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+**The Project Gutenberg Etext of De Profundis, by Oscar Wilde**
+#13 in our series by Oscar Wilde
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+De Profundis
+
+by Oscar Wilde 
+
+May, 1997  [Etext #921]
+
+
+**The Project Gutenberg Etext of De Profundis, by Oscar Wilde**
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+De Profundis by Oscar Wilde 
+Scanned and proofed by David Price, ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
+
+
+
+
+
+De Profundis
+
+
+
+
+. . . Suffering is one very long moment.  We cannot divide it by 
+seasons.  We can only record its moods, and chronicle their return.  
+With us time itself does not progress.  It revolves.  It seems to 
+circle round one centre of pain.  The paralysing immobility of a 
+life every circumstance of which is regulated after an unchangeable 
+pattern, so that we eat and drink and lie down and pray, or kneel 
+at least for prayer, according to the inflexible laws of an iron 
+formula:  this immobile quality, that makes each dreadful day in 
+the very minutest detail like its brother, seems to communicate 
+itself to those external forces the very essence of whose existence 
+is ceaseless change.  Of seed-time or harvest, of the reapers 
+bending over the corn, or the grape gatherers threading through the 
+vines, of the grass in the orchard made white with broken blossoms 
+or strewn with fallen fruit:  of these we know nothing and can know 
+nothing.
+
+For us there is only one season, the season of sorrow.  The very 
+sun and moon seem taken from us.  Outside, the day may be blue and 
+gold, but the light that creeps down through the thickly-muffled 
+glass of the small iron-barred window beneath which one sits is 
+grey and niggard.  It is always twilight in one's cell, as it is 
+always twilight in one's heart.  And in the sphere of thought, no 
+less than in the sphere of time, motion is no more.  The thing that 
+you personally have long ago forgotten, or can easily forget, is 
+happening to me now, and will happen to me again to-morrow.  
+Remember this, and you will be able to understand a little of why I 
+am writing, and in this manner writing. . . .
+
+A week later, I am transferred here.  Three more months go over and 
+my mother dies.  No one knew how deeply I loved and honoured her.  
+Her death was terrible to me; but I, once a lord of language, have 
+no words in which to express my anguish and my shame.  She and my 
+father had bequeathed me a name they had made noble and honoured, 
+not merely in literature, art, archaeology, and science, but in the 
+public history of my own country, in its evolution as a nation.  I 
+had disgraced that name eternally.  I had made it a low by-word 
+among low people.  I had dragged it through the very mire.  I had 
+given it to brutes that they might make it brutal, and to fools 
+that they might turn it into a synonym for folly.  What I suffered 
+then, and still suffer, is not for pen to write or paper to record.  
+My wife, always kind and gentle to me, rather than that I should 
+hear the news from indifferent lips, travelled, ill as she was, all 
+the way from Genoa to England to break to me herself the tidings of 
+so irreparable, so irremediable, a loss.  Messages of sympathy 
+reached me from all who had still affection for me.  Even people 
+who had not known me personally, hearing that a new sorrow had 
+broken into my life, wrote to ask that some expression of their 
+condolence should be conveyed to me. . . .
+
+Three months go over.  The calendar of my daily conduct and labour 
+that hangs on the outside of my cell door, with my name and 
+sentence written upon it, tells me that it is May. . . .
+
+Prosperity, pleasure and success, may be rough of grain and common 
+in fibre, but sorrow is the most sensitive of all created things.  
+There is nothing that stirs in the whole world of thought to which 
+sorrow does not vibrate in terrible and exquisite pulsation.  The 
+thin beaten-out leaf of tremulous gold that chronicles the 
+direction of forces the eye cannot see is in comparison coarse.  It 
+is a wound that bleeds when any hand but that of love touches it, 
+and even then must bleed again, though not in pain.
+
+Where there is sorrow there in holy ground.  Some day people will 
+realise what that means.  They will know nothing of life till they 
+do, - and natures like his can realise it.  When I was brought down 
+from my prison to the Court of Bankruptcy, between two policemen, - 
+waited in the long dreary corridor that, before the whole crowd, 
+whom an action so sweet and simple hushed into silence, he might 
+gravely raise his hat to me, as, handcuffed and with bowed head, I 
+passed him by.  Men have gone to heaven for smaller things than 
+that.  It was in this spirit, and with this mode of love, that the 
+saints knelt down to wash the feet of the poor, or stooped to kiss 
+the leper on the cheek.  I have never said one single word to him 
+about what he did.  I do not know to the present moment whether he 
+is aware that I was even conscious of his action.  It is not a 
+thing for which one can render formal thanks in formal words.  I 
+store it in the treasure-house of my heart.  I keep it there as a 
+secret debt that I am glad to think I can never possibly repay.  It 
+is embalmed and kept sweet by the myrrh and cassia of many tears.  
+When wisdom has been profitless to me, philosophy barren, and the 
+proverbs and phrases of those who have sought to give me 
+consolation as dust and ashes in my mouth, the memory of that 
+little, lovely, silent act of love has unsealed for me all the 
+wells of pity:  made the desert blossom like a rose, and brought me 
+out of the bitterness of lonely exile into harmony with the 
+wounded, broken, and great heart of the world.  When people are 
+able to understand, not merely how beautiful -'s action was, but 
+why it meant so much to me, and always will mean so much, then, 
+perhaps, they will realise how and in what spirit they should 
+approach me. . . .
+
+The poor are wise, more charitable, more kind, more sensitive than 
+we are.  In their eyes prison is a tragedy in a man's life, a 
+misfortune, a casuality, something that calls for sympathy in 
+others.  They speak of one who is in prison as of one who is 'in 
+trouble' simply.  It is the phrase they always use, and the 
+expression has the perfect wisdom of love in it.  With people of 
+our own rank it is different.  With us, prison makes a man a 
+pariah.  I, and such as I am, have hardly any right to air and sun.  
+Our presence taints the pleasures of others.  We are unwelcome when 
+we reappear.  To revisit the glimpses of the moon is not for us.  
+Our very children are taken away.  Those lovely links with humanity 
+are broken.  We are doomed to be solitary, while our sons still 
+live.  We are denied the one thing that might heal us and keep us, 
+that might bring balm to the bruised heart, and peace to the soul 
+in pain. . . .
+
+I must say to myself that I ruined myself, and that nobody great or 
+small can be ruined except by his own hand.  I am quite ready to 
+say so.  I am trying to say so, though they may not think it at the 
+present moment.  This pitiless indictment I bring without pity 
+against myself.  Terrible as was what the world did to me, what I 
+did to myself was far more terrible still.
+
+I was a man who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture 
+of my age.  I had realised this for myself at the very dawn of my 
+manhood, and had forced my age to realise it afterwards.  Few men 
+hold such a position in their own lifetime, and have it so 
+acknowledged.  It is usually discerned, if discerned at all, by the 
+historian, or the critic, long after both the man and his age have 
+passed away.  With me it was different.  I felt it myself, and made 
+others feel it.  Byron was a symbolic figure, but his relations 
+were to the passion of his age and its weariness of passion.  Mine 
+were to something more noble, more permanent, of more vital issue, 
+of larger scope.
+
+The gods had given me almost everything.  But I let myself be lured 
+into long spells of senseless and sensual ease.  I amused myself 
+with being a FLANEUR, a dandy, a man of fashion.  I surrounded 
+myself with the smaller natures and the meaner minds.  I became the 
+spendthrift of my own genius, and to waste an eternal youth gave me 
+a curious joy.  Tired of being on the heights, I deliberately went 
+to the depths in the search for new sensation.  What the paradox 
+was to me in the sphere of thought, perversity became to me in the 
+sphere of passion.  Desire, at the end, was a malady, or a madness, 
+or both.  I grew careless of the lives of others.  I took pleasure 
+where it pleased me, and passed on.  I forgot that every little 
+action of the common day makes or unmakes character, and that 
+therefore what one has done in the secret chamber one has some day 
+to cry aloud on the housetop.  I ceased to be lord over myself.  I 
+was no longer the captain of my soul, and did not know it.  I 
+allowed pleasure to dominate me.  I ended in horrible disgrace.  
+There is only one thing for me now, absolute humility.
+
+I have lain in prison for nearly two years.  Out of my nature has 
+come wild despair; an abandonment to grief that was piteous even to 
+look at; terrible and impotent rage; bitterness and scorn; anguish 
+that wept aloud; misery that could find no voice; sorrow that was 
+dumb.  I have passed through every possible mood of suffering.  
+Better than Wordsworth himself I know what Wordsworth meant when he 
+said -
+
+
+'Suffering is permanent, obscure, and dark
+And has the nature of infinity.'
+
+
+But while there were times when I rejoiced in the idea that my 
+sufferings were to be endless, I could not bear them to be without 
+meaning.  Now I find hidden somewhere away in my nature something 
+that tells me that nothing in the whole world is meaningless, and 
+suffering least of all.  That something hidden away in my nature, 
+like a treasure in a field, is Humility.
+
+It is the last thing left in me, and the best:  the ultimate 
+discovery at which I have arrived, the starting-point for a fresh 
+development.  It has come to me right out of myself, so I know that 
+it has come at the proper time.  It could not have come before, nor 
+later.  Had any one told me of it, I would have rejected it.  Had 
+it been brought to me, I would have refused it.  As I found it, I 
+want to keep it.  I must do so.  It is the one thing that has in it 
+the elements of life, of a new life, VITA NUOVA for me.  Of all 
+things it is the strangest.  One cannot acquire it, except by 
+surrendering everything that one has.  It is only when one has lost 
+all things, that one knows that one possesses it.
+
+Now I have realised that it is in me, I see quite clearly what I 
+ought to do; in fact, must do.  And when I use such a phrase as 
+that, I need not say that I am not alluding to any external 
+sanction or command.  I admit none.  I am far more of an 
+individualist than I ever was.  Nothing seems to me of the smallest 
+value except what one gets out of oneself.  My nature is seeking a 
+fresh mode of self-realisation.  That is all I am concerned with.  
+And the first thing that I have got to do is to free myself from 
+any possible bitterness of feeling against the world.
+
+I am completely penniless, and absolutely homeless.  Yet there are 
+worse things in the world than that.  I am quite candid when I say 
+that rather than go out from this prison with bitterness in my 
+heart against the world, I would gladly and readily beg my bread 
+from door to door.  If I got nothing from the house of the rich I 
+would get something at the house of the poor.  Those who have much 
+are often greedy; those who have little always share.  I would not 
+a bit mind sleeping in the cool grass in summer, and when winter 
+came on sheltering myself by the warm close-thatched rick, or under 
+the penthouse of a great barn, provided I had love in my heart.  
+The external things of life seem to me now of no importance at all.  
+You can see to what intensity of individualism I have arrived - or 
+am arriving rather, for the journey is long, and 'where I walk 
+there are thorns.'
+
+Of course I know that to ask alms on the highway is not to be my 
+lot, and that if ever I lie in the cool grass at night-time it will 
+be to write sonnets to the moon.  When I go out of prison, R- will 
+be waiting for me on the other side of the big iron-studded gate, 
+and he is the symbol, not merely of his own affection, but of the 
+affection of many others besides.  I believe I am to have enough to 
+live on for about eighteen months at any rate, so that if I may not 
+write beautiful books, I may at least read beautiful books; and 
+what joy can be greater?  After that, I hope to be able to recreate 
+my creative faculty.
+
+But were things different:  had I not a friend left in the world; 
+were there not a single house open to me in pity; had I to accept 
+the wallet and ragged cloak of sheer penury:  as long as I am free 
+from all resentment, hardness and scorn, I would be able to face 
+the life with much more calm and confidence than I would were my 
+body in purple and fine linen, and the soul within me sick with 
+hate.
+
+And I really shall have no difficulty.  When you really want love 
+you will find it waiting for you.
+
+I need not say that my task does not end there.  It would be 
+comparatively easy if it did.  There is much more before me.  I 
+have hills far steeper to climb, valleys much darker to pass 
+through.  And I have to get it all out of myself.  Neither 
+religion, morality, nor reason can help me at all.
+
+Morality does not help me.  I am a born antinomian.  I am one of 
+those who are made for exceptions, not for laws.  But while I see 
+that there is nothing wrong in what one does, I see that there is 
+something wrong in what one becomes.  It is well to have learned 
+that.
+
+Religion does not help me.  The faith that others give to what is 
+unseen, I give to what one can touch, and look at.  My gods dwell 
+in temples made with hands; and within the circle of actual 
+experience is my creed made perfect and complete:  too complete, it 
+may be, for like many or all of those who have placed their heaven 
+in this earth, I have found in it not merely the beauty of heaven, 
+but the horror of hell also.  When I think about religion at all, I 
+feel as if I would like to found an order for those who CANNOT 
+believe:  the Confraternity of the Faithless, one might call it, 
+where on an altar, on which no taper burned, a priest, in whose 
+heart peace had no dwelling, might celebrate with unblessed bread 
+and a chalice empty of wine.  Every thing to be true must become a 
+religion.  And agnosticism should have its ritual no less than 
+faith.  It has sown its martyrs, it should reap its saints, and 
+praise God daily for having hidden Himself from man.  But whether 
+it be faith or agnosticism, it must be nothing external to me.  Its 
+symbols must be of my own creating.  Only that is spiritual which 
+makes its own form.  If I may not find its secret within myself, I 
+shall never find it:  if I have not got it already, it will never 
+come to me.
+
+Reason does not help me.  It tells me that the laws under which I 
+am convicted are wrong and unjust laws, and the system under which 
+I have suffered a wrong and unjust system.  But, somehow, I have 
+got to make both of these things just and right to me.  And exactly 
+as in Art one is only concerned with what a particular thing is at 
+a particular moment to oneself, so it is also in the ethical 
+evolution of one's character.  I have got to make everything that 
+has happened to me good for me.  The plank bed, the loathsome food, 
+the hard ropes shredded into oakum till one's finger-tips grow dull 
+with pain, the menial offices with which each day begins and 
+finishes, the harsh orders that routine seems to necessitate, the 
+dreadful dress that makes sorrow grotesque to look at, the silence, 
+the solitude, the shame - each and all of these things I have to 
+transform into a spiritual experience.  There is not a single 
+degradation of the body which I must not try and make into a 
+spiritualising of the soul.
+
+I want to get to the point when I shall be able to say quite 
+simply, and without affectation that the two great turning-points 
+in my life were when my father sent me to Oxford, and when society 
+sent me to prison.  I will not say that prison is the best thing 
+that could have happened to me:  for that phrase would savour of 
+too great bitterness towards myself.  I would sooner say, or hear 
+it said of me, that I was so typical a child of my age, that in my 
+perversity, and for that perversity's sake, I turned the good 
+things of my life to evil, and the evil things of my life to good.
+
+What is said, however, by myself or by others, matters little.  The 
+important thing, the thing that lies before me, the thing that I 
+have to do, if the brief remainder of my days is not to be maimed, 
+marred, and incomplete, is to absorb into my nature all that has 
+been done to me, to make it part of me, to accept it without 
+complaint, fear, or reluctance.  The supreme vice is shallowness.  
+Whatever is realised is right.
+
+When first I was put into prison some people advised me to try and 
+forget who I was.  It was ruinous advice.  It is only by realising 
+what I am that I have found comfort of any kind.  Now I am advised 
+by others to try on my release to forget that I have ever been in a 
+prison at all.  I know that would be equally fatal.  It would mean 
+that I would always be haunted by an intolerable sense of disgrace, 
+and that those things that are meant for me as much as for anybody 
+else - the beauty of the sun and moon, the pageant of the seasons, 
+the music of daybreak and the silence of great nights, the rain 
+falling through the leaves, or the dew creeping over the grass and 
+making it silver - would all be tainted for me, and lose their 
+healing power, and their power of communicating joy.  To regret 
+one's own experiences is to arrest one's own development.  To deny 
+one's own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one's own 
+life.  It is no less than a denial of the soul.
+
+For just as the body absorbs things of all kinds, things common and 
+unclean no less than those that the priest or a vision has 
+cleansed, and converts them into swiftness or strength, into the 
+play of beautiful muscles and the moulding of fair flesh, into the 
+curves and colours of the hair, the lips, the eye; so the soul in 
+its turn has its nutritive functions also, and can transform into 
+noble moods of thought and passions of high import what in itself 
+is base, cruel and degrading; nay, more, may find in these its most 
+august modes of assertion, and can often reveal itself most 
+perfectly through what was intended to desecrate or destroy.
+
+The fact of my having been the common prisoner of a common gaol I 
+must frankly accept, and, curious as it may seem, one of the things 
+I shall have to teach myself is not to be ashamed of it.  I must 
+accept it as a punishment, and if one is ashamed of having been 
+punished, one might just as well never have been punished at all.  
+Of course there are many things of which I was convicted that I had 
+not done, but then there are many things of which I was convicted 
+that I had done, and a still greater number of things in my life 
+for which I was never indicted at all.  And as the gods are 
+strange, and punish us for what is good and humane in us as much as 
+for what is evil and perverse, I must accept the fact that one is 
+punished for the good as well as for the evil that one does.  I 
+have no doubt that it is quite right one should be.  It helps one, 
+or should help one, to realise both, and not to be too conceited 
+about either.  And if I then am not ashamed of my punishment, as I 
+hope not to be, I shall be able to think, and walk, and live with 
+freedom.
+
+Many men on their release carry their prison about with them into 
+the air, and hide it as a secret disgrace in their hearts, and at 
+length, like poor poisoned things, creep into some hole and die.  
+It is wretched that they should have to do so, and it is wrong, 
+terribly wrong, of society that it should force them to do so.  
+Society takes upon itself the right to inflict appalling punishment 
+on the individual, but it also has the supreme vice of shallowness, 
+and fails to realise what it has done.  When the man's punishment 
+is over, it leaves him to himself; that is to say, it abandons him 
+at the very moment when its highest duty towards him begins.  It is 
+really ashamed of its own actions, and shuns those whom it has 
+punished, as people shun a creditor whose debt they cannot pay, or 
+one on whom they have inflicted an irreparable, an irremediable 
+wrong.  I can claim on my side that if I realise what I have 
+suffered, society should realise what it has inflicted on me; and 
+that there should be no bitterness or hate on either side.
+
+Of course I know that from one point of view things will be made 
+different for me than for others; must indeed, by the very nature 
+of the case, be made so.  The poor thieves and outcasts who are 
+imprisoned here with me are in many respects more fortunate than I 
+am.  The little way in grey city or green field that saw their sin 
+is small; to find those who know nothing of what they have done 
+they need go no further than a bird might fly between the twilight 
+and the dawn; but for me the world is shrivelled to a handsbreadth, 
+and everywhere I turn my name is written on the rocks in lead.  For 
+I have come, not from obscurity into the momentary notoriety of 
+crime, but from a sort of eternity of fame to a sort of eternity of 
+infamy, and sometimes seem to myself to have shown, if indeed it 
+required showing, that between the famous and the infamous there is 
+but one step, if as much as one.
+
+Still, in the very fact that people will recognise me wherever I 
+go, and know all about my life, as far as its follies go, I can 
+discern something good for me.  It will force on me the necessity 
+of again asserting myself as an artist, and as soon as I possibly 
+can.  If I can produce only one beautiful work of art I shall be 
+able to rob malice of its venom, and cowardice of its sneer, and to 
+pluck out the tongue of scorn by the roots.
+
+And if life be, as it surely is, a problem to me, I am no less a 
+problem to life.  People must adopt some attitude towards me, and 
+so pass judgment, both on themselves and me.  I need not say I am 
+not talking of particular individuals.  The only people I would 
+care to be with now are artists and people who have suffered:  
+those who know what beauty is, and those who know what sorrow is:  
+nobody else interests me.  Nor am I making any demands on life.  In 
+all that I have said I am simply concerned with my own mental 
+attitude towards life as a whole; and I feel that not to be ashamed 
+of having been punished is one of the first points I must attain 
+to, for the sake of my own perfection, and because I am so 
+imperfect.
+
+Then I must learn how to be happy.  Once I knew it, or thought I 
+knew it, by instinct.  It was always springtime once in my heart.  
+My temperament was akin to joy.  I filled my life to the very brim 
+with pleasure, as one might fill a cup to the very brim with wine.  
+Now I am approaching life from a completely new standpoint, and 
+even to conceive happiness is often extremely difficult for me.  I 
+remember during my first term at Oxford reading in Pater's 
+RENAISSANCE - that book which has had such strange influence over 
+my life - how Dante places low in the Inferno those who wilfully 
+live in sadness; and going to the college library and turning to 
+the passage in the DIVINE COMEDY where beneath the dreary marsh lie 
+those who were 'sullen in the sweet air,' saying for ever and ever 
+through their sighs -
+
+
+'Tristi fummo
+Nell aer dolce che dal sol s'allegra.'
+
+
+I knew the church condemned ACCIDIA, but the whole idea seemed to 
+me quite fantastic, just the sort of sin, I fancied, a priest who 
+knew nothing about real life would invent.  Nor could I understand 
+how Dante, who says that 'sorrow remarries us to God,' could have 
+been so harsh to those who were enamoured of melancholy, if any 
+such there really were.  I had no idea that some day this would 
+become to me one of the greatest temptations of my life.
+
+While I was in Wandsworth prison I longed to die.  It was my one 
+desire.  When after two months in the infirmary I was transferred 
+here, and found myself growing gradually better in physical health, 
+I was filled with rage.  I determined to commit suicide on the very 
+day on which I left prison.  After a time that evil mood passed 
+away, and I made up my mind to live, but to wear gloom as a king 
+wears purple:  never to smile again:  to turn whatever house I 
+entered into a house of mourning:  to make my friends walk slowly 
+in sadness with me:  to teach them that melancholy is the true 
+secret of life:  to maim them with an alien sorrow:  to mar them 
+with my own pain.  Now I feel quite differently.  I see it would be 
+both ungrateful and unkind of me to pull so long a face that when 
+my friends came to see me they would have to make their faces still 
+longer in order to show their sympathy; or, if I desired to 
+entertain them, to invite them to sit down silently to bitter herbs 
+and funeral baked meats.  I must learn how to be cheerful and 
+happy.
+
+The last two occasions on which I was allowed to see my friends 
+here, I tried to be as cheerful as possible, and to show my 
+cheerfulness, in order to make them some slight return for their 
+trouble in coming all the way from town to see me.  It is only a 
+slight return, I know, but it is the one, I feel certain, that 
+pleases them most.  I saw R- for an hour on Saturday week, and I 
+tried to give the fullest possible expression of the delight I 
+really felt at our meeting.  And that, in the views and ideas I am 
+here shaping for myself, I am quite right is shown to me by the 
+fact that now for the first time since my imprisonment I have a 
+real desire for life.
+
+There is before me so much to do, that I would regard it as a 
+terrible tragedy if I died before I was allowed to complete at any 
+rate a little of it.  I see new developments in art and life, each 
+one of which is a fresh mode of perfection.  I long to live so that 
+I can explore what is no less than a new world to me.  Do you want 
+to know what this new world is?  I think you can guess what it is.  
+It is the world in which I have been living.  Sorrow, then, and all 
+that it teaches one, is my new world.
+
+I used to live entirely for pleasure.  I shunned suffering and 
+sorrow of every kind.  I hated both.  I resolved to ignore them as 
+far as possible:  to treat them, that is to say, as modes of 
+imperfection.  They were not part of my scheme of life.  They had 
+no place in my philosophy.  My mother, who knew life as a whole, 
+used often to quote to me Goethe's lines - written by Carlyle in a 
+book he had given her years ago, and translated by him, I fancy, 
+also:-
+
+
+'Who never ate his bread in sorrow,
+Who never spent the midnight hours
+Weeping and waiting for the morrow, -
+He knows you not, ye heavenly powers.'
+
+
+They were the lines which that noble Queen of Prussia, whom 
+Napoleon treated with such coarse brutality, used to quote in her 
+humiliation and exile; they were the lines my mother often quoted 
+in the troubles of her later life.  I absolutely declined to accept 
+or admit the enormous truth hidden in them.  I could not understand 
+it.  I remember quite well how I used to tell her that I did not 
+want to eat my bread in sorrow, or to pass any night weeping and 
+watching for a more bitter dawn.
+
+I had no idea that it was one of the special things that the Fates 
+had in store for me:  that for a whole year of my life, indeed, I 
+was to do little else.  But so has my portion been meted out to me; 
+and during the last few months I have, after terrible difficulties 
+and struggles, been able to comprehend some of the lessons hidden 
+in the heart of pain.  Clergymen and people who use phrases without 
+wisdom sometimes talk of suffering as a mystery.  It is really a 
+revelation.  One discerns things one never discerned before.  One 
+approaches the whole of history from a different standpoint.  What 
+one had felt dimly, through instinct, about art, is intellectually 
+and emotionally realised with perfect clearness of vision and 
+absolute intensity of apprehension.
+
+I now see that sorrow, being the supreme emotion of which man is 
+capable, is at once the type and test of all great art.  What the 
+artist is always looking for is the mode of existence in which soul 
+and body are one and indivisible:  in which the outward is 
+expressive of the inward:  in which form reveals.  Of such modes of 
+existence there are not a few:  youth and the arts preoccupied with 
+youth may serve as a model for us at one moment:  at another we may 
+like to think that, in its subtlety and sensitiveness of 
+impression, its suggestion of a spirit dwelling in external things 
+and making its raiment of earth and air, of mist and city alike, 
+and in its morbid sympathy of its moods, and tones, and colours, 
+modern landscape art is realising for us pictorially what was 
+realised in such plastic perfection by the Greeks.  Music, in which 
+all subject is absorbed in expression and cannot be separated from 
+it, is a complex example, and a flower or a child a simple example, 
+of what I mean; but sorrow is the ultimate type both in life and 
+art.
+
+Behind joy and laughter there may be a temperament, coarse, hard 
+and callous.  But behind sorrow there is always sorrow.  Pain, 
+unlike pleasure, wears no mask.  Truth in art is not any 
+correspondence between the essential idea and the accidental 
+existence; it is not the resemblance of shape to shadow, or of the 
+form mirrored in the crystal to the form itself; it 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 outward rendered expressive of the inward:  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 cloy the other, 
+but out of sorrow have the worlds been built, and at the birth of a 
+child or a star there is pain.
+
+More than this, there is about sorrow an intense, an extraordinary 
+reality.  I have said of myself that I was one who stood in 
+symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age.  There is not 
+a single wretched man in this wretched place along with me who does 
+not stand in symbolic relation to the very secret of life.  For the 
+secret of life is suffering.  It is what is hidden behind 
+everything.  When we begin to live, what is sweet is so sweet to 
+us, and what is bitter so bitter, that we inevitably direct all our 
+desires towards pleasures, and seek not merely for a 'month or 
+twain to feed on honeycomb,' but for all our years to taste no 
+other food, ignorant all the while that we may really be starving 
+the soul.
+
+I remember talking once on this subject to one of the most 
+beautiful personalities I have ever known:  a woman, whose sympathy 
+and noble kindness to me, both before and since the tragedy of my 
+imprisonment, have been beyond power and description; one who has 
+really assisted me, though she does not know it, to bear the burden 
+of my troubles more than any one else in the whole world has, and 
+all through the mere fact of her existence, through her being what 
+she is - partly an ideal and partly an influence:  a suggestion of 
+what one might become as well as a real help towards becoming it; a 
+soul that renders the common air sweet, and makes what is spiritual 
+seem as simple and natural as sunlight or the sea:  one for whom 
+beauty and sorrow walk hand in hand, and have the same message.  On 
+the occasion of which I am thinking I recall distinctly how I said 
+to her that there was enough suffering in one narrow London lane to 
+show that God did not love man, and that wherever there was any 
+sorrow, though but that of a child, in some little garden weeping 
+over a fault that it had or had not committed, the whole face of 
+creation was completely marred.  I was entirely wrong.  She told me 
+so, but I could not believe her.  I was not in the sphere in which 
+such belief was to be attained to.  Now it seems to me that love of 
+some kind is the only possible explanation of the extraordinary 
+amount of suffering that there is in the world.  I cannot conceive 
+of any other explanation.  I am convinced that there is no other, 
+and that if the world has indeed, as I have said, been built of 
+sorrow, it has been built by the hands of love, because in no other 
+way could the soul of man, for whom the world was made, reach the 
+full stature of its perfection.  Pleasure for the beautiful body, 
+but pain for the beautiful soul.
+
+When I say that I am convinced of these things I speak with too 
+much pride.  Far off, like a perfect pearl, one can see the city of 
+God.  It is so wonderful that it seems as if a child could reach it 
+in a summer's day.  And so a child could.  But with me and such as 
+me it is different.  One can realise a thing in a single moment, 
+but one loses it in the long hours that follow with leaden feet.  
+It is so difficult to keep 'heights that the soul is competent to 
+gain.'  We think in eternity, but we move slowly through time; and 
+how slowly time goes with us who lie in prison I need not tell 
+again, nor of the weariness and despair that creep back into one's 
+cell, and into the cell of one's heart, with such strange 
+insistence that one has, as it were, to garnish and sweep one's 
+house for their coming, as for an unwelcome guest, or a bitter 
+master, or a slave whose slave it is one's chance or choice to be.
+
+And, though at present my friends may find it a hard thing to 
+believe, it is true none the less, that for them living in freedom 
+and idleness and comfort it is more easy to learn the lessons of 
+humility than it is for me, who begin the day by going down on my 
+knees and washing the floor of my cell.  For prison life with its 
+endless privations and restrictions makes one rebellious.  The most 
+terrible thing about it is not that it breaks one's heart - hearts 
+are made to be broken - but that it turns one's heart to stone.  
+One sometimes feels that it is only with a front of brass and a lip 
+of scorn that one can get through the day at all.  And he who is in 
+a state of rebellion cannot receive grace, to use the phrase of 
+which the Church is so fond - so rightly fond, I dare say - for in 
+life as in art the mood of rebellion closes up the channels of the 
+soul, and shuts out the airs of heaven.  Yet I must learn these 
+lessons here, if I am to learn them anywhere, and must be filled 
+with joy if my feet are on the right road and my face set towards 
+'the gate which is called beautiful,' though I may fall many times 
+in the mire and often in the mist go astray.
+
+This New Life, as through my love of Dante I like sometimes to call 
+it, is of course no new life at all, but simply the continuance, by 
+means of development, and evolution, of my former life.  I remember 
+when I was at Oxford saying to one of my friends as we were 
+strolling round Magdalen's narrow bird-haunted walks one morning in 
+the year before I took my degree, that I wanted to eat of the fruit 
+of all the trees in the garden of the world, and that I was going 
+out into the world with that passion in my soul.  And so, indeed, I 
+went out, and so I lived.  My only mistake was that I confined 
+myself so exclusively to the trees of what seemed to me the sun-lit 
+side of the garden, and shunned the other side for its shadow and 
+its gloom.  Failure, disgrace, poverty, sorrow, despair, 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 passions, all acquired 
+culture, and all external possessions, be they good or evil.
+
+I bore up against everything with some stubbornness of will and 
+much rebellion of nature, till I had absolutely nothing left in the 
+world but one thing.  I had lost my name, my position, my 
+happiness, my freedom, my wealth.  I was a prisoner and a pauper.  
+But I still had my children left.  Suddenly they were taken away 
+from me by the law.  It was a blow so appalling that I did not know 
+what to do, so I flung myself on my knees, and bowed my head, and 
+wept, and said, 'The body of a child is as the body of the Lord:  I 
+am not worthy of either.'  That moment seemed to save me.  I saw 
+then that the only thing for me was to accept everything.  Since 
+then - curious as it will no doubt sound - I have been happier.  It 
+was of course my soul in its ultimate essence that I had reached.  
+In many ways I had been its enemy, but I found it waiting for me as 
+a friend.  When one comes in contact with the soul it makes one 
+simple as a child, as Christ said one should be.
+
+It is tragic how few people ever 'possess their souls' before they 
+die.  'Nothing is more rare in any man,' says Emerson, 'than an act 
+of his own.'  It is quite true.  Most people are other people.  
+Their thoughts are some one else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, 
+their passions a quotation.  Christ was not merely the supreme 
+individualist, but he was the first individualist in history.  
+People have tried to make him out an ordinary philanthropist, or 
+ranked him as an altruist with the scientific and sentimental.  But 
+he was really neither one nor the other.  Pity he has, of course, 
+for the poor, for those who are shut up in prisons, for the lowly, 
+for the wretched; but he has far more pity for the rich, for the 
+hard hedonists, for those who waste their freedom in becoming 
+slaves to things, for those who wear soft raiment and live in 
+kings' houses.  Riches and pleasure seemed to him to be really 
+greater tragedies than poverty or sorrow.  And as for altruism, who 
+knew better than he that it is vocation not volition that 
+determines us, and that one cannot gather grapes of thorns or figs 
+from thistles?
+
+To live for others as a definite self-conscious aim was not his 
+creed.  It was not the basis of his creed.  When he says, 'Forgive 
+your enemies,' it is not for the sake of the enemy, but for one's 
+own sake that he says so, and because love is more beautiful than 
+hate.  In his own entreaty to the young man, 'Sell all that thou 
+hast and give to the poor,' it is not of the state of the poor that 
+he is thinking but of the soul of the young man, the soul that 
+wealth was marring.  In his view of life he is one with the artist 
+who knows that by the inevitable law of self-perfection, the poet 
+must sing, and the sculptor think in bronze, and the painter make 
+the world a mirror for his moods, as surely and as certainly as the 
+hawthorn must blossom in spring, and the corn turn to gold at 
+harvest-time, and the moon in her ordered wanderings change from 
+shield to sickle, and from sickle to shield.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+Of all this Guildenstern and Rosencrantz realise nothing.  They bow 
+and smirk and smile, and what the one says the other echoes with 
+sickliest intonation.  When, at last, by means of the play within 
+the play, and the puppets in their dalliance, Hamlet 'catches the 
+conscience' of the King, and drives the wretched man in terror from 
+his throne, Guildenstern and Rosencrantz see no more in his conduct 
+than a rather painful breach of Court etiquette.  That is as far as 
+they can attain to in 'the contemplation of the spectacle of life 
+with appropriate emotions.'  They are close to his very secret and 
+know nothing of it.  Nor would there be any use in telling them.  
+They are the little cups that can hold so much and no more.  
+Towards the close it is suggested that, caught in a cunning spring 
+set for another, they have met, or may meet, with a violent and 
+sudden death.  But a tragic ending of this kind, though touched by 
+Hamlet's humour with something of the surprise and justice of 
+comedy, is really not for such as they.  They never die.  Horatio, 
+who in order to 'report Hamlet and his cause aright to the 
+unsatisfied,'
+
+
+'Absents him from felicity a while, 
+And in this harsh world draws his breath in pain,'
+
+dies, but Guildenstern and Rosencrantz are as immortal as Angelo 
+and Tartuffe, and should rank with them.  They are what modern life 
+has contributed to the antique ideal of friendship.  He who writes 
+a new DE AMICITIA must find a niche for them, and praise them in 
+Tusculan prose.  They are types fixed for all time.  To censure 
+them would show 'a lack of appreciation.'  They are merely out of 
+their sphere:  that is all.  In sublimity of soul there is no 
+contagion.  High thoughts and high emotions are by their very 
+existence isolated.
+
+
+I am to be released, if all goes well with me, towards the end of 
+May, and hope to go at once to some little sea-side village abroad 
+with R- and M-.
+
+The sea, as Euripides says in one of his plays about Iphigeneia, 
+washes away the stains and wounds of the world.
+
+I hope to be at least a month with my friends, and to gain peace 
+and balance, and a less troubled heart, and a sweeter mood.  I have 
+a strange longing for the great simple primeval things, such as the 
+sea, to me no less of a mother than the Earth.  It seems to me that 
+we all look at Nature too much, and live with her too little.  I 
+discern great sanity in the Greek attitude.  They never chattered 
+about sunsets, or discussed whether the shadows on the grass were 
+really mauve or not.  But they saw that the sea was for the 
+swimmer, and the sand for the feet of the runner.  They loved the 
+trees for the shadow that they cast, and the forest for its silence 
+at noon.  The vineyard-dresser wreathed his hair with ivy that he 
+might keep off the rays of the sun as he stooped over the young 
+shoots, and for the artist and the athlete, the two types that 
+Greece gave us, they plaited with garlands the leaves of the bitter 
+laurel and of the wild parsley, which else had been of no service 
+to men.
+
+We call ours a utilitarian age, and we do not know the uses of any 
+single thing.  We have forgotten that water can cleanse, and fire 
+purify, and that the Earth is mother to us all.  As a consequence 
+our art is of the moon and plays with shadows, while Greek art is 
+of the sun and deals directly with things.  I feel sure that in 
+elemental forces there is purification, and I want to go back to 
+them and live in their presence.
+
+Of course to one so modern as I am, 'Enfant de mon siecle,' merely 
+to look at the world will be always lovely.  I tremble with 
+pleasure when I think that on the very day of my leaving prison 
+both the laburnum and the lilac will be blooming in the gardens, 
+and that I shall see the wind stir into restless beauty the swaying 
+gold of the one, and make the other toss the pale purple of its 
+plumes, so that all the air shall be Arabia for me.  Linnaeus fell 
+on his knees and wept for joy when he saw for the first time the 
+long heath of some English upland made yellow with the tawny 
+aromatic brooms of the common furze; and I know that for me, to 
+whom flowers are part of desire, there are tears waiting in the 
+petals of some rose.  It has always been so with me from my 
+boyhood.  There is not a single colour hidden away in the chalice 
+of a flower, or the curve of a shell, to which, by some subtle 
+sympathy with the very soul of things, my nature does not answer.  
+Like Gautier, I have always been one of those 'pour qui le monde 
+visible existe.'
+
+Still, I am conscious now that behind all this beauty, satisfying 
+though it may be, there is some spirit hidden of which the painted 
+forms and shapes are but modes of manifestation, and it is with 
+this spirit that I desire to become in harmony.  I have grown tired 
+of the articulate utterances of men and things.  The Mystical in 
+Art, the Mystical in Life, the Mystical in Nature this is what I am 
+looking for.  It is absolutely necessary for me to find it 
+somewhere.
+
+All trials are trials for one's life, just as all sentences are 
+sentences of death; and three times have I been tried.  The first 
+time I left the box to be arrested, the second time to be led back 
+to the house of detention, the third time to pass into a prison for 
+two years.  Society, as we have constituted it, will have no place 
+for me, has none to offer; but Nature, whose sweet rains fall on 
+unjust and just alike, will have clefts in the rocks where I may 
+hide, and secret valleys in whose silence I may weep undisturbed.  
+She will hang the night with stars so that I may walk abroad in the 
+darkness without stumbling, and send the wind over my footprints so 
+that none may track me to my hurt:  she will cleanse me in great 
+waters, and with bitter herbs make me whole.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of The Project Gutenberg Etext of De Profundis, by Oscar Wilde
+
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