No More Learning

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.