De Profundis

“But in the case of an artist, weakness is nothing less than a crime, when it is a weakness that paralyses the imagination.”

Imagination plays an important role in Wilde’s thought, as it allows not only for creativity but also for communal and shared experiences with others. As such, it fosters love in the purest sense. In the case of the artist who, much like Christ, strives to embrace the human self and give it voice, the lack of imagination is detrimental.

“Plain living and high thinking.”

Wilde quotes Wordsworth’s “Sonnet written in London,” which was published in 1802. He quotes Wordsworth in an attempt to show Bosie the corrupting nature of a lavish and decadent lifestyle. He argues that such a way of life destroys one’s intellect.

“Blindly I staggered as an ox into the shambles. I had made a gigantic psychological error. I had always thought that my giving up to you in small things meant nothing: that when a great moment arrived I could reassert my willpower in its natural superiority. It was not so. At the great moment my will-power completely failed me. In life there is really no small or great thing. All things are of equal value and equal size.”

Wilde remembers the moment he agreed to sue Bosie’s father. He learns from this experience that small things hold as much meaning as large things do. His imprisonment is the culmination of all his prior actions. Every time he let Bosie indulge in his vices, he expressed approval of their relationship and its dynamics. Wilde existed in a state of denial, where he possessed no control over his soul.

“The person from whom I was flying being no terrible creature sprung from sewer or mire into modern life with whom I had entangled my days, but you yourself, a young man of my own social rank and position, who had been at my own college at Oxford, and was an incessant guest at my house.”

Wilde reflects on why he was so afraid of Bosie during his emotional outbursts. He realizes that Bosie is just a person and, further, a peer of his. Yet he flees from him as if he were a monster, exposing the abusive nature of their relationship.

“Suffering—curious as it may sound to you—is the means by which we exist, because it is the only means by which we become conscious of existing, and the remembrance of suffering in the past is necessary to us as the warrant, the evidence, of our continued identity.”

Suffering constitutes one’s being in a way that joy, happiness, or excitement cannot. It reveals one to oneself and jolts the individual out of their ignorant state of existence.

“The flowers you took from me to put on your brother’s grave were to be a symbol not merely of the beauty of his life, but of the beauty that in all lives lies dormant and may be brought to light.”

Wilde decides to reconcile with Bosie after receiving word of his brother’s death. Seeing Bosie in a state of vulnerability and suffering, Wilde feels the closest and the most intimate with Bosie that he ever has. Suffering thus reveals a beauty within Bosie that Wilde hasn’t previously recognized.

“To be entirely free, and at the same time entirely dominated by law, is the eternal paradox of human life that we realise at every moment…”

Humanity seemingly possesses the ability to act freely and thus to choose good or evil. Nevertheless, one still must submit to the laws of nature, to the laws of the universe, and to their own predetermined disposition. This causes humanity much anxiety, depression, and anguish.

“Love is fed by the imagination, by which we become wiser than we know, better than we feel, nobler than we are: by which we can see Life as a whole: by which, and by which alone, we can understand others in their real as in their ideal relations. Only what is fine, and finely conceived, can feed Love. But anything will feed Hate. There was not a glass of champagne you drank, not a rich dish you ate in all those years, that did not feed your Hate and make you fat.”

Wilde juxtaposes love and hate so that each definition becomes starker in its truth. It takes work to feed love, but its reward is inconceivable in its greatness. Contrastingly, hate will feed on anything and is easily satisfied, yet leaves one empty and slowly destroys the mind and body.

“The faculty ‘by which, and by which alone, one can understand others in their real as in their ideal relations,’ your narrow egotism had blunted, and long disuse had made of no avail. The imagination was as much in prison as I was. Vanity had barred up the windows, and the name of the warder was Hate.”

The faculty alluded to is the imagination. Bosie has left this faculty uncultivated due to his egoism. Wilde uses personification to explain how the emotions and traits—specifically, imagination, vanity, and hate—interact with one another.

“There is nothing that stirs in the whole world of thought or motion to which Sorrow does not vibrate in terrible if exquisite pulsation. The thin beaten-out leaf of tremulous gold that chronicles the direction of forces that the eye cannot see is in comparison coarse. It is a wound that bleeds when any hand but that of Love touches it and even then must bleed again, though not for pain.”

Wilde’s use of imagery is strong here and creates a moving mental picture for the reader. Sorrow finds solace in love alone, but Wilde adds that even then it must bleed, seemingly because it is a necessary part of life through which one finds truth, beauty, and humility. This quote foreshadows Wilde’s later declaration that he now wants to explore the world of sorrow and that he understands why it is important to feel it in its wholeness.

“But while there were times when I rejoiced in the idea that my sufferings were to be endless, I could not bear them to be without meaning. Now I find hidden away in my nature, something that tells me that nothing in the whole world is meaningless, and suffering least of all. That something hidden away in my nature, like a treasure in a filed, is Humility.”

In suffering one finds humility—or rather, in feeling the negative effects of one’s actions, one sees the truth of their own moral character. They must confront themselves and their decisions. This realization, Wilde says, is the meaning buried deep within pain.

“I want to get to the point when I shall be able to say, quite simply and without affectation, that the two great turning-points of my life were when my father sent me to Oxford, and when society sent me to prison.”

Wilde depicts the goal he has for himself. He desires to come to terms with his imprisonment and public ridicule, believing that to deny his experiences is to deny his own soul.

“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 its spirit.”

Wilde is acting like a Hegelian scholar in the above quote. Hegel defines art as the purest presentation of Spirit, wherein the outer form is the sole expression of the inner concept. Art therefore allows humanity to comprehend and study truth in a way no other discipline does. The outward and the inward give way to a new and singular whole that reveals what was once concealed—i.e., truth.