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 making 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.