bloom, its clear pure light, its joy of innocence and expectation, you had left far behind you.  With very swift and running feet you had passed from Romance to Realism.  The gutter and the things that live in it had begun to fascinate you.  That was the origin of the trouble[39] in which you sought my aid, and I, unwisely, according to the wisdom of this world, out of pity and kindness, gave it to you.  You must read this letter right through, though each word may become to you as the fire or knife of the surgeon that makes the delicate flesh burn or bleed.  Remember that the fool to the eyes of the gods and the fool to the eyes of man are very different.  One who is entirely ignorant[40] of the modes of Art in its revelation or the moods of thought in its progress, of the pomp of the Latin line or the richer music of the vowelled Greek, of Tuscan sculpture or Elizabethan song, may yet be full of the very sweetest wisdom.  The real fool, such as the gods mock or mar, is he who does not know himself.  I was such a one too long.  You have been such a one too long.  Be so no more.  Do not be afraid.  The supreme vice is shallowness.  Everything that is realised is right.  Remember also that whatever is misery to you to read, is still greater misery to me to set down.  They have permitted you to see the strange and tragic shapes of life as one sees shadows in a crystal.  The head of Medusa that turns living men to stone, you have been allowed to look at in a mirror merely.  You yourself have walked free among the flowers.  From me the beautiful world of colour and motion has been taken away.

I will begin by telling you that I blame myself terribly.  As I sit in this dark cell in convict clothes, a disgraced and ruined man, I blame myself.  In the perturbed and fitful nights of anguish, in the long monotonous days of pain, it is myself I blame.  I blame myself for allowing an intellectual friendship, a friendship whose primary aim was not the creation and contemplation of beautiful things, entirely to dominate my life.  From the very first there was too wide a gap between us.  You had been idle at your school, worse than idle[41] at your university.  You did not realise that an artist, and especially such an artist as I am, one, that is to say, the quality of whose work depends on the intensification of personality, requires an intellectual atmosphere, quiet, peace, and solitude.  You admired my work when it was finished:  you enjoyed the brilliant successes of my first nights, and the brilliant banquets that followed them:  you were proud, and quite naturally so, of being the intimate friend of an artist so distinguished:  but you could not understand the conditions requisite for the production of artistic work.  I am not speaking in phrases of rhetorical exaggeration, but in terms of absolute truth to actual fact when I remind you that during the whole time we were together I never wrote one single line.  Whether at Torquay, Goring, London, Florence, or elsewhere, my life, as long as you were by my side, was entirely sterile and uncreative.  And with but few intervals, you were, I regret to say, by my side always.