enough, this higher vision helped, as we shall soon see, to shake his
individuality from its centre, and thus destroyed his power of work and
completed his soul-ruin. Oscar's second fall--this time from a
height--was fatal and made writing impossible to him. It is all clear
enough now in retrospect though I did not understand it at the time.
When he went to live with Bosie Douglas he threw off the Christian
attitude, but afterwards had to recognise that "De Profundis" and "The
Ballad of Reading Gaol" were deeper and better work than any of his
earlier writings. He resumed the pagan position; outwardly and for the
time being he was the old Oscar again, with his Greek love of beauty and
hatred of disease, deformity and ugliness, and whenever he met a
kindred spirit, he absolutely revelled in gay paradoxes and brilliant
flashes of humour. But he was at war with himself, like Milton's Satan
always conscious of his fall, always regretful of his lost estate and by
reason of this division of spirit unable to write. Perhaps because of
this he threw himself more than ever into talk.
He was beyond all comparison the most interesting companion I have ever
known: the most brilliant talker, I cannot but think, that ever lived.
No one surely ever gave himself more entirely in speech. Again and again
he declared that he had only put his talent into his books and plays,
but his genius into his life. If he had said into his talk, it would
have been the exact truth.
People have differed a great deal about his mental and physical
condition after he came out of prison. All who knew him really, Ross,
Turner, More Adey, Lord Alfred Douglas and myself, are agreed that in
spite of a slight deafness he was never better in health, never indeed
so well. But some French friends were determined to make him out a
martyr.
In his picture of Wilde's last years, Gide tells us that "he had
suffered too grievously from his imprisonment.... His will had been
broken ... nothing remained in his shattered life but a mouldy
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