No More Learning

It is tragic how few people ever 'possess their souls' before they die.
'Nothing is more rare in any man,' says Emerson, 'than an act of his
own. ' It is quite true. Most people are other people. Their thoughts
are some one else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a
quotation. Christ was not merely the supreme individualist, but he was
the first individualist in history. People have tried to make him out an
ordinary philanthropist, or ranked him as an altruist with the scientific
and sentimental. But he was really neither one nor the other. Pity he
has, of course, for the poor, for those who are shut up in prisons, for
the lowly, for the wretched; but he has far more pity for the rich, for
the hard hedonists, for those who waste their freedom in becoming slaves
to things, for those who wear soft raiment and live in kings' houses.
Riches and pleasure seemed to him to be really greater tragedies than
poverty or sorrow. And as for altruism, who knew better than he that it
is vocation not volition that determines us, and that one cannot gather
grapes of thorns or figs from thistles?

To live for others as a definite self-conscious aim was not his creed. It
was not the basis of his creed. When he says, 'Forgive your enemies,' it
is not for the sake of the enemy, but for one's own sake that he says so,
and because love is more beautiful than hate. In his own entreaty to the
young man, 'Sell all that thou hast and give to the poor,' it is not of
the state of the poor that he is thinking but of the soul of the young
man, the soul that wealth was marring.
In his view of life he is one
with the artist who knows that by the inevitable law of self-perfection,
the poet must sing, and the sculptor think in bronze, and the painter
make the world a mirror for his moods, as surely and as certainly as the
hawthorn must blossom in spring, and the corn turn to gold at harvest-
time, and the moon in her ordered wanderings change from shield to
sickle, and from sickle to shield.

But while Christ did not say to men, 'Live for others,' he pointed out
that there was no difference at all between the lives of others and one's
own life. By this means he gave to man an extended, a Titan personality.
Since his coming the history of each separate individual is, or can be
made, the history of the world. Of course, culture has intensified the
personality of man. Art has made us myriad-minded. Those who have the
artistic temperament go into exile with Dante and learn how salt is the
bread of others, and how steep their stairs; they catch for a moment the
serenity and calm of Goethe, and yet know but too well that Baudelaire
cried to God--

'O Seigneur, donnez moi la force et le courage
De contempler mon corps et mon coeur sans degout. '

Out of Shakespeare's sonnets they draw, to their own hurt it may be, the
secret of his love and make it their own; they look with new eyes on
modern life, because they have listened to one of Chopin's nocturnes, or
handled Greek things, or read the story of the passion of some dead man
for some dead woman whose hair was like threads of fine gold, and whose
mouth was as a pomegranate. But the sympathy of the artistic temperament
is necessarily with what has found expression. In words or in colours,
in music or in marble, behind the painted masks of an AEschylean play, or
through some Sicilian shepherds' pierced and jointed reeds, the man and
his message must have been revealed.

To the artist, expression is the only mode under which he can conceive
life at all. To him what is dumb is dead. But to Christ it was not so.
With a width and wonder of imagination that fills one almost with awe, he
took the entire world of the inarticulate, the voiceless world of pain,
as his kingdom, and made of himself its eternal mouthpiece. Those of
whom I have spoken, who are dumb under oppression, and 'whose silence is
heard only of God,' he chose as his brothers. He sought to become eyes
to the blind, ears to the deaf, and a cry in the lips of those whose
tongues had been tied.