De Profundis
who says that 'sorrow remarries us to God,' could have been so harsh to
those who were enamoured of melancholy, if any such there really were. I
had no idea that some day this would become to me one of the greatest
temptations of my life.
While I was in Wandsworth prison I longed to die. It was my one desire.
When after two months in the infirmary I was transferred here, and found
myself growing gradually better in physical health, I was filled with
rage. I determined to commit suicide on the very day on which I left
prison. After a time that evil mood passed away, and I made up my mind
to live, but to wear gloom as a king wears purple: never to smile again:
to turn whatever house I entered into a house of mourning: to make my
friends walk slowly in sadness with me: to teach them that melancholy is
the true secret of life: to maim them with an alien sorrow: to mar them
with my own pain. Now I feel quite differently. I see it would be both
ungrateful and unkind of me to pull so long a face that when my friends
came to see me they would have to make their faces still longer in order
to show their sympathy; or, if I desired to entertain them, to invite
them to sit down silently to bitter herbs and funeral baked meats. I
must learn how to be cheerful and happy.
The last two occasions on which I was allowed to see my friends here, I
tried to be as cheerful as possible, and to show my cheerfulness, in
order to make them some slight return for their trouble in coming all the
way from town to see me. It is only a slight return, I know, but it is
the one, I feel certain, that pleases them most. I saw R--- for an hour
on Saturday week, and I tried to give the fullest possible expression of
the delight I really felt at our meeting. And that, in the views and
ideas I am here shaping for myself, I am quite right is shown to me by
the fact that now for the first time since my imprisonment I have a real
desire for life.
There is before me so much to do, that I would regard it as a terrible
tragedy if I died before I was allowed to complete at any rate a little
of it. I see new developments in art and life, each one of which is a
fresh mode of perfection. I long to live so that I can explore what is
no less than a new world to me. Do you want to know what this new world
is? I think you can guess what it is. It is the world in which I have
been living. Sorrow, then, and all that it teaches one, is my new world.
I used to live entirely for pleasure. I shunned suffering and sorrow of
every kind. I hated both. I resolved to ignore them as far as possible:
to treat them, that is to say, as modes of imperfection. They were not
part of my scheme of life. They had no place in my philosophy. My
mother, who knew life as a whole, used often to quote to me Goethe's
lines--written by Carlyle in a book he had given her years ago, and
translated by him, I fancy, also:--
'Who never ate his bread in sorrow,
Who never spent the midnight hours
Weeping and waiting for the morrow,--
He knows you not, ye heavenly powers.'
They were the lines which that noble Queen of Prussia, whom Napoleon
treated with such coarse brutality, used to quote in her humiliation and
exile; they were the lines my mother often quoted in the troubles of her
later life. I absolutely declined to accept or admit the enormous truth
hidden in them. I could not understand it. I remember quite well how I
used to tell her that I did not want to eat my bread in sorrow, or to
pass any night weeping and watching for a more bitter dawn.
I had no idea that it was one of the special things that the Fates had in
store for me: that for a whole year of my life, indeed, I was to do
little else. But so has my portion been meted out to me; and during the
last few months I have, after terrible difficulties and struggles, been
able to comprehend some of the lessons hidden in the heart of pain.
Clergymen and people who use phrases without wisdom sometimes talk of
suffering as a mystery. It is really a revelation. One discerns things
one never discerned before. One approaches the whole of history from a
different standpoint. What one had felt dimly, through instinct, about
art, is intellectually and emotionally realised with perfect clearness of
vision and absolute intensity of apprehension.
I now see that sorrow, being the supreme emotion of which man is capable,
is at once the type and test of all great art. What the artist is always
looking for is the mode of existence in which soul and body are one and
indivisible: in which the outward is expressive of the inward: in which
form reveals. Of such modes of existence there are not a few: youth and
the arts preoccupied with youth may serve as a model for us at one
moment: at another we may like to think that, in its subtlety and
sensitiveness of impression, its suggestion of a spirit dwelling in
external things and making its raiment of earth and air, of mist and city
alike, and in its morbid sympathy of its moods, and tones, and colours,
modern landscape art is realising for us pictorially what was realised in
such plastic perfection by the Greeks. Music, in which all subject is
absorbed in expression and cannot be separated from it, is a complex
example, and a flower or a child a simple example, of what I mean; but
sorrow is the ultimate type both in life and art.
Behind joy and laughter there may be a temperament, coarse, hard and
callous. But behind sorrow there is always sorrow. Pain, unlike
pleasure, wears no mask. Truth in art is not any correspondence between
the essential idea and the accidental existence; it is not the
resemblance of shape to shadow, or of the form mirrored in the crystal to
the form itself; it is no echo coming from a hollow hill, any more than
it is a silver well of water in the valley that shows the moon to the
moon and Narcissus to Narcissus. Truth in art is the unity of a thing
with itself: the outward rendered expressive of the inward: the soul made
incarnate: the body instinct with spirit. For this reason there is no
truth comparable 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.
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 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
existence, through her being what she is--partly an ideal and partly an
influence: a suggestion of what one might become as well as a real help
towards becoming it; a soul that renders 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 thinking 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 wherever 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 the sphere in which such belief was to be attained to.
Now it seems to me that love of some kind is the only possible
explanation of the extraordinary amount of suffering that there is in the
world. I 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 beautiful soul.
When I say that I am convinced of these things I speak with too much
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 a single moment, but one loses it in the long
hours that follow with leaden feet. It is so difficult 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 despair that creep back
into one's cell, and into the cell of one's heart, with such strange
insistence that one has, as it were, to garnish and sweep one's house for
their coming, as for an unwelcome 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 washing the floor of
my cell. For prison life with its endless privations and restrictions
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
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 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 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 remember when I was at
Oxford saying to one of my friends as we were strolling 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
shadow and its gloom. Failure, disgrace, poverty, sorrow, despair,