One last word on Oscar Wilde’s place in English literature.  In the course of this narrative I have indicated sufficiently, I think, the value and importance of his work; he will live with Congreve and with Sheridan as the wittiest and most humorous of all our playwrights.  “The Importance of Being Earnest” has its own place among the best of English comedies.  But Oscar Wilde has done better work than Congreve or Sheridan:  he is a master not only of the smiles, but of the tears of men.  “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” is the best ballad in English; it is more, it is the noblest utterance that has yet reached us from a modern prison, the only high utterance indeed that has ever come from that underworld of man’s hatred and man’s inhumanity.  In it, and by the spirit of Jesus which breathes through it, Oscar Wilde has done much, not only to reform English prisons, but to abolish them altogether, for they are as degrading to the intelligence as they are harmful to the soul.  What gaoler and what gaol could do anything but evil to the author of such a verse as this: 

    This too I know—­and wise it were
      If each could know the same—­
    That every prison that men build
      Is built with bricks of shame,
    And bound with bars, lest Christ should see
      How men their brothers maim.

Indeed, is it not clear that the man who, in his own wretchedness, wrote that letter to the warder which I have reproduced, and was eager to bring about the freeing of the little children at his own cost, is far above the judge who condemned him or the society which sanctions such punishments?  “The Ballad of Reading Gaol,” I repeat, and some pages of “De Profundis,” and, above all, the tragic fate of which these were the outcome, render Oscar Wilde more interesting to men than any of his peers.

He has been indeed well served by the malice and cruelty of his enemies; in this sense his word in “De Profundis” that he stood in symbolic relation to the art and life of his time is justified.

The English drove Byron and Shelley and Keats into exile and allowed Chatterton, Davidson and Middleton to die of misery and destitution; but they treated none of their artists and seers with the malevolent cruelty they showed to Oscar Wilde.  His fate in England is symbolic of the fate of all artists; in some degree they will all be punished as he was punished by a grossly materialised people who prefer to go in blinkers and accept idiotic conventions because they distrust the intellect and have no taste for mental virtues.

All English artists will be judged by their inferiors and condemned, as Dante’s master was condemned, for their good deeds (per tuo ben far):  for it must not be thought that Oscar Wilde was punished solely or even chiefly for the evil he wrought:  he was punished for his popularity and his preeminence, for the superiority of his mind and wit; he was punished by the envy of journalists, and by the malignant pedantry of half-civilised judges.  Envy in his case overleaped itself:  the hate of his justicers was so diabolic that they have given him to the pity of mankind forever; they it is who have made him eternally interesting to humanity, a tragic figure of imperishable renown.