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 The unpublished portions of "De Profundis" which were read out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
man to disaster.

That unpublished portion of "De Profundis" is in essence, from
beginning to end, one long curse of Lord Alfred Douglas, an indictment
apparently impartial, particularly at first; but in reality a bitter and
merciless accusation, showing in Oscar Wilde a curious want of sympathy
even with the man he said he loved. Those who would know Oscar Wilde as
he really was will read that piece of rhetoric with care enough to
notice that he reiterates the charge of shallow selfishness with such
venom, that he discovers his own colossal egotism and essential hardness
of heart. "Love," we are told, "suffereth long and is kind ... beareth
all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all
things"--that sweet, generous, all-forgiving tenderness of love was not
in the pagan, Oscar Wilde, and therefore even his deepest passion never
won to complete reconciliation and ultimate redemption.

In this same talk with M. Gide, Oscar is reported to have said that he
had known beforehand that a catastrophe was unavoidable; "there was but
one end possible.... That state of things could not last; there had to
be some end to it."

This view I believe is Gide's and not Oscar's. In any case I am sure
that my description of him before the trials as full of insolent
self-assurance is the truer truth. Of course he must have had
forebodings; he was