De Profundis

Capítulo 1

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Title: De Profundis

Author: Oscar Wilde

Release date: May 1, 1997 [eBook #921]

Most recently updated: June 11, 2013

Language: English

Credits: Transcribed from the 1913 Methuen & Co. edition by David Price. Note that later editions of De Profundis contained more material. The most complete editions are still in copyright in the U.S.A

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DE PROFUNDIS ***

Transcribed from the 1913 Methuen & Co. edition by David Price, email

ccx074@pglaf.org. Note that later editions of De Profundis contained

more material. The most complete editions are still in copyright in the

U.S.A.

DE PROFUNDIS

. . . Suffering is one very long moment. We cannot divide it by seasons.

We can only record its moods, and chronicle their return. With us time

itself does not progress. It revolves. It seems to circle round one

centre of pain. The paralysing immobility of a life every circumstance

of which is regulated after an unchangeable pattern, so that we eat and

drink and lie down and pray, or kneel at least for prayer, according to

the inflexible laws of an iron formula: this immobile quality, that makes

each dreadful day in the very minutest detail like its brother, seems to

communicate itself to those external forces the very essence of whose

existence is ceaseless change. Of seed-time or harvest, of the reapers

bending over the corn, or the grape gatherers threading through the

vines, of the grass in the orchard made white with broken blossoms or

strewn with fallen fruit: of these we know nothing and can know nothing.

For us there is only one season, the season of sorrow. The very sun and

moon seem taken from us. Outside, the day may be blue and gold, but the

light that creeps down through the thickly-muffled glass of the small

iron-barred window beneath which one sits is grey and niggard. It is

always twilight in one's cell, as it is always twilight in one's heart.

And in the sphere of thought, no less than in the sphere of time, motion

is no more. The thing that you personally have long ago forgotten, or

can easily forget, is happening to me now, and will happen to me again to-

morrow. Remember this, and you will be able to understand a little of

why I am writing, and in this manner writing. . . .

A week later, I am transferred here. Three more months go over and my

mother dies. No one knew how deeply I loved and honoured her. Her death

was terrible to me; but I, once a lord of language, have no words in

which to express my anguish and my shame. She and my father had

bequeathed me a name they had made noble and honoured, not merely in

literature, art, archaeology, and science, but in the public history of

my own country, in its evolution as a nation. I had disgraced that name

eternally. I had made it a low by-word among low people. I had dragged

it through the very mire. I had given it to brutes that they might make

it brutal, and to fools that they might turn it into a synonym for folly.

What I suffered then, and still suffer, is not for pen to write or paper

to record. My wife, always kind and gentle to me, rather than that I

should hear the news from indifferent lips, travelled, ill as she was,

all the way from Genoa to England to break to me herself the tidings of

so irreparable, so irremediable, a loss. Messages of sympathy reached me

from all who had still affection for me. Even people who had not known

me personally, hearing that a new sorrow had broken into my life, wrote

to ask that some expression of their condolence should be conveyed to me.

. . .

Three months go over. The calendar of my daily conduct and labour that

hangs on the outside of my cell door, with my name and sentence written

upon it, tells me that it is May. . . .

Prosperity, pleasure and success, may be rough of grain and common in

fibre, but sorrow is the most sensitive of all created things. There is

nothing that stirs in the whole world of thought to which sorrow does not

vibrate in terrible and exquisite pulsation. The thin beaten-out leaf of

tremulous gold that chronicles the direction of forces the eye cannot see

is in comparison coarse. It is a wound that bleeds when any hand but

that of love touches it, and even then must bleed again, though not in

pain.

Where there is sorrow there is holy ground. Some day people will realise

what that means. They will know nothing of life till they do,--and

natures like his can realise it. When I was brought down from my prison

to the Court of Bankruptcy, between two policemen,--waited in the long

dreary corridor that, before the whole crowd, whom an action so sweet and

simple hushed into silence, he might gravely raise his hat to me, as,

handcuffed and with bowed head, I passed him by. Men have gone to heaven

for smaller things than that. It was in this spirit, and with this mode

of love, that the saints knelt down to wash the feet of the poor, or

stooped to kiss the leper on the cheek. I have never said one single

word to him about what he did. I do not know to the present moment

whether he is aware that I was even conscious of his action. It is not a

thing for which one can render formal thanks in formal words. I store it

in the treasure-house of my heart. I keep it there as a secret debt that

I am glad to think I can never possibly repay. It is embalmed and kept

sweet by the myrrh and cassia of many tears. When wisdom has been

profitless to me, philosophy barren, and the proverbs and phrases of

those who have sought to give me consolation as dust and ashes in my

mouth, the memory of that little, lovely, silent act of love has unsealed

for me all the wells of pity: made the desert blossom like a rose, and

brought me out of the bitterness of lonely exile into harmony with the

wounded, broken, and great heart of the world. When people are able to

understand, not merely how beautiful ---'s action was, but why it meant

so much to me, and always will mean so much, then, perhaps, they will

realise how and in what spirit they should approach me. . . .

The poor are wise, more charitable, more kind, more sensitive than we

are. In their eyes prison is a tragedy in a man's life, a misfortune, a

casuality, something that calls for sympathy in others. They speak of

one who is in prison as of one who is 'in trouble' simply. It is the

phrase they always use, and the expression has the perfect wisdom of love

in it. With people of our own rank it is different. With us, prison

makes a man a pariah. I, and such as I am, have hardly any right to air

and sun. Our presence taints the pleasures of others. We are unwelcome

when we reappear. To revisit the glimpses of the moon is not for us. Our

very children are taken away. Those lovely links with humanity are

broken. We are doomed to be solitary, while our sons still live. We are

denied the one thing that might heal us and keep us, that might bring

balm to the bruised heart, and peace to the soul in pain. . . .

I must say to myself that I ruined myself, and that nobody great or small

can be ruined except by his own hand. I am quite ready to say so. I am

trying to say so, though they may not think it at the present moment.

This pitiless indictment I bring without pity against myself. Terrible

as was what the world did to me, what I did to myself was far more

terrible still.

I was a man who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my

age. I had realised this for myself at the very dawn of my manhood, and

had forced my age to realise it afterwards. Few men hold such a position

in their own lifetime, and have it so acknowledged. It is usually

discerned, if discerned at all, by the historian, or the critic, long

after both the man and his age have passed away. With me it was

different. I felt it myself, and made others feel it. Byron was a

symbolic figure, but his relations were to the passion of his age and its

weariness of passion. Mine were to something more noble, more permanent,

of more vital issue, of larger scope.

The gods had given me almost everything. But I let myself be lured into

long spells of senseless and sensual ease. I amused myself with being a

flaneur, a dandy, a man of fashion. I surrounded myself with the

smaller natures and the meaner minds. I became the spendthrift of my own

genius, and to waste an eternal youth gave me a curious joy. Tired of

being on the heights, I deliberately went to the depths in the search for

new sensation. What the paradox was to me in the sphere of thought,

perversity became to me in the sphere of passion. Desire, at the end,

was a malady, or a madness, or both. I grew careless of the lives of

others. I took pleasure where it pleased me, and passed on. I forgot

that every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character,

and that therefore what one has done in the secret chamber one has some

day to cry aloud on the housetop. I ceased to be lord over myself. I

was no longer the captain of my soul, and did not know it. I allowed

pleasure to dominate me. I ended in horrible disgrace. There is only

one thing for me now, absolute humility.

I have lain in prison for nearly two years. Out of my nature has come

wild despair; an abandonment to grief that was piteous even to look at;

terrible and impotent rage; bitterness and scorn; anguish that wept

aloud; misery that could find no voice; sorrow that was dumb. I have

passed through every possible mood of suffering. Better than Wordsworth

himself I know what Wordsworth meant when he said--

'Suffering is permanent, obscure, and dark

And has the nature of infinity.'

But while there were times when I rejoiced in the idea that my sufferings

were to be endless, I could not bear them to be without meaning. Now I

find hidden somewhere away in my nature something that tells me that

nothing in the whole world is meaningless, and suffering least of all.

That something hidden away in my nature, like a treasure in a field, is

Humility.

It is the last thing left in me, and the best: the ultimate discovery at

which I have arrived, the starting-point for a fresh development. It has

come to me right out of myself, so I know that it has come at the proper

time. It could not have come before, nor later. Had any one told me of

it, I would have rejected it. Had it been brought to me, I would have

refused it. As I found it, I want to keep it. I must do so. It is the

one thing that has in it the elements of life, of a new life, Vita

Nuova for me. Of all things it is the strangest. One cannot acquire

it, except by surrendering everything that one has. It is only when one

has lost all things, that one knows that one possesses it.

Now I have realised that it is in me, I see quite clearly what I ought to

do; in fact, must do. And when I use such a phrase as that, I need not

say that I am not alluding to any external sanction or command. I admit

none. I am far more of an individualist than I ever was. Nothing seems

to me of the smallest value except what one gets out of oneself. My

nature is seeking a fresh mode of self-realisation. That is all I am

concerned with. And the first thing that I have got to do is to free

myself from any possible bitterness of feeling against the world.

I am completely penniless, and absolutely homeless. Yet there are worse

things in the world than that. I am quite candid when I say that rather

than go out from this prison with bitterness in my heart against the

world, I would gladly and readily beg my bread from door to door. If I

got nothing from the house of the rich I would get something at the house

of the poor. Those who have much are often greedy; those who have little

always share. I would not a bit mind sleeping in the cool grass in

summer, and when winter came on sheltering myself by the warm

close-thatched rick, or under the penthouse of a great barn, provided I

had love in my heart. The external things of life seem to me now of no

importance at all. You can see to what intensity of individualism I have

arrived--or am arriving rather, for the journey is long, and 'where I

walk there are thorns.'

Of course I know that to ask alms on the highway is not to be my lot, and

that if ever I lie in the cool grass at night-time it will be to write

sonnets to the moon. When I go out of prison, R--- will be waiting for

me on the other side of the big iron-studded gate, and he is the symbol,

not merely of his own affection, but of the affection of many others

besides. I believe I am to have enough to live on for about eighteen

months at any rate, so that if I may not write beautiful books, I may at

least read beautiful books; and what joy can be greater? After that, I

hope to be able to recreate my creative faculty.

But were things different: had I not a friend left in the world; were

there not a single house open to me in pity; had I to accept the wallet

and ragged cloak of sheer penury: as long as I am free from all

resentment, hardness and scorn, I would be able to face the life with

much more calm and confidence than I would were my body in purple and

fine linen, and the soul within me sick with hate.

And I really shall have no difficulty. When you really want love you

will find it waiting for you.

I need not say that my task does not end there. It would be

comparatively easy if it did. There is much more before me. I have

hills far steeper to climb, valleys much darker to pass through. And I

have to get it all out of myself. Neither religion, morality, nor reason

can help me at all.

Morality does not help me. I am a born antinomian. I am one of those

who are made for exceptions, not for laws. But while I see that there is

nothing wrong in what one does, I see that there is something wrong in

what one becomes. It is well to have learned that.

Religion does not help me. The faith that others give to what is unseen,

I give to what one can touch, and look at. My gods dwell in temples made

with hands; and within the circle of actual experience is my creed made

perfect and complete: too complete, it may be, for like many or all of

those who have placed their heaven in this earth, I have found in it not

merely the beauty of heaven, but the horror of hell also. When I think

about religion at all, I feel as if I would like to found an order for

those who cannot believe: the Confraternity of the Faithless, one might

call it, where on an altar, on which no taper burned, a priest, in whose

heart peace had no dwelling, might celebrate with unblessed bread and a

chalice empty of wine. Every thing to be true must become a religion.

And agnosticism should have its ritual no less than faith. It has sown

its martyrs, it should reap its saints, and praise God daily for having

hidden Himself from man. But whether it be faith or agnosticism, it must

be nothing external to me. Its symbols must be of my own creating. Only

that is spiritual which makes its own form. If I may not find its secret

within myself, I shall never find it: if I have not got it already, it

will never come to me.

Reason does not help me. It tells me that the laws under which I am

convicted are wrong and unjust laws, and the system under which I have

suffered a wrong and unjust system. But, somehow, I have got to make

both of these things just and right to me. And exactly as in Art one is

only concerned with what a particular thing is at a particular moment to

oneself, so it is also in the ethical evolution of one's character. I

have got to make everything that has happened to me good for me. The

plank bed, the loathsome food, the hard ropes shredded into oakum till

one's finger-tips grow dull with pain, the menial offices with which each

day begins and finishes, the harsh orders that routine seems to

necessitate, the dreadful dress that makes sorrow grotesque to look at,

the silence, the solitude, the shame--each and all of these things I have

to transform into a spiritual experience. There is not a single

degradation of the body which I must not try and make into a

spiritualising of the soul.

I want to get to the point when I shall be able to say quite simply, and

without affectation that the two great turning-points in my life were

when my father sent me to Oxford, and when society sent me to prison. I

will not say that prison is the best thing that could have happened to

me: for that phrase would savour of too great bitterness towards myself.

I would sooner say, or hear it said of me, that I was so typical a child

of my age, that in my perversity, and for that perversity's sake, I

turned the good things of my life to evil, and the evil things of my life

to good.

What is said, however, by myself or by others, matters little. The

important thing, the thing that lies before me, the thing that I have to

do, if the brief remainder of my days is not to be maimed, marred, and

incomplete, is to absorb into my nature all that has been done to me, to

make it part of me, to accept it without complaint, fear, or reluctance.

The supreme vice is shallowness. Whatever is realised is right.

When first I was put into prison some people advised me to try and forget

who I was. It was ruinous advice. It is only by realising what I am

that I have found comfort of any kind. Now I am advised by others to try

on my release to forget that I have ever been in a prison at all. I know

that would be equally fatal. It would mean that I would always be

haunted by an intolerable sense of disgrace, and that those things that

are meant for me as much as for anybody else--the beauty of the sun and

moon, the pageant of the seasons, the music of daybreak and the silence

of great nights, the rain falling through the leaves, or the dew creeping

over the grass and making it silver--would all be tainted for me, and

lose their healing power, and their power of communicating joy. To

regret one's own experiences is to arrest one's own development. To deny

one's own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one's own life. It

is no less than a denial of the soul.

For just as the body absorbs things of all kinds, things common and

unclean no less than those that the priest or a vision has cleansed, and

converts them into swiftness or strength, into the play of beautiful

muscles and the moulding of fair flesh, into the curves and colours of

the hair, the lips, the eye; so the soul in its turn has its nutritive

functions also, and can transform into noble moods of thought and

passions of high import what in itself is base, cruel and degrading; nay,

more, may find in these its most august modes of assertion, and can often

reveal itself most perfectly through what was intended to desecrate or

destroy.

The fact of my having been the common prisoner of a common gaol I must

frankly accept, and, curious as it may seem, one of the things I shall

have to teach myself is not to be ashamed of it. I must accept it as a

punishment, and if one is ashamed of having been punished, one might just

as well never have been punished at all. Of course there are many things

of which I was convicted that I had not done, but then there are many

things of which I was convicted that I had done, and a still greater

number of things in my life for which I was never indicted at all. And

as the gods are strange, and punish us for what is good and humane in us

as much as for what is evil and perverse, I must accept the fact that one

is punished for the good as well as for the evil that one does. I have

no doubt that it is quite right one should be. It helps one, or should

help one, to realise both, and not to be too conceited about either. And

if I then am not ashamed of my punishment, as I hope not to be, I shall

be able to think, and walk, and live with freedom.

Many men on their release carry their prison about with them into the

air, and hide it as a secret disgrace in their hearts, and at length,

like poor poisoned things, creep into some hole and die. It is wretched

that they should have to do so, and it is wrong, terribly wrong, of

society that it should force them to do so. Society takes upon itself

the right to inflict appalling punishment on the individual, but it also

has the supreme vice of shallowness, and fails to realise what it has

done. When the man's punishment is over, it leaves him to himself; that

is to say, it abandons him at the very moment when its highest duty

towards him begins. It is really ashamed of its own actions, and shuns

those whom it has punished, as people shun a creditor whose debt they

cannot pay, or one on whom they have inflicted an irreparable, an

irremediable wrong. I can claim on my side that if I realise what I have

suffered, society should realise what it has inflicted on me; and that

there should be no bitterness or hate on either side.

Of course I know that from one point of view things will be made

different for me than for others; must indeed, by the very nature of the

case, be made so. 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.