Sorrows/Virtues
on De Profundis by Oscar Wilde
De Profundis is less of a love letter than it is a tirade against an incompetent lover. Wilde’s voice is self-assured and self-important, and his passages are rife with admonishments: for his young lover Bosie, who exploited his wealth and attention; and for himself, who allowed it for a second too long. This, combined with his unalloyed worship of Christ—the persona, not the empire built after his name—did not make for a cogent message of affection, except, of course, if it was addressed to Christ himself. The length of his verses on Christ might have one thinking that Wilde was religious (in fact, he was a deathbed convert), and it seemed to me a case of what Virginia Woolf observed in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre as “an awkward break”. That said, I would deify this letter if I must.
In 1895, Wilde was at the height of his fame. The Importance of Being Earnest opened to great acclaim in February, and Wilde was the talk of London; the venerated guest of every high society dinner party. By May, he would sit in a prison cell in Reading, indicted to two years of hard labour for homosexuality—or, as the Victorians called it, “gross indecency”. On his release, Wilde went into exile in France under a pseudonym (he found no value left in his name: his wife Constance had taken their children and replaced his last name with another), couch surfing, if you can believe it. He died of meningitis in 1900, at the age of 46. “For the hundred years since his death ‘Oscar Wilde’ has meant less an oeuvre than a study in reputation,” writes Geoffrey Wheatcroft for the Atlantic, “and even now disentangling the man from tendentious interpretation is a tricky job.”
Indeed, were it not for unjust laws and hateful eyes, Wilde’s association with Bosie would have been an affair no more contentious than any others. “Society sent me to prison,” he wrote, then elsewhere lamented his own mindlessness when he turned to society for protection: “…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.” Wilde had wished society would defend him as they do his creative genius, but alas they renounced him. They had caressed the gentle curves of the marble and sung sweetly each messianic verse, only to sever the hands of the sculptor and deplete the ink of the poet.
Wilde had many lovers, but none more important than Art. “One half hour with art was always more to me than a cycle with you,” he wrote. He then went to criticise Bosie for impairing his artistic desires, saying he “…required rest and freedom from the terrible strain of [Bosie’s] companionship,“ then condemned his own foolishness: “I blame myself without reserve for my weakness…in the case of an artist, weakness is nothing less than a crime, when it is weakness that paralyses the imagination.” It felt very bitter to me then to discover that his own creation not only predicted his downfall but helped secure it.
When The Picture of Dorian Gray was released five years prior to his court proceedings, it had deeply offended English critics. The furor, Alex Ross wrote on the New Yorker, was owed to the fact that “no work of mainstream English-language fiction had come so close to spelling out homosexual desire.” The work became a key evidence against Wilde in court. There is a cruel irony here: In his only novel, Art was both the spring of life and the root of death, and I wondered if perhaps the superiority of Wilde’s practice brought it close to divination. Then, elsewhere in the letter, Wilde wrote with jarring lucidity: “Every single work of art is the fulfilment of a prophecy; for every work of art is the conversion of an idea into an image.” He had accepted his fate as Frankenstein and Dorian as his monster—all without much protest.
Acceptance was a newfound virtue for Wilde. Reflecting on how his life had been turned on its head, he admitted that he used to “live entirely for pleasure,” and “shunned sorrow and suffering of any kind,” and was “resolved to ignore them as far as possible, to treat them, that is to say, as modes of imperfection.” But into inescapable sorrow he was thrown, and he quickly made it his paramour. By no means did it supersede his sacred union with Art; if anything, it intensified his desire for Art—to create Art and engross himself in it—and stripped Art from the shroud of opulence Wilde had lost himself in. “One discerns things that one never discerned before,” he wrote, then offered us his revelation:
“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…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.”
Wilde had found romance in sorrow, and he had come to believe that suffering is the source of great beauty and candour. Is it any surprise then that he found a kindred spirit in Christ, a martyr whose suffering roused generations of loyal subjects? He regarded Christ as an artist—“he ranks with the poets,” Wilde wrote—and Christ’s charity and compassion validated Wilde’s agony. He wrote of Christ the altruist: “Pity he has, of course, for the poor, for those who are shut up in prisons…but he has far more pity for the rich, for the hard Hedonists…Riches and Pleasure seemed to him to be really greater tragedies than Poverty and Sorrow.” Christ was to Wilde a comrade that freed his soul; a remedy for his sorrow that sunk deeper with each day that he passed behind bars. “But we who live in prison and in whose lives there is no event but sorrow,” Wilde wrote, “have to measure time by throbs of pain, and the record of bitter moments.” Wilde’s sentiments were made certain as he quoted Dante: “Sorrow remarries us to God.”
Let it be known that I do not normally care for writings on these subjects. Wilde’s reverence of Christ is close to idolatry, and though I had been prepared to abandon the letter the moment Wilde turned to an animated discussion of Christ’s character, I found myself applauding him—for it is not the Son of God Wilde wrote of; it is the Son of man.
And as man succumbs to love, Wilde too could not deny its potency, nor its continued survival within the shackles and sorrow. Despite his many objections Wilde believed that Bosie loved him: “I know you did”, he claimed, though he recognised still that hate overshadowed any love in his heart. “Only what is fine, and finely conceived, can feed Love,” he wrote, “but anything will feed hate.” It became clear, deep into the letter, that Wilde was not merely offended by Bosie’s failure—he was heartbroken. Bosie never written to him in prison, and he bemoaned that if the tables were turned, he would have “written to [Bosie] in season and out of season in the hope that some mere phrase, some single word, some broken echo even of Love might reach [him].” His devotion, it seems, had brought him great sorrow, and the fact had not been lost on him:
“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 am convinced that there is no other, and that if the worlds have indeed, as I have said, been built out of Sorrow, it has been by the hands of Love, because in no other way could the Soul of man for whom the worlds are made reach the full stature of its perfection.”
Wilde had refined, perfected himself, this passage implied, and indeed he thought so: “…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,” he said, “You can judge for yourself.”
By the end of his letter, he had begun to verbalise yet another virtue—that of forgiveness. Wilde had outgrown his own affections, this he knew, and a gaping crevice now stands between him and the object of said affections. “But to Love all things are easy,” Wilde wrote, and I knew then no amount of sorrow could dampen his passion or shut his heart. Finally, in the last pages of the ruled blue prison paper on which this letter was written, Wilde wrote with finality the virtue that will liberate him: Humility. “No one can possibly shut the doors against Love for ever…There is no prison in any world into which Love cannot force an entrance.”
