The production of insanity is, if not its object, certainly its result.

That is a well-ascertained fact.

Its causes are obvious.

Deprived of books, of all human intercourse, isolated from every humane and humanising influence, condemned to eternal silence, robbed of all intercourse with the external world, treated like an unintelligent animal, brutalised below the level of any of the brute-creation, the wretched man who is confined in an English prison can hardly escape becoming insane." This letter ended by saying that if all the reforms suggested were carried out much would still remain to be done.

It would still be advisable to "humanise the governors of prisons, to civilise the warders, and to Christianise the Chaplains." This letter was the last effort of the new Oscar, the Oscar who had manfully tried to put the prison under his feet and to learn the significance of sorrow and the lesson of love which Christ brought into the world.
In the beautiful pages about Jesus which form the greater part of _De Profundis_, also written in those last hopeful months in Reading Gaol, Oscar shows, I think, that he might have done much higher work than Tolstoi or Renan had he set himself resolutely to transmute his new insight into some form of art.