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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Soul of Man, by Oscar Wilde
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
+other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions 
+whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of
+the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at 
+www.gutenberg.org.  If you are not located in the United States, you'll have
+to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook.
+
+
+
+
+Title: The Soul of Man
+
+
+Author: Oscar Wilde
+
+
+
+Release Date: September 26, 2014  [eBook #1017]
+[This file was first posted on August 10, 1997]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SOUL OF MAN***
+
+
+Transcribed from the 1909 Arthur L. Humphreys edition by David Price,
+email ccx074@pglaf.org
+
+                          [Picture: Book cover]
+
+
+
+
+THE
+SOUL OF MAN
+
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+                                  LONDON
+                            ARTHUR L. HUMPREYS
+                                   1900
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+                           _Second Impression_
+
+
+
+
+THE SOUL OF MAN
+
+
+THE chief advantage that would result from the establishment of Socialism
+is, undoubtedly, the fact that Socialism would relieve us from that
+sordid necessity of living for others which, in the present condition of
+things, presses so hardly upon almost everybody.  In fact, scarcely
+anyone at all escapes.
+
+Now and then, in the course of the century, a great man of science, like
+Darwin; a great poet, like Keats; a fine critical spirit, like M. Renan;
+a supreme artist, like Flaubert, has been able to isolate himself, to
+keep himself out of reach of the clamorous claims of others, to stand
+‘under the shelter of the wall,’ as Plato puts it, and so to realise the
+perfection of what was in him, to his own incomparable gain, and to the
+incomparable and lasting gain of the whole world.  These, however, are
+exceptions.  The majority of people spoil their lives by an unhealthy and
+exaggerated altruism—are forced, indeed, so to spoil them.  They find
+themselves surrounded by hideous poverty, by hideous ugliness, by hideous
+starvation.  It is inevitable that they should be strongly moved by all
+this.  The emotions of man are stirred more quickly than man’s
+intelligence; and, as I pointed out some time ago in an article on the
+function of criticism, it is much more easy to have sympathy with
+suffering than it is to have sympathy with thought.  Accordingly, with
+admirable, though misdirected intentions, they very seriously and very
+sentimentally set themselves to the task of remedying the evils that they
+see.  But their remedies do not cure the disease: they merely prolong it.
+Indeed, their remedies are part of the disease.
+
+They try to solve the problem of poverty, for instance, by keeping the
+poor alive; or, in the case of a very advanced school, by amusing the
+poor.
+
+But this is not a solution: it is an aggravation of the difficulty.  The
+proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty
+will be impossible.  And the altruistic virtues have really prevented the
+carrying out of this aim.  Just as the worst slave-owners were those who
+were kind to their slaves, and so prevented the horror of the system
+being realised by those who suffered from it, and understood by those who
+contemplated it, so, in the present state of things in England, the
+people who do most harm are the people who try to do most good; and at
+last we have had the spectacle of men who have really studied the problem
+and know the life—educated men who live in the East End—coming forward
+and imploring the community to restrain its altruistic impulses of
+charity, benevolence, and the like.  They do so on the ground that such
+charity degrades and demoralises.  They are perfectly right.  Charity
+creates a multitude of sins.
+
+There is also this to be said.  It is immoral to use private property in
+order to alleviate the horrible evils that result from the institution of
+private property.  It is both immoral and unfair.
+
+Under Socialism all this will, of course, be altered.  There will be no
+people living in fetid dens and fetid rags, and bringing up unhealthy,
+hunger-pinched children in the midst of impossible and absolutely
+repulsive surroundings.  The security of society will not depend, as it
+does now, on the state of the weather.  If a frost comes we shall not
+have a hundred thousand men out of work, tramping about the streets in a
+state of disgusting misery, or whining to their neighbours for alms, or
+crowding round the doors of loathsome shelters to try and secure a hunch
+of bread and a night’s unclean lodging.  Each member of the society will
+share in the general prosperity and happiness of the society, and if a
+frost comes no one will practically be anything the worse.
+
+Upon the other hand, Socialism itself will be of value simply because it
+will lead to Individualism.
+
+Socialism, Communism, or whatever one chooses to call it, by converting
+private property into public wealth, and substituting co-operation for
+competition, will restore society to its proper condition of a thoroughly
+healthy organism, and insure the material well-being of each member of
+the community.  It will, in fact, give Life its proper basis and its
+proper environment.  But for the full development of Life to its highest
+mode of perfection, something more is needed.  What is needed is
+Individualism.  If the Socialism is Authoritarian; if there are
+Governments armed with economic power as they are now with political
+power; if, in a word, we are to have Industrial Tyrannies, then the last
+state of man will be worse than the first.  At present, in consequence of
+the existence of private property, a great many people are enabled to
+develop a certain very limited amount of Individualism.  They are either
+under no necessity to work for their living, or are enabled to choose the
+sphere of activity that is really congenial to them, and gives them
+pleasure.  These are the poets, the philosophers, the men of science, the
+men of culture—in a word, the real men, the men who have realised
+themselves, and in whom all Humanity gains a partial realisation.  Upon
+the other hand, there are a great many people who, having no private
+property of their own, and being always on the brink of sheer starvation,
+are compelled to do the work of beasts of burden, to do work that is
+quite uncongenial to them, and to which they are forced by the
+peremptory, unreasonable, degrading Tyranny of want.  These are the poor,
+and amongst them there is no grace of manner, or charm of speech, or
+civilisation, or culture, or refinement in pleasures, or joy of life.
+From their collective force Humanity gains much in material prosperity.
+But it is only the material result that it gains, and the man who is poor
+is in himself absolutely of no importance.  He is merely the
+infinitesimal atom of a force that, so far from regarding him, crushes
+him: indeed, prefers him crushed, as in that case he is far more
+obedient.
+
+Of course, it might be said that the Individualism generated under
+conditions of private property is not always, or even as a rule, of a
+fine or wonderful type, and that the poor, if they have not culture and
+charm, have still many virtues.  Both these statements would be quite
+true.  The possession of private property is very often extremely
+demoralising, and that is, of course, one of the reasons why Socialism
+wants to get rid of the institution.  In fact, property is really a
+nuisance.  Some years ago people went about the country saying that
+property has duties.  They said it so often and so tediously that, at
+last, the Church has begun to say it.  One hears it now from every
+pulpit.  It is perfectly true.  Property not merely has duties, but has
+so many duties that its possession to any large extent is a bore.  It
+involves endless claims upon one, endless attention to business, endless
+bother.  If property had simply pleasures, we could stand it; but its
+duties make it unbearable.  In the interest of the rich we must get rid
+of it.  The virtues of the poor may be readily admitted, and are much to
+be regretted.  We are often told that the poor are grateful for charity.
+Some of them are, no doubt, but the best amongst the poor are never
+grateful.  They are ungrateful, discontented, disobedient, and
+rebellious.  They are quite right to be so.  Charity they feel to be a
+ridiculously inadequate mode of partial restitution, or a sentimental
+dole, usually accompanied by some impertinent attempt on the part of the
+sentimentalist to tyrannise over their private lives.  Why should they be
+grateful for the crumbs that fall from the rich man’s table?  They should
+be seated at the board, and are beginning to know it.  As for being
+discontented, a man who would not be discontented with such surroundings
+and such a low mode of life would be a perfect brute.  Disobedience, in
+the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s original virtue.  It is
+through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience
+and through rebellion.  Sometimes the poor are praised for being thrifty.
+But to recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting.  It
+is like advising a man who is starving to eat less.  For a town or
+country labourer to practise thrift would be absolutely immoral.  Man
+should not be ready to show that he can live like a badly-fed animal.  He
+should decline to live like that, and should either steal or go on the
+rates, which is considered by many to be a form of stealing.  As for
+begging, it is safer to beg than to take, but it is finer to take than to
+beg.  No: a poor man who is ungrateful, unthrifty, discontented, and
+rebellious, is probably a real personality, and has much in him.  He is
+at any rate a healthy protest.  As for the virtuous poor, one can pity
+them, of course, but one cannot possibly admire them.  They have made
+private terms with the enemy, and sold their birthright for very bad
+pottage.  They must also be extraordinarily stupid.  I can quite
+understand a man accepting laws that protect private property, and admit
+of its accumulation, as long as he himself is able under those conditions
+to realise some form of beautiful and intellectual life.  But it is
+almost incredible to me how a man whose life is marred and made hideous
+by such laws can possibly acquiesce in their continuance.
+
+However, the explanation is not really difficult to find.  It is simply
+this.  Misery and poverty are so absolutely degrading, and exercise such
+a paralysing effect over the nature of men, that no class is ever really
+conscious of its own suffering.  They have to be told of it by other
+people, and they often entirely disbelieve them.  What is said by great
+employers of labour against agitators is unquestionably true.  Agitators
+are a set of interfering, meddling people, who come down to some
+perfectly contented class of the community, and sow the seeds of
+discontent amongst them.  That is the reason why agitators are so
+absolutely necessary.  Without them, in our incomplete state, there would
+be no advance towards civilisation.  Slavery was put down in America, not
+in consequence of any action on the part of the slaves, or even any
+express desire on their part that they should be free.  It was put down
+entirely through the grossly illegal conduct of certain agitators in
+Boston and elsewhere, who were not slaves themselves, nor owners of
+slaves, nor had anything to do with the question really.  It was,
+undoubtedly, the Abolitionists who set the torch alight, who began the
+whole thing.  And it is curious to note that from the slaves themselves
+they received, not merely very little assistance, but hardly any sympathy
+even; and when at the close of the war the slaves found themselves free,
+found themselves indeed so absolutely free that they were free to starve,
+many of them bitterly regretted the new state of things.  To the thinker,
+the most tragic fact in the whole of the French Revolution is not that
+Marie Antoinette was killed for being a queen, but that the starved
+peasant of the Vendée voluntarily went out to die for the hideous cause
+of feudalism.
+
+It is clear, then, that no Authoritarian Socialism will do.  For while
+under the present system a very large number of people can lead lives of
+a certain amount of freedom and expression and happiness, under an
+industrial-barrack system, or a system of economic tyranny, nobody would
+be able to have any such freedom at all.  It is to be regretted that a
+portion of our community should be practically in slavery, but to propose
+to solve the problem by enslaving the entire community is childish.
+Every man must be left quite free to choose his own work.  No form of
+compulsion must be exercised over him.  If there is, his work will not be
+good for him, will not be good in itself, and will not be good for
+others.  And by work I simply mean activity of any kind.
+
+I hardly think that any Socialist, nowadays, would seriously propose that
+an inspector should call every morning at each house to see that each
+citizen rose up and did manual labour for eight hours.  Humanity has got
+beyond that stage, and reserves such a form of life for the people whom,
+in a very arbitrary manner, it chooses to call criminals.  But I confess
+that many of the socialistic views that I have come across seem to me to
+be tainted with ideas of authority, if not of actual compulsion.  Of
+course, authority and compulsion are out of the question.  All
+association must be quite voluntary.  It is only in voluntary
+associations that man is fine.
+
+But it may be asked how Individualism, which is now more or less
+dependent on the existence of private property for its development, will
+benefit by the abolition of such private property.  The answer is very
+simple.  It is true that, under existing conditions, a few men who have
+had private means of their own, such as Byron, Shelley, Browning, Victor
+Hugo, Baudelaire, and others, have been able to realise their personality
+more or less completely.  Not one of these men ever did a single day’s
+work for hire.  They were relieved from poverty.  They had an immense
+advantage.  The question is whether it would be for the good of
+Individualism that such an advantage should be taken away.  Let us
+suppose that it is taken away.  What happens then to Individualism?  How
+will it benefit?
+
+It will benefit in this way.  Under the new conditions Individualism will
+be far freer, far finer, and far more intensified than it is now.  I am
+not talking of the great imaginatively-realised Individualism of such
+poets as I have mentioned, but of the great actual Individualism latent
+and potential in mankind generally.  For the recognition of private
+property has really harmed Individualism, and obscured it, by confusing a
+man with what he possesses.  It has led Individualism entirely astray.
+It has made gain not growth its aim.  So that man thought that the
+important thing was to have, and did not know that the important thing is
+to be.  The true perfection of man lies, not in what man has, but in what
+man is.  Private property has crushed true Individualism, and set up an
+Individualism that is false.  It has debarred one part of the community
+from being individual by starving them.  It has debarred the other part
+of the community from being individual by putting them on the wrong road,
+and encumbering them.  Indeed, so completely has man’s personality been
+absorbed by his possessions that the English law has always treated
+offences against a man’s property with far more severity than offences
+against his person, and property is still the test of complete
+citizenship.  The industry necessary for the making money is also very
+demoralising.  In a community like ours, where property confers immense
+distinction, social position, honour, respect, titles, and other pleasant
+things of the kind, man, being naturally ambitious, makes it his aim to
+accumulate this property, and goes on wearily and tediously accumulating
+it long after he has got far more than he wants, or can use, or enjoy, or
+perhaps even know of.  Man will kill himself by overwork in order to
+secure property, and really, considering the enormous advantages that
+property brings, one is hardly surprised.  One’s regret is that society
+should be constructed on such a basis that man has been forced into a
+groove in which he cannot freely develop what is wonderful, and
+fascinating, and delightful in him—in which, in fact, he misses the true
+pleasure and joy of living.  He is also, under existing conditions, very
+insecure.  An enormously wealthy merchant may be—often is—at every moment
+of his life at the mercy of things that are not under his control.  If
+the wind blows an extra point or so, or the weather suddenly changes, or
+some trivial thing happens, his ship may go down, his speculations may go
+wrong, and he finds himself a poor man, with his social position quite
+gone.  Now, nothing should be able to harm a man except himself.  Nothing
+should be able to rob a man at all.  What a man really has, is what is in
+him.  What is outside of him should be a matter of no importance.
+
+With the abolition of private property, then, we shall have true,
+beautiful, healthy Individualism.  Nobody will waste his life in
+accumulating things, and the symbols for things.  One will live.  To live
+is the rarest thing in the world.  Most people exist, that is all.
+
+It is a question whether we have ever seen the full expression of a
+personality, except on the imaginative plane of art.  In action, we never
+have.  Cæsar, says Mommsen, was the complete and perfect man.  But how
+tragically insecure was Cæsar!  Wherever there is a man who exercises
+authority, there is a man who resists authority.  Cæsar was very perfect,
+but his perfection travelled by too dangerous a road.  Marcus Aurelius
+was the perfect man, says Renan.  Yes; the great emperor was a perfect
+man.  But how intolerable were the endless claims upon him!  He staggered
+under the burden of the empire.  He was conscious how inadequate one man
+was to bear the weight of that Titan and too vast orb.  What I mean by a
+perfect man is one who develops under perfect conditions; one who is not
+wounded, or worried or maimed, or in danger.  Most personalities have
+been obliged to be rebels.  Half their strength has been wasted in
+friction.  Byron’s personality, for instance, was terribly wasted in its
+battle with the stupidity, and hypocrisy, and Philistinism of the
+English.  Such battles do not always intensify strength: they often
+exaggerate weakness.  Byron was never able to give us what he might have
+given us.  Shelley escaped better.  Like Byron, he got out of England as
+soon as possible.  But he was not so well known.  If the English had had
+any idea of what a great poet he really was, they would have fallen on
+him with tooth and nail, and made his life as unbearable to him as they
+possibly could.  But he was not a remarkable figure in society, and
+consequently he escaped, to a certain degree.  Still, even in Shelley the
+note of rebellion is sometimes too strong.  The note of the perfect
+personality is not rebellion, but peace.
+
+It will be a marvellous thing—the true personality of man—when we see it.
+It will grow naturally and simply, flowerlike, or as a tree grows.  It
+will not be at discord.  It will never argue or dispute.  It will not
+prove things.  It will know everything.  And yet it will not busy itself
+about knowledge.  It will have wisdom.  Its value will not be measured by
+material things.  It will have nothing.  And yet it will have everything,
+and whatever one takes from it, it will still have, so rich will it be.
+It will not be always meddling with others, or asking them to be like
+itself.  It will love them because they will be different.  And yet while
+it will not meddle with others, it will help all, as a beautiful thing
+helps us, by being what it is.  The personality of man will be very
+wonderful.  It will be as wonderful as the personality of a child.
+
+In its development it will be assisted by Christianity, if men desire
+that; but if men do not desire that, it will develop none the less
+surely.  For it will not worry itself about the past, nor care whether
+things happened or did not happen.  Nor will it admit any laws but its
+own laws; nor any authority but its own authority.  Yet it will love
+those who sought to intensify it, and speak often of them.  And of these
+Christ was one.
+
+‘Know thyself’ was written over the portal of the antique world.  Over
+the portal of the new world, ‘Be thyself’ shall be written.  And the
+message of Christ to man was simply ‘Be thyself.’  That is the secret of
+Christ.
+
+When Jesus talks about the poor he simply means personalities, just as
+when he talks about the rich he simply means people who have not
+developed their personalities.  Jesus moved in a community that allowed
+the accumulation of private property just as ours does, and the gospel
+that he preached was not that in such a community it is an advantage for
+a man to live on scanty, unwholesome food, to wear ragged, unwholesome
+clothes, to sleep in horrid, unwholesome dwellings, and a disadvantage
+for a man to live under healthy, pleasant, and decent conditions.  Such a
+view would have been wrong there and then, and would, of course, be still
+more wrong now and in England; for as man moves northward the material
+necessities of life become of more vital importance, and our society is
+infinitely more complex, and displays far greater extremes of luxury and
+pauperism than any society of the antique world.  What Jesus meant, was
+this.  He said to man, ‘You have a wonderful personality.  Develop it.
+Be yourself.  Don’t imagine that your perfection lies in accumulating or
+possessing external things.  Your affection is inside of you.  If only
+you could realise that, you would not want to be rich.  Ordinary riches
+can be stolen from a man.  Real riches cannot.  In the treasury-house of
+your soul, there are infinitely precious things, that may not be taken
+from you.  And so, try to so shape your life that external things will
+not harm you.  And try also to get rid of personal property.  It involves
+sordid preoccupation, endless industry, continual wrong.  Personal
+property hinders Individualism at every step.’  It is to be noted that
+Jesus never says that impoverished people are necessarily good, or
+wealthy people necessarily bad.  That would not have been true.  Wealthy
+people are, as a class, better than impoverished people, more moral, more
+intellectual, more well-behaved.  There is only one class in the
+community that thinks more about money than the rich, and that is the
+poor.  The poor can think of nothing else.  That is the misery of being
+poor.  What Jesus does say is that man reaches his perfection, not
+through what he has, not even through what he does, but entirely through
+what he is.  And so the wealthy young man who comes to Jesus is
+represented as a thoroughly good citizen, who has broken none of the laws
+of his state, none of the commandments of his religion.  He is quite
+respectable, in the ordinary sense of that extraordinary word.  Jesus
+says to him, ‘You should give up private property.  It hinders you from
+realising your perfection.  It is a drag upon you.  It is a burden.  Your
+personality does not need it.  It is within you, and not outside of you,
+that you will find what you really are, and what you really want.’  To
+his own friends he says the same thing.  He tells them to be themselves,
+and not to be always worrying about other things.  What do other things
+matter?  Man is complete in himself.  When they go into the world, the
+world will disagree with them.  That is inevitable.  The world hates
+Individualism.  But that is not to trouble them.  They are to be calm and
+self-centred.  If a man takes their cloak, they are to give him their
+coat, just to show that material things are of no importance.  If people
+abuse them, they are not to answer back.  What does it signify?  The
+things people say of a man do not alter a man.  He is what he is.  Public
+opinion is of no value whatsoever.  Even if people employ actual
+violence, they are not to be violent in turn.  That would be to fall to
+the same low level.  After all, even in prison, a man can be quite free.
+His soul can be free.  His personality can be untroubled.  He can be at
+peace.  And, above all things, they are not to interfere with other
+people or judge them in any way.  Personality is a very mysterious thing.
+A man cannot always be estimated by what he does.  He may keep the law,
+and yet be worthless.  He may break the law, and yet be fine.  He may be
+bad, without ever doing anything bad.  He may commit a sin against
+society, and yet realise through that sin his true perfection.
+
+There was a woman who was taken in adultery.  We are not told the history
+of her love, but that love must have been very great; for Jesus said that
+her sins were forgiven her, not because she repented, but because her
+love was so intense and wonderful.  Later on, a short time before his
+death, as he sat at a feast, the woman came in and poured costly perfumes
+on his hair.  His friends tried to interfere with her, and said that it
+was an extravagance, and that the money that the perfume cost should have
+been expended on charitable relief of people in want, or something of
+that kind.  Jesus did not accept that view.  He pointed out that the
+material needs of Man were great and very permanent, but that the
+spiritual needs of Man were greater still, and that in one divine moment,
+and by selecting its own mode of expression, a personality might make
+itself perfect.  The world worships the woman, even now, as a saint.
+
+Yes; there are suggestive things in Individualism.  Socialism annihilates
+family life, for instance.  With the abolition of private property,
+marriage in its present form must disappear.  This is part of the
+programme.  Individualism accepts this and makes it fine.  It converts
+the abolition of legal restraint into a form of freedom that will help
+the full development of personality, and make the love of man and woman
+more wonderful, more beautiful, and more ennobling.  Jesus knew this.  He
+rejected the claims of family life, although they existed in his day and
+community in a very marked form.  ‘Who is my mother?  Who are my
+brothers?’ he said, when he was told that they wished to speak to him.
+When one of his followers asked leave to go and bury his father, ‘Let the
+dead bury the dead,’ was his terrible answer.  He would allow no claim
+whatsoever to be made on personality.
+
+And so he who would lead a Christlike life is he who is perfectly and
+absolutely himself.  He may be a great poet, or a great man of science;
+or a young student at a University, or one who watches sheep upon a moor;
+or a maker of dramas, like Shakespeare, or a thinker about God, like
+Spinoza; or a child who plays in a garden, or a fisherman who throws his
+net into the sea.  It does not matter what he is, as long as he realises
+the perfection of the soul that is within him.  All imitation in morals
+and in life is wrong.  Through the streets of Jerusalem at the present
+day crawls one who is mad and carries a wooden cross on his shoulders.
+He is a symbol of the lives that are marred by imitation.  Father Damien
+was Christlike when he went out to live with the lepers, because in such
+service he realised fully what was best in him.  But he was not more
+Christlike than Wagner when he realised his soul in music; or than
+Shelley, when he realised his soul in song.  There is no one type for
+man.  There are as many perfections as there are imperfect men.  And
+while to the claims of charity a man may yield and yet be free, to the
+claims of conformity no man may yield and remain free at all.
+
+Individualism, then, is what through Socialism we are to attain to.  As a
+natural result the State must give up all idea of government.  It must
+give it up because, as a wise man once said many centuries before Christ,
+there is such a thing as leaving mankind alone; there is no such thing as
+governing mankind.  All modes of government are failures.  Despotism is
+unjust to everybody, including the despot, who was probably made for
+better things.  Oligarchies are unjust to the many, and ochlocracies are
+unjust to the few.  High hopes were once formed of democracy; but
+democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for
+the people.  It has been found out.  I must say that it was high time,
+for all authority is quite degrading.  It degrades those who exercise it,
+and degrades those over whom it is exercised.  When it is violently,
+grossly, and cruelly used, it produces a good effect, by creating, or at
+any rate bringing out, the spirit of revolt and Individualism that is to
+kill it.  When it is used with a certain amount of kindness, and
+accompanied by prizes and rewards, it is dreadfully demoralising.
+People, in that case, are less conscious of the horrible pressure that is
+being put on them, and so go through their lives in a sort of coarse
+comfort, like petted animals, without ever realising that they are
+probably thinking other people’s thoughts, living by other people’s
+standards, wearing practically what one may call other people’s
+second-hand clothes, and never being themselves for a single moment.  ‘He
+who would be free,’ says a fine thinker, ‘must not conform.’  And
+authority, by bribing people to conform, produces a very gross kind of
+over-fed barbarism amongst us.
+
+With authority, punishment will pass away.  This will be a great gain—a
+gain, in fact, of incalculable value.  As one reads history, not in the
+expurgated editions written for school-boys and passmen, but in the
+original authorities of each time, one is absolutely sickened, not by the
+crimes that the wicked have committed, but by the punishments that the
+good have inflicted; and a community is infinitely more brutalised by the
+habitual employment of punishment, than it is by the occurrence of crime.
+It obviously follows that the more punishment is inflicted the more crime
+is produced, and most modern legislation has clearly recognised this, and
+has made it its task to diminish punishment as far as it thinks it can.
+Wherever it has really diminished it, the results have always been
+extremely good.  The less punishment, the less crime.  When there is no
+punishment at all, crime will either cease to exist, or, if it occurs,
+will be treated by physicians as a very distressing form of dementia, to
+be cured by care and kindness.  For what are called criminals nowadays
+are not criminals at all.  Starvation, and not sin, is the parent of
+modern crime.  That indeed is the reason why our criminals are, as a
+class, so absolutely uninteresting from any psychological point of view.
+They are not marvellous Macbeths and terrible Vautrins.  They are merely
+what ordinary, respectable, commonplace people would be if they had not
+got enough to eat.  When private property is abolished there will be no
+necessity for crime, no demand for it; it will cease to exist.  Of
+course, all crimes are not crimes against property, though such are the
+crimes that the English law, valuing what a man has more than what a man
+is, punishes with the harshest and most horrible severity, if we except
+the crime of murder, and regard death as worse than penal servitude, a
+point on which our criminals, I believe, disagree.  But though a crime
+may not be against property, it may spring from the misery and rage and
+depression produced by our wrong system of property-holding, and so, when
+that system is abolished, will disappear.  When each member of the
+community has sufficient for his wants, and is not interfered with by his
+neighbour, it will not be an object of any interest to him to interfere
+with anyone else.  Jealousy, which is an extraordinary source of crime in
+modern life, is an emotion closely bound up with our conceptions of
+property, and under Socialism and Individualism will die out.  It is
+remarkable that in communistic tribes jealousy is entirely unknown.
+
+Now as the State is not to govern, it may be asked what the State is to
+do.  The State is to be a voluntary association that will organise
+labour, and be the manufacturer and distributor of necessary commodities.
+The State is to make what is useful.  The individual is to make what is
+beautiful.  And as I have mentioned the word labour, I cannot help saying
+that a great deal of nonsense is being written and talked nowadays about
+the dignity of manual labour.  There is nothing necessarily dignified
+about manual labour at all, and most of it is absolutely degrading.  It
+is mentally and morally injurious to man to do anything in which he does
+not find pleasure, and many forms of labour are quite pleasureless
+activities, and should be regarded as such.  To sweep a slushy crossing
+for eight hours, on a day when the east wind is blowing is a disgusting
+occupation.  To sweep it with mental, moral, or physical dignity seems to
+me to be impossible.  To sweep it with joy would be appalling.  Man is
+made for something better than disturbing dirt.  All work of that kind
+should be done by a machine.
+
+And I have no doubt that it will be so.  Up to the present, man has been,
+to a certain extent, the slave of machinery, and there is something
+tragic in the fact that as soon as man had invented a machine to do his
+work he began to starve.  This, however, is, of course, the result of our
+property system and our system of competition.  One man owns a machine
+which does the work of five hundred men.  Five hundred men are, in
+consequence, thrown out of employment, and, having no work to do, become
+hungry and take to thieving.  The one man secures the produce of the
+machine and keeps it, and has five hundred times as much as he should
+have, and probably, which is of much more importance, a great deal more
+than he really wants.  Were that machine the property of all, every one
+would benefit by it.  It would be an immense advantage to the community.
+All unintellectual labour, all monotonous, dull labour, all labour that
+deals with dreadful things, and involves unpleasant conditions, must be
+done by machinery.  Machinery must work for us in coal mines, and do all
+sanitary services, and be the stoker of steamers, and clean the streets,
+and run messages on wet days, and do anything that is tedious or
+distressing.  At present machinery competes against man.  Under proper
+conditions machinery will serve man.  There is no doubt at all that this
+is the future of machinery, and just as trees grow while the country
+gentleman is asleep, so while Humanity will be amusing itself, or
+enjoying cultivated leisure—which, and not labour, is the aim of man—or
+making beautiful things, or reading beautiful things, or simply
+contemplating the world with admiration and delight, machinery will be
+doing all the necessary and unpleasant work.  The fact is, that
+civilisation requires slaves.  The Greeks were quite right there.  Unless
+there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture
+and contemplation become almost impossible.  Human slavery is wrong,
+insecure, and demoralising.  On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the
+machine, the future of the world depends.  And when scientific men are no
+longer called upon to go down to a depressing East End and distribute bad
+cocoa and worse blankets to starving people, they will have delightful
+leisure in which to devise wonderful and marvellous things for their own
+joy and the joy of everyone else.  There will be great storages of force
+for every city, and for every house if required, and this force man will
+convert into heat, light, or motion, according to his needs.  Is this
+Utopian?  A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth
+even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is
+always landing.  And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing
+a better country, sets sail.  Progress is the realisation of Utopias.
+
+Now, I have said that the community by means of organisation of machinery
+will supply the useful things, and that the beautiful things will be made
+by the individual.  This is not merely necessary, but it is the only
+possible way by which we can get either the one or the other.  An
+individual who has to make things for the use of others, and with
+reference to their wants and their wishes, does not work with interest,
+and consequently cannot put into his work what is best in him.  Upon the
+other hand, whenever a community or a powerful section of a community, or
+a government of any kind, attempts to dictate to the artist what he is to
+do, Art either entirely vanishes, or becomes stereotyped, or degenerates
+into a low and ignoble form of craft.  A work of art is the unique result
+of a unique temperament.  Its beauty comes from the fact that the author
+is what he is.  It has nothing to do with the fact that other people want
+what they want.  Indeed, the moment that an artist takes notice of what
+other people want, and tries to supply the demand, he ceases to be an
+artist, and becomes a dull or an amusing craftsman, an honest or a
+dishonest tradesman.  He has no further claim to be considered as an
+artist.  Art is the most intense mode of Individualism that the world has
+known.  I am inclined to say that it is the only real mode of
+Individualism that the world has known.  Crime, which, under certain
+conditions, may seem to have created Individualism, must take cognisance
+of other people and interfere with them.  It belongs to the sphere of
+action.  But alone, without any reference to his neighbours, without any
+interference, the artist can fashion a beautiful thing; and if he does
+not do it solely for his own pleasure, he is not an artist at all.
+
+And it is to be noted that it is the fact that Art is this intense form
+of Individualism that makes the public try to exercise over it in an
+authority that is as immoral as it is ridiculous, and as corrupting as it
+is contemptible.  It is not quite their fault.  The public has always,
+and in every age, been badly brought up.  They are continually asking Art
+to be popular, to please their want of taste, to flatter their absurd
+vanity, to tell them what they have been told before, to show them what
+they ought to be tired of seeing, to amuse them when they feel heavy
+after eating too much, and to distract their thoughts when they are
+wearied of their own stupidity.  Now Art should never try to be popular.
+The public should try to make itself artistic.  There is a very wide
+difference.  If a man of science were told that the results of his
+experiments, and the conclusions that he arrived at, should be of such a
+character that they would not upset the received popular notions on the
+subject, or disturb popular prejudice, or hurt the sensibilities of
+people who knew nothing about science; if a philosopher were told that he
+had a perfect right to speculate in the highest spheres of thought,
+provided that he arrived at the same conclusions as were held by those
+who had never thought in any sphere at all—well, nowadays the man of
+science and the philosopher would be considerably amused.  Yet it is
+really a very few years since both philosophy and science were subjected
+to brutal popular control, to authority in fact—the authority of either
+the general ignorance of the community, or the terror and greed for power
+of an ecclesiastical or governmental class.  Of course, we have to a very
+great extent got rid of any attempt on the part of the community, or the
+Church, or the Government, to interfere with the individualism of
+speculative thought, but the attempt to interfere with the individualism
+of imaginative art still lingers.  In fact, it does more than linger; it
+is aggressive, offensive, and brutalising.
+
+In England, the arts that have escaped best are the arts in which the
+public take no interest.  Poetry is an instance of what I mean.  We have
+been able to have fine poetry in England because the public do not read
+it, and consequently do not influence it.  The public like to insult
+poets because they are individual, but once they have insulted them, they
+leave them alone.  In the case of the novel and the drama, arts in which
+the public do take an interest, the result of the exercise of popular
+authority has been absolutely ridiculous.  No country produces such
+badly-written fiction, such tedious, common work in the novel form, such
+silly, vulgar plays as England.  It must necessarily be so.  The popular
+standard is of such a character that no artist can get to it.  It is at
+once too easy and too difficult to be a popular novelist.  It is too
+easy, because the requirements of the public as far as plot, style,
+psychology, treatment of life, and treatment of literature are concerned
+are within the reach of the very meanest capacity and the most
+uncultivated mind.  It is too difficult, because to meet such
+requirements the artist would have to do violence to his temperament,
+would have to write not for the artistic joy of writing, but for the
+amusement of half-educated people, and so would have to suppress his
+individualism, forget his culture, annihilate his style, and surrender
+everything that is valuable in him.  In the case of the drama, things are
+a little better: the theatre-going public like the obvious, it is true,
+but they do not like the tedious; and burlesque and farcical comedy, the
+two most popular forms, are distinct forms of art.  Delightful work may
+be produced under burlesque and farcical conditions, and in work of this
+kind the artist in England is allowed very great freedom.  It is when one
+comes to the higher forms of the drama that the result of popular control
+is seen.  The one thing that the public dislike is novelty.  Any attempt
+to extend the subject-matter of art is extremely distasteful to the
+public; and yet the vitality and progress of art depend in a large
+measure on the continual extension of subject-matter.  The public dislike
+novelty because they are afraid of it.  It represents to them a mode of
+Individualism, an assertion on the part of the artist that he selects his
+own subject, and treats it as he chooses.  The public are quite right in
+their attitude.  Art is Individualism, and Individualism is a disturbing
+and disintegrating force.  Therein lies its immense value.  For what it
+seeks to disturb is monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of
+habit, and the reduction of man to the level of a machine.  In Art, the
+public accept what has been, because they cannot alter it, not because
+they appreciate it.  They swallow their classics whole, and never taste
+them.  They endure them as the inevitable, and as they cannot mar them,
+they mouth about them.  Strangely enough, or not strangely, according to
+one’s own views, this acceptance of the classics does a great deal of
+harm.  The uncritical admiration of the Bible and Shakespeare in England
+is an instance of what I mean.  With regard to the Bible, considerations
+of ecclesiastical authority enter into the matter, so that I need not
+dwell upon the point.
+
+But in the case of Shakespeare it is quite obvious that the public really
+see neither the beauties nor the defects of his plays.  If they saw the
+beauties, they would not object to the development of the drama; and if
+they saw the defects, they would not object to the development of the
+drama either.  The fact is, the public make use of the classics of a
+country as a means of checking the progress of Art.  They degrade the
+classics into authorities.  They use them as bludgeons for preventing the
+free expression of Beauty in new forms.  They are always asking a writer
+why he does not write like somebody else, or a painter why he does not
+paint like somebody else, quite oblivious of the fact that if either of
+them did anything of the kind he would cease to be an artist.  A fresh
+mode of Beauty is absolutely distasteful to them, and whenever it appears
+they get so angry, and bewildered that they always use two stupid
+expressions—one is that the work of art is grossly unintelligible; the
+other, that the work of art is grossly immoral.  What they mean by these
+words seems to me to be this.  When they say a work is grossly
+unintelligible, they mean that the artist has said or made a beautiful
+thing that is new; when they describe a work as grossly immoral, they
+mean that the artist has said or made a beautiful thing that is true.
+The former expression has reference to style; the latter to
+subject-matter.  But they probably use the words very vaguely, as an
+ordinary mob will use ready-made paving-stones.  There is not a single
+real poet or prose-writer of this century, for instance, on whom the
+British public have not solemnly conferred diplomas of immorality, and
+these diplomas practically take the place, with us, of what in France, is
+the formal recognition of an Academy of Letters, and fortunately make the
+establishment of such an institution quite unnecessary in England.  Of
+course, the public are very reckless in their use of the word.  That they
+should have called Wordsworth an immoral poet, was only to be expected.
+Wordsworth was a poet.  But that they should have called Charles Kingsley
+an immoral novelist is extraordinary.  Kingsley’s prose was not of a very
+fine quality.  Still, there is the word, and they use it as best they
+can.  An artist is, of course, not disturbed by it.  The true artist is a
+man who believes absolutely in himself, because he is absolutely himself.
+But I can fancy that if an artist produced a work of art in England that
+immediately on its appearance was recognised by the public, through their
+medium, which is the public press, as a work that was quite intelligible
+and highly moral, he would begin to seriously question whether in its
+creation he had really been himself at all, and consequently whether the
+work was not quite unworthy of him, and either of a thoroughly
+second-rate order, or of no artistic value whatsoever.
+
+Perhaps, however, I have wronged the public in limiting them to such
+words as ‘immoral,’ ‘unintelligible,’ ‘exotic,’ and ‘unhealthy.’  There
+is one other word that they use.  That word is ‘morbid.’  They do not use
+it often.  The meaning of the word is so simple that they are afraid of
+using it.  Still, they use it sometimes, and, now and then, one comes
+across it in popular newspapers.  It is, of course, a ridiculous word to
+apply to a work of art.  For what is morbidity but a mood of emotion or a
+mode of thought that one cannot express?  The public are all morbid,
+because the public can never find expression for anything.  The artist is
+never morbid.  He expresses everything.  He stands outside his subject,
+and through its medium produces incomparable and artistic effects.  To
+call an artist morbid because he deals with morbidity as his
+subject-matter is as silly as if one called Shakespeare mad because he
+wrote ‘King Lear.’
+
+On the whole, an artist in England gains something by being attacked.
+His individuality is intensified.  He becomes more completely himself.
+Of course, the attacks are very gross, very impertinent, and very
+contemptible.  But then no artist expects grace from the vulgar mind, or
+style from the suburban intellect.  Vulgarity and stupidity are two very
+vivid facts in modern life.  One regrets them, naturally.  But there they
+are.  They are subjects for study, like everything else.  And it is only
+fair to state, with regard to modern journalists, that they always
+apologise to one in private for what they have written against one in
+public.
+
+Within the last few years two other adjectives, it may be mentioned, have
+been added to the very limited vocabulary of art-abuse that is at the
+disposal of the public.  One is the word ‘unhealthy,’ the other is the
+word ‘exotic.’  The latter merely expresses the rage of the momentary
+mushroom against the immortal, entrancing, and exquisitely lovely orchid.
+It is a tribute, but a tribute of no importance.  The word ‘unhealthy,’
+however, admits of analysis.  It is a rather interesting word.  In fact,
+it is so interesting that the people who use it do not know what it
+means.
+
+What does it mean?  What is a healthy, or an unhealthy work of art?  All
+terms that one applies to a work of art, provided that one applies them
+rationally, have reference to either its style or its subject, or to both
+together.  From the point of view of style, a healthy work of art is one
+whose style recognises the beauty of the material it employs, be that
+material one of words or of bronze, of colour or of ivory, and uses that
+beauty as a factor in producing the æsthetic effect.  From the point of
+view of subject, a healthy work of art is one the choice of whose subject
+is conditioned by the temperament of the artist, and comes directly out
+of it.  In fine, a healthy work of art is one that has both perfection
+and personality.  Of course, form and substance cannot be separated in a
+work of art; they are always one.  But for purposes of analysis, and
+setting the wholeness of æsthetic impression aside for a moment, we can
+intellectually so separate them.  An unhealthy work of art, on the other
+hand, is a work whose style is obvious, old-fashioned, and common, and
+whose subject is deliberately chosen, not because the artist has any
+pleasure in it, but because he thinks that the public will pay him for
+it.  In fact, the popular novel that the public calls healthy is always a
+thoroughly unhealthy production; and what the public call an unhealthy
+novel is always a beautiful and healthy work of art.
+
+I need hardly say that I am not, for a single moment, complaining that
+the public and the public press misuse these words.  I do not see how,
+with their lack of comprehension of what Art is, they could possibly use
+them in the proper sense.  I am merely pointing out the misuse; and as
+for the origin of the misuse and the meaning that lies behind it all, the
+explanation is very simple.  It comes from the barbarous conception of
+authority.  It comes from the natural inability of a community corrupted
+by authority to understand or appreciate Individualism.  In a word, it
+comes from that monstrous and ignorant thing that is called Public
+Opinion, which, bad and well-meaning as it is when it tries to control
+action, is infamous and of evil meaning when it tries to control Thought
+or Art.
+
+Indeed, there is much more to be said in favour of the physical force of
+the public than there is in favour of the public’s opinion.  The former
+may be fine.  The latter must be foolish.  It is often said that force is
+no argument.  That, however, entirely depends on what one wants to prove.
+Many of the most important problems of the last few centuries, such as
+the continuance of personal government in England, or of feudalism in
+France, have been solved entirely by means of physical force.  The very
+violence of a revolution may make the public grand and splendid for a
+moment.  It was a fatal day when the public discovered that the pen is
+mightier than the paving-stone, and can be made as offensive as the
+brickbat.  They at once sought for the journalist, found him, developed
+him, and made him their industrious and well-paid servant.  It is greatly
+to be regretted, for both their sakes.  Behind the barricade there may be
+much that is noble and heroic.  But what is there behind the
+leading-article but prejudice, stupidity, cant, and twaddle?  And when
+these four are joined together they make a terrible force, and constitute
+the new authority.
+
+In old days men had the rack.  Now they have the press.  That is an
+improvement certainly.  But still it is very bad, and wrong, and
+demoralising.  Somebody—was it Burke?—called journalism the fourth
+estate.  That was true at the time, no doubt.  But at the present moment
+it really is the only estate.  It has eaten up the other three.  The
+Lords Temporal say nothing, the Lords Spiritual have nothing to say, and
+the House of Commons has nothing to say and says it.  We are dominated by
+Journalism.  In America the President reigns for four years, and
+Journalism governs for ever and ever.  Fortunately in America Journalism
+has carried its authority to the grossest and most brutal extreme.  As a
+natural consequence it has begun to create a spirit of revolt.  People
+are amused by it, or disgusted by it, according to their temperaments.
+But it is no longer the real force it was.  It is not seriously treated.
+In England, Journalism, not, except in a few well-known instances, having
+been carried to such excesses of brutality, is still a great factor, a
+really remarkable power.  The tyranny that it proposes to exercise over
+people’s private lives seems to me to be quite extraordinary.  The fact
+is, that the public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything,
+except what is worth knowing.  Journalism, conscious of this, and having
+tradesman-like habits, supplies their demands.  In centuries before ours
+the public nailed the ears of journalists to the pump.  That was quite
+hideous.  In this century journalists have nailed their own ears to the
+keyhole.  That is much worse.  And what aggravates the mischief is that
+the journalists who are most to blame are not the amusing journalists who
+write for what are called Society papers.  The harm is done by the
+serious, thoughtful, earnest journalists, who solemnly, as they are doing
+at present, will drag before the eyes of the public some incident in the
+private life of a great statesman, of a man who is a leader of political
+thought as he is a creator of political force, and invite the public to
+discuss the incident, to exercise authority in the matter, to give their
+views, and not merely to give their views, but to carry them into action,
+to dictate to the man upon all other points, to dictate to his party, to
+dictate to his country; in fact, to make themselves ridiculous,
+offensive, and harmful.  The private lives of men and women should not be
+told to the public.  The public have nothing to do with them at all.  In
+France they manage these things better.  There they do not allow the
+details of the trials that take place in the divorce courts to be
+published for the amusement or criticism of the public.  All that the
+public are allowed to know is that the divorce has taken place and was
+granted on petition of one or other or both of the married parties
+concerned.  In France, in fact, they limit the journalist, and allow the
+artist almost perfect freedom.  Here we allow absolute freedom to the
+journalist, and entirely limit the artist.  English public opinion, that
+is to say, tries to constrain and impede and warp the man who makes
+things that are beautiful in effect, and compels the journalist to retail
+things that are ugly, or disgusting, or revolting in fact, so that we
+have the most serious journalists in the world, and the most indecent
+newspapers.  It is no exaggeration to talk of compulsion.  There are
+possibly some journalists who take a real pleasure in publishing horrible
+things, or who, being poor, look to scandals as forming a sort of
+permanent basis for an income.  But there are other journalists, I feel
+certain, men of education and cultivation, who really dislike publishing
+these things, who know that it is wrong to do so, and only do it because
+the unhealthy conditions under which their occupation is carried on
+oblige them to supply the public with what the public wants, and to
+compete with other journalists in making that supply as full and
+satisfying to the gross popular appetite as possible.  It is a very
+degrading position for any body of educated men to be placed in, and I
+have no doubt that most of them feel it acutely.
+
+However, let us leave what is really a very sordid side of the subject,
+and return to the question of popular control in the matter of Art, by
+which I mean Public Opinion dictating to the artist the form which he is
+to use, the mode in which he is to use it, and the materials with which
+he is to work.  I have pointed out that the arts which have escaped best
+in England are the arts in which the public have not been interested.
+They are, however, interested in the drama, and as a certain advance has
+been made in the drama within the last ten or fifteen years, it is
+important to point out that this advance is entirely due to a few
+individual artists refusing to accept the popular want of taste as their
+standard, and refusing to regard Art as a mere matter of demand and
+supply.  With his marvellous and vivid personality, with a style that has
+really a true colour-element in it, with his extraordinary power, not
+over mere mimicry but over imaginative and intellectual creation, Mr
+Irving, had his sole object been to give the public what they wanted,
+could have produced the commonest plays in the commonest manner, and made
+as much success and money as a man could possibly desire.  But his object
+was not that.  His object was to realise his own perfection as an artist,
+under certain conditions, and in certain forms of Art.  At first he
+appealed to the few: now he has educated the many.  He has created in the
+public both taste and temperament.  The public appreciate his artistic
+success immensely.  I often wonder, however, whether the public
+understand that that success is entirely due to the fact that he did not
+accept their standard, but realised his own.  With their standard the
+Lyceum would have been a sort of second-rate booth, as some of the
+popular theatres in London are at present.  Whether they understand it or
+not the fact however remains, that taste and temperament have, to a
+certain extent been created in the public, and that the public is capable
+of developing these qualities.  The problem then is, why do not the
+public become more civilised?  They have the capacity.  What stops them?
+
+The thing that stops them, it must be said again, is their desire to
+exercise authority over the artist and over works of art.  To certain
+theatres, such as the Lyceum and the Haymarket, the public seem to come
+in a proper mood.  In both of these theatres there have been individual
+artists, who have succeeded in creating in their audiences—and every
+theatre in London has its own audience—the temperament to which Art
+appeals.  And what is that temperament?  It is the temperament of
+receptivity.  That is all.
+
+If a man approaches a work of art with any desire to exercise authority
+over it and the artist, he approaches it in such a spirit that he cannot
+receive any artistic impression from it at all.  The work of art is to
+dominate the spectator: the spectator is not to dominate the work of art.
+The spectator is to be receptive.  He is to be the violin on which the
+master is to play.  And the more completely he can suppress his own silly
+views, his own foolish prejudices, his own absurd ideas of what Art
+should be, or should not be, the more likely he is to understand and
+appreciate the work of art in question.  This is, of course, quite
+obvious in the case of the vulgar theatre-going public of English men and
+women.  But it is equally true of what are called educated people.  For
+an educated person’s ideas of Art are drawn naturally from what Art has
+been, whereas the new work of art is beautiful by being what Art has
+never been; and to measure it by the standard of the past is to measure
+it by a standard on the rejection of which its real perfection depends.
+A temperament capable of receiving, through an imaginative medium, and
+under imaginative conditions, new and beautiful impressions, is the only
+temperament that can appreciate a work of art.  And true as this is in
+the case of the appreciation of sculpture and painting, it is still more
+true of the appreciation of such arts as the drama.  For a picture and a
+statue are not at war with Time.  They take no count of its succession.
+In one moment their unity may be apprehended.  In the case of literature
+it is different.  Time must be traversed before the unity of effect is
+realised.  And so, in the drama, there may occur in the first act of the
+play something whose real artistic value may not be evident to the
+spectator till the third or fourth act is reached.  Is the silly fellow
+to get angry and call out, and disturb the play, and annoy the artists?
+No.  The honest man is to sit quietly, and know the delightful emotions
+of wonder, curiosity, and suspense.  He is not to go to the play to lose
+a vulgar temper.  He is to go to the play to realise an artistic
+temperament.  He is to go to the play to gain an artistic temperament.
+He is not the arbiter of the work of art.  He is one who is admitted to
+contemplate the work of art, and, if the work be fine, to forget in its
+contemplation and the egotism that mars him—the egotism of his ignorance,
+or the egotism of his information.  This point about the drama is hardly,
+I think, sufficiently recognised.  I can quite understand that were
+‘Macbeth’ produced for the first time before a modern London audience,
+many of the people present would strongly and vigorously object to the
+introduction of the witches in the first act, with their grotesque
+phrases and their ridiculous words.  But when the play is over one
+realises that the laughter of the witches in ‘Macbeth’ is as terrible as
+the laughter of madness in ‘Lear,’ more terrible than the laughter of
+Iago in the tragedy of the Moor.  No spectator of art needs a more
+perfect mood of receptivity than the spectator of a play.  The moment he
+seeks to exercise authority he becomes the avowed enemy of Art and of
+himself.  Art does not mind.  It is he who suffers.
+
+With the novel it is the same thing.  Popular authority and the
+recognition of popular authority are fatal.  Thackeray’s ‘Esmond’ is a
+beautiful work of art because he wrote it to please himself.  In his
+other novels, in ‘Pendennis,’ in ‘Philip,’ in ‘Vanity Fair’ even, at
+times, he is too conscious of the public, and spoils his work by
+appealing directly to the sympathies of the public, or by directly
+mocking at them.  A true artist takes no notice whatever of the public.
+The public are to him non-existent.  He has no poppied or honeyed cakes
+through which to give the monster sleep or sustenance.  He leaves that to
+the popular novelist.  One incomparable novelist we have now in England,
+Mr George Meredith.  There are better artists in France, but France has
+no one whose view of life is so large, so varied, so imaginatively true.
+There are tellers of stories in Russia who have a more vivid sense of
+what pain in fiction may be.  But to him belongs philosophy in fiction.
+His people not merely live, but they live in thought.  One can see them
+from myriad points of view.  They are suggestive.  There is soul in them
+and around them.  They are interpretative and symbolic.  And he who made
+them, those wonderful quickly-moving figures, made them for his own
+pleasure, and has never asked the public what they wanted, has never
+cared to know what they wanted, has never allowed the public to dictate
+to him or influence him in any way but has gone on intensifying his own
+personality, and producing his own individual work.  At first none came
+to him.  That did not matter.  Then the few came to him.  That did not
+change him.  The many have come now.  He is still the same.  He is an
+incomparable novelist.
+
+With the decorative arts it is not different.  The public clung with
+really pathetic tenacity to what I believe were the direct traditions of
+the Great Exhibition of international vulgarity, traditions that were so
+appalling that the houses in which people lived were only fit for blind
+people to live in.  Beautiful things began to be made, beautiful colours
+came from the dyer’s hand, beautiful patterns from the artist’s brain,
+and the use of beautiful things and their value and importance were set
+forth.  The public were really very indignant.  They lost their temper.
+They said silly things.  No one minded.  No one was a whit the worse.  No
+one accepted the authority of public opinion.  And now it is almost
+impossible to enter any modern house without seeing some recognition of
+good taste, some recognition of the value of lovely surroundings, some
+sign of appreciation of beauty.  In fact, people’s houses are, as a rule,
+quite charming nowadays.  People have been to a very great extent
+civilised.  It is only fair to state, however, that the extraordinary
+success of the revolution in house-decoration and furniture and the like
+has not really been due to the majority of the public developing a very
+fine taste in such matters.  It has been chiefly due to the fact that the
+craftsmen of things so appreciated the pleasure of making what was
+beautiful, and woke to such a vivid consciousness of the hideousness and
+vulgarity of what the public had previously wanted, that they simply
+starved the public out.  It would be quite impossible at the present
+moment to furnish a room as rooms were furnished a few years ago, without
+going for everything to an auction of second-hand furniture from some
+third-rate lodging-house.  The things are no longer made.  However they
+may object to it, people must nowadays have something charming in their
+surroundings.  Fortunately for them, their assumption of authority in
+these art-matters came to entire grief.
+
+It is evident, then, that all authority in such things is bad.  People
+sometimes inquire what form of government is most suitable for an artist
+to live under.  To this question there is only one answer.  The form of
+government that is most suitable to the artist is no government at all.
+Authority over him and his art is ridiculous.  It has been stated that
+under despotisms artists have produced lovely work.  This is not quite
+so.  Artists have visited despots, not as subjects to be tyrannised over,
+but as wandering wonder-makers, as fascinating vagrant personalities, to
+be entertained and charmed and suffered to be at peace, and allowed to
+create.  There is this to be said in favour of the despot, that he, being
+an individual, may have culture, while the mob, being a monster, has
+none.  One who is an Emperor and King may stoop down to pick up a brush
+for a painter, but when the democracy stoops down it is merely to throw
+mud.  And yet the democracy have not so far to stoop as the emperor.  In
+fact, when they want to throw mud they have not to stoop at all.  But
+there is no necessity to separate the monarch from the mob; all authority
+is equally bad.
+
+There are three kinds of despots.  There is the despot who tyrannises
+over the body.  There is the despot who tyrannises over the soul.  There
+is the despot who tyrannises over the soul and body alike.  The first is
+called the Prince.  The second is called the Pope.  The third is called
+the People.  The Prince may be cultivated.  Many Princes have been.  Yet
+in the Prince there is danger.  One thinks of Dante at the bitter feast
+in Verona, of Tasso in Ferrara’s madman’s cell.  It is better for the
+artist not to live with Princes.  The Pope may be cultivated.  Many Popes
+have been; the bad Popes have been.  The bad Popes loved Beauty, almost
+as passionately, nay, with as much passion as the good Popes hated
+Thought.  To the wickedness of the Papacy humanity owes much.  The
+goodness of the Papacy owes a terrible debt to humanity.  Yet, though the
+Vatican has kept the rhetoric of its thunders, and lost the rod of its
+lightning, it is better for the artist not to live with Popes.  It was a
+Pope who said of Cellini to a conclave of Cardinals that common laws and
+common authority were not made for men such as he; but it was a Pope who
+thrust Cellini into prison, and kept him there till he sickened with
+rage, and created unreal visions for himself, and saw the gilded sun
+enter his room, and grew so enamoured of it that he sought to escape, and
+crept out from tower to tower, and falling through dizzy air at dawn,
+maimed himself, and was by a vine-dresser covered with vine leaves, and
+carried in a cart to one who, loving beautiful things, had care of him.
+There is danger in Popes.  And as for the People, what of them and their
+authority?  Perhaps of them and their authority one has spoken enough.
+Their authority is a thing blind, deaf, hideous, grotesque, tragic,
+amusing, serious, and obscene.  It is impossible for the artist to live
+with the People.  All despots bribe.  The people bribe and brutalise.
+Who told them to exercise authority?  They were made to live, to listen,
+and to love.  Someone has done them a great wrong.  They have marred
+themselves by imitation of their inferiors.  They have taken the sceptre
+of the Prince.  How should they use it?  They have taken the triple tiara
+of the Pope.  How should they carry its burden?  They are as a clown
+whose heart is broken.  They are as a priest whose soul is not yet born.
+Let all who love Beauty pity them.  Though they themselves love not
+Beauty, yet let them pity themselves.  Who taught them the trick of
+tyranny?
+
+There are many other things that one might point out.  One might point
+out how the Renaissance was great, because it sought to solve no social
+problem, and busied itself not about such things, but suffered the
+individual to develop freely, beautifully, and naturally, and so had
+great and individual artists, and great and individual men.  One might
+point out how Louis XIV., by creating the modern state, destroyed the
+individualism of the artist, and made things monstrous in their monotony
+of repetition, and contemptible in their conformity to rule, and
+destroyed throughout all France all those fine freedoms of expression
+that had made tradition new in beauty, and new modes one with antique
+form.  But the past is of no importance.  The present is of no
+importance.  It is with the future that we have to deal.  For the past is
+what man should not have been.  The present is what man ought not to be.
+The future is what artists are.
+
+It will, of course, be said that such a scheme as is set forth here is
+quite unpractical, and goes against human nature.  This is perfectly
+true.  It is unpractical, and it goes against human nature.  This is why
+it is worth carrying out, and that is why one proposes it.  For what is a
+practical scheme?  A practical scheme is either a scheme that is already
+in existence, or a scheme that could be carried out under existing
+conditions.  But it is exactly the existing conditions that one objects
+to; and any scheme that could accept these conditions is wrong and
+foolish.  The conditions will be done away with, and human nature will
+change.  The only thing that one really knows about human nature is that
+it changes.  Change is the one quality we can predicate of it.  The
+systems that fail are those that rely on the permanency of human nature,
+and not on its growth and development.  The error of Louis XIV. was that
+he thought human nature would always be the same.  The result of his
+error was the French Revolution.  It was an admirable result.  All the
+results of the mistakes of governments are quite admirable.
+
+It is to be noted also that Individualism does not come to man with any
+sickly cant about duty, which merely means doing what other people want
+because they want it; or any hideous cant about self-sacrifice, which is
+merely a survival of savage mutilation.  In fact, it does not come to man
+with any claims upon him at all.  It comes naturally and inevitably out
+of man.  It is the point to which all development tends.  It is the
+differentiation to which all organisms grow.  It is the perfection that
+is inherent in every mode of life, and towards which every mode of life
+quickens.  And so Individualism exercises no compulsion over man.  On the
+contrary, it says to man that he should suffer no compulsion to be
+exercised over him.  It does not try to force people to be good.  It
+knows that people are good when they are let alone.  Man will develop
+Individualism out of himself.  Man is now so developing Individualism.
+To ask whether Individualism is practical is like asking whether
+Evolution is practical.  Evolution is the law of life, and there is no
+evolution except towards Individualism.  Where this tendency is not
+expressed, it is a case of artificially-arrested growth, or of disease,
+or of death.
+
+Individualism will also be unselfish and unaffected.  It has been pointed
+out that one of the results of the extraordinary tyranny of authority is
+that words are absolutely distorted from their proper and simple meaning,
+and are used to express the obverse of their right signification.  What
+is true about Art is true about Life.  A man is called affected,
+nowadays, if he dresses as he likes to dress.  But in doing that he is
+acting in a perfectly natural manner.  Affectation, in such matters,
+consists in dressing according to the views of one’s neighbour, whose
+views, as they are the views of the majority, will probably be extremely
+stupid.  Or a man is called selfish if he lives in the manner that seems
+to him most suitable for the full realisation of his own personality; if,
+in fact, the primary aim of his life is self-development.  But this is
+the way in which everyone should live.  Selfishness is not living as one
+wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.  And
+unselfishness is letting other people’s lives alone, not interfering with
+them.  Selfishness always aims at creating around it an absolute
+uniformity of type.  Unselfishness recognises infinite variety of type as
+a delightful thing, accepts it, acquiesces in it, enjoys it.  It is not
+selfish to think for oneself.  A man who does not think for himself does
+not think at all.  It is grossly selfish to require of ones neighbour
+that he should think in the same way, and hold the same opinions.  Why
+should he?  If he can think, he will probably think differently.  If he
+cannot think, it is monstrous to require thought of any kind from him.  A
+red rose is not selfish because it wants to be a red rose.  It would be
+horribly selfish if it wanted all the other flowers in the garden to be
+both red and roses.  Under Individualism people will be quite natural and
+absolutely unselfish, and will know the meanings of the words, and
+realise them in their free, beautiful lives.  Nor will men be egotistic
+as they are now.  For the egotist is he who makes claims upon others, and
+the Individualist will not desire to do that.  It will not give him
+pleasure.  When man has realised Individualism, he will also realise
+sympathy and exercise it freely and spontaneously.  Up to the present man
+has hardly cultivated sympathy at all.  He has merely sympathy with pain,
+and sympathy with pain is not the highest form of sympathy.  All sympathy
+is fine, but sympathy with suffering is the least fine mode.  It is
+tainted with egotism.  It is apt to become morbid.  There is in it a
+certain element of terror for our own safety.  We become afraid that we
+ourselves might be as the leper or as the blind, and that no man would
+have care of us.  It is curiously limiting, too.  One should sympathise
+with the entirety of life, not with life’s sores and maladies merely, but
+with life’s joy and beauty and energy and health and freedom.  The wider
+sympathy is, of course, the more difficult.  It requires more
+unselfishness.  Anybody can sympathise with the sufferings of a friend,
+but it requires a very fine nature—it requires, in fact, the nature of a
+true Individualist—to sympathise with a friend’s success.
+
+In the modern stress of competition and struggle for place, such sympathy
+is naturally rare, and is also very much stifled by the immoral ideal of
+uniformity of type and conformity to rule which is so prevalent
+everywhere, and is perhaps most obnoxious in England.
+
+Sympathy with pain there will, of course, always be.  It is one of the
+first instincts of man.  The animals which are individual, the higher
+animals, that is to say, share it with us.  But it must be remembered
+that while sympathy with joy intensifies the sum of joy in the world,
+sympathy with pain does not really diminish the amount of pain.  It may
+make man better able to endure evil, but the evil remains.  Sympathy with
+consumption does not cure consumption; that is what Science does.  And
+when Socialism has solved the problem of poverty, and Science solved the
+problem of disease, the area of the sentimentalists will be lessened, and
+the sympathy of man will be large, healthy, and spontaneous.  Man will
+have joy in the contemplation of the joyous life of others.
+
+For it is through joy that the Individualism of the future will develop
+itself.  Christ made no attempt to reconstruct society, and consequently
+the Individualism that he preached to man could be realised only through
+pain or in solitude.  The ideals that we owe to Christ are the ideals of
+the man who abandons society entirely, or of the man who resists society
+absolutely.  But man is naturally social.  Even the Thebaid became
+peopled at last.  And though the cenobite realises his personality, it is
+often an impoverished personality that he so realises.  Upon the other
+hand, the terrible truth that pain is a mode through which man may
+realise himself exercises a wonderful fascination over the world.
+Shallow speakers and shallow thinkers in pulpits and on platforms often
+talk about the world’s worship of pleasure, and whine against it.  But it
+is rarely in the world’s history that its ideal has been one of joy and
+beauty.  The worship of pain has far more often dominated the world.
+Mediævalism, with its saints and martyrs, its love of self-torture, its
+wild passion for wounding itself, its gashing with knives, and its
+whipping with rods—Mediævalism is real Christianity, and the mediæval
+Christ is the real Christ.  When the Renaissance dawned upon the world,
+and brought with it the new ideals of the beauty of life and the joy of
+living, men could not understand Christ.  Even Art shows us that.  The
+painters of the Renaissance drew Christ as a little boy playing with
+another boy in a palace or a garden, or lying back in his mother’s arms,
+smiling at her, or at a flower, or at a bright bird; or as a noble,
+stately figure moving nobly through the world; or as a wonderful figure
+rising in a sort of ecstasy from death to life.  Even when they drew him
+crucified they drew him as a beautiful God on whom evil men had inflicted
+suffering.  But he did not preoccupy them much.  What delighted them was
+to paint the men and women whom they admired, and to show the loveliness
+of this lovely earth.  They painted many religious pictures—in fact, they
+painted far too many, and the monotony of type and motive is wearisome,
+and was bad for art.  It was the result of the authority of the public in
+art-matters, and is to be deplored.  But their soul was not in the
+subject.  Raphael was a great artist when he painted his portrait of the
+Pope.  When he painted his Madonnas and infant Christs, he is not a great
+artist at all.  Christ had no message for the Renaissance, which was
+wonderful because it brought an ideal at variance with his, and to find
+the presentation of the real Christ we must go to mediæval art.  There he
+is one maimed and marred; one who is not comely to look on, because
+Beauty is a joy; one who is not in fair raiment, because that may be a
+joy also: he is a beggar who has a marvellous soul; he is a leper whose
+soul is divine; he needs neither property nor health; he is a God
+realising his perfection through pain.
+
+The evolution of man is slow.  The injustice of men is great.  It was
+necessary that pain should be put forward as a mode of self-realisation.
+Even now, in some places in the world, the message of Christ is
+necessary.  No one who lived in modern Russia could possibly realise his
+perfection except by pain.  A few Russian artists have realised
+themselves in Art; in a fiction that is mediæval in character, because
+its dominant note is the realisation of men through suffering.  But for
+those who are not artists, and to whom there is no mode of life but the
+actual life of fact, pain is the only door to perfection.  A Russian who
+lives happily under the present system of government in Russia must
+either believe that man has no soul, or that, if he has, it is not worth
+developing.  A Nihilist who rejects all authority, because he knows
+authority to be evil, and welcomes all pain, because through that he
+realises his personality, is a real Christian.  To him the Christian
+ideal is a true thing.
+
+And yet, Christ did not revolt against authority.  He accepted the
+imperial authority of the Roman Empire and paid tribute.  He endured the
+ecclesiastical authority of the Jewish Church, and would not repel its
+violence by any violence of his own.  He had, as I said before, no scheme
+for the reconstruction of society.  But the modern world has schemes.  It
+proposes to do away with poverty and the suffering that it entails.  It
+desires to get rid of pain, and the suffering that pain entails.  It
+trusts to Socialism and to Science as its methods.  What it aims at is an
+Individualism expressing itself through joy.  This Individualism will be
+larger, fuller, lovelier than any Individualism has ever been.  Pain is
+not the ultimate mode of perfection.  It is merely provisional and a
+protest.  It has reference to wrong, unhealthy, unjust surroundings.
+When the wrong, and the disease, and the injustice are removed, it will
+have no further place.  It will have done its work.  It was a great work,
+but it is almost over.  Its sphere lessens every day.
+
+Nor will man miss it.  For what man has sought for is, indeed, neither
+pain nor pleasure, but simply Life.  Man has sought to live intensely,
+fully, perfectly.  When he can do so without exercising restraint on
+others, or suffering it ever, and his activities are all pleasurable to
+him, he will be saner, healthier, more civilised, more himself.  Pleasure
+is Nature’s test, her sign of approval.  When man is happy, he is in
+harmony with himself and his environment.  The new Individualism, for
+whose service Socialism, whether it wills it or not, is working, will be
+perfect harmony.  It will be what the Greeks sought for, but could not,
+except in Thought, realise completely, because they had slaves, and fed
+them; it will be what the Renaissance sought for, but could not realise
+completely except in Art, because they had slaves, and starved them.  It
+will be complete, and through it each man will attain to his perfection.
+The new Individualism is the new Hellenism.
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+               _Reprinted from the_ ‘_Fortnightly Review_,’
+               _by permission of Messrs Chapman and Hall_.
+
+
+
+
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+<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=US-ASCII" />
+<title>The Soul of Man, by Oscar Wilde</title>
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+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Soul of Man, by Oscar Wilde
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
+other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions 
+whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of
+the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at 
+www.gutenberg.org.  If you are not located in the United States, you'll have
+to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook.
+
+
+
+
+Title: The Soul of Man
+
+
+Author: Oscar Wilde
+
+
+
+Release Date: September 26, 2014  [eBook #1017]
+[This file was first posted on August 10, 1997]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SOUL OF MAN***
+</pre>
+<p>Transcribed from the 1909 Arthur L. Humphreys edition by David
+Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a href="images/coverb.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Book cover"
+title=
+"Book cover"
+ src="images/covers.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<h2>THE<br />
+SOUL OF MAN</h2>
+
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p style="text-align: center"><span
+class="GutSmall">LONDON</span><br />
+ARTHUR L. HUMPREYS<br />
+1900</p>
+
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p style="text-align: center"><i>Second Impression</i></p>
+<h2><a name="page1"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 1</span>THE SOUL
+OF MAN</h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">The</span> chief advantage that would
+result from the establishment of Socialism is, undoubtedly, the
+fact that Socialism would relieve us from that sordid necessity
+of living for others which, in the present condition of things,
+presses so hardly upon almost everybody.&nbsp; In fact, scarcely
+anyone at all escapes.</p>
+<p>Now and then, in the course of the century, a great man of
+science, like Darwin; a great poet, like Keats; a fine critical
+spirit, like M. Renan; a supreme artist, like Flaubert, has been
+able to isolate himself, to keep himself out of reach of the
+clamorous claims of others, to stand &lsquo;under the shelter of
+the wall,&rsquo; as Plato puts it, <a name="page2"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 2</span>and so to realise the perfection of
+what was in him, to his own incomparable gain, and to the
+incomparable and lasting gain of the whole world.&nbsp; These,
+however, are exceptions.&nbsp; The majority of people spoil their
+lives by an unhealthy and exaggerated altruism&mdash;are forced,
+indeed, so to spoil them.&nbsp; They find themselves surrounded
+by hideous poverty, by hideous ugliness, by hideous
+starvation.&nbsp; It is inevitable that they should be strongly
+moved by all this.&nbsp; The emotions of man are stirred more
+quickly than man&rsquo;s intelligence; and, as I pointed out some
+time ago in an article on the function of criticism, it is much
+more easy to have sympathy with suffering than it is to have
+sympathy with thought.&nbsp; Accordingly, with admirable, though
+misdirected intentions, they very seriously and very
+sentimentally set themselves to the task of remedying the evils
+that they see.&nbsp; But their remedies do not <a
+name="page3"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 3</span>cure the
+disease: they merely prolong it.&nbsp; Indeed, their remedies are
+part of the disease.</p>
+<p>They try to solve the problem of poverty, for instance, by
+keeping the poor alive; or, in the case of a very advanced
+school, by amusing the poor.</p>
+<p>But this is not a solution: it is an aggravation of the
+difficulty.&nbsp; The proper aim is to try and reconstruct
+society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible.&nbsp;
+And the altruistic virtues have really prevented the carrying out
+of this aim.&nbsp; Just as the worst slave-owners were those who
+were kind to their slaves, and so prevented the horror of the
+system being realised by those who suffered from it, and
+understood by those who contemplated it, so, in the present state
+of things in England, the people who do most harm are the people
+who try to do most good; and at last we have had the spectacle of
+men who have really studied the problem <a name="page4"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 4</span>and know the life&mdash;educated men
+who live in the East End&mdash;coming forward and imploring the
+community to restrain its altruistic impulses of charity,
+benevolence, and the like.&nbsp; They do so on the ground that
+such charity degrades and demoralises.&nbsp; They are perfectly
+right.&nbsp; Charity creates a multitude of sins.</p>
+<p>There is also this to be said.&nbsp; It is immoral to use
+private property in order to alleviate the horrible evils that
+result from the institution of private property.&nbsp; It is both
+immoral and unfair.</p>
+<p>Under Socialism all this will, of course, be altered.&nbsp;
+There will be no people living in fetid dens and fetid rags, and
+bringing up unhealthy, hunger-pinched children in the midst of
+impossible and absolutely repulsive surroundings.&nbsp; The
+security of society will not depend, as it does now, on the state
+of the weather.&nbsp; If a frost comes we shall not have a
+hundred <a name="page5"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+5</span>thousand men out of work, tramping about the streets in a
+state of disgusting misery, or whining to their neighbours for
+alms, or crowding round the doors of loathsome shelters to try
+and secure a hunch of bread and a night&rsquo;s unclean
+lodging.&nbsp; Each member of the society will share in the
+general prosperity and happiness of the society, and if a frost
+comes no one will practically be anything the worse.</p>
+<p>Upon the other hand, Socialism itself will be of value simply
+because it will lead to Individualism.</p>
+<p>Socialism, Communism, or whatever one chooses to call it, by
+converting private property into public wealth, and substituting
+co-operation for competition, will restore society to its proper
+condition of a thoroughly healthy organism, and insure the
+material well-being of each member of the community.&nbsp; It
+will, in fact, give Life its proper basis and its proper <a
+name="page6"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+6</span>environment.&nbsp; But for the full development of Life
+to its highest mode of perfection, something more is
+needed.&nbsp; What is needed is Individualism.&nbsp; If the
+Socialism is Authoritarian; if there are Governments armed with
+economic power as they are now with political power; if, in a
+word, we are to have Industrial Tyrannies, then the last state of
+man will be worse than the first.&nbsp; At present, in
+consequence of the existence of private property, a great many
+people are enabled to develop a certain very limited amount of
+Individualism.&nbsp; They are either under no necessity to work
+for their living, or are enabled to choose the sphere of activity
+that is really congenial to them, and gives them pleasure.&nbsp;
+These are the poets, the philosophers, the men of science, the
+men of culture&mdash;in a word, the real men, the men who have
+realised themselves, and in whom all Humanity gains a partial <a
+name="page7"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+7</span>realisation.&nbsp; Upon the other hand, there are a great
+many people who, having no private property of their own, and
+being always on the brink of sheer starvation, are compelled to
+do the work of beasts of burden, to do work that is quite
+uncongenial to them, and to which they are forced by the
+peremptory, unreasonable, degrading Tyranny of want.&nbsp; These
+are the poor, and amongst them there is no grace of manner, or
+charm of speech, or civilisation, or culture, or refinement in
+pleasures, or joy of life.&nbsp; From their collective force
+Humanity gains much in material prosperity.&nbsp; But it is only
+the material result that it gains, and the man who is poor is in
+himself absolutely of no importance.&nbsp; He is merely the
+infinitesimal atom of a force that, so far from regarding him,
+crushes him: indeed, prefers him crushed, as in that case he is
+far more obedient.</p>
+<p>Of course, it might be said that the <a name="page8"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 8</span>Individualism generated under
+conditions of private property is not always, or even as a rule,
+of a fine or wonderful type, and that the poor, if they have not
+culture and charm, have still many virtues.&nbsp; Both these
+statements would be quite true.&nbsp; The possession of private
+property is very often extremely demoralising, and that is, of
+course, one of the reasons why Socialism wants to get rid of the
+institution.&nbsp; In fact, property is really a nuisance.&nbsp;
+Some years ago people went about the country saying that property
+has duties.&nbsp; They said it so often and so tediously that, at
+last, the Church has begun to say it.&nbsp; One hears it now from
+every pulpit.&nbsp; It is perfectly true.&nbsp; Property not
+merely has duties, but has so many duties that its possession to
+any large extent is a bore.&nbsp; It involves endless claims upon
+one, endless attention to business, endless bother.&nbsp; If
+property had simply pleasures, we could stand <a
+name="page9"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 9</span>it; but its
+duties make it unbearable.&nbsp; In the interest of the rich we
+must get rid of it.&nbsp; The virtues of the poor may be readily
+admitted, and are much to be regretted.&nbsp; We are often told
+that the poor are grateful for charity.&nbsp; Some of them are,
+no doubt, but the best amongst the poor are never grateful.&nbsp;
+They are ungrateful, discontented, disobedient, and
+rebellious.&nbsp; They are quite right to be so.&nbsp; Charity
+they feel to be a ridiculously inadequate mode of partial
+restitution, or a sentimental dole, usually accompanied by some
+impertinent attempt on the part of the sentimentalist to
+tyrannise over their private lives.&nbsp; Why should they be
+grateful for the crumbs that fall from the rich man&rsquo;s
+table?&nbsp; They should be seated at the board, and are
+beginning to know it.&nbsp; As for being discontented, a man who
+would not be discontented with such surroundings and such a low
+mode of life would be a perfect brute.&nbsp; Disobedience, <a
+name="page10"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 10</span>in the eyes
+of anyone who has read history, is man&rsquo;s original
+virtue.&nbsp; It is through disobedience that progress has been
+made, through disobedience and through rebellion.&nbsp; Sometimes
+the poor are praised for being thrifty.&nbsp; But to recommend
+thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting.&nbsp; It is
+like advising a man who is starving to eat less.&nbsp; For a town
+or country labourer to practise thrift would be absolutely
+immoral.&nbsp; Man should not be ready to show that he can live
+like a badly-fed animal.&nbsp; He should decline to live like
+that, and should either steal or go on the rates, which is
+considered by many to be a form of stealing.&nbsp; As for
+begging, it is safer to beg than to take, but it is finer to take
+than to beg.&nbsp; No: a poor man who is ungrateful, unthrifty,
+discontented, and rebellious, is probably a real personality, and
+has much in him.&nbsp; He is at any rate a healthy protest.&nbsp;
+As for the virtuous <a name="page11"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+11</span>poor, one can pity them, of course, but one cannot
+possibly admire them.&nbsp; They have made private terms with the
+enemy, and sold their birthright for very bad pottage.&nbsp; They
+must also be extraordinarily stupid.&nbsp; I can quite understand
+a man accepting laws that protect private property, and admit of
+its accumulation, as long as he himself is able under those
+conditions to realise some form of beautiful and intellectual
+life.&nbsp; But it is almost incredible to me how a man whose
+life is marred and made hideous by such laws can possibly
+acquiesce in their continuance.</p>
+<p>However, the explanation is not really difficult to
+find.&nbsp; It is simply this.&nbsp; Misery and poverty are so
+absolutely degrading, and exercise such a paralysing effect over
+the nature of men, that no class is ever really conscious of its
+own suffering.&nbsp; They have to be told of it by other people,
+and they often entirely disbelieve them.&nbsp; <a
+name="page12"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 12</span>What is said
+by great employers of labour against agitators is unquestionably
+true.&nbsp; Agitators are a set of interfering, meddling people,
+who come down to some perfectly contented class of the community,
+and sow the seeds of discontent amongst them.&nbsp; That is the
+reason why agitators are so absolutely necessary.&nbsp; Without
+them, in our incomplete state, there would be no advance towards
+civilisation.&nbsp; Slavery was put down in America, not in
+consequence of any action on the part of the slaves, or even any
+express desire on their part that they should be free.&nbsp; It
+was put down entirely through the grossly illegal conduct of
+certain agitators in Boston and elsewhere, who were not slaves
+themselves, nor owners of slaves, nor had anything to do with the
+question really.&nbsp; It was, undoubtedly, the Abolitionists who
+set the torch alight, who began the whole thing.&nbsp; And it is
+curious to <a name="page13"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+13</span>note that from the slaves themselves they received, not
+merely very little assistance, but hardly any sympathy even; and
+when at the close of the war the slaves found themselves free,
+found themselves indeed so absolutely free that they were free to
+starve, many of them bitterly regretted the new state of
+things.&nbsp; To the thinker, the most tragic fact in the whole
+of the French Revolution is not that Marie Antoinette was killed
+for being a queen, but that the starved peasant of the
+Vend&eacute;e voluntarily went out to die for the hideous cause
+of feudalism.</p>
+<p>It is clear, then, that no Authoritarian Socialism will
+do.&nbsp; For while under the present system a very large number
+of people can lead lives of a certain amount of freedom and
+expression and happiness, under an industrial-barrack system, or
+a system of economic tyranny, nobody would be able to have any
+such freedom <a name="page14"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+14</span>at all.&nbsp; It is to be regretted that a portion of
+our community should be practically in slavery, but to propose to
+solve the problem by enslaving the entire community is
+childish.&nbsp; Every man must be left quite free to choose his
+own work.&nbsp; No form of compulsion must be exercised over
+him.&nbsp; If there is, his work will not be good for him, will
+not be good in itself, and will not be good for others.&nbsp; And
+by work I simply mean activity of any kind.</p>
+<p>I hardly think that any Socialist, nowadays, would seriously
+propose that an inspector should call every morning at each house
+to see that each citizen rose up and did manual labour for eight
+hours.&nbsp; Humanity has got beyond that stage, and reserves
+such a form of life for the people whom, in a very arbitrary
+manner, it chooses to call criminals.&nbsp; But I confess that
+many of the socialistic views that I have come across <a
+name="page15"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 15</span>seem to me to
+be tainted with ideas of authority, if not of actual
+compulsion.&nbsp; Of course, authority and compulsion are out of
+the question.&nbsp; All association must be quite
+voluntary.&nbsp; It is only in voluntary associations that man is
+fine.</p>
+<p>But it may be asked how Individualism, which is now more or
+less dependent on the existence of private property for its
+development, will benefit by the abolition of such private
+property.&nbsp; The answer is very simple.&nbsp; It is true that,
+under existing conditions, a few men who have had private means
+of their own, such as Byron, Shelley, Browning, Victor Hugo,
+Baudelaire, and others, have been able to realise their
+personality more or less completely.&nbsp; Not one of these men
+ever did a single day&rsquo;s work for hire.&nbsp; They were
+relieved from poverty.&nbsp; They had an immense advantage.&nbsp;
+The question is whether it would be for the good of Individualism
+<a name="page16"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 16</span>that such
+an advantage should be taken away.&nbsp; Let us suppose that it
+is taken away.&nbsp; What happens then to Individualism?&nbsp;
+How will it benefit?</p>
+<p>It will benefit in this way.&nbsp; Under the new conditions
+Individualism will be far freer, far finer, and far more
+intensified than it is now.&nbsp; I am not talking of the great
+imaginatively-realised Individualism of such poets as I have
+mentioned, but of the great actual Individualism latent and
+potential in mankind generally.&nbsp; For the recognition of
+private property has really harmed Individualism, and obscured
+it, by confusing a man with what he possesses.&nbsp; It has led
+Individualism entirely astray.&nbsp; It has made gain not growth
+its aim.&nbsp; So that man thought that the important thing was
+to have, and did not know that the important thing is to
+be.&nbsp; The true perfection of man lies, not in what man has,
+but in what man is.&nbsp; <a name="page17"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 17</span>Private property has crushed true
+Individualism, and set up an Individualism that is false.&nbsp;
+It has debarred one part of the community from being individual
+by starving them.&nbsp; It has debarred the other part of the
+community from being individual by putting them on the wrong
+road, and encumbering them.&nbsp; Indeed, so completely has
+man&rsquo;s personality been absorbed by his possessions that the
+English law has always treated offences against a man&rsquo;s
+property with far more severity than offences against his person,
+and property is still the test of complete citizenship.&nbsp; The
+industry necessary for the making money is also very
+demoralising.&nbsp; In a community like ours, where property
+confers immense distinction, social position, honour, respect,
+titles, and other pleasant things of the kind, man, being
+naturally ambitious, makes it his aim to accumulate this
+property, and goes on wearily and tediously <a
+name="page18"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 18</span>accumulating
+it long after he has got far more than he wants, or can use, or
+enjoy, or perhaps even know of.&nbsp; Man will kill himself by
+overwork in order to secure property, and really, considering the
+enormous advantages that property brings, one is hardly
+surprised.&nbsp; One&rsquo;s regret is that society should be
+constructed on such a basis that man has been forced into a
+groove in which he cannot freely develop what is wonderful, and
+fascinating, and delightful in him&mdash;in which, in fact, he
+misses the true pleasure and joy of living.&nbsp; He is also,
+under existing conditions, very insecure.&nbsp; An enormously
+wealthy merchant may be&mdash;often is&mdash;at every moment of
+his life at the mercy of things that are not under his
+control.&nbsp; If the wind blows an extra point or so, or the
+weather suddenly changes, or some trivial thing happens, his ship
+may go down, his speculations may go wrong, and he finds himself
+a poor <a name="page19"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+19</span>man, with his social position quite gone.&nbsp; Now,
+nothing should be able to harm a man except himself.&nbsp;
+Nothing should be able to rob a man at all.&nbsp; What a man
+really has, is what is in him.&nbsp; What is outside of him
+should be a matter of no importance.</p>
+<p>With the abolition of private property, then, we shall have
+true, beautiful, healthy Individualism.&nbsp; Nobody will waste
+his life in accumulating things, and the symbols for
+things.&nbsp; One will live.&nbsp; To live is the rarest thing in
+the world.&nbsp; Most people exist, that is all.</p>
+<p>It is a question whether we have ever seen the full expression
+of a personality, except on the imaginative plane of art.&nbsp;
+In action, we never have.&nbsp; C&aelig;sar, says Mommsen, was
+the complete and perfect man.&nbsp; But how tragically insecure
+was C&aelig;sar!&nbsp; Wherever there is a man who exercises
+authority, there is a man who resists authority.&nbsp;
+C&aelig;sar was very perfect, <a name="page20"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 20</span>but his perfection travelled by too
+dangerous a road.&nbsp; Marcus Aurelius was the perfect man, says
+Renan.&nbsp; Yes; the great emperor was a perfect man.&nbsp; But
+how intolerable were the endless claims upon him!&nbsp; He
+staggered under the burden of the empire.&nbsp; He was conscious
+how inadequate one man was to bear the weight of that Titan and
+too vast orb.&nbsp; What I mean by a perfect man is one who
+develops under perfect conditions; one who is not wounded, or
+worried or maimed, or in danger.&nbsp; Most personalities have
+been obliged to be rebels.&nbsp; Half their strength has been
+wasted in friction.&nbsp; Byron&rsquo;s personality, for
+instance, was terribly wasted in its battle with the stupidity,
+and hypocrisy, and Philistinism of the English.&nbsp; Such
+battles do not always intensify strength: they often exaggerate
+weakness.&nbsp; Byron was never able to give us what he might
+have given us.&nbsp; Shelley escaped better.&nbsp; Like Byron, he
+got out of <a name="page21"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+21</span>England as soon as possible.&nbsp; But he was not so
+well known.&nbsp; If the English had had any idea of what a great
+poet he really was, they would have fallen on him with tooth and
+nail, and made his life as unbearable to him as they possibly
+could.&nbsp; But he was not a remarkable figure in society, and
+consequently he escaped, to a certain degree.&nbsp; Still, even
+in Shelley the note of rebellion is sometimes too strong.&nbsp;
+The note of the perfect personality is not rebellion, but
+peace.</p>
+<p>It will be a marvellous thing&mdash;the true personality of
+man&mdash;when we see it.&nbsp; It will grow naturally and
+simply, flowerlike, or as a tree grows.&nbsp; It will not be at
+discord.&nbsp; It will never argue or dispute.&nbsp; It will not
+prove things.&nbsp; It will know everything.&nbsp; And yet it
+will not busy itself about knowledge.&nbsp; It will have
+wisdom.&nbsp; Its value will not be measured by material
+things.&nbsp; It will have nothing.&nbsp; And yet it will have
+everything, and whatever <a name="page22"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 22</span>one takes from it, it will still
+have, so rich will it be.&nbsp; It will not be always meddling
+with others, or asking them to be like itself.&nbsp; It will love
+them because they will be different.&nbsp; And yet while it will
+not meddle with others, it will help all, as a beautiful thing
+helps us, by being what it is.&nbsp; The personality of man will
+be very wonderful.&nbsp; It will be as wonderful as the
+personality of a child.</p>
+<p>In its development it will be assisted by Christianity, if men
+desire that; but if men do not desire that, it will develop none
+the less surely.&nbsp; For it will not worry itself about the
+past, nor care whether things happened or did not happen.&nbsp;
+Nor will it admit any laws but its own laws; nor any authority
+but its own authority.&nbsp; Yet it will love those who sought to
+intensify it, and speak often of them.&nbsp; And of these Christ
+was one.</p>
+<p><a name="page23"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+23</span>&lsquo;Know thyself&rsquo; was written over the portal
+of the antique world.&nbsp; Over the portal of the new world,
+&lsquo;Be thyself&rsquo; shall be written.&nbsp; And the message
+of Christ to man was simply &lsquo;Be thyself.&rsquo;&nbsp; That
+is the secret of Christ.</p>
+<p>When Jesus talks about the poor he simply means personalities,
+just as when he talks about the rich he simply means people who
+have not developed their personalities.&nbsp; Jesus moved in a
+community that allowed the accumulation of private property just
+as ours does, and the gospel that he preached was not that in
+such a community it is an advantage for a man to live on scanty,
+unwholesome food, to wear ragged, unwholesome clothes, to sleep
+in horrid, unwholesome dwellings, and a disadvantage for a man to
+live under healthy, pleasant, and decent conditions.&nbsp; Such a
+view would have been wrong there and then, and would, of course,
+be still <a name="page24"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+24</span>more wrong now and in England; for as man moves
+northward the material necessities of life become of more vital
+importance, and our society is infinitely more complex, and
+displays far greater extremes of luxury and pauperism than any
+society of the antique world.&nbsp; What Jesus meant, was
+this.&nbsp; He said to man, &lsquo;You have a wonderful
+personality.&nbsp; Develop it.&nbsp; Be yourself.&nbsp;
+Don&rsquo;t imagine that your perfection lies in accumulating or
+possessing external things.&nbsp; Your affection is inside of
+you.&nbsp; If only you could realise that, you would not want to
+be rich.&nbsp; Ordinary riches can be stolen from a man.&nbsp;
+Real riches cannot.&nbsp; In the treasury-house of your soul,
+there are infinitely precious things, that may not be taken from
+you.&nbsp; And so, try to so shape your life that external things
+will not harm you.&nbsp; And try also to get rid of personal
+property.&nbsp; It involves sordid preoccupation, endless
+industry, continual wrong.&nbsp; Personal <a
+name="page25"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 25</span>property
+hinders Individualism at every step.&rsquo;&nbsp; It is to be
+noted that Jesus never says that impoverished people are
+necessarily good, or wealthy people necessarily bad.&nbsp; That
+would not have been true.&nbsp; Wealthy people are, as a class,
+better than impoverished people, more moral, more intellectual,
+more well-behaved.&nbsp; There is only one class in the community
+that thinks more about money than the rich, and that is the
+poor.&nbsp; The poor can think of nothing else.&nbsp; That is the
+misery of being poor.&nbsp; What Jesus does say is that man
+reaches his perfection, not through what he has, not even through
+what he does, but entirely through what he is.&nbsp; And so the
+wealthy young man who comes to Jesus is represented as a
+thoroughly good citizen, who has broken none of the laws of his
+state, none of the commandments of his religion.&nbsp; He is
+quite respectable, in the ordinary sense of that extraordinary
+word.&nbsp; Jesus says <a name="page26"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 26</span>to him, &lsquo;You should give up
+private property.&nbsp; It hinders you from realising your
+perfection.&nbsp; It is a drag upon you.&nbsp; It is a
+burden.&nbsp; Your personality does not need it.&nbsp; It is
+within you, and not outside of you, that you will find what you
+really are, and what you really want.&rsquo;&nbsp; To his own
+friends he says the same thing.&nbsp; He tells them to be
+themselves, and not to be always worrying about other
+things.&nbsp; What do other things matter?&nbsp; Man is complete
+in himself.&nbsp; When they go into the world, the world will
+disagree with them.&nbsp; That is inevitable.&nbsp; The world
+hates Individualism.&nbsp; But that is not to trouble them.&nbsp;
+They are to be calm and self-centred.&nbsp; If a man takes their
+cloak, they are to give him their coat, just to show that
+material things are of no importance.&nbsp; If people abuse them,
+they are not to answer back.&nbsp; What does it signify?&nbsp;
+The things people say of a man do not alter a man.&nbsp; He is
+what he is.&nbsp; <a name="page27"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+27</span>Public opinion is of no value whatsoever.&nbsp; Even if
+people employ actual violence, they are not to be violent in
+turn.&nbsp; That would be to fall to the same low level.&nbsp;
+After all, even in prison, a man can be quite free.&nbsp; His
+soul can be free.&nbsp; His personality can be untroubled.&nbsp;
+He can be at peace.&nbsp; And, above all things, they are not to
+interfere with other people or judge them in any way.&nbsp;
+Personality is a very mysterious thing.&nbsp; A man cannot always
+be estimated by what he does.&nbsp; He may keep the law, and yet
+be worthless.&nbsp; He may break the law, and yet be fine.&nbsp;
+He may be bad, without ever doing anything bad.&nbsp; He may
+commit a sin against society, and yet realise through that sin
+his true perfection.</p>
+<p>There was a woman who was taken in adultery.&nbsp; We are not
+told the history of her love, but that love must have been very
+great; for Jesus said that her sins were forgiven her, <a
+name="page28"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 28</span>not because
+she repented, but because her love was so intense and
+wonderful.&nbsp; Later on, a short time before his death, as he
+sat at a feast, the woman came in and poured costly perfumes on
+his hair.&nbsp; His friends tried to interfere with her, and said
+that it was an extravagance, and that the money that the perfume
+cost should have been expended on charitable relief of people in
+want, or something of that kind.&nbsp; Jesus did not accept that
+view.&nbsp; He pointed out that the material needs of Man were
+great and very permanent, but that the spiritual needs of Man
+were greater still, and that in one divine moment, and by
+selecting its own mode of expression, a personality might make
+itself perfect.&nbsp; The world worships the woman, even now, as
+a saint.</p>
+<p>Yes; there are suggestive things in Individualism.&nbsp;
+Socialism annihilates family life, for instance.&nbsp; With the
+<a name="page29"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 29</span>abolition
+of private property, marriage in its present form must
+disappear.&nbsp; This is part of the programme.&nbsp;
+Individualism accepts this and makes it fine.&nbsp; It converts
+the abolition of legal restraint into a form of freedom that will
+help the full development of personality, and make the love of
+man and woman more wonderful, more beautiful, and more
+ennobling.&nbsp; Jesus knew this.&nbsp; He rejected the claims of
+family life, although they existed in his day and community in a
+very marked form.&nbsp; &lsquo;Who is my mother?&nbsp; Who are my
+brothers?&rsquo; he said, when he was told that they wished to
+speak to him.&nbsp; When one of his followers asked leave to go
+and bury his father, &lsquo;Let the dead bury the dead,&rsquo;
+was his terrible answer.&nbsp; He would allow no claim whatsoever
+to be made on personality.</p>
+<p>And so he who would lead a Christlike life is he who is
+perfectly and absolutely himself.&nbsp; He may be a <a
+name="page30"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 30</span>great poet,
+or a great man of science; or a young student at a University, or
+one who watches sheep upon a moor; or a maker of dramas, like
+Shakespeare, or a thinker about God, like Spinoza; or a child who
+plays in a garden, or a fisherman who throws his net into the
+sea.&nbsp; It does not matter what he is, as long as he realises
+the perfection of the soul that is within him.&nbsp; All
+imitation in morals and in life is wrong.&nbsp; Through the
+streets of Jerusalem at the present day crawls one who is mad and
+carries a wooden cross on his shoulders.&nbsp; He is a symbol of
+the lives that are marred by imitation.&nbsp; Father Damien was
+Christlike when he went out to live with the lepers, because in
+such service he realised fully what was best in him.&nbsp; But he
+was not more Christlike than Wagner when he realised his soul in
+music; or than Shelley, when he realised his soul in song.&nbsp;
+There is no one type for man.&nbsp; <a name="page31"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 31</span>There are as many perfections as
+there are imperfect men.&nbsp; And while to the claims of charity
+a man may yield and yet be free, to the claims of conformity no
+man may yield and remain free at all.</p>
+<p>Individualism, then, is what through Socialism we are to
+attain to.&nbsp; As a natural result the State must give up all
+idea of government.&nbsp; It must give it up because, as a wise
+man once said many centuries before Christ, there is such a thing
+as leaving mankind alone; there is no such thing as governing
+mankind.&nbsp; All modes of government are failures.&nbsp;
+Despotism is unjust to everybody, including the despot, who was
+probably made for better things.&nbsp; Oligarchies are unjust to
+the many, and ochlocracies are unjust to the few.&nbsp; High
+hopes were once formed of democracy; but democracy means simply
+the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people.&nbsp;
+It has been found out.&nbsp; I must say <a
+name="page32"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 32</span>that it was
+high time, for all authority is quite degrading.&nbsp; It
+degrades those who exercise it, and degrades those over whom it
+is exercised.&nbsp; When it is violently, grossly, and cruelly
+used, it produces a good effect, by creating, or at any rate
+bringing out, the spirit of revolt and Individualism that is to
+kill it.&nbsp; When it is used with a certain amount of kindness,
+and accompanied by prizes and rewards, it is dreadfully
+demoralising.&nbsp; People, in that case, are less conscious of
+the horrible pressure that is being put on them, and so go
+through their lives in a sort of coarse comfort, like petted
+animals, without ever realising that they are probably thinking
+other people&rsquo;s thoughts, living by other people&rsquo;s
+standards, wearing practically what one may call other
+people&rsquo;s second-hand clothes, and never being themselves
+for a single moment.&nbsp; &lsquo;He who would be free,&rsquo;
+says a fine thinker, &lsquo;must not conform.&rsquo;&nbsp; And
+authority, <a name="page33"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+33</span>by bribing people to conform, produces a very gross kind
+of over-fed barbarism amongst us.</p>
+<p>With authority, punishment will pass away.&nbsp; This will be
+a great gain&mdash;a gain, in fact, of incalculable value.&nbsp;
+As one reads history, not in the expurgated editions written for
+school-boys and passmen, but in the original authorities of each
+time, one is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the
+wicked have committed, but by the punishments that the good have
+inflicted; and a community is infinitely more brutalised by the
+habitual employment of punishment, than it is by the occurrence
+of crime.&nbsp; It obviously follows that the more punishment is
+inflicted the more crime is produced, and most modern legislation
+has clearly recognised this, and has made it its task to diminish
+punishment as far as it thinks it can.&nbsp; Wherever it has
+really diminished it, the results have always been extremely <a
+name="page34"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 34</span>good.&nbsp;
+The less punishment, the less crime.&nbsp; When there is no
+punishment at all, crime will either cease to exist, or, if it
+occurs, will be treated by physicians as a very distressing form
+of dementia, to be cured by care and kindness.&nbsp; For what are
+called criminals nowadays are not criminals at all.&nbsp;
+Starvation, and not sin, is the parent of modern crime.&nbsp;
+That indeed is the reason why our criminals are, as a class, so
+absolutely uninteresting from any psychological point of
+view.&nbsp; They are not marvellous Macbeths and terrible
+Vautrins.&nbsp; They are merely what ordinary, respectable,
+commonplace people would be if they had not got enough to
+eat.&nbsp; When private property is abolished there will be no
+necessity for crime, no demand for it; it will cease to
+exist.&nbsp; Of course, all crimes are not crimes against
+property, though such are the crimes that the English law,
+valuing what a man has more than what a <a
+name="page35"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 35</span>man is,
+punishes with the harshest and most horrible severity, if we
+except the crime of murder, and regard death as worse than penal
+servitude, a point on which our criminals, I believe,
+disagree.&nbsp; But though a crime may not be against property,
+it may spring from the misery and rage and depression produced by
+our wrong system of property-holding, and so, when that system is
+abolished, will disappear.&nbsp; When each member of the
+community has sufficient for his wants, and is not interfered
+with by his neighbour, it will not be an object of any interest
+to him to interfere with anyone else.&nbsp; Jealousy, which is an
+extraordinary source of crime in modern life, is an emotion
+closely bound up with our conceptions of property, and under
+Socialism and Individualism will die out.&nbsp; It is remarkable
+that in communistic tribes jealousy is entirely unknown.</p>
+<p>Now as the State is not to govern, <a name="page36"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 36</span>it may be asked what the State is to
+do.&nbsp; The State is to be a voluntary association that will
+organise labour, and be the manufacturer and distributor of
+necessary commodities.&nbsp; The State is to make what is
+useful.&nbsp; The individual is to make what is beautiful.&nbsp;
+And as I have mentioned the word labour, I cannot help saying
+that a great deal of nonsense is being written and talked
+nowadays about the dignity of manual labour.&nbsp; There is
+nothing necessarily dignified about manual labour at all, and
+most of it is absolutely degrading.&nbsp; It is mentally and
+morally injurious to man to do anything in which he does not find
+pleasure, and many forms of labour are quite pleasureless
+activities, and should be regarded as such.&nbsp; To sweep a
+slushy crossing for eight hours, on a day when the east wind is
+blowing is a disgusting occupation.&nbsp; To sweep it with
+mental, moral, or physical dignity seems to <a
+name="page37"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 37</span>me to be
+impossible.&nbsp; To sweep it with joy would be appalling.&nbsp;
+Man is made for something better than disturbing dirt.&nbsp; All
+work of that kind should be done by a machine.</p>
+<p>And I have no doubt that it will be so.&nbsp; Up to the
+present, man has been, to a certain extent, the slave of
+machinery, and there is something tragic in the fact that as soon
+as man had invented a machine to do his work he began to
+starve.&nbsp; This, however, is, of course, the result of our
+property system and our system of competition.&nbsp; One man owns
+a machine which does the work of five hundred men.&nbsp; Five
+hundred men are, in consequence, thrown out of employment, and,
+having no work to do, become hungry and take to thieving.&nbsp;
+The one man secures the produce of the machine and keeps it, and
+has five hundred times as much as he should have, and probably,
+which is of much more importance, a great <a
+name="page38"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 38</span>deal more
+than he really wants.&nbsp; Were that machine the property of
+all, every one would benefit by it.&nbsp; It would be an immense
+advantage to the community.&nbsp; All unintellectual labour, all
+monotonous, dull labour, all labour that deals with dreadful
+things, and involves unpleasant conditions, must be done by
+machinery.&nbsp; Machinery must work for us in coal mines, and do
+all sanitary services, and be the stoker of steamers, and clean
+the streets, and run messages on wet days, and do anything that
+is tedious or distressing.&nbsp; At present machinery competes
+against man.&nbsp; Under proper conditions machinery will serve
+man.&nbsp; There is no doubt at all that this is the future of
+machinery, and just as trees grow while the country gentleman is
+asleep, so while Humanity will be amusing itself, or enjoying
+cultivated leisure&mdash;which, and not labour, is the aim of
+man&mdash;or making beautiful things, or reading beautiful <a
+name="page39"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 39</span>things, or
+simply contemplating the world with admiration and delight,
+machinery will be doing all the necessary and unpleasant
+work.&nbsp; The fact is, that civilisation requires slaves.&nbsp;
+The Greeks were quite right there.&nbsp; Unless there are slaves
+to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture and
+contemplation become almost impossible.&nbsp; Human slavery is
+wrong, insecure, and demoralising.&nbsp; On mechanical slavery,
+on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world
+depends.&nbsp; And when scientific men are no longer called upon
+to go down to a depressing East End and distribute bad cocoa and
+worse blankets to starving people, they will have delightful
+leisure in which to devise wonderful and marvellous things for
+their own joy and the joy of everyone else.&nbsp; There will be
+great storages of force for every city, and for every house if
+required, and this force man will convert into heat, <a
+name="page40"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 40</span>light, or
+motion, according to his needs.&nbsp; Is this Utopian?&nbsp; A
+map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even
+glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity
+is always landing.&nbsp; And when Humanity lands there, it looks
+out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail.&nbsp; Progress is
+the realisation of Utopias.</p>
+<p>Now, I have said that the community by means of organisation
+of machinery will supply the useful things, and that the
+beautiful things will be made by the individual.&nbsp; This is
+not merely necessary, but it is the only possible way by which we
+can get either the one or the other.&nbsp; An individual who has
+to make things for the use of others, and with reference to their
+wants and their wishes, does not work with interest, and
+consequently cannot put into his work what is best in him.&nbsp;
+Upon the other hand, whenever a community or a <a
+name="page41"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 41</span>powerful
+section of a community, or a government of any kind, attempts to
+dictate to the artist what he is to do, Art either entirely
+vanishes, or becomes stereotyped, or degenerates into a low and
+ignoble form of craft.&nbsp; A work of art is the unique result
+of a unique temperament.&nbsp; Its beauty comes from the fact
+that the author is what he is.&nbsp; It has nothing to do with
+the fact that other people want what they want.&nbsp; Indeed, the
+moment that an artist takes notice of what other people want, and
+tries to supply the demand, he ceases to be an artist, and
+becomes a dull or an amusing craftsman, an honest or a dishonest
+tradesman.&nbsp; He has no further claim to be considered as an
+artist.&nbsp; Art is the most intense mode of Individualism that
+the world has known.&nbsp; I am inclined to say that it is the
+only real mode of Individualism that the world has known.&nbsp;
+Crime, which, under certain conditions, may seem <a
+name="page42"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 42</span>to have
+created Individualism, must take cognisance of other people and
+interfere with them.&nbsp; It belongs to the sphere of
+action.&nbsp; But alone, without any reference to his neighbours,
+without any interference, the artist can fashion a beautiful
+thing; and if he does not do it solely for his own pleasure, he
+is not an artist at all.</p>
+<p>And it is to be noted that it is the fact that Art is this
+intense form of Individualism that makes the public try to
+exercise over it in an authority that is as immoral as it is
+ridiculous, and as corrupting as it is contemptible.&nbsp; It is
+not quite their fault.&nbsp; The public has always, and in every
+age, been badly brought up.&nbsp; They are continually asking Art
+to be popular, to please their want of taste, to flatter their
+absurd vanity, to tell them what they have been told before, to
+show them what they ought to be tired of seeing, to amuse them
+when they feel heavy after eating too much, and to distract <a
+name="page43"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 43</span>their
+thoughts when they are wearied of their own stupidity.&nbsp; Now
+Art should never try to be popular.&nbsp; The public should try
+to make itself artistic.&nbsp; There is a very wide
+difference.&nbsp; If a man of science were told that the results
+of his experiments, and the conclusions that he arrived at,
+should be of such a character that they would not upset the
+received popular notions on the subject, or disturb popular
+prejudice, or hurt the sensibilities of people who knew nothing
+about science; if a philosopher were told that he had a perfect
+right to speculate in the highest spheres of thought, provided
+that he arrived at the same conclusions as were held by those who
+had never thought in any sphere at all&mdash;well, nowadays the
+man of science and the philosopher would be considerably
+amused.&nbsp; Yet it is really a very few years since both
+philosophy and science were subjected to brutal popular control,
+to authority in fact&mdash;<a name="page44"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 44</span>the authority of either the general
+ignorance of the community, or the terror and greed for power of
+an ecclesiastical or governmental class.&nbsp; Of course, we have
+to a very great extent got rid of any attempt on the part of the
+community, or the Church, or the Government, to interfere with
+the individualism of speculative thought, but the attempt to
+interfere with the individualism of imaginative art still
+lingers.&nbsp; In fact, it does more than linger; it is
+aggressive, offensive, and brutalising.</p>
+<p>In England, the arts that have escaped best are the <a
+name="page45"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 45</span>arts in which
+the public take no interest.&nbsp; Poetry is an instance of what
+I mean.&nbsp; We have been able to have fine poetry in England
+because the public do not read it, and consequently do not
+influence it.&nbsp; The public like to insult poets because they
+are individual, but once they have insulted them, they leave them
+alone.&nbsp; In the case of the novel and the drama, arts in
+which the public do take an interest, the result of the exercise
+of popular authority has been absolutely ridiculous.&nbsp; No
+country produces such badly-written fiction, such tedious, common
+work in the novel form, such silly, vulgar plays as
+England.&nbsp; It must necessarily be so.&nbsp; The popular
+standard is of such a character that no artist can get to
+it.&nbsp; It is at once too easy and too difficult to be a
+popular novelist.&nbsp; It is too easy, because the requirements
+of the public as far as plot, style, psychology, treatment of
+life, and treatment of literature are concerned are within the
+reach of the very meanest capacity and the most uncultivated
+mind.&nbsp; It is too difficult, because to meet such
+requirements the artist would have to do violence to his
+temperament, would have to write not for the artistic joy of
+writing, but for the amusement of half-educated people, and so
+would have to suppress his individualism, <a
+name="page46"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 46</span>forget his
+culture, annihilate his style, and surrender everything that is
+valuable in him.&nbsp; In the case of the drama, things are a
+little better: the theatre-going public like the obvious, it is
+true, but they do not like the tedious; and burlesque and
+farcical comedy, the two most popular forms, are distinct forms
+of art.&nbsp; Delightful work may be produced under burlesque and
+farcical conditions, and in work of this kind the artist in
+England is allowed very great freedom.&nbsp; It is when one comes
+to the higher forms of the drama that the result of popular
+control is seen.&nbsp; The one thing that the public dislike is
+novelty.&nbsp; Any attempt to extend the subject-matter of art is
+extremely distasteful to the public; and yet the vitality and
+progress of art depend in a large measure on the continual
+extension of subject-matter.&nbsp; The public dislike novelty
+because they are afraid of it.&nbsp; It represents to them a mode
+of Individualism, an assertion <a name="page47"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 47</span>on the part of the artist that he
+selects his own subject, and treats it as he chooses.&nbsp; The
+public are quite right in their attitude.&nbsp; Art is
+Individualism, and Individualism is a disturbing and
+disintegrating force.&nbsp; Therein lies its immense value.&nbsp;
+For what it seeks to disturb is monotony of type, slavery of
+custom, tyranny of habit, and the reduction of man to the level
+of a machine.&nbsp; In Art, the public accept what has been,
+because they cannot alter it, not because they appreciate
+it.&nbsp; They swallow their classics whole, and never taste
+them.&nbsp; They endure them as the inevitable, and as they
+cannot mar them, they mouth about them.&nbsp; Strangely enough,
+or not strangely, according to one&rsquo;s own views, this
+acceptance of the classics does a great deal of harm.&nbsp; The
+uncritical admiration of the Bible and Shakespeare in England is
+an instance of what I mean.&nbsp; With regard to the Bible,
+considerations of ecclesiastical <a name="page48"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 48</span>authority enter into the matter, so
+that I need not dwell upon the point.</p>
+<p>But in the case of Shakespeare it is quite obvious that the
+public really see neither the beauties nor the defects of his
+plays.&nbsp; If they saw the beauties, they would not object to
+the development of the drama; and if they saw the defects, they
+would not object to the development of the drama either.&nbsp;
+The fact is, the public make use of the classics of a country as
+a means of checking the progress of Art.&nbsp; They degrade the
+classics into authorities.&nbsp; They use them as bludgeons for
+preventing the free expression of Beauty in new forms.&nbsp; They
+are always asking a writer why he does not write like somebody
+else, or a painter why he does not paint like somebody else,
+quite oblivious of the fact that if either of them did anything
+of the kind he would cease to be an artist.&nbsp; A fresh mode of
+Beauty is absolutely distasteful to them, and whenever it appears
+<a name="page49"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 49</span>they get
+so angry, and bewildered that they always use two stupid
+expressions&mdash;one is that the work of art is grossly
+unintelligible; the other, that the work of art is grossly
+immoral.&nbsp; What they mean by these words seems to me to be
+this.&nbsp; When they say a work is grossly unintelligible, they
+mean that the artist has said or made a beautiful thing that is
+new; when they describe a work as grossly immoral, they mean that
+the artist has said or made a beautiful thing that is true.&nbsp;
+The former expression has reference to style; the latter to
+subject-matter.&nbsp; But they probably use the words very
+vaguely, as an ordinary mob will use ready-made
+paving-stones.&nbsp; There is not a single real poet or
+prose-writer of this century, for instance, on whom the British
+public have not solemnly conferred diplomas of immorality, and
+these diplomas practically take the place, with us, of what in
+France, is the formal recognition of an Academy <a
+name="page50"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 50</span>of Letters,
+and fortunately make the establishment of such an institution
+quite unnecessary in England.&nbsp; Of course, the public are
+very reckless in their use of the word.&nbsp; That they should
+have called Wordsworth an immoral poet, was only to be
+expected.&nbsp; Wordsworth was a poet.&nbsp; But that they should
+have called Charles Kingsley an immoral novelist is
+extraordinary.&nbsp; Kingsley&rsquo;s prose was not of a very
+fine quality.&nbsp; Still, there is the word, and they use it as
+best they can.&nbsp; An artist is, of course, not disturbed by
+it.&nbsp; The true artist is a man who believes absolutely in
+himself, because he is absolutely himself.&nbsp; But I can fancy
+that if an artist produced a work of art in England that
+immediately on its appearance was recognised by the public,
+through their medium, which is the public press, as a work that
+was quite intelligible and highly moral, he would begin to
+seriously question whether in its creation <a
+name="page51"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 51</span>he had really
+been himself at all, and consequently whether the work was not
+quite unworthy of him, and either of a thoroughly second-rate
+order, or of no artistic value whatsoever.</p>
+<p>Perhaps, however, I have wronged the public in limiting them
+to such words as &lsquo;immoral,&rsquo;
+&lsquo;unintelligible,&rsquo; &lsquo;exotic,&rsquo; and
+&lsquo;unhealthy.&rsquo;&nbsp; There is one other word that they
+use.&nbsp; That word is &lsquo;morbid.&rsquo;&nbsp; They do not
+use it often.&nbsp; The meaning of the word is so simple that
+they are afraid of using it.&nbsp; Still, they use it sometimes,
+and, now and then, one comes across it in popular
+newspapers.&nbsp; It is, of course, a ridiculous word to apply to
+a work of art.&nbsp; For what is morbidity but a mood of emotion
+or a mode of thought that one cannot express?&nbsp; The public
+are all morbid, because the public can never find expression for
+anything.&nbsp; The artist is never morbid.&nbsp; He expresses
+everything.&nbsp; He stands outside his subject, and through its
+<a name="page52"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 52</span>medium
+produces incomparable and artistic effects.&nbsp; To call an
+artist morbid because he deals with morbidity as his
+subject-matter is as silly as if one called Shakespeare mad
+because he wrote &lsquo;King Lear.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>On the whole, an artist in England gains something by being
+attacked.&nbsp; His individuality is intensified.&nbsp; He
+becomes more completely himself.&nbsp; Of course, the attacks are
+very gross, very impertinent, and very contemptible.&nbsp; But
+then no artist expects grace from the vulgar mind, or style from
+the suburban intellect.&nbsp; Vulgarity and stupidity are two
+very vivid facts in modern life.&nbsp; One regrets them,
+naturally.&nbsp; But there they are.&nbsp; They are subjects for
+study, like everything else.&nbsp; And it is only fair to state,
+with regard to modern journalists, that they always apologise to
+one in private for what they have written against one in
+public.</p>
+<p>Within the last few years two other <a name="page53"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 53</span>adjectives, it may be mentioned, have
+been added to the very limited vocabulary of art-abuse that is at
+the disposal of the public.&nbsp; One is the word
+&lsquo;unhealthy,&rsquo; the other is the word
+&lsquo;exotic.&rsquo;&nbsp; The latter merely expresses the rage
+of the momentary mushroom against the immortal, entrancing, and
+exquisitely lovely orchid.&nbsp; It is a tribute, but a tribute
+of no importance.&nbsp; The word &lsquo;unhealthy,&rsquo;
+however, admits of analysis.&nbsp; It is a rather interesting
+word.&nbsp; In fact, it is so interesting that the people who use
+it do not know what it means.</p>
+<p>What does it mean?&nbsp; What is a healthy, or an unhealthy
+work of art?&nbsp; All terms that one applies to a work of art,
+provided that one applies them rationally, have reference to
+either its style or its subject, or to both together.&nbsp; From
+the point of view of style, a healthy work of art is one whose
+style recognises the beauty of the material it employs, be that
+material one of words <a name="page54"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 54</span>or of bronze, of colour or of ivory,
+and uses that beauty as a factor in producing the &aelig;sthetic
+effect.&nbsp; From the point of view of subject, a healthy work
+of art is one the choice of whose subject is conditioned by the
+temperament of the artist, and comes directly out of it.&nbsp; In
+fine, a healthy work of art is one that has both perfection and
+personality.&nbsp; Of course, form and substance cannot be
+separated in a work of art; they are always one.&nbsp; But for
+purposes of analysis, and setting the wholeness of &aelig;sthetic
+impression aside for a moment, we can intellectually so separate
+them.&nbsp; An unhealthy work of art, on the other hand, is a
+work whose style is obvious, old-fashioned, and common, and whose
+subject is deliberately chosen, not because the artist has any
+pleasure in it, but because he thinks that the public will pay
+him for it.&nbsp; In fact, the popular novel that the public
+calls healthy is always a thoroughly unhealthy production; <a
+name="page55"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 55</span>and what the
+public call an unhealthy novel is always a beautiful and healthy
+work of art.</p>
+<p>I need hardly say that I am not, for a single moment,
+complaining that the public and the public press misuse these
+words.&nbsp; I do not see how, with their lack of comprehension
+of what Art is, they could possibly use them in the proper
+sense.&nbsp; I am merely pointing out the misuse; and as for the
+origin of the misuse and the meaning that lies behind it all, the
+explanation is very simple.&nbsp; It comes from the barbarous
+conception of authority.&nbsp; It comes from the natural
+inability of a community corrupted by authority to understand or
+appreciate Individualism.&nbsp; In a word, it comes from that
+monstrous and ignorant thing that is called Public Opinion,
+which, bad and well-meaning as it is when it tries to control
+action, is infamous and of evil meaning when it tries to control
+Thought or Art.</p>
+<p><a name="page56"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 56</span>Indeed,
+there is much more to be said in favour of the physical force of
+the public than there is in favour of the public&rsquo;s
+opinion.&nbsp; The former may be fine.&nbsp; The latter must be
+foolish.&nbsp; It is often said that force is no argument.&nbsp;
+That, however, entirely depends on what one wants to prove.&nbsp;
+Many of the most important problems of the last few centuries,
+such as the continuance of personal government in England, or of
+feudalism in France, have been solved entirely by means of
+physical force.&nbsp; The very violence of a revolution may make
+the public grand and splendid for a moment.&nbsp; It was a fatal
+day when the public discovered that the pen is mightier than the
+paving-stone, and can be made as offensive as the brickbat.&nbsp;
+They at once sought for the journalist, found him, developed him,
+and made him their industrious and well-paid servant.&nbsp; It is
+greatly to be regretted, for both their sakes.&nbsp; <a
+name="page57"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 57</span>Behind the
+barricade there may be much that is noble and heroic.&nbsp; But
+what is there behind the leading-article but prejudice,
+stupidity, cant, and twaddle?&nbsp; And when these four are
+joined together they make a terrible force, and constitute the
+new authority.</p>
+<p>In old days men had the rack.&nbsp; Now they have the
+press.&nbsp; That is an improvement certainly.&nbsp; But still it
+is very bad, and wrong, and demoralising.&nbsp;
+Somebody&mdash;was it Burke?&mdash;called journalism the fourth
+estate.&nbsp; That was true at the time, no doubt.&nbsp; But at
+the present moment it really is the only estate.&nbsp; It has
+eaten up the other three.&nbsp; The Lords Temporal say nothing,
+the Lords Spiritual have nothing to say, and the House of Commons
+has nothing to say and says it.&nbsp; We are dominated by
+Journalism.&nbsp; In America the President reigns for four years,
+and Journalism governs for ever and ever.&nbsp; Fortunately <a
+name="page58"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 58</span>in America
+Journalism has carried its authority to the grossest and most
+brutal extreme.&nbsp; As a natural consequence it has begun to
+create a spirit of revolt.&nbsp; People are amused by it, or
+disgusted by it, according to their temperaments.&nbsp; But it is
+no longer the real force it was.&nbsp; It is not seriously
+treated.&nbsp; In England, Journalism, not, except in a few
+well-known instances, having been carried to such excesses of
+brutality, is still a great factor, a really remarkable
+power.&nbsp; The tyranny that it proposes to exercise over
+people&rsquo;s private lives seems to me to be quite
+extraordinary.&nbsp; The fact is, that the public have an
+insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth
+knowing.&nbsp; Journalism, conscious of this, and having
+tradesman-like habits, supplies their demands.&nbsp; In centuries
+before ours the public nailed the ears of journalists to the
+pump.&nbsp; That was quite hideous.&nbsp; In this century
+journalists have nailed their <a name="page59"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 59</span>own ears to the keyhole.&nbsp; That
+is much worse.&nbsp; And what aggravates the mischief is that the
+journalists who are most to blame are not the amusing journalists
+who write for what are called Society papers.&nbsp; The harm is
+done by the serious, thoughtful, earnest journalists, who
+solemnly, as they are doing at present, will drag before the eyes
+of the public some incident in the private life of a great
+statesman, of a man who is a leader of political thought as he is
+a creator of political force, and invite the public to discuss
+the incident, to exercise authority in the matter, to give their
+views, and not merely to give their views, but to carry them into
+action, to dictate to the man upon all other points, to dictate
+to his party, to dictate to his country; in fact, to make
+themselves ridiculous, offensive, and harmful.&nbsp; The private
+lives of men and women should not be told to the public.&nbsp;
+The public have nothing to <a name="page60"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 60</span>do with them at all.&nbsp; In France
+they manage these things better.&nbsp; There they do not allow
+the details of the trials that take place in the divorce courts
+to be published for the amusement or criticism of the
+public.&nbsp; All that the public are allowed to know is that the
+divorce has taken place and was granted on petition of one or
+other or both of the married parties concerned.&nbsp; In France,
+in fact, they limit the journalist, and allow the artist almost
+perfect freedom.&nbsp; Here we allow absolute freedom to the
+journalist, and entirely limit the artist.&nbsp; English public
+opinion, that is to say, tries to constrain and impede and warp
+the man who makes things that are beautiful in effect, and
+compels the journalist to retail things that are ugly, or
+disgusting, or revolting in fact, so that we have the most
+serious journalists in the world, and the most indecent
+newspapers.&nbsp; It is no exaggeration to talk of
+compulsion.&nbsp; There <a name="page61"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 61</span>are possibly some journalists who
+take a real pleasure in publishing horrible things, or who, being
+poor, look to scandals as forming a sort of permanent basis for
+an income.&nbsp; But there are other journalists, I feel certain,
+men of education and cultivation, who really dislike publishing
+these things, who know that it is wrong to do so, and only do it
+because the unhealthy conditions under which their occupation is
+carried on oblige them to supply the public with what the public
+wants, and to compete with other journalists in making that
+supply as full and satisfying to the gross popular appetite as
+possible.&nbsp; It is a very degrading position for any body of
+educated men to be placed in, and I have no doubt that most of
+them feel it acutely.</p>
+<p>However, let us leave what is really a very sordid side of the
+subject, and return to the question of popular control in the
+matter of Art, by which <a name="page62"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 62</span>I mean Public Opinion dictating to
+the artist the form which he is to use, the mode in which he is
+to use it, and the materials with which he is to work.&nbsp; I
+have pointed out that the arts which have escaped best in England
+are the arts in which the public have not been interested.&nbsp;
+They are, however, interested in the drama, and as a certain
+advance has been made in the drama within the last ten or fifteen
+years, it is important to point out that this advance is entirely
+due to a few individual artists refusing to accept the popular
+want of taste as their standard, and refusing to regard Art as a
+mere matter of demand and supply.&nbsp; With his marvellous and
+vivid personality, with a style that has really a true
+colour-element in it, with his extraordinary power, not over mere
+mimicry but over imaginative and intellectual creation, Mr
+Irving, had his sole object been to give the public what they
+wanted, could have produced <a name="page63"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 63</span>the commonest plays in the commonest
+manner, and made as much success and money as a man could
+possibly desire.&nbsp; But his object was not that.&nbsp; His
+object was to realise his own perfection as an artist, under
+certain conditions, and in certain forms of Art.&nbsp; At first
+he appealed to the few: now he has educated the many.&nbsp; He
+has created in the public both taste and temperament.&nbsp; The
+public appreciate his artistic success immensely.&nbsp; I often
+wonder, however, whether the public understand that that success
+is entirely due to the fact that he did not accept their
+standard, but realised his own.&nbsp; With their standard the
+Lyceum would have been a sort of second-rate booth, as some of
+the popular theatres in London are at present.&nbsp; Whether they
+understand it or not the fact however remains, that taste and
+temperament have, to a certain extent been created in the public,
+and that <a name="page64"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+64</span>the public is capable of developing these
+qualities.&nbsp; The problem then is, why do not the public
+become more civilised?&nbsp; They have the capacity.&nbsp; What
+stops them?</p>
+<p>The thing that stops them, it must be said again, is their
+desire to exercise authority over the artist and over works of
+art.&nbsp; To certain theatres, such as the Lyceum and the
+Haymarket, the public seem to come in a proper mood.&nbsp; In
+both of these theatres there have been individual artists, who
+have succeeded in creating in their audiences&mdash;and every
+theatre in London has its own audience&mdash;the temperament to
+which Art appeals.&nbsp; And what is that temperament?&nbsp; It
+is the temperament of receptivity.&nbsp; That is all.</p>
+<p>If a man approaches a work of art with any desire to exercise
+authority over it and the artist, he approaches it in such a
+spirit that he cannot receive any artistic impression from it at
+all.&nbsp; The work of art is to dominate <a
+name="page65"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 65</span>the
+spectator: the spectator is not to dominate the work of
+art.&nbsp; The spectator is to be receptive.&nbsp; He is to be
+the violin on which the master is to play.&nbsp; And the more
+completely he can suppress his own silly views, his own foolish
+prejudices, his own absurd ideas of what Art should be, or should
+not be, the more likely he is to understand and appreciate the
+work of art in question.&nbsp; This is, of course, quite obvious
+in the case of the vulgar theatre-going public of English men and
+women.&nbsp; But it is equally true of what are called educated
+people.&nbsp; For an educated person&rsquo;s ideas of Art are
+drawn naturally from what Art has been, whereas the new work of
+art is beautiful by being what Art has never been; and to measure
+it by the standard of the past is to measure it by a standard on
+the rejection of which its real perfection depends.&nbsp; A
+temperament capable of receiving, through an imaginative medium,
+and under imaginative <a name="page66"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 66</span>conditions, new and beautiful
+impressions, is the only temperament that can appreciate a work
+of art.&nbsp; And true as this is in the case of the appreciation
+of sculpture and painting, it is still more true of the
+appreciation of such arts as the drama.&nbsp; For a picture and a
+statue are not at war with Time.&nbsp; They take no count of its
+succession.&nbsp; In one moment their unity may be
+apprehended.&nbsp; In the case of literature it is
+different.&nbsp; Time must be traversed before the unity of
+effect is realised.&nbsp; And so, in the drama, there may occur
+in the first act of the play something whose real artistic value
+may not be evident to the spectator till the third or fourth act
+is reached.&nbsp; Is the silly fellow to get angry and call out,
+and disturb the play, and annoy the artists?&nbsp; No.&nbsp; The
+honest man is to sit quietly, and know the delightful emotions of
+wonder, curiosity, and suspense.&nbsp; He is not to go to the
+play to lose a vulgar <a name="page67"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 67</span>temper.&nbsp; He is to go to the play
+to realise an artistic temperament.&nbsp; He is to go to the play
+to gain an artistic temperament.&nbsp; He is not the arbiter of
+the work of art.&nbsp; He is one who is admitted to contemplate
+the work of art, and, if the work be fine, to forget in its
+contemplation and the egotism that mars him&mdash;the egotism of
+his ignorance, or the egotism of his information.&nbsp; This
+point about the drama is hardly, I think, sufficiently
+recognised.&nbsp; I can quite understand that were
+&lsquo;Macbeth&rsquo; produced for the first time before a modern
+London audience, many of the people present would strongly and
+vigorously object to the introduction of the witches in the first
+act, with their grotesque phrases and their ridiculous
+words.&nbsp; But when the play is over one realises that the
+laughter of the witches in &lsquo;Macbeth&rsquo; is as terrible
+as the laughter of madness in &lsquo;Lear,&rsquo; more terrible
+than the laughter of Iago in the tragedy of the <a
+name="page68"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 68</span>Moor.&nbsp;
+No spectator of art needs a more perfect mood of receptivity than
+the spectator of a play.&nbsp; The moment he seeks to exercise
+authority he becomes the avowed enemy of Art and of
+himself.&nbsp; Art does not mind.&nbsp; It is he who suffers.</p>
+<p>With the novel it is the same thing.&nbsp; Popular authority
+and the recognition of popular authority are fatal.&nbsp;
+Thackeray&rsquo;s &lsquo;Esmond&rsquo; is a beautiful work of art
+because he wrote it to please himself.&nbsp; In his other novels,
+in &lsquo;Pendennis,&rsquo; in &lsquo;Philip,&rsquo; in
+&lsquo;Vanity Fair&rsquo; even, at times, he is too conscious of
+the public, and spoils his work by appealing directly to the
+sympathies of the public, or by directly mocking at them.&nbsp; A
+true artist takes no notice whatever of the public.&nbsp; The
+public are to him non-existent.&nbsp; He has no poppied or
+honeyed cakes through which to give the monster sleep or
+sustenance.&nbsp; He leaves that to the popular novelist.&nbsp;
+One incomparable novelist we have <a name="page69"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 69</span>now in England, Mr George
+Meredith.&nbsp; There are better artists in France, but France
+has no one whose view of life is so large, so varied, so
+imaginatively true.&nbsp; There are tellers of stories in Russia
+who have a more vivid sense of what pain in fiction may be.&nbsp;
+But to him belongs philosophy in fiction.&nbsp; His people not
+merely live, but they live in thought.&nbsp; One can see them
+from myriad points of view.&nbsp; They are suggestive.&nbsp;
+There is soul in them and around them.&nbsp; They are
+interpretative and symbolic.&nbsp; And he who made them, those
+wonderful quickly-moving figures, made them for his own pleasure,
+and has never asked the public what they wanted, has never cared
+to know what they wanted, has never allowed the public to dictate
+to him or influence him in any way but has gone on intensifying
+his own personality, and producing his own individual work.&nbsp;
+At first none came to him.&nbsp; That did not matter.&nbsp; Then
+the few came to <a name="page70"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+70</span>him.&nbsp; That did not change him.&nbsp; The many have
+come now.&nbsp; He is still the same.&nbsp; He is an incomparable
+novelist.</p>
+<p>With the decorative arts it is not different.&nbsp; The public
+clung with really pathetic tenacity to what I believe were the
+direct traditions of the Great Exhibition of international
+vulgarity, traditions that were so appalling that the houses in
+which people lived were only fit for blind people to live
+in.&nbsp; Beautiful things began to be made, beautiful colours
+came from the dyer&rsquo;s hand, beautiful patterns from the
+artist&rsquo;s brain, and the use of beautiful things and their
+value and importance were set forth.&nbsp; The public were really
+very indignant.&nbsp; They lost their temper.&nbsp; They said
+silly things.&nbsp; No one minded.&nbsp; No one was a whit the
+worse.&nbsp; No one accepted the authority of public
+opinion.&nbsp; And now it is almost impossible to enter any
+modern house without seeing some recognition of good taste, some
+recognition of the value of lovely surroundings, <a
+name="page71"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 71</span>some sign of
+appreciation of beauty.&nbsp; In fact, people&rsquo;s houses are,
+as a rule, quite charming nowadays.&nbsp; People have been to a
+very great extent civilised.&nbsp; It is only fair to state,
+however, that the extraordinary success of the revolution in
+house-decoration and furniture and the like has not really been
+due to the majority of the public developing a very fine taste in
+such matters.&nbsp; It has been chiefly due to the fact that the
+craftsmen of things so appreciated the pleasure of making what
+was beautiful, and woke to such a vivid consciousness of the
+hideousness and vulgarity of what the public had previously
+wanted, that they simply starved the public out.&nbsp; It would
+be quite impossible at the present moment to furnish a room as
+rooms were furnished a few years ago, without going for
+everything to an auction of second-hand furniture from some
+third-rate lodging-house.&nbsp; The things are no longer
+made.&nbsp; However they <a name="page72"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 72</span>may object to it, people must
+nowadays have something charming in their surroundings.&nbsp;
+Fortunately for them, their assumption of authority in these
+art-matters came to entire grief.</p>
+<p>It is evident, then, that all authority in such things is
+bad.&nbsp; People sometimes inquire what form of government is
+most suitable for an artist to live under.&nbsp; To this question
+there is only one answer.&nbsp; The form of government that is
+most suitable to the artist is no government at all.&nbsp;
+Authority over him and his art is ridiculous.&nbsp; It has been
+stated that under despotisms artists have produced lovely
+work.&nbsp; This is not quite so.&nbsp; Artists have visited
+despots, not as subjects to be tyrannised over, but as wandering
+wonder-makers, as fascinating vagrant personalities, to be
+entertained and charmed and suffered to be at peace, and allowed
+to create.&nbsp; There is this to be said in favour of the
+despot, that he, being an individual, <a name="page73"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 73</span>may have culture, while the mob,
+being a monster, has none.&nbsp; One who is an Emperor and King
+may stoop down to pick up a brush for a painter, but when the
+democracy stoops down it is merely to throw mud.&nbsp; And yet
+the democracy have not so far to stoop as the emperor.&nbsp; In
+fact, when they want to throw mud they have not to stoop at
+all.&nbsp; But there is no necessity to separate the monarch from
+the mob; all authority is equally bad.</p>
+<p>There are three kinds of despots.&nbsp; There is the despot
+who tyrannises over the body.&nbsp; There is the despot who
+tyrannises over the soul.&nbsp; There is the despot who
+tyrannises over the soul and body alike.&nbsp; The first is
+called the Prince.&nbsp; The second is called the Pope.&nbsp; The
+third is called the People.&nbsp; The Prince may be
+cultivated.&nbsp; Many Princes have been.&nbsp; Yet in the Prince
+there is danger.&nbsp; One thinks of Dante at the bitter feast <a
+name="page74"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 74</span>in Verona, of
+Tasso in Ferrara&rsquo;s madman&rsquo;s cell.&nbsp; It is better
+for the artist not to live with Princes.&nbsp; The Pope may be
+cultivated.&nbsp; Many Popes have been; the bad Popes have
+been.&nbsp; The bad Popes loved Beauty, almost as passionately,
+nay, with as much passion as the good Popes hated Thought.&nbsp;
+To the wickedness of the Papacy humanity owes much.&nbsp; The
+goodness of the Papacy owes a terrible debt to humanity.&nbsp;
+Yet, though the Vatican has kept the rhetoric of its thunders,
+and lost the rod of its lightning, it is better for the artist
+not to live with Popes.&nbsp; It was a Pope who said of Cellini
+to a conclave of Cardinals that common laws and common authority
+were not made for men such as he; but it was a Pope who thrust
+Cellini into prison, and kept him there till he sickened with
+rage, and created unreal visions for himself, and saw the gilded
+sun enter his room, and grew so enamoured of <a
+name="page75"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 75</span>it that he
+sought to escape, and crept out from tower to tower, and falling
+through dizzy air at dawn, maimed himself, and was by a
+vine-dresser covered with vine leaves, and carried in a cart to
+one who, loving beautiful things, had care of him.&nbsp; There is
+danger in Popes.&nbsp; And as for the People, what of them and
+their authority?&nbsp; Perhaps of them and their authority one
+has spoken enough.&nbsp; Their authority is a thing blind, deaf,
+hideous, grotesque, tragic, amusing, serious, and obscene.&nbsp;
+It is impossible for the artist to live with the People.&nbsp;
+All despots bribe.&nbsp; The people bribe and brutalise.&nbsp;
+Who told them to exercise authority?&nbsp; They were made to
+live, to listen, and to love.&nbsp; Someone has done them a great
+wrong.&nbsp; They have marred themselves by imitation of their
+inferiors.&nbsp; They have taken the sceptre of the Prince.&nbsp;
+How should they use it?&nbsp; They have taken the triple tiara of
+the Pope.&nbsp; How should <a name="page76"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 76</span>they carry its burden?&nbsp; They are
+as a clown whose heart is broken.&nbsp; They are as a priest
+whose soul is not yet born.&nbsp; Let all who love Beauty pity
+them.&nbsp; Though they themselves love not Beauty, yet let them
+pity themselves.&nbsp; Who taught them the trick of tyranny?</p>
+<p>There are many other things that one might point out.&nbsp;
+One might point out how the Renaissance was great, because it
+sought to solve no social problem, and busied itself not about
+such things, but suffered the individual to develop freely,
+beautifully, and naturally, and so had great and individual
+artists, and great and individual men.&nbsp; One might point out
+how Louis XIV., by creating the modern state, destroyed the
+individualism of the artist, and made things monstrous in their
+monotony of repetition, and contemptible in their conformity to
+rule, and destroyed throughout all France all those fine freedoms
+of expression <a name="page77"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+77</span>that had made tradition new in beauty, and new modes one
+with antique form.&nbsp; But the past is of no importance.&nbsp;
+The present is of no importance.&nbsp; It is with the future that
+we have to deal.&nbsp; For the past is what man should not have
+been.&nbsp; The present is what man ought not to be.&nbsp; The
+future is what artists are.</p>
+<p>It will, of course, be said that such a scheme as is set forth
+here is quite unpractical, and goes against human nature.&nbsp;
+This is perfectly true.&nbsp; It is unpractical, and it goes
+against human nature.&nbsp; This is why it is worth carrying out,
+and that is why one proposes it.&nbsp; For what is a practical
+scheme?&nbsp; A practical scheme is either a scheme that is
+already in existence, or a scheme that could be carried out under
+existing conditions.&nbsp; But it is exactly the existing
+conditions that one objects to; and any scheme that could accept
+these conditions is wrong and foolish.&nbsp; The conditions will
+be <a name="page78"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 78</span>done
+away with, and human nature will change.&nbsp; The only thing
+that one really knows about human nature is that it
+changes.&nbsp; Change is the one quality we can predicate of
+it.&nbsp; The systems that fail are those that rely on the
+permanency of human nature, and not on its growth and
+development.&nbsp; The error of Louis XIV. was that he thought
+human nature would always be the same.&nbsp; The result of his
+error was the French Revolution.&nbsp; It was an admirable
+result.&nbsp; All the results of the mistakes of governments are
+quite admirable.</p>
+<p>It is to be noted also that Individualism does not come to man
+with any sickly cant about duty, which merely means doing what
+other people want because they want it; or any hideous cant about
+self-sacrifice, which is merely a survival of savage
+mutilation.&nbsp; In fact, it does not come to man with any
+claims upon him at all.&nbsp; It comes naturally <a
+name="page79"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 79</span>and
+inevitably out of man.&nbsp; It is the point to which all
+development tends.&nbsp; It is the differentiation to which all
+organisms grow.&nbsp; It is the perfection that is inherent in
+every mode of life, and towards which every mode of life
+quickens.&nbsp; And so Individualism exercises no compulsion over
+man.&nbsp; On the contrary, it says to man that he should suffer
+no compulsion to be exercised over him.&nbsp; It does not try to
+force people to be good.&nbsp; It knows that people are good when
+they are let alone.&nbsp; Man will develop Individualism out of
+himself.&nbsp; Man is now so developing Individualism.&nbsp; To
+ask whether Individualism is practical is like asking whether
+Evolution is practical.&nbsp; Evolution is the law of life, and
+there is no evolution except towards Individualism.&nbsp; Where
+this tendency is not expressed, it is a case of
+artificially-arrested growth, or of disease, or of death.</p>
+<p>Individualism will also be unselfish <a
+name="page80"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 80</span>and
+unaffected.&nbsp; It has been pointed out that one of the results
+of the extraordinary tyranny of authority is that words are
+absolutely distorted from their proper and simple meaning, and
+are used to express the obverse of their right
+signification.&nbsp; What is true about Art is true about
+Life.&nbsp; A man is called affected, nowadays, if he dresses as
+he likes to dress.&nbsp; But in doing that he is acting in a
+perfectly natural manner.&nbsp; Affectation, in such matters,
+consists in dressing according to the views of one&rsquo;s
+neighbour, whose views, as they are the views of the majority,
+will probably be extremely stupid.&nbsp; Or a man is called
+selfish if he lives in the manner that seems to him most suitable
+for the full realisation of his own personality; if, in fact, the
+primary aim of his life is self-development.&nbsp; But this is
+the way in which everyone should live.&nbsp; Selfishness is not
+living as one wishes to live, it is <a name="page81"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 81</span>asking others to live as one wishes
+to live.&nbsp; And unselfishness is letting other people&rsquo;s
+lives alone, not interfering with them.&nbsp; Selfishness always
+aims at creating around it an absolute uniformity of type.&nbsp;
+Unselfishness recognises infinite variety of type as a delightful
+thing, accepts it, acquiesces in it, enjoys it.&nbsp; It is not
+selfish to think for oneself.&nbsp; A man who does not think for
+himself does not think at all.&nbsp; It is grossly selfish to
+require of ones neighbour that he should think in the same way,
+and hold the same opinions.&nbsp; Why should he?&nbsp; If he can
+think, he will probably think differently.&nbsp; If he cannot
+think, it is monstrous to require thought of any kind from
+him.&nbsp; A red rose is not selfish because it wants to be a red
+rose.&nbsp; It would be horribly selfish if it wanted all the
+other flowers in the garden to be both red and roses.&nbsp; Under
+Individualism people will be quite natural and absolutely
+unselfish, <a name="page82"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+82</span>and will know the meanings of the words, and realise
+them in their free, beautiful lives.&nbsp; Nor will men be
+egotistic as they are now.&nbsp; For the egotist is he who makes
+claims upon others, and the Individualist will not desire to do
+that.&nbsp; It will not give him pleasure.&nbsp; When man has
+realised Individualism, he will also realise sympathy and
+exercise it freely and spontaneously.&nbsp; Up to the present man
+has hardly cultivated sympathy at all.&nbsp; He has merely
+sympathy with pain, and sympathy with pain is not the highest
+form of sympathy.&nbsp; All sympathy is fine, but sympathy with
+suffering is the least fine mode.&nbsp; It is tainted with
+egotism.&nbsp; It is apt to become morbid.&nbsp; There is in it a
+certain element of terror for our own safety.&nbsp; We become
+afraid that we ourselves might be as the leper or as the blind,
+and that no man would have care of us.&nbsp; It is curiously
+limiting, too.&nbsp; One should sympathise with <a
+name="page83"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 83</span>the entirety
+of life, not with life&rsquo;s sores and maladies merely, but
+with life&rsquo;s joy and beauty and energy and health and
+freedom.&nbsp; The wider sympathy is, of course, the more
+difficult.&nbsp; It requires more unselfishness.&nbsp; Anybody
+can sympathise with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a
+very fine nature&mdash;it requires, in fact, the nature of a true
+Individualist&mdash;to sympathise with a friend&rsquo;s
+success.</p>
+<p>In the modern stress of competition and struggle for place,
+such sympathy is naturally rare, and is also very much stifled by
+the immoral ideal of uniformity of type and conformity to rule
+which is so prevalent everywhere, and is perhaps most obnoxious
+in England.</p>
+<p>Sympathy with pain there will, of course, always be.&nbsp; It
+is one of the first instincts of man.&nbsp; The animals which are
+individual, the higher animals, that is to say, share it with
+us.&nbsp; But it must be remembered that <a
+name="page84"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 84</span>while
+sympathy with joy intensifies the sum of joy in the world,
+sympathy with pain does not really diminish the amount of
+pain.&nbsp; It may make man better able to endure evil, but the
+evil remains.&nbsp; Sympathy with consumption does not cure
+consumption; that is what Science does.&nbsp; And when Socialism
+has solved the problem of poverty, and Science solved the problem
+of disease, the area of the sentimentalists will be lessened, and
+the sympathy of man will be large, healthy, and
+spontaneous.&nbsp; Man will have joy in the contemplation of the
+joyous life of others.</p>
+<p>For it is through joy that the Individualism of the future
+will develop itself.&nbsp; Christ made no attempt to reconstruct
+society, and consequently the Individualism that he preached to
+man could be realised only through pain or in solitude.&nbsp; The
+ideals that we owe to Christ are the ideals of the man who
+abandons society entirely, or of the man <a
+name="page85"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 85</span>who resists
+society absolutely.&nbsp; But man is naturally social.&nbsp; Even
+the Thebaid became peopled at last.&nbsp; And though the cenobite
+realises his personality, it is often an impoverished personality
+that he so realises.&nbsp; Upon the other hand, the terrible
+truth that pain is a mode through which man may realise himself
+exercises a wonderful fascination over the world.&nbsp; Shallow
+speakers and shallow thinkers in pulpits and on platforms often
+talk about the world&rsquo;s worship of pleasure, and whine
+against it.&nbsp; But it is rarely in the world&rsquo;s history
+that its ideal has been one of joy and beauty.&nbsp; The worship
+of pain has far more often dominated the world.&nbsp;
+Medi&aelig;valism, with its saints and martyrs, its love of
+self-torture, its wild passion for wounding itself, its gashing
+with knives, and its whipping with rods&mdash;Medi&aelig;valism
+is real Christianity, and the medi&aelig;val Christ is the real
+Christ.&nbsp; When the Renaissance dawned upon the world, and
+brought <a name="page86"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+86</span>with it the new ideals of the beauty of life and the joy
+of living, men could not understand Christ.&nbsp; Even Art shows
+us that.&nbsp; The painters of the Renaissance drew Christ as a
+little boy playing with another boy in a palace or a garden, or
+lying back in his mother&rsquo;s arms, smiling at her, or at a
+flower, or at a bright bird; or as a noble, stately figure moving
+nobly through the world; or as a wonderful figure rising in a
+sort of ecstasy from death to life.&nbsp; Even when they drew him
+crucified they drew him as a beautiful God on whom evil men had
+inflicted suffering.&nbsp; But he did not preoccupy them
+much.&nbsp; What delighted them was to paint the men and women
+whom they admired, and to show the loveliness of this lovely
+earth.&nbsp; They painted many religious pictures&mdash;in fact,
+they painted far too many, and the monotony of type and motive is
+wearisome, and was bad for art.&nbsp; It was the result of the
+authority of the public in art-matters, and is to be
+deplored.&nbsp; But <a name="page87"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+87</span>their soul was not in the subject.&nbsp; Raphael was a
+great artist when he painted his portrait of the Pope.&nbsp; When
+he painted his Madonnas and infant Christs, he is not a great
+artist at all.&nbsp; Christ had no message for the Renaissance,
+which was wonderful because it brought an ideal at variance with
+his, and to find the presentation of the real Christ we must go
+to medi&aelig;val art.&nbsp; There he is one maimed and marred;
+one who is not comely to look on, because Beauty is a joy; one
+who is not in fair raiment, because that may be a joy also: he is
+a beggar who has a marvellous soul; he is a leper whose soul is
+divine; he needs neither property nor health; he is a God
+realising his perfection through pain.</p>
+<p>The evolution of man is slow.&nbsp; The injustice of men is
+great.&nbsp; It was necessary that pain should be put forward as
+a mode of self-realisation.&nbsp; Even now, in some places in the
+world, the message of Christ is necessary.&nbsp; No one who lived
+<a name="page88"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 88</span>in modern
+Russia could possibly realise his perfection except by
+pain.&nbsp; A few Russian artists have realised themselves in
+Art; in a fiction that is medi&aelig;val in character, because
+its dominant note is the realisation of men through
+suffering.&nbsp; But for those who are not artists, and to whom
+there is no mode of life but the actual life of fact, pain is the
+only door to perfection.&nbsp; A Russian who lives happily under
+the present system of government in Russia must either believe
+that man has no soul, or that, if he has, it is not worth
+developing.&nbsp; A Nihilist who rejects all authority, because
+he knows authority to be evil, and welcomes all pain, because
+through that he realises his personality, is a real
+Christian.&nbsp; To him the Christian ideal is a true thing.</p>
+<p>And yet, Christ did not revolt against authority.&nbsp; He
+accepted the imperial authority of the Roman Empire and paid
+tribute.&nbsp; He endured the ecclesiastical authority of the
+Jewish <a name="page89"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+89</span>Church, and would not repel its violence by any violence
+of his own.&nbsp; He had, as I said before, no scheme for the
+reconstruction of society.&nbsp; But the modern world has
+schemes.&nbsp; It proposes to do away with poverty and the
+suffering that it entails.&nbsp; It desires to get rid of pain,
+and the suffering that pain entails.&nbsp; It trusts to Socialism
+and to Science as its methods.&nbsp; What it aims at is an
+Individualism expressing itself through joy.&nbsp; This
+Individualism will be larger, fuller, lovelier than any
+Individualism has ever been.&nbsp; Pain is not the ultimate mode
+of perfection.&nbsp; It is merely provisional and a
+protest.&nbsp; It has reference to wrong, unhealthy, unjust
+surroundings.&nbsp; When the wrong, and the disease, and the
+injustice are removed, it will have no further place.&nbsp; It
+will have done its work.&nbsp; It was a great work, but it is
+almost over.&nbsp; Its sphere lessens every day.</p>
+<p>Nor will man miss it.&nbsp; For what man <a
+name="page90"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 90</span>has sought
+for is, indeed, neither pain nor pleasure, but simply Life.&nbsp;
+Man has sought to live intensely, fully, perfectly.&nbsp; When he
+can do so without exercising restraint on others, or suffering it
+ever, and his activities are all pleasurable to him, he will be
+saner, healthier, more civilised, more himself.&nbsp; Pleasure is
+Nature&rsquo;s test, her sign of approval.&nbsp; When man is
+happy, he is in harmony with himself and his environment.&nbsp;
+The new Individualism, for whose service Socialism, whether it
+wills it or not, is working, will be perfect harmony.&nbsp; It
+will be what the Greeks sought for, but could not, except in
+Thought, realise completely, because they had slaves, and fed
+them; it will be what the Renaissance sought for, but could not
+realise completely except in Art, because they had slaves, and
+starved them.&nbsp; It will be complete, and through it each man
+will attain to his perfection.&nbsp; The new Individualism is the
+new Hellenism.</p>
+
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p style="text-align: center"><a name="page91"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 91</span><i>Reprinted from the</i>
+&lsquo;<i>Fortnightly Review</i>,&rsquo;<br />
+<i>by permission of Messrs Chapman and Hall</i>.</p>
+<p>***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SOUL OF MAN***</p>
+<pre>
+
+
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Soul of Man, by Oscar Wilde
+(#14 in our series by Oscar Wilde)
+
+Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the
+copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing
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+Title: The Soul of Man
+
+Author: Oscar Wilde
+
+Release Date: August, 1997  [EBook #1017]
+[This file was first posted on August 10, 1997]
+[Most recently updated: May 21, 2003]
+
+Edition: 10
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+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: US-ASCII
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, THE SOUL OF MAN ***
+
+
+
+
+Transcribed by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
+
+
+
+
+THE SOUL OF MAN
+
+
+
+
+The chief advantage that would result from the establishment of
+Socialism is, undoubtedly, the fact that Socialism would relieve us
+from that sordid necessity of living for others which, in the
+present condition of things, presses so hardly upon almost
+everybody.  In fact, scarcely anyone at all escapes.
+
+Now and then, in the course of the century, a great man of science,
+like Darwin; a great poet, like Keats; a fine critical spirit, like
+M. Renan; a supreme artist, like Flaubert, has been able to isolate
+himself, to keep himself out of reach of the clamorous claims of
+others, to stand 'under the shelter of the wall,' as Plato puts it,
+and so to realise the perfection of what was in him, to his own
+incomparable gain, and to the incomparable and lasting gain of the
+whole world.  These, however, are exceptions.  The majority of
+people spoil their lives by an unhealthy and exaggerated altruism--
+are forced, indeed, so to spoil them.  They find themselves
+surrounded by hideous poverty, by hideous ugliness, by hideous
+starvation.  It is inevitable that they should be strongly moved by
+all this.  The emotions of man are stirred more quickly than man's
+intelligence; and, as I pointed out some time ago in an article on
+the function of criticism, it is much more easy to have sympathy
+with suffering than it is to have sympathy with thought.
+Accordingly, with admirable, though misdirected intentions, they
+very seriously and very sentimentally set themselves to the task of
+remedying the evils that they see.  But their remedies do not cure
+the disease:  they merely prolong it.  Indeed, their remedies are
+part of the disease.
+
+They try to solve the problem of poverty, for instance, by keeping
+the poor alive; or, in the case of a very advanced school, by
+amusing the poor.
+
+But this is not a solution:  it is an aggravation of the
+difficulty.  The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on
+such a basis that poverty will be impossible.  And the altruistic
+virtues have really prevented the carrying out of this aim.  Just
+as the worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their slaves,
+and so prevented the horror of the system being realised by those
+who suffered from it, and understood by those who contemplated it,
+so, in the present state of things in England, the people who do
+most harm are the people who try to do most good; and at last we
+have had the spectacle of men who have really studied the problem
+and know the life--educated men who live in the East End--coming
+forward and imploring the community to restrain its altruistic
+impulses of charity, benevolence, and the like.  They do so on the
+ground that such charity degrades and demoralises.  They are
+perfectly right.  Charity creates a multitude of sins.
+
+There is also this to be said.  It is immoral to use private
+property in order to alleviate the horrible evils that result from
+the institution of private property.  It is both immoral and
+unfair.
+
+Under Socialism all this will, of course, be altered.  There will
+be no people living in fetid dens and fetid rags, and bringing up
+unhealthy, hunger-pinched children in the midst of impossible and
+absolutely repulsive surroundings.  The security of society will
+not depend, as it does now, on the state of the weather.  If a
+frost comes we shall not have a hundred thousand men out of work,
+tramping about the streets in a state of disgusting misery, or
+whining to their neighbours for alms, or crowding round the doors
+of loathsome shelters to try and secure a hunch of bread and a
+night's unclean lodging.  Each member of the society will share in
+the general prosperity and happiness of the society, and if a frost
+comes no one will practically be anything the worse.
+
+Upon the other hand, Socialism itself will be of value simply
+because it will lead to Individualism.
+
+Socialism, Communism, or whatever one chooses to call it, by
+converting private property into public wealth, and substituting
+co-operation for competition, will restore society to its proper
+condition of a thoroughly healthy organism, and insure the material
+well-being of each member of the community.  It will, in fact, give
+Life its proper basis and its proper environment.  But for the full
+development of Life to its highest mode of perfection, something
+more is needed.  What is needed is Individualism.  If the Socialism
+is Authoritarian; if there are Governments armed with economic
+power as they are now with political power; if, in a word, we are
+to have Industrial Tyrannies, then the last state of man will be
+worse than the first.  At present, in consequence of the existence
+of private property, a great many people are enabled to develop a
+certain very limited amount of Individualism.  They are either
+under no necessity to work for their living, or are enabled to
+choose the sphere of activity that is really congenial to them, and
+gives them pleasure.  These are the poets, the philosophers, the
+men of science, the men of culture--in a word, the real men, the
+men who have realised themselves, and in whom all Humanity gains a
+partial realisation.  Upon the other hand, there are a great many
+people who, having no private property of their own, and being
+always on the brink of sheer starvation, are compelled to do the
+work of beasts of burden, to do work that is quite uncongenial to
+them, and to which they are forced by the peremptory, unreasonable,
+degrading Tyranny of want.  These are the poor, and amongst them
+there is no grace of manner, or charm of speech, or civilisation,
+or culture, or refinement in pleasures, or joy of life.  From their
+collective force Humanity gains much in material prosperity.  But
+it is only the material result that it gains, and the man who is
+poor is in himself absolutely of no importance.  He is merely the
+infinitesimal atom of a force that, so far from regarding him,
+crushes him:  indeed, prefers him crushed, as in that case he is
+far more obedient.
+
+Of course, it might be said that the Individualism generated under
+conditions of private property is not always, or even as a rule, of
+a fine or wonderful type, and that the poor, if they have not
+culture and charm, have still many virtues.  Both these statements
+would be quite true.  The possession of private property is very
+often extremely demoralising, and that is, of course, one of the
+reasons why Socialism wants to get rid of the institution.  In
+fact, property is really a nuisance.  Some years ago people went
+about the country saying that property has duties.  They said it so
+often and so tediously that, at last, the Church has begun to say
+it.  One hears it now from every pulpit.  It is perfectly true.
+Property not merely has duties, but has so many duties that its
+possession to any large extent is a bore.  It involves endless
+claims upon one, endless attention to business, endless bother.  If
+property had simply pleasures, we could stand it; but its duties
+make it unbearable.  In the interest of the rich we must get rid of
+it.  The virtues of the poor may be readily admitted, and are much
+to be regretted.  We are often told that the poor are grateful for
+charity.  Some of them are, no doubt, but the best amongst the poor
+are never grateful.  They are ungrateful, discontented,
+disobedient, and rebellious.  They are quite right to be so.
+Charity they feel to be a ridiculously inadequate mode of partial
+restitution, or a sentimental dole, usually accompanied by some
+impertinent attempt on the part of the sentimentalist to tyrannise
+over their private lives.  Why should they be grateful for the
+crumbs that fall from the rich man's table?  They should be seated
+at the board, and are beginning to know it.  As for being
+discontented, a man who would not be discontented with such
+surroundings and such a low mode of life would be a perfect brute.
+Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man's
+original virtue.  It is through disobedience that progress has been
+made, through disobedience and through rebellion.  Sometimes the
+poor are praised for being thrifty.  But to recommend thrift to the
+poor is both grotesque and insulting.  It is like advising a man
+who is starving to eat less.  For a town or country labourer to
+practise thrift would be absolutely immoral.  Man should not be
+ready to show that he can live like a badly-fed animal.  He should
+decline to live like that, and should either steal or go on the
+rates, which is considered by many to be a form of stealing.  As
+for begging, it is safer to beg than to take, but it is finer to
+take than to beg.  No:  a poor man who is ungrateful, unthrifty,
+discontented, and rebellious, is probably a real personality, and
+has much in him.  He is at any rate a healthy protest.  As for the
+virtuous poor, one can pity them, of course, but one cannot
+possibly admire them.  They have made private terms with the enemy,
+and sold their birthright for very bad pottage.  They must also be
+extraordinarily stupid.  I can quite understand a man accepting
+laws that protect private property, and admit of its accumulation,
+as long as he himself is able under those conditions to realise
+some form of beautiful and intellectual life.  But it is almost
+incredible to me how a man whose life is marred and made hideous by
+such laws can possibly acquiesce in their continuance.
+
+However, the explanation is not really difficult to find.  It is
+simply this.  Misery and poverty are so absolutely degrading, and
+exercise such a paralysing effect over the nature of men, that no
+class is ever really conscious of its own suffering.  They have to
+be told of it by other people, and they often entirely disbelieve
+them.  What is said by great employers of labour against agitators
+is unquestionably true.  Agitators are a set of interfering,
+meddling people, who come down to some perfectly contented class of
+the community, and sow the seeds of discontent amongst them.  That
+is the reason why agitators are so absolutely necessary.  Without
+them, in our incomplete state, there would be no advance towards
+civilisation.  Slavery was put down in America, not in consequence
+of any action on the part of the slaves, or even any express desire
+on their part that they should be free.  It was put down entirely
+through the grossly illegal conduct of certain agitators in Boston
+and elsewhere, who were not slaves themselves, nor owners of
+slaves, nor had anything to do with the question really.  It was,
+undoubtedly, the Abolitionists who set the torch alight, who began
+the whole thing.  And it is curious to note that from the slaves
+themselves they received, not merely very little assistance, but
+hardly any sympathy even; and when at the close of the war the
+slaves found themselves free, found themselves indeed so absolutely
+free that they were free to starve, many of them bitterly regretted
+the new state of things.  To the thinker, the most tragic fact in
+the whole of the French Revolution is not that Marie Antoinette was
+killed for being a queen, but that the starved peasant of the
+Vendee voluntarily went out to die for the hideous cause of
+feudalism.
+
+It is clear, then, that no Authoritarian Socialism will do.  For
+while under the present system a very large number of people can
+lead lives of a certain amount of freedom and expression and
+happiness, under an industrial-barrack system, or a system of
+economic tyranny, nobody would be able to have any such freedom at
+all.  It is to be regretted that a portion of our community should
+be practically in slavery, but to propose to solve the problem by
+enslaving the entire community is childish.  Every man must be left
+quite free to choose his own work.  No form of compulsion must be
+exercised over him.  If there is, his work will not be good for
+him, will not be good in itself, and will not be good for others.
+And by work I simply mean activity of any kind.
+
+I hardly think that any Socialist, nowadays, would seriously
+propose that an inspector should call every morning at each house
+to see that each citizen rose up and did manual labour for eight
+hours.  Humanity has got beyond that stage, and reserves such a
+form of life for the people whom, in a very arbitrary manner, it
+chooses to call criminals.  But I confess that many of the
+socialistic views that I have come across seem to me to be tainted
+with ideas of authority, if not of actual compulsion.  Of course,
+authority and compulsion are out of the question.  All association
+must be quite voluntary.  It is only in voluntary associations that
+man is fine.
+
+But it may be asked how Individualism, which is now more or less
+dependent on the existence of private property for its development,
+will benefit by the abolition of such private property.  The answer
+is very simple.  It is true that, under existing conditions, a few
+men who have had private means of their own, such as Byron,
+Shelley, Browning, Victor Hugo, Baudelaire, and others, have been
+able to realise their personality more or less completely.  Not one
+of these men ever did a single day's work for hire.  They were
+relieved from poverty.  They had an immense advantage.  The
+question is whether it would be for the good of Individualism that
+such an advantage should be taken away.  Let us suppose that it is
+taken away.  What happens then to Individualism?  How will it
+benefit?
+
+It will benefit in this way.  Under the new conditions
+Individualism will be far freer, far finer, and far more
+intensified than it is now.  I am not talking of the great
+imaginatively-realised Individualism of such poets as I have
+mentioned, but of the great actual Individualism latent and
+potential in mankind generally.  For the recognition of private
+property has really harmed Individualism, and obscured it, by
+confusing a man with what he possesses.  It has led Individualism
+entirely astray.  It has made gain not growth its aim.  So that man
+thought that the important thing was to have, and did not know that
+the important thing is to be.  The true perfection of man lies, not
+in what man has, but in what man is.
+
+Private property has crushed true Individualism, and set up an
+Individualism that is false.  It has debarred one part of the
+community from being individual by starving them.  It has debarred
+the other part of the community from being individual by putting
+them on the wrong road, and encumbering them.  Indeed, so
+completely has man's personality been absorbed by his possessions
+that the English law has always treated offences against a man's
+property with far more severity than offences against his person,
+and property is still the test of complete citizenship.  The
+industry necessary for the making money is also very demoralising.
+In a community like ours, where property confers immense
+distinction, social position, honour, respect, titles, and other
+pleasant things of the kind, man, being naturally ambitious, makes
+it his aim to accumulate this property, and goes on wearily and
+tediously accumulating it long after he has got far more than he
+wants, or can use, or enjoy, or perhaps even know of.  Man will
+kill himself by overwork in order to secure property, and really,
+considering the enormous advantages that property brings, one is
+hardly surprised.  One's regret is that society should be
+constructed on such a basis that man has been forced into a groove
+in which he cannot freely develop what is wonderful, and
+fascinating, and delightful in him--in which, in fact, he misses
+the true pleasure and joy of living.  He is also, under existing
+conditions, very insecure.  An enormously wealthy merchant may be--
+often is--at every moment of his life at the mercy of things that
+are not under his control.  If the wind blows an extra point or so,
+or the weather suddenly changes, or some trivial thing happens, his
+ship may go down, his speculations may go wrong, and he finds
+himself a poor man, with his social position quite gone.  Now,
+nothing should be able to harm a man except himself.  Nothing
+should be able to rob a man at all.  What a man really has, is what
+is in him.  What is outside of him should be a matter of no
+importance.
+
+With the abolition of private property, then, we shall have true,
+beautiful, healthy Individualism.  Nobody will waste his life in
+accumulating things, and the symbols for things.  One will live.
+To live is the rarest thing in the world.  Most people exist, that
+is all.
+
+It is a question whether we have ever seen the full expression of a
+personality, except on the imaginative plane of art.  In action, we
+never have.  Caesar, says Mommsen, was the complete and perfect
+man.  But how tragically insecure was Caesar!  Wherever there is a
+man who exercises authority, there is a man who resists authority.
+Caesar was very perfect, but his perfection travelled by too
+dangerous a road.  Marcus Aurelius was the perfect man, says Renan.
+Yes; the great emperor was a perfect man.  But how intolerable were
+the endless claims upon him!  He staggered under the burden of the
+empire.  He was conscious how inadequate one man was to bear the
+weight of that Titan and too vast orb.  What I mean by a perfect
+man is one who develops under perfect conditions; one who is not
+wounded, or worried or maimed, or in danger.  Most personalities
+have been obliged to be rebels.  Half their strength has been
+wasted in friction.  Byron's personality, for instance, was
+terribly wasted in its battle with the stupidity, and hypocrisy,
+and Philistinism of the English.  Such battles do not always
+intensify strength:  they often exaggerate weakness.  Byron was
+never able to give us what he might have given us.  Shelley escaped
+better.  Like Byron, he got out of England as soon as possible.
+But he was not so well known.  If the English had had any idea of
+what a great poet he really was, they would have fallen on him with
+tooth and nail, and made his life as unbearable to him as they
+possibly could.  But he was not a remarkable figure in society, and
+consequently he escaped, to a certain degree.  Still, even in
+Shelley the note of rebellion is sometimes too strong.  The note of
+the perfect personality is not rebellion, but peace.
+
+It will be a marvellous thing--the true personality of man--when we
+see it.  It will grow naturally and simply, flowerlike, or as a
+tree grows.  It will not be at discord.  It will never argue or
+dispute.  It will not prove things.  It will know everything.  And
+yet it will not busy itself about knowledge.  It will have wisdom.
+Its value will not be measured by material things.  It will have
+nothing.  And yet it will have everything, and whatever one takes
+from it, it will still have, so rich will it be.  It will not be
+always meddling with others, or asking them to be like itself.  It
+will love them because they will be different.  And yet while it
+will not meddle with others, it will help all, as a beautiful thing
+helps us, by being what it is.  The personality of man will be very
+wonderful.  It will be as wonderful as the personality of a child.
+
+In its development it will be assisted by Christianity, if men
+desire that; but if men do not desire that, it will develop none
+the less surely.  For it will not worry itself about the past, nor
+care whether things happened or did not happen.  Nor will it admit
+any laws but its own laws; nor any authority but its own authority.
+Yet it will love those who sought to intensify it, and speak often
+of them.  And of these Christ was one.
+
+'Know thyself' was written over the portal of the antique world.
+Over the portal of the new world, 'Be thyself' shall be written.
+And the message of Christ to man was simply 'Be thyself.'  That is
+the secret of Christ.
+
+When Jesus talks about the poor he simply means personalities, just
+as when he talks about the rich he simply means people who have not
+developed their personalities.  Jesus moved in a community that
+allowed the accumulation of private property just as ours does, and
+the gospel that he preached was not that in such a community it is
+an advantage for a man to live on scanty, unwholesome food, to wear
+ragged, unwholesome clothes, to sleep in horrid, unwholesome
+dwellings, and a disadvantage for a man to live under healthy,
+pleasant, and decent conditions.  Such a view would have been wrong
+there and then, and would, of course, be still more wrong now and
+in England; for as man moves northward the material necessities of
+life become of more vital importance, and our society is infinitely
+more complex, and displays far greater extremes of luxury and
+pauperism than any society of the antique world.  What Jesus meant,
+was this.  He said to man, 'You have a wonderful personality.
+Develop it.  Be yourself.  Don't imagine that your perfection lies
+in accumulating or possessing external things.  Your affection is
+inside of you.  If only you could realise that, you would not want
+to be rich.  Ordinary riches can be stolen from a man.  Real riches
+cannot.  In the treasury-house of your soul, there are infinitely
+precious things, that may not be taken from you.  And so, try to so
+shape your life that external things will not harm you.  And try
+also to get rid of personal property.  It involves sordid
+preoccupation, endless industry, continual wrong.  Personal
+property hinders Individualism at every step.'  It is to be noted
+that Jesus never says that impoverished people are necessarily
+good, or wealthy people necessarily bad.  That would not have been
+true.  Wealthy people are, as a class, better than impoverished
+people, more moral, more intellectual, more well-behaved.  There is
+only one class in the community that thinks more about money than
+the rich, and that is the poor.  The poor can think of nothing
+else.  That is the misery of being poor.  What Jesus does say is
+that man reaches his perfection, not through what he has, not even
+through what he does, but entirely through what he is.  And so the
+wealthy young man who comes to Jesus is represented as a thoroughly
+good citizen, who has broken none of the laws of his state, none of
+the commandments of his religion.  He is quite respectable, in the
+ordinary sense of that extraordinary word.  Jesus says to him, 'You
+should give up private property.  It hinders you from realising
+your perfection.  It is a drag upon you.  It is a burden.  Your
+personality does not need it.  It is within you, and not outside of
+you, that you will find what you really are, and what you really
+want.'  To his own friends he says the same thing.  He tells them
+to be themselves, and not to be always worrying about other things.
+What do other things matter?  Man is complete in himself.  When
+they go into the world, the world will disagree with them.  That is
+inevitable.  The world hates Individualism.  But that is not to
+trouble them.  They are to be calm and self-centred.  If a man
+takes their cloak, they are to give him their coat, just to show
+that material things are of no importance.  If people abuse them,
+they are not to answer back.  What does it signify?  The things
+people say of a man do not alter a man.  He is what he is.  Public
+opinion is of no value whatsoever.  Even if people employ actual
+violence, they are not to be violent in turn.  That would be to
+fall to the same low level.  After all, even in prison, a man can
+be quite free.  His soul can be free.  His personality can be
+untroubled.  He can be at peace.  And, above all things, they are
+not to interfere with other people or judge them in any way.
+Personality is a very mysterious thing.  A man cannot always be
+estimated by what he does.  He may keep the law, and yet be
+worthless.  He may break the law, and yet be fine.  He may be bad,
+without ever doing anything bad.  He may commit a sin against
+society, and yet realise through that sin his true perfection.
+
+There was a woman who was taken in adultery.  We are not told the
+history of her love, but that love must have been very great; for
+Jesus said that her sins were forgiven her, not because she
+repented, but because her love was so intense and wonderful.  Later
+on, a short time before his death, as he sat at a feast, the woman
+came in and poured costly perfumes on his hair.  His friends tried
+to interfere with her, and said that it was an extravagance, and
+that the money that the perfume cost should have been expended on
+charitable relief of people in want, or something of that kind.
+Jesus did not accept that view.  He pointed out that the material
+needs of Man were great and very permanent, but that the spiritual
+needs of Man were greater still, and that in one divine moment, and
+by selecting its own mode of expression, a personality might make
+itself perfect.  The world worships the woman, even now, as a
+saint.
+
+Yes; there are suggestive things in Individualism.  Socialism
+annihilates family life, for instance.  With the abolition of
+private property, marriage in its present form must disappear.
+This is part of the programme.  Individualism accepts this and
+makes it fine.  It converts the abolition of legal restraint into a
+form of freedom that will help the full development of personality,
+and make the love of man and woman more wonderful, more beautiful,
+and more ennobling.  Jesus knew this.  He rejected the claims of
+family life, although they existed in his day and community in a
+very marked form.  'Who is my mother?  Who are my brothers?' he
+said, when he was told that they wished to speak to him.  When one
+of his followers asked leave to go and bury his father, 'Let the
+dead bury the dead,' was his terrible answer.  He would allow no
+claim whatsoever to be made on personality.
+
+And so he who would lead a Christlike life is he who is perfectly
+and absolutely himself.  He may be a great poet, or a great man of
+science; or a young student at a University, or one who watches
+sheep upon a moor; or a maker of dramas, like Shakespeare, or a
+thinker about God, like Spinoza; or a child who plays in a garden,
+or a fisherman who throws his net into the sea.  It does not matter
+what he is, as long as he realises the perfection of the soul that
+is within him.  All imitation in morals and in life is wrong.
+Through the streets of Jerusalem at the present day crawls one who
+is mad and carries a wooden cross on his shoulders.  He is a symbol
+of the lives that are marred by imitation.  Father Damien was
+Christlike when he went out to live with the lepers, because in
+such service he realised fully what was best in him.  But he was
+not more Christlike than Wagner when he realised his soul in music;
+or than Shelley, when he realised his soul in song.  There is no
+one type for man.  There are as many perfections as there are
+imperfect men.  And while to the claims of charity a man may yield
+and yet be free, to the claims of conformity no man may yield and
+remain free at all.
+
+Individualism, then, is what through Socialism we are to attain to.
+As a natural result the State must give up all idea of government.
+It must give it up because, as a wise man once said many centuries
+before Christ, there is such a thing as leaving mankind alone;
+there is no such thing as governing mankind.  All modes of
+government are failures.  Despotism is unjust to everybody,
+including the despot, who was probably made for better things.
+Oligarchies are unjust to the many, and ochlocracies are unjust to
+the few.  High hopes were once formed of democracy; but democracy
+means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the
+people.  It has been found out.  I must say that it was high time,
+for all authority is quite degrading.  It degrades those who
+exercise it, and degrades those over whom it is exercised.  When it
+is violently, grossly, and cruelly used, it produces a good effect,
+by creating, or at any rate bringing out, the spirit of revolt and
+Individualism that is to kill it.  When it is used with a certain
+amount of kindness, and accompanied by prizes and rewards, it is
+dreadfully demoralising.  People, in that case, are less conscious
+of the horrible pressure that is being put on them, and so go
+through their lives in a sort of coarse comfort, like petted
+animals, without ever realising that they are probably thinking
+other people's thoughts, living by other people's standards,
+wearing practically what one may call other people's second-hand
+clothes, and never being themselves for a single moment.  'He who
+would be free,' says a fine thinker, 'must not conform.'  And
+authority, by bribing people to conform, produces a very gross kind
+of over-fed barbarism amongst us.
+
+With authority, punishment will pass away.  This will be a great
+gain--a gain, in fact, of incalculable value.  As one reads
+history, not in the expurgated editions written for school-boys and
+passmen, but in the original authorities of each time, one is
+absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have
+committed, but by the punishments that the good have inflicted; and
+a community is infinitely more brutalised by the habitual
+employment of punishment, than it is by the occurrence of crime.
+It obviously follows that the more punishment is inflicted the more
+crime is produced, and most modern legislation has clearly
+recognised this, and has made it its task to diminish punishment as
+far as it thinks it can.  Wherever it has really diminished it, the
+results have always been extremely good.  The less punishment, the
+less crime.  When there is no punishment at all, crime will either
+cease to exist, or, if it occurs, will be treated by physicians as
+a very distressing form of dementia, to be cured by care and
+kindness.  For what are called criminals nowadays are not criminals
+at all.  Starvation, and not sin, is the parent of modern crime.
+That indeed is the reason why our criminals are, as a class, so
+absolutely uninteresting from any psychological point of view.
+They are not marvellous Macbeths and terrible Vautrins.  They are
+merely what ordinary, respectable, commonplace people would be if
+they had not got enough to eat.  When private property is abolished
+there will be no necessity for crime, no demand for it; it will
+cease to exist.  Of course, all crimes are not crimes against
+property, though such are the crimes that the English law, valuing
+what a man has more than what a man is, punishes with the harshest
+and most horrible severity, if we except the crime of murder, and
+regard death as worse than penal servitude, a point on which our
+criminals, I believe, disagree.  But though a crime may not be
+against property, it may spring from the misery and rage and
+depression produced by our wrong system of property-holding, and
+so, when that system is abolished, will disappear.  When each
+member of the community has sufficient for his wants, and is not
+interfered with by his neighbour, it will not be an object of any
+interest to him to interfere with anyone else.  Jealousy, which is
+an extraordinary source of crime in modern life, is an emotion
+closely bound up with our conceptions of property, and under
+Socialism and Individualism will die out.  It is remarkable that in
+communistic tribes jealousy is entirely unknown.
+
+Now as the State is not to govern, it may be asked what the State
+is to do.  The State is to be a voluntary association that will
+organise labour, and be the manufacturer and distributor of
+necessary commodities.  The State is to make what is useful.  The
+individual is to make what is beautiful.  And as I have mentioned
+the word labour, I cannot help saying that a great deal of nonsense
+is being written and talked nowadays about the dignity of manual
+labour.  There is nothing necessarily dignified about manual labour
+at all, and most of it is absolutely degrading.  It is mentally and
+morally injurious to man to do anything in which he does not find
+pleasure, and many forms of labour are quite pleasureless
+activities, and should be regarded as such.  To sweep a slushy
+crossing for eight hours, on a day when the east wind is blowing is
+a disgusting occupation.  To sweep it with mental, moral, or
+physical dignity seems to me to be impossible.  To sweep it with
+joy would be appalling.  Man is made for something better than
+disturbing dirt.  All work of that kind should be done by a
+machine.
+
+And I have no doubt that it will be so.  Up to the present, man has
+been, to a certain extent, the slave of machinery, and there is
+something tragic in the fact that as soon as man had invented a
+machine to do his work he began to starve.  This, however, is, of
+course, the result of our property system and our system of
+competition.  One man owns a machine which does the work of five
+hundred men.  Five hundred men are, in consequence, thrown out of
+employment, and, having no work to do, become hungry and take to
+thieving.  The one man secures the produce of the machine and keeps
+it, and has five hundred times as much as he should have, and
+probably, which is of much more importance, a great deal more than
+he really wants.  Were that machine the property of all, every one
+would benefit by it.  It would be an immense advantage to the
+community.  All unintellectual labour, all monotonous, dull labour,
+all labour that deals with dreadful things, and involves unpleasant
+conditions, must be done by machinery.  Machinery must work for us
+in coal mines, and do all sanitary services, and be the stoker of
+steamers, and clean the streets, and run messages on wet days, and
+do anything that is tedious or distressing.  At present machinery
+competes against man.  Under proper conditions machinery will serve
+man.  There is no doubt at all that this is the future of
+machinery, and just as trees grow while the country gentleman is
+asleep, so while Humanity will be amusing itself, or enjoying
+cultivated leisure--which, and not labour, is the aim of man--or
+making beautiful things, or reading beautiful things, or simply
+contemplating the world with admiration and delight, machinery will
+be doing all the necessary and unpleasant work.  The fact is, that
+civilisation requires slaves.  The Greeks were quite right there.
+Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting
+work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible.  Human
+slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralising.  On mechanical
+slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world
+depends.  And when scientific men are no longer called upon to go
+down to a depressing East End and distribute bad cocoa and worse
+blankets to starving people, they will have delightful leisure in
+which to devise wonderful and marvellous things for their own joy
+and the joy of everyone else.  There will be great storages of
+force for every city, and for every house if required, and this
+force man will convert into heat, light, or motion, according to
+his needs.  Is this Utopian?  A map of the world that does not
+include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the
+one country at which Humanity is always landing.  And when Humanity
+lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail.
+Progress is the realisation of Utopias.
+
+Now, I have said that the community by means of organisation of
+machinery will supply the useful things, and that the beautiful
+things will be made by the individual.  This is not merely
+necessary, but it is the only possible way by which we can get
+either the one or the other.  An individual who has to make things
+for the use of others, and with reference to their wants and their
+wishes, does not work with interest, and consequently cannot put
+into his work what is best in him.  Upon the other hand, whenever a
+community or a powerful section of a community, or a government of
+any kind, attempts to dictate to the artist what he is to do, Art
+either entirely vanishes, or becomes stereotyped, or degenerates
+into a low and ignoble form of craft.  A work of art is the unique
+result of a unique temperament.  Its beauty comes from the fact
+that the author is what he is.  It has nothing to do with the fact
+that other people want what they want.  Indeed, the moment that an
+artist takes notice of what other people want, and tries to supply
+the demand, he ceases to be an artist, and becomes a dull or an
+amusing craftsman, an honest or a dishonest tradesman.  He has no
+further claim to be considered as an artist.  Art is the most
+intense mode of Individualism that the world has known.  I am
+inclined to say that it is the only real mode of Individualism that
+the world has known.  Crime, which, under certain conditions, may
+seem to have created Individualism, must take cognisance of other
+people and interfere with them.  It belongs to the sphere of
+action.  But alone, without any reference to his neighbours,
+without any interference, the artist can fashion a beautiful thing;
+and if he does not do it solely for his own pleasure, he is not an
+artist at all.
+
+And it is to be noted that it is the fact that Art is this intense
+form of Individualism that makes the public try to exercise over it
+in an authority that is as immoral as it is ridiculous, and as
+corrupting as it is contemptible.  It is not quite their fault.
+The public has always, and in every age, been badly brought up.
+They are continually asking Art to be popular, to please their want
+of taste, to flatter their absurd vanity, to tell them what they
+have been told before, to show them what they ought to be tired of
+seeing, to amuse them when they feel heavy after eating too much,
+and to distract their thoughts when they are wearied of their own
+stupidity.  Now Art should never try to be popular.  The public
+should try to make itself artistic.  There is a very wide
+difference.  If a man of science were told that the results of his
+experiments, and the conclusions that he arrived at, should be of
+such a character that they would not upset the received popular
+notions on the subject, or disturb popular prejudice, or hurt the
+sensibilities of people who knew nothing about science; if a
+philosopher were told that he had a perfect right to speculate in
+the highest spheres of thought, provided that he arrived at the
+same conclusions as were held by those who had never thought in any
+sphere at all--well, nowadays the man of science and the
+philosopher would be considerably amused.  Yet it is really a very
+few years since both philosophy and science were subjected to
+brutal popular control, to authority--in fact the authority of
+either the general ignorance of the community, or the terror and
+greed for power of an ecclesiastical or governmental class.  Of
+course, we have to a very great extent got rid of any attempt on
+the part of the community, or the Church, or the Government, to
+interfere with the individualism of speculative thought, but the
+attempt to interfere with the individualism of imaginative art
+still lingers.  In fact, it does more than linger; it is
+aggressive, offensive, and brutalising.
+
+In England, the arts that have escaped best are the arts in which
+the public take no interest.  Poetry is an instance of what I mean.
+We have been able to have fine poetry in England because the public
+do not read it, and consequently do not influence it.  The public
+like to insult poets because they are individual, but once they
+have insulted them, they leave them alone.  In the case of the
+novel and the drama, arts in which the public do take an interest,
+the result of the exercise of popular authority has been absolutely
+ridiculous.  No country produces such badly-written fiction, such
+tedious, common work in the novel form, such silly, vulgar plays as
+England.  It must necessarily be so.  The popular standard is of
+such a character that no artist can get to it.  It is at once too
+easy and too difficult to be a popular novelist.  It is too easy,
+because the requirements of the public as far as plot, style,
+psychology, treatment of life, and treatment of literature are
+concerned are within the reach of the very meanest capacity and the
+most uncultivated mind.  It is too difficult, because to meet such
+requirements the artist would have to do violence to his
+temperament, would have to write not for the artistic joy of
+writing, but for the amusement of half-educated people, and so
+would have to suppress his individualism, forget his culture,
+annihilate his style, and surrender everything that is valuable in
+him.  In the case of the drama, things are a little better:  the
+theatre-going public like the obvious, it is true, but they do not
+like the tedious; and burlesque and farcical comedy, the two most
+popular forms, are distinct forms of art.  Delightful work may be
+produced under burlesque and farcical conditions, and in work of
+this kind the artist in England is allowed very great freedom.  It
+is when one comes to the higher forms of the drama that the result
+of popular control is seen.  The one thing that the public dislike
+is novelty.  Any attempt to extend the subject-matter of art is
+extremely distasteful to the public; and yet the vitality and
+progress of art depend in a large measure on the continual
+extension of subject-matter.  The public dislike novelty because
+they are afraid of it.  It represents to them a mode of
+Individualism, an assertion on the part of the artist that he
+selects his own subject, and treats it as he chooses.  The public
+are quite right in their attitude.  Art is Individualism, and
+Individualism is a disturbing and disintegrating force.  Therein
+lies its immense value.  For what it seeks to disturb is monotony
+of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of habit, and the reduction of
+man to the level of a machine.  In Art, the public accept what has
+been, because they cannot alter it, not because they appreciate it.
+They swallow their classics whole, and never taste them.  They
+endure them as the inevitable, and as they cannot mar them, they
+mouth about them.  Strangely enough, or not strangely, according to
+one's own views, this acceptance of the classics does a great deal
+of harm.  The uncritical admiration of the Bible and Shakespeare in
+England is an instance of what I mean.  With regard to the Bible,
+considerations of ecclesiastical authority enter into the matter,
+so that I need not dwell upon the point.  But in the case of
+Shakespeare it is quite obvious that the public really see neither
+the beauties nor the defects of his plays.  If they saw the
+beauties, they would not object to the development of the drama;
+and if they saw the defects, they would not object to the
+development of the drama either.  The fact is, the public make use
+of the classics of a country as a means of checking the progress of
+Art.  They degrade the classics into authorities.  They use them as
+bludgeons for preventing the free expression of Beauty in new
+forms.  They are always asking a writer why he does not write like
+somebody else, or a painter why he does not paint like somebody
+else, quite oblivious of the fact that if either of them did
+anything of the kind he would cease to be an artist.  A fresh mode
+of Beauty is absolutely distasteful to them, and whenever it
+appears they get so angry, and bewildered that they always use two
+stupid expressions--one is that the work of art is grossly
+unintelligible; the other, that the work of art is grossly immoral.
+What they mean by these words seems to me to be this.  When they
+say a work is grossly unintelligible, they mean that the artist has
+said or made a beautiful thing that is new; when they describe a
+work as grossly immoral, they mean that the artist has said or made
+a beautiful thing that is true.  The former expression has
+reference to style; the latter to subject-matter.  But they
+probably use the words very vaguely, as an ordinary mob will use
+ready-made paving-stones.  There is not a single real poet or
+prose-writer of this century, for instance, on whom the British
+public have not solemnly conferred diplomas of immorality, and
+these diplomas practically take the place, with us, of what in
+France, is the formal recognition of an Academy of Letters, and
+fortunately make the establishment of such an institution quite
+unnecessary in England.  Of course, the public are very reckless in
+their use of the word.  That they should have called Wordsworth an
+immoral poet, was only to be expected.  Wordsworth was a poet.  But
+that they should have called Charles Kingsley an immoral novelist
+is extraordinary.  Kingsley's prose was not of a very fine quality.
+Still, there is the word, and they use it as best they can.  An
+artist is, of course, not disturbed by it.  The true artist is a
+man who believes absolutely in himself, because he is absolutely
+himself.  But I can fancy that if an artist produced a work of art
+in England that immediately on its appearance was recognised by the
+public, through their medium, which is the public press, as a work
+that was quite intelligible and highly moral, he would begin to
+seriously question whether in its creation he had really been
+himself at all, and consequently whether the work was not quite
+unworthy of him, and either of a thoroughly second-rate order, or
+of no artistic value whatsoever.
+
+Perhaps, however, I have wronged the public in limiting them to
+such words as 'immoral,' 'unintelligible,' 'exotic,' and
+'unhealthy.'  There is one other word that they use.  That word is
+'morbid.'  They do not use it often.  The meaning of the word is so
+simple that they are afraid of using it.  Still, they use it
+sometimes, and, now and then, one comes across it in popular
+newspapers.  It is, of course, a ridiculous word to apply to a work
+of art.  For what is morbidity but a mood of emotion or a mode of
+thought that one cannot express?  The public are all morbid,
+because the public can never find expression for anything.  The
+artist is never morbid.  He expresses everything.  He stands
+outside his subject, and through its medium produces incomparable
+and artistic effects.  To call an artist morbid because he deals
+with morbidity as his subject-matter is as silly as if one called
+Shakespeare mad because he wrote 'King Lear.'
+
+On the whole, an artist in England gains something by being
+attacked.  His individuality is intensified.  He becomes more
+completely himself.  Of course, the attacks are very gross, very
+impertinent, and very contemptible.  But then no artist expects
+grace from the vulgar mind, or style from the suburban intellect.
+Vulgarity and stupidity are two very vivid facts in modern life.
+One regrets them, naturally.  But there they are.  They are
+subjects for study, like everything else.  And it is only fair to
+state, with regard to modern journalists, that they always
+apologise to one in private for what they have written against one
+in public.
+
+Within the last few years two other adjectives, it may be
+mentioned, have been added to the very limited vocabulary of art-
+abuse that is at the disposal of the public.  One is the word
+'unhealthy,' the other is the word 'exotic.'  The latter merely
+expresses the rage of the momentary mushroom against the immortal,
+entrancing, and exquisitely lovely orchid.  It is a tribute, but a
+tribute of no importance.  The word 'unhealthy,' however, admits of
+analysis.  It is a rather interesting word.  In fact, it is so
+interesting that the people who use it do not know what it means.
+
+What does it mean?  What is a healthy, or an unhealthy work of art?
+All terms that one applies to a work of art, provided that one
+applies them rationally, have reference to either its style or its
+subject, or to both together.  From the point of view of style, a
+healthy work of art is one whose style recognises the beauty of the
+material it employs, be that material one of words or of bronze, of
+colour or of ivory, and uses that beauty as a factor in producing
+the aesthetic effect.  From the point of view of subject, a healthy
+work of art is one the choice of whose subject is conditioned by
+the temperament of the artist, and comes directly out of it.  In
+fine, a healthy work of art is one that has both perfection and
+personality.  Of course, form and substance cannot be separated in
+a work of art; they are always one.  But for purposes of analysis,
+and setting the wholeness of aesthetic impression aside for a
+moment, we can intellectually so separate them.  An unhealthy work
+of art, on the other hand, is a work whose style is obvious, old-
+fashioned, and common, and whose subject is deliberately chosen,
+not because the artist has any pleasure in it, but because he
+thinks that the public will pay him for it.  In fact, the popular
+novel that the public calls healthy is always a thoroughly
+unhealthy production; and what the public call an unhealthy novel
+is always a beautiful and healthy work of art.
+
+I need hardly say that I am not, for a single moment, complaining
+that the public and the public press misuse these words.  I do not
+see how, with their lack of comprehension of what Art is, they
+could possibly use them in the proper sense.  I am merely pointing
+out the misuse; and as for the origin of the misuse and the meaning
+that lies behind it all, the explanation is very simple.  It comes
+from the barbarous conception of authority.  It comes from the
+natural inability of a community corrupted by authority to
+understand or appreciate Individualism.  In a word, it comes from
+that monstrous and ignorant thing that is called Public Opinion,
+which, bad and well-meaning as it is when it tries to control
+action, is infamous and of evil meaning when it tries to control
+Thought or Art.
+
+Indeed, there is much more to be said in favour of the physical
+force of the public than there is in favour of the public's
+opinion.  The former may be fine.  The latter must be foolish.  It
+is often said that force is no argument.  That, however, entirely
+depends on what one wants to prove.  Many of the most important
+problems of the last few centuries, such as the continuance of
+personal government in England, or of feudalism in France, have
+been solved entirely by means of physical force.  The very violence
+of a revolution may make the public grand and splendid for a
+moment.  It was a fatal day when the public discovered that the pen
+is mightier than the paving-stone, and can be made as offensive as
+the brickbat.  They at once sought for the journalist, found him,
+developed him, and made him their industrious and well-paid
+servant.  It is greatly to be regretted, for both their sakes.
+Behind the barricade there may be much that is noble and heroic.
+But what is there behind the leading-article but prejudice,
+stupidity, cant, and twaddle?  And when these four are joined
+together they make a terrible force, and constitute the new
+authority.
+
+In old days men had the rack.  Now they have the press.  That is an
+improvement certainly.  But still it is very bad, and wrong, and
+demoralising.  Somebody--was it Burke?--called journalism the
+fourth estate.  That was true at the time, no doubt.  But at the
+present moment it really is the only estate.  It has eaten up the
+other three.  The Lords Temporal say nothing, the Lords Spiritual
+have nothing to say, and the House of Commons has nothing to say
+and says it.  We are dominated by Journalism.  In America the
+President reigns for four years, and Journalism governs for ever
+and ever.  Fortunately in America Journalism has carried its
+authority to the grossest and most brutal extreme.  As a natural
+consequence it has begun to create a spirit of revolt.  People are
+amused by it, or disgusted by it, according to their temperaments.
+But it is no longer the real force it was.  It is not seriously
+treated.  In England, Journalism, not, except in a few well-known
+instances, having been carried to such excesses of brutality, is
+still a great factor, a really remarkable power.  The tyranny that
+it proposes to exercise over people's private lives seems to me to
+be quite extraordinary.  The fact is, that the public have an
+insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth
+knowing.  Journalism, conscious of this, and having tradesman-like
+habits, supplies their demands.  In centuries before ours the
+public nailed the ears of journalists to the pump.  That was quite
+hideous.  In this century journalists have nailed their own ears to
+the keyhole.  That is much worse.  And what aggravates the mischief
+is that the journalists who are most to blame are not the amusing
+journalists who write for what are called Society papers.  The harm
+is done by the serious, thoughtful, earnest journalists, who
+solemnly, as they are doing at present, will drag before the eyes
+of the public some incident in the private life of a great
+statesman, of a man who is a leader of political thought as he is a
+creator of political force, and invite the public to discuss the
+incident, to exercise authority in the matter, to give their views,
+and not merely to give their views, but to carry them into action,
+to dictate to the man upon all other points, to dictate to his
+party, to dictate to his country; in fact, to make themselves
+ridiculous, offensive, and harmful.  The private lives of men and
+women should not be told to the public.  The public have nothing to
+do with them at all.  In France they manage these things better.
+There they do not allow the details of the trials that take place
+in the divorce courts to be published for the amusement or
+criticism of the public.  All that the public are allowed to know
+is that the divorce has taken place and was granted on petition of
+one or other or both of the married parties concerned.  In France,
+in fact, they limit the journalist, and allow the artist almost
+perfect freedom.  Here we allow absolute freedom to the journalist,
+and entirely limit the artist.  English public opinion, that is to
+say, tries to constrain and impede and warp the man who makes
+things that are beautiful in effect, and compels the journalist to
+retail things that are ugly, or disgusting, or revolting in fact,
+so that we have the most serious journalists in the world, and the
+most indecent newspapers.  It is no exaggeration to talk of
+compulsion.  There are possibly some journalists who take a real
+pleasure in publishing horrible things, or who, being poor, look to
+scandals as forming a sort of permanent basis for an income.  But
+there are other journalists, I feel certain, men of education and
+cultivation, who really dislike publishing these things, who know
+that it is wrong to do so, and only do it because the unhealthy
+conditions under which their occupation is carried on oblige them
+to supply the public with what the public wants, and to compete
+with other journalists in making that supply as full and satisfying
+to the gross popular appetite as possible.  It is a very degrading
+position for any body of educated men to be placed in, and I have
+no doubt that most of them feel it acutely.
+
+However, let us leave what is really a very sordid side of the
+subject, and return to the question of popular control in the
+matter of Art, by which I mean Public Opinion dictating to the
+artist the form which he is to use, the mode in which he is to use
+it, and the materials with which he is to work.  I have pointed out
+that the arts which have escaped best in England are the arts in
+which the public have not been interested.  They are, however,
+interested in the drama, and as a certain advance has been made in
+the drama within the last ten or fifteen years, it is important to
+point out that this advance is entirely due to a few individual
+artists refusing to accept the popular want of taste as their
+standard, and refusing to regard Art as a mere matter of demand and
+supply.  With his marvellous and vivid personality, with a style
+that has really a true colour-element in it, with his extraordinary
+power, not over mere mimicry but over imaginative and intellectual
+creation, Mr Irving, had his sole object been to give the public
+what they wanted, could have produced the commonest plays in the
+commonest manner, and made as much success and money as a man could
+possibly desire.  But his object was not that.  His object was to
+realise his own perfection as an artist, under certain conditions,
+and in certain forms of Art.  At first he appealed to the few:  now
+he has educated the many.  He has created in the public both taste
+and temperament.  The public appreciate his artistic success
+immensely.  I often wonder, however, whether the public understand
+that that success is entirely due to the fact that he did not
+accept their standard, but realised his own.  With their standard
+the Lyceum would have been a sort of second-rate booth, as some of
+the popular theatres in London are at present.  Whether they
+understand it or not the fact however remains, that taste and
+temperament have, to a certain extent been created in the public,
+and that the public is capable of developing these qualities.  The
+problem then is, why do not the public become more civilised?  They
+have the capacity.  What stops them?
+
+The thing that stops them, it must be said again, is their desire
+to exercise authority over the artist and over works of art.  To
+certain theatres, such as the Lyceum and the Haymarket, the public
+seem to come in a proper mood.  In both of these theatres there
+have been individual artists, who have succeeded in creating in
+their audiences--and every theatre in London has its own audience--
+the temperament to which Art appeals.  And what is that
+temperament?  It is the temperament of receptivity.  That is all.
+
+If a man approaches a work of art with any desire to exercise
+authority over it and the artist, he approaches it in such a spirit
+that he cannot receive any artistic impression from it at all.  The
+work of art is to dominate the spectator:  the spectator is not to
+dominate the work of art.  The spectator is to be receptive.  He is
+to be the violin on which the master is to play.  And the more
+completely he can suppress his own silly views, his own foolish
+prejudices, his own absurd ideas of what Art should be, or should
+not be, the more likely he is to understand and appreciate the work
+of art in question.  This is, of course, quite obvious in the case
+of the vulgar theatre-going public of English men and women.  But
+it is equally true of what are called educated people.  For an
+educated person's ideas of Art are drawn naturally from what Art
+has been, whereas the new work of art is beautiful by being what
+Art has never been; and to measure it by the standard of the past
+is to measure it by a standard on the rejection of which its real
+perfection depends.  A temperament capable of receiving, through an
+imaginative medium, and under imaginative conditions, new and
+beautiful impressions, is the only temperament that can appreciate
+a work of art.  And true as this is in the case of the appreciation
+of sculpture and painting, it is still more true of the
+appreciation of such arts as the drama.  For a picture and a statue
+are not at war with Time.  They take no count of its succession.
+In one moment their unity may be apprehended.  In the case of
+literature it is different.  Time must be traversed before the
+unity of effect is realised.  And so, in the drama, there may occur
+in the first act of the play something whose real artistic value
+may not be evident to the spectator till the third or fourth act is
+reached.  Is the silly fellow to get angry and call out, and
+disturb the play, and annoy the artists?  No.  The honest man is to
+sit quietly, and know the delightful emotions of wonder, curiosity,
+and suspense.  He is not to go to the play to lose a vulgar temper.
+He is to go to the play to realise an artistic temperament.  He is
+to go to the play to gain an artistic temperament.  He is not the
+arbiter of the work of art.  He is one who is admitted to
+contemplate the work of art, and, if the work be fine, to forget in
+its contemplation and the egotism that mars him--the egotism of his
+ignorance, or the egotism of his information.  This point about the
+drama is hardly, I think, sufficiently recognised.  I can quite
+understand that were 'Macbeth' produced for the first time before a
+modern London audience, many of the people present would strongly
+and vigorously object to the introduction of the witches in the
+first act, with their grotesque phrases and their ridiculous words.
+But when the play is over one realises that the laughter of the
+witches in 'Macbeth' is as terrible as the laughter of madness in
+'Lear,' more terrible than the laughter of Iago in the tragedy of
+the Moor.  No spectator of art needs a more perfect mood of
+receptivity than the spectator of a play.  The moment he seeks to
+exercise authority he becomes the avowed enemy of Art and of
+himself.  Art does not mind.  It is he who suffers.
+
+With the novel it is the same thing.  Popular authority and the
+recognition of popular authority are fatal.  Thackeray's 'Esmond'
+is a beautiful work of art because he wrote it to please himself.
+In his other novels, in 'Pendennis,' in 'Philip,' in 'Vanity Fair'
+even, at times, he is too conscious of the public, and spoils his
+work by appealing directly to the sympathies of the public, or by
+directly mocking at them.  A true artist takes no notice whatever
+of the public.  The public are to him non-existent.  He has no
+poppied or honeyed cakes through which to give the monster sleep or
+sustenance.  He leaves that to the popular novelist.  One
+incomparable novelist we have now in England, Mr George Meredith.
+There are better artists in France, but France has no one whose
+view of life is so large, so varied, so imaginatively true.  There
+are tellers of stories in Russia who have a more vivid sense of
+what pain in fiction may be.  But to him belongs philosophy in
+fiction.  His people not merely live, but they live in thought.
+One can see them from myriad points of view.  They are suggestive.
+There is soul in them and around them.  They are interpretative and
+symbolic.  And he who made them, those wonderful quickly-moving
+figures, made them for his own pleasure, and has never asked the
+public what they wanted, has never cared to know what they wanted,
+has never allowed the public to dictate to him or influence him in
+any way but has gone on intensifying his own personality, and
+producing his own individual work.  At first none came to him.
+That did not matter.  Then the few came to him.  That did not
+change him.  The many have come now.  He is still the same.  He is
+an incomparable novelist.  With the decorative arts it is not
+different.  The public clung with really pathetic tenacity to what
+I believe were the direct traditions of the Great Exhibition of
+international vulgarity, traditions that were so appalling that the
+houses in which people lived were only fit for blind people to live
+in.  Beautiful things began to be made, beautiful colours came from
+the dyer's hand, beautiful patterns from the artist's brain, and
+the use of beautiful things and their value and importance were set
+forth.  The public were really very indignant.  They lost their
+temper.  They said silly things.  No one minded.  No one was a whit
+the worse.  No one accepted the authority of public opinion.  And
+now it is almost impossible to enter any modern house without
+seeing some recognition of good taste, some recognition of the
+value of lovely surroundings, some sign of appreciation of beauty.
+In fact, people's houses are, as a rule, quite charming nowadays.
+People have been to a very great extent civilised.  It is only fair
+to state, however, that the extraordinary success of the revolution
+in house-decoration and furniture and the like has not really been
+due to the majority of the public developing a very fine taste in
+such matters.  It has been chiefly due to the fact that the
+craftsmen of things so appreciated the pleasure of making what was
+beautiful, and woke to such a vivid consciousness of the
+hideousness and vulgarity of what the public had previously wanted,
+that they simply starved the public out.  It would be quite
+impossible at the present moment to furnish a room as rooms were
+furnished a few years ago, without going for everything to an
+auction of second-hand furniture from some third-rate lodging-
+house.  The things are no longer made.  However they may object to
+it, people must nowadays have something charming in their
+surroundings.  Fortunately for them, their assumption of authority
+in these art-matters came to entire grief.
+
+It is evident, then, that all authority in such things is bad.
+People sometimes inquire what form of government is most suitable
+for an artist to live under.  To this question there is only one
+answer.  The form of government that is most suitable to the artist
+is no government at all.  Authority over him and his art is
+ridiculous.  It has been stated that under despotisms artists have
+produced lovely work.  This is not quite so.  Artists have visited
+despots, not as subjects to be tyrannised over, but as wandering
+wonder-makers, as fascinating vagrant personalities, to be
+entertained and charmed and suffered to be at peace, and allowed to
+create.  There is this to be said in favour of the despot, that he,
+being an individual, may have culture, while the mob, being a
+monster, has none.  One who is an Emperor and King may stoop down
+to pick up a brush for a painter, but when the democracy stoops
+down it is merely to throw mud.  And yet the democracy have not so
+far to stoop as the emperor.  In fact, when they want to throw mud
+they have not to stoop at all.  But there is no necessity to
+separate the monarch from the mob; all authority is equally bad.
+
+There are three kinds of despots.  There is the despot who
+tyrannises over the body.  There is the despot who tyrannises over
+the soul.  There is the despot who tyrannises over the soul and
+body alike.  The first is called the Prince.  The second is called
+the Pope.  The third is called the People.  The Prince may be
+cultivated.  Many Princes have been.  Yet in the Prince there is
+danger.  One thinks of Dante at the bitter feast in Verona, of
+Tasso in Ferrara's madman's cell.  It is better for the artist not
+to live with Princes.  The Pope may be cultivated.  Many Popes have
+been; the bad Popes have been.  The bad Popes loved Beauty, almost
+as passionately, nay, with as much passion as the good Popes hated
+Thought.  To the wickedness of the Papacy humanity owes much.  The
+goodness of the Papacy owes a terrible debt to humanity.  Yet,
+though the Vatican has kept the rhetoric of its thunders, and lost
+the rod of its lightning, it is better for the artist not to live
+with Popes.  It was a Pope who said of Cellini to a conclave of
+Cardinals that common laws and common authority were not made for
+men such as he; but it was a Pope who thrust Cellini into prison,
+and kept him there till he sickened with rage, and created unreal
+visions for himself, and saw the gilded sun enter his room, and
+grew so enamoured of it that he sought to escape, and crept out
+from tower to tower, and falling through dizzy air at dawn, maimed
+himself, and was by a vine-dresser covered with vine leaves, and
+carried in a cart to one who, loving beautiful things, had care of
+him.  There is danger in Popes.  And as for the People, what of
+them and their authority?  Perhaps of them and their authority one
+has spoken enough.  Their authority is a thing blind, deaf,
+hideous, grotesque, tragic, amusing, serious, and obscene.  It is
+impossible for the artist to live with the People.  All despots
+bribe.  The people bribe and brutalise.  Who told them to exercise
+authority?  They were made to live, to listen, and to love.
+Someone has done them a great wrong.  They have marred themselves
+by imitation of their inferiors.  They have taken the sceptre of
+the Prince.  How should they use it?  They have taken the triple
+tiara of the Pope.  How should they carry its burden?  They are as
+a clown whose heart is broken.  They are as a priest whose soul is
+not yet born.  Let all who love Beauty pity them.  Though they
+themselves love not Beauty, yet let them pity themselves.  Who
+taught them the trick of tyranny?
+
+There are many other things that one might point out.  One might
+point out how the Renaissance was great, because it sought to solve
+no social problem, and busied itself not about such things, but
+suffered the individual to develop freely, beautifully, and
+naturally, and so had great and individual artists, and great and
+individual men.  One might point out how Louis XIV., by creating
+the modern state, destroyed the individualism of the artist, and
+made things monstrous in their monotony of repetition, and
+contemptible in their conformity to rule, and destroyed throughout
+all France all those fine freedoms of expression that had made
+tradition new in beauty, and new modes one with antique form.  But
+the past is of no importance.  The present is of no importance.  It
+is with the future that we have to deal.  For the past is what man
+should not have been.  The present is what man ought not to be.
+The future is what artists are.
+
+It will, of course, be said that such a scheme as is set forth here
+is quite unpractical, and goes against human nature.  This is
+perfectly true.  It is unpractical, and it goes against human
+nature.  This is why it is worth carrying out, and that is why one
+proposes it.  For what is a practical scheme?  A practical scheme
+is either a scheme that is already in existence, or a scheme that
+could be carried out under existing conditions.  But it is exactly
+the existing conditions that one objects to; and any scheme that
+could accept these conditions is wrong and foolish.  The conditions
+will be done away with, and human nature will change.  The only
+thing that one really knows about human nature is that it changes.
+Change is the one quality we can predicate of it.  The systems that
+fail are those that rely on the permanency of human nature, and not
+on its growth and development.  The error of Louis XIV. was that he
+thought human nature would always be the same.  The result of his
+error was the French Revolution.  It was an admirable result.  All
+the results of the mistakes of governments are quite admirable.
+
+It is to be noted also that Individualism does not come to man with
+any sickly cant about duty, which merely means doing what other
+people want because they want it; or any hideous cant about self-
+sacrifice, which is merely a survival of savage mutilation.  In
+fact, it does not come to man with any claims upon him at all.  It
+comes naturally and inevitably out of man.  It is the point to
+which all development tends.  It is the differentiation to which
+all organisms grow.  It is the perfection that is inherent in every
+mode of life, and towards which every mode of life quickens.  And
+so Individualism exercises no compulsion over man.  On the
+contrary, it says to man that he should suffer no compulsion to be
+exercised over him.  It does not try to force people to be good.
+It knows that people are good when they are let alone.  Man will
+develop Individualism out of himself.  Man is now so developing
+Individualism.  To ask whether Individualism is practical is like
+asking whether Evolution is practical.  Evolution is the law of
+life, and there is no evolution except towards Individualism.
+Where this tendency is not expressed, it is a case of artificially-
+arrested growth, or of disease, or of death.
+
+Individualism will also be unselfish and unaffected.  It has been
+pointed out that one of the results of the extraordinary tyranny of
+authority is that words are absolutely distorted from their proper
+and simple meaning, and are used to express the obverse of their
+right signification.  What is true about Art is true about Life.  A
+man is called affected, nowadays, if he dresses as he likes to
+dress.  But in doing that he is acting in a perfectly natural
+manner.  Affectation, in such matters, consists in dressing
+according to the views of one's neighbour, whose views, as they are
+the views of the majority, will probably be extremely stupid.  Or a
+man is called selfish if he lives in the manner that seems to him
+most suitable for the full realisation of his own personality; if,
+in fact, the primary aim of his life is self-development.  But this
+is the way in which everyone should live.  Selfishness is not
+living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one
+wishes to live.  And unselfishness is letting other people's lives
+alone, not interfering with them.  Selfishness always aims at
+creating around it an absolute uniformity of type.  Unselfishness
+recognises infinite variety of type as a delightful thing, accepts
+it, acquiesces in it, enjoys it.  It is not selfish to think for
+oneself.  A man who does not think for himself does not think at
+all.  It is grossly selfish to require of ones neighbour that he
+should think in the same way, and hold the same opinions.  Why
+should he?  If he can think, he will probably think differently.
+If he cannot think, it is monstrous to require thought of any kind
+from him.  A red rose is not selfish because it wants to be a red
+rose.  It would be horribly selfish if it wanted all the other
+flowers in the garden to be both red and roses.  Under
+Individualism people will be quite natural and absolutely
+unselfish, and will know the meanings of the words, and realise
+them in their free, beautiful lives.  Nor will men be egotistic as
+they are now.  For the egotist is he who makes claims upon others,
+and the Individualist will not desire to do that.  It will not give
+him pleasure.  When man has realised Individualism, he will also
+realise sympathy and exercise it freely and spontaneously.  Up to
+the present man has hardly cultivated sympathy at all.  He has
+merely sympathy with pain, and sympathy with pain is not the
+highest form of sympathy.  All sympathy is fine, but sympathy with
+suffering is the least fine mode.  It is tainted with egotism.  It
+is apt to become morbid.  There is in it a certain element of
+terror for our own safety.  We become afraid that we ourselves
+might be as the leper or as the blind, and that no man would have
+care of us.  It is curiously limiting, too.  One should sympathise
+with the entirety of life, not with life's sores and maladies
+merely, but with life's joy and beauty and energy and health and
+freedom.  The wider sympathy is, of course, the more difficult.  It
+requires more unselfishness.  Anybody can sympathise with the
+sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature--it
+requires, in fact, the nature of a true Individualist--to
+sympathise with a friend's success.
+
+In the modern stress of competition and struggle for place, such
+sympathy is naturally rare, and is also very much stifled by the
+immoral ideal of uniformity of type and conformity to rule which is
+so prevalent everywhere, and is perhaps most obnoxious in England.
+
+Sympathy with pain there will, of course, always be.  It is one of
+the first instincts of man.  The animals which are individual, the
+higher animals, that is to say, share it with us.  But it must be
+remembered that while sympathy with joy intensifies the sum of joy
+in the world, sympathy with pain does not really diminish the
+amount of pain.  It may make man better able to endure evil, but
+the evil remains.  Sympathy with consumption does not cure
+consumption; that is what Science does.  And when Socialism has
+solved the problem of poverty, and Science solved the problem of
+disease, the area of the sentimentalists will be lessened, and the
+sympathy of man will be large, healthy, and spontaneous.  Man will
+have joy in the contemplation of the joyous life of others.
+
+For it is through joy that the Individualism of the future will
+develop itself.  Christ made no attempt to reconstruct society, and
+consequently the Individualism that he preached to man could be
+realised only through pain or in solitude.  The ideals that we owe
+to Christ are the ideals of the man who abandons society entirely,
+or of the man who resists society absolutely.  But man is naturally
+social.  Even the Thebaid became peopled at last.  And though the
+cenobite realises his personality, it is often an impoverished
+personality that he so realises.  Upon the other hand, the terrible
+truth that pain is a mode through which man may realise himself
+exercises a wonderful fascination over the world.  Shallow speakers
+and shallow thinkers in pulpits and on platforms often talk about
+the world's worship of pleasure, and whine against it.  But it is
+rarely in the world's history that its ideal has been one of joy
+and beauty.  The worship of pain has far more often dominated the
+world.  Mediaevalism, with its saints and martyrs, its love of
+self-torture, its wild passion for wounding itself, its gashing
+with knives, and its whipping with rods--Mediaevalism is real
+Christianity, and the mediaeval Christ is the real Christ.  When
+the Renaissance dawned upon the world, and brought with it the new
+ideals of the beauty of life and the joy of living, men could not
+understand Christ.  Even Art shows us that.  The painters of the
+Renaissance drew Christ as a little boy playing with another boy in
+a palace or a garden, or lying back in his mother's arms, smiling
+at her, or at a flower, or at a bright bird; or as a noble, stately
+figure moving nobly through the world; or as a wonderful figure
+rising in a sort of ecstasy from death to life.  Even when they
+drew him crucified they drew him as a beautiful God on whom evil
+men had inflicted suffering.  But he did not preoccupy them much.
+What delighted them was to paint the men and women whom they
+admired, and to show the loveliness of this lovely earth.  They
+painted many religious pictures--in fact, they painted far too
+many, and the monotony of type and motive is wearisome, and was bad
+for art.  It was the result of the authority of the public in art-
+matters, and is to be deplored.  But their soul was not in the
+subject.  Raphael was a great artist when he painted his portrait
+of the Pope.  When he painted his Madonnas and infant Christs, he
+is not a great artist at all.  Christ had no message for the
+Renaissance, which was wonderful because it brought an ideal at
+variance with his, and to find the presentation of the real Christ
+we must go to mediaeval art.  There he is one maimed and marred;
+one who is not comely to look on, because Beauty is a joy; one who
+is not in fair raiment, because that may be a joy also:  he is a
+beggar who has a marvellous soul; he is a leper whose soul is
+divine; he needs neither property nor health; he is a God realising
+his perfection through pain.
+
+The evolution of man is slow.  The injustice of men is great.  It
+was necessary that pain should be put forward as a mode of self-
+realisation.  Even now, in some places in the world, the message of
+Christ is necessary.  No one who lived in modern Russia could
+possibly realise his perfection except by pain.  A few Russian
+artists have realised themselves in Art; in a fiction that is
+mediaeval in character, because its dominant note is the
+realisation of men through suffering.  But for those who are not
+artists, and to whom there is no mode of life but the actual life
+of fact, pain is the only door to perfection.  A Russian who lives
+happily under the present system of government in Russia must
+either believe that man has no soul, or that, if he has, it is not
+worth developing.  A Nihilist who rejects all authority, because he
+knows authority to be evil, and welcomes all pain, because through
+that he realises his personality, is a real Christian.  To him the
+Christian ideal is a true thing.
+
+And yet, Christ did not revolt against authority.  He accepted the
+imperial authority of the Roman Empire and paid tribute.  He
+endured the ecclesiastical authority of the Jewish Church, and
+would not repel its violence by any violence of his own.  He had,
+as I said before, no scheme for the reconstruction of society.  But
+the modern world has schemes.  It proposes to do away with poverty
+and the suffering that it entails.  It desires to get rid of pain,
+and the suffering that pain entails.  It trusts to Socialism and to
+Science as its methods.  What it aims at is an Individualism
+expressing itself through joy.  This Individualism will be larger,
+fuller, lovelier than any Individualism has ever been.  Pain is not
+the ultimate mode of perfection.  It is merely provisional and a
+protest.  It has reference to wrong, unhealthy, unjust
+surroundings.  When the wrong, and the disease, and the injustice
+are removed, it will have no further place.  It will have done its
+work.  It was a great work, but it is almost over.  Its sphere
+lessens every day.
+
+Nor will man miss it.  For what man has sought for is, indeed,
+neither pain nor pleasure, but simply Life.  Man has sought to live
+intensely, fully, perfectly.  When he can do so without exercising
+restraint on others, or suffering it ever, and his activities are
+all pleasurable to him, he will be saner, healthier, more
+civilised, more himself.  Pleasure is Nature's test, her sign of
+approval.  When man is happy, he is in harmony with himself and his
+environment.  The new Individualism, for whose service Socialism,
+whether it wills it or not, is working, will be perfect harmony.
+It will be what the Greeks sought for, but could not, except in
+Thought, realise completely, because they had slaves, and fed them;
+it will be what the Renaissance sought for, but could not realise
+completely except in Art, because they had slaves, and starved
+them.  It will be complete, and through it each man will attain to
+his perfection.  The new Individualism is the new Hellenism.
+
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, THE SOUL OF MAN ***
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+<title>The Soul of Man</title>
+</head>
+<body>
+<h2>
+<a href="#startoftext">The Soul of Man, by Oscar Wilde</a>
+</h2>
+<pre>
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Soul of Man, by Oscar Wilde
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+Title: The Soul of Man
+
+Author: Oscar Wilde
+
+Release Date: August, 1997  [EBook #1017]
+[This file was first posted on August 10, 1997]
+[Most recently updated: May 21, 2003]
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+Edition: 10
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+Language: English
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+Character set encoding: US-ASCII
+</pre>
+<p><a name="startoftext"></a></p>
+<p>Transcribed by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines3"><br /><br /><br /></div>
+<h1>THE SOUL OF MAN</h1>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines3"><br /><br /><br /></div>
+<p>The chief advantage that would result from the establishment of Socialism
+is, undoubtedly, the fact that Socialism would relieve us from that
+sordid necessity of living for others which, in the present condition
+of things, presses so hardly upon almost everybody.&nbsp; In fact, scarcely
+anyone at all escapes.</p>
+<p>Now and then, in the course of the century, a great man of science,
+like Darwin; a great poet, like Keats; a fine critical spirit, like
+M. Renan; a supreme artist, like Flaubert, has been able to isolate
+himself, to keep himself out of reach of the clamorous claims of others,
+to stand &lsquo;under the shelter of the wall,&rsquo; as Plato puts
+it, and so to realise the perfection of what was in him, to his own
+incomparable gain, and to the incomparable and lasting gain of the whole
+world.&nbsp; These, however, are exceptions.&nbsp; The majority of people
+spoil their lives by an unhealthy and exaggerated altruism&mdash;are
+forced, indeed, so to spoil them.&nbsp; They find themselves surrounded
+by hideous poverty, by hideous ugliness, by hideous starvation.&nbsp;
+It is inevitable that they should be strongly moved by all this.&nbsp;
+The emotions of man are stirred more quickly than man&rsquo;s intelligence;
+and, as I pointed out some time ago in an article on the function of
+criticism, it is much more easy to have sympathy with suffering than
+it is to have sympathy with thought.&nbsp; Accordingly, with admirable,
+though misdirected intentions, they very seriously and very sentimentally
+set themselves to the task of remedying the evils that they see.&nbsp;
+But their remedies do not cure the disease: they merely prolong it.&nbsp;
+Indeed, their remedies are part of the disease.</p>
+<p>They try to solve the problem of poverty, for instance, by keeping
+the poor alive; or, in the case of a very advanced school, by amusing
+the poor.</p>
+<p>But this is not a solution: it is an aggravation of the difficulty.&nbsp;
+The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that
+poverty will be impossible.&nbsp; And the altruistic virtues have really
+prevented the carrying out of this aim.&nbsp; Just as the worst slave-owners
+were those who were kind to their slaves, and so prevented the horror
+of the system being realised by those who suffered from it, and understood
+by those who contemplated it, so, in the present state of things in
+England, the people who do most harm are the people who try to do most
+good; and at last we have had the spectacle of men who have really studied
+the problem and know the life&mdash;educated men who live in the East
+End&mdash;coming forward and imploring the community to restrain its
+altruistic impulses of charity, benevolence, and the like.&nbsp; They
+do so on the ground that such charity degrades and demoralises.&nbsp;
+They are perfectly right.&nbsp; Charity creates a multitude of sins.</p>
+<p>There is also this to be said.&nbsp; It is immoral to use private
+property in order to alleviate the horrible evils that result from the
+institution of private property.&nbsp; It is both immoral and unfair.</p>
+<p>Under Socialism all this will, of course, be altered.&nbsp; There
+will be no people living in fetid dens and fetid rags, and bringing
+up unhealthy, hunger-pinched children in the midst of impossible and
+absolutely repulsive surroundings.&nbsp; The security of society will
+not depend, as it does now, on the state of the weather.&nbsp; If a
+frost comes we shall not have a hundred thousand men out of work, tramping
+about the streets in a state of disgusting misery, or whining to their
+neighbours for alms, or crowding round the doors of loathsome shelters
+to try and secure a hunch of bread and a night&rsquo;s unclean lodging.&nbsp;
+Each member of the society will share in the general prosperity and
+happiness of the society, and if a frost comes no one will practically
+be anything the worse.</p>
+<p>Upon the other hand, Socialism itself will be of value simply because
+it will lead to Individualism.</p>
+<p>Socialism, Communism, or whatever one chooses to call it, by converting
+private property into public wealth, and substituting co-operation for
+competition, will restore society to its proper condition of a thoroughly
+healthy organism, and insure the material well-being of each member
+of the community.&nbsp; It will, in fact, give Life its proper basis
+and its proper environment.&nbsp; But for the full development of Life
+to its highest mode of perfection, something more is needed.&nbsp; What
+is needed is Individualism.&nbsp; If the Socialism is Authoritarian;
+if there are Governments armed with economic power as they are now with
+political power; if, in a word, we are to have Industrial Tyrannies,
+then the last state of man will be worse than the first.&nbsp; At present,
+in consequence of the existence of private property, a great many people
+are enabled to develop a certain very limited amount of Individualism.&nbsp;
+They are either under no necessity to work for their living, or are
+enabled to choose the sphere of activity that is really congenial to
+them, and gives them pleasure.&nbsp; These are the poets, the philosophers,
+the men of science, the men of culture&mdash;in a word, the real men,
+the men who have realised themselves, and in whom all Humanity gains
+a partial realisation.&nbsp; Upon the other hand, there are a great
+many people who, having no private property of their own, and being
+always on the brink of sheer starvation, are compelled to do the work
+of beasts of burden, to do work that is quite uncongenial to them, and
+to which they are forced by the peremptory, unreasonable, degrading
+Tyranny of want.&nbsp; These are the poor, and amongst them there is
+no grace of manner, or charm of speech, or civilisation, or culture,
+or refinement in pleasures, or joy of life.&nbsp; From their collective
+force Humanity gains much in material prosperity.&nbsp; But it is only
+the material result that it gains, and the man who is poor is in himself
+absolutely of no importance.&nbsp; He is merely the infinitesimal atom
+of a force that, so far from regarding him, crushes him: indeed, prefers
+him crushed, as in that case he is far more obedient.</p>
+<p>Of course, it might be said that the Individualism generated under
+conditions of private property is not always, or even as a rule, of
+a fine or wonderful type, and that the poor, if they have not culture
+and charm, have still many virtues.&nbsp; Both these statements would
+be quite true.&nbsp; The possession of private property is very often
+extremely demoralising, and that is, of course, one of the reasons why
+Socialism wants to get rid of the institution.&nbsp; In fact, property
+is really a nuisance.&nbsp; Some years ago people went about the country
+saying that property has duties.&nbsp; They said it so often and so
+tediously that, at last, the Church has begun to say it.&nbsp; One hears
+it now from every pulpit.&nbsp; It is perfectly true.&nbsp; Property
+not merely has duties, but has so many duties that its possession to
+any large extent is a bore.&nbsp; It involves endless claims upon one,
+endless attention to business, endless bother.&nbsp; If property had
+simply pleasures, we could stand it; but its duties make it unbearable.&nbsp;
+In the interest of the rich we must get rid of it.&nbsp; The virtues
+of the poor may be readily admitted, and are much to be regretted.&nbsp;
+We are often told that the poor are grateful for charity.&nbsp; Some
+of them are, no doubt, but the best amongst the poor are never grateful.&nbsp;
+They are ungrateful, discontented, disobedient, and rebellious.&nbsp;
+They are quite right to be so.&nbsp; Charity they feel to be a ridiculously
+inadequate mode of partial restitution, or a sentimental dole, usually
+accompanied by some impertinent attempt on the part of the sentimentalist
+to tyrannise over their private lives.&nbsp; Why should they be grateful
+for the crumbs that fall from the rich man&rsquo;s table?&nbsp; They
+should be seated at the board, and are beginning to know it.&nbsp; As
+for being discontented, a man who would not be discontented with such
+surroundings and such a low mode of life would be a perfect brute.&nbsp;
+Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man&rsquo;s
+original virtue.&nbsp; It is through disobedience that progress has
+been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.&nbsp; Sometimes
+the poor are praised for being thrifty.&nbsp; But to recommend thrift
+to the poor is both grotesque and insulting.&nbsp; It is like advising
+a man who is starving to eat less.&nbsp; For a town or country labourer
+to practise thrift would be absolutely immoral.&nbsp; Man should not
+be ready to show that he can live like a badly-fed animal.&nbsp; He
+should decline to live like that, and should either steal or go on the
+rates, which is considered by many to be a form of stealing.&nbsp; As
+for begging, it is safer to beg than to take, but it is finer to take
+than to beg.&nbsp; No: a poor man who is ungrateful, unthrifty, discontented,
+and rebellious, is probably a real personality, and has much in him.&nbsp;
+He is at any rate a healthy protest.&nbsp; As for the virtuous poor,
+one can pity them, of course, but one cannot possibly admire them.&nbsp;
+They have made private terms with the enemy, and sold their birthright
+for very bad pottage.&nbsp; They must also be extraordinarily stupid.&nbsp;
+I can quite understand a man accepting laws that protect private property,
+and admit of its accumulation, as long as he himself is able under those
+conditions to realise some form of beautiful and intellectual life.&nbsp;
+But it is almost incredible to me how a man whose life is marred and
+made hideous by such laws can possibly acquiesce in their continuance.</p>
+<p>However, the explanation is not really difficult to find.&nbsp; It
+is simply this.&nbsp; Misery and poverty are so absolutely degrading,
+and exercise such a paralysing effect over the nature of men, that no
+class is ever really conscious of its own suffering.&nbsp; They have
+to be told of it by other people, and they often entirely disbelieve
+them.&nbsp; What is said by great employers of labour against agitators
+is unquestionably true.&nbsp; Agitators are a set of interfering, meddling
+people, who come down to some perfectly contented class of the community,
+and sow the seeds of discontent amongst them.&nbsp; That is the reason
+why agitators are so absolutely necessary.&nbsp; Without them, in our
+incomplete state, there would be no advance towards civilisation.&nbsp;
+Slavery was put down in America, not in consequence of any action on
+the part of the slaves, or even any express desire on their part that
+they should be free.&nbsp; It was put down entirely through the grossly
+illegal conduct of certain agitators in Boston and elsewhere, who were
+not slaves themselves, nor owners of slaves, nor had anything to do
+with the question really.&nbsp; It was, undoubtedly, the Abolitionists
+who set the torch alight, who began the whole thing.&nbsp; And it is
+curious to note that from the slaves themselves they received, not merely
+very little assistance, but hardly any sympathy even; and when at the
+close of the war the slaves found themselves free, found themselves
+indeed so absolutely free that they were free to starve, many of them
+bitterly regretted the new state of things.&nbsp; To the thinker, the
+most tragic fact in the whole of the French Revolution is not that Marie
+Antoinette was killed for being a queen, but that the starved peasant
+of the Vend&eacute;e voluntarily went out to die for the hideous cause
+of feudalism.</p>
+<p>It is clear, then, that no Authoritarian Socialism will do.&nbsp;
+For while under the present system a very large number of people can
+lead lives of a certain amount of freedom and expression and happiness,
+under an industrial-barrack system, or a system of economic tyranny,
+nobody would be able to have any such freedom at all.&nbsp; It is to
+be regretted that a portion of our community should be practically in
+slavery, but to propose to solve the problem by enslaving the entire
+community is childish.&nbsp; Every man must be left quite free to choose
+his own work.&nbsp; No form of compulsion must be exercised over him.&nbsp;
+If there is, his work will not be good for him, will not be good in
+itself, and will not be good for others.&nbsp; And by work I simply
+mean activity of any kind.</p>
+<p>I hardly think that any Socialist, nowadays, would seriously propose
+that an inspector should call every morning at each house to see that
+each citizen rose up and did manual labour for eight hours.&nbsp; Humanity
+has got beyond that stage, and reserves such a form of life for the
+people whom, in a very arbitrary manner, it chooses to call criminals.&nbsp;
+But I confess that many of the socialistic views that I have come across
+seem to me to be tainted with ideas of authority, if not of actual compulsion.&nbsp;
+Of course, authority and compulsion are out of the question.&nbsp; All
+association must be quite voluntary.&nbsp; It is only in voluntary associations
+that man is fine.</p>
+<p>But it may be asked how Individualism, which is now more or less
+dependent on the existence of private property for its development,
+will benefit by the abolition of such private property.&nbsp; The answer
+is very simple.&nbsp; It is true that, under existing conditions, a
+few men who have had private means of their own, such as Byron, Shelley,
+Browning, Victor Hugo, Baudelaire, and others, have been able to realise
+their personality more or less completely.&nbsp; Not one of these men
+ever did a single day&rsquo;s work for hire.&nbsp; They were relieved
+from poverty.&nbsp; They had an immense advantage.&nbsp; The question
+is whether it would be for the good of Individualism that such an advantage
+should be taken away.&nbsp; Let us suppose that it is taken away.&nbsp;
+What happens then to Individualism?&nbsp; How will it benefit?</p>
+<p>It will benefit in this way.&nbsp; Under the new conditions Individualism
+will be far freer, far finer, and far more intensified than it is now.&nbsp;
+I am not talking of the great imaginatively-realised Individualism of
+such poets as I have mentioned, but of the great actual Individualism
+latent and potential in mankind generally.&nbsp; For the recognition
+of private property has really harmed Individualism, and obscured it,
+by confusing a man with what he possesses.&nbsp; It has led Individualism
+entirely astray.&nbsp; It has made gain not growth its aim.&nbsp; So
+that man thought that the important thing was to have, and did not know
+that the important thing is to be.&nbsp; The true perfection of man
+lies, not in what man has, but in what man is.</p>
+<p>Private property has crushed true Individualism, and set up an Individualism
+that is false.&nbsp; It has debarred one part of the community from
+being individual by starving them.&nbsp; It has debarred the other part
+of the community from being individual by putting them on the wrong
+road, and encumbering them.&nbsp; Indeed, so completely has man&rsquo;s
+personality been absorbed by his possessions that the English law has
+always treated offences against a man&rsquo;s property with far more
+severity than offences against his person, and property is still the
+test of complete citizenship.&nbsp; The industry necessary for the making
+money is also very demoralising.&nbsp; In a community like ours, where
+property confers immense distinction, social position, honour, respect,
+titles, and other pleasant things of the kind, man, being naturally
+ambitious, makes it his aim to accumulate this property, and goes on
+wearily and tediously accumulating it long after he has got far more
+than he wants, or can use, or enjoy, or perhaps even know of.&nbsp;
+Man will kill himself by overwork in order to secure property, and really,
+considering the enormous advantages that property brings, one is hardly
+surprised.&nbsp; One&rsquo;s regret is that society should be constructed
+on such a basis that man has been forced into a groove in which he cannot
+freely develop what is wonderful, and fascinating, and delightful in
+him&mdash;in which, in fact, he misses the true pleasure and joy of
+living.&nbsp; He is also, under existing conditions, very insecure.&nbsp;
+An enormously wealthy merchant may be&mdash;often is&mdash;at every
+moment of his life at the mercy of things that are not under his control.&nbsp;
+If the wind blows an extra point or so, or the weather suddenly changes,
+or some trivial thing happens, his ship may go down, his speculations
+may go wrong, and he finds himself a poor man, with his social position
+quite gone.&nbsp; Now, nothing should be able to harm a man except himself.&nbsp;
+Nothing should be able to rob a man at all.&nbsp; What a man really
+has, is what is in him.&nbsp; What is outside of him should be a matter
+of no importance.</p>
+<p>With the abolition of private property, then, we shall have true,
+beautiful, healthy Individualism.&nbsp; Nobody will waste his life in
+accumulating things, and the symbols for things.&nbsp; One will live.&nbsp;
+To live is the rarest thing in the world.&nbsp; Most people exist, that
+is all.</p>
+<p>It is a question whether we have ever seen the full expression of
+a personality, except on the imaginative plane of art.&nbsp; In action,
+we never have.&nbsp; Caesar, says Mommsen, was the complete and perfect
+man.&nbsp; But how tragically insecure was Caesar!&nbsp; Wherever there
+is a man who exercises authority, there is a man who resists authority.&nbsp;
+Caesar was very perfect, but his perfection travelled by too dangerous
+a road.&nbsp; Marcus Aurelius was the perfect man, says Renan.&nbsp;
+Yes; the great emperor was a perfect man.&nbsp; But how intolerable
+were the endless claims upon him!&nbsp; He staggered under the burden
+of the empire.&nbsp; He was conscious how inadequate one man was to
+bear the weight of that Titan and too vast orb.&nbsp; What I mean by
+a perfect man is one who develops under perfect conditions; one who
+is not wounded, or worried or maimed, or in danger.&nbsp; Most personalities
+have been obliged to be rebels.&nbsp; Half their strength has been wasted
+in friction.&nbsp; Byron&rsquo;s personality, for instance, was terribly
+wasted in its battle with the stupidity, and hypocrisy, and Philistinism
+of the English.&nbsp; Such battles do not always intensify strength:
+they often exaggerate weakness.&nbsp; Byron was never able to give us
+what he might have given us.&nbsp; Shelley escaped better.&nbsp; Like
+Byron, he got out of England as soon as possible.&nbsp; But he was not
+so well known.&nbsp; If the English had had any idea of what a great
+poet he really was, they would have fallen on him with tooth and nail,
+and made his life as unbearable to him as they possibly could.&nbsp;
+But he was not a remarkable figure in society, and consequently he escaped,
+to a certain degree.&nbsp; Still, even in Shelley the note of rebellion
+is sometimes too strong.&nbsp; The note of the perfect personality is
+not rebellion, but peace.</p>
+<p>It will be a marvellous thing&mdash;the true personality of man&mdash;when
+we see it.&nbsp; It will grow naturally and simply, flowerlike, or as
+a tree grows.&nbsp; It will not be at discord.&nbsp; It will never argue
+or dispute.&nbsp; It will not prove things.&nbsp; It will know everything.&nbsp;
+And yet it will not busy itself about knowledge.&nbsp; It will have
+wisdom.&nbsp; Its value will not be measured by material things.&nbsp;
+It will have nothing.&nbsp; And yet it will have everything, and whatever
+one takes from it, it will still have, so rich will it be.&nbsp; It
+will not be always meddling with others, or asking them to be like itself.&nbsp;
+It will love them because they will be different.&nbsp; And yet while
+it will not meddle with others, it will help all, as a beautiful thing
+helps us, by being what it is.&nbsp; The personality of man will be
+very wonderful.&nbsp; It will be as wonderful as the personality of
+a child.</p>
+<p>In its development it will be assisted by Christianity, if men desire
+that; but if men do not desire that, it will develop none the less surely.&nbsp;
+For it will not worry itself about the past, nor care whether things
+happened or did not happen.&nbsp; Nor will it admit any laws but its
+own laws; nor any authority but its own authority.&nbsp; Yet it will
+love those who sought to intensify it, and speak often of them.&nbsp;
+And of these Christ was one.</p>
+<p>&lsquo;Know thyself&rsquo; was written over the portal of the antique
+world.&nbsp; Over the portal of the new world, &lsquo;Be thyself&rsquo;
+shall be written.&nbsp; And the message of Christ to man was simply
+&lsquo;Be thyself.&rsquo;&nbsp; That is the secret of Christ.</p>
+<p>When Jesus talks about the poor he simply means personalities, just
+as when he talks about the rich he simply means people who have not
+developed their personalities.&nbsp; Jesus moved in a community that
+allowed the accumulation of private property just as ours does, and
+the gospel that he preached was not that in such a community it is an
+advantage for a man to live on scanty, unwholesome food, to wear ragged,
+unwholesome clothes, to sleep in horrid, unwholesome dwellings, and
+a disadvantage for a man to live under healthy, pleasant, and decent
+conditions.&nbsp; Such a view would have been wrong there and then,
+and would, of course, be still more wrong now and in England; for as
+man moves northward the material necessities of life become of more
+vital importance, and our society is infinitely more complex, and displays
+far greater extremes of luxury and pauperism than any society of the
+antique world.&nbsp; What Jesus meant, was this.&nbsp; He said to man,
+&lsquo;You have a wonderful personality.&nbsp; Develop it.&nbsp; Be
+yourself.&nbsp; Don&rsquo;t imagine that your perfection lies in accumulating
+or possessing external things.&nbsp; Your affection is inside of you.&nbsp;
+If only you could realise that, you would not want to be rich.&nbsp;
+Ordinary riches can be stolen from a man.&nbsp; Real riches cannot.&nbsp;
+In the treasury-house of your soul, there are infinitely precious things,
+that may not be taken from you.&nbsp; And so, try to so shape your life
+that external things will not harm you.&nbsp; And try also to get rid
+of personal property.&nbsp; It involves sordid preoccupation, endless
+industry, continual wrong.&nbsp; Personal property hinders Individualism
+at every step.&rsquo;&nbsp; It is to be noted that Jesus never says
+that impoverished people are necessarily good, or wealthy people necessarily
+bad.&nbsp; That would not have been true.&nbsp; Wealthy people are,
+as a class, better than impoverished people, more moral, more intellectual,
+more well-behaved.&nbsp; There is only one class in the community that
+thinks more about money than the rich, and that is the poor.&nbsp; The
+poor can think of nothing else.&nbsp; That is the misery of being poor.&nbsp;
+What Jesus does say is that man reaches his perfection, not through
+what he has, not even through what he does, but entirely through what
+he is.&nbsp; And so the wealthy young man who comes to Jesus is represented
+as a thoroughly good citizen, who has broken none of the laws of his
+state, none of the commandments of his religion.&nbsp; He is quite respectable,
+in the ordinary sense of that extraordinary word.&nbsp; Jesus says to
+him, &lsquo;You should give up private property.&nbsp; It hinders you
+from realising your perfection.&nbsp; It is a drag upon you.&nbsp; It
+is a burden.&nbsp; Your personality does not need it.&nbsp; It is within
+you, and not outside of you, that you will find what you really are,
+and what you really want.&rsquo;&nbsp; To his own friends he says the
+same thing.&nbsp; He tells them to be themselves, and not to be always
+worrying about other things.&nbsp; What do other things matter?&nbsp;
+Man is complete in himself.&nbsp; When they go into the world, the world
+will disagree with them.&nbsp; That is inevitable.&nbsp; The world hates
+Individualism.&nbsp; But that is not to trouble them.&nbsp; They are
+to be calm and self-centred.&nbsp; If a man takes their cloak, they
+are to give him their coat, just to show that material things are of
+no importance.&nbsp; If people abuse them, they are not to answer back.&nbsp;
+What does it signify?&nbsp; The things people say of a man do not alter
+a man.&nbsp; He is what he is.&nbsp; Public opinion is of no value whatsoever.&nbsp;
+Even if people employ actual violence, they are not to be violent in
+turn.&nbsp; That would be to fall to the same low level.&nbsp; After
+all, even in prison, a man can be quite free.&nbsp; His soul can be
+free.&nbsp; His personality can be untroubled.&nbsp; He can be at peace.&nbsp;
+And, above all things, they are not to interfere with other people or
+judge them in any way.&nbsp; Personality is a very mysterious thing.&nbsp;
+A man cannot always be estimated by what he does.&nbsp; He may keep
+the law, and yet be worthless.&nbsp; He may break the law, and yet be
+fine.&nbsp; He may be bad, without ever doing anything bad.&nbsp; He
+may commit a sin against society, and yet realise through that sin his
+true perfection.</p>
+<p>There was a woman who was taken in adultery.&nbsp; We are not told
+the history of her love, but that love must have been very great; for
+Jesus said that her sins were forgiven her, not because she repented,
+but because her love was so intense and wonderful.&nbsp; Later on, a
+short time before his death, as he sat at a feast, the woman came in
+and poured costly perfumes on his hair.&nbsp; His friends tried to interfere
+with her, and said that it was an extravagance, and that the money that
+the perfume cost should have been expended on charitable relief of people
+in want, or something of that kind.&nbsp; Jesus did not accept that
+view.&nbsp; He pointed out that the material needs of Man were great
+and very permanent, but that the spiritual needs of Man were greater
+still, and that in one divine moment, and by selecting its own mode
+of expression, a personality might make itself perfect.&nbsp; The world
+worships the woman, even now, as a saint.</p>
+<p>Yes; there are suggestive things in Individualism.&nbsp; Socialism
+annihilates family life, for instance.&nbsp; With the abolition of private
+property, marriage in its present form must disappear.&nbsp; This is
+part of the programme.&nbsp; Individualism accepts this and makes it
+fine.&nbsp; It converts the abolition of legal restraint into a form
+of freedom that will help the full development of personality, and make
+the love of man and woman more wonderful, more beautiful, and more ennobling.&nbsp;
+Jesus knew this.&nbsp; He rejected the claims of family life, although
+they existed in his day and community in a very marked form.&nbsp; &lsquo;Who
+is my mother?&nbsp; Who are my brothers?&rsquo; he said, when he was
+told that they wished to speak to him.&nbsp; When one of his followers
+asked leave to go and bury his father, &lsquo;Let the dead bury the
+dead,&rsquo; was his terrible answer.&nbsp; He would allow no claim
+whatsoever to be made on personality.</p>
+<p>And so he who would lead a Christlike life is he who is perfectly
+and absolutely himself.&nbsp; He may be a great poet, or a great man
+of science; or a young student at a University, or one who watches sheep
+upon a moor; or a maker of dramas, like Shakespeare, or a thinker about
+God, like Spinoza; or a child who plays in a garden, or a fisherman
+who throws his net into the sea.&nbsp; It does not matter what he is,
+as long as he realises the perfection of the soul that is within him.&nbsp;
+All imitation in morals and in life is wrong.&nbsp; Through the streets
+of Jerusalem at the present day crawls one who is mad and carries a
+wooden cross on his shoulders.&nbsp; He is a symbol of the lives that
+are marred by imitation.&nbsp; Father Damien was Christlike when he
+went out to live with the lepers, because in such service he realised
+fully what was best in him.&nbsp; But he was not more Christlike than
+Wagner when he realised his soul in music; or than Shelley, when he
+realised his soul in song.&nbsp; There is no one type for man.&nbsp;
+There are as many perfections as there are imperfect men.&nbsp; And
+while to the claims of charity a man may yield and yet be free, to the
+claims of conformity no man may yield and remain free at all.</p>
+<p>Individualism, then, is what through Socialism we are to attain to.&nbsp;
+As a natural result the State must give up all idea of government.&nbsp;
+It must give it up because, as a wise man once said many centuries before
+Christ, there is such a thing as leaving mankind alone; there is no
+such thing as governing mankind.&nbsp; All modes of government are failures.&nbsp;
+Despotism is unjust to everybody, including the despot, who was probably
+made for better things.&nbsp; Oligarchies are unjust to the many, and
+ochlocracies are unjust to the few.&nbsp; High hopes were once formed
+of democracy; but democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people
+by the people for the people.&nbsp; It has been found out.&nbsp; I must
+say that it was high time, for all authority is quite degrading.&nbsp;
+It degrades those who exercise it, and degrades those over whom it is
+exercised.&nbsp; When it is violently, grossly, and cruelly used, it
+produces a good effect, by creating, or at any rate bringing out, the
+spirit of revolt and Individualism that is to kill it.&nbsp; When it
+is used with a certain amount of kindness, and accompanied by prizes
+and rewards, it is dreadfully demoralising.&nbsp; People, in that case,
+are less conscious of the horrible pressure that is being put on them,
+and so go through their lives in a sort of coarse comfort, like petted
+animals, without ever realising that they are probably thinking other
+people&rsquo;s thoughts, living by other people&rsquo;s standards, wearing
+practically what one may call other people&rsquo;s second-hand clothes,
+and never being themselves for a single moment.&nbsp; &lsquo;He who
+would be free,&rsquo; says a fine thinker, &lsquo;must not conform.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+And authority, by bribing people to conform, produces a very gross kind
+of over-fed barbarism amongst us.</p>
+<p>With authority, punishment will pass away.&nbsp; This will be a great
+gain&mdash;a gain, in fact, of incalculable value.&nbsp; As one reads
+history, not in the expurgated editions written for school-boys and
+passmen, but in the original authorities of each time, one is absolutely
+sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed, but by the
+punishments that the good have inflicted; and a community is infinitely
+more brutalised by the habitual employment of punishment, than it is
+by the occurrence of crime.&nbsp; It obviously follows that the more
+punishment is inflicted the more crime is produced, and most modern
+legislation has clearly recognised this, and has made it its task to
+diminish punishment as far as it thinks it can.&nbsp; Wherever it has
+really diminished it, the results have always been extremely good.&nbsp;
+The less punishment, the less crime.&nbsp; When there is no punishment
+at all, crime will either cease to exist, or, if it occurs, will be
+treated by physicians as a very distressing form of dementia, to be
+cured by care and kindness.&nbsp; For what are called criminals nowadays
+are not criminals at all.&nbsp; Starvation, and not sin, is the parent
+of modern crime.&nbsp; That indeed is the reason why our criminals are,
+as a class, so absolutely uninteresting from any psychological point
+of view.&nbsp; They are not marvellous Macbeths and terrible Vautrins.&nbsp;
+They are merely what ordinary, respectable, commonplace people would
+be if they had not got enough to eat.&nbsp; When private property is
+abolished there will be no necessity for crime, no demand for it; it
+will cease to exist.&nbsp; Of course, all crimes are not crimes against
+property, though such are the crimes that the English law, valuing what
+a man has more than what a man is, punishes with the harshest and most
+horrible severity, if we except the crime of murder, and regard death
+as worse than penal servitude, a point on which our criminals, I believe,
+disagree.&nbsp; But though a crime may not be against property, it may
+spring from the misery and rage and depression produced by our wrong
+system of property-holding, and so, when that system is abolished, will
+disappear.&nbsp; When each member of the community has sufficient for
+his wants, and is not interfered with by his neighbour, it will not
+be an object of any interest to him to interfere with anyone else.&nbsp;
+Jealousy, which is an extraordinary source of crime in modern life,
+is an emotion closely bound up with our conceptions of property, and
+under Socialism and Individualism will die out.&nbsp; It is remarkable
+that in communistic tribes jealousy is entirely unknown.</p>
+<p>Now as the State is not to govern, it may be asked what the State
+is to do.&nbsp; The State is to be a voluntary association that will
+organise labour, and be the manufacturer and distributor of necessary
+commodities.&nbsp; The State is to make what is useful.&nbsp; The individual
+is to make what is beautiful.&nbsp; And as I have mentioned the word
+labour, I cannot help saying that a great deal of nonsense is being
+written and talked nowadays about the dignity of manual labour.&nbsp;
+There is nothing necessarily dignified about manual labour at all, and
+most of it is absolutely degrading.&nbsp; It is mentally and morally
+injurious to man to do anything in which he does not find pleasure,
+and many forms of labour are quite pleasureless activities, and should
+be regarded as such.&nbsp; To sweep a slushy crossing for eight hours,
+on a day when the east wind is blowing is a disgusting occupation.&nbsp;
+To sweep it with mental, moral, or physical dignity seems to me to be
+impossible.&nbsp; To sweep it with joy would be appalling.&nbsp; Man
+is made for something better than disturbing dirt.&nbsp; All work of
+that kind should be done by a machine.</p>
+<p>And I have no doubt that it will be so.&nbsp; Up to the present,
+man has been, to a certain extent, the slave of machinery, and there
+is something tragic in the fact that as soon as man had invented a machine
+to do his work he began to starve.&nbsp; This, however, is, of course,
+the result of our property system and our system of competition.&nbsp;
+One man owns a machine which does the work of five hundred men.&nbsp;
+Five hundred men are, in consequence, thrown out of employment, and,
+having no work to do, become hungry and take to thieving.&nbsp; The
+one man secures the produce of the machine and keeps it, and has five
+hundred times as much as he should have, and probably, which is of much
+more importance, a great deal more than he really wants.&nbsp; Were
+that machine the property of all, every one would benefit by it.&nbsp;
+It would be an immense advantage to the community.&nbsp; All unintellectual
+labour, all monotonous, dull labour, all labour that deals with dreadful
+things, and involves unpleasant conditions, must be done by machinery.&nbsp;
+Machinery must work for us in coal mines, and do all sanitary services,
+and be the stoker of steamers, and clean the streets, and run messages
+on wet days, and do anything that is tedious or distressing.&nbsp; At
+present machinery competes against man.&nbsp; Under proper conditions
+machinery will serve man.&nbsp; There is no doubt at all that this is
+the future of machinery, and just as trees grow while the country gentleman
+is asleep, so while Humanity will be amusing itself, or enjoying cultivated
+leisure&mdash;which, and not labour, is the aim of man&mdash;or making
+beautiful things, or reading beautiful things, or simply contemplating
+the world with admiration and delight, machinery will be doing all the
+necessary and unpleasant work.&nbsp; The fact is, that civilisation
+requires slaves.&nbsp; The Greeks were quite right there.&nbsp; Unless
+there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture
+and contemplation become almost impossible.&nbsp; Human slavery is wrong,
+insecure, and demoralising.&nbsp; On mechanical slavery, on the slavery
+of the machine, the future of the world depends.&nbsp; And when scientific
+men are no longer called upon to go down to a depressing East End and
+distribute bad cocoa and worse blankets to starving people, they will
+have delightful leisure in which to devise wonderful and marvellous
+things for their own joy and the joy of everyone else.&nbsp; There will
+be great storages of force for every city, and for every house if required,
+and this force man will convert into heat, light, or motion, according
+to his needs.&nbsp; Is this Utopian?&nbsp; A map of the world that does
+not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out
+the one country at which Humanity is always landing.&nbsp; And when
+Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets
+sail.&nbsp; Progress is the realisation of Utopias.</p>
+<p>Now, I have said that the community by means of organisation of machinery
+will supply the useful things, and that the beautiful things will be
+made by the individual.&nbsp; This is not merely necessary, but it is
+the only possible way by which we can get either the one or the other.&nbsp;
+An individual who has to make things for the use of others, and with
+reference to their wants and their wishes, does not work with interest,
+and consequently cannot put into his work what is best in him.&nbsp;
+Upon the other hand, whenever a community or a powerful section of a
+community, or a government of any kind, attempts to dictate to the artist
+what he is to do, Art either entirely vanishes, or becomes stereotyped,
+or degenerates into a low and ignoble form of craft.&nbsp; A work of
+art is the unique result of a unique temperament.&nbsp; Its beauty comes
+from the fact that the author is what he is.&nbsp; It has nothing to
+do with the fact that other people want what they want.&nbsp; Indeed,
+the moment that an artist takes notice of what other people want, and
+tries to supply the demand, he ceases to be an artist, and becomes a
+dull or an amusing craftsman, an honest or a dishonest tradesman.&nbsp;
+He has no further claim to be considered as an artist.&nbsp; Art is
+the most intense mode of Individualism that the world has known.&nbsp;
+I am inclined to say that it is the only real mode of Individualism
+that the world has known.&nbsp; Crime, which, under certain conditions,
+may seem to have created Individualism, must take cognisance of other
+people and interfere with them.&nbsp; It belongs to the sphere of action.&nbsp;
+But alone, without any reference to his neighbours, without any interference,
+the artist can fashion a beautiful thing; and if he does not do it solely
+for his own pleasure, he is not an artist at all.</p>
+<p>And it is to be noted that it is the fact that Art is this intense
+form of Individualism that makes the public try to exercise over it
+in an authority that is as immoral as it is ridiculous, and as corrupting
+as it is contemptible.&nbsp; It is not quite their fault.&nbsp; The
+public has always, and in every age, been badly brought up.&nbsp; They
+are continually asking Art to be popular, to please their want of taste,
+to flatter their absurd vanity, to tell them what they have been told
+before, to show them what they ought to be tired of seeing, to amuse
+them when they feel heavy after eating too much, and to distract their
+thoughts when they are wearied of their own stupidity.&nbsp; Now Art
+should never try to be popular.&nbsp; The public should try to make
+itself artistic.&nbsp; There is a very wide difference.&nbsp; If a man
+of science were told that the results of his experiments, and the conclusions
+that he arrived at, should be of such a character that they would not
+upset the received popular notions on the subject, or disturb popular
+prejudice, or hurt the sensibilities of people who knew nothing about
+science; if a philosopher were told that he had a perfect right to speculate
+in the highest spheres of thought, provided that he arrived at the same
+conclusions as were held by those who had never thought in any sphere
+at all&mdash;well, nowadays the man of science and the philosopher would
+be considerably amused.&nbsp; Yet it is really a very few years since
+both philosophy and science were subjected to brutal popular control,
+to authority&mdash;in fact the authority of either the general ignorance
+of the community, or the terror and greed for power of an ecclesiastical
+or governmental class.&nbsp; Of course, we have to a very great extent
+got rid of any attempt on the part of the community, or the Church,
+or the Government, to interfere with the individualism of speculative
+thought, but the attempt to interfere with the individualism of imaginative
+art still lingers.&nbsp; In fact, it does more than linger; it is aggressive,
+offensive, and brutalising.</p>
+<p>In England, the arts that have escaped best are the arts in which
+the public take no interest.&nbsp; Poetry is an instance of what I mean.&nbsp;
+We have been able to have fine poetry in England because the public
+do not read it, and consequently do not influence it.&nbsp; The public
+like to insult poets because they are individual, but once they have
+insulted them, they leave them alone.&nbsp; In the case of the novel
+and the drama, arts in which the public do take an interest, the result
+of the exercise of popular authority has been absolutely ridiculous.&nbsp;
+No country produces such badly-written fiction, such tedious, common
+work in the novel form, such silly, vulgar plays as England.&nbsp; It
+must necessarily be so.&nbsp; The popular standard is of such a character
+that no artist can get to it.&nbsp; It is at once too easy and too difficult
+to be a popular novelist.&nbsp; It is too easy, because the requirements
+of the public as far as plot, style, psychology, treatment of life,
+and treatment of literature are concerned are within the reach of the
+very meanest capacity and the most uncultivated mind.&nbsp; It is too
+difficult, because to meet such requirements the artist would have to
+do violence to his temperament, would have to write not for the artistic
+joy of writing, but for the amusement of half-educated people, and so
+would have to suppress his individualism, forget his culture, annihilate
+his style, and surrender everything that is valuable in him.&nbsp; In
+the case of the drama, things are a little better: the theatre-going
+public like the obvious, it is true, but they do not like the tedious;
+and burlesque and farcical comedy, the two most popular forms, are distinct
+forms of art.&nbsp; Delightful work may be produced under burlesque
+and farcical conditions, and in work of this kind the artist in England
+is allowed very great freedom.&nbsp; It is when one comes to the higher
+forms of the drama that the result of popular control is seen.&nbsp;
+The one thing that the public dislike is novelty.&nbsp; Any attempt
+to extend the subject-matter of art is extremely distasteful to the
+public; and yet the vitality and progress of art depend in a large measure
+on the continual extension of subject-matter.&nbsp; The public dislike
+novelty because they are afraid of it.&nbsp; It represents to them a
+mode of Individualism, an assertion on the part of the artist that he
+selects his own subject, and treats it as he chooses.&nbsp; The public
+are quite right in their attitude.&nbsp; Art is Individualism, and Individualism
+is a disturbing and disintegrating force.&nbsp; Therein lies its immense
+value.&nbsp; For what it seeks to disturb is monotony of type, slavery
+of custom, tyranny of habit, and the reduction of man to the level of
+a machine.&nbsp; In Art, the public accept what has been, because they
+cannot alter it, not because they appreciate it.&nbsp; They swallow
+their classics whole, and never taste them.&nbsp; They endure them as
+the inevitable, and as they cannot mar them, they mouth about them.&nbsp;
+Strangely enough, or not strangely, according to one&rsquo;s own views,
+this acceptance of the classics does a great deal of harm.&nbsp; The
+uncritical admiration of the Bible and Shakespeare in England is an
+instance of what I mean.&nbsp; With regard to the Bible, considerations
+of ecclesiastical authority enter into the matter, so that I need not
+dwell upon the point.&nbsp; But in the case of Shakespeare it is quite
+obvious that the public really see neither the beauties nor the defects
+of his plays.&nbsp; If they saw the beauties, they would not object
+to the development of the drama; and if they saw the defects, they would
+not object to the development of the drama either.&nbsp; The fact is,
+the public make use of the classics of a country as a means of checking
+the progress of Art.&nbsp; They degrade the classics into authorities.&nbsp;
+They use them as bludgeons for preventing the free expression of Beauty
+in new forms.&nbsp; They are always asking a writer why he does not
+write like somebody else, or a painter why he does not paint like somebody
+else, quite oblivious of the fact that if either of them did anything
+of the kind he would cease to be an artist.&nbsp; A fresh mode of Beauty
+is absolutely distasteful to them, and whenever it appears they get
+so angry, and bewildered that they always use two stupid expressions&mdash;one
+is that the work of art is grossly unintelligible; the other, that the
+work of art is grossly immoral.&nbsp; What they mean by these words
+seems to me to be this.&nbsp; When they say a work is grossly unintelligible,
+they mean that the artist has said or made a beautiful thing that is
+new; when they describe a work as grossly immoral, they mean that the
+artist has said or made a beautiful thing that is true.&nbsp; The former
+expression has reference to style; the latter to subject-matter.&nbsp;
+But they probably use the words very vaguely, as an ordinary mob will
+use ready-made paving-stones.&nbsp; There is not a single real poet
+or prose-writer of this century, for instance, on whom the British public
+have not solemnly conferred diplomas of immorality, and these diplomas
+practically take the place, with us, of what in France, is the formal
+recognition of an Academy of Letters, and fortunately make the establishment
+of such an institution quite unnecessary in England.&nbsp; Of course,
+the public are very reckless in their use of the word.&nbsp; That they
+should have called Wordsworth an immoral poet, was only to be expected.&nbsp;
+Wordsworth was a poet.&nbsp; But that they should have called Charles
+Kingsley an immoral novelist is extraordinary.&nbsp; Kingsley&rsquo;s
+prose was not of a very fine quality.&nbsp; Still, there is the word,
+and they use it as best they can.&nbsp; An artist is, of course, not
+disturbed by it.&nbsp; The true artist is a man who believes absolutely
+in himself, because he is absolutely himself.&nbsp; But I can fancy
+that if an artist produced a work of art in England that immediately
+on its appearance was recognised by the public, through their medium,
+which is the public press, as a work that was quite intelligible and
+highly moral, he would begin to seriously question whether in its creation
+he had really been himself at all, and consequently whether the work
+was not quite unworthy of him, and either of a thoroughly second-rate
+order, or of no artistic value whatsoever.</p>
+<p>Perhaps, however, I have wronged the public in limiting them to such
+words as &lsquo;immoral,&rsquo; &lsquo;unintelligible,&rsquo; &lsquo;exotic,&rsquo;
+and &lsquo;unhealthy.&rsquo;&nbsp; There is one other word that they
+use.&nbsp; That word is &lsquo;morbid.&rsquo;&nbsp; They do not use
+it often.&nbsp; The meaning of the word is so simple that they are afraid
+of using it.&nbsp; Still, they use it sometimes, and, now and then,
+one comes across it in popular newspapers.&nbsp; It is, of course, a
+ridiculous word to apply to a work of art.&nbsp; For what is morbidity
+but a mood of emotion or a mode of thought that one cannot express?&nbsp;
+The public are all morbid, because the public can never find expression
+for anything.&nbsp; The artist is never morbid.&nbsp; He expresses everything.&nbsp;
+He stands outside his subject, and through its medium produces incomparable
+and artistic effects.&nbsp; To call an artist morbid because he deals
+with morbidity as his subject-matter is as silly as if one called Shakespeare
+mad because he wrote &lsquo;King Lear.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>On the whole, an artist in England gains something by being attacked.&nbsp;
+His individuality is intensified.&nbsp; He becomes more completely himself.&nbsp;
+Of course, the attacks are very gross, very impertinent, and very contemptible.&nbsp;
+But then no artist expects grace from the vulgar mind, or style from
+the suburban intellect.&nbsp; Vulgarity and stupidity are two very vivid
+facts in modern life.&nbsp; One regrets them, naturally.&nbsp; But there
+they are.&nbsp; They are subjects for study, like everything else.&nbsp;
+And it is only fair to state, with regard to modern journalists, that
+they always apologise to one in private for what they have written against
+one in public.</p>
+<p>Within the last few years two other adjectives, it may be mentioned,
+have been added to the very limited vocabulary of art-abuse that is
+at the disposal of the public.&nbsp; One is the word &lsquo;unhealthy,&rsquo;
+the other is the word &lsquo;exotic.&rsquo;&nbsp; The latter merely
+expresses the rage of the momentary mushroom against the immortal, entrancing,
+and exquisitely lovely orchid.&nbsp; It is a tribute, but a tribute
+of no importance.&nbsp; The word &lsquo;unhealthy,&rsquo; however, admits
+of analysis.&nbsp; It is a rather interesting word.&nbsp; In fact, it
+is so interesting that the people who use it do not know what it means.</p>
+<p>What does it mean?&nbsp; What is a healthy, or an unhealthy work
+of art?&nbsp; All terms that one applies to a work of art, provided
+that one applies them rationally, have reference to either its style
+or its subject, or to both together.&nbsp; From the point of view of
+style, a healthy work of art is one whose style recognises the beauty
+of the material it employs, be that material one of words or of bronze,
+of colour or of ivory, and uses that beauty as a factor in producing
+the aesthetic effect.&nbsp; From the point of view of subject, a healthy
+work of art is one the choice of whose subject is conditioned by the
+temperament of the artist, and comes directly out of it.&nbsp; In fine,
+a healthy work of art is one that has both perfection and personality.&nbsp;
+Of course, form and substance cannot be separated in a work of art;
+they are always one.&nbsp; But for purposes of analysis, and setting
+the wholeness of aesthetic impression aside for a moment, we can intellectually
+so separate them.&nbsp; An unhealthy work of art, on the other hand,
+is a work whose style is obvious, old-fashioned, and common, and whose
+subject is deliberately chosen, not because the artist has any pleasure
+in it, but because he thinks that the public will pay him for it.&nbsp;
+In fact, the popular novel that the public calls healthy is always a
+thoroughly unhealthy production; and what the public call an unhealthy
+novel is always a beautiful and healthy work of art.</p>
+<p>I need hardly say that I am not, for a single moment, complaining
+that the public and the public press misuse these words.&nbsp; I do
+not see how, with their lack of comprehension of what Art is, they could
+possibly use them in the proper sense.&nbsp; I am merely pointing out
+the misuse; and as for the origin of the misuse and the meaning that
+lies behind it all, the explanation is very simple.&nbsp; It comes from
+the barbarous conception of authority.&nbsp; It comes from the natural
+inability of a community corrupted by authority to understand or appreciate
+Individualism.&nbsp; In a word, it comes from that monstrous and ignorant
+thing that is called Public Opinion, which, bad and well-meaning as
+it is when it tries to control action, is infamous and of evil meaning
+when it tries to control Thought or Art.</p>
+<p>Indeed, there is much more to be said in favour of the physical force
+of the public than there is in favour of the public&rsquo;s opinion.&nbsp;
+The former may be fine.&nbsp; The latter must be foolish.&nbsp; It is
+often said that force is no argument.&nbsp; That, however, entirely
+depends on what one wants to prove.&nbsp; Many of the most important
+problems of the last few centuries, such as the continuance of personal
+government in England, or of feudalism in France, have been solved entirely
+by means of physical force.&nbsp; The very violence of a revolution
+may make the public grand and splendid for a moment.&nbsp; It was a
+fatal day when the public discovered that the pen is mightier than the
+paving-stone, and can be made as offensive as the brickbat.&nbsp; They
+at once sought for the journalist, found him, developed him, and made
+him their industrious and well-paid servant.&nbsp; It is greatly to
+be regretted, for both their sakes.&nbsp; Behind the barricade there
+may be much that is noble and heroic.&nbsp; But what is there behind
+the leading-article but prejudice, stupidity, cant, and twaddle?&nbsp;
+And when these four are joined together they make a terrible force,
+and constitute the new authority.</p>
+<p>In old days men had the rack.&nbsp; Now they have the press.&nbsp;
+That is an improvement certainly.&nbsp; But still it is very bad, and
+wrong, and demoralising.&nbsp; Somebody&mdash;was it Burke?&mdash;called
+journalism the fourth estate.&nbsp; That was true at the time, no doubt.&nbsp;
+But at the present moment it really is the only estate.&nbsp; It has
+eaten up the other three.&nbsp; The Lords Temporal say nothing, the
+Lords Spiritual have nothing to say, and the House of Commons has nothing
+to say and says it.&nbsp; We are dominated by Journalism.&nbsp; In America
+the President reigns for four years, and Journalism governs for ever
+and ever.&nbsp; Fortunately in America Journalism has carried its authority
+to the grossest and most brutal extreme.&nbsp; As a natural consequence
+it has begun to create a spirit of revolt.&nbsp; People are amused by
+it, or disgusted by it, according to their temperaments.&nbsp; But it
+is no longer the real force it was.&nbsp; It is not seriously treated.&nbsp;
+In England, Journalism, not, except in a few well-known instances, having
+been carried to such excesses of brutality, is still a great factor,
+a really remarkable power.&nbsp; The tyranny that it proposes to exercise
+over people&rsquo;s private lives seems to me to be quite extraordinary.&nbsp;
+The fact is, that the public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything,
+except what is worth knowing.&nbsp; Journalism, conscious of this, and
+having tradesman-like habits, supplies their demands.&nbsp; In centuries
+before ours the public nailed the ears of journalists to the pump.&nbsp;
+That was quite hideous.&nbsp; In this century journalists have nailed
+their own ears to the keyhole.&nbsp; That is much worse.&nbsp; And what
+aggravates the mischief is that the journalists who are most to blame
+are not the amusing journalists who write for what are called Society
+papers.&nbsp; The harm is done by the serious, thoughtful, earnest journalists,
+who solemnly, as they are doing at present, will drag before the eyes
+of the public some incident in the private life of a great statesman,
+of a man who is a leader of political thought as he is a creator of
+political force, and invite the public to discuss the incident, to exercise
+authority in the matter, to give their views, and not merely to give
+their views, but to carry them into action, to dictate to the man upon
+all other points, to dictate to his party, to dictate to his country;
+in fact, to make themselves ridiculous, offensive, and harmful.&nbsp;
+The private lives of men and women should not be told to the public.&nbsp;
+The public have nothing to do with them at all.&nbsp; In France they
+manage these things better.&nbsp; There they do not allow the details
+of the trials that take place in the divorce courts to be published
+for the amusement or criticism of the public.&nbsp; All that the public
+are allowed to know is that the divorce has taken place and was granted
+on petition of one or other or both of the married parties concerned.&nbsp;
+In France, in fact, they limit the journalist, and allow the artist
+almost perfect freedom.&nbsp; Here we allow absolute freedom to the
+journalist, and entirely limit the artist.&nbsp; English public opinion,
+that is to say, tries to constrain and impede and warp the man who makes
+things that are beautiful in effect, and compels the journalist to retail
+things that are ugly, or disgusting, or revolting in fact, so that we
+have the most serious journalists in the world, and the most indecent
+newspapers.&nbsp; It is no exaggeration to talk of compulsion.&nbsp;
+There are possibly some journalists who take a real pleasure in publishing
+horrible things, or who, being poor, look to scandals as forming a sort
+of permanent basis for an income.&nbsp; But there are other journalists,
+I feel certain, men of education and cultivation, who really dislike
+publishing these things, who know that it is wrong to do so, and only
+do it because the unhealthy conditions under which their occupation
+is carried on oblige them to supply the public with what the public
+wants, and to compete with other journalists in making that supply as
+full and satisfying to the gross popular appetite as possible.&nbsp;
+It is a very degrading position for any body of educated men to be placed
+in, and I have no doubt that most of them feel it acutely.</p>
+<p>However, let us leave what is really a very sordid side of the subject,
+and return to the question of popular control in the matter of Art,
+by which I mean Public Opinion dictating to the artist the form which
+he is to use, the mode in which he is to use it, and the materials with
+which he is to work.&nbsp; I have pointed out that the arts which have
+escaped best in England are the arts in which the public have not been
+interested.&nbsp; They are, however, interested in the drama, and as
+a certain advance has been made in the drama within the last ten or
+fifteen years, it is important to point out that this advance is entirely
+due to a few individual artists refusing to accept the popular want
+of taste as their standard, and refusing to regard Art as a mere matter
+of demand and supply.&nbsp; With his marvellous and vivid personality,
+with a style that has really a true colour-element in it, with his extraordinary
+power, not over mere mimicry but over imaginative and intellectual creation,
+Mr Irving, had his sole object been to give the public what they wanted,
+could have produced the commonest plays in the commonest manner, and
+made as much success and money as a man could possibly desire.&nbsp;
+But his object was not that.&nbsp; His object was to realise his own
+perfection as an artist, under certain conditions, and in certain forms
+of Art.&nbsp; At first he appealed to the few: now he has educated the
+many.&nbsp; He has created in the public both taste and temperament.&nbsp;
+The public appreciate his artistic success immensely.&nbsp; I often
+wonder, however, whether the public understand that that success is
+entirely due to the fact that he did not accept their standard, but
+realised his own.&nbsp; With their standard the Lyceum would have been
+a sort of second-rate booth, as some of the popular theatres in London
+are at present.&nbsp; Whether they understand it or not the fact however
+remains, that taste and temperament have, to a certain extent been created
+in the public, and that the public is capable of developing these qualities.&nbsp;
+The problem then is, why do not the public become more civilised?&nbsp;
+They have the capacity.&nbsp; What stops them?</p>
+<p>The thing that stops them, it must be said again, is their desire
+to exercise authority over the artist and over works of art.&nbsp; To
+certain theatres, such as the Lyceum and the Haymarket, the public seem
+to come in a proper mood.&nbsp; In both of these theatres there have
+been individual artists, who have succeeded in creating in their audiences&mdash;and
+every theatre in London has its own audience&mdash;the temperament to
+which Art appeals.&nbsp; And what is that temperament?&nbsp; It is the
+temperament of receptivity.&nbsp; That is all.</p>
+<p>If a man approaches a work of art with any desire to exercise authority
+over it and the artist, he approaches it in such a spirit that he cannot
+receive any artistic impression from it at all.&nbsp; The work of art
+is to dominate the spectator: the spectator is not to dominate the work
+of art.&nbsp; The spectator is to be receptive.&nbsp; He is to be the
+violin on which the master is to play.&nbsp; And the more completely
+he can suppress his own silly views, his own foolish prejudices, his
+own absurd ideas of what Art should be, or should not be, the more likely
+he is to understand and appreciate the work of art in question.&nbsp;
+This is, of course, quite obvious in the case of the vulgar theatre-going
+public of English men and women.&nbsp; But it is equally true of what
+are called educated people.&nbsp; For an educated person&rsquo;s ideas
+of Art are drawn naturally from what Art has been, whereas the new work
+of art is beautiful by being what Art has never been; and to measure
+it by the standard of the past is to measure it by a standard on the
+rejection of which its real perfection depends.&nbsp; A temperament
+capable of receiving, through an imaginative medium, and under imaginative
+conditions, new and beautiful impressions, is the only temperament that
+can appreciate a work of art.&nbsp; And true as this is in the case
+of the appreciation of sculpture and painting, it is still more true
+of the appreciation of such arts as the drama.&nbsp; For a picture and
+a statue are not at war with Time.&nbsp; They take no count of its succession.&nbsp;
+In one moment their unity may be apprehended.&nbsp; In the case of literature
+it is different.&nbsp; Time must be traversed before the unity of effect
+is realised.&nbsp; And so, in the drama, there may occur in the first
+act of the play something whose real artistic value may not be evident
+to the spectator till the third or fourth act is reached.&nbsp; Is the
+silly fellow to get angry and call out, and disturb the play, and annoy
+the artists?&nbsp; No.&nbsp; The honest man is to sit quietly, and know
+the delightful emotions of wonder, curiosity, and suspense.&nbsp; He
+is not to go to the play to lose a vulgar temper.&nbsp; He is to go
+to the play to realise an artistic temperament.&nbsp; He is to go to
+the play to gain an artistic temperament.&nbsp; He is not the arbiter
+of the work of art.&nbsp; He is one who is admitted to contemplate the
+work of art, and, if the work be fine, to forget in its contemplation
+and the egotism that mars him&mdash;the egotism of his ignorance, or
+the egotism of his information.&nbsp; This point about the drama is
+hardly, I think, sufficiently recognised.&nbsp; I can quite understand
+that were &lsquo;Macbeth&rsquo; produced for the first time before a
+modern London audience, many of the people present would strongly and
+vigorously object to the introduction of the witches in the first act,
+with their grotesque phrases and their ridiculous words.&nbsp; But when
+the play is over one realises that the laughter of the witches in &lsquo;Macbeth&rsquo;
+is as terrible as the laughter of madness in &lsquo;Lear,&rsquo; more
+terrible than the laughter of Iago in the tragedy of the Moor.&nbsp;
+No spectator of art needs a more perfect mood of receptivity than the
+spectator of a play.&nbsp; The moment he seeks to exercise authority
+he becomes the avowed enemy of Art and of himself.&nbsp; Art does not
+mind.&nbsp; It is he who suffers.</p>
+<p>With the novel it is the same thing.&nbsp; Popular authority and
+the recognition of popular authority are fatal.&nbsp; Thackeray&rsquo;s
+&lsquo;Esmond&rsquo; is a beautiful work of art because he wrote it
+to please himself.&nbsp; In his other novels, in &lsquo;Pendennis,&rsquo;
+in &lsquo;Philip,&rsquo; in &lsquo;Vanity Fair&rsquo; even, at times,
+he is too conscious of the public, and spoils his work by appealing
+directly to the sympathies of the public, or by directly mocking at
+them.&nbsp; A true artist takes no notice whatever of the public.&nbsp;
+The public are to him non-existent.&nbsp; He has no poppied or honeyed
+cakes through which to give the monster sleep or sustenance.&nbsp; He
+leaves that to the popular novelist.&nbsp; One incomparable novelist
+we have now in England, Mr George Meredith.&nbsp; There are better artists
+in France, but France has no one whose view of life is so large, so
+varied, so imaginatively true.&nbsp; There are tellers of stories in
+Russia who have a more vivid sense of what pain in fiction may be.&nbsp;
+But to him belongs philosophy in fiction.&nbsp; His people not merely
+live, but they live in thought.&nbsp; One can see them from myriad points
+of view.&nbsp; They are suggestive.&nbsp; There is soul in them and
+around them.&nbsp; They are interpretative and symbolic.&nbsp; And he
+who made them, those wonderful quickly-moving figures, made them for
+his own pleasure, and has never asked the public what they wanted, has
+never cared to know what they wanted, has never allowed the public to
+dictate to him or influence him in any way but has gone on intensifying
+his own personality, and producing his own individual work.&nbsp; At
+first none came to him.&nbsp; That did not matter.&nbsp; Then the few
+came to him.&nbsp; That did not change him.&nbsp; The many have come
+now.&nbsp; He is still the same.&nbsp; He is an incomparable novelist.&nbsp;
+With the decorative arts it is not different.&nbsp; The public clung
+with really pathetic tenacity to what I believe were the direct traditions
+of the Great Exhibition of international vulgarity, traditions that
+were so appalling that the houses in which people lived were only fit
+for blind people to live in.&nbsp; Beautiful things began to be made,
+beautiful colours came from the dyer&rsquo;s hand, beautiful patterns
+from the artist&rsquo;s brain, and the use of beautiful things and their
+value and importance were set forth.&nbsp; The public were really very
+indignant.&nbsp; They lost their temper.&nbsp; They said silly things.&nbsp;
+No one minded.&nbsp; No one was a whit the worse.&nbsp; No one accepted
+the authority of public opinion.&nbsp; And now it is almost impossible
+to enter any modern house without seeing some recognition of good taste,
+some recognition of the value of lovely surroundings, some sign of appreciation
+of beauty.&nbsp; In fact, people&rsquo;s houses are, as a rule, quite
+charming nowadays.&nbsp; People have been to a very great extent civilised.&nbsp;
+It is only fair to state, however, that the extraordinary success of
+the revolution in house-decoration and furniture and the like has not
+really been due to the majority of the public developing a very fine
+taste in such matters.&nbsp; It has been chiefly due to the fact that
+the craftsmen of things so appreciated the pleasure of making what was
+beautiful, and woke to such a vivid consciousness of the hideousness
+and vulgarity of what the public had previously wanted, that they simply
+starved the public out.&nbsp; It would be quite impossible at the present
+moment to furnish a room as rooms were furnished a few years ago, without
+going for everything to an auction of second-hand furniture from some
+third-rate lodging-house.&nbsp; The things are no longer made.&nbsp;
+However they may object to it, people must nowadays have something charming
+in their surroundings.&nbsp; Fortunately for them, their assumption
+of authority in these art-matters came to entire grief.</p>
+<p>It is evident, then, that all authority in such things is bad.&nbsp;
+People sometimes inquire what form of government is most suitable for
+an artist to live under.&nbsp; To this question there is only one answer.&nbsp;
+The form of government that is most suitable to the artist is no government
+at all.&nbsp; Authority over him and his art is ridiculous.&nbsp; It
+has been stated that under despotisms artists have produced lovely work.&nbsp;
+This is not quite so.&nbsp; Artists have visited despots, not as subjects
+to be tyrannised over, but as wandering wonder-makers, as fascinating
+vagrant personalities, to be entertained and charmed and suffered to
+be at peace, and allowed to create.&nbsp; There is this to be said in
+favour of the despot, that he, being an individual, may have culture,
+while the mob, being a monster, has none.&nbsp; One who is an Emperor
+and King may stoop down to pick up a brush for a painter, but when the
+democracy stoops down it is merely to throw mud.&nbsp; And yet the democracy
+have not so far to stoop as the emperor.&nbsp; In fact, when they want
+to throw mud they have not to stoop at all.&nbsp; But there is no necessity
+to separate the monarch from the mob; all authority is equally bad.</p>
+<p>There are three kinds of despots.&nbsp; There is the despot who tyrannises
+over the body.&nbsp; There is the despot who tyrannises over the soul.&nbsp;
+There is the despot who tyrannises over the soul and body alike.&nbsp;
+The first is called the Prince.&nbsp; The second is called the Pope.&nbsp;
+The third is called the People.&nbsp; The Prince may be cultivated.&nbsp;
+Many Princes have been.&nbsp; Yet in the Prince there is danger.&nbsp;
+One thinks of Dante at the bitter feast in Verona, of Tasso in Ferrara&rsquo;s
+madman&rsquo;s cell.&nbsp; It is better for the artist not to live with
+Princes.&nbsp; The Pope may be cultivated.&nbsp; Many Popes have been;
+the bad Popes have been.&nbsp; The bad Popes loved Beauty, almost as
+passionately, nay, with as much passion as the good Popes hated Thought.&nbsp;
+To the wickedness of the Papacy humanity owes much.&nbsp; The goodness
+of the Papacy owes a terrible debt to humanity.&nbsp; Yet, though the
+Vatican has kept the rhetoric of its thunders, and lost the rod of its
+lightning, it is better for the artist not to live with Popes.&nbsp;
+It was a Pope who said of Cellini to a conclave of Cardinals that common
+laws and common authority were not made for men such as he; but it was
+a Pope who thrust Cellini into prison, and kept him there till he sickened
+with rage, and created unreal visions for himself, and saw the gilded
+sun enter his room, and grew so enamoured of it that he sought to escape,
+and crept out from tower to tower, and falling through dizzy air at
+dawn, maimed himself, and was by a vine-dresser covered with vine leaves,
+and carried in a cart to one who, loving beautiful things, had care
+of him.&nbsp; There is danger in Popes.&nbsp; And as for the People,
+what of them and their authority?&nbsp; Perhaps of them and their authority
+one has spoken enough.&nbsp; Their authority is a thing blind, deaf,
+hideous, grotesque, tragic, amusing, serious, and obscene.&nbsp; It
+is impossible for the artist to live with the People.&nbsp; All despots
+bribe.&nbsp; The people bribe and brutalise.&nbsp; Who told them to
+exercise authority?&nbsp; They were made to live, to listen, and to
+love.&nbsp; Someone has done them a great wrong.&nbsp; They have marred
+themselves by imitation of their inferiors.&nbsp; They have taken the
+sceptre of the Prince.&nbsp; How should they use it?&nbsp; They have
+taken the triple tiara of the Pope.&nbsp; How should they carry its
+burden?&nbsp; They are as a clown whose heart is broken.&nbsp; They
+are as a priest whose soul is not yet born.&nbsp; Let all who love Beauty
+pity them.&nbsp; Though they themselves love not Beauty, yet let them
+pity themselves.&nbsp; Who taught them the trick of tyranny?</p>
+<p>There are many other things that one might point out.&nbsp; One might
+point out how the Renaissance was great, because it sought to solve
+no social problem, and busied itself not about such things, but suffered
+the individual to develop freely, beautifully, and naturally, and so
+had great and individual artists, and great and individual men.&nbsp;
+One might point out how Louis XIV., by creating the modern state, destroyed
+the individualism of the artist, and made things monstrous in their
+monotony of repetition, and contemptible in their conformity to rule,
+and destroyed throughout all France all those fine freedoms of expression
+that had made tradition new in beauty, and new modes one with antique
+form.&nbsp; But the past is of no importance.&nbsp; The present is of
+no importance.&nbsp; It is with the future that we have to deal.&nbsp;
+For the past is what man should not have been.&nbsp; The present is
+what man ought not to be.&nbsp; The future is what artists are.</p>
+<p>It will, of course, be said that such a scheme as is set forth here
+is quite unpractical, and goes against human nature.&nbsp; This is perfectly
+true.&nbsp; It is unpractical, and it goes against human nature.&nbsp;
+This is why it is worth carrying out, and that is why one proposes it.&nbsp;
+For what is a practical scheme?&nbsp; A practical scheme is either a
+scheme that is already in existence, or a scheme that could be carried
+out under existing conditions.&nbsp; But it is exactly the existing
+conditions that one objects to; and any scheme that could accept these
+conditions is wrong and foolish.&nbsp; The conditions will be done away
+with, and human nature will change.&nbsp; The only thing that one really
+knows about human nature is that it changes.&nbsp; Change is the one
+quality we can predicate of it.&nbsp; The systems that fail are those
+that rely on the permanency of human nature, and not on its growth and
+development.&nbsp; The error of Louis XIV. was that he thought human
+nature would always be the same.&nbsp; The result of his error was the
+French Revolution.&nbsp; It was an admirable result.&nbsp; All the results
+of the mistakes of governments are quite admirable.</p>
+<p>It is to be noted also that Individualism does not come to man with
+any sickly cant about duty, which merely means doing what other people
+want because they want it; or any hideous cant about self-sacrifice,
+which is merely a survival of savage mutilation.&nbsp; In fact, it does
+not come to man with any claims upon him at all.&nbsp; It comes naturally
+and inevitably out of man.&nbsp; It is the point to which all development
+tends.&nbsp; It is the differentiation to which all organisms grow.&nbsp;
+It is the perfection that is inherent in every mode of life, and towards
+which every mode of life quickens.&nbsp; And so Individualism exercises
+no compulsion over man.&nbsp; On the contrary, it says to man that he
+should suffer no compulsion to be exercised over him.&nbsp; It does
+not try to force people to be good.&nbsp; It knows that people are good
+when they are let alone.&nbsp; Man will develop Individualism out of
+himself.&nbsp; Man is now so developing Individualism.&nbsp; To ask
+whether Individualism is practical is like asking whether Evolution
+is practical.&nbsp; Evolution is the law of life, and there is no evolution
+except towards Individualism.&nbsp; Where this tendency is not expressed,
+it is a case of artificially-arrested growth, or of disease, or of death.</p>
+<p>Individualism will also be unselfish and unaffected.&nbsp; It has
+been pointed out that one of the results of the extraordinary tyranny
+of authority is that words are absolutely distorted from their proper
+and simple meaning, and are used to express the obverse of their right
+signification.&nbsp; What is true about Art is true about Life.&nbsp;
+A man is called affected, nowadays, if he dresses as he likes to dress.&nbsp;
+But in doing that he is acting in a perfectly natural manner.&nbsp;
+Affectation, in such matters, consists in dressing according to the
+views of one&rsquo;s neighbour, whose views, as they are the views of
+the majority, will probably be extremely stupid.&nbsp; Or a man is called
+selfish if he lives in the manner that seems to him most suitable for
+the full realisation of his own personality; if, in fact, the primary
+aim of his life is self-development.&nbsp; But this is the way in which
+everyone should live.&nbsp; Selfishness is not living as one wishes
+to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.&nbsp; And
+unselfishness is letting other people&rsquo;s lives alone, not interfering
+with them.&nbsp; Selfishness always aims at creating around it an absolute
+uniformity of type.&nbsp; Unselfishness recognises infinite variety
+of type as a delightful thing, accepts it, acquiesces in it, enjoys
+it.&nbsp; It is not selfish to think for oneself.&nbsp; A man who does
+not think for himself does not think at all.&nbsp; It is grossly selfish
+to require of ones neighbour that he should think in the same way, and
+hold the same opinions.&nbsp; Why should he?&nbsp; If he can think,
+he will probably think differently.&nbsp; If he cannot think, it is
+monstrous to require thought of any kind from him.&nbsp; A red rose
+is not selfish because it wants to be a red rose.&nbsp; It would be
+horribly selfish if it wanted all the other flowers in the garden to
+be both red and roses.&nbsp; Under Individualism people will be quite
+natural and absolutely unselfish, and will know the meanings of the
+words, and realise them in their free, beautiful lives.&nbsp; Nor will
+men be egotistic as they are now.&nbsp; For the egotist is he who makes
+claims upon others, and the Individualist will not desire to do that.&nbsp;
+It will not give him pleasure.&nbsp; When man has realised Individualism,
+he will also realise sympathy and exercise it freely and spontaneously.&nbsp;
+Up to the present man has hardly cultivated sympathy at all.&nbsp; He
+has merely sympathy with pain, and sympathy with pain is not the highest
+form of sympathy.&nbsp; All sympathy is fine, but sympathy with suffering
+is the least fine mode.&nbsp; It is tainted with egotism.&nbsp; It is
+apt to become morbid.&nbsp; There is in it a certain element of terror
+for our own safety.&nbsp; We become afraid that we ourselves might be
+as the leper or as the blind, and that no man would have care of us.&nbsp;
+It is curiously limiting, too.&nbsp; One should sympathise with the
+entirety of life, not with life&rsquo;s sores and maladies merely, but
+with life&rsquo;s joy and beauty and energy and health and freedom.&nbsp;
+The wider sympathy is, of course, the more difficult.&nbsp; It requires
+more unselfishness.&nbsp; Anybody can sympathise with the sufferings
+of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature&mdash;it requires, in
+fact, the nature of a true Individualist&mdash;to sympathise with a
+friend&rsquo;s success.</p>
+<p>In the modern stress of competition and struggle for place, such
+sympathy is naturally rare, and is also very much stifled by the immoral
+ideal of uniformity of type and conformity to rule which is so prevalent
+everywhere, and is perhaps most obnoxious in England.</p>
+<p>Sympathy with pain there will, of course, always be.&nbsp; It is
+one of the first instincts of man.&nbsp; The animals which are individual,
+the higher animals, that is to say, share it with us.&nbsp; But it must
+be remembered that while sympathy with joy intensifies the sum of joy
+in the world, sympathy with pain does not really diminish the amount
+of pain.&nbsp; It may make man better able to endure evil, but the evil
+remains.&nbsp; Sympathy with consumption does not cure consumption;
+that is what Science does.&nbsp; And when Socialism has solved the problem
+of poverty, and Science solved the problem of disease, the area of the
+sentimentalists will be lessened, and the sympathy of man will be large,
+healthy, and spontaneous.&nbsp; Man will have joy in the contemplation
+of the joyous life of others.</p>
+<p>For it is through joy that the Individualism of the future will develop
+itself.&nbsp; Christ made no attempt to reconstruct society, and consequently
+the Individualism that he preached to man could be realised only through
+pain or in solitude.&nbsp; The ideals that we owe to Christ are the
+ideals of the man who abandons society entirely, or of the man who resists
+society absolutely.&nbsp; But man is naturally social.&nbsp; Even the
+Thebaid became peopled at last.&nbsp; And though the cenobite realises
+his personality, it is often an impoverished personality that he so
+realises.&nbsp; Upon the other hand, the terrible truth that pain is
+a mode through which man may realise himself exercises a wonderful fascination
+over the world.&nbsp; Shallow speakers and shallow thinkers in pulpits
+and on platforms often talk about the world&rsquo;s worship of pleasure,
+and whine against it.&nbsp; But it is rarely in the world&rsquo;s history
+that its ideal has been one of joy and beauty.&nbsp; The worship of
+pain has far more often dominated the world.&nbsp; Mediaevalism, with
+its saints and martyrs, its love of self-torture, its wild passion for
+wounding itself, its gashing with knives, and its whipping with rods&mdash;Mediaevalism
+is real Christianity, and the mediaeval Christ is the real Christ.&nbsp;
+When the Renaissance dawned upon the world, and brought with it the
+new ideals of the beauty of life and the joy of living, men could not
+understand Christ.&nbsp; Even Art shows us that.&nbsp; The painters
+of the Renaissance drew Christ as a little boy playing with another
+boy in a palace or a garden, or lying back in his mother&rsquo;s arms,
+smiling at her, or at a flower, or at a bright bird; or as a noble,
+stately figure moving nobly through the world; or as a wonderful figure
+rising in a sort of ecstasy from death to life.&nbsp; Even when they
+drew him crucified they drew him as a beautiful God on whom evil men
+had inflicted suffering.&nbsp; But he did not preoccupy them much.&nbsp;
+What delighted them was to paint the men and women whom they admired,
+and to show the loveliness of this lovely earth.&nbsp; They painted
+many religious pictures&mdash;in fact, they painted far too many, and
+the monotony of type and motive is wearisome, and was bad for art.&nbsp;
+It was the result of the authority of the public in art-matters, and
+is to be deplored.&nbsp; But their soul was not in the subject.&nbsp;
+Raphael was a great artist when he painted his portrait of the Pope.&nbsp;
+When he painted his Madonnas and infant Christs, he is not a great artist
+at all.&nbsp; Christ had no message for the Renaissance, which was wonderful
+because it brought an ideal at variance with his, and to find the presentation
+of the real Christ we must go to mediaeval art.&nbsp; There he is one
+maimed and marred; one who is not comely to look on, because Beauty
+is a joy; one who is not in fair raiment, because that may be a joy
+also: he is a beggar who has a marvellous soul; he is a leper whose
+soul is divine; he needs neither property nor health; he is a God realising
+his perfection through pain.</p>
+<p>The evolution of man is slow.&nbsp; The injustice of men is great.&nbsp;
+It was necessary that pain should be put forward as a mode of self-realisation.&nbsp;
+Even now, in some places in the world, the message of Christ is necessary.&nbsp;
+No one who lived in modern Russia could possibly realise his perfection
+except by pain.&nbsp; A few Russian artists have realised themselves
+in Art; in a fiction that is mediaeval in character, because its dominant
+note is the realisation of men through suffering.&nbsp; But for those
+who are not artists, and to whom there is no mode of life but the actual
+life of fact, pain is the only door to perfection.&nbsp; A Russian who
+lives happily under the present system of government in Russia must
+either believe that man has no soul, or that, if he has, it is not worth
+developing.&nbsp; A Nihilist who rejects all authority, because he knows
+authority to be evil, and welcomes all pain, because through that he
+realises his personality, is a real Christian.&nbsp; To him the Christian
+ideal is a true thing.</p>
+<p>And yet, Christ did not revolt against authority.&nbsp; He accepted
+the imperial authority of the Roman Empire and paid tribute.&nbsp; He
+endured the ecclesiastical authority of the Jewish Church, and would
+not repel its violence by any violence of his own.&nbsp; He had, as
+I said before, no scheme for the reconstruction of society.&nbsp; But
+the modern world has schemes.&nbsp; It proposes to do away with poverty
+and the suffering that it entails.&nbsp; It desires to get rid of pain,
+and the suffering that pain entails.&nbsp; It trusts to Socialism and
+to Science as its methods.&nbsp; What it aims at is an Individualism
+expressing itself through joy.&nbsp; This Individualism will be larger,
+fuller, lovelier than any Individualism has ever been.&nbsp; Pain is
+not the ultimate mode of perfection.&nbsp; It is merely provisional
+and a protest.&nbsp; It has reference to wrong, unhealthy, unjust surroundings.&nbsp;
+When the wrong, and the disease, and the injustice are removed, it will
+have no further place.&nbsp; It will have done its work.&nbsp; It was
+a great work, but it is almost over.&nbsp; Its sphere lessens every
+day.</p>
+<p>Nor will man miss it.&nbsp; For what man has sought for is, indeed,
+neither pain nor pleasure, but simply Life.&nbsp; Man has sought to
+live intensely, fully, perfectly.&nbsp; When he can do so without exercising
+restraint on others, or suffering it ever, and his activities are all
+pleasurable to him, he will be saner, healthier, more civilised, more
+himself.&nbsp; Pleasure is Nature&rsquo;s test, her sign of approval.&nbsp;
+When man is happy, he is in harmony with himself and his environment.&nbsp;
+The new Individualism, for whose service Socialism, whether it wills
+it or not, is working, will be perfect harmony.&nbsp; It will be what
+the Greeks sought for, but could not, except in Thought, realise completely,
+because they had slaves, and fed them; it will be what the Renaissance
+sought for, but could not realise completely except in Art, because
+they had slaves, and starved them.&nbsp; It will be complete, and through
+it each man will attain to his perfection.&nbsp; The new Individualism
+is the new Hellenism.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines3"><br /><br /><br /></div>
+<p>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, THE SOUL OF MAN ***</p>
+<pre>
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