Sorrow, being the supreme emotion of which man is capable, is at once the
type and test of all great art. What the artist is always looking for is
the mode of existence in which soul and body are one and indivisible: in
which the outward is expressive of the inward: in which form reveals. Of
such modes of existence there are not a few: youth and the arts
preoccupied with youth may serve as a model for us at one moment: at
another we may like to think that, in its subtlety and sensitiveness of
impression, its suggestion of a spirit dwelling in external things and
making its raiment of earth and air, of mist and city alike, and in its
morbid sympathy of its moods, and tones, and colours, modern landscape
art is realising for us pictorially what was realised in such plastic
perfection by the Greeks. Music, in which all subject is absorbed in
expression and cannot be separated from it, is a complex example, and a
flower or a child a simple example, of what I mean; but sorrow is the
ultimate type both in life and art.
Behind joy and laughter there may be a temperament, coarse, hard and
callous. But behind sorrow there is always sorrow. Pain, unlike
pleasure, wears no mask. Truth in art is not any correspondence between
the essential idea and the accidental existence; it is not the
resemblance of shape to shadow, or of the form mirrored in the crystal to
the form itself; it is no echo coming from a hollow hill, any more than
it is a silver well of water in the valley that shows the moon to the
moon and Narcissus to Narcissus. Truth in art is the unity of a thing
with itself: the outward rendered expressive of the inward: the soul made
incarnate: the body instinct with spirit. For this reason there is no
truth comparable to sorrow. There are times when sorrow seems to me to
be the only truth. Other things may be illusions of the eye or the
appetite, made to blind the one and cloy the other, but out of sorrow
have the worlds been built, and at the birth of a child or a star there
is pain.
More than this, there is about sorrow an intense, an extraordinary
reality. I have said of myself that I was one who stood in symbolic
relations to the art and culture of my age. There is not a single
wretched man in this wretched place along with me who does not stand in
symbolic relation to the very secret of life. For the secret of life is
suffering. It is what is hidden behind everything. When we begin to
live, what is sweet is so sweet to us, and what is bitter so bitter, that
we inevitably direct all our desires towards pleasures, and seek not
merely for a 'month or twain to feed on honeycomb,' but for all our years
to taste no other food, ignorant all the while that we may really be
starving the soul.--_De Profundis_.