Then Wilde's prose goes on to tell how the young man turns and recognises his interlocutor and answers that he was a leper once, that Christ had healed him. How else should he live?
Our Lord leaves the palace and walks through the city, and he sees another young man pursuing a harlot, while his eyes are bright with lust. He speaks to the young man and asks him the reason of his way of life, and the young man turns and tells the Saviour of Mankind that he was once blind and that He had given him sight, and, therefore, at what else could he look?
The allegory goes on, but it is not necessary to continue an account of it. All it is necessary and right to say is, that the allegory is blasphemous and horrible—horrible with the insane pride of one who has not realised his imminent fall, who has realised the horror of his mental attitude no less than the life he was proved to have been leading at the time.
I have purposely refrained from quotation here. But let it again be said that the artistic presentment of these parables is without flaw.
I do not think it would be a kindness to the memory of Oscar Wilde, nor be doing a service to anyone at all, to continue this ethical criticism of the "Poems in Prose." Let me say only that Wilde, in another story, takes a sinner to the Judgment Seat and introduces God the Father into a dialogue in which the sinner silences the Almighty by his repartee. All these "Poems in Prose" are written beautifully, as I have said, but also with an extraordinarily adroit use of actual phrases from the New Testament. I will permit myself one quotation before I conclude, which is surely saddening in its significance in the view of after events.
And God said to the Man: "Thy life hath been Evil, and the Beauty I have shown thou hast sought for, and the Good I have hidden thou did'st pass by."
It remains to say something about Wilde's final essay, entitled "The Soul of Man," which also appeared in The Fortnightly Review. Upon its appearance it was called "The Soul of Man under Socialism," but it has since been republished under the title of "The Soul of Man."
This essay, brilliant in conception, brilliant in execution, has none of the old lyric beauty of phrase. It can in no sense be considered a masterpiece of prose, but only a piece of fine and cultured writing. In it paradox obscures the underlying truth. The very first words strike the old weary note. "The chief advantage that would result from the establishment of Socialism is, undoubtedly, the fact that Socialism would relieve us from that sordid necessity of living for others, which, in the present condition of things, presses so hardly upon himself and everybody."
As far as the prose artist is concerned, the essay has little to recommend it. He was tired, tired out, and had no longer the wish or the stimulus to produce the marvellous and glowing prose to which we have been accustomed in these other statements of the writer's attitude towards art, towards morals and towards beauty. Yet, at the same time, the man's love of individualism drove him to write this essay, and at certain points it comes strangely into impact with Catholic truth.
The more Catholic the conception of religion and of art becomes, the more surely the socialistic idea obtains. Certainly our Lord taught that individual character can only be developed through community. The great socialistic organ of England attempted the value and weight of Oscar Wilde's defence of Socialism in the following words:—