De Profundis
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Oscar Wilde >> De Profundis
But while Christ did not say to men, 'Live for others,' he pointed
out that there was no difference at all between the lives of others
and one's own life. By this means he gave to man an extended, a
Titan personality. Since his coming the history of each separate
individual is, or can be made, the history of the world. Of
course, culture has intensified the personality of man. Art has
made us myriad-minded. Those who have the artistic temperament go
into exile with Dante and learn how salt is the bread of others,
and how steep their stairs; they catch for a moment the serenity
and calm of Goethe, and yet know but too well that Baudelaire cried
to God -
'O Seigneur, donnez moi la force et le courage
De contempler mon corps et mon coeur sans degout.'
Out of Shakespeare's sonnets they draw, to their own hurt it may
be, the secret of his love and make it their own; they look with
new eyes on modern life, because they have listened to one of
Chopin's nocturnes, or handled Greek things, or read the story of
the passion of some dead man for some dead woman whose hair was
like threads of fine gold, and whose mouth was as a pomegranate.
But the sympathy of the artistic temperament is necessarily with
what has found expression. In words or in colours, in music or in
marble, behind the painted masks of an AEschylean play, or through
some Sicilian shepherds' pierced and jointed reeds, the man and his
message must have been revealed.
To the artist, expression is the only mode under which he can
conceive life at all. To him what is dumb is dead. But to Christ
it was not so. With a width and wonder of imagination that fills
one almost with awe, he took the entire world of the inarticulate,
the voiceless world of pain, as his kingdom, and made of himself
its eternal mouthpiece. Those of whom I have spoken, who are dumb
under oppression, and 'whose silence is heard only of God,' he
chose as his brothers. He sought to become eyes to the blind, ears
to the deaf, and a cry in the lips of those whose tongues had been
tied. His desire was to be to the myriads who had found no
utterance a very trumpet through which they might call to heaven.
And feeling, with the artistic nature of one to whom suffering and
sorrow were modes through which he could realise his conception of
the beautiful, that an idea is of no value till it becomes
incarnate and is made an image, he made of himself the image of the
Man of Sorrows, and as such has fascinated and dominated art as no
Greek god ever succeeded in doing.
For the Greek gods, in spite of the white and red of their fair
fleet limbs, were not really what they appeared to be. The curved
brow of Apollo was like the sun's disc crescent over a hill at
dawn, and his feet were as the wings of the morning, but he himself
had been cruel to Marsyas and had made Niobe childless. In the
steel shields of Athena's eyes there had been no pity for Arachne;
the pomp and peacocks of Hera were all that was really noble about
her; and the Father of the Gods himself had been too fond of the
daughters of men. The two most deeply suggestive figures of Greek
Mythology were, for religion, Demeter, an Earth Goddess, not one of
the Olympians, and for art, Dionysus, the son of a mortal woman to
whom the moment of his birth had proved also the moment of her
death.
But Life itself from its lowliest and most humble sphere produced
one far more marvellous than the mother of Proserpina or the son of
Semele. Out of the Carpenter's shop at Nazareth had come a
personality infinitely greater than any made by myth and legend,
and one, strangely enough, destined to reveal to the world the
mystical meaning of wine and the real beauties of the lilies of the
field as none, either on Cithaeron or at Enna, had ever done.
The song of Isaiah, 'He is despised and rejected of men, a man of
sorrows and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces
from him,' had seemed to him to prefigure himself, and in him the
prophecy was fulfilled. We must not be afraid of such a phrase.
Every single work of art is the fulfilment of a prophecy: for
every work of art is the conversion of an idea into an image.
Every single human being should be the fulfilment of a prophecy:
for every human being should be the realisation of some ideal,
either in the mind of God or in the mind of man. Christ found the
type and fixed it, and the dream of a Virgilian poet, either at
Jerusalem or at Babylon, became in the long progress of the
centuries incarnate in him for whom the world was waiting.
To me one of the things in history the most to be regretted is that
the Christ's own renaissance, which has produced the Cathedral at
Chartres, the Arthurian cycle of legends, the life of St. Francis
of Assisi, the art of Giotto, and Dante's DIVINE COMEDY, was not
allowed to develop on its own lines, but was interrupted and
spoiled by the dreary classical Renaissance that gave us Petrarch,
and Raphael's frescoes, and Palladian architecture, and formal
French tragedy, and St. Paul's Cathedral, and Pope's poetry, and
everything that is made from without and by dead rules, and does
not spring from within through some spirit informing it. But
wherever there is a romantic movement in art there somehow, and
under some form, is Christ, or the soul of Christ. He is in ROMEO
AND JULIET, in the WINTER'S TALE, in Provencal poetry, in the
ANCIENT MARINER, in LA BELLE DAME SANS MERCI, and in Chatterton's
BALLAD OF CHARITY.
We owe to him the most diverse things and people. Hugo's LES
MISERABLES, Baudelaire's FLEURS DU MAL, the note of pity in Russian
novels, Verlaine and Verlaine's poems, the stained glass and
tapestries and the quattro-cento work of Burne-Jones and Morris,
belong to him no less than the tower of Giotto, Lancelot and
Guinevere, Tannhauser, the troubled romantic marbles of Michael
Angelo, pointed architecture, and the love of children and flowers
- for both of which, indeed, in classical art there was but little
place, hardly enough for them to grow or play in, but which, from
the twelfth century down to our own day, have been continually
making their appearances in art, under various modes and at various
times, coming fitfully and wilfully, as children, as flowers, are
apt to do: spring always seeming to one as if the flowers had been
in hiding, and only came out into the sun because they were afraid
that grown up people would grow tired of looking for them and give
up the search; and the life of a child being no more than an April
day on which there is both rain and sun for the narcissus.
It is the imaginative quality of Christ's own nature that makes him
this palpitating centre of romance. The strange figures of poetic
drama and ballad are made by the imagination of others, but out of
his own imagination entirely did Jesus of Nazareth create himself.
The cry of Isaiah had really no more to do with his coming than the
song of the nightingale has to do with the rising of the moon - no
more, though perhaps no less. He was the denial as well as the
affirmation of prophecy. For every expectation that he fulfilled
there was another that he destroyed. 'In all beauty,' says Bacon,
'there is some strangeness of proportion,' and of those who are
born of the spirit - of those, that is to say, who like himself are
dynamic forces - Christ says that they are like the wind that
'bloweth where it listeth, and no man can tell whence it cometh and
whither it goeth.' That is why he is so fascinating to artists.
He has all the colour elements of life: mystery, strangeness,
pathos, suggestion, ecstasy, love. He appeals to the temper of
wonder, and creates that mood in which alone he can be understood.
And to me it is a joy to remember that if he is 'of imagination all
compact,' the world itself is of the same substance. I said in
DORIAN GRAY that the great sins of the world take place in the
brain: but it is in the brain that everything takes place. We
know now that we do not see with the eyes or hear with the ears.
They are really channels for the transmission, adequate or
inadequate, of sense impressions. It is in the brain that the
poppy is red, that the apple is odorous, that the skylark sings.
Of late I have been studying with diligence the four prose poems
about Christ. At Christmas I managed to get hold of a Greek
Testament, and every morning, after I had cleaned my cell and
polished my tins, I read a little of the Gospels, a dozen verses
taken by chance anywhere. It is a delightful way of opening the
day. Every one, even in a turbulent, ill-disciplined life, should
do the same. Endless repetition, in and out of season, has spoiled
for us the freshness, the naivete, the simple romantic charm of the
Gospels. We hear them read far too often and far too badly, and
all repetition is anti-spiritual. When one returns to the Greek;
it is like going into a garden of lilies out of some, narrow and
dark house.
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 [Greek text which cannot be
reproduced], that when he thought of the lilies of the field and
how they neither toil nor spin, his absolute expression was [Greek
text which cannot be reproduced], 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:
[Greek text which cannot be reproduced] - 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 - ([Greek text which cannot be
reproduced], '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.