He forfeited, in the pursuit of forbidden pleasures, if pleasures they can be called, all and everything that made life dear.
He entered upon his incarceration bankrupt in reputation, in friends, in pocket, and had not even left to him the poor shreds of his own self-esteem.
He went into gaol, knowing that if he emerged alive, the darkness would swallow him up and that his world—the spheres which had delighted to honour him—would know him no more.
He had covered his name with infamy and sank his own celebrity in a slough of slime and filth.
He would die to leave behind him what?—the name of a man who was absolutely governed by his own vices and to whom no act of immorality was too foul or horrible.
Oscar Wilde emerged from prison in every way a broken man. The wonderful descriptive force of the Ballad of Reading Gaol; the perfect, torturing self-analysis of De Profundis speak eloquently of powers unimpaired; but they were the swan-songs of a once great mind. All his abilities had fled. He seemed unable to concentrate his mind upon anything. He took up certain subjects, played with them, and wearied of them in a day. French authors did not ostracise the erratic English genius when he hid himself amongst them and they honestly endeavoured to find him employment. But his faculties had been blunted by the horrors of prison life. His epigrams had lost their edge. His aphorisms were trite and aimless. He abandoned every subject he took up, in despair. His mind died before his body. He suffered from a complete mental atrophy. A nightingale cannot sing in a cage. A genius cannot flourish in a prison. He died in two years and is now—the merest memory! Let us remember this of him: if he sinned much, he suffered much.
Peace to his ashes!
