Or to take another guess, granted we read Original Sin in th_We moderns

must we not read there, also, the way to get rid of it? If by Original

Sin Man fell, then by renouncing it let him arise again. But how

renounce it? What! Cannot Man renounce a metaphor?

Yet how powerful is metaphor! Man is ruled by metaphor. The gods

were nothing but that, some sublime, some terrible, some lovely, all

metaphors, Jehovah, Moloch, Apollo, Eros. Life is now stained through

and through with metaphor. And there are further transfigurations still

possible! Yet we would not destroy the beauty already starring Life's

skies, the lovely hues lent by Aphrodite, and Artemis, and Dionysos, or

the sublime colours of Jehovah and Thor. But the heavy disfiguring blot

tarnishing all, Love, Innocence, Ecstasy, Wrath, that we would rather

altogether extirpate and annul. Original Sin we would cut off as a

disfigurement and disease of Life.

Or, again, may not the myth be an attempt to glorify Man and to clothe

him with a sad splendour. And not Original Sin, but Original Innocence

is the true reading of the fable? Its _raison d'être_ is the Garden of

Eden, not the Fall? To glorify Humanity at its source it set there a

Superman. The fall from innocence--that was the fall from the Superman

into Man. And how, then, is Man to be redeemed? By the return of the

Superman! Let that be our reading of the myth!

_The Use of Myth_

In the early world myth was used to dignify Man by idealizing his

origin. Henceforward it must be used to dignify him by idealizing his

goal. _That_ is the task of the poets and artists.

_Before the Fall_

Innocence is the morality of the instincts. Original Sin--that was war

upon the instincts, morality become abstract, separate, self-centred,

accusing and tyrannical. This self-consciousness of morality, this

disruption in the nature of Man, was the Fall.

_Beyond Original Sin_

How far is Man still from his goal? How sexual, foul in word and

thought, naively hedonistic! How little of spirit is in him! How

clumsily his mind struggles in the darkness! How far he is still from

his goal!--This is a cry which the believer in Original Sin cannot

understand, because he accepts all this imperfection as inevitable, as

the baleful heritage of Man, from which he cannot escape.

The feeling of pure joy in life, the feeling that Life is a

sacrament--that also is forever denied to the believer in Original Sin.

For Life is not a sacrament to him, but a sin of which joy itself is

only an aggravation.

_The Eternal Bluestocking_

The bluestocking is as old as mankind. Her original was Eve, the first

dabbler in moral philosophy.

_The Sin of Intellectualism_

The first sin, the original sin was that of the intellectuals. The

knowledge of Good and Evil was not an instantaneous "illumination"; it

was the result of long experiment and analysis: the apple took perhaps

hundreds of years to eat! Before that, in the happy day of innocence,

Good and Evil were not, for instinct and morality were one and not

twain. As time passed, however, the physically lazy, who had been

from the beginning, became weaker and wiser. Enforced contemplation,

the contemplation of those who were not strong enough to hunt or to

labour, made them more subtle than their simple brethren; they formed

themselves into a priesthood, and created a theology. In these priests

instinct was not strong: they were invalids with powerful reason.

But they had the lust for power; they wished to conquer by means of

their reason; therefore, they said to themselves, belittle instinct,

tyrannize over instinct, discover an absolute "good" and an absolute

"evil," become moral. Morality, which had in the days of innocence been

unconscious, the harmony of the instincts, was now given a separate

existence. The cry was morality against the instincts. Thus triumphed

the priests, the intellectuals, by means of their reason. Original Sin

was their sin--the result of the analysis by which they had separated

morality and the instincts. If we are to speak of Original Sin at all,

let it be in this manner.

_Once More_

The belief in Original Sin--that was itself Man's original sin.

_Apropos Gautier_

He had just read "Mlle. de Maupin," "What seduction there is still for

Man in the senses!" he exclaimed. "How much more of an animal than a

spirit he must be to be charmed and enslaved by this book!" Yet, what

ground had he to conclude that because the sensual intoxicates Man,

therefore Man is more sensual than spiritual? For we are most fatally

attracted by what is most alien to us.

_Psychology of the Humble_

There is something very naïve in those who speak of humility as a

certain good and of pride as a proven evil. In the first place these

are not opposites at all; there are a hundred kinds of both, and

humility is sometimes simply a refined form of pride. Humility may be

prudence, or good taste, or timidity, or a concealment, or a sermon, or

a snub. How much of it, for instance, is simple prudence? Is not this,

indeed, its chief _utility,_ that it saves men from the dangers which

accompany pride? On the day on which some one discovered that "Pride

goeth before a fall," humility became no mean virtue. For if one become

the servant and proclaim himself the least of all, how can he still

fall? Yet if he does it is a fall into greater humility, and his virtue

only shows the brighter. This is the sagacity of the humble, that they

turn even ignominy to their glorification.

Humility is most commonly used with a different meaning, however. There

are people who wish to be anonymous and uniform, and people who desire

to be personal and distinct. Or, more exactly, it is their instincts

that seek these ends. The first are humble in the fundamental sense

that they are instinctively so; the latter are proud in the same sense.

Humility, then, is the desire to be as others are and to escape notice;

and this desire can only be realized in conformity. It is true, people

become conceited after a while about their very conformity, and would

be wounded in their vanity if they failed to comply with fashion; but

vanity and humility are not incompatible.

Pride, however, is something much more subtle. The naïve, unconditional

contemners of pride, who plead with men to cast it out, have certainly

no idea what would happen if they were obeyed. For pride is the

condition of all fruitful action. This thought must be consciously or

subconsciously present in the doer, What I do is of value! I am capable

of doing a thing which is worth doing! The Christian, it is true, still

acts, though he is convinced that all action is sinful and of little

worth. But it is only his mind that is convinced: his instincts are by

no means persuaded of the truth of this! For though in the conscious

there may be self-doubt, in the unconscious there _must_ be pride,

or actions would not be performed at all. Moreover, in all those

qualities which are personal and not common--in personality--pride is

an essential ingredient. The pronoun "I" is itself an affirmation of

pride. The feeling, This is myself, this quality is _my_ quality, by

possessing it I am different from you, these things constitute _my_

personality and _are_ me: what a naïve assumption of the valuableness

of these qualities do we have there, how much pride is there in that

unconscious confession! And without this instinctive pride, these

qualities, personality could never have been possible. In the heart of

all distinct, valuable and heroic things, pride lies coiled. Yes, even

in the heart of humility, of the most refined, spiritual humility. For

such humility is _not_ a conformity; it separates and individualizes

its possessor as effectually as pride could; it takes its own path and

not that of the crowd; and so its source must be in an inward sense of

worth, of independence: it is a form of pride. But pride is so closely

woven into life that to wound it is to wound life; to abolish it, if

that were possible, would be to abolish life. Well do its subtler

defamers know that! And when they shoot their arrows at pride, it is

Life they hope to hit.

_Les Humbles_

Humility is the chief virtue, said a humble man. Then are you the

vainest man, said his friend, for you are renowned for your humility.

Good taste demands from writers who praise humility a little

aggressiveness and dogmatism, lest they be taken for humble, and,

therefore, proud. On the other hand, if humility is the chief virtue,

it is immoral not to practise it. And, therefore, one should praise

humility, and practise it? Or praise it and not practise it? Or not

praise it and practise it? There is contradiction in every course. That

is the worst of believing in paradoxical virtues!

_Against the Ostentatiously Humble_

He who is truly humble conceals even his humility.

_The Pessimists_

In pessimistic valuations of Life, the alternative contemplated is

generally not between Life and Death, but between different types of

Life. The real goal of Schopenhauerism is not the extinction of life,

for death is a perfectly normal aspect of existence, and Life would

not be denied even if death became universal. In order to deny Life

and to triumph over it, the pessimist must continue at least to exist,

in a sort of death in life: he must be dead, but he must also know it.

That is the goal of Schopenhauerism; perhaps not so difficult, perhaps

frequently attained! "They have not enough life even to die," said

Nietzsche.

_Sickness and Health_

Some men have such unconquerable faith in Life that they defy their

very maladies, creating out of them forms of ecstasy: that is their way

of triumphing over them. Perhaps some poetry, certainly not a little

religion has sprung from this. In religions defaming the senses and

enjoining asceticism, or, in other words, a lowering of vitality, the

chronic sufferers _affirm_ Life in their own way; for sickness _is_

their life: their praise of sickness is their praise of Life. And if

they sometimes morbidly invite death, that is because death is nothing

but another form of experience, of Life. To the sick, if they are to

retain self-respect and pride, these doctrines are perhaps the best

possible; it is only to the healthy that they are noxious. For the

healthy who are converted by them, become sick through them, yet not

so sick as to find comfort in them. The aspiration after an ascetic

life contends in these men with their old health, their desire to live

fully, and causes untold perplexities and conflicts; leaving them at

last with nothing but a despairing desire for release. Thus, a religion

of consolation becomes for the strong a Will to Death--the very

opposite of that which it was to those who created it.

_The Pride of the Sterile_

Ecclesiastical, ceremonious humility is the pride of those who cannot

create or initiate, either because they are sterile, or because the

obstacles in their way are too great. Their pride is centred, not on

what they can do, but on what they can endure. The anchorite goes

into the wilderness, perhaps rather to get his background than to

escape attention, and there imposes upon himself the most difficult

and loathsome tasks, enduring not only outward penances, fasting

and goading of the flesh, but such inward convulsions, portents and

horrors, as the soul of man has by no other means experienced. Here, in

endurance, is his power, and here, therefore, is his pride: the poor

Atlas, who does not remove, but supports mountains, and these of his

own making!

Men who have the power to create but are at the same time extremely

timid belong to this class. Rather than venture outside themselves

they will do violence to their own nature. The forces which in

creation would have been liberated are pent within them and cause

untold restlessness, uneasiness and pain. Religions which stigmatize

"self-expression," separating the individual into an "outward" and an

"inward" and raising a barrier between the two, encourage the growth

of this type of man. These religions themselves have their roots in a

timidity, a fear of pain. For self-expression is by no means painless;

it is, on the contrary, a great cause of suffering. Essentially its

outcome is strife, the clash of egos: Tragedy is the great recognition

in Art of this truth. Christianity saw the suffering which conflict

brought with it, said it was altogether evil, and sought to abolish

it. But a law of Life cannot be abolished: strife, driven from the

world of outward event, retreated into the very core of man, and

there became baleful, indeed, disintegrating, and subversive. The

early Christians did not see that men would suffer more from that

inward psychic conflict than from the other. It was the Greeks who

elevated conflict to an honourable position in their outward actions;

with them, as Nietzsche said, there was no distinction between the

"outward" and "inward"; they lived completely and died once. But the

Christians, to use the words of St. Paul, "died daily." How true was

that of those proudly humble anchorites! What a light it throws upon

their sternly endured convulsions of the soul! In the end, Death

itself came no doubt to many of them as a relief from this terribly

protracted "dying." Perhaps one thing, however, made their lives

bearable and even enjoyable--the power of the soul to plumb its own

sufferings and capacity for endurance. Psychology arose first among the

ecclesiastically humble men.

Well, let us count up our gains and losses. Spiritual humility,

wherever it has spread, has certainly weakened the expression of

Life: for it has weakened man by introducing within him a disrupting

conflict. But it has also made Life subtler and deeper; it has enlarged

the inward world of man, even if it has straitened the world outside.

So that when we return--as we must--to the Pagan ideal of "expression,"

our works shall be richer than those of the Pagans, for man has now

_more_ to express.

_When Pride is Necessary_

Perhaps in all great undertakings into which uncertainty enters

pride is necessary. In the Elizabethan age, our most productive and

adventurous age, pride was at its zenith. Was that pride the necessary

condition of that productiveness? Would the poets, the thinkers and the

discoverers have attempted what they did attempt, had they been humble

men? What is needed is more enquiry: a new psychology, and, above all,

a new history of pride.

_Humility and the Artists_

There is one man, at any rate, who has always owed more to pride than

to humility--the artist. Whether it be in himself, where it is almost

the condition of productiveness, or in others, where it is the cause

of all actions and movements æsthetically agreeable, Pride is his

great benefactor. All artists are proud, but not all have the good

conscience of their pride. In their thoughts they permit themselves to

be persuaded too much by the theologians; they have not enough "free

spirit" to say, "Pride is my atmosphere, in which I create. I do not

choose to refuse my atmosphere."

But if pride were banished even from the remainder of Life, how poor

would the artists be left! For every gesture that is beautiful, all

free, spirited, swift movement and all noble repose have in them pride.

Humility uglifies, except, indeed, the humility which is a form of

pride; that has a sublimity of its own. Even the Christian Church--the

Church of the humble--had to make its ceremonies magnificent to make

itself æsthetically presentable; without its magnificence it would

have been an impossible institution. Humility, to be supportable, must

have in it an admixture of pride. That gives it _standing._ It was His

subtle pride that communicated to the humility of Jesus its gracious

"charm."

Poetic tragedy and pride are profoundly associated. No event is tragic

which has not arisen out of pride, and has not been borne proudly:

the Greeks knew that. But, as well, is not pride at times laughable

and absurd? Well, what does that prove, except that comedy as well as

tragedy has been occasioned by it? Humility is not even laughable!

_Love and Pride_

Pride is so indissolubly bound up with everything great--Joy, Beauty,

Courage, Creation--that surely it must have had some celestial origin.

Who created it? Was it Love, who wished to shape a weapon for itself,

the better to fashion things? Pride has so much to do with creation

that sometimes it imagines it is a creator. But that it is not. Only

Love can create. Pride was fashioned out of a rib taken from the side

of Love.

_Pride and the Fall_

It was not humility that was the parent of the fable of the Fall. Or is

it humility to boast of one's high ancestry, and if the ancestry does

not exist, to invent it? The naïve poet who created that old allegory

did not foresee the number of interpretations which would be read into

it. He did not foresee that it would be used to humiliate Man instead

of to exalt him; he did not at all foresee Original Sin. As less than

justice, then, has been meted to him, let us now accord him more than

justice. Let us say that he was a divine philosopher who perceived that

in unconditional morality lay the grand misfortune of mankind. Man is

innocent; thus, he said, it is an absolute ethic that defiles him--the

knowledge of Good and Evil. Sweep that away, and he is innocent and

back in the Garden of Eden again. Let us say this of the first poet,

for certainly he did not mean it! Perhaps he knew nothing at all about

morality! All that he wished for was to provide a dignified family tree

for his generation.

_The Good Conscience_

What a revolution for mankind it would be to get back "the good

conscience"? Life made innocent, washed free from how much filth of

remorse, guilt, contempt, "sin"--that vision arouses a longing more

intense than that of the religious for any heaven. And it seems at

least equally possible of realization! Bad conscience arises when

religion and the instincts are in opposition; the more comprehensive

and deep this conflict, the more guilty the conscience. But there

have been religions not antagonistic to the instincts, which, instead

of condemning them, have thought so well of them as to become their

rule, their discipline. The religion of the Greeks was an example of

this; and in Greece, accordingly, there was no "bad conscience" in our

sense. Well, how is it possible, if it _is_ possible, to regain "the

good conscience"? Not by any miracle! Not by an instantaneous "change

of heart," for even the heart changes slowly. But suppose that a new

instinctive religion and morality were to be set up, and painfully

complied with, until they became a second nature as ours have become,

should we not then gradually lose our bad conscience, born as it is out

of the antagonism between instinct and morality? Nay, if we were to

persevere still further until instinct and religion and morality became

intermingled and indistinguishable, might we not enter the Garden of

Eden again, might not innocence itself become ours? But to attain that

end, an unremitting discipline, extending over hundreds of years,

might be necessary; and who, in the absence of gods, is to impose that

discipline?

_The Other Side_

The life-defaming creeds are not to be condemned unconditionally: even

they are not evil. "Guilt," asceticism, contempt for the world--these

are the physiologically bad things which have sharpened, deepened and

made subtle the soul of man. The Greeks were simple compared with

modern man; a thousand times more healthy, it is true--perhaps because

they were incapable of contracting our maladies. Well, let us judge

Christianity, which in Europe was mainly responsible for this deepening

of Man, by an artistic criterion: let us judge it by the effects it

achieved, not by what it said.

_Effects of Christianity_

If there are gods who take an interest in Man, and experiment upon

him, what better means could they have devised for getting out of

him certain "effects," not Christian at all, than Christianity? Far

more significant for mankind than the virtues of Christianity, are

its contradictions, excesses and "states of mind." The "way of life,"

Christian morality, is of little account compared with the permanent

physiological and psychological transformations effected upon Man by

the discipline of centuries of religion. Not that Man has been forced

into the mould of Christian morality, but that in the process he has

undergone the most unique convulsions, adaptations and permutations,

that an entire new world of conflict, pain, fear, horror, exaltation,

faith and scepticism has been born within him, that Life, driven

within itself, has deepened, enriched and invested him--_that_ is

from the standpoint of human culture the most important thing, beside

which what is usually understood by the Christianizing of Europe is

relatively insignificant. Not Christian morality, but the effects of

Christian morality it is that now concern us. And these effects are

not themselves Christian; rather the contrary. Christianity has made

Man more complex, contradictory, sceptical, tragic and sublime; it has

given him more capacity for good and for evil, and has added to these

two qualities subtlety and spirituality.

III

WHAT IS MODERN?

_Whither?_

The fever of modern thought which burns in our veins, and from which

we refuse to escape by reactionary backdoors--Christianity and the

like--is not without its distinction: it is an "honourable sickness,"

to use the phrase of Nietzsche. I speak of those who sincerely strive

to seek an issue from this fever; to pass through it into a new health.

Of the others to whom fever is the condition of existence, who make a

profession of their maladies, the valetudinarians of the spirit, the

dabblers in quack soul-remedies for their own sake, it is impossible

to speak without disdain. Our duty is to exterminate them, by ridicule

or any other means found effectual. But we are ourselves already too

grievously harassed; we are caught in the whirlwind of modern thought,

which contains as much dust as wind. We see outside our field of

conflict a region of Christian calm, but never, never, never can we

return there, for our instincts as well as our intellect are averse

to it. The problem must have a different solution. And what, indeed,

is the problem? To some of us it is still that of emancipation--that

which confronted Goethe, Ibsen, Nietzsche, and the other great spirits

of last century. It is an error to think that these men have yet been

refuted or even understood; they have simply been buried beneath the

corpses of later writers. And it is the worst intellectual weakness,

and, therefore, crime, of our age that ideas are no longer disproved,

but simply superseded by newer ideas. The latest is the true, and Time

refutes everything! That is our modern superstition. We have still,

then, to go back--or, rather, forward--to Goethe, Ibsen and Nietzsche.

Our problem is still that of clearing a domain of freedom around us,

of enlarging our field of choice, and so making destiny itself more

spacious; and, then, having delivered ourselves from prejudice and

superstition--and how many other things!--of setting an aim before us

for the unflinching pursuit of which we make ourselves responsible.

Greater freedom, and therefore greater responsibility, above all

greater aims, an enlargement of life, not a whittling of it down to

Christian standards--that is our problem still!

_The "Restoration" of Christianity_

Or to take another guess, granted we read Original Sin in the Fall,