It is not often possible to detect the original intention of rebuke in the published portions of _De Profundis_. I suppose that as Wilde pointed out his friend's share in his disaster, and set down on paper what that disaster was, he came to examine its ulterior effect on his own mind, for those pages that are open to us contain such an examination. He is in prison, and is at pains to realize exactly what this means to him: where he is unchanged, where he has lost, and where and how he has gained. He would draw up a profit and loss account, of the loaves that are sustenance for the body and the flowers of the white narcissus that are food for the soul, and in this way give himself courage to face the world with the knowledge that he had kept his soul alive. He will discover where he stands with regard to Christianity, and where with regard to Flaubert. A critic and artist, he will realize himself among masterpieces, and discover what is altered in the personality for whose notation he has been accustomed to use his criticism of works of art. "To the artist, expression is the only mode under which he can conceive life at all. To him what is dumb is dead."
Wilde's life in prison was lived on two planes. Only one of them is represented in _De Profundis_. In writing that letter he was able to pick up the frayed threads of his intellectual existence, to find that some were gold and some were crimson, and to learn that whatever else he might have lost he had not lost his lordship over words. The existence whose threads he thus collected was not that which was at the moment determining the further development of his character. It was an aftermath of that summer of the intellect that had given him _Intentions_. Instead of the debonair personality of an Ernest or a Gilbert, he painted now a no less ideal vision of himself in circumstances similar to those that now surrounded him.
Behind this imaginary and as it were dramatic life was another in which he shared the days and the day's business of his fellow convicts.
"We tore the tarry rope to shreds With blunt and bleeding nails; We rubbed the doors, and scrubbed the floors And cleaned the shining rails: And rank by rank, we soaped the plank, And clattered with the pails."