De Profundis - 4

Of all this Guildenstern and Rosencrantz realise nothing.  They bow and smirk and smile, and what the one says the other echoes with sickliest intonation.  When, at last, by means of the play within the play, and the puppets in their dalliance, Hamlet ‘catches the conscience’ of the King, and drives the wretched man in terror from his throne, Guildenstern and Rosencrantz see no more in his conduct than a rather painful breach of Court etiquette.  That is as far as they can attain to in ‘the contemplation of the spectacle of life with appropriate emotions.’  They are close to his very secret and know nothing of it.  Nor would there be any use in telling them.  They are the little cups that can hold so much and no more.  Towards the close it is suggested that, caught in a cunning spring set for another, they have met, or may meet, with a violent and sudden death.  But a tragic ending of this kind, though touched by Hamlet’s humour with something of the surprise and justice of comedy, is really not for such as they.  They never die.  Horatio, who in order to ‘report Hamlet and his cause aright to the unsatisfied,’
‘Absents him from felicity a while,
And in this harsh world draws his breath in pain,’
dies, but Guildenstern and Rosencrantz are as immortal as Angelo and Tartuffe, and should rank with them.  They are what modern life has contributed to the antique ideal of friendship.  He who writes a new De Amicitia must find a niche for them, and praise them in Tusculan prose.  They are types fixed for all time.  To censure them would show ‘a lack of appreciation.’  They are merely out of their sphere: that is all.  In sublimity of soul there is no contagion.  High thoughts and high emotions are by their very existence isolated.
* * * * *
I am to be released, if all goes well with me, towards the end of May, and hope to go at once to some little sea-side village abroad with R--- and M---.
The sea, as Euripides says in one of his plays about Iphigeneia, washes away the stains and wounds of the world.
I hope to be at least a month with my friends, and to gain peace and balance, and a less troubled heart, and a sweeter mood.  I have a strange longing for the great simple primeval things, such as the sea, to me no less of a mother than the Earth.  It seems to me that we all look at Nature too much, and live with her too little.  I discern great sanity in the Greek attitude.  They never chattered about sunsets, or discussed whether the shadows on the grass were really mauve or not.  But they saw that the sea was for the swimmer, and the sand for the feet of the runner.  They loved the trees for the shadow that they cast, and the forest for its silence at noon.  The vineyard-dresser wreathed his hair with ivy that he might keep off the rays of the sun as he stooped over the young shoots, and for the artist and the athlete, the two types that Greece gave us, they plaited with garlands the leaves of the bitter laurel and of the wild parsley, which else had been of no service to men.
We call ours a utilitarian age, and we do not know the uses of any single thing.  We have forgotten that water can cleanse, and fire purify, and that the Earth is mother to us all.  As a consequence our art is of the moon and plays with shadows, while Greek art is of the sun and deals directly with things.  I feel sure that in elemental forces there is purification, and I want to go back to them and live in their presence.
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.’
Still, I am conscious now that behind all this beauty, satisfying though it may be, there is some spirit hidden of which the painted forms and shapes are but modes of manifestation, and it is with this spirit that I desire to become in harmony.  I have grown tired of the articulate utterances of men and things.  The Mystical in Art, the Mystical in Life, the Mystical in Nature this is what I am looking for.  It is absolutely necessary for me to find it somewhere.
All trials are trials for one’s life, just as all sentences are sentences of death; and three times have I been tried.  The first time I left the box to be arrested, the second time to be led back to the house of detention, the third time to pass into a prison for two years.  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.