No More Learning

' That is why he is so fascinating to
artists. He has all the colour elements of life: mystery, strangeness,
pathos, suggestion, ecstasy, love. He appeals to the temper of wonder,
and creates that mood in which alone he can be understood.

And to me it is a joy to remember that if he is 'of imagination all
compact,' the world itself is of the same substance. I said in _Dorian
Gray_ that the great sins of the world take place in the brain: but it is
in the brain that everything takes place. We know now that we do not see
with the eyes or hear with the ears. They are really channels for the
transmission, adequate or inadequate, of sense impressions. It is in the
brain that the poppy is red, that the apple is odorous, that the skylark
sings.

Of late I have been studying with diligence the four prose poems about
Christ. At Christmas I managed to get hold of a Greek Testament, and
every morning, after I had cleaned my cell and polished my tins, I read a
little of the Gospels, a dozen verses taken by chance anywhere. It is a
delightful way of opening the day. Every one, even in a turbulent, ill-
disciplined life, should do the same. Endless repetition, in and out of
season, has spoiled for us the freshness, the naivete, the simple
romantic charm of the Gospels. We hear them read far too often and far
too badly, and all repetition is anti-spiritual. When one returns to the
Greek; it is like going into a garden of lilies out of some, narrow and
dark house.
And to me, the pleasure is doubled by the reflection that it is extremely
probable that we have the actual terms, the _ipsissima verba_, used by
Christ. It was always supposed that Christ talked in Aramaic. Even
Renan thought so. But now we know that the Galilean peasants, like the
Irish peasants of our own day, were bilingual, and that Greek was the
ordinary language of intercourse all over Palestine, as indeed all over
the Eastern world. I never liked the idea that we knew of Christ's own
words only through a translation of a translation. It is a delight to me
to think that as far as his conversation was concerned, Charmides might
have listened to him, and Socrates reasoned with him, and Plato
understood him: that he really said [Greek text], that when he thought of
the lilies of the field and how they neither toil nor spin, his absolute
expression was [Greek text], and that his last word when he cried out 'my
life has been completed, has reached its fulfilment, has been perfected,'
was exactly as St. John tells us it was: [Greek text]--no more.

While in reading the Gospels--particularly that of St. John himself, or
whatever early Gnostic took his name and mantle--I see the continual
assertion of the imagination as the basis of all spiritual and material
life, I see also that to Christ imagination was simply a form of love,
and that to him love was lord in the fullest meaning of the phrase. Some
six weeks ago I was allowed by the doctor to have white bread to eat
instead of the coarse black or brown bread of ordinary prison fare. It
is a great delicacy. It will sound strange that dry bread could possibly
be a delicacy to any one. To me it is so much so that at the close of
each meal I carefully eat whatever crumbs may be left on my tin plate, or
have fallen on the rough towel that one uses as a cloth so as not to soil
one's table; and I do so not from hunger--I get now quite sufficient
food--but simply in order that nothing should be wasted of what is given
to me. So one should look on love.

Christ, like all fascinating personalities, had the power of not merely
saying beautiful things himself, but of making other people say beautiful
things to him; and I love the story St. Mark tells us about the Greek
woman, who, when as a trial of her faith he said to her that he could not
give her the bread of the children of Israel, answered him that the
little dogs--([Greek text], 'little dogs' it should be rendered)--who are
under the table eat of the crumbs that the children let fall.