In this same talk with M. Gide, Oscar is reported to have said that he had known beforehand that a catastrophe was unavoidable; “there was but one end possible....  That state of things could not last; there had to be some end to it.”

This view I believe is Gide’s and not Oscar’s.  In any case I am sure that my description of him before the trials as full of insolent self-assurance is the truer truth.  Of course he must have had forebodings; he was warned as I’ve related, again and again; but he took character-colour from his associates and he met Queensberry’s first attempts at attack with utter disdain.  He did not realise his danger at all.  Gide reports him more correctly as adding: 

“Prison has completely changed me.  I was relying on it for that—­Douglas is terrible.  He cannot understand that—­cannot understand that I am not taking up the same existence again.  He accuses the others of having changed me.”

I may publish here part of a letter of a prison warder which Mr. Stuart Mason reproduced in his excellent little book on Oscar Wilde.  He says: 

“No more beautiful life had any man lived, no more beautiful life could any man live than Oscar Wilde lived during the short period I knew him in prison.  He wore upon his face an eternal smile; sunshine was on his face, sunshine of some sort must have been in his heart.  People say he was not sincere:  he was the very soul of sincerity when I knew him.  If he did not continue that life after he left prison, then the forces of evil must have been too strong for him.  But he tried, he honestly tried, and in prison he succeeded.”

All this seems to me in the main, true.  Oscar’s gay vivacity would have astonished any stranger.  Besides, the regular hours and scant plain food of prison had improved his health and the solitude and suffering had lent him a deeper emotional life.  But there was an intense bitterness in him, a profound underlying sense of injury which came continually to passionate expression.  Yet as soon as the miserable petty persecution of the prison was lifted from him, all the joyous gaiety and fun of his nature bubbled up irresistibly.  There was no contradiction in this complexity.  A man can hold in himself a hundred conflicting passions and impulses without confusion.  At this time the dominant chord in Oscar was pity for others.

To my delight the world had evidence of this changed Oscar Wilde in a very short time.  On May 28th, a few days after he left prison, there appeared in The Daily Chronicle a letter more than two columns in length, pleading for the kindlier treatment of little children in English prisons.  The letter was written because Warder Martin[8] of Reading prison had been dismissed by the Commissioners for the dreadful crime of “having given some sweet biscuits to a little hungry child."...

I must quote a few paragraphs of this letter; because it shows how prison had deepened Oscar Wilde, how his own suffering had made him, as Shakespeare says, “pregnant to good pity,” and also because it tells us what life was like in an English prison in our time.  Oscar wrote: