Transcribed from the 1909 Arthur L. Humphreys edition by David Price,
email ccx074@pglaf.org
[Picture: Book cover]
THE
SOUL OF MAN
* * * * *
LONDON
ARTHUR L. HUMPREYS
1900
* * * * *
_Second Impression_
THE SOUL OF MAN
THE chief advantage that would result from the establishment of Socialism
is, undoubtedly, the fact that Socialism would relieve us from that
sordid necessity of living for others which, in the present condition of
things, presses so hardly upon almost everybody. In fact, scarcely
anyone at all escapes.
Now and then, in the course of the century, a great man of science, like
Darwin; a great poet, like Keats; a fine critical spirit, like M. Renan;
a supreme artist, like Flaubert, has been able to isolate himself, to
keep himself out of reach of the clamorous claims of others, to stand
‘under the shelter of the wall,’ as Plato puts it, and so to realise the
perfection of what was in him, to his own incomparable gain, and to the
incomparable and lasting gain of the whole world. These, however, are
exceptions. The majority of people spoil their lives by an unhealthy and
exaggerated altruism—are forced, indeed, so to spoil them. They find
themselves surrounded by hideous poverty, by hideous ugliness, by hideous
starvation. It is inevitable that they should be strongly moved by all
this. The emotions of man are stirred more quickly than man’s
intelligence; and, as I pointed out some time ago in an article on the
function of criticism, it is much more easy to have sympathy with
suffering than it is to have sympathy with thought. Accordingly, with
admirable, though misdirected intentions, they very seriously and very
sentimentally set themselves to the task of remedying the evils that they
see. But their remedies do not cure the disease: they merely prolong it.
Indeed, their remedies are part of the disease.
They try to solve the problem of poverty, for instance, by keeping the
poor alive; or, in the case of a very advanced school, by amusing the
poor.
But this is not a solution: it is an aggravation of the difficulty. The
proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty
will be impossible. And the altruistic virtues have really prevented the
carrying out of this aim. Just as the worst slave-owners were those who
were kind to their slaves, and so prevented the horror of the system
being realised by those who suffered from it, and understood by those who
contemplated it, so, in the present state of things in England, the
people who do most harm are the people who try to do most good; and at
last we have had the spectacle of men who have really studied the problem
and know the life—educated men who live in the East End—coming forward
and imploring the community to restrain its altruistic impulses of
charity, benevolence, and the like. They do so on the ground that such
charity degrades and demoralises. They are perfectly right. Charity
creates a multitude of sins.
There is also this to be said. It is immoral to use private property in
order to alleviate the horrible evils that result from the institution of
private property. It is both immoral and unfair.
Under Socialism all this will, of course, be altered. There will be no
people living in fetid dens and fetid rags, and bringing up unhealthy,
hunger-pinched children in the midst of impossible and absolutely
repulsive surroundings. The security of society will not depend, as it
does now, on the state of the weather. If a frost comes we shall not
have a hundred thousand men out of work, tramping about the streets in a
state of disgusting misery, or whining to their neighbours for alms, or
crowding round the doors of loathsome shelters to try and secure a hunch
of bread and a night’s unclean lodging. Each member of the society will
share in the general prosperity and happiness of the society, and if a
frost comes no one will practically be anything the worse.
Upon the other hand, Socialism itself will be of value simply because it
will lead to Individualism.
Socialism, Communism, or whatever one chooses to call it, by converting
private property into public wealth, and substituting co-operation for
competition, will restore society to its proper condition of a thoroughly
healthy organism, and insure the material well-being of each member of
the community. It will, in fact, give Life its proper basis and its
proper environment. But for the full development of Life to its highest
mode of perfection, something more is needed. What is needed is
Individualism. If the Socialism is Authoritarian; if there are
Governments armed with economic power as they are now with political
power; if, in a word, we are to have Industrial Tyrannies, then the last
state of man will be worse than the first. At present, in consequence of
the existence of private property, a great many people are enabled to
develop a certain very limited amount of Individualism. They are either
under no necessity to work for their living, or are enabled to choose the
sphere of activity that is really congenial to them, and gives them
pleasure. These are the poets, the philosophers, the men of science, the
men of culture—in a word, the real men, the men who have realised
themselves, and in whom all Humanity gains a partial realisation. Upon
the other hand, there are a great many people who, having no private
property of their own, and being always on the brink of sheer starvation,
are compelled to do the work of beasts of burden, to do work that is
quite uncongenial to them, and to which they are forced by the
peremptory, unreasonable, degrading Tyranny of want. These are the poor,
and amongst them there is no grace of manner, or charm of speech, or
civilisation, or culture, or refinement in pleasures, or joy of life.
From their collective force Humanity gains much in material prosperity.
But it is only the material result that it gains, and the man who is poor
is in himself absolutely of no importance. He is merely the
infinitesimal atom of a force that, so far from regarding him, crushes
him: indeed, prefers him crushed, as in that case he is far more
obedient.
Of course, it might be said that the Individualism generated under
conditions of private property is not always, or even as a rule, of a
fine or wonderful type, and that the poor, if they have not culture and
charm, have still many virtues. Both these statements would be quite
true. The possession of private property is very often extremely
demoralising, and that is, of course, one of the reasons why Socialism
wants to get rid of the institution. In fact, property is really a
nuisance. Some years ago people went about the country saying that
property has duties. They said it so often and so tediously that, at
last, the Church has begun to say it. One hears it now from every
pulpit. It is perfectly true. Property not merely has duties, but has
so many duties that its possession to any large extent is a bore. It
involves endless claims upon one, endless attention to business, endless
bother. If property had simply pleasures, we could stand it; but its
duties make it unbearable. In the interest of the rich we must get rid
of it. The virtues of the poor may be readily admitted, and are much to
be regretted. We are often told that the poor are grateful for charity.
Some of them are, no doubt, but the best amongst the poor are never
grateful. They are ungrateful, discontented, disobedient, and
rebellious. They are quite right to be so. Charity they feel to be a
ridiculously inadequate mode of partial restitution, or a sentimental
dole, usually accompanied by some impertinent attempt on the part of the
sentimentalist to tyrannise over their private lives. Why should they be
grateful for the crumbs that fall from the rich man’s table? They should
be seated at the board, and are beginning to know it. As for being
discontented, a man who would not be discontented with such surroundings
and such a low mode of life would be a perfect brute. Disobedience, in
the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s original virtue. It is
through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience
and through rebellion. Sometimes the poor are praised for being thrifty.
But to recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. It
is like advising a man who is starving to eat less. For a town or
country labourer to practise thrift would be absolutely immoral. Man
should not be ready to show that he can live like a badly-fed animal. He
should decline to live like that, and should either steal or go on the
rates, which is considered by many to be a form of stealing. As for
begging, it is safer to beg than to take, but it is finer to take than to
beg. No: a poor man who is ungrateful, unthrifty, discontented, and
rebellious, is probably a real personality, and has much in him. He is
at any rate a healthy protest. As for the virtuous poor, one can pity
them, of course, but one cannot possibly admire them. They have made
private terms with the enemy, and sold their birthright for very bad
pottage. They must also be extraordinarily stupid. I can quite
understand a man accepting laws that protect private property, and admit
of its accumulation, as long as he himself is able under those conditions
to realise some form of beautiful and intellectual life. But it is
almost incredible to me how a man whose life is marred and made hideous
by such laws can possibly acquiesce in their continuance.
However, the explanation is not really difficult to find. It is simply
this. Misery and poverty are so absolutely degrading, and exercise such
a paralysing effect over the nature of men, that no class is ever really
conscious of its own suffering. They have to be told of it by other
people, and they often entirely disbelieve them. What is said by great
employers of labour against agitators is unquestionably true. Agitators
are a set of interfering, meddling people, who come down to some
perfectly contented class of the community, and sow the seeds of
discontent amongst them. That is the reason why agitators are so
absolutely necessary. Without them, in our incomplete state, there would
be no advance towards civilisation. Slavery was put down in America, not
in consequence of any action on the part of the slaves, or even any
express desire on their part that they should be free. It was put down
entirely through the grossly illegal conduct of certain agitators in
Boston and elsewhere, who were not slaves themselves, nor owners of
slaves, nor had anything to do with the question really. It was,
undoubtedly, the Abolitionists who set the torch alight, who began the
whole thing. And it is curious to note that from the slaves themselves
they received, not merely very little assistance, but hardly any sympathy
even; and when at the close of the war the slaves found themselves free,
found themselves indeed so absolutely free that they were free to starve,
many of them bitterly regretted the new state of things. To the thinker,
the most tragic fact in the whole of the French Revolution is not that
Marie Antoinette was killed for being a queen, but that the starved
peasant of the Vendée voluntarily went out to die for the hideous cause
of feudalism.
It is clear, then, that no Authoritarian Socialism will do. For while
under the present system a very large number of people can lead lives of
a certain amount of freedom and expression and happiness, under an
industrial-barrack system, or a system of economic tyranny, nobody would
be able to have any such freedom at all. It is to be regretted that a
portion of our community should be practically in slavery, but to propose
to solve the problem by enslaving the entire community is childish.
Every man must be left quite free to choose his own work. No form of
compulsion must be exercised over him. If there is, his work will not be
good for him, will not be good in itself, and will not be good for
others. And by work I simply mean activity of any kind.
I hardly think that any Socialist, nowadays, would seriously propose that
an inspector should call every morning at each house to see that each
citizen rose up and did manual labour for eight hours. Humanity has got
beyond that stage, and reserves such a form of life for the people whom,
in a very arbitrary manner, it chooses to call criminals. But I confess
that many of the socialistic views that I have come across seem to me to
be tainted with ideas of authority, if not of actual compulsion. Of
course, authority and compulsion are out of the question. All
association must be quite voluntary. It is only in voluntary
associations that man is fine.
But it may be asked how Individualism, which is now more or less
dependent on the existence of private property for its development, will
benefit by the abolition of such private property. The answer is very
simple. It is true that, under existing conditions, a few men who have
had private means of their own, such as Byron, Shelley, Browning, Victor
Hugo, Baudelaire, and others, have been able to realise their personality
more or less completely. Not one of these men ever did a single day’s
work for hire. They were relieved from poverty. They had an immense
advantage. The question is whether it would be for the good of
Individualism that such an advantage should be taken away. Let us
suppose that it is taken away. What happens then to Individualism? How
will it benefit?
It will benefit in this way. Under the new conditions Individualism will
be far freer, far finer, and far more intensified than it is now. I am
not talking of the great imaginatively-realised Individualism of such
poets as I have mentioned, but of the great actual Individualism latent
and potential in mankind generally. For the recognition of private
property has really harmed Individualism, and obscured it, by confusing a
man with what he possesses. It has led Individualism entirely astray.
It has made gain not growth its aim. So that man thought that the
important thing was to have, and did not know that the important thing is
to be. The true perfection of man lies, not in what man has, but in what
man is. Private property has crushed true Individualism, and set up an
Individualism that is false. It has debarred one part of the community
from being individual by starving them. It has debarred the other part
of the community from being individual by putting them on the wrong road,
and encumbering them. Indeed, so completely has man’s personality been
absorbed by his possessions that the English law has always treated
offences against a man’s property with far more severity than offences
against his person, and property is still the test of complete
citizenship. The industry necessary for the making money is also very
demoralising. In a community like ours, where property confers immense
distinction, social position, honour, respect, titles, and other pleasant
things of the kind, man, being naturally ambitious, makes it his aim to
accumulate this property, and goes on wearily and tediously accumulating
it long after he has got far more than he wants, or can use, or enjoy, or
perhaps even know of. Man will kill himself by overwork in order to
secure property, and really, considering the enormous advantages that
property brings, one is hardly surprised. One’s regret is that society
should be constructed on such a basis that man has been forced into a
groove in which he cannot freely develop what is wonderful, and
fascinating, and delightful in him—in which, in fact, he misses the true
pleasure and joy of living. He is also, under existing conditions, very
insecure. An enormously wealthy merchant may be—often is—at every moment
of his life at the mercy of things that are not under his control. If
the wind blows an extra point or so, or the weather suddenly changes, or
some trivial thing happens, his ship may go down, his speculations may go
wrong, and he finds himself a poor man, with his social position quite
gone. Now, nothing should be able to harm a man except himself. Nothing
should be able to rob a man at all. What a man really has, is what is in
him. What is outside of him should be a matter of no importance.
With the abolition of private property, then, we shall have true,
beautiful, healthy Individualism. Nobody will waste his life in
accumulating things, and the symbols for things. One will live. To live
is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.
It is a question whether we have ever seen the full expression of a
personality, except on the imaginative plane of art. In action, we never
have. Cæsar, says Mommsen, was the complete and perfect man. But how
tragically insecure was Cæsar! Wherever there is a man who exercises
authority, there is a man who resists authority. Cæsar was very perfect,
but his perfection travelled by too dangerous a road. Marcus Aurelius
was the perfect man, says Renan. Yes; the great emperor was a perfect
man. But how intolerable were the endless claims upon him! He staggered
under the burden of the empire. He was conscious how inadequate one man
was to bear the weight of that Titan and too vast orb. What I mean by a
perfect man is one who develops under perfect conditions; one who is not
wounded, or worried or maimed, or in danger. Most personalities have
been obliged to be rebels. Half their strength has been wasted in
friction. Byron’s personality, for instance, was terribly wasted in its
battle with the stupidity, and hypocrisy, and Philistinism of the
English. Such battles do not always intensify strength: they often
exaggerate weakness. Byron was never able to give us what he might have
given us. Shelley escaped better. Like Byron, he got out of England as
soon as possible. But he was not so well known. If the English had had
any idea of what a great poet he really was, they would have fallen on
him with tooth and nail, and made his life as unbearable to him as they
possibly could. But he was not a remarkable figure in society, and
consequently he escaped, to a certain degree. Still, even in Shelley the
note of rebellion is sometimes too strong. The note of the perfect
personality is not rebellion, but peace.
It will be a marvellous thing—the true personality of man—when we see it.
It will grow naturally and simply, flowerlike, or as a tree grows. It
will not be at discord. It will never argue or dispute. It will not
prove things. It will know everything. And yet it will not busy itself
about knowledge. It will have wisdom. Its value will not be measured by
material things. It will have nothing. And yet it will have everything,
and whatever one takes from it, it will still have, so rich will it be.
It will not be always meddling with others, or asking them to be like
itself. It will love them because they will be different. And yet while
it will not meddle with others, it will help all, as a beautiful thing
helps us, by being what it is. The personality of man will be very
wonderful. It will be as wonderful as the personality of a child.
In its development it will be assisted by Christianity, if men desire
that; but if men do not desire that, it will develop none the less
surely. For it will not worry itself about the past, nor care whether
things happened or did not happen. Nor will it admit any laws but its
own laws; nor any authority but its own authority. Yet it will love
those who sought to intensify it, and speak often of them. And of these
Christ was one.
‘Know thyself’ was written over the portal of the antique world. Over
the portal of the new world, ‘Be thyself’ shall be written. And the
message of Christ to man was simply ‘Be thyself.’ That is the secret of
Christ.
When Jesus talks about the poor he simply means personalities, just as
when he talks about the rich he simply means people who have not
developed their personalities. Jesus moved in a community that allowed
the accumulation of private property just as ours does, and the gospel
that he preached was not that in such a community it is an advantage for
a man to live on scanty, unwholesome food, to wear ragged, unwholesome
clothes, to sleep in horrid, unwholesome dwellings, and a disadvantage
for a man to live under healthy, pleasant, and decent conditions. Such a
view would have been wrong there and then, and would, of course, be still
more wrong now and in England; for as man moves northward the material
necessities of life become of more vital importance, and our society is
infinitely more complex, and displays far greater extremes of luxury and
pauperism than any society of the antique world. What Jesus meant, was
this. He said to man, ‘You have a wonderful personality. Develop it.
Be yourself. Don’t imagine that your perfection lies in accumulating or
possessing external things. Your affection is inside of you. If only
you could realise that, you would not want to be rich. Ordinary riches
can be stolen from a man. Real riches cannot. In the treasury-house of
your soul, there are infinitely precious things, that may not be taken
from you. And so, try to so shape your life that external things will
not harm you. And try also to get rid of personal property. It involves
sordid preoccupation, endless industry, continual wrong. Personal
property hinders Individualism at every step.’ It is to be noted that
Jesus never says that impoverished people are necessarily good, or
wealthy people necessarily bad. That would not have been true. Wealthy
people are, as a class, better than impoverished people, more moral, more
intellectual, more well-behaved. There is only one class in the
community that thinks more about money than the rich, and that is the
poor. The poor can think of nothing else. That is the misery of being
poor. What Jesus does say is that man reaches his perfection, not
through what he has, not even through what he does, but entirely through
what he is. And so the wealthy young man who comes to Jesus is
represented as a thoroughly good citizen, who has broken none of the laws
of his state, none of the commandments of his religion. He is quite
respectable, in the ordinary sense of that extraordinary word. Jesus
says to him, ‘You should give up private property. It hinders you from
realising your perfection. It is a drag upon you. It is a burden. Your
personality does not need it. It is within you, and not outside of you,
that you will find what you really are, and what you really want.’ To
his own friends he says the same thing. He tells them to be themselves,
and not to be always worrying about other things. What do other things
matter? Man is complete in himself. When they go into the world, the
world will disagree with them. That is inevitable. The world hates
Individualism. But that is not to trouble them. They are to be calm and
self-centred. If a man takes their cloak, they are to give him their
coat, just to show that material things are of no importance. If people
abuse them, they are not to answer back. What does it signify? The
things people say of a man do not alter a man. He is what he is. Public
opinion is of no value whatsoever. Even if people employ actual
violence, they are not to be violent in turn. That would be to fall to
the same low level. After all, even in prison, a man can be quite free.
His soul can be free. His personality can be untroubled. He can be at
peace. And, above all things, they are not to interfere with other
people or judge them in any way. Personality is a very mysterious thing.
A man cannot always be estimated by what he does. He may keep the law,
and yet be worthless. He may break the law, and yet be fine. He may be
bad, without ever doing anything bad. He may commit a sin against
society, and yet realise through that sin his true perfection.
There was a woman who was taken in adultery. We are not told the history
of her love, but that love must have been very great; for Jesus said that
her sins were forgiven her, not because she repented, but because her
love was so intense and wonderful. Later on, a short time before his
death, as he sat at a feast, the woman came in and poured costly perfumes
on his hair. His friends tried to interfere with her, and said that it
was an extravagance, and that the money that the perfume cost should have
been expended on charitable relief of people in want, or something of
that kind. Jesus did not accept that view. He pointed out that the
material needs of Man were great and very permanent, but that the
spiritual needs of Man were greater still, and that in one divine moment,
and by selecting its own mode of expression, a personality might make
itself perfect. The world worships the woman, even now, as a saint.
Yes; there are suggestive things in Individualism. Socialism annihilates
family life, for instance. With the abolition of private property,
marriage in its present form must disappear. This is part of the
programme. Individualism accepts this and makes it fine. It converts
the abolition of legal restraint into a form of freedom that will help
the full development of personality, and make the love of man and woman
more wonderful, more beautiful, and more ennobling. Jesus knew this. He
rejected the claims of family life, although they existed in his day and
community in a very marked form. ‘Who is my mother? Who are my
brothers?’ he said, when he was told that they wished to speak to him.
When one of his followers asked leave to go and bury his father, ‘Let the
dead bury the dead,’ was his terrible answer. He would allow no claim
whatsoever to be made on personality.
And so he who would lead a Christlike life is he who is perfectly and
absolutely himself. He may be a great poet, or a great man of science;
or a young student at a University, or one who watches sheep upon a moor;
or a maker of dramas, like Shakespeare, or a thinker about God, like
Spinoza; or a child who plays in a garden, or a fisherman who throws his
net into the sea. It does not matter what he is, as long as he realises
the perfection of the soul that is within him. All imitation in morals
and in life is wrong. Through the streets of Jerusalem at the present
day crawls one who is mad and carries a wooden cross on his shoulders.
He is a symbol of the lives that are marred by imitation. Father Damien
was Christlike when he went out to live with the lepers, because in such
service he realised fully what was best in him. But he was not more
Christlike than Wagner when he realised his soul in music; or than
Shelley, when he realised his soul in song. There is no one type for
man. There are as many perfections as there are imperfect men. And
while to the claims of charity a man may yield and yet be free, to the
claims of conformity no man may yield and remain free at all.
Individualism, then, is what through Socialism we are to attain to. As a
natural result the State must give up all idea of government. It must
give it up because, as a wise man once said many centuries before Christ,
there is such a thing as leaving mankind alone; there is no such thing as
governing mankind. All modes of government are failures. Despotism is
unjust to everybody, including the despot, who was probably made for
better things. Oligarchies are unjust to the many, and ochlocracies are
unjust to the few. High hopes were once formed of democracy; but
democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for
the people. It has been found out. I must say that it was high time,
for all authority is quite degrading. It degrades those who exercise it,
and degrades those over whom it is exercised. When it is violently,
grossly, and cruelly used, it produces a good effect, by creating, or at
any rate bringing out, the spirit of revolt and Individualism that is to
kill it. When it is used with a certain amount of kindness, and
accompanied by prizes and rewards, it is dreadfully demoralising.
People, in that case, are less conscious of the horrible pressure that is
being put on them, and so go through their lives in a sort of coarse
comfort, like petted animals, without ever realising that they are
probably thinking other people’s thoughts, living by other people’s
standards, wearing practically what one may call other people’s
second-hand clothes, and never being themselves for a single moment. ‘He
who would be free,’ says a fine thinker, ‘must not conform.’ And
authority, by bribing people to conform, produces a very gross kind of
over-fed barbarism amongst us.
With authority, punishment will pass away. This will be a great gain—a
gain, in fact, of incalculable value. As one reads history, not in the
expurgated editions written for school-boys and passmen, but in the
original authorities of each time, one is absolutely sickened, not by the
crimes that the wicked have committed, but by the punishments that the
good have inflicted; and a community is infinitely more brutalised by the
habitual employment of punishment, than it is by the occurrence of crime.
It obviously follows that the more punishment is inflicted the more crime
is produced, and most modern legislation has clearly recognised this, and
has made it its task to diminish punishment as far as it thinks it can.
Wherever it has really diminished it, the results have always been
extremely good. The less punishment, the less crime. When there is no
punishment at all, crime will either cease to exist, or, if it occurs,
will be treated by physicians as a very distressing form of dementia, to
be cured by care and kindness. For what are called criminals nowadays
are not criminals at all. Starvation, and not sin, is the parent of
modern crime. That indeed is the reason why our criminals are, as a
class, so absolutely uninteresting from any psychological point of view.
They are not marvellous Macbeths and terrible Vautrins. They are merely
what ordinary, respectable, commonplace people would be if they had not
got enough to eat. When private property is abolished there will be no
necessity for crime, no demand for it; it will cease to exist. Of
course, all crimes are not crimes against property, though such are the
crimes that the English law, valuing what a man has more than what a man
is, punishes with the harshest and most horrible severity, if we except
the crime of murder, and regard death as worse than penal servitude, a
point on which our criminals, I believe, disagree. But though a crime
may not be against property, it may spring from the misery and rage and
depression produced by our wrong system of property-holding, and so, when
that system is abolished, will disappear. When each member of the
community has sufficient for his wants, and is not interfered with by his
neighbour, it will not be an object of any interest to him to interfere
with anyone else. Jealousy, which is an extraordinary source of crime in
modern life, is an emotion closely bound up with our conceptions of
property, and under Socialism and Individualism will die out. It is
remarkable that in communistic tribes jealousy is entirely unknown.
Now as the State is not to govern, it may be asked what the State is to
do. The State is to be a voluntary association that will organise
labour, and be the manufacturer and distributor of necessary commodities.
The State is to make what is useful. The individual is to make what is
beautiful. And as I have mentioned the word labour, I cannot help saying
that a great deal of nonsense is being written and talked nowadays about
the dignity of manual labour. There is nothing necessarily dignified
about manual labour at all, and most of it is absolutely degrading. It
is mentally and morally injurious to man to do anything in which he does
not find pleasure, and many forms of labour are quite pleasureless
activities, and should be regarded as such. To sweep a slushy crossing
for eight hours, on a day when the east wind is blowing is a disgusting
occupation. To sweep it with mental, moral, or physical dignity seems to
me to be impossible. To sweep it with joy would be appalling. Man is
made for something better than disturbing dirt. All work of that kind
should be done by a machine.
And I have no doubt that it will be so. Up to the present, man has been,
to a certain extent, the slave of machinery, and there is something
tragic in the fact that as soon as man had invented a machine to do his
work he began to starve. This, however, is, of course, the result of our
property system and our system of competition. One man owns a machine
which does the work of five hundred men. Five hundred men are, in
consequence, thrown out of employment, and, having no work to do, become
hungry and take to thieving. The one man secures the produce of the
machine and keeps it, and has five hundred times as much as he should
have, and probably, which is of much more importance, a great deal more
than he really wants. Were that machine the property of all, every one
would benefit by it. It would be an immense advantage to the community.
All unintellectual labour, all monotonous, dull labour, all labour that
deals with dreadful things, and involves unpleasant conditions, must be
done by machinery. Machinery must work for us in coal mines, and do all
sanitary services, and be the stoker of steamers, and clean the streets,
and run messages on wet days, and do anything that is tedious or
distressing. At present machinery competes against man. Under proper
conditions machinery will serve man. There is no doubt at all that this
is the future of machinery, and just as trees grow while the country
gentleman is asleep, so while Humanity will be amusing itself, or
enjoying cultivated leisure—which, and not labour, is the aim of man—or
making beautiful things, or reading beautiful things, or simply
contemplating the world with admiration and delight, machinery will be
doing all the necessary and unpleasant work. The fact is, that
civilisation requires slaves. The Greeks were quite right there. Unless
there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture
and contemplation become almost impossible. Human slavery is wrong,
insecure, and demoralising. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the
machine, the future of the world depends. And when scientific men are no
longer called upon to go down to a depressing East End and distribute bad
cocoa and worse blankets to starving people, they will have delightful
leisure in which to devise wonderful and marvellous things for their own
joy and the joy of everyone else. There will be great storages of force
for every city, and for every house if required, and this force man will
convert into heat, light, or motion, according to his needs. Is this
Utopian? A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth
even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is
always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing
a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias.
Now, I have said that the community by means of organisation of machinery
will supply the useful things, and that the beautiful things will be made
by the individual. This is not merely necessary, but it is the only
possible way by which we can get either the one or the other. An
individual who has to make things for the use of others, and with
reference to their wants and their wishes, does not work with interest,
and consequently cannot put into his work what is best in him. Upon the
other hand, whenever a community or a powerful section of a community, or
a government of any kind, attempts to dictate to the artist what he is to
do, Art either entirely vanishes, or becomes stereotyped, or degenerates
into a low and ignoble form of craft. A work of art is the unique result
of a unique temperament. Its beauty comes from the fact that the author
is what he is. It has nothing to do with the fact that other people want
what they want. Indeed, the moment that an artist takes notice of what
other people want, and tries to supply the demand, he ceases to be an
artist, and becomes a dull or an amusing craftsman, an honest or a
dishonest tradesman. He has no further claim to be considered as an
artist. Art is the most intense mode of Individualism that the world has
known. I am inclined to say that it is the only real mode of
Individualism that the world has known. Crime, which, under certain
conditions, may seem to have created Individualism, must take cognisance
of other people and interfere with them. It belongs to the sphere of
action. But alone, without any reference to his neighbours, without any
interference, the artist can fashion a beautiful thing; and if he does
not do it solely for his own pleasure, he is not an artist at all.
And it is to be noted that it is the fact that Art is this intense form
of Individualism that makes the public try to exercise over it in an
authority that is as immoral as it is ridiculous, and as corrupting as it
is contemptible. It is not quite their fault. The public has always,
and in every age, been badly brought up. They are continually asking Art
to be popular, to please their want of taste, to flatter their absurd
vanity, to tell them what they have been told before, to show them what
they ought to be tired of seeing, to amuse them when they feel heavy
after eating too much, and to distract their thoughts when they are
wearied of their own stupidity. Now Art should never try to be popular.
The public should try to make itself artistic. There is a very wide
difference. If a man of science were told that the results of his
experiments, and the conclusions that he arrived at, should be of such a
character that they would not upset the received popular notions on the
subject, or disturb popular prejudice, or hurt the sensibilities of
people who knew nothing about science; if a philosopher were told that he
had a perfect right to speculate in the highest spheres of thought,
provided that he arrived at the same conclusions as were held by those
who had never thought in any sphere at all—well, nowadays the man of
science and the philosopher would be considerably amused. Yet it is
really a very few years since both philosophy and science were subjected
to brutal popular control, to authority in fact—the authority of either
the general ignorance of the community, or the terror and greed for power
of an ecclesiastical or governmental class. Of course, we have to a very
great extent got rid of any attempt on the part of the community, or the
Church, or the Government, to interfere with the individualism of
speculative thought, but the attempt to interfere with the individualism
of imaginative art still lingers. In fact, it does more than linger; it
is aggressive, offensive, and brutalising.
In England, the arts that have escaped best are the arts in which the
public take no interest. Poetry is an instance of what I mean. We have
been able to have fine poetry in England because the public do not read
it, and consequently do not influence it. The public like to insult
poets because they are individual, but once they have insulted them, they
leave them alone. In the case of the novel and the drama, arts in which
the public do take an interest, the result of the exercise of popular
authority has been absolutely ridiculous. No country produces such
badly-written fiction, such tedious, common work in the novel form, such
silly, vulgar plays as England. It must necessarily be so. The popular
standard is of such a character that no artist can get to it. It is at
once too easy and too difficult to be a popular novelist. It is too
easy, because the requirements of the public as far as plot, style,
psychology, treatment of life, and treatment of literature are concerned
are within the reach of the very meanest capacity and the most
uncultivated mind. It is too difficult, because to meet such
requirements the artist would have to do violence to his temperament,
would have to write not for the artistic joy of writing, but for the
amusement of half-educated people, and so would have to suppress his
individualism, forget his culture, annihilate his style, and surrender
everything that is valuable in him. In the case of the drama, things are
a little better: the theatre-going public like the obvious, it is true,
but they do not like the tedious; and burlesque and farcical comedy, the
two most popular forms, are distinct forms of art. Delightful work may
be produced under burlesque and farcical conditions, and in work of this
kind the artist in England is allowed very great freedom. It is when one
comes to the higher forms of the drama that the result of popular control
is seen. The one thing that the public dislike is novelty. Any attempt
to extend the subject-matter of art is extremely distasteful to the
public; and yet the vitality and progress of art depend in a large
measure on the continual extension of subject-matter. The public dislike
novelty because they are afraid of it. It represents to them a mode of
Individualism, an assertion on the part of the artist that he selects his
own subject, and treats it as he chooses. The public are quite right in
their attitude. Art is Individualism, and Individualism is a disturbing
and disintegrating force. Therein lies its immense value. For what it
seeks to disturb is monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of
habit, and the reduction of man to the level of a machine. In Art, the
public accept what has been, because they cannot alter it, not because
they appreciate it. They swallow their classics whole, and never taste
them. They endure them as the inevitable, and as they cannot mar them,
they mouth about them. Strangely enough, or not strangely, according to
one’s own views, this acceptance of the classics does a great deal of
harm. The uncritical admiration of the Bible and Shakespeare in England
is an instance of what I mean. With regard to the Bible, considerations
of ecclesiastical authority enter into the matter, so that I need not
dwell upon the point.
But in the case of Shakespeare it is quite obvious that the public really
see neither the beauties nor the defects of his plays. If they saw the
beauties, they would not object to the development of the drama; and if
they saw the defects, they would not object to the development of the
drama either. The fact is, the public make use of the classics of a
country as a means of checking the progress of Art. They degrade the
classics into authorities. They use them as bludgeons for preventing the
free expression of Beauty in new forms. They are always asking a writer
why he does not write like somebody else, or a painter why he does not
paint like somebody else, quite oblivious of the fact that if either of
them did anything of the kind he would cease to be an artist. A fresh
mode of Beauty is absolutely distasteful to them, and whenever it appears
they get so angry, and bewildered that they always use two stupid
expressions—one is that the work of art is grossly unintelligible; the
other, that the work of art is grossly immoral. What they mean by these
words seems to me to be this. When they say a work is grossly
unintelligible, they mean that the artist has said or made a beautiful
thing that is new; when they describe a work as grossly immoral, they
mean that the artist has said or made a beautiful thing that is true.
The former expression has reference to style; the latter to
subject-matter. But they probably use the words very vaguely, as an
ordinary mob will use ready-made paving-stones. There is not a single
real poet or prose-writer of this century, for instance, on whom the
British public have not solemnly conferred diplomas of immorality, and
these diplomas practically take the place, with us, of what in France, is
the formal recognition of an Academy of Letters, and fortunately make the
establishment of such an institution quite unnecessary in England. Of
course, the public are very reckless in their use of the word. That they
should have called Wordsworth an immoral poet, was only to be expected.
Wordsworth was a poet. But that they should have called Charles Kingsley
an immoral novelist is extraordinary. Kingsley’s prose was not of a very
fine quality. Still, there is the word, and they use it as best they
can. An artist is, of course, not disturbed by it. The true artist is a
man who believes absolutely in himself, because he is absolutely himself.
But I can fancy that if an artist produced a work of art in England that
immediately on its appearance was recognised by the public, through their
medium, which is the public press, as a work that was quite intelligible
and highly moral, he would begin to seriously question whether in its
creation he had really been himself at all, and consequently whether the
work was not quite unworthy of him, and either of a thoroughly
second-rate order, or of no artistic value whatsoever.
Perhaps, however, I have wronged the public in limiting them to such
words as ‘immoral,’ ‘unintelligible,’ ‘exotic,’ and ‘unhealthy.’ There
is one other word that they use. That word is ‘morbid.’ They do not use
it often. The meaning of the word is so simple that they are afraid of
using it. Still, they use it sometimes, and, now and then, one comes
across it in popular newspapers. It is, of course, a ridiculous word to
apply to a work of art. For what is morbidity but a mood of emotion or a
mode of thought that one cannot express? The public are all morbid,
because the public can never find expression for anything. The artist is
never morbid. He expresses everything. He stands outside his subject,
and through its medium produces incomparable and artistic effects. To
call an artist morbid because he deals with morbidity as his
subject-matter is as silly as if one called Shakespeare mad because he
wrote ‘King Lear.’
On the whole, an artist in England gains something by being attacked.
His individuality is intensified. He becomes more completely himself.
Of course, the attacks are very gross, very impertinent, and very
contemptible. But then no artist expects grace from the vulgar mind, or
style from the suburban intellect. Vulgarity and stupidity are two very
vivid facts in modern life. One regrets them, naturally. But there they
are. They are subjects for study, like everything else. And it is only
fair to state, with regard to modern journalists, that they always
apologise to one in private for what they have written against one in
public.
Within the last few years two other adjectives, it may be mentioned, have
been added to the very limited vocabulary of art-abuse that is at the
disposal of the public. One is the word ‘unhealthy,’ the other is the
word ‘exotic.’ The latter merely expresses the rage of the momentary
mushroom against the immortal, entrancing, and exquisitely lovely orchid.
It is a tribute, but a tribute of no importance. The word ‘unhealthy,’
however, admits of analysis. It is a rather interesting word. In fact,
it is so interesting that the people who use it do not know what it
means.
What does it mean? What is a healthy, or an unhealthy work of art? All
terms that one applies to a work of art, provided that one applies them
rationally, have reference to either its style or its subject, or to both
together. From the point of view of style, a healthy work of art is one
whose style recognises the beauty of the material it employs, be that
material one of words or of bronze, of colour or of ivory, and uses that
beauty as a factor in producing the æsthetic effect. From the point of
view of subject, a healthy work of art is one the choice of whose subject
is conditioned by the temperament of the artist, and comes directly out
of it. In fine, a healthy work of art is one that has both perfection
and personality. Of course, form and substance cannot be separated in a
work of art; they are always one. But for purposes of analysis, and
setting the wholeness of æsthetic impression aside for a moment, we can
intellectually so separate them. An unhealthy work of art, on the other
hand, is a work whose style is obvious, old-fashioned, and common, and
whose subject is deliberately chosen, not because the artist has any
pleasure in it, but because he thinks that the public will pay him for
it. In fact, the popular novel that the public calls healthy is always a
thoroughly unhealthy production; and what the public call an unhealthy
novel is always a beautiful and healthy work of art.