I am weeping because I too have wrought miracles. I also have
given sight to the blind, I have healed the palsied and I have raised the dead;
I too have caused the barren fig tree to wither away and I have turned water
into wine . . . and yet they have not crucified me.'"

At the time this apologue amused me; in the light of later events it assumed a
tragic significance. Oscar Wilde ought to have known that in this world every
real superiority is pursued with hatred, and every worker of miracles is sure
to be persecuted. But he had no inkling that the Gospel story is symbolic--the
life-story of genius for all time, eternally true. He never looked outside
himself, and as the fruits of success were now sweet in his mouth, a pursuing
Fate seemed to him the most mythical of myths. His child-like self-confidence
was pathetic. The laws that govern human affairs had little interest for the
man who was always a law unto himself. Yet by some extraordinary prescience,