Page:Wilde - De profundis, 1915.djvu/47

Rh how beautiful 's action was, but why it meant so much to me, and always will mean so much, then, perhaps, they will realise how and in what spirit they should approach me. . ..

The first volume of Poems that in the very springtide of his manhood a young man sends forth to the world should be like a blossom or flower of spring, like the white thorn in the meadow at Magdalen or the cowslips in the Cumnor fields. It should not be burdened by the weight of a terrible and revolting tragedy; a terrible revolting scandal. If I had allowed my name to serve as herald to such a book, it would have been a grave artistic error; it would have brought a wrong atmosphere round the whole work and in modern art atmosphere counts for so much. Modem life is complex and relative; those are its two distinguishing notes; to render the first we require atmosphere with its subtlety of nuances, of suggestion, of strange perspectives; as for the second we require background. That is why sculpture has