De Profundis - 3

And to me, the pleasure is doubled by the reflection that it is extremely probable that we have the actual terms, the ipsissima verba, used by Christ.  It was always supposed that Christ talked in Aramaic.  Even Renan thought so.  But now we know that the Galilean peasants, like the Irish peasants of our own day, were bilingual, and that Greek was the ordinary language of intercourse all over Palestine, as indeed all over the Eastern world.  I never liked the idea that we knew of Christ’s own words only through a translation of a translation.  It is a delight to me to think that as far as his conversation was concerned, Charmides might have listened to him, and Socrates reasoned with him, and Plato understood him: that he really said εyω ειμι ο ποιμην ο καλος, that when he thought of the lilies of the field and how they neither toil nor spin, his absolute expression was καταyαθετε τα κρίνα του αγρου τως αυξανει ου κοπιυ ουδε νηθει, and that his last word when he cried out ‘my life has been completed, has reached its fulfilment, has been perfected,’ was exactly as St. John tells us it was: τετέλεσται—no more.
While in reading the Gospels—particularly that of St. John himself, or whatever early Gnostic took his name and mantle—I see the continual assertion of the imagination as the basis of all spiritual and material life, I see also that to Christ imagination was simply a form of love, and that to him love was lord in the fullest meaning of the phrase.  Some six weeks ago I was allowed by the doctor to have white bread to eat instead of the coarse black or brown bread of ordinary prison fare.  It is a great delicacy.  It will sound strange that dry bread could possibly be a delicacy to any one.  To me it is so much so that at the close of each meal I carefully eat whatever crumbs may be left on my tin plate, or have fallen on the rough towel that one uses as a cloth so as not to soil one’s table; and I do so not from hunger—I get now quite sufficient food—but simply in order that nothing should be wasted of what is given to me.  So one should look on love.
Christ, like all fascinating personalities, had the power of not merely saying beautiful things himself, but of making other people say beautiful things to him; and I love the story St. Mark tells us about the Greek woman, who, when as a trial of her faith he said to her that he could not give her the bread of the children of Israel, answered him that the little dogs—(κυναρια, ‘little dogs’ it should be rendered)—who are under the table eat of the crumbs that the children let fall.  Most people live for love and admiration.  But it is by love and admiration that we should live.  If any love is shown us we should recognise that we are quite unworthy of it.  Nobody is worthy to be loved.  The fact that God loves man shows us that in the divine order of ideal things it is written that eternal love is to be given to what is eternally unworthy.  Or if that phrase seems to be a bitter one to bear, let us say that every one is worthy of love, except him who thinks that he is.  Love is a sacrament that should be taken kneeling, and Domine, non sum dignus should be on the lips and in the hearts of those who receive it.
If ever I write again, in the sense of producing artistic work, there are just two subjects on which and through which I desire to express myself: one is ‘Christ as the precursor of the romantic movement in life’: the other is ‘The artistic life considered in its relation to conduct.’  The first is, of course, intensely fascinating, for I see in Christ not merely the essentials of the supreme romantic type, but all the accidents, the wilfulnesses even, of the romantic temperament also.  He was the first person who ever said to people that they should live ‘flower-like lives.’  He fixed the phrase.  He took children as the type of what people should try to become.  He held them up as examples to their elders, which I myself have always thought the chief use of children, if what is perfect should have a use.  Dante describes the soul of a man as coming from the hand of God ‘weeping and laughing like a little child,’ and Christ also saw that the soul of each one should be a guisa di fanciulla che piangendo e ridendo pargoleggia.  He felt that life was changeful, fluid, active, and that to allow it to be stereotyped into any form was death.  He saw that people should not be too serious over material, common interests: that to be unpractical was to be a great thing: that one should not bother too much over affairs.  The birds didn’t, why should man?  He is charming when he says, ‘Take no thought for the morrow; is not the soul more than meat? is not the body more than raiment?’  A Greek might have used the latter phrase.  It is full of Greek feeling.  But only Christ could have said both, and so summed up life perfectly for us.
His morality is all sympathy, just what morality should be.  If the only thing that he ever said had been, ‘Her sins are forgiven her because she loved much,’ it would have been worth while dying to have said it.  His justice is all poetical justice, exactly what justice should be.  The beggar goes to heaven because he has been unhappy.  I cannot conceive a better reason for his being sent there.  The people who work for an hour in the vineyard in the cool of the evening receive just as much reward as those who have toiled there all day long in the hot sun.  Why shouldn’t they?  Probably no one deserved anything.  Or perhaps they were a different kind of people.  Christ had no patience with the dull lifeless mechanical systems that treat people as if they were things, and so treat everybody alike: for him there were no laws: there were exceptions merely, as if anybody, or anything, for that matter, was like aught else in the world!
That which is the very keynote of romantic art was to him the proper basis of natural life.  He saw no other basis.  And when they brought him one, taken in the very act of sin and showed him her sentence written in the law, and asked him what was to be done, he wrote with his finger on the ground as though he did not hear them, and finally, when they pressed him again, looked up and said, ‘Let him of you who has never sinned be the first to throw the stone at her.’  It was worth while living to have said that.
Like all poetical natures he loved ignorant people.  He knew that in the soul of one who is ignorant there is always room for a great idea.  But he could not stand stupid people, especially those who are made stupid by education: people who are full of opinions not one of which they even understand, a peculiarly modern type, summed up by Christ when he describes it as the type of one who has the key of knowledge, cannot use it himself, and does not allow other people to use it, though it may be made to open the gate of God’s Kingdom.  His chief war was against the Philistines.  That is the war every child of light has to wage.  Philistinism was the note of the age and community in which he lived.  In their heavy inaccessibility to ideas, their dull respectability, their tedious orthodoxy, their worship of vulgar success, their entire preoccupation with the gross materialistic side of life, and their ridiculous estimate of themselves and their importance, the Jews of Jerusalem in Christ’s day were the exact counterpart of the British Philistine of our own.  Christ mocked at the ‘whited sepulchre’ of respectability, and fixed that phrase for ever.  He treated worldly success as a thing absolutely to be despised.  He saw nothing in it at all.  He looked on wealth as an encumbrance to a man.  He would not hear of life being sacrificed to any system of thought or morals.  He pointed out that forms and ceremonies were made for man, not man for forms and ceremonies.  He took sabbatarianism as a type of the things that should be set at nought.  The cold philanthropies, the ostentatious public charities, the tedious formalisms so dear to the middle-class mind, he exposed with utter and relentless scorn.  To us, what is termed orthodoxy is merely a facile unintelligent acquiescence; but to them, and in their hands, it was a terrible and paralysing tyranny.  Christ swept it aside.  He showed that the spirit alone was of value.  He took a keen pleasure in pointing out to them that though they were always reading the law and the prophets, they had not really the smallest idea of what either of them meant.  In opposition to their tithing of each separate day into the fixed routine of prescribed duties, as they tithe mint and rue, he preached the enormous importance of living completely for the moment.
Those whom he saved from their sins are saved simply for beautiful moments in their lives.  Mary Magdalen, when she sees Christ, breaks the rich vase of alabaster that one of her seven lovers had given her, and spills the odorous spices over his tired dusty feet, and for that one moment’s sake sits for ever with Ruth and Beatrice in the tresses of the snow-white rose of Paradise.  All that Christ says to us by the way of a little warning is that every moment should be beautiful, that the soul should always be ready for the coming of the bridegroom, always waiting for the voice of the lover, Philistinism being simply that side of man’s nature that is not illumined by the imagination.  He sees all the lovely influences of life as modes of light: the imagination itself is the world of light.  The world is made by it, and yet the world cannot understand it: that is because the imagination is simply a manifestation of love, and it is love and the capacity for it that distinguishes one human being from another.
But it is when he deals with a sinner that Christ is most romantic, in the sense of most real.  The world had always loved the saint as being the nearest possible approach to the perfection of God.  Christ, through some divine instinct in him, seems to have always loved the sinner as being the nearest possible approach to the perfection of man.  His primary desire was not to reform people, any more than his primary desire was to a relieve suffering.  To turn an interesting thief into a tedious honest man was not his aim.  He would have thought little of the Prisoners’ Aid Society and other modern movements of the kind.  The conversion of a publican into a Pharisee would not have seemed to him a great achievement.  But in a manner not yet understood of the world he regarded sin and suffering as being in themselves beautiful holy things and modes of perfection.
It seems a very dangerous idea.  It is—all great ideas are dangerous.  That it was Christ’s creed admits of no doubt.  That it is the true creed I don’t doubt myself.
Of course the sinner must repent.  But why?  Simply because otherwise he would be unable to realise what he had done.  The moment of repentance is the moment of initiation.  More than that: it is the means by which one alters one’s past.  The Greeks thought that impossible.  They often say in their Gnomic aphorisms, ‘Even the Gods cannot alter the past.’  Christ showed that the commonest sinner could do it, that it was the one thing he could do.  Christ, had he been asked, would have said—I feel quite certain about it—that the moment the prodigal son fell on his knees and wept, he made his having wasted his substance with harlots, his swine-herding and hungering for the husks they ate, beautiful and holy moments in his life.  It is difficult for most people to grasp the idea.  I dare say one has to go to prison to understand it.  If so, it may be worth while going to prison.
There is something so unique about Christ.  Of course just as there are false dawns before the dawn itself, and winter days so full of sudden sunlight that they will cheat the wise crocus into squandering its gold before its time, and make some foolish bird call to its mate to build on barren boughs, so there were Christians before Christ.  For that we should be grateful.  The unfortunate thing is that there have been none since.  I make one exception, St. Francis of Assisi.  But then God had given him at his birth the soul of a poet, as he himself when quite young had in mystical marriage taken poverty as his bride: and with the soul of a poet and the body of a beggar he found the way to perfection not difficult.  He understood Christ, and so he became like him.  We do not require the Liber Conformitatum to teach us that the life of St. Francis was the true Imitatio Christi, a poem compared to which the book of that name is merely prose.
Indeed, that is the charm about Christ, when all is said: he is just like a work of art.  He does not really teach one anything, but by being brought into his presence one becomes something.  And everybody is predestined to his presence.  Once at least in his life each man walks with Christ to Emmaus.
As regards the other subject, the Relation of the Artistic Life to Conduct, it will no doubt seem strange to you that I should select it.  People point to Reading Gaol and say, ‘That is where the artistic life leads a man.’  Well, it might lead to worse places.  The more mechanical people to whom life is a shrewd speculation depending on a careful calculation of ways and means, always know where they are going, and go there.  They start with the ideal desire of being the parish beadle, and in whatever sphere they are placed they succeed in being the parish beadle and no more.  A man whose desire is to be something separate from himself, to be a member of Parliament, or a successful grocer, or a prominent solicitor, or a judge, or something equally tedious, invariably succeeds in being what he wants to be.  That is his punishment.  Those who want a mask have to wear it.
But with the dynamic forces of life, and those in whom those dynamic forces become incarnate, it is different.  People whose desire is solely for self-realisation never know where they are going.  They can’t know.  In one sense of the word it is of course necessary, as the Greek oracle said, to know oneself: that is the first achievement of knowledge.  But to recognise that the soul of a man is unknowable, is the ultimate achievement of wisdom.  The final mystery is oneself.  When one has weighed the sun in the balance, and measured the steps of the moon, and mapped out the seven heavens star by star, there still remains oneself.  Who can calculate the orbit of his own soul?  When the son went out to look for his father’s asses, he did not know that a man of God was waiting for him with the very chrism of coronation, and that his own soul was already the soul of a king.
I hope to live long enough and to produce work of such a character that I shall be able at the end of my days to say, ‘Yes! this is just where the artistic life leads a man!’  Two of the most perfect lives I have come across in my own experience are the lives of Verlaine and of Prince Kropotkin: both of them men who have passed years in prison: the first, the one Christian poet since Dante; the other, a man with a soul of that beautiful white Christ which seems coming out of Russia.  And for the last seven or eight months, in spite of a succession of great troubles reaching me from the outside world almost without intermission, I have been placed in direct contact with a new spirit working in this prison through man and things, that has helped me beyond any possibility of expression in words: so that while for the first year of my imprisonment I did nothing else, and can remember doing nothing else, but wring my hands in impotent despair, and say, ‘What an ending, what an appalling ending!’ now I try to say to myself, and sometimes when I am not torturing myself do really and sincerely say, ‘What a beginning, what a wonderful beginning!’  It may really be so.  It may become so.  If it does I shall owe much to this new personality that has altered every man’s life in this place.
You may realise it when I say that had I been released last May, as I tried to be, I would have left this place loathing it and every official in it with a bitterness of hatred that would have poisoned my life.  I have had a year longer of imprisonment, but humanity has been in the prison along with us all, and now when I go out I shall always remember great kindnesses that I have received here from almost everybody, and on the day of my release I shall give many thanks to many people, and ask to be remembered by them in turn.
The prison style is absolutely and entirely wrong.  I would give anything to be able to alter it when I go out.  I intend to try.  But there is nothing in the world so wrong but that the spirit of humanity, which is the spirit of love, the spirit of the Christ who is not in churches, may make it, if not right, at least possible to be borne without too much bitterness of heart.
I know also that much is waiting for me outside that is very delightful, from what St. Francis of Assisi calls ‘my brother the wind, and my sister the rain,’ lovely things both of them, down to the shop-windows and sunsets of great cities.  If I made a list of all that still remains to me, I don’t know where I should stop: for, indeed, God made the world just as much for me as for any one else.  Perhaps I may go out with something that I had not got before.  I need not tell you that to me reformations in morals are as meaningless and vulgar as Reformations in theology.  But while to propose to be a better man is a piece of unscientific cant, to have become a deeper man is the privilege of those who have suffered.  And such I think I have become.
If after I am free a friend of mine gave a feast, and did not invite me to it, I should not mind a bit.  I can be perfectly happy by myself.  With freedom, flowers, books, and the moon, who could not be perfectly happy?  Besides, feasts are not for me any more.  I have given too many to care about them.  That side of life is over for me, very fortunately, I dare say.  But if after I am free a friend of mine had a sorrow and refused to allow me to share it, I should feel it most bitterly.  If he shut the doors of the house of mourning against me, I would come back again and again and beg to be admitted, so that I might share in what I was entitled to share in.  If he thought me unworthy, unfit to weep with him, I should feel it as the most poignant humiliation, as the most terrible mode in which disgrace could be inflicted on me.  But that could not be.  I have a right to share in sorrow, and he who can look at the loveliness of the world and share its sorrow, and realise something of the wonder of both, is in immediate contact with divine things, and has got as near to God’s secret as any one can get.
Perhaps there may come into my art also, no less than into my life, a still deeper note, one of greater unity of passion, and directness of impulse.  Not width but intensity is the true aim of modern art.  We are no longer in art concerned with the type.  It is with the exception that we have to do.  I cannot put my sufferings into any form they took, I need hardly say.  Art only begins where Imitation ends, but something must come into my work, of fuller memory of words perhaps, of richer cadences, of more curious effects, of simpler architectural order, of some aesthetic quality at any rate.
When Marsyas was ‘torn from the scabbard of his limbs’—della vagina della membre sue, to use one of Dante’s most terrible Tacitean phrases—he had no more song, the Greek said.  Apollo had been victor.  The lyre had vanquished the reed.  But perhaps the Greeks were mistaken.  I hear in much modern Art the cry of Marsyas.  It is bitter in Baudelaire, sweet and plaintive in Lamartine, mystic in Verlaine.  It is in the deferred resolutions of Chopin’s music.  It is in the discontent that haunts Burne-Jones’s women.  Even Matthew Arnold, whose song of Callicles tells of ‘the triumph of the sweet persuasive lyre,’ and the ‘famous final victory,’ in such a clear note of lyrical beauty, has not a little of it; in the troubled undertone of doubt and distress that haunts his verses, neither Goethe nor Wordsworth could help him, though he followed each in turn, and when he seeks to mourn for Thyrsis or to sing of the Scholar Gipsy, it is the reed that he has to take for the rendering of his strain.  But whether or not the Phrygian Faun was silent, I cannot be.  Expression is as necessary to me as leaf and blossoms are to the black branches of the trees that show themselves above the prison walls and are so restless in the wind.  Between my art and the world there is now a wide gulf, but between art and myself there is none.  I hope at least that there is none.
To each of us different fates are meted out.  My lot has been one of public infamy, of long imprisonment, of misery, of ruin, of disgrace, but I am not worthy of it—not yet, at any rate.  I remember that I used to say that I thought I could bear a real tragedy if it came to me with purple pall and a mask of noble sorrow, but that the dreadful thing about modernity was that it put tragedy into the raiment of comedy, so that the great realities seemed commonplace or grotesque or lacking in style.  It is quite true about modernity.  It has probably always been true about actual life.  It is said that all martyrdoms seemed mean to the looker on.  The nineteenth century is no exception to the rule.
Everything about my tragedy has been hideous, mean, repellent, lacking in style; our very dress makes us grotesque.  We are the zanies of sorrow.  We are clowns whose hearts are broken.  We are specially designed to appeal to the sense of humour.  On November 13th, 1895, I was brought down here from London.  From two o’clock till half-past two on that day I had to stand on the centre platform of Clapham Junction in convict dress, and handcuffed, for the world to look at.  I had been taken out of the hospital ward without a moment’s notice being given to me.  Of all possible objects I was the most grotesque.  When people saw me they laughed.  Each train as it came up swelled the audience.  Nothing could exceed their amusement.  That was, of course, before they knew who I was.  As soon as they had been informed they laughed still more.  For half an hour I stood there in the grey November rain surrounded by a jeering mob.
For a year after that was done to me I wept every day at the same hour and for the same space of time.  That is not such a tragic thing as possibly it sounds to you.  To those who are in prison tears are a part of every day’s experience.  A day in prison on which one does not weep is a day on which one’s heart is hard, not a day on which one’s heart is happy.
Well, now I am really beginning to feel more regret for the people who laughed than for myself.  Of course when they saw me I was not on my pedestal, I was in the pillory.  But it is a very unimaginative nature that only cares for people on their pedestals.  A pedestal may be a very unreal thing.  A pillory is a terrific reality.  They should have known also how to interpret sorrow better.  I have said that behind sorrow there is always sorrow.  It were wiser still to say that behind sorrow there is always a soul.  And to mock at a soul in pain is a dreadful thing.  In the strangely simple economy of the world people only get what they give, and to those who have not enough imagination to penetrate the mere outward of things, and feel pity, what pity can be given save that of scorn?
I write this account of the mode of my being transferred here simply that it should be realised how hard it has been for me to get anything out of my punishment but bitterness and despair.  I have, however, to do it, and now and then I have moments of submission and acceptance.  All the spring may be hidden in the single bud, and the low ground nest of the lark may hold the joy that is to herald the feet of many rose-red dawns.  So perhaps whatever beauty of life still remains to me is contained in some moment of surrender, abasement, and humiliation.  I can, at any rate, merely proceed on the lines of my own development, and, accepting all that has happened to me, make myself worthy of it.
People used to say of me that I was too individualistic.  I must be far more of an individualist than ever I was.  I must get far more out of myself than ever I got, and ask far less of the world than ever I asked.  Indeed, my ruin came not from too great individualism of life, but from too little.  The one disgraceful, unpardonable, and to all time contemptible action of my life was to allow myself to appeal to society for help and protection.  To have made such an appeal would have been from the individualist point of view bad enough, but what excuse can there ever be put forward for having made it?  Of course once I had put into motion the forces of society, society turned on me and said, ‘Have you been living all this time in defiance of my laws, and do you now appeal to those laws for protection?  You shall have those laws exercised to the full.  You shall abide by what you have appealed to.’  The result is I am in gaol.  Certainly no man ever fell so ignobly, and by such ignoble instruments, as I did.
The Philistine element in life is not the failure to understand art.  Charming people, such as fishermen, shepherds, ploughboys, peasants and the like, know nothing about art, and are the very salt of the earth.  He is the Philistine who upholds and aids the heavy, cumbrous, blind, mechanical forces of society, and who does not recognise dynamic force when he meets it either in a man or a movement.
People thought it dreadful of me to have entertained at dinner the evil things of life, and to have found pleasure in their company.  But then, from the point of view through which I, as an artist in life, approach them they were delightfully suggestive and stimulating.  The danger was half the excitement. . . . My business as an artist was with Ariel.  I set myself to wrestle with Caliban. . . .
A great friend of mine—a friend of ten years’ standing—came to see me some time ago, and told me that he did not believe a single word of what was said against me, and wished me to know that he considered me quite innocent, and the victim of a hideous plot.  I burst into tears at what he said, and told him that while there was much amongst the definite charges that was quite untrue and transferred to me by revolting malice, still that my life had been full of perverse pleasures, and that unless he accepted that as a fact about me and realised it to the full I could not possibly be friends with him any more, or ever be in his company.  It was a terrible shock to him, but we are friends, and I have not got his friendship on false pretences.
Emotional forces, as I say somewhere in Intentions, are as limited in extent and duration as the forces of physical energy.  The little cup that is made to hold so much can hold so much and no more, though all the purple vats of Burgundy be filled with wine to the brim, and the treaders stand knee-deep in the gathered grapes of the stony vineyards of Spain.  There is no error more common than that of thinking that those who are the causes or occasions of great tragedies share in the feelings suitable to the tragic mood: no error more fatal than expecting it of them.  The martyr in his ‘shirt of flame’ may be looking on the face of God, but to him who is piling the faggots or loosening the logs for the blast the whole scene is no more than the slaying of an ox is to the butcher, or the felling of a tree to the charcoal burner in the forest, or the fall of a flower to one who is mowing down the grass with a scythe.  Great passions are for the great of soul, and great events can be seen only by those who are on a level with them.
* * * * *
I know of nothing in all drama more incomparable from the point of view of art, nothing more suggestive in its subtlety of observation, than Shakespeare’s drawing of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.  They are Hamlet’s college friends.  They have been his companions.  They bring with them memories of pleasant days together.  At the moment when they come across him in the play he is staggering under the weight of a burden intolerable to one of his temperament.  The dead have come armed out of the grave to impose on him a mission at once too great and too mean for him.  He is a dreamer, and he is called upon to act.  He has the nature of the poet, and he is asked to grapple with the common complexity of cause and effect, with life in its practical realisation, of which he knows nothing, not with life in its ideal essence, of which he knows so much.  He has no conception of what to do, and his folly is to feign folly.  Brutus used madness as a cloak to conceal the sword of his purpose, the dagger of his will, but the Hamlet madness is a mere mask for the hiding of weakness.  In the making of fancies and jests he sees a chance of delay.  He keeps playing with action as an artist plays with a theory.  He makes himself the spy of his proper actions, and listening to his own words knows them to be but ‘words, words, words.’  Instead of trying to be the hero of his own history, he seeks to be the spectator of his own tragedy.  He disbelieves in everything, including himself, and yet his doubt helps him not, as it comes not from scepticism but from a divided will.