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, some inexplicable presentiment, the approaching
catastrophe cast its shadow over his mind and he felt vaguely that the
life-journey of genius would be incomplete and farcical without the
final tragedy: whoever lives for the highest must be crucified.
It seems memorable to me that in this brief summer of his life, Oscar
Wilde should have concerned himself especially with the life-story of
the Man of Sorrows who had sounded all the depths of suffering. Just
when he himself was about to enter the Dark Valley, Jesus was often in
his thoughts and he always spoke of Him with admiration. But after all
how could he help it? Even Dekker saw as far as that:
"The best of men
That e'er wore earth about Him."
This was the deeper strain in Oscar Wilde's nature though he was
always disinclined to show it. Habitually he lived in humorous talk,
in the epithets and epigrams he struck out in the desire to please and
astonish his hearers.
One evening I learned almost by chance that he was about to try a new
experiment and break into a new field.
He took up the word "lose" at the table, I remember.
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