out that one of the results of the extraordinary tyranny of authority is
that words are absolutely distorted from their proper and simple meaning,
and are used to express the obverse of their right signification. What
is true about Art is true about Life. A man is called affected,
nowadays, if he dresses as he likes to dress. But in doing that he is
acting in a perfectly natural manner. Affectation, in such matters,
consists in dressing according to the views of one’s neighbour, whose
views, as they are the views of the majority, will probably be extremely
stupid. Or a man is called selfish if he lives in the manner that seems
to him most suitable for the full realisation of his own personality; if,
in fact, the primary aim of his life is self-development. But this is
the way in which everyone should live. Selfishness is not living as one
wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live. And
unselfishness is letting other people’s lives alone, not interfering with
them. Selfishness always aims at creating around it an absolute
uniformity of type. Unselfishness recognises infinite variety of type as
a delightful thing, accepts it, acquiesces in it, enjoys it. It is not
selfish to think for oneself. A man who does not think for himself does
not think at all. It is grossly selfish to require of ones neighbour
that he should think in the same way, and hold the same opinions. Why
should he? If he can think, he will probably think differently. If he
cannot think, it is monstrous to require thought of any kind from him. A
red rose is not selfish because it wants to be a red rose. It would be
horribly selfish if it wanted all the other flowers in the garden to be
both red and roses. Under Individualism people will be quite natural and
absolutely unselfish, and will know the meanings of the words, and
realise them in their free, beautiful lives. Nor will men be egotistic
as they are now. For the egotist is he who makes claims upon others, and
the Individualist will not desire to do that. It will not give him
pleasure. When man has realised Individualism, he will also realise
sympathy and exercise it freely and spontaneously. Up to the present man
has hardly cultivated sympathy at all. He has merely sympathy with pain,
and sympathy with pain is not the highest form of sympathy. All sympathy
is fine, but sympathy with suffering is the least fine mode. It is
tainted with egotism. It is apt to become morbid. There is in it a
certain element of terror for our own safety. We become afraid that we
ourselves might be as the leper or as the blind, and that no man would
have care of us. It is curiously limiting, too. One should sympathise
with the entirety of life, not with life’s sores and maladies merely, but
with life’s joy and beauty and energy and health and freedom. The wider
sympathy is, of course, the more difficult. It requires more
unselfishness. Anybody can sympathise with the sufferings of a friend,
but it requires a very fine nature—it requires, in fact, the nature of a
true Individualist—to sympathise with a friend’s success.
In the modern stress of competition and struggle for place, such sympathy
is naturally rare, and is also very much stifled by the immoral ideal of
uniformity of type and conformity to rule which is so prevalent
everywhere, and is perhaps most obnoxious in England.
Sympathy with pain there will, of course, always be. It is one of the
first instincts of man. The animals which are individual, the higher
animals, that is to say, share it with us. But it must be remembered
that while sympathy with joy intensifies the sum of joy in the world,
sympathy with pain does not really diminish the amount of pain. It may
make man better able to endure evil, but the evil remains. Sympathy with
consumption does not cure consumption; that is what Science does. And
when Socialism has solved the problem of poverty, and Science solved the
problem of disease, the area of the sentimentalists will be lessened, and
the sympathy of man will be large, healthy, and spontaneous. Man will
have joy in the contemplation of the joyous life of others.
For it is through joy that the Individualism of the future will develop
itself. Christ made no attempt to reconstruct society, and consequently
the Individualism that he preached to man could be realised only through
pain or in solitude. The ideals that we owe to Christ are the ideals of
the man who abandons society entirely, or of the man who resists society
absolutely. But man is naturally social. Even the Thebaid became
peopled at last. And though the cenobite realises his personality, it is
often an impoverished personality that he so realises. Upon the other
hand, the terrible truth that pain is a mode through which man may
realise himself exercises a wonderful fascination over the world.
Shallow speakers and shallow thinkers in pulpits and on platforms often
talk about the world’s worship of pleasure, and whine against it. But it
is rarely in the world’s history that its ideal has been one of joy and
beauty. The worship of pain has far more often dominated the world.
Mediævalism, 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—Mediævalism is real Christianity, and the mediæval
Christ is the real Christ. When the Renaissance dawned upon the world,
and brought with it the new ideals of the beauty of life and the joy of
living, men could not understand Christ. Even Art shows us that. The
painters of the Renaissance drew Christ as a little boy playing with
another boy in a palace or a garden, or lying back in his mother’s arms,
smiling at her, or at a flower, or at a bright bird; or as a noble,
stately figure moving nobly through the world; or as a wonderful figure
rising in a sort of ecstasy from death to life. Even when they drew him
crucified they drew him as a beautiful God on whom evil men had inflicted
suffering. But he did not preoccupy them much. What delighted them was
to paint the men and women whom they admired, and to show the loveliness
of this lovely earth. They painted many religious pictures—in fact, they
painted far too many, and the monotony of type and motive is wearisome,
and was bad for art. It was the result of the authority of the public in
art-matters, and is to be deplored. But their soul was not in the
subject. Raphael was a great artist when he painted his portrait of the
Pope. When he painted his Madonnas and infant Christs, he is not a great
artist at all. Christ had no message for the Renaissance, which was
wonderful because it brought an ideal at variance with his, and to find
the presentation of the real Christ we must go to mediæval art. There he
is one maimed and marred; one who is not comely to look on, because
Beauty is a joy; one who is not in fair raiment, because that may be a
joy also: he is a beggar who has a marvellous soul; he is a leper whose
soul is divine; he needs neither property nor health; he is a God
realising his perfection through pain.
The evolution of man is slow. The injustice of men is great. It was
necessary that pain should be put forward as a mode of self-realisation.
Even now, in some places in the world, the message of Christ is
necessary. No one who lived in modern Russia could possibly realise his
perfection except by pain. A few Russian artists have realised
themselves in Art; in a fiction that is mediæval 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
developing. A Nihilist who rejects all authority, because he knows
authority to be evil, and welcomes all pain, because through that he
realises his personality, is a real Christian. To him the Christian
ideal is a true thing.
And yet, Christ did not revolt against authority. He accepted the
imperial authority of the Roman Empire and paid tribute. He endured the
ecclesiastical authority of the Jewish Church, and would not repel its
violence by any violence of his own. He had, as I said before, no scheme
for the reconstruction of society. But the modern world has schemes. It
proposes to do away with poverty and the suffering that it entails. It
desires to get rid of pain, and the suffering that pain entails. It
trusts to Socialism and to Science as its methods. What it aims at is an
Individualism expressing itself through joy. This Individualism will be
larger, fuller, lovelier than any Individualism has ever been. Pain is
not the ultimate mode of perfection. It is merely provisional and a
protest. It has reference to wrong, unhealthy, unjust surroundings.
When the wrong, and the disease, and the injustice are removed, it will
have no further place. It will have done its work. It was a great work,
but it is almost over. Its sphere lessens every day.
Nor will man miss it. For what man has sought for is, indeed, neither
pain nor pleasure, but simply Life. Man has sought to live intensely,
fully, perfectly. When he can do so without exercising restraint on
others, or suffering it ever, and his activities are all pleasurable to
him, he will be saner, healthier, more civilised, more himself. Pleasure
is Nature’s test, her sign of approval. When man is happy, he is in
harmony with himself and his environment. The new Individualism, for
whose service Socialism, whether it wills it or not, is working, will be
perfect harmony. It will be what the Greeks sought for, but could not,
except in Thought, realise completely, because they had slaves, and fed
them; it will be what the Renaissance sought for, but could not realise
completely except in Art, because they had slaves, and starved them. It
will be complete, and through it each man will attain to his perfection.
The new Individualism is the new Hellenism.
* * * * *
_Reprinted from the_ ‘_Fortnightly Review_,’
_by permission of Messrs Chapman and Hall_.