On the afternoon of Easter Day I heard Vespers at the Lateran: music quite lovely. At the close, a Bishop in red, and with red gloves—such as Pater talks of in Gaston de Latour—came out on the balcony and showed us the Relics. He was swarthy, and wore a yellow mitre. A sinister mediæval man, but superbly Gothic, just like the bishops carved on stalls or on portals: and when one thinks that once people mocked at stained-glass attitudes! they are the only attitudes for the clothes. The sight of the Bishop, whom I watched with fascination, filled me with the great sense of the realism of Gothic art. Neither in Greek art nor in Gothic art is there any pose. Posing was invented by bad portrait-painters; and the first person who posed was a stock-broker, and he has gone on posing ever since.
I send you a photograph I took on Palm Sunday at Palermo. Do send me some of yours, and love me always, and try to read this letter.
Kindest regards to your dear mother.
Always,
OSCAR.
—Letter to Robert Ross.
FOOTNOTES
[{1}] “The Influence of Pater and Matthew Arnold in the Prose-Writings of Oscar Wilde,” by Ernst Bendz. London: H. Grevel & Co., 1914.
[{2}] “The Eighteen Nineties: A Review of Art and Idea at the Close of the Nineteenth Century,” by Holbrook Jackson. London: Grant Richards Ltd., 1913.
[{3}] Mortimer Menpes.