His weakness was strength. The gods, he has discovered, make instruments to plague us out of our virtues as well as our vices.

Wilde acknowledges that along with good qualities, he was “the spendthrift of my own genius.” But he passes quickly over this defect, and those that attend it. Much of De Profundis is an elegy for lost greatness. As he whips his own image, he cannot withhold his admiration for what that image was. Elegy generates eulogy. He heightens the pinnacle from which he has fallen:

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…. Byron 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 characterisation: 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 mycentury so that it created myth and legend around me: I summed up all systems in a phrase, and all existence in an epigram.

In prison, he says, he has at least learned humility. Humility is a slippery term in De Profundis. Wilde’s only definition of it there is “the frank acceptance of all experience.” The pursuit of pleasure must take into account the advent of sorrow. But in a way he has always known this. Still, much of the folderol of personality has receded in importance: as a young man he had often praised poses and masks; now he says, “Those who want a mask have to wear it.” In America he announced that “the secret of life is art.” Now he had found that “the secret of life is suffering.”

De Profundis moves from the discovery of pain to the discovery of consolation. Its climax, doubtless premeditated from the start, was a section dealing with Wilde’s discovery in prison of Christ. This too is less humble than it seems, since Wilde not only describes Christ without recognizing his divinity, but blends Christianity with aestheticism, as long before he told André Gide he would do. Christ appears here as the supreme individualist, uniting personality and perfection, saying beautiful things, making of his life the most wonderful of poems by creating himself out of his own imagination. He sympathizes with sinners as Wilde in “The Soul of Man Under Socialism” sympathizes with criminals, and recognizes no morality but that of sympathy. Christ is a precursor of the romantic movement, a supreme artist, a master of paradox, a type of Wilde in the ancient world. In this section of De Profundis Douglas is almost forgotten, but Wilde makes all he has learned about Christ into something he must impart to his friend. He cannot resist more particularization of the Queensberrys’ misdeeds, but he reaches at last a Christlike conclusion: “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.”

The most important thing about De Profundis is that it is a love letter. Wilde complains of neglect and arranges a reunion. He reminds Douglas, even at this late stage, that Douglas’s family had promised to pay his court costs, but financial matters are forgotten as he evokes the thought of their meeting “in some quiet foreign town like Bruges,” where Bosie, who had come to him once to learn the Pleasure of Life and of Art, may be offered tutelage in “the meaning of Sorrow, and its beauty.” For no matter how badly Douglas behaved, he always loved Wilde in his fashion. As an apologia De Profundis suffers from the adulteration of simplicity by eloquence, by an arrogance lurking in its humility, and by its disjointed structure. But as a love letter it has all the consistency it needs, and must rank—with its love and hate, solicitude, vanity, and philosophic musings—as one of the greatest, and the longest, ever written. Wilde on 3 April 1897 asked permission to send the letter out, but cannily recognized that to send it to Douglas would be to anticipate its destruction.