It
is like advising a man who is starving to eat less.
is like advising a man who is starving to eat less.
Oscar Wilde - Aphorisms, the Soul of Man
Art takes life as part of
her rough material, recreates it and refashions it in fresh form; is
absolutely indifferent to facts; invents, imagines, dreams, and keeps
between herself and reality the impenetrable barrier of beautiful style,
of decorative or ideal treatment. The third stage is when Life gets the
upper hand and drives Art out into the wilderness. This is the true
decadence, and it is from this that we are now suffering.
Good intentions have been the ruin of the world. The only people who
have achieved anything have been those who have had no intentions at
all.
I never take any notice of what common people say, and I never interfere
with what charming people do.
You know I am not a champion of marriage. The real drawback to
marriage is that it makes one unselfish, and unselfish people are
colourless--they lack individuality. Still there are certain
temperaments that marriage makes more complex. They retain their
egotism, and add to it many other egos. They are forced to have more
than one life. They become more highly organised, and to be highly
organised is, I should fancy, the object of man's existence. Besides,
every experience is of value, and whatever one may say against marriage
it is certainly an experience.
Those who read the symbol do so at their peril.
I never talk during music--at least not during good music. If anyone
hears bad music it is one's duty to drown it in conversation.
When critics disagree the artist is in accord with himself.
Faith is the most plural thing I know. We are all supposed to believe in
the same thing in different ways. It is like eating out of the same dish
with different coloured spoons.
Experience is of no ethical value. It is merely the name men give to
their mistakes. Moralists have, as a rule, regarded it as a mode of
warning, have claimed for it a certain ethical efficacy in the formation
of character, have praised it as something that teaches us what to
follow and shows us what to avoid. But there is no motive power in
experience. It is as little of an active cause as conscience itself. All
that it really demonstrates is that our future will be the same as our
past and that the sin we have done once, and with loathing, we shall do
many times, and with joy.
Sensations are the details that build up the stories of our lives.
No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an
unpardonable mannerism of style.
She looks like an 'edition de luxe' of a wicked French novel meant
specially for the English market.
I never knew what terror was before; I know it now. It is as if a hand
of ice were laid upon one's heart. It is as if one's heart were beating
itself to death in some empty hollow.
We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not
admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one
admires it intensely.
No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are true can be
proved.
One knows so well the popular idea of health. The English country
gentleman galloping along after a fox--the unspeakable in pursuit of the
uneatable.
People seldom tell the truths that are worth telling. We ought to choose
our truths as carefully as we choose our lies and to select our virtues
with as much thought as we bestow upon the selection of our enemies.
Soul and body, body and soul--how mysterious they are! There is
animalism in the soul, and the body has its moments of spirituality. The
senses can refine and the intellect can degrade. Who can say where the
fleshly impulse ceases or the psychical impulse begins? How shallow are
the arbitrary definitions of ordinary psychologists! And yet how
difficult to decide between the claims of the various schools! Is the
soul a shadow seated in the house of sin? Or is the body really in the
soul, as Giordano Bruno thought? The separation of spirit from matter is
a mystery, and the unison of spirit with matter is a mystery also.
Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the
cultivated. For these there is hope.
There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well
written or badly written-that is all.
Marriage is a sort of forcing house. It brings strange sins to fruit,
and sometimes strange renunciations.
The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist,
but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect
medium.
A sense of duty is like some horrible disease. It destroys the tissues
of the mind, as certain complaints destroy the tissues of the body. The
catechism has a great deal to answer for.
They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only beauty.
Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without
being charming. This is a fault.
Few people have sufficient strength to resist the preposterous claims of
orthodoxy.
She wore far too much rouge last night and not quite enough clothes.
That is always a sign of despair in a woman.
A virtue is like a city set upon a hill--it cannot be hid. We can
conceal our vices if we care to--for a time at least--but a virtue will
out.
Can't make out how you stand London society. The thing has gone to the
dogs: a lot of damned nobodies talking about nothing.
You don't know what an existence they lead down there. It is pure,
unadulterated country life. They get up early because they have so much
to do, and go to bed early because they have so little to think about.
Nothing is so fatal to a personality as the keeping of promises, unless
it be telling the truth.
Who cares whether Mr Ruskin's views on Turner are sound or not? What
does it matter? That mighty and majestic prose of his, so fervid and so
fiery coloured in its noble eloquence, so rich in its elaborate
symphonic music, so sure and certain, at its best, in subtle choice of
word and epithet, is, at least, as great a work of art as any of those
wonderful sunsets that bleach or rot on their corrupted canvases in
England's gallery--greater, indeed, one is apt to think at times, not
merely because its equal beauty is more enduring but on account of the
fuller variety of its appeal--soul speaking to soul in those long,
cadenced lines, not through form and colour alone, though through these,
indeed, completely and without loss, but with intellectual and emotional
utterance, with lofty passion and with loftier thought, with imaginative
insight and with poetic aim--greater, I always think, even as literature
is the greater art.
Laughter is not at all a bad beginning for a friendship, and it is far
the best ending for one.
Mrs Cheveley is one of those very modern women of our time who find a
new scandal as becoming as a new bonnet, and air them both in the Park
every afternoon at 5. 30. I am sure she adores scandals, and that the
sorrow of her life at present is that she can't manage to have enough of
them.
The world divides actions into three classes: good actions, bad actions
that you may do, and bad actions that you may not do. If you stick to
the good actions you are respected by the good. If you stick to the bad
actions that you may do you are respected by the bad. But if you perform
the bad actions that no one may do then the good and the bad set upon
you and you are lost indeed.
I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their
good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects.
The artist is the creator of beautiful things.
To me the word 'natural' means all that is middle class, all that is of
the essence of Jingoism, all that is colourless and without form and
void. It might be a beautiful word, but it is the most debased coin in
the currency of language.
I pity any woman who is married to a man called John. She would probably
never be allowed to know the entrancing pleasure of a single moment's
solitude.
It is only when we have learned to love forgetfulness that we have
learned the art of living.
To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim.
The world taken 'en masse' is a monster, crammed with prejudices, packed
with prepossessions, cankered with what it calls virtues, a Puritan, a
prig. And the art of life is the art of defiance. To defy--that is what
we ought to live for, instead of living, as we do, to acquiesce.
Some resemblance the creative work of the critic will have to the work
that has stirred him to creation, but it will be such resemblance as
exists, not between nature and the mirror that the painter of landscape
or figure may be supposed to hold up to her, but between nature and the
work of the decorative artist. Just as on the flowerless carpets of
Persia tulip and rose blossom indeed, and are lovely to look on, though
they are not reproduced in visible shape or line; just as the pearl and
purple of the sea shell is echoed in the church of St Mark at Venice;
just as the vaulted ceiling of the wondrous chapel at Ravenna is made
gorgeous by the gold and green and sapphire of the peacock's tail,
though the birds of Juno fly not across it; so the critic reproduces the
work that he criticises in a mode that is never imitative, and part of
whose charm may really consist in the rejection of resemblance, and
shows us in this way not merely the meaning but also the mystery of
beauty, and by transforming each art into literature solves once for all
the problem of art's unity.
Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new,
complex, and vital.
Nothing is more painful to me than to come across virtue in a person in
whom I have never suspected its existence. It is like finding a needle
in a bundle of hay. It pricks you. If we have virtue we should warn
people of it.
The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material
his impression of beautiful things.
Hopper is one of nature's gentlemen--the worst type of gentleman I
know.
If one intends to be good one must take it up as a profession. It is
quite the most engrossing one in the world.
I like Wagner's music better than anybody's. It is so loud that one can
talk the whole time without other people hearing what one says.
All art is at once surface and symbol.
Childhood is one long career of innocent eavesdropping, of hearing what
one ought not to hear.
The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography.
The only things worth saying are those that we forget, just as the only
things worth doing are those that the world is surprised at.
Maturity is one long career of saying what one ought not to say. That is
the art of conversation.
Virtue is generally merely a form of deficiency, just as vice is an
assertion of intellect.
People teach in order to conceal their ignorance, as people smile in
order to conceal their tears.
To be unnatural is often to be great. To be natural is generally to be
stupid.
To lie finely is an art, to tell the truth is to act according to
nature.
People who talk sense are like people who break stones in the road: they
cover one with dust and splinters.
Jesus 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 perfection 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. 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.
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.
An echo is often more beautiful than the voice it repeats.
* * * * *
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 it's 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 riot 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 of 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 he.
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 intensity 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 perfection 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.
her rough material, recreates it and refashions it in fresh form; is
absolutely indifferent to facts; invents, imagines, dreams, and keeps
between herself and reality the impenetrable barrier of beautiful style,
of decorative or ideal treatment. The third stage is when Life gets the
upper hand and drives Art out into the wilderness. This is the true
decadence, and it is from this that we are now suffering.
Good intentions have been the ruin of the world. The only people who
have achieved anything have been those who have had no intentions at
all.
I never take any notice of what common people say, and I never interfere
with what charming people do.
You know I am not a champion of marriage. The real drawback to
marriage is that it makes one unselfish, and unselfish people are
colourless--they lack individuality. Still there are certain
temperaments that marriage makes more complex. They retain their
egotism, and add to it many other egos. They are forced to have more
than one life. They become more highly organised, and to be highly
organised is, I should fancy, the object of man's existence. Besides,
every experience is of value, and whatever one may say against marriage
it is certainly an experience.
Those who read the symbol do so at their peril.
I never talk during music--at least not during good music. If anyone
hears bad music it is one's duty to drown it in conversation.
When critics disagree the artist is in accord with himself.
Faith is the most plural thing I know. We are all supposed to believe in
the same thing in different ways. It is like eating out of the same dish
with different coloured spoons.
Experience is of no ethical value. It is merely the name men give to
their mistakes. Moralists have, as a rule, regarded it as a mode of
warning, have claimed for it a certain ethical efficacy in the formation
of character, have praised it as something that teaches us what to
follow and shows us what to avoid. But there is no motive power in
experience. It is as little of an active cause as conscience itself. All
that it really demonstrates is that our future will be the same as our
past and that the sin we have done once, and with loathing, we shall do
many times, and with joy.
Sensations are the details that build up the stories of our lives.
No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an
unpardonable mannerism of style.
She looks like an 'edition de luxe' of a wicked French novel meant
specially for the English market.
I never knew what terror was before; I know it now. It is as if a hand
of ice were laid upon one's heart. It is as if one's heart were beating
itself to death in some empty hollow.
We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not
admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one
admires it intensely.
No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are true can be
proved.
One knows so well the popular idea of health. The English country
gentleman galloping along after a fox--the unspeakable in pursuit of the
uneatable.
People seldom tell the truths that are worth telling. We ought to choose
our truths as carefully as we choose our lies and to select our virtues
with as much thought as we bestow upon the selection of our enemies.
Soul and body, body and soul--how mysterious they are! There is
animalism in the soul, and the body has its moments of spirituality. The
senses can refine and the intellect can degrade. Who can say where the
fleshly impulse ceases or the psychical impulse begins? How shallow are
the arbitrary definitions of ordinary psychologists! And yet how
difficult to decide between the claims of the various schools! Is the
soul a shadow seated in the house of sin? Or is the body really in the
soul, as Giordano Bruno thought? The separation of spirit from matter is
a mystery, and the unison of spirit with matter is a mystery also.
Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the
cultivated. For these there is hope.
There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well
written or badly written-that is all.
Marriage is a sort of forcing house. It brings strange sins to fruit,
and sometimes strange renunciations.
The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist,
but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect
medium.
A sense of duty is like some horrible disease. It destroys the tissues
of the mind, as certain complaints destroy the tissues of the body. The
catechism has a great deal to answer for.
They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only beauty.
Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without
being charming. This is a fault.
Few people have sufficient strength to resist the preposterous claims of
orthodoxy.
She wore far too much rouge last night and not quite enough clothes.
That is always a sign of despair in a woman.
A virtue is like a city set upon a hill--it cannot be hid. We can
conceal our vices if we care to--for a time at least--but a virtue will
out.
Can't make out how you stand London society. The thing has gone to the
dogs: a lot of damned nobodies talking about nothing.
You don't know what an existence they lead down there. It is pure,
unadulterated country life. They get up early because they have so much
to do, and go to bed early because they have so little to think about.
Nothing is so fatal to a personality as the keeping of promises, unless
it be telling the truth.
Who cares whether Mr Ruskin's views on Turner are sound or not? What
does it matter? That mighty and majestic prose of his, so fervid and so
fiery coloured in its noble eloquence, so rich in its elaborate
symphonic music, so sure and certain, at its best, in subtle choice of
word and epithet, is, at least, as great a work of art as any of those
wonderful sunsets that bleach or rot on their corrupted canvases in
England's gallery--greater, indeed, one is apt to think at times, not
merely because its equal beauty is more enduring but on account of the
fuller variety of its appeal--soul speaking to soul in those long,
cadenced lines, not through form and colour alone, though through these,
indeed, completely and without loss, but with intellectual and emotional
utterance, with lofty passion and with loftier thought, with imaginative
insight and with poetic aim--greater, I always think, even as literature
is the greater art.
Laughter is not at all a bad beginning for a friendship, and it is far
the best ending for one.
Mrs Cheveley is one of those very modern women of our time who find a
new scandal as becoming as a new bonnet, and air them both in the Park
every afternoon at 5. 30. I am sure she adores scandals, and that the
sorrow of her life at present is that she can't manage to have enough of
them.
The world divides actions into three classes: good actions, bad actions
that you may do, and bad actions that you may not do. If you stick to
the good actions you are respected by the good. If you stick to the bad
actions that you may do you are respected by the bad. But if you perform
the bad actions that no one may do then the good and the bad set upon
you and you are lost indeed.
I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their
good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects.
The artist is the creator of beautiful things.
To me the word 'natural' means all that is middle class, all that is of
the essence of Jingoism, all that is colourless and without form and
void. It might be a beautiful word, but it is the most debased coin in
the currency of language.
I pity any woman who is married to a man called John. She would probably
never be allowed to know the entrancing pleasure of a single moment's
solitude.
It is only when we have learned to love forgetfulness that we have
learned the art of living.
To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim.
The world taken 'en masse' is a monster, crammed with prejudices, packed
with prepossessions, cankered with what it calls virtues, a Puritan, a
prig. And the art of life is the art of defiance. To defy--that is what
we ought to live for, instead of living, as we do, to acquiesce.
Some resemblance the creative work of the critic will have to the work
that has stirred him to creation, but it will be such resemblance as
exists, not between nature and the mirror that the painter of landscape
or figure may be supposed to hold up to her, but between nature and the
work of the decorative artist. Just as on the flowerless carpets of
Persia tulip and rose blossom indeed, and are lovely to look on, though
they are not reproduced in visible shape or line; just as the pearl and
purple of the sea shell is echoed in the church of St Mark at Venice;
just as the vaulted ceiling of the wondrous chapel at Ravenna is made
gorgeous by the gold and green and sapphire of the peacock's tail,
though the birds of Juno fly not across it; so the critic reproduces the
work that he criticises in a mode that is never imitative, and part of
whose charm may really consist in the rejection of resemblance, and
shows us in this way not merely the meaning but also the mystery of
beauty, and by transforming each art into literature solves once for all
the problem of art's unity.
Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new,
complex, and vital.
Nothing is more painful to me than to come across virtue in a person in
whom I have never suspected its existence. It is like finding a needle
in a bundle of hay. It pricks you. If we have virtue we should warn
people of it.
The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material
his impression of beautiful things.
Hopper is one of nature's gentlemen--the worst type of gentleman I
know.
If one intends to be good one must take it up as a profession. It is
quite the most engrossing one in the world.
I like Wagner's music better than anybody's. It is so loud that one can
talk the whole time without other people hearing what one says.
All art is at once surface and symbol.
Childhood is one long career of innocent eavesdropping, of hearing what
one ought not to hear.
The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography.
The only things worth saying are those that we forget, just as the only
things worth doing are those that the world is surprised at.
Maturity is one long career of saying what one ought not to say. That is
the art of conversation.
Virtue is generally merely a form of deficiency, just as vice is an
assertion of intellect.
People teach in order to conceal their ignorance, as people smile in
order to conceal their tears.
To be unnatural is often to be great. To be natural is generally to be
stupid.
To lie finely is an art, to tell the truth is to act according to
nature.
People who talk sense are like people who break stones in the road: they
cover one with dust and splinters.
Jesus 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 perfection 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. 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.
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.
An echo is often more beautiful than the voice it repeats.
* * * * *
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 it's 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 riot 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 of 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 he.
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 intensity 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 perfection 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.
