The Dyers Hand and Other Essays

Two card -players. A is a good loser when, holding good cards, he makes a fatal error, but a bad loser when he is dealt cards with which it is impossible to win. With B it is the other way round; he cheerfully resigns himself to defeat if his hand is poor, but becomes furious if defeat is his own fault.

Almost all of our relationships begin and most of them con­tinue as forms of mutual exploitation, a mental or physical barter, to be terminated when one or both parties run out of goods.

But if the seed of a genuine disinterested love, which is often present, is ever to develop, it is essential that we pretend to ourselves and to others that it is stronger and more devel­oped than it is, that we are less selfish than we are. Hence the social havoc wrought by the paranoid to whom the thought of indifference is so intolerable that he divides others into two classes, those who love him for himself alone and those who hate him for the same reason.

Do a paranoid a favor, like paying his hotel bill in a foreign city when his monthly check has not yet arrived, and he will take this as an expression of personal affection—the thought that you might have done it from a general sense of duty towards a fellow countryman in distress will never occur to him. So back he comes for more until your patience is ex­hausted, there is a row, and he departs convinced that you are his personal enemy. In this he is right to the extent that it is difficult not to hate a person who reveals to you so clearly how litde you love others.

Two cyclic madmen. In his elated phase, A feels: "I am God. The universe is full of gods. I adore all and am adored by all." B feels: "The universe is only a thing. I am happily free from all bonds of attachment to it." In the corresponding de­pressed phase, A feels: "I am a devil. The universe is full of devils. I hate all and am hated by all." B feels: "I am only a thing to the universe which takes no interest in me." This difference is reflected in their behavior. When elated A does not wash and even revels in dirt because all things are holy. He runs after women, after whores in particular whom he intends to save through Love. But B in this mood takes a fastidious pride in his physical cleanliness as a mark of his superiority and is chaste for the same reason. When depressed A begins to wash obsessively to cleanse himself from guilt and feels a morbid horror of all sex, B now neglects his appearance because "nobody cares how I look," and tries to be a Don Juan seducer in an attempt to compel life to take an interest in him.

A's God—Zeus-Jehovah: B's God—The Unmoved Mover.

BALAAM AND HIS ASS

Am I not thine ass, upon -which thou hast ridden ever since I was thine unto this day?

numbers: xxii, 30

Friend, I do thee no -wrong: didst thou not agree -with me for a penny?

matthew; xx, 13

I

The relation between Master and Servant is not given by nature or fate but comes into being through an act of conscious volition. Nor is it erotic; an erotic relationship, e.g., between man and wife or parent and child, comes into being in order to satisfy needs which are, in part, given by nature; the needs which are satisfied by a master-servant relationship are purely social and historical. By this definition, a wet nurse is not a servant, a cook may be. Thirdly, it is contractual. A contractual relationship comes into being through the free decision of both parties, a double commitment. The liberty of decision need not be, and indeed very rarely is, equal on both sides, but the weaker party must possess some degree of sovereignty. Thus, a slave is not a servant because he has no sovereignty what­soever; he cannot even say, "I would rather starve than work for you." A contractual relationship not only involves double sovereignty, it is also asymmetric; what the master contributes, e.g., shelter, food and wages, and what the servant contributes, e.g., looking after the master's clothes and house, are qualita­tively different and there is no objective standard by which one can decide whether the one is or is not equivalent to the other. A contract, therefore, differs from a law. In law all sovereignty lies with the law or with those who impose it and the in­dividual has no sovereignty. Even in a democracy where sovereignty is said to reside in the people, it is as one of the people that each citizen has a share in that, not as an individ­ual. Further, the relationship of all individuals to a law is symmetric; it commands or prohibits the same thing to all who come under it. Of any law one can ask the aesthetic question, "Is it enforceable?" and the ethical question, "Is it just?" An individual has the aesthetic right to break the law if he is powerful enough to do so with impunity, and it may be his ethical duty to break it if his conscience tells him that the law is unjust. Of a contract, on the other hand, one can only ask the historical question, "Did both parties pledge their word do it?" Its justice or its enforceability are secondary to the historical fact of mutual personal commitment. A contract can only be broken or changed by the mutual consent of both parties. It will be my ethical duty to insist on changing a con­tract when my conscience tells me it is unfair only if I am in the advantageous position; if I am in the weaker position I have a right to propose a change but no right to insist on one.

When the false oracle has informed Don Quixote that Dul- cinea can only be disenchanted if Sancho Panza will receive several thousand lashes, the latter agrees to receive them on condition that he inflict them himself and in his own good time. One night Don Quixote becomes so impatient for the release of his love that he attempts to become the whipper, at which point Sancho Panza knocks his master down.

don quixote : So you would rebel against your lord and master, would you, and dare to raise your hand against the one who feeds you.

sancho: I neither make nor unmake a king, but am simply standing up for myself, for I am my own lord.

Similarly, when Mr. Pickwick, on entering the Debtors' Prison, attempts to dismiss Sam Weller because it would be unjust to the latter to expect him to accompany his master, Sam Weller refuses to accept dismissal and arranges to get sent to jail himself.

Lastly, the master-servant relationship is between real per­sons. Thus we do not call the employees of a factory or a store servants because the factory and the store are corporate, i.e., fictitious, persons.

ii

Who is there? I.

Who is I?

Thou.

And that is the awakening—the Thou and the I.

paul valery

Man is a creature who is capable of entering into Thou- Thou relationships with God and with his neighbors because he has a Thou-Thou relationship to himself. There are other social animals who have signal codes, e.g., bees have signals for informing each other about the whereabouts and distance of flowers, but only man has a language by means of which he can disclose himself to his neighbor, which he could not do and could not want to do if he did not first possess the capacity and the need to disclose himself to himself. The communica­tion of mere objective fact only requires monologue and for monologue a language is not necessary, only a code. But sub­jective communication demands dialogue and dialogue de­mands a real language.

A capacity for self-disclosure implies an equal capacity for self-concealment. Of an animal it is equally true to say that it is incapable of telling us what it really feels, and that it is incapable of hiding its feelings. A man can do both. For the animal motto is that of the trolls in Ibsen's Peer Gynt—"To thyself be enough"—while the human motto is, "To thyself by true." Peer is perfecdy willing, if it is convenient, to swear that the cow he sees is a beautiful young lady, but when the Troll-King suggests an operation which will take away from Peer the power of distinguishing between truth and falsehood so that if he wishes that a cow were a beautiful girl, the cow immediately appears to him as such, Peer revolts.

To present artistically a human personality in its full depth, its inner dialectic, its self-disclosure and self-conceal­ment, through the medium of a single character is almost im­possible. The convention of the soliloquy attempts to get around the difficulty but it suffers from the disadvantage of being a convention; it presents, that is, what is really a dialogue in the form of a monologue. When Hamlet soliloquizes, we hear a single voice which is supposed to be addressed to him­self but, in fact, is heard as addressed to us, the audience, so that we suspect that he is not disclosing to himself what he conceals from others, but only disclosing to us what he thinks it is good we should know, and at the same time concealing from us what he does not choose to tell us.

A dialogue requires two voices, but, if it is the inner dia­logue of human personality that is to be expressed artistically, the two characters employed to express it and the relationship between them must be of a special kind. The pair must in certain respects be similar, i.e., they must be of the same sex, and in others, physical and temperamental, polar opposites— identical twins will not do because they inevitably raise the question, "Which is the real one?"—and they must be in­separable, i.e., the relationship between them must be of a kind which is not affected by the passage of time or the fluctu­ations of mood and passion, and which makes it plausible that wherever one of them is, whatever he is doing, the other should be there too. There is only one relationship which satisfies all these conditions, that between master and personal servant. It might be objected at this point that the Ego-self relationship is given while the master-servant relationship, as defined above, is contractual. The objection would be valid if man, like all other finite things, had only the proto-history of coming into being and then merely sustaining that being. But man has a real history; having come into being, he has then through his choices to become what he is not yet, and this he cannot do unless he first chooses himself as he is now with all his finite limitations. To reach "the age of consent" means to arrive at the point where the "given" Ego-self relationship is changed into a contractual one. Suicide is a breach of contract.

in

crichton: There must always he a master and servants in all civilized communities, for it is natural, and whatever is natural is right.

lord loamshere : It's very unnatural for me to stand here and allow you to talk such non­sense.

crichton: Yes, my lord, it is. That is what I have been striving to -point out to your lord­ship.

—j. m. barrie, The Admirable Crichton

Defined abstracdy, a master is one who gives orders and a servant is one who obeys orders. This characteristic makes the master-servant relationship peculiarly suitable as an expression of the inner life, so much of which is carried on in imperatives. If a large lady carelessly, but not intentionally, treads on my com during a subway rush hour, what goes on in my mind can be expressed dramatically as follows:

self : (in whom the physical sensation of pain has he- come the mental passion of anger): "Care for my anger! Do something about it!"

cognitive ego: "You are angry because of the pain caused by this large lady who, carelessly but not in­tentionally, has trodden on your com. If you decide

to relieve your feelings, you can give her a sharp kick on the ankle without being noticed." self : "Kick her."

super-ego: (to simplify matters, let us pretend that super-ego and conscience are identical, which they are not):

"Unintentional wrongs must not be avenged. Ladies must not be kicked. Control your anger!" lady: (noticing what she has done):

"I beg your pardon! I hope I didn't hurt you." self: "Kick her!"

super-ego: "Smile! Say 'Not at all, Madam.' " volitional ego: (to the appropriate voluntary mus­cles):

either "Kick her!"

or "Smile! Say 'Not at all, Madam!' "

Of my five "characters," only one, my cognitive ego, really employs the indicative mood. Of the others, my self and my super-ego cannot, either of them, be a servant. Each is a master who is either obeyed or disobeyed. Neither can take orders. My body, on the other hand (or rather its "voluntary mus­cles"), can do nothing but what it is told; it can never be a master, nor even a servant, only a slave. While my volitional ego is always both, a servant in relation to either my self or my super-ego and a master in relation to my body.

The "demands" of reason are not imperatives because, al­though it is possible not to listen to them and to forget them, as long as we listen and remember, it is impossible to disobey them, and a true imperative always implies the possibility of either obeying or disobeying. In so far as we listen to reason, we are its slaves, not its servants.

iv

I care for nobody, no, not I And nobody cares for me.

—The Miller of Dee

But my five wits nor my five senses can Dissuade one foolish heart from serving thee, Who leaves unswayed the likeness of a man Thy proud heart's slave and vassal wretch to he.

—shakespeare, Sonnet CXLI

Because of its double role the volitional ego has two wishes which, since the Fall, instead of being dialectically related, have become contradictory opposites. On the one hand it wishes to be free of all demands made upon it by the self or the conscience or the outer world. As Kierkegaard wrote:

If I had a humble spirit in my service, who, when I asked for a glass of water, brought me the world's cosdiest wines blended in a chalice, I should dismiss him, in order to teach him that pleasure consists not in what I enjoy, but in having my own way.

When Biron, the hero of Love's Labour's Lost, who has hith­erto been free of passion, finds himself falling in love, he is annoyed.

This senior junior, giant dwarf, Dan Cupid, Sole emperator and great general Of trotting paritors (Oh nay litde heart) And I to be a corporal of his field And wear his colours like a tumbler's hoop.

On the other hand, the same ego wishes to be important, to find its existence meaningful, to have a telos, and this telos it can only find in something or someone outside itself. To have a telos is to have something to obey, to be the servant of. Thus all lovers instinctively use the master-servant metaphor.

Miranda : To be your fellow

You may deny me; but I'll be your servant, Whether you will or no. Ferdinand: My Mistress, dearest,

And I thus humble ever. miranda : My husband then?

Ferdinand: Aye, with a heart as willing As bondage e'er of freedom.

And so, with calculation, speaks every seducer.

BERTRAM: I prithee do not strive against my vows.

I was compelled to her, but I love thee By love's own sweet constraint, and will for ever

Do thee all rights of service.

diana: Ay, so you serve us

Till we serve you.

To be loved, to be the telos of another, can contribute to the ego's sense of importance, provided that it feels that such giving of love is a free act on the part of the other, that the other is not a slave of his or her passion. In practice, unfortu­nately, if there is an erotic element present as distinct from fhilia, most people find it hard to believe that another's love for them is free and not a compulsion, unless they happen to reciprocate it.

Had man not fallen, the wish of his ego for freedom would be simply a wish not to find its telos in a false or inferior good, and its wish for a telos simply a longing for the true good, and both wishes would be granted. In his fallen state, he oscillates between a wish for absolute autonomy, to be as God, and a wish for an idol who will take over the whole responsibility for his existence, to be an irresponsible slave. The consequence of indulging the first is a sense of loneliness and lack of mean­ing; the consequence of indulging the second, a masochistic insistence on being made to suffer. John falls in love with Anne who returns his love, is always faithful and anxious to please. Proud and self-satisfied, he thinks of my Anne, pres- endy of my -wife and finally of my well-being. Anne as a real other has ceased to exist for him. He does not suffer in any way that he can put his finger on, nevertheless he begins to feel bored and lonely.

George falls in love with Alice who does not return his love, is unfaithful and treats him badly. To George she remains

Alice, cruel but real. He suffers but be is not lonely or bored, for his suffering is the proof that another exists to cause it.

The futility of trying to combine both wishes into one, of trying, that is, to have a telos, but to find it within oneself not without, is expressed in the myth of Narcissus. Narcissus falls in love with his reflection; he wishes to become its servant, but instead his reflection insists upon being his slave.

v

Das verfluchte Hier —goethe, Faust

Goethe's Faust is full of great poetry and wise sayings but it is not dramatically exciting; like a variety show, it gives us a succession of scenes interesting in themselves but without a real continuity; one could remove a scene or add a new one without causing any radical change in the play. Further, once the Marguerite episode is over, it is surprising how litde Faust himself actually does. Mephisto creates a new situation and Faust tells us what he feels about it. I can well imagine that every actor would like to play Mephisto, who is always enter­taining, but the actor who plays Faust has to put up with being ignored whenever Mephisto is on stage. Moreover, from a histrionic point of view, is there ever any reason why Faust should move instead of standing still and just delivering his lines? Is not any movement the actor may think up arbitrary?

These defects are not, of course, due to any lack of dramatic talent in Goethe but to the nature of the Faust myth itself, for the story of Faust is precisely the story of a man who refuses to be anyone and only wishes to become someone else. Once he has summoned Mephisto, the manifestation of possibility without actuality, there is nothing left for Faust to represent but the passive consciousness of possibilities. When the Spirit of Fire appears to Faust, it says:

Du gleichst dem Geist, den du loegreifst, Nicht mir

and in an ideal production, Faust and Mephisto should be played by identical twins.

Near the beginning of the play Faust describes his condi­tion:

Zwei Seelen wohnen, ach! in meiner Brust Die eine will sich von der andern trennen; Die eine halt, in derher Lieheslust Sich an die Welt mit klammernden Organen; Die andre heht gewaltsam sich vom Dust Zu den Gefilden hoher Ahnen.

This has nothing to do, though he may think it has, with the conflict between pleasure and goodness, the kingdom of this world and the kingdom of Heaven. Faust's Welt is the im­mediate actual moment, the actual concrete world now, and his hohe Ahnen the same world seen by memory and imag­ination as possible, as what might have been once and may be yet. All value belongs to possibility, the actual here and now is valueless, or rather the value it has is the feeling of discon­tent it provokes. When Faust signs his contract with the latter says:

Ich will mich hier zu deinem Dienst verhinden, Auf deinen Wink nicht rasten and nicht ruhn; wenn wir uns driihen wieder fmden So sollst du mir das Gleiche tun

to which Faust replies airily:

Das Driihen kann mich wenig kiimmern Schlagst du erst diese Welt zu Trummern, Die andre mag danach entstehen

Mephisto,

because he does not believe that Das Driihen, the exhaustion of all possibilities, can ever be reached—as, indeed, in the play it never is. Faust escapes Mephisto's clutches because he is careful to define the contentment of his last moment in terms of anticipation:

Im Vorgefiihl von solchem hohen Gliick Geniess' ich jezt den hochsten Augenblick.

But, though Faust is not damned, it would be nonsense to say that he is saved. The angels bearing him to Heaven describe him as being in the pupa stage, and to such a condition Judg­ment has no meaning.

Mephisto describes himself as:

ein Teil des Teils, der Anfangs alles war, Ein Teil der Finsternis, die sich das Licht gebar

as, that is to say, a manifestation of the rejection of all finite- ness, the desire for existence without the limitation of essence. To the spirit that rejects any actuality, the idea must be the Abgrund, the abyss of infinite potentiality, and will creation must be hateful to it. So Valery's serpent cries out against God:

II se fit Celui qui dissipe En consequences son Principe, En entoiles son Unite.

Mephisto describes himself as:

ein Teil von jener Kraft, Die stets das Bose will und stets das Gute schaft,

but it is hard to see what good or evil he does to Faust. Through his agency or his suggestion, Faust may do a good deal of harm to others, but Faust himself is completely un­affected by his acts. He passively allows Mephisto to entertain him and is no more changed in character by these entertain­ments than we are by watching the play.

Faust may talk a great deal about the moral dangers of con­tent and sloth, but the truth is that his discontent is not a dis­content with himself but a terror of being bored. What Faust is totally lacking in is a sacramental sense,¹ a sense that the

¹IЈ Faust holds any theological position, it is pantheist. The pantheist believes that the universe is numinous as-a.-wh.ole. But a sacramental sign is always some particular aspect oЈ the finite, this thing, this act, not the finite can be a sign for the infinite, that the secular can be sanctified; one cannot imagine him saying with George Her­bert:

A servant with this clause Makes drudgery divine; Who sweeps a room as for Thy laws Makes that and the action fine.

In this lack Faust is a typical modern figure. In earlier ages men have been tempted to think that the finite was not a sign for the holy but the holy itself, and fell therefore into idolatry and magic. The form which the Devil assumed in such periods, therefore, was always finite; he appeared as the manifestation of some specific temptation, as a beautiful woman, a bag of gold, etc. In our age there are no idols in the strict sense because we tire of one so quickly and take up another that the word cannot apply. Our real, because permanent, idolatry is an idolatry of possibility. And in such an age the Devil appears in the form of Mephisto, in the form, that is, of an actor. The point about an actor is that he has no name of his own, for his name is Legion. One might say that our age recognized its nature on the day when Henry Irving was knighted.

VI

Voglio far il gentiluomo E non voglio -piu servir.

—da ponte, Don Giovanni

Dein Werkl O thorige Magd

—wagner, Tristan and Isolde

The man who refuses to be the servant of any telos can only be direcdy represented, like the Miller of Dee, lyrically. He

finite-in-general, and it is valid for this person, this social group, this his­torical epoch, not for humaiiity-in-general. Pansacramentalism is self- contradictory.

can sing his rapture of freedom and indifference, but after that there is nothing for him to do but be quiet. In a drama he can only be represented indirectly as a man with a telos, indeed a monomania, but of such a kind that it is clear that it is an arbitrary choice; nothing in his nature and circum­stances imposes it on him or biases him toward it. Such is Don Giovanni. The telos he chooses is to seduce, to "know" every woman in the world. Leporello says of him:

Non si picca, se sia ricca

Se sia brutta, se sia bella,

Perehe porti la gonnella

A sensual libertine, like the Duke in Rigoletto, cannot see a pretty girl, or a girl who is "his type" without trying to seduce her; but if a plain elderly woman like Donna Elvira passes by, he cries, "My God, what a dragon," and quickly looks away. That is sensuality, and pains should be taken in a production to make it clear why the Duke should have fallen into this particular idolization of the finite rather than another. The Duke must appear to be the kind of man to whom all women will be attracted; he must be extremely good-looking, virile, rich, magnificent, a grand seigneur.

Don Giovanni's pleasure in seducing women is not sensual but arithmetical; his satisfaction lies in adding one more name to his list which is kept for him by Leporello. Everything possible, therefore, should be done to make him as incon­spicuous and anonymous in appearance as an FBI agent. If he is made handsome, then his attraction for women is a bias in his choice, and if he is made ugly, then the repulsion he arouses in women is a challenge. He should look so neutral that the audience realizes that, so far as any finite motive is concerned, he might just as well have chosen to collect stamps. The Duke does not need a servant because there is no con­tradiction involved in sensuality or indeed in any idolatry of the finite. The idol and the idolater between them can say all there is to say. The Duke is the master of his ladies and the slave of his sensuality. Any given form of idolatry of the finite is lacking in contradiction because such idolatry is itself finite. Whenever we find one idol we find others, we find polytheism. We do not have to be told so to know that there are times when the Duke is too tired or too hungry to look at a pretty girl. For Don Giovanni there are no such times, and it is only in conjunction with his servant, as Giovanni- Leporello, that he can be understood.

Don Giovanni is as inconspicuous as a shadow, resolute and fearless in action; Leporello is comically substantial like Falstaff, irresolute and cowardly. When, in his opening aria, Leporello sings the words quoted at the head of this sec­tion, the audience laughs because it is obvious that he is lacking in all the qualities of character that a master should have. He is no Figaro. But by the end of the opera, one begins to suspect that the joke is much funnier than one had first thought. Has it not, in fact, been Leporello all along who was really the master and Don Giovanni really his servant? It is Leporello who keeps the list and if he lost it or forgot to keep it up-to-date or walked off with it, Don Giovanni would have no raison d'etre. It is significant that we never see Don Giovanni look at the list himself or show any pleasure in it; only Leporello does that: Don Giovanni merely reports the latest name to him. Perhaps it should have been Leporello who was carried down alive to hell by the Commendatore, leaving poor worn-out Giovanni to die in peace. Imagine a Leporello who, in real life, is a rabbity-look­ing, celibate, timid, stupendously learned professor, with the finest collection in the world, of, say, Trilobites, but in every aspect of life outside his field, completely incompetent. Brought up by a stern fundamentalist father (II Commenda­tore) he went to college with the intention of training for the ministry, but there he read Darwin and lost his faith. Will not his daydream version of his ideal self be someone very like Don Giovanni?

It is fortunate for our understanding of the myth of Tristan and Isolde that Wagner should have chosen to write an opera about it, for the physical demands made by Wagnerian opera defend us, quite accidentally, from an illusion which we are likely to fall into when reading the medieval legend; the two lovers, for whom nothing is of any value hut each other, ap­pear on the stage, not as the handsomest of princes and the most beautiful of princesses, not as Tamino and Pamina, but as a Wagnerian tenor and soprano in all their corseted bulk. When Tamino and Pamina fall mutually in love, we see that the instigating cause is the manly beauty of one and the womanly beauty of the other. Beauty is a finite quality which time will take away; this does not matter in the case of Tamino and Pamina because we know that their romantic passion for each other has only to be temporary, a natural but not serious preliminary to the serious unromantic love of man and wife. But the infinite romantic passion of Tristan and Isolde which has no past and no future outside itself cannot be generated by a finite quality; it can only be generated by finiteness-in- itself against which it protests with an infinite passion of rejection. Like Don Giovanni, Tristan and Isolde are purely mythical figures in that we never meet them in historical exist­ence: we meet promiscuous men like the Duke, but never a man who is absolutely indifferent to the physical qualities of the women he seduces; we meet romantically passionate en­gaged couples, but never a couple of whom we can say that their romantic passion will not and cannot change into mar­ried affection or decline into indifference. Just as we can say that Don Giovanni might have chosen to collect stamps instead of women, so we can say that Tristan and Isolde might have fallen in love with two other people; they are so indiffer­ent to each other as persons with unique bodies and characters that they might just as well—and this is one significance of the love potion—have drawn each other's names out of a hat. A lifelong romantic idolatry of a real person is possible and occurs in life provided that the romance is one-sided, that one party plays the Cruel Fair, e.g., Don Jose and Carmen. For any finite idolatry is by definition an asymmetric relation: my idol is that which I make responsible for my existence in order that I may have no responsibility for myself; if it turns round and demands responsibility from me it ceases to be an idol. Again, it is fortunate that the operatic medium makes it impossible for Wagner's Tristan and Isolde to consummate their love physically. Wagner may have intended, probably did intend, the love duet in the Second Act to stand for such a physical consummation, but what we actually see are two people singing of how much they desire each other, and con­summation remains something that is always about to happen but never does, and this, whatever Wagner intended, is cor­rect: their mutual idolatry is only possible because, while both assert their infinite willingness to give themselves to each other, in practice both play the Cruel Fair and withhold themselves. Were they to yield, they would know something about each other and their relation would change into a one­sided idolatry, a mutual affection or a mutual indifference. They do not yield because their passion is not for each other but for something they hope to obtain by means of each other, Nirvana, the primordial unity that made the mistake of begetting multiplicity, "der Finsternis die sich das Licht gebar/'

Just as Don Giovanni is inseparable from his servant Lep­orello, so Tristan and Isolde appear flanked by Brangaene and Kurvenal. It is Kurvenal's mocking reference to Morold that makes Isolde so angry that she decides to poison Tristan and herself, in consequence of which Tristan and she are brought together; otherwise he would have kept his distance till they landed. It is Brangaene who substitutes the love potion for the death potion so that Tristan and Isolde are committed to each other not by their personal decisions but by an extraneous factor for which they are not responsible. It is Brangaene who tells King Mark about the love potion so that he is willing to forgive the lovers and let them join each other, but tells him too late for his decision to be of any practical help. And it is Kurvenal's leaving of his master to greet Isolde that gives Tristan the opportunity to cause his death by tearing off his bandages. Kurvenal obeys his friend like a slave who has no mind of his own.

Den guten Marke

dienst ich ih-rn hold,

■wie worst du ihm treuer als Gold!

Musst' ich verrathen

den edlen Herrn,

■wie betrogst du ihn da so gem

Dir nicht eigen,

einzig mein

Tristan tells him, but then points out that Kurvenal has one freedom which he, Tristan, can never have. He is not in love.

Nur—-was ich leide,

dass—hannst du nicht leiden.

As in the case of Don Giovanni and Leporello, one begins to wonder who are really master and mistress. Imagine a Kurvenal and a Brangaene who in real life are an average respectable lower-middle-class couple (but with more children than is today usual), living in a dingy suburban house. He has a dingy white-collar job and has a hard time making both ends meet. She has no maid and is busy all day washing the diapers of the latest baby, mending the socks of older children, washing up, trying to keep the house decent, etc. She has lost any figure and looks she may once have had; he is going bald and acquiring a middle-aged spread. Their mar­riage, given their circumstances, is an average one; any romantic passion has long ago faded but, though they often get on each other's nerves, they don't passionately hate each other. A couple, that is, on whom the finite bears down with the fullest possible weight, or provides the fewest of its satis­factions. Now let them concoct their daydream of the ideal love and the ideal world, and something very like the passion of Tristan and Isolde will appear, and a world in which children, jobs, and food do not exist. His Boss will appear as King Mark, an old disreputable drinking crony of his as Morold, the scandal-mongering neighbors next door as Melot. They cannot, however, keep the sense of reality out of their dream and make everything end happily. They are dreamers but they are sane dreamers, and sanity demands that Tristan and Isolde are doomed.

vii

The fool will stay And let the wise man fly.

The knave turns fool who runs away, The fool, no knave ■perdy.

—shakespeabe, King Lear

According to Renaissance political theory, the King, as the earthly representative of Divine Justice, is above the law which he imposes on his subjects. For his subjects the law is a uni­versal, but the King who makes the law is an individual who cannot be subject to it, since the creator is superior to his creation—a poet, for instance, cannot be subordinate to his poem. In general, the Middle Ages had thought differently; they held that not even the King could violate Natural Law. In English history, the transition from one view to the other is marked by Henry the Eighth's execution of Sir Thomas More who, as Lord Chancellor, was the voice of Natural Law and the keeper of the King's Conscience. Both periods believed that, in some sense, the King was a divine representative, so that the political question, "Is the King obliged to obey his law?" is really the theological question, "Does God have to obey His own laws?" The answer given seems to me to depend upon what doctrine of God is held, Trinitarian or Unitarian. If the former, then the Middle Ages were right, for it implies that obedience is a meaningful term when applied to God—the co-equal Son obeys the Father. If the latter, then the Renaissance was right, unless the sacramental theory of kingship is abandoned, in which case, of course, the problem does not arise.² An absolute monarch is a repre­sentative of the deist God. The Renaissance King, then, is an individual, and the only individual, the superman, who is above the law, not subject to the universal. If he should do wrong, who can tell him so? Only an individual who, like

² Or does it? In recent years we have seen lie emergence, and not only in professedly totalitarian countries, of something very like a doctrine of the Divine Rights of States, though the adjective would be indignantly denied by most of its exponents.

himself, is not subject to the universal because he is as below the universal as the King is above it. The fool is such an individual because, being deficient in reason, subhuman, he has no contact with its demands. The fool is "simple," i.e., he is not a madman. A madman is someone who was once a normal sane man but who, under the stress of emotion, has lost his reason. A fool is born a fool and was never anything else; he is, as we say, "wanting," and whereas a madman is presumed to feel emotions like normal men, indeed to feel them more strongly than the normal man, the fool is presumed to be without emotions. If, therefore, he should happen to utter a truth, it cannot be his utterance, for he cannot distingush between truth and falsehood, and he cannot have a personal motive for uttering what, without his knowing it, happens to be true, since motive implies emotion and the fool is pre­sumed to have none. It can only be the voice of God using him as His mouthpiece. God is as far above the superman- King, whose earthly representative he is, as the King is above ordinary mortals, so that the voice of God is a voice, the only one, which the King must admit that it is his duty to obey. Hence the only individual who can speak to the King with authority, not as a subject, is the fool.

The position of the King's Fool is not an easy one. It is obvious that God uses him as a mouthpiece only occasionally, for most of the time what he says is patently nonsense, the words of a fool. At all moments when he is not divinely in­spired but just a fool, he is subhuman, not a subject, but a slave, with no human rights, who may be whipped like an animal if he is a nuisance. On the occasions when he happens to speak the truth, he cannot, being a fool, say, "This time I am not speaking nonsense as I usually do, but the truth"; it rests with the King to admit the difference and, since truth is often unwelcome and hard to admit, it is not surprising that the fool's life should be a rough one.

fool: Prithee, nuncle, keep a schoolmaster that can teach thy fool to lie.

lear: An you lie, sirrah, we'll have you whipped.

fool: I marvel what kin thou and thy daughters are. They'll have me whipped for speaking true; thou'lt have me whipped for lying; and sometimes I am whipped for holding my peace. I had rather be any kind o' thing than a fool; and yet, I would not be thee, nuncle.

It was said above that the cognitive ego never uses the im­perative mood, always the indicative or the conditional: it does not say, "Do such-and-such!"; it says, "Such-and-such is the case. If you want such-and-such a result, you can obtain it by doing as follows. What you want to do, your emotive self can tell you, not I. What you ought to do, your super-ego can tell you, not I." Nor can it compel the volitional ego to listen to it; the choice of listening or refusing to listen lies with the latter.

Truth's a dog must to kennel; he must be whipped out when Lady the brach may stand by the fire and stink.

We are told that, after Cordelia's departure for France after Lear's first fatal folly, his first "mad" act, the fool started to pine away. After the Third Act, he mysteriously vanishes from the play, and when Lear appears without him, Lear is irremediably mad. At the very end, just before his death, Lear suddenly exclaims "And my poor fool is hanged!" and it is impossible for the audience to know if he is actually referring to the fool or suffering from aphasia and meaning to say Cordelia, whom we know to have been hanged.

The fool, that is, seems to stand for Lear's sense of reality which he rejects. Not for his conscience. The fool never speaks to him, as Kent does, in the name of morality. It was immoral of Lear to make the dowries of his daughters proportionate to their capacity to express their affection for their father, but not necessarily mad because he (and the audience) has no reason to suppose that Cordelia has any less talent for expressing affection than her sisters. Rationally, there is no reason that she should not have surpassed them. Her failure in the competi­tion is due to a moral refusal, not to a lack of talent. Lear's reaction to Cordelia's speech, on the other hand, is not immoral but mad because he knows that, in fact, Cordelia loves him and that Goneril and Regan do not. From that moment on, his sanity is, so to speak, on the periphery of his being instead of at its center, and the dramatic manifestation of this shift is the appearance of the fool who stands outside him as a second figure and is devoted to Cordelia. As long as passion has not totally engulfed him, the fool can appear at his side, laboring "to outjest / His heart struck injuries." There is still a chance, however faint, that he may realize the facts of his situation and be restored to sanity. Thus when Lear begins to address the furniture as if it were his daughters, the fool remarks:

I cry you mercy. I took you for a joint-stool.

In other words, there is still an element of theatre in Lear's behavior, as a child will talk to inanimate objects as if they were people, while knowing that, in reality, they are not. But when this chance has passed and Lear has descended into mad­ness past recall, there is nothing for the fool to represent and he must disappear.

Frequendy the fool makes play with the words "knave" and "fool." A knave is one who disobeys the imperatives of con­science; a fool is one who cannot hear or understand them. Though the cognitive ego is, morally, a "fool" because con­science speaks not to it but to the volitional ego, yet the im­perative of duty can never be in contradiction to the actual facts of the situation, as the imperative of passion can be and frequently is. The Socratic doctrine that to know the good is to will it, that sin is ignorance, is valid if by knowing one means listening to what one knows, and by ignorance, willful ignorance. If that is what one means, then, though not all fools are knaves, all knaves are fools.

lear: Dost thou call me fool, boy?

fool: All thy other tides thou hast given away; that

thou wast born with. kent: This is not altogether fool, my lord. fool: No, faith, lords and great men will not let me. If I had a monopoly on't; they would have part of it.

Ideally, in a stage production, Lear and the fool should be of the same physical type; they should both be athletic meso- morphs. The difference should be in their respective sizes. Lear should be as huge as possible, the fool as tiny.

viii

body: O -who shall me deliver whole

From bonds of this tyrannic soul? Which, stretcht upright, impales me so That mine own precipice I go. . . .

soul: What Magick could me thus confine Within another's grief to pine? Where whatsoever it complain, 1 feel, that cannot feel, the pain . . .

andrew majrvell

valentine: Belike, boy, then you are in love; for last morning you could not see to wipe my shoes.

speed: True sir; I was in love with my bed. I thank you, you swinged me for my love, which makes me the bolder to chide you for yours.

—shakespeare, Two Gentlemen of Verona

The Tempest, Shakespeare's last play, is a disquieting work. Like the other three comedies of his late period, Pericles, Cym- beline and The Winter's Tale, it is concerned with a wrong done, repentance, penance and reconciliation; but, whereas the others all end in a blaze of forgiveness and love—"Par­don's the word to all"—in The Tempest both the repentance of the guilty and the pardon of the injured seem more formal than real. Of the former, Alonso is the only one who seems genuinely sorry; the repentance of the rest, both the courdy characters, Antonio and Sebastian, and the low, Trinculo and Stephano, is more the prudent promise of the punished and frightened, "I won't do it again. It doesn't pay," than any change of heart: and Prospero's forgiving is more the con­temptuous pardon of a man who knows that he has his enemies completely at his mercy than a heartfelt reconciliation. His attitude to all of them is expressed in his final words to Cali­ban:

as you look To have my pardon trim it handsomely.

One must admire Prospero because of his talents and his strength; one cannot possibly like him. He has the coldness of someone who has come to the conclusion that human nature is not worth much, that human relations are, at their best, pretty sorry affairs. Even towards the innocent young lovers, Ferdi­nand and Miranda, and their "brave new world," his attitude is one of mistrust so that he has to preach them a sermon on the dangers of anticipating their marriage vows. One might ex­cuse him if he included himself in his critical skepticism but he never does; it never occurs to him that he, too, might have erred and be in need of pardon. He says of Caliban:

born devil on whose nature Nurture can never stick, on whom my pains, Humanely taken, all, all lost, quite lost

but Shakespeare has written Caliban's part in such a way that, while we have to admit that Caliban is both brutal and corrupt, a "lying slave" who can be prevented from doing mischief only "by stripes not kindness," we cannot help feeling that Prospero is largely responsible for his corruption, and that, in the debate between them, Caliban has the best of the argu­ment.

Before Prospero's arrival, Caliban had the island to himself, living there in a state of savage innocence. Prospero attempts to educate him, in return for which Caliban shows him all the qualities of the isle. The experiment is brought to a halt when Caliban tries to rape Miranda, and Prospero abandons any hope of educating him further. He does not, however, sever their relation and turn Caliban back to the forest; he changes

its nature and, instead of trying to treat Caliban as a son, makes him a slave whom he rules by fear. This relation is profitable to Prospero:

as it is

We cannot miss him. He does make our fire, Fetch in our wood, and serve us in offices That profit us

but it is hard to see what profit, material or spiritual, Caliban gets out of it. He has lost his savage freedom:

For I am all the subjects that you have Which first was mine own king

and he has lost his savage innocence:

You taught me language and my profit on't Is, I know how to curse

so that he is vulnerable to further corruption when he comes into contact with the civilized vices of Trinculo and Stephano. He is hardly to be blamed, then, if he regards the virtues of civilization with hatred as responsible for his condition:

Remember

First to possess his books, for without them He's but a sot, as I am.

As a biological organism Man is a natural creature subject to the necessities of nature; as a being with consciousness and will, he is at the same time a historical person with the freedom of the spirit. The Tempest seems to me a manichean work, not because it shows the relation of Nature to Spirit as one of conflict and hostility, which in fallen man it is, but be­cause it puts the blame for this upon Nature and makes the Spirit innocent. Such a view is the exact opposite of the view expressed by Dante:

JLo naturale e sempre senza errore ma I'altro puote error per male ohhietto o per poco o per troppo di vigore.

(Purgatorio xvnj

The natural can never desire too much or too little because the natural good is the mean—too much and too little are both painful to its natural well-being. The natural, conforming to necessity, cannot imagine possibility. The closest it can come to a relation with the possible is as a vague dream; without Prospero, Ariel can only be known to Caliban as "sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not." The animals can­not fall because the words of the tempter, "Ye shall be as gods," are in the future tense, and the animals have no future tense, for the future tense implies the possibility of doing some­thing that has not been done before, and this they cannot imagine.

Man can never know his "nature" because knowing is it­self a spiritual and historical act; his physical sensations are always accompanied by conscious emotions. It is impossible to remember a physical sensation of pleasure or pain, the moment it ceases one cannot recall it, and all one remembers is the emotion of happiness or fear which accompanied it. On the other hand, a sensory stimulus can recall forgotten emotions associated with a previous occurrence of the same stimulus, as when Proust eats the cake.

It is unfortunate that the word "Flesh," set in contrast to "Spirit," is bound to suggest not what the Gospels and St. Paul intended it to mean, the whole physical-historical nature of fallen man, but his physical nature alone, a suggestion very welcome to our passion for reproving and improving others instead of examining our own consciences. For, the more "fleshly" a sin is, the more obviously public it is, and the easier to prevent by the application of a purely external discipline. Thus the sin of gluttony exists in acts of gluttony, in eating, drinking, smoking too much, etc. If a man restrains himself from such excess, or is restrained by others, he ceases to be a glutton; the phrase "gluttonous thoughts" apart from glutton­ous acts is meaningless.

As Christ's comment on the commandment indicates, the sin of lust is already "unfleshly" to the degree that it is possible to have lustful thoughts without lustful deeds, but the former are still "fleshly" in that the thinker cannot avoid knowing what they are; he may insist that his thoughts are not sinful but he cannot pretend that they are not lustful. Further, the rela­tion between thought and act is still direct. The thought is the thought of a specific act. The lustful man cannot be a hypo­crite to himself except through a symbolic transformation of his desires into images which are not consciously lustful. But the more "spiritual" the sin, the more indirect is the relation­ship between thought and act, and the easier it is to conceal the sin from others and oneself. I have only to watch a glutton at the dinner table to see that he is a glutton, but I may know someone for a very long time before I realize that he is an envious man, for there is no act which is in itself envious; there are only acts done in the spirit of envy, and there is often nothing about the acts themselves to show that they are done from envy and not from love. It is always possible, therefore, for the envious man to conceal from himself the fact that he is envious and to believe that he is acting from the highest of motives. While in the case of the purely spiritual sin of pride there is no "fleshly" element of the concrete whatsoever, so that no man, however closely he observes others, however strictly he examines himself, can ever know if they or he are proud; if he finds traces of any of the other six capital sins, he can infer pride, because pride is fallen "Spirit-in-itself" and the source of all the other sins, but he cannot draw the reverse inference and, because he finds no traces of the other six, say categorically that he, or another, is not proud.

If man's physical nature could speak when his spirit re­bukes it for its corruption, it would have every right to say, "Well, who taught me my bad habits?"; as it is, it has only one form of protest, sickness; in the end, all it can do is destroy itself in an attempt to murder its master.

Over against Caliban, the embodiment of the natural, stands the invisible spirit of imagination, Ariel. (In a stage produc­tion, Caliban should be as monstrously conspicuous as possible, and, indeed, suggest, as far as decency permits, the phallic. Ariel, on the other hand, except when he assumes a specific disguise at Prospero's order, e.g., when he appears as a harpy, should, ideally, be invisible, a disembodied voice, an ideal which, in these days of microphones and loud-speakers, should be realizable.)

Caliban was once innocent but has been corrupted; his initial love for Prospero has turned into hatred. The terms "in­nocent" and "corrupt" cannot be applied to Ariel because he is beyond good and evil; he can neither love nor hate, he can only play. It is not sinful of Eve to imagine the possibility of being as a god knowing good and evil: her sin lay in desiring to realize that possibility when she knew it was forbidden her, and her desire did not come from her imagination, for imagina­tion is without desire and is, therefore, incapable of dis­tinguishing between permitted and forbidden possibilities; it only knows that they are imaginatively possible. Similarly, imagination cannot distinguish the possible from the impos­sible; to it the impossible is a species of the genus possible, not another genus. I can perfecdy well imagine that I might be a hundred feet high or a champion heavyweight boxer, and I do myself no harm in so doing, provided I do so playfully, with­out desire. I shall, however, come to grief if I take the possi­bility seriously, which I can do in two ways. Desiring to become a heavyweight boxer, I may deceive myself into think­ing that the imaginative possibility is a real possibility and waste my life trying to become the boxer I never can become. Or, desiring to become a boxer, but realizing that it is, for me, impossible, I may refuse to relinquish the desire and turn on God and my neighbor in a passion of hatred and rejection be­cause I cannot have what I want. So Richard III, to punish existence for his misfortune in being born a hunchback, de­cided to become a villain. Imagination is beyond good and evil. Without imagination I remain an innocent animal, unable to become anything but what I already am. In order to become what I should become, therefore, I have to put my imagination to work, and limit its playful activity to imagining those possi­bilities which, for me, are both permissible and real; if I allow it to be the master and play exacdy as it likes, then I shall remain in a dreamlike state of imagining everything I might become, without getting round to ever becoming anything. But, once imagination has done its work for me, to the degree that, with its help, I have become what I should become, imagination has a right to demand its freedom to play without any limitations, for there is no longer any danger that I shall take its play seriously. Hence the relation between Prospero and Ariel is contractual, and, at the end of the drama, Ariel is released.

If The Tempest is overpessimistic and manichean, The Magic Flute is overoptimistic and pelagian. At the end of the opera a double wedding is celebrated; the representative of the spiritual, Tamino, finds his happiness in Pamina and has attained wisdom while the chorus sing:

Es siegte die Starke und kronet zum Lohn.

Die Schonheit und Weisheit mit ewiger Kron

and, at the same time, the representative of the natural, Pa- pageno is rewarded with Papagena, and they sing together:

Erst einen kleinen Papageno Dann eine kleine Papagena Dann wieder einen Papageno Dann wieder eine Papagena

expressing in innocent humility the same attitude which Cali­ban expresses in guilty defiance when Prospero accuses him of having tried to rape Miranda,

O ho, O ho! Would't had been done.

Thou didst prevent me; I had peopled else

This isle with Calibans.

Tamino obtains his reward because he had had the courage to risk his life undergoing the trials of Fire and Water; Papageno obtains his because he has had the humility to refuse to risk his life even if the refusal will mean that he must remain single. It is as if Caliban, when Prospero offered to adopt him and educate him, had replied: "Thank you very much, but clothes and speech are not for me; It is better I stay in the jungle."

According to The Magic Flute, it is possible for nature and spirit to coexist in man harmoniously and without conflict, pro­vided both keep to themselves and do not interfere with each other, and that, further, the natural has the freedom to refuse to be interfered with.

The greatest of spirit-nature pairs and the most orthodox is, of course, Don Quixote—Sancho Panza. Unlike Prospero and Caliban, their relationship is harmonious and happy; unlike Tamino and Papageno, it is dialectical; each affects the other. Further, both they and their relationship are comic; Don Quixote is comically mad, Sancho Panza is comically sane, and each finds the other a lovable figure of fun, an endless source of diversion. It is this omnipresent comedy that makes the book orthodox; present the relationship as tragic and the conclusion is manichean, present either or both of the char­acters as serious, and the conclusion is pagan or pelagian. The man who takes seriously the command of Christ to take up his cross and follow Him must, if he is serious, see himself as a comic figure, for he is not the Christ, only an ordinary man, yet he believes that the command, "Be ye perfect," is seri­ously addressed to himself. Worldly "sanity" will say, "I am not Christ, only an ordinary man. For me to think that I can become perfect would be madness. Therefore, the command cannot seriously be addressed to me." The other can only say, "It is madness for me to attempt to obey the command, for it seems impossible; nevertheless, since I believe it is ad­dressed to me, I must believe that it is possible"; in proportion as he takes the command seriously, that is, he will see himself as a comic figure. To take himself seriously would mean that he thought of himself, not as an ordinary man, but as Christ.

For Christ is not a model to be imitated, like Hector, or Aristotle's megalopsych, but the Way to be followed, If a man thinks that the megalopsych is a desirable model, all he has to do is to read up how the megalopsych behaves and imitate him, e.g., he will be careful, when walking, not to swing his arms.

But the Way cannot be imitated, only followed; a Chris­tian who is faced with a moral problem cannot look up the answer in the Gospels. If someone, for instance, were to let his hair and beard grow till he looked like some popular pious picture of Christ, put on a white linen robe and ride into town on a donkey, we should know at once that he was either a madman or a fake. At first sight Don Quixote's madness seems to be of this kind. He believes that the world of the Romances is the real world and that, to be a knight-errant, all he has to do is imitate the Romances exactly. Like Lear, he cannot distinguish imaginative possibilities from actualities and treats analogies as identities; Lear thinks a stool is his daughter, Don Quixote thinks windmills are giants, but their manias are not really the same. Lear might be said to be suffer­ing from worldly madness. The worldly man goes mad when the actual state of affairs becomes too intolerable for his amour- pro-pre to accept; Lear cannot face the fact that he is no longer a man of power or that he has brought his present situation upon himself by his unjust competition. Don Quixote's mad­ness, on the other hand, might be called holy madness, for amour-propre has nothing to do with his delusions. If his mad­ness were of Lear's kind, then, in addition to believing that he must imitate the knight-errants of old, he would have en­dowed himself in their imagination with their gifts, e.g., with the youth and strength of Amadis of Gaul: but he does noth­ing of the kind; he knows that he is past fifty and penniless, nevertheless, he believes he is called to be a knight-errant. The knight-errant sets out to win glory by doing great deeds and to win the love of his lady, and whatever trials and defeats he may suffer on the way, in the end he triumphs. Don Quixote, however, fails totally; he accomplishes nothing, he does not win his lady, and, as if that were not ignominious enough, what he does win is a parody of what a knight-errant is supposed to win, for he does, in fact, become famous and admired—as a madman. If his were a worldly madness, amour- propre would demand that he add to his other delusions the delusion of having succeeded, the delusion that the welcome he receives everywhere is due to the fame of his great deeds (a delusion which his audience do everything to encourage), but Don Quixote is perfecdy well aware that he has failed to do anything which he set out to do.

At the opposite pole to madness stands philistine realism.

Madness says, "Windmills are giants"; philistine realism says, "Windmills are only windmills; giants are only giants," and then adds "Windmills really exist because they provide me with flour; giants are imaginary and do not exist because they provide me with nothing." (A student of psychoanalysis who says, "Windmills and giants are only phallic symbols," is both philistine and mad.) Madness confuses analogies with identi­ties, philistine realism refuses to recognize analogies and only admits identities; neither can say, "Windmills are like giants."

At first sight Sancho Panza seems a philistine realist. "I go," he says, "with a great desire to make money"; it may seem to the reader hardly "realistic" of Sancho Panza to believe that he will gain a penny, far less an island governorship, by follow­ing Don Quixote, but is not the philistine realist who believes in nothing but material satisfactions precisely the same type to whom it is easiest to sell a nonexistent gold mine?

The sign that Sancho Panza is not a philistine but a "holy" realist is the persistence of his hope of getting something when he has realized that his master is mad. It is as if a man who had been sold a nonexistent gold mine continued to believe in its existence after he had discovered that the seller was a crook. It is clear that, whatever Sancho Panza may say, his motives for following his master are love of his master, and that equally unrealistic of motives, love of adventure for its own sake, a poetic love of fun. Just as Don Quixote wins fame, but fame as a madman, so Sancho Panza actually becomes the Governor of an island, but as a practical joke; as Governor he obtains none of the material rewards which a philistine would hope for, yet he enjoys himself enormously. Sancho Panza is a realist in that it is always the actual world, the immediate moment, which he enjoys, not an imaginary world or an antici­pated future, but a "holy" realist in that he enjoys the actual and immediate for its own sake, not for any material satisfac­tions it provides.

Don Quixote and Sancho Panza are both inveterate quoters: what the Romances are to the one, proverbs are to the other. A Romance is a history, feigned or real. It recounts a series of unique and quite extraordinary events which have, or are pur­ported to have, happened in the past. The source of interest is in the events themselves, not in the literary style in which they are narrated; as long as the reader leams what happened, it is a matter of indifference to him whether the style is imagi­native or banal. A proverb has nothing to do with history for it states, or claims to state, a truth which is valid at all times. The context of "A stitch in time saves nine" belongs to the same class as a statement of empirical science like "Bodies at­tract each other in direct proportion to their masses." The interest of a proverb, therefore, lies not in its content but in the unique way in which that content is expressed; the content is always banal because it is a statement of empirical science, and a scientific statement which was not banal would not be true.

Proverbs belong to the natural world where the 'Model and imitation of the Model are valid concepts. A proverb tells one exacdy what one should do or avoid doing whenever the situation comes up to which it applies: if the situation comes up the proverb applies exacdy; if it does not come up, the proverb does not apply at all. Romances, as we have seen, be­long to the historical world of the spirit, where the Model is replaced by the Way, and imitation by following. But in man, these two worlds are not separate but dialectically related; the proverb, as an expression of the natural, admits its relation to the historical by its valuation of style; the romance, as an ex­pression of the historical, admits its relation to the natural by its indifference to style.

Don Quixote's lack of illusions about his own powers is a sign that his madness is not worldly but holy, a forsaking of the world, but without Sancho Panza it would not be Christian. For his madness to be Christian, he must have a neighbor, someone other than himself about whom he has no delusions but loves as himself. Without Sancho Panza, Don Quixote would be without neighbors, and the kind of religion implied would be one in which love of God was not only possible without but incompatible with love of one's neighbor.

IX

He that is greatest among you, let him he as the younger; and he that is chief, as he that doth serve.

—luke: xxii, 26

Che per quanti si dice piu li nostro tanto possiede piu di hen ciascuno.

—dante, Purgatorio, xv

When a lover tells his beloved that she is his mistress and that he desires to be her servant, what he is trying, honesdy or hypocritically, to say is something as follows: "As you know, I find you beautiful, an object of desire. I know that for true love such desire is not enough; I must also love you, not as an object of my desire, but as you are in yourself; I must desire your self-fulfillment. I cannot know you as you are nor prove that I desire your self-fulfillment, unless you tell me what you want and allow me to try and give it to you."

The proverb, "No man is a hero to his own valet," does not mean that no valet admires his master, but that a valet knows his master as he really is, admirable or contemptible, because it is a valet's job to supply the wants of his master, and, if you know what somebody wants, you know what he is like. It is possible for a master to have not the faintest inkling of what his servant is really like—unless his servant loves him, it is certain that he never will—but it is impossible for a servant, whether he be friendly, hostile or indifferent, not to know exacdy what his master is like, for the latter reveals himself every time he gives an order.

To illustrate the use of the master-servant relationship as a parable of agape, I will take two examples from books which present the parable in a clear, simplified form, Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne and the Jeeves series by P. G. Wodehouse.

Mr. Fogg, as Jules Verne depicts him in his opening chap­ter, is a kind of stoic saint. He is a bachelor with ample private means and does no work, but he is never idle and has no vices; he plays whist at his club every evening but never more or less than the same number of hands, and, when he wins, he gives the money to charity. He knows all about the world for he is a religious reader of the newspapers, but he takes no part in its affairs; he has no friends and no enemies; he has never been known to show emotion of any kind; he seems to live "outside of any social relation." If "apathy" in the stoic sense is the highest virtue, then Fogg is a saint. His most striking trait, however, is one which seems to have been unknown in Classical times, a ritual mania about the exact time, an idolatry of the clock—his own tells the second, the minute, the hour, the day, the month and the year. He not only does exacdy the same thing every day, but at exactly the same moment. Classical authors like Theophrastus have described very accurately most characterological types, but none of them, so far as I know, has described The Punctual Man (the type to which I personally belong), who cannot tell if he is hungry unless it first looks at the clock. It was never said in praise of any Caesar, for instance, that he made whatever was the Roman equivalent for trains run on time. I have heard it suggested that the first punctual people in history were the monks—at their office hours. It is certain at least that the first serious analysis of the human experience of time was undertaken by St. Augustine, and that the notion of punctuality, of action at an exact moment, depends on drawing a distinction between natural and historical time which Christianity encouraged if it did not invent.³

By and large, at least, the ancients thought of time either as oscillating to and fro like a pendulum or as moving round and round like a wheel, and the notion of historical time moving in an irreversible unilateral direction was strange to them. Both oscillation and cyclical movement provide a notion of change, but of change for-a-thne; this for-a-time may be a long time—the pendulum may oscillate or the

³ The Greek notion of kairos, the propitious moment for doing something, contained the seed of the notion of punctuality, but the seed did not flower.

wheel revolve very slowly—but sooner or later all events reoccur: there is no place for a notion of absolute novelty, of a unique event which occurs once and for all at a particular moment in time. This latter notion cannot be derived from our objective experience of the outside world—all the movements we can see there are either oscillatory or cyclical—but only form our subjective inner experience of time in such phenom­ena as memory and anticipation.

So long as we think of it objectively, time is Fate or Chance, the factor in our lives for which we are not responsible, and about which we can do nothing; but when we begin to think of it subjectively, we feel responsible for our time, and the notion of punctuality arises. In training himself to be superior to circumstance, the ancient stoic would discipline his passions because he knew what a threat they could be to the apathy he sought to acquire, but it would not occur to him to dis­cipline his time, because he was unaware that it was his. A modem stoic like Mr. Fogg knows that the surest way to discipline passion is to discipline time: decide what you want or ought to do during the day, then always do it at exactly the same moment every day, and passion will give you no trouble.

Mr. Fogg has been so successful with himself that he is suffering from hubris; he is convinced that nothing can happen to him which he has not foreseen. Others, it is true, are often unreliable, but the moment he finds them so, he severs relations with them. On the morning when the story opens, he has just dismissed his servant for bringing him his shaving water at a temperature of 84° instead of the proper 86° and is looking for a new one. His conception of the just relation between master and servant is that the former must issue orders which are absolutely clear and unchanging—the master has no right to puzzle his servant or surprise him with an order for which he is not prepared—and the latter must carry them out as impersonally and efficiendy as a machine —one slip and he is fired. The last thing he looks for in a servant or, for that matter, in anyone else is a personal friend.

On the same morning Passepartout has given notice to

Lord Longsferry because he cannot endure to work in a chaotic household where the master is "brought home too frequently on the shoulders of policemen." Himself a sanguine, mercurial character, what he seeks in a master is the very opposite of what he would seek in a friend. He wishes his relation to his master to be formal and impersonal; in a master, therefore, he seeks his opposite, the phlegmatic character. His ideal of the master-servant relation happens, therefore, to coincide with Fogg's, and to the mutual satisfaction of both, he is interviewed and engaged.

But that evening the unforeseen happens, the bet which is to send them both off round the world. It is his huhris which tempts Mr. Fogg into making the bet; he is so convinced that nothing unforeseen can occur which he cannot control that he cannot allow his club mates to challenge this conviction without taking up the challenge. Further, unknown to him, by a chance accident which he could not possibly have fore­seen, a bank robbery has just been committed, and the de­scription of the thief given to the police plus his sudden departure from England have put him under suspicion. Off go Mr. Fogg and Passepartout, then, pursued by the detective Fix. In the boat train Passepartout suddenly remembers that in the haste of packing he has left the gas fire burning in his bedroom. Fogg does not utter a word of reproach but merely remarks that it will bum at Passepartout's expense till they return. Mr. Fogg is still the stoic with the stoic con­ception of justice operating as impersonally and inexorably as the laws of nature. It is a fact that it was Passepartout, not he, who forgot to turn off the gas; the hurry caused by his own sudden decision may have made it difficult for Passe­partout to remember, but it did not make it impossible: there­fore, Passepartout is responsible for his forgetfulness and must pay the price.

Then in India the decisive moment arrives: they run into preparations for the suttee, against her will, of a beautiful young widow, Aouda. For the first time in his life, apparendy, Mr. Fogg is confronted personally with human injustice and suffering, and a moral choice. If, like the priest and the

Levite, he passes by on the other side, he will catch the boat at Calcutta and win his bet with ease; if he attempts to save her, he will miss his boat and run a serious risk of losing his bet. Abandoning his stoic apathy, he chooses the second alter­native, and from that moment on his relationship with Passepartout ceases to be impersonal; -philia is felt by both. Moreover, he discovers that Passepartout has capacities which his normal duties as a servant would never have revealed, but which in this emergency situation are particularly valuable because Mr. Fogg himself is without them. But for Passe­partout's capacity for improvisation and acting which allow him successfully to substitute himself for the corpse on the funeral pyre, Aouda would never have been saved. Hitherto, Mr. Fogg has always believed that there was nothing of im­portance anyone else could do which he could not do as well or better himself; for the first time in his life he abandons that belief.

Hitherto, Passepartout has thought of his master as an unfeeling automaton, just, but incapable of generosity or self-sacrifice; had he not had this unexpected revelation, he would certainly have betrayed Mr. Fogg to Fix, for the detective succeeds in convincing him that his master is a bank robber, and, according to the stoic notion of impersonal justice which Mr. Fogg had seemed to exemplify, that would be his duty, but, having seen him act personally, Passepartout refuses to assist impersonal justice.

Later, when the Trans-American express is attacked by Indians, it is Passepartout's athletic ability, a quality irrelevant to a servant's normal duties, which saves the lives of Mr. Fogg and Aouda at the risk of his own, for he is captured by the Indians. In such an act the whole contractual master- servant relation is transcended; that one party shall undertake to sacrifice his life for the other cannot be a clause in any contract. The only possible repayment is a similar act, and Mr. Fogg lets the relief train go without him, sacrificing what may well be his last chance of winning his bet, and goes back at the risk of his life to rescue Passepartout.

Like Mr. Fogg, Bertie Wooster is a bachelor with private means who does no work, but there all the resemblance ceases. Nobody could possibly be less of a stoic than the latter. If he has no vices it is because his desires are too vague and too fleeting for him to settle down to one. Hardly a week passes without Bertie Wooster thinking he has at last met The Girl; for a week he imagines he is her Tristan, but the next week he has forgotten her as completely as Don Giovanni forgets; besides, nothing ever happens. It is nowhere suggested that he owned a watch or that, if he did, he could tell the time by it. By any worldly moral standard he is a footler whose existence is of no importance to anybody. Yet it is Bertie Wooster who has the incomparable Jeeves for his servant. Jeeves could any day find a richer master or a place with less arduous duties, yet it is Bertie Wooster whom he chooses to serve. The lucky Simpleton is a common folk-tale hero; for example, the Third Son who succeeds in the Quest appears, in comparison with his two elder brothers, the least talented, but his ambition to succeed is equal to theirs. He sets out bravely into the unknown, and unexpectedly triumphs. But Bertie Wooster is without any ambition what­soever and does not lift a finger to help himself, yet he is rewarded with what, for him, is even better than a beautiful Princess, the perfect omniscient nanny who does everything for him and keeps him out of trouble without, however, ever trying, as most nannies will, to educate and improve him.

—I say, Jeeves, a man I met at the club last night told me to put my shirt on Privateer for the two o'clock race this afternoon. How about it?

—I should not advocate it, sir. The stable is not sanguine.

—Talking of shirts, have those mauve ones I ordered arrived yet?

—Yes, sir. I sent them back.

—Sent them back?

—Yes, sir. They would not have become you.

The Quest Hero often encounters an old beggar or an animal who offers him advice: if, too proud to imagine that such an apparently inferior creature could have anything to tell him, he ignores the advice, it has fatal consequences; if he is humble enough to listen and obey, then, thanks to their help, he achieves his goal. But, however humble he may be, he still has the dream of becoming a hero; he may be hum­ble enough to take advice from what seem to be his inferiors, but he is convinced that, potentially, he is a superior person, a prince-to-be. Bertie Wooster, on the other hand, not only knows that he is a person of no account, but also never expects to become anything else; till his dying day he will remain, he knows, a footler who requires a nanny; yet, at the same time, he is totally without envy of others who are or may become of some account. He has, in fact, that rarest of virtues, humility, and so he is blessed: it is he and no other who has for his servant the godlike Jeeves.

—All the other great men of the age are simply in the crowd, watching you go by.

—Thank you very much, sir. I endeavor to give satis­faction.

So speaks comically—and in what other mode than the comic could it on earth truthfully speak?—the voice of Agape, of Holy Love.

THE GUILTY VICARAGE

I had not known sin, hut lay the law.

romans: vji, 7

PP-

A Confession

For me, as for many others, the reading of detective stories is an addiction like tobacco or alcohol. The symptoms of this are: firstly, the intensity of the craving—if I have any work to do, I must be careful not to get hold of a detective story for, once I begin one, I cannot work or sleep till I have finished it. Secondly, its specificity—the story must conform to certain formulas CI find it very difficult, for example, to read one that is not set in rural England). And, thirdly, its immediacy. I forget the story as soon as I have finished it, and have no wish to read it again. If, as sometimes happens, I start reading one and find after a few pages that I have read it before, I cannot go on.

Such reactions convince me that, in my case at least, detective stories have nothing to do with works of art. It is possible, however, that an analysis of the detective story, i.e., of the kind of detective story I enjoy, may throw light, not only on its magical function, but also, by contrast, on the function of art.

Definition

The vulgar definition, "a Whodunit," is correct. The basic formula is this: a murder occurs; many are suspected; all but one suspect, who is the murderer, are eliminated; the murderer is arrested or dies.

This definition excludes:

1 ) Studies of murderers whose guilt is known, e.g., Malice Aforethought. There are borderline cases in which the mur­derer is known and there are no false suspects, but the proof is lacking, e.g., many of the stories of Freeman Wills Crofts. Most of these are permissible.

2,) Thrillers, spy stories, stories of master crooks, etc., when the identification of the criminal is subordinate to the defeat of his criminal designs.

The interest in the thriller is the ethical and characteristic conflict between good and evil, between Us and Them. The interest in the study of a murderer is the observation, by the innocent many, of the sufferings of the guilty one. The in­terest in the detective story is the dialectic of innocence and guilt.

As in the Aristotelian description of tragedy, there is Con­cealment (the innocent seem guilty and the guilty seem innocent) and Manifestation (the real guilt is brought to consciousness). There is also peripeteia, in this case not a reversal of fortune but a double reversal from apparent guilt to innocence and from apparent innocence to guilt. The for­mula may be diagrammed as follows:

Peaceful state before murder

False clues, secondary murder, etc.

Solution

Arrest of murderer

Peaceful state after arrest

In Greek tragedy the audience knows the truth; the actors do not, but discover or bring to pass the inevitable. In modern, e.g., Elizabethan, tragedy the audience knows neither less nor more than the most knowing of the actors. In the detective story the audience does not know the truth at all; one of the actors—the murderer—does; and the detective, of his own free will, discovers and reveals what the murderer, of his own free will, tries to conceal.

False innocence

Revelation of presence of guilt

False location of guilt Location of real guilt Catharsis True Innocence

Greek tragedy and the detective story have one character­istic in common in which they both differ from modern tragedy, namely, the characters are not changed in or by their actions: in Greek tragedy because their actions are fated, in the detective story because the decisive event, the murder, has already occurred. Time and space therefore are simply the when and where of revealing either what has to happen or what has actually happened. In consequence, the detective story probably should, and usually does, obey the classical unities, whereas modern tragedy, in which the char­acters develop with time, can only do so by a technical tourde force; and the thriller, like the picaresque novel, even de­mands frequent changes of time and place.

Why Murder?

There are three classes of crime: (A) offenses against God and one's neighbor or neighbors; (B) offenses against God and society; (C) offenses against God. (All crimes, of course, are offenses against oneself.)

Murder is a member and the only member of Class B. The character common to all crimes in Class A is that it is possible, at least theoretically, either that restitution can be made to the injured party (e.g., stolen goods can be returned), or that the injured party can forgive the criminal (e.g., in the case of rape). Consequendy, society as a whole is only in- direcdy involved; its representatives (the police, etc.) act in the interests of the injured party.

Murder is unique in that it abolishes the party it injures, so that society has to take the place of the victim and on his behalf demand restitution or grant forgiveness; it is the one crime in which society has a direct interest.

Many detective stories begin with a death that appears to be suicide and is later discovered to have been murder. Suicide is a crime belonging to Class C in which neither the criminal's neighbors nor society has any interest, direct or indirect. As long as a death is believed to be suicide, even private curiosity is improper; as soon as it is proved to be murder, public in­quiry becomes a duty.

The detective story has five elements—the milieu, the victim, the murderer, the suspects, the detectives.

The Milieu (Human)

The detective story requires:

i) A closed society so that the possibility of an outside murderer (and hence of the society being totally innocent) is excluded; and a closely related society so that all its members are potentially suspect (cf. the thriller, which requires an open society in which any stranger may be a friend or enemy in disguise).

Such conditions are met by: a) the group of blood rela­tives (the Christmas dinner in the country house); b) the closely knit geographical group (the old world village); c) the occupational group (the theatrical company); d) the group isolated by the neutral place (the Pullman car).

In this last type the concealment-manifestation formula applies not only to the murder but also to the relations between the members of the group who first appear to be strangers to each other, but are later found to be related.

2) It must appear to be an innocent society in a state of grace, i.e., a society where there is no need of the law, no contradiction between the aesthetic individual and the ethical universal, and where murder, therefore, is the un­heard-of act which precipitates a crisis (for it reveals that some member has fallen and is no longer in a state of grace). The law becomes a reality and for a time all must live in its shadow, till the fallen one is identified. With his arrest, inno­cence is restored, and the law retires forever.

The characters in a detective story should, therefore, be eccentric (aesthetically interesting individuals) and good (in­stinctively ethical)—good, that is, either in appearance, later shown to be false, or in reality, first concealed by an appear­ance of bad.

It is a sound instinct that has made so many detective story writers choose a college as a setting. The ruling passion of the ideal professor is the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake so that he is related to other human beings only in- direcdy through their common relation to the truth; and those passions, like lust and avarice and envy, which relate individuals directly and may lead to murder are, in his case, ideally excluded. If a murder occurs in a college, therefore, it is a sign that some colleague is not only a bad man but also a bad professor. Further, as the basic premise of academic life is that truth is universal and to be shared with all, the gnosis of a concrete crime and the gnosis of abstract ideas nicely parallel and parody each other.

(The even more ideal contradiction of a murder in a monastery is excluded by the fact that monks go regularly to confession and, while the murderer might well not confess

his crime, the suspects who are innocent of murder but guilty of lesser sins cannot be supposed to conceal them with­out making the monastery absurd. Incidentally, is it an ac­cident that the detective story has flourished most in predominantly Protestant countries?)

The detective story writer is also wise to choose a society with an elaborate ritual and to describe this in detail. A ritual is a sign of harmony between the aesthetic and the ethical in which body and mind, individual will and general laws, are not in conflict. The murderer uses his knowledge of the ritual to commit the crime and can be caught only by someone who acquires an equal or superior familiarity with it.

The Milieu (Natural)

In the detective story, as in its mirror image, the Quest for the Grail, maps (the ritual of space) and timetables (the ritual of time) are desirable. Nature should reflect its human inhabitants, i.e., it should be the Great Good Place; for the more Eden-like it is, the greater the contradiction of murder. The country is preferable to the town, a well-to-do neighbor­hood (but not too well-to-do—or there will be a suspicion of ill-gotten gains) better than a slum. The corpse must shock not only because it is a corpse but also because, even for a corpse, it is shockingly out of place, as when a dog makes a mess on a drawing room carpet.

Mr. Raymond Chandler has written that he intends to take the body out of the vicarage garden and give the murder back to those who are good at it. If he wishes to write de­tective stories, i.e., stories where the reader's principal interest is to learn who did it, he could not be more mistaken, for in a society of professional criminals, the only possible motives for desiring to identify the murderer are blackmail or revenge, which both apply to individuals, not to the group as a whole, and can equally well inspire murder. Actually, whatever he may say, I think Mr. Chandler is interested in writing, not detective stories, but serious studies of a criminal milieu, the Great Wrong Place, and his powerful but extremely de­pressing books should be read and judged, not as escape literature, but as works of art.

The Victim

The victim has to try to satisfy two contradictory require­ments. He has to involve everyone in suspicion, which re­quires that he be a bad character; and he has to make everyone feel guilty, which requires that he be a good character. He cannot be a criminal because he could then be dealt with by the law and murder would be unnecessary. (Blackmail is the only exception.) The more general the temptation to murder he arouses, the better; e.g., the desire for freedom is a better motive than money alone or sex alone. On the whole, the best victim is the negative Father or Mother Image.

If there is more than one murder, the subsequent victims should be more innocent than the initial victim, i.e., the murderer should start with a real grievance and, as a conse­quence of righting it by illegitimate means, be forced to murder against his will where he has no grievances but his own guilt.

The Murderer

Murder is negative creation, and every murderer is there­fore the rebel who claims the right to be omnipotent. His pathos is his refusal to suffer. The problem for the writer is to conceal his demonic pride from the other characters and from the reader, since, if a person has this pride, it tends to appear in everything he says and does. To surprise the reader when the identity of the murderer is revealed, yet at the same time to convince him that everything he has pre­viously been told about the murderer is consistent with his being a murderer, is the test of a good detective story.

As to the murderer's end, of the three alternatives—execu­tion, suicide, and madness—the first is preferable; for if he commits suicide he refuses to repent, and if he goes mad he cannot repent, but if he does not repent society cannot forgive. Execution on the other hand, is the act of atonement by which the murderer is forgiven by society. In real life I disapprove of capital punishment, but in a detective story the murderer must have no future.

CA Suggestion for Mr. Chandler: Among a group of effi­cient professional killers who murder for strictly professional reasons, there is one to whom, like Leopold and Loeb, murder is an acte gratuite. Presendy murders begin to occur which have not been commissioned. The group is morally outraged and bewildered; it has to call in the police to detect the amateur murderer, rescue the professionals from a mutual suspicion which threatens to disrupt their organization, and restore their capacity to murder.)

The Suspects

The detective-story society is a society consisting of ap­parently innocent individuals, i.e., their aesthetic interest as individuals does not conflict with their ethical obligations to the universal. The murder is the act of disruption by which innocence is lost, and the individual and the law become opposed to each other. In the case of the murderer this op­position is completely real (till he is arrested and consents to be punished); in the case of the suspects it is mosdy ap­parent.

But in order for the appearance to exist, there must be some element of reality; e.g., it is unsatisfactory if the suspicion is caused by chance or the murderer's malice alone. The suspects must be guilty of something, because, now that the aesthetic and the ethical are in opposition, if they are completely inno­cent (obedient to the ethical) they lose their aesthetic interest and the reader will ignore them.

For suspects, the principal causes of guilt are:

i) the wish or even the intention to murder;

2.) crimes of Class A or vices of Class C (e.g., illicit amours) which the suspect is afraid or ashamed to reveal;

a hubris of intellect which tries to solve the crime itself and despises the official police (assertion of the supremacy of the aesthetic over the ethical). If great enough, this hubris leads to its subject getting murdered;

a hubris of innocence which refuses to cooperate with the investigation;

a lack of faith in another loved suspect, which leads its subject to hide or confuse clues.

The Detective

Completely satisfactory detectives are extremely rare. In­deed, I only know of three: Sherlock Holmes (Conan Doyle), Inspector French (Freeman Wills Crofts), and Father Brown (Chesterton).

The job of detective is to restore the state of grace in which the aesthetic and the ethical are as one. Since the murderer who caused their disjunction is the aesthetically de­fiant individual, his opponent, the detective, must be either the official representative of the ethical or the exceptional in­dividual who is himself in a state of grace. If he is the former, he is a professional; if he is the latter, he is an amateur. In either case, the detective must be the total stranger who cannot possibly be involved in the crime; this excludes the local police and should, I think, exclude the detective who is a friend of one of the suspects. The professional detective has the advantage that, since he is not an individual but a representative of the ethical, he does not need a motive for investigating the crime; but for the same reason he has the disadvantage of being unable to overlook the minor ethical violations of the suspects, and therefore it is harder for him to gain their confidence.

Most amateur detectives, on the other hand, are unsatis­factory either because they are priggish supermen, like Lord Peter Wimsey and Philo Vance, who have no motive for being detectives except caprice, or because, like the detectives of the hard-boiled school, they are motivated by avarice or ambition and might just as well be murderers.

The amateur detective genius may have weaknesses to give him aesthetic interest, but they must not be of a kind which outrage ethics. The most satisfactory weaknesses are the solitary oral vices of eating and drinking or childish boast­ing. In his sexual life, the detective must be either celibate or happily married.

Between the amateur detective and the professional police­man stands the criminal lawyer whose telos is, not to discover who is guilty, but to prove that his client is innocent. His ethical justification is that human law is ethically imperfect, i.e., not an absolute manifestation of the universal and divine, and subject to cbance aesthetic limitations, e.g., the intelli­gence or stupidity of individual policemen and juries (in consequence of which an innocent man may sometimes be judged guilty).

To correct this imperfection, the decision is arrived at through an aesthetic combat, i.e., the intellectual gifts of the defense versus those of the prosecution, just as in earlier days doubtful cases were solved by physical combat between the accused and the accuser.

The lawyer-detective (e.g., Joshua Clunk) is never quite satisfactory, therefore, because of his commitment to his client, whom he cannot desert, even if he should really be the guilty party, without ceasing to be a lawyer.

Sherlock Holmes

Holmes is the exceptional individual who is in a state of grace because he is a genius in whom scientific curiosity is raised to the status of a heroic passion. He is erudite but his knowledge is absolutely specialized (e.g., his ignorance of the Copernican system), he is in all matters outside his field as helpless as a child (e.g., his untidiness), and he pays the price for his scientific detachment (his neglect of feeling) by being the victim of melancholia which attacks him when­ever he is unoccupied with a case (e.g., his violin playing and cocaine taking).

His motive for being a detective is, positively, a love of the neutral truth (he has no interest in the feelings of the guilty or the innocent), and negatively, a need to escape from his own feelings of melancholy. His attitude towards peo­ple and his technique of observation and deduction are those of the chemist or physicist. If he chooses human beings rather than inanimate matter as his material, it is because investi­gating the inanimate is unheroically easy since it cannot tell lies, which human beings can and do, so that in dealing with them, observation must be twice as sharp and logic twice as rigorous.

Inspector French

His class and culture are those natural to a Scotland Yard inspector. (The old Oxonian Inspector is insufferable.) His motive is love of duty. Holmes detects for his own sake and shows the maximum indifference to all feelings except a nega­tive fear of his own. French detects for the sake of the innocent members of society, and is indifferent only to his own feelings and those of the murderer. (He would much rather stay at home with his wife.) He is exceptional only in his exceptional love of duty which makes him take ex­ceptional pains; he does only what all could do as well if they had the same patient industry (his checking of alibis for tiny flaws which careless hurry had missed). He outwits the murderer, pardy because the latter is not quite so pain­staking as he, and partly because the murderer must act alone, while he has the help of all the innocent people in the world who are doing their duty, e.g., the postmen, railway clerks, milkmen, etc., who become, accidentally, witnesses to the truth.

Father Brown

Like Holmes, an amateur; yet, like French, not an indi­vidual genius. His activities as a detective are an incidental part of his activities as a priest who cares for souls. His prime motive is compassion, of which the guilty are in greater need than the innocent, and he investigates murders, not for his own sake, nor even for the sake of the innocent, but for the sake of the murderer who can save his soul if he will confess and repent. He solves his cases, not by approaching them objectively like a scientist or a policeman, but by sub­jectively imagining himself to be the murderer, a process which is good not only for the murderer but for Father Brown himself because, as he says, "it gives a man his remorse beforehand."

Holmes and French can only help the murderer as teachers, i.e., they can teach him that murder will out and does not pay. More they cannot do since neither is tempted to murder; Holmes is too gifted, French too well trained in the habit of virtue. Father Brown can go further and help the murderer as an example, i.e., as a man who is also tempted to murder, but is able by faith to resist temptation.

The Reader

The most curious fact about the detective story is that it makes its greatest appeal precisely to those classes of people who are most immune to other forms of daydream literature. The typical detective story addict is a doctor or clergyman or scientist or artist, i.e., a fairly successful professional man with intellectual interests and well-read in his own field, who could never stomach the Saturday Evening Post or True Con­fessions or movie magazines or comics. If I ask myself why I cannot enjoy stories about strong silent men and lovely girls who make love in a beautiful landscape and come into mil­lions of dollars, I cannot answer that I have no fantasies of being handsome and loved and rich, because of course I have (though my life is, perhaps, sufficiendy fortunate to make me less envious in a nai've way than some). No, I can only say that I am too conscious of the absurdity of such wishes to enjoy seeing them reflected in print.

I can, to some degree, resist yielding to these or similar de­sires which tempt me, but I cannot prevent myself from hav­ing them to resist; and it is the fact that I have them which makes me feel guilty, so that instead of dreaming about indulging my desires, I dream about the removal of the guilt which I feel at their existence. This I still do, and must do, because guilt is a subjective feeling where any further step is only a reduplication—feeling guilty about guilt. I suspect that the typical reader of detective stories is, like myself, a person who suffers from a sense of sin. From the point of view of ethics, desires and acts are good and bad, and I must choose the good and reject the bad, but the I which makes this choice is ethically neutral; it only becomes good or bad in its choice. To have a sense of sin means to feel guilty at there being an ethical choice to make, a guilt which, however "good" I may become, remains unchanged. It is sometimes said that detective stories are read by respectable law-abiding citi­zens in order to gratify in fantasy die violent or murderous wishes they dare not, or are ashamed to, translate into action. This may be true for the reader of thrillers (which I rarely enjoy), but it is quite false for the reader of detective stories.

On the contrary, the magical satisfaction the latter provide (which makes them escape literature, not works of art) is the illusion of being dissociated from the murderer.

The magic formula is an innocence which is discovered to contain guilt; then a suspicion of being the guilty one; and finally a real innocence from which the guilty other has been expelled, a cure effected, not by me or my neighbors, but by the miraculous intervention of a genius from outside who removes guilt by giving knowledge of guilt. (The de­tective story subscribes, in fact, to the Socratic daydream: "Sin is ignorance.")

If one thinks of a work of art which deals with murder, Crime and Punishment for example, its effect on the reader is to compel an identification with the murderer which he would prefer not to recognize. The identification of fantasy is always an attempt to avoid one's own suffering: the identification of art is a sharing in the suffering of another. Kafka's The Trial is another instructive example of the differ­ence between a work of art and the detective story. In the latter it is certain that a crime has been committed and, temporarily, uncertain to whom the guilt should be attached; as soon as this is known, the innocence of everyone else is certain. (Should it turn out that after all no crime has been committed, then all would be innocent.) In The Trial, on the other hand, it is the guilt that is certain and the crime that is uncertain; the aim of the hero's investigation is not to prove his innocence (which would be impossible for he knows he is guilty), but to discover what, if anything, he has done to make himself guilty. K, the hero, is, in fact, a portrait of the kind of person who reads detective stories for escape.

The fantasy, then, which the detective story addict indulges is the fantasy of being restored to the Garden of Eden, to a state of innocence, where he may know love as love and not as the law. The driving force behind this daydream is the feeling of guilt, the cause of which is unknown to the dreamer. The fantasy of escape is the same, whether one explains the guilt in Christian, Freudian, or any other terms. One's way of trying to face the reality, on the other hand, will, of course, depend very much on one's creed.

THE I WITHOUT A SELF

The joys of this life are not its own, hut our dread of ascending to a higher life: the torments of this life are not its own, hut our self-torment because of that dread.

FRANZ KAFKA

Kafka is a great, perhaps the greatest, master of the pure parable, a literary genre about which a critic can say very little worth saying. The reader of a novel, or the spectator at a drama, though novel and drama may also have a parabolic significance, is confronted by a feigned history, by char­acters, situations, actions which, though they may be anal­ogous to his own, are not identical. Watching a performance of Macbeth, for example, I see particular historical persons involved in a tragedy of their own making: I may compare Macbeth with myself and wonder what I should have done and felt had I been in his situation, but I remain a spectator, firmly fixed in my own time and place. But I cannot read a

pure parable in this way. Though the hero of a parable may be given a proper name (often, though, he may just be called "a certain man" or "K") and a definite historical and geographical setting, these particulars are irrelevant to the meaning of parable. To find out what, if anything, a parable means, I have to surrender my objectivity and identify myself with what I read. The "meaning" of a parable, in fact, is differ­ent for every reader. In consequence there is nothing a critic can do to "explain" it to others. Thanks to his superior knowl­edge of artistic and social history, of language, of human na­ture even, a good critic can make others see things in a novel or a play which, but for him, they would never have seen for themselves. But if he tries to interpret a parable, he will only reveal himself. What he writes will be a description of what the parable has done to him; of what it may do to others he does not and cannot have any idea.

Sometimes in real life one meets a character and thinks, "This man comes straight out of Shakespeare or Dickens," but nobody ever met a Kafka character. On the other hand, one can have experiences which one recognizes as Kafkaesque, while one would never call an experience of one's own Dickensian or Shakespearian. During the war, I had spent a long and tiring day in the Pentagon. My errand done, I hurried down long corridors eager to get home, and came to a turnstile with a guard standing beside it. "Where are you going?" said the guard. 'I'm trying to get out," I replied. "You are out," he said. For the moment I felt I was K.

In the case of the ordinary novelist or playwright, a knowl­edge of his personal life and character contributes almost nothing to one's understanding of his work, but in the case of a writer of parables like Kafka, biographical information is, I believe, a great help, at least in a negative way, by pre­venting one from making false readings. (The "true" read­ings are always many.)

In the new edition of Max Brod's biography, he describes a novel by a Czech writer, Bozena Nemcova (182.0-1862.), called The Grandmother. The setting is a village in the Riesengebirge which is dominated by a casde. The villagers speak Czech, the inhabitants of the castle German. The Duchess who owns the castle is kind and good, but she is often absent on her travels and between her and the peasants are interposed a horde of insolent household servants and selfish, dishonest officials, so that the Duchess has no idea of what is really going on in the village. At last the heroine of the story succeeds in getting past the various barriers to gain a personal audience with the Duchess, to whom she tells the truth, and all ends happily.

What is illuminating about this information is that the casde officials in Nemcova are openly presented as being evil, which suggests that those critics who have thought of the inhabitants of Kafka's castle as agents of Divine Grace were mistaken, and that Erich Heller's reading is substantially correct.

The casde of Kafka's novel is, as it were, the heavily fortified garrison of a company of Gnostic demons, suc­cessfully holding an advanced position against the manoeuvres of an impatient soul. I do not know of any conceivable idea of divinity which could justify those interpreters who see in the casde the residence of "divine law and divine grace." Its officers are totally indifferent to good if they are not positively wicked. Neither in their decrees nor in their activities is there discernible any trace of love, mercy, charity or majesty. In their icy detach­ment they inspire no awe, but fear and revulsion.

Dr. Brod also publishes for the first time a rumor which, if true, might have occurred in a Kafka story rather than in his life, namely, that, without his knowledge, Kafka was the father of a son who died in 192,1 at the age of seven. The story cannot be verified since the mother was arrested by the Germans in 1944 and never heard of again.

Remarkable as The Trial and The Castle are, Kafka's finest work, I think, is to be found in the volume The Great Wall of China, all of it written during the last six years of his life. The world it portrays is still the world of his earlier books and one cannot call it euphoric, but the tone is lighter. The sense of appalling anguish and despair which make stories like "The Penal Colony" almost unbearable, has gone. Existence may be as difficult and frustrating as ever, but the characters are more humorously resigned to it.

Of a typical story one might say that it takes the formula of the heroic Quest and turns it upside down. In the tradi­tional Quest, the goal—a Princess, the Fountain of Life, etc. —is known to the hero before he starts. This goal is far distant and he usually does not know in advance the way thither nor the dangers which beset it, but there are other beings who know both and give him accurate directions and warnings. Moreover the goal is publicly recognizable as desirable. Every­body would like to achieve it, but it can only be reached by the Predestined Hero. When three brothers attempt the Quest in turn, the first two are found wanting and fail because of their arrogance and self-conceit, while the youngest succeeds, thanks to his humility and kindness of heart. But the youngest, like his two elders, is always perfectly confident that he will succeed.

In a typical Kafka story, on the other hand, the goal is peculiar to the hero himself: he has no competitors. Some beings whom he encounters try to help him, more are ob­structive, most are indifferent, and none has the faintest notion of the way. As one of the aphorisms puts it: "There is a goal but no way; what we call the way is mere wavering." Far from being confident of success, the Kafka hero is convinced from the start that he is doomed to fail, as he is also doomed, being who he is, to make prodigious and unending efforts to reach it. Indeed, the mere desire to reach the goal is itself a proof, not that he is one of the Elect, but that he is under a special curse.

Perhaps there is only one cardinal sin: impatience. Because of impatience we were driven out of Paradise, because of impatience we cannot return.

Theoretically, there exists a perfect possibility of happiness: to believe in the indestructible element in oneself and not strive after it.

In all previous versions of the Quest, the hero knows what he ought to do and his one problem is "Can I do it?" Odysseus knows he must not listen to the song of the sirens, a knight in quest of the Sangreal knows he must remain chaste, a detec­tive knows he must distinguish between truth and falsehood. But for K the problem is "What ought I to do?" He is neither tempted, confronted with a choice between good and evil, nor carefree, content with the sheer exhilaration of motion. He is certain that it matters enormously what he does now, without knowing at all what that ought to be. If he guesses wrong, he must not only suffer the same consequences as if he had chosen wrong, but also feel the same responsibility. If the instructions and advice he receives seem to him absurd or contradictory, he cannot interpret this as evidence of malice or guilt in others; it may well be proof of his own.

The traditional Quest Hero has arete, either manifest, like Odysseus, or concealed, like the fairy tale hero; in the first case, successful achievement of the Quest adds to his glory, in the second it reveals that the apparent nobody is a glorious hero: to become a hero, in the traditional sense, means acquir­ing the right, thanks to one's exceptional gifts and deeds, to say I. But K is an I from the start, and in this fact alone, that he exists, irrespective of any gifts or deeds, lies his guilt.

If the K of The Trial were innocent, he would cease to be K and become nameless like the fawn in the wood in Through the Looking-Glass. In The Castle, K, the letter, wants to be­come a word, land-surveyor, that is to say, to acquire a self like everybody else but this is precisely what he is not allowed to acquire.

The world of the traditional Quest may be dangerous, but it is open: the hero can set off in any direction he fancies. But the Kafka world is closed; though it is almost devoid of sensory properties, it is an intensely physical world. The objects and faces in it may be vague, but the reader feels himself hemmed in by their suffocating presence: in no other imaginary world, I think, is everything so heavy. To take a single step exhausts the strength. The hero feels himself to be a prisoner and tries to escape but perhaps imprisonment is the proper state for which he was created, and freedom would destroy him.

The more horse you yoke, the quicker everything will go—not the rending of the block from its foundation, which is impossible, but the snapping of the traces and with that the gay and empty journey.

The narrator hero of "The Burrow" for example, is a beast of unspecified genus, but, presumably, some sort of badger-like animal, except that he is carnivorous. He lives by himself without a mate and never encounters any other member of his own species. He also lives in a perpetual state of fear lest he be pursued and attacked by other animals—"My enemies are coundess," he says—but we never learn what they may be like and we never actually encounter one. His preoccupation is with the burrow which has been his lifework. Perhaps, when he first began excavating this, the idea of a burrow-fortress was more playful than serious, but the bigger and better the burrow becomes, the more he is tormented by the question: "Is it possible to construct the absolutely impregnable bur­row?" This is a torment because he can never be certain that there is not some further precaution of which he has not thought. Also the burrow he has spent his life constructing has become a precious thing which he must defend as much as he would defend himself.

One of my favorite plans was to isolate the Casde Keep from its surroundings, that is to say to restrict the thick­ness of the walls to about my own height, and leave a free space of about the same width all around the Casde Keep ... I had always pictured this free space, and not without reason as the loveliest imaginable haunt. What a joy to he pressed against the rounded outer wall, pull one­self up, let oneself slide down again, miss one's footing and find oneself on firm earth, and play all these games literally upon the Casde Keep and not inside it; to avoid the Casde Keep, to rest one's eyes from it whenever one wanted, to postpone the joy of seeing it until later and yet not have to do without it, but literally hold it safe between one's claws . . .

He begins to wonder if, in order to defend it, it would not be better to hide in the bushes outside near its hidden entrance and keep watch. He considers the possibility of enlisting the help of a confederate to share the task of watching, but decides against it.

. . . would he not demand some counter-service from me; would he not at least want to see the burrow? That in it­self, to let anyone freely into my burrow, would be ex­quisitely painful to me. I built it for myself, not for visitors, and I think I would refuse to admit him ... I simply could not admit him, for either I must let him go in first by himself, which is simply unimaginable, or we must both descend at the same time, in which case the advantage I am supposed to derive from him, that of being kept watch over, would be lost. And what trust can I really put in him? ... It is comparatively easy to trust any one if you are supervising him or at least super­vise him; perhaps it is possible to trust some one at a distance; but completely to trust some one outside the burrow when you are inside the burrow, that is, in a different world, that, it seems to me, is impossible.

One morning he is awakened by a faint whistling noise which he cannot identify or locate. It might be merely the wind, but it might be some enemy. From now on, he is in the grip of a hysterical anxiety. Does this strange beast, if it is a beast, know of his existence and, if so, what does it know. The story breaks off without a solution. Edwin Muir has suggested that the story would have ended with the appearance of the in­visible enemy to whom the hero would succumb. I am doubt­ful about this. The whole point of the parable seems to be that the reader is never to know if the narrator's subjective fears have any objective justification.

The more we admire Kafka's writings, the more seriously we must reflect upon his final instructions that they should be destroyed. At first one is tempted to see in this request a fantastic spiritual pride, as if he had said to himself: "To be worthy of me, anything I write must be absolutely perfect.

But no piece of writing, however excellent, can be perfect. Therefore, let what I have written be destroyed as unworthy of me." But everything which Dr. Brod and other friends tell us about Kafka as a person makes nonsense of this explana­tion.

It seems clear that Kafka did not think of himself as an artist in the traditional sense, that is to say, as a being dedi­cated to a particular function, whose personal existence is ac­cidental to his artistic productions. If there ever was a man of whom it could be said that he "hungered and thirsted after righteousness," it was Kafka. Perhaps he came to regard what he had written as a personal device he had employed in his search for God. "Writing," he once wrote, "is a form of prayer," and no person whose prayers are genuine, desires them to be overheard bv a third party. In another passage, he describes his aim in writing thus:

Somewhat as if one were to hammer together a table with painful and methodical technical efficiency, and simultaneously do nothing at all, and not in such a way that people could say: "Hammering a table together is nothing to him," but rather "Hammering a table together is really hammering a table together to him, but at the same time it is nothing," whereby certainly the hammer­ing would have become still bolder, still surer, still more real, and if you will, still more senseless.

But whatever the reasons, Kafka's reluctance to have his work published should at least make a reader wary of the way in which he himself reads it. Kafka may be one of those writers who are doomed to be read by the wrong public. Those on whom their effect would be most beneficial are repelled and on those whom they most fascinate their effect may be danger­ous, even harmful.

I am inclined to believe that one should only read Kafka when one is in a eupeptic state of physical and mental health and, in consequence, tempted to dismiss any scrupulous heart- searching as a morbid fuss. When one is in low spirits, one should probably keep away from him, for, unless introspec­tion is accompanied, as it always was in Kafka, by an equal passion for the good life, it all too easily degenerates into a spineless narcissistic fascination with one's own sin and weak­ness.

No one who thinks seriously about evil and suffering can avoid entertaining as a possibility the gnostic-manichean no­tion of the physical world as intrinsically evil, and some of Kafka's sayings come perilously close to accepting it.

There is only a spiritual world; what we call the physi­cal world is the evil in the spiritual one.

The physical world is not an illusion, but only its evil which, however, admittedly constitutes our picture of the physical world.

Kafka's own life and his writings as a whole are proof that he was not a gnostic at heart, for the true gnostic can always be recognized by certain characteristics. He regards himself as a member of a spiritual elite and despises all earthly affections and social obligations. Quite often, he also allows himself an anarchic immorality in his sexual life, on the grounds that, since the body is irredeemable, a moral judg­ment cannot be applied to its actions.

Neither Kafka, as Dr. Brod knew him, nor any of his heroes show a trace of spiritual snobbery nor do they think of the higher life they search for as existing in some other- world sphere: the distinction they draw between this world and the world does not imply that there are two different worlds, only that our habitual conceptions of reality are not the true conception.

Perhaps, when he wished his writings to be destroyed, Kafka foresaw the nature of too many of his admirers.

PART FOUR

The Shakespearian City

THE GLOBE

Physiological life is of course not "Life." And neither is -psychological life. Life is the world.

ludwig wittgenstein

It is difficult, perhaps impossible, for us to form a complete pic­ture of life because, for that, we have to reconcile and combine two completely different impressions—that of life as each of us experiences it in his own person, and that of life as we all observe it in others.

When I observe myself, the I which observes is unique, but not individual, since it has no characteristics of its own; it has only the power to recognize, compare, judge and choose: the self which it observes is not a unique identity but a succession of various states of feeling or desire. Necessity in my world means two things, the givenness of whatever state of myself is at any moment present, and the obligatory freedom of my ego.

Action in my world has a special sense; I act towards my states of being, not towards the stimuli which provoked them; my action, in fact, is the giving or withholding of permission to myself to act. It is impossible for me to act in ignorance, for my world is by definition what I know; it is not even possible, strictly speaking, for me to be self-deceived, for if I know I am deceiving myself, I am no longer doing so; I can never believe that I do not know what is good for me. I cannot say that I am fortunate or unfortunate, for these words apply only to my self. Though some states of my self are more interesting to me than others, there are none which are so uninteresting that I can ignore them; even boredom is interesting because it is my boredom with which I have to cope. If I try, then, to project my subjective experience of life in dramatic form the play will be of the allegorical morality type like Everyman. The hero will be the volitional ego that chooses, and the other characters, either states of the self, pleasant and unpleasant, good and bad, for or against which the hero's choices are made, or counselors, like reason and conscience, which attempt to influence his choices. The plot can only be a succession of incidents in time—the number I choose to portray is arbitrary —and the passing of time from birth to death the only neces­sity; all else is free choice.

If now I turn round and, deliberately excluding everything I know about myself, scrutinize other human beings as ob­jectively as I can, as if I were simply a camera and a tape- recorder, I experience a very different world. I do not see states of being but individuals in states, say, of anger, each of them different and caused by different stimuli. I see and hear people, that is to say, acting and speaking in a situation, and the situation, their acts and words are all I know. I never see another choose between two alternative actions, only the action he does take. I cannot, therefore, tell whether he has free will or not; I only know that he is fortunate or unfortunate in his circumstances. I may see him acting in ignorance of facts about his situation which I know, but I can never say for certain that in any given situation he is deceiving himself. Then, while it is impossible for me to be totally uninterested in anything that happens to my self, I can only be interested in others who "catch my attention" by being exceptions to the average, exceptionally powerful, exceptionally beautiful, ex­ceptionally amusing, and my interest or lack of it in what they do and suffer is determined by the old journalistic law that Dog-Bites-Bishop is not news but Bishop-Bites-Dog is.

If I try to present my objective experience in dramatic form, the play will be of the Greek type, the story of an exceptional man or woman who suffers an exceptional fate. The drama will consist, not in the choices he freely makes, but in the actions which the situation obliges him to take.

The pure drama of consciousness and the drama of pure objectivity are alike in that their characters have no secrets; the audience knows all about them that there is to know. One cannot imagine, therefore, writing a book about the char­acters in Greek tragedy or the characters in the morality plays; they themselves have said all there is to say. The fact that it has been and always will be possible to write books about the characters in Shakespeare's plays, in which different critics ar­rive at completely different interpretations, indicates that the Elizabethan drama is different from either, being, in fact, an attempt to synthesize both into a new, more complicated type.

Actually, of course, the Elizabethan dramatists knew very litde about classical drama and owed very litde to it. The closet tragedies of Seneca may have had some influence upon their style of rhetoric, the comedies of Plautus and Terence pro­vided a few comic situations and devices, but Elizabethan drama would be pretty much the same if these authors had never been known at all. Even Ben Jonson, the only "high­brow" among the playwrights, who was strongly influenced by the aesthetic theories of the humanists, owes more to the morality play than he does to Latin Comedy. Take away Everyman, substitute for him as the hero one of the seven deadly sins, set the other six in league to profit from it, and one has the basic pattern of the Jonsonian comedy of humors.

The link between the medieval morality play and the Eliza­bethan drama is the Chronicle play. If few of the pre-

Shakespearian chronicle plays except Marlowe's Edward II are now readable, nothing could have been more fortunate for Shakespeare's development as a dramatist than his being com­pelled for his livelihood—judging by his early poems, his youthful taste was something much less coarse—to face the problems which the chronicle play poses. The writer of a chronicle play cannot, like the Greek tragedians who had some significant myth as a subject, select his situation; he has to take whatever history offers, those in which a character is a victim of a situation and those in which he creates one. He can have no narrow theory about aesthetic propriety which separates the tragic from the comic, no theory of heroic arete which can pick one historical character and reject another. The study of the human individual involved in political ac­tion, and of the moral ambiguities in which history abounds, checks any tendency towards a simple moralizing of characters into good and bad, any equating of success and failure with virtue and vice.

The Elizabethan drama inherited from the mystery plays three important and very un-Greek notions.

The Significance of Time

Time in Greek drama is simply the time it takes for the situation of the hero to be revealed, and when this revelation shall take place is decided by the gods, not by men. The plague which sets the action of Oedipus Rex in motion could have been sent earlier or postponed. In Elizabethan drama time is what the hero creates with what he does and suffers, the medium in which he realizes his potential character.

The Significance of Choice

In a Greek tragedy everything that could have been other­wise has already happened before the play begins. It is true that sometimes the chorus may warn the hero against a course of action, but it is unthinkable that he should listen to them, for a Greek hero is what he is and cannot change. If Hippol- ytus had made a sacrifice to Aphrodite, he would have ceased to be Hippolytus. But in an Elizabethan tragedy, in

Othello, for example, there is no point before he actually murders Desdemona when it would have been impossible for him to control his jealousy, discover the truth, and convert the tragedy into a comedy. Vice versa, there is no point in a comedy like The Two Gentlemen of Verona at which a wrong turning could not be taken and the conclusion be tragic.

The Significance of Suffering

To the Greeks, suffering and misfortune are signs of the displeasure of the gods and must therefore be accepted by men as mysteriously just. One of the commonest kinds of suffering is to be compelled to commit crimes, either unwittingly, like the parricide and incest of Oedipus, or at the direct command of a god, like Orestes. These crimes are not what we mean by sins because they are against, not with, the desire of the criminal. But in Shakespeare, suffering and misfortune are not in themselves proofs of Divine displeasure. It is true that they would not occur if man had not fallen into sin, but, precisely because he has, suffering is an inescapable element in life—there is no man who does not suffer—to be accepted, not as just in itself, as a penalty proportionate to the particular sins of the sufferer, but as an occasion for grace or as a process of purgation. Those who try to refuse suffering not only fail to avoid it but are plunged deeper into sin and suffering. Thus, the difference between Shake­speare's tragedies and comedies is not that the characters suffer in the one and not in the other, but that in comedy the suffer­ing leads to self-knowledge, repentance, forgiveness, love, and in tragedy it leads in the opposite direction into self-blindness, defiance, hatred.

The audience at a Greek tragedy are pure spectators, never participants; the sufferings of the hero arouse their pity and fear, but they cannot think, "Something similar might happen to me," for the whole point in a Greek tragedy is that the hero and his tragic fate are exceptional. But all of Shake­speare's tragedies might be called variations on the same tragic myth, the only one which Christianity possesses, the story of the unrepentant thief, and anyone of us is in danger of re-enacting it in his own way. The audience at a tragedy of Shakespeare's, therefore, has to be both a spectator and a participant, for it is both a feigned history and a parable.

Dr. Johnson was right, surely, when he said of Shakespeare: "His tragedy seems to be skill, his comedy to be instinct." It seems to me doubtful if a completely satisfactory tragedy is possible within a Christian society which does not believe that there is a necessary relation between suffering and guilt. The dramatist, therefore, is faced with two choices. He can show a noble and innocent character suffering exceptional mis­fortune, but then the effect will be not tragic but pathetic. Or he can portray a sinner who by his sins—usually the sins have to produce crimes—brings his suffering upon him­self. But, then, there is no such thing as a noble sinner, for to sin is precisely to become ignoble. Both Shakespeare and Racine try to solve the problem in the same way, by giving the sinner noble poetry to speak, but both of them must have known in their heart of hearts that this was a conjuring trick. Any journalist could tell the story of Oedipus or Hippolytus and it would be just as tragic as when Sophocles or Euripides tells it. The difference would be only that the journalist is incapable of providing Oedipus and Hippolytus with the noble language which befits their tragedy, while Sophocles and Euripides, being great poets, can.

But let a journalist tell the story of Macbeth or Phedre and we shall immediately recognize them for what they are, one a police court case, the other a pathological case. The poetry that Shakespeare and Racine have given them is not an out­ward expression of their noble natures, but a gorgeous robe which hides their nakedness. D. H. Lawrence's poem seems to me not altogether unjust.

When I read Shakespeare I am struck with wonder that such trivial people should muse and thunder in such lovely language.

Lear, the old buffer, you wonder his daughters

didn't treat him rougher,

the old chough, the old chuffer.

And Hamlet, how boring, how boring to live with, so mean and self-conscious, blowing and snoring his wonderful speeches, full of other folk's whoring!

And Macbeth and his Lady, who should have been choring,

such suburban ambition, so messily goring old Duncan with daggers!

How boring, how small Shakespeare's people are! Yet the language so lovely! like the dyes from gas-tar.

Comedy, on the other hand, is not only possible within a Christian society, but capable of a much greater breadth and depth than classical comedy. Greater in breadth because classical comedy is based upon the division of mankind into two classes, those who have arete and those who do not, and only the second class, fools, shameless rascals, slaves, are fit subjects for comedy. But Christian comedy is based upon the belief that all men are sinners; no one, therefore, whatever his rank or talents, can claim immunity from the comic exposure and, indeed, the more virtuous, in the Greek sense, a man is, the more he realizes that he deserves to be exposed. Greater in depth because, while classical comedy believes that rascals should get the drubbing they deserve, Christian comedy believes that we are forbidden to judge others and that it is our duty to forgive each other. In classi­cal comedy the characters are exposed and punished: when the curtain falls, the audience is laughing and those on stage are in tears. In Christian comedy the characters are exposed and forgiven; when the curtain falls, the audience and the characters are laughing together. Ben Jonson's comedies, unlike Shakespeare's, axe classical, not Christian.

If the plays of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson—and Jonson is untypical, anyway—had been lost, we should find in the dramatic literature written between 1590 and 1642, many passages of magnificent poetry, many scenes of exciting theatre, but no play which is satisfactory as a whole; the average Elizabethan play is more like a variety show—a series of scenes, often moving or entertaining enough in themselves, but without essential relation to each other—than like a properly constructed drama in which every character and every word is relevant. For this defect we should probably blame the laxness of Elizabethan stage conventions, which permitted the dramatist to have as many scenes and characters as he liked, and to include tragic and comic scenes, verse and prose, in the same play. Fortunately, Shakespeare's plays have not perished, and we are able to see how greatly, in his case, these conventions contributed towards his achievement. Had the stage conventions of his day been those, for example, of the French classical theatre in the seventeenth century, he could not, given his particular kind of genius and interests, have become the greatest creator of "Feigned Histories" in dramatic form who ever lived. In the preface to Mrs. Warren's Profession, with his typical mixture of perspicacity and polemical exaggeration, Shaw writes:

The drama can do little to delight the senses: all the ap­parent instances to the contrary are instances of the personal fascination of the performers. The drama of pure feeling is no longer in the hands of the play­wright: it has been conquered by the musician, after whose enchantment all the verbal arts seem cold and tame. Romeo and Juliet with the loveliest Juliet is dry, tedious and rhetorical in comparison with Wagner's Tristan, even though Isolde be both fourteen stone and forty, as she often is in Germany . . . There is, flatly, no future now for any drama without music except the drama of thought. The attempt to produce a genus of opera without music (and this absurdity is what our fashionable theatres have been driving at for a long time past without knowing it) is far less hopeful than my own determination to accept problems as the normal material for drama.¹

¹ Curiously enough, now we have got used to them, what impresses us most about Shaw's plays is their musical quality. He has told us himself that it was from Don Giovanni that he learned "How to write seriously

Every aspect of life is, of course, a problem. The belief Shaw is attacking is the belief that the only problem worth a playwright's attention is love between the sexes, considered in isolation from everything else which men and women think and do. Like all persons engaged in polemic, he accepts the view of Shakespeare held by his opponents, namely, that, as a dramatist, Shakespeare, even when his characters are princes and warriors, was only interested in their "private" emotional life. In actual fact, however, the revolt of Ibsen and Shaw against the conventional nineteenth century drama could very well be described as a return to Shakespeare, as an attempt once again to present human beings in their historical and social setting and not, as playwrights since the Restoration had done, either as wholly private or as em­bodiments of the social manners of a tiny class. Shakespeare's plays, it is true, are not, in the Shavian sense, "dramas of thought," that is to say, not one of his characters is an intellectual: it is true, as Shaw says, that, when stripped of their wonderful diction, the philosophical and moral views expressed by his characters are commonplaces, but the number of people in any generation or society whose thoughts are not commonplace is very small indeed. On the other hand, there is hardly one of his plays which does not provide un­ending food for thought, if one cares to think about it. Romeo and Juliet, for example, is by no means merely a "drama of feeling," a verbal opera about a love affair between two adolescents; it is also, and more importandy, a portrait of a society, charming enough in many ways, but morally in­adequate because the only standard of value by which its members regulate and judge their conduct is that of la bella

without being dull." For all his claims to be just a propagandist, his writing has an effect nearer to that of music than most of those who have claimed to be writing "dramas of feeling." His plays are a joy to watch, not because they purport to deal with social and political problems, but because they are such wonderful displays of conspicuous waste; the conversational energy displayed by his characters is so far in excess of what their situation requires that, if it were to be devoted to practical action, it would wreck the world in five minutes. The Mozart of English letters he is not—the music of the Marble Statue is beyond him—the Rossini, yes. He has all the brio, humor, cruel clarity and virtuosity of that Master of opera buffa.

or la brutta figura. The disaster that overtakes the young lovers is one symptom of what is wrong with Verona, and every citizen, from Prince Escalus down to the starving apothecary, has a share of responsibility for their deaths. Quite aside from their different temperaments and talents, one can see a good reason why Shakespeare does not need to tell the audience his "thoughts," while Shaw is obliged to. Thanks to the conventions and the economics of the Elizabethan theatre, Shakespeare can present his picture of Verona in twenty- four scenes with a cast of thirty speaking roles and a crowd of walk-ons. Shaw has to write for a picture stage framed by a proscenium arch, furnished with sets which admit of few changes of location, and for actors whose salary scale makes a large cast prohibitively expensive. When, therefore, he writes about a social problem such as slum landlords, he is obliged to tell us through an intellectual debate between the few characters in the few locations at his disposal what he cannot present dramatically as evidence from which we could draw the conclusions for ourselves.

As a dramatic historian, Shakespeare was bom at just the right time. Later, changes in the conventions and economics of the theatre made it an inadequate medium, and feigned histories became the province of the novelist. Earlier, dramatic history would have been impossible, because the only history which was recognized as such was sacred history. The drama had to become secularized before any adequate treatment of human history was possible. Greek tragedy, like the mystery play, is religious drama. What the hero does himself is subordinate to what the gods make him do. Further, the gods are concerned, not with human society, but with certain exceptional indi­viduals. The hero dies or goes into exile, but his city, as represented by the chorus, remains. The chorus may give him support or warning advice, but they cannot influence his ac­tions and bear no responsibility for them. Only the hero has a biography; the chorus are mere observers. Human history can­not be written except on the presupposition that, whatever part God may play in human affairs, we cannot say of one event, "This is an act of God," of another, "This is a natural event," and of another, "This is a human choice"; we can only record what happens. The allegorical morality plays are concerned with history, but only with subjective history; the social- historical setting of any particular man is deliberately ex­cluded.

We do not know what Shakespeare's personal beliefs were, nor his opinion on any subject (though most of us privately think we do). All we can notice is an ambivalence in his feelings towards his characters which is, perhaps, characteristic of all great dramatists. A dramatist's characters are, normally, men- of-action, but he himself is a maker, not a doer, concerned, not with disclosing himself to others in the moment, but with making a work which, unlike himself, will endure, if possible forever. The dramatist, therefore, admires and envies in his characters their courage and readiness to risk their lives and souls—qua dramatist, he never risks himself—but, at the same time, to his detached imagination, all action, however glorious, is vain because the consequence is never what the doer intended. What a man does is irrevocable for good or ill; what he makes, he can always modify or even destroy. In all great drama, I believe, we can feel the tension of this ambiva­lent attitude, torn between reverence and contempt, of the maker towards the doer. A character for which his creator felt either absolute reverence or absolute contempt would not, I think, be actable.

THE PRINCE'S DOG

Whoever takes up the sword shall perish hy the sword. And whoever does not take up the sword (or lets it drop) shall perish on the cross.

simone weil

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it has been observed that critics who write about Shakespeare reveal more about themselves than about Shakespeare, but perhaps that is the great value of drama of the Shakespearian kind, namely, that whatever he may see taking place on stage, its final effect upon each spectator is a self-revelation.

Shakespeare holds the position in our literature of Top Bard, but this deserved priority has one unfortunate conse­quence; we generally make our first acquaintance with his plays, not in the theatre, but in the classroom or study, so that, when we do attend a performance, we have lost that naive openness to surprise which is the proper frame of mind in which to witness any drama. The experience of reading a play and the experience of watching it performed are never identical, but in the case of Henry IV the difference between the two is particularly great.

At a performance, my immediate reaction is to wonder what Falstaff is doing in this play at all. At the end of Richard II, we were told that the Heir Apparent has taken up with a dissolute crew of "unrestrained loose companions." What sort of bad company would one expect to find Prince Hal keeping when the curtain rises on Henry IV? Surely, one could expect to see him surrounded by daring, rather sinister juvenile delinquents and beautiful gold-digging whores. But whom do we meet in the Boars Head? A fat, cowardly tosspot, old enough to be his father, two down-at-heel hangers-on, a slatternly hostess and only one whore, who is not in her earliest youth either; all of them seedy, and, by any worldly standards, including those of the criminal classes, all of them failures. Surely, one thinks, an Heir Apparent, sowing his wild oats, could have picked himself a more exciting crew than that. As the play proceeds, our surprise is replaced by another kind of puzzle, for the better we come to know Fal­staff, the clearer it becomes that the world of historical reality which a Chronicle Play claims to imitate is not a world which he can inhabit.

If it really was Queen Elizabeth who demanded to see Falstaff in a comedy, then she showed herself a very perceptive critic. But even in The Merry Wives of Windsor, Falstaff has not and could not have found his true home because Shake­speare was only a poet. For that he was to wait nearly two hundred years till Verdi wrote his last opera. Falstaff is not the only case of a character whose true home is the world of music; others are Tristan, Isolde, and Don Giovanni.¹

Though they each call for a different kind of music, Tristan, Don Giovanni, and Falstaff have certain traits in common. They do not belong to the temporal world of change. One cannot imagine any of them as babies, for a Tristan who is not in love, a Don Giovanni who has no name on his list, a

¹ If Verdi's Macbetto fails to come off, the main reason is that the proper world for Macbeth is poetry, not song; he won't go into notes.

Falstaff who is not old and fat, are inconceivable. When Fal- staff says, "When I was about their years, Hal, I was not an eagle's talent in the waist; I could have crept into an alder­man's thumb-ring"—we take it as a typical Falstaffian fib, but we believe him when he says, "I was born about three in the afternoon, with a white head and something of a round belly."

Time, for Tristan, is a single moment stretched out tighter and tighter until it snaps. Time, for Don Giovanni, is an infinite arithmetical series of unrelated moments which has no beginning and would have no end if Heaven did not inter­vene and cut it short. For Falstaff, time does not exist, since he belongs to the opera huff a world of play and mock action governed not by will or desire, but by innocent wish, a world where no one can suffer because everything he says and does is only a pretense.

Thus, while we must see Tristan die in Isolde's arms and we must see Don Giovanni sink into the earth, because being doomed to die and to go to hell are essential to their beings, we cannot see Falstaff die on stage because, if we did, we should not believe it; we should know that, as at the battle of Shrewsbury, he was only shamming. I am not even quite sure that we believe it when we are told of his death in Henry V; I think we accept it, as we accept the death of Sherlock Holmes, as his creator's way of saying, "I am getting tired of this character"; we feel sure that, if the public pleads with him strongly enough, Shakespeare will find some way to bring him to life again. The only kind of funeral music we can associate with him is the mock-requiem in the last act of Verdi's opera.

Domine fallo casto

Ma salvaggi I'addomine

Domine fallo guasto.

Ma salvaggi I'addomine.

There are at least two places in the play where the in­congruity of the opera huffa world with the historical world is too much, even for Shakespeare, and a patendy false note is struck. The first occurs when, on the battlefield of Shrews­bury, Falstaff thrusts his sword into Hotspur's corpse. Within his own world, Falstaff could stab a corpse because, there, all battles are mock batdes, all corpses straw dummies; but we, the audience, are too conscious that this battle has been a real batde and that this corpse is the real dead body of a brave and noble young man. Pistol could do it, because Pistol is a contemptible character, but Falstaff cannot; that is to say, there is no way in which an actor can play the scene con­vincingly. So, too, with the surrender of Colevile to Falstaff in the Second Part. In his conversation, first with Colevile and then with Prince John, Falstaff talks exacdy as we expect —to him, the whole business is a huge joke. But then he is present during a scene when we are shown that it is no joke at all. How is any actor to behave and speak his lines during the following?

Lancaster—Is thy name Colevile?

colevile—It is, my lord.

Lancaster—A famous rebel art thou, Colevile.

falstaff—And a famous true subject took him.

colevile—I am, my lord, but as my betters are,

That led me hither. Had they been ruled by me, You would have won them dearer than you have.

falstaff—I know not how they sold themselves: but thou, like a kind fellow, gavest thyself away gratis; and I thank thee for thee.

Lancaster—Now have you left pursuit?

Westmoreland—Retreat is made and execution stay'd.

Lancaster—Send Colevile, with his confederates, To York, to present execution.

The Falstaffian frivolity and the headsman's axe cannot so direcdy confront each other.

Reading Henry IV, we can easily give our full attention to the historical-political scenes, but, when watching a perform­ance, attention is distracted by our eagerness to see Falstaff reappear. Short of cutting him out of die play altogether, no producer can prevent him stealing the show. From an actor's point of view, the role of Falstaff has the enormous advantage that he has only to think of one thing—playing to an audience. Since he lives in an eternal present and the historical world does not exist for him, there is no difference for Falstaff be­tween those on stage and those out front, and if the actor were to appear in one scene in Elizabethan costume and in the next in top hat and morning coat, no one would be bewildered. The speech of all the other characters is, like our own, con­ditioned by two factors, the external situation with its ques­tions, answers, and commands, and the inner need of each character to disclose himself to others. But FalstafFs speech has only one cause, his absolute insistence, at every moment and at all costs, upon disclosing himself. Half his lines could be moved from one speech to another without our noticing, for nearly everything he says is a variant upon one theme— "I am that I am."

Moreover, Shakespeare has so written his part that it can­not be played unsympathetically. A good actor can make us admire Prince Hal, but he cannot hope to make us like him as much as even a second-rate actor will make us like Falstaff. Sober reflection in the study may tell us that Falstaff is not, after all, a very admirable person, but Falstaff on the stage gives us no time for sober reflection. When Hal or the Chief Justice or any others indicate that they are not bewitched by Falstaff, reason might tell us that they are in the right, but we ourselves are already bewitched, so that their dis­enchantment seems out of place, like the presence of tee­totalers at a drunken party.

Suppose, then, that a producer were to cut the Falstaff scenes altogether, what would Henry IV become? The middle section of a political trilogy which could be entided Looking for the Doctor.

The body politic of England catches an infection from its family physician. An able but unqualified practitioner throws him out of the sickroom and takes over. The patient's tempera­ture continues to rise. But then, to everybody's amazement, the son of the unqualified practitioner whom, though he has taken his degree, everyone has hitherto believed to be a hope­less invalid, effects a cure. Not only is the patient restored to health but also, at the doctor's orders, takes another body politic, France, to wife.

The theme of this trilogy is, that is to say, the question: What combination of qualities is needed in the Ruler whose function is the establishment and maintenance of Temporal Justice? According to Shakespeare, the ideal Ruler must satisfy five conditions. 1) He must know what is just and what is unjust. He must himself be just. 3) He must be strong enough to compel those who would like to be unjust to be­have jusdy. 4) He must have the capacity both by nature and by art of making others loyal to his person. 5) He must be the legitimate ruler by whatever standard legitimacy is de­termined in the society to which he belongs.

Richard II fails to satisfy the first four of these. He does not know what Justice is, for he follows the advice of foolish flatterers. He is himself unjust, for he spends the money he obtains by taxing the Commons and fining the Nobility, not on defending England against her foes, but upon maintaining a lavish and frivolous court, so that, when he really does need money for a patriotic purpose, the war with Ireland, his exchequer is empty and in desperation he commits a gross act of injustice by confiscating Bolingbroke's estates.

It would seem that at one time he had been popular but he has now lost his popularity, pardy on account of his actions, but also because he lacks the art of winning hearts. According to his successor, he had made the mistake of being overfamiliar —the ruler should not let himself be seen too often as "human"—and in addition, he is not by nature the athletic, physically brave warrior who is the type most admired by the feudal society he is called upon to rule.

In consequence, Richard II is a weak ruler who cannot keep the great nobles in order or even command the loyalty of his soldiers, and weakness in a ruler is the worst defect of all. A cruel, even an unjust king, who is strong, is preferable to the most saindy weakling because most men will behave unjusdy if they discover that they can with impunity; tyranny, the injustice of one, is less unjust than anarchy, the in­justice of many.

But there remains the fifth condition: whatever his defects, Richard II is the legitimate King of England. Since all men are mortal, and many men are ambitious, unless there is some impersonal principle by which, when the present ruler dies, the choice of his successor can be decided, there will be a risk of civil war in every generation. It is better to endure the injustice of the legitimate ruler, who will die anyway sooner or later, than allow a usurper to take his place by force.

As a potential ruler, Bolingbroke possesses many of the right qualities. He is a strong man, he knows how to make himself popular, and he would like to be just. We never hear, even from the rebels, of any specific actions of Henry IV which are unjust, only of suspicions which may be just or unjust. But in yielding to the temptation, when the opportunity un­expectedly offers itself, of deposing his lawful sovereign, he commits an act of injustice for which he and his kingdom have to pay a heavy price. Because of it, though he is strong enough to crush rebellion, he is not strong or popular enough to prevent rebellion breaking out.

Once Richard has been murdered, however, the rule of Henry IV is better than any alternative. Though, legally, Mortimer may have a good or better right to the throne, the scene at Bangor between Hotspur, Worcester, Mortimer, and Glendower, convinces us that Henry's victory is a victory for justice since we learn that the rebels have no concern for the interests of the Kingdom, only for their own. Their plan, if they succeed, is to carve up England into three petty states. Henry may wish that Hotspur, not Hal, were his heir, be­cause Hotspur is a brave warrior ready to risk his life in batde against England's foes, while Hal appears to be dissipated and frivolous, but we know better. Hotspur is indeed brave, but that is all. A man who can say

I'll give thrice so much land To any well-deserving friend; But in the way of bargain, mark ye me, I'll cavil on the ninth part of a hair

is clearly unfitted to be a ruler because his actions are based, not on justice, but on personal whim. Moreover, he is not interested in political power; all he desires is military glory.

Thirdly, there is Prince Hal, Henry V-to-be. To everyone except himself, he seems at first to be another Richard, unjust, lacking in self-control but, unfortunately, the legitimate heir. By the time the curtain falls on Henry V, however, he is recognized by all to be the Ideal Ruler. Like his father in his youth, he is brave and personable. In addition, he is a much cleverer politician. While his father was an improviser, he is a master of the art of timing. His first soliloquy reveals him as a person who always sees several steps ahead and has the pa­tience to wait, even though waiting means temporary mis­understanding and unpopularity, until the right moment for action comes; he will never, if he can help it, leave anything to chance. Last but not least, he is blessed by luck. His father had foreseen that internal dissension could only be cured if some common cause could be found which would unite all parties but he was too old and ill, the internal quarrels too violent. But when Hal succeeds as Henry V, most of his enemies are dead or powerless—Cambridge and Scroop have no armies at their back—and his possible right to the throne of France provides the common cause required to unite both the nobles and the commons, and gives him the oppor­tunity, at Agincourt, to show his true metde.

One of FalstafFs dramatic functions is to be the means by which Hal is revealed to be the Just Ruler, not the dissolute and frivolous young man everybody has thought him; but, so far as the audience is concerned, Falstaff has fulfilled his function by Act III, Scene 2 of the First Part, when the King entrusts Hal with a military command. Up to this point the Falstaff scenes have kept us in suspense. In Act I, Scene 2., we hear Hal promise

I'll so offend to make offense a skill,

Redeeming time when men least think I will.

But then we watch the rebellion being prepared while he does nothing but amuse himself with Falstaff, so that we are left wondering whether he meant what he said or was only play acting. But from the moment he engages in the political action of the play, we have no doubts whatsoever as to his ambition, capacity, and ultimate triumph for, however often henceforward we may see him with Falstaff, it is never at a time when his advice and arms are needed by the State; he visits the Boar's Head in leisure hours when there is nothing serious for him to do.

For those in the play, the decisive moment of revelation is, of course, his first public act as Henry V, his rejection of Falstaff and company. For his subjects who have not, as we have, watched him with Falstaff, it is necessary to allay their fears that, though they already know him to be brave and capable, he may still be unjust and put his personal friend­ships before the impartial justice which it is his duty as king to maintain. But we, who have watched his private life, have no such fears. We have long known that his first soliloquy meant what it said, that he has never been under any false illusions about Falstaff or anyone else and that when the right moment comes to reject Falstaff, that is to say, when such a rejection will make the maximum political effect, he will do so without hesitation. Even the magnanimity he shows in granting his old companion a life competence, which so im­presses those about him, cannot impress us because, knowing Falstaff as they do not, we know what the effect on him of such a rejection must be, that his heart will be "fracted and corroborate" and no life competence can mend that. It is Hal's company he wants, not a pension from the Civil List.

The essential Falstaff is the Falstaff of The Merry Wives and Verdi's opera, the comic hero of the world of play, the unkillable self-sufficient immortal whose verdict on existence is

Tutto nel mondo e hurla. . . . Tutti gahhati. Irride L'un I'altro ogni mortal. Ma ride hen chi ride La risata final

In Henry IV, however, something has happened to this im­mortal which draws him out of his proper world into the historical world of suffering and death. He has become capable of serious emotion. He continues to employ the speech of his comic world:

I have forsworn his company hourly any time this two- and-twenty years, and yet I am bewitched by the rogue's company. If the rascal have not given me medicines to make me love him, I'll be hanged. It could not be else. I have drunk medicines.

But the emotion so flippantly expressed could equally well be expressed thus:

If my dear love were but the child of state It might for Fortune's bastard be unfathered, As subject to Time's love or to Time's hate, Weeds among weeds, or flowers with flowers gathered.

No, it was builded far from accident;

It suffers not in smiling pomp, nor falls

Under the blow of thralled discontent,

Whereto th' inviting time and fashion calls

It fears not Policy, that heretic

WTiich works on leases of short numbered hours,

But all alone stands hugely politic.

As the play proceeds, we become aware, behind all the fun, of something tragic. Falstaff loves Hal with an absolute de­votion. "The lovely bully" is the son he has never had, the youth predestined to the success and worldly glory which he will never enjoy. He believes that his love is returned, that the Prince is indeed his other self, so he is happy, despite old age and poverty. We, however, can see that he is living in a fool's paradise, for the Prince cares no more for him as a person than he would care for the King's Jester. He finds Fal­staff amusing but no more. If we could warn Falstaff of what lie is too blind to see, we might well say: Beware, before it is too late, of becoming involved with one of those mortals

That do not do the thing they most do show, Who, moving others, are themselves as stone. . . .

Falstaff's story, in fact, is not unlike one of those folk tales in which a mermaid falls in love with a mortal prince: the price she pays for her infatuation is the loss of her immortality without the compensation of temporal happiness.

Let us now suppose, not only that Falstaff takes no part in the play, but is also allowed to sit in the audience as a spec­tator. How much will he understand of what he sees going on?

He will see a number of Englishmen divided into two parties who finally come to blows. That they should come to blows will in itself be no proof to him that they are enemies because they might, like boxers, have agreed to fight for fun. In Falstaff's world there are two causes of friendship and enmity. My friend may be someone whose appearance and manner I like at this moment, my enemy someone whose ap­pearance and manner I dislike. Thus, he will understand Hotspur's objection to Bolingbroke perfecdy well.

Why, what a candy deal of courtesy This fawning greyhound then did proffer me. "Look, when his infant fortune came to age," And "gende Harry Percy" and "kind cousin." O the devil take such cozeners.

To Falstaff, "my friend" can also mean he whose wish at this moment coincides with mine, "my enemy" he whose wish contradicts mine. He will see the civil war, therefore, as a clash between Henry and Mortimer who both wish to wear the crown. What will perplex him is any argument as to who has the better right to wear it.

Anger and fear he can understand, because they are imme­diate emotions, but not nursing a grievance or planning re­venge or apprehension, for these presuppose that the future inherits from the past. He will not, therefore, be able to make head or tail of Warwick's speech, "There is a history in all men's lives . . . ," nor any reasons the rebels give for their actions which are based upon anything Bolingbroke did before he became king, nor the reason given by Worcester for concealing the king's peace offer from Hotspur:

It is impossible, it cannot be

The King should keep his word in loving us.

He will suspect us still and find a time

To punish this offence in other faults.

To keep his word is a phrase outside Falstaff's comprehen­sion, for a promise means that at some future moment I might have to refuse to do what I wish, and, in Falstaff's world to wish and to do are synonymous. For the same reason, when, by promising them redress, Prince John tricks the rebels into disbanding their armies and then arrests them, Falstaff will not understand why they and all the audience except himself are shocked.

The first words Shakespeare puts into Falstaff's mouth are, "Now Hal, what time of day is it, lad?" to which the Prince quite righdy replies, "What the devil hast thou to do with the time of day?" In Falstaff's world, every moment is one of infinite possibility when anything can be wished. As a spec­tator, he will keep hearing the characters use the words time and occasion in a sense which will stump him.

What I know Is ruminated, plotted, and set down And only stays but to behold the face Of that occasion that shall bring it on.

The purpose you undertake is dangerous, the time itself unsorted. . . .

... I will resolve to Scodand. There am I Till time and vantage crave my company.

Of all the characters in the play, the one he will think he understands best is the least Falstaff-like of them all, Hotspur, for Hotspur, like himself, appears to obey the impulse of the moment and say exactly what he thinks without prudent calculation. Both conceal nothing from others, Falstaff be­cause he has no mask to put on, Hotspur because he has so become his mask that he has no face beneath it. Falstaff says, as it were, "I am I. Whatever I do, however outrageous, is of infinite importance because I do it." Hotspur says: "I am Hot­spur, the fearless, the honest, plain-spoken warrior. If I should ever show fear or tell lies, even white ones, I should cease to exist." If Falstaff belonged to the same world as Hotspur, one could call him a liar, but, in his own eyes, he is perfectly truthful, for, to him, fact is subjective fact, "what I am actually feeling and thinking at this moment." To call him a liar is as ridiculous as if, in a play, a character should say, "I am Napoleon," and a member of the audience should cry, "You're not. You're Sir John Gielgud."

In Ibsen's Peer Gynt, there is a remarkable scene in which Peer visits the Troll King. At the entertainment given in his honor, animals dance to hideous noises, but Peer behaves to them with perfect manners as if they were beautiful girls and the music ravishing. After it is over, the Troll King asks him: "Now, frankly, tell me what you saw." Peer replies: "What I saw was impossibly ugly"—and then describes the scene as the audience had seen it. The Troll King who has taken a fancy to him, suggests that Peer would be happier at a troll. All that is needed is a little eye operation, after which he will really see a cow as a beautiful girl. Peer indig- nandy refuses. He is perfecdy willing, he says, to swear that a cow is a girl, but to surrender his humanity so that he can no longer lie, because he cannot distinguish between fact and fiction, that he will never do. By this criterion, neither Falstaff nor Hotspur is quite human, Falstaff because he is pure troll, Hotspur because he is so lacking in imagination that the troll kingdom is invisible to him.

At first, then, Falstaff will believe that Hotspur is one of his own kind, who like himself enjoys putting on an act, but then he will hear Hotspur say words which he cannot comprehend.

. . . time serves wherein you may redeem Your banished honours and restore yourselves Into the good thoughts of the world again.

In Falstaff's world, the only value standard is importance, that is to say, all he demands from others is attention, all he fears is being ignored. Whether others applaud or hiss does not matter; what matters is the volume of the hissing or the applause.

Hence, in his soliloquy about honor, his reasoning runs something like this: if the consequences of demanding moral approval from others is dying, it is better to win their disap­proval; a dead man has no audience.

Since the Prince is a personal friend, Falstaff is, of course, a King's man who thinks it a shame to be on any side but one, but his loyalty is like that of those who, out of local pride, support one football team rather than another. As a member of the audience, his final comment upon the political action of the play will be the same as he makes from behind the footlights.

Well, God be thanked for these rebels: they offend none but the virtuous. . . .

A young knave and begging. Is there not employ­ment? Doth not the King lack subjects? Do not the rebels need soldiers?

Once upon a time we were all Falstaffs: then we became social beings with super-egos. Most of us leam to accept this, but there are some in whom the nostalgia for the state of innocent self-importance is so strong that they refuse to accept adult life and responsibilities and seek some means to become again the Falstaffs they once were. The commonest technique adopted is the botde, and, curiously enough, the male drinker reveals his intention by developing a drinker's belly.

If one visits a bathing beach, one can observe that men and women grow fat in different ways. A fat woman exag­gerates her femininity; her breasts and buttocks enlarge till she comes to look like the Venus of Willendorf. A fat man, on the other hand, looks like a cross between a very young child and a pregnant mother. There have been cultures in which obesity in women was considered the ideal of sexual attraction, but in no culture, so far as I know, has a fat man been considered more attractive than a thin one. If my own weight and experience give me any authority, I would say that fatness in the male is the physical expression of a psycho­logical wish to withdraw from sexual competition and, by combining mother and child in his own person, to become emotionally self-sufficient. The Greeks thought of Narcissus as a slender youth but I think they were wrong. I see him as a middle-aged man with a corporation, for, however ashamed he may be of displaying it in public, in private a man with a belly loves it dearly; it may be an unprepossessing child to look at, but he has borne it all by himself.

I do walk here before thee like a sow that hath over­whelmed all her little but one. . . .

I have a whole school of tongues in this belly of mine, and not a tongue of them all speaks any other word but my name. My womb, my womb undoes me.

Not all fat men are heavy drinkers, but all males who drink heavily become fat.[2] At the same time, the more they drink, the less they eat. "Q monstrous! But one halfpenny worth of bread to this intolerable deal of sack!" exclaims Hal on looking at Falstaff's bill, but he cannot have expected any­thing else. Drunkards die, not from the liquid alcohol they take so much of, but from their refusal to eat solid food, and anyone who had to look after a drunk knows that the only way to get enough nourishment into him is to give him liquid or mashed-up foods, for he will reject any dish that needs chewing. Solid food is to the drunkard a symbolic reminder of the loss of the mother's breast and his ejection from Eden.

A plague on sighing and grief. It blows a man up like a bladder.. ..

So Falstaff, and popular idiom identifies the kind of griefs which have this fattening effect—eating humble pie, swallow­ing insults, etc.

In a recent number of The Paris Review, Mr. Nicholas Tucci writes:

The death song of the drunkard—it may go on for thirty years—goes more or less like this. "I was bom a god, with the whole world in reach of my hands, lie now defeated in the gutter. Come and listen: hear what the world has done to me."

In Vino Veritas is an old saying that has nothing to do with the drunkard's own truth. He has no secrets— that is true—but it is not true that his truth may be found under the skin of his moral reserve or of his sober lies, so that the moment he begins to cross his eyes and pour out his heart, anyone may come in and get his fill of truth. What happens is exacdy the opposite- When the drunkard confesses, he makes a careful choice of his pet sins: and these are nonexistent. He may be unable to distinguish a person from a chair, but never an un­profitable lie from a profitable one. How could he see himself as a very significant entity in a huge world of others, when he sees nothing but himself spread over the whole universe. "I am alone" is indeed a true cry, but it should not be taken literally.

The drunk is unlovely to look at, intolerable to listen to, and his self-pity is contemptible. Nevertheless, as not merely a worldly failure but also a willful failure, he is a disturbing image for the sober citizen. His refusal to accept the realities of this world, babyish as it may be, compels us to take another look at this world and reflect upon our motives for accepting it. The drunkard's suffering may be self-inflicted, but it is real suffering and reminds us of all the suffering in this world which we prefer not to think about because, from the moment we accepted this world, we acquired our share of responsibility for everything that happens in it.

When we see Falstaff's gross paunch and red face, we are reminded that the hody politic of England is not so healthy, either.

The Commonwealth is sick of its own choice. Their over-greedy love hath surfeited. . . . Thou (beastly feeder) are so full of him That thou provokest thyself to cast him up. So, so, thou common dog, didst thou disgorge Thy glutton bosom of the royal Richard. . . . Then you perceive the body of our kingdom How foul it is: what rank diseases grow, And with what danger near the heart of it.

It might be expected that we would be revolted at the sight and turn our eyes with relief and admiration to the Hero Prince. But in fact we aren't and we don't. Whenever Falstaff is on stage, we have no eyes for Hal. If Shakespeare did orig­inally write a part for Falstaff in Henry V, it would not have taken pressure from the Cobhams to make him cut it out; his own dramatic instinct would have told him that, if Henry was to be shown in his full glory, the presence of Falstaff would diminish it.

Seeking for an explanation of why Falstaff affects us as he does, I find myself compelled to see Henry IV as possessing, in addition to its overt meaning, a parabolic significance. Overdy, Falstaff is a Lord of Misrule; parabolically, he is a comic symbol for the supernatural order of Charity as con­trasted with the temporal order of Justice symbolized by Henry of Monmouth.

Such readings are only possible with drama which, like Shakespeare's, is secular, concerned direcdy, not with the relation of man and God, but with the relations between men. Greek tragedy, at least before Euripides, is direcdy religious, concerned with what the gods do to men rather than what men do to each other: it presents a picture of human events, the causes of which are divine actions. In consequence, a Greek tragedy does not demand that we "read" it in the sense that we speak of "reading" a face .The ways of the gods may

be mysterious to human beings but they are not ambiguous.

There can be no secular drama of any depth or importance except in a culture which recognizes that man has an internal history as well as an external; that his actions are partly in re­sponse to an objective situation created by his past acts and the acts of others, and partly initiated by his subjective need to re-create, redefine, and rechoose himself. Surprise and revelation are the essence of drama. In Greek tragedy these are supplied by the gods; no mortal can foresee how and when they will act. But the conduct of men has no element of surprise, that is to say, the way in which they react to the surprising events which befall them is exactly what one would expect.

A secular drama presupposes that in all which men say and do there is a gratuitous element which makes their conduct ambiguous and unpredictable. Secular drama, therefore, de­mands a much more active role from its audience than a Greek tragedy. The audience has to be at one and the same time a witness to what is occurring on stage and a subjective partici­pant who interprets what he sees and hears. And a secular dramatist like Shakespeare who attempts to project the inner history of human beings into objective stage action is faced with problems which Aeschylus and Sophocles were spared, for there are aspects of this inner history which resist and sometimes defy manifestation.

Humility is represented with difficulty—when it is shown in its ideal moment, the beholder senses the lack of something because he feels that its true ideality does not consist in the fact that it is ideal in the moment but that it is constant. Romantic love can very well be represented in the moment, but conjugal love cannot, because an ideal husband is not one who is such once in his life but one who every day is such. Courage can very well be concentrated in the moment, but not pa­tience, precisely for the reason that patience strives with time. A king who conquers kingdoms can be represented in the moment, but a cross bearer who every day takes

up his cross cannot be represented in art because the point is that he does it every day. (Kierkegaard.)

Let us suppose, then, that a dramatist wishes to show a char­acter acting out of the spirit of charity or agape. At first this looks easy. Agape requires that we love our enemies, do good to those that hate us and forgive those who injure us, and this command is unconditional. Surely, all a dramatist has to do is to show one human being forgiving an enemy.

In Measure for Measure, Angelo has wronged Isabella and Mariana, and the facts of the wrong become public. Angelo repents and demands that the just sentence of death be passed on him by the Duke. Isabella and Mariana implore the Duke to show Mercy. The Duke yields to their prayers and all ends happily. I agree with Professor Coghill's interpretation of Measure for Measure as a parable in which Isabella is an image for die redeemed Christian Soul, perfectly chaste and loving, whose reward is to become the bride of God; but, to my mind, the parable does not quite work because it is im­possible to distinguish in dramatic action between the spirit of forgiveness and the act of pardon.

The command to forgive is unconditional: whether my enemy harden his heart or repent and beg forgiveness is irrele­vant. If he hardens his heart, he does not care whether I forgive him or not and it would be impertinent of me to say, "I forgive you." If he repents and asks, "Will you forgive me?" the answer, "Yes," should not express a decision on my part but describe a state of feeling which has always existed. On the stage, however, it is impossible to show one person for­giving another, unless the wrongdoer asks for forgiveness, because silence and inaction are undramatic. The Isabella we are shown in earlier scenes of Measure for Measure is certainly not in a forgiving spirit—she is in a passion of rage and despair at Angelo's injustice—and dramatically she could not be otherwise, for then there would be no play. Again, on the stage, forgiveness requires manifestation in action, that is to say, the one who forgives must be in a position to do something for the other which, if he were not forgiving, he would not do. This means that my enemy must be at my mercy; but, to the spirit of charity, it is irrelevant whether I am at my enemy's mercy or he at mine. So long as he is at my mercy, forgiveness is indistinguishable from judicial par­don.

The law cannot forgive, for the law has not been wronged, only broken; only persons can be wronged. The law can par­don, but it can only pardon what it has the power to punish. If the lawbreaker is stronger than the legal authorities, they are powerless to do either. The decision to grant or refuse par­don must be governed by prudent calculation—if the wrong­doer is pardoned, he will behave better in the future than if he were punished, etc. But charity is forbidden to calculate in this way: I am required to forgive my enemy whatever the effect on him may be.

One may say that Isabella forgives Angelo and the Duke pardons him. But, on the stage, this distinction is invisible because, there, power, justice and love are all on the same side. Justice is able to pardon what love is commanded to forgive. But to love, it is an accident that the power of tem­poral justice should be on its side; indeed, the Gospels assure us that, sooner or later, they will find themselves in opposi­tion and that love must suffer at the hands of justice.

In King Lear, Shakespeare attempts to show absolute love and goodness, in the person of Cordelia, destroyed by the powers of this world, but the price he pays is that Cordelia, as a dramatic character, is a bore.

If she is not to be a fake, what she says cannot be poetically very impressive nor what she does dramatically very exciting.

What shall Cordelia speak? Love and be silent.

In a play with twenty-six scenes, Shakespeare allows her to appear in only four, and from a total of over three thousand three hundred lines, he allots to her less than ninety.

Temporal Justice demands the use of force to quell the un­just; it demands prudence, a practical reckoning with time and place; and it demands publicity for its laws and its penal­ties. But Charity forbids all three—we are not to resist evil, if a man demand our coat we are to give him our cloak also, we are to take no thought for the morrow and, while secretly fasting and giving alms, we are to appear in public as persons who do neither.

A direct manifestation of charity in secular terms is, there­fore, impossible. One form of indirect manifestation employed by religious teachers has been through parables in which actions which are ethically immoral are made to stand as a sign for that which transcends ethics. The Gospel parable of the Unjust Steward is one example. These words by a Hasidic Rabbi are another :

I cannot teach you the ten principles of service but a little child and a thief can show you what they are. From the child you can learn three things;

He is merry for no particular reason.

Never for a moment is he idle.

When he wants something, he demands it vigorously.

The thief can instruct you in many things.

He does his service by night.

If he does not finish what he has set out to do in one night, he devotes the next night to it.

He and all those who work for him, love one another.

He risks his life for slight gains.

What he takes has so little value for him that he gives up for a very small coin.

He endures blows and hardships and it matters nothing to him.

He likes his trade and would not exchange it for any other.

If a parable of this kind is dramatized, the action must be comic, that is to say, the apparendy immoral actions of the hero must not inflict, as in the actual world they would, real suffering upon others.

Thus, Falstaff speaks of himself as if he were always rob­bing travelers. We see him do this once—incidentally, it is not Falstaff but the Prince who is the instigator—and the sight convinces us that he never has been and never could be a successful highwayman. The money is restolen from him and returned to its proper owners; the only sufferer is Falstaff him­self who has been made a fool of. He lives shamelessly on credit, but none of his creditors seems to be in serious trouble as a result. The Hostess may swear that if he does not pay his bill, she will have to pawn her plate and tapestries, but this is shown to be the kind of exaggeration habitual to landladies, for in the next scene they are still there. What, overdy, is dishonesty becomes, parabolically, a sign for a lack of pride, humility which acknowledges its unimportance and depend­ence upon others.

Then he rejoices in his reputation as a fornicator with whom no woman is safe alone, but the Falstaff on stage is too old to fornicate, and it is impossible to imagine him younger. All we see him do is defend a whore against a bully, set her on his knee and make her cry out of affection and pity. What in the real world is promiscuous lust, the treatment of other persons as objects of sexual greed, becomes in the comic world of play a symbol for the charity that loves all neighbors with­out distinction.

Living off other people's money and indiscriminate fornica­tion are acts of injustice towards private individuals; Falstaff is also guilty of injustice to others in their public character as citizens. In any war it is not the justice or injustice of either side that decides who is to be the victor but the force each can command. It is therefore the duty of all who believe in the justice of the King's side to supply him with the best soldiers possible. Falstaff makes no attempt to fulfill this duty. Before the batde of Shrewsbury, he first conscripts those who have most money and least will to fight and then allows them to buy their way out, so that he is finally left with a sorry regi­ment of "discarded unjust serving men, younger sons to younger brothers, revolted tapsters and osders trade fallen. . .." Before the battle of Gaultree Forest, the two most sturdy young men, Mouldy and Bullcalf, offer him money and are let off, and the weakest, Shadow, Feeble and Wart, taken.

From the point of view of society this is unjust, but if the villagers who are subject to conscription were to be asked, as private individuals, whether they would rather be treated jusdy or as Falstaff treats them, there is no doubt as to their answer. What their betters call just and unjust means nothing to them; all they know is that conscription will tear them away from their homes and livelihoods with a good chance of getting killed or returning maimed "to beg at the town's end." Those whom Falstaff selects are those with least to lose, dere­licts without home or livelihood to whom soldiering at least offers a chance of loot. Bullcalf wants to stay with his friends, Mouldy has an old mother to look after, but Feeble is quite ready to go if his friend Wart can go with him.

Falstaff's neglect of the public interest in favor of private concerns is an image for the justice of charity which treats each person, not as a cipher, but as a unique person. The Prince may jusdy complain:

I never did see such pitiful rascals

but Falstaffs retort speaks for all the insulted and injured of this world:

Tut tut—good enough to toss, food for powder, food for powder. They'll fit a pit as well as better. Tush, man, mortal men, mortal men. . . .

These are Falstaff's only acts: for the rest, he fritters away his time, swigging at the botde and taking no thought for the morrow. As a parable, both the idleness and the drinking, the surrender to immediacy and the refusal to accept reality, become signs for the Unworldly Man as contrasted with Prince Hal who represents worldliness at its best.

At his best, the worldly man is one who dedicates his life to some public end, politics, science, industry, art. etc. The end is outside himself, but the choice of end is determined by the particular talents with which nature has endowed him, and the proof that he has chosen righdy is worldly success. To dedicate one's life to an end for which one is not endowed is madness, the madness of Don Quixote. Stricdy speaking, he does not desire fame for himself, but to achieve something which merits fame. Because his end is worldly, that is, in the public domain—to marry the girl of one's choice, or to become a good parent, are private, not worldly, ends—the personal life and its satisfactions are, for the worldly man, of secondary importance and, should they ever conflict with his vocation, must be sacrificed. The worldly man at his best knows that other persons exist and desires that they should—a statesman has no wish to establish justice among tables and chairs—but if it is necessary to the achievement of his end to treat certain persons as if they were things, then, callously or regretfully, he will. What distinguishes him from the ordinary criminal is that the criminal lacks the imagination to conceive of others as being persons like himself; when he sacrifices others, he feels no guilt because, to the criminal, he is the only person in a world of things. What distinguishes both the worldly man and the criminal from the wicked man is their lack of malice. The wicked man is not worldly, but anti-worldly. His conscious end is nothing less than the destruction of others. He is obsessed by hatred at his knowledge that other persons exist besides himself and cannot rest until he has reduced them all to the status of things.

But it is not always easy to distinguish the worldly man from the criminal or the wicked man by observing their be­havior and its results. It can happen, for instance, that, despite his intention, a wicked man does good. Don John in Much Ado About Nothing certainly means nothing but harm to Claudio and Hero, yet it is thanks to him that Claudio obtains insight into his own shortcomings and becomes, what pre­viously he was not, a fit husband for Hero. To the outward eye, however different their subjective intentions, both Harry of Monmouth and Iago deceive and destroy. Even in their speech one cannot help noticing a certain resemblance be­tween

So when this loose behaviour I throw off And pay the debt I never promised, By how much better than my word I am. I'll so offend to make offence a skill Redeeming time when men least think I will.

and:

From when my outward action doth demonstrate The native act and figure of my heart In compliment extern, 'tis not long after But I will wear my heart upon my sleeve For daws to peck at. I am not what I am. . . .

and the contrast of both to Sonnet 12,1:

No, I am that I am; and they that level

At my abuses reckon up their own.

I may be straight though they themselves be bevel.

Falstaff is perfectly willing to tell the world: "I am that I am, a drunken old failure." Hal cannot jeopardize his career by such careless disclosure but must always assume whatever manner is politic at the moment. To the degree that we have worldly ambitions, Falstaff's verdict on the Prince strikes home.

Thou art essentially mad without seeming so.

Falstaff never really does anything, but he never stops talk­ing, so that the impression he makes on the audience is not of idleness but of infinite energy. He is never tired, never bored, and until he is rejected he radiates happiness as Hal radiates power, and this happiness without apparent cause, this untiring devotion to making others laugh becomes a comic image for a love which is absolutely self-giving.

Laughing and loving have certain properties in common. Laughter is contagious but not, like physical force, irresistible. A man in a passion of any kind cannot be made to laugh; if he laughs, it is a proof that he has already mastered his pas­sion. Laughter is an action only in a special sense. Many kinds of action can cause laughter, but the only kind of action that laughter causes is more laughter; while we laugh, time stops and no other kind of action can be contemplated. In rage or hysteria people sometimes are said to "laugh" but no one can confuse the noises they make with the sound of real laughter. Real laughter is absolutely unaggressive; we cannot wish people or things we find amusing to be other than they are; we do not desire them to change them, far less hurt or destroy them. An angry and dangerous mob is rendered harmless by the orator who can succeed in making it laugh. Real laughter is always, as we say, "disarming."