“I shall be very lonely when I come out, and I can’t stand loneliness and solitude; it is intolerable to me, hateful, I have had too much of it....

“You see, Frank, I am breaking with the past altogether.  I am going to write the history of it.  I am going to tell how I was tempted and fell, how I was pushed by the man I loved into that dreadful quarrel of his, driven forward to the fight with his father and then left to suffer alone....

“That is the story I am now going to tell.  That is the book[6] of pity and of love which I am writing now—­a terrible book....

“I wonder would you publish it, Frank?  I should like it to appear in The Saturday.”

“I’d be delighted to publish anything of yours,” I replied, “and happier still to publish something to show that you have at length chosen the better part and are beginning a new life.  I’d pay you, too, whatever the work turns out to be worth to me; in any case much more than I pay Bernard Shaw or anyone else.”  I said this to encourage him.

“I’m sure of that,” he answered.  “I’ll send you the book as soon as I’ve finished it.  I think you’ll like it”—­and there for the moment the matter ended.

At length I felt sure that all would be well with him.  How could I help feeling sure?  His mind was richer and stronger than it had ever been; and he had broken with all the dark past.  I was overjoyed to believe that he would yet do greater things than he had ever done, and this belief and determination were in him too, as anyone can see on reading what he wrote at this time in prison: 

“There is before me so much to do that I would regard it as a terrible tragedy if I died before I was allowed to complete at any rate a little of it.  I see new developments in art and life, each one of which is a fresh mode of perfection.  I long to live so that I can explore what is no less than a new world to me.  Do you want to know what this new world is?  I think you can guess what it is.  It is the world in which I have been living.  Sorrow, then, and all that it teaches one, is my new world....

“I used to live entirely for pleasure.  I shunned suffering and sorrow of every kind.  I hated both....”

Through the prison bars Oscar had begun to see how mistaken he had been, how much greater, and more salutary to the soul, suffering is than pleasure.

“Out of sorrow have the worlds been built, and at the birth of a child or a star there is pain.”

FOOTNOTES: 

[3] Cfr.  Appendix:  “Criticisms by Robert Ross.”

[4] I give Oscar’s view of the trial just to show how his romantic imagination turned disagreeable facts into pleasant fiction.  Oscar could only have heard of the trial, and perhaps his mother was his informant—­which adds to the interest of the story.

[5] Permission to visit a dying mother is accorded in France, even to murderers.  The English pretend to be more religious than the French; but are assuredly less humane.