No More Learning

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.