|
|
Oscar Wilde:
THE SOUL OF MAN UNDER SOCIALISM
( Die Seele des Menschen im Sozialismus )
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 any one 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, hungerpinched 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 wellbeing
of each member of the community. It will, in fact, give Life its
proper basis and its proper environment. But for the full development
of Life to its highest mode of perfection, something more is needed.
What is needed is Individualism. If the Socialism is Authoritarian;
if there are Governments armed with economic power as they are now
with political power; if, in a word, we are to have Industrial Tyrannies,
then the last state of man will be worse than the first. At present,
in consequence of the existence of private property, a great many
people are enabled to develop a certain very limited amount of individualism.
They are either under no necessity to work for their living, or
are enabled to choose the sphere of activity that is really congenial
to them and gives them pleasure. These are the poets, the philosophers,
the men of science, the men of culture - in a word, the real men,
the men who have realised themselves, and in whom all Humanity gains
a partial realisation. Upon the other hand, there are a great many
people who, having no private property of their own, and being always
on the brink of sheer starvation, are compelled to do the work of
beasts of burden, to do work that is quite uncongenial to them,
and to which they are forced by the peremptory, unreasonable, degrading
Tyranny of want. These are the poor, and amongst them there is no
grace of manner, or charm of speech, or civilisation, or culture,
or refinement in pleasures, or joy of life. From their collective
force Humanity gains much in material prosperity. But it is only
the material result that it gains, and the man who is poor is in
himself absolutely of no importance. He is merely the infinitesimal
atom of a force that, so far from regarding him, crushes him: indeed,
prefers him crushed, as in that case he is far more obedient.
Of course, it might be said that the Individualism generated under
conditions of private property is not always, or even as a rule
of a fine or wonderful type, and that the poor, if they have not
culture and charm, have still many virtues. Both these statements
would be quite true. The possession of private property is very
often extremely demoralising, and that is, of course, one of the
reasons why Socialism wants to get rid of the institution. In fact,
property is really a nuisance. Some years ago people went about
the country saying that property has duties. They said it so often
and so tediously that, at last, the Church has begun to say it.
One hears it now from every pulpit. It is perfectly true. Property
not merely has duties, but has so many duties that its possession
to any large extent is a bore. It involves endless claims upon one,
endless attention to business, endless bother. If property had simply
pleasures, we could stand it; but its duties make it unbearable.
In the interest of the rich we must get rid of it. The virtues of
the poor may be readily admitted, and are much to be regretted.
We are often told that the poor are grateful for charity. Some of
them are, no doubt, but the best amongst the poor are never grateful.
They are ungrateful, discontented, disobedient, and rebellious.
They are quite right to be so. Charity they feel to be a ridiculously
inadequate mode of partial restitution, or a sentimental dole, usually
accompanied by some impertinent attempt on the part of the sentimentalist
to tyrannise over their private lives. Why should they be grateful
for the crumbs that fall from the rich man's table? They should
be seated at the board, and are beginning to know it. As for being
discontented, a man who would not be discontented with such surroundings
and such alow mode of life would be a perfect brute. Disobedience,
in the eyes of any one 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 these 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 so 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 he exercised
over him. If there is, his work will not be good for him, will not
be good in itself, and will not be good for others. And by work
I simply mean activity of any kind.
I hardly think that any Socialist, nowadays, would seriously propose
that an inspector should call every morning at each house to see
that each citizen rose up and did manual labour for eight hours.
Humanity has got beyond that stage, and reserves such a form of
life for the people whom, in a very arbitrary manner, it chooses
to call criminals. But I confess that many of the socialistic views
that I have come across seem to me to be tainted with ideas of authority,
if not of actual compulsion. Of course, authority and compulsion
are out of the question. All association must be quite voluntary.
It is only in voluntary associations that man is fine.
But it may be asked how Individualism, which is now more or less
dependent on the existence of private property for its development,
will benefit by the abolition of such private property. The answer
is very simple. It is true that, under existing conditions, a few
men who have had private means of their own, such as Byron, Shelley,
Browning, Victor Hugo, Baudelaire, and others, have been able to
realise their personality more or less completely. Not one of these
men ever did a single day's work for hire. They were relieved from
poverty. They had an immense advantage. The question is whether
it would be for the good of Individualism that such an advantage
should be taken away. Let us suppose that it is taken away. What
happens then to Individualism? How will it benefit ?
It will benefit in this way. Under the new conditions Individualism
will be far freer, far finer, and far more intensified than it is
now. I am not talking of the great imaginatively realised Individualism
of such poets as I have mentioned, but of the great actual Individualism
latent and potential in mankind generally. For the recognition of
private property has really harmed Individualism, and obscured it,
by confusing a man with what he possesses. It has led Individualism
entirely astray. It has made gain not growth its aim. So that man
thought that the important thing was to have, and did not know that
the important thing is to be. The true perfection of man lies not
in what man has, but in what man is. Private property has crushed
true Individualism, and set up an Individualism that is false. It
has debarred one part of the community from being individual by
starving them. It has debarred the other part of the community from
being individual by putting them on the wrong road and encumbering
them. Indeed, so completely has man's personality been absorbed
by his possessions that the English law has always treated offences
against a man s property with far more severity than offences against
his person, and property is still the test of complete citizenship.
The industry necessary for the making 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, flower-like, or as
a tree grows. It will not be at discord. It will never argue or
dispute. It will not prove things. It will know everything. And
yet it will not busy itself about knowledge. It will have wisdom.
Its value will not be measured by material things. It will have
nothing. And yet it will have everything, and whatever one takes
from it, it will still have, so rich will it be. It will not be
always meddling with others, or asking them to be like itself. It
will love them because they will be different. And yet, while it
will not meddle with others, it will help all, as a beautiful thing
helps us by being what it is. The personality of man will be very
wonderful. It will be as wonderful as the personality of a child.
In its development it will be assisted by Christianity, if men desire
that; but if men do not desire that, it will develop none the less
surely. For it will not worry itself about the past, nor care whether
things happened or did not happen. Nor will it admit any laws but
its own laws; nor any authority but its own authority. Yet it will
love those who sought to intensify it, and speak often of them.
And of these Christ was one.
"Know Thyself" was written over the portal of the antique
world. Over the portal of the new world, "Be Thyself"
shall be written. And the message of Christ to man was simply "Be
Thyself." That is the secret of Christ.
When Jesus talks about the poor He simply means personalities, just
as when He talks about the rich He simply means people who have
not developed their personalities. Jesus moved in a community that
allowed the accumulation of private property just as our 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 northwards 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 this is not
to trouble them. They are to be calm and self-centred. If a man
takes their cloak, they are to give him their coat, just to show
that material things are of no importance. If people abuse them,
they are not to answer back. What does it signify ? The things people
say of a man do not alter a man. He is what he is. Public opinion
is of no value whatsoever. Even if people employ actual violence,
they are not to be violent in turn. That would be to fall to the
same low level. After all, even in prison, a man can be quite free.
His soul can be free. His personality can be untroubled. He can
be at peace. And, above all things, they are not to interfere with
other people or judge them in any way. Personality is a very mysterious
thing. A man cannot always be estimated by what he does. He may
keep the law, and yet be worthless. He may break the law, and yet
be fine. He may be bad, without ever doing anything bad. He may
commit a sin against society, and yet realise through that sin his
true perfection.
There was a woman who was taken in adultery. We are not told the
history of her love, but that love must have been very great; for
Jesus said that her sins were forgiven her, not because she repented,
but because her love was so intense and wonderful. Later on, a short
time before His death, as He sat at a feast, the woman came in and
poured costly perfumes on His hair. His friends tried to interfere
with her, and said that it was an extravagance, and that the money
that the perfume cost should have been expended on charitable relief
of people in want, or something of that kind. Jesus did not accept
that view. He pointed out that the material needs of Man were great
and very permanent, but that the spiritual needs of Man were greater
still, and that in one divine moment, and by selecting its own mode
of expression, a personality might make itself perfect. The world
worships the woman, even now, as a saint.
Yes; there are suggestive things in Individualism. Socialism annihilates
family life, for instance. With the abolition of private property,
marriage in its present form must disappear. This is part of the
programme. Individualism accepts this and makes it fine. It converts
the abolition of legal restraint into a form of freedom that will
help the full development of personality, and make the love of man
and woman more wonderful, more beautiful, and more ennobling. Jesus
knew this. He rejected the claims of family life, although they
existed in His day and community in a very marked form. "Who
is my mother? Who are my brothers ?" He said, when He was told
that they wished to speak to Him. When one of His followers asked
leave to go and bury his father, "Let the dead bury the dead,"
was His terrible answer. He would allow no claim whatsoever to be
made on personality.
And so he who would lead a Christ-like life is he who is perfectly
and absolutely himself. He may be a great poet, or a great man of
science; or a young student at a University, or one who watches
sheep upon a moor; or a maker of dramas, like Shakespeare, or a
thinker about God, like Spinoza; or a child who plays in a garden,
or a fisherman who throws his nets into the sea It does not matter
what he is, as long as he realises the perfection of the soul that
is within him. All imitation in morals and in life is wrong. Through
the streets of Jerusalem at the present day crawls one who is mad
and carries a wooden cross on his shoulders. He is a symbol of the
lives that are marred by imitation. Father Damien was Christ-like
when he went out to live with the lepers, because in such service
he realised fully what was best in him. But he was not more Christ-like
than Wagner, when he realised his soul in music; or than Shelley,
when he realised his soul in song. There is no one type for man.
There are as many perfections as there are imperfect men. And while
to the claims of charity a man may yield and yet be free, to the
claims of conformity no man may yield and remain free at all.
Individualism, then, is what through Socialism we are to attain
to. As a natural result the State must give up all idea of government.
It must give it up because, as a wise man once said many centuries
before Christ, there is such a thing as leaving mankind alone; there
is no such thing as governing mankind. All modes of government are
failures. Despotism is unjust to everybody, including the despot,
who was probably made for better things. Oligarchies are unjust
to the many, and ochlocracies are unjust to the few. High hopes
were once formed of democracy; but democracy means simply the bludgeoning
of the people by the people for the people. It has been found out.
I must say that it was high time, for all authority is quite degrading.
It degrades those who exercise it, and degrades those over whom
it is exercised. When it is violently, grossly, and cruelly used,
it produces a good effect by creating, or at any rate bringing out,
the spirit of revolt and individualism that is to kill it. When
it is used with a certain amount of kindness, and accompanied by
prizes and rewards, it is dreadfully demoralising. People, in that
case, are less conscious of the horrible pressure that is being
put on them, and so go through their lives in a sort of coarse comfort,
like petted animals, without ever realising that they are probably
thinking other people's thoughts, living by other people's standards,
wearing practically what one may call other people's second-hand
clothes, and never being themselves for a single moment. "He
who would be free," says a fine thinker, "must not conform."
And authority, by bribing people to conform, produces a very gross
kind of overfed barbarism amongst us.
With authority, punishment will pass away. This will be a great
gain - a gain, in fact, of incalculable value. As one reads history,
not in the expurgated editions written for schoolboys and passmen,
but in the original authorities of each time, one is absolutely
sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed, but
by the punishments that the good have inflicted; and a community
is infinitely more brutalised by the habitual employment of punishment
than it is by the occasional occurrence of crime. It obviously follows
that the more punishment is inflicted the more crime is produced,
and most modern legislation has clearly recognised this, and has
made it its task to diminish punishment as far as it thinks it can.
Wherever it has really diminished it the results have always been
extremely good. The less punishment the less crime. When there is
no punishment at all, crime will either cease to exist, or, if it
occurs, will be treated by physicians as a very distressing form
of dementia, to be cured by care and kindness. For what are called
criminals nowadays are not criminals at all. Starvation, and not
sin, is the parent of modern crime. That indeed is the reason why
our criminals are, as a class, so absolutely uninteresting from
any psychological point of view. They are not marvellous Macbeths
and terrible Vautrins. They are merely what ordinary, respectable,
commonplace people would be if they had not got enough to eat. When
private property is abolished there will be no necessity for crime,
no demand for it; it will cease to exist. Of course, all crimes
are not crimes against property, though such are the crimes that
the English law, valuing what a man has more than what a man is,
punishes with the harshest and most horrible severity, if we except
the crime of murder, and regard death as worse than penal servitude,
a point on which our criminals, I believe, disagree. But though
a crime may not be against property, it may spring from the misery
and rage and depression produced by our wrong system of property-holding,
and so, when that system is abolished, will disappear. When each
member of the community has sufficient for his wants, and is not
interfered with by his neighbour, it will not be an object of any
interest to him to interfere with any one else. Jealousy, which
is an extraordinary source of crime in modern life, is an emotion
closely bound up with our conceptions of property, and under Socialism
and Individualism will die out. It is remarkable that in communistic
tribes jealousy is entirely unknown.
Now, as the State is not to govern, it may be asked what the State
is to do. The State is to be a voluntary association that will organise
labour, and be the manufacturer and distributor of necessary commodities.
The State is to make what is useful. The individual is to make what
is beautiful. And as I have mentioned the word labour, I cannot
help saying that a great deal of nonsense is being written and talked
nowadays about the dignity of manual labour. There is nothing necessary
dignified about manual labour at all, and most of it is absolutely
degrading. It is mentally and morally injurious to man to do anything
in which he does not find pleasure, and many forms of labour are
quite pleasureless activities, and should be regarded as such. To
sweep a slushy crossing for eight hours on a day when the east wind
is blowing is a disgusting occupation. To sweep it with mental,
moral, or physical dignity seems to me to be impossible. To sweep
it with joy would be appalling. Man is made for something better
than disturbing dirt. All work of that kind should be done by a
machine.
And I have no doubt that it will be so. Up to the present, man has
been, to a certain extent, the slave of machinery, and there is
something tragic in the fact that as soon as man had invented a
machine to do his work he began to starve. This, however, is, of
course, the result of our property system and our system of competition.
One man owns a machine which does the work of five hundred men.
Five hundred men are, in consequence, thrown out of employment,
and, having no work to do, become hungry and take to thieving. The
one man secures the produce of the machine and keeps it, and has
five hundred times as much as he should have, and probably, which
is of much more importance, a great deal more than he really wants.
Were that machine the property of all, every one would benefit by
it. It would be an immense advantage to the community. All unintellectual
labour, all monotonous, dull labour, all labour that deals with
dreadful things, and involves unpleasant conditions, must be done
by machinery. Machinery must work for us in coal mines, and do all
sanitary services, and be the stoker of steamers, and clean the
streets, and run messages on wet days, and do anything that is tedious
or distressing. At present machinery competes against man. Under
proper conditions machinery will serve man. There is no doubt at
all that this is the future of machinery, and just as trees grow
while the country gentleman is asleep, so while Humanity will be
amusing itself, or enjoying cultivated leisure which, and not labour,
is the aim of man - or making beautiful things, or reading beautiful
things, or simply contemplating the world with admiration and delight,
machinery will be doing all the necessary and unpleasant work. The
fact is, that civilisation requires slaves. The Greeks were quite
right there. Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting
work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible. Human
slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralising. On mechanical slavery,
on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends.
And when scientific men are no longer called upon to go down to
a depressing East End and distribute bad cocoa and worse blankets
to starving people, they will have delightful leisure in which to
devise wonderful and marvellous things for their own joy and the
joy of every one else. There will be great storages of force for
every city, and for every house if required, and this force man
will convert into heat, light, or motion, according to his needs.
Is this Utopian? A map of the world that does not include Utopia
is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country
at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there,
it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress
is the realisation of Utopias.
Now, I have said that the community by means of organisation of
machinery will supply the useful things, and that the beautiful
things will be made by the individual. This is not merely necessary,
but it is the only possible way by which we can get either the one
or the other. An individual who has to make things for the use of
others, and with reference to their wants and their wishes, does
not work with interest, and consequently cannot put into his work
what is best in him. Upon the other hand, whenever a community or
a powerful section of a community, or a government of any kind,
attempts to dictate to the artist what he is to do, Art either entirely
vanishes, or becomes stereotyped, or degenerates into a low and
ignoble form of craft. A work of art is the unique result of a unique
temperament. Its beauty comes from the fact that the author is what
he is. It has nothing to do with the fact that other people want
what they want. Indeed, the moment that an artist takes notice of
what other people want, and tries to supply the demand, he ceases
to be an artist, and becomes a dull or an amusing craftsman, an
honest or a dishonest tradesman. He has no further claim to be considered
as an artist. Art is the most intense mode of individualism that
the world has known. I am inclined to say that it is the only real
mode of individualism that the world has known. Crime, which, under
certain conditions, may seem to have created individualism, must
take cognisance of other people and interfere with them. It belongs
to the sphere of action. But alone, without any reference to his
neighbours, without any interference, the artist can fashion a beautiful
thing; and if he does not do it solely for his own pleasure, he
is not an artist at all.
And it is to be noted that it is the fact that Art is this intense
form of individualism that makes the public try to exercise over
it an authority that is as immoral as it is ridiculous, and as corrupting
as it is contemptible. It is not quite their fault. The public have
always, and in every age, been badly brought up. They are continually
asking Art to be popular, to please their want of taste, to flatter
their absurd vanity, to tell them what they have been told before,
to show them what they ought to be tired of seeing, to amuse them
when they feel heavy after eating too much, and to distract their
thoughts when they are wearied of their own stupidity. Now Art should
never try to be popular. The public should try to make itself artistic.
There is a very wide difference. If a man of science were told that
the results of his experiments, and the conclusions that he arrived
at, should be of such a character that they would not upset the
received popular notions on the subject, or disturb popular prejudice,
or hurt the sensibilities of people who knew nothing about science;
if a philosopher were told that he had a perfect right to speculate
in the highest spheres of thought, provided that he arrived at the
same conclusions as were held by those who had never thought in
any sphere at all - well, nowadays the man of science and the philosopher
would be considerably amused. Yet it is really a very few years
since both philosophy and science were subjected to brutal popular
control, to authority in fact - the authority of either the general
ignorance of the community, or the terror and greed for power of
an ecclesiastical or governmental class. Of course, we have to a
very great extent got rid of any attempt on the part of the community
or the Church, or the Government, to interfere with the individualism
of speculative thought, but the attempt to interfere with the individualism
of imaginative art still lingers. In fact, it does more than linger:
it is aggressive, offensive, and brutalising.
In England, the arts that have escaped best are the arts in which
the public take no interest. Poetry is an instance of what I mean.
We have been able to have fine poetry in England because the public
do not read it, and consequently do not influence it. The public
like to insult poets because they are individual, but once they
have insulted them they leave them alone. In the case of the novel
and the drama, arts in which the public do take an interest, the
result of the exercise of popular authority has been absolutely
ridiculous. No country produces such badly written fiction, such
tedious, common work in the novel form, such silly, vulgar plays
as England. It must necessarily be so. The popular standard is of
such a character that no artist can get to it. It is at once too
easy and too difficult to be a popular novelist. It is too easy,
because the requirements of the public as far as plot, style, psychology,
treatment of life, and treatment of literature are concerned, are
within the reach of the very meanest capacity and the most uncultivated
mind. It is too difficult, because to meet such requirements the
artist would have to do violence to his temperament, would have
to write not for the artistic joy of writing, but for the amusement
of half-educated people, and so would have to suppress his individualism,
forget his culture, annihilate his style, and surrender everything
that is valuable in him. In the case of the drama, things are a
little better: the theatre-going public like the obvious, it is
true, but they do not like the tedious; and burlesque and farcical
comedy, the two most popular forms, are distinct forms of art. Delightful
work may be produced under burlesque and farcical conditions, and
in work of this kind the artist in England is allowed very great
freedom. It is when one comes to the higher forms of the drama that
the result of popular control is seen. The one thing that the public
dislike is novelty. Any attempt to extend the subject matter of
art is extremely distasteful to the public; and yet the vitality
and progress of art depend in a large measure on the continual extension
of subject-matter. The public dislike novelty because they are afraid
of it. It represents to them a mode of Individualism, an assertion
on the part of the artist that he selects his own subject, and treats
it as he chooses. The public are quite right in their attitude.
Art is Individualism, and Individualism is a disturbing and disintegrating
force. Therein lies its immense value. For what it seeks to disturb
is monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of habit, and the
reduction of man to the level of a machine. In Art, the public accept
what has been, because they cannot alter it, not because they appreciate
it. They swallow their classics whole, and never taste them. They
endure them as the inevitable, and, as they cannot mar them, they
mouth about them. Strangely enough, or not strangely, according
to one's own views, this acceptance of the classics does a great
deal of harm. The uncritical admiration of the Bible and Shakespeare
in England is an instance of what I mean. With regard to the Bible,
considerations of ecclesiastical authority enter into the matter,
so that I need not dwell upon the point.
But in the case of Shakespeare it is quite obvious that the public
really see neither the beauties nor the defects of his plays. If
they saw the beauties, they would not object to the development
of the drama; and if they saw the defects, they would not object
to the development of the drama either. The fact is, the public
make use of the classics of a country as a means of checking the
progress of Art. They degrade the classics into authorities. They
use them as bludgeons for preventing the free expression of Beauty
in new forms. They are always asking a writer why he does not write
like somebody else, or a painter why he does not paint like somebody
else, quite oblivious of the fact that if either of them did anything
of the kind he would cease to be an artist. A fresh mode of Beauty
is absolutely distasteful to them, and whenever it appears they
get so angry and bewildered that they always use two stupid expressions
- one is that the work of art is grossly unintelligible; the other,
that the work of art is grossly immoral. What they mean by these
words seems to me to be this. When they say a work is grossly unintelligible,
they mean that the artist has said or made a beautiful thing that
is new; when they describe a work as grossly immoral, they mean
that the artist has said or made a beautiful thing that is true.
The former expression has reference to style; the latter to subject-matter.
But they probably use the words very vaguely, as an ordinary mob
will use ready-made paving-stones. There is not a single real poet
or prose writer of this century, for instance, on whom the British
public have not solemnly conferred diplomas of immorality, and these
diplomas practically take the place, with us, of what in France
is the formal recognition of an Academy of Letters, and fortunately
make the establishment of such an institution quite unnecessary
in England. Of course, the public are very reckless in their use
of the word. That they should have called Wordsworth an immoral
poet was only to be expected. Wordsworth was a poet. But that they
should have called Charles Kingsley an immoral novelist is extraordinary.
Kingsley's prose was not of a very fine quality. Still, there is
the word, and they use it as best they can. An artist is, of course,
not disturbed by it. The true artist is a man who believes absolutely
in himself, because he is absolutely himself. But I can fancy that
if an artist produced a work of art in England that immediately
on its appearance was recognised by the public, through their medium,
which is the public press, as a work that was quite intelligible
and highly moral, he would begin to seriously question whether in
its creation he had really been himself at all, and consequently
whether the work was not quite unworthy of him, and either of a
thoroughly second-rate order, or of no artistic value what so ever.
Perhaps, however, I have wronged the public in limiting them to
such words as "immoral," "unintelligible," "exotic,"
and "unhealthy." There is one other word that they use.
That word is "morbid." They do not use it often. The meaning
of the word is so simple that they are afraid of using it. Still,
they use it sometimes, and, now and then, one comes across it in
popular newspapers. It is, of course, a ridiculous word to apply
to a work of art. For what is morbidity but a mood of emotion or
a mode of thought that one cannot express? The public are all morbid,
because they never find expression for anything. The artist is never
morbid. He expresses everything. He stands outside his subject,
and through its medium produces incomparable and artistic effects.
To call an artist morbid because he deals with morbidity as his
subject-matter is as silly as if one called Shakespeare mad because
he wrote King Lear.
On the whole, an artist in England gains something by being attacked.
His individuality is intensified. He becomes more completely himself.
Of course, the attacks are very gross, very impertinent, and very
contemptible. But then no artist expects grace from the vulgar mind,
or style from the suburban intellect. Vulgarity and stupidity are
two very vivid facts in modern life. One regrets them, naturally.
But there they are. They are subjects for study, like everything
else. And it is only fair to state, with regard to modern journalists,
that they always apologise to one in private for what they have
written against one in public.
Within the last few years two other adjectives, it may be mentioned,
have been added to the very limited vocabulary of art abuse that
is at the disposal of the public. One is the word "unhealthy,"
the other is the word "exotic." The latter merely expresses
the rage of the momentary mushroom against the immortal, entrancing,
and exquisitely lovely orchid. It is a tribute, but a tribute of
no importance. The word "unhealthy," however, admits of
analysis. It is a rather interesting word. In fact, it is so interesting
that the people who use it do not know what it means.
What does it mean? What is a healthy or an unhealthy work of art?
All terms that one applies to a work of art, provided that one applies
them rationally, have reference to either its style or its subject,
or to both together. From the point of viewof style, a healthy work
of art is one whose style recognises the beauty of the material
it employs, be that material one of words or of bronze, of colour
or of ivory, and uses that beauty as a factor in producing the aesthetic
effect. From the point of view of subject, a healthy work of art
is one the choice of whose subject is conditioned by the temperament
of the artist, and comes directly out of it. In fine, a healthy
work of art is one that has both perfection and personality. Of
course, form and substance cannot be separated in a work of art;
they are always one. But for purposes of analysis, and setting the
wholeness of aesthetic impression aside for a moment, we can intellectually
so separate them. An unhealthy work of art, on the other hand, is
a work whose style is obvious, old-fashioned, and common, and whose
subject is deliberately chosen, not because the artist has any pleasure
in it, but because he thinks that the public will pay him for it.
In fact, the popular novel that the public calls healthy is always
a thoroughly unhealthy production; and what the public call an unhealthy
novel is always a beautiful and healthy work of art.
I need hardly say that I am not, for a single moment, complaining
that the public and the public press misuse these words. I do not
see how, with their lack of comprehension of what Art is, they could
possibly use them in the proper sense. I am merely pointing out
the misuse; and as for the origin of the misuse and the meaning
that lies behind it all, the explanation is very simple. It comes
from the barbarous conception of authority. It comes from the natural
inability of a community corrupted by authority to understand or
appreciate Individualism. In a word, it comes from that monstrous
and ignorant thing that is called Public Opinion, which, bad and
well-meaning as it is when it tries to control action, is infamous
and of evil meaning when it tries to control Thought or Art.
Indeed, there is much more to be said in favour of the physical
force of the public than there is in favour of the public's opinion.
The former may be fine. The latter must be foolish. It is often
said that force is no argument. That, however, entirely depends
on what one wants to prove. Many of the most important problems
of the last few centuries, such as the continuance of personal government
in England, or feudalism in France, have been solved entirely by
means of physical force. The very violence of a revolution may make
the public grand and splendid for a moment. It was a fatal day when
the public discovered that the pen is mightier than the paving-stone,
and can be made as offensive as the brick-bat. They at once sought
for the journalist, found him, developed him, and made him their
industrious and well-paid servant. It is greatly to be regretted,
for both their sakes. Behind the barricade there may be much that
is noble and heroic. But what is there behind the leading article
but prejudice, stupidity, cant, and twaddle? And when these four
are joined together they make a terrible force, and constitute the
new authority.
In old days men had the rack. Now they have the press. That is an
improvement certainly. But still it is very bad, and wrong, and
demoralising. Somebody - was it Burke? - called journalism the fourth
estate. That was true at the time, no doubt. But at the present
moment it really is the only estate. It has eaten up the other three.
The Lords Temporal say nothing, the Lords Spiritual have nothing
to say, and the House of Commons has nothing to say and says it.
We are dominated by Journalism. In America the President reigns
for four years, and Journalism governs for ever and ever. Fortunately,
in America journalism has carried its authority to the grossest
and most brutal extreme. As a natural consequence it has begun to
create a spirit of revolt. People are amused by it, or disgusted
by it, according to their temperaments. But it is no longer the
real force it was. It is not seriously treated. In England, Journalism,
not, except in a few well-known instances, having been carried to
such excesses of brutality, is still a great factor, a really remarkable
power. The tyranny that it proposes to exercise over people's private
lives seems to me to be quite extraordinary. The fact is, that the
public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what
is worth knowing. Journalism, conscious of this, and having tradesmanlike
habits, supplies their demands. In centuries before ours the public
nailed the ears of journalists to the pump. That was quite hideous.
In this century journalists have nailed their own ears to the keyhole.
That is much worse. And what aggravates the mischief is that the
journalists who are most to blame are not the amusing journalists
who write for what are called Society papers. The harm is done by
the serious, thoughtful, earnest journalists, who solemnly, as they
are doing at present, will drag before the eyes of the public some
incident in the private life of a great statesman, of a man who
is a leader of political thought as he is a creator of political force, and invite the public to discuss the incident, to exercise
authority in the matter, to give their views, and not merely to
give their views, but to carry them into action, to dictate to the
man upon all other points, to dictate to his party, to dictate to
his country; infact, to make themselves ridiculous, offensive, and
harmful. The private lives of men and women should not be told to
the public. The public have nothing to do with them at all. In France
they manage these things better. There they do not allow the details
of the trials that take place in the divorce courts to be published
for the amusement or criticism of the public. All that the public
are allowed to know is that the divorce has taken place and was
granted on petition of one or other or both of the married parties
concerned. In France, in fact, they limit the journalist, and allow
the artist almost perfect freedom. Here we allow absolute freedom
to the journalist, and entirely limit the artist. English public
opinion, that is to say, tries to constrain and impede and warp
the man who makes things that are beautiful in effect, and compels
the journalist to retail things that are ugly, or disgusting, or
revolting in fact, so that we have the most serious journalists
in the world, and the most indecent newspapers. It is no exaggeration
to talk of compulsion. There are possibly some journalists who take
a real pleasure in publishing horrible things, or who, being poor,
look to scandals as forming a sort of permanent basis for an income.
But there are other journalists, I feel certain, men of education
and cultivation, who really dislike publishing these things, who
know that it is wrong to do so, and only do it because the unhealthy
conditions under which their occupation is carried on oblige them
to supply the pubic 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 are 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 laughter of Iago in the tragedy of the Moor. No spectator
of art needs a more perfect mood of receptivity than the spectator
of a play. The moment he seeks to exercise authority he becomes
the avowed enemy of Art and of himself. Art does not mind. It is
he who suffers.
With the novel it is the same thing. Popular authority and the recognition
of popular authority are fatal. Thackeray's Esmond is a beautiful
work of art because he wrote it to please himself. In his other
novels, in Pendennis, in Philip, in Vanity Fair even, at times,
he is too conscious of the public, and spoils his work by appealing
directly to the sympathies of the public, or by directly mocking
at them. A true artist takes no notice whatever of the public. The
public are to him non-existent. He has no poppied or honeyed cakes
through which to give the monster sleep or sustenance. He leaves
that to the popular novelist. One incomparable novelist we have
now in England, Mr. George Meredith. There are better artists in
France, but France has no one whose view of life is so large, so
varied, so imaginatively true. There are tellers of stories in Russia
who have a more vivid sense of what pain in fiction may be. But
to him belongs philosophy in fiction. His people not merely live,
but they live in thought. One can see them from myriad points of
view. They are suggestive. There is soul in them and around them.
They are interpretative and symbolic. And he who made them, those
wonderful quickly moving figures, made them for his own pleasure,
and has never asked the public what they wanted, has never cared
to know what they wanted, has never allowed the public to dictate
to him or influence him in any way, but has gone on intensifying
his own personality, and producing his own individual work. At first
none came to him. That did not matter. Then the few came to him.
That did not change him. The many have come now. He is still the
same. He is an incomparable novelist.
With the decorative arts it is not different. The public clung with
really pathetic tenacity to what I believe were the direct traditions
of the Great Exhibition of international vulgarity, traditions that
were so appalling that the houses in which people lived were only
fit for blind people to live in. Beautiful things began to be made,
beautiful colours came from the dyer's hand, beautiful patterns
from the artist's brain, and the use of beautiful things and their
value and importance were set forth. The public were really very
indignant. They lost their temper. They said silly things. No one
minded. No one was a whit the worse. No one accepted the authority
of public opinion. And now it is almost impossible to enter any
modern house without seeing some recognition of good taste, some
recognition of the value of lovely surroundings, some sign of appreciation
of beauty. In fact, people's houses are, as a rule, quite charming
nowadays. People have been to a very great extent civilised. It
is only fair to state, however, that the extraordinary success of
the revolution in house decoration and furniture and the like has
not really been due to the majority of the public developing a very
fine taste in such matters. It has been chiefly due to the fact
that the craftsmen of things so appreciated the pleasure of making
what was beautiful, and woke to such a vivid consciousness of the
hideousness and vulgarity of what the public had previously wanted,
that they simply starved the public out. It would be quite impossible
at the present moment to furnish a room as rooms were furnished
a few years ago, without going for everything to an auction of second-hand
furniture from some third-rate lodging-house. The things are no
longer made. However they may object to it, people must nowadays
have something charming in their surroundings. Fortunately for them,
their assumption of authority in these art matters came to entire
grief.
It is evident, then, that all authority in such things is bad. People
sometimes inquire what form of government is most suitable for an
artist to live under. To this question there is only one answer.
The form of government that is most suitable to the artist is no
government at all. Authority over him and his art is ridiculous.
It has been stated that under despotisms artists have produced lovely
work. This is not quite so. Artists have visited despots, not as
subjects to be tyrannised over, but as wandering wonder-makers,
as fascinating vagrant personalities, to be entertained and charmed
and suffered to be at peace, and allowed to create. There is this
to be said in favour of the despot, that he, being an individual,
may have culture, while the mob, being a monster, has none. One
who is an Emperor and King may stoop down to pick up a brush for
a painter, but when the democracy stoops down it is merely to throw
mud. And yet the democracy have not so far to stoop as the Emperor.
In fact, when they want to throw mud they have not to stoop at all.
But there is no necessity to separate the monarch from the mob;
all authority is equally bad.
There are three kinds of despots. There is the despot who tyrannises
over the body. There is the despot who tyrannises over the soul.
There is the despot who tyrannises over 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. Some
one 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 shouldnot 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 every one 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 he
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 lives 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 exercised 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 it 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 norhealth; He is a God realising His perfection
through pain.
The evolution of man is slow. The injustice of men is great. It
was necessary that pain should be put forward as a mode of self-realisation.
Even now in some places in the world, the message of Christ is necessary.
No one who lived in modern Russia could possibly realise his perfection
except by pain. A few Russian artists have realised themselves in
Art, in a fiction that is mediaeval in character, because its dominant
note is the realisation of men through suffering. But for those
who are not artists, and to whom there is no mode of life but the
actual life of fact, pain is the only door to perfection. A Russian
who lives happily under the present system of government in Russia
must either believe that man has no soul, or that, if he has, it
is not worth while developing. A Nihilist who rejects all authority,
because he knows authority to be evil, and who 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 it
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.
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) :
- Utopia on a map
- The Soul of Man Under Socialism
- Die Seele des Menschen im Sozialismus
- Das Sternenkind
Oscar Wilde / Das Bildnis des Dorian Gray:
1) -"Wenn ich es wäre, der ewig jung bliebe und das Bild altern könnte! Meine Seele gäbe ich dafür als Preis!"
2) - "Und doch, da stand das Bild vor ihm und hatte einen Zug von Grausamkeit um den Mund."
3) - "Auf dem Boden lag ein toter Mann. Erst als sie die Ringe sahen, erkannten sie, wer es war."
- Oscar Wilde - Werke / Works
|