Look around the world! Everybody putting himself out in some form or another! Why? It doesn't do any good. At the end you exhaust the possibilities of the outside world—geographically and spiritually. You can use up the external. You can come to the end of objectifying and objectives, and then what? In the end, only what we started with—the Self in the body, the Self at home, where it was all the time while bits of it were wandering outside.
Peter applauded with sundry bravos and benisons and divers amens, but was moved to ask, Does the cat know this? Has the cat got a conscious being? Does he appreciate his advantage?
But no one answered these questions, least of all the haughty white Persian.
Apparently unreasonably (this biography was as far from my mind as anything well could be), following a habit which I never could explain to myself until I became a professional writer and the reason became clear, before going to bed, I made notes on this and several subsequent evenings and it is upon these notes that I am drawing now, to refresh my memory. A few nights later, when Edith and Peter and I were sitting alone on the loggia, Peter talked to us about the critics.
The trouble with the critics, he was saying, is that they are not contradictory enough. They stick to a theory for better or worse, as unwise men stick to an unwise marriage. Once they have exploited a postulate about art or about an artist, they make all his work conform to this postulate, if they admire it. On the other hand, if the work of an artist displeases them, they use the postulate as a hammer. I think it is Oscar Wilde who has written, Only mediocre minds are consistent. There is something very profound in this aphorism.
Consider Frank Harris's Shakespeare theory, for example. It is good enough as an idea, as a casual inspiration it is almost a masterpiece. It would make a fine essay; if it had been used as a passing reference in a book, it probably would have been quoted for years. Harris, however, has spun it out into two thick volumes and made it fit into crevices and crannies where it cannot very well feel at home. Certainly, it is true that any artist creates his characters out of his own virtues and weaknesses; all of a novelists' characters, to a certain extent, reflect phases of himself. The mistake Harris has made lies in identifying Shakespeare only with his weak, unsuccessful, sentimental, disappointed, unhappy characters, such as Hamlet, Macbeth, Orsino, Antonio, and Romeo. Shakespeare probably was just as much Sir Toby Belch and Falstaff. Curiously, this theory of identification fits the critic himself, the intellectual creator, more snugly than it does the romancer, the emotional creator. Remy de Gourmont has pointed this out. He says, Criticism is perhaps the most suggestive of literary forms; it is a perpetual confession; believing to analyze the works of others, the critic unveils and exposes himself to the public. So from these books we may learn more about Frank Harris than we do about Shakespeare.[2] This, of course, has its value.
But that is why Shakespeare is greater than his critics, that is greater than the critics who cling to one theory. Shakespeare speaks only through his characters and he can say, or make some one say,
Frailty, thy name is woman,
but on the next page another character may deny this sentiment, for this is not Shakespeare's opinion, it is that of an incensed lover. So Richard III remarks:
Conscience is but a word the cowards use,
Devised at first to keep the strong in awe.