No More Learning

There is in it a certain element of
terror for our own safety. We become afraid that we ourselves might be
as the leper or as the blind, and that no man would have care of us. It
is curiously limiting, too. One should sympathise with the entirety of
life, not with life's sores and maladies merely, but with life's joy and
beauty and energy and health and freedom. The wider sympathy is, of
course, the more difficult. It requires more unselfishness. Anybody can
sympathise with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine
nature--it requires, in fact, the nature of a true Individualist--to
sympathise with a friend's success.

In the modern stress of competition and struggle for place, such
sympathy is naturally rare, and is also very much stifled by the immoral
ideal of uniformity of type and conformity to rule which is so prevalent
everywhere, and is perhaps most obnoxious in England.

Sympathy with pain there will, of course, always be. It is one of the
first instincts of man. The animals which are individual, the higher
animals, that is to say, share it with us. But it must be remembered
that while sympathy with joy intensifies the sum of joy in the world,
sympathy with pain does not really diminish the amount of pain. It may
make man better able to endure evil, but the evil remains. Sympathy with
consumption does not cure consumption; that is what Science does. And
when Socialism has solved the problem of poverty, and Science solved the
problem of disease, the area of the sentimentalists will be lessened,
and the sympathy of man will be large, healthy, and spontaneous.
Man
will have joy in the contemplation of the joyous life of others.

For it is through joy that the Individualism of the future will develop
itself. Christ made no attempt to reconstruct society, and consequently
the Individualism that he preached to man could be realised only through
pain or in solitude. The ideals that we owe to Christ are the ideals of
the man who abandons society entirely, or of the man who resists society
absolutely. But man is naturally social. Even the Thebaid became peopled
at last. And though the cenobite realises his personality, it is often
an impoverished personality that he so realises. Upon the other hand,
the terrible truth that pain is a mode through which man may realise
himself exercises a wonderful fascination over the world. Shallow
speakers and shallow thinkers in pulpits and on platforms often talk
about the world's worship of pleasure, and whine against it. But it is
rarely in the world's history that its ideal has been one of joy and
beauty. The worship of pain has far more often dominated the world.
Mediaevalism, with its saints and martyrs, its love of self-torture, its
wild passion for wounding itself, its gashing with knives, and its
whipping with rods--Mediaevalism is real Christianity, and the mediaeval
Christ is the real Christ. When the Renaissance dawned upon the world,
and brought with it the new ideals of the beauty of life and the joy of
living, men could not understand Christ. Even Art shows us that. The
painters of the Renaissance drew Christ as a little boy playing with
another boy in a palace or a garden, or lying back in his mother's arms,
smiling at her, or at a flower, or at a bright bird; or as a noble,
stately figure moving nobly through the world; or as a wonderful figure
rising in a sort of ecstasy from death to life. Even when they drew him
crucified they drew him as a beautiful God on whom evil men had
inflicted suffering.