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De Profundis by Oscar Wilde
page 31 of 55 (56%)
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To the artist, expression is the only mode under which he can
conceive life at all. To him what is dumb is dead. But to Christ
it was not so. With a width and wonder of imagination that fills
one almost with awe, he took the entire world of the inarticulate,
the voiceless world of pain, as his kingdom, and made of himself
its eternal mouthpiece. Those of whom I have spoken, who are dumb
under oppression, and 'whose silence is heard only of God,' he
chose as his brothers. He sought to become eyes to the blind, ears
to the deaf, and a cry in the lips of those whose tongues had been
tied. His desire was to be to the myriads who had found no
utterance a very trumpet through which they might call to heaven.
And feeling, with the artistic nature of one to whom suffering and
sorrow were modes through which he could realise his conception of
the beautiful, that an idea is of no value till it becomes
incarnate and is made an image, he made of himself the image of the
Man of Sorrows, and as such has fascinated and dominated art as no
Greek god ever succeeded in doing.

For the Greek gods, in spite of the white and red of their fair
fleet limbs, were not really what they appeared to be. The curved
brow of Apollo was like the sun's disc crescent over a hill at
dawn, and his feet were as the wings of the morning, but he himself
had been cruel to Marsyas and had made Niobe childless. In the
steel shields of Athena's eyes there had been no pity for Arachne;
the pomp and peacocks of Hera were all that was really noble about
her; and the Father of the Gods himself had been too fond of the
daughters of men. The two most deeply suggestive figures of Greek
Mythology were, for religion, Demeter, an Earth Goddess, not one of
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