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I see a far more intimate and immediate connection between the true Life of Christ and the true life of the artist, and I take a keen pleasure in the reflection that long before Sorrow had made my days her own and bound me to her wheel I had written in The Soul of Man that he who would lead a Christ-like life must be entirely and absolutely himself, and had taken as my types not merely the shepherd on the hillside and the prisoner in his cell but also the painter to whom the world is a pageant and the poet for whom the world is a song. I remember saying once to Andre Gide, as we sat together in some Paris café, that while Metaphysics had but little real interest for me, and Morality absolutely none, there was nothing that either Plato or Christ had said that could not be transferred immediately into the sphere of Art, and there and its complete fulfilment. It was a generalisation as profound as it was novel.
我看到了，真正的基督生命和真正的艺术家生命之间，有一个亲密直接得多的联系；令我大为高兴的是，回想起在悲怆占据我的日日夜夜、使我身心俱裂之前，我早就在《人的灵魂》中写道，一个人必须完全是、绝对是他自己，才会过基督那样的生活，而我引为典型的，不但有山坡上的牧羊人、牢里的囚徒，还有画家，对于他们世界是一幅美景，还有诗人，对于他们世界是一首歌。记得有一次跟安德烈?纪德在巴黎的一家咖啡馆里，我对他说过，对形而上学我少有兴趣，对道德伦理则一点也没有，然而不管是柏拉图还是耶稣基督，他们所说的无不能直接移植到艺术领域，并在此获得圆满的实现。这一条概括既新颖又深刻。
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