‘Know thyself’ was written over the portal of the antique world.  Over the portal of the new world, ‘Be thyself’ shall be written.  And the message of Christ to man was simply ‘Be thyself.’  That is the secret of Christ.

When Jesus talks about the poor he simply means personalities, just as when he talks about the rich he simply means people who have not developed their personalities.  Jesus moved in a community that allowed the accumulation of private property just as ours does, and the gospel that he preached was not that in such a community it is an advantage for a man to live on scanty, unwholesome food, to wear ragged, unwholesome clothes, to sleep in horrid, unwholesome dwellings, and a disadvantage for a man to live under healthy, pleasant, and decent conditions.  Such a view would have been wrong there and then, and would, of course, be still p. 24more wrong now and in England; for as man moves northward the material necessities of life become of more vital importance, and our society is infinitely more complex, and displays far greater extremes of luxury and pauperism than any society of the antique world.  What Jesus meant, was this.  He said to man, ‘You have a wonderful personality.  Develop it.  Be yourself.  Don’t imagine that your perfection lies in accumulating or possessing external things.  Your affection is inside of you.  If only you could realise that, you would not want to be rich.  Ordinary riches can be stolen from a man.  Real riches cannot.  In the treasury-house of your soul, there are infinitely precious things, that may not be taken from you.  And so, try to so shape your life that external things will not harm you.  And try also to get rid of personal property.  It involves sordid preoccupation, endless industry, continual wrong.  Personal p. 25property hinders Individualism at every step.’  It is to be noted that Jesus never says that impoverished people are necessarily good, or wealthy people necessarily bad.  That would not have been true.  Wealthy people are, as a class, better than impoverished people, more moral, more intellectual, more well-behaved.  There is only one class in the community that thinks more about money than the rich, and that is the poor.  The poor can think of nothing else.  That is the misery of being poor.  What Jesus does say is that man reaches his perfection, not through what he has, not even through what he does, but entirely through what he is.  And so the wealthy young man who comes to Jesus is represented as a thoroughly good citizen, who has broken none of the laws of his state, none of the commandments of his religion.  He is quite respectable, in the ordinary sense of that extraordinary word.  Jesus says p. 26to him, ‘You should give up private property.  It hinders you from realising your perfection.  It is a drag upon you.  It is a burden.  Your personality does not need it.  It is within you, and not outside of you, that you will find what you really are, and what you really want.’  To his own friends he says the same thing.  He tells them to be themselves, and not to be always worrying about other things.  What do other things matter?  Man is complete in himself.  When they go into the world, the world will disagree with them.  That is inevitable.  The world hates Individualism.  But that is not to trouble them.  They are to be calm and self-centred.  If a man takes their cloak, they are to give him their coat, just to show that material things are of no importance.  If people abuse them, they are not to answer back.  What does it signify?  The things people say of a man do not alter a man.  He is what he is.  p. 27Public opinion is of no value whatsoever.  Even if people employ actual violence, they are not to be violent in turn.  That would be to fall to the same low level.  After all, even in prison, a man can be quite free.  His soul can be free.  His personality can be untroubled.  He can be at peace.  And, above all things, they are not to interfere with other people or judge them in any way.  Personality is a very mysterious thing.  A man cannot always be estimated by what he does.  He may keep the law, and yet be worthless.  He may break the law, and yet be fine.  He may be bad, without ever doing anything bad.  He may commit a sin against society, and yet realise through that sin his true perfection.

There was a woman who was taken in adultery.  We are not told the history of her love, but that love must have been very great; for Jesus said that her sins were forgiven her, p. 28not because she repented, but because her love was so intense and wonderful.  Later on, a short time before his death, as he sat at a feast, the woman came in and poured costly perfumes on his hair.  His friends tried to interfere with her, and said that it was an extravagance, and that the money that the perfume cost should have been expended on charitable relief of people in want, or something of that kind.  Jesus did not accept that view.  He pointed out that the material needs of Man were great and very permanent, but that the spiritual needs of Man were greater still, and that in one divine moment, and by selecting its own mode of expression, a personality might make itself perfect.  The world worships the woman, even now, as a saint.

Yes; there are suggestive things in Individualism.  Socialism annihilates family life, for instance.  With the p. 29abolition of private property, marriage in its present form must disappear.  This is part of the programme.  Individualism accepts this and makes it fine.  It converts the abolition of legal restraint into a form of freedom that will help the full development of personality, and make the love of man and woman more wonderful, more beautiful, and more ennobling.  Jesus knew this.  He rejected the claims of family life, although they existed in his day and community in a very marked form.  ‘Who is my mother?  Who are my brothers?’ he said, when he was told that they wished to speak to him.  When one of his followers asked leave to go and bury his father, ‘Let the dead bury the dead,’ was his terrible answer.  He would allow no claim whatsoever to be made on personality.

And so he who would lead a Christlike life is he who is perfectly and absolutely himself.  He may be a p. 30great poet, or a great man of science; or a young student at a University, or one who watches sheep upon a moor; or a maker of dramas, like Shakespeare, or a thinker about God, like Spinoza; or a child who plays in a garden, or a fisherman who throws his net into the sea.  It does not matter what he is, as long as he realises the perfection of the soul that is within him.  All imitation in morals and in life is wrong.  Through the streets of Jerusalem at the present day crawls one who is mad and carries a wooden cross on his shoulders.  He is a symbol of the lives that are marred by imitation.  Father Damien was Christlike when he went out to live with the lepers, because in such service he realised fully what was best in him.  But he was not more Christlike than Wagner when he realised his soul in music; or than Shelley, when he realised his soul in song.  There is no one type for man.  p. 31There are as many perfections as there are imperfect men.  And while to the claims of charity a man may yield and yet be free, to the claims of conformity no man may yield and remain free at all.

Individualism, then, is what through Socialism we are to attain to.  As a natural result the State must give up all idea of government.  It must give it up because, as a wise man once said many centuries before Christ, there is such a thing as leaving mankind alone; there is no such thing as governing mankind.  All modes of government are failures.  Despotism is unjust to everybody, including the despot, who was probably made for better things.  Oligarchies are unjust to the many, and ochlocracies are unjust to the few.  High hopes were once formed of democracy; but democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people.  It has been found out.  I must say p. 32that it was high time, for all authority is quite degrading.  It degrades those who exercise it, and degrades those over whom it is exercised.  When it is violently, grossly, and cruelly used, it produces a good effect, by creating, or at any rate bringing out, the spirit of revolt and Individualism that is to kill it.  When it is used with a certain amount of kindness, and accompanied by prizes and rewards, it is dreadfully demoralising.  People, in that case, are less conscious of the horrible pressure that is being put on them, and so go through their lives in a sort of coarse comfort, like petted animals, without ever realising that they are probably thinking other people’s thoughts, living by other people’s standards, wearing practically what one may call other people’s second-hand clothes, and never being themselves for a single moment.  ‘He who would be free,’ says a fine thinker, ‘must not conform.’  And authority, p. 33by bribing people to conform, produces a very gross kind of over-fed barbarism amongst us.

With authority, punishment will pass away.  This will be a great gain—a gain, in fact, of incalculable value.  As one reads history, not in the expurgated editions written for school-boys and passmen, but in the original authorities of each time, one is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed, but by the punishments that the good have inflicted; and a community is infinitely more brutalised by the habitual employment of punishment, than it is by the occurrence of crime.  It obviously follows that the more punishment is inflicted the more crime is produced, and most modern legislation has clearly recognised this, and has made it its task to diminish punishment as far as it thinks it can.  Wherever it has really diminished it, the results have always been extremely p. 34good.  The less punishment, the less crime.  When there is no punishment at all, crime will either cease to exist, or, if it occurs, will be treated by physicians as a very distressing form of dementia, to be cured by care and kindness.  For what are called criminals nowadays are not criminals at all.  Starvation, and not sin, is the parent of modern crime.  That indeed is the reason why our criminals are, as a class, so absolutely uninteresting from any psychological point of view.  They are not marvellous Macbeths and terrible Vautrins.  They are merely what ordinary, respectable, commonplace people would be if they had not got enough to eat.  When private property is abolished there will be no necessity for crime, no demand for it; it will cease to exist.  Of course, all crimes are not crimes against property, though such are the crimes that the English law, valuing what a man has more than what a p. 35man is, punishes with the harshest and most horrible severity, if we except the crime of murder, and regard death as worse than penal servitude, a point on which our criminals, I believe, disagree.  But though a crime may not be against property, it may spring from the misery and rage and depression produced by our wrong system of property-holding, and so, when that system is abolished, will disappear.  When each member of the community has sufficient for his wants, and is not interfered with by his neighbour, it will not be an object of any interest to him to interfere with anyone else.  Jealousy, which is an extraordinary source of crime in modern life, is an emotion closely bound up with our conceptions of property, and under Socialism and Individualism will die out.  It is remarkable that in communistic tribes jealousy is entirely unknown.

Now as the State is not to govern, p. 36it may be asked what the State is to do.  The State is to be a voluntary association that will organise labour, and be the manufacturer and distributor of necessary commodities.  The State is to make what is useful.  The individual is to make what is beautiful.  And as I have mentioned the word labour, I cannot help saying that a great deal of nonsense is being written and talked nowadays about the dignity of manual labour.  There is nothing necessarily dignified about manual labour at all, and most of it is absolutely degrading.  It is mentally and morally injurious to man to do anything in which he does not find pleasure, and many forms of labour are quite pleasureless activities, and should be regarded as such.  To sweep a slushy crossing for eight hours, on a day when the east wind is blowing is a disgusting occupation.  To sweep it with mental, moral, or physical dignity seems to p. 37me to be impossible.  To sweep it with joy would be appalling.  Man is made for something better than disturbing dirt.  All work of that kind should be done by a machine.

And I have no doubt that it will be so.  Up to the present, man has been, to a certain extent, the slave of machinery, and there is something tragic in the fact that as soon as man had invented a machine to do his work he began to starve.  This, however, is, of course, the result of our property system and our system of competition.  One man owns a machine which does the work of five hundred men.  Five hundred men are, in consequence, thrown out of employment, and, having no work to do, become hungry and take to thieving.  The one man secures the produce of the machine and keeps it, and has five hundred times as much as he should have, and probably, which is of much more importance, a great p. 38deal more than he really wants.  Were that machine the property of all, every one would benefit by it.  It would be an immense advantage to the community.  All unintellectual labour, all monotonous, dull labour, all labour that deals with dreadful things, and involves unpleasant conditions, must be done by machinery.  Machinery must work for us in coal mines, and do all sanitary services, and be the stoker of steamers, and clean the streets, and run messages on wet days, and do anything that is tedious or distressing.  At present machinery competes against man.  Under proper conditions machinery will serve man.  There is no doubt at all that this is the future of machinery, and just as trees grow while the country gentleman is asleep, so while Humanity will be amusing itself, or enjoying cultivated leisure—which, and not labour, is the aim of man—or making beautiful things, or reading beautiful p. 39things, or simply contemplating the world with admiration and delight, machinery will be doing all the necessary and unpleasant work.  The fact is, that civilisation requires slaves.  The Greeks were quite right there.  Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible.  Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralising.  On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends.  And when scientific men are no longer called upon to go down to a depressing East End and distribute bad cocoa and worse blankets to starving people, they will have delightful leisure in which to devise wonderful and marvellous things for their own joy and the joy of everyone else.  There will be great storages of force for every city, and for every house if required, and this force man will convert into heat, p. 40light, or motion, according to his needs.  Is this Utopian?  A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing.  And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail.  Progress is the realisation of Utopias.

Now, I have said that the community by means of organisation of machinery will supply the useful things, and that the beautiful things will be made by the individual.  This is not merely necessary, but it is the only possible way by which we can get either the one or the other.  An individual who has to make things for the use of others, and with reference to their wants and their wishes, does not work with interest, and consequently cannot put into his work what is best in him.  Upon the other hand, whenever a community or a p. 41powerful section of a community, or a government of any kind, attempts to dictate to the artist what he is to do, Art either entirely vanishes, or becomes stereotyped, or degenerates into a low and ignoble form of craft.  A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament.  Its beauty comes from the fact that the author is what he is.  It has nothing to do with the fact that other people want what they want.  Indeed, the moment that an artist takes notice of what other people want, and tries to supply the demand, he ceases to be an artist, and becomes a dull or an amusing craftsman, an honest or a dishonest tradesman.  He has no further claim to be considered as an artist.  Art is the most intense mode of Individualism that the world has known.  I am inclined to say that it is the only real mode of Individualism that the world has known.  Crime, which, under certain conditions, may seem p. 42to have created Individualism, must take cognisance of other people and interfere with them.  It belongs to the sphere of action.  But alone, without any reference to his neighbours, without any interference, the artist can fashion a beautiful thing; and if he does not do it solely for his own pleasure, he is not an artist at all.

And it is to be noted that it is the fact that Art is this intense form of Individualism that makes the public try to exercise over it in an authority that is as immoral as it is ridiculous, and as corrupting as it is contemptible.  It is not quite their fault.  The public has always, and in every age, been badly brought up.  They are continually asking Art to be popular, to please their want of taste, to flatter their absurd vanity, to tell them what they have been told before, to show them what they ought to be tired of seeing, to amuse them when they feel heavy after eating too much, and to distract p. 43their thoughts when they are wearied of their own stupidity.  Now Art should never try to be popular.  The public should try to make itself artistic.  There is a very wide difference.  If a man of science were told that the results of his experiments, and the conclusions that he arrived at, should be of such a character that they would not upset the received popular notions on the subject, or disturb popular prejudice, or hurt the sensibilities of people who knew nothing about science; if a philosopher were told that he had a perfect right to speculate in the highest spheres of thought, provided that he arrived at the same conclusions as were held by those who had never thought in any sphere at all—well, nowadays the man of science and the philosopher would be considerably amused.  Yet it is really a very few years since both philosophy and science were subjected to brutal popular control, to authority in fact—p. 44the authority of either the general ignorance of the community, or the terror and greed for power of an ecclesiastical or governmental class.  Of course, we have to a very great extent got rid of any attempt on the part of the community, or the Church, or the Government, to interfere with the individualism of speculative thought, but the attempt to interfere with the individualism of imaginative art still lingers.  In fact, it does more than linger; it is aggressive, offensive, and brutalising.

In England, the arts that have escaped best are the p. 45arts in which the public take no interest.  Poetry is an instance of what I mean.  We have been able to have fine poetry in England because the public do not read it, and consequently do not influence it.  The public like to insult poets because they are individual, but once they have insulted them, they leave them alone.  In the case of the novel and the drama, arts in which the public do take an interest, the result of the exercise of popular authority has been absolutely ridiculous.  No country produces such badly-written fiction, such tedious, common work in the novel form, such silly, vulgar plays as England.  It must necessarily be so.  The popular standard is of such a character that no artist can get to it.  It is at once too easy and too difficult to be a popular novelist.  It is too easy, because the requirements of the public as far as plot, style, psychology, treatment of life, and treatment of literature are concerned are within the reach of the very meanest capacity and the most uncultivated mind.  It is too difficult, because to meet such requirements the artist would have to do violence to his temperament, would have t............