De Profundis - Oscar Wilde (little readers .TXT) 📗

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