Have you come to grief through self-indulgence and good-living?  Here are months in which men will take care that you shall eat badly and lie hard.  Did you lack respect for others?  Here are men who will show you no consideration.  Were you careless of others’ sufferings?  Here now you shall agonize unheeded:  gaolers and governors as well as black cells just to teach you.  Thank your stars then for every day’s experience, for, when you have learned the lesson of it and turned its discipline into service, the prison shall transform itself into a hermitage, the dungeon into a home; the burnt skilly shall be sweet in your mouth; and your rest on the plank-bed the dreamless slumber of a little child.

And if you are an artist, prison will be more to you than this; an astonishing vital and novel experience, accorded only to the chosen.  What will you make of it?  That’s the question for you.  It is a wonderful opportunity.  Seen truly, a prison’s more spacious than a palace; nay, richer, and for a loving soul, a far rarer experience.  Thank then the spirit which steers men for the divine chance which has come to you; henceforth the prison shall be your domain; in future men will not think of it without thinking of you.  Others may show them what the good things of life do for one; you will show them what suffering can do, cold and regretful sleepless hours and solitude, misery and distress.  Others will teach the lessons of joy.  The whole vast underworld of pity and pain, fear and horror and injustice is your kingdom.  Men have drawn darkness about you as a curtain, shrouded you in blackest night; the light in you will shine the brighter.  Always provided of course that the light is not put out altogether.

Hammer or anvil?  How would Oscar Wilde take punishment?

* * * * *

We could not know for months.  Yet he was an artist by nature—­that gave one a glimmer of hope.  We needed it.  For outside at first there was an icy atmosphere of hatred and contempt.  The mere mention of his name was met with expressions of disgust, or frozen silence.

One bare incident will paint the general feeling more clearly than pages of invective or description.  The day after Oscar’s sentence Mr. Charles Brookfield, who, it will be remembered, had raked together the witnesses that enabled Lord Queensberry to “justify” his accusation; assisted by Mr. Charles Hawtrey, the actor, gave a dinner to Lord Queensberry to celebrate their triumph.  Some forty Englishmen of good position were present at the banquet—­a feast to celebrate the ruin and degradation of a man of genius.