文档介绍：The Soul of Man
The Soul of Man
by Oscar Wilde
1
The Soul of Man
The chief advantage that would result from the establishment of
Socialism is, undoubtedly, the fact that Socialism would relieve us from
that sordid necessity of living for others which, in the present condition of
things, presses so hardly upon almost everybody. In fact, scarcely
anyone at 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 M. Renan; a
supreme artist, like Flaubert, has been able to isolate himself, to keep
himself out of reach of the clamorous claims of others, to stand 'under the
shelter of the wall,' as Plato puts it, and so to realise the perfection of what
was in him, to his own parable gain, and to the parable and
lasting gain of the whole world. These, however, are exceptions. The
majority of people spoil their lives by an unhealthy and exaggerated
altruism - are forced, indeed, so to spoil them. They 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 stirred more quickly than man's intelligence; and, as I
pointed out some time ago in an article on the function of criticism, it is
much more easy to have sympathy with suffering than it is to have
sympathy with thought. Accordingly, with admirable, though misdirected
intentions, they very seriously and very sentimentally set themselves to the
task of remedying the evils 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 bas