No More Learning

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.