Oscar Wilde On Art and Soul

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars —Oscar Wilde

It made sense that words would call him, child of two writers. His papa was Ireland’s leading eye and ear surgeon, but also a writer who published books on archaeology and folklore. His mama was a poet who wrote under the name Speranza.

Some people say tragedy informs art and I don’t know if that’s always true, but I know Oscar Wilde was no stranger to pain. Watched all three of his sisters die horribly.

When he was twelve his little sister died of febrile illness. Which is basically a fever out of control. Fevers are the body creating an environment that’s inhospitable to a virus. But if it gets too high? It’s not hospitable to life, either. It’s not an easy death. It’s an ugly, terrible way to die. Gasping, choking, vomiting. She was nine.

When he was seventeen, his two stepsisters burned to death at a party. One sister’s dress touched a flame. Dresses back then were coated in flammable material to make them stand pretty. His other step-sister ran to help. Her dress was flammable too.

His sisters peek out of his work if you know to look for them. One of his poems is called Requiescat. It’s a beautiful read. Starts like this:

Tread lightly, she is near
Under the snow,
Speak gently, she can hear
The daisies grow.

The last stanza undoes me.

Peace, peace, she cannot hear
Lyre or sonnet,
All my life's buried here,
Heap earth upon it.

He wrote that for his baby sister. They say he never got over losing her.

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In college, he exploded onto the world like one of Kerouac’s Roman candles. Got a degree with honors from Oxford. Won the coveted Newdigate Prize for his poetry. A young and shining twenty-something with his whole life in front of him.

They called him a poet, a scholar, a rising star.

In 1882 he landed a gig travelling Canada and America lecturing on the Aesthetic movement in England, which advocated creating art for art’s sake. Before the aesthetic movement, most art was created for commercial or political reasons. So he travelled across America, telling people we should create art for the sake of art.

The American press did not like him at all. Not one bit.

They were downright hostile about his “languid poses” and thought his velvet jacket, knee breeches, and black silk stockings were far too flamboyant. He didn’t care. Being who he was mattered more to him than public opinion was what he said.

After the tour, he went to London and had a flurry of successes. Published a short version of The Picture of Dorian Grey in Lippincott's Monthly Magazine in 1890 and it was so popular he expanded it into a full novel in 1891.

He started writing plays and people loved them.

Lady Windermere's Fan, 1892.
A Woman of No Importance, 1893.
An Ideal Husband, 1894.
The Importance of Being Earnest, 1895.

Five years. Five glorious years his star shone so bright.

But Cupid painted blind.

Shakespeare said that, and so it was. Three months after “The Importance Of Being Earnest” hit the stage, he was charged with homosexuality. He was a married man with two sons. Editor of a popular magazine, successful poet, author and playwright. But he’d fallen in love with a man and Victorian society did not approve.

The man who filed the charges was his lover’s father.

His friends said run. Go to France. You’ll be safe there But his lover said please stay, fight my dad. So he did. He was sentenced to 2 years hard labor.

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In prison, he wrote letters to the man he loved but he didn’t send them. Carried them around until he died and it was only after his death that the letters were published as a book. He called it De Profundis.

In English, From The Depths.

And it was. From a depths of an artist, a study on art and the human soul.

It’s the kind of book you read a little and have to put it down to let the words sink in. One man sitting in prison for two years, digging into his soul.

A work of staggering genius.

Early in the book, he examines his pain and his shame.

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 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. 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.

You can feel his pain. Standing there while people laughed at him. And then laughed even more when they found out that poor sap in cuffs was the writer Oscar Wilde. He writes everything that happened in letters he would never send. Examining his pain and shame. Trying to come to terms with it.

• • •

I have got to make everything that has happened to me good for me. The plank bed, the loathsome food, the hard ropes shredded into oakum till one’s finger-tips grow dull with pain, the menial offices with which each day begins and finishes, the harsh orders that routine seems to necessitate, the dreadful dress that makes sorrow grotesque to look at, the silence, the solitude, the shame — each and all of these things I have to transform into a spiritual experience.

He realizes he can’t allow himself to feel a victim. That he must find a way to come to terms with everything that happened to him. To shape his pain into something. But to do that, he can’t deny any of it. He has to look at it.

• • •

I have a right to share in sorrow, and he who can look at the loveliness of the world and share its sorrow, and realise something of the wonder of both, is in immediate contact with divine things, and has got as near to God’s secret as any one can get.

Twenty years later, Robert Hayden, poet laureate for the Library of Congress would write “all art is pain suffered” and I wonder if he thought of Wilde when he wrote that. We don’t choose what happens to us. But we choose what to do with it.

• • •

“It is tragic how few people ever possess their souls before they die. Most people are other people. Their thoughts are some one else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry…”

We are Frankensteins, cobbled together of every person who told us who we are or aren’t. People who criticized, people who praised, people who influence us good or bad. And how freeing to ask ourselves which thoughts hang off us like a poorly fitted hand-me-down suit that we didn’t even choose for ourselves, and which thoughts feed our soul. To choose how to define ourselves is the biggest choice we can make.

• • •

“Art only begins where imitation ends.”

Creativity begins in imitation. It’s where all art comes from. We stumble across work that inspires us and we imitate. We paint or write like those we admire and every successful writer and artist can tell you who inspired them. Sometimes it shows in the work if you know enough to look. But most people will never see it, because at some point, imitation fades away. Our soul becomes stronger than the work we imitate, he says. But it’s not just work in which we imitate our influencers. It’s thoughts, too, and that’s worth pondering. Whose thoughts are influencing us, you know?

• • •

I tremble with pleasure when I think that on the day of my leaving prison both the laburnum and the lilac will be blooming in the gardens, and I shall see the wind stir into restless beauty the swaying gold of one, and make the other toss the pale purple of its plumes, so that all the air shall be Arabia for me… and I know that for me, to whom flowers are part of desire, there are tears waiting in the petals of some rose.

In May, 1897, Oscar Wilde was released from jail. The following year, he published a poem called The Ballad of Reading Gaol. A long poem describing the horrors of prison. He published it under the pseudonym C.3.3. His cell number.

Three years later, he was gone. Died of meningitis in 1900, at the turn of the century.

Five years after his death, De Profundis was published. He had given legal publishing rights to his dear friend Robert Ross. A Canadian in London. He told Ross he started writing the letters for his lover. But then he realized they were letters to himself. And finally, he realized they were for public viewing. They were letters to an artist.

I hope you enjoyed the peek into his letters. He wrote them for us.

“God made the world just as much for me as for any one else.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis