Strange things rise up to us out of the deeps. Because I am a heathen, and Apollo is my god rather than any other, I have never been quite able to comprehend the powerful appeal the Hebrew Messiah makes to the hearts of so many. The solution is to be found in this "De Profundis"—Oscar Wilde's posthumous volume. It is a beautiful book: likely to become a classic of our language by reason of its beautiful, limpid English, its amazing exposition of the course of reasoning by which an outcast of humanity reaches peace and reconciliation with his own soul.
The man's crime, I think, was the result of his reluctance to relinquish youth, with its passions and stimulations of the senses. We all find its relinquishment a tragedy. Some of us refuse to accept the slow, cold enveloping of that cruel serpent of Time, which squeezes out of us our beauty, our vigour, our warmth, and leaves us pallid and eviscerated before devouring us entirely. Wilde, whose whole existence was the pursuit of passion and beauty, violently resenting the fact that with the lapse of years he was no longer able to wake the old thrill of existence by any of the old methods—finding that poetry, art, and the beauty of women all left him more and more jaded and cold, he grasped at vice as a means of heat, and brought himself within the iron clutch of the law. One can guess, even without the aid of his own confessions, at the hysterical rage of this sybaritic dandy caught in the grim trap of the reprobation of Society. Not only the physical discomforts and restraints bore heavily, but more intolerable was the contempt and disgust of the average man—the Philistine—to whom he had always held himself airily and scornfully superior. The old primal laws of the struggle for life lie too deep for even the boldest of us to lightly face universal condemnation. The worst of rebels and cynics is so dependent upon the countenance of his fellows that when good-will is withdrawn a sort of madness of despair falls upon him, and this vain, sensitive poet makes it plain how the passionate protest of the ordinary criminal was in his case intensified to ecstasy. One sees the poor creature, like a rat in a cage, darting hither and thither, and shivering with sick and furious helplessness at the rigidity of the barriers by which the world had shut him away from any further part in the body corporate.
In the last exhaustion of his grief a light dawned for him. There was one who had protested against these laws of reprobation which Society had codified—one who had mercy for the sinner; who had insisted that the suffering and sorrow experienced by those not conforming themselves to the pattern Society demanded regenerated the victims of sorrow, and they became of more worth than those who condemned them. Here was a means of regaining his own peace with himself. Here was a way out of his imprisonment in the scorn of his fellows.
Mary Magdalen, because of her sumptuous repentance, was of more value than the busy and virtuous Martha. The Prodigal Son was more welcome than the patient home-keeper. The lost sheep was the really important member of the flock. The repentant thief was the heir of Paradise. The sinning woman was bid go in peace. All the offenders against the laws of Society were welcomed: the dull walkers in the beaten path were contumeliously branded as Philistines and Pharisees. At once, by this point of view, the prisoner was freed from his cell. It was possible to stand upright once more and return frown for frown with his judges. All these were redeemed by their "beautiful moment"—? Well, let him too have his beautiful moment and he was really of more worth than those who had condemned him.
Here is the secret of the hold the Hebrew thinker has had upon humanity.
When our race slowly began to stand up on their hind legs and to live a life in common, they found—as the ants and bees had done before them—that the common life was only to be made feasible by adopting some general law of behaviour which would enable individuals to assimilate; and so morals and conscience had their generation. A man might never leave his home if the tribe would not accept it as an evil to steal; might never sleep in peace if murder were not a crime; would not feed his children were there not a rule against adultery which ensured him against assuming duties to cuckoos. How bitter, slow, and toilsome was that upward struggle to subdue for the good of the mass the lusts of the individual all history relates. Always a remnant have protested against these hard exactions of the general good at their expense. Always the tribe has, for its own safety, slain, imprisoned, cast out the rebels. The war is not over yet; will, possibly, never end. Always those who prefer their own ends will strive to find justification for their wilfulness; will seek some ground for answering scorn with scorn—and their vociferousness, their lofty, sentimental phrases confuse the minds of the slow-witted.
Alas! dear Philistine—what contumely you suffer at the hands of the revolted! You have grown apologetic for your virtues, which the idealists cast in your teeth as a reproach. You are so foolish you cannot eat of the fruit of desire and at once make it as though it had never been by one "beautiful moment" of emotion. You are so stupid you cannot content the neighbour who owned the fruit by accusing him of being hard because your repentance does not satisfy him for his loss. You are "stodgy"; you are "narrow." You are bitter and untender because you worship the God of Things as They Are, instead of accepting a theism of Things as They Might Be. Of course you really rule the world, and when your critics become too aggressive your logic of stone walls and iron bars makes a trenchant reply, but you are very inarticulate. No one gives you credit for your patient, dull self-restraint. You almost apologize to the scoffers for your persistent moral drudgery. You talk very little about the temptations you have resisted—so much less dramatic than sins against your fellows histrionically washed away by repentant tears. Your painful drudging up the path of obvious duty dazzles and touches no one.—But I, at least, love and respect you—you poor old self-denying Pharisee!