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

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