The Dyers Hand and Other Essays

A capacity for self-disclosure implies an equal capacity for self-concealment. Of an animal it is equally true to say that it is incapable of telling us what it really feels, and that it is incapable of hiding its feelings. A man can do both. For the animal motto is that of the trolls in Ibsen's Peer Gynt—"To thyself be enough"—while the human motto is, "To thyself by true." Peer is perfecdy willing, if it is convenient, to swear that the cow he sees is a beautiful young lady, but when the Troll-King suggests an operation which will take away from Peer the power of distinguishing between truth and falsehood so that if he wishes that a cow were a beautiful girl, the cow immediately appears to him as such, Peer revolts.

To present artistically a human personality in its full depth, its inner dialectic, its self-disclosure and self-conceal­ment, through the medium of a single character is almost im­possible. The convention of the soliloquy attempts to get around the difficulty but it suffers from the disadvantage of being a convention; it presents, that is, what is really a dialogue in the form of a monologue. When Hamlet soliloquizes, we hear a single voice which is supposed to be addressed to him­self but, in fact, is heard as addressed to us, the audience, so that we suspect that he is not disclosing to himself what he conceals from others, but only disclosing to us what he thinks it is good we should know, and at the same time concealing from us what he does not choose to tell us.

A dialogue requires two voices, but, if it is the inner dia­logue of human personality that is to be expressed artistically, the two characters employed to express it and the relationship between them must be of a special kind. The pair must in certain respects be similar, i.e., they must be of the same sex, and in others, physical and temperamental, polar opposites— identical twins will not do because they inevitably raise the question, "Which is the real one?"—and they must be in­separable, i.e., the relationship between them must be of a kind which is not affected by the passage of time or the fluctu­ations of mood and passion, and which makes it plausible that wherever one of them is, whatever he is doing, the other should be there too. There is only one relationship which satisfies all these conditions, that between master and personal servant. It might be objected at this point that the Ego-self relationship is given while the master-servant relationship, as defined above, is contractual. The objection would be valid if man, like all other finite things, had only the proto-history of coming into being and then merely sustaining that being. But man has a real history; having come into being, he has then through his choices to become what he is not yet, and this he cannot do unless he first chooses himself as he is now with all his finite limitations. To reach "the age of consent" means to arrive at the point where the "given" Ego-self relationship is changed into a contractual one. Suicide is a breach of contract.

in

crichton: There must always he a master and servants in all civilized communities, for it is natural, and whatever is natural is right.

lord loamshere : It's very unnatural for me to stand here and allow you to talk such non­sense.

crichton: Yes, my lord, it is. That is what I have been striving to -point out to your lord­ship.

—j. m. barrie, The Admirable Crichton

Defined abstracdy, a master is one who gives orders and a servant is one who obeys orders. This characteristic makes the master-servant relationship peculiarly suitable as an expression of the inner life, so much of which is carried on in imperatives. If a large lady carelessly, but not intentionally, treads on my com during a subway rush hour, what goes on in my mind can be expressed dramatically as follows:

self : (in whom the physical sensation of pain has he- come the mental passion of anger): "Care for my anger! Do something about it!"

cognitive ego

: "You are angry because of the pain caused by this large lady who, carelessly but not in­tentionally, has trodden on your com. If you decide

to relieve your feelings, you can give her a sharp kick on the ankle without being noticed." self : "Kick her."

super-ego: (to simplify matters, let us pretend that super-ego and conscience are identical, which they are not):