THE RIDDLE FOR THE STATESMAN
1
I have been planning and replanning, writing and rewriting, this next portion of my book for many days.I perceive I must leave it raw edged and ill joined.I have learnt something of the impossibility of History.For all I have had to tell is the story of one man's convictions and aims and how they reacted upon his life; and I find it too subtle and involved and intricate for the doing.I find it taxes all my powers to convey even the main forms and forces in that development.It is like looking through moving media of changing hue and variable refraction at something vitally unstable.Broad theories and generalisations are mingled with personal influences, with prevalent prejudices; and not only coloured but altered by phases of hopefulness and moods of depression.The web is made up of the most diverse elements, beyond treatment multitudinous....For a week or so I desisted altogether, and walked over the mountains and returned to sit through the warm soft mornings among the shaded rocks above this little perched-up house of ours, discussing my difficulties with Isabel and I think on the whole complicating them further in the effort to simplify them to manageable and stateable elements.
Let me, nevertheless, attempt a rough preliminary analysis of this confused process.A main strand is quite easily traceable.This main strand is the story of my obvious life, my life as it must have looked to most of my acquaintances.It presents you with a young couple, bright, hopeful, and energetic, starting out under Altiora's auspices to make a career.You figure us well dressed and active, running about in motor-cars, visiting in great people's houses, dining amidst brilliant companies, going to the theatre, meeting in the lobby.Margaret wore hundreds of beautiful dresses.We must have had an air of succeeding meritoriously during that time.
We did very continually and faithfully serve our joint career.Ithought about it a great deal, and did and refrained from doing ten thousand things for the sake of it.I kept up a solicitude for it, as it were by inertia, long after things had happened and changes occurred in me that rendered its completion impossible.Under certain very artless pretences, we wanted steadfastly to make a handsome position in the world, achieve respect, SUCCEED.Enormous unseen changes had been in progress for years in my mind and the realities of my life, before our general circle could have had any inkling of their existence, or suspected the appearances of our life.Then suddenly our proceedings began to be deflected, our outward unanimity visibly strained and marred by the insurgence of these so long-hidden developments.
That career had its own hidden side, of course; but when I write of these unseen factors I do not mean that but something altogether broader.I do not mean the everyday pettinesses which gave the cynical observer scope and told of a narrower, baser aspect of the fair but limited ambitions of my ostensible self.This "sub-careerist" element noted little things that affected the career, made me suspicious of the rivalry of so-and-so, propitiatory to so-and-so, whom, as a matter of fact, I didn't respect or feel in the least sympathetic towards; guarded with that man, who for all his charm and interest wasn't helpful, and a little touchy at the appearance of neglect from that.No, I mean something greater and not something smaller when I write of a hidden life.
In the ostensible self who glowed under the approbation of Altiora Bailey, and was envied and discussed, praised and depreciated, in the House and in smoking-room gossip, you really have as much of a man as usually figures in a novel or an obituary notice.But I am tremendously impressed now in the retrospect by the realisation of how little that frontage represented me, and just how little such frontages do represent the complexities of the intelligent contemporary.Behind it, yet struggling to disorganise and alter it, altogether, was a far more essential reality, a self less personal, less individualised, and broader in its references.Its aims were never simply to get on; it had an altogether different system of demands and satisfactions.It was critical, curious, more than a little unfeeling--and relentlessly illuminating.
It is just the existence and development of this more generalised self-behind-the-frontage that is ****** modern life so much more subtle and intricate to render, and so much more hopeful in its relations to the perplexities of the universe.I see this mental and spiritual hinterland vary enormously in the people about me, from a type which seems to keep, as people say, all its goods in the window, to others who, like myself, come to regard the ostensible existence more and more as a mere experimental feeder and agent for that greater personality behind.And this back-self has its history of phases, its crises and happy accidents and irrevocable conclusions, more or less distinct from the adventures and achievements of the ostensible self.It meets persons and phrases, it assimilates the spirit of a book, it is startled into new realisations by some accident that seems altogether irrelevant to the general tenor of one's life.Its increasing independence of the ostensible career makes it the organ of corrective criticism; it accumulates disturbing energy.Then it breaks our overt promises and repudiates our pledges, coming down at last like an overbearing mentor upon the small engagements of the pupil.
In the life of the individual it takes the role that the growth of philosophy, science, and creative literature may play in the development of mankind.
2
