De profundis, p.1
De Profundis, page 1
Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde was born in Dublin in 1854. His father was a celebrated surgeon, his mother a supporter of Irish independence who presided over literary salons in Ireland and England. Although his brilliance as a classicist at Dublin’s Trinity College won him a scholarship to Magdalen College, Oxford, Wilde failed in his attempts at an academic career. Instead he set his sights on the literary and artistic worlds of London. Fusing the influences of Ruskin, the Pre-Raphaelites, Walter Pater, and Gautier’s l’art pour l’art, he made himself the most visible manifestation of the Aesthetic movement; by 1881 a burlesque of Wilde provided the protagonist for the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta Patience. It was to exploit the popularity of the operetta, in fact, that the producer D’Oyly Carte underwrote Wilde’s immensely successful lecture tour of America. Married in 1884 to Constance Lloyd, Wilde worked briefly as a magazine editor while publishing poetry, plays, fairy tales, and essays.
The Picture of Dorian Gray was commissioned by J. M. Stoddardt, the Philadelphia publisher of Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine. It appeared in the July 1890 issue and immediately gained a certain notoriety for being “mawkish and nauseous,” “unclean,” “effeminate,” and “contaminating.” When it was published as a book the following year, Wilde greatly revised and expanded the text, filling it out with a melodramatic subplot and adding a preface that defended his aesthetic philosophy. As for the book’s value as autobiography, Wilde noted in a letter that the main characters are in different ways reflections of him: “Basil Hallward is what I think I am; Lord Henry what the world thinks me; Dorian what I would like to be—in other ages, perhaps.”
In the early nineties, Wilde was at the center of an artistic milieu characterized by The Yellow Book, the Rhymers’ Club, and the art of Aubrey Beardsley. He wrote a poetic drama, Salomé, in French (1892), but it was banned in England; the play was published in book form with illustrations by Beardsley in 1894. Salomé was produced in Paris in 1896.
However, Wilde did achieve success as a popular playwright, writing in rapid succession Lady Windermere’s Fan, A Woman of No Importance, An Ideal Husband, and The Importance of Being Earnest. In 1895, two of his plays were on the London stage simultaneously, and he was acknowledged as a pivotal figure in English literary life, admired for his wit and eloquence.
Since at least the mid-1880s, Wilde had lived a sexual double life, and in 1893 he distanced himself from his family by taking rooms at the Savoy Hotel. He had by then embarked on a passionate relationship with the considerably younger Lord Alfred Douglas, the English translator of Salomé whom he had met the year after he wrote The Picture of Dorian Gray. In March 1895, Wilde undertook a libel action against the Marquis of Queensberry, Lord Alfred’s father, who had denounced Wilde as a “somdomite” [sic]. Wilde withdrew the suit following damaging cross-examination by the marquis’s defense attorney, a former classmate of Wilde’s. (Question: “Have you ever adored a young man madly?” Answer: “I have never given adoration to anybody except myself.”) Shortly thereafter, Wilde was arrested for homosexual offenses and underwent two trials before being sentenced to hard labor at Wandsworth Prison and Reading Gaol. A long recriminatory letter to Douglas written while in prison was eventually published as De Profundis.
Released in 1897, Wilde left for France, calling himself Sebastian Melmoth, a name taken from the gothic novel Melmoth the Wanderer, written by Wilde’s great-uncle. A poem based on his prison experience, The Ballad of Reading Gaol, was published in 1898.
His health destroyed, and bankrupted by legal expenses, Wilde lived in Paris for three years, making a conversion to Roman Catholicism just before his death in November 1900. He is buried in the cemetery of Père Lachaise.
CONTENTS
PREFACE BY RICHARD ELLMANN
DE PROFUNDIS
NOTES
COMMENTARY
READING GROUP GUIDE FOR DE PROFUNDIS
Preface
by Richard Ellmann
De Profundis is a kind of dramatic monologue, which constantly questions and takes into account the silent recipient’s supposed responses. Given the place where it was written, Wilde might have been expected to confess his guilt. Instead he refuses to admit that his past conduct with young men was guilty, and declares that the laws by which he was condemned were unjust. * The closest he comes to the subject of homosexuality is to say, impenitently, that what the paradox was for him in the realm of thought, sexual deviation was in the realm of conduct. More than half of De Profundis is taken up by his confession, not of his own sins, but of Bosie’s. He evokes two striking images for that young man. One is his favorite passage from Agamemnon, about bringing up a lion’s whelp inside one’s house only to have it run amok. Aeschylus compared it to Helen, Wilde to Douglas. The other is Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who have no realization of Hamlet’s tragedy, being “the little cups that can hold so much and no more.”
The main theme of self-recrimination is that he did not break with Bosie. But his letter is an attempt to restore relations. And while he admits to “weakness,” he explains the weakness as due to his affection, good nature, aversion to scenes, incapacity to bear resentment, and desire to keep life comely by ignoring what he considered trifles. His weakness was strength. The gods, he has discovered, make instruments to plague us out of our virtues as well as our vices.
Wilde acknowledges that along with good qualities, he was “the spendthrift of my own genius.” But he passes quickly over this defect, and those that attend it. Much of De Profundis is an elegy for lost greatness. As he whips his own image, he cannot withhold his admiration for what that image was. Elegy generates eulogy. He heightens the pinnacle from which he has fallen:
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…. Byron was a symbolic figure, but his relations were to the passion of his age and its weariness of passion. Mine were to something more noble, more permanent, of more vital issue, of larger scope.
The gods had given me almost everything. I had genius, a distinguished name, high social position, brilliancy, intellectual daring: I made art a philosophy, and philosophy an art: I altered the minds of men and the colours of things: there was nothing I said or did that did not make people wonder: I took the drama, the most objective form known to art, and made it as personal a mode of expression as the lyric or the sonnet, at the same time that I widened its range and enriched its characterisation: drama, novel, poem in rhyme, poem in prose, subtle or fantastic dialogue, whatever I touched I made beautiful in a new mode of beauty: to truth itself I gave what is false no less than what is true as its rightful province, and showed that the false and the true are merely forms of intellectual existence. I treated Art as the supreme reality, and life as a mere mode of fiction: I awoke the imagination of mycentury so that it created myth and legend around me: I summed up all systems in a phrase, and all existence in an epigram.
In prison, he says, he has at least learned humility. Humility is a slippery term in De Profundis. Wilde’s only definition of it there is “the frank acceptance of all experience.” The pursuit of pleasure must take into account the advent of sorrow. But in a way he has always known this. Still, much of the folderol of personality has receded in importance: as a young man he had often praised poses and masks; now he says, “Those who want a mask have to wear it.” In America he announced that “the secret of life is art.” Now he had found that “the secret of life is suffering.”
De Profundis moves from the discovery of pain to the discovery of consolation. Its climax, doubtless premeditated from the start, was a section dealing with Wilde’s discovery in prison of Christ. This too is less humble than it seems, since Wilde not only describes Christ without recognizing his divinity, but blends Christianity with aestheticism, as long before he told André Gide he would do. Christ appears here as the supreme individualist, uniting personality and perfection, saying beautiful things, making of his life the most wonderful of poems by creating himself out of his own imagination. He sympathizes with sinners as Wilde in “The Soul of Man Under Socialism” sympathizes with criminals, and recognizes no morality but that of sympathy. Christ is a precursor of the romantic movement, a supreme artist, a master of paradox, a type of Wilde in the ancient world. In this section of De Profundis Douglas is almost forgotten, but Wilde makes all he has learned about Christ into something he must impart to his friend. He cannot resist more particularization of the Queensberrys’ misdeeds, but he reaches at last a Christlike conclusion: “And the end of it all is that I have got to forgive you. I must do so. I don’t write this letter to put bitterness into your heart, but to pluck it out of mine. For my own sake I must forgive you.”
The most important thing about De Profundis is that it is a love letter. Wilde complains of neglect and arranges a reunion. He reminds Douglas, even at this late stage, that Douglas’s family had promised to pay his court costs, but financial matters are forgotten as he evokes the thought of their meeting “in some quiet foreign town like Bruges,” where Bosie, who had come to him once to learn the Pleasure of Life and of Art, may be offered tutelage in “the meaning of Sorrow, and its beauty.” For no matter how badly Douglas behaved, he always loved Wilde in his fashion. As an apologia De Profundis suffers from the adulteration of simplicity by eloquence, by an arrogance lurking in its humility, and by its disjointed structure. But as a love letter it has all the consistency it needs, and must rank—with its love and hate, so licitude, vanity, and philosophic musings—as one of the greatest, and the longest, ever written. Wilde on 3 April 1897 asked permission to send the letter out, but cannily recognized that to send it to Douglas would be to anticipate its destruction. In that case there would be no record of what had brought him to prison. So he asked permission to send it to Ross, who was instructed to have it copied and send Douglas the original. The Home Office refused permission to send it to anybody, but said he could take it with him on his release.
* In 1894 he told an interviewer (Almy), “Never attempt to reform a man. Men never repent. To punish a man for wrong-doing, with a view to his reformation, is the most lamentable mistake it is possible to commit. If he has any soul at all, such procedure is calculated to make him ten times worse than before. It is a sign of a noble nature to refuse to be broken by force.”
H. M. PRISON, READING
Dear Bosie, 1 After long and fruitless waiting I have determined to write to you myself, as much for your sake as for mine, as I would not like to think that I had passed through two long years of imprisonment without ever having received a single line from you, or any news or message even, except such as gave me pain.
Our ill-fated and most lamentable friendship has ended in ruin and public infamy for me, yet the memory of our ancient affection is often with me, and the thought that loathing, bitterness and contempt should for ever take that place in my heart once held by love is very sad to me: and you yourself will, I think, feel in your heart that to write to me as I lie in the loneliness of prison-life is better than to publish my letters without my permission or to dedicate poems to me unasked, though the world will know nothing of whatever words of grief or passion, of remorse or indifference you may choose to send as your answer or your appeal.
I have no doubt that in this letter in which I have to write of your life and of mine, of the past and of the future, of sweet things changed to bitterness and of bitter things that may be turned into joy, there will be much that will wound your vanity to the quick. If it prove so, read the letter over and over again till it kills your vanity. If you find in it something of which you feel that you are unjustly accused, remember that one should be thankful that there is any fault of which one can be unjustly accused. If there be in it one single passage that brings tears to your eyes, weep as we weep in prison where the day no less than the night is set apart for tears. It is the only thing that can save you. If you go complaining to your mother, as you did with reference to the scorn of you I displayed in my letter to Robbie, 2 so that she may flatter and soothe you back into self complacency or conceit, you will be completely lost. If you find one false excuse for yourself, you will soon find a hundred, and be just what you were before. Do you still say, as you said to Robbie in your answer, that I “attribute unworthy motives” to you? Ah! you had no motives in life. You had appetites merely. A motive is an intellectual aim. That you were “very young” when our friendship began? Your defect was not that you knew so little about life, but that you knew so much. The morning dawn of boyhood with its delicate bloom, its clear pure light, its joy of innocence and expectation you had left far behind. With very swift and running feet you had passed from Romance to Realism. The gutter and the things that live in it had begun to fascinate you. That was the origin of the trouble in which you sought my aid, and I, so unwisely according to the wisdom of this world, out of pity and kindness gave it to you. You must read this letter right through, though each word may become to you as the fire or knife of the surgeon that makes the delicate flesh burn or bleed. Remember that the fool in the eyes of the gods and the fool in the eyes of man are very different. One who is entirely ignorant of the modes of Art in its revolution or the moods of thought in its progress, of the pomp of the Latin line or the richer music of the vowelled Greek, of Tuscan sculpture or Elizabethan song may yet be full of the very sweetest wisdom. The real fool, such as the gods mock or mar, is he who does not know himself. I was such a one too long. You have been such a one too long. Be so no more. Do not be afraid. The supreme vice is shallowness. Everything that is realised is right. Remember also that whatever is misery to you to read, is still greater misery to me to set down. To you the Unseen Powers have been very good. They have permitted you to see the strange and tragic shapes of Life as one sees shadows in a crystal. The head of Medusa that turns living men to stone, you have been allowed to look at in a mirror merely. You yourself have walked free among the flowers. From me the beautiful world of colour and motion has been taken away.
I will begin by telling you that I blame myself terribly. As I sit here in this dark cell in convict clothes, a disgraced and ruined man, I blame myself. In the perturbed and fitful nights of anguish, in the long monotonous days of pain, it is myself I blame. I blame myself for allowing an unintellectual friendship, a friendship whose primary aim was not the creation and contemplation of beautiful things, to entirely dominate my life. From the very first there was too wide a gap between us. You had been idle at your school, worse than idle at your university. You did not realise that an artist, and especially such an artist, as I am, one, that is to say, the quality of whose work depends on the intensification of personality, requires for the development of his art the companionship of ideas, and intellectual atmosphere, quiet, peace, and solitude. You admired my work when it was finished: you enjoyed the brilliant successes of my first nights, and the brilliant banquets that followed them: you were proud, and quite naturally so, of being the intimate friend of an artist so distinguished: but you could not understand the conditions requisite for the production of artistic work. I am not speaking in phrases of rhetorical exaggeration but in terms of absolute truth to actual fact when I remind you that during the whole time we were together I never wrote one single line. Whether at Torquay, Goring, London, Florence or elsewhere, my life, as long as you were by my side, was entirely sterile and uncreative. And with but few intervals you were, I regret to say, by my side always.
I remember, for instance, in September ’93, to select merely one instance out of many, taking a set of chambers, purely in order to work undisturbed, as I had broken my contract with John Hare for whom I had promised to write a play, and who was pressing me on the subject. During the first week you kept away. We had, not unnaturally indeed, differed on the question of the artistic value of your translation of Salome, so you contented yourself with sending me foolish letters on the subject. In that week I wrote and completed in every detail, as it was ultimately performed, the first act of An Ideal Husband. The second week you returned and my work practically had to be given up. I arrived at James’s Place every morning at 11.30, in order to have the opportunity of thinking and writing without the interruptions inseparable from my own household, quiet and peaceful as that household was. But the attempt was vain. At twelve o’clock you drove up, and stayed smoking cigarettes and chattering till 1.30, when I had to take you out to luncheon at the Café Royal or the Berkeley. Luncheon with its liqueurs lasted usually till 3.30. For an hour you retired to White’s. At tea-time you appeared again, and stayed till it was time to dress for dinner. You dined with me either at the Savoy or at Tite Street. We did not separate as a rule till after midnight, as supper at Willis’s had to wind up the entrancing day. That was my life for those three months, every single day, except during the four days when you went abroad. I then, of course, had to go over to Calais to fetch you back. For one of my nature and temperament it was a position at once grotesque and tragic.
You surely must realise that now? You must see now that your incapacity of being alone: your nature so exigent in its persistent claim on the attention and time of others: your lack of any power of sustained intellectual concentration: the unfortunate accident—for I like to think it was no more—that you had not yet been able to acquire the “Oxford temper” in intellectual matters, never, I mean, been one who could play gracefully with ideas but had arrived at violence of opinion merely—that all these things, combined with the fact that your desires and interests were in Life not in Art, were as destructive to your own progress in culture as they were to my work as an artist? When I compare my friendship with you to my friendship with such still younger men as John Gray 3 and Pierre Louys 4 I feel ashamed. My real life, my higher life was with them and such as they.
