De Profundis - Oscar Wilde (little readers .TXT) 📗

remains oneself. Who can

calculate the orbit of his own soul? When the son went out to look

for his father’s asses, he did not know that a man of God was

waiting for him with the very chrism of coronation, and that his

own soul was already the soul of a king.

 

I hope to live long enough and to produce work of such a character

that I shall be able at the end of my days to say, ‘Yes! this is

just where the artistic life leads a man!’ Two of the most perfect

lives I have come across in my own experience are the lives of

Verlaine and of Prince Kropotkin: both of them men who have passed

years in prison: the first, the one Christian poet since Dante;

the other, a man with a soul of that beautiful white Christ which

seems coming out of Russia. And for the last seven or eight

months, in spite of a succession of great troubles reaching me from

the outside world almost without intermission, I have been placed

in direct contact with a new spirit working in this prison through

man and things, that has helped me beyond any possibility of

expression in words: so that while for the first year of my

imprisonment I did nothing else, and can remember doing nothing

else, but wring my hands in impotent despair, and say, ‘What an

ending, what an appalling ending!’ now I try to say to myself, and

sometimes when I am not torturing myself do really and sincerely

say, ‘What a beginning, what a wonderful beginning!’ It may really

be so. It may become so. If it does I shall owe much to this new

personality that has altered every man’s life in this place.

 

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 rosered 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