He was speaking in a low voice without any excitement.

“Have you ever learned how wonderful a thing pity is?  For my part I thank God every night, yes, on my knees I thank God for having taught it to me.  I went into prison with a heart of stone, thinking only of my own pleasure; but now my heart is utterly broken—­pity has entered into my heart.  I have learned now that pity is the greatest and the most beautiful thing in the world.  And that is why I cannot bear ill-will towards those who caused my suffering and those who condemned me; no, nor to anyone, because without them I should not have known all that.  Alfred Douglas writes me terrible letters.  He says he does not understand me, that he does not understand that I do not wish everyone ill, and that everyone has been horrid to me.  No, he does not understand me.  He cannot understand me any more.  But I keep on telling him that in every letter:  we cannot follow the same road.  He has his and it is beautiful—­I have mine.  His is that of Alcibiades; mine is now that of St. Francis of Assisi.”

How much of this is sincere and how much merely imagined and stated in order to incarnate the new ideal to perfection would be hard to say.  The truth is not so saintly simple as the christianised Oscar would have us believe.  The unpublished portions of “De Profundis” which were read out in the Douglas-Ransome trial prove, what all his friends know, that Oscar Wilde found it impossible to forgive or forget what seemed to him personal ill-treatment.  There are beautiful pages in “De Profundis,” pages of sweetest Christlike resignation and charity and no doubt in a certain mood Oscar was sincere in writing them.  But there was another mood in him, more vital and more enduring, if not so engaging, a mood in which he saw himself as one betrayed and sacrificed and abandoned, and then he attributed his ruin wholly to his friend and did not hesitate to speak of him as the “Judas” whose shallow selfishness and imperious ill-temper and unfulfilled promises of monetary help had driven a great man to disaster.

That unpublished portion of “De Profundis” is in essence, from beginning to end, one long curse of Lord Alfred Douglas, an indictment apparently impartial, particularly at first; but in reality a bitter and merciless accusation, showing in Oscar Wilde a curious want of sympathy even with the man he said he loved.  Those who would know Oscar Wilde as he really was will read that piece of rhetoric with care enough to notice that he reiterates the charge of shallow selfishness with such venom, that he discovers his own colossal egotism and essential hardness of heart.  “Love,” we are told, “suffereth long and is kind ... beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things”—­that sweet, generous, all-forgiving tenderness of love was not in the pagan, Oscar Wilde, and therefore even his deepest passion never won to complete reconciliation and ultimate redemption.