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De Profundis
...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 BurneJones'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.
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