De Profundis
suffering, tears even, the broken words that come from lips in pain,
remorse that makes one walk on thorns, conscience that condemns, self-
abasement that punishes, the misery that puts ashes on its head, the
anguish that chooses sack-cloth for its raiment and into its own drink
puts gall:--all these were things of which I was afraid. And as I had
determined to know nothing of them, I was forced to taste each of them in
turn, to feed on them, to have for a season, indeed, no other food at
all.
I don't regret for a single moment having lived for pleasure. I did it
to the full, as one should do everything that one does. There was no
pleasure I did not experience. I threw the pearl of my soul into a cup
of wine. I went down the primrose path to the sound of flutes. I lived
on honeycomb. But to have continued the same life would have been wrong
because it would have been limiting. I had to pass on. The other half
of the garden had its secrets for me also. Of course all this is
foreshadowed and prefigured in my books. Some of it is in _The Happy
Prince_, some of it in _The Young King_, notably in the passage where the
bishop says to the kneeling boy, 'Is not He who made misery wiser than
thou art'? a phrase which when I wrote it seemed to me little more than a
phrase; a great deal of it is hidden away in the note of doom that like a
purple thread runs through the texture of _Dorian Gray_; in _The Critic
as Artist_ it is set forth in many colours; in _The Soul of Man_ it is
written down, and in letters too easy to read; it is one of the refrains
whose recurring _motifs_ make _Salome_ so like a piece of music and bind
it together as a ballad; in the prose poem of the man who from the bronze
of the image of the 'Pleasure that liveth for a moment' has to make the
image of the 'Sorrow that abideth for ever' it is incarnate. It could
not have been otherwise. At every single moment of one's life one is
what one is going to be no less than what one has been. Art is a symbol,
because man is a symbol.
It is, if I can fully attain to it, the ultimate realisation of the
artistic life. For the artistic life is simply self-development.
Humility in the artist is his frank acceptance of all experiences, just
as love in the artist is simply the sense of beauty that reveals to the
world its body and its soul. In _Marius the Epicurean_ Pater seeks to
reconcile the artistic life with the life of religion, in the deep,
sweet, and austere sense of the word. But Marius is little more than a
spectator: an ideal spectator indeed, and one to whom it is given 'to
contemplate the spectacle of life with appropriate emotions,' which
Wordsworth defines as the poet's true aim; yet a spectator merely, and
perhaps a little too much occupied with the comeliness of the benches of
the sanctuary to notice that it is the sanctuary of sorrow that he is
gazing at.
I see a far more intimate and immediate connection between the true life
of Christ and the true life of the artist; and I take a keen pleasure in
the reflection that long before sorrow had made my days her own and bound
me to her wheel I had written in _The Soul of Man_ that he who would lead
a Christ-like life must be entirely and absolutely himself, and had taken
as my types not merely the shepherd on the hillside and the prisoner in
his cell, but also the painter to whom the world is a pageant and the
poet for whom the world is a song. I remember saying once to Andre Gide,
as we sat together in some Paris _cafe_, that while meta-physics had but
little real interest for me, and morality absolutely none, there was
nothing that either Plato or Christ had said that could not be
transferred immediately into the sphere of Art and there find its
complete fulfilment.
Nor is it merely that we can discern in Christ that close union of
personality with perfection which forms the real distinction between the
classical and romantic movement in life, but the very basis of his nature
was the same as that of the nature of the artist--an intense and
flamelike imagination. He realised in the entire sphere of human
relations that imaginative sympathy which in the sphere of Art is the
sole secret of creation. He understood the leprosy of the leper, the
darkness of the blind, the fierce misery of those who live for pleasure,
the strange poverty of the rich. Some one wrote to me in trouble, 'When
you are not on your pedestal you are not interesting.' How remote was
the writer from what Matthew Arnold calls 'the Secret of Jesus.' Either
would have taught him that whatever happens to another happens to
oneself, and if you want an inscription to read at dawn and at
night-time, and for pleasure or for pain, write up on the walls of your
house in letters for the sun to gild and the moon to silver, 'Whatever
happens to oneself happens to another.'
Christ's place indeed is with the poets. His whole conception of
Humanity sprang right out of the imagination and can only be realised by
it. What God was to the pantheist, man was to Him. He was the first to
conceive the divided races as a unity. Before his time there had been
gods and men, and, feeling through the mysticism of sympathy that in
himself each had been made incarnate, he calls himself the Son of the one
or the Son of the other, according to his mood. More than any one else
in history he wakes in us that temper of wonder to which romance always
appeals. There is still something to me almost incredible in the idea of
a young Galilean peasant imagining that he could bear on his own
shoulders the burden of the entire world; all that had already been done
and suffered, and all that was yet to be done and suffered: the sins of
Nero, of Caesar Borgia, of Alexander VI., and of him who was Emperor of
Rome and Priest of the Sun: the sufferings of those whose names are
legion and whose dwelling is among the tombs: oppressed nationalities,
factory children, thieves, people in prison, outcasts, those who are dumb
under oppression and whose silence is heard only of God; and not merely
imagining this but actually achieving it, so that at the present moment
all who come in contact with his personality, even though they may
neither bow to his altar nor kneel before his priest, in some way find
that the ugliness of their sin is taken away and the beauty of their
sorrow revealed to them.
I had said of Christ that he ranks with the poets. That is true. Shelley
and Sophocles are of his company. But his entire life also is the most
wonderful of poems. For 'pity and terror' there is nothing in the entire
cycle of Greek tragedy to touch it. The absolute purity of the
protagonist raises the entire scheme to a height of romantic art from
which the sufferings of Thebes and Pelops' line are by their very horror
excluded, and shows how wrong Aristotle was when he said in his treatise
on the drama that it would be impossible to bear the spectacle of one
blameless in pain. Nor in AEschylus nor Dante, those stern masters of
tenderness, in Shakespeare, the most purely human of all the great
artists, in the whole of Celtic myth and legend, where the loveliness of
the world is shown through a mist of tears, and the life of a man is no
more than the life of a flower, is there anything that, for sheer
simplicity of pathos wedded and made one with sublimity of tragic effect,
can be said to equal or even approach the last act of Christ's passion.
The little supper with his companions, one of whom has already sold him
for a price; the anguish in the quiet moon-lit garden; the false friend
coming close to him so as to betray him with a kiss; the friend who still
believed in him, and on whom as on a rock he had hoped to build a house
of refuge for Man, denying him as the bird cried to the dawn; his own
utter loneliness, his submission, his acceptance of everything; and along
with it all such scenes as the high priest of orthodoxy rending his
raiment in wrath, and the magistrate of civil justice calling for water
in the vain hope of cleansing himself of that stain of innocent blood
that makes him the scarlet figure of history; the coronation ceremony of
sorrow, one of the most wonderful things in the whole of recorded time;
the crucifixion of the Innocent One before the eyes of his mother and of
the disciple whom he loved; the soldiers gambling and throwing dice for
his clothes; the terrible death by which he gave the world its most
eternal symbol; and his final burial in the tomb of the rich man, his
body swathed in Egyptian linen with costly spices and perfumes as though
he had been a king's son. When one contemplates all this from the point
of view of art alone one cannot but be grateful that the supreme office
of the Church should be the playing of the tragedy without the shedding
of blood: the mystical presentation, by means of dialogue and costume and
gesture even, of the Passion of her Lord; and it is always a source of
pleasure and awe to me to remember that the ultimate survival of the
Greek chorus, lost elsewhere to art, is to be found in the servitor
answering the priest at Mass.
Yet the whole life of Christ--so entirely may sorrow and beauty be made
one in their meaning and manifestation--is really an idyll, though it
ends with the veil of the temple being rent, and the darkness coming over
the face of the earth, and the stone rolled to the door of the sepulchre.
One always thinks of him as a young bridegroom with his companions, as
indeed he somewhere describes himself; as a shepherd straying through a
valley with his sheep in search of green meadow or cool stream; as a
singer trying to build out of the music the walls of the City of God; or
as a lover for whose love the whole world was too small. His miracles
seem to me to be as exquisite as the coming of spring, and quite as
natural. I see no difficulty at all in believing that such was the charm
of his personality that his mere presence could bring peace to souls in
anguish, and that those who touched his garments or his hands forgot
their pain; or that as he passed by on the highway of life people who had
seen nothing of life's mystery, saw it clearly, and others who had been
deaf to every voice but that of pleasure heard for the first time the
voice of love and found it as 'musical as Apollo's lute'; or that evil
passions fled at his approach, and men whose dull unimaginative lives had
been but a mode of death rose as it were from the grave when he called
them; or that when he taught on the hillside the multitude forgot their
hunger and thirst and the cares of this world, and that to his friends
who listened to him as he sat at meat the coarse food seemed delicate,
and the water had the taste of good wine, and the whole house became full
of the odour and sweetness of nard.
Renan in his _Vie de Jesus_--that gracious fifth gospel, the gospel
according to St. Thomas, one might call it--says somewhere that Christ's
great achievement was that he made himself as much loved after his death
as he had been during his lifetime. And certainly, if his place is among
the poets, he is the leader of all the lovers. He saw that love was the
first secret of the world for which the wise men had been looking, and
that it was only through love that one could approach either the heart of
the leper or the feet of God.
And above all, Christ is the most supreme of individualists. Humility,
like the artistic, acceptance of all experiences, is merely a mode of
manifestation. It is man's soul that Christ is always looking for. He
calls it 'God's Kingdom,' and finds it in every one. He compares it to
little things, to a tiny seed, to a handful of leaven, to a pearl. That
is because one realises one's soul only by getting rid of all alien