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.
* * * * *
Mr. Ross's letter to me concludes thus: "'De Profundis,' however, even in
its present form, is only a fragment.
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