De Profundis by Oscar Wilde (popular books to read .TXT) 📖
- Author: Oscar Wilde
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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
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