("But for you I do not think the book would ever have been published"), and some highly interesting letters written in Reading Gaol by Wilde to Mr. Ross (which had previously been published in Germany).  In the course of this dedicatory letter, Mr. Ross says:  “In sending copy to Messrs. Methuen (to whom alone I submitted it) I anticipated refusal, as though the work were my own.  A very distinguished man of letters who acted as their reader advised, however, its acceptance, and urged, in view of the uncertainty of its reception, the excision of certain passages, to which I readily assented.”

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This explains clearly enough the motive for suppressing the passages.  But even after making allowance for the natural timidity and apprehensiveness of the publishers’ reader, I cannot quite understand why those particular passages were cut out.  Here is one of them:  “I had genius, a distinguished name, high social position, brilliancy, intellectual daring; I made art a philosophy and philosophy an art.  I altered the minds of men and the colours of things; there was nothing I said or did that did not make people wonder.  I took the drama, the most objective form known to art, and made it as personal a mode of expression as the lyric or sonnet; at the same time I widened its range and enriched its characteristics.  Drama, novel, poem in prose, poem in rhyme, subtle or fantastic dialogue, whatever I touched I made beautiful in a new mode of beauty.  To truth itself I gave what is false no less than what is true as its rightful province, and showed that the false and the true are merely forms of intellectual existence.  I treated art as the supreme reality and life as a mere mode of fiction.  I awoke the imagination of my century so that it created myth and legend around me.  I summed up all systems in a phrase, and all existence in an epigram.  Along with these things I had things that were different.  But I let myself be lured into long spells of senseless and sensual ease.”  It is difficult to see anything in the factitious but delightful brilliance of this very characteristic swagger that could have endangered the book’s reception.

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Mr. Ross’s letter to me concludes thus:  “‘De Profundis,’ however, even in its present form, is only a fragment.  The whole work could not be published in the lifetime of the present generation.”  This makes, within a month, the third toothsome dish as to which I have had the exasperating news that it is being reserved for that spoiled child, posterity.  I may say, however, that I do not regard “De Profundis” as one of Wilde’s best books.  I was disappointed with it.  It is too frequently insincere, and the occasion was not one for pose.  And it has another fault.  I happened to meet M. Henry Davray several times while he was translating the book into French.  M. Davray’s knowledge of English is profound, and I was accordingly somewhat disconcerted