The Dyers Hand and Other Essays

Falstaff makes the same impression on us that the Sinner of Lublin made upon his rabbi.

In Lublin lived a great sinner. Whenever he went to talk to the rabbi, the rabbi readily consented and con­versed with him as if he were a man of integrity and one who was a close friend. Many of the hassidim were an­noyed at this and one said to the other: "Is it possible that our rabbi who has only to look once into a man's face to know his life from first to last, to know the very origin of his soul, does not see that this fellow is a sinner? And if he does see it, that he considers him worthy to speak to and associate with." Finally they summoned up courage to go to the rabbi himself with their ques­tion. He answered them: "I know all about him as well as you. But you know how I love gaiety and hate dejec­tion. And this man is so great a sinner. Others repent the moment they have sinned, are sorry for a moment, and then return to their folly. But he knows no regrets and no doldrums, and lives in his happiness as in a tower. And it is the radiance of his happiness that overwhelms my heart."

Falstaff's happiness is almost an impregnable tower, but not quite. "I am that I am" is not a complete self-description; he must also add—"The young prince hath misled me. I am the fellow with the great belly, and he is my dog."

The Christian God is not a self-sufficient being like Aris- tode's First Cause, but a God who creates a world which he continues to love although it refuses to love him in return. He appears in this world, not as Apollo or Aphrodite might appear, disguised as man so that no mortal should recognize his divinity, but as a real man who openly claims to be God.

And the consequence is inevitable. The highest religious and temporal authorities condemn Him as a blasphemer and a Lord of Misrule, as a Bad Companion for mankind. Inevitable because, as Richelieu said, "The salvation of States is in this world," and history has not as yet provided us with any evidence that the Prince of this world has changed his char­acter.

INTERLUDE: THE WISH GAME

Were some fanatic to learn the whole of Proust by heart, word for word, and then try reciting it to an audience in a drawing room after dinner, the chances are, I fancy, that within half an hour most of the audience would have fallen asleep, and their verdict upon Remembrance of Things Past would be that it was a boring and incomprehensible story. The difficulty of judging fairly a printed folk tale, still more a collection of tales* that were never intended to be grasped through the eye, is just as great. Our feeling for orally transmitted lit­erature is distorted by the peculiar nature of the only literature of this class that is still alive—for us the spoken tale is the un­printable tale—but it is possible, even in the smoking-room story, to perceive some of the characteristics common to all storytelling. To begin with, both the occasion of the telling and the voice and gestures of the teller are important elements in the effect; the story that has delighted us on one occasion may, in a different context and told by a different speaker, fail utterly to amuse. Then, the ear is much slower in compre­hending than the eye, far less avid of novelty, and far more appreciative of rhythmical repetition.

Folk tales have also suffered from certain preconceived ideas on the part of the general public. They are commonly thought of as being either entertainment for children or docu­ments for adult anthropologists and students of comparative religion. Children enjoy them, it is true, but that is no reason

* The Borzoi Book of French Folk Tales, edited by Paul Delarue.

why grownups, for whom they were primarily intended, should assume that they are childish. They undoubtedly con­tain elements drawn from ancient rituals and myths, but a knowledge of such things is no more essential to appreciating them than a knowledge of the reading and personal experience of a modern novelist is essential to enjoying his novels.

A religious rite is a serious matter, an act that must be done in exactly the right way in order to secure supernatural aid, without which the crops will fail and men die. A myth almost always contains playful elements, but it claims to answer a serious question—how did such-and-such come to be?—and to some degree or other demands to be believed. But a tale is to be told only if someone wishes to hear it, and the one question it presupposes is, "How are we to spend a pleasant evening?" As the soldier-narrator of "John-of-the-Bear" says:

I go through a forest where there is no woods, through a river where there is no water, through a village where there is no house. I knock at a door and everybody answers me. The more I tell you, the more I shall lie to you. I'm not paid to tell you the truth.

"The Doctor and His Pupil" contains a motif common to many folk tales—that of one character pursuing another through a series of magical metamorphoses. The hunted turns into a hare, whereupon the hunter turns into a dog, where­upon the hare becomes a lark, whereupon the dog becomes an eagle, and so on. The primal source of this idea is probably a ritual fertility dance in which the twelve months were symbolically mimed. In such a rite, if it existed, the symbolical animals would be fixed in number and kind and the worshipers would know in advance what they were, but a tale that makes use of the notion can use any beasts, and any number of them it pleases, provided that the pairs logically match. If the story­teller makes the hunted one a hare, he cannot make the hunter a donkey; if he wants the hunter to be a donkey, then he must make the hunted something like a carrot. The pleasure of the audience is that of suspense, pattern and surprise, so that at each transformation it wonders, "How will the hunted get out of that one?" Similarly, the motif of the Virgin and the Seven-Headed Dragon in "The Three Dogs and the Dragon" and "The Miller's Three Sons" may well be derived from the myth of Perseus and Andromeda, but there is no apparent attempt to relate these tales to any historical event or person. Questions of religion and history, however interesting and important, are not the business of the literary critic. He can only ask the questions he would ask of any work of literature, e.g., what kind of writing is this, as compared with other kinds? What are its special virtues and its special limitations? Judged by its own intentions, what makes one tale or one version of a tale better or worse than another?

One characteristic that clearly differentiates the fairy tale from other kinds of narrative is the nature of the fairy-tale hero. The epic hero is one who, thanks to his exceptional gifts, is able to perform great deeds of which the average man is incapable. He is of noble (often divine) descent, stronger, braver, better looking, more skillful than everybody else. A stranger meeting him in the street would immediately recog­nize him as a hero. Some of his adventures may be sexual, he may marry, but such matters are incidental to his main object, which is to win immortal fame. Even when he is transformed into the knight-errant in whose life the ladies play a great role, his honor is still more important than his love.

Like the epic hero, the fairy story hero performs great and seemingly impossible deeds, but there the resemblance ends. He may be by birth a prince, but, if so, he is, as it were, a prince of the first generation, for he never possesses, as the epic hero always does, a genealogical tree. More commonly, however, he is the child of poor parents and starts his life at the very bottom of the social scale. He is not recognizable as a hero except in the negative sense—that he is the one who to the outward eye appears, of all people, the least likely to succeed. Often he is a child, lacking even the strength and wit of the ordinary adult, and nearly always his relatives and neighbors consider him stupid and lacking in ambition. The virtue by which he succeeds when others fail is the very un- militant virtue of humble good nature. He is the one who stops to share his crust with the old beggar woman or free the trapped beast, thereby securing magical aid, when his proud and impatient rivals pass by and in consequence come to grief. The fairy-story world is purely Calvinist. That is to say, the hero's deeds cannot be called his; without magical assistance he would be totally helpless. Officially, he is a lover, not a warrior, who desires glory and treasure only in order that he may deserve the hand of the princess, but no fairy-story char­acter, either in speech or in behavior, shows real erotic feeling. We find neither outright sexual passion nor sentimental Frauendienst. Fairy-story "love" is not an emotion but a formal principle, one of the rules by which the story game is played. If the fairy-story hero differs from the epic hero in having no visible arete, he differs also from the hero of the modern novel in that he has no hidden qualities that are in time revealed. As a character, he is the same person at the end that he was at the beginning; all that has changed is his status. Nothing that happens to him can be called personally significant in the sense that, thanks to it, his awareness of himself is altered.

Since the characters in a fairy story are either good or bad, benevolent or malevolent—it is rare for a bad character to repent and unknown for a good one to become bad—they can­not be said to be tempted. There are occasions when the hero Cor heroine), though warned not to do something—not to pick up a wig or enter a particular room—ignores the warning and gets into trouble, but the prohibited act is never, in itself, immoral. There is only one fairy-tale motif, to my knowledge, that contains an element of inner conflict: the theme of Grimm's "Faithful John" and M. Delarue's "Father Roque- laure." The Prince's loyal servant leams by chance that, in order to save his master, he must do things which will appear to be evil, and that if he explains the reason he will be turned to stone. He does them and—under threat of death or because he cannot bear his master's displeasure—he tells and is turned to stone. The Prince then discovers that to restore his faithful servant he must sacrifice his own child.

In other kinds of fiction, the plot evolves through the clash between fate or chance on the one side and will and desire on the other; the fairy story is peculiar in that the main cause of any event is a wish. A desire is a real and given experience of a human individual in a particular historical context. I am not free to choose what desire I shall feel, nor can I choose the goal that will satisfy it; if the desire is real, it proposes its own satisfaction. When I desire, I know what I want. I am then free to choose either to remain in a state of unsatisfied desire by refusing to assent to its demands or to use my reason and will to satisfy it. A wish, on the other hand, is not given; I am free to wish anything I choose, but the cause of all wishes is the same—that which is should not be. If I say, "I desire to eat," I do not mean, "I desire not to be hungry," for if I were not hungry I should not desire to eat. When a scolded child says to a parent, "I wish you were dead," he does not mean what he actually says; he only means, "I wish I were not what I am, a child being scolded by you," and a hundred other wishes would have done equally well. If the young heir to the fortune of a disagreeable old aunt says, "I wish she were dead," he may really desire her death, but his wish does not express this desire; its real content is, "I wish that my conscience and the law did not, as they do, forbid murder." We can wish anything we choose precisely because all wishes are equally impossible, for all substitute an imaginary present for the real one. A world in which all wishes were magically granted would be a world without desire or will, for every moment of time would be disjunct and there would be no way of distinguishing between animate and inanimate beings, ani­mals and men.

Wishing is not the sole cause of events in the fairy tale but the license it is given prevents the fairy tale from arousing any strong emotions in the audience. This, however, is one of the peculiar pleasures the fairy story affords—that it can take images of beautiful maidens or cannibalistic ogres who, in our dreams, arouse violent emotions of desire or terror, or it can inflict horrible punishments on the wicked (like rolling them downhill in a barrel full of nails) which in real life would be acts of sadism, and make them all playful.

A game, of course, must have rules if it is not to be purely arbitrary and meaningless, and the characters in the fairy tale have a "fate" to which even their wishes must submit. They must obey, for instance, the laws of language. We can lie in language, that is to say, manipulate the world as we wish, but the lie must make sense as a grammatical proposition:

"What are you doing there, good woman?" he asked.

"I'd like to take some sunshine home, a whole wheel- barrowful, but it's difficult, for as soon as I get it in the shade it vanishes."

"What do you want a wheelbarrowful of sunshine for?"

"It's to warm my litde boy who is at home half dead from cold."

The other law, so often introduced in the fairy tale, which all must obey is the law of numerical series. The hero who is set three tasks cannot wish them into two or four.

It would be misleading to say that because the fairy tale world is a fantastic one, such literature is "escapist." A work may jusdy be condemned as escapist only if it claims to portray the real world when in fact its portrait is false. But the fairy story never pretends to be a picture of the real world, and even if its audience were to respond with the feeling, "How I wish we could live in this world instead of the world we have to live in" (and I very much doubt that any audience ever felt this way), it would always know that such a wish was impossible. The kind of enjoyment the fairy tale can provide is similar, I believe, to that provided by the poems of Mallarme or by abstract painting.

M. Delarue's collection of French folk tales includes versions of several stories that are also to be found in Grimm. A com­parison of the one with the other may help to show the qualities we look for in a folk tale and by which we judge it:

The Lost Children Hansel and Gretel In their respective openings, the German version is superior both in richness of detail and in dramatic suspense. The

French version lacks the conflict between the bad mother and the kind but weak father, and the children do not overhear their conversation, so the drama of the pebbles and the crumbs is lacking. The French children climb a tree, see a white house and a red house, and choose to go to the red house, which, of course, turns out to be the wrong choice, but we never learn what the white house is. This is a violation of one of the laws of storytelling, namely, that everything introduced must be accounted for. In the central part of the story, the French version replaces the witch in her edible house with the Devil and his wife on an ordinary farm, and the children succeed in killing the Devil's wife while he is taking a walk. There is a loss, perhaps, in beauty of imagery but a gain in character interest. In its conclusion, the French version is much superior. In the German version, Hansel and Gretel merely wander through the forest till they come to a river, which they are ferried across by a duck. The presence and nature of the duck are not explained, nor is any reason given why there should be a river between them and their home that they did not have to cross when they set out. But in the French version, the Devil pursues the runaways and his pursuit is punctuated by a ritual verse dialogue between him and those he meets. They all fool him and finally cause him to be drowned in a river that he is told the children have crossed, though in fact they have simply gone home.

The Godchild of the Fairy in the Tower Hapunzel In the German version, the witch learns about the Prince from the girl herself, in the French from a talking bitch she has left to keep watch on the girl, a variation that is more interesting and more logical. But the unhappy ending of the French version—the witch turns the girl into a frog and grows a pig's snout on the Prince—seems to me an artistic mistake. In the playful world of the fairy story, all problems, including that of moral justice, must be solved. When a fairy story ends unhappily, we do not feel that we have been told an un­pleasant truth; we merely feel that the story has been broken off in the middle.

The Story of Grandmother Little Red Riding Hood M. Delarue tells us in his notes that the Grimm story is largely derived from Perrault. The French oral version he prints is infinitely superior to either, and a model of what a folk tale should be:

There was once a woman who had some bread, and she said to her daughter: "You are going to carry a hot loaf and a bottle of milk to your grandmother."

The little girl departed. At the crossroads she met the hzou, who said to her: "Where are you going?"

"I'm taking a hot loaf and a botde of milk to my grand­mother."

"What road are you taking," said the hzou, "the Needles Road or the Pins Road?"

"The Needles Road," said the little girl.

"Well, I shall take the Pins Road."

The little girl enjoyed herself, picking up needles. Meanwhile the hzou arrived at her grandmother's, killed her, put some of her flesh in the pantry and a bottle of her blood on the shelf. The girl arrived and knocked at the door.

"Push the door," said the hzou, "it's closed with a wet straw."

"Hello, Grandmother; I'm bringing you a hot loaf and a botde of milk."

"Put them in the pantry. You eat the meat that's in it and drink a bottle of wine that is on the shelf."

As she ate there was a little cat that said: "A slut is she who eats the flesh and drinks the blood of her grand­mother!"

"Undress, my child," said the hzou, "and come and sleep beside me."

"Where should I put my apron?"

'Throw it in the fire, my child; you don't need it any more."

And she asked where to put all the other garments, the bodice, the dress, the skirt, and the hose, and the

wolf replied: "Throw them into the fire, my child; you will need them no more."

"Oh, Grandmother, how hairy you are!"

"It's to keep me warmer, my child."

"Oh, Grandmother, those long nails you have!"

"It's to scratch me better, my child."

"Oh, Grandmother, those big shoulders you have!"

"All the better to carry kindling from the woods, my child."

"Oh, Grandmother, those big ears you have!"

"All the better to hear with, my child."

"Oh, Grandmother, that big mouth you have!"

"All the better to eat you with, my child!"

"Oh, Grandmother, I need to go outside to relieve my­self."

"Do it in the bed, my child."

"No, Grandmother, I want to go outside."

"All right, but don't stay long."

The bzou tied a woollen thread to her feet and let her go out, and when the little girl was outside she tied the end of the string to a big plum tree in the yard. The hzou got impatient and said: "Are you making cables?"

When he became aware that no one answered him, he jumped out of bed and saw that the little girl had escaped. He followed her, but he arrived at the house just at the moment that she was safely inside.

BROTHERS & OTHERS

The possible redemption from the predicament of irreversibility—of being unable to undo what one has done—is the faculty of forgiving. The remedy for unpredictability, for the chaotic un­certainty of the future, is contained in the faculty to make and keep promises. Both faculties de­pend upon plurality, on the presence and acting of others, for no man can forgive himself and no one can be bound by a promise made only to himself.

hannah arendt

The England which Shakespeare presents in Richard II and Henry IV is a society in which wealth, that is to say, social power, is derived from ownership of land, not from accumu­lated capital. The only person who is in need of money is the King who must equip troops to defend the country against foreign foes. If, like Richard II, he is an unjust king, he spends the money which should have been spent on defense in main­taining a luxurious and superfluous court. Economically, the country is self-sufficient, and production is for use, not profit. The community-forming bond in this England is either the family tie of common blood which is given by nature or the feudal tie of lord and vassal created by personal oath. Both are commitments to individuals and both are lifelong commit­ments. But this type of community tie is presented as being ill suited to the needs of England as a functioning society. If England is to function properly as a society, the community based on personal loyalty must be converted into a community united by a common love of impersonal justice, that is to say, of the King's Law which is no respecter of persons. We are given to understand that in Edward Ill's day, this kind of community already existed, so that the family type of com­munity is seen as a regression. Centuries earlier, a war between Wessex and Mercia, for example, would have been regarded as legitimate as a war between England and France, but now a conflict between a Percy and a Bolingbroke is regarded as a civil war, illegitimate because between brothers. It is possible, therefore, to apply a medical analogy to England and speak of a sick body politic, because it is as obvious who are aliens and who ought to be brothers as it is obvious which cells belong to my body and which to the body of another. War, as such, is not condemned but is still considered, at least for the gentry, a normal and enjoyable occupation like farming. Indeed peace, as such, carries with it the pejorative associations of idleness and vice.

Now all the youth of England on fire And silken dalliance in the wardrobe lies. Now shrive the Armourers and Honour's thought Reigns solely in the breast of every man. They sell the pasture now to buy the horse.

The only merchants who appear in Henry TV are the "Bacon- fed Knaves and Fat Chuffs" whom Falstaff robs, and they are presented as contemptible physical cowards.

In The Merchant of Venice and Othello Shakespeare de­picts a very different kind of society. Venice does not produce anything itself, either raw materials or manufactured goods. Its existence depends upon the financial profits which can be made by international trade,

. . . the trade and profit of the city Consisteth of all nations

that is to say, on buying cheaply here and selling dearly there, and its wealth lies in its accumulated money capital. Money has ceased to be simply a convenient medium of exchange and has become a form of social power which can be gained or lost. Such a mercantile society is international and cosmopolitan; it does not distinguish between the brother and the alien other than on a basis of blood or religion—from the point of view of society, customers are brothers, trade rivals others. But Venice is not simply a mercantile society; it is also a city in­habited by various communities with different loves—Gentiles and Jews, for example—who do not regard each other per­sonally as brothers, but must tolerate each other's existence because both are indispensable to the proper functioning of their society, and this toleration is enforced by the laws of the Venetian state.

A change in the nature of wealth from landownership to money capital radically alters the social conception of time. The wealth produced by land may vary from year to year— there are good harvests and bad—but, in the long run its average yield may be counted upon. Land, barring disposses­sion by an invader or confiscation by the State, is held by a family in perpetuity. In consequence, the social conception of time in a landowning society is cyclical—the future is expected to be a repetition of the past. But in a mercantile society time is conceived of as unilinear forward movement in which the future is always novel and unpredictable. (The unpredictable event in a landowning society is an Act of God, that is to say, it is not "natural" for an event to be unpredictable.) The mer­chant is constandy taking risks—if he is lucky, he may make a fortune, if he is unlucky he may lose everything. Since, in a mercantile society, social power is derived from money, the distribution of power within it is constandy changing, which has the effect of weakening reverence for the past; who one's distant ancestors were soon ceases to be of much social im­portance. The oath of lifelong loyalty is replaced by the con­tract which binds its signatories to fulfill certain specific promises by a certain specific future date, after which their commitment to each other is over.

The action of The Merchant of Venice takes place in two locations, Venice and Belmont, which are so different in char­acter that to produce the play in a manner which will not blur this contrast and yet preserve a unity is very difficult. If the spirit of Belmont is made too predominant, then Antonio and Shylock will seem irrelevant, and vice versa. In Henry IV, Shakespeare intrudes Falstaff, who by nature belongs to the world of opera huffa, into the historical world of political chronicle with which his existence is incompatible, and thereby, consciously or unconsciously, achieves the effect of calling in question the values of military glory and temporal justice as embodied in Henry of Monmouth. In The Merchant of Venice he gives us a similar contrast—the romantic fairy story world of Belmont is incompatible with the historical reality of money-making Venice—but this time what is called in question is the claim of Belmont to be the Great Good Place, the Earthly Paradise. Watching Henry IV, we become convinced that our aesthetic sympathy with Falstaff is a pro- founder vision than our ethical judgment which must side with Hal. Watching The Merchant of Venice, on the other hand, we are compelled to acknowledge that the attraction which we naturally feel towards Belmont is highly question­able. On that account, I think The Merchant of Venice must be classed among Shakespeare's "Unpleasant Plays."

Omit Antonio and Shylock, and the play becomes a romantic fairy tale like A Midsummer Night's Dream. The world of the fairy tale is an unambiguous, unproblematic world in which there is no contradiction between outward appearance and inner reality, a world of being, not becoming. A character may be temporarily disguised—the unlovely animal is really the Prince Charming under a spell, the hideous old witch transforms herself into a lovely young girl to tempt the hero— but this is a mask, not a contradiction: the Prince is really handsome, the witch really hideous. A fairy story character may sometimes change, but, if so, the change is like a muta­tion; at one moment he or she is this kind of person, at the next he is transformed into that kind. It is a world in which people are either good or had by nature; occasionally a had character repents, but a good character never becomes bad. It is meaningless therefore to ask why a character in a fairy tale acts as he does because his nature will only allow him to act in one way. It is a world in which, ultimately, good fortune is the sign of moral goodness, ill fortune of moral badness. The good are beautiful, rich and speak with felicity, the bad are ugly, poor and speak crudely.

In real life we can distinguish between two kinds of choice, the strategic and the personal. A strategic choice is conditioned by a future goal which is already known to the chooser. I wish to catch a certain train which will be leaving in ten minutes. I can either go by subway or take a taxi. It is the rush hour, so I have to decide which I believe will get me sooner to the station. My choice may turn out to be mistaken, but neither I nor an observer will have any difficulty in understanding the choice I make. But now and again, I take a decision which is based, not on any calculation of its future consequences, for I cannot tell what they will be, but upon my immediate convic­tion that, whatever the consequences, I must do this now. How­ever well I know myself, I can never understand completely why I take such a decision, and to others it will always seem mysterious. The traditional symbol in Western Literature for this kind of personal choice is the phenomenon of falling-in-love. But in the fairy-tale world, what appear to be the personal choices of the characters are really the strategic choices of the storyteller, for within the tale the future is predestined. We watch Portia's suitors choosing their casket, but we know in advance that Morocco and Arragon cannot choose the right •one and that Bessanio cannot choose the wrong one, and we know this, not only from what we know of their characters but also from their ordinal position in a series, for the fairy-tale ■world is ruled by magical numbers. Lovers are common •enough in fairy tales, but love appears as a pattern-forming principle rather than sexual passion as we experience it in the historical world. The fairy tale cannot tolerate intense emotions of any kind, because any intense emotion has tragic possibilities, and even the possibility of tragedy is excluded from the fairy tale. It is possible to imagine the serious passion of Romeo and Juliet having a happy ending instead of a tragic one, but it is impossible to imagine either of them in Oberon's Wood or the Forest of Arden.

The fairy tale is hospitable to black magicians as well as to white; ogres, witches, bogeys are constandy encountered who have their temporary victories but in the end are always van­quished by the good and banished, leaving Arcadia to its un­sullied innocent joy where the good live happily ever after. But the malevolence of a wicked character in a fairy tale is a given premise; their victims, that is to say, never bear any responsibility for the malice, have never done the malevolent one an injury. The Devil, by definition malevolent without a cause, is presented in the medieval miracle plays as a fairy- story bogey, never victorious but predestined to be cheated of his prey.

Recent history has made it utterly impossible for the most unsophisticated and ignorant audience to ignore the historical reality of the Jews and think of them as fairy-story bogeys with huge noses and red wigs. An Elizabethan audience undoubt­edly still could—very few of them had seen a Jew—and, if Shakespeare had so wished, he could have made Shylock grotesquely wicked like the Jew of Malta. The star actors who, from die eighteenth century onwards have chosen to play the role, have not done so out of a sense of moral duty in order to combat anti-Semitism, but because their theatrical instinct told them that the part, played seriously, not comically, offered them great possibilities.

The Merchant of Venice is, among other things, as much a "problem" play as one by Ibsen or Shaw. The question of the immorality or morality of usury was a sixteenth century issue on which both the theologians and the secular authorities were divided. Though the majority of medieval theologians had con­demned usury, there had been, from the beginning, divergence of opinion as to the correct interpretation of Deuteronomy, XXIII, w 19-20:

Thou shalt not lend upon usury to thy brother; usury of

money, usury of victuals, usury of any thing that is lent

upon usury: Unto a stranger thou mayest lend upon usury

and Leviticus XXV, w 35-37 which proscribe the talcing of usury, not only from a fellow Jew, but also from the stranger living in their midst and under their protection.

Some Christian theologians had interpreted this to mean that, since the Christians had replaced the Jews as God's Chosen, they were entitled to exact usury from non-Chris- tians.¹

Who is your brother? He is your sharer in nature, co-heir in grace, every people, which, first, is in the faith, then under the Roman Law. Who, then, is the stranger? the foes of God's people. From him, demand usury whom you rightly desire to harm, against whom weapons are lawfully carried. Upon him usury is legally imposed. Where there is the right of war, there also is the right of usury, (st. Ambrose.)

Several centuries later, St. Bernard of Siena, in a statement of which the sanctity seems as doubtful as the logic, takes St. Ambrose's argument even further.

Temporal goods are given to men for the worship of the true God and the Lord of the Universe. When, there­fore, the worship of God does not exist, as in the case of God's enemies, usury is lawfully exacted, because this is not done for the sake of gain, but for the sake of the Faith; and the motive is brotherly love, namely, that God's enemies may be weakened and so return to Him; and further because the goods they have do not belong to them, since they are rebels against the true faith; they shall therefore devolve upon the Christians.

The majority, however, starting from the Gospel, command that we are to treat all men, even our enemies, as brothers, held that the Deuteronomic permission was no longer valid, so that under no circumstances was usury permissible. Thus,

^XN.B. For the quotations which follow, I am indebted to Benjamin Nelson's fascinating book The Idea of Usury, Princeton University Press.

St. Thomas Aquinas, who was also, no doubt, influenced by Aristotle's condemnation of usury, says:

The Jews were forbidden to take usury from their brethren, i.e., from others Jews. By this we are given to understand that to take usury from any man is simply evil, because we ought to treat every man as our neighbor and brother, especially in the state of the Gospel whereto we are called. They were permitted, however, to take usury from foreigners, not as though it were lawful, but in order to avoid a greater evil, lest to wit, through avarice to which they were prone, according to Isaiah LVI, VII, they should take usury from Jews, who were worshippers of God.

On the Jewish side, talmudic scholars had some interesting interpretations. Rashi held that the Jewish debtor is forbidden to pay interest to a fellow Jew, but he may pay interest to a Gentile. Maimonides, who was anxious to prevent Jews from being tempted into idolatry by associating with Gentiles, held that a Jew might borrow at usury from a Gentile, but should not make loans to one, on the ground that debtors are generally anxious to avoid their creditors, but creditors are obliged to seek the company of debtors.

Had Shakespeare wished to show Shylock the usurer in the most unfavorable light possible, he could have placed him in a medieval agricultural society, where men become debtors through misfortunes, like a bad harvest or sickness for which they are not responsible, but he places him in a mercantile society, where the role played by money is a very different one.

When Antonio says:

I neither lend nor borrow By taking or by giving of excess

he does not mean that, if he goes into partnership with an­other merchant contributing, say, a thousand ducats to their venture, and their venture makes a profit, he only asks for a thousand ducats back. He is a merchant and the Aristotelian argument that money is barren and cannot breed money, which he advances to Shylock, is invalid in his own case.

This change in the role of money had already been recog­nized by both Catholic and Protestant theologians. Calvin, for example, had come to the conclusion that the Deuteronomic injunction had been designed to meet a particular political situation which no longer existed.

The law of Moses is political and does not obligate us beyond what equity and the reason of humanity suggest. There is a difference in the political union, for the situa­tion in which God placed the Jews and many circum­stances permitted them to trade conveniendy among themselves without usuries. Our union is entirely differ­ent. Therefore I do not feel that usuries are forbidden to us simply, except in so far as they are opposed to equity and charity.

The condemnation of usury by Western Christendom cannot be understood except in relation to the severity of its legal attitude, inherited from Roman Law, towards the defaulting debtor. The pound of flesh story has a basis in historical fact for, according to the Law of the Twelve Tables, a defaulting debtor could be torn to pieces alive. In many medieval con­tracts the borrower agreed, in the case of default, to pay double the amount of the loan as a forfeit, and imprisonment for debt continued into the nineteenth century. It was possible to consider interest on a loan immoral because the defaulting debtor was regarded as a criminal, that is to say, an exception to the human norm, so that lending was thought of as nor­mally entailing no risk. One motive which led the theologians of the sixteenth century to modify the traditional theories about usury and to regard it as a necessary social evil rather than as a mortal sin was their fear of social revolution and the teachings of the Anabaptists and other radical Utopians. These, starting from the same premise of Universal Brother­hood which had been the traditional ground for condemning usury, drew the conclusion that private property was unchris­tian, that Christians should share all their goods in common, so that the relation of creditor to debtor would be abolished. Thus, Luther, who at first had accused Catholic theologians of being lax towards the sin of usury, by 1524, was giving this advice to Prince Frederick of Saxony:

It is highly necessary that the taking of interest should be regulated everywhere, but to abolish it entirely would not be right either, for it can be made just. I do not advise your Grace, however, to support people in their refusal to pay interest or to prevent them from paying it, for it is not a burden laid upon people by a Prince in his law, but it is a common plague that all have taken upon themselves. We must put up with it, therefore, and hold debtors to it and not let them spare themselves and seek a remedy of their own, but put them on a level with everybody else, as love requires.

Shylock is a Jew living in a predominandy Christian society, just as Othello is a Negro living in a predominandy white society. But, unlike Othello, Shylock rejects the Christian community as firmly as it rejects him. Shylock and Antonio are at one in refusing to acknowledge a common brotherhood.

I will buy with you, sell with you, talk with you, walk with you, and so following, but I will not eat with you, drink with you, nor pray with you. (Shylock.)

I am as like

To spit on thee again, to spurn thee, too.

If thou wilt lend this money, lend it not

As to thy friends . . .

But lend it rather to thine enemy,

Who if he break, thou mayst with better face

Exact the penalty. (Antonio.)

In addition, unlike Othello, whose profession of arms is socially honorable, Shylock is a professional usurer who, like a prosti­tute, has a social function but is an outcast from the com­munity. But, in the play, he acts unprofessionally; he refuses to charge Antonio interest and insists upon malting their legal relation that of debtor and creditor, a relation acknowledged as legal by all societies. Several critics have pointed to analogies between the trial scene and the medieval Processus Belial in which Our Lady defends man against the prosecuting Devil who claims the legal right to man's soul. The Roman doctrine of the Atonement presupposes that the debtor de­serves no mercy—Christ may substitute Himself for man, but the debt has to be paid by death on the cross. The Devil is defeated, not because he has no right to demand a penalty, but because he does not know that the penalty has been already suffered. But the differences between Shylock and Belial are as important as their similarities. The comic Devil of the mystery play can appeal to logic, to the letter of the law, but he cannot appeal to the heart or to the imagination, and Shakespeare allows Shylock to do both. In his "Hath not a Jew eyes . . ." speech in Act III, Scene I, he is permitted to appeal to the sense of human brotherhood, and in the trial scene, he is allowed to argue, with a sly appeal to the fear a merchant class has of radical social revolution:

You have among you many a purchased slave

Which, like your asses and your dogs and mules,

You use in abject and in slavish parts,

which points out that those who preach mercy and brother­hood as universal obligations limit them in practice and are prepared to treat certain classes of human beings as things.

Furthermore, while Belial is malevolent without any cause except love of malevolence for its own sake, Shylock is pre­sented as a particular individual living in a particular kind of society at a particular time in history. Usury, like prostitution, may corrupt the character, but those who borrow upon usury, like those who visit brothels, have their share of responsibility for this corruption and aggravate their guilt by showing con­tempt for those whose services they make use of.

It is, surely, in order to emphasize this point that, in the trial scene, Shakespeare introduces an element which is not found in Pecorone or other versions of the pound-of-flesh- story. After Portia has trapped Shylock through his own insistence upon the letter of the law of Contract, she produces another law by which any alien who conspires against the life of a Venetian citizen forfeits his goods and places his life at the Doge's mercy. Even in the rush of a stage per­formance, the audience cannot help reflecting that a man as interested in legal subdeties as Shylock, would, surely, have been aware of the existence of this law and that, if by any chance he had overlooked it, the Doge surely would very soon have drawn his attention to it. Shakespeare, it seems to me, was willing to introduce what is an absurd implausi- bility for the sake of an effect which he could not secure without it: at the last moment when, through his conduct, Shylock has destroyed any sympathy we may have felt for him earlier, we are reminded that, irrespective of his personal character, his status is one of inferiority. A Jew is not regarded, even in law, as a brother.

If the wicked Shylock cannot enter the fairy story world of Belmont, neither can the noble Antonio, though his friend, Bassanio, can. In the fairy story world, the symbol of final peace and concord is marriage, so that, if the story is concerned with the adventures of two friends of the same sex, male or female, it must end with a double wedding. Had he wished, Shakespeare could have followed the Pecorone story in which it is Ansaldo, not Gratiano, who marries the equivalent of Nerissa. Instead, he portrays Antonio as a melancholic who is incapable of loving a woman. He deliberately avoids the classical formula of the Perfect Friends by making the rela­tionship unequal. When Salanio says of Antonio's feelings for Bassanio

I think he only loves the world for him

we believe it, but no one would say that Bassanio's affec­tions are equally exclusive. Bassanio, high-spirited, elegant, pleasure-loving, belongs to the same world as Gratiano and Lorenzo; Antonio does not. When he says:

I hold the world but as the world, Gratiano,

A stage, where everyman must play a part,

And mine a sad one

Gratiano may accuse him oЈ putting on an act, but we believe him, just as it does not seem merely the expression oЈ a noble spirit oЈ self-sacrifice when he tells Bassanio:

I am a tainted wether of the flock, Meetest for death; the weakest kind of fruit Drops earliest to the ground, and so let me.

It is well known that love and understanding breed love and understanding.

The more people on high who comprehend each other, the more there are to love well, and the more love is there, and like a mirror, one giveth back to the other.

CPurgatorio, xv.)

So, with the rise of a mercantile economy in which money breeds money, it became an amusing paradox for poets to use the ignoble activity of usury as a metaphor for love, the most noble of human activities. Thus, in his Sonnets, Shakespeare uses usury as an image for the married love which begets children.

Profitless usurer, why does thou use

So great a sum of sums, yet canst not live?

For having traffic with thyself alone

Thou of thyself they sweet self dost deceive.

(Sonnet rv.)

That use is not forbidden usury Which happies those that pay the willing loan, That's for thyself, to breed another thee, Or ten times happier, be it ten for one.

CvO

And, even more relevant, perhaps, to Antonio are the lines

But since she pricked thee out for women's pleasure Mine be thy love, and thy love's use their treasure.

Cxxxin.)

There is no reason to suppose that Shakespeare had read Dante, but he must have been familiar with the association of usury with sodomy of which Dante speaks in the Ninth Canto of the Inferno.

It behoves man to gain his bread and to prosper. And because the usurer takes another way, he contemns Nature in herself and her followers, placing elsewhere his hope .... And hence the smallest round seals wdth its mark Sodom and the Cahors ....

It can, therefore, hardly be an accident that Shylock the usurer has as his antagonist a man whose emotional life, though his conduct may be chaste, is concentrated upon a member of his own sex.

In any case, the fact that Bassanio's feelings are so much less intense makes Antonio's seem an example of that inor­dinate affection which theologians have always condemned as a form of idolatry, a putting of the creature before the creator. In the sixteenth century, suretyship, like usury, was a contro­versial issue. The worldly-wise condemned the standing surety for another on worldly grounds.

Beware of standing suretyship for thy best friends; he that payeth another man's debts seeketh his own decay: neither borrow money of a neighbour or a friend, but of a stranger, (lord burghley.)

Suffer not thyself to be wounded for other men's faults, or scourged for other men's offences, which is the surety for another: for thereby, millions of men have been beggared and destroyed. . . . from suretyship as from a manslayer or enchanter, bless thyself.

(sir walter raleigh.)

And clerics like Luther condemned it on theological grounds.

Of his life and property a man is not certain for a single moment, any more than he is certain of the man for whom he becomes surety. Therefore the man who becomes surety acts unchristian like and deserves what he gets, because he pledges and promises what is not his and not in his power, but in the hands of God alone. . . . These sureties act as though their life and property were their own and were in their power as long as they wished to have it; and this is nothing but the fruit of unbelief. ... If there were no more of this becoming surety, many a man would have to keep down and be satisfied with a moderate living, who now aspires night and day after high places, relying on borrowing and standing surety.

The last sentence of this passage applies very well to Bassanio. In Pecorone, the Lady of Belmonte is a kind of witch and Gianetto gets into financial difficulties because he is the victim of magic, a fate which is never regarded as the victim's fault. But Bassanio had often borrowed money from Antonio before he ever considered wooing Portia and was in debt, not through magic or unforeseeable misfortune, but through his own extravagances,

'Tis not unknown to you, Antonio, How much I have disabled my estate By something showing a more swelling port Than my faint means would grant continuance

and we feel that Antonio's continual generosity has encour­aged Bassanio in his spendthrift habits. Bassanio seems to be one of those people whose attitude towards money is that of a child; it will somehow always appear by magic when really needed. Though Bassanio is aware of Shylock's malevo­lence, he makes no serious effort to dissuade Antonio from signing the bond because, thanks to the ever-open purse of his friend, he cannot believe that bankruptcy is a real possibility in life.

Shylock is a miser and Antonio is openhanded with his money; nevertheless, as a merchant, Antonio is equally a member of an acquisitive society. He is trading with Tripoli, the Indies, Mexico, England, and when Salanio imagines him­self in Antonio's place, he describes a possible shipwreck thus:

. . . the rocks Scatter all her spices on the stream, Enrobe the roaring waters with my silks.

The commodities, that is to say, in which the Venetian merchant deals are not necessities but luxury goods, the con­sumption of which is governed not by physical need but by psychological values like social prestige, so that there can be no question of a Just Price. Then, as regards his own expendi­ture, Antonio is, like Shylock, a sober merchant who practices economic abstinence. Both of them avoid the carnal music of this world. Shylock's attitude towards the Masquers

Lock up my doors and when you hear the drum And the vile squeaking of the wry-necked fife Clamber not you up the casement then, Let not the sound of shallow foppery enter My sober house

finds an echo in Antonio's words a scene later:

Fie, fie, Gratiano. Where are all the rest? Tis nine o'clock: our friends all stay for you. No masque to-night—the wind is come about.

Neither of them is capable of enjoying the carefree happiness for which Belmont stands. In a production of the play, a stage director is faced with the awkward problem of what to do with Antonio in the last act. Shylock, the villain, has been vanquished and will trouble Arcadia no more, but, now that Bassanio is getting married, Antonio, the real hero of the play, has no further dramatic function. According to the Arden edition, when Alan McKinnon produced the play at the Garrick theatre in 1905, he had Antonio and Bassanio hold the stage at the final curtain, but I cannot picture Portia, who is certainly no Victorian doormat of a wife, allowing her bridegroom to let her enter the house by herself. If Antonio is not to fade away into a nonentity, then the married couples must enter the lighted house and leave Antonio standing alone on the darkened stage, outside the Eden from which, not by the choice of others, but by his own nature, he is excluded.

Without the Venice scenes, Belmont would be an Arcadia without any relation to actual times and places, and where, therefore, money and sexual love have no reality of their own, but are symbolic signs for a community in a state of grace. But Belmont is related to Venice though their existences are not really compatible with each other. This incompatibility is brought out in a fascinating way by the difference between Belmont time and Venice time. Though we are not told exactly how long the period is before Shylock's loan must be repaid, we know that it is more than a month. Yet Bassanio goes off to Belmont immediately, submits immediately on arrival to the test of the caskets, and has just triumphantly passed it when Antonio's letter arrives to inform him that Shylock is about to take him to court and claim his pound of flesh. Bel­mont, in fact, is like one of those enchanted palaces where time stands still. But because we are made aware of Venice, the real city, where time is real, Belmont becomes a real society to be judged by the same standards we apply to any other kind of society. Because of Shylock and Antonio, Portia's inherited fortune becomes real money which must have been made in this world, as all fortunes are made, by toil, anxiety, the enduring and inflicting of suffering. Portia we can admire because, having seen her leave her Earthly Paradise to do a good deed in this world (one notices, incidentally, that in this world she appears in disguise), we know that she is aware of her wealth as a moral responsibility, but the other inhabitants of Belmont, Bassanio, Gratiano, Lorenzo and Jessica, for all their beauty and charm, appear as frivolous members of a leisure class, whose carefree life is parasitic upon the labors of others, including usurers. When we learn that Jessica has spent fourscore ducats of her father's money in an evening and bought a monkey with her mother's ring, we cannot take this as a comic punishment for Shylock's sin of avarice; her behavior seems rather an example of the opposite sin of conspicuous waste. Then, with, the example in our minds of self-sacrificing love as displayed by Antonio, while we can enjoy the verbal felicity of the love duet between Lorenzo and Jessica, we cannot help noticing that the pairs of lovers they recall, Troilus and Cressida, Aeneas and Dido, Jason and Medea, are none of them examples of self-sacrifice or fidelity. Recalling that the inscription on the leaden casket ran, "Who chooseth me, must give and hazard all he hath," it occurs to us that we have seen two characters do this. Shy­lock, however unintentionally, did, in fact, hazard all for the sake of destroying the enemy he hated, and Antonio, how­ever unthinkingly he signed the bond, hazarded all to secure the happiness of the friend he loved. Yet it is precisely these two who cannot enter Belmont. Belmont would like to believe that men and women are either good or bad by nature, but Shylock and Antonio remind us that this is an illusion: in the real world, no hatred is totally without justification, no love totally innocent.

As a society, Venice is more efficient and successful than Henry IV's England. Its citizens are better off, more secure and nicer mannered. Politically speaking, therefore, one may say that a mercantile society represents an advance upon a feudal society, as a feudal society represents an advance upon a tribal society. But every step forward brings with it its own dangers and evils for, the more advanced the social organiza­tion, the greater the moral demands it makes upon its members and the greater the degree of guilt which they incur if they fail to meet these demands. The members of a society with a primitive self-sufficient economy can think of those outside it as others, not brothers, with a good conscience, because they can get along by themselves. But, first, money and, then, machinery have created a world in which, irrespective of our cultural traditions and our religious or political convictions, we are all mutually dependent. This demands that we accept all other human beings on earth as brothers, not only in law, but also in our hearts. Our temptation, of course, is to do just the opposite, not to return to tribal loyalties—that is impos­sible—but, each of us, to regard everybody else on earth not even as an enemy, but as a faceless algebraical cipher.

They laid the coins before the council.

Kay, the king's steward, wise in economics, said:

"Good; these cover the years and the miles

and talk one style's dialects to London and Omsk.

Traffic can hold now and treasure be held,

streams are bridged and mountains of ridged space

tunnelled; gold dances deftly over frontiers.

The poor have choice of purchase, the rich of rents,

and events move now in a smoother control

than the swords of lords or the orisons of nuns.

Money is the medium of exchange."

Taliessin's look darkened; his hand shook while he touched the dragons; he said "We had a good thought.

Sir, if you made verse, you would doubt symbols. I am afraid of the little loosed dragons. When the means are autonomous, they are deadly; when words

escape from verse they hurry to rape souls; when sensation slips from intellect, expect the tyrant; the brood of carriers levels the good they carry. We have taught our images to be free; are ye glad? are we glad to have brought convenient heresy to Logres?"

The Archbishop answered the lords; his words went up through a slope of calm air: "Might may take symbols and folly make treasure, and greed bid God, who hides himself for man's pleasure by occasion, hide himself essentially: this abides— that the everlasting house the soul discovers is always another's; we must lose our own ends; we must always live in the habitation of our lovers, my friend's shelter for me, mine for him. This is the way of this world in the day of that other's; make yourselves friends by means of the riches of iniquity,

for the wealth of the self is the health of the self ex­changed.

What saith Heraclitus?—and what is the City's breath?— dying each other's life, living each other's death. Money is a medium of exchange."

(chabxes Williams, Taliessin through Logres

INTERLUDE: WEST'S DISEASE

Nathanael West is not, strictly speaking, a novelist; that is to say, he does not attempt an accurate description either of the social scene or of the subjective life of the mind. For his first book, he adopted the dream convention, but neither the incidents nor the language are credible as a transcription of a real dream. For his other three, he adopted the convention of a social narrative; his characters need real food, drink and money, and live in recognizable places like New York or Hollywood, but, taken as feigned history, they are absurd. Newspapers do, certainly, have Miss Lonelyhearts columns; but in real life these are written by sensible, not very sensitive, people who conscientiously give the best advice they can, but do not take the woes of their correspondents home with them from the office, people, in fact, like Betty of whom Mr. West's hero says scornfully:

Her world was not the world and could never include the readers of his column. Her sureness was based on the power to limit experience arbitrarily. Moreover, his con­fusion was significant, while her order was not.

On Mr. West's paper, the column is entrusted to a man the walls of whose room

were bare except for an ivory Christ that hung opposite the foot of the bed. He had removed the figure from the cross to which it had been fastened and had nailed it to the walls with large spikes.... As a boy in his father's church, he had discovered that something stirred in him when he shouted the name of Christ, something secret and enormously powerful. He had played with this thing, but had never allowed it to come alive. He knew now what this thing was—hysteria, a snake whose scales were tiny mirrors in which the dead world takes on a semblance of life, and how dead the world is ... a world of doorknobs.

It is impossible to believe that such a character would ever apply for a Miss Lonelyhearts job (in the hope, apparently, of using it as a stepping-stone to a gossip column), or that, if by freak chance he did, any editor would hire him.

Again, the occupational vice of the editors one meets is an overestimation of the social and moral value of what a newspaper does. Mr. West's editor, Shrike, is a Mephisto who spends all his time exposing to his employees the meaning- lessness of journalism:

Miss Lonelyhearts, my friend, I advise you to give your readers stones. When they ask for bread don't give them crackers as does the Church, and don't, like the State, tell them to eat cake. Explain that man cannot live by bread alone and give them stones. Teach them to pray each morning: 'Give us this day our daily stone.'

Such a man, surely, would not be a Feature Editor long.

A writer may concern himself with a very limited area of life and still convince us that he is describing the real world, but one becomes suspicious when, as in West's case, whatever world he claims to be describing, the dream life of a highbrow, lowbrow existence in Hollywood, or the Amer­ican political scene, all these worlds share the same peculiar traits—no married couples have children, no child has more than one parent, a high percentage of the inhabitants are cripples, and the only kind of personal relation is the sado­masochistic.

There is, too, a curious resemblance among the endings of his four books.

His body broke free of the bard. It took on a life of its own; a life that knew nothing of the poet Balso. Only to death can this release be likened—the mechanics of decay. After death the body takes command; it performs the manual of disintegration with a marvelous certainty. So now, his body performed the evolutions of love with a like sureness. In this activity, Home and Duty, Love and Art were forgotten. . . . His body screamed and shouted as it marched and uncoiled; then with one heav­ing shout of triumph, it fell back quiet.

He was running to succor them with love. The cripple turned to escape, but he was too slow and Miss Lonely- hearts caught him. . . . The gun inside the package exploded and Miss Lonelyhearts fell, dragging the cripple with him. They both rolled part of the way down stairs.

'I am a clown,' he began, 'but there are times when even clowns must grow serious. This is such a time. I . . .' Lem got no further. A shot rang out and he fell dead, drilled through the heart by an assassin's bullet.

He was carried through the exit to the back street and lifted into a police car. The siren began to scream and at first he thought he was making the noise himself. He felt his lips with his hands. They were clamped tight. He knew then it was the siren. For some reason this made him laugh and he began to imitate the siren as loud as he could.

An orgasm, two sudden deaths by violence, a surrender to madness, are presented by West as different means for secur­ing the same and desirable end, escape from the conscious Ego and its make-believe. Consciousness, it would seem, does not mean freedom to choose, but freedom to play a fantastic role, an unreality from which a man can only be delivered by some physical or mental explosion outside his voluntary con­trol.

There are many admirable and extremely funny satirical passages in his books, but West is not a satirist. Satire pre­supposes conscience and reason as the judges between the true and the false, the moral and the immoral, to which it appeals, but for West these faculties are themselves the creators of unreality.

His books should, I think, be classified as Cautionary Tales, parables about a Kingdom of Hell whose ruler is not so much the Father of Lies as the Father of Wishes. Shakespeare gives a glimpse of this hell in Hamlet, and Dostoievsky has a lengthy description in Notes from the Underground, but they were interested in many hells and heavens. Compared with them, West has the advantages and disadvantages of the specialist who knows everything about one disease and nothing about any other. He was a sophisticated and highly skilled literary craftsman, but what gives all his books such a power­ful and disturbing fascination, even A Cool Million, which must, I think, be judged a failure, owes nothing to calculation. West's descriptions of Inferno have the authenticity of first­hand experience: he has certainly been there, and the reader has the uncomfortable feeling that his was not a short visit.

All his main characters suffer from the same spiritual dis­ease which, in honor of the man who devoted his life to studying it, we may call West's Disease. This is a disease of consciousness which renders it incapable of converting wishes into desires. A lie is false; what it asserts is not the case. A wish is fantastic; it knows what is the case but refuses to accept it. All wishes, whatever their apparent content, have the same and unvarying meaning: "I refuse to be what I am." A wish, therefore, is either innocent and frivolous, a kind of play, or a serious expression of guilt and despair, a hatred of oneself and every being one holds responsible for oneself.

Our subconscious life is a world ruled by wish but, since it is not a world of action, this is harmless; even nightmare is playful, but it is the task of consciousness to translate wish into desire. If, for whatever reason, self-hatred or self-pity, it fails to do this, it dooms a human being to a peculiar and horrid fate. To begin with, he cannot desire anything, for the present state of the self is the ground of every desire, and that is precisely what the wisher rejects. Nor can he believe anything, for a

wish is not a belief; whatever he wishes he cannot help know­ing that he could have wished something else. At first he may be content with switching from one wish to another:

She would get some music on the radio, then lie down on her bed and shut her eyes. She had a large assortment of stories to choose from. After getting herself in the right mood, she would go over them in her mind as though they were a pack of cards, discarding one after another until she found one that suited. On some days she would run through the whole pack without making a choice. When that happened, she would either go down to Fine Street for an ice-cream soda or, if she were broke, thumb over the pack again and force herself to choose.

While she admitted that her method was too mechani­cal for the best results and that it was better to slip into a dream naturally, she said that any dream was better than none and beggars couldn't be choosers.

But in time, this ceases to amuse, and the wisher is left with the despair which is the cause of all of them:

WTien not keeping house, he sat in the back yard, called the patio by the real estate agent, in a broken down deck chair. In one of the closets he had found a tattered book and he held it in his lap without looking at it. There was a much better view to be had in any direction other than the one he faced. By moving his chair in a quarter circle he could have seen a large part of the canyon twisting down to the city below. He never thought of making this shift. From where he sat, he saw the closed door of the garage and a patch of its shabby, tarpaper roof.

A sufferer from West's Disease is not selfish but absolutely self-centered. A selfish man is one who satisfies his desires at other people's expense; for this reason, he tries to see what others are really like and often sees them extremely accurately in order that he may make use of them. But, to the self- centered man, other people only exist as images either of what

he is or of what he is not, his feelings towards them are pro­jections of the pity or the hatred he feels for himself and any­thing he does to them is really done to himself. Hence the inconsistent and unpredictable behavior of a sufferer from West's Disease: he may kiss your feet one moment and kick you in the jaw the next and, if you were to ask him why, he could not tell you.

In its final stages, the disease reduces itself to a craving for violent physical pain—this craving, unfortunately, can be projected onto others—for only violent pain can put an end to wishing for something and produce the real wish of neces­sity, the cry "Stop!"

All West's books contain cripples. A cripple is unfortunate and his misfortune is both singular and incurable. Hunch­backs, girls without noses, dwarfs, etc., are not sufficiently common in real life to appear as members of an unfortunate class, like the very poor. Each one makes the impression of a unique case. Further, the nature of the misfortune, a physical deformity, makes the victim repellent to the senses of the typical and normal, and there is nothing the cripple or others can do to change his condition. What attitude towards his own body can he have then but hatred? As used by West, the cripple is, I believe, a symbolic projection of the state of wish­ful self-despair, the state of those who will not accept them­selves in order to change themselves into what they would or should become, and justify their refusal by thinking that being what they are is uniquely horrible and uncurable. To look at, Faye Greener is a pretty but not remarkable girl; in the eyes of Faye Greener, she is an exceptionally hideous spirit.

In saying that cripples have this significance in West's writ­ing, I do not mean to say that he was necessarily aware of it. Indeed, I am inclined to think he was not. I suspect that, con­sciously, he thought pity and compassion were the same thing, but what the behavior of his "tender" characters shows is that all pity is self-pity and that he who pities others is incapable of compassion. Ruthlessly as he exposes his dreamers, he seems to believe that the only alternative to despair is to become a crook. Wishes may be unreal, but at least they are not, like all desires, wicked:

His friends would go on telling such stories until they were too drunk to talk. They were aware of their child­ishness, but did not know how else to revenge them­selves. At college, and perhaps for a year afterwards, they had believed in Beauty and in personal expression as an absolute end. When they lost this belief, they lost every­thing. Money and fame meant nothing to them. They were not worldly men.

The use of the word -worldly is significant. West comes very near to accepting the doctrine of the Marquis de Sade—there are many resemblances between A Cool Million and Justine— to believing, that is, that the creation is essentially evil and that goodness is contrary to its laws, but his moral sense re­volted against Sade's logical conclusion that it was therefore a man's duty to be as evil as possible. All West's "worldly" characters are bad men, most of them grotesquely bad, but here again his artistic instinct seems at times to contradict his conscious intentions. I do not think, for example, that he meant to make Wu Fong, the brothel-keeper, more sym­pathetic and worthy of respect than, say, Miss Lonelyhearts or Homer Simpson, but that is what he does:

Wu Fong w^Tas a very shrewd man and a student of fashion. He saw that the trend was in the direction of home industry and home talent and when the Hearst papers began their "Buy American" campaign, he de­cided to get rid of all the foreigners in his employ and turn his establishment into a hundred percentum Amer­ican place. He engaged Mr. Asa Goldstein to redecorate the house and that worthv designed a Pennsylvania Dutch, Old South, Log Cabin Pioneer, Victorian New York, Western Cattle Days, Californian Monterey, In­dian and Modern Girl series of interiors. . . .

He was as painstaking as a great artist and in order to be consistent as one he did away with the French cuisine and wines traditional to his business. Instead, he sub­stituted an American kitchen and cellar. When a client visited Lena Haubengruber, it was possible for him to eat roast groundhog and drink Sam Thompson rye.

While with Alice Sweethorne, he was served sow belly with grits and bourbon. In Mary Judkins' rooms he re­ceived, if he so desired, fried squirrel and corn liquor. In the suite occupied by Patricia Van Riis, lobster and champagne were the rule. The patrons of Powder River Rose usually ordered mountain oysters and washed them down with forty rod. And so on down the list. . . .

After so many self-centered despairers who cry in their baths or bare their souls in barrooms, a selfish man like this, who takes pride in doing something really well, even if it is running a brothel, seems almost a good man.

There have, no doubt, always been cases of West's Disease, but the chances of infection in a democratic and mechanized society like our own are much greater than in the more static and poorer societies of earlier times.

When, for most people, their work, their company, even their marriages, were determined, not by personal choice or ability, but by the class into which they were bom, the in­dividual was less tempted to develop a personal grudge against Fate; his fate was not his own but that of everyone around him.

But the greater the equality of opportunity in a society be­comes, the more obvious becomes the inequality of the talent and character among individuals, and the more bitter and personal it must be to fail, particularly for those who have some talent but not enough to win them second or third place.

In societies with fewer opportunities for amusement, it was also easier to tell a mere wish from a real desire. If, in order to hear some music, a man has to wait for six months and then walk twenty miles, it is easy to tell whether the words, "I should like to hear some music," mean what they appear to mean, or merely, "At this moment I should like to forget my­self." When all he has to do is press a switch, it is more diffi­cult. He may easily come to believe that wishes can come true. This is the first symptom of West's Disease; the later symptoms are less pleasant, but nobody who has read Nathanael West can say that he wasn't warned.

THE JOKER IN THE PACK

Reason is God's gift; but so are the passions. Reason is as guilty as passion.

j. h. newman

I

Any consideration of the Tragedy of Othello must be pri­marily occupied, not with its official hero but with its villain. I cannot think of any other play in which only one character performs personal actions—all the deeds are Iago's—and all the others without exception only exhibit behavior. In marry­ing each other, Othello and Desdemona have performed a deed, but this took place before the play begins. Nor can I think of another play in which the villain is so completely triumphant: everything Iago sets out to do, he accomplishes —(among his goals, I include his self-destruction). Even Cassio, who survives, is maimed for life.

If Othello is a tragedy—and one certainly cannot call it a

comedy—it is tragic in a peculiar way. In most tragedies the fall of the hero from glory to misery and death is the work, either of the gods, or of his own freely chosen acts, or, more commonly, a mixture of both. But the fall of Othello is the work of another human being; nothing he says or does orig­inates with himself. In consequence we feel pity for him but no respect; our aesthetic respect is reserved for lago.

Iago is a wicked man. The wicked man, the stage villain, as a subject of serious dramatic interest does not, so far as I know, appear in the drama of Western Europe before the Elizabethans. In the mystery plays, the wicked characters, like Satan or Herod, are treated comically, but the theme of the triumphant villain cannot be treated comically because the suffering he inflicts is real.

A distinction must be made between the villainous character —figures like Don John in Much Ado, Richard III, Edmund in bear, Iachimo in Cymbeline—and the merely criminal char­acter—figures like Duke Antonio in The Tempest, Angelo in Measure for Measure, Macbeth or Claudius in Hamlet. The criminal is a person who finds himself in a situation where he is tempted to break the law and succumbs to the tempta­tion : he ought, of course, to have resisted the temptation, but everybody, both on stage and in the audience, must admit that, had they been placed in the same situation, they, too, would have been tempted. The opportunities are exceptional— Prospero, immersed in his books, has left the government of Milan to his brother, Angelo is in a position of absolute author­ity, Claudius is the Queen's lover, Macbeth is egged on by prophecies and heaven-sent opportunities, but the desire for a dukedom or a crown or a chaste and beautiful girl are desires which all can imagine themselves feeling.

The villain, on the other hand, is shown from the beginning as being a malcontent, a person with a general grudge against life and society. In most cases this is comprehensible because the villain has, in fact, been wronged by Nature or Society: Richard III is a hunchback, Don John and Edmund are bastards. What distinguishes their actions from those of the criminal is that, even when they have something tangible to gain, this is a secondary satisfaction; their primary satisfaction is the infliction of suffering on others, or the exercise of power over others against their will. Richard does not really desire Anne; what he enjoys is successfully wooing a lady whose husband and father-in-law he has killed. Since he has per­suaded Gloucester that Edgar is a would-be parricide, Edmund does not need to betray his father to Cornwall and Regan in order to inherit. Don John has nothing personally to gain from ruining the happiness of Claudio and Hero except the pleasure of seeing them unhappy. Iachimo is a doubtful case of villainy. When he and Posthumus make their wager, the latter warns him:

If she remain unseduced, you not making it appear other­wise, for your ill opinion and th'assault you have made on her chastity you shall answer me with your sword.

To the degree that his motive in deceiving Posthumus is simply physical fear of losing his life in a duel, he is a coward, not a villain; he is only a villain to the degree that his motive is the pleasure of making and seeing the innocent suffer. Coleridge's description of Iago's actions as "motiveless malig­nancy" applies in some degree to all the Shakespearian vil­lains. The adjective motiveless means, firstly, that the tangible gains, if any, are clearly not the principal motive and, secondly, that the motive is not the desire for personal revenge upon another for a personal injury. Iago himself proffers two reasons for wishing to injure Othello and Cassio. He tells Roderigo that, in appointing Cassio to be his lieutenant, Othello has treated him unjusdy, in which conversation he talks like the conventional Elizabethan malcontent. In his soliloquies with himself, he refers to his suspicion that both Othello and Cassio have made him a cuckold, and here he talks like the conventional jealous husband who desires revenge. But there are, I believe, insuperable objections to taking these reasons, as some critics have done, at their face value. If one of Iago's goals is to supplant Cassio in the lieutenancy, one can only say that his plot fails for, when Cassio is cashiered, Othello does not appoint Iago in his place. It is true that, in Act III, scene 3, when they swear blood-brotherhood in revenge, Othello concludes with the words

. . . now thou are my lieutenant

to which Iago replies:

I am your own for ever

but the use of the word lieutenant in this context refers, surely, not to a public military rank, but to a private and illegal dele­gation of authority—the job delegated to Iago is the secret murder of Cassio, and lago's reply, which is a mocking echo of an earlier line of Othello's, refers to a relation which can never become public. The ambiguity of the word is confirmed by its use in the first line of the scene which immediately follows. Desdemona says

Do you know, sirrah, where the Lieutenant Cassio lies?

(One should beware of attaching too much significance to Elizabethan typography, but it is worth noting that Othello's lieutenant is in lower case and Desdomona's in upper). As for lago's jealousy, one cannot believe that a seriously jealous man could behave towards his wife as Iago behaves towards Emilia, for the wife of a jealous husband is the first person to suffer. Not only is the relation of Iago and Emilia, as we see it on stage, without emotional tension, but also Emilia openly refers to a rumor of her infidelity as something already disposed of.

Some such squire it was That turned your wit, the seamy side without And made you to suspect me with the Moor.

At one point Iago states that, in order to revenge himself on Othello, he will not rest till he is even with him, wife for wife, but, in the play, no attempt at Desdemona's seduction is made. Iago does not make an assault on her virtue himself, he does not encourage Cassio to make one, and he even prevents Roderigo from getting anywhere near her.

Finally, one who seriously desires personal revenge desires to reveal himself. The revenger's greatest satisfaction is to be able to tell his victim to his face—"You thought you were all- powerful and untouchable and could injure me with im­punity. Now you see that you were wrong. Perhaps you have forgotten what you did; let me have the pleasure of remind­ing you."

When at the end of the play, Othello asks Iago in be­wilderment why he has thus ensnared his soul and body, if his real motive were revenge for having been cuckolded or unjustly denied promotion, he could have said so, instead of refusing to explain.

In Act II, Scene I, occur seven lines which, taken in isolation, seem to make Iago a seriously jealous man.

Now I do love her too, Not out of absolute lust (though peradventure I stand accountant for as great a sin) But partly led to diet my revenge For that I do suspect the lusty Moor Hath leaped into my seat; the thought whereof Doth like a poisonous mineral gnaw my vitals.

But if spoken by an actor with serious passion, these lines are completely at variance with the rest of the play, including lago's other lines on the same subject.

And it is thought abroad, that twixt my sheets He's done my office: I know not if't be true Yet I, for mere suspicion in that kind, Will do, as if for surety.

It is not inconceivable, given the speed at which he wrote, that, at some point in the composition of Othello, Shakespeare considered making Iago seriously jealous and, like his proto­type in Cinthio, a would-be seducer of Desdemona, and that, when he arrived at his final conception of Iago, he overlooked the incompatibility of the poisonous mineral and the -wife-for- wife passages with the rest.

In trying to understand lago's character one should begin, I believe, by asking why Shakespeare should have gone to the trouble of inventing Roderigo, a character who has no prototype in Cinthio. From a stage director's point of view, Roderigo is a headache. In the first act we learn that Brabantio had forbidden him the house, from which we must conclude that Desdemona had met him and disliked him as much as her father. In the second act, in order that the audience shall know that he has come to Cyprus, Roderigo has to arrive on the same ship as Desdemona, yet she shows no embarrassment in his presence. Indeed, she and everybody else, except lago, seem unaware of his existence, for Iago is the only person who ever speaks a word to him. Presumably, he has some official position in the army, but we are never told what it is. His entrances and exits are those of a puppet: whenever Iago has company, he obligingly disappears, and whenever Iago is alone and wishes to speak to him, he comes in again immediately.

Moreover, so far as Iago's plot is concerned, there is nothing Roderigo does which Iago could not do better without him. He could easily have found another means, like an anonymous letter, of informing Brabantio of Desdemona's elopement and, for picking a quarrel with a drunken Cassio, he has, on his own admission, other means handy.

Three lads of Cyprus, noble swelling spirits That hold their honour in a wary distance, The very elements of this warlike isle Have I to-night flustered with flowing cups.

Since Othello has expressly ordered him to kill Cassio, Iago could have murdered him without fear of legal investigation. Instead, he not only chooses as an accomplice a man whom he is cheating and whose suspicions he has constantly to allay, but also a man who is plainly inefficient as a murderer and also holds incriminating evidence against him.

A man who is seriously bent on revenge does not take unnecessary risks nor confide in anyone whom he cannot trust or do without. Emilia is not, as in Cinthio, Iago's willing ac­complice, so that, in asking her to steal the handkerchief,

Iago is running a risk, but it is a risk he has to take. By involving Roderigo in his plot, he makes discovery and his own ruin almost certain. It is a law of drama that, by the final curtain, all secrets, guilty or innocent, shall have been revealed so that all, on both sides of the footlights, know who did or did not do what, but usually the guilty are exposed either because, like Edmund, they repent and confess or be­cause of events which they could not reasonably have foreseen. Don John could not have foreseen that Dogberry and Verges would overhear Borachio's conversation, nor lachimo that Pisanio would disobey Posthumus' order to kill Imogen, nor King Claudius the intervention of a ghost.

Had he wished, Shakespeare could easily have contrived a similar kind of exposure for Iago. Instead, by giving Roderigo the role he does, he makes Iago as a plotter someone devoid of ordinary worldly common sense.

One of Shakespeare's intentions was, I believe, to indicate that Iago desires self-destruction as much as he desires the destruction of others but, before elaborating on this, let us consider Iago's treatment of Roderigo, against whom he has no grievance—it is he who is injuring Roderigo—as a clue to his treatment of Othello and Cassio.

When we first see Iago and Roderigo together, the situation is like that in a Ben Jonson comedy—a clever rascal is gulling a rich fool who deserves to be gulled because his desire is no more moral than that of the more intelligent avowed rogue who cheats him out of his money. Were the play a comedy, Roderigo would finally realize that he had been cheated but would not dare appeal to the law because, if the whole truth were made public, he would cut a ridiculous or shameful figure. But, as the play proceeds, it becomes clear that Iago is not simply after Roderigo's money, a rational motive, but that his main game is Roderigo's moral corruption, which is irrational because Roderigo has given him no cause to desire his moral ruin. WTien the play opens, Roderigo is shown as a spoiled weakling, but no worse. It may be foolish of him to hope to win Desdemona's affection by gifts and to employ a go-between, but his conduct is not in itself im­moral. Nor is he, like Cloten in Cymheline, a brute who re­gards women as mere objects of lust. He is genuinely shocked as well as disappointed when he learns of Desdemona's mar­riage, but continues to admire her as a woman full of most blessed condition. Left to himself, he would have had a good bawl, and given her up. But Iago will not let him alone. By insisting that Desdemona is seducible and that his real rival is not Othello but Cassio, he brings Roderigo to entertain the idea, originally foreign to him, of becoming a seducer and of helping Iago to ruin Cassio. Iago had had the pleasure of making a timid conventional man become aggressive and criminal. Cassio beats up Roderigo. Again, at this point, had he been left to himself, he would have gone no further, but Iago will not let him alone until he consents to murder Cassio, a deed which is contrary to his nature, for he is not only timid but also incapable of passionate hatred.

I have no great devotion to the deed:

And yet he has given me satisfying reasons.

'Tis but a man gone.

Why should Iago want to do this to Roderigo'? To me, the clue to this and to all lago's conduct is to be found in Emilia's comment when she picks up the handkerchief.

My wayward husband hath a hundred times

Wooed me to steal it . . .

what he'll do with it

Heaven knows, not I,

I nothing but to please his fantasy.

As his wife, Emilia must know Iago better than anybody else does. She does not know, any more than the others, that he is malevolent, but she does know that her husband is addicted to practical jokes. What Shakespeare gives us in Iago is a portrait of a practical joker of a peculiarly appalling kind, and perhaps the best way of approaching the play is by a general consideration of the Practical Joker.

Social relations, as distinct from the brotherhood of a com­munity, are only possible if there is a common social agree­ment as to which actions or words are to be regarded as serious means to a rational end and which are to be regarded as play, as ends in themselves. In our culture, for example, a policeman must be able to distinguish between a murderous street fight and a boxing match, or a listener between a radio play in which war is declared and a radio news-broadcast announcing a declaration of war.

Social life also presupposes that we may believe what we are told unless we have reason to suppose, either that our in­formant has a serious motive for deceiving us, or that he is mad and incapable himself of distinguishing between truth and falsehood. If a stranger tries to sell me shares in a gold mine, I shall be a fool if I do not check up on his statements before parting with my money, and if another tells me that he has talked with little men who came out of a flying saucer, I shall assume that he is crazy. But if I ask a stranger the way to the station, I shall assume that his answer is truthful to the best of his knowledge, because I cannot imagine what motive he could have for misdirecting me.

Practical jokes are a demonstration that the distinction between seriousness and play is not a law of nature but a social convention which can be broken, and that a man does not always require a serious motive for deceiving another.

Two men, dressed as city employees, block off a busy street and start digging it up. The traffic cop, motorists and pedes­trians assume that this familiar scene has a practical explana­tion—a water main or an electric cable is being repaired— and make no attempt to use the street. In fact, however, the two diggers are private citizens in disguise who have no busi­ness there.

All practical jokes are anti-social acts, but this does not necessarily mean that all practical jokes are immoral. A moral practical joke exposes some flaw in society which is a hin­drance to a real community or brotherhood. That it should be possible for two private individuals to dig up a street without being stopped is a just criticism of the impersonal life of a large city where most people are strangers to each other, not brothers; in a village where all the inhabitants know each other personally, the deception would be impossible.

A real community, as distinct from social life, is only possi­ble between persons whose idea of themselves and others is real, not fantastic. There is, therefore, another class of prac­tical jokes which is aimed at particular individuals with the reformatory intent of de-intoxicating them from their illusions. This kind of joke is one of the stock devices of comedy. The deceptions practiced on Falstaff by Mistress Page, Mistress Ford and Dame Quickly, or by Octavian on Baron Ochs are possible because these two gendemen have a fantastic idea of themselves as lady-charmers; the result of the jokes played upon them is that they are brought to a state of self-knowledge and this brings mutual forgiveness and true brotherhood. Similarly, the mock deaths of Hero and of Hermione are ways of bringing home to Claudio and to Leontes how badly they have behaved and of testing the genuineness of their re­pentance.

All practical jokes, friendly, harmless or malevolent, involve deception, but not all deceptions are practical jokes. The two men digging up the street, for example, might have been two burglars who wished to recover some swag which they knew to be buried there. But, in that case, having found what they were looking for, they would have departed quietly and never been heard of again, whereas, if they are practical jokers, they must reveal afterwards what they have done or the joke will be lost. The practical joker must not only deceive but also, when he has succeeded, unmask and reveal the truth to his victims. The satisfaction of the practical joker is the look of astonishment on the faces of others when they learn that all the time they were convinced that they were thinking and acting on their own initiative, they were actually the puppets of another's will. Thus, though his jokes may be harmless in themselves and extremely funny, there is some­thing slightly sinister about every practical joker, for they betray him as someone who likes to play God behind the scenes. Unlike the ordinary ambitious man who strives for a dominant position in public and enjoys giving orders and seeing others obey them, the practical joker desires to make others obey him without being aware of his existence until the moment of his theophany when he says: "Behold the God whose puppets you have been and behold, he does not look like a god but is a human being just like yourselves." The success of a practical joker depends upon his accurate estimate of the weaknesses of others, their ignorances, their social reflexes, their unquestioned presuppositions, their ob­sessive desires, and even the most harmless practical joke is an expression of the joker's contempt for those he deceives.

But, in most cases, behind the joker's contempt for others lies something else, a feeling of self-insufficiency, of a self lacking in authentic feelings and desires of its own. The normal human being may have a fantastic notion of himself, but he believes in it; he thinks he knows who he is and what he wants so that he demands recognition by others of the value he puts upon himself and must inform others of what he de­sires if they are to satisfy them.

But the self of the practical joker is unrelated to his joke. He manipulates others but, when he finally reveals his identity, his victims leam nothing about his nature, only something about their own; they know how it was possible for them to be deceived but not why he chose to deceive them. The only answer that any practical joker can give to the question: "Why did you do this?" is Iago's: "Demand me nothing. What you know, you know."

In fooling others, it cannot be said that the practical joker satisfies any concrete desire of his nature; he has only demon­strated the weaknesses of others and all he can now do, once he has revealed his existence, is to bow and retire from the stage. He is only related to others, that is, so long as they are unaware of his existence; once they are made aware of it, he cannot fool them again, and the relation is broken off.

The practical joker despises his victims, but at the same time he envies them because their desires, however childish and mistaken, are real to them, whereas he has no desire which he can call his own. His goal, to make game of others, makes his existence absolutely dependent upon theirs; when he is alone, he is a nullity. Iago's self-description, I am not what I am, is correct and the negation of the Divine I am that I am. If the word motive is given its normal meaning of a positive purpose of the self like sex, money, glory, etc., then the prac­tical joker is without motive. Yet the professional practical joker is certainly driven, like a gambler, to his activity, but the drive is negative, a fear of lacking a concrete self, of being nobody. In any practical joker to whom playing such jokes is a passion, there is always an element of malice, a projection of his self-hatred onto others, and in the ultimate case of the absolute practical joker, this is projected onto all created things. Iago's statement, "I am not what I am," is given its proper explanation in the Credo which Boito wrote for him in his libretto for Verdi's opera.

Credo in un Dio crudel che m'ha creato

Simile a se, e che nell'ira io nomo.

Drill vilta d'un germe e d'un atomo

Vile son nato,

Son scellerato

Perche son uomo:

E sento il fango originario in me

E credo I'uom gioco d'iniqua sorte

Dal germe della culla

Al verme dell'avel.

Vien dopo tanto irrision la Morte

E poi? La Morte e il Nulla.

Equally applicable to Iago is Valery's "Ebauche d'un serpent." The serpent speaks to God the Creator thus

O Vanitel Cause Premiere Celui qui regne dans les Cieux D'une voix qui jut la lumiere

Ouvrit I'univers spacieux. Comme las de son pur spectacle Dieu lui-meme a rompu Vohstacle De sa parfaite eternite; 11 se fit Celui qui dissipe En consequences son Principe, En etoiles son Unite.

And of himself thus

Je suis Celui qui modifie

the ideal motto, surely, for Iago's coat of arms.

Since the ultimate goal of Iago is nothingness, he must not only destroy others, but himself as well. Once Othello and Desdemona are dead his "occupation's gone."

To convey this to an audience demands of the actor who plays the role the most violent contrast in the way he acts when Iago is with others and the way he acts when he is left alone. With others, he must display every virtuoso trick of dramatic technique for which great actors are praised, perfect control of movement, gesture, expression, diction, melody and timing, and the ability to play every kind of role, for there are as many "honest" lagos as there are characters with whom he speaks, a Roderigo Iago, a Cassio Iago, an Othello Iago, a Desdemona Iago, etc. When he is alone, on the other hand, the actor must display every technical fault for which bad actors are criticized. He must deprive himself of all stage pres­ence, and he must deliver the lines of his soliloquies in such a way that he makes nonsense of them. His voice must lack ex­pression, his delivery must be atrocious, he must pause where the verse calls for no pauses, accentuate unimportant words, etc.

in

If Iago is so alienated from nature and society that he has no relation to time and place—he could turn up anywhere at any time—his victims are citizens of Shakespeare's Venice.

To be of dramatic interest, a character must to some degree be at odds with the society of which he is a member, but his estrangement is normally an estrangement from a specific social situation.

Shakespeare's Venice is a mercantile society, the purpose of which is not military glory but the acquisition of wealth. However, human nature being what it is, like any other society, it has enemies, trade rivals, pirates, etc., against whom it must defend itself, if necessary by force. Since a mercantile society regards warfare as a disagreeable, but unfortunately sometimes unavoidable, activity and not, like a feudal aristoc­racy, as a form of play, it replaces the old feudal levy by a paid professional army, nonpolitical employees of the State, to whom fighting is their specialized job.

In a professional army, a soldier's military rank is not determined by his social status as a civilian, but by his military efficiency. Unlike the feudal knight who has a civilian home from which he is absent from time to time but to which, between campaigns, he regularly returns, the home of the professional soldier is an army camp and he must go wherever the State sends him. Othello's account of his life as a soldier, passed in exotic landscapes and climates, would have struck Hotspur as unnatural, unchivalrous and no fun.

A professional army has its own experiences and its own code of values which are different from those of civilians. In Othello, we are shown two societies, that of the city of Venice proper and that of the Venetian army. The only character who, because he is equally estranged from both, can simulate being equally at home in both, is Iago. With army folk he can play the blunt soldier, but in his first scene with Desdemona upon their arrival in Cyprus, he speaks like a character out of Love's Labour's Lost. Cassio's comment

Madam, you may relish him more in the soldier than the scholar

is provoked by envy. Iago has excelled him in the euphuistic flirtatious style of conversation which he considers his forte.

Roderigo does not feel at home, either with civilians or with soldiers. He lacks the charm which makes a man a success with the ladies, and the physical courage and heartiness which make a man popular in an army mess. The sympathetic aspect of his character, until Iago destroys it, is a certain humility; he knows that he is a person of no consequence. But for Iago, he would have remained a sort of Bertie Wooster, and one suspects that the notion that Desdemona's heart might he soft­ened by expensive presents was not his own but suggested to him by Iago.

In deceiving Roderigo, Iago has to overcome his conscious­ness of his inadequacy, to persuade him that he could be what he knows he is not, charming, brave, successful. Con­sequently, to Roderigo and, I think, to Roderigo only, Iago tells direct lies. The lie may be on a point of fact, as when he tells Roderigo that Othello and Desdemona are not return­ing to Venice but going to Mauritania, or a lie about the future, for it is obvious that, even if Desdemona is seducible, Roderigo will never be the man. I am inclined to think that the story Iago tells Roderigo about his disappointment over the lieutenancy is a deliberate fabrication. One notices, for example, that he contradicts himself. At first he claims that Othello had appointed Cassio in spite of the request of three great ones of the city who had recommended Iago, but then a few lines later, he says

Preferment goes by letter and affection,

Not by the old gradation where each second

Stood heir to the first.

In deceiving Cassio and Othello, on the other hand, Iago has to deal with characters who consciously think well of them­selves but are unconsciously insecure. With them, therefore, his tactics are different; what he says to them is always possi­bly true.

Cassio is a ladies' man, that is to say, a man who feels most at home in feminine company where his looks and good man­ners make him popular, but is ill at ease in the company of his own sex becuse he is unsure of his masculinity. In civilian life he would be perfectly happy, but circumstances have made him a soldier and he has been forced by his profes­sion into a society which is predominantly male. Had he been born a generation earlier, he would never have found himself in the army at all, but changes in the technique of warfare demand of soldiers, not only the physical courage and aggres­siveness which the warrior has always needed, but also in­tellectual gifts. The Venetian army now needs mathemati­cians, experts in the science of gunnery. But in all ages, the typical military mentality is conservative and resents the intel­lectual expert.

A fellow

That never set a squadron in the field

Nor the division of a batde knows

More than a spinster . . . mere pratde without practise

Is all his soldiership

is a criticism which has been heard in every army mess in every war. Like so many people who cannot bear to feel un­popular and therefore repress their knowledge that they are, Cassio becomes quarrelsome when drunk, for alcohol releases his suppressed resentment at not being admired by his com­rades in arms and his wish to prove that he is what he is not, as "manly" as they are. It is significant that, when he sobers up, his regret is not that he has behaved badly by his own standards but that he has lost his reputation. The advice which Iago then gives him, to get Desdemona to plead for him with Othello, is good advice in itself, for Desdemona ob­viously likes him, but it is also exacdy the advice a character- type like Cassio will be most willing to listen to, for feminine society is where he feels most at home.

Emilia informs Cassio that, on her own initiative, Des­demona has already spoken on his behalf and that Othello has said he will take the safest occasion by the front to restore him to his post. Hearing this, many men would have been content to leave matters as they were, but Cassio persists: the pleasure of a heart-to-heart talk with a lady about his fascinating self is too tempting.

While he is talking to Desdemona, Othello is seen ap­proaching and she says:

Stay and hear me speak.

Again, many men would have done so, but Cassio's uneasiness with his own sex, particulady when he is in disgrace, is too strong and he sneaks away, thus providing Iago with his first opportunity to make an insinuation.

Cassio is a ladies' man, not a seducer. With women of his own class, what he enjoys is socialized eroticism; he would be frightened of a serious personal passion. For physical sex he goes to prostitutes and when, unexpectedly, Bianca falls in love with him, like many of his kind, he behaves like a cad and brags of his conquest to others. Though he does not know who the owner of the handkerchief actually is, he certainly knows that Bianca will think that it belongs to another woman, and to ask her to copy it is gratuitous cruelty. His smiles, ges­tures and remarks about Bianca to Iago are insufferable in themselves; to Othello, who knows that he is talking about a woman, though he is mistaken as to her identity, they are an insult which only Cassio's death can avenge.

In Cinthio nothing is said about the Moor's color or religion, but Shakespeare has made Othello a black Negro who has been baptized.

No doubt there are differences between color prejudice in the twentieth century and color prejudice in the seventeenth and probably few of Shakespeare's audience had ever seen a Negro, but the slave trade was already flourishing and the Elizabethans were certainly no innocents to whom a Negro was simply a comic exotic. Lines like

... an old black ram is tupping your white ewe . . . The gross clasps of a lascivious Moor . . . What delight shall she have to look on the devil

are evidence that the paranoid fantasies of the white man in which the Negro appears as someone who is at one and the same time less capable of self-control and more sexually potent than himself, fantasies with which, alas, we are only too familiar, already were rampant in Shakespeare's time.

The Venice of both The Merchant of Venice and Othello is a cosmopolitan society in which there are two kinds of social bond between its members, the bond of economic inter­est and the bond of personal friendship, which may coincide, run parallel with each other or conflict, and both plays are concerned with an extreme case of conflict.

Venice needs financiers to provide capital and it needs the best general it can hire to defend it; it so happens that the most skillful financier it can find is a Jew and the best general a Negro, neither of whom the majority are willing to accept as a brother.

Though both are regarded as outsiders by the Venetian community, Othello's relation to it differs from Shylock's. In the first place, Shylock rejects the Gentile community as firmly as the Gentile community rejects him; he is just as angry when he hears that Jessica has married Lorenzo as Bra- bantio is about Desdemona's elopement with Othello. In the second place, while the profession of usurer, however socially useful, is regarded as ignoble, the military profession, even though the goal of a mercantile society is not military glory, is still highly admired and, in addition, for the sedentary civilians who govern the city, it has a romantic exotic glamour which it cannot have in a feudal society in which fighting is a familiar shared experience.

Thus no Venetian would dream of spitting on Othello and, so long as there is no question of his marrying into the family, Brabantio is delighted to entertain the famous general and listen to his stories of military life. In the army, Othello is ac­customed to being obeyed and treated with the respect due to his rank and, on his rare visits to the city, he is treated by the white aristocracy as someone important and interesting. Out­wardly, nobody treats him as an outsider as they treat Shylock. Consequendy, it is easy for him to persuade himself that he is accepted as a brother and when Desdemona accepts him as a husband, he seems to have proof of this.

It is painful to hear him say

But that I love the gentle Desdemona I would not mv unhoused free condition Put into circumscription or confine For the sea's worth

for the condition of the outsider is always unhoused and free. He does not or will not recognize that Brabantio's view of the match

If such actions may have passage free, Bond-slaves and pagans shall our statesmen be

is shared by all his fellow senators, and the arrival of news about the Turkish fleet prevents their saying so because their need of Othello's military skill is too urgent for them to risk offending him.

If one compares Othello with the other plays in which Shakespeare treats the subject of male jealousy, The Winter's Tale and Cymheline, one notices that Othello's jealousy is of a peculiar kind.

Leontes is a classical case of paranoid sexual jealousy due to repressed homosexual feelings. He has absolutely no evidence that Hermione and Polixenes have committed adultery and his entire court are convinced of their innocence, but he is utterly possessed by his fantasy. As he says to Hermione: "Your ac­tions are my dreams." But, mad as he is, "the twice-nine changes of the Watery Starre" which Polixenes has spent at the Bohemian court, make the act of adultery physically pos­sible so that, once the notion has entered his head, neither Hermione nor Polixenes nor the court can prove that it is false. Hence the appeal to the Oracle.

Posthumus is perfecdy sane and is convinced against his will that Imogen has been unfaithful because Iachimo offers him apparently irrefutable evidence that adultery has taken place.

But both the mad Leontes and the sane Posthumus react in the same way: "My wife has been unfaithful; therefore she must be killed and forgotten." That is to say, it is only as husbands that their lives are affected. As king of Bohemia, as a warrior, they function as if nothing has happened.

In Othello, thanks to Iago's manipulations, Cassio and Des­demona behave in a way which would make it not altogether unreasonable for Othello to suspect that they were in love with each other, but the time factor rules out the possibility of adultery having been actually committed. Some critics have taken the double time in the play to be merely a dramaturgical device for speeding the action which the audience in the theatre will never notice. I believe, however, that Shakespeare meant the audience to notice it as, in The Merchant of Venice, he meant them to notice the discrepancy between Belmont time and Venice time.

If Othello had simply been jealous of the feelings for Cassio he imagined Desdemona to have, he would have been sane enough, guilty at worst of a lack of trust in his wife. But Othello is not merely jealous of feelings which might exist; he demands proof of an act which could not have taken place, and the effect on him of believing in this physical impossibility goes far beyond wishing to kill her: it is not only his wife who has betrayed him but the whole universe; life has become meaningless, his occupation is gone.

This reaction might be expected if Othello and Desdemona were a pair like Romeo and Juliet or Antony and Cleopatra whose love was an all-absorbing Tristan-Isolde kind of passion, but Shakespeare takes care to inform us that it was not.

When Othello asks leave to take Desdemona with him to Cyprus, he stresses the spiritual element in his love.

I therefore beg it not To please the palate of my appetite Nor to comply with heat, the young affects In me defunct, and proper satisfaction, But to be free and bounteous of her mind.

Though the imagery in which he expresses his jealously is sexual—what other kind of images could he use?—Othello's marriage is important to him less as a sexual relationship than as a symbol of being loved and accepted as a person, a brother in the Venetian community. The monster in his own mind too hideous to be shown is the fear he has so far repressed that he is only valued for his social usefulness to the City. But for his occupation, he would be treated as a black barbarian.

The overcredulous, overgood-natured character which, as Iago tells us, Othello had always displayed is a telltale symp­tom. He had had to be overcredulous in order to compensate for his repressed suspicions. Both in his happiness at the be­ginning of the play and in his cosmic despair later, Othello re­minds one more of Timon of Athens than of Leontes.

Since what really matters to Othello is that Desdemona should love him as the person he really is, Iago has only to get him to suspect that she does not, to release the repressed fears and resentments of a lifetime, and the question of what she has done or not done is irrelevant.

Iago treats Othello as an analyst treats a patient except that, of course, his intention is to kill not to cure. Everything he says is designed to bring to Othello's consciousness what he has already guessed is there. Accordingly, he has no need to tell lies. Even his speech, "I lay with Cassio lately," can be a truth­ful account of something which actually happened: from what we know of Cassio, he might very well have such a dream as Iago reports. Even when he has worked Othello up to a degree of passion where he would risk nothing by telling a direct lie, his answer is equivocal and its interpretation is left to Othello.

othello: What hath he said?

iago: Faith that he did—I know not what he did.

othello: But what?

iago: Lie—

othello: With her?

iago: With her, on her, what you will.

Nobody can offer Leontes absolute proof that his jealousy is baseless; similarly, as Iago is careful to point out, Othello can have no proof that Desdemona really is the person she seems to be.

Iago makes his first decisive impression when, speaking as a Venetian with firsthand knowledge of civilian life, he draws attention to Desdemona's hoodwinking of her father.

iago: I would not have your free and noble nature

Out of self-bounty be abused, look to't: I know our country disposition well: In Venice they do let God see the pranks They dare not show their husbands: their best conscience

Is not to leave undone but keep unknown. Dost thou say so?

She did deceive her father, marrying you: And when she seemed to shake and fear your looks,

She loved them most.

And so she did.

Why, go to then. She that so young could give out such a seeming

To seal her father's eyes up, close as oak. He thought 'twas witchcraft.

And a few lines later, he refers direcdy to the color difference.

Not to affect many proposed matches, Of her own clime, complexion and degree, Whereto we see in all things nature tends, Foh! one may smell in such a will most rank, Foul disproportion, thoughts unnatural. But pardon me: I do not in position Distinctly speak of her, though I may fear Her will, recoiling to her better judgment May fall to match you with her country-forms, And happily repent.

othello:

iago:

othello:

iago:

Once Othello allows himself to suspect that Desdemona may not be the person she seems, she cannot allay the suspicion by speaking the truth but she can appear to confirm it by telling alie. Hence the catastrophic effect when she denies having lost the handkerchief.

If Othello cannot trust her, then he can trust nobody and nothing, and precisely what she has done is not important. In the scene where he pretends that the Castle is a brothel of which Emilia is the Madam, he accuses Desdemona, not of adultery with Cassio, but of nameless orgies.

desdemona: Alas, what ignorant sin have I committed¹?

othello: Was this fair paper, this most goodly book Made to write whore on. What committed¹? Committed. O thou public commoner, I should make very forges of my cheeks That would to cinders burn up modestly Did I but speak thy deeds.

And, as Mr. Eliot has pointed out, in his farewell speech his thoughts are not on Desdemona at all but upon his relation to Venice, and he ends by identifying himself with another out­sider, the Moslem Turk who beat a Venetian and traduced the state.

Everybody must pity Desdemona, but I cannot bring myself to like her. Her determination to marry Othello—it was she who virtually did the proposing—seems the romantic crush of a silly schoolgirl rather than a mature affection; it is Othel­lo's adventures, so unlike the civilian life she knows, which captivate her rather than Othello as a person. He may not have practiced witchcraft, but, in fact, she is spellbound. And despite all Brabantio's prejudices, her deception of her own father makes an unpleasant impression: Shakespeare does not allow us to forget that the shock of the marriage kills him.

Then, she seems more aware than is agreeable of the honor she has done Othello by becoming his wife. When Iago tells Cassio that "our General's wife is now the General" and, soon afterwards, soliloquizes

His soul is so infettered to her love That she may make, unmake, do what she list Even as her appetite shall play the god With his weak function

he is, no doubt, exaggerating, but there is much truth in what he says. Before Cassio speaks to her, she has already discussed him with her husband and learned that he is to be reinstated as soon as is opportune. A sensible wife would have told Cassio this and left matters alone. In continuing to badger Othello, she betrays a desire to prove to herself and to Cassio that she can make her husband do as she pleases.

Her lie about the handkerchief is, in itself, a trivial fib but, had she really regarded her husband as her equal, she might have admitted the loss. As it is, she is frightened because she is suddenly confronted with a man whose sensibility and superstitions are alien to her.

Though her relation with Cassio is perfectly innocent, one cannot but share Iago's doubts as to the durability of the mar­riage. It is worth noting that, in the willow-song scene with Emilia, she speaks with admiration of Ludovico and then turns to the topic of adultery. Of course, she discusses this in general terms and is shocked by Emilia's attitude, but she does discuss the subject and she does listen to what Emilia has to say about

husbands and wives. It is as if she had suddenlv realized that

>

she had made a mesalliance and that the sort of man she ought to have married was someone of her own class and color like Ludovico. Given a few more years of Othello and of Emilia's influence and she might well, one feels, have taken a lover.

rv

And so one comes back to where one started, to Iago, the sole agent in the play. A play, as Shakespeare said, is a mirror held up to nature. This particular mirror bears the date 1604, but, when we look into it, the face that confronts us is our own in the middle of the twentieth century. We hear Iago say the same words and see him do the same things as an Elizabethan audience heard and saw, but what they mean to us cannot be exacdy the same. To his first audience and even, maybe, to his creator, Iago appeared to be just another Machiavellian villain who might exist in real life but with whom one would never dream of identifying oneself. To us, I think, he is a much more alarming figure; we cannot hiss at him when he appears as we ~an hiss at the villain in a Western movie because none of us can honestly say that he does not understand how such a wicked person can exist. For is not Iago, the practical joker, a parabolic figure for the autonomous pursuit of scientific knowl­edge through experiment which we all, whether we are scientists or not, take for granted as natural and right?

As Nietzsche said, experimental science is the last flower of asceticism. The investigator must discard all his feelings, hopes and fears as a human person and reduce himself to a disem­bodied observer of events upon which he passes no value judg­ment. Iago is an ascetic. "Love" he says, "is merely a lust of the blood, and a permission of the will."

The knowledge sought by science is only one kind of knowl­edge. Another kind is that implied by the Biblical phrase, 'Then Adam knew Eve, his wife," and it is this kind I still mean when I say, "I know John Smith very well." I cannot know in this sense without being known in return. If I know John Smith well, he must also know me well.

But, in the scientific sense of knowledge, I can only know that which does not and cannot know me. Feeling unwell, I go to my doctor who examines me, says "You have Asian flu," and gives me an injection. The Asian virus is as unaware of my doctor's existence as his victims are of a practical joker.

Further, to-know in the scientific sense means, ultimately, to-have-power-over. To the degree that human beings are authentic persons, unique and self-creating, they cannot be scientifically known. But human beings are not pure persons like angels; they are also biological organisms, almost identical in their functioning, and, to a greater or lesser degree, they are neurotic, that is to say, less free than they imagine because of fears and desires of which they have no personal knowledge but could and ought to have. Hence, it is always possible to reduce human beings to the status of things which are com­pletely scientifically knowable and completely controllable.

This can be done by direct action on their bodies with drugs, Iobotomies, deprivation of sleep, etc. The difficulty about this method is that your victims will know that you are trying to enslave them and, since nobody wishes to be a slave, they will object, so that it can only be practiced upon minor? ties like prisoners and lunatics who are physically incapable of resisting.

The other method is to play on the fears and desires of which you are aware and they are not until they enslave them­selves. In this case, concealment of your real intention is not only possible but essential for, if people know they are being played upon, they will not believe what you say or do what you suggest. An advertisement based on snob appeal, for example, can only succeed with people who are unaware that they are snobs and that their snobbish feelings are being appealed to and to whom, therefore, your advertisement seems as honest as Iago seems to Othello.

lago's treatment of Othello conforms to Bacon's definition of scientific enquiry as putting Nature to the Question. If a member of the audince were to interrupt the play and ask him: "What are you doing?" could not Iago answer with a boyish giggle, "Nothing. I'm only trying to find out what Othello is really like"? And we must admit that his experiment is highly successful. By the end of the play he does know the scientific truth about the object to which he has reduced Othello. That is what makes his parting shot, "What you know, you know," so terrifying for, by then, Othello has be­come a thing, incapable of knowing anything.

And why shouldn't Iago do this? After all, he has certainly acquired knowledge. What makes it impossible for us to con­demn him self-righteously is that, in our culture, we have all accepted the notion that the right to know is absolute and un­limited. The gossip column is one side of the medal; the cobalt bomb the other. We are quite prepared to admit that, while food and sex are good in themselves, an uncontrolled pursuit of either is not, but it is difficult for us to believe that intel­lectual curiosity is a desire like any other, and to realize that correct knowledge and truth axe not identical. To apply a categorical imperative to knowing, so that, instead of asking, "What can I know?" we ask, "What, at this moment, am I meant to know?"—to entertain the possibility that the only knowledge which can be true for us is the knowledge we can live up to—that seems to all of us crazy and almost immoral. But, in that case, who are we to say to Iago—"No, you mustn't."

POSTSCRIPT: INFERNAL SCIENCE

JfS.

All exact science is dominated by the idea of approximation. (bertrand russell.) If so, then infernal science differs from human science in that it lacks the notion of approxima­tion: it believes its laws to be exact.

Ethics does not treat of the world. Ethics must be a condition of the world like logic, (wittgenstein.) On this God and the Evil One are agreed. It is a purely human illusion to imagine that the laws of the spiritual life are, like our legisla­tion, imposed laws which we can break. We may defy them, either by accident, i.e., out of ignorance, or by choice, but we can no more break them than we can break the laws of human physiology by getting drunk.

The Evil One is not interested in evil, for evil is, by definition, what he believes he already knows. To him, Auschwitz is a banal fact, like the date of the batde of Hastings. He is only interested in good, as that which he has so far failed to under­stand in terms of his absolute presuppositions; Goodness is his obsession.

The first anthropological axiom of the Evil One is not All men are evil, but All men are the same; and his second—Men do not act: they only behave.

Humanly speaking, to tempt someone means to offer him some inducement to defy his conscience. In that sense, the Evil One cannot be said to tempt us for, to him, conscience is a fiction. Nor can he properly be thought of as trying to make us do anything, for he does not believe in the existence of deeds. What to us is a temptation is to him an experiment: he is try­ing to confirm a hypothesis about human behavior.

One of our greatest spiritual dangers is our fancy that the Evil One takes a personal interest in our perdition. He doesn't care a button about my soul, any more than Don Giovanni cared a button about Donna Elvira's body. I am his "one-thou- sand-and-third-in-Spain."

One can conceive of Heaven having a Telephone Directory, but it would have to be gigantic, for it would include the Proper Name and address of every electron in the Universe. But Hell could not have one, for in Hell, as in prison and the army, its inhabitants are identified not by name but by num­ber. They do not have numbers, they are numbers.

PART FIVE

Two Bestiaries

D. H. LAWRENCE

If men were as much men as lizards are lizards, They'd he worth looking at.

The artist, the man who makes, is less important to mankind, for good or evil, than the apostle, the man with a message. Without a religion, a philosophy, a code of behavior, call it what you will, men cannot live at all; what they believe may be absurd or revolting, but they have to believe something. On the other hand, however much the arts may mean to us, it is possible to imagine our lives without them.

As a human being, every artist holds some set of beliefs or other but, as a rule, these are not of his own invention; his pub­lic knows this and judges his work without reference to them. We read Dante for his poetry not for his theology because we have already met the theology elsewhere.

There are a few writers, however, like Blake and D. H. Lawrence, who are both artists and apostles and this makes a just estimation of their work difficult to arrive at. Readers who find something of value in their message will attach unique im­portance to their writings because they cannot find it anywhere else. But this importance may be shortlived; once I have learned his message, I cease to be interested in a messenger and, should I later come to think his message false or mislead­ing, I shall remember him with resentment and distaste. Even if I try to ignore the message and read him again as if he were only an artist, I shall probably feel disappointed because I cannot recapture the excitement I felt when I first read him.

When I first read Lawrence in the late Twenties, it was his message which made the greatest impression on me, so that it was his "think" books like Fantasia on the Unconscious rather than his fiction which I read most avidly. As for his poetry, when I first tried to read it, I did not like it; despite my admira­tion for him, it offended my notions of what poetry should be. Today my notions of what poetry should be are still, in all essentials, what thev were then and hostile to his, yet there are a number of his poems which I have come to admire enor­mously. When a poet who holds views about the nature of poetry which we believe to be false writes a poem we like, we are apt to think: "This time he has forgotten his theory and is writing according to ours." But what fascinates me about the poems of Lawrence's which I like is that I must admit he could never have written them had he held the kind of views about poetry of which I approve.

Man is a history-making creature who can neither repeat his past nor leave it behind; at every moment he adds to and thereby modifies everything that had previously happened to him. Hence the difficulty of finding a single image which can stand as an adequate symbol for man's kind of existence. If we think of his ever-open future, then the natural image is of a single pilgrim walking along an unending road into hitherto unexplored country; if we think of his never-forgettable past, then the natural image is of a great crowded city, built in every style of architecture, in which the dead are as active citizens as the living. The only feature common to both images is that both are purposive; a road goes in a certain direction, a city is built to endure and be a home. The animals, who live in the present, have neither cities nor roads and do not miss them; they are at home in the wilderness and at most, if they are social, set up camps for a single generation. But man requires both; the image of a city with no roads leading away from it suggests a prison, the image of a road that starts from nowhere in particular, an animal spoor.

Every man is both a citizen and a pilgrim, but most men are predominantly one or the other and in Lawrence the pilgrim almost obliterated the citizen. It is only natural, therefore, that he should have admired Whitman so much, both for his matter and his manner.

Whitman's essential message was the Open Road. The leaving of the soul free unto herself, the leaving of his fate to her and to the loom of the open road. .. . The true democracy . . . where all journey down the open road. And where a soul is known at once in its going. Not by its clothes or appearance. Not by its family name. Not even by its reputation. Not by works at all. The soul passing unenhanced, passing on foot, and being no more than itself.

In his introduction to New Poems, Lawrence tries to explain the difference between traditional verse and the free verse which Whitman was the first to write.

The poetry of the beginning and the poetry of the end must have that exquisite finality, perfection which be­longs to all that is far off. It is in the realm of all that is perfect . . . the finality and perfection are conveyed in exquisite form: the perfect symmetry, the rhythm which returns upon itself like a dance where the hands link and loosen and link for the supreme moment of the end . . . But there is another kind of poetry, the poetry of that which is at hand: the immediate present. . . . Life, the ever present, knows no finality, no finished crystallisa­tion. ... It is obvious that the poetry of the instant present cannot have the same body or the same motions as the poetry of the before and after. It can never submit to the same conditions, it is never finished. . . . Much has been written about free verse. But all that can be said, first and last, is that free verse is, or should be, direct utterance from the instant whole man. It is the soul and body surging at once, nothing left out. ... It has no finish. It has no satisfying stability. It does not want to get any­where. It just takes place.

It would be easy to make fun of this passage, to ask Lawrence, for example, to tell us exacdy how long an instant is, or how it would be physically possible for the poet to express it in writing before it had become past. But it is obvious that Law­rence is struggling to say something which he believes to be important. Very few statements which poets make about poetry, even when they appear to be quite lucid, are understandable except in their polemic context. To understand them, we need to know what they are directed against, what the poet who made them considered the principal enemies of genuine poetry.

In Lawrence's case, one enemy was the conventional re­sponse, the laziness or fear which makes people prefer second­hand experience to the shock of looking and listening for themselves.

Man fixes some wonderful erection of his own between himself and the wild chaos, and gradually goes bleached and stifled under his parasol. Then comes a poet, enemy of convention, and makes a slit in the umbrella; and lo! the glimpse of chaos is a vision, a window to the sun. But after a while, getting used to the vision, and not liking the genuine draft from chaos, commonplace man daubs a simulacrum of the window that opens into chaos and patches the umbrella with the painted patch of the simulacrum. That is, he gets used to the vision; it is part of his house decoration.

Lawrence's justified dislike of the conventional response leads him into a false identification of the genuine with the novel. The image of the slit in the umbrella is misleading because what you can see through it will always be the same. But a genuine work of art is one in which every generation finds something new. A genuine work of art remains an example of what being genuine means, so that it can stimulate later artists to be genuine in their turn. Stimulate, not compel; if a playwright in the twentieth century chooses to write a play in a pastiche of Shakespearian blank verse, the fault is his, not Shakespeare's. Those who are afraid of firsthand experience would find means of avoiding it if all the art of the past were destroyed.

However, theory aside. Lawrence did care passionately about genuineness of feeling. He wrote little criticism about other poets who were his contemporaries, but, when he did, he was quick to pounce on any phoniness of emotion. About Ralph Hodgson's lines

The sky was lit, The sky was stars all over it, I stood, I knew not why

he writes, "No one should say I knew not why any more. It is as meaningless as Yours truly at the end of a letter," and, after quoting an American poetess

Why do I think of stairways With a rush of hurt surprise?

he remarks, "Heaven knows, my dear, unless you once fell down." Whatever faults his own poetry may have, it never puts on an act. Even when Lawrence talks nonsense, as when he asserts that the moon is made of phosphorous or radium, one is convinced that it is nonsense in which he sincerely believed. This is more than can be said of some poets much greater than he. When Yeats assures me, in a stanza of the utmost magnificence, that after death he wants to be­come a mechanical bird, I feel that he is telling what my nanny would have called "A story."

The second object of Lawrence's polemic was a doctrine which first became popular in France during the second half of the nineteenth century, the belief that Art is the true religion, that life has no value except as material for a beauti­ful artistic structure and that, therefore, the artist is the only authentic human being—the rest, rich and poor alike, are canaille. Works of art are the only cities; life itself is a jungle. Lawrence's feelings about this creed were so strong that when­ever he detects its influence, as he does in Proust and Joyce, he refuses their work any merit whatsoever. A juster and more temperate statement of his objection has been made by Dr. Auerbach:

When we compare Stendhal's or even Balzac's world with the world of Flaubert or the two Goncourts, the latter seems strangely narrow and petty despite its wealth of impressions. Documents of the kind represented by Flaubert's correspondance and the Goncourt diary are indeed admirable in the purity and incorruptibility of their artistic ethics, the wealth of impressions elaborated in them, and their refinement of sensory culture. At the same time, however, we sense something narrow, some­thing oppressively close in their books. They are full of reality and intellect, but poor in humor and inner poise. The purely literary, even on the highest level of artistic acumen, limits the power of judgment, reduces the wealth of life, and at times distorts the outlook upon the world of phenomena. And while the writers contemptu­ously avert their attention from the political and eco­nomic busde, consistently value life only as literary subject matter, and remain arrogantly and bitterly aloof from its great practical problems, in order to achieve aesthetic isolation for their work, often at great and daily expense of effort, the practical world nevertheless besets them in a thousand petty ways.

Sometimes there are financial worries, and almost always there is nervous hypotension and a morbid con­cern with health. . . . What finally emerges, despite

all their intellectual and artistic incorruptibility, is a strangely petty impression; that of an upper bourgeois egocentrically concerned over his aesthetic comfort, plagued by a thousand small vexations, nervous, obsessed by a mania—only in this case the mania is called "Liter­ature." (A limesis.)

In rejecting the doctrine that life has no value except as raw material for art, Lawrence fell into another error, that of identifying art with life, making with action.

I offer a bunch of pansies, not a wreath of immortelles. I don't want everlasting flowers and I don't want to offer them to anybody else. A flower passes, and that perhaps is the best of it. . . . Don't nail the pansy down. You won't keep it any better if you do.

Here Lawrence draws a false analogy between the process of artistic creation and the organic growth of living creatures. "Nature hath no goal though she hath law." Organic growth is a cyclical process; it is just as true to say that the oak is a potential acorn as it is to say the acorn is a potential oak. But the process of writing a poem, of making any art object, is not cyclical but a motion in one direction towards a definite end. As Socrates says in Valery's dialogue Ewpalinos:

The tree does not construct its branches and leaves; nor the cock his beak and feathers. But the tree and all its parts, or the cock and all his, are constructed by the principles themselves, which do not exist apart from the constructing. . . . But, in the objects made by man, the principles are separate from the construction, and are, as it were, imposed by a tyrant from without upon the material, to which he imparts them by acts. ... If a man waves his arm, we distinguish this arm from his gesture, and we conceive between gesture and arm a purely possible relation. But from the point of view of nature, this gesture of the arm and the arm itself cannot be separated.

An artist who ignores this difference between natural growth and human construction will produce the exact opposite of what he intends. He hopes to produce something which will seem as natural as a flower, but the qualities of the natural are exactly what his product will lack. A natural object never appears unfinished; if it is an inorganic object like a stone, it is what it has to be, if an organic object like a flow^Ter, what it has to be at this moment. But a similar effect—of being what it has to be—can only be achieved in a work of art by much thought, labor and care. The gesture of a ballet dancer, for example, only looks natural when, through long practice, its execution has become "second nature" to him. That perfect incarnation of life in substance, word in flesh, which in nature is immediate, has in art to be achieved and, in fact, can never be perfectly achieved. In many of Lawrence's poems, the spirit has failed to make itself a fit body to live in, a curious defect in the work of a writer who was so conscious of the value and significance of the body. In his essay on Thomas Hardy, Lawrence made some acute observations about this very problem. Speaking of the antimony between Law and Love, the Flesh and the Spirit, he says

The principle of the Law is found strongest in Woman, the principle of Love in Man. In every creature, the mobility, the law of change is found exemplified in the male, the stability, the conservatism in the female.

The very adherence of rhyme and regular rhythm is a concession to the Law, a concession to the body, to the being and requirements of the body. They are an admis­sion of the living positive inertia which is the other half of life, other than the pure will to motion.

This division of Lawrence's is a variant on the division be­tween the City and the Open Road. To the mind of the pil­grim, his journey is a succession of ever-new sights and sounds, but to his heart and legs, it is a rhythmical repetition—tic- toc, left-right—even die poetry of the Open Road must pay that much homage to the City. By his own admission and definition Lawrence's defect as an artist was an exaggerated maleness.

Reading Lawrence's early poems, one is continually struck by the originality of the sensibility and the conventionality of the expressive means. For most immature poets, their chief problem is to learn to forget what they have been taught poets are supposed to feel; too often, as Lawrence says, the young man is afraid of his demon, puts his hand over the demon's mouth and speaks for him. On the other hand, an immature poet, if he has real talent, usually begins to exhibit quite early a distinctive style of his own; however obvious the in­fluence of some older writer may be, there is something original in his manner or, at least, great technical competence. In Lawrence's case, this was not so; he learned quite soon to let his demon speak, but it took him a long time to find the appropriate style for him to speak in. All too often in his early poems, even the best ones, he is content to versify his thoughts; there is no essential relation between what he is saying and the formal structure he imposes upon it.

Being nothing, I bear the brunt

Of the nightly heavens overhead, like an immense open eye

With a cat's distended pupil, that sparkles with litde stars

And with thoughts that flash and crackle in far-off malignancy

So distant, they cannot touch me, whom nothing mars.

A mere poetaster with nothing to say, would have done some­thing about -whom nothing mars.

It is interesting to notice that the early poems in which he seems technically most at ease and the form most natural, are those he wrote in dialect.

I wish tha hadna done it, Tim,

I do, an' that I do, For whenever I look thee i'th' face, I s'll see Her face too.

I wish I could wash er ofFn thee; 'Appen I can, If I try.

But tha'll ha'e ter promise ter be true ter me Till I die.

This sounds like a living woman talking, whereas no woman on earth ever talked like this:

How did you love him, you who only roused

His mind until it burnt his heart away!

'Twas you who killed him, when you both caroused

In words and things well said. But the other way

He never loved you, never with desire

Touched you to fire.

I suspect that Lawrence's difficulties with formal verse had their origin in his linguistic experiences as a child.

My father was a working man

and a collier was he, At six in the morning they turned him down and they turned him up for tea.

My mother was a superior soul

a superior soul was she, cut out to play a superior role

in the god-damn bourgoisie.

We children were the in-betweens,

Litde non-descripts were we, In doors we called each other you outside it was tha and thee.

In formal poetry, the role played by the language itself is so great that it demands of the poet that he be as intimate with it as with his own flesh and blood and love it with a single- minded passion. A child who has associated standard English with Mother and dialect with Father has ambivalent feelings about both which can hardly fail to cause trouble for him in later life if he should try to write formal poetry. Not that it would have been possible for Lawrence to become a dialect poet like Burns or William Barnes, both of whom lived before public education had made dialect quaint. The language of Burns was a national not a parochial speech, and the peculiar charm of Barnes' poetry is its combination of the simplest emotions with an extremely sophisticated formal technique: Lawrence could never have limited himself to the thoughts and feelings of a Nottinghamshire mining village, and he had neither the taste nor the talent of Barnes for what he scornfully called word games.

Most of Lawrence's finest poems are to be found in the volume Birds, Beasts, and Flowers, begun in Tuscany when he was thirty-five and finished three years later in New Mexico. All of them are written in free verse.

The difference between formal and free verse may be likened to the difference between carving and modeling; the formal poet, that is to say, thinks of the poem he is writing as something already latent in the language which he has to re­veal, while the free verse poet thinks of language as a plastic passive medium upon which he imposes his artistic conception. One might also say that, in their attitude towards art, the formal verse writer is a catholic, the free verse writer a protestant. And Lawrence was, in every respect, very protestant indeed. As he himself acknowledged, it was through Whitman that he found himself as a poet, found the right idiom of poetic speech for his demon.

On no other English poet, so far as I know, has Whitman had a beneficial influence; he could on Lawrence because, despite certain superficial resemblances, their sensibilities were utterly different. Whitman quite consciously set out to be the Epic Bard of America and created a poetic persona for the purpose. He keeps using the first person singular and even his own name, but these stand for a persona, not an actual human being, even when he appears to be talking about the most intimate experiences. When he sounds ridiculous, it is usually because the image of an individual obtrudes itself comically upon what is meant to be a statement about a collective ex­perience. I am large. I contain multitudes is absurd if one thinks of Whitman himself or any individual; of a corporate person like General Motors it makes perfectly good sense. The more we learn about Whitman the man, the less like his per­sona he looks. On the other hand it is doubtful if a writer ever existed who had less of an artistic persona than Lawrence; from his letters and the reminiscences of his friends, it would seem that he wrote for publication in exactly the same way as he spoke in private. (I must confess that I find Lawrence's love poems embarrassing because of their lack of reticence; they make me feel a Peeping Tom.) Then, Whitman looks at life extensively rather than intensively. No detail is dwelt upon for long; it is snapshotted and added as one more item to the vast American catalogue. But Lawrence in his best poems is always concerned intensively with a single subject, a bat, a tortoise, a fig tree, which he broods on until he has exhausted its possibilities.

A sufficient number of years have passed for us to have gotten over both the first overwhelming impact of Lawrence's genius and the subsequent violent reaction when we realized that there were silly and nasty sides to his nature. We can be grateful to him for what he can do for us, without claiming that he can do everything or condemning him because he cannot. As an analyst and portrayer of the forces of hatred and aggression which exist in all human beings and, from time to time, manifest themselves in nearly all human relationships, Lawrence is, probably, the greatest master who ever lived. But that was absolutely all that we knew and understood about human beings; about human affection and human charity, for example, he knew absolutely nothing. The truth is that he detested nearly all human beings if he had to be in close con­tact with them; his ideas of what a human relationship, be­tween man and man or man and woman, ought to be are pure daydreams because they are not based upon any experience of actual relationships which might be improved or corrected. Whenever, in his novels and short stories, he introduces a character whom he expects the reader to admire, he or she is always an unmitigated humorless bore, but the more he dis­likes his characters the more interesting he makes them. And,

in his heart of hearts, Lawrence knew this himself. There is a sad passage in An Autobiographical Sketch:

Why is there so little contact between myself and the people I know? The answer, as far as I can see, has some­thing to do with class. As a man from the working class, I feel that the middle class cut off some of my vital vibra­tion when I am with them. I admit them charming and good people often enough, but they just stop some part of me from working.

Then, why don't I live with my own people? Because their vibration is limited in another direction. The work­ing class is narrow in outlook, in prejudice, and narrow in intelligence. This again makes a prison. Yet I find, here in Italy, for example, that I live in a certain contact with the peasants who work the land of this villa. I am not intimate with them, hardly speak to them save to say good-day. And they are not working for me. I am not their padrone. I don't want to live with them in their cot­tages; that would be a sort of prison. I don't idealise them. I don't expect them to make any millenium here on earth, neither now nor in the future. But I want them to be there, about the place, their lives going along with mine.

For the word peasants, one might substitute the words birds, beasts and flowers. Lawrence possessed a great capacity for affection and charity, but he could only direct it towards non- human life or peasants whose lives were so uninvolved with his that, so far as he was concerned, they might just as well have been nonhuman. Whenever, in his writings, he forgets about men and women with proper names and describes the anonymous life of stones, waters, forests, animals, flowers, chance traveling companions or passers-by, his bad temper and his dogmatism immediately vanish and he becomes the most enchanting companion imaginable, tender, intelligent, funny and, above all, happy. But the moment any living thing, even a dog, makes demands on him, the rage and preaching return. His poem about "Bibbles," "the wait whitmanesque love-bitch who loved just everybody," is the best poem about a dog

ever written, but it makes it clear that Lawrence was no person to be entrusted with the care of a dog.

All right, mv little bitch.

You learn loyalty rather than loving,

And I'll protect you.

To which Bibbles might, surely, with justice retort: "O for Chris-sake, mister, go get yourself an Alsatian and leave me alone, can't you."

The poems in Birds, Beasts, and Flowers are among Law­rence's longest. He was not a concise writer and he needs room to make his effect. In his poetry he manages to make a virtue out of what in his prose is often a vice, a tendency to verbal repetition. The recurrence of identical or slightly varied phrases helps to give his free verse a structure; the phrases themselves are not particularly striking, but this is as it should be, for their function is to act as stitches.

Like the romantics, Lawrence's starting point in these poems is a personal encounter between himself and some animal or flower but, unlike the romantics, he never confuses the feel­ings they arouse in him with what he sees and hears and knows about them.

Thus, he accuses Keats, very justly, I think, of being so preoccupied with his own feelings that he cannot really listen to the nightingale. Thy -plaintive anthem fades deserves Law­rence's comment: It never was a plaintive anthem—it was Caruso at his jauntiest.

Lawrence never forgets—indeed this is what he likes most about them—that a plant or an animal has its own kind of existence which is unlike and uncomprehending of man's.

It is no use my saying to him in an emotional voice:

'This is your Mother, she laid you when you were an

egg-'

He does not even trouble to answer: 'Woman, what have I to do with thee?'

He wearily looks the other way,

And she even more wearily looks another way still.

C"Tortoise Family Connections.")

But watching closer

That motionless deadly motion,

That unnatural barrel body, that long ghoul nose . . . I left off hailing him.

I had made a mistake, I didn't know him, This grey, monotonous soul in the water, This intense individual in shadow, Fish-alive.

I didn't know his God.

("Fish.")

When discussing people or ideas, Lawrence is often turgid and obscure, but when, as in these poems, he is contemplating some object with love, the lucidity of his language matches the intensity of his vision, and he can make the reader see what he is saying as very few writers can.

Queer, with your thin wings and your streaming legs, How you sail like a heron, or a dull clot of air.

("The Mosquito.")

Her little loose hands, and sloping Victorian shoulders

("Kangaroo.")

There she is, perched on her manger, looking over the

boards into the day Like a belle at her window.

And immediately she sees me she blinks, stares, doesn't know me, turns her head and ignores me vulgarly with a wooden blank on her face. What do I care for her, the ugly female, standing up there with her long tangled sides like an old rug thrown over a fence. But she puts her nose down shrewdly enough when the

knot is untied, And jumps staccato to earth, a sharp, dry jump, still

ignoring me, Pretending to look around the stall Come on, you crapal I'm not your servant.

She turns her head away with an obtuse female sort of deafness, bete.

And then invariably she crouches her rear and makes water.

That being her way of answer, if I speak to her.—Self- conscious I

Le bestie -non parlano, poverine! . . .

Queer it is, suddenly, in the garden

To catch sight of her standing like some huge ghoulish grey bird in the air, on the bough of the leaning almond-tree,

Straight as a board on the bough, looking down like some hairy horrid God the Father in a William Blake imagination.

Come, down, Crap a, out of that almond tree!

("She-Goat.")

In passages like these, Lawrence's writing is so transparent that one forgets him entirely and simply sees what he saw.

Birds, Beasts, and Flowers is the peak of Lawrence's achievement as a poet. There are a number of fine things in the later volumes, but a great deal that is tedious, both in subject matter and form. A writer's doctrines are not the busi­ness of a literary critic except in so far as they touch upon questions which concern the art of writing; if a writer makes statements about nonliterary matters, it is not for the literary critic to ask whether they are true or false but he may legiti­mately question the writer's authority to make them.

The Flauberts and the Goncourts considered social and political questions beneath them; to his credit, Lawrence knew that there are many questions that are more important than Art with an A, but it is one thing to know this and another to believe one is in a position to answer them.

In the modern world, a man who earns his living by writing novels and poems is a self-employed worker whose customers are not his neighbors, and this makes him a social oddity. He may work extremely hard, but his manner of life is something between that of a rentier and a gypsy, he can live where he likes and know only the people he chooses to know. He has no firsthand knowledge of all those involuntary relationships created by social, economic and political necessity. Very few artists can be engage because life does not engage them: for better or worse, they do not quite belong to the City. And Lawrence, who was self-employed after the age of twenty-six, belonged to it less than most. Some writers have spent their lives in the same place and social milieu; Lawrence kept con- standy moving from one place and one country to another. Some have been extroverts who entered fully into whatever society happened to be available; Lawrence's nature made him avoid human contacts as much as possible. Most writers have at least had the experience of parenthood and its re­sponsibilities; this experience was denied Lawrence. It was inevitable, therefore, that when he tried to lay down the law about social and political matters, money, machinery, etc., he could only be negative and moralistic because, since his youth, he had had no firsthand experiences upon which concrete and positive suggestions could have been based. Furthermore, if, like Lawrence, the only aspects of human beings which you care for and value are states of being, timeless moments of passionate intensity, then social and political life, which are essentially historical—without a past and a future, human so­ciety is inconceivable—must be, for you, the worthless aspects of human life. You cannot honesdy say, "This kind of society is preferable to that," because, for you, society is wholly given over to Satan.

The other defect in many of the later poems is a formal one. It is noticeable that the best are either of some length or rhymed; the short ones in free verse very rarely come off. A poem which contains a number of ideas and feelings can be organized in many different ways, but a poem which makes a single point and is made up of no more than one or two sentences can only be organized verbally; an epigram or an aphorism must be written either in prose or in some strictly measured verse; written in free verse, it will sound like prose arbitrarily chopped up.

It has always seemed to me that a real thought, not an argument can only exist in verse, or in some poetic form. There is a didactic element about prose thoughts which makes them repellent, slightly bullying, "He who hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune." There is a point well put: but immediately it irritates by its assertiveness. If it were put into poetry, it would not nag at us so practically. We don't want to be nagged at.

(Preface to "Pansies.")

Though I personally love good prose aphorisms, I can see what Lawrence means. If one compares

Phis qa change, phis cest la meme chose

with

The accursed power that stands on Privelege

And goes with Women and Champagne and Bridge

Broke, and Democracy resumed her reign

That goes with Bridge and Women and Champagne

the first does seem a bit smug and a bit abstract, while, in the second, the language dances and is happy.

The bourgeois produced the Bolshevist inevitably As every half-truth at length produces the contradiction

of itself In the opposite half-truth

has the worst of both worlds; it lacks the conciseness of the prose and the jollity of the rhymed verse.

The most interesting verses in the last poems of Lawrence belong to a literary genre he had not attempted before, satir­ical doggerel.

If formal verse can be likened to carving, free verse to modeling, then one might say that doggerel verse is like oh jets trouves—the piece of driftwood that looks like a witch, the stone that has a profile. The writer of doggerel, as it were, takes any old words, rhythms and rhymes that come into his head, gives them a good shake and then throws them onto the page like dice where, lo and behold, contrary to all probability they make sense, not by law but by chance. Since the words appear to have no will of their own, but to be the puppets of chance, so will the things or persons to which they refer; hence the value of doggerel for a certain kind of satire.

It is a different kind of satire from that written by Dryden and Pope. Their kind presupposes a universe, a city, governed by, or owing allegiance to, certain eternal laws of reason and morality; the purpose of their satire is to demonstrate that the individual or institution they are attacking violates these laws. Consequendy, the stricter in form their verse, the more artful their technique, the more effective it is. Satirical doggerel, on the other hand, presupposes no fixed laws. It is the weapon of the outsider, the anarchist rebel, who refuses to accept con­ventional laws and pieties as binding or worthy of respect. Hence its childish technique, for the child represents the naive and personal, as yet uncorrupted by education and convention. Satire of the Pope kind says: "The Emperor is wearing a celluloid collar. That simply isn't done." Satiric doggerel cries: "The Emperor is naked."

At this kind of satiric doggerel, Lawrence turned out to be a master.

And Mr. Meade, that old old lily,

Said: "Gross, coarse, hideous!" and I, like a silly

Thought he meant the faces of the police court officials

And how right he was, so I signed my initials.

But Tolstoi was a traitor To the Russia that needed him most, The great bewildered Russia So worried by the Holy Ghost; He shifted his job onto the peasants And landed them all on toast.

Parnassus has many mansions.

MARIANNE MOORE

Why an inordinate interest in animals and athletes? They are subjects for art and exem­plars of it, are they not? minding their own busi­ness. Pangolins, hornbills, pitchers, catchers, do not pry or prey—or prolong the conversation; do not make us self-conscious; look their best when caring least; although in a Frank Buck docu­mentary, I saw a leopard insult a crocodile (basking on the river bank—head only visible on the bank)—bat the animal on the nose and continue on its way without so much as a look back.

When I first read Lawrence's poetry, I didn't like it much, but I had no difficulty in understanding it. But when in 1935, I first tried to read Marianne Moore's poems, I simply could not make head or tail of them. To begin with, I could not "hear" the verse. One may have a prejudice against Free Verse as such but, if it is in any way competendy written, the ear immediately hears where one line ends and another begins, for each line represents either a speech unit or a thought unit. Accent has always played so important a role in English prosody that no Englishman, even if he has been brought up on the poetry written according to the traditional English prosodic convention in which lines are scanned by accentual feet, iambics, trochees, anapaests, etc., has any diffi­culty in recognizing as formal and rhythmical a poem, like Christabel or The Wreck of the Deutschland, which is written in an accentual meter. But a syllabic verse, like Miss Moore's, in which accents and feet are ignored and only the number of syllables count, is very difficult for an English ear to grasp. One of our problems with the French alexandrine, for example, is that, whatever we may know intellectually about French prosody, our ear cannot help hearing most alex­andrines as anapaestic verse which, in English poetry, we associate with light verse. Try as one may to forget it, Je le vols, je lui parle; et mon coeur . . . Je tn'egare reminds us of The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold. But, at least, in listening to Racine all the lines have twelve syllables. Before I had encountered Miss Moore's verse, I was well acquainted with Robert Bridges's syllabic experiments, but he confined his verses to a regular succession of either six-syllable or twelve-syllable lines. A typical poem by Miss Moore, on the other hand, is written in stanzas, containing anything from one up to twenty syllables, not infrequendy a word is split up with one or more of its syllables at the end of a line and the rest of them at the beginning of the next, caesuras fall where they may and, as a rule, some of the lines rhyme and some are unrhymed. This, for a long time, I found very difficult. Then, I found her process of thinking very hard to follow. Rimbaud seemed child's play compared with a passage like this:

they are to me

like enchanted Earl Gerald who changes himself into a stag, to a great green-eyed cat of the mountain. Discommodity makes

them invisible; they've dis­appeared. The Irish say your trouble is their

trouble and your

joy their joy? I wish I could believe it;

I am troubled, I'm dissatisfied, I'm Irish.

Uncomprehending as I was, I felt attracted by the tone of voice, so I persevered and I am very thankful that I did, for today there are very few poets who give me more pleasure to read. What I did see from the first was that she is a pure "Alice." She has all the Alice qualities, the distaste for noise and excess:

Poets, don't make a fuss; the elephants crooked trumpet' 'doth write;' and to a tiger-book I am reading—

I think you know the one— I am under obligation.

One may be pardoned, yes I know one may, for love undying.

The passion for setting people right is in itself

an afflictive disease. Distaste which takes no credit to itself is best

the fastidiousness:

I remember a swan under the willows in Oxford, with flamingo-coloured, maple-

leaflike feet. It reconnoitred like a battle­ship. Disbelief and conscious fastidiousness were

the staple

ingredients in its

disinclination to move. Finally its hardihood

was not proof against its proclivity to more fully appraise such bits of food as the stream bore counter to it; it made away with what I gave it to eat. I have seen this swan and

I have seen you; I have seen ambition without understanding in a variety of forms

the love of order and precision:

And as

MEridian one-two one-two gives, each fifteenth second

in the same voice, the new data—"The time will be" so and so— you realize that "when you hear the signal," you'll be hearing Jupiter or jour pater, the day god—

the salvaged son of Father Time— telling the cannibal Chronos

(eater of his proxime new-born progeny) that punctuality is not a crime

the astringent ironical sharpness:

One may be a blameless bachelor and it is but a step to Congreve.

She says, "This butterfly,

this waterfly, this nomad

that has proposed

to setde on my hand for life'.—

what can one do with it.

There must have been more time

in Shakespeare's day

to sit and watch a play.

You know so many artists who are fools."

He says; "You know so many fools

who are not artists."

Like Lawrence's, many of Miss Moore's best poems are, overtly, at least, about animals. Animals have made their appearance in literature in a number of ways.

O The beast fable. In these, the actors have animals' bodies but human consciousness. Sometimes the intention is simply amusing entertainment, but more often it is educative. The fable may be a mythical explanation of how things came to be as they are, and the beast in it may be a folk-culture hero whose qualities of courage or cunning are to be imitated. Or again, though this is a later historical development, the fable may be satirical. What prevents man, individually and col­lectively, from behaving reasonably and morally is not so much ignorance as a self-blindness induced by some passion or desire. In a satirical beast fable, the beast has the desires of his kind which are different from those which govern man, so that we can view them with detachment and cannot fail to rec­ognize what is good or bad, sensible or foolish behavior. In a beast fable, the descriptions of animal life cannot be realistic, for its basic premise of a self-conscious speaking animal is fantastic. If a human being is introduced into a beast fable, as Mr. MacGregor is introduced into Peter Rabbit, he appears not as a man but as a God.

2) The animal simile. This can be expressed in the form:

as an a behaves so acted N

where a is a species of animal with a typical way of behaving and N is the proper name of a human individual, mythical or historical, acting in a historical situation. The description of animals in an epic simile is more realistic than it is in the beast fable, but what is described is the behavior considered typical for that animal; everything else about it is irrelevant.

Homer's animal similes are more than merely ways of catching a mood or an impression, more than attempts to place an event in greater relief by stressing external sim­ilarities. WTien Homer has someone go against his ene­mies "like a lion," we must take him at his word. The warrior and the lion are activated by the same force; on more than one occasion this force is expressly stated to be the menos, the forward impulse. The animals of the Homeric similes are not only symbols, but the particular embodiments of universal vital forces. Homer has litde regard for anything except the forces in them, and that is the reason why animals are more prominent in the similes than in the narrative itself. By themselves they hold next to no interest for him.

In the clearly defined, the typical forms within which nature has allocated her gifts among the beasts, men find the models for gauging their own responses and emotions; they are the mirror in which man sees himself. The sentence: "Hector is as a lion," besides constituting a comparison, besides focussing the formlessness of human existence against a characteristic type, also signalises a factual connection, (bruno snell, The Discovery of Mind.)

3) The animal as an allegorical emblem. The significance of an emblem is not, like a simile, self-evident. The artist who uses one must either assume that his audience already knows the symbolic association—it is a legend of the culture to which he belongs—or, if it is his own invention, he must explain it. A Buddhist, for instance, looking at a painting of the Christ Child in which there is a goldfinch, may know enough ornithology to recognize it as a goldfinch and to know that it eats Cor used to be thought to eat) thorns, but he cannot pos­sibly understand why the bird is there unless it is explained to him that Christians associate thorns, the goldfinch's sup­posed diet, with the crown of thorns Christ wore at his cruci­fixion; the painter has introduced the goldfinch into his picture of the Christ Child to remind the spectator that Christmas, an occasion for rejoicing, is necessarily related to Good Friday, an occasion for mourning.

The painter may have represented the bird as natural is tically as possible in order that the spectator shall not mistake it for some other bird, a woodpecker, for instance, which, because it bores holes in trees, is an emblem for Satan who undermines human nature, but correct identification is all that matters; there is no visual resemblance between the emblem and its meaning. In poetry, the mere name would be sufficient.

The romantic encounter of man and beast. In such an encounter, the animal provides an accidental stimulus to the thoughts and emotions of a human individual. As a rule, the characteristics of the animal which make it a stimulus are not those in which it resembles man—as in the epic simile—but those in which it is unlike him. A man whose beloved has died or left him, hears a thrush singing and the song recalls to him an evening when he and his beloved listened together to another thrush singing. There are two thrushes and one man, but, while the songs of the two thrushes are identical— thrush-life does not change and knows nothing of unhappy love—the man hearing the second is changed from what he was when he heard the first. Since, in these encounters, the nature of the animal itself has little, if anything, to do with the thoughts and emotions he provokes in the human individ­ual, realistic description counts for little. Very few of the famous romantic poems concerned with animals are accurate in their natural history.

Animals as objects of human interest and affection. Ani­mals play an important economic role in the lives of hunts­men and farmers, many people keep them as pets, every major city in our culture has a zoo where exotic animals are on public exhibition, and some people are naturalists who are more interested in animals than in anything else. If an animal lover happens also to be a poet, it is quite possible that he will write poems about the animals he loves and, if he does, he w^Till describe them in the same way that he would describe a friend, that is to say, every detail of the animal's appearance and behavior will interest him. It is almost impossible to make such a description communicable to others except in anthro­pomorphic terms, so that, in the animal lover's poetry, the order of the Homeric simile is reversed and takes the form:

as n looks or acts so does A

where n is a typical class of human being and A is an indi­vidual animal. Its grace and charm are conveyed by likening it to some instance of what makes some human beings admir­able; sometimes, too, like Lawrence, the animal lover goes further and contrasts the virtue of a beast with the vices and follies of man.

Overtly, Miss Moore's animal poems are those of a naturalist; the animals she selects are animals she likes—the one excep­tion is the cobra, and the point of the poem is that we, not the cobra, are to be blamed for our subjective fear and dislike— and nearly all of her animals are exotic, to be seen normally only in zoos or photographs by explorers; she has only one poem about a common domestic pet.

Like Lawrence, she has an extraordinary gift for meta­phorical comparisons which make the reader see what she has seen. The metaphors may be drawn from other animals and plants. Thus, she describes a tomcat's face:

the small tuft of fronds or katydid-legs above each eye, still numbering the

units in each group; the shadbones regularly set about the mouth, to droop or rise in unison like the porcupine quills—motionless.

The firs stand in a procession, each with an

emerald turkey-foot at the top, reserved in their contours, saying nothing

the lion's ferocious chrysanthemum head Or the metaphors may be taken from human artifacts.

pillar body erect on a three-cornered smooth-working chippendale claw.

("The Jerboa.")

the intensively watched eggs coming from the shell free it when they are freed, leaving its wasp-nest flaws

of white on white and close- laid Ionic chiton-folds like the lines in the mane of a Parthenon horse

("The Paper Nautilus.")

And on occasion, she uses an elaborate reversed epic simile.

As impassioned Handel— meant for a lawyer and a masculine German domestic career—clandestinely studied the harpsichord and never was known to have fallen in love,

the unconfiding frigate-bird hides in the height and in the majestic display of his art.

("The Frigate Pelican.")

But, unlike Lawrence, she likes the human race. For all the evil he does, man is, for her, a more sacred being than an animal.

Bedizened or stark naked, man, the self, the being we call human, writing— master to this world, griffons a dark

"Like does not like like that is obnoxious"—and

writes error with four r's. Among animals, one has a sense of humour,

Humour saves a few steps, it saves yours. Unignorant, modest and unemotional, and all emotion, he has everlasting vigour, power to grow

though there are few creatures who can make one breathe faster and make one erecter.

The approach of her poetry is that of a naturalist but, really, their theme is almost always the Good Life. Sometimes, as in the bestiaries, she sees an animal as an emblem—the devil­fish, so frightening to look at, because of the care she takes

of her eggs becomes an emblem of charity, the camel-sparrow an emblem of justice, the jerboa-rat an emblem of true free­dom as contrasted with the false freedom of the conqueror- tyrant—and sometimes, as in the beast fable, the behavior of animals is presented as a moral paradigm. Occasionally, as in "Elephants," the moral is direct, but, as a rule, the reader has to perceive it for himself.

The "Pangolin," written during the war, is a longish poem —nine stanzas of eleven lines each—but it is not until the end of the seventh stanza that a direct likeness between the pangolin and man is drawn:

in fighting, mechanicked like the pangolin.

On the one hand, the pangolin is an enchanting animal; on the other, it is a great honor to be created a human being. But the one way in which men can physically resemble pangolins is by putting on armor and this should not have to be necessary. The pangolin's armor is an adaptation which secures his survival, for he is an ant-eater; as creatures go, he is unpugnacious and unaggressive. But man wears armor because he is an aggressive creature full of hatred for and fear of his own kind. The moral: men ought to be gentle-natured like pangolins but, if they were, they would cease to look like pangolins, and the pangolin could not be an emblem.

Miss Moore's poems are an example of a kind of art which is not as common as it should be; they delight, not only be­cause they are intelligent, sensitive and beautifully written, but also because they convince the reader that they have been written by someone who is personally good. Questioned about the relation between art and morals, Miss Moore herself has said:

Must a man be good to write good poems? The vil­lains in Shakespeare are not illiterate, are they? But rectitude has a ring that is implicative, I would say. And with no integrity, a man is not likely to write the kind of book I read.

PART SIX

Americana

THE AMERICAN SCENE

America where there is the little old ramshackle victoria in the south,

where cigars are smoked on the street in the north; where there are no proof­readers, no silk-worms, no digressions; the wild man's land; grassless linksless, language-

less country in which letters are written not in Spanish, not in Greek, not in Latin, not

in shorthand, hut in plain American which cats and dogs can readl

marianne moore

Two of James' virtues, his self-knowledge, his awareness of just what he could and could not do, and his critical literary- sense, his respect for the inalienable right of every subject to its own form and treatment, are nowhere more conspicuous than in The American Scene.

Of all possible subjects, travel is the most difficult for an artist, as it is the easiest for a journalist. For the latter, the interesting event is the new, the extraordinary, the comic, the shocking, and all that the peripatetic journalist requires is a flair for being on the spot where and when such events happen —the rest is merely passive typewriter thumping: meaning, relation, importance, are not his quarry. The artist, on the other hand, is deprived of his most treasured liberty, the freedom to invent; successfully to extract importance from his­torical personal events without ever departing from them, free only to select and never to modify or to add, calls for imagina­tion of a very high order.

Few writers have had less journalistic talent than James, and this is his defect, for the supreme masters have one trait in common with the childish scribbling mass, the vulgar curi­osity of a police-court reporter. One can easily imagine Stendhal or Tolstoi or Dostoievski becoming involved in a barroom fight, but James, never. I have read somewhere a story that once, when James was visiting a French friend, the latter's mistress, unobserved, filled his top hat with cham­pagne, but I do not believe it because, try as I will, I simply cannot conceive what James did and said when he put his hat on.

James was, of course, well aware of this limitation; he knew that both his character and circumstances confined his resi­dence to a certain kind of house or hotel, his intimate ac­quaintance to a certain social class, and that such confine­ment might be an insuperable obstacle to writing a book of travel in which the author must try to catch the spirit, not of a particular milieu, but of a whole place, a whole social order. Nevertheless, the challenge, perhaps just because it was, for him, so particularly formidable, fascinated James from the first, and The American Scene is only the latest, most am­bitious and best of a series of topographical writings, beginning in 1870 with sketches of Saratoga and Newport.

Immature as these early American pieces are, they seem to me more satisfactory than the subsequent descriptions of Eng­land and Europe, even the charming A Little Tour in France (1886). Confronted with the un-American scene, he seems prim and a little amateurish, as if he were a conscien­tious father writing letters to an intelligent daughter of four­teen; as guidebooks, the European travelogues are incomplete, and as personal impressions, they are timid; the reader is conscious that the traveler must have seen and felt a great deal more than he says, and refrained either from a fear of shock­ing or from a lack of confidence in his own judgment; but even as a young man, James was unafraid of America as a subject: puzzled often, angry sometimes, yes, but quite certain of what he felt and of his right to say it.

In letters directly and in his novels by implication James makes many criticisms of the English, but he would never have been so outspoken about them as he is, for instance, about the habits of American children of whom he writes in 1870:

You meet them far into the evening, roaming over the piazzas and corridors of the hotels—the little girls espe­cially—lean, pale, formidable. Occasionally childhood confesses itself, even when maternity resists, and you see at eleven o'clock at night some poor litde bedizened pre­cocity collapsed in slumber in a lonely wayside chair.

And again in 1906:

. . . there were ladies and children all about—though indeed there may have been sometimes hut the lone breakfasting child to deal with; the little pale, carnivo­rous, coffee-drinking ogre or ogress, who prowls down in advance of its elders, engages a table—dread vision! and has the "run" of the bill of fare.

All who knew James personally have spoken of the terror he could inspire when enraged, and one of the minor delights of The American Scene is that the stranger occasionally gets a glimpse, at a fortunately safe distance, of what these out­bursts must have been like—the unhurried implacable ad­vance of the huge offensive periods, the overwhelming allitera­tive barrage, the annihilating adverbial scorn.

The freedoms of the young three—who were, by-the- way, not in their earliest bloom either—were thus bandied about in the void of the gorgeous valley without even a consciousness of its shrill, its recording echoes . . . The immodesty was too colossal to be anything but in no- cence, but the innocence on the other hand, was too colossal to be anything but inane. And they were alive, the slightly stale three: they talked, they laughed, they sang, they shrieked, they romped, they scaled the pin­nacle of publicity and perched on it, flapping their wings; whereby they were shown in possession of many of the movements of life.

Whom were they constructed, such specimens, to talk with or to talk over, or to talk under, and what form of address or of intercourse, what uttered, what intelligible terms of introduction, of persuasion, of menace, what de­veloped, what specific human process of any sort, was it possible to impute to them? What reciprocities did they imply, what presumptions did they, could they, create? What happened, inconceivably, when such Greeks met such Greeks, such faces looked into such faces, and such sounds, in especial, were exchanged with such sounds? What women did they live with, what women, living with them, could yet leave them as they were? What wives, daughters, sisters, did they in fine make credible; and what, in especial, was the speech, what the manners, what the general dietary, what most the mon­strous morning meal, of ladies receiving at such hands the law or the license of life?

Just what, one asks with nostalgic awe, would James have said if confronted with the spectacle of a drum-majorette?

In writing The American Scene, the "facts" he selected to go on are, even for James, amazingly and, one would have thought, fatally few. Though he seems to have visited Chicago (and _not to have "liked" it) he confines his chapters to the East Coast from Boston to Miami. The Far West, the Midwest, the Deep South are totally ignored. This is a pity because the regional differences of the United States are significant, though not, I think, so decisively significant as the professional regionalists insist. Today it would be quite fatal to neglect the states remoter from Europe, not so much as re­gions in themselves, but because some of the most essential and generally typical American facts, such as the film and automobile industries, the public power projects, the divorce mills, are regionally situated. Still, even in 1906, there were many things west of Massachusetts, the landscape of Arizona, the distinctive atmosphere of San Francisco, to mention only two of them, which would have "amused" "the resdess analyst," and in whose amusement his readers would have been very glad to share.¹

With the second limitation that James imposed upon him­self, however—his decision to reject all second-hand infor­mation and sentiment, to stick to those facts, however few, which were felt by him, however mistakenly, to be important, to be unashamedly, defiandy subjective—one can only whole­heartedly agree. In grasping the character of a society, as in judging the character of an individual, no documents, statis­tics, "objective" measurements can ever compete with the single intuitive glance. Intuition may err, for though its sound judgment is, as Pascal said, only a question of good eyesight, it must be good, for the principles are subtle and numerous, and the omission of one principle leads to error; but docu­mentation which is useless unless it is complete, must err in a field where completeness is impossible. James' eyesight was good, his mind was accurate, and he understood exacdy what he was doing; he never confused his observation with his in­terpretation.

The fond observer is by his very nature committed everywhere to his impression—which means essentially, I think, that he is foredoomed, in one place as in an­other, to "put in" a certain quantity of emotion and reflection. The turn his sensibility takes depends of course on what is before him; but when is it not in some manner exposed and alert? If it be anything really of a touch­stone, it is more disposed, I hold, to easy bargains than to hard ones; it only wants to be somehow interested, and is not without the knowledge that an emotion is after all, at the best or the worst, but an emotion. All of

¹ James originally intended, it appears, to write a second volume dealing; with the West and Middle West.

which is a voluminous commentary, I admit, on the modest text that I perhaps made the University Hos­pital stand for too many things. That establishes at all events my contention—that the living fact, in the United States, -will stand, other facts not preventing, for almost anything you may ask of it.

Where, in the United States, the interest, where the pleasure of contemplation is concerned, discretion is the better part of valor and insistence too often a betrayal. It is not so much that the hostile fact crops up as that the friendly fact breaks down. If you have luckily seen, you have seen; carry off your prize, in this case, instantly and at any risk. Try it again and you don't, you won't, see.

Yet, if the vision had, necessarily, to be brief, it was neither poor nor vague, and only the most leisurely and luxuriant treatment could do justice to its rich possibilities. In the novels and short stories of the previous decade, James had been evolving a style of metaphorical description of the emotions which is all his own, a kind of modern Gongorism, and in The American Scene this imagery, no longer inhibited by the restraining hand of character or the impatient tug of plot, came to its fullest and finest bloom.

Indeed, perhaps the best way to approach this book is as a prose poem of the first order, i.e., to suspend, for the time being, ones own conclusions about America and Americans, and to read on slowly, relishing it sentence by sentence, for it is no more a guidebook than the "Ode to a Nightingale" is an ornithological essay. It is not even necessary to start at the beginning or read with continuity; one can open it at almost any page. I advise, for instance, the reader who finds James' later manner a Iitde hard to get into, to begin by reading the long paragraph about Lees statue which concludes the chap­ter on Richmond: this is, admittedly, a purple patch, but there are many others which match it.

James' firsthand experiences were, necessarily, mostly those of a tourist, namely scenic objects, landscapes, buildings, the faces and behavior of strangers, and his own reflections on what these objects stood for. Unlike his modern rival at con­veying the sense of Place—D. H. Lawrence—James was no naturalist; one is not convinced that he knew one bird or flower from another. He sees Nature as a city-bred gentleman with a knowledge of the arts, and by accepting this fully, turns it to his advantage in his descriptive conceits.

. . . the social scene, shabby and sordid, and lost in the scale of space as the quotable line is lost in a dull epic or the needed name in an ageing memory.

The spread of this single great wash of Winter from latitude to latitude struck me in fact as having its analogy in the vast vogue of some infinitely selling novel, one of those happy volumes of which the circulation roars, periodically, from Atlantic to Pacific and from great windy state to state, in the manner as I have heard it vividly put, of a blazing prairie fire; with as litde possi­bility of arrest from "criticism" in the one case as from the bleating of lost sheep in the other.

. . . the hidden ponds where the season itself seemed to blend as a young bedizened, a slightly melodramatic mother, before taking some guilty flight, hangs over the crib of her sleeping child.

But it is in his treatment of social objects and mental con­cepts that James reveals most clearly his great and highly original poetic gift. Outside of fairy tales, I know of no book in which things so often and so naturally become persons. Buildings address James:

Un hon mouvemeni, therefore: you must make a dash for it, but you'll see I'm worth it.

James addresses buildings:

You overdo it for what you are; you overdo it still more for what you may be; and don't pretend above all, with the object lesson supplied you, close at hand, by the queer case of Newport, don't pretend, we say, not to know what we mean.

Buildings address each other:

Exquisite was what they called you, eh? We'll teach you, then, little sneak, to be exquisite! We'll allow none of that rot around here.

At Farmington, the bullying railroad orders taste and tra­dition

—ofF their decent avenue without a fear that they will "stand up" to it.

From Philadelphia the alluring train:

disvulgarized of passengers, steams away, in disinter­ested empty form, to some terminus too noble to be marked in our poor schedules.

Again, since "The Faerie Queene, what book has been more hospitable to allegorical figures? At Mount Vernon:

the slight, pale, bleeding Past, in a patched homespun suit, stands there taking the thanks of the Bloated Pres­ent, having woundedly rescued from thieves and brought to his door the fat, locked pocket book of which that personage appears to be the owner.

At Baltimore the Muse of History descends in a quick white flash to declare that she has found that city "a charming patient."

In Richmond the Spirit of the South reveals herself for a vivid moment,

a figure somehow blighted and stricken discomfortably, impossibly seated in an invalid chair, and yet facing one with strange eyes that were half a defiance and half a deprecation of one's noticing, and much more of one's referring to, an abnormal sign.

In Florida the American Woman is waiting to state her case in the manner of a politician in Thucydides:

How can I do all the grace, all the interest, as I'm ex­pected to? Yes, literally all the interest that isn't the mere interest in the money . . . All I want—that is all I need, for there is perhaps a difference—is, to put it simply, that my parents and my brothers and my male cousins should consent to exist otherwise than occuldy, undis- coverably, or, as I suppose you'd call it, irresponsibly.

When the "recent immigrant," to copy the Jamesian nomen­clature, compares his own impressions with those of the "rest­less analyst," he is immediately struck by how litde, on the one hand, America has changed in any decisive way—the changes, great as they are, seem but extensions and modifica­tions of a pattern already observable thirty years ago—and, on the other, by the irrevocable and catastrophic alterations in Europe.

The features of the American scene which most struck the analyst then are those which most strike the immigrant now, whether they be minor details, like the magnificent boots and teeth, the heavy consumption of candy, "the vagueness of separation between apartments, between hall and room, be­tween one room and another, between the one you are in and the one you are not in," or major matters like the promiscuous gregariousness, the lack, even among the rich, of constituted privacy, the absence of forms for vice no less than for virtue, the "spoiling" of women and their responsibility for the whole of culture, above all the elimination from the scene of the squire and the parson.² It takes the immigrant a litde time to discover just why the United States seems so different from any of the countries he resentfully or nostalgically remembers, but the cru­cial difference is, I think, just this last elimination of "the pervasive Patron" and "the old ecclesiastical arrogance for