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The
University
of Iowa
Libraries

PR5318
D3
1912a
 3 1858 024 989 315
main
De profundis / Wilde, Oscar,
PR 5818 .D3 1912a /* c.1 1*

DATE DUE

ba!Ang

DEMCO 38-297
 siA
1
 Methuen's Shilling Library
А SERIES of general literature issued in fcap. 8vo. at is. net,
printed on good paper and well bound in cloth. The books
are reprints of well- known works by popular authors.
The following are either ready or in the press :
A Little of Everything E. V. Lucas
The Vicar of Morwenstow S. Baring -Gould
John Boyes, King of the Wa- kikuyu John Boyes
*Jimmy Glover -His Book Jaines M, Glover
Vailima Letters Robert Louis Stevenson
The Life of Tennyson A, C, Benson
An Ideal Husband Oscar Wilde
Lady Windermere's Fan Oscar Wilde
De Profundis Oscar Wilde
Selected Poems Oscar Wilde
Lord Arthur Savile's Crime Oscar Wilde
The Blue Bird Maurice Maeterlinck
lary Magdalene Maurice Maeterlinck
evastopol and other Stories Leo Tolstoy
The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson
Graham Balfour
She Life of John Ruskin W. G. Collingwood
The Condition of England C. P. G. Masterman, M.P.
Letters from a Self -Made Merchant to his Son
George Horace Lorimer
The Lore of the Honey Bee Tickner Edwardes
Under Five Reigns Lady Dorothy Nevill
From Midshipman to Field Marshal
Sir Evelyn Wood
Man and the Universe Sir Oliver Lodge
Slightly abridged.

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 Methuen's Shilling Novels
A SERIES of popular novels by distinguished authors at is. net,
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Jane Marie Corelli
Light Freights W. W. Jacobs
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C. N. and A. M. Williamson
The Tyrant Mrs. Henry de la Pasture
Anna of the Five Towns Arnold Bennett
The Secret Woman Eden Phillpoits
The Long Road John Oxenham
The Severins Mr. A. Sidgwick
Under the Red Robe Stanley Weyman
Mirage E. Temple Thurston
Virginia Perfect Peggy Webling
Spanish Gold G. A. Birmingham
Barbary Sheep Robert Hichens
The Woman with the Fan Robert Hichens
The Golden Centipede Louise Gerard
Round the Red Lamp Sir A. Conan Doyle
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Methuen & Co., Ltd., 36 Essex Street, London, W.C.

DE PROFUNDIS
Isole BY

OSCAR WILDE

TWENTY - FOURTH EDITION

METHUEN & CO . LTD.

36 ESSEX STREET W.C.
LONDON
This Book was first published February, 1905
Second , Third , Fourth , and
Fifth Edition 1905
Sixth Edition 1906
Seventh, Eighth, Ninth, ani
Tenth Editions 1907
Eleventh and Twelfth Editions 1908
Thirteenth Edition
(With additional matter ) 1908
tFourteenth Edition 1909
*Fifteenth Edition III
Sixteenth Edition at is. net, April 6th, 1911
(Without additional matter.)
* Seventeenth , Eighteenth , Nineteenth ,
Twentieth , Twenty - first and
Twenty-second Editions at is , net 1911
• Twenty -third and Twenty - fourth
Editions at is . net 1912

+ With additional matter

* Without additional matter
mas
nan
10

!!!
***
1

PREFACE

For a long time considerable curiosity

about the manu
has been expressed about
script of DE PROFUNDIS , which was
known to be in my possession, the
author having mentioned its existence
to many other friends. The book re
quires little introduction , and scarcely
any explanation . I have only to record
that it was written by my friend during
the last months of his imprisonment,
that it was the only work he wrote
while in prison, and the last work
in prose he ever wrote. ( The ‘ Ballad
GEN

315087
,
vi DE PROFUNDIS

of Reading Gaol ' was not composed

nor even planned until he had regained
his liberty .)
In sending me instructions with re
gard to the publication of DE PRO
FUNDIS, Oscar Wilde wrote :
' I don't defend my conduct. I explain
it. Also there are in my letter certain
passages which deal with my mental
development in prison, and the inevit
able evolution of my character and in
tellectual attitude towards life that has
taken place ; and I want you and others
who still stand by me and have affection
for me to know exactly in what mood
and manner I hope to face the world .
Of course, from one point of view , I
know that on the day of my release
 PREFACE vii

I shall be merely passing from one prison

into another, and there are times when
>

the whole world seems to me no larger

than my cell, and as full of terror for me.
" Still I helieve that at the beginning God
made a world for each separate man , and
in that world , which is within us, one
should seek to live. At any rate you will
read those parts of my letter with less
pain than the others. Of course I need
not remind you how fluid a thing thought
is with me with us all - and of what an
evanescent substance are оur einotions
made. Still I do see a sort of possible
goaltowards which ,through art, I may
progress .
* Prison life makes one see people
and things as they really are . That

The University of lowa

LIBRARIES
viii DE PROFUNDIS

is why it turns one to stone . It is the

people outside who are deceived by the
illusions of a life in constant motion .
They revolve with life and contribute to
its unreality. We who are immobile both
see and know .
Whether or not the letter does good
to narrow natures and hectic brains, to
me it has done good. I have " cleansed
my bosom of much perilous stuff." I need
not remind you that mere expression
is to an artist the supreme and only
mode of life. It is by utterance that we
live. Of the many, many things for
which I have to thank the Governor
there is none for which I am more grate
ful than for his permission to write fully
to you, and at as great a length as I
 PREFACE ix

desire. Por nearly two years I have had

within a growing burden of bitterness, of
much of which I have now got rid. On
the other side of the prison wall there
!
are some poor black 800t - besmirched
trees which are just breaking out into
buds of an almost shrill green . I know
quite well what they are going through.
They are finding expression .'
I venture to hope that DE PROFUNDIS,
which renders so vividly, and so pain
fully, the effect of social débâcle and im
prisonment on a highly intellectual and
artificial nature, will give many readers
a different impression of the witty and
delightful writer.

ROBERT ROSS
}
 DE PROFUNDIS

. . SUFFERING is one very long mo

ment. 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 re
gulated 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,
11
atini
Tirane DE PROFUNDIS

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 .
 DE PROFUNDIS 13

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 . Re

member 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 know how deeply
I loved and honoured her. Her death
was terrible to me ; but I, once a lord
26. ‫نگ‬r‫ج‬
‫ی‬te

14 DE PROFUNDIS

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, archæology, and science, but in
the public history of my own country, >
1

in its evolution as a nation. I had

disgraced that name eternally. I had
made it a low byword 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
 DE PROFUNDIS 15

than that I should hear the news

from indifferent lips, travelled, ill

she was, all the way from Genoa to
England to break to me herself the
tidings of so irreparable, so irremedi
able, 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 ex
pression 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. ... .
rom
16 DE PROFUNDIS

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.
 DE PROFUNDIS 17

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
B

1
19 DE PROFUNDIS
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 re

pay. It is embalmed and kept sweet
cassia of many
and cassia
by the myrrhand
tears . When wisdom has been profit
less 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
 DE PROFUNDIS 19

bitterness
of lonely exile into har
mony 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, per

haps, 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 casu
ality, something that calls for sym
pathy 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
Poor and prison
to prison. and us.
20 DE PROFUNDIS
perfect wisdom of love in it. With
peopleofourownrank 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 re

visit 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
 3156827 Contersin
DE PROFUNDIS 21

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 acknow
ledged. It is usually discerned, if dis
cerned at all, by the historian, or the
critic. long after both the man and his
aitava
22 DE PROFUNDIS

age have passed away . With me it

was different. I felt it myself, and
made others feel it. Byron was a sym
bolic 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
flâneur, a dandy, a man of fashion . I
surrounded myself with the smaller
natures and the meaner minds. I be

came the spendthrift of my own genius,

and to waste an eternal youth gave me
a curious joy. Tired of being on the
 DE PROFUNDIS 23

heights, I deliberately went to the

depths in the search for new sensation.

What the paradox was to me in the
į
sphere of thought, perversity became
to me in the sphere of passion. Desire,

sifasian
at the end, was a malady, or a madness,
or both . I grew careless of the lives
of Į took pleasure where it
others .

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.
24 DE PROFUNDIS

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 nó 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
3
' 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
 Nicarną goufferings
kmh,
DE PROFUNDIS 25

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 meaning
less, 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
26 DE PROFUNDIS

do so . It is the one thing that has in

it the elements of life, of a new life,
a Vita Nuova for me. Of all things
it is the strangest. One cannot acquire
it, except by surrendering
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
 DE PROFUNDIS 27

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 abso
lutely homeless. Yet there are worse

things in the world than that. I am

quite candid when I say that rather

than ggoo out
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
28 DE PROFUNDIS

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 individual
ism 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
 DE PROFUNDIS 29

gate, and he is the symbol, not merely

of his own affection, but of the affec
tion 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
 30 DE PROFUNDIS

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

X who are made for exceptions, not for

laws. But while I see that there is

Cerver note
 DE PROFUNDIS 31

Land!
nothing wrong in what one does, I see dem
that there is something wrong in what
1
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
not Cheste anty
32 DE PROFUNDIS

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 un

blessed 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 ΟΣ

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 >
 a Reason .
DE PROFUNDIS 33

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 con
victed are wrong and unjust laws, and
the system under which I have suffered
a wrong and unjust system . But, some
how , 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
 84 DE PROFUNDIS

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
)
Ortaya Prison - Thor twinna pronto
 DE PROFUNDIS 35

phrase would savour of too great bitter

ness 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
 86 DE PROFUNDIS

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 intoler
able 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
Facing The tect of에 self and the fact
ces
 DE PROFUNDIS 37

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 ex

periences is to put a lie intothe 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
38 DE PROFUNDIS

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 degrad
ing ; 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
 DE PROFUNDIS 89

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
Punciment consid nad to be
asraad of
De les du cores ?
 40 DE PROFUNDIS

to think, and walk,

walk, and live with
freedom.
Many men on their release carry their
lid's prison about with them into the air,
and hide it as a secret disgrace in their
nd i
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
 DE PROFUNDIS 41

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 II 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

 42 DE PROFUNDIS

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 twi
light 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
1 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
 DE PROFUNDIS 48

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 pro
duce 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 atti
tude 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
 44 DE PROFUNDIS

people who have suffered : those who

know what beauty is, and those who
know what sorrow is : nobody else in
terests me . Noram 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
2 ) Learn how to be hathy, not tang Empiramint
dat he will
 DE PROFUNDIS 45

fill a cup to the very brim with wine.

Now I am approaching life from a com
pletely 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
6
Tristi fummo
>
Nell aer dolce che dal sol s’allegra '
46 DE PROFUNDIS

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 under
6
stand 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 deter
 DE PROFUNDIS 47

mined to commit suicide on the very

day on which I left prison. After a
1
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 sad
ness 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
see
II see it would be
quite differently.
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,
or, if I desired to
48 DE PROFUNDIS

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 expres
sion of the delight I really felt at our
meeting And that, in the views and
ideas I am here shaping for myself, I
 DE PROFUNDIS 49

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 .
D
Torrent and te wees.

50 DE PROFUNDIS

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 im
perfection. 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 Car
lyle in a book he had given her years
ago, and translated by him , I fancy,
also :

6
" 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

 DE PROFUNDIS 51

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 ad
mit the enormous truth hidden in them .
I could not understand it. I remem

ber quite well how I used to tell her

that I did not want to eat my bread
in sorrow ,, or to pass any night weep
ing 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
 52 DE PROFUNDIS

out to me ; and during the last few

months I have, after terrible difficul
ties and struggles, been able to com
prehend some of the lessons hidden in
the heart of pain. Clergymen and
people who use phrases without wis
dom sometimes talk of suffering as a
mystery . It is really a revelation .
One discerns things one never dis
cerned before. One approaches the
whole of history from a different stand
point. What one had felt dimly,
through instinct, about art, is intel
lectually 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 cap

1) Sorrow the Tyle mital yart,
 DE PROFUNDIS 53

able, is at once the type and test of

all great art. What the artist is
1

always looking for is the mode of

existence in which soul and body are
one and indivisible : in which the out
ward 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 sensi
tiveness 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 mood s, and
moods,
tones,, and colours, modern landscape
54 DE PROFUNDIS

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 com
plex 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 essen

tial idea and the accidental existence ;
it is not the resemblance of shape to
shadow , or of the form mirrored in
>
 DE PROFUNDIS 55

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.
( Truth in art is the unity of a thing
with itself : the outward rendered ex
pressive of the inward : the soul made
incarnate : the body instinct with spirit.
For this reason there is no truth com
parable to sorrow . There are times
when sorrow seems to me to be the
only truth. Other things may be
illusions of the eye or the appetite,
made to blind the one and cloy the
other, but out of sorrow have the
worlds been built, and at the birth of
a child or a star there is pain .
Horrow is truth in ant no tratto a poupareat

teit
56 DE PROFUNDIS

More than this, there is about sorrow

an intense, an extraordinary reality. I
have said of myself that I was one
who stood in symbolic relations to the
art and culture of my age. There

is not a single wretched man in this

wretched place along with me who
does not stand in symbolic relation to
the very secret of life. For the secret
of life is suffering . It is what is
hidden behind everything. When we
begin to live, what is sweet is so sweet
to us, and what is bitter so bitter,
that we inevitably direct all our desires
towards pleasures, and seek not merely
for a * month or twain to feed on
honeycomb,' but for all our years to
taste no other food , ignorant all the,
 DE PROFUNDIS

while that we may really be starving

the soul.
I remember talking once on this
subject to one of the most beautiful
personalities I have ever known : a
<

woman , whose sympathy and noble

kindness to me, both before and since
the tragedy of my imprisonment, have
been beyond power and description ;
one who has really assisted me, though
she does not 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 exist
ence, through her being what she is
-partly an ideal and partly an in
fluence :aà suggestion of what one
might become as well as a real help
 DE PROFUNDIS

cowards becoming it ; a soul that ren

ders 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 think
ing 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 where
ever 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
 DE PROFUNDIS 59

the sphere in which such belief was to

be attained to. Now it seems to me
that love of
some kind
some kind is
is the only
possible explanation of the extraor
dinary amount of suffering that there
is in the world.. II 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 1
beautiful soul.
When I say that I am convinced of
these things I speak with too much
60 DE PROFUNDIS

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 aa single moment,
but one loses it in the long hours that
follow with leaden feet. It is so diffi
cult 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 des
pair that creep back into one's cell,
and into the cell of one's heart, with
such strange insistence that one has,
 DE PROFUNDIS 61

as it were, to garnish and sweep one's

house for their coming, as for an un
welcome 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 wash
ing the floor of my cell. For prison
life with its endless privations and re
strictions 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
62 DE PROFUNDIS

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
6

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
 DE PROFUNDIS 63

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 re
member when I was at Oxford saying
to one of my friends as we were stroll
ing 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
64 DE PROFUNDIS

shadow and its gloom . Failure, dis

grace, poverty, sorrow , despair,, suffer
ing, 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
 DE PROFUNDIS 65

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 con
tinued the same life would have been
wrong because it would have been limit
ing. 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 pass
age where the bishop says to the kneel
ing 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
66 DE PROFUNDIS

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 80 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
6
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
 DE PROFUNDIS 67

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-de

velopment. 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
à spectator : an ideal spectator indeed ,
6

and one to whom it is given to con -Nol

arouk
template the spectacle of life with quote
appropriate emotions, which Words
 68 DE PROFUNDIS

worth defines as the poet's true aim ;

yet û spectator merely, and perhaps a
little too much occupied with the come
liness 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 im
mediate 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 14an 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,
 DE PROFUNDIS 69

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 André Gide, as we sat together
in some Paris café, that while meta
physics had but little real interest for me,
and morality absolutely none, there was
nothing that either Plato or Christ kad
said that could not be transferred im
mediately 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
Esimies 2) necequestini mkality
70 DE PROFUNDIS

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.
6

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
6
' 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
 DE PROFUNDIS 71

house in letters for the sun to gild and

6

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
72 DE PROFUNDIS

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 Cæsar 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 nation
alities, factory children, thieves, people
in prison, outcasts, those who are dumb
under oppression and whose silence is
heard only of God ; and not merely
imagining this but actually achieving
 DE PROFUNDIS "3

it, so that at the present moment all

who come in contact with his person
ality, even though they may neither bow
to his altar nor kneel before his priest,
in some way find that the ugliness of
their sin is taken away and the beauty of
their sorrow revealed to them .
I had said of Christ that he ranks
with the poets. That is true. Shelley
and Sophocles are of his company. But
his entire life also is the most wonderful
of poems. For ' pity and terror ' there
is nothing in the entire cycle of Greek
tragedy to touch it. The absolute
purity of the protagonist raises the
entire scheme to a height of romantic
art from which the sufferings of Thebes
and Pelops' line are by their very horror
1794 DE PROFUNDIS

excluded , and shows how wrong Aristotle

was when he said in his treatise on the
drama that it would be impossible to
bear the spectacle of one blameless in
pain. Nor in Æschylus nor Dante, those
stern masters of tenderness, in Shake
speare, the most purely human of all the
great artists, in the whole of Celtic myth
and legend, where the loveliness of the
world is shown through a mist of tears,
and the life of a man is no more than
the life of a flower, is there anything
that, for sheer simplicity of pathos
wedded and made one with sublimity
of tragic effect, can be said to equal or
even approach the last act of Christ's
passion. The little supper with his
companions, one of whom has already
 DE PROFUNDIS 75

sold him for a price ; the anguish in the

quiet moon - lit garden ; the false friend
coming close to him so as to betray
him with a kiss ; the friend who still
believed in him , and on whom as on a
rock he had hoped to build a house of
refuge for Man , denying him as the
bird cried to the dawn ; his own utter
loneliness, his submission , his accept
ance of everything ; and along with it all
such scenes as the high priest of ortho
doxy rending his raiment in wrath , and
the magistrate of civil justice calling
for water in the vain hope of cleansing
himself of that stain of innocent blood
that makes him the scarlet figure of his
tory ; the coronation ceremony of sorrow ,
one of the most wonderful things in
76 DE PROFUNDIS

the whole of recorded time ; the cruci

fixion of the Innocent One before the eyes
of his mother and of the disciple whom
he loved ;: the soldiers gambling and
throwing dice for his clothes ; the ter
rible death by which he gave the world
its most eternal symbol ; and his final
burial in the tomb of the rich man , his
body swathed in Egyptian linen with
costly spices and perfumes as though he
had been a king's son . When one con
templates all this from the point of view
of art alone one cannot but be grateful
that the supreme office of the Church
should be the playing of the tragedy
without the shedding of blood : the
mystical presentation , by means of dia
logue and costume and gesture even, of
 ‫که من هرمات اہے‬

DE PROFUNDIS 77

the Passion of her Lord ; and it is always

à source of pleasure and awe to me to
remember that the ultimate survival of
the Greek chorus, lost elsewhere to art,
is to be found in the servitor answering
the priest at Mass.
Yet the whole life of Christ - 80 en
tirely may sorrow and beauty be made
one in their meaning and manifestation
-is really an idyll, though it ends with
the veil of the temple being rent, and
the darkness coming over the face of the
earth, and the stone rolled to the door
of the sepulchre. One always thinks of
him as a young bridegroom with his com
panions, as indeed he somewhere describes
himself; as a shepherd straying through
a valley with his sheep in search of green
78 DE PROFUNDIS

meadow or cool stream ; as a singer

trying to build out of the music the
walls of the City of God ; or as a lover
for whose love the whole world was too
small. His miracles seem to me to be
as exquisite as the coming of spring,
and quite as natural. I see no difficulty
at all in believing that such was the
charm of his personality that his mere
presence could bring peace to souls in
anguish , and that those who touched his
garments or his hands forgot their pain ;
or that as he passed by on the highway
of life people who had seen nothing of
life's mystery, saw it clearly , and others
who had been deaf to every voice but
that of pleasure heard for the first time
the voice of love and found it as
 DE PROFUNDIS 79

musical as Apollo's lute '; or that evil

passions fled at his approach , and men
whose dull unimaginative lives had been
but a mode of death rose as it were from
the grave when he called them ; or that
when he taught on the hillside the mul
titude forgot their hunger and thirst and
the cares of this world, and that to his
friends who listened to him as he sat
at meat the coarse food seemed delicate,
and the water had the taste of good
wine, and the whole house became full
of the odour and sweetness of nard.
Renan in his Vie de Jesus - that
gracious fifth gospel, the gospel ac
cording to St. Thomas, one might call
it - says somewhere that Christ's great
achievement was that he made himself
80 DE PROFUNDIS

as much loved after his death as he

had been during his lifetime. And
certainly, if his place is among the
poets, he is the leader of all the lovers.
He saw that love was the first secret
of the world for which the wise men
had been looking, and that it was only
through love that one could approach
either the heart of the leper or the feet
of God .

And above all, Christ is the most

supreme of Humility,
individualists.
like the artistic acceptance of all ex
periences, is merely a mode of manifes
tation . It is man's soul that Christ is
always looking for. He calls it ' God's
Kingdom ,' and finds it in every one.
He compares it to little things, to a
& Christ is inderdual
 DE PROFUNDIS 81

tiny seed, to a handful of leaven , to a

pearl. That is because one realises one's
soul only by getting rid of all alien
passions, all acquired culture, and all ex
ternal possessions, be they good or evil.
I bore up against everything with
some stubbornness of will and much re
bellion of nature, till I had absolutely
nothing left in the world but one

thing. I had lost my name, my posi

tion, my happiness, my freedom , my
wealth. I was a prisoner and a pauper.
But I still had my children left.
Suddenly they were taken away from
me by the law . It was a blow SO
appalling that I did not know what
to do, I flung myself on my
so
SO

knees, and bowed my head, and wept,

F
82 DE PROFUNDIS

and said , ' The body of a child is

as the body of the Lord : I am not
worthy of either .' That moment
seemed to save me. I saw then that
the only thing for me was to accept
everything Since then - curious as it
will no doubt sound I have been
happier. It was of course my soul in
its ultimate essence that I had reached .
In many ways I had been its enemy,
but I found it waiting for me as a
friend .. When one comes in contact
with the soul it makes one simple as
a child, as Christ said one should be.
It is tragic how few people ever 1

possess their souls ' before they die .

' Nothing is more rare in any man,
9
says Emerson, ' than an act of his own.
 DE PROFUNDIS 83

It is quite true. Most people are

other people. Their thoughts are
some one else's opinions, their lives a
ti mimicry, the
their sions a quotation.
passions
ir pas
+ Christ was not merely the supreme in
t dividualist, but he was the first in
1 dividualist in history. People have
I tried to make him out an ordinary
philanthropist, or ranked him as an

altruist with the unscientific and sen

i timental. But he was really neither
one nor the other. Pity he has, of
course,
id for the poor, for those who are
shut up in prisons, for the lowly, for
the wretched ; but he has far more
pity for the rich, for the hard hedon
ists, for those who waste their freedom
in becoming slaves to things, for those
84 DE PROFUNDIS
who wear soft raiment and live in
kings' houses. Riches and pleasure
seemed to him to be really greater
tragedies than poverty or sorrow . And
as for altruism , who knew better than
he that it is vocation not volition that
determines us, and that one cannot
gather grapes of thorns or figs from
thistles ?
To live for others as a definite self
conscious aim was not his creed. It
was not the basis of his creed . When
6
he says, ' Forgive your enemies,' it is
not for the sake of the enemy, but for
one's own sake that he says so , and
because love is more beautiful than
hate. In his own entreaty to the
6
young man, ' Sell all that thou hast
 DE PROFUNDIS 85

and give to the poor,' it is not of the

state of the poor that he is thinking
but of the soul of the young man , the
soul that wealth was marring. In his
view of life he is one with the artist
who knows that by the inevitable law
of self-perfection, the poet must sing,
and the sculptor think in bronze, and
the painter make the world a mirror
for his moods, as surely and as certainly
as the hawthorn must blossom in
spring, and the corn turn to gold at
harvest - time, and the moon in her

ordered wanderings change from shield

to sickle, and from sickle to shield .
But while Christ did not say to
men , ' Live for others,' he pointed out
that there was no difference at all
86 DE PROFUNDIS

between the lives of others and one's

own life. By this means he gave to
man an extended, aa Titan personality.
Since his coming the history of each
separate individual is, or can be made,
the history of the world. Of course ,
culture has intensified the personality
of man . Art has made us myriad
minded . Those who have the artistic
temperament go into exile with Dante
and learn how salt is the bread of
others, and how steep their stairs ; they
catch for a moment the serenity and
calm of Goethe, and yet know but too
well that Baudelaire cried to God

O Seigneur, donnez moi la force et le courage

De contempler mon corps et mon coeur sans
dégoût,'
 DE PROFUNDIS 87

Out of Shakespeare's
sonnets they
draw , to their own hurt it may be,
the secret of his love and make it
their own ; they look with new eyes on
modern life, beause they have listened
to one of Chopin's nocturnes, or
handled Greek things, or read the
story of the passion of some dead man
for some dead woman whose hair
was like threads of fine gold, and >

whose mouth was as a pomegranate.

But the sympathy of the artistic tem
perament is necessarily with what has
found expression. In words or in
colours, in music or in marble, behind
the painted masks of an Æschylean
play, or through some Sicilian shep
herds' pierced and jointed reeds, the
88 DE PROFUNDIS

man and his message must have been

revealed .
To the artist, expression is the only
mode under which he can conceive life
at all. To him what is dumb is dead..
But to Christ it was not so. With a

width and wonder of imagination that

fills one almost with awe, he took the
entire world of the inarticulate, the
voiceless world of pain, as his kingdom ,
and made of himself its eternal mouth
piece . Those of whom I have spoken,
who are dumb under oppression , and
' whose silence is heard only of God,'
he chose as his brothers. He sought to
become eyes to the blind, ears to the
deaf, and a cry in the lips of those
whose tongues had been tied. His desire
 DE PROFUNDIS 89

was to be to the myriads who had found

no utterance avery trumpet through
which they might call to heaven. And
feeling, with the artistic nature of one
to whom suffering and sorrot were

modes through which he could realise

his conception of the beautiful, that an
idea is of no value till it becomes incar
nate and is made an image, he made
of himself the image of the Man of
Sorrows, and as such has fascinated and
dominated art as no Greek god ever
succeeded in doing.
For the Greek gods, in spite of the
white and red of their fair fleet limbs,
were not really what they appeared to be.
The curved brow of Apollo was like the
sun's disc crescent over a hill at dawn ,
90 DE PROFUNDIS

and his feet were as the wings of the

morning, but he himself had been cruel
to Marsyas and had made Niobe child
less. In the steel shields of Athena's
eyes there had been no pity for Arachne ;
the pomp and peacocks of Hera were

all that was really noble about her ; and

the Father of the Gods himself had
been too fond of the daughters of men .
The two most deeply suggestive figures
of Greek Mythology were, for religion,
Demeter, an Earth Goddess, not one of
the Olympians, and for art, Dionysus,
the son of a mortal woman to whom the
moment of his birth had proved also
the moment of her death.
But Life itself from its lowliest and
most humble sphere produced one far
 DE PROFUNDIS 91

more marvellous than the mother of

Proserpina or the son of Semele. Out
of the Carpenter's shop at Nazareth had
come a personality infinitely greater
than any made by myth and legend,
and one, strangely enough, destined to
reveal to the world the mystical mean
ing of wine and the real beauties of the
lilies of the field as none, either on
Cithaeron or at Enna, had ever done.
6
The song of Isaiah, He is despised
and rejected of men , a man of sorrows
and acquainted with grief : and we hid
as it were our faces from him ,' had
seemed to him to prefigure himself, and
in him the prophecy was fulfilled. We
must not be afraid of such a phrase.
Every single work of art is the fulfil
92 DE PROFUNDIS

ment of a prophecy : for every work of

art is the conversion of an idea into
an image. Every single human being
should be the fulfilment of a prophecy :
for every human being should be the
realisation of some ideal, either in the
mind of God or in the mind of man.
Christ found the type and fixed it, and
the dream of a Virgilian poet, either at
Jerusalem or at Babylon, became in
the long progress of the centuries in
carnate in him for whom the world
was waiting.
To me one of the things in history
the most to be regretted is that the
Christ's own renaissance , which has pro
duced the Cathedral at Chartres, the
Arthurian cycle of legends, the life of
 DE PROFUNDIS 93

St. Francis of Assisi, the art of Giotto ,

and Dante's Divine Comedy, was not
allowed to develop on its own lines,
but was interrupted and spoiled by

the dreary classical Renaissance that

gave us Petrarch, and Raphael's fres
coes, and Palladian architecture, and
formal French tragedy, and St. Paul's
Cathedral, and Pope's poetry, and
everything that is made from with
out and by dead rules, and does not
spring from within through some spirit
informing it. But wherever there is a
romantic movement in art there some
how, and under some form , is Christ,
or the soul of Christ. He is in Romeo
and Juliet, in the Winter's Tale, in
Provençal poetry, in the Ancient Mar
 94 DE PROFUNDIS

iner, in La Belle Dame sans merci, and

in Chatterton's Ballad of Charity .
We owe to him the most diverse
things and people. Hugo's Les Misé
rables, Baudelaire's Pleurs du Mal, the
note of pity in Russian novels, Ver
laine and Verlaine's poems, the stained
glass and tapestries and the quattro
cento work of Burne- Jones and Morris,
belong to him no less than the tower of
Giotto, Lancelot and Guinevere, Tann
häuser, the troubled romantic marbles
of Michael Angelo, pointed architec
intele ture, and the love of children and
flowers - for both of which, indeed, in
classical art there was but little place,
hardly enough for them to gro groww or
play in, but which, from the twelfth
.
 DE PROFUNDIS 95

century down to our own day, have

been continually making their appear
ances in art, under various modes and
at various times, coming fitfully and
wilfully, as children, as flowers, are apt
to do : spring always seeming to one
as if the flowers had been in hiding,
and only came out into the sun be
cause they were afraid that grown up
people would grow tired of looking for
them and give up the search ; and the
life of a child being no more than an
April day on which there is both rain
and sun for the narcissus.
It is the imaginative quality of
Christ's own nature that makes him
this palpitating centre of romance .
The strange figures of poetic drama
96 DE PROFUNDIS

and ballad are made by the imagina

tion of others, but out of his own
imagination entirely did Jesus of Naza
reth create himself. The cry of Isaiah
had really no more to do with his

coming than the song of the nightin

gale has to do with the rising of the
moon - no
more,, though perhaps no
less . He was the denial as well as
the affirmation of prophecy. For every
expectation that he fulfilled there was
another that he destroyed . * In all
beauty ,' says Bacon , ' there is some
strangeness of proportion , and of those
who are born of the spirit - of those,
that is to say, who like himself are
dynamic forces - Christ says that they
are like the wind that ' bloweth where
 ... dar
474

DE PROFUNDIS 97

it listeth , and no man can tell whence

goethh .' That
it cometh and whither it goet
is why he is so fascinating to artists.
He has all the colour elements of life
mystery, strangeness, pathos, sugges
7
tion, ecstasy, love. He appeals to the
temper of wonder, and creates that
mood in which alone he can be under
stood .
And to me it is a joy to remem
ber that if he is of imagination all
compact,' the world itself is of the
same substance. I said in Dorian Gray
that the great sins of the world take
place in the brain : but it is in the
brain that everything takes place. We
know now that we do not see with
the eyes or hear with the ears. They
G
98 DE PROFUNDIS

are really channels for the transmission,

adequate or inadequate, of sense im
pressions. It is in the brain that the
poppy is red, that the apple is odorous,
that the skylark sings.
Of late I have been studying with
diligence the four prose poems about
Christ. At Christmas I managed to
get hold of a Greek Testament, and
every morning, after I had cleaned my
cell and polished my tins, I read a
little of the Gospels, a dozen verses
taken by chance anywhere . It is a
delightful way of opening the day.
Every one , even in a turbulent, ill
disciplined life, should do the same .
Endless repetition, in and out of season,
has spoiled for us the freshness, the
 DE PROFUNDIS 99

naïveté, the simple romantic charm of

the Gospels. We hear them read far
too often and far too badly, and all
repetition is anti-spiritual. When one
returns to the Greek ; it is like going
into a garden of lilies out of some
narrow and dark house.
And to me, the pleasure is doubled
by the reflection that it is extremely pro
bable that we have the actual terms, the
ipsissima verba, used by Christ. It was
always supposed that Christ talked in
Aramaic. Even Renan thought so. But
now we know that the Galilean peasants,
like the Irish peasants of our own day,
were bilingual, and that Greek was the
ordinary language of intercourse all
over Palestine, as indeed all over the
100 DE PROFUNDIS

Eastern world. I never liked the idea

that we knew of Christ's own words
only through a translation of a trans
lation . It is a delight to me to think
that as far as his conversation was con
cerned, Charmides might have listened
to him , and Socrates reasoned with
him , and Plato understood him ; that
he really said εγώ είμι ο ποιμήν ο καλός,
that when he thought of the lilies of
the field and how they neither toil nor
spin, bis absolute expression was ката

μάθετε τα κρίνα του αγρού πώς αυξάνει ου

κοπιά ουδε νήθει, and that his last word
when he cried out ' my life has been
completed, has reached its fulfilment,
has been perfected ,' was exactly as St.
John tells us it was : TETÉcoTa -- no more .
 DE PROFUNDIS 101

While in reading the Gospels - par

ticularly that of St. John himself, or
whatever early Gnostic took his name
and mantle I see the continual asser
tion of the imagination as the basis of
all spiritual and material life, I see also
that to Christ imagination was simply
a form of love, and that to him love was
lord in the fullest meaning of the phrase.
Some six weeks ago I was allowed by
the doctor to have white bread to eat
instead of the coarse black or brown
bread of ordinary prison fare. It is a
great delicacy . It will sound strange
that dry bread could possibly be a deli
cacy to any one . To me it is so much
so that at the close of each meal I care
fully eat whatever crumbs may be left
102 DE PROFUNDIS

on my tin plate, or have fallen on the

rough towel that one uses as a cloth so
as not to soil one's table ; and I do so
not from hunger I get now quite suffi
cient food — but simply in order that
nothing should be wasted of what is
given to me. So one should look on love.
Christ, like all fascinating person
alities, had the power of not merely
saying beautiful things himself, but of
making other people say beautiful things
to him ; and I love the story St. Mark
tells us about the Greek woman , who,
when as a trial of her faith he said to
her that he could not give her the bread
of the children of Israel, answered him
that the little dogs ( ια ,, little
(κυνάρ
dogs ' it should be rendered ) -- who are
 DE PROFUNDIS 103

under the table eat of the crumbs that

the children let fall. Most people live
for love and admiration . But it is by
love and admiration that we should live.
If any love is shown us we should recog
nise that we are quite unworthy of it.
Nobody is worthy to be loved . The
fact that God loves man shows us that
in the divine order of ideal things it is
written that eternal love is to be given
to what is eternally unworthy. Or if
that phrase seems to be a bitter one to
bear, let us say that every one is worthy
of love, except him who thinks that he
is. Love is a sacrament that should be
taken kneeling, and Domine, non sum
dignus should be on the lips and in the
hearts of those who receive it.
 104 DE PROFUNDIS

If ever I write again, in the sense of

producing artistic work, there are just
two subjects on which and through
which I desire to express myself: one
is Christ as the precursor of the
romantic movement in life ' : the other
is The artistic life considered in
6
its
??
relation to conduct .' The first is, of
course, intensely fascinating, for I see
in Christ not merely the essentials of
the supreme romantic type, but all the
accidents, the wilfulnesses even , of the
romantic temperament also. He was
the first person who ever said to people
that they should live ' flower - like lives.'
He fixed the phrase. He took children
as the type of what people should try
to become. He held them up as
 DE PROFUNDIS 105

examples to their elders, which I myself

have always thought the chief use of
children, if what is perfect should have
a use . Dante describes the soul of a
man as coming from the hand of God
weeping and laughing like a little child ,
at

and Christ also saw that the soul of each

one should be a guisa di fanciulla che
piangendo e ridendo pargoleggia. He
felt that life was changeful, fluid, active,

-
and that to allow it to be stereotyped
into any form was death. He saw that
people should not be too serious over
material, common interests : that to be
unpractical was to be a great thing : that
one should not bother too much over
affairs. The birds didn't, why should
man He is charming when he says,
106 DE PROFUNDIS

* Take no thought for the morrow ; is

not the soul more than meat ? is not the
body more than raiment ? ' A Greek
might have used the latter phrase. It

is full of Greek feeling. But only Christ

could have said both , and so summed
up life perfectly for us.
His morality is all sympathy, just
what morality should be. If the only
thing that he ever said had been,
6

* Her sins are forgiven her because she

loved much ,' it would have been worth
while dying to have said it. His justice
is all poetical justice, exactly what
justice should be. The beggar goes to
heaven because he has been unhappy.
I cannot conceive a better reason for
his being sent there . The people who
 DE PROFUNDIS 107

work for an hour in the vineyard in the

cool of the evening receive just as much
reward as those who have toiled there all
day long in the hot sun. Why shouldn't
they ? Probably no one deserved any
thing. Or perhaps they were a different
2

kind of people. Christ had no patience

with the dull lifeless mechanical systems 1

that treat people as if they were things,

and so treat everybody alike : for him
there were no laws : there were excep
tions merely, as if anybody, or anything,
for that matter, was like aught else in
the world !
That which is the very keynote of
romantic art was to him the proper
basis of natural life . He saw no other
basis. And when they brought him
108 DE PROFUNDIS

one taken in the very act of sin and

showed him her sentence written in the
law, and asked him what was to be
done, he wrote with his finger on the
ground as though he did not hear them ,
and finally , when they pressed him again,
looked up and said , “ Let him of you
who has never sinned be the first to
throw the stone at her.' It was worth
while living to have said that.
Like all poetical natures he loved
ignorant people. He knew that in the
soul of one who is ignorant there is
always room for a great idea. But he
could not stand stupid people, especially
those who are made stupid by educa
tion : people who are full of opinions not
one of which they even understand, a
 DE PROFUNDIS 109

peculiarly modern type, summed up by

Christ when he describes it as the type
of one who has the key of knowledge,
cannot use it himself, and does not allow
other people to use it, though it may be
made to open the gate of God's King
dom. His chief war was against the
Philistines. That is the war every child
of light has to wage. Philistinism was
the note of the age and community
in which he lived . In their heavy in
accessibility to ideas, their dull re
spectability, their tedious orthodoxy,,
their worship of vulgar success , their
entire preoccupation with the gross
materialistic side of life, and their
ridiculous estimate of themselves and
their importance, the Jews of Jerusalem
110 DE PROFUNDIS

in Christ's day were the exact counter

part of the British Philistine of our
own . Christ mocked at the whited
sepulchre ' of respectability, and fixed
that phrase for ever . He treated worldly
success as a thing absolutely to be de
spised. He saw nothing in it at all.
He looked on wealth as an encumbrance
to a man. He would not hear of life
being sacrificed to any system of thought
or morals. He pointed out that forms
and ceremonies were made for man, not
man for forms and ceremonies. He took
sabbatarianism as a type of the things
that should be set at nought. The cold
philanthropies, the- ostentatious public
charities, the tedious formalisms so dear
to the middle -class mind, he exposed
 DE PROFUNDIS 111 5

with utter and relentless scorn . To us,

what is termed orthodoxy is merely a
facile unintelligent acquiescence ; but to
them, and in their hands, it was a

terrible and paralysing tyranny. Christ

swept it aside. He showed that the
spirit alone was of value. He took a
keen pleasure in pointing out to them
that though they were always reading
the law and the prophets, they had not
really the smallest idea of what either of
them meant. In opposition to their

tithing of each separate day into the

fixed routine of prescribed duties, as
they tithe mint and rue, he preached
the enormous importance of living com
pletely for the moment.
Those whom he saved from their sins
112 DE PROFUNDIS

are saved simply for beautiful moments

in their lives. Mary Magdalen, when
she sees Christ, breaks the rich vase of
alabaster that one of her seven lovers
had given her, and spills the odorous
spices over his tired dusty feet, and for
that one moment's sake sits for ever
with Ruth and Beatrice in the tresses
of the snow -white rose of Paradise. All
that Christ says to us by the way of a
little warning is that every moment
should be beautiful, that the soul should
always be ready for the coming of the
bridegroom , always waiting for the voice
of the lover, Philistinism being simply
that side of man's nature that is not
illumined by the imagination. He sees
all the lovely influences of life as modes
 DE PROFUNDIS 113

of light : the imagination itself is the

world of light. The world is made by it,
and yet the world cannot understand it :
that is because the imagination is simply
a manifestation of love, and it is love
and the capacity for it that distinguishes
one human being from another.
But it is when he deals with a sinner
that Christ is most romantic, in the sense
of most real. The world had always 1

loved the saint as being the nearest t

possible approach to the perfection of

God . Christ, through some divine in
stinct in him , seems to have always loved
the sinner as being the nearest possible
approach to the perfection of man . His
primary desire was not to reform people,
any more than his primary desire was to
H
114 DE PROFUNDIS

relieve suffering. To turn an interesting

thief into a tedious honest man was not
his aim . He would have thought little
of the Prisoners' Aid Society and other
modern movements of the kind . The

conversion of a publican into a Pharisee

would not have seemed to him a great
achievement. But in a manner not yet
understood of the world he regarded
sin and suffering as being in themselves
beautiful holy things and modes of per
fection .
It seems a very dangerous idea. It
is — all great ideas are dangerous. That
it was Christ's creed admits of no doubt.
That it is the true creed I don't doubt
myself.
Of course the sinner must repent.
 DE PROFUNDIS 115

But why ? Simply because otherwise

he would be unable to realise what he
had done. The moment of repentance
is the moment of initiation . More than
that : it is the means by which one
alters one's past. The Greeks thought
that impossible. They often say in their
6
Gnomic aphorisms, ' Even the Gods
cannot alter the past.' Christ showed
that the commonest sinner could do it,
that it was the one thing he could do.
Christ, had he been asked , would have
said I feel quite certain about it — that
the moment the prodigal son fell on his
knees and wept, he made his having
wasted his substance with harlots, his
swine-herding and hungering for the
husks they ate, beautiful and holy
116 DE PROFUNDIS

moments in his life. It is difficult for

most people to grasp the idea. I dare
say one has to go to prison to under
stand it. If so, it may be worth while
going to prison.
There is something so unique about
Christ. Of course just as there are
false dawns before the dawn itself, and
winter days so full of sudden sunlight
that they will cheat the wise crocus into
squandering its gold before its time, and
make some foolish bird call to its mate
to build on barren boughs, so there were
Christians before Christ. For that we
should be grateful. The unfortunate

thing is that there have been none since.

I make one exception, St. Francis of
Assisi, But then God had given him
 DE PROFUNDIS 117

at his birth the soul of a poet, as he

himself when quite young had in mys
tical marriage taken poverty as his bride :
and with the soul of a poet and the
body of a beggar he found the way to
perfection not difficult. He understood
Christ, and so he became like him . We
do not require the Liber Conformitatum
to teach us that the life of St. Francis
was the true Imitatio Christi, a poem
compared to which the book of that
name is merely prose .
Indeed, that is the charm about Christ,
when all is said : he is just like a work
of art. He does not really teach one
brought into
anything, but by being brought
his presence one becomes something.
And everybody is predestined to his
 Christ and conduct

118 DE PROFUNDIS
presence. Once at least in his life each
man walks with Christ to Emmaus.
As regards the other subject, the
Relation of the Artistic Life to Con
duct, it will no doubt seem strange to
you that I should select it. People
point to Reading Gaol and say, ' That
is where the artistic life leads a man .'
Well, it might lead to worse places.
The more mechanical people to whom
life is a shrewd speculation depending
on a careful calculation of ways and
means, always know where they are
going, and go there. They start with
the ideal desire of being the parish
beadle, and in whatever sphere they are
placed they succeed in being the parish
beadle and no more. A man whose
 DE PROFUNDIS 119

desire is to be something separate from

himself, to be a member of Parliament,
or a successful grocer, or a prominent
solicitor, or a judge, or something equally
tedious, invariably succeeds in being
what he wants to be. That is his pun
ishment. Those who want a mask have
to wear metus
it.
But with the dynamic forces of life,
and those in whom those dynamic forces
become incarnate, it is different. People
whose desire is solely for self -realisation
never know where they are going. They
can't know . In one sense of the word
it is of course necessary, as the Greek
oracle said, to know oneself : that is the
first achievement of knowledge. But

to recognise that the soul of a man is

!
120 DE PROFUNDIS

unknowable, is the ultimate achieve

ment of wisdom . The final mystery is
oneself. When one has weighed the
sun in the balance, and measured the
steps of the moon , and mapped out the
seven heavens star by star, there still
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
 DE PROFUNDIS 121

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 with
out 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 possi
bility of expression in words : so that
while for the first year of my imprison
ment I did nothing else, and can re
122 DE PROFUNDIS

member 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 tortur
ing 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
 DE PROFUNDIS 123

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
many thanks to many people,
and ask to be remembered by them in
turn .

The prison style is absolutely and en

*****
tirely 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.
124 DE PROFUNDIS

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
 DE PROFUNDIS 125

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 per
fectly 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 1

side of life is over for me, very fortu

nately, 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
126 DE PROFUNDIS

I was entitled to share in . If he thought

me unworthy, unfit to weep with him , I
should feel it as the most poignant humi
liation , 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
 DE PROFUNDIS 127

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 theTypor
scabbard of his limbs
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
128 DE PROFUNDIS

the cry of Marsyas.. It is bitter in

Baudelaire, sweet and plaintive in La
martine, 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,'
6

and the famous final victory ,' in such

a clear note of lyrical beauty , has not
a little of it ; in the troubled undertone
of donat 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.
 DE PROFUNDIS 129

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
of 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
I
130 DE PROFUNDIS

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 ząnies of sor
row. We are clowns whose hearts are
broken . We are specially designed to
On

appeal to the sense of humour.

 DE PROFUNDIS 191

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
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
132 DE PROFUNDIS

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
 DE PROFUNDIS 133

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 inter
pret 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 worll people only get what they
give, and to those who have not enough
imagination to penetrate the mere out
ward 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
134 DE PROFUNDIS

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 rose-red dawns. So perhaps what
ever beauty of life still remains to me
is contained in some moment of sur
render, 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
 DE PROFUNDIS 135

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 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
136 DE PROFUNDIS

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. Charm
ing 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 Philis
tine 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.
 DE PROFUNDIS 137

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
138 DE PROFUNDIS

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 some

where 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 80
 DE PROFUNDIS 139

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
140 DE PROFUNDIS

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 They are Hamlet's
Guildenstern .
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
 DE PROFUNDIS 141

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 . Hi has no conception of
what to do, and his folly is to feign
folly. Brutus used madness as a cloak
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.
142 DE PROFUNDIS

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, includ
ing himself, and yet his doubt helps him
not, as it comes not from scepticism but
from a divided will.
Of all this Guildenstern and Rosen
crantz 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
 DE PROFUNDIS 143

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 con

duct than a rather painful breach of 1

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 . To
wards 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
144 DE PROFUNDIS

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 Tar
tuffe, and should rank with them .
They are what modern life has con
tributed to the antique ideal of friend
ship. He who writes a new De Ami
citia must find a niche for them , and
praise them in Tusculan prose . They
are types fixed for all time. To
 DE PROFUNDIS 145

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
&
146 DE PROFUNDIS

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 atti
tude. They never chattered about sun
sets, 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
 DE PROFUNDIS 147

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 oursa 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.
148 DE PROFUNDIS

Of course to one so modern as I

am, ' Enfant de mon siècle,' 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 gar
dens, 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.
Linnæus 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
blossoms of the common furze ; and I
know that for me, to whom flowers
 DE PROFUNDIS 149

are part of desire, there are tears wait

ing in the petals of some rose. It has
always been so with me from my boy
hood. 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 be
hind 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 be
come in harmony. I have grown tired
150 DE PROFUNDIS

of the articulate utterances of men and

things. The Mystical in Art, the Mys
tical 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
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,
 DE PROFUNDIS 151

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
hurt : she will cleanse me in
great waters, and with bitter herbs
make me whole.
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