De Profundis
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Oscar Wilde >> De Profundis
You may realise it when I say that had I been released last May, as
I tried to be, I would have left this place loathing it and every
official in it with a bitterness of hatred that would have poisoned
my life. I have had a year longer of imprisonment, but humanity
has been in the prison along with us all, and now when I go out I
shall always remember great kindnesses that I have received here
from almost everybody, and on the day of my release I shall give
many thanks to many people, and ask to be remembered by them in
turn.
The prison style is absolutely and entirely wrong. I would give
anything to be able to alter it when I go out. I intend to try.
But there is nothing in the world so wrong but that the spirit of
humanity, which is the spirit of love, the spirit of the Christ who
is not in churches, may make it, if not right, at least possible to
be borne without too much bitterness of heart.
I know also that much is waiting for me outside that is very
delightful, from what St. Francis of Assisi calls 'my brother the
wind, and my sister the rain,' lovely things both of them, down to
the shop-windows and sunsets of great cities. If I made a list of
all that still remains to me, I don't know where I should stop:
for, indeed, God made the world just as much for me as for any one
else. Perhaps I may go out with something that I had not got
before. I need not tell you that to me reformations in morals are
as meaningless and vulgar as Reformations in theology. But while
to propose to be a better man is a piece of unscientific cant, to
have become a deeper man is the privilege of those who have
suffered. And such I think I have become.
If after I am free a friend of mine gave a feast, and did not
invite me to it, I should not mind a bit. I can be perfectly happy
by myself. With freedom, flowers, books, and the moon, who could
not be perfectly happy? Besides, feasts are not for me any more.
I have given too many to care about them. That side of life is
over for me, very fortunately, I dare say. But if after I am free
a friend of mine had a sorrow and refused to allow me to share it,
I should feel it most bitterly. If he shut the doors of the house
of mourning against me, I would come back again and again and beg
to be admitted, so that I might share in what I was entitled to
share in. If he thought me unworthy, unfit to weep with him, I
should feel it as the most poignant humiliation, as the most
terrible mode in which disgrace could be inflicted on me. But that
could not be. I have a right to share in sorrow, and he who can
look at the loveliness of the world and share its sorrow, and
realise something of the wonder of both, is in immediate contact
with divine things, and has got as near to God's secret as any one
can get.
Perhaps there may come into my art also, no less than into my life,
a still deeper note, one of greater unity of passion, and
directness of impulse. Not width but intensity is the true aim of
modern art. We are no longer in art concerned with the type. It
is with the exception that we have to do. I cannot put my
sufferings into any form they took, I need hardly say. Art only
begins where Imitation ends, but something must come into my work,
of fuller memory of words perhaps, of richer cadences, of more
curious effects, of simpler architectural order, of some aesthetic
quality at any rate.
When Marsyas was 'torn from the scabbard of his limbs' - DELLA
VAGINA DELLA MEMBRE SUE, to use one of Dante's most terrible
Tacitean phrases - he had no more song, the Greek said. Apollo had
been victor. The lyre had vanquished the reed. But perhaps the
Greeks were mistaken. I hear in much modern Art the cry of
Marsyas. It is bitter in Baudelaire, sweet and plaintive in
Lamartine, mystic in Verlaine. It is in the deferred resolutions
of Chopin's music. It is in the discontent that haunts Burne-
Jones's women. Even Matthew Arnold, whose song of Callicles tells
of 'the triumph of the sweet persuasive lyre,' and the 'famous
final victory,' in such a clear note of lyrical beauty, has not a
little of it; in the troubled undertone of doubt and distress that
haunts his verses, neither Goethe nor Wordsworth could help him,
though he followed each in turn, and when he seeks to mourn for
THYRSIS or to sing of the SCHOLAR GIPSY, it is the reed that he has
to take for the rendering of his strain. But whether or not the
Phrygian Faun was silent, I cannot be. Expression is as necessary
to me as leaf and blossoms are to the black branches of the trees
that show themselves above the prison walls and are so restless in
the wind. Between my art and the world there is now a wide gulf,
but between art and myself there is none. I hope at least that
there is none.
To each of us different fates are meted out. My lot has been one
of public infamy, of long imprisonment, of misery, of ruin, of
disgrace, but I am not worthy of it - not yet, at any rate. I
remember that I used to say that I thought I could bear a real
tragedy if it came to me with purple pall and a mask of noble
sorrow, but that the dreadful thing about modernity was that it put
tragedy into the raiment of comedy, so that the great realities
seemed commonplace or grotesque or lacking in style. It is quite
true about modernity. It has probably always been true about
actual life. It is said that all martyrdoms seemed mean to the
looker on. The nineteenth century is no exception to the rule.
Everything about my tragedy has been hideous, mean, repellent,
lacking in style; our very dress makes us grotesque. We are the
zanies of sorrow. We are clowns whose hearts are broken. We are
specially designed to appeal to the sense of humour. On November
13th, 1895, I was brought down here from London. From two o'clock
till half-past two on that day I had to stand on the centre
platform of Clapham Junction in convict dress, and handcuffed, for
the world to look at. I had been taken out of the hospital ward
without a moment's notice being given to me. Of all possible
objects I was the most grotesque. When people saw me they laughed.
Each train as it came up swelled the audience. Nothing could
exceed their amusement. That was, of course, before they knew who
I was. As soon as they had been informed they laughed still more.
For half an hour I stood there in the grey November rain surrounded
by a jeering mob.
For a year after that was done to me I wept every day at the same
hour and for the same space of time. That is not such a tragic
thing as possibly it sounds to you. To those who are in prison
tears are a part of every day's experience. A day in prison on
which one does not weep is a day on which one's heart is hard, not
a day on which one's heart is happy.
Well, now I am really beginning to feel more regret for the people
who laughed than for myself. Of course when they saw me I was not
on my pedestal, I was in the pillory. But it is a very
unimaginative nature that only cares for people on their pedestals.
A pedestal may be a very unreal thing. A pillory is a terrific
reality. They should have known also how to interpret sorrow
better. I have said that behind sorrow there is always sorrow. It
were wiser still to say that behind sorrow there is always a soul.
And to mock at a soul in pain is a dreadful thing. In the
strangely simple economy of the world people only get what they
give, and to those who have not enough imagination to penetrate the
mere outward of things, and feel pity, what pity can be given save
that of scorn?
I write this account of the mode of my being transferred here
simply that it should be realised how hard it has been for me to
get anything out of my punishment but bitterness and despair. I
have, however, to do it, and now and then I have moments of
submission and acceptance. All the spring may be hidden in the
single bud, and the low ground nest of the lark may hold the joy
that is to herald the feet of many rose-red dawns. So perhaps
whatever beauty of life still remains to me is contained in some
moment of surrender, abasement, and humiliation. I can, at any
rate, merely proceed on the lines of my own development, and,
accepting all that has happened to me, make myself worthy of it.
People used to say of me that I was too individualistic. I must be
far more of an individualist than ever I was. I must get far more
out of myself than ever I got, and ask far less of the world than
ever I asked. Indeed, my ruin came not from too great
individualism of life, but from too little. The one disgraceful,
unpardonable, and to all time contemptible action of my life was to
allow myself to appeal to society for help and protection. To have
made such an appeal would have been from the individualist point of
view bad enough, but what excuse can there ever be put forward for
having made it? Of course once I had put into motion the forces of
society, society turned on me and said, 'Have you been living all
this time in defiance of my laws, and do you now appeal to those
laws for protection? You shall have those laws exercised to the
full. You shall abide by what you have appealed to.' The result
is I am in gaol. Certainly no man ever fell so ignobly, and by
such ignoble instruments, as I did.
The Philistine element in life is not the failure to understand
art. Charming people, such as fishermen, shepherds, ploughboys,
peasants and the like, know nothing about art, and are the very
salt of the earth. He is the Philistine who upholds and aids the
heavy, cumbrous, blind, mechanical forces of society, and who does
not recognise dynamic force when he meets it either in a man or a
movement.
People thought it dreadful of me to have entertained at dinner the
evil things of life, and to have found pleasure in their company.
But then, from the point of view through which I, as an artist in
life, approach them they were delightfully suggestive and
stimulating. The danger was half the excitement. . . . My business
as an artist was with Ariel. I set myself to wrestle with Caliban.
. . .
A great friend of mine - a friend of ten years' standing - came to
see me some time ago, and told me that he did not believe a single
word of what was said against me, and wished me to know that he
considered me quite innocent, and the victim of a hideous plot. I
burst into tears at what he said, and told him that while there was
much amongst the definite charges that was quite untrue and
transferred to me by revolting malice, still that my life had been
full of perverse pleasures, and that unless he accepted that as a
fact about me and realised it to the full I could not possibly be
friends with him any more, or ever be in his company. It was a
terrible shock to him, but we are friends, and I have not got his
friendship on false pretences.
Emotional forces, as I say somewhere in INTENTIONS, are as limited
in extent and duration as the forces of physical energy. The
little cup that is made to hold so much can hold so much and no
more, though all the purple vats of Burgundy be filled with wine to
the brim, and the treaders stand knee-deep in the gathered grapes
of the stony vineyards of Spain. There is no error more common
than that of thinking that those who are the causes or occasions of
great tragedies share in the feelings suitable to the tragic mood:
no error more fatal than expecting it of them. The martyr in his
'shirt of flame' may be looking on the face of God, but to him who
is piling the faggots or loosening the logs for the blast the whole
scene is no more than the slaying of an ox is to the butcher, or
the felling of a tree to the charcoal burner in the forest, or the
fall of a flower to one who is mowing down the grass with a scythe.
Great passions are for the great of soul, and great events can be
seen only by those who are on a level with them.
* * * * *
I know of nothing in all drama more incomparable from the point of
view of art, nothing more suggestive in its subtlety of
observation, than Shakespeare's drawing of Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern. They are Hamlet's college friends. They have been
his companions. They bring with them memories of pleasant days
together. At the moment when they come across him in the play he
is staggering under the weight of a burden intolerable to one of
his temperament. The dead have come armed out of the grave to
impose on him a mission at once too great and too mean for him. He
is a dreamer, and he is called upon to act. He has the nature of
the poet, and he is asked to grapple with the common complexity of
cause and effect, with life in its practical realisation, of which
he knows nothing, not with life in its ideal essence, of which he
knows so much. He has no conception of what to do, and his folly
is to feign folly. Brutus used madness as a cloak to conceal the
sword of his purpose, the dagger of his will, but the Hamlet
madness is a mere mask for the hiding of weakness. In the making
of fancies and jests he sees a chance of delay. He keeps playing
with action as an artist plays with a theory. He makes himself the
spy of his proper actions, and listening to his own words knows
them to be but 'words, words, words.' Instead of trying to be the
hero of his own history, he seeks to be the spectator of his own
tragedy. He disbelieves in everything, including himself, and yet
his doubt helps him not, as it comes not from scepticism but from a
divided will.
Of all this Guildenstern and Rosencrantz realise nothing. They bow
and smirk and smile, and what the one says the other echoes with
sickliest intonation. When, at last, by means of the play within
the play, and the puppets in their dalliance, Hamlet 'catches the
conscience' of the King, and drives the wretched man in terror from
his throne, Guildenstern and Rosencrantz see no more in his conduct
than a rather painful breach of Court etiquette. That is as far as
they can attain to in 'the contemplation of the spectacle of life
with appropriate emotions.' They are close to his very secret and
know nothing of it. Nor would there be any use in telling them.
They are the little cups that can hold so much and no more.
Towards the close it is suggested that, caught in a cunning spring
set for another, they have met, or may meet, with a violent and
sudden death. But a tragic ending of this kind, though touched by
Hamlet's humour with something of the surprise and justice of
comedy, is really not for such as they. They never die. Horatio,
who in order to 'report Hamlet and his cause aright to the
unsatisfied,'
'Absents him from felicity a while,
And in this harsh world draws his breath in pain,'
dies, but Guildenstern and Rosencrantz are as immortal as Angelo
and Tartuffe, and should rank with them. They are what modern life
has contributed to the antique ideal of friendship. He who writes
a new DE AMICITIA must find a niche for them, and praise them in
Tusculan prose. They are types fixed for all time. To censure
them would show 'a lack of appreciation.' They are merely out of
their sphere: that is all. In sublimity of soul there is no
contagion. High thoughts and high emotions are by their very
existence isolated.
I am to be released, if all goes well with me, towards the end of
May, and hope to go at once to some little sea-side village abroad
with R- and M-.
The sea, as Euripides says in one of his plays about Iphigeneia,
washes away the stains and wounds of the world.
I hope to be at least a month with my friends, and to gain peace
and balance, and a less troubled heart, and a sweeter mood. I have
a strange longing for the great simple primeval things, such as the
sea, to me no less of a mother than the Earth. It seems to me that
we all look at Nature too much, and live with her too little. I
discern great sanity in the Greek attitude. They never chattered
about sunsets, or discussed whether the shadows on the grass were
really mauve or not. But they saw that the sea was for the
swimmer, and the sand for the feet of the runner. They loved the
trees for the shadow that they cast, and the forest for its silence
at noon. The vineyard-dresser wreathed his hair with ivy that he
might keep off the rays of the sun as he stooped over the young
shoots, and for the artist and the athlete, the two types that
Greece gave us, they plaited with garlands the leaves of the bitter
laurel and of the wild parsley, which else had been of no service
to men.
We call ours a utilitarian age, and we do not know the uses of any
single thing. We have forgotten that water can cleanse, and fire
purify, and that the Earth is mother to us all. As a consequence
our art is of the moon and plays with shadows, while Greek art is
of the sun and deals directly with things. I feel sure that in
elemental forces there is purification, and I want to go back to
them and live in their presence.
Of course to one so modern as I am, 'Enfant de mon siecle,' merely
to look at the world will be always lovely. I tremble with
pleasure when I think that on the very day of my leaving prison
both the laburnum and the lilac will be blooming in the gardens,
and that I shall see the wind stir into restless beauty the swaying
gold of the one, and make the other toss the pale purple of its
plumes, so that all the air shall be Arabia for me. Linnaeus fell
on his knees and wept for joy when he saw for the first time the
long heath of some English upland made yellow with the tawny
aromatic brooms of the common furze; and I know that for me, to
whom flowers are part of desire, there are tears waiting in the
petals of some rose. It has always been so with me from my
boyhood. There is not a single colour hidden away in the chalice
of a flower, or the curve of a shell, to which, by some subtle
sympathy with the very soul of things, my nature does not answer.
Like Gautier, I have always been one of those 'pour qui le monde
visible existe.'
Still, I am conscious now that behind all this beauty, satisfying
though it may be, there is some spirit hidden of which the painted
forms and shapes are but modes of manifestation, and it is with
this spirit that I desire to become in harmony. I have grown tired
of the articulate utterances of men and things. The Mystical in
Art, the Mystical in Life, the Mystical in Nature this is what I am
looking for. It is absolutely necessary for me to find it
somewhere.
All trials are trials for one's life, just as all sentences are
sentences of death; and three times have I been tried. The first
time I left the box to be arrested, the second time to be led back
to the house of detention, the third time to pass into a prison for
two years. Society, as we have constituted it, will have no place
for me, has none to offer; but Nature, whose sweet rains fall on
unjust and just alike, will have clefts in the rocks where I may
hide, and secret valleys in whose silence I may weep undisturbed.
She will hang the night with stars so that I may walk abroad in the
darkness without stumbling, and send the wind over my footprints so
that none may track me to my hurt: she will cleanse me in great
waters, and with bitter herbs make me whole.