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], that when he thought of
the lilies of the field and how they neither toil nor spin, his absolute
expression was [Greek text], and that his last word when he cried out 'my
life has been completed, has reached its fulfilment, has been perfected,'
was exactly as St. John tells us it was: [Greek text]--no more.
While in reading the Gospels--particularly that of St. John himself, or
whatever early Gnostic took his name and mantle--I see the continual
assertion of the imagination as the basis of all spiritual and material
life, I see also that to Christ imagination was simply a form of love,
and that to him love was lord in the fullest meaning of the phrase. Some
six weeks ago I was allowed by the doctor to have white bread to eat
instead of the coarse black or brown bread of ordinary prison fare. It
is a great delicacy. It will sound strange that dry bread could possibly
be a delicacy to any one. To me it is so much so that at the close of
each meal I carefully eat whatever crumbs may be left on my tin plate, or
have fallen on the rough towel that one uses as a cloth so as not to soil
one's table; and I do so not from hunger--I get now quite sufficient
food--but simply in order that nothing should be wasted of what is given
to me. So one should look on love.
Christ, like all fascinating personalities, had the power of not merely
saying beautiful things himself, but of making other people say beautiful
things to him; and I love the story St. Mark tells us about the Greek
woman, who, when as a trial of her faith he said to her that he could not
give her the bread of the children of Israel, answered him that the
little dogs--([Greek text], 'little dogs' it should be rendered)--who are
under the table eat of the crumbs that the children let fall. Most
people live for love and admiration. But it is by love and admiration
that we should live. If any love is shown us we should recognise that we
are quite unworthy of it. Nobody is worthy to be loved. The fact that
God loves man shows us that in the divine order of ideal things it is
written that eternal love is to be given to what is eternally unworthy.
Or if that phrase seems to be a bitter one to bear, let us say that every
one is worthy of love, except him who thinks that he is. Love is a
sacrament that should be taken kneeling, and _Domine, non sum dignus_
should be on the lips and in the hearts of those who receive it.
If ever I write again, in the sense of producing artistic work, there are
just two subjects on which and through which I desire to express myself:
one is 'Christ as the precursor of the romantic movement in life': the
other is 'The artistic life considered in its relation to conduct.' The
first is, of course, intensely fascinating, for I see in Christ not
merely the essentials of the supreme romantic type, but all the
accidents, the wilfulnesses even, of the romantic temperament also. He
was the first person who ever said to people that they should live
'flower-like lives.' He fixed the phrase. He took children as the type
of what people should try to become. He held them up as examples to
their elders, which I myself have always thought the chief use of
children, if what is perfect should have a use. Dante describes the soul
of a man as coming from the hand of God 'weeping and laughing like a
little child,' and Christ also saw that the soul of each one should be _a
guisa di fanciulla che piangendo e ridendo pargoleggia_. He felt that
life was changeful, fluid, active, and that to allow it to be stereotyped
into any form was death. He saw that people should not be too serious
over material, common interests: that to be unpractical was to be a great
thing: that one should not bother too much over affairs. The birds
didn't, why should man? He is charming when he says, 'Take no thought
for the morrow; is not the soul more than meat? is not the body more than
raiment?' A Greek might have used the latter phrase. It is full of
Greek feeling. But only Christ could have said both, and so summed up
life perfectly for us.
His morality is all sympathy, just what morality should be. If the only
thing that he ever said had been, 'Her sins are forgiven her because she
loved much,' it would have been worth while dying to have said it. His
justice is all poetical justice, exactly what justice should be. The
beggar goes to heaven because he has been unhappy. I cannot conceive a
better reason for his being sent there. The people who work for an hour
in the vineyard in the cool of the evening receive just as much reward as
those who have toiled there all day long in the hot sun. Why shouldn't
they? Probably no one deserved anything. Or perhaps they were a
different kind of people. Christ had no patience with the dull lifeless
mechanical systems that treat people as if they were things, and so treat
everybody alike: for him there were no laws: there were exceptions
merely, as if anybody, or anything, for that matter, was like aught else
in the world!
That which is the very keynote of romantic art was to him the proper
basis of natural life. He saw no other basis. And when they brought him
one, taken in the very act of sin and showed him her sentence written in
the law, and asked him what was to be done, he wrote with his finger on
the ground as though he did not hear them, and finally, when they pressed
him again, looked up and said, 'Let him of you who has never sinned be
the first to throw the stone at her.' It was worth while living to have
said that.
Like all poetical natures he loved ignorant people. He knew that in the
soul of one who is ignorant there is always room for a great idea. But
he could not stand stupid people, especially those who are made stupid by
education: people who are full of opinions not one of which they even
understand, a peculiarly modern type, summed up by Christ when he
describes it as the type of one who has the key of knowledge, cannot use
it himself, and does not allow other people to use it, though it may be
made to open the gate of God's Kingdom. His chief war was against the
Philistines. That is the war every child of light has to wage.
Philistinism was the note of the age and community in which he lived. In
their heavy inaccessibility to ideas, their dull respectability, their
tedious orthodoxy, their worship of vulgar success, their entire
preoccupation with the gross materialistic side of life, and their
ridiculous estimate of themselves and their importance, the Jews of
Jerusalem in Christ's day were the exact counterpart of the British
Philistine of our own. Christ mocked at the 'whited sepulchre' of
respectability, and fixed that phrase for ever. He treated worldly
success as a thing absolutely to be despised. He saw nothing in it at
all. He looked on wealth as an encumbrance to a man. He would not hear
of life being sacrificed to any system of thought or morals. He pointed
out that forms and ceremonies were made for man, not man for forms and
ceremonies. He took sabbatarianism as a type of the things that should
be set at nought. The cold philanthropies, the ostentatious public
charities, the tedious formalisms so dear to the middle-class mind, he
exposed with utter and relentless scorn. To us, what is termed orthodoxy
is merely a facile unintelligent acquiescence; but to them, and in their
hands, it was a terrible and paralysing tyranny. Christ swept it aside.
He showed that the spirit alone was of value. He took a keen pleasure in
pointing out to them that though they were always reading the law and the
prophets, they had not really the smallest idea of what either of them
meant. In opposition to their tithing of each separate day into the
fixed routine of prescribed duties, as they tithe mint and rue, he
preached the enormous importance of living completely for the moment.
Those whom he saved from their sins are saved simply for beautiful
moments in their lives. Mary Magdalen, when she sees Christ, breaks the
rich vase of alabaster that one of her seven lovers had given her, and
spills the odorous spices over his tired dusty feet, and for that one
moment's sake sits for ever with Ruth and Beatrice in the tresses of the
snow-white rose of Paradise. All that Christ says to us by the way of a
little warning is that every moment should be beautiful, that the soul
should always be ready for the coming of the bridegroom, always waiting
for the voice of the lover, Philistinism being simply that side of man's
nature that is not illumined by the imagination. He sees all the lovely
influences of life as modes of light: the imagination itself is the world
of light. The world is made by it, and yet the world cannot understand
it: that is because the imagination is simply a manifestation of love,
and it is love and the capacity for it that distinguishes one human being
from another.
But it is when he deals with a sinner that Christ is most romantic, in
the sense of most real. The world had always loved the saint as being
the nearest possible approach to the perfection of God. Christ, through
some divine instinct in him, seems to have always loved the sinner as
being the nearest possible approach to the perfection of man. His
primary desire was not to reform people, any more than his primary desire
was to a relieve suffering. To turn an interesting thief into a tedious
honest man was not his aim. He would have thought little of the
Prisoners' Aid Society and other modern movements of the kind. The
conversion of a publican into a Pharisee would not have seemed to him a
great achievement. But in a manner not yet understood of the world he
regarded sin and suffering as being in themselves beautiful holy things
and modes of perfection.
It seems a very dangerous idea. It is--all great ideas are dangerous.
That it was Christ's creed admits of no doubt. That it is the true creed
I don't doubt myself.
Of course the sinner must repent. But why? Simply because otherwise he
would be unable to realise what he had done. The moment of repentance is
the moment of initiation. More than that: it is the means by which one
alters one's past. The Greeks thought that impossible. They often say
in their Gnomic aphorisms, 'Even the Gods cannot alter the past.' Christ
showed that the commonest sinner could do it, that it was the one thing
he could do. Christ, had he been asked, would have said--I feel quite
certain about it--that the moment the prodigal son fell on his knees and
wept, he made his having wasted his substance with harlots, his swine-
herding and hungering for the husks they ate, beautiful and holy moments
in his life. It is difficult for most people to grasp the idea. I dare
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.