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

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.