De Profundis by Oscar Wilde

De Profundis by Oscar Wilde
. . . Suffering is one very long moment. We cannot divide it by
seasons. We can only record its moods, and chronicle their return.
With us time itself does not progress. It revolves. It seems to
circle round one centre of pain. The paralysing immobility of a
life every circumstance of which is regulated after an unchangeable
pattern, so that we eat and drink and lie down and pray, or kneel
at least for prayer, according to the inflexible laws of an iron
formula: this immobile quality, that makes each dreadful day in
the very minutest detail like its brother, seems to communicate
itself to those external forces the very essence of whose existence
is ceaseless change. Of seed-time or harvest, of the reapers
bending over the corn, or the grape gatherers threading through the
vines, of the grass in the orchard made white with broken blossoms
or strewn with fallen fruit: of these we know nothing and can know
nothing.
For us there is only one season, the season of sorrow. The very
sun and moon seem taken from us. Outside, the day may be blue and
gold, but the light that creeps down through the thickly-muffled
glass of the small iron-barred window beneath which one sits is
grey and niggard. It is always twilight in one's cell, as it is
always twilight in one's heart. And in the sphere of thought, no
less than in the sphere of time, motion is no more. The thing that
you personally have long ago forgotten, or can easily forget, is
happening to me now, and will happen to me again to-morrow.
Remember this, and you will be able to understand a little of why I
am writing, and in this manner writing. . . .
A week later, I am transferred here. Three more months go over and
my mother dies. No one knew how deeply I loved and honoured her.
Her death was terrible to me; but I, once a lord of language, have
no words in which to express my anguish and my shame. She and my
father had bequeathed me a name they had made noble and honoured,
not merely in literature, art, archaeology, and science, but in the
public history of my own country, in its evolution as a nation. I
had disgraced that name eternally. I had made it a low by-word
among low people. I had dragged it through the very mire. I had
given it to brutes that they might make it brutal, and to fools
that they might turn it into a synonym for folly. What I suffered
then, and still suffer, is not for pen to write or paper to record.
My wife, always kind and gentle to me, rather than that I should
hear the news from indifferent lips, travelled, ill as she was, all
the way from Genoa to England to break to me herself the tidings of
so irreparable, so irremediable, a loss. Messages of sympathy
reached me from all who had still affection for me. Even people
who had not known me personally, hearing that a new sorrow had
broken into my life, wrote to ask that some expression of their
condolence should be conveyed to me. . . .
Three months go over. The calendar of my daily conduct and labour
that hangs on the outside of my cell door, with my name and
sentence written upon it, tells me that it is May. . . .
Prosperity, pleasure and success, may be rough of grain and common
in fibre, but sorrow is the most sensitive of all created things.
There is nothing that stirs in the whole world of thought to which
sorrow does not vibrate in terrible and exquisite pulsation. The
thin beaten-out leaf of tremulous gold that chronicles the
direction of forces the eye cannot see is in comparison coarse. It
is a wound that bleeds when any hand but that of love touches it,
and even then must bleed again, though not in pain.
Where there is sorrow there in holy ground. Some day people will
realise what that means. They will know nothing of life till they
do, - and natures like his can realise it. When I was brought down
from my prison to the Court of Bankruptcy, between two policemen, -
waited in the long dreary corridor that, before the whole crowd,
whom an action so sweet and simple hushed into silence, he might
gravely raise his hat to me, as, handcuffed and with bowed head, I
passed him by. Men have gone to heaven for smaller things than
that. It was in this spirit, and with this mode of love, that the
saints knelt down to wash the feet of the poor, or stooped to kiss
the leper on the cheek. I have never said one single word to him
about what he did. I do not know to the present moment whether he
is aware that I was even conscious of his action. It is not a
thing for which one can render formal thanks in formal words. I
store it in the treasure-house of my heart. I keep it there as a
secret debt that I am glad to think I can never possibly repay. It
is embalmed and kept sweet by the myrrh and cassia of many tears.
When wisdom has been profitless to me, philosophy barren, and the
proverbs and phrases of those who have sought to give me
consolation as dust and ashes in my mouth, the memory of that
little, lovely, silent act of love has unsealed for me all the
wells of pity: made the desert blossom like a rose, and brought me
out of the bitterness of lonely exile into harmony with the
wounded, broken, and great heart of the world. When people are
able to understand, not merely how beautiful -'s action was, but
why it meant so much to me, and always will mean so much, then,
perhaps, they will realise how and in what spirit they should
approach me. . . .
The poor are wise, more charitable, more kind, more sensitive than
we are. In their eyes prison is a tragedy in a man's life, a
misfortune, a casuality, something that calls for sympathy in
others. They speak of one who is in prison as of one who is 'in
trouble' simply. It is the phrase they always use, and the
expression has the perfect wisdom of love in it. With people of
our own rank it is different. With us, prison makes a man a
pariah. I, and such as I am, have hardly any right to air and sun.
Our presence taints the pleasures of others. We are unwelcome when
we reappear. To revisit the glimpses of the moon is not for us.
Our very children are taken away. Those lovely links with humanity
are broken. We are doomed to be solitary, while our sons still
live. We are denied the one thing that might heal us and keep us,
that might bring balm to the bruised heart, and peace to the soul
in pain. . . .
I must say to myself that I ruined myself, and that nobody great or
small can be ruined except by his own hand. I am quite ready to
say so. I am trying to say so, though they may not think it at the
present moment. This pitiless indictment I bring without pity
against myself. Terrible as was what the world did to me, what I
did to myself was far more terrible still.
I was a man who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture
of my age. I had realised this for myself at the very dawn of my
manhood, and had forced my age to realise it afterwards. Few men
hold such a position in their own lifetime, and have it so
acknowledged. It is usually discerned, if discerned at all, by the
historian, or the critic, long after both the man and his age have
passed away. With me it was different. I felt it myself, and made
others feel it. Byron was a symbolic figure, but his relations
were to the passion of his age and its weariness of passion. Mine
were to something more noble, more permanent, of more vital issue,
of larger scope.
The gods had given me almost everything. But I let myself be lured
into long spells of senseless and sensual ease. I amused myself
with being a FLANEUR, a dandy, a man of fashion. I surrounded
myself with the smaller natures and the meaner minds. I became the
spendthrift of my own genius, and to waste an eternal youth gave me
a curious joy. Tired of being on the heights, I deliberately went
to the depths in the search for new sensation. What the paradox
was to me in the sphere of thought, perversity became to me in the
sphere of passion. Desire, at the end, was a malady, or a madness,
or both. I grew careless of the lives of others. I took pleasure
where it pleased me, and passed on. I forgot that every little
action of the common day makes or unmakes character, and that
therefore what one has done in the secret chamber one has some day
to cry aloud on the housetop. I ceased to be lord over myself. I
was no longer the captain of my soul, and did not know it. I
allowed pleasure to dominate me. I ended in horrible disgrace.
There is only one thing for me now, absolute humility.
I have lain in prison for nearly two years. Out of my nature has
come wild despair; an abandonment to grief that was piteous even to
look at; terrible and impotent rage; bitterness and scorn; anguish
that wept aloud; misery that could find no voice; sorrow that was
dumb. I have passed through every possible mood of suffering.
Better than Wordsworth himself I know what Wordsworth meant when he
said -
'Suffering is permanent, obscure, and dark
And has the nature of infinity.'
But while there were times when I rejoiced in the idea that my
sufferings were to be endless, I could not bear them to be without
meaning. Now I find hidden somewhere away in my nature something
that tells me that nothing in the whole world is meaningless, and
suffering least of all. That something hidden away in my nature,
like a treasure in a field, is Humility.
It is the last thing left in me, and the best: the ultimate
discovery at which I have arrived, the starting-point for a fresh
development. It has come to me right out of myself, so I know that
it has come at the proper time. It could not have come before, nor
later. Had any one told me of it, I would have rejected it. Had
it been brought to me, I would have refused it. As I found it, I
want to keep it. I must do so. It is the one thing that has in it
the elements of life, of a new life, VITA NUOVA for me. Of all
things it is the strangest. One cannot acquire it, except by
surrendering everything that one has. It is only when one has lost
all things, that one knows that one possesses it.
Now I have realised that it is in me, I see quite clearly what I
ought to do; in fact, must do. And when I use such a phrase as
that, I need not say that I am not alluding to any external
sanction or command. I admit none. I am far more of an
individualist than I ever was. Nothing seems to me of the smallest
value except what one gets out of oneself. My nature is seeking a
fresh mode of self-realisation. That is all I am concerned with.
And the first thing that I have got to do is to free myself from
any possible bitterness of feeling against the world.
I am completely penniless, and absolutely homeless. Yet there are
worse things in the world than that. I am quite candid when I say
that rather than go out from this prison with bitterness in my
heart against the world, I would gladly and readily beg my bread
from door to door. If I got nothing from the house of the rich I
would get something at the house of the poor. Those who have much
are often greedy; those who have little always share. I would not
a bit mind sleeping in the cool grass in summer, and when winter
came on sheltering myself by the warm close-thatched rick, or under
the penthouse of a great barn, provided I had love in my heart.
The external things of life seem to me now of no importance at all.
You can see to what intensity of individualism I have arrived - or
am arriving rather, for the journey is long, and 'where I walk
there are thorns.'
Of course I know that to ask alms on the highway is not to be my
lot, and that if ever I lie in the cool grass at night-time it will
be to write sonnets to the moon. When I go out of prison, R- will
be waiting for me on the other side of the big iron-studded gate,
and he is the symbol, not merely of his own affection, but of the
affection of many others besides. I believe I am to have enough to
live on for about eighteen months at any rate, so that if I may not
write beautiful books, I may at least read beautiful books; and
what joy can be greater? After that, I hope to be able to recreate
my creative faculty.
But were things different: had I not a friend left in the world;
were there not a single house open to me in pity; had I to accept
the wallet and ragged cloak of sheer penury: as long as I am free
from all resentment, hardness and scorn, I would be able to face
the life with much more calm and confidence than I would were my
body in purple and fine linen, and the soul within me sick with
hate.
And I really shall have no difficulty. When you really want love
you will find it waiting for you.
I need not say that my task does not end there. It would be
comparatively easy if it did. There is much more before me. I
have hills far steeper to climb, valleys much darker to pass
through. And I have to get it all out of myself. Neither
religion, morality, nor reason can help me at all.
Morality does not help me. I am a born antinomian. I am one of
those who are made for exceptions, not for laws. But while I see
that there is nothing wrong in what one does, I see that there is
something wrong in what one becomes. It is well to have learned
that.
Religion does not help me. The faith that others give to what is
unseen, I give to what one can touch, and look at. My gods dwell
in temples made with hands; and within the circle of actual
experience is my creed made perfect and complete: too complete, it
may be, for like many or all of those who have placed their heaven
in this earth, I have found in it not merely the beauty of heaven,
but the horror of hell also. When I think about religion at all, I
feel as if I would like to found an order for those who CANNOT
believe: the Confraternity of the Faithless, one might call it,
where on an altar, on which no taper burned, a priest, in whose
heart peace had no dwelling, might celebrate with unblessed bread
and a chalice empty of wine. Every thing to be true must become a
religion. And agnosticism should have its ritual no less than
faith. It has sown its martyrs, it should reap its saints, and
praise God daily for having hidden Himself from man. But whether
it be faith or agnosticism, it must be nothing external to me. Its
symbols must be of my own creating. Only that is spiritual which
makes its own form. If I may not find its secret within myself, I
shall never find it: if I have not got it already, it will never
come to me.
Reason does not help me. It tells me that the laws under which I
am convicted are wrong and unjust laws, and the system under which
I have suffered a wrong and unjust system. But, somehow, I have
got to make both of these things just and right to me. And exactly
as in Art one is only concerned with what a particular thing is at
a particular moment to oneself, so it is also in the ethical
evolution of one's character. I have got to make everything that
has happened to me good for me. The plank bed, the loathsome food,
the hard ropes shredded into oakum till one's finger-tips grow dull
with pain, the menial offices with which each day begins and
finishes, the harsh orders that routine seems to necessitate, the
dreadful dress that makes sorrow grotesque to look at, the silence,
the solitude, the shame - each and all of these things I have to
transform into a spiritual experience. There is not a single
degradation of the body which I must not try and make into a
spiritualising of the soul.
I want to get to the point when I shall be able to say quite
simply, and without affectation that the two great turning-points
in my life were when my father sent me to Oxford, and when society
sent me to prison. I will not say that prison is the best thing
that could have happened to me: for that phrase would savour of
too great bitterness towards myself. I would sooner say, or hear
it said of me, that I was so typical a child of my age, that in my
perversity, and for that perversity's sake, I turned the good
things of my life to evil, and the evil things of my life to good.
What is said, however, by myself or by others, matters little. The
important thing, the thing that lies before me, the thing that I
have to do, if the brief remainder of my days is not to be maimed,
marred, and incomplete, is to absorb into my nature all that has
been done to me, to make it part of me, to accept it without
complaint, fear, or reluctance. The supreme vice is shallowness.
Whatever is realised is right.
When first I was put into prison some people advised me to try and
forget who I was. It was ruinous advice. It is only by realising
what I am that I have found comfort of any kind. Now I am advised
by others to try on my release to forget that I have ever been in a
prison at all. I know that would be equally fatal. It would mean
that I would always be haunted by an intolerable sense of disgrace,
and that those things that are meant for me as much as for anybody
else - the beauty of the sun and moon, the pageant of the seasons,
the music of daybreak and the silence of great nights, the rain
falling through the leaves, or the dew creeping over the grass and
making it silver - would all be tainted for me, and lose their
healing power, and their power of communicating joy. To regret
one's own experiences is to arrest one's own development. To deny
one's own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one's own
life. It is no less than a denial of the soul.
For just as the body absorbs things of all kinds, things common and
unclean no less than those that the priest or a vision has
cleansed, and converts them into swiftness or strength, into the
play of beautiful muscles and the moulding of fair flesh, into the
curves and colours of the hair, the lips, the eye; so the soul in
its turn has its nutritive functions also, and can transform into
noble moods of thought and passions of high import what in itself
is base, cruel and degrading; nay, more, may find in these its most
august modes of assertion, and can often reveal itself most
perfectly through what was intended to desecrate or destroy.
The fact of my having been the common prisoner of a common gaol I
must frankly accept, and, curious as it may seem, one of the things
I shall have to teach myself is not to be ashamed of it. I must
accept it as a punishment, and if one is ashamed of having been
punished, one might just as well never have been punished at all.
Of course there are many things of which I was convicted that I had
not done, but then there are many things of which I was convicted
that I had done, and a still greater number of things in my life
for which I was never indicted at all. And as the gods are
strange, and punish us for what is good and humane in us as much as
for what is evil and perverse, I must accept the fact that one is
punished for the good as well as for the evil that one does. I
have no doubt that it is quite right one should be. It helps one,
or should help one, to realise both, and not to be too conceited
about either. And if I then am not ashamed of my punishment, as I
hope not to be, I shall be able to think, and walk, and live with
freedom.
Many men on their release carry their prison about with them into
the air, and hide it as a secret disgrace in their hearts, and at
length, like poor poisoned things, creep into some hole and die.
It is wretched that they should have to do so, and it is wrong,
terribly wrong, of society that it should force them to do so.
Society takes upon itself the right to inflict appalling punishment
on the individual, but it also has the supreme vice of shallowness,
and fails to realise what it has done. When the man's punishment
is over, it leaves him to himself; that is to say, it abandons him
at the very moment when its highest duty towards him begins. It is
really ashamed of its own actions, and shuns those whom it has
punished, as people shun a creditor whose debt they cannot pay, or
one on whom they have inflicted an irreparable, an irremediable
wrong. I can claim on my side that if I realise what I have
suffered, society should realise what it has inflicted on me; and
that there should be no bitterness or hate on either side.
Of course I know that from one point of view things will be made
different for me than for others; must indeed, by the very nature
of the case, be made so. The poor thieves and outcasts who are
imprisoned here with me are in many respects more fortunate than I
am. The little way in grey city or green field that saw their sin
is small; to find those who know nothing of what they have done
they need go no further than a bird might fly between the twilight
and the dawn; but for me the world is shrivelled to a handsbreadth,
and everywhere I turn my name is written on the rocks in lead. For
I have come, not from obscurity into the momentary notoriety of
crime, but from a sort of eternity of fame to a sort of eternity of
infamy, and sometimes seem to myself to have shown, if indeed it
required showing, that between the famous and the infamous there is
but one step, if as much as one.
Still, in the very fact that people will recognise me wherever I
go, and know all about my life, as far as its follies go, I can
discern something good for me. It will force on me the necessity
of again asserting myself as an artist, and as soon as I possibly
can. If I can produce only one beautiful work of art I shall be
able to rob malice of its venom, and cowardice of its sneer, and to
pluck out the tongue of scorn by the roots.
And if life be, as it surely is, a problem to me, I am no less a
problem to life. People must adopt some attitude towards me, and
so pass judgment, both on themselves and me. I need not say I am
not talking of particular individuals. The only people I would
care to be with now are artists and people who have suffered:
those who know what beauty is, and those who know what sorrow is:
nobody else interests me. Nor am I making any demands on life. In
all that I have said I am simply concerned with my own mental
attitude towards life as a whole; and I feel that not to be ashamed
of having been punished is one of the first points I must attain
to, for the sake of my own perfection, and because I am so
imperfect.
Then I must learn how to be happy. Once I knew it, or thought I
knew it, by instinct. It was always springtime once in my heart.
My temperament was akin to joy. I filled my life to the very brim
with pleasure, as one might fill a cup to the very brim with wine.
Now I am approaching life from a completely new standpoint, and
even to conceive happiness is often extremely difficult for me. I
remember during my first term at Oxford reading in Pater's
RENAISSANCE - that book which has had such strange influence over
my life - how Dante places low in the Inferno those who wilfully
live in sadness; and going to the college library and turning to
the passage in the DIVINE COMEDY where beneath the dreary marsh lie
those who were 'sullen in the sweet air,' saying for ever and ever
through their sighs -
'Tristi fummo
Nell aer dolce che dal sol s'allegra.'
I knew the church condemned ACCIDIA, but the whole idea seemed to
me quite fantastic, just the sort of sin, I fancied, a priest who
knew nothing about real life would invent. Nor could I understand
how Dante, who says that 'sorrow remarries us to God,' could have
been so harsh to those who were enamoured of melancholy, if any
such there really were. I had no idea that some day this would
become to me one of the greatest temptations of my life.
While I was in Wandsworth prison I longed to die. It was my one
desire. When after two months in the infirmary I was transferred
here, and found myself growing gradually better in physical health,
I was filled with rage. I determined to commit suicide on the very
day on which I left prison. After a time that evil mood passed
away, and I made up my mind to live, but to wear gloom as a king
wears purple: never to smile again: to turn whatever house I
entered into a house of mourning: to make my friends walk slowly
in sadness with me: to teach them that melancholy is the true
secret of life: to maim them with an alien sorrow: to mar them
with my own pain. Now I feel quite differently. I see it would be
both ungrateful and unkind of me to pull so long a face that when
my friends came to see me they would have to make their faces still
longer in order to show their sympathy; or, if I desired to
entertain them, to invite them to sit down silently to bitter herbs
and funeral baked meats. I must learn how to be cheerful and
happy.
The last two occasions on which I was allowed to see my friends
here, I tried to be as cheerful as possible, and to show my
cheerfulness, in order to make them some slight return for their
trouble in coming all the way from town to see me. It is only a
slight return, I know, but it is the one, I feel certain, that
pleases them most. I saw R- for an hour on Saturday week, and I
tried to give the fullest possible expression of the delight I
really felt at our meeting. And that, in the views and ideas I am
here shaping for myself, I am quite right is shown to me by the
fact that now for the first time since my imprisonment I have a
real desire for life.
There is before me so much to do, that I would regard it as a
terrible tragedy if I died before I was allowed to complete at any
rate a little of it. I see new developments in art and life, each
one of which is a fresh mode of perfection. I long to live so that
I can explore what is no less than a new world to me. Do you want
to know what this new world is? I think you can guess what it is.
It is the world in which I have been living. Sorrow, then, and all
that it teaches one, is my new world.
I used to live entirely for pleasure. I shunned suffering and
sorrow of every kind. I hated both. I resolved to ignore them as
far as possible: to treat them, that is to say, as modes of
imperfection. They were not part of my scheme of life. They had
no place in my philosophy. My mother, who knew life as a whole,
used often to quote to me Goethe's lines - written by Carlyle in a
book he had given her years ago, and translated by him, I fancy,
also:-
'Who never ate his bread in sorrow,
Who never spent the midnight hours
Weeping and waiting for the morrow, -
He knows you not, ye heavenly powers.'
They were the lines which that noble Queen of Prussia, whom
Napoleon treated with such coarse brutality, used to quote in her
humiliation and exile; they were the lines my mother often quoted
in the troubles of her later life. I absolutely declined to accept
or admit the enormous truth hidden in them. I could not understand
it. I remember quite well how I used to tell her that I did not
want to eat my bread in sorrow, or to pass any night weeping and
watching for a more bitter dawn.
I had no idea that it was one of the special things that the Fates
had in store for me: that for a whole year of my life, indeed, I
was to do little else. But so has my portion been meted out to me;
and during the last few months I have, after terrible difficulties
and struggles, been able to comprehend some of the lessons hidden
in the heart of pain. Clergymen and people who use phrases without
wisdom sometimes talk of suffering as a mystery. It is really a
revelation. One discerns things one never discerned before. One
approaches the whole of history from a different standpoint. What
one had felt dimly, through instinct, about art, is intellectually
and emotionally realised with perfect clearness of vision and
absolute intensity of apprehension.
I now see that sorrow, being the supreme emotion of which man is
capable, is at once the type and test of all great art. What the
artist is always looking for is the mode of existence in which soul
and body are one and indivisible: in which the outward is
expressive of the inward: in which form reveals. Of such modes of
existence there are not a few: youth and the arts preoccupied with
youth may serve as a model for us at one moment: at another we may
like to think that, in its subtlety and sensitiveness of
impression, its suggestion of a spirit dwelling in external things
and making its raiment of earth and air, of mist and city alike,
and in its morbid sympathy of its moods, and tones, and colours,
modern landscape art is realising for us pictorially what was
realised in such plastic perfection by the Greeks. Music, in which
all subject is absorbed in expression and cannot be separated from
it, is a complex example, and a flower or a child a simple example,
of what I mean; but sorrow is the ultimate type both in life and
art.
Behind joy and laughter there may be a temperament, coarse, hard
and callous. But behind sorrow there is always sorrow. Pain,
unlike pleasure, wears no mask. Truth in art is not any
correspondence between the essential idea and the accidental
existence; it is not the resemblance of shape to shadow, or of the
form mirrored in the crystal to the form itself; it is no echo
coming from a hollow hill, any more than it is a silver well of
water in the valley that shows the moon to the moon and Narcissus
to Narcissus. Truth in art is the unity of a thing with itself:
the outward rendered expressive of the inward: the soul made
incarnate: the body instinct with spirit. For this reason there
is no truth comparable to sorrow. There are times when sorrow
seems to me to be the only truth. Other things may be illusions of
the eye or the appetite, made to blind the one and cloy the other,
but out of sorrow have the worlds been built, and at the birth of a
child or a star there is pain.
More than this, there is about sorrow an intense, an extraordinary
reality. I have said of myself that I was one who stood in
symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age. There is not
a single wretched man in this wretched place along with me who does
not stand in symbolic relation to the very secret of life. For the
secret of life is suffering. It is what is hidden behind
everything. When we begin to live, what is sweet is so sweet to
us, and what is bitter so bitter, that we inevitably direct all our
desires towards pleasures, and seek not merely for a 'month or
twain to feed on honeycomb,' but for all our years to taste no
other food, ignorant all the while that we may really be starving
the soul.
I remember talking once on this subject to one of the most
beautiful personalities I have ever known: a woman, whose sympathy
and noble kindness to me, both before and since the tragedy of my
imprisonment, have been beyond power and description; one who has
really assisted me, though she does not know it, to bear the burden
of my troubles more than any one else in the whole world has, and
all through the mere fact of her existence, through her being what
she is - partly an ideal and partly an influence: a suggestion of
what one might become as well as a real help towards becoming it; a
soul that renders the common air sweet, and makes what is spiritual
seem as simple and natural as sunlight or the sea: one for whom
beauty and sorrow walk hand in hand, and have the same message. On
the occasion of which I am thinking I recall distinctly how I said
to her that there was enough suffering in one narrow London lane to
show that God did not love man, and that wherever there was any
sorrow, though but that of a child, in some little garden weeping
over a fault that it had or had not committed, the whole face of
creation was completely marred. I was entirely wrong. She told me
so, but I could not believe her. I was not in the sphere in which
such belief was to be attained to. Now it seems to me that love of
some kind is the only possible explanation of the extraordinary
amount of suffering that there is in the world. I cannot conceive
of any other explanation. I am convinced that there is no other,
and that if the world has indeed, as I have said, been built of
sorrow, it has been built by the hands of love, because in no other
way could the soul of man, for whom the world was made, reach the
full stature of its perfection. Pleasure for the beautiful body,
but pain for the beautiful soul.
When I say that I am convinced of these things I speak with too
much pride. Far off, like a perfect pearl, one can see the city of
God. It is so wonderful that it seems as if a child could reach it
in a summer's day. And so a child could. But with me and such as
me it is different. One can realise a thing in a single moment,
but one loses it in the long hours that follow with leaden feet.
It is so difficult to keep 'heights that the soul is competent to
gain.' We think in eternity, but we move slowly through time; and
how slowly time goes with us who lie in prison I need not tell
again, nor of the weariness and despair that creep back into one's
cell, and into the cell of one's heart, with such strange
insistence that one has, as it were, to garnish and sweep one's
house for their coming, as for an unwelcome guest, or a bitter
master, or a slave whose slave it is one's chance or choice to be.
And, though at present my friends may find it a hard thing to
believe, it is true none the less, that for them living in freedom
and idleness and comfort it is more easy to learn the lessons of
humility than it is for me, who begin the day by going down on my
knees and washing the floor of my cell. For prison life with its
endless privations and restrictions makes one rebellious. The most
terrible thing about it is not that it breaks one's heart - hearts
are made to be broken - but that it turns one's heart to stone.
One sometimes feels that it is only with a front of brass and a lip
of scorn that one can get through the day at all. And he who is in
a state of rebellion cannot receive grace, to use the phrase of
which the Church is so fond - so rightly fond, I dare say - for in
life as in art the mood of rebellion closes up the channels of the
soul, and shuts out the airs of heaven. Yet I must learn these
lessons here, if I am to learn them anywhere, and must be filled
with joy if my feet are on the right road and my face set towards
'the gate which is called beautiful,' though I may fall many times
in the mire and often in the mist go astray.
This New Life, as through my love of Dante I like sometimes to call
it, is of course no new life at all, but simply the continuance, by
means of development, and evolution, of my former life. I remember
when I was at Oxford saying to one of my friends as we were
strolling round Magdalen's narrow bird-haunted walks one morning in
the year before I took my degree, that I wanted to eat of the fruit
of all the trees in the garden of the world, and that I was going
out into the world with that passion in my soul. And so, indeed, I
went out, and so I lived. My only mistake was that I confined
myself so exclusively to the trees of what seemed to me the sun-lit
side of the garden, and shunned the other side for its shadow and
its gloom. Failure, disgrace, poverty, sorrow, despair, suffering,
tears even, the broken words that come from lips in pain, remorse
that makes one walk on thorns, conscience that condemns, selfabasement
that punishes, the misery that puts ashes on its head,
the anguish that chooses sack-cloth for its raiment and into its
own drink puts gall:- all these were things of which I was afraid.
And as I had determined to know nothing of them, I was forced to
taste each of them in turn, to feed on them, to have for a season,
indeed, no other food at all.
I don't regret for a single moment having lived for pleasure. I
did it to the full, as one should do everything that one does.
There was no pleasure I did not experience. I threw the pearl of
my soul into a cup of wine. I went down the primrose path to the
sound of flutes. I lived on honeycomb. But to have continued the
same life would have been wrong because it would have been
limiting. I had to pass on. The other half of the garden had its
secrets for me also. Of course all this is foreshadowed and
prefigured in my books. Some of it is in THE HAPPY PRINCE, some of
it in THE YOUNG KING, notably in the passage where the bishop says
to the kneeling boy, 'Is not He who made misery wiser than thou
art'? a phrase which when I wrote it seemed to me little more than
a phrase; a great deal of it is hidden away in the note of doom
that like a purple thread runs through the texture of DORIAN GRAY;
in THE CRITIC AS ARTIST it is set forth in many colours; in THE
SOUL OF MAN it is written down, and in letters too easy to read; it
is one of the refrains whose recurring MOTIFS make SALOME so like a
piece of music and bind it together as a ballad; in the prose poem
of the man who from the bronze of the image of the 'Pleasure that
liveth for a moment' has to make the image of the 'Sorrow that
abideth for ever' it is incarnate. It could not have been
otherwise. At every single moment of one's life one is what one is
going to be no less than what one has been. Art is a symbol,
because man is a symbol.
It is, if I can fully attain to it, the ultimate realisation of the
artistic life. For the artistic life is simply self-development.
Humility in the artist is his frank acceptance of all experiences,
just as love in the artist is simply the sense of beauty that
reveals to the world its body and its soul. In MARIUS THE
EPICUREAN Pater seeks to reconcile the artistic life with the life
of religion, in the deep, sweet, and austere sense of the word.
But Marius is little more than a spectator: an ideal spectator
indeed, and one to whom it is given 'to contemplate the spectacle
of life with appropriate emotions,' which Wordsworth defines as the
poet's true aim; yet a spectator merely, and perhaps a little too
much occupied with the comeliness of the benches of the sanctuary
to notice that it is the sanctuary of sorrow that he is gazing at.
I see a far more intimate and immediate connection between the true
life of Christ and the true life of the artist; and I take a keen
pleasure in the reflection that long before sorrow had made my days
her own and bound me to her wheel I had written in THE SOUL OF MAN
that he who would lead a Christ-like life must be entirely and
absolutely himself, and had taken as my types not merely the
shepherd on the hillside and the prisoner in his cell, but also the
painter to whom the world is a pageant and the poet for whom the
world is a song. I remember saying once to Andre Gide, as we sat
together in some Paris CAFE, that while meta-physics had but little
real interest for me, and morality absolutely none, there was
nothing that either Plato or Christ had said that could not be
transferred immediately into the sphere of Art and there find its
complete fulfilment.
Nor is it merely that we can discern in Christ that close union of
personality with perfection which forms the real distinction
between the classical and romantic movement in life, but the very
basis of his nature was the same as that of the nature of the
artist - an intense and flamelike imagination. He realised in the
entire sphere of human relations that imaginative sympathy which in
the sphere of Art is the sole secret of creation. He understood
the leprosy of the leper, the darkness of the blind, the fierce
misery of those who live for pleasure, the strange poverty of the
rich. Some one wrote to me in trouble, 'When you are not on your
pedestal you are not interesting.' How remote was the writer from
what Matthew Arnold calls 'the Secret of Jesus.' Either would have
taught him that whatever happens to another happens to oneself, and
if you want an inscription to read at dawn and at night-time, and
for pleasure or for pain, write up on the walls of your house in
letters for the sun to gild and the moon to silver, 'Whatever
happens to oneself happens to another.'
Christ's place indeed is with the poets. His whole conception of
Humanity sprang right out of the imagination and can only be
realised by it. What God was to the pantheist, man was to Him. He
was the first to conceive the divided races as a unity. Before his
time there had been gods and men, and, feeling through the
mysticism of sympathy that in himself each had been made incarnate,
he calls himself the Son of the one or the Son of the other,
according to his mood. More than any one else in history he wakes
in us that temper of wonder to which romance always appeals. There
is still something to me almost incredible in the idea of a young
Galilean peasant imagining that he could bear on his own shoulders
the burden of the entire world; all that had already been done and
suffered, and all that was yet to be done and suffered: the sins
of Nero, of Caesar Borgia, of Alexander VI., and of him who was
Emperor of Rome and Priest of the Sun: the sufferings of those
whose names are legion and whose dwelling is among the tombs:
oppressed nationalities, factory children, thieves, people in
prison, outcasts, those who are dumb 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 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 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 swineherding
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.
I hope to live long enough and to produce work of such a character
that I shall be able at the end of my days to say, 'Yes! this is
just where the artistic life leads a man!' Two of the most perfect
lives I have come across in my own experience are the lives of
Verlaine and of Prince Kropotkin: both of them men who have passed
years in prison: the first, the one Christian poet since Dante;
the other, a man with a soul of that beautiful white Christ which
seems coming out of Russia. And for the last seven or eight
months, in spite of a succession of great troubles reaching me from
the outside world almost without intermission, I have been placed
in direct contact with a new spirit working in this prison through
man and things, that has helped me beyond any possibility of
expression in words: so that while for the first year of my
imprisonment I did nothing else, and can remember doing nothing
else, but wring my hands in impotent despair, and say, 'What an
ending, what an appalling ending!' now I try to say to myself, and
sometimes when I am not torturing myself do really and sincerely
say, 'What a beginning, what a wonderful beginning!' It may really
be so. It may become so. If it does I shall owe much to this new
personality that has altered every man's life in this place.
You may realise it when I say that had I been released last May, as
I tried to be, I would have left this place loathing it and every
official in it with a bitterness of hatred that would have poisoned
my life. I have had a year longer of imprisonment, but humanity
has been in the prison along with us all, and now when I go out I
shall always remember great kindnesses that I have received here
from almost everybody, and on the day of my release I shall give
many thanks to many people, and ask to be remembered by them in
turn.
The prison style is absolutely and entirely wrong. I would give
anything to be able to alter it when I go out. I intend to try.
But there is nothing in the world so wrong but that the spirit of
humanity, which is the spirit of love, the spirit of the Christ who
is not in churches, may make it, if not right, at least possible to
be borne without too much bitterness of heart.
I know also that much is waiting for me outside that is very
delightful, from what St. Francis of Assisi calls 'my brother the
wind, and my sister the rain,' lovely things both of them, down to
the shop-windows and sunsets of great cities. If I made a list of
all that still remains to me, I don't know where I should stop:
for, indeed, God made the world just as much for me as for any one
else. Perhaps I may go out with something that I had not got
before. I need not tell you that to me reformations in morals are
as meaningless and vulgar as Reformations in theology. But while
to propose to be a better man is a piece of unscientific cant, to
have become a deeper man is the privilege of those who have
suffered. And such I think I have become.
If after I am free a friend of mine gave a feast, and did not
invite me to it, I should not mind a bit. I can be perfectly happy
by myself. With freedom, flowers, books, and the moon, who could
not be perfectly happy? Besides, feasts are not for me any more.
I have given too many to care about them. That side of life is
over for me, very fortunately, I dare say. But if after I am free
a friend of mine had a sorrow and refused to allow me to share it,
I should feel it most bitterly. If he shut the doors of the house
of mourning against me, I would come back again and again and beg
to be admitted, so that I might share in what I was entitled to
share in. If he thought me unworthy, unfit to weep with him, I
should feel it as the most poignant humiliation, as the most
terrible mode in which disgrace could be inflicted on me. But that
could not be. I have a right to share in sorrow, and he who can
look at the loveliness of the world and share its sorrow, and
realise something of the wonder of both, is in immediate contact
with divine things, and has got as near to God's secret as any one
can get.
Perhaps there may come into my art also, no less than into my life,
a still deeper note, one of greater unity of passion, and
directness of impulse. Not width but intensity is the true aim of
modern art. We are no longer in art concerned with the type. It
is with the exception that we have to do. I cannot put my
sufferings into any form they took, I need hardly say. Art only
begins where Imitation ends, but something must come into my work,
of fuller memory of words perhaps, of richer cadences, of more
curious effects, of simpler architectural order, of some aesthetic
quality at any rate.
When Marsyas was 'torn from the scabbard of his limbs' - DELLA
VAGINA DELLA MEMBRE SUE, to use one of Dante's most terrible
Tacitean phrases - he had no more song, the Greek said. Apollo had
been victor. The lyre had vanquished the reed. But perhaps the
Greeks were mistaken. I hear in much modern Art the cry of
Marsyas. It is bitter in Baudelaire, sweet and plaintive in
Lamartine, mystic in Verlaine. It is in the deferred resolutions
of Chopin's music. It is in the discontent that haunts Burne-
Jones's women. Even Matthew Arnold, whose song of Callicles tells
of 'the triumph of the sweet persuasive lyre,' and the 'famous
final victory,' in such a clear note of lyrical beauty, has not a
little of it; in the troubled undertone of doubt and distress that
haunts his verses, neither Goethe nor Wordsworth could help him,
though he followed each in turn, and when he seeks to mourn for
THYRSIS or to sing of the SCHOLAR GIPSY, it is the reed that he has
to take for the rendering of his strain. But whether or not the
Phrygian Faun was silent, I cannot be. Expression is as necessary
to me as leaf and blossoms are to the black branches of the trees
that show themselves above the prison walls and are so restless in
the wind. Between my art and the world there is now a wide gulf,
but between art and myself there is none. I hope at least that
there is none.
To each of us different fates are meted out. My lot has been one
of public infamy, of long imprisonment, of misery, of ruin, of
disgrace, but I am not worthy of it - not yet, at any rate. I
remember that I used to say that I thought I could bear a real
tragedy if it came to me with purple pall and a mask of noble
sorrow, but that the dreadful thing about modernity was that it put
tragedy into the raiment of comedy, so that the great realities
seemed commonplace or grotesque or lacking in style. It is quite
true about modernity. It has probably always been true about
actual life. It is said that all martyrdoms seemed mean to the
looker on. The nineteenth century is no exception to the rule.
Everything about my tragedy has been hideous, mean, repellent,
lacking in style; our very dress makes us grotesque. We are the
zanies of sorrow. We are clowns whose hearts are broken. We are
specially designed to appeal to the sense of humour. On November
13th, 1895, I was brought down here from London. From two o'clock
till half-past two on that day I had to stand on the centre
platform of Clapham Junction in convict dress, and handcuffed, for
the world to look at. I had been taken out of the hospital ward
without a moment's notice being given to me. Of all possible
objects I was the most grotesque. When people saw me they laughed.
Each train as it came up swelled the audience. Nothing could
exceed their amusement. That was, of course, before they knew who
I was. As soon as they had been informed they laughed still more.
For half an hour I stood there in the grey November rain surrounded
by a jeering mob.
For a year after that was done to me I wept every day at the same
hour and for the same space of time. That is not such a tragic
thing as possibly it sounds to you. To those who are in prison
tears are a part of every day's experience. A day in prison on
which one does not weep is a day on which one's heart is hard, not
a day on which one's heart is happy.
Well, now I am really beginning to feel more regret for the people
who laughed than for myself. Of course when they saw me I was not
on my pedestal, I was in the pillory. But it is a very
unimaginative nature that only cares for people on their pedestals.
A pedestal may be a very unreal thing. A pillory is a terrific
reality. They should have known also how to interpret sorrow
better. I have said that behind sorrow there is always sorrow. It
were wiser still to say that behind sorrow there is always a soul.
And to mock at a soul in pain is a dreadful thing. In the
strangely simple economy of the world people only get what they
give, and to those who have not enough imagination to penetrate the
mere outward of things, and feel pity, what pity can be given save
that of scorn?
I write this account of the mode of my being transferred here
simply that it should be realised how hard it has been for me to
get anything out of my punishment but bitterness and despair. I
have, however, to do it, and now and then I have moments of
submission and acceptance. All the spring may be hidden in the
single bud, and the low ground nest of the lark may hold the joy
that is to herald the feet of many rose-red dawns. So perhaps
whatever beauty of life still remains to me is contained in some
moment of surrender, abasement, and humiliation. I can, at any
rate, merely proceed on the lines of my own development, and,
accepting all that has happened to me, make myself worthy of it.
People used to say of me that I was too individualistic. I must be
far more of an individualist than ever I was. I must get far more
out of myself than ever I got, and ask far less of the world than
ever I asked. Indeed, my ruin came not from too great
individualism of life, but from too little. The one disgraceful,
unpardonable, and to all time contemptible action of my life was to
allow myself to appeal to society for help and protection. To have
made such an appeal would have been from the individualist point of
view bad enough, but what excuse can there ever be put forward for
having made it? Of course once I had put into motion the forces of
society, society turned on me and said, 'Have you been living all
this time in defiance of my laws, and do you now appeal to those
laws for protection? You shall have those laws exercised to the
full. You shall abide by what you have appealed to.' The result
is I am in gaol. Certainly no man ever fell so ignobly, and by
such ignoble instruments, as I did.
The Philistine element in life is not the failure to understand
art. Charming people, such as fishermen, shepherds, ploughboys,
peasants and the like, know nothing about art, and are the very
salt of the earth. He is the Philistine who upholds and aids the
heavy, cumbrous, blind, mechanical forces of society, and who does
not recognise dynamic force when he meets it either in a man or a
movement.
People thought it dreadful of me to have entertained at dinner the
evil things of life, and to have found pleasure in their company.
But then, from the point of view through which I, as an artist in
life, approach them they were delightfully suggestive and
stimulating. The danger was half the excitement. . . . My business
as an artist was with Ariel. I set myself to wrestle with Caliban.
. . .
A great friend of mine - a friend of ten years' standing - came to
see me some time ago, and told me that he did not believe a single
word of what was said against me, and wished me to know that he
considered me quite innocent, and the victim of a hideous plot. I
burst into tears at what he said, and told him that while there was
much amongst the definite charges that was quite untrue and
transferred to me by revolting malice, still that my life had been
full of perverse pleasures, and that unless he accepted that as a
fact about me and realised it to the full I could not possibly be
friends with him any more, or ever be in his company. It was a
terrible shock to him, but we are friends, and I have not got his
friendship on false pretences.
Emotional forces, as I say somewhere in INTENTIONS, are as limited
in extent and duration as the forces of physical energy. The
little cup that is made to hold so much can hold so much and no
more, though all the purple vats of Burgundy be filled with wine to
the brim, and the treaders stand knee-deep in the gathered grapes
of the stony vineyards of Spain. There is no error more common
than that of thinking that those who are the causes or occasions of
great tragedies share in the feelings suitable to the tragic mood:
no error more fatal than expecting it of them. The martyr in his
'shirt of flame' may be looking on the face of God, but to him who
is piling the faggots or loosening the logs for the blast the whole
scene is no more than the slaying of an ox is to the butcher, or
the felling of a tree to the charcoal burner in the forest, or the
fall of a flower to one who is mowing down the grass with a scythe.
Great passions are for the great of soul, and great events can be
seen only by those who are on a level with them.
* * * * *
I know of nothing in all drama more incomparable from the point of
view of art, nothing more suggestive in its subtlety of
observation, than Shakespeare's drawing of Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern. They are Hamlet's college friends. They have been
his companions. They bring with them memories of pleasant days
together. At the moment when they come across him in the play he
is staggering under the weight of a burden intolerable to one of
his temperament. The dead have come armed out of the grave to
impose on him a mission at once too great and too mean for him. He
is a dreamer, and he is called upon to act. He has the nature of
the poet, and he is asked to grapple with the common complexity of
cause and effect, with life in its practical realisation, of which
he knows nothing, not with life in its ideal essence, of which he
knows so much. He has no conception of what to do, and his folly
is to feign folly. Brutus used madness as a cloak to conceal the
sword of his purpose, the dagger of his will, but the Hamlet
madness is a mere mask for the hiding of weakness. In the making
of fancies and jests he sees a chance of delay. He keeps playing
with action as an artist plays with a theory. He makes himself the
spy of his proper actions, and listening to his own words knows
them to be but 'words, words, words.' Instead of trying to be the
hero of his own history, he seeks to be the spectator of his own
tragedy. He disbelieves in everything, including himself, and yet
his doubt helps him not, as it comes not from scepticism but from a
divided will.
Of all this Guildenstern and Rosencrantz realise nothing. They bow
and smirk and smile, and what the one says the other echoes with
sickliest intonation. When, at last, by means of the play within
the play, and the puppets in their dalliance, Hamlet 'catches the
conscience' of the King, and drives the wretched man in terror from
his throne, Guildenstern and Rosencrantz see no more in his conduct
than a rather painful breach of Court etiquette. That is as far as
they can attain to in 'the contemplation of the spectacle of life
with appropriate emotions.' They are close to his very secret and
know nothing of it. Nor would there be any use in telling them.
They are the little cups that can hold so much and no more.
Towards the close it is suggested that, caught in a cunning spring
set for another, they have met, or may meet, with a violent and
sudden death. But a tragic ending of this kind, though touched by
Hamlet's humour with something of the surprise and justice of
comedy, is really not for such as they. They never die. Horatio,
who in order to 'report Hamlet and his cause aright to the
unsatisfied,'
'Absents him from felicity a while,
And in this harsh world draws his breath in pain,'
dies, but Guildenstern and Rosencrantz are as immortal as Angelo
and Tartuffe, and should rank with them. They are what modern life
has contributed to the antique ideal of friendship. He who writes
a new DE AMICITIA must find a niche for them, and praise them in
Tusculan prose. They are types fixed for all time. To censure
them would show 'a lack of appreciation.' They are merely out of
their sphere: that is all. In sublimity of soul there is no
contagion. High thoughts and high emotions are by their very
existence isolated.
I am to be released, if all goes well with me, towards the end of
May, and hope to go at once to some little sea-side village abroad
with R- and M-.
The sea, as Euripides says in one of his plays about Iphigeneia,
washes away the stains and wounds of the world.
I hope to be at least a month with my friends, and to gain peace
and balance, and a less troubled heart, and a sweeter mood. I have
a strange longing for the great simple primeval things, such as the
sea, to me no less of a mother than the Earth. It seems to me that
we all look at Nature too much, and live with her too little. I
discern great sanity in the Greek attitude. They never chattered
about sunsets, or discussed whether the shadows on the grass were
really mauve or not. But they saw that the sea was for the
swimmer, and the sand for the feet of the runner. They loved the
trees for the shadow that they cast, and the forest for its silence
at noon. The vineyard-dresser wreathed his hair with ivy that he
might keep off the rays of the sun as he stooped over the young
shoots, and for the artist and the athlete, the two types that
Greece gave us, they plaited with garlands the leaves of the bitter
laurel and of the wild parsley, which else had been of no service
to men.
We call ours a utilitarian age, and we do not know the uses of any
single thing. We have forgotten that water can cleanse, and fire
purify, and that the Earth is mother to us all. As a consequence
our art is of the moon and plays with shadows, while Greek art is
of the sun and deals directly with things. I feel sure that in
elemental forces there is purification, and I want to go back to
them and live in their presence.
Of course to one so modern as I am, 'Enfant de mon siecle,' merely
to look at the world will be always lovely. I tremble with
pleasure when I think that on the very day of my leaving prison
both the laburnum and the lilac will be blooming in the gardens,
and that I shall see the wind stir into restless beauty the swaying
gold of the one, and make the other toss the pale purple of its
plumes, so that all the air shall be Arabia for me. Linnaeus fell
on his knees and wept for joy when he saw for the first time the
long heath of some English upland made yellow with the tawny
aromatic brooms of the common furze; and I know that for me, to
whom flowers are part of desire, there are tears waiting in the
petals of some rose. It has always been so with me from my
boyhood. There is not a single colour hidden away in the chalice
of a flower, or the curve of a shell, to which, by some subtle
sympathy with the very soul of things, my nature does not answer.
Like Gautier, I have always been one of those 'pour qui le monde
visible existe.'
Still, I am conscious now that behind all this beauty, satisfying
though it may be, there is some spirit hidden of which the painted
forms and shapes are but modes of manifestation, and it is with
this spirit that I desire to become in harmony. I have grown tired
of the articulate utterances of men and things. The Mystical in
Art, the Mystical in Life, the Mystical in Nature this is what I am
looking for. It is absolutely necessary for me to find it
somewhere.
All trials are trials for one's life, just as all sentences are
sentences of death; and three times have I been tried. The first
time I left the box to be arrested, the second time to be led back
to the house of detention, the third time to pass into a prison for
two years. Society, as we have constituted it, will have no place
for me, has none to offer; but Nature, whose sweet rains fall on
unjust and just alike, will have clefts in the rocks where I may
hide, and secret valleys in whose silence I may weep undisturbed.
She will hang the night with stars so that I may walk abroad in the
darkness without stumbling, and send the wind over my footprints so
that none may track me to my hurt: she will cleanse me in great
waters, and with bitter herbs make me whole.