Dear Oscar,

Consider the below:

“A child who finds himself rejected and attacked on all sides is not likely to develop dignity and poise as his outstanding traits.  He develops defences.  Like a dwarf in a world of menacing giants, he cannot fight on equal terms.  He is forced to listen to their derision and laughter and submit to their abuse … He may withdraw into himself, speaking little to the giants and never honestly.  He may band together with other dwarfs, sticking close to them for comfort … Or he may out of despair find himself acting the part that the giants expect, and gradually grow to share his master’s own uncomplimentary view of dwarfs.  His natural self love may, under the persistent blows of contempt, turn his spirit to criticism and self hate”.  

GORDON ALLPORT, THE NATURE OF PREJUDICE, (Addison Wesley, 1954), pp. 142-143.

Published, as you have no doubt noted, long after your death, and probably in a mode of expression somewhat alien to your own times, although you too wrote about giants, had something of  fairy-tale mentality, so I cannot see that it is much of stretch to come to an understanding of what this quote is actually saying.  

It is interesting to note that the prejudice from which you suffered was not in and of yourself, was not as such self-directed, imposed upon yourself as a reaction to the word of the giants that surrounded you, but was more purely their own, or society’s own, in which you passed for so long as someone to be praised and lauded, to be revered even, until the prejudice came to be public censure.

I do wonder what it must have been like to be the sort of dwarf that you were, so very popular, until the giants waiting in the wings (with their bouquets of cabbage leaves) finally got to you.  It is almost a strange mystery that condemnation has to be pointed out, and then whipped up, before it is anything at all.  Bizarre, Oscar, that there must have been people you knew who on one day were your ardent admirers, and only days later were in direct opposition to you spouting their venom in print and in voice!  And the silent, more lethal I fear, who said nothing but had their thoughts, and who let those thoughts run free and become a lynching once those thoughts were given permisiion to be..  All just a media storm?  An early media storm?  Public opinion urged into being by confirming suspicions, by offering proof, by retelling a story which had been of victory across stages (even continents, so we are told – after all, you did tour America!)

All something of a mystery …

And about what …

Hope you like my artwork!

Your friend,

Algernon B. Duffoure.