The Soul of Man by Oscar Wilde ~ Full Audiobook [philosophy]
00:00The Soul of Man by Oscar Wilde. Section 1The chief advantage that would result from the establishment of socialism is undoubtedly the fact that socialismwould relieve us from that sordid necessity of living for others, which in the presentcondition of things presses so hardly upon almost everybody. In fact, scarcely anyoneat 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 Monsieur Renan, a supreme artist likeFlaubert, has been able to isolate himself, to keep himself out of reach of the clamorousclaims of others, to stand under the shelter of the war.
01:00as Plato puts it, and so to realise the perfection of what was in him, to his own incomparablegain, and to the incomparable and lasting gain of the whole world.These, however, are exceptions.The majority of people spoiled their lives by an unhealthy and exaggerated altruism,are forced indeed so to spoil them.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 stirredmore quickly than man's intelligence. And as I pointed out some time ago in an article on
01:54the function of criticism, it is much more easy to have sympathy with so much more.suffering, and it is to have sympathy with thought. Accordingly, with admirable, though misdirectedintentions, they very seriously and very sentimentally set themselves to the task of remedying theevils 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.
03:06Just as the worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their slaves, and so prevented thehorror of the system being realised by those who suffered from it, and understood by those who contemplatedit. So in the present state of things in England, the people who do most harm are the people whopeople who try to do most good. And at last we have had the spectacle of men who have reallystudied the problem, and know the life, educated men who live in the East End, coming forwardand 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 demoral.They are perfectly right. Charity creates a multitude of sins. There is also this to be said. It is
04:09immoral to use private property in order to alleviate the horrible evils that result from the institutionof private property. It is both immoral and unfair. Under socialism, all this will of course bealtered. 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 arms,
05:06or 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 cooperation for competition.
05:52will restore society to its proper condition of a thoroughly healthy organism, and ensure thematerial well-being of each member of the community. It will, in fact, give life its properbasis and its proper environment. But for the full development of life, to its highest mode ofperfection, 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 ofindividualism. They are either under no necessity to work for their living, or are enabledto 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.
07:13In a word, the real men, the men who have realised themselves, and in whom all humanity gainsa partial realisation. Upon the other hand, there are a great many people who having no privateproperty of their own, and being always on the brink of sheer starvation, are compelled to dothe work of beasts of burden, to do work that is quite uncongenial to them, and to which theyare 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 civilization, 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
08:30regarding 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 propertyis 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 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.
09:35One 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 standit, 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.
10:25Some 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 sentimentaldole, usually accompanied by some impertinent attempt on the part of the sentimentalist to tyrannise overtheir private lives. Why should they be grateful for the crumbs that fall from the rich man'stable? 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
11:19mode 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 practice thrift would be absolutely immoral.Man should not be ready to be ready to do.
12:05to show that he can live like a badly fed animal. He should decline to live like that, and shouldeither steal or go on the rates, which is considered by many to be a form of stealing. As forbegging, 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 healthyprotest. As for the virtuous poor, one can pity them, of course, but one cannot possibly admirethem. They have made private terms with the enemy, and sold their birthright for very badpotage. They must also be extraordinarily stupid. I can quite understand a man accepting laws that
13:10protect private property, and admit of its accumulation, as long as he himself is able under thoseconditions to realise some form of beautiful and intellectual life. But it is almost incredibleto me how a man whose life is marred and made hideous by such laws can possibly acquiesce intheir continuance. However, the explanation is not really difficult to find. It is simplythis. Misery and poverty are so absolutely degrading, and exercise such a paralysingeffect 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.
14:14Agitators are a set of interfering, meddling people, who come down to some perfectlycontented 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 incompletestate, 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 partthat they should be free. It was put down entirely through the grossly illegal conduct of certainagitators 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
15:13the torture light, 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 themselvesindeed so absolutely free that they were free to starve, many of them bitterly regrettedthe new state of things. To the thinker, the most tragic fact in the whole of the Frenchrevolution is not that Marie Antoinette was killed for being a queen, but that the starvedpeasant of the Vande 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
16:12system, a very large number of people can lead lives of a certain amount of freedom andexpression 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 ourcommunity should be practically in slavery, but to propose to solve the problem by enslavingthe 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 workwill 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
17:13would seriously propose that an inspector should call every morning at each house to see thateach 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 callcriminals. But I confess that many of the socialistic views that I have comeacross 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 quitevoluntary. It is only involuntary associations that man is fine. But it may be askedhow individualism, which is now more or less dependent upon the existence of the existence of
18:13of 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 hadprivate means of their own, such as Byron, Shelley, Browning, Victor Hugo, Baudelaire and othershave 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 individualismthat 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. It will benefit.
19:13in this way. Under the new conditions, individualism will be far freer, far finer, and far moreintensified than it is now. I am not talking of the great imaginatively realized individualismof such poets, as I have mentioned, but of the great actual individualism latent and potentialin mankind generally. For the recognition ofprivate property has really harmed individualism, and obscured it by confusing a man withwhat he possesses.It has led individualism entirely astray.It has made gain, not growth, its aim.
20:01So that man thought that the important thing was to have, and did not know that the importantthing is to be.The true perfection of man lies not in what man has, but in what man is.End of section 1.RBC Training Ground has discovered potential in over 20,000 Canadian athletes and counting.Your story could be next.If you've got the drive, they'll help you find your path to the Olympics.Let's see what you've got.
20:36Sign up for free at rbc trainingground.ca.Section 2.Private property has crushed.true individualism, and set up an individualism that is false. It has debarred one part of thecommunity from being individual by starving them. It has debarred the other part of the communityfrom 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
21:24severity 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.
22:15Man will kill himself by overwork in order to secure property. And really, considering the enormousadvantages that property brings, one is hardly surprised. One's regret is that society should be constructedon such a basis that man has been forced into a groove, in which he cannot freely developwhat is wonderful and fascinating and delightful in him, in which, in fact, he misses the truepleasure and joy of living. He is also under existing conditions very insecure. An enormouslywealthy merchant may be, often is, at every moment of his life at the mercy of thingsthat are not under his control. If the wind blows an extra point or so, or the weather suddenlychanges, or some trivial thing happens, his ship may go down, his speculations may go wrong,
23:23and he finds himself a poor man, with his social position quite gone. Now, nothing should be ableto harm a man except himself. Nothing should be able to harm a man except himself. Nothing should be able to harm a man,should be able to rob a man at all. What a man really has is what is in him. What is outside of himshould be a matter of no importance. With the abolition of private property, then, we shall havetrue, 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.
24:14It is a question whether we have ever seen the full expression of a personality,except on the imaginative plane of art.In action we never have.Caesar, says Momson, was the complete and perfect man.But how tragically insecure was Caesar.Wherever there is a man who exercises authority, there is a man who resists authority.Caesar was very perfect, but his perfection travelled by too dangerous a road.Marcus Aurelius was the perfect man, says Renan.
24:57Yes, 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 wasto bear the weight of that titan and too vast orb.What I mean by a perfect manis 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
25:35rebels. Half their strength has been wasted in friction. Byron's personality, for instance, wasterribly wasted in its battle with the stupidity and hypocrisy and Philistinism of the English. Such battlesdo not always intensify strength. They often exaggerate weakness. Byron was never able to give uswhat 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,
26:20they would have fallen on him with tooth and nail,and made his life as unbearable to him as they possibly could.But he was not a remarkable figure in society,and consequently he escaped to a certain degree.Still, even in Shelley, the note of rebellion is sometimes too strong.The note of the perfect personality is not rebellion, but peace.It will be a marvellous thing, the true personality of man, when we see it.It will grow naturally and simply flower-lis.
27:01or as a tree grows. It will not be at discord. It will never argue or dispute. It will not provethings. It will know everything. And yet it will not busy itself about knowledge. It willhave wisdom. Its value will not be measured by material things. It will have nothing. And yet itwill have everything, and whatever one takes from it, it will still have. So rich will it be. It will not bealways meddling with others, or asking them to be like itself. It will love them because theywill be different. And yet, while it will not meddle with others, it will help all, as a beautifulthing helps us, by being what it is.The personality of man will be very wonderful.
28:02It 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 nonetheless 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
28:52portal of the new world, be thyself shall be written. And the message of Christ to man was simplybe thyself. That is the secret of Christ. When Jesus talks about the poor, he simply meanspersonalities. Just as when he talks about the rich, he simply means people who have notdeveloped their personalities. Jesus moved in a community that allowed the accumulationof private property, just as ours does. And the gospel that he preached was not that in such acommunity 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 tolive under healthy, pleasant and decent conditions. Such a view would have been wrong,
29:52there and then, and would of course be still more wrong now, and in England, for as man movesnorthward, the material necessities of life become of more vital importance, and our societyis infinitely more complex, and displays far greater extremes of luxury and pauperism than anysociety 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 perfectionlies in the accumulating or possessing external things. Your affection is inside of you.If only you could realize that you would not want to be rich. Ordinary riches can be stolenfrom a man. Real riches cannot. In the treasured, the treasured, you can't. In the treasured,
30:52house of your soul, there are infinitely precious things that may not be taken from you. And so, try to soshape 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 hindersindividualism at every step. It is to be noted that Jesus never says that impoverished people arenecessarily 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.
31:57The 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,
32:37You 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 alwaysworrying about other things. What do other things matter? Man iscomplete 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-centered.
33:32If a man takes their cloak, they are to give him their coat, just to show that material thingsare 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. Heis 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
34:36estimated 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 doinganything bad. He may commit a sin against society, and yet realise through that sin his trueperfection. There was a woman who was taken in adultery. We are not told the history of herlove, 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 costlyperfumes on his hair. His friends tried to interfere with her, and said that it was an extravagance,
35:36and 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 motive,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.
36:28With the abolition of private property, marriage in its present form must disappear. This is part of theprogram. Individualism accepts this and makes it fine. It converts the abolition of legal restraintinto a form of freedom that will help the full development of personality, and make the loveof man and woman more wonderful, more beautiful, and more ennobling. Jesus knew this. He rejectedthe 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.
37:33to be made on personality. And so, he who would lead a Christ-like life is he who is perfectly andabsolutely himself. He may be a great poet, or a great man of science, or a young studentat 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 throwshis net into the sea. It does not matter what he is, as long as he realizes the perfectionof the soul that is within him. All imitation in morals and in life is wrong. Through the streetsof 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
38:37by imitation. Father Damien was Christ-like when he went out to live with the lepers,because in such service he realised fully what was best in him. But he was not more Christ-likethan 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.
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40:18Don't miss what the movie blog calls something you need to watch.Saving those children is how we all go home.From Binge All Episodes exclusively on Paramount Plus.Section 3.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.
40:57There 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 oclocracies are unjust to the few.High hopes were once formed of democracy, but democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the peopleby 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 degradesthose over whom it is exercised. When it is violently, grossly and cruelly used, it produces
41:56a 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 certainamount 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 animal.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'ssecond-hand clothes, and never being themselves for a single moment.
42:50He who would be free, says a fine thinker, must not conform.And authority, by bribing people to conform, produces a very gross kind of overfed barbarismamongst us.With authority, punishment will pass away.This will be a great gain, a gain, in fact, of incalculable value.As one reads history, not in the expurgated editions written for schoolboys and passmen,in the original authorities of each time.One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed, but by the punishments
43:37that the good have inflicted.And a community is infinitely more brutalised by the habitual employment of punishment thanit is by the occurrence of crime.It obviously follows that the more punishment is inflicted, the more punishment is inflicted, thethe more crime is produced, and most modern legislation has clearly recognised this, and has made it itstask to diminish punishment as far as it thinks it can. Wherever it has really diminishedit, the results have always been extremely good. The less punishment, the less crime.Where there is no punishment at all, crime will either cease to exist, or if it is a
44:25occurs will be treated by physicians as a very distressing form of dementia, to be cured by careand kindness. For what are called criminals nowadays are not criminals at all. Starvation andnot sin is the parent of modern crime. That indeed is the reason why our criminals are as a classso absolutely uninteresting from any psychological point of view. They are not marvellous Macbeths, and terrible votins.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,
45:35punishes with the harshest and most horrible severity,if we accept 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 depressionproduced 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 notinterfered with by his neighbour, it will not be an object of any interest to him to interfere withanyone else. Jealousy, which is an extraordinary source of crime in modern life, is an emotion
46:30closely bound up with our conceptions of property, and under socialism and individualismwill 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 manufacturerand 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 nonsenseis being written and talked nowadays about the dignity of manual labour.
47:27There is nothing necessarily dignified about manual labour at all, and most of it is absolutelydegrading.It is mentally and morally injurious to man to do anything in which he does not findpleasure, and many forms of labour are quite pleasureless activities, and should be regardedas 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 meto be impossible. To sweep it with joy would be aappalling. Man is made for something better than disturbing dirt. All work of that kind should be done by a
48:23machine. And I have no doubt that it will be so. Up to the present man has been to a certain extentthe slave of machinery, and there is something tragic in the fact that as soon as man had inventeda machine to do his work, he began to starve. This, however, is of course the result of our propertysystem, and of our system of competition. One man owns a machine which does the work of five hundredmen. 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 moreimportance, a great deal more than he really wants. Where that machine, the property of all,
49:31everyone would benefit by it. It would be an immense advantage to the country.community. All unintellectual labour, all monotonous, dull labour, or labour that deals withdreadful things, and involves unpleasant conditions, must be done by machinery. Machinery mustwork for us in coal mines, and do all sanitary services, and be the stoker of steamers, andclean 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 growwhile the country gentleman is asleep, so while humanity will be able to be. So, while humanity will
50:32amusing 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 worldwith admiration and delight. Machinery will be doing all the necessary and unpleasantwork. The fact is that civilisation requires slaves.The Greeks were quite right there. Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninterestingwork, 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.
51:53There 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 glancingat, for it leaves out the one country at which humanity is always landing. And when humanitylands there, it looks out, and seeing a better country, set sail. Progress is the realisationof utopias. End of Section 3. Section 4. Now, I have said that the community, by means oforganisation of machinery, will supply the useful things, and that the beautiful things will be made bythe individual. That is not merely necessary, but it is the only possible way by which we can get
53:06either 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 consequentlycannot put into his work what is best in him. Upon the other hand, whenever a community or a powersection 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 ofcraft. A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament. Its beauty comes from the factthat the author is what he is. It has nothing to do with the fact that other people want what theywant. Indeed, the moment that an artist takes notice of what other people want, and tries to supply
54:14the 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 saythat it is the only real mode of individualism that the world has known. Crime, which under certainconditions may seem to have created individualism, must take cognizance of other people, andinterfere with them. It belongs to the sphere of action. But alone, without any referenceto his neighbours, without any interference, the artist can fashion a beautiful thing, and if hedoes not do it solely for his own pleasure, he is not an artist at all.
55:18And it is to be noted that it is the fact that art is this intense form of individualismthat makes the public try to exercise over it, an authority that is as immoral as it isridiculous, 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 absurdvanity, to tell them what they have been told before, to show them what they ought to betired of seeing, to amuse them when they feel heavy after eating too much, and to distract
56:11their 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 experimentsand the conclusions that he arrived atshould be of such a character that they would not upsetthe received popular notions on the subject
56:43or 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 thecommunity, or the terror and greed for power of an ecclesiastical or ghastical, orgovernmental class. Of course, we have to a very great extent got rid of any attempt on the part of the
57:46community, 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, or,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 in
58:38individual, 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, suchsilly, vulgar plays as England. It must necessarily be so. The popular standard is of such acharacter that no artist can get to it. It is at once too easy and too difficult to be a popularnovelist. It is too easy because the requirements of the public, as far as plot, style,Well, psychology, treatment of life, and treatment of literature are concerned, are within
59:40the 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 violenceto his temperament, would have to write not for the artistic joy of writing, but for the amusementof 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.
01:00:40Delightful 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 the result ofpopular control is seen. The one thing that the public dislike is novelty. Any attemptto extend the subject matter of art is extremely distasteful to the public, and yet thevitality and progress of art depend in a large measure on the continual extension of subjectmatter. The public dislike novelty because they are afraid of it. It represents to them a modeof individualism, an assertion on the part of the artist that he selects his own subject and
01:01:39treats it as he chooses. The public are quite right in their attitude. Art is individualism,and individualism is a disturbing and disintegration.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 theyappreciate it. They swallow their classics.whole, and never taste them. They endure them as the inevitable, and as they cannot mar them,they mowls about them. Strangely enough, or not strangely, according to one's views,
01:02:40this acceptance of the classics does a great deal of harm. The uncritical admiration of theBible 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 thebeauties nor the defects of his plays. If they saw the beauties, they would not object tothe development of the drama. And if they saw the defect,They would not object to the development of the drama either.
01:03:29The fact is the public make use of the classics of a country as a means of checking the progressof art.They degrade the classics into authorities.They use them as bludgeon 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 obliviousof 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
01:04:15angry 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 grosslyimmoral. What they mean by these words seems to me to be this. When they say a work is grosslyunintelligible, they mean that the artist has said or made a beautiful thing that is new. Whenthey describe a work as grossly immoral, they mean that the artis'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 ordinarymob will use ready-made paving-stones. There is not a single real poet or prose writer
01:05:18of this century, for instance, on whom the British publichave not solemnly conferred diplomas of immorality. And these diplomas practically take the placewith us of what in France is the formal recognition of an Academy of Letters, and fortunatelymake 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 calledWordsworth, an immoral poet, was only to be expected. Wordsworth was a poet. But that they shouldhave called Charles Kingsley an immoral novelist is extraordinary. Kingsley's prose was not of a veryfine quality. Still, there is the word, and they used it as best they can. An artist is, of course,
01:06:21not 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 artin 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,
01:07:19unintelligible, 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 ofemotion or a mode of thought that one cannot express? The public are all morbid, because thepublic can never find expression for anything. The artist is never morbid. He expresseseverything. He stands outside his subject, and through its medium produces incomparableand artistic effects. To call an artist morbid, because he deals with morbidity as his subject matter,
01:08:29is as silly as if one called Shakespeare mad, because he wrote King Lear. On the whole, an artist in Englandgains something by being attacked. His individuality is intensified. He becomes more completelyhimself. 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 suburbanintellect. Vulgarity and stupidity are two very vivid facts in modern life. One regrets themnaturally, but they are there. They are subjects for study, like everything else.And it is only fair to state with regard to modern journalists that they alwaysapologise to one in private for what they have written against one in public.
01:09:35Within the last few years, two other adjectives, it may be mentioned, have been added to thevery 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 thepeople who use it do not know what it means. What does it mean? What is a healthy or an unhealthywork of art?
01:10:34All 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 beautyof the material it employs.Be that material one of words or of bronze, of colour or of iron.and uses that beauty as a factor in producing the aesthetic effect.From the point of view of subject, a healthy work of art is one the choice of whose subjectis conditioned by the temperament of the artist, and comes directly out of it.
01:11:24In fine, a healthy work of art is one that has both perfection and personality.Of course, form and substance cannot be separated in a work of art.They are always one.But for purposes of analysis, and setting the wholeness of aesthetic impression aside for a moment,we can intellectually so separate them.An unhealthy work of art, on the other hand, is a work whose style is obvious, old-fashioned,common, and whose subject is deliberately chosen, not because the artist has any pleasurein it, but because he thinks that the public will pay him for it.
01:12:13In fact, the popular novel that the public calls healthy is always a thoroughly unhealthyproduction, and what the public call an unhealthy novel is always a beautiful and healthy workof art. I need hardly say that I am not for a single moment complaining that the public andthe public press misuse these words. I do not see how, with their lack of comprehension of whatart is, they could possibly use them in the proper sense. I am merely pointing out the misuse,and as for the origin of the misuse and the meaning that lies behind,behind it all, the explanation is very simple. It comes from the barbarous conception of authority.It comes from the natural inability of a community corrupted by authority to understand or
01:13:16appreciate individualism. In a word, it comes from that monstrous and ignorant thingthat is called public opinion.Which bad and well-meaning as it iswhen it tries to control actionis infamous and of evil meaningwhen it tries to control thought or art.Indeed, there is much more to be said in favourof the physical force of the public
01:13:51than there is in favour of the public's opinion.The former may be fine. The latter must be foolish.It is often said that force is no argument.That, however, entirely depends on what one wants to prove.Many of the most important problems of the last few centuries,such as the continuance of personal government in England, or of feudalism in France,have been solved entirely by means of physical force.The very violence of a revolution may make the public grand and splendid for a moment.
01:14:38It was a fatal day when the public discovered that the pen is mightier than the paving stone,and can be made as offensive as the brick-bat.They at once sought for the journalist found him,developed him, and made him their industrious and well-paid servant.It is greatly to be regretted for both their sakes.Behind the barricade there may be much that is noble and heroic,but what is there behind the leading article, but prejudice, stupidity, cant and twaddle?And when these four are joined together,
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01:16:53animprovementcertainly, but still it is very bad and wrong and demoralising. Somebody, was it Burke,called journalism the fourth estate? That was true at the time, no doubt, but at the present momentit really is the only estate. It has eaten up the other three. The Lord's temporal say nothing,The Lord's spiritual have nothing to say, and the House of Commons has nothing to say and says it.We are dominated by journalism.In America, the President reigns for four years, and journalism governs forever and ever.
01:17:42Fortunately, in America, journalism has carried its authority to the grossest and most brutal extreme.As a natural consequence, it has begun to create a spirit of revolt.People are amused by it, or disgusted by it, according to their temperaments, but it is no longerthe real force it was. It is not seriously treated.In England, journalism, not, except in a few well-known instances, having been carried to suchexcesses of brutality is still a great factor, a really remarkable power. The tyranny that itproposes to exercise over people's private lives seems to me to be quite extraordinary.The fact is that the public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything except what is worth
01:18:40knowing. Journalism, conscious of this, and having trades,like habits, supplies their demands. In centuries before hours, the public nailed the earsof journalists to the pump. That was quite hideous. In this century, journalists have nailedtheir own ears to the keyhole. That is much worse. And what aggravates the mischief is thatthe journalists who are most to blame are not the amusing journalists who write for what are calledsociety papers. The harm is done by the serious, thoughtful, earnest journalists who solemnly,as they are doing at present, will drag before the eyes of the public some incident in the privatelife of a great statesman, of a man who is a leader of political thought, as he is a creator of
01:19:40political force, and invite the public to discuss the incident, to exercise authority in the matter,to give their views, and not merely to give their views, but to carry them into action,to dictate to the man upon all other points, to dictate to his party, to dictate to his country,in fact, to make themselves ridiculous, offensive and harmful.The private lives of men and women should not be told to the public.The public have nothing to do with them at all.In France, they manage these things better.There they do not allow the details of the trials that take place in the divorce courts
01:20:29to be published for the amusement or criticism of the public.All that the public are allowed to know is that the divorce has taken place, andwas granted on petition of one or other, or both of the married parties concerned.In France, in fact, they limit the journalist, and allow the artist almost perfect freedom.Here we allow absolute freedom to the journalist, and entirely limit the artist.English public opinion, that is to say, tries to constrain and impede and warp the manwho makes things that are beautiful in effect, and compels the journalist to retail thingsthat are ugly or disgusting or revolting in fact, so that we have the most serious journalists
01:21:26in the world and the most indecent newspapers. It is no exaggeration to talk of compulsion.There are possibly some journalists who take a real pleasure in public.publishing horrible things, or who being poor, look to scandals as forming a sort of permanentbasis for an income.But there are other journalists, I feel certain, men of education and cultivation, whoreally dislike publishing these things, who know that it is wrong to do so.And only do it because the unhealthy conditions under which their occupation is carried on,oblige them to supply the public with what the public wants, and to compete with other journalists
01:22:17in making that supply as full and satisfying to the gross popular appetite as possible.It is a very degrading position for any body of educated men to be placed in, and I have no doubtthat most of them feel it acutely. However, let us leave.what is really a very sardid side of the subject, and return to the question of popular controlin the matter of art, by which I mean public opinion dictating to the artist, the form whichhe is to use, the mode in which he is to use it, and the materials with which he is to work.I have pointed out that the arts which have escaped best in England are the arts in whichthe public have not been interested. They are, however, interested in the drama, and as a certain
01:23:15advance has been made in the drama within the last ten or fifteen years. It is importantto point out that this advance is entirely due to a few individual artists, refusing to acceptthe popular want of taste as their standard, and refusing to regard art as a merematter of demand and supply. With his marvellous and vivid personality, with a style that hasreally a true colour element in it, with his extraordinary power, not over mere mimicry,but over imaginative and intellectual creation, Mr. Irving, had his sole object been to give thepublic what they wanted, could have produced the commonest plays in the commonest manner,and made as much success and money as a man could possibly desire.
01:24:13But his object was not that.His object was to realise his own perfection as an artist,under certain conditions and in certain forms of art.At first he appealed to the few.Now he has educated the many.He has created in the public both taste and temperament.The public appreciate his artistic success immensely.I often wonder, however, whether the public understand that that success is entirely due to the fact that he did not accept their standard, but realized his own.
01:24:55With their standard, the Lyceum would have been a sort of second-rate booth, as some of the popular theatres in London are at present.Whether they understand it or not, the fact, however, remains that taste and temperamenthave to a certain extent been created in the public, and that the public is capable ofdeveloping these qualities. The problem, then, is why do not the public become more civilised?They have the capacity. What stops them?The thing that stops them, it must be said again, is their desire to exercise authority over the artist and over works of art.To certain theatres, such as the Lyceum and the Haymarket, the public seem to come in a proper mood.In both of these theatres there have been individual artists who have succeeded in creating in their audiences,
01:25:58and every theatre in London has its own audience, the temperament to which art appeals.And what is that temperament? It is the temperament of receptivity. That is all.If a man approaches a work of art with any desire to exercise authority over it and the artist,He approaches it in such a spirit that he cannot receive any artistic impression from it at all.The work of art is to dominate the spectator.The spectator is not to dominate the work of art.The spectator is to be receptive.He is to be the violin on which the master is to play.
01:26:49And the more completely he can suppress his own silly view,his own foolish prejudices, his own absurd ideas of what art should be, or should not be, the more likely he is to understand and appreciate the work of art in question.This is, of course, quite obvious in the case of the vulgar theatre-going public of English men and women, but it is equally true of what are called educated people. For an educated person,ideas of art are drawn naturally from what art has been, whereas the new work of art is beautifulby being what art has never been, and to measure it by the standard of the past is to measureit by a standard on the rejection of which its real perfection depends. A temperamentcapable of receiving through an imaginative medium, and under imaginativeconditions, new and beautiful impressions, is the only temperament that can appreciate a work
01:28:00of art. And true as this is, in the case of the appreciation of sculpture and painting,it is still more true of the appreciation of such arts as the drama. For a picture and a statueare not at war with time. They take no count of its succession. In one moment their unitmay be apprehended. In the case of literature it is different. Time must be traversed before the unityof effect is realised. And so in the drama, they may occur in the first act of the play,something whose real artistic value may not be evident to the spectator till the third or fourthact is reached. Is the silly fellow to get angry and call out and disturb,the play and annoy the artists. No. The honest man is to sit quietly and know the delightful
01:29:02emotions of wonder, curiosity and suspense. He is not to go to the play to lose a vulgartemper. He is to go to the play to realize an artistic temperament. He is to go to theplay, to gain an artistic temperament. He is not the arbiter of the work of art. He is one who is admittedto contemplate the work of art, and if the work be fine, to forget in its contemplationthe egotism that mars him, the egotism of his ignorance, or the egotism of hisinformation. This point about the drama is hardly, I think, sufficiently recognised. I can understandthat where Macbeth produced for the first time before a modern London audience, many of thepeople present would strongly and vigorously object to the introduction of the witches in the
01:30:07first act, with their grotesque phrases and their ridiculous words. But whenthe play is over, one realises that the laughter of the witches in Macbeth is as terrible as thelaughter of madness in Lear, more terrible than the laughter of Iago in the tragedy of the moor.No spectator of art needs a more perfect mood of receptivity than the spectator of a play.The moment he seeks to exercise authority, he becomes the avowed enemy of art.and of himself. Art does not mind. It is he who suffers. With the novel it is the same thing.Popular authority, and the recognition of popular authority are fatal. Thackeray's Esmond is a beautifulwork of art, because he wrote it to please himself. In his other novels, in Penn Dennis, in Philip,
01:31:11in vanity fair even at times, he is too conscious of the public, and spoils his work by appealingdirectly to the sympathies of the public, or by directly mocking at them. A true artist takes nonotice whatever of the public. The public are to him non-existent. He has no poppied or honeyedcakes through which to give the monster sleep or sustenance. He leaves that to the popular novelist.One incomparable novelist we have now in England, Mr. George Meredith. There are better artistsin France, but France has no one whose view of life is so large, so varied, so imaginatively true.There are tellers of stories in Russia who have a more vivid.sense of what pain in fiction may be, but to him belongs philosophy in fiction. His people not merely
01:32:18live, but they live in thought. One can see them from myriad points of view. They are suggestive.There is soul in them and around them. They are interpretative and symbolic. And he who madethem, those wonderful, quickly moving figures, made them for his own pleasure, and has neverasked the public what they wanted, has never cared to know what they wanted, has neverallowed the public to dictate to him or influence him in any way, but has gone on intensifyinghis own personality, and producing his own individual work. At first none came to him. That didnot matter. Then the few came to him. That did not change him. The many have come now. He is stillthe same. He is an incomparable novelist. With the decorative arts, it is not different.
01:33:23The public clung with really pathetic tenacity to what I believe were the direct traditionsof the great exhibition of international vulgarity.traditions that were so appalling that the houses in which people lived were only fit for blind people to live in.Beautiful things began to be made, beautiful colours came from the Dyer's hand, beautiful patterns from the artist's brain,and the use of beautiful things and their value and importance were set forth.The public were really very indignant.They lost their temper. They said silly things. No one minded. No one was a whit the worse.No one accepted the authority of public opinion. And now it is almost impossible to enter
01:34:22any modern house without seeing some recognition of good taste, some recognition of the valueof lovely surroundings, some sign of appreciation of beauty.In fact, people's houses are as a rule quite charming nowadays.People have been, to a very great extent, civilised.It is only fair to state, however,that the extraordinary success of the revolution in house decoration and furniture and the likehas not really been due to the majority of the public developing a very fine taste in such matters.It has been chiefly due to the fact that the craftsmen of things so appreciated the pleasure of making what was beautiful, and woke to such a vivid consciousness of the hideousness and vulgarity of what the public had previously wanted, that they simply starved the public out. It would be quite impossible at the present moment to furnish a room as rooms were furnished a few years ago.
01:35:33without going for everything to an auction of second-hand furniture from some third-rate lodging-house.The things are no longer made.However they may object to it, people must nowadays have something charming in their surroundings.Fortunately for them, their assumption of authority in these art matters came to entire grief.It is evident, then, that all authority in such things is bad. People sometimes inquirewhat form of government is most suitable for an artist to live under. To this question,there is only one answer. The form of government that is most suitable to the artist is nogovernment at all. Authority over him and his art is ridiculous.
01:36:32It has been stated that under despotisms, artists have produced lovely work.This is not quite so.Artists have visited despots, not as subjects to be tyrannised over, but as wandering wonder-makers,as fascinating vagrant personalities, to be entertained and charmed, and suffered to be at peace,and allowed to create.There is this to be said in favour of the despotthat he, being an individual, may have culture,while the mob, being a monster, has none.
01:37:16One who is an emperor and kingmay stoop down to pick up a brush for a painter,but when the democracy stoops down,it is merely to throw mud,and yet the democracy have not so far to stoop as the emperor.In fact, when they want to throw mud, they have not to stoop at all.But there is no necessity to separate the monarch from the mob.All authority is equally bad.
01:37:53End of Section 5.Section 6.There are three kinds of.of despots. There is the despot who tyrannises over the body. There is the despot who tyrannisesover 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,
01:38:40of 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 Pope's 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 arthur.not to live with popes. It was a pope who said of Chalini to a conclave of cardinals,that common laws and common authority were not made for men such as he. But it was apope who thrust Chalini into prison, and kept him there till he sickened with rage,and created unreal visions for himself, and saw the gilded son enter his role.and grew so enamoured of it that he sought to escape, and crept out from tower to tower,
01:40:09and 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?
01:41:08They were made to live, to listen, and to love. Someone has done them a great wrong. They have marredthemselves by imitation of their inferiors. They have taken the sceptre of the prince.How should they use it? They have taken the tripletiara 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 trickof tyranny. There are many other things that one might point out. One might point out how the Renaissancewas great, because it sought to solve no social problem, and busied itself not about such things,
01:42:14but suffered the individual to develop freely, beautifully, and naturally. And so had great and individualartists and great and individual men.One might point out how Louis XIV, by creating the modern state, destroyed the individualismof the artist, and made things monstrous in their monotony of repetition, and contemptible intheir 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,
01:43:20The future is what artists are.It will, of course, be said that such a scheme as is set forth here is quite unpractical, and goes against human nature.This is perfectly true. It is unpractical, and it goes against human nature.This is why it is worth carrying out, and that is why one proposes it.For what is a practical scheme?A practical scheme is either a scheme that is already in existence,or a scheme that could be carried out under existing conditions.But it is exactly the existing conditions that one objects to,
01:44:08and 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
01:44:47the same. The result of his error was the French Revolution. It was an admirable result. All theresults of the mistakes of governments are quite admirable. It is to be noted also thatindividualism does not come to man with any sickly cant about duty, which merely means doingwhat 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 withany claims upon him at all. It comes naturally and inevitably out of man. It is the pointto which all development tends. It is aIt is the differentiation to which all organisms grow.
01:45:48It is the perfection that is inherent in every mode of life, and towards which every modeof 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 overhim. It does not try to force people to be good. It knows that people are good when theyare let alone. Man will develop individualism out of himself. Man is now so developingindividualism. To ask whether individualism is practical is like asking whether evolutionis practical. Evolution is the law of life, and there is no evolution except towards individualism.
01:46:47Where this tendency is not expressed, it is a case of artificially arrested growth,or of disease, or of death. Individualism will also be unselfish and unaffected. It has been pointed outthat one of the results of the extraordinary tyranny of authority is that words are absolutely distortedfrom their proper and simple meaning, and are used to express the obverse of their rightsignification. What is true about art is true about life. A man is called affected nowadaysif he dresses as he likes to dress. But in doing that he is active.in a perfectly natural manner. Affectation in such matters consists in dressing according to theviews of one's neighbour, whose views, as they are the views of the majority, will probably
01:47:50be extremely stupid. Or a man is called selfish if he lives in the manner that seems to himmost 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.
01:48:31Selfishness 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 doesnot think for himself does not think at all. It is grossly selfish to require of one's neighbourthat 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 kindfrom him. A red rose is not selfish because it wants to be a red rose. It would be horribly selfishif it wanted all the other flowers in the garden to be both red and roses.
01:49:38Under 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 a-bishop.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 andspontaneously. Up to the present, man has hardly cultivated sympathy at all. He has merelysympathy 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
01:50:45morbid. There is in it a certain element of terror for our own safety. We become afraid that weourselves 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'ssores 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. It requires moremore unselfishness. Anybody can sympathise with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very finenature, it requires, in fact, the nature of a true individualist to sympathise with a friend'ssuccess. In the modern stress of competition and struggle for place, such sympathy is naturally
01:51:50rare, and is also very much stifled by the immoral ideal of uniformity of type and conformityto rule, which is so prevalent everywhere, and is perhaps most obnoxious in England.Sympathy with pain they 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 joyintensifies the sum of joy in the world, sympathy with pain does not really diminish the amountof pain. It may make man better able to endure evil, but the evil remains. Sympathy with
01:52:46consumption does not cure consumption, that is, for the evil.what science does. And when socialism has solved the problem of poverty, and science solved the problemof 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 mancould be realised only through pain or in solitude.
01:53:37The 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 Thebbiad 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 modethrough which man may realise himself exercises a wonderful fascination over the world.
01:54:22Shallow speakers and shallow thinkers in pulpits and on platformsoften 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. Medievalism, 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. Medievalism is real Christianity, and the medieval Christ is the real Christ.When the Renaissance dawned upon the worldand 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.
01:55:25The painters of the Renaissance drew Christ as a little boyplaying with another little boy in a palace or a garden,or lying back in his mother's arms, smiling at her or at a face.flower, or at a bright bird, or as a noble stately figure, moving nobly through the world, or as awonderful figure rising in a sort of ecstasy from death to life. Even when they drew himcrucified, they drew him as a beautiful god on whom evil man had inflicted suffering. But he didnot 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,
01:56:21they 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 Christ's, 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 medieval art.There he is one maimed and marred, one who is not comely to look on, because beauty is a joy,
01:57:19one 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, realizing 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,
01:58:15in a fiction that is medieval in character, because its dominant note is the realisation of menthrough suffering. But for those who are not artists, and to whom there is no mode of life butthe actual life of fact, pain is the only door to perfection. A Russian who lives happilyunder the present system of government in Russia must either believe that man hashas 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 herealizes his personality, is a real Christian. To him, the Christian ideal is a true thing.And yet Christ did not revolt against authority.
01:59:15He 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,
01:59:51and 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,
02:00:33it will have no further place.It will have done its work.It was a great work, but it is almost over.It's fear lessons 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 arepleasurable to him, he will be saner, healthier, more civilised, more himself.
02:01:22Pleasure is nature's test, a 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,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 soughtfor, but could not realize completely, except in art, because they had slaves and starvedthem. It will be complete, and through it each man will attain to his perfection. The newindividualism is the new Hellenism. End of Section 6. Recording by Martin Gieson in Hazelmere,
02:02:32Surrey. End of the Soul of Man. By Oscar Wilde.Thank you.
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