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was letting himself go.
    Howbeit, here is the letter which I wrote, already some years ago, to Mr. X … who, likewise, thought that he had found a certain contradiction between my account and the recognition of that generous fidelity from which certain friends never departed:
    â€œAs far the pecuniary question goes, Lord Alfred Douglas’ explanation is the only plausible one—I believe, in effect, that Wilde, on leaving prison, would have had enough to live on tolerably well, if he had not been ‘incurably extravagant and reckless.’ But it is none the less true that, the last times I saw Wilde, he seemed deeply miserable, sad, impotent and hopeless—as, in fact, he is portrayed, for example,in this letter which he wrote to me a short time before he left for Cannes (winter of ’97-98), and which I cite, however beautiful it may be, only to help you set things straight:
    â€˜ … However, at the present moment I am very sad—I have received nothing from my publisher in London who owes me money: and I am in extreme want … You see how wretched the tragedy of my life has become—suffering is possible—is perhaps necessary—but poverty, destitution—that’s what’s terrible. It soils man’s soul …
    Howbeit, I should be deeply grieved that something in my article might in any way have displeased Lord Alfred who conducted himself in that whole affair with the greatest nobility, as I shall one day set down in writing, and for whom I have retained a keen affection. Be so good as to tell him that if you see him again …”
    In the space of a few months, two of Wilde’s books have just been published in our language: Intentions 1 and De Profundis; 2 the first dates from the most brilliant period of his success; the second, dated from prison, stands facing it, seems its antithesis or palinode. I should have liked, in this article, not to separate these two books, to discover one in the other, the memory of the first in the second, and, especially, the promises of the second in the first. ButMichel Arnauld, in this very place, 3 has spoken of Intentions too excellently for me to have to recur to it; I refer the reader to the high praise he has given this most remarkable book and turn to De Profundis.
    De Profundis can hardly be considered as a book; it is, disengaged from some rather vain and specious theories, the sobbing of a wounded man who is struggling. I was unable to listen to it without tears; I should like, however, to speak of it without any trembling in my voice.
    â€œ Life cheats us with shadows, ” wrote Wilde six years before his trial. “ We ask it for pleasure. It gives it to us, with bitterness and disappointment in its train. ”
    And further on: “Life! Life! Don’t let us go to life for our fulfillments or our experience. It is a thing narrowed by circumstances, incoherent in its utterance, and without that fine correspondence of form and spirit which is the only thing that can satisfy the artistic and critical temperament. It makes us pay too high a price for its wares, and we purchase the meanest of its secrets at a cost that is monstrous and infinite. ”
    What, at least, is this mean secret that Wilde, experienced as he nevertheless was, had to purchase at so monstrous a price?—From page to page, in his De Profundis, he repeats it: “ That something hidden away in my nature, like a treasure in a field, is humility. ” That was not perhaps what the essayist was seeking; but what is to be done about it? For the present, he must cling to it since that is all he has. “ There is only one thing for me now, absolute humility. ” And if at first he calls his state a horrible disgrace, shortly afterwards, regaining his self-possession, or pretending to regain his self-possession, he writes: “ It is the last thing left in me, and the best: the ultimate discovery at which I have arrived,