How vast, how kindly, how enveloping does the world of Shakespeare seem in comparison! We seem to be afloat again on the tide of time, in a young, green world; we are ready to tempt new fortunes, in the hope of reaching better things than we know. And this is the right spirit; because although the best, if it had been attained, would be all-sufficient, the best is not yet. 37 THE CENSOR AND THE POET There is an important official of the inner man who in the latest psychology is called the Censor; his function is to forbid the utterance, in the council chamber within us, of unparliamentary sentiments, and to suppress all reports not in the interest of our moral dignity. By relegating half our experience to oblivion and locking up our unseemly passions in solitary dungeons, the Censor composes a conventional personage that we may decently present to the world. It is he, whilst we are sane and virtuous, that regulates our actions. It had occurred to me sometimes that the Censor was only another name for our old friend Reason; but there is a great difference. This is no censor of the noble Roman sort, like Cato Major; he makes no attempt to purify the republic from within; he is not concerned with moral health, honest harmony, and the thorough extirpation of hopeless rebels. He is concerned only with appearances and diplomatic relations; his old name was not Reason but Vanity or Self-love. He is merely the head of the government propaganda, charged with preventing inconvenient intelligence of our psychological home politics from reaching foreign powers or weakening the _moral_ of our fighting force. He is the father of shams. He invents those masterly methods of putting our best foot forward, and sustaining the illusion that we are always actuated by becoming and avowable motives. He it is that dictates the polite movements by which we show that we prefer the comfort of others to our own. He causes us to put on mourning for those who have left us legacies. He persuades us that we believe in the religion of our ancestors, in the science of the day, in the national cause, and in the party cry. He leads us to admire the latest art, or the most ancient; he enables us to be pleased with every fashion in turn, or perhaps to sigh at its ugliness, if we are conscious of being the best-dressed persons in the room. He induces us to follow the doings of the royal family with affectionate awe, to love our relations, to prefer Bach to Offenbach, and always to have had a good time when we leave a friend's house. The Censor sends our children to the best schools, to prove what sacrifices we are willing to make for their good, and to relieve us of further responsibility in regard to them. He directs that considerations of wealth shall control our careers, our friendships, and our manners; and this is perhaps the greatest sham of all the shams he has set up: that money is an expression of happiness and a means to it. What opens the way to