No More Learning

If ever I write again, in the sense of producing artistic work, there are
just two subjects on which and through which I desire to express myself:
one is 'Christ as the precursor of the romantic movement in life': the
other is 'The artistic life considered in its relation to conduct. ' The
first is, of course, intensely fascinating, for I see in Christ not
merely the essentials of the supreme romantic type, but all the
accidents, the wilfulnesses even, of the romantic temperament also. He
was the first person who ever said to people that they should live
'flower-like lives. ' He fixed the phrase. He took children as the type
of what people should try to become. He held them up as examples to
their elders, which I myself have always thought the chief use of
children, if what is perfect should have a use. Dante describes the soul
of a man as coming from the hand of God 'weeping and laughing like a
little child,' and Christ also saw that the soul of each one should be _a
guisa di fanciulla che piangendo e ridendo pargoleggia_. He felt that
life was changeful, fluid, active, and that to allow it to be stereotyped
into any form was death. He saw that people should not be too serious
over material, common interests: that to be unpractical was to be a great
thing: that one should not bother too much over affairs. The birds
didn't, why should man? He is charming when he says, 'Take no thought
for the morrow; is not the soul more than meat? is not the body more than
raiment? ' A Greek might have used the latter phrase. It is full of
Greek feeling. But only Christ could have said both, and so summed up
life perfectly for us.
His morality is all sympathy, just what morality should be. If the only
thing that he ever said had been, 'Her sins are forgiven her because she
loved much,' it would have been worth while dying to have said it. His
justice is all poetical justice, exactly what justice should be. The
beggar goes to heaven because he has been unhappy. I cannot conceive a
better reason for his being sent there. The people who work for an hour
in the vineyard in the cool of the evening receive just as much reward as
those who have toiled there all day long in the hot sun. Why shouldn't
they? Probably no one deserved anything. Or perhaps they were a
different kind of people. Christ had no patience with the dull lifeless
mechanical systems that treat people as if they were things, and so treat
everybody alike: for him there were no laws: there were exceptions
merely, as if anybody, or anything, for that matter, was like aught else
in the world!

That which is the very keynote of romantic art was to him the proper
basis of natural life. He saw no other basis. And when they brought him
one, taken in the very act of sin and showed him her sentence written in
the law, and asked him what was to be done, he wrote with his finger on
the ground as though he did not hear them, and finally, when they pressed
him again, looked up and said, 'Let him of you who has never sinned be
the first to throw the stone at her. ' It was worth while living to have
said that.

Like all poetical natures he loved ignorant people. He knew that in the
soul of one who is ignorant there is always room for a great idea.