There is an important official of the inner man who in the latest psychology is called the Censor; his function is to forbid the utterance, in the council chamber within us, of unparliamentary sentiments, and to suppress all reports not in the interest of our moral dignity. By relegating half our experience to oblivion and locking up our unseemly passions in solitary dungeons, the Censor composes a conventional personage that we may decently present to the world. It is he, whilst we are sane and virtuous, that regulates our actions. It had occurred to me sometimes that the Censor was only another name for our old friend Reason; but there is a great difference. This is no censor of the noble Roman sort, like Cato Major; he makes no attempt to purify the republic from within; he is not concerned with moral health, honest harmony, and the thorough extirpation of hopeless rebels. He is concerned only with appearances and diplomatic relations; his old name was not Reason but Vanity or Self-love. He is merely the head of the government propaganda, charged with preventing inconvenient intelligence of our psychological home politics from reaching foreign powers or weakening the moral of our fighting force. He is the father of shams. He invents those masterly methods of putting our best foot forward, and sustaining the illusion that we are always actuated by becoming and avowable motives. He it is that dictates the polite movements by which we show that we prefer the comfort of others to our own. He causes us to put on mourning for those who have left us legacies. He persuades us that we believe in the religion of our ancestors, in the science of the day, in the national cause, and in the party cry. He leads us to admire the latest art, or the most ancient; he enables us to be pleased with every fashion in turn, or perhaps to sigh at its ugliness, if we are conscious of being the best-dressed persons in the room. He induces us to follow the doings of the royal family with affectionate awe, to love our relations, to prefer Bach to Offenbach, and always to have had a good time when we leave a friend's house. The Censor sends our children to the best schools, to prove what sacrifices we are willing to make for their good, and to relieve us of further responsibility in regard to them. He directs that considerations of wealth shall control our careers, our friendships, and our manners; and this is perhaps the greatest sham of all the shams he has set up: that money is an expression of happiness and a means to it. What opens the way to happiness, if our character does not render happiness impossible, is freedom, and some security against want is usually necessary for that; but wealth, and the necessity of being fashionable if one is rich, take away freedom. A genuine love for the pleasant surroundings and the facilities which riches afford is often keener in the outsider, who peeps in at the gate, than in the master or his children who perhaps, if the Censor would let them, would prefer their low acquaintance and their days afield. But the Censor-ridden inner man cannot break his harness. He is groomed and reined in like a pony at the circus: at the crack of the whip the neck must be bent, the tail switched, the trained feet must retrace the circle in the sawdust, or tap the velvet barrier. So we prance to our funeral, the last sham of all, after the Censor has made our wills for us; whereupon somebody else's Censor gives us the finishing touches by praising our character, and nailing down the coffin.
The untutored passions which the Censor keeps down are themselves remarkable dissemblers. That old propensity to allegory, which is now condemned in literature, seems to rule unchecked in dreams. Invention in dreams, as in mythology, is far-fetched, yet spontaneous. What it sets immediately before us is a third or a fourth transformation of the fundamental fact. It hides the fact, without misrepresenting it; the orchestration of the theme, the alien images in which allegory dresses it up, are suggested by some subtle affinity, some instinctive choice, which is perfectly automatic and innocent; the Psyche could find no simpler way of bringing her agitations to consciousness. Just as we cannot see a material object more clearly than by seeing exactly how it looks (though that may not be at all how it is), so we cannot express a feeling more sincerely than by rehearsing all the images, all the metaphors, which it suggests to us. Passion when aroused to speech is rich in rhetorical figures. When we assert inaccurately that a man is a cur we depart from observation only to register sentiment; we express truly the niche he fills in our thoughts. Dramatic poetry is an excursus in this direction; it reports the echoes which events produce in a voluminous inner sensibility; it throws back our perception of what is going on into the latent dream which this perception has for its background: for a perception, apart from its object, is only one feature in a dream, momentarily more salient than the rest. These natural harlequins, the passions, are perfectly sincere in their falsehoods and indirections: their fancy is their only means of expressing the facts. To be more literal would require training, and a painful effort; it would require the art of reading and discounting dreams, whilst these simple poets have only the gift of dreaming. When Juliet dreams (it is a desperate poetic little dream created by her passion) that she will cut up Romeo into bits and make stars of him, the image is extravagant; yet if the fundamental theme is, as I suppose, that every atom of Romeo is precious, this mad but natural passion for the bits, even, of what she loves, is expressed truly. But this sort of sincere fiction, though it may put the Censor to sleep if he does not quite understand what it signifies, is the very opposite of his own shams; it is exuberance and these are suppression. If the Censor could have got at Juliet in time, she would have expressed herself quite differently. Wiping her prospective tears he would have said, "What is Romeo's body to me? Our spirits will be reunited in heaven!" This would have been a sham; because we should now not be led to understand that Juliet loved the eyes and the hands and the lips of Romeo—which was the fact to be expressed—but on the contrary her idolatrous infatuation would have been hushed up, and something else, an empty convention contradicting her true feeling, would have been substituted for it.
The Censor may not be useless to the poet in the end, because the need of shamming develops sensitiveness in some directions, as in that, for instance, of self-consciousness. The vigour of art in England may depend on the possibility of using the fineness of perception which reticence enhances in order to invent new metaphors and allegories by which to express the heart. Could a vigorous English art, for instance, ever give expression to the erotic passion which, according to this latest psychology, plays such a great part in the Psyche? The comic vein of English writers commonly stops short at the improper. This is doubtless a wise modesty on their part, because every artist is a moralist, though he need not preach; like Orpheus he tames the simple soul to his persuasive measures; he insinuates his preferences and his principles, he teaches us what to love: and to discover what we truly love is the whole of ethics. Now if any passion were sinful and really shameful in itself, it ought not to enter at all into human life, either through the door of art or through any other door. Conceivably a perfect expression might still be given to it technically, although even this is improbable if the artist had a bad conscience and a leering eye; but this expression, good only from an abstracted point of view, would be on the whole an evil experience and an evil possession. If the early Christians and the Puritans and a whole cloud of mystics and ascetics everywhere have been right in thinking the flesh essentially sinful, the Censor must not be allowed to flinch; on the contrary, he must considerably extend his operations. If you renounce the flesh you must renounce the world; things called indecent or obscene are inextricably woven into the texture of human existence; there can be no completely honest comedy without them. Life itself would have to be condemned as sinful; we should deny that anything harmonious, merry, or sweet could be made of it, either in the world or on the stage. If we made any concession to art at all, on the same grounds as to matrimony, it would be only in favour of tragedy, which should show us that all we think most amiable is an illusion, ending in torments and in nothingness. Wedlock itself would be sanctioned only grudgingly, as a concession to human frailty, lest a worse thing be; and we should marry, if at all very sadly, with fear and trembling and strictly for the sake of children. Marriage would then not be the happy-go-lucky, tender, faithful, humorous, trying fatality which nature has made of it, and which comedy describes.
Perhaps the emancipated plebeians of the future will expect their comic poets to play upon sensuality as upon something altogether innocent and amiable: comic, too, because all reality is comic, and especially a phase of it where illusion, jollity, conceit, mishap, and chagrin follow one another in such quick alternation. If this subject could be passed by the Censor, and treated judiciously, it would enrich the arts and at the same time disinfect the mind in one of its most troubled and sullen moods, by giving it a merry expression. In the Arabian Nights I find something of this kind; but erotic art in Europe, even in antiquity, seems to have been almost always constrained and vicious. A man who is moralized politically, as Europeans are, rather than religiously or poetically like Orientals, cannot treat natural things naturally. He respects the uttered feelings of others more than his own feelings unuttered, and suppresses every manifestation of himself which a spectator might frown upon, even if behind the Censor's back everybody would rejoice in it. So long as this social complication lasts public art and the inner life have to flow separately, the one remains conventional the other clouded and incoherent. If poets under these circumstances tried to tell the whole truth, they would not only offend the public but do a grave injustice to their theme, and fail to make it explicit, for want of discipline and grace of expression. It is as well that the Censor, by imposing silence, keeps them from attempting the impossible.
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THE MASK OF THE PHILOSOPHER
Amongst tragic masks may be counted all systems of philosophy and religion. So long as they are still plastic in the mind of their creator, they seem to him to wear the very lineaments of nature. He cannot distinguish the comic cast of his own thought; yet inevitably it shows the hue and features of his race; it has its curious idiom and constitutional grammar, its quite personal rhetoric, its ridiculous ignorances and incapacities, and when his work is finished and its expression set, and other people behold it, it becomes under his name one of the stock masks or dramatis personae of the moral world. In it every wrinkle of his soul is eternalized, its old dead passion persisted in, its open mouth, always with the same rictus, bawling one deaf thought for ever. Even to himself, if he could have seen his mind at a distance, it would have appeared limited and foreign, as to an old man the verses of his youth, or like one's own figure seen unexpectedly in a mirror and mistaken at first for another person. His own system, as much as those of others, would have seemed to him a mask for the truth, partial, over-emphatic, exaggerating one feature and distorting another, and above all severed from the context of nature, as a picture in a frame, where much may be shown with a wonderfully distilled beauty, yet without its substance, and without its changeful setting in the moving world. Yet this fate is in part a favour. A system, like a tell-tale glass, may reveal by a trick of reflection many a fact going on behind one's back. By it the eye of the mind travels where experience cannot penetrate; it turns into a spectacle what was never open to sight, and it disentangles things seen from the personal accidents of vision. The mask is greater than the man. In isolating what was important and pertinent in his thoughts, it rescues his spirit from the contamination of all alien dyes, and bequeaths it to posterity such as it would have wished to be.