De Profundis
that if ever I lie in the cool grass at night-time it will be to write
sonnets to the moon. When I go out of prison, R--- will be waiting for
me on the other side of the big iron-studded gate, and he is the symbol,
not merely of his own affection, but of the affection of many others
besides. I believe I am to have enough to live on for about eighteen
months at any rate, so that if I may not write beautiful books, I may at
least read beautiful books; and what joy can be greater? After that, I
hope to be able to recreate my creative faculty.
But were things different: had I not a friend left in the world; were
there not a single house open to me in pity; had I to accept the wallet
and ragged cloak of sheer penury: as long as I am free from all
resentment, hardness and scorn, I would be able to face the life with
much more calm and confidence than I would were my body in purple and
fine linen, and the soul within me sick with hate.
And I really shall have no difficulty. When you really want love you
will find it waiting for you.
I need not say that my task does not end there. It would be
comparatively easy if it did. There is much more before me. I have
hills far steeper to climb, valleys much darker to pass through. And I
have to get it all out of myself. Neither religion, morality, nor reason
can help me at all.
Morality does not help me. I am a born antinomian. I am one of those
who are made for exceptions, not for laws. But while I see that there is
nothing wrong in what one does, I see that there is something wrong in
what one becomes. It is well to have learned that.
Religion does not help me. The faith that others give to what is unseen,
I give to what one can touch, and look at. My gods dwell in temples made
with hands; and within the circle of actual experience is my creed made
perfect and complete: too complete, it may be, for like many or all of
those who have placed their heaven in this earth, I have found in it not
merely the beauty of heaven, but the horror of hell also. When I think
about religion at all, I feel as if I would like to found an order for
those who _cannot_ believe: the Confraternity of the Faithless, one might
call it, where on an altar, on which no taper burned, a priest, in whose
heart peace had no dwelling, might celebrate with unblessed bread and a
chalice empty of wine. Every thing to be true must become a religion.
And agnosticism should have its ritual no less than faith. It has sown
its martyrs, it should reap its saints, and praise God daily for having
hidden Himself from man. But whether it be faith or agnosticism, it must
be nothing external to me. Its symbols must be of my own creating. Only
that is spiritual which makes its own form. If I may not find its secret
within myself, I shall never find it: if I have not got it already, it
will never come to me.
Reason does not help me. It tells me that the laws under which I am
convicted are wrong and unjust laws, and the system under which I have
suffered a wrong and unjust system. But, somehow, I have got to make
both of these things just and right to me. And exactly as in Art one is
only concerned with what a particular thing is at a particular moment to
oneself, so it is also in the ethical evolution of one's character. I
have got to make everything that has happened to me good for me. The
plank bed, the loathsome food, the hard ropes shredded into oakum till
one's finger-tips grow dull with pain, the menial offices with which each
day begins and finishes, the harsh orders that routine seems to
necessitate, the dreadful dress that makes sorrow grotesque to look at,
the silence, the solitude, the shame--each and all of these things I have
to transform into a spiritual experience. There is not a single
degradation of the body which I must not try and make into a
spiritualising of the soul.
I want to get to the point when I shall be able to say quite simply, and
without affectation that the two great turning-points in my life were
when my father sent me to Oxford, and when society sent me to prison. I
will not say that prison is the best thing that could have happened to
me: for that phrase would savour of too great bitterness towards myself.
I would sooner say, or hear it said of me, that I was so typical a child
of my age, that in my perversity, and for that perversity's sake, I
turned the good things of my life to evil, and the evil things of my life
to good.
What is said, however, by myself or by others, matters little. The
important thing, the thing that lies before me, the thing that I have to
do, if the brief remainder of my days is not to be maimed, marred, and
incomplete, is to absorb into my nature all that has been done to me, to
make it part of me, to accept it without complaint, fear, or reluctance.
The supreme vice is shallowness. Whatever is realised is right.
When first I was put into prison some people advised me to try and forget
who I was. It was ruinous advice. It is only by realising what I am
that I have found comfort of any kind. Now I am advised by others to try
on my release to forget that I have ever been in a prison at all. I know
that would be equally fatal. It would mean that I would always be
haunted by an intolerable sense of disgrace, and that those things that
are meant for me as much as for anybody else--the beauty of the sun and
moon, the pageant of the seasons, the music of daybreak and the silence
of great nights, the rain falling through the leaves, or the dew creeping
over the grass and making it silver--would all be tainted for me, and
lose their healing power, and their power of communicating joy. To
regret one's own experiences is to arrest one's own development. To deny
one's own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one's own life. It
is no less than a denial of the soul.
For just as the body absorbs things of all kinds, things common and
unclean no less than those that the priest or a vision has cleansed, and
converts them into swiftness or strength, into the play of beautiful
muscles and the moulding of fair flesh, into the curves and colours of
the hair, the lips, the eye; so the soul in its turn has its nutritive
functions also, and can transform into noble moods of thought and
passions of high import what in itself is base, cruel and degrading; nay,
more, may find in these its most august modes of assertion, and can often
reveal itself most perfectly through what was intended to desecrate or
destroy.
The fact of my having been the common prisoner of a common gaol I must
frankly accept, and, curious as it may seem, one of the things I shall
have to teach myself is not to be ashamed of it. I must accept it as a
punishment, and if one is ashamed of having been punished, one might just
as well never have been punished at all. Of course there are many things
of which I was convicted that I had not done, but then there are many
things of which I was convicted that I had done, and a still greater
number of things in my life for which I was never indicted at all. And
as the gods are strange, and punish us for what is good and humane in us
as much as for what is evil and perverse, I must accept the fact that one
is punished for the good as well as for the evil that one does. I have
no doubt that it is quite right one should be. It helps one, or should
help one, to realise both, and not to be too conceited about either. And
if I then am not ashamed of my punishment, as I hope not to be, I shall
be able to think, and walk, and live with freedom.
Many men on their release carry their prison about with them into the
air, and hide it as a secret disgrace in their hearts, and at length,
like poor poisoned things, creep into some hole and die. It is wretched
that they should have to do so, and it is wrong, terribly wrong, of
society that it should force them to do so. Society takes upon itself
the right to inflict appalling punishment on the individual, but it also
has the supreme vice of shallowness, and fails to realise what it has
done. When the man's punishment is over, it leaves him to himself; that
is to say, it abandons him at the very moment when its highest duty
towards him begins. It is really ashamed of its own actions, and shuns
those whom it has punished, as people shun a creditor whose debt they
cannot pay, or one on whom they have inflicted an irreparable, an
irremediable wrong. I can claim on my side that if I realise what I have
suffered, society should realise what it has inflicted on me; and that
there should be no bitterness or hate on either side.
Of course I know that from one point of view things will be made
different for me than for others; must indeed, by the very nature of the
case, be made so. The poor thieves and outcasts who are imprisoned here
with me are in many respects more fortunate than I am. The little way in
grey city or green field that saw their sin is small; to find those who
know nothing of what they have done they need go no further than a bird
might fly between the twilight and the dawn; but for me the world is
shrivelled to a handsbreadth, and everywhere I turn my name is written on
the rocks in lead. For I have come, not from obscurity into the
momentary notoriety of crime, but from a sort of eternity of fame to a
sort of eternity of infamy, and sometimes seem to myself to have shown,
if indeed it required showing, that between the famous and the infamous
there is but one step, if as much as one.
Still, in the very fact that people will recognise me wherever I go, and
know all about my life, as far as its follies go, I can discern something
good for me. It will force on me the necessity of again asserting myself
as an artist, and as soon as I possibly can. If I can produce only one
beautiful work of art I shall be able to rob malice of its venom, and
cowardice of its sneer, and to pluck out the tongue of scorn by the
roots.
And if life be, as it surely is, a problem to me, I am no less a problem
to life. People must adopt some attitude towards me, and so pass
judgment, both on themselves and me. I need not say I am not talking of
particular individuals. The only people I would care to be with now are
artists and people who have suffered: those who know what beauty is, and
those who know what sorrow is: nobody else interests me. Nor am I making
any demands on life. In all that I have said I am simply concerned with
my own mental attitude towards life as a whole; and I feel that not to be
ashamed of having been punished is one of the first points I must attain
to, for the sake of my own perfection, and because I am so imperfect.
Then I must learn how to be happy. Once I knew it, or thought I knew it,
by instinct. It was always springtime once in my heart. My temperament
was akin to joy. I filled my life to the very brim with pleasure, as one
might fill a cup to the very brim with wine. Now I am approaching life
from a completely new standpoint, and even to conceive happiness is often
extremely difficult for me. I remember during my first term at Oxford
reading in Pater's _Renaissance_--that book which has had such strange
influence over my life--how Dante places low in the Inferno those who
wilfully live in sadness; and going to the college library and turning to
the passage in the _Divine Comedy_ where beneath the dreary marsh lie
those who were 'sullen in the sweet air,' saying for ever and ever
through their sighs--
'Tristi fummo
Nell aer dolce che dal sol s'allegra.'
I knew the church condemned _accidia_, but the whole idea seemed to me
quite fantastic, just the sort of sin, I fancied, a priest who knew
nothing about real life would invent. Nor could I understand how Dante,