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    De Profundis: "I have said to you to speak the truth is a painful thing. To be forced to tell lies is much worse."
    De Profundis: "I have said to you to speak the truth is a painful thing. To be forced to tell lies is much worse."
    De Profundis: "I have said to you to speak the truth is a painful thing. To be forced to tell lies is much worse."
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    De Profundis: "I have said to you to speak the truth is a painful thing. To be forced to tell lies is much worse."

    By Oscar Wilde

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    Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was born on the 16th October 1854 in Dublin Ireland. The son of Dublin intellectuals Oscar proved himself an outstanding classicist at Dublin, then at Oxford. With his education complete Wilde moved to London and its fashionable cultural and social circles. With his biting wit, flamboyant dress, and glittering conversation, Wilde became one of the most well-known personalities of his day. His only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray was published in 1890 and he then moved on to writing for the stage with Salome in 1891. His society comedies produced enormous hits and turned him into one of the most successful writers of late Victorian London. Whilst his masterpiece, The Importance of Being Earnest, was on stage in London, Wilde had the Marquess of Queensberry, the father of his lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, prosecuted for libel. The trial unearthed evidence that caused Wilde to drop his charges and led to his own arrest and trial for gross indecency. He was convicted and imprisoned for two years' hard labour. It was to break him. On release he left for France, There he wrote his last work, The Ballad of Reading Gaol in 1898. He died destitute in Paris at the age of forty-six sipping champagne a friend had brought with the line ‘Alas I am dying beyond my means’. Here we publish his epistle De Profundis, written whilst in prison at Reading Gaol.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherA Word To The Wise
    Release dateNov 25, 2013
    ISBN9781783946617
    De Profundis: "I have said to you to speak the truth is a painful thing. To be forced to tell lies is much worse."
    Author

    Oscar Wilde

    Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was born on the 16th October 1854 and died on the 30th November 1900. He was an Irish playwright, poet, and author of numerous short stories and one novel. Known for his biting wit, he became one of the most successful playwrights of the late Victorian era in London, and one of the greatest celebrities of his day. Several of his plays continue to be widely performed, especially The Importance of Being Earnest.

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    Reviews for De Profundis

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    • 5/5
      Very moving account of his emotional state in Prison.
    • 4/5
      A moving, angry love letter. I recommend this second only to The Picture of Dorian Gray to people who aren't familiar with Wilde's work. Even then, it's a very close second. Beautiful. My copy is a hardcover from approx. 1910. The "unabridged" version wasn't available until approx. 1960.
    • 1/5
      Clearly, prison time was wasted on the author, sorry, Author. Pages upon pages of resentment, spite, anger and bitterness, especially bitterness. I read the history behind it after reading the book and it makes Wilde look rather bad and the claimed humility looks even more fake in its light.
    • 4/5
      "Love does not traffic in a marketplace, nor use a huckster's scales. Its joy, like the joy of the intellect, is to feel itself alive. The aim of Love is to love: no more, and no less. You were my enemy: such an enemy as no man ever had. I had given you all my life, and to gratify the lowest and most contemptible of all human passions, hatred and vanity and greed, you had thrown it away. In less than three years you had entirely ruined me in every point of view. For my own sake there was nothing for me to do but to love you."This is another book that I wish I could have given 3½ star to because I'm not sure whether to give it a 3 or a 4. De Profundis is the 50 000-word letter (yes, imagine writing that by hand with ink.) that Oscar Wilde wrote to his lover Lord Alfred Douglas, whilst in prison. Some say it is a love letter, other says it is not. It's not the relationship between them that makes the "love letter or not" debatable - because there is no denying that Wilde loved Douglas - it's the fact that most of the time, Wilde portrays Douglas as a - how should I put this - douchebag. The letter begins with a very detailed account of how Wilde was put into prison in the first place. He describes detailed and with his own words the moments between him and Douglas and everything that lead to to the trial. I thought this part was the most interesting. I'm not that fond of autobiographies and memoirs but I've always been interested in Oscar Wilde (or anything else LGTB-related for that matter) and hearing Wilde put everything into his own words and describing, to Douglas, how he was to blame for the misery and downfall of Wilde, and still loving the man, was very fascinating. Like always, his language is beautiful and there are lots of wit and aphorism. He writes about how much he loved Douglas and the things he had done for him yet at the same time, condemns him for behaving so selfish and rude. What makes me hesitate about giving it a four star instead of a three is the middle part of the letter when Wilde all of the sudden goes into deep contemplation and comparison between religion, Christ and artists. I find religion interesting too but those pages were simply put, boring. The third half of the book becomes better however when he goes back to talk about Douglas actions and the philosophy of life. It's filled with emotions and you can tell that there is a lot of misery, sorrow and grief. One of my favourite passages that describe the sorrow very well and at the same time shows the beauty is this: "Of course to one so modern as I am, `Enfant de mon siècle,’ 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.’"I was planning on continuing this review but now I am left speechless again and I think I will, after all, give this a four star. Here are several memorable quotes however to read and admire.Memorable Quotes"I made art a philosophy, and philosophy an art: I altered the minds of men, and the colour of things: I awoke the imagination of my century so that it created myth and legend around me: I summed up all things in a phrase, all existence in an epigram: whatever I touched I made beautiful.""To regret one's own experiences is to arrest one's own development. To deny one's own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one's own life. It is no less than a denial of the soul.""Most people are other people. Their thoughts are some one else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation. ""We are the zanies of sorrow. We are clowns whose hearts are broken.""There is no room for Love and Hate in the same soul. They cannot live together in that fair cavern house. Love is fed by 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 feel Love. But anything will feed Hate.""After my terrible sentence, when the prison dress was on me, and the prison house closed, I sat amidst the ruins of my wonderful life, crushed by anguish, bewildered with terror, dazed through pain. But I would not hate you. Every day I said to myself: 'I must keep love in my heart today, else how shall I live through the day?'""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.""Suffering is one very long moment. We cannot divide it by seasons. We can only record its moods, and chronicle their return. With us time itself does not progress. It revolves. It seems to circle round one centre of pain.""Morality did not help me. I am one of those who are made for exceptions, not for laws. But while I see that there is nothing wrong in what one does, I see that there is something wrong in what one becomes."
    • 4/5
      The end of Oscar Wilde’s life was so sad it makes me shiver to think about. The world was his oyster, and he was a highly successful playwright and wit at the height of his powers when he was convicted of “gross indecency”, and then sentenced to two years in prison. Humiliated, jeered at by crowds, not allowed to read or write for portions of his imprisonment, scrubbing floors and performing other menial tasks so ridiculously beneath such a brilliant, eloquent mind, losing his children as well as a lot of weight, suffering injuries that would later contribute to his early death, and becoming a pauper – all for essentially being gay. How appropriate to have bought this book in Dublin after seeing the Pride parade march through the streets there. Never again, and always remember.De Profundis, or, ‘From the Depths’, is a long letter Wilde was allowed to write but not send to his lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, towards the end of his imprisonment. When he was released in 1897 he gave the letter to Robert Ross, instructing him to give it to Douglas, which may or may not have ever happened. Over the objections of the families on both sides, Wilde did meet Douglas again for short intervals in France and Italy, but died a few years afterwards in 1900, disgraced and impoverished. The letter was then published posthumously five years later.There is a pervasive feeling of overwhelming sadness in De Profundis, as well as Wilde’s attempts to come to terms with the absurdity and cruelty of it all. Prison was so damaging to his sensitive, artistic soul, and yet he tried to make sense of it, find meaning, and become a better person for having been there. His words flow so beautifully, and while the content at times was not all that interesting, such as the Christian themes and likening Christ to an artist, one cannot help but feel sadness for the condition he was in, and the tragedy of his life and career being cut short so senselessly.Unfortunately, while finding the first edition from 1905 was very cool, it came with a significant drawback, for when the book was first published, large portions of the letter were suppressed – in particular, Wilde’s recounting of his personal time with Douglas, and everything that led up to his arrest – and it’s worse for it, losing the ‘feel’ of a letter and the stories from his life. Gone are the passion and myriad feelings towards Douglas, who had influenced Wilde into a playboy lifestyle and then encouraged him to sue his father for libel, which of course ended in the disastrous U-turn of events and Wilde’s own arrest. It’s for this reason I knock down the review score a bit, though it may be a bit unfair, not having the full text which appeared in later editions.Quotes:On beauty:“…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.”On prison, and the charity of the poor:“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 casualty, 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…”On regret:“The gods had given me almost everything. But I let myself be lured into long spells of senseless and sensual ease. I amused myself with being a flaneur, a dandy, a man of fashion. I surrounded myself with the smaller natures and the meaner minds. I became the spendthrift of my own genius, and to waste an eternal youth gave me a curious joy. Tired of being on the heights, I deliberately went to the depths in the search for new sensation. What the paradox was to me in the sphere of thought, perversity became to me in the sphere of passion. Desire, at the end, was a malady, or a madness, or both. I grew careless of the lives of others.”On the other hand: (love the poetry in this one)“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.”Lastly, on solitude, this at the book’s end:“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.”
    • 5/5
      Beautiful, fascinating, poetic, and heartbreaking, Wilde becomes the “spectator of his own tragedy” in De Profundis and attempts a sort of mystical Confiteor to make sense of the suffering of his soul.

      When first I was put into prison some people advised me to try and forget who I was. It was ruinous advice. It is only by realizing what I am that I have found comfort of any kind. Now I am advised by others to try on my release to forget that I have ever been in a prison at all. I know that would be equally fatal. It would mean that I would be always haunted by an intolerable sense of disgrace, and that those things that are meant as much for me as for anyone else -- the beauty of the sun and moon, the pageant of the seasons, the music of daybreak and the silence of great nights, the rain falling through the leaves, or the dew creeping over the grass and making it silver -- would all be tainted for me, and lose their healing power and their power of communicating joy. To reject one's own experiences is to arrest one's own development. To deny one's own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one's own life. It is no less than a denial of the Soul."

      There are so many great reviews of this here on GR that I'll just add an aspect that I think hasn't been touched upon. Wilde’s meditations on his pre-prison life were colored by the reading he undertook while in prison: the Bible, Dante, Saint Augustine, and Cardinal Newman among others. However, it was still his situational antinomianism upon which he filtered his philosophy even as he found in himself parallels with the prodigal son:

      Of course the sinner must repent. But why? Simply because otherwise he would be unable to realize 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 really made his having wasted his substance with harlots, and then kept swine and hungered for the husks they ate, beautiful and holy incidents 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 worthwhile going to prison.

      Wilde puts the past transgressions (despite what you/I/we see today as transgressions) of the prodigal son into the category of “beautiful and holy things” rather than the effect that later resulted from them, thus making the evil things good rather than accepting that God may bring good from evil. He’s justified his own actions as necessary for the remaking of the man he thought he was become.

      It is tempting to see him as a new man born from his catastrophe but the short, mostly depressed and alcohol-soaked life of poverty he lived afterward was not exemplary of someone on the road to wisdom or salvation. Instead, it seems he'd become even more mired in "the depths" from which he thought he was rising. However, that detracts nothing from him being one of the masters of the English language.

    Book preview

    De Profundis - Oscar Wilde

    De Profundis by Oscar Wilde

    Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was born on the 16th October 1854 in Dublin Ireland.  The son of Dublin intellectuals Oscar proved himself an outstanding classicist at Dublin, then at Oxford. With his education complete Wilde moved to London and its fashionable cultural and social circles.  With his biting wit, flamboyant dress, and glittering conversation, Wilde became one of the most well-known personalities of his day.

    His only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray was published in 1890 and he then moved on to writing for the stage with Salome in 1891.  His society comedies produced enormous hits and turned him into one of the most successful writers of late Victorian London.

    Whilst his masterpiece, The Importance of Being Earnest, was on stage in London, Wilde had the Marquess of Queensberry, the father of his lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, prosecuted for libel.  The trial unearthed evidence that caused Wilde to drop his charges and led to his own arrest and trial for gross indecency. He was convicted and imprisoned for two years' hard labour. It was to break him.

    On release he left for France, There he wrote his last work, The Ballad of Reading Gaol in 1898.  He died destitute in Paris at the age of forty-six sipping champagne a friend had brought with the line ‘Alas I am dying beyond my means’.

    Here we publish his epistle De Profundis, written whilst in prison at Reading Gaol. 

    Index Of Contents

    De Profundis

    Oscar Wilde – A Short Biography

    DE PROFUNDIS

     . . . Suffering is one very long moment.  We cannot divide it by seasons. We can only record its moods, and chronicle their return.  With us time itself does not progress.  It revolves.  It seems to circle round one centre of pain.  The paralysing immobility of a life every circumstance of which is regulated after an unchangeable pattern, so that we eat and drink and lie down and pray, or kneel at least for prayer, according to the inflexible laws of an iron formula: this immobile quality, that makes each dreadful day in the very minutest detail like its brother, seems to communicate itself to those external forces the very essence of whose existence is ceaseless change.  Of seed-time or harvest, of the reapers bending over the corn, or the grape gatherers threading through the vines, of the grass in the orchard made white with broken blossoms or strewn with fallen fruit: of these we know nothing and can know nothing.

    For us there is only one season, the season of sorrow.  The very sun and moon seem taken from us.  Outside, the day may be blue and gold, but the light that creeps down through the thickly-muffled glass of the small iron-barred window beneath which one sits is grey and niggard.  It is always twilight in one's cell, as it is always twilight in one's heart. And in the sphere of thought, no less than in the sphere of time, motion is no more.  The thing that you personally have long ago forgotten, or can easily forget, is happening to me now, and will happen to me again to- morrow.  Remember this, and you will be able to understand a little of why I am writing, and in this manner writing. . . .

    A week later, I am transferred here.  Three more months go over and my mother dies.  No one knew how deeply I loved and honoured her.  Her death was terrible to me; but I, once a lord of language, have no words in which to express my anguish and my shame.  She and my father had bequeathed me a name they had made noble and honoured, not merely in literature, art, archaeology, and science, but in the public history of my own country, in its evolution as a nation.  I had disgraced that name eternally.  I had made it a low by-word among low people.  I had dragged it through the very mire.  I had given it to brutes that they might make it brutal, and to fools that they might turn it into a synonym for folly. What I suffered then, and still suffer, is not for pen to write or paper to record.  My wife, always kind and gentle to me, rather than that I should hear the news from indifferent lips, travelled, ill as she was, all the way from Genoa to England to break to me herself the tidings of so irreparable, so irremediable, a loss.  Messages of sympathy reached me from all who had still affection for me.  Even people who had not known me personally, hearing that a new sorrow had broken into my life, wrote to ask that some expression of their condolence should be conveyed to me. . . .

    Three months go over.  The calendar of my daily conduct and labour that hangs on the outside of my cell door, with my name and sentence written upon it, tells me that it is May. . . .

    Prosperity, pleasure and success, may be rough of grain and common in fibre, but sorrow is the most sensitive of all created things.  There is nothing that stirs in the whole world of thought to which sorrow does not vibrate in terrible and exquisite pulsation.  The thin beaten-out leaf of tremulous gold that chronicles the direction of forces 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 in pain.

    Where there is sorrow there is 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

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