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 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