I think the Christian saint and hero, instead of being merely
dissatisfied, make deliberate sacrifice. I remember reading once an
autobiography of a man who had made a daring journey in disguise to
Russian exiles in Siberia, and his telling how, very timid as a child, he
schooled himself by wandering at night through dangerous streets. Saint
and hero cannot be content to pass at moments to that hollow image and
after become their heterogeneous selves, but would always, if they could,
resemble the antithetical self. There is a shadow of type on type, for in
all great poetical styles there is saint or hero, but when it is all over
Dante can return to his chambering and Shakespeare to his "pottle pot."
They sought no impossible perfection but when they handled paper or
parchment. So too will saint or hero, because he works in his own flesh
and blood and not in paper or parchment, have more deliberate
understanding of that other flesh and blood.
Some years ago I began to believe that our culture, with its doctrine of
sincerity and self-realisation, made us gentle and passive, and that the
Middle Ages and the Renaissance were right to found theirs upon the
imitation of Christ or of some classic hero. St. Francis and Caesar Borgia
made themselves over-mastering, creative persons by turning from the
mirror to meditation upon a mask. When I had this thought I could see
nothing else in life. I could not write the play I had planned, for all
became allegorical, and though I tore up hundreds of pages in my endeavour
to escape from allegory, my imagination became sterile for nearly five
years and I only escaped at last when I had mocked in a comedy my own
thought. I was always thinking of the element of imitation in style and in
life, and of the life beyond heroic imitation. I find in an old diary: "I
think all happiness depends on the energy to assume the mask of some other
life, on a re-birth as something not one's self, something created in a
moment and perpetually renewed; in playing a game like that of a child
where one loses the infinite pain of self-realisation, in a grotesque or
solemn painted face put on that one may hide from the terror of
judgment.... Perhaps all the sins and energies of the world are but the
world's flight from an infinite blinding beam"; and again at an earlier
date: "If we cannot imagine ourselves as different from what we are, and
try to assume that second self, we cannot impose a discipline upon
ourselves though we may accept one from others. Active virtue, as
distinguished from the passive acceptance of a code, is therefore
theatrical, consciously dramatic, the wearing of a mask.... Wordsworth,
great poet though he be, is so often flat and heavy partly because his
moral sense, being a discipline he had not created, a mere obedience, has
no theatrical element. This increases his popularity with the better kind
of journalists and politicians who have written books."