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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