glad to say, as a man; he who entered into prison as a mere litterateur left there as a Life.
No doubt he suffered in prison more and deeper than we Japanese fancy; if he had been a Japanese to whom visible beauty of Nature and life are not so attractive, he would have found at once the edifice of sanctuary undisturbed and serene under whose blessing his thoughts would have entered into philosophy and song; but he was far more physical indeed. How he suffered, can well imagine, before he got his spiritual triumph. When I say that he was as a playwright, far below, for instance, Bernard Shaw, I am thinking of the fact that he was unable, at least before he was put in prison, to see the world and life with the naked eyes of man real and true; are there not, as some critic pleases to point out, places where he seems to use again his old silly trick of making a literature from his own misfortune or casuality or tragedy even in “De Profundis”? And again as an essayist, I should say that Chesterton is not inferior to Wilde; that the former, unlike the latter, has no particular aesthetic pretension pleases me immensely. As
