De Profundis
thing. In the strangely simple economy of the world people only get what
they give, and to those who have not enough imagination to penetrate the
mere outward 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 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 whatever beauty of life still remains to me is contained in some
moment of surrender, 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 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 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.
Charming 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 Philistine 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.
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 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 somewhere 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 so 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 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 Guildenstern. They are Hamlet's
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 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.
He has no conception of what to do, and his folly is to feign folly.
Brutus used madness as a cloak to 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. 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, including himself, and yet his
doubt helps him not, as it comes not from scepticism but from a divided
will.
Of all this Guildenstern and Rosencrantz 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
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 conduct than a rather painful breach of
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. Towards 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 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
Tartuffe, and should rank with them. They are what modern life has
contributed to the antique ideal of friendship. He who writes a new _De
Amicitia_ must find a niche for them, and praise them in Tusculan prose.
They are types fixed for all time. To 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 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 attitude. They never chattered about sunsets, 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 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 ours a 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.
Of course to one so modern as I am, 'Enfant de mon siecle,' 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 gardens, 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. Linnaeus 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 brooms of the common furze; and I know that for me, to
whom flowers are part of desire, there are tears waiting in the petals of
some rose. It has always been so with me from my boyhood. 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 behind 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 become in harmony. I have grown tired of the articulate
utterances of men and things. The Mystical in Art, the Mystical 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, 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, 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