Ecclesiastical, ceremonious humility is the pride of those who cannot create or initiate, either because they are sterile, or because the obstacles in their way are too great. Their pride is centred, not on what they can do, but on what they can endure. The anchorite goes into the wilderness, perhaps rather to get his background than to escape attention, and there imposes upon himself the most difficult and loathsome tasks, enduring not only outward penances, fasting and goading of the flesh, but such inward convulsions, portents and horrors, as the soul of man has by no other means experienced. Here, in endurance, is his power, and here, therefore, is his pride: the poor Atlas, who does not remove, but supports mountains, and these of his own making!
Men who have the power to create but are at the same time extremely timid belong to this class. Rather than venture outside themselves they will do violence to their own nature. The forces which in creation would have been liberated are pent within them and cause untold restlessness, uneasiness and pain. Religions which stigmatize "self-expression," separating the individual into an "outward" and an "inward" and raising a barrier between the two, encourage the growth of this type of man. These religions themselves have their roots in a timidity, a fear of pain. For self-expression is by no means painless; it is, on the contrary, a great cause of suffering. Essentially its outcome is strife, the clash of egos: Tragedy is the great recognition in Art of this truth. Christianity saw the suffering which conflict brought with it, said it was altogether evil, and sought to abolish it. But a law of Life cannot be abolished: strife, driven from the world of outward event, retreated into the very core of man, and there became baleful, indeed, disintegrating, and subversive. The early Christians did not see that men would suffer more from that inward psychic conflict than from the other. It was the Greeks who elevated conflict to an honourable position in their outward actions; with them, as Nietzsche said, there was no distinction between the "outward" and "inward"; they lived completely and died once. But the Christians, to use the words of St. Paul, "died daily." How true was that of those proudly humble anchorites! What a light it throws upon their sternly endured convulsions of the soul! In the end, Death itself came no doubt to many of them as a relief from this terribly protracted "dying." Perhaps one thing, however, made their lives bearable and even enjoyable—the power of the soul to plumb its own sufferings and capacity for endurance. Psychology arose first among the ecclesiastically humble men.
Well, let us count up our gains and losses. Spiritual humility, wherever it has spread, has certainly weakened the expression of Life: for it has weakened man by introducing within him a disrupting conflict. But it has also made Life subtler and deeper; it has enlarged the inward world of man, even if it has straitened the world outside. So that when we return—as we must—to the Pagan ideal of "expression," our works shall be richer than those of the Pagans, for man has now more to express.
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When Pride is Necessary
Perhaps in all great undertakings into which uncertainty enters pride is necessary. In the Elizabethan age, our most productive and adventurous age, pride was at its zenith. Was that pride the necessary condition of that productiveness? Would the poets, the thinkers and the discoverers have attempted what they did attempt, had they been humble men? What is needed is more enquiry: a new psychology, and, above all, a new history of pride.
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Humility and the Artists
There is one man, at any rate, who has always owed more to pride than to humility—the artist. Whether it be in himself, where it is almost the condition of productiveness, or in others, where it is the cause of all actions and movements æsthetically agreeable, Pride is his great benefactor. All artists are proud, but not all have the good conscience of their pride. In their thoughts they permit themselves to be persuaded too much by the theologians; they have not enough "free spirit" to say, "Pride is my atmosphere, in which I create. I do not choose to refuse my atmosphere."
But if pride were banished even from the remainder of Life, how poor would the artists be left! For every gesture that is beautiful, all free, spirited, swift movement and all noble repose have in them pride. Humility uglifies, except, indeed, the humility which is a form of pride; that has a sublimity of its own. Even the Christian Church—the Church of the humble—had to make its ceremonies magnificent to make itself æsthetically presentable; without its magnificence it would have been an impossible institution. Humility, to be supportable, must have in it an admixture of pride. That gives it standing. It was His subtle pride that communicated to the humility of Jesus its gracious "charm."