I. Sincerity: Its Origin and Rise - [cont.]

But although innocent feigning has its own very great interest, it is dissimulation in the service of evil that most commands the moral attention. The word 'villain' as used in drama carries no necessary meaning of dissembling--it is possible for a villain not to compound his wickedness with deceit, to be overt in his intention of doing harm. Yet the fact that in the lists of dramatis personae in the First Folio Iago alone is denominated 'a villain' suggests that, in his typical existence, a villain is a dissembler, his evil nature apparent to the audience but concealed from those with whom he treads the boards.

And it is thus that the conception of the villain survived well into the Victorian era. A characteristic of the literary culture of the post-Victorian age was the discovery that villains were not, as the phrase went, 'true to life', and that to believe in the possibility of their existence was na�eve. It became established doctrine that people were 'a mixture of good and bad' and that much of the bad could be accounted for by 'circumstances'. The diminished credibility of the villain, the opinion that he was appropriate only to the fantasy of melodrama, not to the truth of serious novels or plays, may in part be explained by the modern tendency to locate evil in social systems rather than in persons. But it is worth considering whether it might not also have come about because the dissembling which defined the villain became less appropriate to new social circumstances than it had been to preceding ones. Perhaps it should not be taken for granted that the villain was nothing but a convention of the stage which for a time was also adopted by the novel. There is ground for believing that a the villain was once truer to life than he later became. We cannot establish by actual count that there were more villains in real life at one time than at another, but we can say that there was at one time better reason, more practical use, for villainous dissembling than at another. Taratuffe, Blifil, la cousine Bette, Mme Marneffe, Uriah Heep, Blandois, Becky Sharp--these wolves in sheep's clothing are not free fantasies, and it is a misapprehension to think of them as such. The possibility of their actual existence is underwritten by social fact.

It is a historical commonplace that, beginning in the sixteenth century, there was a decisive increase in the rate of social mobility, most especially in England but also in France. It became more and more possible for people to leave the class into which they were born. The middle class rose, not only in its old habitual way but unprecedentedly. Yet, striking as the new social mobility was compared with that of the past, from our present point of view it must seem to have been most inadequate to the social desires that had come into being. Tocqueville's principle of revolutions is here in point, that in the degree to which the gratification of social desires begins to be possible, impatience at the hindrances to gratification increases. And how effectual these hindrances were may be learned from any good English or French novel of the nineteenth century. Tocqueville pressed it upon the attention of the French that England had gained much in the way of political stability from the licence given to upward mobility by the commodious English idea of the 'gentleman' ; yet we cannot fail to be aware of how limited that mobility was, how quick was the class of gentlemen to remark the social stigmata that made a man unfit for membership in it. A salient fact of French and English society up to a hundred years ago is the paucity of honorable professions which could [p. 15] serve the ambitious as avenues of social advancement. To a society thus restricted, the scheme, the plot, do not seem alien; the forging or destroying of wills is a natural form of economic enterprise. The system of social deference was still of a kind to encourage flattery as a means of personal ingratiation and advancement. The original social meaning of the word 'villain' bears decisively upon its later moral meaning. The opprobrious term referred to the man who stood lowest in the scale of feudal society; the villain of plays and novels is characteristically a person who seeks to rise above the station to which he was born. He is not what he is: this can be said of him both because by his intention he denies and violates his social identity and because he can achieve his unnatural purpose only by covert acts, by guile. In the nature of his case, he is a hypocrite, which is to say one who plays a part. It is to the point that Iago's resentment of his class situation and his wish to better it are conspicuous in his character.

The hypocrite-villain, the conscious dissembler, has become marginal, even alien, to the modern imagination of the moral life. The situation which a person systematically misrepresents himself in order to practise upon the good faith of another does not readily command our interest, scarcely our credence. The deception we best understand and most willingly give our attention to is that which a person works upon himself. Iago's avowed purpose of base duplicity does not hold for us the fascination that nineteenth-century audiences found in it; our liveliest curiosity is likely to be directed to the moral condition of Othello, to what lies hidden under his superbness, to what in him is masked by the heroic persona. Similarly Tartuffe, who consciously and avowedly dissembles, engages us less than the protagonist of Le Misanthrope, who, Moli�re suggests, despite the programmatic completeness of his sincerity is [p. 16] not entirely what he is. 'My chief talent is to be frank and sincere', Alceste says. The whole energy of his being is directed towards perfecting the trait upon which he prides himself. '... Dont son �me se pique': it is the clue to the comic flaw. Every ridiculous person in the play has his point of pride; for Oronte it is his sonnets, for Clitandre his waistcoats, for Acaste his noble blood, his wealth, and his infallible charm. Alceste's point of pride is his sincerity, his remorseless outspokenness on behalf of truth. The obsessiveness and obduracy of his sincerity amount to hubris, that state of being in which truth is obscured through the ascendancy of self-regarding will over intelligence. It is to his will and not, as he persuades himself, to truth that Alceste gives his stern allegiance.

No laughter at human weakness was ever more charged with compunction and tenderness than that which Molli�re directs upon the self-deception of Alceste's sincerity. Of this Rousseau would seem to have had no awareness when, in the Lettre � M. d'Alembert sur les spectacles, he framed his famous denunciation of Le Misanthrope. Not that Rousseau was not himself moved to compunction and tenderness in his attack--he spoke more in sorrow than in anger and chastised where he loved, for he adored Moli�re and, for all the severity of his strictures on the play, he especially admired Le Misanthrope. In it, we may suppose, he saw his own portrait drawn, and the root of his quarrel with Moli�re is that the radical moral absolutism of Alceste is not celebrated but questioned and teased. It was not the intention of Moli�re in his comedies, Rousseau says, to set up the model of a good man but rather that of a man of the world, a likeable man; he did not wish to correct vices but only what is ridiculous, 'and of all ridiculous characters the one which the world pardons least is the one who is ridiculous because he is virtuous'. Le Misanthrope, Rousseau goes [p. 17] on, was written 'to please corrupt minds'; it represents a 'false good' which is more dangerous than actual evil, causing 'the practice and the principles of society to be preferred to exact probity' and making 'wisdom consist in a certain mean between vice and virtue'.

This is a reading of the play that everyone must make. It consorts with the common view of the moral principle of Moli�re's comedies, which is that right conduct is sensible conduct, involving a large element of pragmatic accommodation to society's deficiencies and contradictions. But with this reading must go another, which takes account of the perception that Alceste's feelings and opinions are Moli�re's own, that the bland good sense of Alceste's loyal friend Philinte does not really have the last word, that C�lim�ne is not only all that George Meredith says she is in the way of charm and vitality but also a whited sepulchre and as such an allegory of society itself. For our present purpose of identifying a chief circumstance with which the origin and rise of sincerity is bound up, it does not matter which of the two readings best recommends itself, since one as decisively as the other places the concept of society at the center of the play. What occupies and tortures the mind of Alceste is not that first one and then another of the members of his immediate circle, and then still another and at last most all of them, out of vanity or for material advantage, make avowals which are not in accord with what they feel or believe, but rather that the life of man in a developed community must inevitably be a corruption of truth. When in the end Alceste vows himself to solitude, it is not out of mere personal disappointment in the entrancing C�lim^egravene but out of disgust with society, an entity whose nature is not to be exactly defined by the nature of the individuals who constitute it. [p. 18]

In his book Culture and Society Raymond Williams examines certain words, now of capital importance in our speech, which first came into use in their present meaning in the last decades of the eighteenth century and in the first half of the nineteenth: 'industry', 'democracy', 'class', 'art', and 'culture'. These words make our way of thinking about society. And although Mr. Williams does not say so, 'society' itself is another such word. The provenance of its present meaning is older than that of the others, but it too came into use at a particular time--in the sixteenth century--and we can observe not only its ever-increasing currency but also its ever-widening range of connotation. Society is a concept that is readily hypostatized--the things that are said about it suggest that it has a life of its own and its own laws. An aggregate of individual human beings, society is yet something other than this, something other than man, and its being conceived in this way, as having in need a life of its own but not a human life, gives rise to the human desire to bring it into accord with humanity. Society is a kind of entity different from a kingdom or realm; and even 'commonwealth', as Hobbes uses that word, seems archaic to denote what he has in mind.

Historians of European culture are in substantial agreement that, in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, something like a mutation in human nature took place. Frances Yates speaks of 'the inner deep-seated changes in the psyche during the early seventeenth century', which she calls 'the vital period for the emergence of modern European and American man'. The changes were most dramatically marked in England, and Aevedei Barbu describes what he calls 'the formation of a new type of personality, which embodies the main traits of English national character throughout the modern era'. Paul Delany in his study of the sudden efflorescence of autobiography in [p. 19] the period remarks 'some deep change in the British habits of thought' that must account for the development of the new genre. The unfolding public events with which the psychological changes are connected--equally, we note, as cause and as effect--are the dissolution of the feudal order and the diminished authority of the Church. One way of giving a synopsis of the whole complex pscyho-historical occurrence is to say that the idea of society, much as we now conceive it, had come into being.

The decline of feudalism issued in the unprecedented social mobility I have touched on, with, expectably enough, an ever-increasing urbanization of the population. In 1550 London was a city of some 60,000 souls; within a hundred years the number had increased nearly six times to about 350,000. This is a condition of life that literature has chiefly deplored and for many generations the educated bourgeoisie has characteristically shuddered away from the moral and spiritual effects of the circumstance from which it derives its being and its name. Its vision of the good life, so far as it has been enlightened and polemical, has been largely shaped by the imagination of the old rural existence. For Karl Marx, however, the city was to be praised for at last one thing, the escape it offers from what he called 'the idiocy of village life'. He no doubt had in mind the primitive meaning of the word 'idiot', which is not a mentally deficient person, nor yet an uncouth and ignorant person, but a private person, one 'who does not hold public office': a person who is not a participant in society as Marx understood it. For Marx the working out of the historical process, and therefore the essential life of man, could take place only in cities, where the classes confront each other, where men in the mass demonstrate the nature and destiny of mankind. In the swarming of men in cities--in Schw�merei, as Carlyle called it, meaning contemptuously to invoke both [p. 20] the physical and the emotional meaning of the German word--society forced itself upon the very senses: before it was ever an idea to be thought about, it was a thing to be seen and heard. [Peter Laslett emphasizes 'the minute scale of life, the small size of human groups before the coming of industry'. See The World We have Lost: England Before the Industrial Age [Scribner's, New York: Methuen, London, 1965], p. 51; also pp. 9-11 and 74. The church service, Mr Laslett says, was the occasion most likely to bring people together in groups larger than a household. He mentions also the assizes of the country towns, the quarter sessions of the country justices, meetings of craft associations, assemblies of the clergy and of Nonconformist ministers, market days, the universities, the army, and Parliament. His point is that all these groups were small by comparison with the groups that are characteristic of modern mass society, which did not begin to come into being until the middle and late eighteenth century when factories were established. But it should be remarked that by the end of the sixteenth century the theatres were bringing people together in quite considerable numbers--the spectators at a performance at the Globe [1598] and at the Fortune [1600] commonly numbered a thousand, and both theatres are thought to have had capacities of more than two thousand.]

Society was seen and heard, and thought about, by men who had liberated themselves from the sanctions of the corporate Church. To the Calvinist divines of England, predictions about society and the ways in which it was to be shaped and controlled came as readily as predications about divinity and the divine governance of the world. Michael Walzer makes the suggestion that these Calvinist leaders are 'the first instance of 'advanced' intellectuals in a traditional society' and gives to his book about them, The Revolution of the Saints, the descriptive subtitle, A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics--which is to say, a politics in which partisanship is based not upon discrete practical issues but upon a formulated conception of what society is and a prophecy of what it is to be. The divines were intellectuals in their reliance upon the Word and in their resolution to speak it out plain for all to hear. Like Moli�re's Alceste, they regarded society as fallen into corruption [p. 21] through false avowal; like him, the talent on which they most prided themselves was that of being sincere, telling the offensive truth to those who had no wish to hear it.

Plain speaking became the order of the day. How new a thing this was and how worthy to be remarked in its heady novelty is suggested by an episode in the fourth book of Castiglione's Courtier. By this point in the dialogues the character of the ideal courtier, the perfect man, has been fully drawn. Everything that he should be by reason of his noble birth and his study and labour to be beautiful has been stipulated. And now, after so much has been agreed upon, one of the company, Signor Ottaviano, raises the disquieting question of whether the whole enterprise of making the perfect self, as one might make a work of art, can after all be taken seriously. Does the achieved grace and charm, Ottaviano asks, constitute anything but a frivolity and a vanity, even an unmanliness? The effort to achieve this grace and charm is to be praised, he says, only if it serves some good and serious purpose. But then Ottaviano himself discovers that there is indeed such a purpose. The perfect courtier will be so attractive to his Prince that he can depend on not falling out of favour when he speaks plain, or nearly plain, telling the Prince--'in a gentle manner'--in what respects his conduct of affairs is not what it should be. In Italy in 1518 one could speak plain to sovereign power only if one possessed a trained perfection of grace and charm. In England a century later the only requirement for speaking plain was a man's conviction that he had the Word to speak. I would not press the point, but it does seem to be of significance in the developing political culture of the time that Shakespeare, in what nowadays is often said to be his greatest play, should set so much store by plain speaking and ring so many changes on the theme, [p. 22] what with Codelia, who by nature is the perfection of courtesy, and Kent, whose style is the negation of Castiglione's discipline of courtliness, and the Fool, and Cornwalls' astonishing peasant: a bless hierarchy of English plain speakers.

In England the nature of the sovereign had, of course, changed. The Calvinist divines, when they spoke the plain word to the sovereign prince, derived their moral and intellectual authority from their relation to the divine Word, but also from their awareness of the sovereign many, the people, to whom their discourses on society were addressed, who were ready to receive the Word plainspoken. There was an external as well as an internal sanction for their reliance on the Word.

The internal sanction could never, it is true, be proved, but its probability might be enforced. If one spoke publicly on great matters as an individual, one's only authority was the truth of one's experience and the intensity of one's conviction of enlightenment--these, and the accent of sincerity, clearly identifiable as such. It therefore cannot surprise us that at this point in time autobiography should have taken its rise in England. The genre, as Delay observes, is by no means exclusively Protestant, but it is predominantly so. Its earliest examples are not elaborate; chiefly they are sparse records of the events of religious experience. But the form continues to press towards a more searching scrutiny of the inner life, its purpose being to enforce upon the reader the conclusion that the writer cannot in any respect be false to any man because he has been true to himself, as he was and is. Rousseau's Confessions exists, of course, in a different dimension of achievement from these first English autobiographies, but it is continuous with them. The confessions was not a gratuitous undertaking. It was the painstaking demonstration of the author's authority to speak [p. 23] plain, to bring into question every aspect of society. Anyone who responds to Rousseau's ideas in a positive way must wonder whether they would have made an equal effect upon him if they had not been backed by the Confessions. The person who is depicted in that great work may repel us; but the author of the Discourses has the more power over us because he is the subject of the Confessions. He is the man; he suffered; he was there.

The impulse to write autobiography may be taken as virtually definitive of the psycholgocial changes to which the historians point. Which is to say--although one rather dreads saying it, so often has it been said before, so firmly is it established in our minds as the first psycho-historical concept we ever learned--that the new kind of personality which emerges [the verb is tediously constant in the context] is what we call an 'individual'-- at a certain point in history men became individuals.