De Profundis, Oscar Wilde [great novels to read .txt] 📗

The poor thieves and outcasts who are

imprisoned here with me are in many respects more fortunate than I

am. The little way in grey city or green field that saw their sin

is small; to find those who know nothing of what they have done

they need go no further than a bird might fly between the twilight

and the dawn; but for me the world is shrivelled to a handsbreadth,

and everywhere I turn my name is written on the rocks in lead. For

I have come, not from obscurity into the momentary notoriety of

crime, but from a sort of eternity of fame to a sort of eternity of

infamy, and sometimes seem to myself to have shown, if indeed it

required showing, that between the famous and the infamous there is

but one step, if as much as one.

 

Still, in the very fact that people will recognise me wherever I

go, and know all about my life, as far as its follies go, I can

discern something good for me. It will force on me the necessity

of again asserting myself as an artist, and as soon as I possibly

can. If I can produce only one beautiful work of art I shall be

able to rob malice of its venom, and cowardice of its sneer, and to

pluck out the tongue of scorn by the roots.

 

And if life be, as it surely is, a problem to me, I am no less a

problem to life. People must adopt some attitude towards me, and

so pass judgment, both on themselves and me. I need not say I am

not talking of particular individuals. The only people I would

care to be with now are artists and people who have suffered:

those who know what beauty is, and those who know what sorrow is:

nobody else interests me. Nor am I making any demands on life. In

all that I have said I am simply concerned with my own mental

attitude towards life as a whole; and I feel that not to be ashamed

of having been punished is one of the first points I must attain

to, for the sake of my own perfection, and because I am so

imperfect.

 

Then I must learn how to be happy. Once I knew it, or thought I

knew it, by instinct. It was always springtime once in my heart.

My temperament was akin to joy. I filled my life to the very brim

with pleasure, as one might fill a cup to the very brim with wine.

Now I am approaching life from a completely new standpoint, and

even to conceive happiness is often extremely difficult for me. I

remember during my first term at Oxford reading in Pater’s

RENAISSANCE - that book which has had such strange influence over

my life - how Dante places low in the Inferno those who wilfully

live in sadness; and going to the college library and turning to

the passage in the DIVINE COMEDY where beneath the dreary marsh lie

those who were ‘sullen in the sweet air,’ saying for ever and ever

through their sighs -

 

‘Tristi fummo

Nell aer dolce che dal sol s’allegra.’

 

I knew the church condemned ACCIDIA, but the whole idea seemed to

me quite fantastic, just the sort of sin, I fancied, a priest who

knew nothing about real life would invent. Nor could I understand

how Dante, who says that ‘sorrow remarries us to God,’ could have

been so harsh to those who were enamoured of melancholy, if any

such there really were. I had no idea that some day this would

become to me one of the greatest temptations of my life.

 

While I was in Wandsworth prison I longed to die. It was my one

desire. When after two months in the infirmary I was transferred

here, and found myself growing gradually better in physical health,

I was filled with rage. I determined to commit suicide on the very

day on which I left prison. After a time that evil mood passed

away, and I made up my mind to live, but to wear gloom as a king

wears purple: never to smile again: to turn whatever house I

entered into a house of mourning: to make my friends walk slowly

in sadness with me: to teach them that melancholy is the true

secret of life: to maim them with an alien sorrow: to mar them

with my own pain. Now I feel quite differently. I see it would be

both ungrateful and unkind of me to pull so long a face that when

my friends came to see me they would have to make their faces still

longer in order to show their sympathy; or, if I desired to

entertain them, to invite them to sit down silently to bitter herbs

and funeral baked meats. I must learn how to be cheerful and

happy.

 

The last two occasions on which I was allowed to see my friends

here, I tried to be as cheerful as possible, and to show my

cheerfulness, in order to make them some slight return for their

trouble in coming all the way from town to see me. It is only a

slight return, I know, but it is the one, I feel certain, that

pleases them most. I saw R-for an hour on Saturday week, and I

tried to give the fullest possible expression of the delight I

really felt at our meeting. And that, in the views and ideas I am

here shaping for myself, I am quite right is shown to me by the

fact that now for the first time since my imprisonment I have a

real desire for life.

 

There is before me so much to do, that I would regard it as a

terrible tragedy if I died before I was allowed to complete at any

rate a little of it. I see new developments in art and life, each

one of which is a fresh mode of perfection. I long to live so that

I can explore what is no less than a new world to me. Do you want

to know what this new world is? I think you can guess what it is.

It is the world in which I have been living. Sorrow, then, and all

that it teaches one, is my new world.

 

I used to live entirely for pleasure. I shunned suffering and

sorrow of every kind. I hated both. I resolved to ignore them as

far as possible: to treat them, that is to say, as modes of

imperfection. They were not part of my scheme of life. They had

no place in my philosophy. My mother, who knew life as a whole,

used often to quote to me Goethe’s lines - written by Carlyle in a

book he had given her years ago, and translated by him, I fancy,

also:-

 

‘Who never ate his bread in sorrow,

Who never spent the midnight hours

Weeping and waiting for the morrow, -

He knows you not, ye heavenly powers.’

 

They were the lines which that noble Queen of Prussia, whom

Napoleon treated with such coarse brutality, used to quote in her

humiliation and exile; they were the lines my mother often quoted

in the troubles of her later life. I absolutely declined to accept

or admit the enormous truth hidden in them. I could not understand

it. I remember quite well how I used to tell her that I did not

want to eat my bread in sorrow, or to pass any night weeping and

watching for a more bitter dawn.

 

I had no idea that it was one of the special things that the Fates

had in store for me: that for a whole year of my life, indeed, I

was to do little else. But so has my portion been meted out to me;

and during the last few months I have, after terrible difficulties

and struggles, been able to comprehend some of the lessons hidden

in the heart of pain. Clergymen and people who use phrases without

wisdom sometimes talk of suffering as a mystery. It is really a

revelation. One discerns things one never discerned before. One

approaches the whole of history from a different standpoint. What

one had felt dimly, through instinct, about art, is intellectually

and emotionally realised with perfect clearness of vision and

absolute intensity of apprehension.

 

I now see that sorrow, being the supreme emotion of which man is

capable, is at once the type and test of all great art. What the

artist is always looking for is the mode of existence in which soul

and body are one and indivisible: in which the outward is

expressive of the inward: in which form reveals. Of such modes of

existence there are not a few: youth and the arts preoccupied with

youth may serve as a model for us at one moment: at another we may

like to think that, in its subtlety and sensitiveness of

impression, its suggestion of a spirit dwelling in external things

and making its raiment of earth and air, of mist and city alike,

and in its morbid sympathy of its moods, and tones, and colours,

modern landscape art is realising for us pictorially what was

realised in such plastic perfection by the Greeks. Music, in which

all subject is absorbed in expression and cannot be separated from

it, is a complex example, and a flower or a child a simple example,

of what I mean; but sorrow is the ultimate type both in life and

art.

 

Behind joy and laughter there may be a temperament, coarse, hard

and callous. But behind sorrow there is always sorrow. Pain,

unlike pleasure, wears no mask. Truth in art is not any

correspondence between the essential idea and the accidental

existence; it is not the resemblance of shape to shadow, or of the

form mirrored in the crystal to the form itself; it is no echo

coming from a hollow hill, any more than it is a silver well of

water in the valley that shows the moon to the moon and Narcissus

to Narcissus. Truth in art is the unity of a thing with itself:

the outward rendered expressive of the inward: the soul made

incarnate: the body instinct with spirit. For this reason there

is no truth comparable to sorrow. There are times when sorrow

seems to me to be the only truth. Other things may be illusions of

the eye or the appetite, made to blind the one and cloy the other,

but out of sorrow have the worlds been built, and at the birth of a

child or a star there is pain.

 

More than this, there is about sorrow an intense, an extraordinary

reality. I have said of myself that I was one who stood in

symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age. There is not

a single wretched man in this wretched place along with me who does

not stand in symbolic relation to the very secret of life. For the

secret of life is suffering. It is what is hidden behind

everything. When we begin to live, what is sweet is so sweet to

us, and what is bitter so bitter, that we inevitably direct all our

desires towards pleasures, and seek not merely for a ‘month or

twain to feed on honeycomb,’ but for all our years to taste no

other food, ignorant all the while that we may really be starving

the soul.

 

I remember talking once on this subject to one of the most

beautiful personalities I have ever known: a woman, whose sympathy

and noble kindness to me, both before and since the tragedy of my

imprisonment, have been beyond power and description; one who has

really assisted me, though she does not