ABSTRACT
Two simple impressions were left on my mind when I had read the history of his soul in prison, written by Oscar Wilde. One was that it was poignantly touching, the other that it was extraordinary and profoundly interesting. A man to whom applause was a primary need of life, acutely sensitive to beauty, impatient of any control, had fallen in squalid ruin, amidst common execration, and was condemned to two years of, perhaps, the most hideous and unlovely life ever devised by man for his fellows. How far he deserved it all is here an irrelevant consideration. It is relevant to remember that if we can put aside that for which he suffered, he was very far from being a man with whom sympathy was impossible. It is the callous, the mean, the vindictive, with whom we find it hard to sympathise. This was a humane man, generous to his friends, placable to his enemies. His books and plays had given thousands delightful moments of thought and fun. Well, such a man had to suffer such a punishment. He had to find himself again in it, some sort of tolerable relation he had to find between himself and life, some meaning in it all not utterly unbearable. Inevitably, however, being an artist, one to whom expression was necessary in a degree the average man can never understand, he had to put this meaning into words, for the world or not, at least for himself. Any record of all this must have been touching; the actual record is profoundly interesting. These, as I said, were the two simple impressions on my mind. They seemed to need no qualification. But when I heard the book discussedand read other people’s opinions about it, I found that to many its interest was qualified, if not vitiated, by what they thought its insincerity. I think this criticism shallow, and it will help me to express how the book is significant to me if I explain why I think so.
