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for the very things for which he was vilified. Sadly, Wilde is as misunderstood today as he was in his own day, especially as the central theme of his late works has precious little to do with the role of “sexual liberator” that posterity has thrust upon him and everything to do with the Christian penitent seeking forgiveness. Wilde’s “heart of stone” was broken by the experience of the two-year prison sentence imposed in the wake of the libel trial, and his two late works, The Ballad of Reading Gaol and the posthumously published De Profundis , bear witness to his eleventh-hour conversion to Catholicism. Three weeks before his death, he told a Daily Chronicle correspondent that “much of my moral obliquity is due to the fact that my father would not allow me to become a Catholic. The artistic side of the Church and the fragrance of its teaching would have cured my degeneracies. I intend to be received before long.” He was received on his deathbed.
    It is indeed ironic that Wilde is remembered only for the tragedy of his life and not for its happy ending. His last will and testament remains, however, in the brilliance of The Ballad of Reading Gaol , a poem that bears a remarkable similarity to Thompson’s masterpiece “The Hound of Heaven” in its description of the triumph of Christ through the suffering and desolation of a misspent life:
         And thus we rust Life’s iron chain
              Degraded and alone:
         And some men curse, and some men weep,
              And some men make no moan:
         But God’s eternal Laws are kind
              And break the heart of stone.
         And every human heart that breaks,
              In prison-cell or yard,
         Is as that broken box that gave
              Its treasure to the Lord,
         And filled the unclean leper’s house
              With the scent of costliest nard.
         Ah! happy they whose hearts can break
              And peace of pardon win!
         How else may man make straight his plan
              And cleanse his soul from Sin?
         How else but through a broken heart
              May Lord Christ enter in?
    Ultimately, the Decadents were far more in revolt against the humanistic “rationalism” of the post-Enlightenment than they were ever in revolt against the traditions of the Church. They sprang from the same romantic tradition as Coleridge and Wordsworth, seeking the soul and its secrets in a world that had seemingly lost its soul through a lack of belief in its very existence. Whereas Coleridge and Wordsworth had become sceptical about scepticism, the Decadents had become cynical toward cynicism. Furthermore, when their cynicism led them to sin, it brought them into contact with authentic tradition, specifically the Church’s teaching on the seven deadly sins, reflected most sublimely in art by the divinely inspired infernal and purgatorial visions of Dante. The Decadents were groping uncertainly and sometimes blindly in search of the same Dantean vision. Their own visions may have been pale reflections of Dante’s masterpiece, but they were visions of sublime reality nonetheless. The Decadents discovered the reality of sin and, having kissed it, recoiled from its embrace. Having experienced the dire consequences of the real absence of God, they hungered for His Real Presence.
    Apart from the striking similarity between the Decadent and the Dantean, there is also an obvious affinity of inspiration and intent between Decadent works such as A Rebours and The Picture of Dorian Gray and the Faustian parables of Marlowe and Goethe. Perhaps the most striking example of a Decadent reworking of the legend of Dr. Faustus was “Finis Coronat Opus”, a short story by Francis Thompson. The hero, or more correctly the antihero, of Thompson’s tale is Florentian, a character cast in the same mold as Dr. Faustus or Dorian Gray, who also