De Profundis
say one has to go to prison to understand 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 at his birth the soul of a poet, as he himself when quite young
had in mystical 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 anything, but by being
brought into his presence one becomes something. And everybody is
predestined to his 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
Conduct, 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 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 punishment. Those
who want a mask have to wear 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 unknowable, is the ultimate
achievement 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 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 without 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 possibility of
expression in words: so that while for the first year of my imprisonment
I did nothing else, and can remember 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
torturing 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 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 thanks to many people, and ask to
be remembered by them in turn.
The prison style is absolutely and entirely 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.
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 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 perfectly 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 side of life is over for me, very fortunately, 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 I was
entitled to share in. If he thought me unworthy, unfit to weep with him,
I should feel it as the most poignant humiliation, 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 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 the scabbard of his limbs'--_della vagina
della 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 the cry of Marsyas. It is bitter in
Baudelaire, sweet and plaintive in Lamartine, 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,' and the
'famous final victory,' in such a clear note of lyrical beauty, has not a
little of it; in the troubled undertone of doubt 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 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 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 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 zanies of sorrow.
We are clowns whose hearts are broken. We are specially designed to
appeal to the sense of humour. On 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 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 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 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 interpret 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