Masks are arrested expressions and admirable echoes of feeling, at once
faithful, discreet, and superlative. Living things in contact with
the air must acquire a cuticle, and it is not urged against cuticles
that they are not hearts; yet some philosophers seem to be angry with
images for not being things, and with words for not being feelings.
Words and images are like shells, no less integral parts of nature
than are the substances they cover, but better addressed to the eye and
more open to observation. I would not say that substance exists for the
sake of appearance, or faces for the sake of masks, or the passions
for the sake of poetry and virtue. Nothing arises in nature for the
sake of anything else; all these phases and products are involved
equally in the round of existence, and it would be sheer wilfulness
to praise the germinal phase on the ground that it is vital, and to
denounce the explicit phase on the ground that it is dead and sterile.
We might as justly despise the seed for being merely instrumental,
and glorify the full-blown flower, or the conventions of art, as the
highest achievement and fruition of life. Substance is fluid, and,
since it cannot exist without some form, is always ready to exchange
one form for another; but sometimes it falls into a settled rhythm or
recognizable vortex, which we call a nature, and which sustains an
interesting form for a season. These sustained forms are enshrined in
memory and worshipped in moral philosophy, which often assigns to them
a power to create and to reassert themselves which their precarious
status is very far from justifying. But they are all in all to the
mind: art and happiness lie in pouring and repouring the molten metal
of existence through some such tenable mould.
Masks are accordingly glorious things; we are instinctively as proud
of designing and wearing them as we are of inventing and using words.
The blackest tragedy is festive; the most pessimistic philosophy is an
enthusiastic triumph of thought. The life which such expressions seem
to arrest or to caricature would be incomplete without them; indeed,
it would be blind and abortive. It is no interruption to experience to
master experience, as tragedy aspires to do; nor is it an interruption
to sink into its episodes and render them consummate, which is the
trick of comedy. On the contrary, without such playful pauses and
reflective interludes our round of motions and sensations would be
deprived of that intellectual dignity which relieves it and renders
it morally endurable--the dignity of knowing what we are doing, even
if it be foolish in itself, and with what probable issue. Tragedy,
the knowledge of death, raises us to that height. In fancy and for a
moment it brings our mortal wills into harmony with our destiny, with
the wages of existence, and with the silence beyond. These discoveries
of reason have fixed the expression of the tragic mask, half horror
and half sublimity. Such is the countenance of man when turned towards
death and eternity and looking beyond all his endeavours at the Gorgon
face of the truth. This is not to say that it is less human, or less
legitimate, to look in other directions and to make other faces. But
whether the visage we assume be a joyful or a sad one, in adopting
and emphasizing it we define our sovereign temper. Henceforth, so
long as we continue under the spell of this self-knowledge, we do not
merely live but act; we compose and play our chosen character, we wear
the buskin of deliberation, we defend and idealize our passions, we
encourage ourselves eloquently to be what we are, devoted or scornful
or careless or austere; we soliloquize (before an imaginary audience)
and we wrap ourselves gracefully in the mantle of our inalienable part.
So draped, we solicit applause and expect to die amid a universal hush.
We profess to live up to the fine sentiments we have uttered, as we try
to believe in the religion we profess. The greater our difficulties
the greater our zeal. Under our published principles and plighted
language we must assiduously hide all the inequalities of our moods and
conduct, and this without hypocrisy, since our deliberate character
is more truly ourself than is the flux of our involuntary dreams. The
portrait we paint in this way and exhibit as our true person may well
be in the grand manner, with column and curtain and distant landscape
and finger pointing to the terrestrial globe or to the Yorick-skull of
philosophy; but if this style is native to us and our art is vital, the
more it transmutes its model the deeper and truer art it will be. The
severe bust of an archaic sculpture, scarcely humanizing the block,
will express a spirit far more justly than the man's dull morning looks
or casual grimaces. Every one who is sure of his mind, or proud of his
office, or anxious about his duty assumes a tragic mask. He deputes it
to be himself and transfers to it almost all his vanity. While still
alive and subject, like all existing things, to the undermining flux
of his own substance, he has crystallized his soul into an idea, and
more in pride than in sorrow he has offered up his life on the altar
of the Muses. Self-knowledge, like any art or science, renders its
subject-matter in a new medium, the medium of ideas, in which it loses
its old dimensions and its old pace. Our animal habits are transmuted
by conscience into loyalties and duties, and we become "persons" or
masks. Art, truth, and death turn everything to marble.
That life should be able to reach such expression in the realm of
eternal form is a sublime and wonderful privilege, but it is tragic,
and for that reason distasteful to the animal in man. A mask is not
responsive; you must not speak to it as to a living person, you must
not kiss it. If you do, you will find the cold thing repulsive and
ghastly. It is only a husk, empty, eyeless, brittle, and glazed. The
more comic its expression the more horrible it will prove, being that
of a corpse. The animal in man responds to things according to their
substance, edible, helpful, or plastic; his only joy is to push his
way victoriously through the material world, till a death stops him
which he never thought of and, in a sense, never experiences. He is not
in the least interested in picturing what he is or what he will have
been; he is intent only on what is happening to him now or may happen
to him next. But when the passions see themselves in the mirror of
reflection, what they behold is a tragic mask. This is the escutcheon
of human nature, in which its experience is emblazoned. In so far as
men are men at all, or men of honour, they militate under this standard
and are true to their colours. Whatever refuses to be idealized in
this way, they are obliged to disown and commit to instant oblivion.
It will never do for a mind merely to live through its passions or
its perceptions; it must discern recognizable objects, in which to
centre its experience and its desires; it must choose names and signs
for them, and these names and symbols, if they are to perform their
function in memory and intercourse, must be tightly conventional. What
could be more unseemly than a fault in grammar, or in many a case
more laughable and disconcerting? Yet any solecism, if it were once
stereotyped and made definitely significant, would become an idiom:
it would become a good verbal mask. What is not covered in this way by
some abiding symbol can never be recovered; the dark flood of existence
carries it down bodily. Only in some word or conventional image can
the secret of one moment be flashed to another moment; and even when
there is no one ready to receive the message, or able to decipher it,
at least the poet in his soliloquy has uttered his mind and raised his
monument in his own eyes; and in expressing his life he has found it.
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