"Prosperity, pleasure, and success, may be rough of grain and common
in fibre, but sorrow is the most sensitive of all created things.
There is nothing that stirs in the whole world of thought to which
sorrow does not vibrate in terrible and exquisite pulsation. . . .
It is a wound that bleeds when any hand but that of love touches it,
and even then must bleed again, though not in pain. 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 . . . 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 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 clog the other, but out of sorrow have the
worlds been built, and at the birth of a child or a star there is
pain."
I have not quoted these passages in order to pit one style against
another; for each writer sets himself about a different task. A "dream
fugue" demands a treatment other than the simpler, more direct treatment
essential for Wilde's purpose. It is not because De Quincey the artist
chose this especial form for once in order to portray a mood that the
passage merits consideration; but because De Quincey always treated his
emotional experiences as "dream fugues." Of suffering and privation, of
pain and anguish bodily and mental, he had experiences more than the
common lot. But when he tries to show this bleeding reality to us a mist
invariably arises, and we see things "as in a glass darkly."
There is a certain passage in his Autobiography which affords a key to
this characteristic of his work.
When quite a boy he had constituted himself imaginary king of an
imaginary kingdom of Gombrom. Speaking of this fancy he writes: "O
reader! do not laugh! I lived for ever under the terror of two separate
wars and two separate worlds; one against the factory boys in a real
world of flesh and blood, of stones and brickbats, of flight and pursuit,
that were anything but figurative; the other in a world purely aerial,
where all the combats and the sufferings were absolute moonshine. And
yet the simple truth is that for anxiety and distress of mind the reality
(which almost every morning's light brought round) was as nothing in
comparison of that Dream Kingdom which rose like a vapour from my own
brain, and which apparently by the fiat of my will could be for ever
dissolved. Ah, but no! I had contracted obligations to Gombrom; I had
submitted my conscience to a yoke; and in secret truth my will had no
autocratic power. Long contemplation of a shadow, earnest study for the
welfare of that shadow, sympathy with the wounded sensibilities of that
shadow under accumulated wrongs; these bitter experiences, nursed by
brooding thought, had gradually frozen that shadow into a region of
reality far denser than the material realities of brass or granite."
This confession is a remarkable testimony to the reality of De Quincey's
imaginative life. "I had contracted obligations to Gombrom." Yes,
despite his practical experiences with the world, it was Gombrom, "the
moonlight" side of things, that appealed to him. The boys might fling
stones and brickbats, just as the world did later--but though he felt the
onslaught, it moved him far less than did the phantasies of his
imagination.
There is no necessity to weigh Wilde's experiences of "Our Ladies of
Sorrow" beside those of De Quincey. All we need ask is which impresses
us the more keenly with the actuality of sorrow. And I think there can
be no doubt that it is not De Quincey.
"The Dream Kingdom that rose like a vapour" from his brain, this it
was--this Vagabond imagination of his--that was the one great reality in
life. It is a mistake to assume, as some have done, that this faculty
for daydreaming was a legacy of the opium-eating. The opium gave an
added brilliance to the dream-life, but it did not create it. He was a
dreamer from his birth--a far more thorough-going dreamer than was ever
Coleridge. There was a strain of insanity about him undoubtedly, and it
says much for his intellectual activity and moral power that the Dream
Kingdom did not disturb his mental life more than it did. Had he never
touched opium to relieve his gastric complaint, he would have been
eccentric--that is, if he had lived. Without some narcotic it is
doubtful whether his highly sensitive organization would have survived
the attacks of disease. As it was, the opium not only eased the pain,
but lifted his imagination above the ugly realities of life, and afforded
a solace in times of loneliness and misery.