you knew so little about
life, but that you knew so much. The morning dawn of boyhood with its
delicate bloom, its clear pure light, its joy of innocence and
expectation, you had left far behind you. With very swift and running
feet you had passed from Romance to Realism. The gutter and the things
that live in it had begun to fascinate you. That was the origin of the
trouble[39] in which you sought my aid, and I, unwisely, according to
the wisdom of this world, out of pity and kindness, gave it to you. You
must read this letter right through, though each word may become to you
as the fire or knife of the surgeon that makes the delicate flesh burn
or bleed. Remember that the fool to the eyes of the gods and the fool to
the eyes of man are very different. One who is entirely ignorant[40] of
the modes of Art in its revelation or the moods of thought in its
progress, of the pomp of the Latin line or the richer music of the
vowelled Greek, of Tuscan sculpture or Elizabethan song, may yet be full
of the very sweetest wisdom. The real fool, such as the gods mock or
mar, is he who does not know himself. I was such a one too long. You
have been such a one too long. Be so no more. Do not be afraid. The
supreme vice is shallowness. Everything that is realised is right.
Remember also that whatever is misery to you to read, is still greater
misery to me to set down. They have permitted you to see the strange and
tragic shapes of life as one sees shadows in a crystal. The head of
Medusa that turns living men to stone, you have been allowed to look at
in a mirror merely. You yourself have walked free among the flowers.
From me the beautiful world of colour and motion has been taken away.

I will begin by telling you that I blame myself terribly. As I sit in
this dark cell in convict clothes, a disgraced and ruined man, I blame
myself. In the perturbed and fitful nights of anguish, in the long
monotonous days of pain, it is myself I blame. I blame myself for
allowing an intellectual friendship, a friendship whose primary aim was
not the creation and contemplation of beautiful things, entirely to
dominate my life. From the very first there was too wide a gap between
us. You had been idle at your school, worse than idle[41] at your
university. You did not realise that an artist, and especially such an
artist as I am, one, that is to say, the quality of whose work depends
on the intensification of personality, requires an intellectual
atm