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
autocr