Contrasts of character form one of the simplest elements of dramatic interest. Such contrasts are often obvious; at other times they take definitiveness only when looked at from a particular point of view. The contrast of character which it is the object of the present study to sketch rests upon a certain distinction which is one of the fundamental ideas in the analysis of human nature—The antithesis of the outer and inner life.the distinction between the outer life of action and the inner life of our own experience. The recognition of the two is as old as the Book of Proverbs, which contrasts the man that ruleth his spirit with the man that taketh a city. The heathen oracle, again, opened out to an age which seemed to have exhausted knowledge a new world for investigation in the simple command, Know thyself. The Stoics, who so despised the busy vanity of state cares, yet delighted to call their ideal man a king; and their particular tenet is universalised by Milton when he says:
Therein stands the office of a king,
His honour, virtue, merit, and chief praise,
That for the public all this weight he bears:
Yet he who reigns within himself, and rules
Passions, desires, and fears, is more a king.
And the modern humourist finds the idea indispensable for his pourtrayal of character and experience. 'Sir,' says one of Thackeray's personages, 'a distinct universe walks about under your hat and under mine ... You and I are but a pair of infinite isolations with some fellow-islands more or less near to us.' And elsewhere the same writer says that 'each creature born has a little kingdom of thought of his own, which it is a sin in us to invade.'
This antithesis of the practical and inner life is so accepted a commonplace of the pulpit and of the essayist on morals and culture that it may seem tedious to expound it. But for the very reason that it belongs to all these spheres, and that these spheres overlap, the two sides of the antithesis are not kept clearly distinct, nor are the terms uniformly used in the same sense. For the present purpose the exact distinction is between the outer world, the world of practical action, the sphere of making and doing, in which we mingle with our fellow men, join in their enterprises, and influence them to our ideas, in which we investigate nature and society, or seek to build up a fabric of power: and, on the other hand, the inner intellectual life, in which our powers as by a mirror are turned inwards upon ourselves, finding a field for enterprise in self-discipline and the contest with inherited notions and passions, exploring the depths of our consciousness and our mysterious relations with the unseen, until the thinker becomes familiar with strange situations of the mind and at ease in the presence of its problems. The antithesis is thus not at all the same as that between worldly and religious, for the inner life may be cultivated for evil: self-anatomy, as Shelley says,
Shall teach the will
Dangerous secrets: for it tempts our powers.