No More Learning

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.