The Dyers Hand and Other Essays

Thus, if a painter tries to portray the Seven Deadly Sins, his experience will furnish him readily enough with images symbolic of Gluttony, Lust, Sloth, Anger, Avarice, and Envy, for all these are qualities of a person's relations to others and the world, but no experience can provide an image of Pride, for the relation it qualifies is the subjective relation of a person to himself. In the seventh frame, therefore, the painter can only place, in lieu of a canvas, a mirror.

he Moi est toujours halssable. (pascal.) True enough, but it is equally true that only

le Moi is lovable in itself, not merely as an object of desire.

B

The absolutely banal—my sense of my own uniqueness. How strange that one should treasure this more than any of the exciting and interesting experiences, emotions, ideas that come and go, leaving it unchanged and unmoved.

The ego which recalls a previous condition of a now changed Self cannot believe that it, too, has changed. The Ego fancies that it is like Zeus who could assume one bodily appearance after another, now a swan, now a bull, while all the time remaining Zeus. Remembering some wrong or foolish action of the past, the Ego feels shame, as one feels ashamed of having been seen in bad company, at having been associated with a Self whom it regards as responsible for the act. Shame, not guilt: guilt, it fancies, is what the Self should feel.

Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self. In one kind of autobiography the Self occupies the stage and narrates, like a Greek Messenger, what the Ego is doing off stage. In another kind it is the Ego who is narrator and the Self who is described without being able to answer back. If the same person were to write his autobiography twice, first in one mode and then in the other, the two accounts would be so different that it would be hard to believe that they referred to the same person. In one he would appear as an obsessed creature, a passionate Knight forever serenading Faith or Beauty, humorless and over-life-size: in the other as coolly detached, full of humor and self-mockery, lacking in a capacity for affection, easily bored and smaller than life-size. As Don Quixote seen by Sancho Panza, he never prays; as Sancho Panza seen by Don Quixote, he never giggles.

An honest self-portrait is extremely rare because a man who has reached the degree of self-consciousness presupposed by the desire to paint his own portrait has almost always also developed an ego-consciousness which paints himself painting himself, and introduces artificial highlights and dramatic shadows.

As an autobiographer, Boswell is almost alone in his hon­esty.

I determined, if the Cyprian Fury should seize me, to

participate my amorous flame with a genteel girl.

Stendhal would never have dared write such a sentence. He would have said to himself: "Phrases like Cyprian Fury and amorous flame

are cliches; I must put down in plain words exactly what I mean." But he would have been wrong, for the Self thinks in cliches and euphemisms, not in the style of the Code Napoleon.

History is, strictly speaking, the study of questions; the study of answers belongs to anthropology and sociology. To ask a question is to declare war, to make some issue a casus belli-, history proper is the history of batdes, physical, intellectual or spiritual and, the more revolutionary the outcome, the greater the historical interest. Culture is history which has become dormant or extinct, a second nature. A good historian is, of course, both a historian in the strict sense and a sociologist. So far as the life of an individual is concerned, an autobiog­raphy probably gives a truer picture of a man's history than even the best biography could have done. But a biographer can perceive what an autobiographer cannot, a man's culture, the influence upon his life of the presuppositions which he takes for granted.

It is possible to imagine oneself as rich when one is poor, as beautiful when ugly, as generous when stingy, etc., but it is impossible to imagine oneself as either more or less imagina­tive than, in fact, one is. A man whose every thought was commonplace could never know this to be the case.

I cannot help believing that my thoughts and acts are my own, not inherited reflexes and prejudices. The most I can say is: "Father taught me such-and-such and I agree with him." My prejudices must be right because, if I knew them to be wrong, I could no longer hold them.