ALGERNON
Cecily! [Embraces her.] At last!
JACK
Gwendolen! [Embraces her.] At last!
LADY RRACKNELL
My nephew, you seem to be displaying signs of triviality.
JACK On the contrary, Aunt Augusta, I've now realized for the first time in
my life the vital Importance of Being Earnest.
CURTAIN
performed 1895 1899
From De Profundis1
And the end of it all is that I have got to forgive you. I must do so. I don't
write this letter to put bitterness into your heart, but to pluck it out of mine.
For my own sake I must forgive you. One cannot always keep an adder in one's
breast to feed on one, nor rise up every night to sow thorns in the garden of
one's soul. It will not be difficult at all for me to do so, if you help me a little.
Whatever you did to me in old days I always readily forgave. It did you no good
2. A play on the name of Max Beerbohm (1872? cillis (Letter In Prison and in Chains). He was 1956), English essayist, caricaturist, and parodist. given the manuscript on his release and turned it I. Out of the depths (Latin); Psalm 130.1: 'Out over to a friend, Robert Ross, who gave it its cur- of the depths have I cried unto thee, O Lord.' rent title and published it in an abridged version in While in prison in Reading Gaol, Wilde was 1905, after Wilde's death. After Douglas's death in allowed a pen and paper only to write letters. Given 1945, a fuller text was published by Wilde's son, one sheet of paper at a time, which was taken away Vyvyan Holland; but only in 1962, when scholars after it was filled, Wilde wrote this work as a letter could consult the original manuscript, did a comto Lord Alfred Douglas, whose nickname was plete version appear. Bosie. Wilde titled it Epistola: In Carcere et Vin
.
DE PROFUNDIS / 1741
then. Only one whose life is without stain of any kind can forgive sins. But
now when I sit in humiliation and disgrace it is different. My forgiveness
should mean a great deal to you now. Some day you will realise it. Whether
you do so early or late, soon or not at all, my way is clear before me. I cannot
allow you to go through life bearing in your heart the burden of having ruined
a man like me. The thought might make you callously indifferent, or morbidly
sad. I must take the burden from you and put it on my own shoulders.
I must say to myself that neither you nor your father, multiplied a thousand
times over, could possibly have ruined a man like me: that I ruined myself:
and that nobody, great or small, can be ruined except by his own hand. I am
quite ready to do so. I am trying to do so, though you may not think it at the
present moment. If I have brought this pitiless indictment against you, think
what an indictment I bring without pity against myself. Terrible as what you did to me was, what I did to myself was far more terrible still.
I was a man who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age. I had realised this for myself at the very dawn of my manhood, and had forced my age to realise it afterwards. Few men hold such a position in their own lifetime and have it so acknowledged. It is usually discerned, if discerned at all, by the historian, or the critic, long after both the man and his age have passed away. With me it was different. I felt it myself, and made others feel it. Byron2 was a symbolic figure, but his relations were to the passion of his age and its weariness of passion. Mine were to something more noble, more permanent, of more vital issue, of larger scope.
The gods had given me almost everything. I had genius, a distinguished name, high social position, brilliancy, intellectual daring: I made art a philosophy, and philosophy an art: I altered the minds of men and the colours of things: there was nothing I said or did that did not make people wonder: I took the drama, the most objective form known to art, and made it as personal a mode of expression as the lyric or the sonnet, at the same time that I widened its range and enriched its characterization: drama, novel, poem in rhyme, poem in prose, subtle or fantastic dialogue, whatever I touched I made beautiful in a new mode of beauty: to truth itself I gave what is false no less than what is true as its rightful province, and showed that the false and the true
are merely forms of intellectual existence. I treated Art as the supreme reality,
and life as a mere mode of fiction: I awoke the imagination of my century so
that it created myth and legend around me: I summed up all systems in a phrase, and all existence in an epigram.
Along with these things, I had things that were different. I let myself be lured into long spells of senseless and sensual ease. I amused myself with being a flaneur,3 a dandy, a man of fashion. I surrounded myself with the
