ABSTRACT
Dear Ross, I have written an article on Wilde for the Neue Freie Presse of Vienna! I am half tempted to cut into the Saturday Review correspondence with a letter giving the comedie view of De Profundis. It is really an extraordinary book, quite exhilarating and amusing as to Wilde himself, and quite disgraceful and shameful to his stupid tormentors. There is pain in it, inconvenience, annoyance, but no real tragedy, all comedy. The unquenchable spirit of the man is magnificent: he maintains his position and puts society squalidly in the wrong-rubs into them every insult and humiliation he endured-comes out the same man he went in-with stupendous success. The little aside in which, after writing several pages with undisguised artistic enjoyment and detachment, he remarks that they have been feeding him satisfactorily of late, is irresistible. It annoys me to have people degrading the whole affair to the level of sentimental tragedy. There is only one moment at which he shows himself subject to the common lot of mankind unconscious of its own comedy; and that is where he calls himself ‘enfant de son siècle’. Of course, except in his personality, and his supermorality, he was thoroughly Irish and old fashioned, a Gautierist in 1879-1900 (!) a chivalrous romanticist (see the Ideal Husband etc.) in the days of Strindberg and Ibsen. The British press is as completely beaten by him de profundis as it was in excelsis….
