De Profundis / Oscar Wilde

. . . 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.