No More Learning

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.