<p>There are three kinds of despots. There is the despot who tyrannises
over the body. There is the despot who tyrannises over the soul.
There is the despot who tyrannises over the soul and body alike.
The first is called the Prince. The second is called the Pope.
The third is called the People. The Prince may be cultivated.
Many Princes have been. Yet in the Prince there is danger.
One thinks of Dante at the bitter feast in Verona, of Tasso in Ferrara’s
madman’s cell. It is better for the artist not to live with
Princes. The Pope may be cultivated. Many Popes have been;
the bad Popes have been. The bad Popes loved Beauty, almost as
passionately, nay, with as much passion as the good Popes hated Thought.
To the wickedness of the Papacy humanity owes much. The goodness
of the Papacy owes a terrible debt to humanity. Yet, though the
Vatican has kept the rhetoric of its thunders, and lost the rod of its
lightning, it is better for the artist not to live with Popes.
It was a Pope who said of Cellini to a conclave of Cardinals that common
laws and common authority were not made for men such as he; but it was
a Pope who thrust Cellini into prison, and kept him there till he sickened
with rage, and created unreal visions for himself, and saw the gilded
sun enter his room, and grew so enamoured of it that he sought to escape,
and crept out from tower to tower, and falling through dizzy air at
dawn, maimed himself, and was by a vine-dresser covered with vine leaves,
and carried in a cart to one who, loving beautiful things, had care
of him. There is danger in Popes. And as for the People,
what of them and their authority? Perhaps of them and their authority
one has spoken enough. Their authority is a thing blind, deaf,
hideous, grotesque, tragic, amusing, serious, and obscene. It
is impossible for the artist to live with the People. All despots
bribe. The people bribe and brutalise. Who told them to
exercise authority? They were made to live, to listen, and to
love. Someone has done them a great wrong. They have marred
themselves by imitation of their inferiors. They have taken the
sceptre of the Prince. How should they use it? They have
taken the triple tiara of the Pope. How should they carry its
burden? They are as a clown whose heart is broken. They
are as a priest whose soul is not yet born. Let all who love Beauty
pity them. Though they themselves love not Beauty, yet let them
pity themselves. Who taught them the trick of tyranny?</p>
<p>There are many other things that one might point out. One might
point out how the Renaissance was great, because it sought to solve
no social problem, and busied itself not about such things, but suffered
the individual to develop freely, beautifully, and naturally, and so
had great and individual artists, and great and individual men.
One might point out how Louis XIV., by creating the modern state, destroyed
the individualism of the artist, and made things monstrous in their
monotony of repetition, and contemptible in their conformity to rule,
and destroyed throughout all France all those fine freedoms of expression
that had made tradition new in beauty, and new modes one with antique
form. But the past is of no importance. The present is of
no importance. It is with the future that we have to deal.
For the past is what man should not have been. The present is
what man ought not to be. The future is what artists are.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Individualism will also be unselfish and unaffected. It has
been pointed out that one of the results of the extraordinary tyranny
of authority is that words are absolutely distorted from their proper
and simple meaning, and are used to express the obverse of their right
signification. What is true about Art is true about Life.
A man is called affected, nowadays, if he dresses as he likes to dress.
But in doing that he is acting in a perfectly natural manner.
Affectation, in such matters, consists in dressing according to the
views of one’s neighbour, whose views, as they are the views of
the majority, will probably be extremely stupid. Or a man is called
selfish if he lives in the manner that seems to him most suitable for
the full realisation of his own personality; if, in fact, the primary
aim of his life is self-development. But this is the way in which
everyone should live. Selfishness is not living as one wishes
to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live. And
unselfishness is letting other people’s lives alone, not interfering
with them. Selfishness always aims at creating around it an absolute
uniformity of type. Unselfishness recognises infinite variety
of type as a delightful thing, accepts it, acquiesces in it, enjoys
it. It is not selfish to think for oneself. A man who does
not think for himself does not think at all. It is grossly selfish
to require of 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>For it is through joy that the Individualism of the future will develop
itself. Christ made no attempt to reconstruct society, and consequently
the Individualism that he preached to man could be realised only through
pain or in solitude. The ideals that we owe to Christ are the
ideals of the man who abandons society entirely, or of the man who resists
society absolutely. But man is naturally social. Even the
Thebaid became peopled at last. And though the cenobite realises
his personality, it is often an impoverished personality that he so
realises. Upon the other hand, the terrible truth that pain is
a mode through which man may realise himself exercises a wonderful fascination
over the world. Shallow speakers and shallow thinkers in pulpits
and on platforms often talk about the world’s worship of pleasure,
and whine against it. But it is rarely in the world’s history
that its ideal has been one of joy and beauty. The worship of
pain has far more often dominated the world. Mediaevalism, with
its saints and martyrs, its love of self-torture, its wild passion for
wounding itself, its gashing with knives, and its whipping with rods—Mediaevalism
is real Christianity, and the mediaeval Christ is the real Christ.
When the Renaissance dawned upon the world, and brought with it the
new ideals of the beauty of life and the joy of living, men could not
understand Christ. Even Art shows us that. The painters
of the Renaissance drew Christ as a little boy playing with another
boy in a palace or a garden, or lying back in his mother’s arms,
smiling at her, or at a flower, or at a bright bird; or as a noble,
stately figure moving nobly through the world; or as a wonderful figure
rising in a sort of ecstasy from death to life. Even when they
drew him crucified they drew him as a beautiful God on whom evil men
had inflicted suffering. But he did not preoccupy them much.
What delighted them was to paint the men and women whom they admired,
and to show the loveliness of this lovely earth. They painted
many religious pictures—in fact, they painted far too many, and
the monotony of type and motive is wearisome, and was bad for art.
It was the result of the authority of the public in art-matters, and
is to be deplored. But their soul was not in the subject.
Raphael was a great artist when he painted his portrait of the Pope.
When he painted his Madonnas and infant Christs, he is not a great artist
at all. Christ had no message for the Renaissance, which was wonderful
because it brought an ideal at variance with his, and to find the presentation
of the real Christ we must go to mediaeval art. There he is one
maimed and marred; one who is not comely to look on, because Beauty
is a joy; one who is not in fair raiment, because that may be a joy
also: he is a beggar who has a marvellous soul; he is a leper whose
soul is divine; he needs neither property nor health; he is a God realising
his perfection through pain.</p>
<p>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
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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
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