De Profundis
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], that when he thought of
the lilies of the field and how they neither toil nor spin, his absolute
expression was [Greek text], 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]--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], '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