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

know it, to bear the burden

of my troubles more than any one else in the whole world has, and

all through the mere fact of her existence, through her being what

she is - partly an ideal and partly an influence: a suggestion of

what one might become as well as a real help towards becoming it; a

soul that renders the common air sweet, and makes what is spiritual

seem as simple and natural as sunlight or the sea: one for whom

beauty and sorrow walk hand in hand, and have the same message. On

the occasion of which I am thinking I recall distinctly how I said

to her that there was enough suffering in one narrow London lane to

show that God did not love man, and that wherever there was any

sorrow, though but that of a child, in some little garden weeping

over a fault that it had or had not committed, the whole face of

creation was completely marred. I was entirely wrong. She told me

so, but I could not believe her. I was not in the sphere in which

such belief was to be attained to. Now it seems to me that love of

some kind is the only possible explanation of the extraordinary

amount of suffering that there is in the world. I cannot conceive

of any other explanation. I am convinced that there is no other,

and that if the world has indeed, as I have said, been built of

sorrow, it has been built by the hands of love, because in no other

way could the soul of man, for whom the world was made, reach the

full stature of its perfection. Pleasure for the beautiful body,

but pain for the beautiful soul.

 

When I say that I am convinced of these things I speak with too

much pride. Far off, like a perfect pearl, one can see the city of

God. It is so wonderful that it seems as if a child could reach it

in a summer’s day. And so a child could. But with me and such as

me it is different. One can realise a thing in a single moment,

but one loses it in the long hours that follow with leaden feet.

It is so difficult to keep ‘heights that the soul is competent to

gain.’ We think in eternity, but we move slowly through time; and

how slowly time goes with us who lie in prison I need not tell

again, nor of the weariness and despair that creep back into one’s

cell, and into the cell of one’s heart, with such strange

insistence that one has, as it were, to garnish and sweep one’s

house for their coming, as for an unwelcome guest, or a bitter

master, or a slave whose slave it is one’s chance or choice to be.

 

And, though at present my friends may find it a hard thing to

believe, it is true none the less, that for them living in freedom

and idleness and comfort it is more easy to learn the lessons of

humility than it is for me, who begin the day by going down on my

knees and washing the floor of my cell. For prison life with its

endless privations and restrictions makes one rebellious. The most

terrible thing about it is not that it breaks one’s heart - hearts

are made to be broken - but that it turns one’s heart to stone.

One sometimes feels that it is only with a front of brass and a lip

of scorn that one can get through the day at all. And he who is in

a state of rebellion cannot receive grace, to use the phrase of

which the Church is so fond - so rightly fond, I dare say - for in

life as in art the mood of rebellion closes up the channels of the

soul, and shuts out the airs of heaven. Yet I must learn these

lessons here, if I am to learn them anywhere, and must be filled

with joy if my feet are on the right road and my face set towards

‘the gate which is called beautiful,’ though I may fall many times

in the mire and often in the mist go astray.

 

This New Life, as through my love of Dante I like sometimes to call

it, is of course no new life at all, but simply the continuance, by

means of development, and evolution, of my former life. I remember

when I was at Oxford saying to one of my friends as we were

strolling round Magdalen’s narrow bird-haunted walks one morning in

the year before I took my degree, that I wanted to eat of the fruit

of all the trees in the garden of the world, and that I was going

out into the world with that passion in my soul. And so, indeed, I

went out, and so I lived. My only mistake was that I confined

myself so exclusively to the trees of what seemed to me the sun-lit

side of the garden, and shunned the other side for its shadow and

its gloom. Failure, disgrace, poverty, sorrow, despair, suffering,

tears even, the broken words that come from lips in pain, remorse

that makes one walk on thorns, conscience that condemns, self-abasement that punishes, the misery that puts ashes on its head,

the anguish that chooses sack-cloth for its raiment and into its

own drink puts gall:- all these were things of which I was afraid.

And as I had determined to know nothing of them, I was forced to

taste each of them in turn, to feed on them, to have for a season,

indeed, no other food at all.

 

I don’t regret for a single moment having lived for pleasure. I

did it to the full, as one should do everything that one does.

There was no pleasure I did not experience. I threw the pearl of

my soul into a cup of wine. I went down the primrose path to the

sound of flutes. I lived on honeycomb. But to have continued the

same life would have been wrong because it would have been

limiting. I had to pass on. The other half of the garden had its

secrets for me also. Of course all this is foreshadowed and

prefigured in my books. Some of it is in THE HAPPY PRINCE, some of

it in THE YOUNG KING, 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 texture of DORIAN GRAY;

in THE CRITIC AS ARTIST it is set forth in many colours; in THE

SOUL OF MAN it is written down, 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. 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.

 

It is, if I can fully attain to it, the ultimate realisation of the

artistic life. For the artistic life is simply self-development.

Humility in the artist is his frank acceptance of all experiences,

just as love in the artist is simply the sense of beauty that

reveals to the world its body and its soul. In MARIUS THE

EPICUREAN Pater seeks to reconcile the artistic life with the life

of religion, in the deep, sweet, and austere sense of the word.

But Marius is little more than a spectator: an ideal spectator

indeed, and one to whom it is given ‘to contemplate the spectacle

of life with appropriate emotions,’ which Wordsworth defines as the

poet’s true aim; yet a spectator merely, and perhaps a little too

much occupied with the comeliness of the benches of the sanctuary

to notice that it is the sanctuary of sorrow that he is gazing at.

 

I see a far more intimate and immediate connection between the true

life of Christ and the true life of the artist; and I take a keen

pleasure in the reflection that long before sorrow had made my days

her own and bound me to her wheel I had written in THE SOUL OF MAN

that he who would lead a Christ-like life must be entirely and

absolutely himself, and had taken as my types not merely the

shepherd on the hillside and the prisoner in his cell, but also the

painter to whom the world is a pageant and the poet for whom the

world is a song. I remember saying once to Andre Gide, as we sat

together in some Paris CAFE, that while meta-physics had but little

real interest for me, and morality absolutely none, there was

nothing that either Plato or Christ had said that could not be

transferred immediately into the sphere of Art and there find its

complete fulfilment.

 

Nor is it merely that we can discern in Christ that close union of

personality with perfection which forms the real distinction

between the classical and romantic movement in life, but the very

basis of his nature was the same as that of the nature of the

artist - an intense and flamelike imagination. He realised in the

entire sphere of human relations that imaginative sympathy which in

the sphere of Art is the sole secret of creation. He understood

the leprosy of the leper, the darkness of the blind, the fierce

misery of those who live for pleasure, the strange poverty of the

rich. Some one wrote to me in trouble, ‘When you are not on your

pedestal you are not interesting.’ How remote was the writer from

what Matthew Arnold calls ‘the Secret of Jesus.’ Either would have

taught him that whatever happens to another happens to oneself, and

if you want an inscription to read at dawn and at night-time, and

for pleasure or for pain, write up on the walls of your house in

letters for the sun to gild and the moon to silver, ‘Whatever

happens to oneself happens to another.’

 

Christ’s place indeed is with the poets. His whole conception of

Humanity sprang right out of the imagination and can only be

realised by it. What God was to the pantheist, man was to Him. He

was the first to conceive the divided races as a unity. Before his

time there had been gods and men, and, feeling through the

mysticism of sympathy that in himself each had been made incarnate,

he calls himself the Son of the one or the Son of the other,

according to his mood. More than any one else in history he wakes

in us that temper of wonder to which romance always appeals. There

is still something to me almost incredible in the idea of a young

Galilean peasant imagining that he could bear on his own shoulders

the burden of the entire world; all that had already been done and

suffered, and all that was yet to be done and suffered: the sins

of Nero, of Caesar Borgia, of Alexander VI., and of him who was

Emperor of Rome and Priest of the Sun: the sufferings of those

whose names are legion and whose dwelling is among the tombs:

oppressed nationalities, factory children, thieves, people in

prison, outcasts, those who are dumb