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 warned as I've related, again and again; but he
took character-colour from his associates and he met Queensberry's first
attempts at attack with utter disdain. He did not realise his danger at
all. Gide reports him more correctly as adding:
"Prison has completely changed me. I was relying on it for that--Douglas
is terrible. He cannot understand that--cannot understand that I am not
taking up the same existence again. He accuses the others of having
changed me."
I may publish here part of a letter of a prison warder which Mr. Stuart
Mason reproduced in his excellent little book on Oscar Wilde. He says:
"No more beautiful life had any man lived, no more beautiful life could
any man live than Oscar Wilde lived during the short period I knew him
in prison. He wore upon his face an eternal smile; sunshine was on his
face, sunshine of some sort must have been in his heart. People say he
was not sincere: he was the very soul of sincerity when I knew him. If
he did not continue that life after he left prison, then the forces of
evil must have been too strong for him. But he tried, he honestly tried,
and in prison he succeeded."
All this seems to me in the main, true. Oscar's gay vivacity would have
astonished any stranger. Besides, the regular hours and scant plain food
of prison had improved his health and the solitude and suffering had
lent him a deeper emotional life. But there was an intense bitterness in
him, a profound underlying sense of injury which came continually to
passionate expression. Yet as soon as the miserable petty persecution of
the prison was lifted from him, all the joyous gaiety and fun of his
nature bubbled up irresistibly. There was no contradiction in this
complexity. A man can hold in himself a hundred conflicting passions and
impulses without confusion. At this time the dominant chord in Oscar was
pity for others.
To my delight the world had evidence of this changed Oscar Wilde in a
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