this palpitating centre of romance. The strange figures of poetic
drama and ballad are made by the imagination of others, but out of
his own imagination entirely did Jesus of Nazareth create himself.
The cry of Isaiah had really no more to do with his coming than the
song of the nightingale has to do with the rising of the moon - no
more, though perhaps no less. He was the denial as well as the
affirmation of prophecy. For every expectation that he fulfilled
there was another that he destroyed. 'In all beauty,' says Bacon,
'there is some strangeness of proportion,' and of those who are
born of the spirit - of those, that is to say, who like himself are
dynamic forces - Christ says that they are like the wind that
'bloweth where it listeth, and no man can tell whence it cometh and
whither it goeth.' 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