They demand that the truth shall be told in a hoarse voice, that they may recognize it, and yet the ugly, conscientious noise of their scrannel-pipes is no nearer than De Profundis to the sincerity they admire. Sincerity, in the sense that they give to that word, does not exist in art. "What people call insincerity is simply a method by which we can multiply our personalities." That sentence, from the mouth of one of the personalities that Wilde was able to assume, explains the obvious variety of his work. It throws also no dubious light upon the general nature of art. For in art no attitude is insincere whose result is beautiful, and no attitude is possible whose result may not be beautiful. All depends on the artist and on the depth and abandon of his insincerity. For art tolerates many contradictions, but a work of art tolerates none. The man who takes an attitude and is unable to sustain it, who smirks at the audience, who plays as it were the traitor to his own choice, can produce nothing but what is ugly, since, like him, it will contain a contradiction. But the man who chooses an attitude, and preserves it consistently in any work of art, is thereby fulfilling a condition of beauty. He may make a lovely thing, and then, taking another attitude, may contradict himself in a thing of no less loveliness. Repentance like that in De Profundis is a guarantee of a moment of humility, but not of a life of reform. Shakespeare wrote Hamlet's soliloquy and also Juliet's murmuring from the balcony. Yet he was not always in love, nor always melancholy with inaction. We are accustomed to insincerity in play-writing, and do not expect each character, fool or wise, young or old, to represent its author. We allow, as, for an obvious example, in Restoration comedy, plays to be written from a standpoint that their authors could not possibly maintain in private life. In poetry also, we do not consider Browning insincere because he speaks now for Lippo Lippi, and now for Andrea del Sarto. In novels we allow Fielding to write "Jonathan Wild" as a satirist, and "Joseph Andrews" as a comic romancer, and we are not shocked when he relishes in imagination deeds that as a magistrate he would be bound to censure. I think we have to learn that all fine literature is dramatic. No man pours from his mouth in any single speech all the roses and the vomit that would represent his soul. Men speak and hold their peace. They make and their hands are still. And many moods flit by while they are silent, and myriad souls agitate the blood in the veins of those motionless hands. The artist is he who, remembering this mood or that, can hold it fast and maintain it long enough for the making of a work of art. We do not ask him to retain it further. The shaping of his mood in words or in clay has already changed his personality. The writer of a mad song need not gibber in the streets. Golden phrases lose none of their magnificence if he who made them wears plain homespun when we meet him in the marketplace. He has been a king for a moment, and given us his kingship for ever. We can ask no more.
Wilde, perhaps more than other men, insisted on the dramatic character of his work. In considering any of it we should remember those sentences in the last paragraph of 'The Truth of Masks':—"Not that I agree with everything that I have said in this essay. There is much with which I entirely disagree. The essay simply represents an artistic standpoint, and in æsthetic criticism attitude is everything." I am not sure that this confession does not spoil 'The Truth of Masks.' It is perilously like an aside; but Wilde was sufficiently subtle to have chosen a mood which such an aside would illustrate rather than contradict. In considering his work, we must remember, first, that all work is dramatic, true to an individual mood only; and, secondly, that Wilde, more clearly conscious of this than most artists, was better able to take advantage of it. He was freed from those qualms of conscience which made Swinburne glad to differentiate his earlier from his later work by saying:—"In my next work it should be superfluous to say that there is no touch of dramatic impersonation or imaginary emotion." This sentence, that denies together what is universal and what does not exist (since you cannot imagine an emotion without feeling it) points to no blemish in Swinburne's work, but only to a discomfort of mind that some of it must have caused him. From this discomfort Wilde was free. He had many tuning-forks, and distrusted none of them because it happened to be pitched differently from another.
There is no doubt that, when De Profundis was finished, Wilde regarded it as a document of historical value, as a veracious confession. This is clear from the tone in which he wrote of it to Mr. Ross:—"I don't defend my conduct. I explain it. Also there are in my letter certain passages which deal with my mental development in prison, and the inevitable evolution of my character and intellectual attitude towards life that has taken place; and I want you and others who still stand by me and have affection for me to know exactly in what mood and manner I hope to face the world." Those sentences certainly let us see the attitude that Wilde hoped to induce in his readers, but, if we would turn to Wilde himself, and, careless of the beauty of the work, pry past it to discover the private feelings of the author, we must take them not as a statement of the truth, but, seeking the truth, take that statement into account. That statement, the published De Profundis, those unpublished portions of the letter which, probably, will never be read in our lifetime, the whole of Wilde's works, the whole of his life, the character of that person to whom he was immediately writing, the character of those other friends by whom he desired to be read, the character which, without deliberate choice, he had himself grown accustomed to present to them: we must know all these things, and be able to weigh them exactly, and balance them justly against each other. Have I not said enough to show that it is a vain task to seek for the absolute truth in such a matter, and that we are better and more hopefully employed when we concern ourselves simply with a wonderful piece of literature dictated by certain conditions that we admit are impossible accurately to discover?
In pointing out that the details of Wilde's life in prison did not affect the manner of his thought, but only provided him with fresh material, I do not wish to suggest that prison was unimportant to him. It might have been. He might, in revolt against it, have made it no more than a hideous accident, stunting his nature by not refusing to allow it to assimilate the black bread that had been thrown to it as well as the sweetened cakes. If he had been earlier released, as he said, this might have happened. He was not released, and revolt was changed to acceptance, and, at last, he was able to say, as he had hoped, that society's sending him to prison ranked with his father's sending him to Oxford, as a turning point in his life. But that is a question for the next chapter, for imprisonment did not radically alter him until he was again in the world.
In prison, however, the anæsthetic of magnificent living was denied him, and he turned to magnificent thought, recovering the power that had been his before popular success had narrowed his horizon.
"Knowing the possible, see thou try beyond it
Into impossible things, unlikely ends;
And thou shalt find thy knowledgeable desire
Grow large as all the regions of thy soul."[6]
In 1894 he had known the possible, and achieved it in The Importance of Being Earnest. But in 1889 he had been trying far beyond it, and now again, in prison, he found his desires growing far beyond the possible, and covering the regions of his soul. He needed an idea that should make this bread-and-water existence one with that of wine and lilies, an idea that should make it possible for him to conceive his life as a whole, and, in the conception, make it so.