From Oscar Wilde’s DE PROFUNDIS
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. Of course all this is foreshadowed and prefigured
in my books. Some of it is in THE HAPPY PRINCE, some of it in THE YOUNG
KING, notably in the passage where the bishop says to the kneeling boy,
'Is not He who made misery wiser than thou art'? a phrase which when I
wrote it seemed to me little more than a phrase; a great deal of it is
hidden away in the note of doom that like a purple thread runs through
the texture of DORIAN GRAY; in THE CRITIC AS ARTIST it is set forth in
many colours; in THE SOUL OF MAN it is written down, and in letters too
easy to read; it is one of the refrains whose recurring MOTIFS make
SALOME so like a piece of music and bind it together as a ballad; in the
prose poem of the man who from the bronze of the image of the 'Pleasure
that liveth for a moment' has to make the image of the 'Sorrow that
abideth for ever' it is incarnate. It could not have been otherwise. At
every single moment of one's life one is what one is going to be no less
than what one has been. Art is a symbol, because man is a symbol.
It is, if I can
fully attain to it, the ultimate realisation of the artistic life. For
the artistic life is simply self-development. Humility in the artist is
his frank acceptance of all experiences, just as love in the artist is
simply the sense of beauty that reveals to the world its body and its
soul. In MARIUS THE EPICUREAN Pater seeks to reconcile the artistic life
with the life of religion, in the deep, sweet, and austere sense of the
word. But Marius is little more than a spectator: an ideal spectator
indeed, and one to whom it is given 'to contemplate the spectacle of
life with appropriate emotions,' which Wordsworth defines as the poet's
true aim; yet a spectator merely, and perhaps a little too much occupied
with the comeliness of the benches of the sanctuary to notice that it
is the sanctuary of sorrow that he is gazing at.
I see a far more
intimate and immediate connection between the true life of Christ and
the true life of the artist; and I take a keen pleasure in the
reflection that long before sorrow had made my days her own and bound me
to her wheel I had written in THE SOUL OF MAN that he who would lead a
Christ-like life must be entirely and absolutely himself, and had taken
as my types not merely the shepherd on the hillside and the prisoner in
his cell, but also the painter to whom the world is a pageant and the
poet for whom the world is a song. I remember saying once to Andre Gide,
as we sat together in some Paris CAFE, that while meta-physics had but
little real interest for me, and morality absolutely none, there was
nothing that either Plato or Christ had said that could not be
transferred immediately into the sphere of Art and there find its
complete fulfillment.
