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Of course all this is foreshadowed and prefigured in my art. Some of it is in “The Happy Prince:” some of it in “The Young King,” [92.1] notably in the passage where the Bishop says to the kneeling boy, “Is not He who made misery wiser than thou art?” a phrase which when I wrote it seemed to me little more than a phrase: a great deal of it is hidden away in the note of Doom that like a purple thread runs through the gold cloth of Dorian Gray: in “The Critic as Artist” it is set forth in many colours: in The Soul of Man it is written down simply and in letters too easy to read: it is one of the refrains whose recurring motifs make Salome so like a piece of music and bind it together as a ballad: in the prose-poem of the man who from the bronze of the image of the “Pleasure that liveth for a Moment” has to make the image of the “Sorrow that abideth for Ever” it is incarnate[92a]. It could not have been otherwise. At every single moment of one’s life one is what one is going to be no less than what one has been. Art is a symbol, because man is a symbol.
当然所有这一切在我的作品中已有先兆，已有预示。有的在《快乐王子》中；有的在《年轻国王》中，特别是主教对跪着的男孩说的那一句：“难道制造不幸的神，不比你聪明吗？”这话写的时候我以为不过是普通一句话罢了；有很多则隐藏在《道林?格雷》中那像紫线缝金衣般穿过整篇的厄运这一主旨中；在《作为艺术家的批评家》中，这预示又呈现为多种色调；在《人的灵魂》中则写得直截了当、一目了然；在《莎乐美》中，又像副歌的迭句一样，其多次重现的主题使剧本变得像一部音乐作品，把它串成了一首叙事曲; 在那首散文诗里, 说那个人不得不用铸《快乐如过眼烟云》塑像的青铜去铸《悲怆地久天长》的塑像，这预示就铸成了具象[92a]。不可能会是别的了。在一个人的生命中，每时每刻的做人，不但取决于他曾经怎样，也同样取决于他即将怎样。艺术是一个象征，因为人是一个象征。
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