I am not so vulgar as to affect megalomania, when asserting that I am cultured: this is an _apologia_, a confession of my sins before my critic, the advocate of simplicity. When facing a sunset, I do not simply see a display of colors, nor do I think of the simple explanation of this phenomenon as offered by science, but I live through a world of associations, recollections of diverse impressions and reactions imprinted on my mind by Boecklin, Mallarmé, Debussy—by all the gods that make up the religion of modern man. Life external, simple facts, are to me an artless raw libretto, which, naturally, cannot in itself satisfy one who has come into this world with the intention of enjoying grandiose opera. I call it culture, this faculty of seeing things _creatively_, not in monotones, not through window-panes, but through multiplying lenses which collect the rays of all suns and concentrate them on the focus. Now, pray, is there any hope for me “to learn how to be simple?” Life is composed of hundreds of grey days interspersed with a few scintillating moments, the few moments justifying our otherwise superfluous existence. In this respect I am not a Croesus, but the half dozen or so of meteoric flashes that have pierced through the ordinariness of my life I treasure grudgingly, and would not exchange them for years of continuous well-being. Congratulate me: I have become enriched now with another moment of rare beatitude, of indelible radiance. I was present at the transubstantiation of Oscar Wilde, performed by John Cowper Powys. Was it a lecture? “Most certainly,” would advise me my simple friend. What a dwarfish misnomer for the solemn rite that took place in the dark temple, the “catacomb” of the Little Theatre! I close my eyes, and see once more the galvanized demi-god vibrating in the green light, invoking the Uranian Oscar. We, the worshipers, sit entranced, hypnotized, demundanized, bewitched; the sorcerer makes us feel the presence in flesh and spirit of the Assyrian half-god, half-beast, who had the moral courage of living his life actively, to the full; we follow bewildered the quaint meteor of Wilde’s genius illuminating the world for a moment, dropping down into a hideous pit, reflaming in the pale glimmer of discovered sorrow; we finally hear the sonorous requiem to Oscar’s break-down from the shock of having discovered a heart in himself. The lights are on, the sorcerer is gone, but we remain under the spell of the hovering spirit.