W. H. Auden

Hic et Ille

A

E VE R Y man carries with him throughlife a mirror, as unique and impos-sible to get rid of as his shadow.

A parlour-game for a wet afternoon--imagining the mirrors of one’s friends. A hasa huge pier-glass, gilded and baroque, B adiscreet little pocket-mirror in a pigskin casewith his initials stamped on the back; when-ever one looks at C, he is in the act of throw-ing his mirror away but, if one looks in hispocket or up his sleeve, one always findsanother, like an extra ace.

Most, perhaps all, our mirrors are inaccurateand uncomplimentary, though to varying de-grees and in various ways. Some magnify,some diminish, others return lugubrious,comic, derisive, or terrifying images.

But the properties of our own particularmirror are not so important as we sometimeslike to think. We shall be judged, not by thekind of mirror found on us, but by the usewe have made of it, by our riposte to ourreflection.

TH~ psychoanalyst says: "Come, my goodman, I know what is the matter with you.You have a distorting mirror. No wonderyou feel guilty. But cheer up. For a slightconsideration I shall be delighted to correctit for you. There! Look l A perfect image.Not a trace of distortion. Now you are oneof the elect. That will be ~666, please."

And immediately come seven devils, and

the last state of that man is worse than thefirst.

,

T~t~. politician, secular or clerical, promisesthe crowd that, if only they will hand in theirprivate mirrors to him, to be melted downinto one large public mirror, the curse ofNarcissus will be taken away.

,N^RclSSUS does not fall in love with his re-flection because it is beautiful, but because itis his. If it were his beauty that enthralledhim, he would be set free in a few years byits fading.

"ArT~-R all," sighedback, "on me it looks

Narcissus the hunch-good."

*

T~ contemplation of his reflection does notturn Narcissus into Priapus: the spell inwhich he is trapped is not a desire for him-self but the satisfaction of not desiring thenymphs.

.

"I VRr.F~R my pistol to my p... ," said Nar-cissus, "it cannot take aim without my per-mission"--and took a pot-shot at Echo.

N~,Rcissus (drunk): "I shouldn’t look at like that, if I were you. I suppose you thinkyou know who I am. Well, let me tell you,my dear, that one of these days you are goingto get a very big surprise mdeea.

.

A v^m woman comes to realise that vanityis a sin and in order not to succumb to

PRODUCED 2003 BY UNZ.ORGELECTRONIC REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED

34 W.H.

temptation, has all the mirrors removed fromher house. Consequently, in a short while shecannot remember how she looks. She remem-bers that vanity is sinful but she forgets thatshe is vain.

He who despises himsel/, neverthelessesteems himsel[ as a sell-despiser (Nietzsche).A vain person is always vain about some-thing. He overestimates the importance ofsome quality or exaggerates the degree towhich he possesses it, but the quality hassome real importance and he does possess itto some degree. The phantasy of over-estimation or exaggeration makes the vainperson comic, but the fact that he cannot bevain about nothing makes his vanity a venialsin, because it is always open to correction byappeal to objective fact.

A proud person, on the other hand, is notproud o[ anything, he is proud, he existsproudly. Pride is neither comic nor venial,but the most mortal of all sins because, lack-ing any basis in concrete particulars, it is bothincorrigible and absolute: one cannot bemore or less proud, only proud or humble.

Thus, if a painter tries to portray the SevenDeadly Sins, his experience will furnish himreadily enough with images symbolic ofGluttony, Lust, Sloth, Anger, Avarice, andEnvy, for all of these are qualities of a per-son’s relations to others and the world, butno experience can provide an image of Pride,for the relation it qualifies is the subjectiverelation of a person to himself. In the seventhframe, therefore, the painter can only place,in lieu of a canvas, a mirror.

Le Moi est toujours haissable (Pascal). Trueenough, but it is equally true that only leMoi is lovable in itself, not merely as anobject of desire.

B

T H ~- absolutely banal--my sense of myown uniqueness. How strange that one

should treasure this more than any of theexciting and interesting experiences, emo-

Audell

tions, ideas that come and go, leaving it un-changed and unmoved.

.

THr. Ego which recalls a previous conditionof a now changed Self cannot believe that it,too, has changed. The Ego fancies that it islike Zeus who could assume one bodilyappearance after another, now a swan, nowa bull, while all the time remaining Zeus.Remembering some wrong or foolish actionof the past, the Ego feels shame, as one feelsashamed of having been seen in bad com-pany, at having been associated with a Selfwhom it regards as responsible for the act.Shame, not guilt: Guilt, it fancies, is whatthe Self should feel.

.

EvERy autobiography is concerned with twocharacters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and aSancho Panza, the Self. In one kind of auto-biography the Self occupies the stage andnarrates, like a Greek Messenger, what theEgo is doing off-stage. In another kind it isthe Ego who is the narrator and the Self whois described without being able to answerback. If the same person were to write hisautobiography twice, first in one mode andthen in the other, the two accounts would beso different that it would be hard to believethat they referred to the same person. In onehe would appear as an obsessed creature, apassionate Knight for ever serenading Faithor Beauty, humourless and over-life-size: inthe other as coolly detached, full of humourand self-mockery, lacking in a capacity foraffection, easily bored and smaller than life-size. As Don Quixote seen by Sancho Panza,he never giggles; as Sancho Panza seen byDon Quixote, he never prays.

A~ honest self-portrait is extremely rare be-cause a man who has reached the degree ofself-consciousness presupposed by the desireto paint his own portrait has almost alwaysalso developed an ego-consciousness whichpaints himself painting himself, and intro-duces artificial highlights and dramaticshadows.

PRODUCED 2003 BY UNZ.ORGELECTRONIC REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED

Hic et

As an autobiographer, Boswell is almostalone in his honesty.

"I determined, i~ the Cyprian Furyshould seize me, to participate my amorousflame with a genteel girl."Stendhal would never have dared write

such a sentence. He would have said to him-self: "Phrases like Cyprian Fury andamorous flame are clich&; I must put downin plain words exactly what I mean." But hewould have been wrong, for the Self thinksin clich& and euphemisms, not in the styleof the Code Napoleon.

.

Ix is possible to imagine oneself as richwhen one is poor, as beautiful when ugly, asgenerous when stingy, etc., but it is impos-sible to imagine oneself as either more or lessimaginative than in fact one is. A man whoseevery thought was commonplace could neverknow this to be the case.

I CANNOT help believing that my thoughtsand acts are my own, not inherited reflexesand prejudices. The most I can say is:"Father taught me such-and-such and I agreewith him." My prejudices must be right be-cause, if I knew them to be wrong, I couldno longer hold them.

,18

SUBJECTIVELY, my experience of life is one ofhaving to make a series of choices betweengiven alternatives and it is this experience ofdoubt, indecision, temptation, that seemsmore important and memorable than theactions I take. Further, if I make a choicewhich I consider the wrong one, I can neverbelieve, however strong the temptation tomake it, that it was inevitable, that I couldnot and should not have made the oppositechoice. But when I look at others, I cannotsee them making choices; I can only see whatthey actually do and, if I know them well, itis rarely that I am surprised, that I could nothave predicted, given his character and up-bringing, how so-and-so would behave.

Compared with myself, that is, otherpeople seem at once less free and stronger in

Ille 35

character. No man, however tough heappears to his friends, can help portrayinghimself in his autobiography as a sensitiveplant.

To peek is always an unfriendly act, a theftof knowledge; we all know this and cannotpeek without feeling guilty. As compensationwe demand that what we discover by peek-ing shall be surprising. If I peer through thekeyhole of a bishop’s study and find himsaying his prayers, the "idleness" of mycuriosity is at once rebuked, but if I catchhim making love to the parlour-maid I canpersuade myself that my curiosity has reallyachieved something.

In the same way, the private papers of anauthor must, if they are to satisfy the public,be twice as unexpected and shocking as hispublished books.

PRIVATE letters, entries in journals, etc., fallinto two classes, those in which the writer isin control of his situation--what he writesabout is what he chooses to write--and thosein which the situation dictates what he writes.The terms personal and impersonal are hereambiguous: the first class is impersonal inso far as the writer is looking at himself inthe world as if at a third person, but personalin so far as it is his personal act so to look--the signature to the letter is really his and heis responsible for its contents. Vice versa, thesecond class is personal in that the writer isidentical with what he writes, but impersonalin that it is the situation not he which en-forces that identity.

The second class are what journalists call"human documents" and should be pub-lished, if at all, anonymously.

C

I F wE were suddenly to become disem-bodied spirits, a few might behave better

than before, but most of us would behavevery much worse.

#

THE Body is a born Aristotelian, its guidingprinciple the Golden Mean. The most

PRODUCED 2003 BY UNZ.ORGELECTRONIC REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED

36

"fleshly" of the sins are not Gluttony andLust, but Sloth and Cowardice: on the otherhand, without a body, we could neither con-ceive of nor practise the virtue of Prudence.

.

You taught me language and my profit on’tIs, 1 know how to curse.

In the debate between the Body and Soul,if the former could present its own case ob-jectively, it would always win. As it is, itcan only protest the Soul’s misstatement ofits case by subjective acts of rebellion, coughs,belches, constipation, etc., which always putit in the wrong. ,

,ALL bodies have the same vocabulary ofphysical symptoms to select from, but theway in which they use it varies from onebody to another: in some the style of bodilybehaviour is banal, in some highly mannered,in some vague, in some precise, and,occasionally, to his bewilderment, a physicianencounters one which is really witty.

ANxir.x~’ affects the Body and the Mind indifferent ways: it makes the former developcompulsions, a concentration on certainactions to the exclusion of others; it makesthe latter surrender to day-dreaming, a lackof concentration on any thought in particular.

.IN a state of panic, a man runs round incircles by himself. In a state of joy, he linkshands with others and they dance round ina circle together.

*

IN the judgment of my nose, some of myneighbours are bad, but none is my inferior.

.

THE ear tends to be lazy, craves the familiar,and is shocked by the unexpected: the eye,on the other hand, tends to be impatient,craves the novel and is bored by repetition.Thus, the average listener prefers concertsconfined to works by the old masters and itis only the highbrow who is willing to listento new works, but the average reader wantsthe latest book and it is the classics of thepast which are left to the highbrow.

W. H. AudenSimilarly, so long as a child has to be read

to or told stories, he insists on the old talebeing retold again and again, but, once hehas learned to read for himself, he rarelyreads the same book twice.

.

As seen reflected in a mirror, a room or alandscape seems more solidly there in spacethan they look themselves. In that purelyvisual world nothing can be hailed, moved,smashed, or eaten, and it is only the observerhimself who, by shifting his position ordosing his eyes, can change.

.

FRos~ the height of xo,ooo feet, the earthappears to the human eye as it appears tothe eye of the camera; that is to say, all his-tory is reduced to nature. This has the salu-tary effect of making historical evils, likenational divisions and political hatreds, seemabsurd. I look down from an aeroplane upona stretch of land which is obviously con-tinuous. That, across it, marked by a tinyridge or river or even by no topographicalsign whatever, there should run a frontier,and that the human beings living on one sideshould hate or refuse to trade with or beforbidden to visit those on the other side, isinstantaneously revealed to me as ridiculous.Unfortunately, I cannot have this revelationwithout simultaneously having the illusionthat there are no historical values either.From the same height I cannot distinguishbetween an outcrop of rock and a Gothiccathedral, or between a happy family play-ing in a backyard and a flock of sheep, sothat I am unable to feel any difference be-tween dropping a bomb upon one or theother. If the effect of distance upon the ob-served and the observer were mutual, so that,as the objects on the ground shrank in sizeand lost their uniqueness, the observer in theaeroplane felt himself shrinking and becom-ing more and more generalised, we shouldeither give up flying as too painful or createa heaven on earth.

,

THosE who accuse the movies of having adeleterious moral effect may well be right but

PRODUCED 2003 BY UNZ.ORGELECTRONIC REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED

Hic et Ille

not for the reasons they usually give. It is notwhat movies are about, gangsters or adultery,which does the damage, but the naturalisticnature of the medium itself which en-courages a phantastic conception of time. Inall narrative art, the narration of the actiontakes less time than it would take in real life,but in the epic or the drama or the novel, theartistic conventions are so obvious that a con-fusion of art with life is impossible. Supposethat there is a scene in a play in which a manwoos a woman; this may take forty minutesby the clock to play, but the audience willhave the sense of having watched a scenewhich really took, let us say, two hours.

The absolute naturalism of the cameradestroys this sense and encourages theaudience to imagine that, in real life as onthe screen, the process of wooing takes fortyminutes.

When he grows impatient, the movieaddict does not cry "Hurry!"; he cries"Cutl"

A DA~’-nR~ASt is a meal at which images areeaten. Some of us are gourmets, some gour-mands, and a good many take their imagespre-cooked out of a can and swallow themdown whole, absentmindedly and with littlerelish.

#

Ev~.N if it be true that our primary interest isin sexual objects only, and that all our laterinterests are symbolic transferences, we couldnever make such a transference if the newobjects of interest did not have a real valueof their own. If all round hills were suddenlyto turn into breasts, all caves into wombs, alltowers into phalli, we should not be pleasedor even shocked: we should be bored.

,

BI~TWEEN the ages of seven and twelve myphantasy life was centred around lead-minesand I spent many hours imagining in theminutest detail the Platonic Idea of all lead-mines. In planning its Concentrating Mill, Iran into difficulty: I had to choose betweentwo types of a certain machine for separatingthe slimes. One I found more "beautiful"

37but the other was, I knew from my reading,the more efficient. My feelings at the time,I remember very clearly, was that I was con-fronted by a moral choice and that it was myduty to choose the second.

Lm~ all polemical movements, existentialismis one-sided. In their laudable protest againstsystematic philosophers, like Hegel or Marx,who would reduce all historical existence tonature, the existentialists have invented anequally imaginary anthropology from whichall elements, like man’s physical nature, orhis reason, about which general statementscan be made, are excluded.

A task for an existentialist theologian: topreach a sermon on the topic The Sleep o]Christ.

ONE Of the most horrible, yet most impor-tant, discoveries of our age has been that, ifyou really wish to destroy a person and turnhim into an automaton, the surest method isnot physical torture, in the strict sense, butsimply to keep him awake, i.e. in an existen-tial relation to life without intermission.

ALL the existentialist descriptions of choice,like Pascal’s wager or Kierkegaard’s leap, areinteresting as dramatic literature, but are theytrue? When I look back at the three or fourchoices in my life which have been decisive,I find that, at the time I made them, I hadvery little sense of the seriousness of what Iwas doing and it was only later I discoveredthat what had then seemed an unimportantbrook was, in fact, a Rubicon.

For this I am very thankful since, had Ibeen fully aware of the risk I was taking, Ishould never have dared take such a step.

In a reflective and anxious age, it is surelybetter, pedagogically, to minimise rather thanto exaggerate the risks involved in a choice,just as one encourages a boy to swim who isafraid of the water by telling him that noth-ing can happen.

PRODUCED 2003 BY UNZ.ORGELECTRONIC REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED

38 W.H.

D

S~ N e ~. he is the only one who has a realhistory, man is the only creature who has

a face. Every face is a present witness to thefact that its owner has a past behind himwhich might have been otherwise, and afuture ahead of him in which some possibili-ties are more probable than others.

To "read" a face is to guess at what mighthave been and what may still be. The noblestface reveals potential evil overcome, the vilestpotential good suppressed.

Children, for whom most future possibili-ties are equally probable, and the dead forwhom all possibilities have been reduced tozero, do not have faces but, like animals,wear inscrutable masks.

UNDER the stress of emotion, animals andchildren "make" faces, but they do not haveone.

*

So much countenance and so little [ace(Henry James). Every European visitor to theUnited States is struck by the comparativerarity of what he would call a face, by thefrequency of men and women who look likeelderly babies. If he stays in the States forany length of time, he will learn that thiscannot be put down to a lack of sensibility--the American feels the joys and sufferings ofhuman life as keenly as anybody else. Theonly plausible explanation I can find lies inhis different attitude to the past. To have aface, in the European sense of the word, itwould seem that one must not only enjoyand suffer but also desire to preserve thememory of even the most humiliating andunpleasant experiences of the past.

More than any other people, perhaps, theAmericans obey the scriptural injunction:"Let the dead bury their dead."

A e^R~e^TuRr, of a face admits that its ownerhas a past but denies him a future. He hascreated his features up to a point but nowthey have taken charge of him so that hecan never change. A mask is inscrutable--it

A uden

cannot be read: a caricature is obvious--itdoes not need to be read.

We enjoy equally caricatures of our friendsand of our enemies: of our friends becausewe cannot bear the thought of their dying,of our enemies because the thought that theymight become lovable is unwelcome.

.WHeN I consider others I can easily believethat their bodies express their personalitiesand that the two are inseparable. But it isimpossible for me not to feel that my bodyis other than I, that I inhabit it like a house,and that my face is a mask which, with orwithout my consent, conceals my real naturefrom others.

,IT Is impossible consciously to approach amirror without composing or "making" aspecial face, and if we catch sight of our re-flection unawares we rarely recognise our-selves. I cannot read my face in the mirrorbecause I am already obvious to myself.

.THE image of myself which I try to createin my own mind in order that I may lovemyself is very different from the image whichI try to create in the minds of others in orderthat they may love me.

*

Mos~" faces are asymmetric, i.e. one side ishappy, the other sad, one self-confident, theother diffident, etc. By cutting up photo-graphs it is possible to make two very dif-ferent portraits, one from the two left sides,the other from the two rights. If these benow shown to the subject and to his friends,almost invariably the one which the subjectprefers will be the one his friends dislike.

.Wr. can imagine loving what we do not lovea great deal more easily than we can imaginefearing what we do not fear. I can sympa-thise with a man who has a passion for col-lecting stamps, but if he is afraid of micethere is a gulf between us. On the other hand,if he is unafraid of spiders, of which I amterrified, I admire him as superior but I donot feel that he is a stranger.

PRODUCED 2003 BY UNZ.ORGELECTRONIC REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED

Hic et Ille

Br.TW~-EN friends differences in taste oropinion are irritating in direct proportion totheir triviality. If my friend takes upVedanta, I can accept it, but if he prefers hissteak well done, I feel it to be a treachery.

WHEN one talks to another, one is more con-scious of him as a listener to the conversationthan of oneself. But the moment one writesanything, be it only a note to pass down thetable, one is more conscious of oneself as areader than of the intended recipient.

Hence we cannot be as false in writing aswe can in speaking nor as true. The writtenword can neither conceal nor reveal so muchas the spoken.

,

Two card players. ~1 is a good loser when,holding good cards, he makes a fatal error,but a bad loser when he is dealt cards withwhich it is impossible to win. With B it isthe other way round: he cheerfully resignshimself to defeat if his hand is poor, but be-comes furious if defeat is his own fault.

.

A~.MosT all of our relationships begin andmost of them continue as forms of mutualexploitation, a mental or physical barter, tobe terminated when one or both parties runout of goods.

But if the seed of a genuine disinterestedlove, which is often present, is ever to de-velop, it is essential that we pretend to our-selves and to others that it is stronger andmore developed than it is, that we are lessselfish than we are. Hence the social havocwrought by the paranoid, to whom thethought of indifference is so intolerable thathe divides others into two classes, those wholove him for himself alone and those whohate him for the same reason.

Do a paranoid a favour, like paying hishotel bill in a foreign city when his monthlycheque has not yet arrived, and he will takethis as an expression of personal affection--the thought that you might have done it froma general sense of duty towards a fellow-countryman in distress will never occur to

39

him. So back he comes for more until yourpatience is exhausted, there is a row, and hedeparts convinced that you are his personalenemy. In this he is right to the extent thatit is difficult not to hate a person who revealsto you so clearly how little you love others.

Two cyclic madmen. In his elated phase, Afeels: "I am God. The universe is full ofgods. I adore all and am adored by all." Bfeels: "The universe is only a thing. I amhappily free from all bonds of attachment toit." In the corresponding depressed phase,A feels: "I am a devil. The universe is fullof devils. I hate all and am hated by all."B feels: "I am only a thing to the universewhich takes no interest in me." This dif-ference is reflected in their behaviour. Whenelated A does not wash and even revels indirt because all things are holy. He runs afterwomen, after whores in particular whom heintends to save through Love. But B in thismood takes a fastidious pride in his physicalcleanliness as a mark of his superiority andis chaste for the same reason. When de-pressed A begins to wash obsessively tocleanse himself from guilt and feels a morbidhorror of all sex, B now neglects his appear-ance because "nobody cares how I look,"and tries to be a Don Juan seducer in anattempt to compel life to take an interest inhim.

A’s God- Zeus-Jehovah: B’s God- TheUnmoved Mover.

Trx~. fellowship of suffering lasts only so longas none of the sufferers can escape. Open adoor through which many, but not all, canescape one at a time, and the community ofprisoners all too easily disintegrates into astampeding crowd.

Tri~. crowd collects to watch the wrecking-gang demolish the old mansion, fascinatedby yet another proof that physical force isthe Prince of this world against whom nolove of the heart shall prevail.

PRODUCED 2003 BY UNZ.ORGELECTRONIC REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED