De profundis

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.

SYSTEMI 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,

SYSTEMI 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!'