ABSTRACT
To take the case of the late Oscar Wilde is, no doubt, to taken an extreme instance. But suppose we consider that one of his works which seemed to show him in his most sincere mood, at a time when, as many have asserted, he repented his life and turned to the deep contemplation of religion. Suddenly in De Profundis we find him declaring: ‘I need not tell you that to me reformations in morals are as meaningless and vulgar as Reformations in theology.’ This is only one of many sentences in his prison utterance which show that it was too hastily judged by many of the newspaper critics. Most of them, recalling the tragedy of his death and his return from prison to an unreformed life, wondered how these melodious confessions of regret, this intimate talk about Christ and the Gospels, could be reconciled with so shameful an ending. They affectedto see in this little book something like a death-bed repentance, the expression of poignant regret for a moral suicide, the finding of consolation in religion and the celebration, as it were, of the rites of Supreme Unction. But for my part I cannot find in those confessions the last utterances of a fallen tragic hero, with the well-proportioned tragedy marred only by a sordid ending. Nor does it seem necessary to regard these pages as a deliberate deceit, as one of the intentional poses of a man who had lived always before the footlights. ‘It is a very unimaginative nature,’ he says himself, ‘which only cares for people on their pedestals.’ Perhaps this fine writing, with its Epicurean philosophy, is not so incompatible with the dismal after-act as many have supposed.
