HIS LAST BOOK
AND HIS LAST YEARS IN PARIS
By “A”
(LORD ALFRED DOUGLAS?)
The following three articles, two of them from the “St. James’s Gazette” and one from the “Motorist”, are marked with so much good sense and dissipate so many errors touching Oscar Wilde’s last Years in Paris that the publisher deemed it a duty to reproduce them here as a permanent answer to the wild legends circulated about the subject of this book.
OSCAR WILDE
His last Book and his last Years
The publication of Oscar Wilde’s last book, “De Profundis,” has revived interest in the closing scenes of his life, and we to-day print the first of two articles dealing with his last years in Paris from a source which puts their authenticity beyond question.
The one question which inevitably suggested itself to the reader of “De Profundis,” was, “What was the effect of his prison reflections on his subsequent life?” The book is full not only of frank admissions of the error of his ways, but of projects for his future activity. “I hope,” he wrote, in reply to some criticisms on the relations of art and morals, “to live long enough to produce work of such a character that I shall be able at the end of my days to say, “Yes, that is just where the artistic life leads a man!” He mentions in particular two subjects on which he proposed to write, “Christ as the Precursor of the Romantic Movement in Life” and “The Artistic Life Considered in its Relation to Conduct.” These resolutions were never carried out, for reasons some of which the writer of the following article indicates.