He was swarthy, and wore a yellow mitre. A
sinister mediaeval man, but superbly Gothic, just like the bishops carved
on stalls or on portals: and when one thinks that once people mocked at
stained-glass attitudes! they are the only attitudes for the clothes. The
sight of the Bishop, whom I watched with fascination, filled me with the
great sense of the realism of Gothic art. Neither in Greek art nor in
Gothic art is there any pose. Posing was invented by bad
portrait-painters; and the first person who posed was a stock-broker, and
he has gone on posing ever since.
I send you a photograph I took on Palm Sunday at Palermo. Do send me
some of yours, and love me always, and try to read this letter.
Kindest regards to your dear mother.
Always,
OSCAR.
--_Letter to Robert Ross_.
FOOTNOTES
{1} "The Influence of Pater and Matthew Arnold in the Prose-Writings of
Oscar Wilde," by Ernst Bendz. London: H. Grevel & Co., 1914.
{2} "The Eighteen Nineties: A Review of Art and Idea at the Close of the
Nineteenth Century," by Holbrook Jackson.
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