He has a
charming
house and a _jardin
potager_.
potager_.
Oscar Wilde
They revolve with life and contribute to its
unreality. We who are immobile both see and know. Whether or not the
letter does good to narrow natures and hectic brains, to me it has done
good. I have "cleansed my bosom of much perilous stuff"; to borrow a
phrase from the poet whom you and I once thought of rescuing from the
Philistines. I need not remind you that mere expression is to an artist
the supreme and only mode of life. It is by utterance that we live. Of
the many, many things for which I have to thank the Governor there is
none for which I am more grateful than for his permission to write fully
and at as great a length as I desire. For nearly two years I had within
a growing burden of bitterness, of much of which I have now got rid. On
the other side of the prison wall there are some poor black
soot-besmirched trees that are just breaking out into buds of an almost
shrill green. I know quite well what they are going through. They are
finding expression.
Ever yours,
OSCAR.
--_Letter from Reading Prison to Robert Ross_.
CAREY STREET
Where there is sorrow there in holy ground. Some day people will realise
what that means. They will know nothing of life till they do,--and
natures like his can realise it. When I was brought down from my prison
to the Court of Bankruptcy, between two policemen,--waited in the long
dreary corridor that, before the whole crowd, whom an action so sweet and
simple hushed into silence, he might gravely raise his hat to me, as,
handcuffed and with bowed head, I passed him by. Men have gone to heaven
for smaller things than that. It was in this spirit, and with this mode
of love, that the saints knelt down to wash the feet of the poor, or
stooped to kiss the leper on the cheek. I have never said one single
word to him about what he did. I do not know to the present moment
whether he is aware that I was even conscious of his action. It is not a
thing for which one can render formal thanks in formal words. I store it
in the treasure-house of my heart. I keep it there as a secret debt that
I am glad to think I can never possibly repay. It is embalmed and kept
sweet by the myrrh and cassia of many tears. When wisdom has been
profitless to me, philosophy barren, and the proverbs and phrases of
those who have sought to give me consolation as dust and ashes in my
mouth, the memory of that little, lovely, silent act of love has unsealed
for me all the wells of pity: made the desert blossom like a rose, and
brought me out of the bitterness of lonely exile into harmony with the
wounded, broken, and great heart of the world. When people are able to
understand, not merely how beautiful ---'s action was, but why it meant
so much to me, and always will mean so much, then, perhaps, they will
realise how and in what spirit they should approach me. . . .
The poor are wise, more charitable, more kind, more sensitive than we
are. In their eyes prison is a tragedy in a man's life, a misfortune, a
casuality, something that calls for sympathy in others. They speak of
one who is in prison as of one who is 'in trouble' simply. It is the
phrase they always use, and the expression has the perfect wisdom of love
in it. With people of our own rank it is different. With us, prison
makes a man a pariah. I, and such as I am, have hardly any right to air
and sun. Our presence taints the pleasures of others. We are unwelcome
when we reappear. To revisit the glimpses of the moon is not for us. Our
very children are taken away. Those lovely links with humanity are
broken. We are doomed to be solitary, while our sons still live. We are
denied the one thing that might heal us and keep us, that might bring
balm to the bruised heart, and peace to the soul in pain. --_De
Profundis_.
SORROW WEARS NO MASK
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. --_De Profundis_.
VITA NUOVA
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,
suffering, tears even, the broken words that come from lips in pain,
remorse that makes one walk on thorns, conscience that condemns, self-
abasement that punishes, the misery that puts ashes on its head, the
anguish that chooses sack-cloth for its raiment and into its own drink
puts gall:--all these were things of which I was afraid. And as I had
determined to know nothing of them, I was forced to taste each of them in
turn, to feed on them, to have for a season, indeed, no other food at
all.
I don't regret for a single moment having lived for pleasure. I did it
to the full, as one should do everything that one does. There was no
pleasure I did not experience. I threw the pearl of my soul into a cup
of wine. I went down the primrose path to the sound of flutes. I lived
on honeycomb. But to have continued the same life would have been wrong
because it would have been limiting. I had to pass on. The other half
of the garden had its secrets for me also. --_De Profundis_.
THE GRAND ROMANTIC
It is when he deals with a sinner that Christ is most romantic, in the
sense of most real. The world had always loved the saint as being the
nearest possible approach to the perfection of God. Christ, through some
divine instinct in him, seems to have always loved the sinner as being
the nearest possible approach to the perfection of man. His primary
desire was not to reform people, any more than his primary desire was to
a relieve suffering. To turn an interesting thief into a tedious honest
man was not his aim. He would have thought little of the Prisoners' Aid
Society and other modern movements of the kind. The conversion of a
publican into a Pharisee would not have seemed to him a great
achievement. But in a manner not yet understood of the world he regarded
sin and suffering as being in themselves beautiful holy things and modes
of perfection.
It seems a very dangerous idea. It is--all great ideas are dangerous.
That it was Christ's creed admits of no doubt. That it is the true creed
I don't doubt myself.
Of course the sinner must repent. But why? Simply because otherwise he
would be unable to realise what he had done. The moment of repentance is
the moment of initiation. More than that: it is the means by which one
alters one's past. The Greeks thought that impossible. They often say
in their Gnomic aphorisms, 'Even the Gods cannot alter the past. ' Christ
showed that the commonest sinner could do it, that it was the one thing
he could do. Christ, had he been asked, would have said--I feel quite
certain about it--that the moment the prodigal son fell on his knees and
wept, he made his having wasted his substance with harlots, his swine-
herding and hungering for the husks they ate, beautiful and holy moments
in his life. It is difficult for most people to grasp the idea. I dare
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. --_De Profundis_.
CLAPHAM JUNCTION
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. --_De Profundis_.
THE BROKEN RESOLUTION
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
footprints so that none may track me to my hurt: she will cleanse me in
great waters, and with bitter herbs make me whole. --_De Profundis_.
DOMESTICITY AT BERNEVAL
DIEPPE,
June 1st, 1897.
My Dear Robbie,--I propose to live at Berneval. I will _not_ live in
Paris, nor in Algiers, nor in Southern Italy. Surely a house for a year,
if I choose to continue there, at 32 pounds is absurdly cheap. I could
not live cheaper at a hotel. You are penny foolish, and pound foolish--a
dreadful state for my financier to be in. I told M. Bonnet that my
bankers were MM. Ross et Cie, banquiers celebres de Londres--and now you
suddenly show me that you have no place among the great financial people,
and are afraid of any investment over 31 pounds, 10s. It is merely the
extra ten shillings that baffles you. As regards people living on me,
and the extra bedrooms: dear boy, there is no one who would stay with me
but you, and you will pay your own bill at the hotel for meals; and as
for your room, the charge will be nominally 2 francs 50 centimes a night,
but there will be lots of extras such as _bougie, bain_ and hot water,
and all cigarettes smoked in the bedrooms are charged extra. And if any
one does not take the extras, of course he is charged more:--
Bain, 25 C.
Pas de bain, 50 C.
Cigarette dans la chambre a coucher, 10 C. pour chaque cigarette.
Pas de cigarette dans la chambre a coucher, 20 C. pour chaque
cigarette.
This is the system at all good hotels. If Reggie comes, of course he
will pay a little more: I cannot forget that he gave me a dressing-case.
Sphinxes pay a hundred per cent more than any one else--they always did
in Ancient Egypt.
But seriously, Robbie, if people stayed with me, of course they would pay
their _pension_ at the hotel. They would have to: except architects. A
modern architect, like modern architecture, doesn't pay. But then I know
only one architect and you are hiding him somewhere from me. I believe
that he is as extinct as the dado, of which now only fossil remains are
found, chiefly in the vicinity of Brompton, where they are sometimes
discovered by workmen excavating. They are usually embedded in the old
Lincrusta Walton strata, and are rare consequently.
I visited M. le Cure {4} to-day.
He has a charming house and a _jardin
potager_. He showed me over the church. To-morrow I sit in the choir by
his special invitation. He showed me all his vestments. To-morrow he
really will be charming in red. He knows I am a heretic, and believes
Pusey is still alive. He says that God will convert England on account
of England's kindness to _les pretres exiles_ at the time of the
Revolution. It is to be the reward of that sea-lashed island.
Stained glass windows are wanted in the church; he has only six; fourteen
more are needed. He gets them at 300 francs--12 pounds--a window in
Paris. I was nearly offering half a dozen, but remembered you, and so
only gave him something _pour les pauvres_. You had a narrow escape,
Robbie. You should be thankful.
I hope the 40 pounds is on its way, and that the 60 pounds will follow. I
am going to hire a boat. It will save walking and so be an economy in
the end. Dear Robbie, I must start well. If the life of St. Francis of
Assissi awaits me I shall not be angry. Worse things might happen.
Yours,
OSCAR.
--_Letter to Robert Ross_.
A VISIT TO THE POPE
c/o COOK & SON, PIAZZA DI SPAGNA, ROME,
April 16th, 1900.
My dear Robbie,--I simply cannot write. It is too horrid, not of me, but
to me. It is a mode of paralysis--a _cacoethes tacendi_--the one form
that malady takes in me.
Well, all passed over very successfully. Palermo, where we stayed eight
days, was lovely. The most beautifully situated town in the world--it
dreams away its life in the _concha d'oro_, the exquisite valley that
lies between two seas. The lemon groves and the orange gardens were so
entirely perfect that I became quite a Pre-Raphaelite, and loathed the
ordinary impressionists whose muddly souls and blurred intelligences
would have rendered, but by mud and blur, those "golden lamps hung in a
green night" that filled me with such joy. The elaborate and exquisite
detail of the true Pre-Raphaelite is the compensation they offer us for
the absence of motion; literature and motion being the only arts that are
not immobile.
Then nowhere, not even at Ravenna, have I seen such mosaics as in the
Capella Palatine, which from pavement to domed ceiling is all gold: one
really feels as if one was sitting in the heart of a great honey-comb
looking at angels singing: and _looking_ at angels, or indeed at people,
singing, is much nicer than listening to them, for this reason: the great
artists always give to their angels lutes without strings, pipes without
vent-holes, and reeds through which no wind can wander or make
whistlings.
Monreale you have heard of--with its cloisters and cathedral: we often
drove there.
I also made great friends with a young seminarist, who lived in the
cathedral of Palermo--he and eleven others, in little rooms beneath the
roof, like birds.
Every day he showed me all over the cathedral, I knelt before the huge
porphyry sarcophagus in which Frederick the Second lies: it is a sublime
bare monstrous thing--blood-coloured, and held up by lions who have
caught some of the rage of the great Emperor's restless soul. At first
my young friend, Giuseppe Loverdi, gave me information; but on the third
day I gave information to him, and re-wrote history as usual, and told
him all about the supreme King and his Court of Poets, and the terrible
book that he never wrote. His reason for entering the church was
singularly mediaeval. I asked him why he thought of becoming a
_clerico_, and how. He answered: "My father is a cook and most poor; and
we are many at home, so it seemed to me a good thing that there should be
in so small a house as ours, one mouth less to feed; for though I am
slim, I eat much, too much, alas! I fear. "
I told him to be comforted, because God used poverty often as a means of
bringing people to Him, and used riches never, or rarely; so Giuseppe was
comforted, and I gave him a little book of devotion, very pretty, and
with far more pictures than prayers in it--so of great service to
Giuseppe whose eyes are beautiful. I also gave him many _lire_, and
prophesied for him a Cardinal's hat, if he remained very good and never
forgot me.
At Naples we stopped three days: most of my friends are, as you know, in
prison, but I met some of nice memory.
We came to Rome on Holy Thursday. H--- left on Saturday for Gland--and
yesterday, to the terror of Grissell {5} and all the Papal Court, I
appeared in the front rank of the pilgrims in the Vatican, and got the
blessing of the Holy Father--a blessing they would have denied me.
He was wonderful as he was carried past me on his throne--not of flesh
and blood, but a white soul robed in white and an artist as well as a
saint--the only instance in history, if the newspapers are to be
believed. I have seen nothing like the extraordinary grace of his
gestures as he rose, from moment to moment, to bless--possibly the
pilgrims, but certainly me.
Tree should see him. It is his only chance.
I was deeply impressed, and my walking-stick showed signs of budding,
would have budded, indeed, only at the door of the Chapel it was taken
from me by the Knave of Spades. This strange prohibition is, of course,
in honour of Tannhauser.
How did I get the ticket? By a miracle, of course. I thought it was
hopeless and made no effort of any kind. On Saturday afternoon at five
o'clock H--- and I went to have tea at the Hotel de l'Europe. Suddenly,
as I was eating buttered toast, a man--or what seemed to be one--dressed
like a hotel porter entered and asked me would I like to see the Pope on
Easter Day. I bowed my head humbly and said "Non sum dignus," or words
to that effect. He at once produced a ticket!
When I tell you that his countenance was of supernatural ugliness, and
that the price of the ticket was thirty pieces of silver, I need say no
more.
An equally curious thing is that whenever I pass the hotel, which I do
constantly, I see the same man. Scientists call that phenomenon an
obsession of the visual nerve. You and I know better.
On the afternoon of Easter Day I heard Vespers at the Lateran: music
quite lovely. At the close, a Bishop in red, and with red gloves--such
as Pater talks of in _Gaston de Latour_--came out on the balcony and
showed us the Relics. He was swarthy, and wore a yellow mitre. A
sinister mediaeval man, but superbly Gothic, just like the bishops carved
on stalls or on portals: and when one thinks that once people mocked at
stained-glass attitudes! they are the only attitudes for the clothes. The
sight of the Bishop, whom I watched with fascination, filled me with the
great sense of the realism of Gothic art. Neither in Greek art nor in
Gothic art is there any pose. Posing was invented by bad
portrait-painters; and the first person who posed was a stock-broker, and
he has gone on posing ever since.
I send you a photograph I took on Palm Sunday at Palermo. Do send me
some of yours, and love me always, and try to read this letter.
Kindest regards to your dear mother.
Always,
OSCAR.
--_Letter to Robert Ross_.
unreality. We who are immobile both see and know. Whether or not the
letter does good to narrow natures and hectic brains, to me it has done
good. I have "cleansed my bosom of much perilous stuff"; to borrow a
phrase from the poet whom you and I once thought of rescuing from the
Philistines. I need not remind you that mere expression is to an artist
the supreme and only mode of life. It is by utterance that we live. Of
the many, many things for which I have to thank the Governor there is
none for which I am more grateful than for his permission to write fully
and at as great a length as I desire. For nearly two years I had within
a growing burden of bitterness, of much of which I have now got rid. On
the other side of the prison wall there are some poor black
soot-besmirched trees that are just breaking out into buds of an almost
shrill green. I know quite well what they are going through. They are
finding expression.
Ever yours,
OSCAR.
--_Letter from Reading Prison to Robert Ross_.
CAREY STREET
Where there is sorrow there in holy ground. Some day people will realise
what that means. They will know nothing of life till they do,--and
natures like his can realise it. When I was brought down from my prison
to the Court of Bankruptcy, between two policemen,--waited in the long
dreary corridor that, before the whole crowd, whom an action so sweet and
simple hushed into silence, he might gravely raise his hat to me, as,
handcuffed and with bowed head, I passed him by. Men have gone to heaven
for smaller things than that. It was in this spirit, and with this mode
of love, that the saints knelt down to wash the feet of the poor, or
stooped to kiss the leper on the cheek. I have never said one single
word to him about what he did. I do not know to the present moment
whether he is aware that I was even conscious of his action. It is not a
thing for which one can render formal thanks in formal words. I store it
in the treasure-house of my heart. I keep it there as a secret debt that
I am glad to think I can never possibly repay. It is embalmed and kept
sweet by the myrrh and cassia of many tears. When wisdom has been
profitless to me, philosophy barren, and the proverbs and phrases of
those who have sought to give me consolation as dust and ashes in my
mouth, the memory of that little, lovely, silent act of love has unsealed
for me all the wells of pity: made the desert blossom like a rose, and
brought me out of the bitterness of lonely exile into harmony with the
wounded, broken, and great heart of the world. When people are able to
understand, not merely how beautiful ---'s action was, but why it meant
so much to me, and always will mean so much, then, perhaps, they will
realise how and in what spirit they should approach me. . . .
The poor are wise, more charitable, more kind, more sensitive than we
are. In their eyes prison is a tragedy in a man's life, a misfortune, a
casuality, something that calls for sympathy in others. They speak of
one who is in prison as of one who is 'in trouble' simply. It is the
phrase they always use, and the expression has the perfect wisdom of love
in it. With people of our own rank it is different. With us, prison
makes a man a pariah. I, and such as I am, have hardly any right to air
and sun. Our presence taints the pleasures of others. We are unwelcome
when we reappear. To revisit the glimpses of the moon is not for us. Our
very children are taken away. Those lovely links with humanity are
broken. We are doomed to be solitary, while our sons still live. We are
denied the one thing that might heal us and keep us, that might bring
balm to the bruised heart, and peace to the soul in pain. --_De
Profundis_.
SORROW WEARS NO MASK
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. --_De Profundis_.
VITA NUOVA
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,
suffering, tears even, the broken words that come from lips in pain,
remorse that makes one walk on thorns, conscience that condemns, self-
abasement that punishes, the misery that puts ashes on its head, the
anguish that chooses sack-cloth for its raiment and into its own drink
puts gall:--all these were things of which I was afraid. And as I had
determined to know nothing of them, I was forced to taste each of them in
turn, to feed on them, to have for a season, indeed, no other food at
all.
I don't regret for a single moment having lived for pleasure. I did it
to the full, as one should do everything that one does. There was no
pleasure I did not experience. I threw the pearl of my soul into a cup
of wine. I went down the primrose path to the sound of flutes. I lived
on honeycomb. But to have continued the same life would have been wrong
because it would have been limiting. I had to pass on. The other half
of the garden had its secrets for me also. --_De Profundis_.
THE GRAND ROMANTIC
It is when he deals with a sinner that Christ is most romantic, in the
sense of most real. The world had always loved the saint as being the
nearest possible approach to the perfection of God. Christ, through some
divine instinct in him, seems to have always loved the sinner as being
the nearest possible approach to the perfection of man. His primary
desire was not to reform people, any more than his primary desire was to
a relieve suffering. To turn an interesting thief into a tedious honest
man was not his aim. He would have thought little of the Prisoners' Aid
Society and other modern movements of the kind. The conversion of a
publican into a Pharisee would not have seemed to him a great
achievement. But in a manner not yet understood of the world he regarded
sin and suffering as being in themselves beautiful holy things and modes
of perfection.
It seems a very dangerous idea. It is--all great ideas are dangerous.
That it was Christ's creed admits of no doubt. That it is the true creed
I don't doubt myself.
Of course the sinner must repent. But why? Simply because otherwise he
would be unable to realise what he had done. The moment of repentance is
the moment of initiation. More than that: it is the means by which one
alters one's past. The Greeks thought that impossible. They often say
in their Gnomic aphorisms, 'Even the Gods cannot alter the past. ' Christ
showed that the commonest sinner could do it, that it was the one thing
he could do. Christ, had he been asked, would have said--I feel quite
certain about it--that the moment the prodigal son fell on his knees and
wept, he made his having wasted his substance with harlots, his swine-
herding and hungering for the husks they ate, beautiful and holy moments
in his life. It is difficult for most people to grasp the idea. I dare
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. --_De Profundis_.
CLAPHAM JUNCTION
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. --_De Profundis_.
THE BROKEN RESOLUTION
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
footprints so that none may track me to my hurt: she will cleanse me in
great waters, and with bitter herbs make me whole. --_De Profundis_.
DOMESTICITY AT BERNEVAL
DIEPPE,
June 1st, 1897.
My Dear Robbie,--I propose to live at Berneval. I will _not_ live in
Paris, nor in Algiers, nor in Southern Italy. Surely a house for a year,
if I choose to continue there, at 32 pounds is absurdly cheap. I could
not live cheaper at a hotel. You are penny foolish, and pound foolish--a
dreadful state for my financier to be in. I told M. Bonnet that my
bankers were MM. Ross et Cie, banquiers celebres de Londres--and now you
suddenly show me that you have no place among the great financial people,
and are afraid of any investment over 31 pounds, 10s. It is merely the
extra ten shillings that baffles you. As regards people living on me,
and the extra bedrooms: dear boy, there is no one who would stay with me
but you, and you will pay your own bill at the hotel for meals; and as
for your room, the charge will be nominally 2 francs 50 centimes a night,
but there will be lots of extras such as _bougie, bain_ and hot water,
and all cigarettes smoked in the bedrooms are charged extra. And if any
one does not take the extras, of course he is charged more:--
Bain, 25 C.
Pas de bain, 50 C.
Cigarette dans la chambre a coucher, 10 C. pour chaque cigarette.
Pas de cigarette dans la chambre a coucher, 20 C. pour chaque
cigarette.
This is the system at all good hotels. If Reggie comes, of course he
will pay a little more: I cannot forget that he gave me a dressing-case.
Sphinxes pay a hundred per cent more than any one else--they always did
in Ancient Egypt.
But seriously, Robbie, if people stayed with me, of course they would pay
their _pension_ at the hotel. They would have to: except architects. A
modern architect, like modern architecture, doesn't pay. But then I know
only one architect and you are hiding him somewhere from me. I believe
that he is as extinct as the dado, of which now only fossil remains are
found, chiefly in the vicinity of Brompton, where they are sometimes
discovered by workmen excavating. They are usually embedded in the old
Lincrusta Walton strata, and are rare consequently.
I visited M. le Cure {4} to-day.
He has a charming house and a _jardin
potager_. He showed me over the church. To-morrow I sit in the choir by
his special invitation. He showed me all his vestments. To-morrow he
really will be charming in red. He knows I am a heretic, and believes
Pusey is still alive. He says that God will convert England on account
of England's kindness to _les pretres exiles_ at the time of the
Revolution. It is to be the reward of that sea-lashed island.
Stained glass windows are wanted in the church; he has only six; fourteen
more are needed. He gets them at 300 francs--12 pounds--a window in
Paris. I was nearly offering half a dozen, but remembered you, and so
only gave him something _pour les pauvres_. You had a narrow escape,
Robbie. You should be thankful.
I hope the 40 pounds is on its way, and that the 60 pounds will follow. I
am going to hire a boat. It will save walking and so be an economy in
the end. Dear Robbie, I must start well. If the life of St. Francis of
Assissi awaits me I shall not be angry. Worse things might happen.
Yours,
OSCAR.
--_Letter to Robert Ross_.
A VISIT TO THE POPE
c/o COOK & SON, PIAZZA DI SPAGNA, ROME,
April 16th, 1900.
My dear Robbie,--I simply cannot write. It is too horrid, not of me, but
to me. It is a mode of paralysis--a _cacoethes tacendi_--the one form
that malady takes in me.
Well, all passed over very successfully. Palermo, where we stayed eight
days, was lovely. The most beautifully situated town in the world--it
dreams away its life in the _concha d'oro_, the exquisite valley that
lies between two seas. The lemon groves and the orange gardens were so
entirely perfect that I became quite a Pre-Raphaelite, and loathed the
ordinary impressionists whose muddly souls and blurred intelligences
would have rendered, but by mud and blur, those "golden lamps hung in a
green night" that filled me with such joy. The elaborate and exquisite
detail of the true Pre-Raphaelite is the compensation they offer us for
the absence of motion; literature and motion being the only arts that are
not immobile.
Then nowhere, not even at Ravenna, have I seen such mosaics as in the
Capella Palatine, which from pavement to domed ceiling is all gold: one
really feels as if one was sitting in the heart of a great honey-comb
looking at angels singing: and _looking_ at angels, or indeed at people,
singing, is much nicer than listening to them, for this reason: the great
artists always give to their angels lutes without strings, pipes without
vent-holes, and reeds through which no wind can wander or make
whistlings.
Monreale you have heard of--with its cloisters and cathedral: we often
drove there.
I also made great friends with a young seminarist, who lived in the
cathedral of Palermo--he and eleven others, in little rooms beneath the
roof, like birds.
Every day he showed me all over the cathedral, I knelt before the huge
porphyry sarcophagus in which Frederick the Second lies: it is a sublime
bare monstrous thing--blood-coloured, and held up by lions who have
caught some of the rage of the great Emperor's restless soul. At first
my young friend, Giuseppe Loverdi, gave me information; but on the third
day I gave information to him, and re-wrote history as usual, and told
him all about the supreme King and his Court of Poets, and the terrible
book that he never wrote. His reason for entering the church was
singularly mediaeval. I asked him why he thought of becoming a
_clerico_, and how. He answered: "My father is a cook and most poor; and
we are many at home, so it seemed to me a good thing that there should be
in so small a house as ours, one mouth less to feed; for though I am
slim, I eat much, too much, alas! I fear. "
I told him to be comforted, because God used poverty often as a means of
bringing people to Him, and used riches never, or rarely; so Giuseppe was
comforted, and I gave him a little book of devotion, very pretty, and
with far more pictures than prayers in it--so of great service to
Giuseppe whose eyes are beautiful. I also gave him many _lire_, and
prophesied for him a Cardinal's hat, if he remained very good and never
forgot me.
At Naples we stopped three days: most of my friends are, as you know, in
prison, but I met some of nice memory.
We came to Rome on Holy Thursday. H--- left on Saturday for Gland--and
yesterday, to the terror of Grissell {5} and all the Papal Court, I
appeared in the front rank of the pilgrims in the Vatican, and got the
blessing of the Holy Father--a blessing they would have denied me.
He was wonderful as he was carried past me on his throne--not of flesh
and blood, but a white soul robed in white and an artist as well as a
saint--the only instance in history, if the newspapers are to be
believed. I have seen nothing like the extraordinary grace of his
gestures as he rose, from moment to moment, to bless--possibly the
pilgrims, but certainly me.
Tree should see him. It is his only chance.
I was deeply impressed, and my walking-stick showed signs of budding,
would have budded, indeed, only at the door of the Chapel it was taken
from me by the Knave of Spades. This strange prohibition is, of course,
in honour of Tannhauser.
How did I get the ticket? By a miracle, of course. I thought it was
hopeless and made no effort of any kind. On Saturday afternoon at five
o'clock H--- and I went to have tea at the Hotel de l'Europe. Suddenly,
as I was eating buttered toast, a man--or what seemed to be one--dressed
like a hotel porter entered and asked me would I like to see the Pope on
Easter Day. I bowed my head humbly and said "Non sum dignus," or words
to that effect. He at once produced a ticket!
When I tell you that his countenance was of supernatural ugliness, and
that the price of the ticket was thirty pieces of silver, I need say no
more.
An equally curious thing is that whenever I pass the hotel, which I do
constantly, I see the same man. Scientists call that phenomenon an
obsession of the visual nerve. You and I know better.
On the afternoon of Easter Day I heard Vespers at the Lateran: music
quite lovely. At the close, a Bishop in red, and with red gloves--such
as Pater talks of in _Gaston de Latour_--came out on the balcony and
showed us the Relics. He was swarthy, and wore a yellow mitre. A
sinister mediaeval man, but superbly Gothic, just like the bishops carved
on stalls or on portals: and when one thinks that once people mocked at
stained-glass attitudes! they are the only attitudes for the clothes. The
sight of the Bishop, whom I watched with fascination, filled me with the
great sense of the realism of Gothic art. Neither in Greek art nor in
Gothic art is there any pose. Posing was invented by bad
portrait-painters; and the first person who posed was a stock-broker, and
he has gone on posing ever since.
I send you a photograph I took on Palm Sunday at Palermo. Do send me
some of yours, and love me always, and try to read this letter.
Kindest regards to your dear mother.
Always,
OSCAR.
--_Letter to Robert Ross_.
