344
RICHARD ELLMANN
in
De Profundis
he asserted, "The gods had given me almost every–
thing," and rather glibly listed the extensive benefactions which he
thought he was ashamed to have wasted: "I had a genius, a
dis–
tinguished name, high social position, brilliance, intellectual daring;
1 made art a philosophy and philosophy an art; 1 altered the minds
of men and the colours of things; there was nothing 1 said or did
that did not make people wonder. 1 took the drama, the most ob–
jective form known to art, and made it as personal a mode of
expression as the lyric or sonnet; at the same time 1 widened its
range and enriched its characterization. Drama, novel, poem in prose,
poem in rhyme, subtle or fantastic dialogue, whatever 1 touched, I
made beautiful in a new mode of beauty: to truth itself 1 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.
1 treated art as the supreme reality and life as a mere mode of
fiction. 1 awoke the imagination of my century so that
it
created
myth and legend around me. 1 summed up all systems in a phrase
and all existence in an epigram." The listing in this
mea culpa
is
too long, but while
it
may have its bravura,
it
cannot be brushed
aside as simple vanity. Once Wilde had fallen, he determined to
make the best of his fall; he had to fall harder and farther than he
had in reality done, like some classic example of overweening pride.
The talents that Wilde did in fact possess were more limited in
number, and they were bestowed upon him equivocally. His wit, it
was decreed, should not content him; he should pursue beauty and
confuse it with garishness, strong adjectives followed by weak
nouns; he should require social acceptance for the flowering of
his
nature, and be ostracized. Yet in that smashup of his fortunes,
rather than at their apogee, Wilde's true position appeared. "Why
is it that one runs to one's ruin?" he wondered afterwards. He toyed
with being the scapegoat of his age, he dangled his legs over the
edge, and eventually he found himself falling. He brooded for a
year over the possibility of bringing suit against Queensberry; when
at last he did, his casuistic position was to pretend he was a con–
formist, though he was not, and in two subsequent trials he con–
tinued in playacting under successively grimmer conditions. He
wrote later, "The one disgraceful, unpardonable, and to all time
contemptible action of my life was to allow myself to appeal to
