Part 15

Why this monotony? Did Spanish life afford fewer contrasts, less individuality of character and idiom, than did the England of Shakespeare? Hardly: in Spain the soldier of fortune, the grandee, peasant, monk, or prelate, the rogue, beggar, and bandit were surely as highly characterized as anything to be then found in England; and Spanish women in their natural ardour of affection, in their ready speech and discretion, in their dignity and religious consecration, lent themselves rather better, one would think, to the making of heroines than did those comparatively cool and boylike young ladies whom Shakespeare transmuted into tragic angels. I think we may go further and say positively that it was Spain rather than England that could have shown the spectacle of "every man in his humour."

Even in the days before Puritanism English character was English; it tended to silent independence and outward reserve, preferring to ignore its opposite rather than to challenge it. In pose and expression the Spaniard is naturally more theatrical and pungent; and his individuality itself is stiffen No doubt, in society, he will simulate and dissimulate as an Englishman never would; but he is prompted to this un-English habit by the very fixity of his purposes; all his courtesy and loyalty are ironical, and inwardly he never yields an inch. He likes if possible to be statuesque; he likes to appeal to his own principles and character, and to say, "Sir, whatever you may think of it, that is the sort of man I am." He has that curious form of self-love which inclines to parade even its defects, as a mourner parades his grief. He admits readily that he is a sinner, and that he means to remain one; he composes his countenance proudly on that basis; whereas when English people say they are miserable sinners (which happens only in church) they feel perhaps that they are imperfect or unlucky, and they may even contemplate being somewhat different in future; but it never occurs to them to classify themselves as miserable sinners for good, with a certain pride in their class, deliberately putting on the mask of Satan or the cock's feather of Mephistopheles and saying to all concerned, "See what a very devil I am!" The Englishman's sins are slips; he feels he was not himself on those occasions, and does not think it fair to be reminded of them. Though theology may sometimes have taught him that he is a sinner fundamentally, such is not his native conviction; the transcendental ego in him cannot admit any external standard to which it ought to have conformed. The Spaniard is metaphysically humbler, knowing himself to be a creature of accident and fate; yet he is dramatically more impudent, and respects himself more than he respects other people. He laughs at kings; and as amongst beggars it is etiquette to whine, and ostentatiously to call oneself blind, old, poor, crippled, hungry, and a brother of yours, so amongst avowed sinners it may become a point of pride to hold, as it were, the record as a liar, a thief, an assassin, or a harlot. These rôles are disgraceful when one is reduced to them by force of circumstances or for some mean ulterior motive, but they recover their human dignity when one wears them as a chosen mask in the comedy of life. The pose, at that angle, redeems the folly, and the façade the building. Nor is this a lapse into sheer immorality; there is many a primitive or animal level of morality beneath the conventional code; and often crime and barbarism are as proud of themselves as virtue, and no less punctilious. If there is effrontery in such a rebellion, there may be also sincerity, courage, relief, profound truth to one's own nature. Hence the eloquence of romanticism. Passion and wilfulness (which romanticists think are above criticism) cannot be expected to understand that, if they merged and subsided into a harmony, the life distilled out of their several deaths would be infinitely more living and varied than any of them, and would be beautiful and perfect to boot; whereas the romantic chaos which they prolong by their obstinacy is the most hideous of hells. But avowed sinners and proud romanticists insist on preserving and on loving hell, because they insist on loving and preserving themselves.

It was not, then, moral variety that was lacking in Spain, always a romantic country, but only interest in moral variety. This lack of interest was itself an expression of romantic independence, intensity, and pride. The gentleman with his hand always on the hilt of his sword, lest some whiff from anywhere should wound his vanity, or the monk perpetually murmuring _memento mori_, closed his mind to every alien vista. Of course he knew that the world was full of motley characters: that was one of his reasons for holding it at arm's length. What were those miscellaneous follies to him but an offence or a danger? Why should he entertain his leisure in depicting or idealizing them? If some psychological zoologist cared to discant on the infinity of phenomena, natural or moral, well and good; but how should such things charm a man of honour, a Christian, or a poet? They might indeed be referred to on occasion, as fabulists make the animals speak, with a humorous and satirical intention, as a sort of warning and confirmation to us in our chosen path; but an appealing poet, for such tightly integrated minds, must illustrate and enforce their personal feelings. Moreover, although in words and under the spell of eloquence the Spaniard may often seem credulous and enthusiastic, he is disillusioned and cynical at heart; he does not credit the existence of motives or feelings better than those he has observed, or thinks he has observed. His preachers recommend religion chiefly by composing invectives against the world, and his political writers express sympathy with one foreign country only out of hatred for another, or perhaps for their own. The sphere of distrust and indifference begins for him very near home; he has little speculative sympathy with life at large; he is cruel to animals; he shrugs his shoulders at crime in high places; he feels little responsibility to the public, and has small faith in time and in work. This does not mean in the least that his character is weak or his morality lax within its natural range; his affections are firm, his sense of obligation deep, his delicacy of feeling often excessive; he is devoted to his family, and will put himself to any inconvenience to do a favour to a friend at the public expense. There are definite things to which his sentiments and habits have pledged him: beyond that horizon nothing speaks to his heart.

Such a people will not go to the play to be vaguely entertained, as if they were previously bored. They are not habitually bored; they are full to the brim of their characteristic passions and ideas. They require that the theatre should set forth these passions and ideas as brilliantly and convincingly as possible, in order to be confirmed in them, and to understand and develop them more clearly. Variety of plot and landscape they will relish, because nothing is easier for them than to imagine themselves born in the purple, or captive, or in love, or in a difficult dilemma of honour; and they will be deeply moved to see some constant spirit, like their own, buffeted by fortune, but even in the last extremity never shaken. The whole force of their dramatic art will lie in leading them to dream of themselves in a different, perhaps more glorious, position, in which their latent passions might be more splendidly expressed. These passions are intense and exceptionally definite; and this is the reason, I think, for the monotony of Spanish music, philosophy, and romantic drama. All eloquence, all issues, all sentiments, if they are not to seem vapid and trivial, must be such as each man can make his own, with a sense of enhanced vitality and moral glory. The lady, if he is to warm to her praises, must not be less divine than the one he loves, or might have loved; the hero must not fall short of what, under such circumstances, he himself would have wished to be. The language, too, must always be worthy of the theme: it cannot be too rapturous and eloquent. Unless his soul can be fired by the poet's words, and can sing them, as it were, in chorus, he will not care to listen to them. But he will not tire of the same cadences or the same images--stars, foam, feathers, flowers--if these symbols, better than any others, transport him into the ethereal atmosphere which it is his pleasure to breathe.

The Spanish nation boils the same peas for its dinner the whole year round; it has only one religion, if it has any; the pious part of it recites the same prayers fifty or one hundred and fifty times daily, almost in one breath; the gay and sentimental part never ceases to sing the same _jotas_ and _malagueñas_. Such constancy is admirable. If a dish is cheap, nutritious, and savoury on Monday, it must be so on Tuesday, too; it was a ridiculous falsehood, though countenanced by some philosophers, which pretended that always to feel (or to eat) the same thing was equivalent to never feeling (or eating) anything. Nor does experience of a genuine good really have any tendency to turn it into an evil, or into an indifferent thing; at most, custom may lead people to take it for granted, and the thoughtless may forget its value, until, perhaps, they lose it. Of course, men and nations may slowly change their nature, and consequently their rational preferences; but at any assigned time a man must have some moral complexion, or if he has none, not much need be said about him.

But there is another point to be considered. Need human nature's daily food be exclusively the Spanish pea? Might it not just as well be rice, or polenta, or even beef and bacon? Much as I admire my countrymen's stomachs for making a clear choice and for sticking to it, I rather pity them for the choice they have made. That hard yellow pea is decidedly heavy, flatulent, and indigestible. I am sure Pythagoras would not have approved of it; possibly it is the very bean he abhorred. Against the _jota_ and the _malagueña_ I can say nothing; I find in them I know not what infinite, never-failing thrill and inimitable power, the power which perfection of any kind always has; yet what are they in comparison to all the possibilities of human music? Enjoyment, which some people call criticism, is something aesthetic, spontaneous, and irresponsible; the aesthetic perfection of anything is incommensurable with that of anything else. But there is a responsible sort of criticism which is political and moral, and which turns on the human advantage of possessing or loving this or that sort of perfection. To cultivate some sorts may be useless or even hostile to the possible perfection of human life. Spanish religion, again, is certainly most human and most superhuman; but its mystic virtue to the devotee cannot alter the fact that, on a broad view, it appears to be a romantic _tour de force,_ a desperate illusion, fostered by premature despair and by a total misunderstanding of nature and history. Finally, those lyrical ladies and entranced gentlemen of the Spanish drama are like filigree flowers upon golden stems; they belong to a fantastic ballet, to an exquisite dream, rather than to sane human society. The trouble is not that their types are few and constant, but that these types are eccentric, attenuated, and forced. They would not be monotonous if they were adequate to human nature. How vast, how kindly, how enveloping does the world of Shakespeare seem in comparison! We seem to be afloat again on the tide of time, in a young, green world; we are ready to tempt new fortunes, in the hope of reaching better things than we know. And this is the right spirit; because although the best, if it had been attained, would be all-sufficient, the best is not yet.

37

THE CENSOR AND THE POET

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.

38

THE MASK OF THE PHILOSOPHER