Amongst tragic masks may be counted all systems of philosophy and
religion. So long as they are still plastic in the mind of their
creator, they seem to him to wear the very lineaments of nature. He
cannot distinguish the comic cast of his own thought; yet inevitably it
shows the hue and features of his race; it has its curious idiom and
constitutional grammar, its quite personal rhetoric, its ridiculous
ignorances and incapacities, and when his work is finished and its
expression set, and other people behold it, it becomes under his name
one of the stock masks or _dramatis personae_ of the moral world. In
it every wrinkle of his soul is eternalized, its old dead passion
persisted in, its open mouth, always with the same _rictus_, bawling
one deaf thought for ever. Even to himself, if he could have seen his
mind at a distance, it would have appeared limited and foreign, as
to an old man the verses of his youth, or like one's own figure seen
unexpectedly in a mirror and mistaken at first for another person. His
own system, as much as those of others, would have seemed to him a mask
for the truth, partial, over-emphatic, exaggerating one feature and
distorting another, and above all severed from the context of nature,
as a picture in a frame, where much may be shown with a wonderfully
distilled beauty, yet without its substance, and without its changeful
setting in the moving world. Yet this fate is in part a favour. A
system, like a tell-tale glass, may reveal by a trick of reflection
many a fact going on behind one's back. By it the eye of the mind
travels where experience cannot penetrate; it turns into a spectacle
what was never open to sight, and it disentangles things seen from the
personal accidents of vision. The mask is greater than the man. In
isolating what was important and pertinent in his thoughts, it rescues
his spirit from the contamination of all alien dyes, and bequeaths it
to posterity such as it would have wished to be.
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