De Profundis by Oscar Wilde (popular books to read .TXT) 📖
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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
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