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

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