To
ask whether Individualism is practical is like asking whether Evolution
is practical.
ask whether Individualism is practical is like asking whether Evolution
is practical.
Oscar Wilde - Poetry
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 Prance 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 all, 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
daughter 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's 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 one's 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, hecauae
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 & Hall. _
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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 Prance 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 all, 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
daughter 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's 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 one's 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, hecauae
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 & Hall. _
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