'And God spake and said to the man, "Seeing that I may not send thee to Hell, I am going to send thee to Heaven." '"Thou canst not send me to Heaven." 'And God said to the man, "Wherefore can I not send thee to Heaven?" 'And the man said, "Because I have never been able to imagine it." 'And there was a great silence in the Judgment Hall of God[6].' One morning Wilde handed me an article in which a sufficiently dense critic congratulated him on 'knowing how to write pretty stories in which the better to clothe his thoughts.' 'They think,' began Wilde, 'that all thoughts come naked to the birth. They do not understand that I _cannot_ think otherwise than in stories. The sculptor does not try to reproduce his thoughts in marble; _he thinks in marble_, straight away. Listen:-- 'There was once a man who could think only in bronze. And this man one day had an idea, an idea of _The Pleasure that Abideth for a Moment_. And he felt that he must give expression to it. But in the whole world there was but one single piece of bronze, for men had used it all up. And this man felt that he would go mad if he did not give expression to his idea. And he remembered a piece of bronze on the tomb of his wife, a statue which he had himself fashioned to set on the tomb of his wife, the only woman he had ever loved. It was the image of _The Sorrow that Endureth for Ever_. And the man felt that he was becoming mad, because he could not give expression to his idea. Then he took this image of Sorrow, of the _Sorrow that endureth for Ever_, and broke it up and melted it and fashioned of it an Image of Pleasure, of the _Pleasure that abideth for a Moment_.' Wilde was a believer in a certain fatality besetting the path of the artist, and that the _Man_ is at the mercy of the Idea. 'There are,' he used to say, 'artists of two kinds: some supply answers, and others ask questions. It is necessary to know if one belongs to those who answer or to those who ask questions; for the one who asks questions is never the one who answers them. There are certain works which wait for their interpretation for a long time. It is because they are giving answers to questions that have not yet been asked--for the question often comes a terribly long time after the answer.' And he added further, 'The soul is born old in the body; it is to rejuvenate the soul that the body becomes old. Plato is Socrates young again.' Then it was three years before I saw him again. [1] In _La Revue Blanche_. [2] _Henry Esmond_, Book II, chap. XI. Thackeray puts these words into the mouth of the famous Mr. Joseph Addison, who continues:--''T is the result of all the others; 't is a latent power in him which compels the favour of the gods, and subjugates fortune.'